Medical Detectives (35 page)

Keith Simpson was born in Brighton where his father practised as a GP. In his autobiography, he wrote, ‘I became a doctor because my father was one.’ With his future direction clearly identified, he prospered at school and, at the age of seventeen, enrolled at Guy’s Medical School in 1924. He admired his teachers and the idea of passing on and sharing learning and knowledge to others would be a strong thread in his subsequent career. After qualifying in medicine, he elected to pursue pathology and was appointed as Demonstrator in Pathology at Guy’s in 1932. In the same year, he married Mary Buchanan who was a hospital nurse.

Two years later, he was appointed Supervisor of medico-legal post-mortems and, subsequently, became an adviser to the Surrey Police. The world of forensic pathology at that time, at least in England, was dominated by the presence of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Good-looking and firm of jaw, he captured the headlines but kept his distance from his fellow professionals and the natural camaraderie which normally exists in such groups. Simpson would later refer to Spilsbury, rather uncharitably, as, ‘unloved and unmourned’. A trio of pathologists, Donald Teare, Francis Camps and Simpson, served the needs of London in the medical investigation of suspicious deaths. They were affectionately known to the police as ‘The Three Musketeers’, and, even during the early war years and the London Blitz, they met regularly for lunch in a Soho restaurant to compare notes and cases.

In 1941, Simpson engaged a secretary, Molly Lefebure, who worked for him throughout the Second World War and proved a valuable assistant. She came from a journalistic background and, being fairly worldly-wise, made the transition from newspaper office to mortuary reporting with ease. Unlike Spilsbury, who would not employ a secretary and made handwritten notes of his cases, Simpson relied on his secretary, who acted very much like a modern personal assistant. His first big case – his Crippen moment – came in 1942. On 17 July, a workman clearing debris from a blitzed church in south London unearthed a skeleton which he imagined was the remains of a victim of the German bombing. He put the body parts to one side while he finished his task and, in due course, reported the discovery to his foreman.

The following day, Dr Simpson was asked by the police to examine the remains which had been taken to the mortuary at Southwark. The presence of a womb in the abdominal cavity determined the sex of the body. His first assessment of the age of the fire-blackened remains was between a year and eighteen months. He viewed the circumstances of the discovery as puzzling. The body had been found buried beneath a stone slab in a cellar floor; not at all like a bomb-damage casualty. And the church had been blitzed in August 1940 which did not correspond with the preliminary assessment of the length of time the body had been dead. Simpson was given permission by the coroner to take the remains back to his laboratory at Guy’s where he could carry out a more thorough examination.

He established that parts of the arms and legs were missing and, subsequently, returned to the bombed-out church to see if any further bones might come to light. Despite the removal of nearly three tons of earth, no human bone fragments were found, but the pathologist’s attention was caught by the presence of yellowish deposits in the cellar and a wooden box. Analysis showed that the deposit was slaked lime. Suspicions formed that the body might have been brought in the box to the cellar where it was buried in lime. Murder was very much on the cards and this line of thought was strengthened by the pathologist’s examination of what remained of the limbs on the skeleton. Both legs had been cut off at the knee and the arms severed at the elbow; clear indications of dismemberment.

It was the teeth remaining in the upper jaw which provided evidence of identity. Simpson had already alerted the police to this possibility when officers trawled through lists of missing persons and found the name of Rachel Dobkin. She was the wife of a fire watcher and had been reported missing by her sister. The description she provided broadly matched what was known about the dead woman and, most importantly, she knew the name of Rachel Dobkin’s dentist. It was a short step to invite the dentist to view the teeth in the jaw. He recognised his work immediately and amid much excitement, declared ‘That’s my patient … That’s Mrs Dobkin.’

Armed with a family photograph of Rachel Dobkin, Dr Simpson set about superimposing the facial image onto a photograph of the skull. This was a technique employed with considerable success a few years earlier by John Glaister and Professor Brash in the Ruxton case. Working with the photographic technician at Guy’s, Simpson prepared a positive image of Dobkin’s portrait and a negative image of the skull on transparent X-ray film and placed one over the other. ‘The portrait fitted the skull like a mask,’ he wrote later. The remains found in the bomb-damaged church were those of Rachel Dobkin. This was a moment of triumph for the young pathologist in what his secretary, Molly Lefebure, described as a ‘case of a lifetime’. To add a further shine to his work, Simpson had retrieved the remains of a larynx preserved in the lime at the scene of burial. He found that the thyroid cartilage was broken and surrounded by a blood clot. This was firm evidence that Rachel Dobkin had been strangled.

The conclusion of the case was left to the police who located Harry Dobkin and invited him to answer a few questions about his wife’s disappearance. As a result, he was charged with murder and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. The jury took twenty minutes to find him guilty and he was subsequently executed at Wandsworth Prison. In the final act of what had been a remarkable case, Simpson carried out the post-mortem on the executed man’s corpse. Molly Lefebure recorded that Dobkin, ‘… looked very peaceful. His debts were settled at last’, she said. Simpson concluded, a touch ruefully, that if there had not been a war on, his case might have achieved headlines to match those that Spilsbury had achieved with Crippen.

Investigation of another concealed burial came to Dr Simpson’s attention just a few months after the first. In October 1942, soldiers on manoeuvres at Hankley Common near Godalming in Surrey came across a body buried in a shallow grave. All that was visible was a hand rising up through the earth as if beckoning attention. Simpson was called to the scene and the outstretched body of a young woman was uncovered. The maggot-strewn corpse was clothed and lying face down. The massive injury to the back of the skull was all too apparent. The remains were taken to Guy’s Hospital for further examination.

The corpse was that of a woman aged around nineteen to twenty who was identified by her clothing. She was known to the police on account of the fact that she lived rough on Hankley Common in a wigwam made from tree branches and foliage. This shelter had been made for her by a Canadian soldier based at Witley Camp who was her boyfriend. August Sangret, aged thirty, was a French-Canadian of native North American stock. Simpson determined that the woman’s skull had been smashed with a violent blow, probably from a tree branch used as a bludgeon. The presence of adipocere on the body led him to estimate that Pearl Wolfe had been dead for between five and seven weeks. The broken skull, which had fractured into thirty-eight pieces, was re-assembled in the laboratory with help from Dr Eric Gardner, whom Simpson liked to call a ‘GP pathologist’. They found two stab wounds which had penetrated the bone. There were also defensive wounds on one of the arms. A characteristic of the stab wounds was that they seemed to have been inflicted with a knife having a distinctive hooked blade.

A detailed search of the area where the body was found turned up a tree branch with hair impacted on one end. The microscopic characteristics of the hair matched the head hair of the dead woman and the thickness of the branch corresponded with the skull injury. Simpson had no doubt that this was the murder weapon. His reconstruction of the crime was that Pearl Wolfe had been stabbed but managed to escape her attacker until he caught up and smashed her skull with the tree branch. He then dragged the body to the place where it was buried, causing injuries to her legs. The question was, where was the knife?

August Sangret was questioned and made a long, rambling statement. He admitted his liaison with Pearl Wolfe and it emerged later that he had reported to his regimental Provost Sergeant that she had failed to turn up for a pre-arranged meeting. The Sergeant told Sangret that this was a private matter and no business of his, to which Sangret responded, tellingly, by saying, ‘If she’s found and anything has happened to her, I don’t want to be mixed up in it.’ The soldier’s uniform and blankets were examined by detectives and proved to have been recently washed but there was no knife among his personal effects. By chance, a soldier picking blackberries on Hankley Common found a knife stuck in a tree close to a shack used by Sangret. The soldier handed the knife in to the regimental provosts who described it as British Army issue with a black handle and hooked blade. As the knife was found near Sangret’s shack, he was given the chance to claim ownership and promptly accepted.

The next time the knife appeared, it was by another chance discovery, this time as the result of unblocking a drain. A soldier clearing a drain at Witley Camp retrieved a black-handled knife with a hooked blade. When Simpson examined it, he found no incriminating fingerprints but determined that the blade fitted perfectly into the holes that Pearl Wolfe’s attacker had stabbed into her skull. Sangret was charged with murder and sent for trial at Kingston Assizes. The pathologist attended to give expert evidence, equipped with the murder victim’s skull and the hook-bladed knife. He demonstrated to the court how precisely the knife fitted into the skull injuries and, when the jury retired, they took both articles with them. After two hours’ deliberation, they found August Sangret guilty but with a recommendation to mercy. The recommendation was not acted upon and the convicted soldier was executed at Wandsworth Prison. Once again, Simpson had the last word when he carried out the post-mortem following Sangret’s execution.

Many years later, in 1978, when the
Sunday Telegraph
serialised Keith Simpson’s autobiography,
Forty Years of Murder
, the pathologist posed for a photograph to be shown on the cover of the magazine. It was a reprise of his appearance in court over thirty years earlier; looking slightly menacing, he held the murder knife in one hand and the victim’s skull in the other. It was publicity of a type that Spilsbury could not have imagined.

‘The Three Musketeers’ continued to deal with the dead in London and the Home Counties. They were not all headline cases with suspicion attached, but simply corpses requiring confirmation of cause of death. As Molly Lefebure recorded in her memoir,
Evidence for the Crown
, published in 1954, her boss was carrying out between ten and twenty-eight post-mortems a day. Where there was no need of extended investigation, Keith Simpson would often complete seven or eight examinations in a morning. Even with the steady flow of bodies, lecturing duties at Guy’s, air-raid warnings and raising a family, he still found time to write. The first edition of his textbook,
Forensic Medicine
, was published in 1947.

War, or no war, it seemed that people were still driven to commit murder on the domestic front for the time-honoured motives of elimination, revenge and jealousy. Following his success in establishing the victim’s identity in the Dobkin case, Keith Simpson was soon confronted with another identification puzzle. Workers changing shifts at the Vauxhall car factory in Luton on 19 November 1943 followed a familiar route, walking along the towpath which ran beside the River Lea, on their way to the factory gates. Some of them noticed a bundle lying in the reeds of the shallow, murky river but thought no more of it. Later that day, two Luton Corporation employees also observed the bundle when they made routine checks on the water levels. They waded out into the river and pulled the bundle open sufficiently to see what was inside. They recoiled in horror when their curiosity was rewarded by the sight of a pale, bloodied face of a woman.

When the police arrived on the scene, the bundle was pulled up onto the river bank for closer inspection. The naked body of a woman was revealed and her battered face showed that she had been the victim of a violent attack. The police surgeon looked at the facial injuries and mistakenly determined that the woman had been shot. He arranged for the body to be taken to the mortuary at Luton and Dunstable Hospital pending the arrival of the Home Office pathologist, Dr Keith Simpson. He carried out a post-mortem examination on the corpse which he judged to be a female aged between thirty and thirty-five. She was about five feet, three inches tall and her body had been doubled up and enclosed in four sacks. Her ankles had been tied together and the knees bound to her chest. Bruises on her back suggested she might have been pinned down in at attempt at strangulation, but that was not the cause of death. There were massive injuries to the face, including a split cheek, fractured jaw, a wound across one eye and another injury that had practically severed an ear. There were bruises on the elbows and hands, suggesting a struggle had taken place. The pathologist found vital reaction in bruises on the legs which he thought might indicate she was concussed following the heavy blows to the face but, not at that point, dead. The woman was five and a half months pregnant.

Simpson estimated that death had occurred thirty to forty minutes after the head injuries had been inflicted. The body had not been in the water longer than twenty-four hours. There was no jewellery on it and no distinguishing marks, although a denture appeared to be missing. At this stage, the victim was simply a Jane Doe. The police investigation was led by Chief Inspector William Chapman who organised a painstaking search of the scene. The river bed was dragged and the banks searched. Missing Persons Lists were consulted, house-to-house enquiries made and workers at the Vauxhall factory interviewed to determine if any of them had noticed signs of suspicious activity anywhere on the riverside. The dead woman’s identity proved elusive. There was no match for her fingerprints in criminal records so it was decided to circulate photographs of her face. This was not a decision arrived at easily because her features had been battered almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, police photographers came up with a passable side portrait view which was published in the local newspaper in the hope that someone would recognise her and come forward with a name. The photograph was also shown at local cinemas and, as a result of this publicity, several people came forward and were invited to view the body although no positive identification resulted.