Doctor death

Anyone living in the south-coast town of Eastbourne in the late 1950s would be familiar with the name Dr John Bodkin Adams. His murder trial was (at the time) the longest in British legal history, but, instead of going to the gallows, remarkably, the overweight doctor was acquitted on 10 April 1957 and resumed medical practice in Eastbourne some four years later. But was he an angel of mercy or an unconvicted mass murderer who killed his patients decades before we heard the name Harold Shipman?

Adams, a chocoholic Northern Irish Methodist, amassed a considerable fortune from legacies he had been left in the wills of his former patients. He ran his practice from a large Victorian house called Kent Lodge and seemed to specialise in wealthy elderly clients like Bobbie Hullett, second wife of a retired Lloyd's underwriter, Jack Hullett.

After Jack's death, Bobbie suffered from depression so Adams prescribed barbiturates to help her sleep.

On Thursday 19 July 1956, Mrs Hullett fell ill and later became comatose. Adams made no attempt to hospitalise her nor did he call for a second opinion until Saturday 21 July. Two days later she died without regaining consciousness.

Raising suspicion

Adams was quick to certify she died of a cerebral haemorrhage but the Home Office pathologist believed she had been poisoned by barbiturates and it was not long before the chief constable started making inquiries. Richard Walker, the chief constable of Eastbourne and a personal friend of Adams and the Hulletts, discovered that before Mrs Hullett fell into her coma she had given Adams a cheque for £1,000 (a considerable sum in the 1950s) and bequeathed to him her Rolls-Royce.

With a degree of reluctance, Walker called in Scotland Yard who sent Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam. The London sleuth uncovered an abundance of evidence of Adams receiving gifts from at least 132 wills '“ he had been left two Rolls-Royces, silver, jewellery, antiques and £45,000 in cash. There was also proof of the 'good doctor' forging an elderly patient's cheques, totalling £18,000.

The widow of wealthy Liverpool food importer Alfred Morrell also met her untimely demise in Adams' care. After retiring to Eastbourne, Mrs Edith Morrell became his patient and later left her residuary estate to him. To his horror, Mrs Morrell changed her will, so it was suggested that he rendered an invoice in the sum of £1,750 to compensate for his lost inheritance. Adams certified the cause of death as cerebral thrombosis though Mrs Morrell's nurse was concerned about the massive doses of drugs the doctor had prescribed before death.

Hannam was convinced that Adams had killed many times (up to 25 victims) and also found evidence that he had forged NHS prescriptions. On 19 December 1956, Hannam arrived at Kent Lodge to arrest Adams for Mrs Morrell's murder. As Adams fetched his hat and coat he told his crying receptionist that he would see her in heaven.

Contradictory judgment

In the end, Adams was only charged on one count of murder and what transpired was a trial where the nurses who gave evidence for the prosecution were confused and the judge delivered a conflicting summing up. Devlin J said: 'If her life was cut short by weeks or months it was just as much murder as if it was cut short by years.'

He then went on to explain that the only exception is where the doctor acts to do all that is proper and necessary to relieve pain with the incidental effect that this will shorten the patient's life: ''¦but that does not mean that a doctor who was aiding the sick and dying had to calculate in minutes, or even hours, perhaps, not in days or weeks, the effect on a patient's life of the medicines which he could administer. If the first purpose of medicine '“ the restoration of health '“ could no longer be achieved there was still much for the doctor to do and he was entitled to do all that was proper and necessary to relieve pain and suffering even if the measures he took might incidentally shorten life by hours or perhaps even longer'¦ Dr Adams' defence was that the treatment was designed to promote comfort and if it was the right and proper treatment the fact that it shortened life did not convict him of murder.'

Adams walked free and lived in Eastbourne until his own demise in 1983. Opinion is, to this day, divided on whether he eased the passing of those he cared for or cold-bloodedly killed '“ what is not in question, however, is that he made a considerable fortune out of his dead patients.