‘Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.’
Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four
For Bell and Littlejohn, the early months of 1893 had not yielded anything as high profile as the Henry Bury case or the Arran murder trial, but it had nonetheless been an unrelentingly busy year. The cases that crossed Littlejohn’s desk included the alleged assault of a former hangman, the death of an infant struck on the head by an ornament thrown by her mother at her father, and the discovery of a child’s body found wrapped in brown parcel paper at a farm northwest of Edinburgh. Bell and Littlejohn had also appeared together at the trial of Patrick Griffin for the culpable homicide of Edward Wynn. It was a fairly unedifying case of alcohol-fuelled brawling that resulted in the victim being hit on the head with a hatchet. When a doctor was eventually called, he put Wynn’s delirium down to the effects of drink and was not informed that he had been struck with a weapon. But Littlejohn and Bell conducted the post-mortem together and concluded that it was the strike that had caused death. The jury took little time in finding Griffin guilty and the defendant received a merciful sentence of just six months. It was, all told, a regular day at the office for Bell and Littlejohn.
Their workaholic tendencies were fully indulged elsewhere, too. Littlejohn added to his already crippling professional burdens the role of president of the Institute of Public Health. In May, meanwhile, he addressed the House of Commons’ Select Committee on death certification. He demanded that a greater level of care be paid to the certification of death, commenting that ‘the existing system permitted by law is a farce, so far as the detection of secret crime is concerned in Edinburgh’. As the Aberdeen Evening News reported it, his words excited ‘visions of slow poisonings and mysterious deaths which can only be held in check by the wholesome knowledge of Littlejohn’s skill in diagnosing. But even the active medical officer of health of Edinburgh sometimes fails, and his evidence will be read with uneasy feelings by the citizens.’ Littlejohn could not have known how prescient his words would be.
Edinburgh University gave him a brief respite from his responsibilities when in July he was called to receive an honorary law degree in recognition of his extraordinary contributions in the medico-legal field. On rising to his feet to collect the degree, he was greeted with roars and cheers from a crowd eager to recognize a hometown hero.
But for his colleague Joseph Bell, the year had taken a sad turn. The month before, he had lost his beloved son, Benjamin, to peritonitis resulting from complications after a bout of appendicitis. He was just short of his twenty-fourth birthday. Bell maintained outward composure in the immediate aftermath – even at the funeral, where six sergeants from his son’s Highland Regiment carried his coffin as pipers played ‘Flowers of the Forest’. But the hurt went deep. He wrote letters to friends so full of grief that they refused to ever discuss their contents with others. Nor was it the first time that Bell had faced such sorrow. In 1874, his wife, Edith, had succumbed to puerperal peritonitis just nine years into their apparently idyllic marriage. Bell’s hair had, it was said, turned from raven black to snowy white within three days of her death. His response to Benjamin’s passing was, as ever, to throw himself into his work. The Ardlamont mystery would ensure that there was no shortage of that.
However, the initial involvement was Littlejohn’s alone. At just after 4 p.m. on Monday 11 September, a small crowd gathered around Cecil’s graveside to witness his exhumation on the orders of the Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith. Alongside Littlejohn were Macnaughton (the Deputy Fiscal), Dr Macmillan and a Dr Sanders from Edinburgh, who was attending on behalf of Monson. Dr Whithead of Ventnor, representing the Hambroughs, joined them a short while later. The large oak coffin with its silver mountings was raised from the ground and placed on a hearse bound for the mortuary at Ventnor Cemetery, up in the hills above the town.
There the coffin lid and inner metallic shell were lifted. It was immediately obvious that decomposition was advancing, although not quickly enough to prohibit the necessary examination. Cecil’s features had swelled but Macmillan was quickly able to confirm his identity. With the public diligently kept clear of proceedings, the corpse was laid out on oil sheets on the grass just outside the mortuary. As Littlejohn noted, ‘the cuticle, or outer skin, everywhere separated with facility’. By removing some cloth loosely wrapped around the lower right-hand side of the boy’s head, he revealed the fatal wound and made sure that a photographer captured images of it before dissection progressed any further.
The wound itself – caused by the shot which was some inch (according to Dr Macmillan’s initial report) or inch-and-a-half (according to Bell’s calculations) in diameter – was about three-and-a-half inches in length, triangular in shape, its base (about two-and-a-half inches long) in the direction of the face and its apex located about an inch underneath and slightly in front of the occipital protuberance (the occipital bone being that which forms the base of the back of the skull). A flap of skin about an inch-and-a-half long hung down from its upper edge. The right ear, meanwhile, had been severely mutilated, with about an inch-and-a-half missing from its middle exterior section – blown away by the impact of the shot. There was no evidence of blackening around the wound as might have been expected from gunpowder or scorching. Cecil’s hair came away in their fingers as they worked around the wound so it took little effort to remove the entire right side of the scalp. The skull beneath presented a ‘localized shattered appearance’. There was also a large hole (around two inches by one) through which the brain was exposed. Closer investigation revealed a significant proportion of the brain to the front of the head was missing. Four small foreign bodies that proved to be shot were removed from the brain matter that remained.
They now moved on to the left side of the head and discovered that it was largely uninjured. The rest of Cecil’s body was in a similarly good state, and his major organs were adjudged to have been in fine health prior to death. The stomach was empty and presented no particularly noticeable odour when opened – there was, for instance, no trace of alcohol. The cavities of the heart and the blood vessels were also empty. Littlejohn and Dr Macmillan committed themselves to the opinion that Cecil had died from shock resulting from the gunshot injury to the skull and brain, coupled with a subsequent loss of blood. Moreover, they were nudging towards the idea that there had been foul play: in the words of Macmillan, ‘As a result of the post-mortem examination, my opinion was that the wound could not have been caused accidentally.’
Once back in Edinburgh, Littlejohn began to liaise closely with Bell and several other colleagues from the university – chief among them an esteemed surgeon, Dr Patrick Heron Watson, and an anatomist, Dr Macdonald Brown. Having thoroughly surveyed the nature of the victim’s injuries, Littlejohn turned his mind to a series of other questions – the type he taught his students to work through in order to establish accident, suicide or murder in cases of mysterious death. The damage to Cecil’s head revealed much but he needed more information. It was not for him to ponder Monson’s relationship with Cecil and his father, or to analyse the tutor’s financial arrangements, or even to question the motive for taking out life insurance upon the victim. In place of supposition he sought cold, empirical facts through which, he hoped, the truth of the events of 10 August would reveal themselves.
‘In ascertaining how an injury has been caused,’ he would note, ‘there are certain matters familiar to doctors as aids to the determination of the question.’ These were the direction of the wound, the direction from which the shot was fired, the position of the weapon with regard to the dead body and the position in which the dead body was found (the latter being ‘all important in determining how death occurred’). Answer these questions conclusively and he could be all but sure as to whether there was intent behind Cecil’s death. But it would be no easy job given the degradation of the evidence caused by the passage of time and the inadequacies of the initial investigation. He nonetheless threw himself into the task with characteristic energy.
To help with the question of the direction of the shot, he presented Dr Brown with Cecil’s skull and a further six bone fragments that had been recovered. The brain had already been removed by sawing one half of the skull cap (‘no instrument has ever been devised,’ Littlejohn was apt to tell his students, ‘which effects the separation of the skullcap better than the ordinary saw’). To facilitate his experiments, Brown prepared a model of the skull that would become a familiar sight at the ensuing trial. Heron Watson, meanwhile, was a veteran of the Crimean War where he gained extensive experience of treating gunshot wounds. Littlejohn plundered his specialist knowledge to help establish the distance and position from which the shot was fired. He too was given the dead man’s skull to inspect, along with photographs and the post-mortem report.
As to where Cecil’s body had fallen and where his gun had lain in relation to his body, the issue was more vexed. The problem was that, purposefully or not, Monson and Scott had done much to eliminate the relevant evidence. They removed the firearm from the scene before any independent third party could view it and also claimed to have lifted Cecil from the ditch where he fell. But it was only their word that this is really what transpired. Littlejohn was instead forced to form his opinion on the basis of the available eyewitness reports. When he travelled to Ardlamont with Dr Macmillan, he inspected the scene in the company of Whyte and Carmichael, who told him where they had first come across the corpse. He also studied some nearby rowan trees for evidence of pellet marks in a bid to corroborate the location.
Back in Edinburgh, he engaged the services of a gunsmith called James MacNaughton (no relation to the Deputy Fiscal), whom he visited on the 23 September armed with the Hambrough skull. Littlejohn wanted his help in carrying out a series of experiments to determine the different firing patterns of the two guns Monson and Cecil had taken with them, along with the effects of using the various available types of shot (namely, No. 5 and No. 6) and different types of powder (including black powder and amberite). By a careful process of elimination, Littlejohn wanted to be sure exactly which ammunition from which gun had killed Cecil, and from how far away it was fired.
MacNaughton travelled to Ardlamont to make his own inspection of the woods and determined the likely line of fire. He did this by conducting a series of detailed measurements taking into account where the witnesses reported having seen Cecil’s body on top of the dyke in relation to the marks on nearby trees that he believed had been caused by the spread of pellets from the fatal shotgun cartridge as it travelled. Afterwards, he designed a series of experiments conducted at his private firing range, which sat on the Water of Leith that runs out of Edinburgh down to the port of Leith. Here he fired into a series of cardboard targets before progressing to heads modelled from cardboard and clay. Littlejohn, Bell and Heron Watson were also in attendance. But however sophisticated the setup, the doctors realized that firing into cardboard gave results only distantly related to the impact of gunshot on human flesh. It was arranged, therefore, that the three doctors and MacNaughton should meet at the mortuary at Edinburgh, where the gunsmith would fire shots into three specially selected cadavers.
This was forensic science at its most brutally pure. In the 1820s, the notorious grave-robbing antics of William Burke and William Hare – carried out to keep Robert Knox, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, supplied with corpses for his anatomy lectures – forged forever a gruesome link between the city and human anatomical study. Fortunately, by the time that Littlejohn and company were at work, the legal supply of cadavers had been extended. Anatomists had previously been restricted to dissecting the bodies only of orphans and foundlings or else those who were executed, had died in prison or committed suicide. Now, though, it was legal to take the corpses of those who perished in the workhouse as long as their bodies were not claimed within forty-eight hours. Though hardly evidence of a compassionate social response to poverty, it did nonetheless ensure that the illicit exhumations of earlier generations were now unnecessary. It was under these circumstances that the gunsmith and the medics could execute their grim task without compunction, all with a view to securing justice for a man brought down before his time. ‘I did not see the results,’ MacNaughton recalled of the experiments. ‘That was for the doctors to see.’
While Littlejohn was the leading light of Scottish forensics at this time, he was not the only player upon the stage. In August, John Blair, a solicitor with the firm of Davidson & Syme, was hired to conduct Monson’s defence. He in turn employed the services of Matthew Hay, who was in many regards Littlejohn’s direct counterpart in Aberdeen. Having studied at the universities of both Glasgow and Edinburgh – as well as on the continent in Strasbourg, Munich and Berlin – Hay became a noted expert in pharmacology and toxicology. He graduated with the gold medal in medicine from Edinburgh in 1881 (the same year as Doyle completed his studies there) and was made chair of forensic medicine at Aberdeen University the following year, when he was just twenty-seven years old. He also served as the city’s Medical Officer of Health, gaining a reputation, like Littlejohn, for his farsighted reforms to public health provision. By 1890, he was also working as a police surgeon and medico-legal examiner for the Crown. The Ardlamont mystery thus offered him the perfect public stage on which to play out his respectful professional rivalry with the older, more famous man.
Like Littlejohn, Hay visited Ardlamont to scout out the scene, where John Steven, the factor, served as his guide. He then set about conducting a series of shooting experiments with Tom Speedy, himself an estate factor and also a partner in a firm of Edinburgh shooting agents. In 1884, Speedy had written a book, Sport in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, with Rod and Gun, which included a chapter on firearms and how to use them. By his own estimation, ‘I have always taken a special interest in the subject of gun accidents.’ He made his own survey of Ardlamont prior to beginning work with Hay.
They then began their practical experiments, which were quite as striking and innovative as those conducted by the Littlejohn–Bell side. Hay and Speedy first fired at wooden boards before proceeding to wooden models of the human head, then dog skins and, ultimately, a freshly slaughtered horse. Hay believed that the flesh of a recently deceased horse closely replicated that of human flesh ‘because of the skin and underlying tissues being practically alive and showing retraction’. The shots were fired into the base of the animal’s head, close to the shoulder, a minute after it had been destroyed. Speedy was just the man for this job. ‘In my gamekeeper days,’ he explained, ‘I had charge of a kennel of dogs. They were fed largely on horse flesh, and it was my duty to slaughter the horses. I have shot a great many horses in my day, probably over five hundred. The method I adopted was to shoot them chiefly on the forehead and sometimes behind the ear.’
The dog skins, meanwhile, were used to study the different effects of various gun powders upon the epidermis. First, a black skin was hung on a board that was fired at from about six inches. In the case of the amberite powder, the shot cut through the hairs on the skin but there was no evidence of scorching. However, aware that the black skin might disguise any subtle discolouration, the experiment was repeated using a white skin. Speedy then went a step further, buying a quantity of human hair to see if it would show signs of singeing from shots fired from a short distance. After discharging his weapon at point-blank range, he next decided to involve his wife in his investigations. The poor woman – accommodating to a fault – let down her hair and allowed her husband to fire a full cartridge of amberite powder through her tresses from a distance of two feet. The powder neither singed the hair nor even left a smell, presumably much to his wife’s general relief.
For the time being out of the public gaze, the Crown and the defence were thus busily building their banks of forensic data. Crucially, Hay was arriving at startlingly different conclusions to those of Littlejohn, Bell and their comrades. The scene was set for a mighty courtroom battle, in which not only was the defendant’s life at stake but also the reputations of some of the nation’s most respected men. Meanwhile, the press was beginning to sniff a story with which they might run and run. It was not long before thoughts turned to the most famous detective in the world. On 1 September 1893, the Yorkshire Evening Post had reflected that ‘the death of young Mr Hambrough affords exactly the sort of problem which Mr Sherlock Holmes is wont to solve so prettily. Give him the details – on paper – and doubtless the eminent detective would pluck out the heart of the mystery – on paper. But unfortunately the Ardlamont mystery is fact and not fiction, and in real life detectives are not so phenomenally acute, nor circumstances so accommodating, as Dr Conan Doyle loves to paint them.’
Little did the author of those words know that the men who represented the living embodiment of Holmes were already poised to enter the fray.