by Robin Odell
In his closing speech, Sir Edward Marshall Hall argued for a reconstruction of events at 63 Tollington Park that allowed the possibility of Miss Barrow accidentally administering the fatal arsenic to herself. Counsel constructed an ingenious if unconvincing account of the way in which this might have occurred. But it was all too late. Seddon had already left an indelible impression on the jury and junior counsel, Gervais Rentoul, commented that when he went into the witness box ‘one felt that the shadow of the gallows had crept appreciably nearer’. The jury found Frederick Seddon guilty and his wife, Margaret, not guilty. The final drama came when Seddon was asked the traditional question, ‘Have you anything to say for yourself why the court should not give you the judgement of death according to law?’
‘I have, sir,’ came the answer, and Seddon treated the court to an extraordinary address in which he reviewed and repudiated the evidence brought against him.
In a poignant conclusion to a remarkable trial, Seddon, a Freemason, declared his innocence before the Great Architect of the Universe. This so moved Mr Justice Bucknill, himself a member of the Brotherhood, that he had difficulty controlling his emotions. With tears wetting his face, he pronounced sentence of death and advised Seddon to try to make peace with his Maker. ‘I am at peace,’ retorted the condemned man, as the judge fumbled his way through to the end of the prescribed litany.
Marshall Hall described Frederick Seddon as ‘The ablest man I ever defended on a capital charge’. Spilsbury, in his copy of The Trial of the Seddons in the Notable British Trials series, marked passages in the text of Marshall Hall’s speeches which criticised the prosecution’s evidence, especially its circumstantial nature.
After the consecutive sensations of the Crippen and Seddon trials, Spilsbury was able to settle down to a quieter routine, although his workload had increased as rapidly as his fame. While he started to consolidate his already successful career, another man destined for greatness in the world of forensic medicine had just qualified at Edinburgh. Sydney Smith, an eventual Professor of Forensic Medicine at Edinburgh University, but in 1912 a newly qualified doctor unsure of his future, followed the forensic trail more by accident than career choice. Like Spilsbury, he was talent-spotted by one of the great pioneers, Professor Harvey Littlejohn, then Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Edinburgh.
In the course of their separate and distinguished careers, Spilsbury and Smith would confront each other as opposing experts in a criminal trial, but that was still a long way off. Edith Spilsbury was expecting their second child and her husband had aspirations of creating his own laboratory. With these factors in mind, the Spilsburys moved in 1912 to a larger house. They took up residence in a large semi-detached house in St John’s Wood.
It proved to be a worrying time, for Edith required an emergency operation for appendicitis a few weeks before her baby was due. The surgery was successful, as was the childbirth, but her infant son, Alan, was a child of delicate health. When family life returned to normal, Spilsbury was able to devote some of his time to his pet project in one of the spare bedrooms of his new home. There he began to establish a laboratory so that he could continue working in his own time while keeping close to his family.
Of course, a forensic pathologist’s career is not composed entirely of sensational murder cases which create large newspaper headlines and end with a criminal trial. There were in Spilsbury’s time, as there are now, numerous deaths occasioned by accident, suicide or murder for which there is no immediately apparent explanation. It is the job of the forensic pathologist, acting as a kind of medical detective, to find an adequate cause of death. In performing this role, he satisfies not only the sophisticated medico-legal code established by civilised societies but also the instinctive need which the human race recognises for every death of one of its members to be properly explained.
In the course of his career and chiefly through the medium of the post-mortem examination, Spilsbury became acquainted with death in a myriad of forms. They varied from the bizarre to the simply tragic and, with each, came an explanation to satisfy the law and a contribution to his knowledge and experience. Spilsbury kept detailed notes of his work and also maintained a separate filing card system on which he recorded individual cases. His intention was, ultimately, to distil the carefully recorded information of a professional career into a text-book. Sadly, he never achieved this, so that the world was deprived of the insight which the man’s own words on the printed page would have conveyed.
The vagaries of crime and the complexities of the human body combined to provide Spilsbury with fascinating fields of enquiry. In January 1914, he examined the body of five-year-old Willie Starchfield who had been found murdered in a railway carriage at Broad Farm. The contents of the boy’s stomach provided useful evidence in this case by corroborating a witness’s sighting of him eating a piece of cake on the day he was murdered. Analysis of stomach contents and an evaluation of the rate of digestion are used in modern forensic investigation to help determine the time of death.
Spilsbury was also interested in contre coup injuries and their possible relevance to brain tumours. Contre coup damage to the brain occurs on the side opposite to the point of a violent impact when the brain bounces against the inside of the skull. He believed that non-fatal injuries of this kind might subsequently trigger the growth of a tumour. When he had the opportunity, he took brain sections at his autopsies which were destined for microscopic examination in his laboratory.
When the Great War erupted, Spilsbury’s offer to serve was turned down by the War Office. While his friend, William Willcox, disintinguished himself in the Royal Army Medical Corps, reorganising the Indian Medical Service in Mesopotamia, Spilsbury remained at the home front. He was by this time an essential part of the medico-legal establishment and it was felt that his work was indispensable. The penalty for those professional men and women not called for military service was to take on a greater burden to compensate for those who were absent. Not that Spilsbury escaped the war entirely, for some of those killed in Germany’s Zeppelin raids on London in 1915 featured in his case records.
While his fellow countrymen were fighting and dying in the trenches in France, one George Joseph Smith was busy with those pursuits which would earn him the name of ‘The Brides in the Bath Murderer’. Smith, who shared something of Seddon’s love of money and also a streak of meanness, began his bigamous depradations in 1910. By January 1915, he had married three times and lost each bride through a tragic bathroom drowning. On each occasion, Smith’s grief was partially ameliorated by the acquisition of his late bride’s worldly wealth.
On Sunday, 3 January 1915, the News of the World published a story with the headline, ‘FOUND DEAD IN BATH’, which was an account of a young woman’s accidental death by drowning. Among the millions who read the newspaper report was Charles Burnham who lived at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire and Joseph Crossley, whose mother let rooms in Blackpool.
Both men reacted sharply and reached for pen and paper to write to the authorities advising them of certain facts. Burnham’s daughter, Alice, had drowned in the bath at Mrs Crossley’s boarding house in Blackpool in December 1913. Her husband, George Joseph Smith, was mentioned in the newspaper report as being married to Margaret Lofty who met a ‘tragic fate on the day after her wedding’. The local police forces, alerted by Burnham and Crossley, conferred with Scotland Yard, and Detective Inspector Arthur Fowler Neil was assigned to the investigation. Nationwide enquiries were made which resulted in suspicion being levelled at Smith in respect of three accidental drownings; Bessie Mundy at Herne Bay in July 1910, Alice Burnham at Blackpool in November 1913 and Margaret Lofty in London in December 1914.
Smith was arrested on 4 February 1915, on the same day that Spilsbury attended the cemetery at Finchley to oversee the exhumation of Margaret Lofty’s body. Finchley Cemetery was beginning to feature regularly in his records – the remains of both Crippen’s and Seddon’s victims reposed there. Within the next
fortnight he carried out similar missions at Blackpool and Herne Bay. On 23 March, Smith was charged with committing three murders, already dubbed by the press as ‘The Brides in the Bath’ case. Despite the war news from France, the newspapers found ample space to devote to the activities of Mr Smith. Come the trial, he was required to answer one murder charge only, that relating to Bessie Mundy at Herne Bay.
Smith met Beatrice Constance Annie Mundy, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of a bank manager, in Bristol. At the time, he presented himself as a picture restorer and immediately won over the rather shy Miss Mundy. In fact, Smith had only recently left his wife, Edith, at Southend where they had bought a house. When he met Bessie Mundy, he was searching out possible new sources of funding and who better than the daughter of a recently deceased bank manager who received £8 a month from a trust fund? On 26 October 1910, the couple were married at Weymouth Registry Office. Within a few weeks, having gained access to Bessie’s money, Smith took his leave. He wrote her a cruel letter accusing her of blighting his future by giving him a disease which he called ‘the bad disorder’.
Eighteen months later and quite by chance, Smith encountered Bessie on the seafront at Weston-super-Mare. Overcome with joy, she took him back to the boarding house where she was staying and announced that she had found her husband. Despite the cruel accusations made in his letters, reconciliation followed and the couple left Weston-super-Mare living as itinerants for three months before settling at Herne Bay in Kent. They rented a small house in the High Street and Smith put up a brass plate announcing that ‘H.W. Williams, Art Dealer’, was in business in the town.
Smith’s movements were carefully planned. On 8 July 1912, he visited a solicitor and had wills drawn up for Mr and Mrs H. Williams. The effect of this was that in the event of the death of one of the parties, the other would inherit the assets of the deceased. This seemed a sensible arrangement except for the fact that, while Smith possessed little of value, Bessie was worth £2,500. The day after the wills were drawn up, Smith went on a shopping expedition – his object was to purchase a bath. This appeared to be another sensible move, for their accommodation lacked the amenity of a bathroom and Bessie had expressed the wish that they should buy one. Smith and Bessie found an ironmonger offering for sale a second-hand bath priced at £2. Bessie liked it and persuaded the shopkeeper to let it go for £1 17s 6d, doubtless much to the amusement and delight of her husband. The bath was delivered and installed on the same day.
On 10 July, ‘Mr and Mrs Williams’ asked for an appointment with one of the town’s medical practitioners. Dr Frank French was told that Bessie had suffered a fit the previous day during which she lost consciousness. The doctor examined her but found nothing obviously wrong. He prescribed a mild sedative. Two days later, ‘Williams’ requested Dr French to visit his wife at home where she was in bed following another attack. Again the doctor’s examination produced no startling results and he promised to call again later in the day. When he paid his second visit, he received no reply and was about to leave when ‘Mr and Mrs Williams’ appeared in the street. As Dr French reported later, ‘Mrs Williams seemed to be in perfect health,’ but the following morning he was sent a note by ‘Williams’ which read, ‘Can you come at once? I am afraid my wife is dead.’
When he called at the house, Dr French was ushered into one of the upstairs rooms by ‘Williams’. In the centre of the room stood a bath, three parts full of water in which Bessie lay, face upwards; there was no discernible pulse. With assistance from ‘Williams’ the doctor lifted the woman out of the bath and onto the floor where he attempted artificial respiration. His efforts at revival failed and he pronounced Bessie dead. The only witness at the coroner’s inquest was ‘Williams’, who sobbed throughout the proceedings, and Dr French. The coroner remarked that he could see no evidence on which to censure ‘Williams’ and a verdict was returned of death by misadventure. The conclusion was that Bessie had suffered an epileptic seizure while taking a bath and as a result she fell back into the water and drowned. Her grieving husband made the necessary funeral arrangements and, before taking his leave of Herne Bay, persuaded the ironmonger who had sold him the bath to take it back. The shopkeeper obligingly met this request not least because he had received no payment in the first place. Probate was granted on the late ‘Mrs Williams’s’ will in September 1912 and Smith, richer by £2,500, re-joined his real wife. He explained that he had been on a visit to Canada where he had made money dealing in porcelain.
Thanks to two astute newspaper readers, Smith’s game plan was rumbled but not before he had drowned two more brides in their baths. When he exhumed Bessie Mundy’s body on 19 February 1915, Bernard Spilsbury reported, ‘I am of the opinion that we have not, so far, discovered the full list of this man’s crimes.’ When Smith was eventually arraigned before the magistrates at Bow Street, he was committed on three charges of murder and, in due course, was tried in respect of the death of Bessie Mundy.
While the newspapers were filled with news of the Dardanelles campaign, Smith had helped to ensure continued public interest by his outburst at Bow Street when he accused the Crown counsel, Archibald Bodkin, of being a criminal and a ‘manufacturer of criminals’. The public sensed that the trial of this man would be no ordinary affair and they were right, for the murder trial of George Joseph Smith proved to be the longest in England since that of the notorious poisoner, William Palmer, in 1856.
Smith was defended at the Old Bailey by Edward Marshall Hall and the prosecution was in the hands of Archibald Bodkin whose expert witnesses were Doctors Spilsbury and Willcox. All four men were rising to the peak of their powers and stood on the edge of great achievements. For Willcox, shortly to be posted on military duties in the Dardanelles, this was his last important trial as Home Office pathologist. He had been called by the Home Secretary to see whether drugs had played any part in what otherwise appeared to be three cases of drowning. His analyses uncovered no traces of drugs or poison in the exhumed bodies and the way was thus opened up for Spilsbury to appear on centre stage as the Crown’s principal expert witness.
Marshall Hall failed in his attempt to have the evidence of the other deaths ruled inadmissible when Smith was only charged with a single murder. Archibald Bodkin, in a brilliant piece of advocacy, laid out the case against Smith and by carefully listing the points of similarity between the three drownings, demonstrated that more than simple coincidence had been at work. Spilsbury’s entrance was preceded by the appearance in the courtroom of two baths as exhibits. Not surprisingly, this event created a stir when the instruments of death were placed close to the solicitors’ table.
Bodkin questioned Spilsbury and took him through his post-mortem findings on the three exhumed bodies. He had found no trace of disease in Bessie Mundy nor in Margaret Lofty; in the case of Alice Burnham, there was a slight thickening of one of the heart valves, although not serious enough to endanger her life. Turning to the two baths in whose shallow depths Bessie and Alice had died, Spilsbury proceeded in his precise and confident style to explain.
Firstly, he disposed of the epilepsy theory of Bessie Mundy’s demise. ‘In view of her height, five feet seven inches, and the length of the bath, five feet, I do not think her head would be submerged,’ he said of the early stage of an epileptic fit when the body tends to become rigid. ‘The head end of this bath is sloping,’ he continued, ‘and if her feet were against the narrow end when the body was rigid, it would tend to thrust the head up and out of the bath.’ In the second stage of a fit, when the body contracts, Spilsbury thought that the lower part of the trunk would be resting on the bottom of the bath and therefore it was unlikely that the body would move down to the foot end of the bath sufficiently to submerge the head. After the seizure had run its course, the body would be limp and unconscious. ‘I do not think,’ he said, ‘that she would be likely to be immersed during the stage of relaxation, because the sloping part at the head and bottom of the bath would support the upper part of th
e trunk and head.’
Referring to Dr French’s report of finding the dead woman in the bath with her legs stretched out straight and the feet out of the water, Spilsbury said, ‘I cannot give any explanation of how a woman – assuming she has had an epileptic seizure – could get into that position by herself.’ He added, ‘If the feet at the narrow end were lifted out of the water that might allow the trunk and head to slide down the bath.’
Spilsbury had considered all the possible scenarios for accidental drowning in the bath. Indeed these had all been discussed with Willcox beforehand and the two men were in complete agreement. The consequences of a person sitting in a bath and fainting would result in the body becoming limp and falling backwards. He believed that if water was thereby taken in through the mouth or nose, the effect would be to stimulate a return to consciousness. He admitted that a person kneeling or standing while taking a bath might pitch forward and, in consequence, be drowned. But as he pointed out, ‘the body would be lying face downwards in the water.’ In short, having taken accurate measurements of the three baths and considered the height of the three victims of drowning, the irrevocable conclusion was that their deaths were assisted by human intervention. The small size of the baths effectively ruled out the possibility of accidental drowning.
Following one of their pre-trial meetings, Spilsbury and Willcox considered the likely course of events on the brides’ fateful bath nights. Willcox’s notes summarised their views:
Q. Was drowning accidental? e.g. fit or syncope, followed by asphyxia?
