by Robin Odell
In April 1966, he published an article in The London Hospital Gazette on the subject of Jack the Ripper, the unknown perpetrator of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888. His assistant, ‘Sam’ Hardy, had discovered in London Hospital’s archives hitherto unpublicised letters, sketches and scene-of-crime maps relating to the murders. Of particular interest were pencil sketches made at the murder scene by Dr F. Gordon Brown, City of London Police Surgeon, of the wounds inflicted on Catherine Eddowes who was murdered in Mitre Square. If anyone could shed light on a subject that had been plagued with all kinds of nonsense over the years, surely it was Francis Camps.
In an interview with Medical News, he gave it as his opinion that the real cause of death in Jack the Ripper’s victims was strangulation, rather than the throat-cutting which followed. He pointed out that contemporary reports in The Lancet mentioned that the faces of the victims were congested which, he suggested, accounted for the fact that they did not cry out. Camps found nothing in these new discoveries to support the notion that the Whitechapel Murderer had any anatomical skill or, indeed, any association with the London Hospital, either as a student or a doctor.
The discovery of these documents caused a flurry of excitement in the media. Never one to shy away from publicity, Camps and his colleagues at the London Hospital gave interviews to the major newspapers and they were overwhelmed with inquiries from writers and researchers interested in these historic crimes. In October 1966, he continued his interest in the Ripper murders by taking what he called a ‘new look’ at them in his book, The Investigation of Murder, co-written with Richard Barber. The first part of the book was devoted to headline murder cases, including Maybrick, Crippen and Christie and a look at the development of scientific methods of investigation. The main thrust of the book, though, was to explore the management of forensic work in the future. He stressed the importance of organisation and wrote about the requirements for education, training and research. He singled out teamwork as the most vital factor in strengthening the relationship between forensic science and forensic medicine. An appendix to his text consisted of a diagram showing how all the elements could be brought together within a university framework to serve the needs of the police and the law courts. It was a model of a kind of forensic utopia.
During his visits to the USA in the 1950s, Camps met Dr Rutherford Gradwohl, a distinguished forensic expert, who modernised the US approach to medical examination. He and Camps shared the ideal of bringing medicine and science together, and Gradwohl’s police laboratory which he set up in St Louis in 1954 was greatly admired. Gradwohl also edited an authoritative textbook on legal medicine and it was his wish that Francis Camps should succeed him as editor. The second edition of Legal Medicine was published under Camps’s editorship in 1968, following his predecessor’s death. The textbook won acclaim as an acknowledged and reliable source for doctors, lawyers and scientists by bringing together the elements of best practice from both sides of the Atlantic. In that respect alone, it reflected the ideals which Camps had pursued throughout his professional life. It was said that if Gradwohl was the father of legal medicine, then Camps was its mentor.
A controversial case in the Canadian courts brought Francis Camps into confrontation with his old adversary, Keith Simpson, in 1967. Some harsh words were spoken about Camps’s performance but, in an ironic twist to the story over forty years later, the Mentor would be vindicated. In the summer of 1959, a murder in Ontario, involving two youngsters, Lynne Harper, aged twelve, and Steven Truscott, aged fourteen, victim and suspect, shocked Canada. On the evening of 9 June, Lynne left her home near Clinton and failed to return. A search for the missing girl located her body two days later in a wooded area called Lawson’s Bush. She had been raped and strangled. The last sighting of her alive was between 7 and 7.45 on the evening that she disappeared.
The post-mortem was carried out by Dr John Penistan, Ontario’s official pathologist. He found that the dead girl’s stomach contained both digested and undigested food, consistent with the meal she had eaten with her parents at around 5.30 p.m. The pathologist determined that she had died within two hours of eating the meal. From the beginning of the investigation, attention focused on Steven Truscott. When questioned, he said he had met Lynne in order to give her a lift on his bike to a place a short distance away where there were some horses she wanted to see. A woman saw the pair leave together just before 7 p.m. Steven said he dropped Lynne off and then cycled back. He chatted with friends at the football field before returning home at around 8.25 p.m.
Steven was questioned several times. His replies were consistent and he mentioned that when he left her, he saw Lynne hitch a lift in a grey Chevrolet with a yellow number plate. He was subjected to a medical examination and doctors found a sore patch on his penis which they concluded had been the result of committing rape. Steven Truscott was charged with murder and his guilt was cut-and-dried as far as local opinion was concerned. His trial for murder took place in the adult court at Goderich, Ontario in September. The key prosecution evidence was given by Dr Penistan, supported by Dr David Brooks, a Royal Canadian Air Force physician, who had been present at the post-mortem on Lynne Harper. Referring to the dead girl’s stomach contents, they confirmed their initial findings which put the girl’s death between 7 and 7.45 p.m. and coincided exactly with the time that she had been seen with Truscott.
This interpretation was challenged by the defence expert, Dr Berkeley Brown, who told the court that the time taken to empty the stomach was longer than the estimates given by the prosecution. By his reckoning, the time of death would have been an hour later, at a time when Steven was known to have returned home. Reference was made to the sore on his penis and the doctor who had examined him testified that he believed it was consistent with committing rape. An alternative speculation was that it was due to an allergy.
The jury returned a guilty verdict with a plea for mercy. The judge sentenced Steven Truscott to death, the execution being scheduled for 8 December 1959. An appeal to the Supreme Court of Ontario failed and an application was made to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. This was also refused but sentence of death was commuted to life imprisonment. There matters rested until 1966 when the writer, Isabel Le Bourdais, published an account of the trial in which she strongly criticised the prosecution case. Her book, The Trial of Steven Truscott, carried a blunt question: ‘Six years ago, at the age of fourteen, he was sentenced to death. Today, he is in the penitentiary at Kingston, Ontario. The question is: was he guilty?’ The book and the issues it raised created considerable disquiet throughout Canada. As a result, pressure mounted for a re-examination of the case which took place in an unprecedented hearing before nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada. The issue was to consider if there were any grounds for a retrial.
The publishers of Le Bourdais’s book sent review copies to both Keith Simpson and Francis Camps. Simpson reviewed it for the Medico-Legal Journal, taking the view that the author’s conclusions were biased and unfounded. Camps, on the other hand, adopted an opposing view which was that the medical evidence was not strong enough to support a conviction. The pace quickened and there was a flurry of excitement among the forensic medicine fraternities on both sides of the Atlantic. The result was that Simpson accepted an invitation from the Canadian Government to give evidence before the Supreme Court in Ottawa in support of the Crown’s case, while Camps was invited to help the defence. He was aided by Dr Charles Petty, a pathologist based in Baltimore.
Also promoting the prosecution case was Dr Milton Helpern, the distinguished New York Medical Examiner. In his memoirs, Autopsy, written with Bernard Knight, he noted, ‘… we had seven forensic pathologists ready to argue the case.’ It is in the nature of such high-level engagements that the professionals involved know each other, if not personally, then by reputation. Helpern described Francis Camps as, ‘one of those restless, enthusiastic men who sometimes stampede down the wrong track’. Certainly, after reading the Le Bourdais b
ook, Camps was voluble in his opinion that Truscott’s conviction was not sustainable. In fact, he had, perhaps unwisely, written to the Attorney-General in England offering to give evidence in support of Truscott. Simpson leapt on this ‘unethical offer of services’, as he phrased it, and Camps was taken to task for it during the hearing in Ottawa.
The key issue remained that of determining when Lynne Harper had died. Dr Penistan, once again, presented his findings, supported by Helpern and Simpson. Their view was that Penistan was entirely correct in the conclusion he had reached in putting time of death in the narrow frame of 7 to 7.45 p.m. Dr Petty, backed by Camps, argued that it was not possible to make such a precise judgement from the state of the victim’s stomach contents. They estimated that death had occurred in a much broader timeframe of one to ten hours. Max Haines, the noted Canadian crime reporter, summed up the prosecution medical evidence succinctly when he wrote, ‘If the doctors were mistaken by a matter of an hour, Steven would have been in the company of other people and could not have been the killer.’
The outcome of the proceedings was that the judges decided there had been no miscarriage of justice and a re-trial was denied. Steven Truscott was returned to the penitentiary, where he remained until his release in 1969. Helpern criticised Francis Camps for being ‘… a somewhat incoherent speaker’, whose ‘brain raced ahead of his tongue’. Keith Simpson crowed that Camps had not ‘come up to proof’ and that ‘… the Crown and Dr Penistan had triumphed’. But, long after the main protagonists had died, the Truscott affair re-surfaced in the headlines in August 2007. Ontario’s Supreme Court announced that Steven had been wrongfully convicted of rape and murder forty-eight years previously and cleared his name. It was ruled that post-mortem findings at the time allowed an estimate of time of death much later, perhaps a day later, than had been argued by the prosecution. This would have placed Truscott in the company of others and clearly lift suspicion from his shoulders. In 2008, he was awarded compensation amounting to £3.2 million.
Justice was served, although the murder of Lynne Harper remained unsolved. The Truscott case helped campaigners against the death penalty in Canada and the statute was abolished in 1976. The ironic reversal of forensic fortunes in this long and drawn-out affair in which Francis Camps’s views had been derided at the time, gave him the last word. The eventual outcome went some way to endorse his philosophy that things are not always what they may seem.
Professor Camps was awarded the Swiney Prize in 1969 for his editorship of Gradwohl’s Legal Medicine, described as the best publication in its field that year. He threw himself wholeheartedly into his teaching, giving lectures at three London hospitals and working as an examiner at five universities. His special contribution lay in his endeavours to break down the old barriers and put forensic studies on a modern footing. He led from the front, establishing a world class teaching department at the London Hospital and putting the British Academy of Forensic Sciences firmly on the map.
His retirement was blighted by bad feeling and poor health. Widely recognised as a man of affable personality, he also had a darker side which involved a strong dislike for some of his contemporaries, particularly Keith Simpson. His friend, David Napley, described the occasion in 1970 after Camps had announced his retirement and colleagues held a dinner in his honour in the City of London. Following a pleasant meal and with plaudits ringing in his ears, he rose to his feet with his friends expecting a warm and witty response to their good wishes. Instead, he launched into a bitter attack on some of his fellow pathologists and, without naming him, those present knew that much of his bile was directed at Keith Simpson. It was an uncomfortable moment and the evening finished on an embarrassing note.
There was a suggestion that he would use his time in retirement to write a biography of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Doubtless, he would have put his own inimitable spin on the life of his predecessor but an admirable biography had been published in 1951 that was hardly likely to be bettered. When Camps experienced stomach pains, he convinced himself that he had cancer. Instead of seeking advice, he lived through the pain and tortured himself with the fear that when he died, it might fall to Keith Simpson to carry out the post-mortem. This was an irrational thought, as misplaced as his self-diagnosis. After he died on 8 July 1972, it was discovered that he had been suffering from stomach ulcers that could have been alleviated by surgery. It was a sad end for a man whose professional raison d’être was that appearances may conspire to deceive.
The death of Francis Camps resulted in fulsome tributes in the medical press. The Lancet referred to him as a ‘… marvellous tutor and mentor … ’, while the British Medical Journal described him as ‘… a delightful host and guest, having a rich fund of humour’. A warm appreciation was included by Sir Leon Radzinowicz in the preface he contributed to Camps on Crime, published in 1973. He wrote that his friend was ‘… constantly opening out broader vistas, more human perspectives … ’, and he summarised Camps’s philosophy of investigation, ‘as hard work, attention to detail and emotional detachment.’
Chapter Five
THE TEACHER
Keith Simpson
KEITH SIMPSON WAS FASCINATED BY DEATH, which is perhaps not surprising for a forensic pathologist. But his interest was more introspective than simply a doctor’s pronouncement about the extinction of life. He considered the moral issues raised by medical procedures which might prolong life to a point where the body no longer has the capacity to survive by itself. Treatment of terminal cancer and determination of brain death in organ donors pose weighty questions for medical practitioners.
These were not normally matters for the forensic pathologist whose subjects were beyond such considerations, but the issues involved concerned Keith Simpson. In an essay entitled, Moment of Death, published in 1967, he asked whether there were historic examples of people declared dead and subsequently found to be alive. ‘Is it possible?’ he asked, and answered, ‘undeniably, yes,’ quoting the case of a woman who supposedly committed suicide but was found to be breathing when her body arrived at the mortuary. He committed these and related thoughts to print a year after his wife, Mary, to whom he had been married for twenty-three years, died of multiple sclerosis. Death and the bearing of it must have been very much in his mind.
He could also turn these questions on their head by adding a dash of black humour to accounts of his work when he was invited to talk to clubs and societies where he was a popular speaker. One of his favourite stories concerned a post-mortem he carried out on an elderly man who, in life, suffered from curvature of the spine, resulting in a pronounced stoop. In order to make the corpse lay flat in its coffin, Simpson straightened the backbone using a length of metal tubing. All went well until the coffin was consigned to the flames of the crematorium oven. Subjected to intense heat, the metal tube in the corpse buckled, with the result that the dead man rose up through the burning coffin. Simpson liked to tease his audience by asking them how they thought the crematorium staff might have reacted.
Keith Simpson was born in Brighton where his father practised as a GP. In his autobiography, he wrote, ‘I became a doctor because my father was one.’ With his future direction clearly identified, he prospered at school and, at the age of seventeen, enrolled at Guy’s Medical School in 1924. He admired his teachers and the idea of passing on and sharing learning and knowledge to others would be a strong thread in his subsequent career. After qualifying in medicine, he elected to pursue pathology and was appointed as Demonstrator in Pathology at Guy’s in 1932. In the same year, he married Mary Buchanan who was a hospital nurse.
Two years later, he was appointed Supervisor of medico-legal post-mortems and, subsequently, became an adviser to the Surrey Police. The world of forensic pathology at that time, at least in England, was dominated by the presence of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Good-looking and firm of jaw, he captured the headlines but kept his distance from his fellow professionals and the natural camaraderie which normally exists in such groups.
Simpson would later refer to Spilsbury, rather uncharitably, as, ‘unloved and unmourned’. A trio of pathologists, Donald Teare, Francis Camps and Simpson, served the needs of London in the medical investigation of suspicious deaths. They were affectionately known to the police as ‘The Three Musketeers’, and, even during the early war years and the London Blitz, they met regularly for lunch in a Soho restaurant to compare notes and cases.
In 1941, Simpson engaged a secretary, Molly Lefebure, who worked for him throughout the Second World War and proved a valuable assistant. She came from a journalistic background and, being fairly worldly-wise, made the transition from newspaper office to mortuary reporting with ease. Unlike Spilsbury, who would not employ a secretary and made handwritten notes of his cases, Simpson relied on his secretary, who acted very much like a modern personal assistant. His first big case – his Crippen moment – came in 1942. On 17 July, a workman clearing debris from a blitzed church in south London unearthed a skeleton which he imagined was the remains of a victim of the German bombing. He put the body parts to one side while he finished his task and, in due course, reported the discovery to his foreman.
The following day, Dr Simpson was asked by the police to examine the remains which had been taken to the mortuary at Southwark. The presence of a womb in the abdominal cavity determined the sex of the body. His first assessment of the age of the fire-blackened remains was between a year and eighteen months. He viewed the circumstances of the discovery as puzzling. The body had been found buried beneath a stone slab in a cellar floor; not at all like a bomb-damage casualty. And the church had been blitzed in August 1940 which did not correspond with the preliminary assessment of the length of time the body had been dead. Simpson was given permission by the coroner to take the remains back to his laboratory at Guy’s where he could carry out a more thorough examination.
