by Sue Black
The second cervical vertebra, C2, or the axis, is a very unusual-looking bone with a peg protruding from its upper surface. This peg, the odontoid process, fits inside the circular atlas. Ligaments wrapped around the waist of the peg allow it to rotate so that we can turn our head from side to side. Ingenious engineering.
Because these two vertebrae are so close to the skull, and to the brain inside, they have a very large volume of neurological tissue to protect, which is why the hole in the middle of each bone, the spinal canal, is very large. And this means that any damage or trauma this high up in the column can have fatal repercussions.
One of the most evocative labels that could ever be given to a fracture is one that involves the second cervical vertebra. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how the “hangman’s fracture” got its name. Because the axis is fundamentally a ring, when it breaks, it must break in two places. If you doubt me, try to create a single break in a certain well-known mint with a hole in the middle. There will always be two pieces.
When somebody is hanged, the fractures of C2 tend to occur on either side of the odontoid process. They are caused by the sharp drop and the sudden, jolting halt of the rope. The peg ploughs backwards into the spinal cord (to be exact, the lower aspect of the brain stem) and the disruption to the neurological tissue causes death—virtually instantaneously, if you are lucky, and if the executioner does a good job.
Many hangmen took pride in a “good” hanging. It was a nineteenth-century British hangman, William Marwood, who, in 1872, designed the more precise “long drop,” which took into account factors such as the condemned person’s height and weight to calculate the optimum length of rope and drop to try to ensure the cleanest and most humane execution possible for each individual. Botched hangings were not only a cruel death, but distressing for the hangmen, and for those required to witness them.
The aim was to break the neck to cause instantaneous death but not decapitation. Yet, however well calculated, not all executions using this method were successful. Research has shown that fewer than 20 per cent of judicial hangings resulted in cervical fracture and of these, only around half would display the classic “hangman’s fracture.” Ironically, then, it is not actually “classic” at all but quite infrequently achieved.
This is why the sentencing would state that a condemned prisoner was to “hang by the neck until dead”: the drop was sometimes not sufficient in itself to cause death and suffocation and vascular constriction with ensuing hypoxia were more likely—hence the “hangman’s jig,” where struggling could go on for several minutes before death occurred. To help bring about a swifter end, family or friends of the condemned prisoner might pay the hangman, or someone else, to pull on the feet. The placing of the knot on the noose could also be instrumental in bringing about a quick death. A submental knot, under the chin, helped to hyperextend the neck and so aid the fatal crushing of the brain stem.
Technically, hanging and strangulation are not necessarily synonymous, although hanging may result in death by a sub-category of strangulation if it is not instantaneous through neurological trauma. Strangulation, which is defined as asphyxia due to constriction of major blood vessels, inhibition of the vagus nerve or obstruction of the air passage in the neck, is a soft-tissue injury, and usually the domain of the pathologist rather than the anthropologist, as strangulation generally leaves no traces on the vertebrae.
The two other methods of strangulation are ligature strangulation, which can either be caused by an assailant or self-inflicted, and manual strangulation, using the hands (and sometimes other parts of the body) to fatally constrict the neck. Manual strangulation is highly unlikely to be self-inflicted for obvious reasons. The distinction between the three types lies in the cause of the external pressure on the neck. A constricting band exacerbated by the weight of the victim’s body is the result of hanging. Ligature strangulation is defined by a constricting band tightened by a force other than body weight and manual strangulation is when the constriction is caused by the hands, forearms or any other part of the body.
There are also three types of hanging: free suspension of the body, incomplete suspension and hanging brought about by a fall from a height (most often due to judicial hanging). It is only in this last category that we are likely to see fractures in the upper cervical vertebrae that relate to the cause of death. Any other form of hanging may leave no mark on the bones.
All of these varieties of hanging and strangulation, except for manual strangulation, may be the result of suicide as well as homicide. A classic hangman’s fracture was the outcome for William Bury, the last man to be hanged in Dundee in 1889. He had been found guilty of the murder of his wife, Ellen, but there were claims that her death may have been due to ligature self-strangulation and partial suspension.
Bury’s murder conviction was not the extent of his notoriety. The timing of his arrival in Dundee from the East End of London, together with certain aspects of Ellen’s demise, led to speculation in some quarters following his arrest that he may have been none other than Jack the Ripper, England’s most infamous serial killer. However, with little evidence to support this theory, he would be some way down my list of likely candidates.
Bury and Ellen left Bow, not far from Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper’s stamping ground, on 20 January 1889, a couple of months after the last of the five murders most strongly attributed to the Ripper. They sailed north on the SS Cambria to Dundee, where Bury had convinced Ellen that there was a job waiting for him in the jute mills. He lied. They rented a top-floor flat at 43 Union Street for eight days, until they ran out of money. Bury then put a roof over their heads—a dingy, unfurnished basement flat at 113 Prince’s Street—by claiming that he wanted to view the property and simply failed to return the keys. Twelve days later he walked into the local police station and told them that if they went to the flat, they would find Ellen’s body inside a wooden trunk. It was established that, by the time she was found, she had been dead for around five days.
Bury was known to be a drunk. He was also known to have been abusive and violent towards Ellen. It was suspected that he had married her because she had a little money from a small windfall, now long gone. What we will never know for certain is why he chose to come to Dundee and what happened in the basement of 113 Prince’s Street on 5 February 1889.
Bury told the police that he and Ellen had been drinking the night before she died, although by all accounts, Ellen was not much of a drinker. He said that he went to bed and when he woke up the following morning she was dead, lying on the floor with a cord around her neck. It transpired that Bury had bought the cord the day before Ellen’s death. It also emerged that on the same day he had spent some hours at the Sheriff Court, listening to proceedings from the public gallery, perhaps doing a bit of research on the legal system.
The Crown pathologists, Drs Templeman and Stalker, carried out a postmortem examination on Ellen’s body and found several bruises and cut marks, one of them so deep that her intestines were protruding from her abdomen. They suggested that the edges of the wound were raised, an indication that she might have been alive when she was disembowelled. Around her neck were impressions left by the cord biting into her skin and the bones of her right leg had been broken in order to squeeze her into the wooden trunk where the police had discovered her mutilated body, packed around with clothing and books.
They also found a knife on the window ledge, the blade still encrusted with blood and hair that matched Ellen’s. The picture seemed very clear: Bury had strangled his wife with the cord, and while she was still alive he had taken a knife to her and slashed her body open—just like Jack the Ripper—and then stuffed her into the wooden trunk, breaking her leg to fit her in. Why had he remained in Dundee, living alongside her body for around five days before finally giving himself up? Was it remorse that took him to the police station that night? Was it a sudden sense of responsibility? Given what was known of the character of William Bury, neither seemed
likely.
The trial was set for 28 March, when the spring court circuit was due to sit in Dundee with Lord Young presiding. All the evidence was to be heard in a single day as the judge did not trust the Dundee public not to interfere with the jury members. The city was vehemently opposed to the death penalty.
The police must have been pretty convinced that this was an open-and-shut case, but they had not reckoned on the courtroom skills of the two other doctors brought in for the defence, Drs Lennox and Kinnear. They were required only to provide grounds for reasonable doubt, not to prove innocence. Bury was pleading not guilty, and it was the Crown’s job to make its case.
The defence doctors did not dispute Bury’s assertion that he and Ellen had been drinking, although they did note that there was no smell of alcohol from her stomach contents. For whatever reason—and they weren’t obliged to provide one—they offered the hypothesis that Ellen could have self-strangulated using the cord found round her neck, with the assistance of partial suspension, perhaps from the door handle. Maybe Bury picked up the knife to cut her down and, distraught and not in his right mind, took the knife to her abdomen in the process. But they believed this took place postmortem as they found no lividity associated with the soft tissue around the wounds. Afterwards Bury panicked and bundled her into the trunk. He then spent five days agonizing over what he had done until, unable to live with it any longer, handed himself in to the police. Nobody was able to explain why he burned all Ellen’s clothes, why he had her jewellery in his pockets when he went to the police station or why the floor of the flat had been cleaned while the rope and the bloody knife were left in clear view. So much of the case simply did not add up. (If you are interested in the full story, do read Euan Macpherson’s book The Trial of Jack the Ripper: The Case of William Bury.) In his summation, the judge told the jury they had only two things to consider: was this murder or was it suicide? The fifteen men returned with a guilty verdict, but with a recommendation for mercy, reflecting the local distaste for the death penalty. When Lord Young asked them for their reasons, they said it was on the grounds of conflicting medical evidence.
Irritated, Young sent them back to the jury room until they were agreed on a clear verdict. It took them only five minutes to come back with a unanimous decision: guilty. Lord Young passed the mandatory death sentence for murder and, four weeks later, some time between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on 24 April 1889, William Bury was hanged by the neck until he was dead. It was at least a “good” hanging: he died almost instantaneously due to the fracturing of the second cervical vertebra. He was twenty-nine years old.
On 7 January 1889, before William and Ellen Bury set foot in Dundee, the first Cox chair of anatomy at Dundee university, Professor Andrew Melville Paterson, gave his inaugural lecture. Obtaining bodies for dissection remained difficult in areas of the country where hangings were infrequent.
In the wake of the nefarious activities earlier in the century of Burke and Hare—who resorted to murder to supply cadavers to anatomists in Edinburgh, one of Europe’s leading centres of anatomical study—the Anatomy Act of 1832 had acknowledged the need for bodies for scientific purposes and granted licences to anatomists, giving them legal access to unclaimed corpses. For the first time it also allowed for a person’s next of kin to donate their body to medical science. But the majority of cadavers were still sourced from those who had died in prison, hospitals, asylums or orphanages, or who had committed suicide.
Three months after Paterson took the chair, the body of William Bury would have been legally available to Dundee’s licensed anatomists and Paterson would surely not have missed the opportunity to acquire it. Unfortunately, although the university has records of corpses acquired both before and after Bury’s death, there is nothing to confirm whether his body ever entered the anatomy department. However, we do know for certain that Paterson had some connection to Bury’s remains, because seven cervical vertebrae that used to sit on my desk in Dundee, including the C2 vertebra that showed the classic hangman’s fracture, were catalogued in the museum collection as having belonged to William Bury. Perhaps Paterson removed the neck vertebrae himself; perhaps either Templeman or Stalker did it for him. We just do not know.
To mark the 130th anniversary of the Cox chair of anatomy at Dundee university, we decided to reconsider the evidence presented at the trial of William Bury and act it out in court—indeed, the very same Sheriff Court in which he had stood trial just a couple of months after the inauguration of the academic chair. The medical reports and the notes taken by Lord Young are stored in the Scottish records office in Edinburgh and we had full access to them. We decided to present only the medical evidence, as this had been the basis of the original instruction from Lord Young, but to do so in the light of contemporary forensic knowledge. It would be fascinating to test whether modern-day science would uphold the views of the jury or overturn their verdict.
A serving supreme court judge, Lord Hugh Matthews, sat on the bench—not in his robes, as that would have been improper: this was not a retrial, but public engagement with science. The legal team for the prosecution were the Mooting Society from the University of Dundee, and these incredibly lucky law students were coached by Scotland’s principal Crown counsel, Alex Prentice QC. They would present testimony from one witness only: a highly regarded forensic pathologist, Dr John Clark, who would confine himself to the evidence recorded in the reports of Drs Templeman and Stalker, the original Crown pathologists.
The legal team for the defence were from the Mooting Society of the University of Aberdeen, coached by Dorothy Bain QC, a leading Scottish lawyer who had been a Crown office advocate depute for many years. They, too, would call only one witness: Dr Richard Shepherd, an equally renowned forensic pathologist, who would work with the evidence provided by Drs Kinnear and Lennox, retained by the defence. The fifteen jurors (fifteen is typical in Scotland) were selected at random from members of the Dundee public following a campaign run by the local newspaper, the only difference being that, to reflect societal as well as scientific advances, we did not restrict ourselves to outmoded nineteenth-century financial or gender eligibility criteria, and the jury was therefore made up of both men and women. The event was filmed by Dan Snow’s company and continues to be used today in the instruction of law students at both Dundee and Aberdeen universities.
The Sheriff Court was packed to capacity as the young man appointed to stand in for William Bury took his place in the dock, flanked by a police officer in period costume. It was Dr Clark who provided the defence team with the snippet they had been looking for. He offered the view that self-strangulation could not be ruled out, that it could have been achieved from a low-level object and that he could not discount the possibility that this could have been the door handle. This gave the defence all the ammunition they needed to champion the cause of reasonable doubt. But would the jury buy it?
After all the evidence-in-chief had been heard and all the cross-examinations and re-examinations completed, the case was summed up by the judge. His most memorable direction to the jury was: “Normally I would say there is no pressure of time, but in this case, I give you fifteen minutes.’ It was strange to hear laughter in the courtroom, especially in one considering something as serious as murder and dismemberment, and after everyone had taken it all very seriously and played their parts perfectly.
The decision the jury had to make was whether they agreed with the prosecution or whether the defence had introduced reasonable doubt: as this was not a retrial, it would have been inappropriate for them to pronounce on guilt or innocence. When they returned, they were split 13–2, on this occasion, in favour of the defence. They did not think that there was sufficient evidence to convict for murder, again due to the conflicting medical evidence. The twenty-first-century jury was largely upholding the first instincts of their predecessors 130 years before.
However, William Bury was not to be let off. The judge, who could not alter the verdict, informed him: “Mr
Bury, please stand. There is good news and there is bad. This jury has found you not guilty, but I think you did it, so you are still going to hang. Take him away.”
So Bury was once again led from the courtroom and down the steps to the cells, only this time, happily, he was not really going to be hanged by the neck until he was dead and nobody was going to dissect his neck to remove his bones.
There was a little twist to the tale that few were aware of. In the dock that day alongside the modern-day William Bury were the mortal remains of the real defendant. I had brought his cervical vertebrae back into the same courtroom where he had stood trial on 28 March 1889. And so, on 3 February 2018, part of his body was present as the jury returned a very different verdict.
What do I think would be the outcome if Bury was put on trial today? I reckon he would have got “not proven,” known colloquially in Scotland as the “bastard verdict,” and would therefore have been acquitted. This verdict basically indicates that the jury believes the defendant may be guilty but that there is insufficient evidence to prove it. While history records what happened to Bury, and is supported by the evidence of his vertebrae, we do not know whether Ellen was strangled or strangled herself. Even if we could examine her remains today, we would not be able to tell the difference.
I was pleased with my quirky choice of keepsake for everyone who took part in the event. They each received a 3D-printed replica of William Bury’s C2 vertebra, complete with its classic hangman’s fracture, in a presentation box. I only recently found out that Dan Snow gave his replica vertebra, in its beautiful box, to his wife as a Valentine’s gift. And they say romance is dead.
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The vertebrae, then, tend not to bear any trace of a soft-tissue injury such as strangulation, whereas the upper cervical vertebrae may speak to death by hanging. What about cases of decapitation? In this situation, the vertebrae will probably carry evidence of the event if the decapitation, or attempted decapitation, has been intentional. This usually results in the first three cervical vertebrae staying with the head and the last two with the chest, so the implements used by an assailant are most likely to leave their mark between C3 and C6, that is, on C4 or C5.
