by Robin Odell
Smith’s next encounter with Spilsbury was less congenial. The two pathologists appeared on opposite sides of the fence in a controversial case involving the reputation of a fellow doctor. Abortion was not a subject discussed in polite society in the 1930s and any doctor accused of carrying out a criminal abortion faced a very serious charge indeed. In October 1933, Dr Avarne, a member of the surgical staff of the General Hospital at St Helier in Jersey, travelled to Edinburgh to consult Smith on a professional matter – he had been charged with carrying out a criminal abortion and was due to face trial the next month.
The circumstances involved Dr Avarne’s friendship with a hotel proprietor in Jersey who asked him to advise on the delicate matter of his young mistress’s pregnancy. The twenty-eight-year-old woman had been pregnant in 1926 when the putative father gave her money to have the baby in England. When she told him in May 1933 that she was pregnant again, he denied responsibility but suggested she see Dr Avarne who was a personal friend.
From the moment that Avarne agreed to see the woman, disaster loomed for the doctor. He first saw her on 27 May when she was eight and a half weeks pregnant and at a second consultation a month later, prescribed nothing more potent than a bromide sedative. On 21 July, complaining of pain and loss of blood, she was admitted to the Jersey nursing home run by Sister Le Feuvre. Dr Avarne took charge of the patient, explaining the circumstances to the Sister and advising her that he might need to carry out an examination under anaesthetic on the following day. The doctor attempted to induce abortion and, when this failed, carried out a second operation to remove the foetus with instruments. This also failed. After an interval of twenty-four hours, the patient’s general condition deteriorated and she experienced rigor accompanied by a high temperature. During the evening of 27 July, her child was born dead. All efforts to contact Dr Avarne failed but Sister Le Feuvre’s anxiety was relieved when another doctor called at the nursing home to deal with a different patient. Dr Bentlif was pressed into service and when the woman recovered consciousness, she told him what she described as ‘the whole truth’. This was to the effect that she had neither pain nor haemorrhage when admitted to the nursing home but made these complaints on the instructions of Dr Avarne who had agreed to terminate her pregnancy. Dr Bentlif, without waiting to contact Avarne, called the police.
The woman made a statement to the police which she later repeated to Dr Blampied, the police surgeon, when he called at the nursing home. The foetus and the placenta were put in specimen jars for further examination by doctors who agreed that there were no indications of softening of the tissues which would be expected if the baby had died in the womb. This boded ill for Dr Avarne, now under arrest, as it appeared that he had indeed carried out a criminal abortion. The patient made a complete recovery but her doctor now faced criminal proceedings.
Spilsbury was called in to advise the Crown and, after examining the pathological material, confirmed the views of the local doctors that there was no softening of the tissues. But Dr Avarne maintained the foetus was dead when his patient was admitted to the nursing home, hence its removal was vital to protect the life of the mother. It was at this point that Sydney Smith entered the contest and he enlisted the help of an Edinburgh colleague, Professor Murray Drennan, of the Pathology Department. They made microscopic sections from the tissues of the foetus and placenta from which they concluded that signs of softening or maceration were present. Furthermore, there were indications of haemorrhage in the placenta and, thus, strong arguments in their view to support the correctness of Dr Avarne’s diagnosis.
If it could be proved satisfactorily that the woman was carrying a dead child, the case against her doctor simply evaporated. Smith agreed to appear on Dr Avarne’s behalf but, realising his lack of experience in gynaecology, decided to enlist expert help. He secured the services of Dr Aleck Bourne, a leading London gynaecologist, who examined the pathological material in the presence of both Smith and Spilsbury. Bourne’s opinion was that the child had been dead for several days before birth. These defence arguments, including the microscopic sections, were demonstrated to Spilsbury but he declined to shift his opinion.
Dr Avarne appeared before the Bailiff of Jersey sitting with ten magistrates and a jury of twenty-four. It was a formidable, if quaint, array of legal presence. The proceedings derived from the island’s Norman French history and Sydney Smith was surprised to see all the witnesses sworn in together, followed by their examination by the Attorney-General without the formality of any opening statement. The rules allowed a verdict to be brought in on a two-thirds majority.
Three of Jersey’s senior medical men gave it as their opinion that neither the foetus nor the placenta demonstrated any indication of maceration that could be taken to show the child was dead in the womb. Sir Bernard Spilsbury lent his weight to this view, and said there had been no haemorrhaging prior to the woman being admitted to the nursing home and that the foetus died during the second operation carried out on her by Dr Avarne. Spilsbury threw his customary astuteness to the wind when he allowed himself to be drawn into answering questions outside his field. He criticised the clinical treatment carried out by Dr Avarne which he said was not appropriate for the circumstances. He was to pay the penalty for this somewhat arrogant approach later on during the trial.
A number of the doctors appearing as prosecution witnesses spoke highly of Dr Avarne, praising his abilities as a surgeon and casting not the slightest doubt on his past professional conduct. Admiring appraisals of the accused doctor came from the defence witnesses, one of whom declared that hundreds of people in Jersey had cause to thank Dr Avarne for his medical skills. Such fulsome testimonials were heart-warming but amounted to very little when measured against the medical background of the case. Spilsbury had said his piece but the star-performer was yet to come.
Smith’s suggestion to invite testimony for the defence from a leading gynaecologist was shrewd. He and Dr Aleck Bourne had thoroughly prepared their evidence and they appeared as final witnesses in the trial. Their conclusion was simply that the child was dead within the mother’s womb before Dr Avarne operated on her. Bourne had no doubts at all that the Jersey doctor had acted properly and implemented the correct treatment. He dismissed contemptuously the suggestion that a criminal abortion had been carried out; it was, he said, ‘asking one to believe an almost impossible thing that Dr Avarne would have attempted to perform a criminal abortion at the period he had.’ He also reserved some vitriol for Spilsbury’s opinion on the case. Counsel asked him if he considered the evidence given by Sir Bernard, who enjoyed a worldwide reputation, to be regarded as unbelievable. He replied, ‘I have the greatest respect and admiration for Sir Bernard when he speaks as a pathologist, but when he dares to give an opinion about the treatment of a living woman I would regard it with contempt.’ These were strong words and of a kind rarely addressed to Spilsbury, but on this occasion at least, they were merited, for the London pathologist admitted he had not been medically involved with a case of pregnancy for twenty years.
Dr Avarne was found ‘Not Guilty’ to cheers from the public gallery and from a crowd of several thousand outside the court. An obviously admired physician had his reputation restored to him and justice was done. There was a great deal of quiet satisfaction in the outcome for Sydney Smith. In his patient way, he had spiked Spilsbury’s guns, not with rhetoric or argument but with superior science. One of the sad aspects of professional life which came out of the Jersey abortion case was the bitterness and relish with which opposing factions in the medical hierarchy fought each other. This had been a factor in bringing the initial charge against Dr Avarne. Sadder still was that the same sense of professional rivalry should prevail amongst the aristocrats of the profession. Spilsbury, who would later have harsh appraisals written about him by his peers, was also sufficiently small minded to mete out his own petty retribution. Whereas Spilsbury, Smith and Bourne had voyaged together amicably across to Jersey from the mainland before the tr
ial, their return was less friendly. They travelled on the same boat but Spilsbury would not speak to the pair who had bested him in court.
Sydney Smith had a knack for accepting difficult and controversial cases; he also liked the challenge of investigations which nudged the frontiers of forensic knowledge. One such case was the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934. On 20 April, eight-year-old Helen Priestly went missing from her home in Urquhart Road. The child had returned home after school at about 12.15 p.m. and ate lunch with her mother. Afterwards, at about 1.30 p.m., she was sent to the bakery a few minutes walk from home to buy a loaf of bread. Helen was due to go back to school in King Street at 2 p.m. and when she failed to return home by 1.50, her mother decided to walk round to the bakery to hurry her up. There she learned that her daughter had been and gone at least a quarter of an hour previously. Mrs Priestly next went to the school and, there, her anxieties deepened, for Helen was not in her class.
By 5 p.m. the disappearance of Helen Priestly had been reported to the police and officers were making preliminary enquiries. John Priestly and his wife, aided by neighbours, drove around the district on what turned out to be a wet, windy night, searching for their only child. The police concentrated their efforts on the four-storey tenements which lined Urquhart Road. Washhouses, coal sheds and passages were systematically searched and, around 5 a.m. the next day, Helen Priestly’s body was discovered almost on her own doorstep. A man taking part in the search entered the tenement and noticed a sack lying in a recess under the stairs on the ground floor immediately beneath the Priestlys’ flat. Closer inspection in the grey dawn light revealed a child’s foot protruding from the opening of the sack.
Dr Robert Richards, the police surgeon, was called to the scene. He noticed immediately that the sack was completely dry which indicated it had not been brought in from outdoors where it had been raining for several hours. After photographs had been taken, the doctor removed the body from the sack. The child was fully clothed except for her knickers and her body was cold and rigid. Although, when found, she lay on her right side, post-mortem lividity caused by blood draining to the bottom of the vessels on her left side clearly indicated she had been moved. Cinder particles in the sack had stuck to the girl’s teeth and hair and there were traces of vomit around her mouth. It was also apparent that she had suffered severe injuries in the genital area. Word soon passed round that Helen Priestly had been raped.
The body was removed to the mortuary for a full post-mortem which was carried out by Professor Theodore Shennan, Professor of Pathology at Aberdeen University, assisted by Dr Richards. The dead child’s stomach contained the undigested meat and potatoes which she had eaten for lunch at 12.30. From the small amount of digestion which had occurred, the doctors were able to make a reasonably accurate assessment of the time of death, which they put at around 2 p.m.
Helen’s neck bore the evidence of an attempt at strangulation; there were bruises on her throat and vomitus in the windpipe and bronchial passages. Death from asphyxia was thus the fairly obvious cause of death. Examination of the injuries to the girl’s sexual organs presented a more difficult diagnostic puzzle. The tissues of the vagina had been severely torn, resulting in considerable loss of blood, and there was a penetrating wound from the vagina into the intestinal wall. These injuries had been inflicted before death and it was quite clear that they had not been caused by an assault amounting to rape. It was far more likely that a sharp object had been thrust into the vaginal opening. The doctors used ultra-violet illumination in a search for semen but could find no traces. The true nature of the injuries slowly became apparent – they constituted a crude, simulated rape, with the implication that either a man or a woman could have inflicted them.
Police officers began the painstaking task of interviewing all the residents in the tenement block in which Helen Priestly’s body had been found. They knew now that they need not restrict their enquiries to the male occupants of the building. On 25 April, officers knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat occupied by Alexander Donald, his wife Jeannie and their nine-year-old daughter, also called Jeannie. The Donalds were not a particularly sociable family, keeping themselves to themselves apart from church going and encouraging their daughter in her ambition to be a dancer. Young Jeannie Donald occasionally played with Helen Priestly, but there was a history of quarrelling between them.
Alexander Donald, a barber by trade, was, uncharacteristically for that calling, a dull, taciturn man. He answered questions in a matter-of-fact manner, explaining that he had heard the commotion outside their flat when Helen Priestly’s body was found. He and his wife were in bed at the time but they did not feel sufficiently curious to investigate what was happening, even after Mrs Donald had remarked, ‘Do you hear? That’s Mrs Joss’s voice. She’s screaming that the child was raped.’ The use of the word ‘rape’ struck a chord with Detective Inspector Taylor, for he was sure in his own mind that only Dr Richards had used that term and not in a tone of voice that could have been overheard inside a nearby flat.
The following day, detectives returned to the Donalds’ home. After further questioning, permission was sought to carry out a search of the house. Some stains were found in a kitchen cupboard which, on preliminary testing, proved to be blood. Alexander and Jeannie Donald were arrested and charged with murdering Helen Priestly. He said he was ‘not guilty’ and his wife stated, ‘I did not do that.’ Shortly after midnight, they were escorted through a hostile crowd to a waiting police van and driven to the police station.
Although laboratory tests on the stains found in the Donalds’ house failed to confirm them as blood, the couple remained in custody. Five days after they were arrested, the Procurator Fiscal asked Sydney Smith to lend his forensic skills to an investigation that was beginning to founder on Alexander Donald’s undoubted alibi and his wife’s vehement denials. Donald was released after six weeks when it was shown conclusively that, at the time the murder was committed, he was at work in his barbershop. Jeannie Donald’s alibi did not stand up well to close scrutiny and she continued to be regarded with suspicion. Smith’s job was to determine whether or not that suspicion had any foundation. He confirmed what everyone now believed, which was that there was no question of rape having being committed – simulated rape perhaps – and that there was a degree of circumstantial evidence pointing towards Jeannie Donald. An interesting item of gossip picked up by the police was that the dead girl did not like Mrs Donald and was in the habit of calling her ‘Coconut’. This hardly seemed sufficient provocation to commit murder but the investigators’ minds were busy constructing theories.
Smith knew that what was required was trace evidence linking Helen Priestly to the place where she was killed. He began looking carefully at the sack in which the body was found. It was a commonplace jute sack with the letters BOSS printed on it in red. Enquiries identified it as part of a consignment of cereals originating in Canada. Nine other sacks were found in the Donalds’ house but none with the BOSS identification. It was a matter of interest that the sack in which Helen’s body was found had a hole in one corner, perhaps enabling it to be hung from a nail or a hook – the Donalds’ sacks all had a similar hole.
Inside the sack was a quantity of washed cinders, ordinary household fluff and a number of hairs. Starting with the cinders, Smith ascertained that Mrs Donald was the only householder in the tenement in the habit of washing her cinders, indeed traces of this practice were found in the sink trap in her kitchen. The cinders found in the sack were examined microscopically and compared with cinders taken from all the houses in the tenement. In addition, samples were sent for specialist examination by X-ray, spectrographic and micro-chemical methods. All these tests proved inconclusive.
Smith next turned his attention to the hairs found in the sack, some of which were human and others animal. The possibility of using hair as a means of personal identification had long intrigued forensic scientists. It was John Glaister, Smith’s successor in Egypt,
who had made a special study of this subject and written the definitive work on it in 1931. It was to Glaister that he turned for help in the Aberdeen child murder investigation.
The human hairs in the sack did not belong to the dead child, they were coarser and of a different colour. The hairs were also irregular in contour, indicating they had been subjected to some form of artificial waving. Samples of Jeannie Donald’s hair were obtained from her in prison – they showed identical characteristics to those found in the sack. Smith knew, of course, that while this comparison was significant it would not stand up as evidence without corroboration. He sent all the hair samples to Glaister for a second opinion and on 30 May Helen Priestly’s body was exhumed in order that hair samples could be taken from it. The two professors of forensic pathology spent many hours bent over their microscopes in Edinburgh and Glasgow examining hair samples.
Having exhausted the hair samples, Sydney Smith next turned his microscope on the household fluff found in the sack. This material which collects in all homes is usually a composite of common fibres deriving from clothing and the furnishings of the house. There will also be dust and other materials brought into the house from outside on shoes and clothing. This unprepossessing material is a microcosm of a household’s characteristics. The little balls of household fluff found in the BOSS sack contained over 200 separately identifiable materials. These ranged from wool, cotton, linen and silk fibres to cat and rabbit hairs.
Smith’s intention was to compare the content of the fluff in the sack with that of fluff taken from the Donalds’ house. If the two materials showed a high degree of correspondence, it was likely they originated from the same source. Using the comparison microscope which he had so successfully developed in Egypt for examining bullets side-by-side, Smith now started to compare his slides, each containing a particular type of fibre teased out of the household fluff samples.
