Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Julia Bradnum was another of Adams’s patients. She was a strong and healthy eighty-two-year-old, but woke up one morning with a pain in her stomach. Dr Adams was called and stayed in the room with her for five minutes, presumably administering drugs. Ten minutes later she was dead, presumably of a drugs overdose. Julia Bradnum’s body was later exhumed, but it was by then too badly decomposed to show anything other than that she did not die of cerebral haemorrhage, which is what Dr Adams had written on his certificate. Julia Bradnum was, of course, leaving money in her will to Dr Adams, He had been there only a few weeks earlier with a new will for her to sign.

  Harriet Maud Hughes was another of Dr Adams’s patients. She was a mere sixty-six when she died. Adams had only begun to treat her three months before she died. Once again, he declared on the death certificate that death was due to ‘cerebral thrombosis’. She spoke of changing her will in his favour. She became seriously ill a few weeks before she died, then recovered just enough to make a trip to the bank with her doctor, who asked the bank manager to make him the executor of her will. Afterwards, she said to her domestic, ‘You should have seen the bank manager’s face. He was most surprised at my choice of executor.’ She made two codicils to her will. One was the instruction that she should be cremated. The other was a bequest of £2,000 to Mr and Mrs Thurston, two friends of Adams, but police later discovered that Adams actually took 90 per cent of this sum, giving the Thurstons a 10 per cent ‘commission’ for the use of their name.

  Another Adams case (unusually a male patient) was a well-heeled retired bank manager, James Downs, who nine times during the last few days of his life tried to put his signature to a will. On the tenth occasion, Mr Downs succeeded in writing a cross, but only with Dr Adams guiding his hand across the paper. It almost goes without saying that the will in question left Dr Adams £1,000 richer. Mr Downs was being treated for a broken ankle, but under Dr Adams’s care he quickly went into a coma and within a month he was dead.

  Another case was a widow called Annabelle Kilgour. She had been ill for several weeks, during which time she was being looked after by a State Registered Nurse, Miss Osgood. Adams arrived one night and announced to the nurse that he would give Mrs Kilgour an injection to help her get a good night’s rest. Miss Osgood watched helplessly as Adams gave Mrs Kilgour what she could see was an excessively large dose. Adams said, ‘That will keep her quiet.’ Then he left. Mrs Kilgour fell immediately into a coma and died the following morning. He had certainly kept her quiet.

  Adams returned to the scene and the nurse told him bluntly that he had been responsible for killing Mrs Kilgour. She later told the police, ‘I have never seen a man look so frightened in all my life.’ Adams signed the death certificate in his usual way: the death, he wrote, was caused by cerebral haemorrhage. It would have been more accurate to write, ‘death was caused by me.’ Adams’s behaviour was flagrant. He was quite openly killing his patients, one after another, sometimes even in front of witnesses.

  Another case was Margaret Pilling, who was suffering from nothing worse than flu when Dr Adams was called out, but within a fortnight she had fallen into a coma. Her family insisted she should stay with them. Her daughter, Irene Richardson, afterwards said that they imagined their mother was dying of cancer and that the doctor was being kind by not telling them the diagnosis. But they quickly realized that things were not as they should be, and called a family conference. The decided that the treatment was unsatisfactory. In particular they were unhappy that their mother was so heavily drugged and that her condition was worsening fast. Irene Richardson and her family decided to take Mrs Pilling away to a house at Ascot, and she began to improve. Irene Richardson later said, ‘Had I not taken her away, I am sure she would have died.’

  In this instance, one of Dr Adams’s patients survived, but only because she was taken out of his clutches before he could kill her. Case after case pointed to Dr John Bodkin Adams as a murderer. The police and the Director of Public Prosecution’s office were spoilt for choice. For the police, the clinching case was that of Bobbie Hullett, Bobbie was a lively forty-nine year old widow. It seems likely that Adams first killed her husband, Jack, in 1955. Jack Hullett was a retired Lloyds underwriter who had developed a heart condition. Adams gave him a dose of morphia and Jack Hullett died seven hours later, leaving £700 to Adams and the rest to Bobbie. Bobbie was grief-stricken and the friendly doctor was on hand to give her sympathy and drugs to help her sleep. The doses Adams prescribed were excessive and it was noticeable that Bobbie was staggering under the effects of the drug when she got up in the morning.

  The comedian Leslie Henson was a close friend of Bobbie Hullett’s and he was distressed to see her disintegrating under the effect of the addictive drugs. Henson and his wife invited her to their house, to try to get her away from the source of the problem, but she had to go back – for more drugs. Another of her friends was the Chief Constable, Mr Walker. When Bobbie died, both he and Leslie Henson were very upset, and Walker was in a strong position to make discreet enquiries. Walker found that a few days before Bobbie Hullett fell into a coma she had given Adams a cheque for £1,000, and that Adams had fed this into his bank account within hours. By this stage Adams had accumulated £35,000 in his bank accounts and a further £125,000 in investments.

  The coroner’s inquest on Bobbie Hullett did not go well for Dr Adams. The coroner asked him why he had not told his medical practice partner about the patient’s history of depression. Why had he not put his patient into a nursing home? Why had he not called in a psychiatrist? Why had he stuck to his diagnosis of cerebral haemorrhage after a pathologist had suggested poisoning might be involved? The coroner was unimpressed by Adams’s answers, commenting on ‘an extraordinary degree of carelessness’. The reality was much worse than carelessness, and the inquest did not take that critical next step, which was to accuse Adams of killing Bobbie Hullett.

  As events turned out, when the case against Adams was assembled, the prosecution decided to focus not on the death of Bobbie Hullett but on the death of Edith Morrell, the seventy-two-year-old widow of a Liverpool shipping merchant, instead. The prosecution lawyers chose this case because they thought it was a very clear-cut and obvious case of murder, though the police investigators – Sergeant Hewitt especially – were alarmed by the choice as they thought other cases were stronger, especially those where there were bodies to supply forensic evidence. Mrs Morrell’s body had been destroyed; it had been cremated. This meant that there was no possibility of bringing in Francis Camps, the foremost forensic scientist of his time. It was Manningham-Buller’s decision, and he made it against the advice of his junior counsel, Melford Stevenson, and against the advice of Mr Leck at the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office. Manningham-Buller knew John Bodkin Adams was a very frightened man and could easily be worn down in the witness stand. In the event, Adams did not take the stand and therefore escaped being reduced by Manningham-Buller. Manningham-Buller completely miscalculated the situation, bungled the prosecution of one of the worst and most flagrant serial killers of the twentieth century, and must be held responsible for letting him get off scot-free.

  The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams opened on 25 April 1957. This was six years after the death of Mrs Morrell, which in itself took the edge off the evidence. The prosecution brought witnesses who gave evidence that over a period of six weeks Adams had prescribed a huge quantity of drugs: more than 4,000 grains of barbiturate and heroin. The standard recommended maximum daily dosage of morphia was a quarter grain, yet in the final day of Mrs Morrell’s life Adams injected eighteen grains. The witnesses were giving strong evidence that Adams had administered a huge drug overdose – one that he must have known would be fatal.

  This damning evidence was nevertheless overturned by Adams’s defence counsel, Geoffrey Lawrence. He had managed to find the nurses’ daily record books. These seemed to show that the nurses’ memories were at fault; in the six years that had passed they had exaggerated the
doses of drugs Dr Adams had administered. They may have thought they were improving the case against Adams, but they were in effect ensuring his release. Geoffrey Lawrence then played his trump card, which was not to put Adams in the dock. He made it appear that there was no case for him to answer, and denied Manningham-Buller the chance to break Adams down by aggressive cross-questioning. The case against Adams – at least as far as the death of Mrs Morrell was concerned – just fell apart.

  To the huge disappointment of the police investigators, who knew that Adams had killed dozens of elderly people, Adams was acquitted. But irregularities had been uncovered about Adams’s professional life that could still be pursued. Three months after he was acquitted, Adams was in the dock at Lewes Assizes on fourteen minor charges over matters such as forging National Health Service prescriptions and bad record keeping in relation to dangerous drugs. The police were determined, at the very least, to remove Dr Adams from general practice. He pleaded guilty to these charges, perhaps hoping that the investigation would stop there, and he was right.

  Adams was fined £2,400. Later in the year he was struck off by the General Medical Council. This meant that he was no longer able to practise. Remarkably and inexplicably, on 22 November 1961, Adams was allowed back onto the medical register. The police had not forgotten that he was an unconvicted serial killer, and the Home Office had not forgotten either; the Home Office refused to give him a licence to dispense drugs.

  People in general, though, seemed to have short memories. Dr John Bodkin Adams, who should by this stage have been hanged as a murderer and buried in an unmarked grave, was back in business and his practice in Eastbourne gradually picked up. Almost astonishingly, in 1965 a grateful patient left him £2,000 in her will. Now Adams really was back in business. Somehow, and perhaps uniquely in legal history, Adams completely escaped retribution. He retired to Hove and eventually died there, a constant living reminder to a frustrated police force and legal profession that he had got the better of them. He even had a brass plate placed outside his front door flaunting his continuing presence: ‘John Bodkin Adams, MD. At home 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.’

  Judge Melford Stevenson reminisced about the case in his later years to his friend the novelist Kingsley Amis. ‘How many did he do?’ Amis asked. ‘The police knew he’d done thirty-two,’ Melford Stevenson said emphatically. ‘There was some doubt about number thirty-three, his mother.’

  Dr John Bodkin Adams was that very rare being, the serial killer who got away with murder, and in spite of being identified by the authorities got away with it over and over again. The terrible crimes he committed remain officially unsolved, simply because officially they were never committed in the first place. There were no crimes. Officially, all of Adams’s victims died as he stated on their death certificates. Their relatives were often uneasy, and in many cases they were certain murder had been done. The police were certain murder was being done. Looking back on that time from a vantage point fifty years on, we can be certain that murder in cold blood was committed over and over again. Yet, officially, because of loopholes in the law, those deaths remain unsolved crimes.

  The Gold-digger, The Duke and The Playboy: Sir Harry Oakes

  On the night of 7–8 July 1943 on Nassau in the Bahamas, Sir Harry Oakes was brutally murdered in his bed. A storm raged that night, and heavy rain coming in through the open bedroom window doused the flames that engulfed his body. At seven o’clock in the morning, Harold Christie, one of his friends, discovered Sir Harry’s badly burnt remains. He had been murdered and his body soaked in petrol before being set on fire. There was a lacquered Chinese screen close to the bed; it was partly burnt and also covered in bloody handprints. Although some of the body was charred, the head was not, and it was clear from the blood and injuries there that Sir Harry had been bludgeoned to death before being set on fire.

  Christie was both shocked and puzzled. The self-made millionaire Harry Oakes was generous and well liked. Who would have wanted to do this to him? Harry Oakes was a member of the social elite on Nassau, which included the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the Bahamas. There was a great deal of speculation about the identity of the murderer. Suspicions surrounded a range of people, from a notorious Mafia boss to a flamboyant French playboy. Really it is only possible to understand what happened, or may have happened, by examining Sir Harry Oakes’s colourful life.

  Harry Oakes was born in 1874, the third of the five children of Edith and William Pitt Oakes of Sangerville, Maine. As a boy, Harry daydreamed about striking it rich one day. He went to Syracuse Medical School, but he was still gripped by the idea of acquiring wealth. He became obsessed with news of a Klondike gold rush, and in 1896 abandoned his medical studies to go off and look for gold. When he reached the Klondike, the gold rush was petering out, and he fell back on work as a medical assistant. He was shipwrecked off the Alaskan coast and for a time imprisoned by the Russians. After these adventures, Oakes went to Australia, working his passage as a deck-hand. Then he went to New Zealand and California, each time failing to find gold. He encountered many hard and unscrupulous men, which made him more self-reliant and tough but also increasingly bitter.

  In 1911, Oakes went to Swastika in Ontario, Canada, following a rumour of gold. He lodged with Roza Brown, a strikingly ugly, smelly and foul woman who held prospectors in contempt but for some reason took a liking to Harry Oakes. She knew a little about the geography and geology of the area and gave him some tips. In 1912, in collaboration with the four Tough brothers and acting on Roza’s advice, Oakes began digging at Kirkland Lake. This time he struck gold. Inevitably a quarrel broke out about the distribution of shares in the gold, and eventually Oakes sold his shares. Oakes decided to mine underneath the lake itself. He was funded by his mother and he again struck gold. Suddenly he was rich. His Lake Shore Mines became one of the biggest producers of gold in the Western Hemisphere, and Oakes was earning $60,000 a day, quickly becoming the richest man in Canada. He gave generous shares in his mining company to family members and friends, and they became rich, too.

  In 1919, Harry Oakes built himself a chateau overlooking his mines, quickly adjusting to the lifestyle of the very wealthy. But he was also restless. In 1923, he set off round the world. During the cruise he met a young Australian woman called Eunice MacIntyre. She was tall, elegant, sensitive, attractive, twenty-four. He was forty-eight and in many ways her antithesis; nevertheless they fell in love. When they reached Sydney they married. Over the following years they had five children and they acquired Canadian citizenship. In the late 1930s, Oakes changed citizenship again, becoming a Bahamian when he moved to Nassau to avoid taxation.

  Harry Oakes’s arrival on Nassau transformed the island’s economy. He bought up half the property on the island and started developing it, building mansions, an airport, a country club and a golf course. Oakes often came across as a difficult and truculent man, but he was at the same time very generous, giving large sums to help the island economy, easing unemployment and building a new wing on the hospital. He also funded training schemes for the islanders, to help them get work. This display of civic responsibility led to Oakes’s knighthood in 1939.

  But there were other rich and successful islanders on Nassau, and maybe we should look to them as potential suspects for his murder. One of Oakes’s social circle was the Governor of the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor, the ex-King Edward VIII of England. With him was his new Duchess, the profoundly dissatisfied and bitter Wallis Simpson, who looked on her stay in the Bahamas as a kind of exile; she found life there very dull and hated the heat. Another irritation was the small allowance offered by the British government to refurbish the government house they were to live in. The Windsors nevertheless threw lavish parties which ran up enormous bills. There was a presumption that the Duke was getting money from other sources. One source says that he received more than two million dollars from Axel Wenner-Gren.

  Wenner-Gren was another wealthy Bahamian with a shadowy past. He made friends wi
th the Windsors, but this relationship was to cause them problems because he had links with the Nazis. He was a Berlin-educated Swede who had worked for a light-bulb company in New York. He had converted his sales commissions into shares, which then sharply increased in value. He eventually gained control, buying out the company. He set up other companies in Germany and by 1939 he was worth an estimated $100 million. He was able to buy himself an enormous yacht in which he set sail for the Bahamas at the outbreak of the Second World War. With his American wife and children, he set up home on Nassau, living in a mansion called Shangri-La.

  While on Nassau, Wenner-Gren made friends with the Duke and Duchess and Sir Harry Oakes. He was also a close friend of Hermann Goering, and it is possible that this relationship made it possible for Sweden to remain on good terms with Germany and retain its neutrality. Wenner-Gren boasted that he was a friend of Mussolini too. Wenner-Gren was on lists of suspect people in both Washington and London; both the Americans and the British believed him to be a spy. They also believed Wenner–Gren was working his way towards controlling the economy of Mexico. As a result, agents of Britain and the United States froze his bank accounts while his activities were investigated. Wenner-Gren was obliged to stay in Mexico, as it was no longer safe for him to return to the Bahamas. During the investigation, it was found that he had financial dealings with Sir Harry Oakes, Harold Christie and the Duke of Windsor.

  Harold Christie was born and brought up on Nassau, and started out poor. He acted as a selling agent for property on the island, persuading his employers to give him commission in land rather than money. In time, the value of the land increased and Christie was able to use the profits to buy larger plots. Christie rapidly became very wealthy. It was Christie who sold Harry Oakes more than half the property on Nassau, which gave him an enormous profit. Christie enjoyed his personal wealth, but he also had a vision for the development of Nassau, hoping to increase the tourist trade. He particularly wanted to open up the air service from Miami to Nassau and build more hotels. Christie and Oakes were really very similar in their ambitions and methods, and they quickly became friends.