The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (41 page)

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.

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.

(Rev. Hall and Mrs Mills, 1922)

James Thurber

The Hall–Mills double murder of 1922 horrified and then mystified the American nation. But it was, as the
Daily News
in New York remarked, “a nice, clean crime”. It was also one of the first to be reported using modern transmission methods. The backstage star of the case was the world’s biggest portable electric switchboard, property of the Western Union, which could handle 20,000 words an hour. Two hundred reporters covered the trial, including sixteen correspondents from the
Daily News,
plus fifty photographers. Ten of these were posted in the courtroom at Somerville, New Jersey; an eleventh fell through the skylight on the day the defence called Mrs Hall. At the end of eleven days, a total of 5 million words had been telegraphed from Somerville. At the end of eighteen days the total was 9 million. By the twenty-fourth day, it was 12 million, enough to fill a shelf of novels twenty-two feet long. The American humorist James Thurber (1894–1961) was a journalist in the 1920s when the Hall–Mills case broke. By the time he composed this account, in 1936, he was a full-time writer. This elegant essay from the creator of Walter Mitty reminds us of Thurber’s extraordinary versatility, and his talents as (his widow’s words) “the analyser and the rememberer”.

On the morning of Saturday, 16 September 1922, a boy named Raymond Schneider and a girl named Pearl Bahmer, walking down a lonely lane on the outskirts of New Brunswick, New Jersey, came upon something that made them rush to the nearest house in Easton Avenue, around the corner, shouting. In that house an excited woman named Grace Edwards listened to them wide-eyed and then telephoned the police. The police came on the run and examined the young people’s discovery: the bodies of a man and a woman. They had been shot to death and the woman’s throat was cut. Leaning against one of the man’s shoes was his calling card, not as if it had fallen there but as if it had been placed there. It bore the name Rev. Edward W. Hall. He had been the rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist in New Brunswick. The woman was identified as Mrs Eleanor R. Mills, wife of the sexton of that church. Raymond Schneider and Pearl Bahmer had stumbled upon what was to go down finally in the annals of our crime as perhaps the country’s most remarkable mystery. Nobody was ever found guilty of the murders. Before the case was officially closed, a 150 persons had had their day in court and on the front pages of the newspapers. The names of two must already have sprung to your mind: Mrs Jane Gibson, called by the avid press “the pig woman”, and William Carpender Stevens, once known to a hundred million people simply as “Willie”. The pig woman died eleven years ago, but Willie Stevens is alive. He still lives in the house that he lived in fourteen years ago with Mr and Mrs Hall, at 23 Nichol Avenue, New Brunswick.

It was from that house that the Rev. Mr Hall walked at around seven-thirty o’clock on the night of Thursday, 14 September 1922, to his peculiar doom. With the activities in that house after Mr Hall’s departure the State of New Jersey was to be vitally concerned. No. 23 Nichol Avenue was to share with De Russey’s Lane, in which the bodies were found, the morbid interest of a whole nation four years later, when the case was finally brought to trial. What actually happened in De Russey’s Lane on the night of 14 September? What actually happened at 23 Nichol Avenue the same night? For the researcher, it is a matter of an involved and voluminous court record, colourful and exciting in places, confused and repetitious in others. Two things, however, stand out as sharply now as they did on the day of their telling: the pig woman’s story of the people she saw in De Russey’s Lane that night, and Willie Stevens’s story of what went on in the house in Nichol Avenue. Willie’s story, brought out in cross-examination by a prosecutor whose name you may have forgotten (it was Alexander Simpson), lacked all the gaudy melodrama of the pig woman’s tale, but in it, and in the way he told it on the stand, was the real drama of the Hall–Mills trial. When the State failed miserably in its confident purpose of breaking Willie Stevens down, the verdict was already written on the wall. The rest of the trial was anticlimax. The jury that acquitted Willie, and his sister, Mrs Frances Stevens Hall, and his brother, Henry Stevens, was out only five hours.