The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

In the mid-1950s, a rumour began in the genteel resort of Eastbourne, on England’s south coast, that a local general practitioner, Dr John Bodkin Adams, was poisoning his patients and pocketing large legacies from them. Suspicion took root in 1950 with the death of an elderly and eccentric patient called Mrs Edith Morrell. Nurses observed Dr Adams dosing Mrs Morrell with various medications including barbiturates, doses that grew bigger as the stricken old woman sank deeper. After her death, Adams received a chest of silver, an antique cupboard and a Rolls-Royce motor car from Mrs Morrell’s estate. Tongues wagged. In July 1956, another elderly patient, Mrs Gertrude Hullett, died in the care of Dr Adams, leaving him another Rolls-Royce car in her will. Teacups in scandalized Eastbourne rattled louder than ever, and the town’s chief constable called in a team of detectives from Scotland Yard’s murder squad to investigate. Adams had treated hundreds of old and wealthy patients, but the police drew up a dossier focusing on nine suspicious deaths. Told that he was to be charged with murdering old Mrs Morrell, Dr Adams blinked owlishly and replied: “Murder? I do not think you could prove it was murder.” He was right. They could not.

Dr Adams, a church-going bachelor, had apparently lived a blameless life, but the case against him was strong. At his sensational Old Bailey trial in 1957, the doctor was said to have been a beneficiary in 132 wills, and to have amassed £45,000 in cash as well as silver, jewellery, antiques, pictures and the two Rolls-Royce cars. When the trial began, the assembled world’s press, believing almost to a man that Adams was guilty, reported the case recklessly. “Eastbourne’s frenzied gossip pushed Dr Adams’s alleged victims as high as 400”, trumpeted Newsweek magazine, which was promptly fined for contempt and banned from circulating for the remainder of the trial. Eric Ambler (b. 1909), the best-selling writer of spy thrillers, was commissioned to cover the case. When this account appeared in Eric Ambler’s 1963 murder anthology The Ability To Kill, Dr Adams made such a fuss that the book was pulped. It was eventually published without the Adams chapter, which appears here for the first time. Dr Adams himself died in 1984.

Even during the summer holiday season, when the visitors are down from London and the hotels and boarding houses become filled, Eastbourne remains a quiet, dignified town. A great many of its residents are well-to-do elderly persons who have gone there to end their days in retirement. To succeed in Eastbourne a doctor has to be more than a good physician. He also needs a good bedside manner.

Dr Adams succeeded from the moment he arrived there in 1922. And not merely because of his sweet smile and his Irish brogue. A busily religious man, he was soon taking an active part in local Salvation Army and welfare activities. Nor was his piety a spare-time thing. He had the engaging habit of carrying a Bible and a selection of religious tracts along with his stethoscope and manometer, and of offering spiritual comfort with his medical advice.

Inevitably, he had his critics. Some members of the Salvation Army discerned in their recruit an irritating tendency to regard himself as the Almighty’s personal representative in Eastbourne. Relations cooled. Yet, those who dismissed him as a sanctimonious humbug made no converts. Success did not spoil him. His older, poorer patients were never neglected. He gave a weekly tea party for the lonely ones among them so that they could meet and gossip. And, of course, he helped them with prayer. If he had a vice-and what man has not?-it was his passion for eating chocolates by the boxful. Certainly, among his patients there was never any doubt of his goodness or of the sincerity of his beliefs. He was fifty-seven and a bachelor.

Early in 1956, the Chief Constable of Eastbourne became aware of a strong undercurrent of rumour in the town. He also received some related anonymous letters. Both the rumours and the letters made the same allegation-that there was a connection between the deaths of several of Dr Adams’s wealthier patients and the fact that the doctor had benefited under their wills.

The identity of those who started the rumours and wrote the letters will probably never be known for certain. After the trial, Dr Adams stated in a newspaper article that he himself had at intervals been receiving anonymous letters accusing him of killing “wealthy widows” since 1935. However, the rumours and letters before the Chief Constable in 1956 were of too serious a nature to be ignored. In the end, he decided to call on Scotland Yard for help.

Scotland Yard sent Superintendent Hannam; and it was upon the results of his work that much of the prosecution’s case subsequently relied.

The superintendent was forty-eight at that time, a self-educated, ambitious and very able man. Some months earlier, he had been responsible for investigating charges of police corruption in the Metropolitan area and had done that disagreeable duty with impressive thoroughness. At the Yard he had a nickname-“The Count”. When he gave evidence at the Old Bailey, the name did not, in its urchin way, seem inappropriate. His tight-lipped manner was a trifle imperious, and he used words like “quest” when he meant “task” or “job” and “loquacious” when “talkative” would have done. He also preferred phrases like “abuts on to” to a more pertinent “is beside” and the medico’s “cerebral vascular accident” to the layman’s “stroke”.

Accounts of the number of deaths he investigated in Eastbourne that summer have varied. At the height of the excitement some newspapers put the figure as high as four hundred. About forty seems a more likely estimate. But forty or four hundred, the investigation gave the rumours something substantial to feed upon.

In August, the investigation began to come out into the open. At a coroner’s inquest on Mrs Gertrude Joyce Hullett, a wealthy widow of fifty, Dr Adams appeared as a witness and said that he had been treating her with sodium barbiturate. A government pathologist said that he had found a fatal dose of it in Mrs Hullett’s body. It was revealed that in her will, she had bequeathed her Rolls-Royce to Dr Adams. The jury returned a verdict of suicide. Depression and ill health following her husband’s recent death were thought to have been the cause. The coroner commented that there had been “an extraordinary element of careless treatment” on Dr Adams’s part. He also asked Superintendent Hannam, significantly present in court, if Scotland Yard was investigating “certain deaths in this neighbourhood”. Hannam agreed that it was.

Immediately after the inquest, Dr Adams was for the first time introduced to Hannam. The doctor told him that in view of the rumours that were going about he welcomed the investigation, and offered to help in any way he could. Apparently Hannam acknowledged the offer politely enough; but, with so much left unsaid (at this stage Hannam must at least have begun to believe that he was dealing with a murderer) it was a strained encounter.

Two days later, Hannam interviewed the doctor’s solicitor and obtained from him a list of the wills under the terms of which Dr Adams had benefited in some way or other. The list was possibly quite extensive. Fifty or sixty years ago, when the social mores of most of the doctor’s older patients were determined, it was quite customary to “remember” a friendly family physician in one’s will. [12]

On 1 October, Hannam had what he later insisted was a chance meeting with the doctor outside the latter’s garage. Yet, chance or not, within hours the newspapers were reporting that Dr Adams had again been interviewed by the Scotland Yard man. Eastbourne seethed with excitement. The world’s press poured in to cover the story. The suspicion that there was a mass murderer in the town had by now become a conviction. On 24 November, Superintendent Hannam, accompanied by Inspector Pugh and Detective-Sergeant Hewitt of the Eastbourne police, went to the doctor’s house. After questioning him about a list of drugs which he had prescribed for another wealthy widow, Edith Alice Morrell, who had died in 1950, Hannam took him to the police station. The doctor was there charged with thirteen offences under the Forgery and Cremation Acts.

The alleged forgeries were mainly concerned with prescriptions for drugs. The four relating to cremation had a more sinister ring.

In England, before a person can be cremated, the doctor who attended must certify that he has no financial interest in the death. It was alleged that, in four such cases, the doctor had certified falsely. One of the cases was that of Mrs Hullett’s husband. Another was that of Mrs Morrell.

The doctor was allowed bail. On 26 November, after an adjourned hearing on the charges, he asked to see Hannam. At that meeting, the doctor asked if Hannam intended to bring any more charges against him.

Hannam replied: “I am still inquiring into the deaths of some of your rich patients. I don’t think they were all natural.” He mentioned Mrs Morrell’s name.

According to Hannam the doctor then said: “Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked. She wanted to die. That can’t be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor.”

He was mistaken. At noon on 19 December Hannam, Pugh and Hewitt went again to the doctor’s house, and arrested him for the murder of Mrs Morrell. Hannam delivered the usual caution.

The way in which Dr Adams responded and the intended meaning of his reply were later to be the subject of argument. The words he uttered were: “Murder? Murder? Can you prove it was murder?” A little later he added: “I did not think you could prove murder. She was dying in any event.”

The following morning, he was taken before the Eastbourne magistrates, remanded in custody, and then sent to Brixton prison. On 14 January he was returned to the magistrates’ court for the preliminary hearing. The Crown’s case, conducted by Mr Melford Stevenson, QC, was in substance this:

Mrs Morrell had suffered from cerebral arterial sclerosis, a hardening of the vessels which supplied blood to the brain, and in June of 1948, when she was seventy-nine, had a stroke which had resulted in some loss of movement on one side of her body. Shortly after this she had come under Dr Adams’s care. In spite of the fact that she had been in no serious pain, Dr Adams had begun prescribing morphine for her condition, and later heroin as well. It was contended that his purpose was to make her a drug addict and, therefore, dependent on him. In this way he hoped to induce her to provide for him generously in her will. During the next two years, the prosecution said, he had gradually stepped up the quantities of these drugs until, in November, 1950, he had administered fatal doses of both morphine and paraldehyde, one of which had killed her. He had then certified the cause of her death as cerebral thrombosis. On the cremation certificate, in answer to the question as to whether he had any financial interest in the death, he had written: “Not so far as I am aware.” His explanation for this had been that he “always wanted cremations to go off smoothly for the dear relatives”. Under her will he had received a valuable chest of Georgian silver cutlery and later received from her son a Rolls-Royce car which she had promised him. He had known that he would get these things, and that had been his motive for the crime.

If the case against Dr Adams had rested there (and, it must be pointed out, that is where it did rest when he was later tried at the Old Bailey) it would, I think, have been felt by most people, even those without any knowledge of the medical evidence available to the defence, that the Crown was on shaky ground.

The doctor was a well-to-do man with a substantial practice. The value of the Georgian silver which he had inherited from the dead woman was £276 (even her chauffeur had received more-£1,000 cash); the second-hand Rolls-Royce car had not been inherited, but given to him by the dead woman’s son. Was it really feasible that the doctor would do murder for £276? If, in fact, he had been motivated simply by greed for money, would he not have tried to keep this wealthy, fee-paying patient alive as long as he could? As for the entry on the cremation form, the doctor’s own explanation could perfectly well be true. Why create difficulties because of a chest of old cutlery? He did not seem to have valued it very much; six years later, when Hannam questioned him, it was still in his house-and he had not even troubled to unwrap it. Of course, it is very wrong to make false statements on legal documents; but most family doctors like things to go smoothly for the bereaved. There must be few who have not, at some time or other, signed a death certificate, knowing that the cause of death they have entered may not be precisely true, because they have seen no sense in insisting on a distressing and pointless autopsy. Of course, the wish for things to go smoothly can go too far. Dr Adams may well have done so.

At Eastbourne, however, there was no room for this sort of argument. After all the rumours, the prolonged and much publicized police investigation, the bringing of the thirteen lesser charges and the massive press coverage, it was virtually impossible to consider the case of Mrs Morrell on its isolated merits. Nor did the Crown attempt to do so. Having presented its case in respect of Mrs Morrell, the prosecution asked leave to introduce supporting evidence to show that Dr Adams’s relationships with two of his other wealthy patients (Mr and Mrs Hullett) had followed a similar pattern-drugs, death, legacy-and that the pattern was one of wilful murder.

Mr Geoffrey Lawrence, QC, who defended the doctor both at Eastbourne and at the subsequent trial, argued strenuously against the hearing of the Hullett evidence in open court. His view was that the case had already received enormous publicity in the press; and that, if it were to go before a jury in another court, they would almost certainly have read about or been told about the Eastbourne proceedings. The trial judge might exclude the Hullett evidence as out of order, but it would be impossible for the jury to exclude it from their minds. If it had to be heard let it be heard incamera.

It is interesting to note that, in his summing up at the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Devlin expressed the same view.

However, the Eastbourne magistrates decided to follow the more usual practice, and allowed the Hullett evidence to be heard in open court. It amounted to this:

In December 1955, Mr Hullett, a former Lloyd’s underwriter of seventy-one, had been operated on for cancer. He was still convalescent in February when his general condition suddenly worsened. He had attacks of breathlessness and complained of pains in the chest and head. On 13 March, after one of these attacks, Doctor Adams had given Mr Hullett an injection of what the attending nurse had thought to be hyperduric morphia. Some eight hours later the patient had died. Dr Adams had told the nurse that the death had been due to a cerebral haemorrhage, but added words which suggested that the operation had not contained the cancer and that Mr Hullett had been doomed anyway. Under his will Dr Adams received £500. Again he had failed to declare his interest on the cremation certificate.

Four months later Mrs Hullett also died. At the inquest the coroner had said that Dr Adams had been “careless”. The Crown said now that Dr Adams had followed the same procedure as in the case of Mrs Morrell, except that this time he had used his knowledge of the fact that she had suicidal tendencies. He had prescribed barbiturates for her and allowed her to possess enough of them for a fatal dose.

As Mr Lawrence pointed out, it was all a little far-fetched. [13]

Dr Adams pleaded not guilty, reserved his defence and was committed for trial.

Another man who had been tried for murder and then acquitted once wrote that the worst part of the trial was undoubtedly having to listen to counsel’s opening speech for the prosecution, without being able to do or say anything about it. Moreover, everyone in court was watching you. If you controlled your feelings too well, that might be construed as callous indifference; if you responded visibly you might convey an impression of guilt and defeat. Whatever you did would be misinterpreted.

Dr Adams proved to be a stout, balding man of medium height with a round, florid face and a puckish nose. His manner was one neither of indifference nor defeat. He listened intently. When counsel drew conclusions with which he disagreed, he shook his head like an irritable schoolteacher trying to be patient with a backward child. Secure in the knowledge that, however imprudent he may have been, he was certainly not guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, his impatience was understandable. My impression was that the only person in court whom he really detested was Superintendent Hannam.

The Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, led for the prosecution, and he did so with an air of stolid confidence which he somehow managed to maintain to the end. Of the gaping holes in his case which the defence persistently exposed he seemed quite unaware. His look of surprise at the verdict could well have been genuine. It was as if the captain of a sinking ship had only just realised that the water was up to his neck.

Dramatically speaking, most criminal trials have a standard structure. The accused enters, the indictment is read, there is a plea of “not guilty”, and the prosecution presents its case. One by one the damaging facts emerge. Then, come the witnesses for the prosecution, telling their individual stories. Counsel for the defence tries to shake them in cross-examination and usually gains a few minor points, but the general effect is unimpaired. Members of the jury glance furtively at the prisoner in the dock, and you know what they are thinking. They are wondering why he should have thought for a moment that he could get away with it, and what lunatic advised him against pleading guilty. Then, later, when the defence presents its case, the whole thing swings the other way. Doubts enter. The battle is joined.

In the trial of Dr Adams everything happened quite differently.

The prosecution had decided to base its case against Dr Adams upon the indictment concerning Mrs Morrell; presumably because they felt that it was the strongest they had. [14]

The Crown’s principal witnesses were the nurses who had attended Mrs Morrell during Dr Adams’s treatment of her, and expert medical witnesses to give their opinions about the nature of his treatment. Since the Crown, to prove its case against Dr Adams, had first to prove that murder had in fact been done, the proceedings took on something of the character of an inquest.

The trained nurses were probably the most important figures in the case. These were the various day and night nurses who had been engaged by Dr Adams to attend Mrs Morrell at her house, from the time she left the nursing home in 1948 until her death two years later. The first of the three to give evidence was Nurse Stronach.

She was a small, faded woman with a short upper lip and a determined jaw. The jaw moved slightly but persistently as if she had sore gums or were chewing some kind of cud.

In reply to the Attorney-General’s questions she drew for us a picture of Mrs Morrell’s last days that looked bad for Dr Adams. We heard of his visits at night, of mysterious injections by him of unknown drugs, of poor Mrs Morrell lying doped and helpless, of further injections being pumped into her. Suggestions that Mrs Morrell might have been suffering pain were waved aside by Nurse Stronach. Mrs Morrell’s complaints, she said firmly, were neurotic. She was the ideal prosecution witness.

Then, Geoffrey Lawrence rose to cross-examine.

His manner is quiet and gentle. He asks for the witness’s help like a charity organizer wheedling a small subscription out of a millionaire. He is elaborately courteous. It is no part of his technique to undermine the witness’s personal dignity or self-confidence. What he seems to propose is a friendly collaboration in his great task of getting the truth.

Unfortunately for Nurse Stronach, she chose to reject his proposal.

Lawrence began by reminding her that what she had described so confidently had taken place over six years ago and that she was relying upon her memory. At this not unreasonable suggestion Nurse Stronach took umbrage.

Her attitude was that she knew what she knew, and that nobody was going to trick her into changing her story. When asked about her numerous interviews with the police prior to Dr Adams’s arrest, she became pert. The judge began to eye her coldly.

Lawrence, still very polite, began to question her about the record books kept by the nurses-the regulation nursing diary-and asked if such a diary had been kept for Mrs Morrell. Yes, of course. And it would be accurate? Oh, yes; everything pertaining to her medical history would be entered into it by every nurse concerned. Lawrence looked wistful. If only we had those records now we could see exactly what happened? Nurse Stronach agreed somewhat tolerantly that we could.

Then Lawrence pounced.

It so happened that we did have the books-he waved one aloft-and he would trouble Nurse Stronach to say if this entry, and that entry, and that, and that, and that, were in her handwriting. They were.

The prosecution’s efforts to appear to remain calm under this assault were manful but forlorn. The Attorney-General recovered quickly enough to put up a counter-barrage of technical objections; but did not get very far. Nurse Stronach was too serious a casualty for technical first aid.

As Lawrence proceeded to demolish practically every statement she had previously made by making her read out what she had written at the time, Nurse Stronach got smaller and smaller.

Not that she gave in easily. She adopted an air of being importuned, while feverishly trying to clamber out of the trap by thumbing through the diary ahead of Lawrence’s questions.

But he was not having that.

“Are you listening to me or are you reading that book?” he asked sharply at this point.

“Yes, I am listening,” was the unhappy reply. She was chewing furiously now.

“Don’t try to read them in advance,” Lawrence persisted.

“I am not,” said Nurse Stronach, bridling.

When the Attorney-General re-examined her in an effort to repair the damage, he found a witness almost as hostile to the prosecution as she had been to the defence. Nurse Stronach had had enough of lawyers for the day-all lawyers. The friendly pat on the shoulder she received from Superintendent Hannam when she left the witness box can have been small consolation to her.

The next prosecution witness, Nurse Mason-Ellis, suffered a different misfortune.

On the adjournment that day, the judge solemnly warned all three nurses not to discuss the case between themselves.

But the situation was too much for them. Together, that evening, they went back to Eastbourne by train. The following morning they returned to London, also by train. Their conversations on both journeys were overheard and reported to the defence. The ladies talked their heads off about the case.

Nurse Mason-Ellis, a nice-mannered little woman, was the one who had to admit publicly to the indiscretion. Lawrence made the most of it.

When she had been persuaded to admit that the conversations had indeed taken place, he asked: “Did one or other of you say, ‘don’t say that or you will get me into trouble’? ”

Nurse Mason-Ellis after squirming a bit admitted that one of them had; but not her.

“Which one was it?”

“Must I answer?”

The judge intervened with a sharp, “yes”.

The truth came out. It had been Nurse Randall, the nurse on duty when Mrs Morrell had died, and what she had been talking about was the important matter of how and where the dangerous drugs had been kept in the Morrell house. It also emerged that, on this same subject, one of the answers given by Nurse Stronach had been patently untrue.

Using the prosecution’s own somewhat battered witness and the nursing diaries (the validity of which was not in dispute) Lawrence now proceeded to build up a picture of Mrs Morrell’s last days totally different from that proffered by the Attorney-General in his opening address.

Sick she had certainly been; but she had also been senile and, at times, scarcely sane. She had been liable to sudden paranoid outbursts, during which, half-paralysed though she was, she would attempt to get out of bed, shout, scream and work herself into violent rages, abuse her nurses and accuse them of trying to kill her. In her condition this had been dangerous. She had needed heavy sedation, for only heavy sedation had had any effect. Her behaviour, as recorded in the diaries, even after massive injections of morphine and heroin, showed that clearly. She had died eventually because she was old and sick, and for no other reason.

By the time Lawrence had finished with the nursing diaries, Dr Adams was not the only person on trial there. What, it was being asked, would have happened if the diaries had not been found and produced? Presumably, the court would have accepted as true a lot of evidence it now knew to be false. Had those who had prepared the case for the Crown made any effort to find the diaries? Admittedly, after six years the chances of their still being available would be small; but had any effort at all been made?

Apparently not. After Mrs Morrell’s death, it seems, the diaries had been delivered to the doctor’s house in a bundle, put away with other records in a filing cabinet, and forgotten. It had not been until Superintendent Hannam had questioned him about some drug prescriptions which he had written for Mrs Morrell, that Dr Adams had remembered the diaries. This was when he was preparing to defend himself against the thirteen lesser charges, and some weeks before his arrest for the murder of Mrs Morrell. He and his solicitor had searched for and found the diaries. They had been handed over at once to the defence lawyers, who, of course, would have made them available if the Crown had inquired about them.

The Attorney-General’s contention was that the diaries had been purposely kept by Dr Adams in case of any inquiry into Mrs Morrell’s death; but this line of thought led him along a strange path. It ended at the dark suggestion that the doctor (driven, we had to assume, by an unholy passion for Georgian cutlery) had taken “the greatest care possible to secure that any entries put by the nurses in those books were not obviously incriminating to him and not obviously showing the design that he had formed”.

How the doctor was supposed to have managed this, the Attorney-General did not explain. There had been no hint of a suggestion from any of the nurses that the doctor had told them what or what not to write. Indeed, they had all insisted on the accuracy of the entries; and the books were all there; no pages had been removed.

These were not the only nursing diaries to inconvenience the prosecution.

The expert witnesses for the Crown were two Harley Street specialists, Doctors Douthwaite and Ashby.

Dr Douthwaite, senior physician at Guy’s Hospital, described the causes of a stroke such as that suffered by Mrs Morrell in Cheshire in 1948, and the treatment that, in his opinion, should have followed such an incident.

The burden of his evidence was that there was no justification for administering morphine to such a patient unless there was an episode of acute mania. In that event a single injection only might be given. Dr Adams’s programme of morphine and heroin injections had been quite wrong. It had led to Mrs Morrell’s becoming an addict of those drugs, and her tolerance of them had increased to the point where she had been suffering withdrawal symptoms. Finally, in Dr Douthwaite’s opinion, Dr Adams had increased the dosage drastically with the intention of murdering her.

These opinions were given simply, lucidly and temperately; but also very positively. There was no doubt of the impression they made upon the court.

When Lawrence rose to cross-examine, he was, we realised, faced with the task of effacing that impression or, at least, of blurring it pending the introduction of an expert witness for the defence who would flatly contradict Dr Douthwaite’s opinions. It had not been expected that he would have as his unwitting collaborators those who had prepared the case for the Crown. This is how the cross-examination went.

Lawrence: “Are you saying that Dr Adams formed the intention to terminate Mrs Morrell’s life on 8 November and carried that intention into effect over the next five days?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

Lawrence: “I think it follows from what you said to my Lord yesterday that that murderous intent, in your view, was present in his mind from and including 8 November onwards to the end?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

Lawrence: “A specialist’s profession is a responsible one, but I hardly suppose that you have often expressed a graver or more fateful opinion on a matter than that, have you?”

Dr Douthwaite: “No.”

Lawrence: “Before going into the witness box and expressing that view, have you satisfied yourself that you have every piece of relevant evidence before you on which to judge?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

Lawrence repeated this question in several different ways and received affirmative replies before going on: “Did you know that, when Mrs Morrell had the stroke over two years before she died, she was staying with her son in Cheshire?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

Lawrence: “Have you made any inquiries, before giving the evidence against Dr Adams that you gave yesterday, into the symptoms of her stroke, the circumstances and the treatment she had in Cheshire before Dr Adams ever took her over in Eastbourne?”

Dr Douthwaite: “I have said in conferences it would be very interesting to know what treatment she had before she came under the care of Dr Adams.”

Lawrence explored this answer a little and then continued: “If it was as relevant and as interesting as that, did you ask for that information to be found, or for attempts to be made to furnish you with it before you came to your final conclusion?”

Dr Douthwaite: “No.”

Lawrence (sharply): “Why not, if it was relevant and material to the medical picture from the point of view of addiction, about which you told us so much yesterday?”

Dr Douthwaite must by now have suspected what was coming, but the hesitation before he replied was only momentary: “In the first place because I was told that the information was not available, and secondly because it would not have materially influenced the answers I have given in respect to the addiction.”

Lawrence’s face was quite expressionless as he produced the nursing record for the case of Mrs Morrell while she had been in the Cheshire cottage hospital. It contained all the information that Dr Douthwaite had been told was not available. The hospital physician had prescribed for her regular injections of morphine. The sedation treatment, which the Crown had postulated as an essential part of Dr Adams’s wicked “design”, had not been initiated by him.

The Attorney-General, while not going so far as to suggest that the cottage hospital in Cheshire had kept its nursing records for six long years solely in order to help Dr Adams defend himself against a charge of murder, dismissed the information in them as “irrelevant” Dr Douthwaite, however, was more interested. While still disapproving of the morphine injections, he conceded that the man on the spot was entitled to exercise his own best judgment. He also said that from six to twelve months would have been a reasonable prognosis in terms of expectation of life for Mrs Morrell after her stroke.

She had lived two years.

From this point on the trial became in effect a debate about the responsibilities of doctors towards their patients and of the ethical dilemmas involved.

Lawrence: “The reasonable object of a general practitioner’s treatment for what he could reasonably expect to be the remaining months of that woman’s life would be to make life as bearable as it could be to her and to those who had to look after her?”

Dr Douthwaite: “The first object would be to try to restore her health if possible.”

Lawrence: “That is at the highest level the object of every doctor in every case, but human life being what it is there are some instances where every sensible doctor knows that, whatever he does, he cannot restore his patient to normal health. No doctor in his senses would think that, short of a miracle, he could restore a woman of seventy-nine or eighty to her pre-stroke health?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Oh, I agree.”

He also agreed that when Dr Adams had been away and his partner had been confronted with a marked degree of cerebral irritation in Mrs Morrell’s case, the partner had been right to increase the morphia administration.

Lawrence: “If a general practitioner decides that he has to make use of some sort of drug, he has to balance up the advantages and disadvantages of his choice?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Certainly.”

Lawrence: “In the case of Mrs Morrell, one of the most prominent circumstances would be his reasonable prognosis at the time of her stroke that her expectation of life was about six to twelve months?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

Lawrence: “Therefore, with that short expectation reasonably entertained by the doctor, the disadvantages of addiction following from the selection of these opiates would be far less than if he was selecting them for a person whose prognosis was absolutely indefinite?”

Dr Douthwaite: “Yes.”

In response to a further question on this point he went on: “The problem often confronts us, and my practice in teaching has been that if a patient is obviously dying it is ridiculous to worry about addiction. If the strong probability is that the patient will not live for more than a month or two, and if the drugs are indicated for the condition, you cannot worry about addiction.”

Nevertheless, he persisted in his opinion that, in the last weeks of Mrs Morrell’s life, Dr Adams had set about causing her death and had, in fact, done so. At the same time (it was all most confusing) he agreed that another physician with qualifications comparable to his own might well have a completely contrary opinion.

Dr Ashby put the ethical dilemma another way: “I think that once it can be established that a patient is dying, considerations of improving their health scarcely apply, and a doctor must give his first thought to the patient’s comfort and well-being. If comfort and well-being are competing against the length of survival, he might properly give them precedence providing death is known for certain.” In his opinion the test was this: if the doctor feels obliged to give priority to treatment of the patient’s discomfort, then he must do so.

Or, in Dr Adams’s words, he must “ease the patient’s passing”.

That concluded the case for the Crown.

Lawrence did not put Dr Adams in the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. It would have been pointless to submit him to that ordeal. The evidence of what had been done in the case of Mrs Morrell was in the nursing records, and it was the best evidence because it depended on nobody’s memory of things that had happened six years earlier.

He called only two witnesses for the defence. The first was Dr Harman, a consulting physician of St Thomas’ Hospital.

Most laymen fall into two categories where their attitudes towards the medical profession are concerned: those who prefer to believe that most doctors are skilful and wise, and those who profoundly distrust the whole pack of them. For the former group, expert medical evidence is always disconcerting. What is an elderly invalid to think of a flat statement by Consultant X that the drug with which he is being regularly dosed should on no account be prescribed for elderly persons? Should he conclude that his own doctor is trying to murder him? Or should he wait for the reassuring news from Consultant Y that what the doctor ordered is the very thing he needs? The patient has a dilemma, too.

In just under two hours Dr Harman contradicted, politely, good-humouredly, but quite firmly, practically every opinion about narcotic drugs and their use in treatment which had been given by the prosecution witnesses. Cross-examination did not shake him.

The one other defence witness was the matron of the Cheshire hospital to which Mrs Morrell had first been taken after her stroke. The patient, she said, had been “irritable and restless”. As an illustration of what she meant by that phrase, the matron recalled that Mrs Morrell had thrown a reading lamp at one of the nurses.

In his summing up, Mr Justice Devlin said that not infrequently he had heard a case presented by the prosecution that seemed to him to be manifestly a strong one and sometimes he had felt it his duty to tell the jury so. He did not think he should hesitate in this case to tell them that here the case for the defence seemed to be manifestly strong.

He concluded: “It is the same question in the end, always the same. Is the case for the Crown strong enough to carry conviction in your minds? It is your question, you have to answer it. It will lie always with you, the jury, always with you.”

The jury retired for forty-three minutes and then returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

The judge then mentioned the further indictment charging Dr Adams with the murder of Mrs Hullett.

The Attorney-General said that he had given the most anxious consideration to the course the Crown should pursue in that matter. He went on:

“One of the considerations I have felt it my duty to consider is that the publicity which has attended this trial would make it even more difficult to secure a fair trial on this further indictment. I have also taken into account the length of this trial, the ordeal which Dr Adams has already undergone, and the fact that the case for the prosecution on this further indictment is based on evidence given before the Eastbourne magistrates, and depends in parts on the evidence of Dr Ashby and very greatly on evidence not supported, as in Mrs Morrell’s case, by the admission of the administration of drugs. Having given the matter the best consideration I can, I have reached the conclusion that in all the circumstances the public interest does not require that Dr Adams should undergo the ordeal of a further trial on a charge of murder…”

The trial had lasted over three weeks. For the last two, few of those present in court throughout the trial had considered a verdict of Guilty conceivable.

Of the few, I remember one in particular. He was an Old Hand with a knowing grin and, he assured us, access to inside information. Right up until the last day, this genial expert was firmly convinced that the Crown would win hands down; and he had a ten shilling bet on to back his judgment. Wasn’t it obvious?

He was one of the policemen on the door of the courtroom.

Postscript

At Lewes Assizes in July of that year, Dr Adams pleaded guilty to certain of the offences under the Forgery and Cremation Acts with which he had originally been charged. The court considered that there had been mitigating circumstances, and a fine rather than a prison sentence was imposed. In view of the conviction, however, the General Medical Council considered it proper to strike his name from the medical register.

In November 1961, following an application by Dr Adams to the Disciplinary Committee of the Council, his name was restored to the register. At the hearing, it was stated that he intended to return to practice in Eastbourne, as an anaesthetist.