Medicine's Strangest Cases by Michael O'Donnell

Author:Michael O'Donnell [O’Donnell, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84994-173-0
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE TRIALS OF THE LEGACY DOCTOR

EASTBOURNE, 1956

In the 1940s and ’50s, Dr John Bodkin Adams, a respected pillar of his local church, was a fashionable Eastbourne general practitioner – fashionable, that is, among superior persons who didn’t wish to be seen as patients of a National Health GP. As the years went by, he began to figure so often in the wills of his patients, many of them elderly widows who had inherited fortunes, that he became known locally as ‘the legacy doctor’.

Rumours of his activities attracted the attention of the police and, in December 1956, he was arrested and charged with the murder of an eighty-year-old woman. Four months later, an Old Bailey jury took only forty minutes to find him not guilty. Though he had benefited from the wills of elderly patients, the jury found no evidence that he had murdered them.

The Bodkin Adams case had a couple of strange sequels. The prosecution’s allegations received such fulsome newspaper coverage that readers were left with the impression that Adams had preyed on lonely widows and, once he’d got himself into their wills, polished them off with an overdose of morphine. The story was so convincing that it persisted after his acquittal, and up till his death in 1983, the good doctor got a regular income by suing lazy journalists who, without checking the facts, wrote of him as if he’d been found guilty.

One journalist, however, benefited from the incongruity between the publicised evidence and the actual verdict. When Bodkin Adams died, Percy Hoskins, former chief crime reporter of the Daily Express, was named as a beneficiary in the doctor’s will. The reason was that, during the inventive speculation that flourished before, during, and after the trial, he was the only Fleet Street crime reporter at all sympathetic to the doctor’s own version of events.

Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express, allowed his man to pursue his independent line but, as he read the lurid coverage of the evidence in his competitors’ papers, he grew increasingly worried that the Express was taking the wrong line. When the jury announced its verdict, Beaverbrook sent Hoskins a telegram addressed, the story goes, to El Vino’s, the Fleet Street wine bar: ‘Two men have been acquitted today.’

The trial itself was notable for a witness’s description of one of those magic moments when people unwittingly reveal something about themselves that they’ve long kept hidden – a moment which the prosecuting counsel, Melford Stevenson, who later became a judge, took great pleasure in recounting long into his retirement.

Adams, who was not short on sanctimony, had found that one way to impress the lonely ladies of Eastbourne was to put on a show of piety. Sometimes when he entered a house he would dramatically drop to his knees in the hall and pray for the recovery of the patient he was about to see.

The younger sister of one of his patients described at his trial what happened one day after she had admitted him at the front door and started to lead him upstairs to the patient.

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