The Sinister gP: Dr John Bodkin Adams

 

In July 1983, an elderly retired doctor died in Hove. A lot of retired people, especially from a genteel profession like his, end up in Hove. But this was no ordinary doctor. This eighty-four-year-old general practitioner was firmly believed by the police to be nothing less than a serial killer, and not only that but a serial killer who had successfully eluded the law for decades.

Because the law of libel is framed as it is, it was only after the old man had died that the newspapers were able to open their dossiers about Dr John Bodkin Adams and level the accusations anew. It was rather like the flood of revelations about Robert Maxwell that followed his death; while he lived, few journalists were prepared to risk litigation to tell what they knew. In a smaller and less sensational way, biographers had to wait until Sir Laurens van der Post was dead before the shadier side of his past, which had long been known about, could safely be revealed.

Dr Adams had been tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of one of his patients, a seventy-two-year-old widow called Edith Morrell. If he had been convicted on that charge, he would certainly have been charged with further murders. Two more charges had been confidently prepared and the Crown Prosecution Service believed they had enough evidence to bring successful prosecutions in another three cases. The police, in other words, were sure that Adams had murdered at least six of his patients. Some officers believed the figure was nine or maybe even as high as twenty-five. Detective Superintendent Charles Hewitt of Scotland Yard believed quite early on in the investigation that the death toll had been that high.

But at the Old Bailey, only the one case was ever discussed or fought over. Dr Adams was acquitted after a classic legal duel between two barristers, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney General, and Adams’s defence lawyer, Geoffrey Lawrence.

Geoffrey Lawrence was a thorough-going professional. He disliked his client, thoroughly disliked him in fact, but took his side ferociously and uncompromisingly in the courtroom. His adversary, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, was sure he could destroy Adams once he had him in the witness box. Lawrence’s advice to Adams was to remain silent and avoid cross-examination. The counsel for the prosecution and the police believed that that was what saved Adams from the death sentence. Manningham-Buller had staked everything on cross-questioning Adams, and when the opportunity was not given to him the basis for the prosecution case collapsed. The jury therefore more or less had to acquit. After a forty-five minute deliberation, that was their verdict – and Adams walked free.

The Adams trial was such a disaster that the Director of Public Prosecutions had no confidence that any of the other similar charges could be made to stick either, so he announced that there would be no further action. It was, in the view of the police who had collected the evidence, a disaster for British justice. A dangerous multiple murderer had gone unpunished: worse still, he had been released.

As was customary in all cases in the English courts, the jury had no knowledge about the many parallel cases that were very similar to Edith Morell’s, and also ended with the victim’s death. If they had known that the police had investigated as many as 400 possibly suspicious deaths with which Adams had been associated, they would almost certainly have been less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. A recent case that has some similarities is that of Dr Harold Shipman, another patient-slaying doctor. But Adams was a different sort of killer from Shipman; Adams killed purely and simply for financial gain. He got the old ladies to change their wills in his favour, and then he killed them.

Over a period of thirty-five years in general practice in Eastbourne, Dr Adams had been named as a beneficiary in the wills of as many as 132 of his patients. Most of the bequests were modest, but in all he had amassed £45,000 in cash, which would be worth perhaps ten times as much today, something approaching £500,000. He had also been left jewellery, silver, furniture and cars, including two Rolls Royces.

It could be argued that a sympathetic doctor with a good bedside manner and a genuine concern for his elderly patients might well be acknowledged in the wills of old ladies, especially old ladies with no-one else to leave their money to. There need not be anything sinister about the matter. There need not be anything exactly sinister about it even if Adams himself had dropped heavy hints about wills or openly asked the old ladies to change their wills in his favour. The key question is – did he kill them?

He was certainly a very popular doctor in Eastbourne, and had made the care of the elderly his speciality ever since he was a young doctor. He arrived in Eastbourne almost straight from medical school in Northern Ireland. He was an unprepossessing little man, only five foot five inches tall, but weighing eighteen stone. His face was pink and fleshy, with small eyes and thin lips. His flabby chin spilled out over the celluloid collars he liked to wear. He looked like Mr Toad. There was no doubt about it – John Bodkin Adams was ugly. Yet he managed to charm all his old ladies. He stroked their hands and even combed their hair for them.

The year-long investigation by Sergeant Hewitt and his superior officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Bert Hannam of the Murder Squad, was to show that there was a much darker side to Adams than the tender loving care that he liked everyone to see. He prescribed addictive drugs for his elderly patients and made them dependent on the drugs. He in effect turned his genteel old ladies into morphine and heroin addicts. Because he was the supplier, their dependency on the drugs could very easily be turned into dependency upon him. He was then able to alter their wills in his favour. Once that was done, he was able to ease them gently on their way out of this world by administering an overdose of the drugs they craved.

The Murder Squad’s investigation showed that for all the patients for whom Adams signed death certificates sixty-eight per cent were alleged (according to what he wrote on the certificates) to have died of cerebral haemorrhage or cerebral thrombosis. This was a very high percentage – incredibly high.

Well before the outbreak of the Second World War there was gossip going round Eastbourne that Adams did his rounds with a bottle of morphia in one pocket and a blank will form in the other. In 1936, Dr Adams had a windfall from the will of Mrs Alice Whitton, who left him £3,000, a large sum then. Mrs Whitton’s niece contested the will, but the court decided in Adams’s favour and he kept the money. The gossip in Eastbourne continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s. Dr Adams’s racket was an open secret. But it was not until 1956 that the police decided to investigate and then the circumstantial evidence started to build up. The problem was that most of the evidence was circumstantial.

There was the case of William Mawhood, where Adams made a bad miscalculation. He reckoned without Mrs Mawhood. William Mawhood was a wealthy steel merchant and also a long-standing friend of Adams. He had lent Adams £3,000 to buy his first house. When Mr Mawhood was dying, Adams visited him and asked his wife Edith to leave them alone for a moment. She was suspicious and listened outside the door to what was being said. It was just as well she did. She heard Adams telling her husband to leave his estate to him, Adams, and he would look after her.

Edith Mawhood was incensed. She burst back into the room, grabbed her walking stick and struck out at the wicked doctor, chasing him round the bed. He scuttled out of the room and down the stairs. Mrs Mawhood threw her stick down the stairs after him. She missed her target and broke a flower vase instead. She shouted after him to get out of the house. She never wanted to see him there again.

It was scandalous behaviour on Dr Adams’s part, and he might perhaps have been charged with unprofessional conduct and maybe even struck off for it. But it was a far cry from that level of misbehaviour to proving that Dr Adams would have hastened the death of his other patients. Dr Adams was obviously a very nasty character, but was he a murderer?

The case of Emily Mortimer was similar to the Mawhood case. In the Mortimer family there was a strict tradition by which the family members intended to keep the family fortune intact. Whenever a Mortimer died, the bulk of the estate was divided among the surviving members of the family. In that way, each time there was a death, the money was recycled within the family. Adams persuaded Emily Mortimer to make a break with tradition. The year she died, she changed her will, transferring £3,000 worth of shares from the family (who would have been expecting that sum) to the doctor. Shortly before she died, she changed her will again so that Adams received £5,000 and the Mortimer family was cut out of the will altogether. Emily Mortimer’s death certificate gave as the cause of death ‘cerebral thrombosis’.

There was a rather different case of two old ladies who owned the house that they lived in. Adams persuaded them to sell their house and move into a flat – for the good of their health, he argued. He refused to hand over the money he made from the house sale until two years later, and then only when forced to do so by a writ.

The police investigation was very thorough. The Murder Squad had obtained statements from local solicitors and bank managers, which showed Dr Adams’s intense concern with the wills of his patients. There were many irregularities. Adams was making visits to banks with his patients to oversee the changes he wanted them to make to their wills. He was making phone calls to solicitors demanding that they come out immediately to change a will or draw up a new one. There was even one patient who was so near to unconsciousness that he could only sign his changed will with a cross. There were also several changes of wills to stipulate cremation instead of burial, which could only have been made so that there could be no exhumation later on to test for levels of morphine or other drugs in the body.

One of the most damning findings of all was the sequence of thirty-two cheques payable to Dr Adams, totalling £18,000, and all drawn out of one old lady’s account during the last few days of her life. The signatures also looked as if they had been forged, presumably by Dr Adams.

But all of this was circumstantial evidence, evidence of Adams’s way of thinking, evidence of his determination to get his hands on his patients’ money. What evidence did the police manage to find of murder?

They did manage to find evidence that some of the death certificates contained information that Dr Adams must have known was untrue. Clara McNeill-Miller was an elderly single lady who had lived with her sister Hilda for thirteen years. When Hilda died, she left everything to Clara. About a year afterwards, Clara too died, leaving nearly everything to Adams. The sum amounted to £5,000. Three years later the bodies were exhumed and post mortems were carried out. Clara had not died of coronary thrombosis as Adams had written on the death certificate, but of pneumonia. This was odd in itself, but then the police were able to interview one of the other guests in the rest home. This is what she told the police:

 

Dr Adams was called to Miss Clara the night before she died. She was suffering from influenza. He remained in her bedroom for nearly forty-five minutes before leaving. 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 cold winter’s night. The bedclothes on her bed had been pulled back and thrown over the bedrail at the base. Her nightdress had been folded back across her body to her neck. All the bedroom windows had been flung open. A cold gush of wind was sweeping through the room. That is how the doctor left her.

 

It was now very clear to the police from this vital witness evidence that Adams had tried to accelerate the death of Clara Neil-Miller – and probably succeeded. She died the day after this ordeal. The police also found that in the weeks running up to her death Clara had made out large cheques to Adams; these could not have been for medical treatment or medicines.

Adams also had a financial interest in the residential home where Clara died. He sent many of his patients there. Mrs Sharp, the woman who ran it, was likely to be able to advance the police enquiry significantly. Hewitt remembered her later. ‘Mrs Sharp was on the point of talking when we left Eastbourne for a week’s conferences with the Attorney General in London. She was the witness we needed. She knew much of what went on between Adams and his patients. She knew where the bodies were buried and she was scared. When we left, she was about to crack.’

Hewitt was sure that with just one more interview, Mrs Sharp would reveal a lot more. He was devastated to find that she had died while he was away in London, and drew the obvious conclusion: that Adams had got to her, killed her, silenced her. Experienced as he was, Hewitt was unable to pin any of this on Adams. By the time Hewitt got back to Eastbourne, only a week after leaving, Elizabeth Sharp was dead and cremated – on Dr John Bodkin Adams’s orders. Hewitt sensed that Adams had played a key role in Elizabeth Sharp’s death but was unable to prove a thing.

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.