The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (39 page)

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
in
camera
.

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.