Medical Detectives (19 page)

Smith knew that what was required was trace evidence linking Helen Priestly to the place where she was killed. He began looking carefully at the sack in which the body was found. It was a commonplace jute sack with the letters BOSS printed on it in red. Enquiries identified it as part of a consignment of cereals originating in Canada. Nine other sacks were found in the Donalds’ house but none with the BOSS identification. It was a matter of interest that the sack in which Helen’s body was found had a hole in one corner, perhaps enabling it to be hung from a nail or a hook – the Donalds’ sacks all had a similar hole.

Inside the sack was a quantity of washed cinders, ordinary household fluff and a number of hairs. Starting with the cinders, Smith ascertained that Mrs Donald was the only householder in the tenement in the habit of washing her cinders, indeed traces of this practice were found in the sink trap in her kitchen. The cinders found in the sack were examined microscopically and compared with cinders taken from all the houses in the tenement. In addition, samples were sent for specialist examination by X-ray, spectrographic and micro-chemical methods. All these tests proved inconclusive.

Smith next turned his attention to the hairs found in the sack, some of which were human and others animal. The possibility of using hair as a means of personal identification had long intrigued forensic scientists. It was John Glaister, Smith’s successor in Egypt, who had made a special study of this subject and written the definitive work on it in 1931. It was to Glaister that he turned for help in the Aberdeen child murder investigation.

The human hairs in the sack did not belong to the dead child, they were coarser and of a different colour. The hairs were also irregular in contour, indicating they had been subjected to some form of artificial waving. Samples of Jeannie Donald’s hair were obtained from her in prison – they showed identical characteristics to those found in the sack. Smith knew, of course, that while this comparison was significant it would not stand up as evidence without corroboration. He sent all the hair samples to Glaister for a second opinion and on 30 May Helen Priestly’s body was exhumed in order that hair samples could be taken from it. The two professors of forensic pathology spent many hours bent over their microscopes in Edinburgh and Glasgow examining hair samples.

Having exhausted the hair samples, Sydney Smith next turned his microscope on the household fluff found in the sack. This material which collects in all homes is usually a composite of common fibres deriving from clothing and the furnishings of the house. There will also be dust and other materials brought into the house from outside on shoes and clothing. This unprepossessing material is a microcosm of a household’s characteristics. The little balls of household fluff found in the BOSS sack contained over 200 separately identifiable materials. These ranged from wool, cotton, linen and silk fibres to cat and rabbit hairs.

Smith’s intention was to compare the content of the fluff in the sack with that of fluff taken from the Donalds’ house. If the two materials showed a high degree of correspondence, it was likely they originated from the same source. Using the comparison microscope which he had so successfully developed in Egypt for examining bullets side-by-side, Smith now started to compare his slides, each containing a particular type of fibre teased out of the household fluff samples.

Twenty-five different fibres were found to match completely between the two sources and there were no similar comparisons with samples taken from the other houses in the tenement. ‘The absolute matching of so many different fibres from the two sources’, said Smith, ‘was, in my opinion, good evidence that the fluff in the sack was derived from the Donalds’ house.’ During the six weeks following the Donalds’ arrests, their house was searched many times and any trace or stain that might be of value to the investigators was studied. Human blood was found on a number of articles of clothing, on two newspapers dated 19 April, the day before Helen Priestly’s disappearance, and on a scrubbing brush and house flannels kept under the kitchen sink. The bloodstains were of Group O blood, the same as the dead child. This was not significant in itself, as 46 per cent of the population fall into Group O, but Jeannie Donald belonged to a different group. Another connecting link was provided by microbiological evidence. The same rare species of intestinal bacteria that were present on the dead child’s bloodstained clothing as a result of her severe internal injuries, were also found on one of the house flannels in the Donalds’ house. Again, this was highly indicative of a common source and Smith’s hunch about this was confirmed by Professor Thomas Mackie, bacteriologist at Edinburgh University.

Smith was aware that Helen Priestly had an enlarged thymus gland in her neck which gives rise to a condition known as
status lymphaticus
. He bore this in mind when he reconstructed his version of the events which led to Helen Priestly’s death. Enlargement of the lymphatic tissue can predispose a child to loss of consciousness when subjected to a sudden shock. Smith believed that the young girl, returning from the errand set by her mother, had seen Jeannie Donald and taunted her, as she had done before, with the shout of ‘Coconut’. Infuriated, Jeannie Donald grabbed at the child and roughed her up, during the course of which, due to her enlarged thymus gland, Helen reacted by falling unconscious. Terrified that she had killed the girl, Donald dragged her into the house and decided to fake a rape attack by inserting an instrument of some sort into her vagina. The pain caused the child to regain consciousness, adding to Donald’s panic and provoking her into strangling Helen. When she had regained her composure, Jeannie Donald began to clean up and, as a temporary measure, put the dead body in the cinder box which was kept under the kitchen sink. In due course, the body was transferred to the BOSS sack and put into the passage under the stairs outside the house where it was found later. What she had not accounted for in her otherwise careful clean-up operations was the incriminating nature of trace evidence transferred from her house into the sack containing her victim.

Jeannie Donald was tried for murder at Edinburgh on 16 July 1934 and after hearing the evidence of 164 witnesses, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. Donald, who had maintained an impassive stance throughout the trial, collapsed when the verdict was announced. The sentence of death passed on her was commuted to one of penal servitude, which Smith believed was right. In his view, she had no intention of killing the child, and merely wanted to frighten her. He suggested before the trial that the plea might be reduced to one of culpable homicide, a Scottish plea similar to manslaughter in the English courts. The defence would not entertain this idea, apparently preferring to go all out for a ‘not guilty’ verdict; ‘they underestimated the medical and scientific evidence,’ wrote Smith.

This was a landmark case which established Sydney Smith as one of the leading forensic pathologists in Britain. ‘He was one of the few,’ wrote Jürgen Thornald in his appreciation of Smith, ‘who dared to challenge the Spilsbury legend.’ He also demonstrated a refreshingly different approach in that he did not rely solely on his own skills and experience. As the investigation of Helen Priestly’s death showed, he exercised great intuition but, at every turn, sought help and corroboration from other experts. This, of course, was not Spilsbury’s way, but a tribute to Smith’s approach came from the unlikely quarter of Jeannie Donald’s defence counsel who described his work as, ‘careful and meticulous preparation unparalleled in the history of this old court.’ ‘This old court’ was the High Court at Edinburgh whence the trial had been moved to avoid any hint of local prejudice in Aberdeen. ‘It was a change’, said Smith dryly, ‘greatly appreciated by the thrifty citizens of Aberdeen, since the expenses of the High Court would be met by the Crown, and not fall on the Aberdeen rates.’ ‘The Patriarch’, as Smith’s students liked to call him, was in the ascendancy.

While the Aberdeen child murder investigation was in progress, Smith received a letter from Lord Trenchard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, asking for his advice about setting up a medico-legal laboratory for the police. The two men met in London and Trenchard, who described himself as ‘an old man in a hurry’, quickly drew up plans to start a laboratory at the Hendon Police College. Smith specified the equipment needed for the laboratories and buildings at the college were suitably adapted. In less than a year, the laboratory was in full operation.

Trenchard offered Smith the post of Director but he turned it down, making way for Dr James Davidson, a lecturer in his department at Edinburgh, to become the first Director. It was a considerable tribute to Smith that he was approached for his views on this innovative step in forensic investigation and he became a regular lecturer at Hendon.

Always a traveller, Smith decided to take his wife on a round-the-world trip in 1935, making a visit to Australia for professional reasons and to New Zealand to see family and friends. While in Sydney en route to Melbourne to attend a British Medical Association meeting, he became involved in what he described as ‘one of the most extraordinary cases of my career’. This was the infamous Shark Arm affair. On 25 April, a startling phenomenon occurred in the Coogee Aquarium which housed a fourteen-foot shark caught by two local fishermen. When this captive denizen of the deep disgorged the contents of its stomach, spectators were horrified to see included a human arm severed at the shoulder. This grisly relic bore a distinctive tattoo of two boxers squaring up to each other which enabled the police to identify the individual to whom the arm belonged. In a list of missing persons were several men with tattoos and, by a process of elimination, the police confirmed that the owner of that particular boxing motif was one James Smith. The arm was identified by his wife and brother and further corroboration came from fingerprinting, for it appeared that Mr Smith was known to the police.

It seemed that James Smith had left home on 8 April, ostensibly to go on a fishing trip with another man whose identity he did not divulge to his wife. The question which the Australian authorities were keen to answer was whether the ‘Shark Arm’, as it was now called, had been ripped off by a shark, suggesting an accidental or possibly suicidal death, or dismembered by an act suggesting something more sinister. The fact that a visiting British Medical Association delegation of 157 doctors, including a distinguished forensic pathologist, was in the country, offered an ideal opportunity to secure an authoritative opinion.

Sydney Smith was asked to examine his namesake’s arm although he admitted his expertise in bites lay more with the camel than the shark. Nevertheless, he had no doubt that the arm in question had been severed at the shoulder joint by a clean incision and that, after the head of the bone had been freed from its socket, the remaining tissues were cut away. The condition of the blood and tissues, despite the fact that the arm had been in the shark’s stomach for at least a week, showed that the arm had been severed after death. There was every indication, therefore, of foul play.

No other portions of James Smith’s body came to light but it was known that he had spent a holiday in a rented cottage on the coast at Cronulla with Patrick Brady, a forger known to the police. Brady denied any involvement in Smith’s disappearance but implicated Reg Holmes, a Sydney boat builder, in forgery dealings. Brady was nevertheless charged with murdering Smith and three days later, following a sensational boat chase in Sydney Harbour, Holmes was apprehended. He had a bullet wound in the head, which was possibly self-inflicted, and he told the arresting officers that Brady had killed Smith and disposed of the body. Two weeks later, Reg Holmes, who would have been a star witness at Brady’s trial, was shot dead in his car.

Sydney Smith’s reconstruction of the crime, pieced together from police information, was that Brady and Smith quarrelled at Cronulla and Smith was killed. It was known that a tin trunk was missing from the cottage and it was supposed that the body was cut up and put into the trunk for disposal at sea. The problem was that the trunk was too small to accommodate every portion of the dismembered corpse. The piece left over was the left forearm, which by a stroke of fate was the only part of the body to bear any visible identification. The offending limb was roped to the side of the trunk and, during its burial at sea, was torn loose by a shark which nature determined should disgorge its stomach contents in a public aquarium. It was an extraordinary story and one which Sydney Smith acknowledged as a great deal stranger than fiction. Patrick Brady was tried for murder in September 1935 and acquitted. He denied the allegations right up to the time of his death in August 1965 and the mystery of the Shark Arm Case died with him.

While on board ship returning to Britain after his visit to the Antipodes, Sydney Smith learned the first details of a case in which he would be embroiled on reaching home. The remains of two women had been found in a gulley near Dumfriesshire on the Carlisle to Edinburgh road on 29 September 1935. These relics were taken to Smith’s laboratory in Edinburgh where they were examined by his assistant, Dr W. Gilbert Millar, and Professor John Glaister of Glasgow University.