There are few things in law so frustrating as an open verdict, and when the cause of death is clearly some kind of poison, then the lack of a closure to the case is even more unsatisfactory. In the death of Dr Howard Lillie of Winterton, there is a yet even more remarkable factor: one of the drugs in his body was a mystery then and remains so now. As Katherine Wilson has shown in her recent work on poisoners and poisoning, Poisoned Lives (2004), until recent years, a death involving a poison has always had the muddle of several possibilities.
First, there is the option of a murder. Some persons unknown administer a poisonous substance; then there is the suicide question. Medical men are in a good position to know the effects of whatever substance they choose as the instrument of their demise. Finally, there is the distinct possibility of accidental death, even for a doctor. In certain circumstances, even the doctors take the wrong quantity, or create the wrong ‘cocktail’ for their body to take.
Around Christmas, 1947, Dr Lillie’s wife found his body in bed. This was in King Street, Winterton, a quiet village to the east of Scunthorpe, on the Barton road. The first inquest, on 5 January, had been adjourned to allow time for further tests, but there was nothing decided a few weeks later, when the coroner, Eric Dyson, stated that ‘He would much rather find some definite cause of death’ but he was afraid that he could not. Even the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory in Nottingham had been unable to offer a theory of cause of death.
Dr Lillie had served in the RAF from 1939 to the end of the war, and then he was invalided out, following a lung injury sustained after being shot down over Africa. Since 1946 he had never been well, suffering from asthma, and also having periods of pneumonia. On the first day of the New Year he had woken up early in the morning after only a few hours sleep but said he was well; his wife was worried because he had been most unwell the week earlier. Obviously, there was something not quite right about his general health.