Houses of Death (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  By the mid-30s tongues had already begun to wag about Adams’s methods and his relationships with his elderly patients. In 1935, Mrs Matilda Whitton left him £7,385 ($14,770) in her will and he would be included in no fewer than 132 of his patients’ wills during the coming years. Eventually, in July 1956, an anonymous telephone call was made to Eastbourne police about him. It was from the well-known music hall performer Leslie Henson, who had become suspicious when his friend, Gertrude ‘Bobbie’ Hullett, died just four months after her husband. They shared the same doctor, John Bodkin Adams, and Henson had heard the rumours.

  People were understandably suspicious. Of the 310 death certificates signed by Bodkin Adams between 1946 and 1956, 163 were found to be suspicious when the police began to examine them. According to a number of the nurses caring for many of the patients he attended, he would ask them to leave the room and gave ‘special injections’ to the patients, the nature of which he refused to explain.

  Fifty year-old ‘Bobbie’ Hullett, Leslie Henson’s friend, had been suicidally depressed since the death of her husband four months previously, and Adams had prescribed her barbiturates. On 19 July 1956, she took an overdose and, as Adams was unavailable, another doctor, Dr Harris, was summoned. When Adams arrived, later that day, and the two doctors conferred, Adams failed to mention her depression or the medication she had been on. They concluded that she had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. When a pathologist was asked to take a spinal fluid sample the next day, he suggested that her stomach contents should be looked at to establish whether narcotics were present, but both Adams and Harris rejected the idea. A urine sample, however, showed the presence of 115g (4oz) of sodium barbitone in her body, more than twice the fatal dose. Adams admitted barbiturate poisoning might be a possibility on 22 July and gave Mrs Hullett an antidote − 10cc of Megimide. The recommended dose of Megimide was 100-200cc. As the coroner later said, Adams’s treatment was ‘merely a gesture’. He also neglected to give her oxygen, although the nurse present described the patient as ‘blue’, and he failed to put her on an intravenous drip, even though the nurse claimed she was ‘sweating a good deal’ and losing fluids. Following her death, the inquest found that Mrs Hullett had committed suicide and Adams was cleared of criminal negligence.

  Needless to say, Adams benefitted greatly from ‘Bobbie’ Hullett’s will, receiving another Rolls-Royce, worth around £3,000 ($6,000). She had also given him a cheque to the value of £1,000 ($2,000) six days before she died. He asked for it to be specially cleared by the bank, in spite of the fact that Mrs Hullett was one of the richest women in Eastbourne. He wanted his money.

  More horror stories emerged. Edith Alice Morrell, for instance, was a wealthy widow who had suffered a stroke. He gave her huge doses of heroin and morphine to help her sleep. In her will he received a small lump sum, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and silver cutlery worth £276 ($552). He had her cremated, having stated on the form that he had no financial interest in her estate. He had seen her 321 times during her illness, but billed her estate for 1,100 visits.

  Emily Louise Mortimer died, aged 75, in 1946, and Adams benefited to the tune of £1,950 ($3,900).

  In 1950, 76-year-old Amy Ware left him £1,000 ($2,000), even though he wrote on the cremation form that he was not a beneficiary of her will.

  Later that same year, 89-year-old Annabelle Kilgour went into a coma shortly after Adams had started her on a course of sedatives. She left him £200 ($400) and a clock.

  In 1952, 85-year-old Julia Bradnum died, leaving him £661($1,322). He had accompanied her to the bank to check her will and gave her advice about changing it. The day before she passed away, she had been fit and well. The next morning, when she said she felt unwell, he gave her an injection, saying, ‘It will be over in three minutes.’ How right he was.

  Shortly before 72-year-old Julia Thomas died, in November 1952, Adams told her cook, ‘Mrs Thomas promised me her typewriter. I’ll take it now.’

  87-year-old Clara Miller left him £1,257 ($2,514) in her will. He would lock her door, throw open the windows, remove her bedclothes and raise her nightgown, exposing her chest to the elements.

  There were many more.

  Detective superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard, famous for solving the infamous 1953 Teddington Towpath Murders, led the police investigation. He faced problems from the start. The British Medical Association (BMA) informed all its members that they should not breach patient confidentiality, even to the police. The Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, tried to have the ban rescinded and, amazingly, gave the police’s 187-page report to the BMA secretary, Dr Macrae, in order to convince him of the importance of the case. It is likely the report was copied and passed to Adams’ defence team.

  The case became even more complex when the police came into possession of a memo by a Daily Mail journalist discussing rumours of homosexuality, illegal at the time, between a police officer, a magistrate and a doctor. The doctor in question was Adams and the magistrate was Sir Roland Gwynne, who was a patient of Adams and visited him every morning at 9am. They were also known to holiday together. The policeman was Richard Walker, chief constable of Eastbourne. The presence of the chief constable’s name persuaded Hannam that he should not spend a great deal of time pursuing this line of enquiry.

  They arrested Adams, by now, the richest doctor in England, on 19 December 1956. He was charged with the murder of Edith Alice Morrell.

  Remarkably, however, after a trial lasting 17 days, Dr John Bodkin Adams was found not guilty.

  There were many outside forces involved in the Adams case. It was important, for instance, for the fledgling NHS, which had been founded in 1948. By 1957, disaffection was rife and finances were stretched to breaking point. To have convicted a doctor of murder, and possibly sentenced him to death, would have completely destroyed morale and public confidence in the service. It would also have threatened the future of the government, which was deeply embroiled in the Suez crisis at the time of Adams’ arrest.

  Interestingly, Adams had treated the 10th Duke of Devonshire, new prime minister, Harold Macmillan’s brother-in-law, in 1950, after he suffered a heart attack. The coroner should have been notified when the duke died, as he had not seen a doctor in the 14 days before his death. But Adams signed the death certificate, using a loophole in the law, stating that the duke had died naturally, and therefore avoided the inconvenience of an inquest and the resulting publicity. Macmillan did not want this case to be investigated any further and was grateful to Adams.

  Following his acquittal, Adams resigned from the NHS, and later in the year was struck off the medical register when he was convicted of forging prescriptions, making false statements on cremation forms and three offences under the Dangerous Drugs Act.

  He was registered as a doctor again in 1961, suggesting that his colleagues were never entirely convinced of his guilt or his incompetence. In 1983, he fell and fractured his hip while shooting – he was president of the British Clay Pigeon Shooting Association. In hospital, he developed a chest infection and died, leaving an estate valued at £402,970 ($805,490). Those legacies had just kept on coming.

  Washington State Penitentiary

  Washington State, USA

  Washington State Penitentiary, or, The 'Concrete Mama' is a cold mistress, known to her inmates simply as 'The Walls'. Her famous residents include Gary Ridgeway - the Green River Killer, and Kenneth Bianchi of the Hillside Stranglers. She is also home to Washington state's execution suite, where the condemned prisoner is provided with a choice between death by lethal injection, or old-fashioned hanging.

  Sometimes they call it the ‘Concrete Mama’, a name borrowed from a book of that title. More commonly, it is known as ‘Wally World’, from the theme park in the Chevy Chase film, National Lampoon’s Vacation.

  Surrounded by wheat fields, Washington State Penitentiary is located on the outskirts of the town of Walla Walla, famous for its sweet onions and the wine produced
by local wineries. It is the state’s largest prison, with around 1,800 inmates, and is the site of Washington State’s death row, where prisoners await execution. They have a choice. They can make themselves comfortable in the electric chair, or, if they would rather, die by hanging.

  Wally World welcomed its first inmates on 11 May 1887. The first ten convicts to take up residence at the new penitentiary were transported from the prison at Seatco in Thurston County, escorted by a company of national guardsmen. The new prison had been built on land donated by the citizens of Walla Walla to replace the old, insecure structure at Seatco. The first prisoner to enter the prison was William Murphy, serving 18 years for manslaughter. Like the rest, he wore a striped suit and his head was shaved.

  Discipline has always been rigidly enforced at Walla Walla – in the beginning, prisoners were rarely allowed to speak and when they moved between locations at the prison, they moved in ‘lockstep’, a method of marching in extremely close, single file, in such a way that the leg of each person in the file moved in the same way and at the same time as the corresponding leg of the person immediately in front. Their legs stayed very close to each other at all times. Nonetheless, two prisoners made the first escape from the new prison just two months after it opened on 4 July, scrambling over the walls. They were recaptured a short distance away and, from then on, guards were positioned on the walls.

  Cells at Walla Walla were made of iron, with strap-iron grill doors and, until 1902, the only light was provided by candles. Prisoners had to work and, from 1892, they produced sacks in a one-storey jute mill. From 1921 the factory produced car registration plates. Today, they produce 900,000 plates a year.

  Strict silence had to be observed during meal times, and inmates were forbidden from staring at visitors or gazing aimlessly around the dining hall. Guards, too, were under a strict regime. There had to be no ‘whistling, scuffing, immoderate laughter or other ungentlemanly conduct’ while on penitentiary property.

  There have been a number of escape attempts, one of the most unusual of which occurred in 1986, when an inmate had himself sealed inside a tiny cardboard box that measured only 35cm by 48cm by 81cm (14 ins by 19 ins by 32 ins). He left behind a lifelike dummy in his cell to fool the guards. It even wore a wig made from the inmate’s own hair. Unfortunately, for him, he was discovered.

  In 1891, two inmates were shot dead by a warder after seizing a supply train that regularly came into the yard to deliver clay to the prison’s brickyard. They captured warder John McLees at knifepoint, but McLees refused to open the gate, instead shouting to a warder on the wall to open fire.

  Donald Collins, died in 1933, as he and three other prisoners tried to scale the prison wall after they had broken out through the wall of a vegetable cellar. On the morning of 12 February 1934, the most serious escape attempt took place and it proved to be one of the most disastrous for those involved. Two officers, Floyd Jackson and H M Williams, were seized at knifepoint by inmates Frank Butler and James DeLong, in an office. Other inmates joined them and also seized another warder, Tom Hubbard, who had come in and tried to take the knife away from one of the convicts. Hubbard was stabbed several times and a wire was wrapped around his neck. Jackson was then locked into a cell.

  When another warden made a phone call to the office, the inmates forced Jackson to answer and, unknown to the prisoners, he succeeded in communicating to the other man, by the tone of his voice, that all was not well. The warders, now including another three, were forced to lead the prisoners out into the yard. In the meantime, the prison authorities were assembling a team.

  As the inmates led the captured warders towards the gate, guards positioned themselves on the walls. En route, however, one warder was fatally stabbed and another was wounded in the leg. Another was almost strangled by wire that had been put around his neck.

  This was more than enough for the guards on the wall, who screamed at the prisoners to lie on the ground. When they failed to do so, the men on the wall opened fire. The first shot felled HR Clark, who was serving 10-20 years for killing a man in the prison. Other inmates now rushed out of their workshops to see what the commotion was. They started to run for the gate, but a burst of machine-gun fire over their heads, from the guards on the wall, forced them to retreat back inside to safety. The prison was placed on lockdown while the warders cleaned up the mess and assessed what had happened.

  Seven inmates and one officer lay dead. Four inmates were badly injured and one of them died later from his wounds. It was one of the worst prison death tolls in American history.

  Nazi Death Camps

  Germany, Poland, Austria

  The scale of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, at extermination centres such as Auschwitz and Belzec, was so massive, and so horrifyingly brutal, that many people in Europe could not believe human beings were capable of such profound evil. These houses of death continue to serve as a reminder to us that such sickening events must not be allowed to happen, ever again.

  The Words Arbeit Macht Frei ( Work Will Set You Free) are written over the massive iron gates at the entrance to Auschwitz extermination camp. It was one of the last things seen by hundreds of thousands of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and opponents to Hitler’s government. The Nazis placed it there to lull the hordes entering the camp into believing that they were being brought there to work. They were, of course, being brought there to die. The extermination camps set up by Nazi Germany, in the 1940s, represent the ultimate houses of death. They existed purely to exterminate countless numbers of people as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  They were part of the plan for what the Nazis termed Die Endlösung der Judenfrage – the Final Solution of the Jewish Question – which was concocted and approved at the Nazi Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Control of the extermination programme was given to an enthusiastic young Third Reich Obersturmbannführer, Adolf Eichmann. He would organize the largest military operation the world has ever known – the mobilization of tens of thousands of trains to transport the Jews to their deaths.

  The Nazis already had camps. These were labour camps – Arbeitslager – that were built for the incarceration and forced labour of ‘enemies of the state’, and later included Jews and prisoners of war. Needless to say, the death rates were still extremely high in these places and inmates died from starvation, disease, exhaustion and extraordinary brutality. Until 1942, the Jews were sent to such concentration camps, places like Dachau and Belsen. From 1942, they went straight to the death camps, and more than half the approximately six million Jews killed in the war died in Hitler’s death camps.

  They were set-up in a number of locations – Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Maly Trostenets and Treblinka. The numbers who died in each of these camps are breathtaking: but may not even tell the whole story. 1,200,000 in Auschwitz; at least 700,000 in Treblinka; around 435,000 in Bełżec; circa 167,000 in Sobibór; between 170,000 and 360,000 at Chelmno; 200,000 at Majdanek and at least 65,000 at Maly Trostenets.

  Auschwitz and Chelmno were in parts of western Poland annexed by Germany. Chelmno was ideally located near the city of Lodz, Poland’s second-largest city, with a Jewish population of 200,000. At Chelmno, Jews were forced into vans into which tubes were inserted and fed exhaust fumes. It took 15 minutes for the job to be done, and the van would then drop the bodies in pre-dug graves before returning to the camp for the next group. Few people in Poland were even aware that it existed.

  Auschwitz-Birkenau is the best known of all the death camps. There were really three camps. At the first one the notorious Josef Mengele carried out medical experiments on twins, dwarves and other unfortunates. But it was Auschwitz II, under the command of the ruthless Rudolf Hoess, that was the extermination camp. The real number of people who died at Auschwitz will never be known, because the Nazis did not register the names of everyone who died there. Built in 1942, it consisted of gas chambers and crematoria for the disposal of the huge numbers of corpses. Around 20,0
00 were killed every day, resulting in so many corpses that they became a logistical problem.

  Trains would arrive daily from all over Europe. On disembarking, the prisoners would be separated into those who looked fit enough to work and those – mostly women and children – who looked unfit. Families were separated from each other during this process.

  Those selected for work had their heads shaved and numbers tattooed on their arms, in this way around 400,000 were registered. Around 340,000 of them died as a result of the cruelty they experienced. Those unfit for work went to the gas chambers, at Birkenau, within several hours of their arrival. The cyanide gas Zyklon-B was used, but only after the victims’ hair was shaved off for use in making haircloth and gold fillings were removed from teeth to be made into gold bars and sent to Berlin.

  As the Russians moved towards Auschwitz, at the end of the war, the Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of what had taken place. When it was liberated, on 27 January 1945, they found a mere 7,600 survivors. Around 58,000 had been sent on a death march to Germany.

  Not long after the Germans and Russians had partitioned Poland between them, the Germans built a forced labour camp at Bełżec, housing 11,000. As a forced labour camp, it played host to thousands of deaths from disease, starvation and execution. However, in 1942, it became a death camp, commanded by Odilo Globocnik, the area’s police chief, known as Himmler’s chief mass murderer. Jews arrived from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

  Initially diesel fumes were used, but the more efficient Zyklon-B was soon introduced. Late in 1942, however, the killing ceased and the dead, who had been buried in mass graves, were dug up and cremated, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of the horrors that had been perpetrated.