Dr. Bodkin Adams

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Bio
Full Name Dr. John Adam Bodkins
Date of Birth 21st January 1899
Date of Death 4th July 1983
Known Also As The Bluebeard of Eastbourne
Hit Count 14+?
Information & Pictures
On the night of Sunday 22nd July 1956, the Eastbourne coroner was roused by a curious phone call from the town's most fashionable physician. Dr John Bodkins MD, DA, DPh sought a favour - would the coroner be prepared to arrange a private post mortem on one of his patients?

The coroner curtly declined to deviate from normal proceedings, but asked: 'When did the patient die?'

'The patient is not yet dead,' countered Bodkin Adams. At this surprising reply from the doctor, the coroner sat up in bed with a start.


Gertrude 'Bobbie' Hullett ]

Gertrude Hullett was fifty years old and a second-time widow. Her first husband, Vaughan Tomlinson, died aged forty five. Her second spouse - the rich, retired Lloyd's underwriter and social lion Jack Hullett - died in March 1956, leaving her suicidal and dependant on sleeping drugs.

Next day, the patient did die. She was fifty year old Gertrude 'Bobbie' Hullett, the vivacious, recently widowed 'Grande Dame' of Holywell Mount - a handsome mansion overlooking the English Channel - and member of a set that included the comedian Leslie Henson and his wife, the singers Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, and the actress Marie Lohr.

It transpired that a junior partner of Dr Adams, who realised that the patient was going to die, had insisted on a post mortem because he wanted to be sure that Adam's diagnoses of the patient's illness was correct. The younger doctor suspect that there was more to the sudden demise of Mrs Hullett than Dr Adams said. He felt that the patient was dying of a drug overdose.

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[ Leslie Henson ]

The English comedian Leslie Henson - seen here in the play Bob's your Uncle - was a friend of 'Bobbie' Hullett. He gave information to the police after her death.

Adam's partner was not the only one whose suspicions were aroused. Leslie Henson, who was performing in Dublin, telephoned Eastbourne's Chief Constable to express her concern. Then Henson gave a statement to the Dublin police. The comedian was upset by the manner in which Dr Adams had kept Mrs Hullett heavily sedated for the four months since the death of her husband. 'My wife and I saw her turning into a drug addict,' he was to say. 'We saw her disintegrating mentally... I am certain the pills sent her nearly mad, and through them she died.'

Discreet enquiries were made. It was established that just before she fell into a fatal coma, Mrs Hullett gave Dr Adams a cheque for £1,000. Three days before that, Mrs Hullett made a will, leaving her Rolls-Royce to the doctor. Staff at Holywell confirmed Mrs Hullett's doped condition. 'She staggered downstairs most mornings as though she was drunk,' said one.

Chief Constable Richard Walker was a proud custodian of Eastbourne's reputation as a retirement haven for the rich. It was hardly thinkable to question the integrity of Dr Bodkin Adams, who patients included many of the area's most eminent people.

Te doctor was rich, and had no need for another Rolls-Royce, he already had one, and several other cars besides. Yet the police chief was keenly aware of persistent, sinister gossip in the town - gossip that linked the doctor's profligate use of addictive opiates to his rich haul of legacies. It was insinuated that the doctor did his rounds with a bottle of morphine in one pocket and a blank will form in the other.


[ Dr Bodkin Adams ]

A photo of Dr Adams taken in the 1940's. At this time he was at the eight of his professional standing, belonging to a prosperous practice and physician to some of Eastbourne's wealthiest citizens.

Dr Bodkin Adams was short and stout - just 1.7m (5 foot, 5 inches) tall, and almost 108kg (18 stone) in weight. He was bald, with a pink, fleshy face, small eyes and round, horn-rimmed glasses, and had a disconcerting habit of rolling his eyes heavenwards, revealing nothing but the whites. Yet he was a master of the bedside manner, and especially charmed his ageing women patients.

As well as attending to their medical needs (at half a guinea a visit for the wealthy), he would caress their hands and comb their hair, and on occasion even stroke their breasts. He also offered the comfort of his faith, forever invoking the Almighty in his ministrations, and kneeling in prayer before entering a patient's room.

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[ Dr Francis Camps ]

Dr Francis Camps, the Home Office pathologist who was associated with some famous murder cases, carried out the third post mortem on Gertrude 'Bobbie' Hullett. His involvement was bad news for Bodkin Adams.

The great age and relative obscurity of his supposed victims had made it possible to contain the rumour-mongers, but 'Bobbie' Hullett was different. This was not a frail and solitary eighty year old, but a popular, middle-aged socialite with powerful show business and society connections. Bobbie Hullett's body was subjected to no less than three post mortems, the last by Dr Francis Camps, a celebrated Home Office pathologist whose specialty was capital crime.

The world outside Eastbourne became aware of John Bodkin Adams on Thursday 26th July 1956. Under the headline, Rich Widow Murder Probe, the Bobbie Hullett story jostled for space in the papers alongside the news of President Nasser seizing the Suez Canal and the liner Andrea Doria sinking in the Atlantic. The deaths of three other women - 'two widows and a spinster' - were reportedly also under investigation.

The story expanded in a later issue to become Six Women In Murder Riddle, and the case assume major significance with the arrival in Eastbourne of Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard to head the investigation.

On 21st August, the Hullett inquest jury returned a unanimous verdict of suicide from an overdose of sleeping tablets. Dr Adams was severely reprimanded by the coroner for 'an extraordinary degree of careless treatment', but this fact was lost amid a spate of truly sensational and scandalous revelations. 'Yard Probe Mass Poisoning: Twenty Five Deaths in the Great Mystery of Eastbourne' screamed one headline, which was followed by 'Enquiry into Four Hundred Wills : Rich Women Believed to Have Been the Victims'.

The readers of Britain's popular press were informed that the Scotland Yard murder squad was investigating the suspected poisoning of hundreds of wealthy women in Eastbourne over a period of twenty years. There were lurid stories of earth samples being taken in cemeteries, and it was suggested that the murderer was a 'hypnotic killer', who exercised a Svengali-like control over his elderly and frail victims.

The facts behind their feverish reports were these; Hannam and Hewitt, the dapper Superintendent and his sergeant from the Yard, and a local man, Inspector Brynley Pugh, had embarked on an investigation of Dr Adams's professional life. Their brief was to look for evidence of fraud and murder.

Records were combed by a desk-bound team of detectives, while the trio penetrated the privet and lace curtain fastness of dozens of homes to question occupants. Relatives in many cases were dead, or too old to remember anything clearly. Most of the bodies had been cremated or had mouldered beyond research of forensic science.

The picture of Dr Adams that emerged from the inquiries was far from pleasant. He was a greedy, avaricious physician of dubious morality and an insatiable legacy hunter. Statements from solicitors and bank managers testified to Dr Adam's persistence in pressing patients to alter their wills in his favour, even to the extent of guiding a dying hand.

There was also evidence of forgery and extortion, and descriptions of the doctor rummaging through a bereaved home for what he could find. One old lady, an important social patron as well as a patient of the doctor, described to the police how she drove him from her home with her gold-headed walking stick after overhearing him whisper to her dying husband: 'Leave your estate to me, and I'll look after your wife.'
A painstaking search found 132 wills amounting to £45,000 - an immense sum for the time - in bequests to the doctor. Cases were discovered of cremation forms in which the doctor had failed to declare his interest as a beneficiary under the will, an omission that avoided the necessity of a post mortem. A study of the doctor's death certificates also raised questions about his diagnostic capability - or honesty - since an unnaturally high proportion had cerebral haemorrhage, or cerebral thrombosis, entered as the cause of death.

Instances of sudden decline and death following closely upon a will change excited particular interest. Relatives drew the Yard's attention to the case of eighty-five year old Julia Bradnum, who died unexpectedly in 1952, leaving the doctor as sole executor of the new will.

Occasionally, the investigators came up with vivid testimony. In the case of a widow named Annabella Kilgour, who died in 1950, a nurse came forward to say that she had been so astonished by the does of drug the doctor injected prior to Mrs Kilgour falling into a fatal coma that she had protested: 'You realise, doctor, that you have killed her?'

The yard also learnt about Hilda and Clara Neil-Miller, genteel spinster sisters who died in 1953 and 1954. Hilda left everything to Clara, who left most of their estate to the doctor. A guest at the rest home where Clara died described the last visit of the doctor. He had remained in the bedroom forty five minutes. She said, 'I later became worried as I heard nothing from the room. I opened the door and was horrified by what I saw. This was a bitterly cold winter's night. The bedclothes had been pulled back... her nightdress had been folded across her body up to her neck. All the bedroom windows had been flung open. A cold gush of wind sweeping through the bedroom. That is how the doctor had left her.

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[ Bodkin Adams ]

Bodkin Adams aged about seventeen, poses for a studio photo in military uniform. In 1918, he enrolled as a medical student at Queen's University, Belfast, and graduated in 1921.

In late October, Hannam submitted his dossier to Sir Theobald Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions. It was said to be 23cm (9 inches) thick. Relaxing over a beer in the Beachy Head Hotel one stormy night, Hannam confided to a reporter: 'I am quite confident that Adams is a mass-murderer. He has certainly killed fourteen people. If we had arrived on the scene years ago, I think I could have said he killed more.'

When he had begun his investigation in August, Detective Superintendent Hannam believed he could establish a homicidal pattern: Dr Adams made his victims dependant on drugs, then influenced them to change their wills in his favour, and then eased them out of life with an overdose. It was as simple as it was difficult to prove.

Hannam and his men sifted through the mass of material and selected a short list of about a dozen worrying cases, then set about 'cracking the suspect' through a series of interviews. The approach was subtle and polite.

Hannam's first meeting with Dr Adams, on 1st October 1956, had been contrived as though by accident, when the detective strolled past the doctor's Eastbourne home in Trinity Trees (the name of the street) just as he was putting his car away. 'Good evening, Doctor, did you have a good holiday in Scotland?'


[ Edith Alice Morrell ]

Edith Alice Morrell was a rich eccentric who still dressed in the styles of her Edwardian heyday. She lived in a ten bedroom mansion on Eastbourne's exclusive Beachy Head Road. Her greatest ambition was to win the Samuel Arno Silver Cup for Dahlias, presented annually by the Eastbourne Horticultural Society. Her gardener James Carter achieved this for her in 1948, and again in 1949. In her will she left Carter £500, and all her dahlia plants. Two dahlia species associated with her are still grown today: the Edit Morrell and the Marden Ash (the name of her house).

The conversation drifted away from an account of the doctor's holiday to his Christian upbringing, and the death of his mother - 'a sweet Christian soul' - and it was left to the doctor to nervously broach the subject of 'all these rumours'. He put it down to jealousy. 'I think it is all God's plan to teach me a new lesson,' he said.

Hannam then expressed concern over a legacy from a Mrs Edith Morrell, a rich Liverpool businessman's widow and the source of the doctor's first Rolls-Royce. The doctor spoke of her as 'a very dear patient'. What about the chest of silver that she had also left him? 'I never wanted it,' he said. 'I am a bachelor and I never use it.' When Hannam reminded him that he had not declared he was a beneficiary under her will on the cremation form, Adams exclaimed: 'Oh, that wasn't done wickedly. God knows it wasn't. We always want cremations to go off smoothly for the dear relatives. If I said I knew I was getting money under a will, they might get suspicious, and I like cremations and burials to go without incident.'

The doctor was left to stew through the next seven weeks of whispers, stares and speculation which became outright allegation wherever Britain's libel laws did not reach. In Franc, they read with relish about 'Le Barbe-Bleu d'Eastbourne' - the Bluebeard of Eastbourne.

At 8.30pm on Saturday 24th November 1956, Hannam and his men returned with a search warrant under the Dangerous Drugs Act. The doctor was dressed in a dinner jacket, and on the point of leaving to chair a YMCA prize giving dinner. The press had been tipped off, and Kent Lodge, Adams's house and surgery was under media siege.

Hannam asked Adams if he could inspect the register which all doctors who handle dangerous, restricted drugs are required to keep. 'I don't know what you mean,' said Dr Bodkin Adams. 'I keep no register.' He added that he 'very, very seldom' use such drugs.

Hannam then produced a formidable list of restricted drugs prescribed for Mrs Morrell. The woman had been dead six years, but Hannam had been able to compile the list from chemists' ledgers, showing the massive doses of morphine and heroin had been given to her.

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[ Dr Bodkin Adams ]

Dr Bodkin Adams is taken by the police from his home after his arrest on 24th November 1956 for offences under the Forgery, Larceny and Cremation Acts. He appeared in court on 26th November and was given bail.

Hannam: 'Who administered the drugs?'
The doctor: 'I did, nearly all. Perhaps the nurses gave some, but mostly me.'
Hannam: 'Were any left over when she died?'
The doctor: 'No, none. All was given to the patient.'
Hannam: 'Doctor, you prescribed for her seventy five tablets of heroin the day before she died.'
The doctor: 'Poor soul, she was in terrible agony. It was all used... I gave her the injections. Do you think it was too much?'
Adams flopped onto his desk chair, sobbing with his head in his hands, while his surgery was searched. Then he was spotted trying to slip something into his pockets. It turned out to be two bottles of morphine solution. The doctor was arrested, taken to Eastbourne police station and read thirteen minor charges.

On Monday morning, 26th November, Adams was brought before the Eastbourne magistrates. Four of the thirteen charges were misrepresentations under the Cremations Act 'with a view to procuring the burning of the remains' of Mrs Morrell, Mrs Hullett's husband, Jack, a very rich retired bank manager named James Priestly Downs, and Down's sister in law Amy Constance Ware

Jack Hullett died four months before his wife, shortly after the doctor injected him with morphine for a condition that a nurse described as breathlessness. Downs was an eighty eight year old widower being treated for a fractured ankle when he fell into a coma and died, leaving £1,000 to the doctor, who had guided his hand as, half-comatose, he signed the bequest. Down's sister in law was seventy six years old when she died, shortly after the doctor arranged for her to make out a will, under which he received £3,000 and was instructed to 'thoroughly examine her body prior to its cremation to make certain she was truly dead' - a task he faithfully carried out.

The doctor was granted bail and made to surrender his passport. Back in the police station, he said that he was worried that there might be other charges. Hannam told him that inquiries were continuing into the death of some of his rich patients. 'Which?' the doctor wanted to know. 'Mrs Morrell is certainly one,' Hannam told him.

The doctor's response was to loom large in his trial. 'Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked,' he protested. 'She wanted to die. That cannot be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor.'

Hannam and Hewitt were summoned to the oak panelled and blue leather chaired House of Commons office of the Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. He had clearly made up his mind before the police investigators arrived. He briefly quizzed his medical advisors on heroin and its effects, then ordered Hannam to go immediately to Eastbourne and arrest the doctor for the murder of Mrs Edith Morrell.


[ Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller ]

Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller was a bluff, boorish Old Etonian nicknamed 'Sir Bullying-Manner' by the press, and generally disliked even by members of his own Tory party. He wanted desperately to become Lord Chief Justice, and had the political clout to secure the post but needed the triumph of a famous courtroom victory.

The Bodkin Adams case provided just the right mix of sensation and notoriety that he sought. He looked forward personally to confronting the doctor in the witness box and bludgeoning guilt out of him.

To add piquancy to the situation, the trial judge, Sir Patrick Devlin, was tipped as a rival for the Chief post. Both he and Manningham-Buller were aged fifty one, but they had nothing in common. Sir Patrick had a razor sharp legal mind and a biting wit. He had a thinly veiled contempt for the man he referred to socially as 'Reggie', and viewed Manningham-Buller's ambition with derision.

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On Wednesday 19th December, Hannam and Hewitt took the 8.30am train to Eastbourne, where they were met by Inspector Pugh. At 11.30am, the doctor returned from his morning rounds, accompanied by his chauffeur, who followed carrying his medical bag. Minutes later, a police car stopped close to Kent Lodge. Hannam emerged, resplendently formal in black pinstripe and bowler, and trailed by Hewitt and Pugh. At the gate, he paused to removed his yellow pigskin gloves. He was asked to wait at the door for a few minutes, and when a patient stepped out, he stepped in. Rhe press were in close attendance - one French journalist was even in the surgery itself. Hannam went up to Dr Adams and arrested him. He cautioned the doctor, who seemed stunned and confused.

The doctor looked at each policeman in turn, and after an awkward silence, said: 'Murder? Murder? Can you prove it was murder? I did not think you could prove murder. She was dying in any event.'

There was another long pause, then he asked Hannam: 'Will there be any more charges of murder?'

As she helped him struggle into his overcoat, Adam's tearful, middle-aged receptionist gripped his hand. Quietly he told her: 'I will see you in heaven.'

The doctor was taken to the police station cell, stripped, and searched. The next day, the little court room in the town hall was packed for the remand proceedings, when the charge of failing to keep a drug register was tacked to that of murder. The the doctor was hustled away.

Heavy curtains were drawn over the windows of Kent Lodge. Only a dim light behind the patterned glasses of the front door indicated that the house was occupied.

Eastbourne's most fashionable doctor was now lodged in Brixton Prison, in London. He found solace in his Christmas cards, and reflected on how fortunate it was that he had posted his own before the police had come to take him away.


[ Kent Lodge, Eastbourne ]

Dr Adams moved into Kent Lodge, No. 6 Trinity Trees, Eastbourne, in 1930. He lived there with his mother, cousin, chauffeur and servant. Surgery and consulting room were on the ground floor.

The trial proper was preceded by the elaborate dress rehearsal in the form of committal proceedings. These lasted nine days and yielded a further crop of sensational headlines. On a freezing January morning in 1957, Dr Adams was brought before his hometown magistrates, old acquaintances who now gazed stonily through him as they death his cause a major blow.

Adams's defence was left by Geoffrey Lawrence, QC. The Crown prosecutor Mr Melford Stevenson, QC, was given leave to link the death of Mrs Morrell in 1950 with the deaths of Mr and Mrs Hullett in 1956, and so make out the doctor was the systematic poisoner that the police believed him to be.

In the case of Jack Hullett, a nurse described how she had spied on the doctor as he loaded a syringe and injected an allegedly fatal dose of concentrated morphine solution. 'I did not think it was a usual death,' the nurse told the hearing. She also maintained that the doctor had diagnosed a cerebral haemorrhage as the cause of death without even looking at the body. Chemist records showed that the doctor had obtained five grains of morphine in Mr Hullett's name on the day following his death - to replenish what had been injected, it was argued. A medical expert then testified that an injection of anything more than a quarter of a grain of the drug would have been risky.

Mrs Hullett's death had started the hue and cry. The post mortem revealed one hundred and fifteen grains of barbiturates in her body - hence the inquest's verdict of suicide. A long statement by the doctor was read out, in which he portrayed himself as a matchmaker who had brought the couple together in the first place.

According to Adams, Mrs Hullett had 'lost her will to live' after the death of such a 'rich and adoring husband'. But he failed to explain why he had accelerated the clearance of her £1,000 cheque so soon before her collapse, and why he kept secret the fact that he had been treating her with barbiturates.


[ Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam ]

The prosecutors of Dr Bodkin Adams at his committal proceedings in Eastbourne were : Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam (pictured above), Detective Inspector Brynley Pugh, the pathologist Dr Corby, Melford Stevenson QC and barristers Malcolm Morris and Bryan Pryor.

The Crown had an explanation. 'The same pattern repeats itself,' Stevenson argued. 'A rich patient. Heavy drugging over a period, ending in a fatal dose. A patient obviously under the influence of a doctor. A patient under whose will Dr Adams benefited. You get the impatience, the same desire for more...'

On 22nd January, the doctor was taken back to Brixton prison to wait almost two more months for his actual trial, which began on 18th March 1957. The Bobbie Hullett evidence was not to be submitted: the Attorney General had decided to make her case the subject of a separate indictment, to keep in reserve for a possible second trial.

The cast in the famous No 1 Court of the Old Bailey was unchanged from Eastbourne, except that the Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, now led the prosecution, and Lord Justice Patrick Devlin, red-robed, heavily wigged, and armed with the black cloth of death, sat in judgement over the plump figure in the dock.

Though the sensational allegations made against Adams ensured an electric atmosphere in court, he made his plea of 'Not Guilty' and with some dignity. Then the Attorney General, who was in a supremely confident mood, instructed the jury to somehow blank from their minds everything they had ever read or heard about the doctor, and to consider only Mrs Morrell and her fate, which he took two hours to describe in booming tones.

The gist of the Crown argument was this: Mrs Morrell was a bedridden, half paralysed, irritable invalid with four nurses attending her round the clock, and the doctor on constant call. The doctor began to supply her with morphine and heroine, and after a while called her solicitor to come and execute a new will, in which he bequeathed him a chest of Georgian silver.

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[ Bodkin Adams ]

By the time of the Eastbourne proceedings, Dr Adams had become a familiar figure, unable to pass unnoticed through the streets of town.

A few months later, the doctor again contacted the solicitor with instructions that Mrs Morrell wished to leave him her Rolls-Royce and jewellery. But when the grouse season beckoned and he took a holiday in Scotland, she became peevish and resentful - so much so that the doctor feared he would get nothing. So he pumped drugs into her until she expired, and he collected the Rolls-Royce and the silver, while not forgetting to submit a hefty bill of over £1,700, which the estate paid after her death.

'It is one thing to give an old lady something to help her sleep, but its quite another to prescribe for her large quantities of morphia and opium,' Sir Reginald told the court.

A graph of what the press had dubbed the 'fatal fortnight' was produced, and Sir Reginald explained: 'See how the prescriptions increased in quantity. During the last thirteen days of Mrs Morrell's life, the rate of morphia was three time higher than in any of the preceding months, and the rate of heroin seven and a half times. Why? Why did the doctor prescribe such quantities, such fatal quantities, for which there is no medical justification?' A pause. 'He did so because he had decided that the time had come for her to die!'

The Attorney General now came to Mrs Morrell's final hours. 'She was very weak, except for occasional spasms. She was in a coma.' With a dramatic flourish, he produced and held aloft a big syringe.

'The doctor gave this syringe to the night nurse and told her to inject it into the unconscious woman. She did so. The doctor took the empty syringe and refilled it with a similar quantity... and told the nurse to give the second injection if she did not become quieter.

'The nurse did not like giving another injection from this unusually large syringe, and later in the evening telephone the doctor. She received her instructions and it was her duty to obey them. She gave the second injection. Mrs Morrell gradually became quiet, and at 2am she died.'

The Crown's medical witnesses argued that the maximum daily dose of heroin was a quarter of a grain, and morphine half a grain. The chemist's ledgers showed 38 grains of heroin and 40 grains of morphia supplied between 8th and 12th November; 'all was given to the patient', according to the doctor. Thus went Day One.

Adams sat with his mouth tightly compressed, periodically shaking his head, as he did throughout the trial.

The second day of the trial, Tuesday 19th March 1957, began with high drama. There was a bomb alert, and the courtroom had to be thoroughly searched before the proceedings. No bomb was found. The following events of the trial were to be explosive enough.


[ Nurse Helen Stronach ]

Nurse Helen Stronach was a crucial witness. The collapse of her evidence under cross-questioning by defence counsel Geoffrey Lawrence was a turning point in the trial.

The Crown opened with its star witnesses - the nurses who were present at the death of Edith Morrell. First up was Helen Rose Stronach, she described Mrs Morrell as 'rambling and semi-conscious'. She also testified that she and the other nurses were never permitted to be present when the doctor was with his patient, and that he never disclosed the nature of the injections that he administered at these times.

Defence Counsel Geoffrey Lawrence rose to cross-examine in a deceptively languid manner. He appeared to commiserate with the nurse for having to remember events that had happened so long before, and he enquired whether she had kept a written record at the time. Nurse Stronach readily confirmed this: 'Everything was entered into a book and signed.'

'And whatever you wrote in that book, that would be accurate because it would have been done right at the very moment?','It would,' she replied firmly. 'As distinct from your memory of six years later, these reports, of course, would be absolutely accurate?' he asked.

There was an uneasy stir in the prosecution bench. Lawrence seemed to sigh. 'So, if only we had these reports now we could see the truth exactly what happened night by night and day by day?'
'Yes, but you have our word for it,' the nurse reassured him.
The trap was sprung. 'I want you to have a look at that book, please.'
An exercise book was passed up to the witness box, and Nurse Helen Stronach found herself confronted with the notes she had made during the treatment of Mrs Edith Morrell.

The Attorney General half rose, goggle-eyed, then slumped back in his seat, having said nothing. Lawrence strung out the agony. A second exercise book was handed up to the nurse, then a third. In a subdued voice, she authenticated each in turn. Only then did Lawrence inform the judge that he had the whole of the nursing reports on Mrs Morrell, from June 1949 to the moment of her death - eight books in all. Nursing reports are normally scrapped on the death of a patient. Hannam and his men had unforgivably missed these, which the doctor's solicitor had found bundled behind a desk at the doctor's home, Kent Lodge.

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[ Geoffrey Lawrence QC ]

The trial made a celebrity of Geoffrey Lawrence QC, the obscure barrister who was a surprise choice as Dr Adam's defence counsel. Lawrence was a slight, quiet, scholarly man of fifty five. He was a master of the politely phrased barb. This was his first criminal trial of any importance, but his tenacity and meticulous preparation were well know from the fashionable divorce cases and tortuous local government disputes in which he had made his reputation. Now he proved himself a master of incisive cross-examination. Commentators likened him to a magician, or a matador, with Manningham-Buller as the bull. Every time that the Attorney General set up a witness or an argument, Lawrence came up with a new document or set of facts to offset them. Soon after the Bodkin Adams case, he was awarded knighthood. In his private life, Lawrence was a violinist and a dairy farmer - his farm won a prize as the best kept in Sussex.

Lawrence now proceeded relentlessly to discredit Nurse Stronach by picking on every point where the records departed from the treatment as she had described it. He ended his examination with a day in November, when, according to the nurse's evidence, Mrs Morrell should have been semi-conscious. The record showed that on that day the patient lunched on partridge, celery and pudding, washed down with a brandy and soda.


[ Sister Helen Mason-Ellis ]

Sister Helen Mason-Ellis a prosecution witness, nursed Mrs Morrell for fourteen months before her death. Her poor memory helped the defence case.

The nurses were now thoroughly cowed. Sister Helen Mason-Ellis, the next witness, was hardly audible as she refused to give an opinion on Mrs Morrell's condition. 'It was so long ago,' she kept mumbling. But Lawrence was not done.

In further cross-examination, he terrorised the thin, pale Mason-Ellis into revealing that Nurse Stronach had lied in testifying that Mrs Morrell's drugs had been kept in a locked cupboard. In fact, they were kept in an unlocked drawer. A defence spy had gleaned this from eavesdropping snippets of a conversation in that morning's train from Eastbourne, when the nurses violated the order not to discuss the evidence among themselves.


[ Nurse Caroline Randall ]

The Crown's key witness was Nurse Randall, a stocky Stronach-type who was with Mrs Morrell on her last night. It was Nurse Randall who was supposed to have reluctantly wielded the big syringe and delivered the coup de grace. Now she was confronted with notes she wrote at the time, and these did not bear the stark melodrama described by the Attorney General, Manningham-Buller.

The doctor was recorded injecting paraldehyde, a comparatively safe sleep-inducer, before departing for the night. The notes then went on to describe the patient's changing conditions in the hours before her death.

'11.30pm - very restless. No sleep'
'12.30am - restless and talkative and very shaky'
('very shaky' underlined twice)
12.45am - seems a little quieter. appears asleep. Respiration 50
2am - Passed away quietly.

Lawrence only just contained a sneer. 'Your memory isn't very trustworthy,' he ventured. The nurse countered by recalling that Mrs Morrell's shakes had been worse than anything she had witnessed in her long career - 'I never want to see anything like it again.' She was so adamant that she did give the final injection with the big syringe left loaded for her by the doctor, but had somehow omitted to write it down, probably because Mrs Morrell's death blotted it out of her mind. But the damage had been done. It was a nurse's word contradicting her own written word.

The notebooks revealed in pathetic detail the dying struggles of a difficult and demanding woman, who was sometimes hysterical and abusive. They recorded an existence of deep drugging and sharp wakefulness, and, in the latter stages, the wild, jerky spasms associated with opiate poisoning. The records of drugs administered fell short of the totals prescribed, but the prosecution argued that the effect would be no less lethal.

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[ Dr Arthur Douthwaite ]

Dr Arthur Douthwaite, a Crown witness, believed in Dr Adam's guilt, but skilful cross examining by Geoffrey Lawrence slowly broke down his dogmatic certainty, providing defence triumph.

The prosecution now relied heavily upon its top medical witness. Dr Arthur Henry Douthwaite, was a senior physician at Guy's Hospital and an authority an opiates. He was horrified by Dr Adams's methods - he called them 'deadly' - and was convinced of his guilt. His voice rang with conviction as he told the court that the doctor made Mrs Morrell a drug addict, and that, in the final phase, 'the intention was to terminate her'. Dr Douthwaite saw a sinister motive in everything the doctor did. The switch to paraldehyde was to 'make the heroin more lethal... by causing a loss of consciousness.'

Again Lawrence had a trump card to play. He produced medical records from Cheshire, which showed that it was not Dr Adams who first introduced Mrs Morrell to morphine, another doctor had done so after she suffered her stroke in 1948. Dr Douthwaite stubbornly dug in, and denounced the Cheshire treatment as deadly to the patient as well.

The trial became a battle between experts who disagreed on the meaning of nurses' notebook entries and on how much tolerance for heroin an eighty one year old woman could develop. To counter the prosecution experts, Lawrence produced a Harley Street doctor who was almost as blasé about the use of opiates as the man on trial.

Lawrence opened his defence on the thirteenth day, and immediately asked for the case to be dismissed. He seemed distressed when the judge turned him down. Then he dropped another bombshell: he was not going to call the doctor. He pleaded compassion as the reason for not risking his client in the witness box.

'Can you begin to understand and appreciate the strain under which this professional man, with his years, has been living?' He urged the jury to heed only the notebooks, 'the one witness which is both eloquent and unchallengeable'.

The judge in summing-up made reaching a verdict easy for the jury. 'It is not a very pretty story,' he acknowledged, 'but all fraudulent rogues are not murderers.' Then he echoed the doctor: 'Murder? Can you prove it?'


[ Bodkin Adams ]

Dr Adams was accused of giving Mrs Morrell excessive doses of morphia and heroin, thereby killing her. But his job as a doctor would have been to ease a patient's suffering.

The jury took forty-four minutes to return their verdict. It was three minutes past noon on the seventeenth day of what was to that date the longest trial in English criminal history. The doctor stood to attention, his blue suit now looking a little crumpled.

At the words 'not guilty', a collective 'ahhh...' went up in the packed courtroom. The doctor flushed, took a deep breath, bowed stiffly to the judge, and said 'Thank you.' They were his first words since the plea of innocence.

The Attorney General announced that he would not pursue the second - Hullett - indictment, and Dr John Bodkin Adams, quietly triumphant, was discharged.

Dr Bodkin Adams greeted his escape from the scaffold with measured calm. 'I knew all the time what was going to happen,' he said. 'God has a purpose in doing this for me. It has never been an ordeal.' He was whisked off by the Daily Express, the one newspaper that had championed him through thick and thin, and now - for a bounty of £10,000 - claimed him as its exclusive property.

A decoy doctor lured away the rest of the press, while the real Adams was driven to Fleet Street, where he declined a glass of champagne. At midnight, he was put into a delivery van with stacks of morning newspapers and smuggled out to a seaside hideaway, for his story to be ghosted by the newspaper staff.

[cruororism]

[ Detective Inspector Brynley Pugh ]

Every April, on the anniversary of the acquittal, Express crime reporter Percy Hoskins would receive a call from the doctor. The message was always the same, 'Thank you for another year of my life.'

The doctor now pleaded guilty at Lewes Assizes to fourteen charges of professional misconduct - all the misdemeanours revealed during the murder investigation - and was fined a total of £2,400. Five months after the trial, his right to possess or supply dangerous drugs was revoked by the Home Secretary. In November he was brought before the Disciplinary Medical Council, and his name was struck off the medical register.

One Christmas, Eastbourne students preformed an outrageous parody of the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas, with a chorus that included;
'11 exhumations, 10 cremated women, 9 hypodermics, 8 forged prescriptions, 7 Rolls-Royce's, 6 foolish spinsters...' and so on to 'one Bodkin Adams of Trinity Trees'.

But he would not be humbled, nor would he be driven from Kent Lodge. Though stripped of his qualifications, he continued to treat loyal patients, and he continued to receive legacies. In Marsh's sweet shop, where he still purchased his hand-made Swiss chocolates, no one would hear a word against Dr Bodkin Adams.


[ Dr Corby (the Pathologist) ]

Gradually he eased himself back into public life, to the point where the Eastbourne Carnival Queen was able to parade through town in Adams's ex-Hullett Rolls-Royce without exciting too much ghoulish comment. In 1961, after several unsuccessful applications, Adams was restored to the medical register.

Now he felt strong enough to turn on his accusers. A libel suit was filed, and a settlement reached in which thirteen newspapers agreed to pay an undisclosed, but substantial, sum for excessive zeal of their investigative reporting in the pre-trial phase.

The doctor kept a sharp eye open for fresh transgressors, and as late as 1969 was able to collect £500 and an abject apology from a weekly magazine that had thought it witty to invoke 'the shade of John Bodkin Adams' when commentating on the failure of cash injections to revive the pound sterling.


[ Melford Stevenson QC ]

He devoted more and more time to his shooting, eventually becoming President (and Honorary Medical Officer) of the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association. He won his last cup at the age of eighty-three. It was while shooting in Sussex a few months later, on 1st July 1983, that he broke a leg. Complications quickly set in, and within three days Adams was dead.

Dr Bodkin Adams had outlived most of his accusers and defenders, but those who survived now returned to the fray with undiminished fervour. Did this man get away with murder? demanded the Mail On Sunday, which devoted several pages to 'the truth that can now be told'.

The daily Express reaffirmed its belief of his innocence, and The Times called him 'the classic enigma in the annals of mass killing'. The then Attorney General was dead, but Milford Stevenson, now knighted, had lost none of his conviction. 'We had so much material it was unbelievable,' he told reporter Rodney Hallworth. 'As I recall it, there was hard evidence of six cases of murder, and sufficient evidential material to frame a murder charge in something like half a dozen cases. He was so incredibly lucky to have literally got away with murder.'

[cruororism]

[ Barrister Malcolm Morris ]

Detective Inspector Hannam was dead, but retired Chief Superintendent Hewitt, his sergeant on the case, was as convinced as ever of the doctor's guilt. 'The blunders that were made were incredible, and so was the doctor's luck,' he said a quarter of a century after the case. 'In fact,' he said, 'I have often thought that that example should have been used in a training annual at Police College. In later years I saw the mistakes made on the Adams job repeated in other cases. The lessons we learned the hard way could have benefited other inquiries.'

Adams's funeral was a media event, attended by 150 friends and patients, and millions of television viewers. A former Eastbourne mayor eulogised the doctor as 'the victim of a vicious whispering campaign of rumour and vilification... by those who had no knowledge whatsoever of the true man and his caring ways.'


[ Barrister Bryan Pryor ]

After Dr Adams's funeral, he was cremated and ashes buried in the graves of his parents in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Then came the reading of the will. He had left £402,907 net, to be divided 47 ways, with nobody to get more than £5,000. The beneficiaries included the doctor's one time fiancée Nora O'Hara and nineteen other women friends 'who stood by him in his time of trouble'. Everyone was remembered - the housekeeper, the chauffer, the grocer, and even the man who came once a week to wind the doctor's clock collection. And true to his convictions to the last, Doctor Bodkin Adams left his own doctor a little something too.


[ Bodkin Adams ]

In the wake of Adam's acquittal, Fleet Street Newspapers were keen on getting his story, but he remained to Daily Express journalist Percy Hoskins and gave his paper rights to the full story.

In 1967, as a direct result of the Adams case, the law was changed to curb the reporting of committal proceedings by leaving the choice of whether or not to allow the press in up to the defence.

[cruororism]

[ Bodkin Adams ]

A gun-toting Dr Adams out clay pigeon shooting - the sport he loved. It was while he was shooting at Battle, in East Sussex that he broke his leg. Complication that followed that led to his death in 1983.

In 1985, the judge, Sir Patrick Devlin, had his say - twenty eight years after the trial and thirty five years after the death of the alleged victim. Bu then Lord Devlin, he became the first ever trial judge to write a book about a trial over which he had presided.


[ Bodkin Adams's Funeral ]

Dr Adams's coffin is unloaded from the Daimler hearse before his funeral on 4th July 1983, at Holy Trinity Church, Eastbourne.

Devlin derided the efforts of the Attorney General, and then he laid out his own conclusions. He suggested that Dr Adams might have operated in a grey area between innocence and guilt: that he was perhaps a mercenary mercy killer - a compassionate but, at the same time, greedy man, who was prepared to sell death. And that, if so, 'he dishonoured a great profession'. Lord Devlin turned detective, and in careful re-examination of the evidence, he focused on Mrs Morrell's last hours, and the introduction of the big syringe - filled according to the nursing notebook, with safe paraldehyde. Devlin pointed out that paraldehyde had a strong, distinctive, unpleasant odour that would have filled the room, yet Nurse Randall seemingly smelled nothing. He also noted a remark that had not been admitted in evidence. The nurse recalled Mrs Morrell telling her of a promise from the doctor that 'he wouldn't let her suffer at the end'. Then Devlin pointed to the three phials of heroin - 75 tablets totalling 12 and a half grains - fetched by the doctor from Browne's chemist on the eve of Mrs Morrell's death. 'Had there ever been any paraldehyde at all?' Devlin now wondered. 'The only evidence was supplied by the doctor himself.' The three phials were never accounted for. The judge made clear his suspicion that the doctor loaded the syringe with a death-dealing dose of heroin before leaving the nurse in charge for the night. Citing the doctor's own remarks to the police about 'easing the passing', Lord Devlin reasoned: 'He did not think of himself as a murderer but a dispenser of death... According to his lights, he had done nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong in a doctor getting a legacy, nor in his bestowing in return... a death as happy as heroin could make it.'


[ Dr Adams's Funeral ]

Flowers were left by many mourners who remembered him fondly.
In 1985, Mrs Dreda-Owen, a sixty eight year old widow, made a £56,000 claim on the Adams estate. She said she had befriended the doctor after his acquittal, and gave him money and jewellery to safeguard. The money and jewels were never found, but Mrs Dreda-Owen was later almost fully compensated for the loss.