Giant Book of Murder: Real Life Cases Cracked by Forensic Science by Roger Wilkes

Author:Roger Wilkes [Wilkes, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Forensics, True, Crime, Murder, Collection
ISBN: 9781845292034
Google: 9w-GSjzpDJMC
Publisher: Vibhatsu
Published: 2022-05-30T18:30:00+00:00

17

Conflict of Evidence

(Sidney Fox, UK 1930)

Sydney Smith

For Bernard Spilsbury, the Crippen case was a personal triumph, a turning-point. He was retained as a pathologist by the Home Office for the next thirty-seven years, and his appearance as an expert Crown witness in a series of important murder trials between the wars brought him celebrity status. “To the man in the street,” explained Edgar Lustgarten, “he stood for pathology as Hobbs stood for cricket or Dempsey for boxing or Capablanca for chess.” Spilsbury’s good looks, easy courtroom manner and his knack of explaining complex forensic points in clear, simple language mesmerized juries. But in 1930 he found himself pitted against a younger, ambitious pathologist called Sydney Smith, who’d been retained by the defence in the sad and sordid case of Sidney Fox, a homosexual drifter accused of murdering his own white-haired mother. Fox was believed to have strangled her and set fire to her room in order to collect on her life insurance, which he had recently increased. Spilsbury, Smith and two other medical experts disagreed in court over the evidence of strangulation. Spilsbury (by now Sir Bernard), who conducted the post-mortem examination of Mrs Rosaline Fox, believed she had been strangled before the fire started, and that she had died from asphyxia due to manual strangulation. Sydney Smith, making his debut as an expert witness for the defence, gave it as his definite opinion that Mrs Fox had died of heart failure, brought on by exertion and fright, having woken to find her room full of smoke. Born in New Zealand, Sir Sydney Smith (1883—1969) was Regius professor of forensic medicine at Edinburgh University for twenty-five years. The Fox case (Smith hyped it as “one of the causes celebres of the century”) was the first of his frequent court clashes with Spilsbury. Although Fox’s trial is said to have involved a direct conflict of medical evidence, the truth is less clear-cut. The evidence on which the two sets of expert witnesses (prosecution and defence) base their opinions is seldom the same: in this case, as in others, the pathologist summoned by the Crown was first in the field. Spilsbury saw the bruise on Mrs Fox’s larynx, but Smith did not, because by the time he examined the larynx several months later, the bruise had disappeared.

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