by Robin Odell
Alice Thomas improved a little the following day but a relapse followed with delirium and severe cramps added to her previous symptoms. Dr Saunders now suspected arsenical poisoning and this tentative diagnosis was confirmed by a specialist called in from Plymouth. Alice Thomas died in Plymouth City Hospital on 4 November and at post-mortem a total of 0.85 grains of arsenic was found in her body. William Thomas was advised of the findings and local gossip led to speculation about Annie Hearn’s relationship with the Thomases. Two days after Alice Thomas’s funeral, Annie disappeared, leaving a note behind addressed to Mr Thomas:
Goodbye. I’m going out if I can. I cannot forget that awful man and the things he said. I am innocent, innocent, but she is dead and it was my lunch she eat. I cannot bear it. When I’m dead they will be sure I am guilty and you at least will be cleared. May your own dear wife’s presence guard and comfort you still.
Yours
A.H.
My life is not a great thing anyhow, now dear Minnie’s gone. I should be glad if you would send my love to Bessie1 and tell her not to worry about me. I’ll be all right, my conscience is clear so I’m not afraid of afterwards.
William Thomas took what appeared to be a suicide note to the police. The letter writer was traced to Looe, where her coat was found on the cliff top and one of her shoes was washed up on the beach. It looked as if Annie Hearn had indeed committed suicide. Two weeks later, the inquest on Alice Thomas concluded that she had died of arsenical poisoning and the verdict was homicide by some person or persons unknown.
On 9 December, in light of Mrs Thomas’s demise due to arsenic poisoning, it was decided to exhume the body of Minnie Hearn, who had died four months previously. Dr Roche Lynch, the Home Office analyst, discovered arsenic in all the organs. An examination of the hair indicated that Minnie had been receiving arsenic for at least seven months before she died. This revelation stimulated the police to greater efforts in their hunt for Annie Hearn, not being entirely convinced that she had taken her own life. She was found after a few weeks in Torquay where she had taken work as a housekeeper using an assumed name. Her employer, Cecil Powell, recognised her from a photograph published in the Daily Mail, which offered a reward of £5002 for information as to her whereabouts. On 18 January 1931, she was arrested and charged with the murder of Alice Thomas and her sister Minnie.
Walter West, Annie’s solicitor, approached Sydney Smith and asked him to review the medical aspects of the case. Smith did not dissent from the cause of death – Alice Thomas had died as the result of arsenical poisoning – what was not clear was how and when the poison had been administered. He was convinced that the picnic sandwiches eaten on 18 October had not been the source of the arsenic, although, in all probability, the salmon had caused food poisoning. The analyst’s findings made it more likely that Mrs Thomas had ingested the arsenic much nearer the time that she died.
In the case of Minnie, her medical history showed her to be a chronic sufferer of gastric troubles, although not of diarrhoea, which is one of the principal indicators of arsenical poisoning. Her own doctor had recorded death due to natural causes and Smith was inclined to agree. How then could the arsenic found in her exhumed body be explained?
When it came to poisoning by arsenic, there was probably no doctor in the British Isles more knowledgeable about the subject than Sydney Smith. He did not dispute that Dr Roche Lynch had discovered arsenic in the dead woman’s muscles, nails and hair, but he was highly critical of his calculations. The analyst had reported finding a total of 0.776 of a grain in the muscles. The calculation was based on analysing a sample of tissue weighing one-eighth of an ounce and applying a standard formula to arrive at a total for the body’s muscles as a whole. The sample yielded 1/6400 of a grain of arsenic which the analyst multiplied by a figure representing the mass of muscle, usually taken to be 40 per cent of the total body weight. In this instance, Roche Lynch had assumed a body weight of 80lb from which he calculated the muscle component as about 32lb.
Smith recognised immediately that 80lb is a very low body weight and the woman must obviously have been in an emaciated condition when she died. The experienced pathologist knew that in a badly wasting body, the muscles are the first to lose weight. Hence, he would have estimated the proportion of muscle to body weight in this case as nearer 15 per cent than the usual 40 per cent. In light of this, it appeared that the amount of arsenic in the body had been badly over-estimated. Of vital importance was the amount of arsenic found in the soil samples taken from the grave in Lewannick churchyard; the soil above the coffin contained 125 parts of arsenic per million and that below it, 62 parts per million. As Smith saw it, the presence of arsenic in the body would have pointed to poisoning if it had been buried in any other county of England but Cornwall. The county was known for its tin mines and, where there is tin, there is usually arsenic to be found. Arsenic occurs naturally in the soil and is a common impurity in many metallic ores.
Smith’s conclusion was that, while arsenic was undoubtedly found in the body of Annie Hearn’s sister, he doubted that its presence was an indicator of cause of death. He believed she had died of natural causes and that the arsenic had most likely infiltrated her corpse from the soil surrounding the grave in which she had lain for over four months. As for Alice Thomas, the indications were that the famous salmon sandwiches might have precipitated the food poisoning which she undoubtedly suffered but that the arsenic was administered after that time. In other words, the two cases provided less than conclusive evidence of Annie Hearn’s guilt and that was the substance of Smith’s report to her solicitor.
Annie Hearn’s trial had been fixed in the legal calendar to start on 15 June 1931 at Bodmin Assizes. In his reply to Walter West, Smith had mentioned that he would not be available to attend the trial owing to the pressures of his university teaching programme. He changed his mind when he received an urgent telegram requesting a meeting with Norman Birkett, the distinguished lawyer who had taken on the task of defending Annie Hearn. Birkett told him that he might not call him to give evidence but that he would like him by his side in court. By drawing out the points that suited his argument in his cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses, and by calling Annie Hearn as the sole witness for the defence, Birkett secured the right to address the jury after the Crown had concluded its case.
The prosecution case took six days and, with help from Smith who passed him notes on the forensic aspects of the evidence, Birkett began to demolish its credibility. Concerning the exhumation of the bodies at Lewannick, he suggested that in an area distinguished for the mineral content of its soil, arsenic could readily have contaminated the exhumed corpse and open specimen jars from dust in the churchyard. ‘Am I right in saying,’ he asked the doctor who carried out the post-mortem, ‘that a piece of soil, so small that you could hold it between your fingers, and dropped on to the body would make every single calculation wrong?’
‘Yes,’ came the answer.
Later in the proceedings, sixty-year-old Herbert du Parcq, leading counsel for the Crown, collapsed and was taken from the courtroom. The way the trial had been proceeding, this might have been seen by some superstitious members of a Cornish jury as a warning from the Almighty not to convict an innocent woman. Certainly Mr Justice Roche was at pains to point out that Mr du Parcq’s indisposition was not something of which a mystery should be made.
In any event, Birkett had taken a firm hold on the trial and he dealt severely with Dr Roche Lynch when he said he had never attended one living patient suffering from arsenical poisoning, ‘yet he speaks of symptoms with the same confidence that he spoke on other matters.’
‘Let the cobbler stick to his last …’ was his stinging rebuttal.
Having weakened the prosecution case regarding the arsenical poisoning of Annie Hearn’s sister, Birkett turned his attention to the poisoning of Mrs Thomas. The vehicle for administering the poison was alleged to be the salmon in the sandwiches made by Annie and the poison was
supposed to be weedkiller which she had bought four years previously.
Smith had done his homework on this aspect of the case knowing that the Arsenic Act of 1851 required arsenical preparations to be coloured with indigo, he had little doubt that when powdered arsenic was sprinkled onto a sandwich, the filling would become discoloured. Roche Lynch had estimated that about 14.3 grains of weedkiller would have been used and the implication was that Annie Hearn added the poison to the sandwiches a few hours before they were eaten. To be absolutely sure of his ground, Smith carried out an experiment with tinned salmon and weedkiller. Within half an hour, his sandwiches thus prepared were stained a bluish-purple.
Armed with this information, Birkett was able to test Roche Lynch in cross-examination. ‘If you put fourteen grains (of arsenic) in a moist sandwich and carried it for hours,’ he asked, ‘is it not inevitable that the sandwich would be discoloured and blue?’
‘I have not tried it,’ answered Roche Lynch, adding rather unwisely, ‘but my opinion, for what it is worth, is that it would not.’ Birkett could easily have demolished the witness but he chose not to, believing, correctly, that he was winning his case in any event.
When he discussed the content of his closing speech with Sydney Smith, Birkett acknowledged the religious nature of the Cornish people. He said he would illustrate the paradox of the loving care which Annie Hearn gave to her sister with the contention that she was also poisoning her, by quoting from The New Testament. The gospel according to St John contains the passage, ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’ Birkett changed his mind when he heard that the jury on its last night together, which happened to be a Sunday, was offered the choice of attending church or going for a drive and elected for the latter. ‘Ah! There go my Father’s Mansions,’ he remarked to Smith.
In a powerful closing address, he asked the jury, by its verdict, to send Annie Hearn ‘back into the sunlight away from the shadows which have haunted her for so long’. They did just that by bringing in a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. Three weeks after she was acquitted, Annie Hearn wrote to Sydney Smith thanking him for putting aside important engagements ‘to come to Bodmin and help to save a life, my life.’ Annie Hearn disappeared into obscurity but, despite her acquittal, local gossip persisted in believing that she was discharged, less on account of her innocence than because of Herbert du Parcq’s collapse and Norman Birkett’s masterly defence of which Sydney Smith was the chief architect.
Controversy seemed to surround many of the cases with which Smith became involved. Hard on the heels of the Hearn trial came a death by strangling which brought him and Spilsbury together again, not in confrontation as in the Fox trial, but both arguing in the defence of a man charged with murder. As Smith put it, ‘It was the first time we had been colleagues in a case – and it was also the last.’
Peter Queen was a thirty-one-year-old clerk who worked in his father’s bookmaker’s business in Glasgow. In the early hours of Saturday, 21 November 1931, he walked into one of the city’s police stations; he placed two house keys on the desk and said, ‘Go to 539 Dumbarton Road, I think you will find my wife dead.’ Two constables were despatched to the address given. In the bedroom of Queen’s two-room apartment, they found the pyjama-clad body of a woman lying on the bed with a piece of cord tied around her neck.
Chrissie Gall, aged twenty-eight, was not Queen’s wife but she had been living with him for several months. She lay with the bedclothes pulled up over her chest, her left arm was outside the blankets and her right arm was underneath. One of the policemen loosened the rope around her neck which had been pulled tight in a half-knot. There were no signs of a struggle having taken place; everything about the room, and particularly the bed, was neat and tidy. There was no doubting that Chrissie Gall had been strangled and Peter Queen was charged with her murder.
Strangulation was confirmed as the cause of death by the pathologist carrying out the post-mortem who discovered the usual signs of asphyxia in the internal organs. The ligature around the dead woman’s neck had been pulled sufficiently tight to create a groove in her flesh and the cricoid cartilage in her throat was broken. Not surprisingly, this led to the conclusion that her death was homicidal.
Chrissie Gall’s personal history was highly relevant in this case. She had only ever worked ‘in service’ and had developed a weakness for drinking. When she met Peter Queen, he tried to wean her away from alcohol; at the time, he was separated from his wife, who was being treated for chronic alcoholism. The couple moved in together in December 1930 and, with the aid of friends, Queen sought to combat her drunkenness. She was subject to bouts of depression and, in the presence of friends, had threatened to commit suicide by drowning herself; ‘making a hole in the Clyde’, as she termed it. On another occasion she attempted to gas herself and spoke also of hanging herself or of taking an overdose.
During the two days prior to her death, Chrissie was in a state of almost continuous inebriation. She spent the final day of her life in bed, sleeping and being cared for by friends who tried to persuade her to eat and drink something non-alcoholic. She was awake when the friends left at about 10.45 but a little over four hours later Queen reported that she was dead.
Smith and Spilsbury examined the bedroom at Dumbarton Road and together considered their stance on the likely cause of death. The natural position of the body with upper denture still in place, the undisturbed bedclothes and tidiness of the room all indicated a lack of struggle and went against murder. The physical signs on the body lacked the telling force of murderous strangulation. There was no bruising in the deeper structures of the neck which indicated that only a small degree of force had been used. This was consistent with the half-knot which had been used to pull the ligature tight around the neck. Stranglers usually employ considerable force, first to overcome the struggles of their victim and then, when a ligature is involved, to prevent the knot slipping.
Spilsbury concluded, ‘It was a suicide.’ Smith agreed. ‘Certainly there isn’t much to suggest murder,’ he said, adding, ‘I have never seen a case of homicide by strangulation in an adult in which there were so few signs.’ He was still concerned though over the half-knot and he wondered if it would have kept tight enough to cause asphyxia after Chrissie Gall had lost consciousness and released her grip on the ends of the cord. Spilsbury partially satisfied him on this point after examining the cord, part of a clothesline, under a microscope. It could be seen that the fibres were roughened at the point where the ends of the cord crossed over and bit into one another.
The trial of Peter Queen was held in Glasgow on 5 January 1932 and lasted five days. There were a number of unsatisfactory aspects of the prosecution’s case. It was alleged that Queen’s declaration to the police, ‘I think I have killed her’, was as good as a confession. It was due to close questioning by the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Alness, that it emerged the police had not made a written record of Queen’s remarks. The accused man, when he reported Chrissie’s death, claimed he had said, ‘Don’t think I have killed her’. There was an obvious world of difference between the two versions. Furthermore, the doctors who had carried out the post-mortem neglected to carry out an analysis of either the blood or the stomach contents. This was particularly unfortunate as the murder allegation rested on the assumption that the victim had been too drunk to resist. In the absence of proof of alcohol in the dead woman’s system this remained at best an assumption.
The experts for the prosecution, including Dr Andrew Allison, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Glasgow, contended that the appearance of the body did not indicate suicide. Against this view was the weight of Spilsbury’s evidence, supported by Sydney Smith, that self-strangulation was entirely consistent with the circumstances of the woman’s death. Although Smith tended towards the suicide explanation, he was not entirely convinced. The case was very much on the borderline but not for Spilsbury, whose lack of hesitation in givin
g his opinions ‘took my breath away’, said Smith later. In the event, the jury rejected the Scottish formula for dealing with borderline cases – the Not Proven verdict – and found Peter Queen guilty. As Smith recorded in due course in his memoirs, ‘… in the only case where Spilsbury and I were in pretty complete agreement, the jury believed neither of us.’
Although sentenced to death, Queen was reprieved following an impressive public petition raised on his behalf by the citizens of Glasgow. He worked in his former occupation of bookmaker’s clerk when he was released from prison until he died in 1958. Smith believed there was insufficient evidence to justify Queen’s conviction and admitted that suicide by strangulation was not a common phenomenon although there were a number of recorded incidents. Indeed he came across another case of self-strangulation a short while after Queen’s conviction. The victim was a forty-five-year-old spinster who suffered from depression. She died by a combination of smothering and strangulation; a handkerchief was found inside her mouth blocking the air passages and a scarf had been tied tightly around her throat. Like Chrissie Gall, she had threatened suicide when friends were present and the scene of her death was marked by a similar lack of disturbance. The advent of the nylon stocking and of materials with high elasticity have made self-strangulation more feasible. A pre-knotted ligature can be stretched over the head and, once around the neck, the material contracts to its original shape, thereby exerting a powerful constriction effect.
