Talk:Death of Edith Alice Morrell

Untitled

It is wrong to label the man a serial killer when he was acquitted! 83.67.58.241 (talk) 22:39, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

It says "suspected serial killer". He is suspected by various reliable sources, so that seems fair. Malick78 (talk) 21:38, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

You should quote the various sources that you think are reliable so readers can make their own judgement on reliability.Sscoulsdon (talk) 08:02, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Dates

"Between 7 and 12 November 1949 alone, she was given 40½ grains of morphia (2624 mg) and 39 grains of heroin (2527 mg), according to prescriptions" - shouldn't this be 1950, since it would then refer to the days before she died? /80.217.120.75 (talk) 13:37, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Between 23 June 1949 and the end of October 1950 the regular dose was a quarter grain of morpia and one-third grain of heroin. Trial Exhibit 4A shows that 78¾ grains of these two opiates were prescribed between 8 and 12 November (the opening speech for the prosecution said 79½ grains) which seems to tie in with the quote above, but it is fairly clear that not all prescribed was injected.

References

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"Murder, can you prove it?"

These were the words that John Bodkin Adams was said to have uttered to the police when arrested on suspicion of the murder Mrs Morrell, and quoted by the leading counsel for the prosecution at Adam's trial. In his summing up, the trial judge Sir Patrick Devlin, indicated the defence argument was that the whole case against Dr. Adams was mere suspicion and that, "...the case for the defence seems to me to be a manifestly strong one". The jury returned a Not Guilty verdict after deliberating for only around forty-five minutes.

There is no basis for saying Mrs Morrell was murdered as there was no Inquest verdict to that effect and the only person accused of her murder, Dr. Adams, was found not guilty. Although many published accounts represent Adams as a serial murderer and speculate on his possibly motive, most simply repeat adverse pretrial newspaper accounts and few make much attempt to investigate the evidence themselves. It is now more than 60 years after Adams' trial and acquittal and almost 70 years from the death of Mrs Morrell, and there are three major unresolved issues that stand in the way of reaching a conclusion on what happened to Mrs Morrell let alone the underlying reasons why. After this lapse of time, it is highly unlikely they will ever be resolved

The first issue is the huge disparity between what was recorded in the nurses' notebooks in the Morrell case and their witness statements. The statements of nurses Stronach and Randall taken in November 1956, after Hannam had been told by his police superiors that the case he had presented was speculative, based on rumour and could not be proved and instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions to obtain more evidence. which were more damaging to Adams than their earlier ones, claiming in particular that they that many of the injections Adams gave were of drugs taken from his bag and that were generally unaware of what he was injecting.

They repeated these allegations under direct examination at the trial, but under cross examination they were forced to admit that it was they and the other two nurses that usually made up the injections to be administered either by them or Adams, and that they had recorded the relatively few injections already prepared by Adams and had also recorded their nature on at least some occasions. Their statements were tested under the adversarial system and found to be so far from the truth that the trial judge said that two of the nurses had lied. If the witness statements were so wrong in the Morrell case, their reliability in the other cases investigated that were not tested in court must be questioned. One critical statement in the Morrell was that of Nurse Stronach, who described Mrs Morrell's state in October to November 1950 as varying between semi-conscious and rambling, and said that Adams had himself administered most injections, whose contents she usually did not know; statements the notebooks showed were completely false. Devlin's summing-up said that Nurse Stronach and one other nurse had lied in the witness box, but her statements and those of other nurses were in line with Hannam's theory that Adams' first made his victims drug addicts, then forced them to leave him legacies and finally killed them with a lethal dose of opiates. The extent, if any, to which the nurses' witness statements were influenced by Hannam's theories remains speculative.

The second issue is how the nurses' notebooks came into the hands of the defence: two contemporary accounts of the trial by Bedford and Furneaux say that the police overlooked them in their search of Adams’ surgery, where they were later found by Adams’ solicitors. Following the Attorney-General asking in his final address where the notebooks had come from, Devlin in his summing-up would not say that there was a mystery about it, and his 1985 book supports the view that the police overlooked them. Other accounts published soon after the deaths of Adams and Manningham-Buller did not challenge this. Rodney Hallworth's 1983 book included comments by both Charles Hewett who took part in the police investigation and Melford Stevenson who seconded Manningham-Buller in the prosecution, and neither made any comment on this matter.

However, Cullen reported from her 2003 review of the Metropolitan Police files that the police had included the notebooks in a list of evidence in the case, and that the list was included with the report sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. She infers from this that that Attorney General must therefore have known of their existence. She does not explain how the notebooks came into the hands of the defence, but claims that this incident somehow shows "that there was a will at the highest of levels to undermine the case against Dr Adams".. As Devlin mentions, it was the responsibility of suitably qualified solicitors and barristers in the Director's office to prepare the brief from the police report, not the personal responsibility of the Attorney General, so basing such a startling claim of interference on a misunderstanding of the prosecution process shows its weakness. A more credible formulation of the matter would be that the police should have flagged-up the importance of the notebooks in their report, if they had examined them in detail and realised they did not support the witness statements.

Since 1996, the prosecution has a duty under the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 to notify defence counsel of all the evidence on which they intend to rely in making their case, and to provide the defence with any material of relevance to the case which they do not intend to use. This would include material casting doubt upon the accuracy or admissibility of any prosecution evidence, which might support a defence or cast doubt on the credibility of a prosecution witness. Until 1946, there were no formal rules about disclosure, and the main forum for the defence to learn about the Crown's case was at the Committal Proceedings. After 1946, the common law rules on disclosure were essentially concerned only with those materials gathered by the police in the course of their investigation that the prosecution intended to use in their case, not discarded materials. This was the position in 1956 and 1957 as outlined by Devlin, who also stressed that the Committal Proceedings were still the place that the defence gained an overall outline of what the Crown's case was to be. Although this disclosure included details of material witnesses, it did not include their witness statements nor evidence the prosecution did not intend to use. Only in 1981 did the Attorney General at the time state that witness statements and unused material should be disclosed: his statement was non-statutory and the prosecution still had discretion on what to disclose.

The flaws in this system in 1957 were that the defence only had an outline of the Crown's case and, if either the police had not included any evidence in their dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions or the lawyers acting for the Director did not include it in their brief to counsel, it would probably never become known to the defence. Although miscarriages of justice such as the cases of George Kelly and Stefan Kiszko which involved the police concealing evidence they had from prosecuting counsel may be rare, between 1946 and 1981 the police were entitled to emphasise evidence that supported their case and underplay that which did not, as long as the latter was at least referred to the prosecuting authorities, who might choose to include it in their case or not. As Hannam was criticised both by his superiors and the trial judge for sloppy work, the simplest explanations for these two issues is that Hannam obtained the witness statements he wanted to prove his theory and, if he ever had the nurses' notebooks in his possession and ever looked into them, he disregarded what they said. As to how the notebooks came into the hands of the defence, the two most likely theories are that the police never had them or that, if the Eastbourne Police had obtained them through a warrant under the Dangerous Drugs Act, they would not be admissible evidence in relation to the murder charge. If the Crown was not entitled to have them, and they were returned to Adams’ defence team, it was in no-one’s interest to make an issue of this during the trial.

The least likely explanation is Cullens, that Manningham-Buller deliberately sabotaged the Morrell trial by handing the notebooks to the defence. The Attorney-General was recorded by Bedford and Hoskins as reacting with apparent surprise when the notebooks were produced, and he tried in his summing up to minimise their impact, saying it was a considerable surprise that they were introduced during the trial and that they did not a reveal the whole truth. He asked rhetorically where they came from, who kept them and who, apart from Adams had an interest in them, suggesting that the doctor had taken care they contained no incriminating entries (by what means was not explained).

Had the 1996 disclosure rules applied in 1957, Adams' defence would have been entitled to the nurses' notebooks, if the prosecution had them. If the prosecution had studied them thoroughly before the trial, at the very least it seems unlikely the Morrell case would have been prosecuted in the way it was, if at all.

The third issue is what happened to any drugs prescribed for Mrs Morrell but not administered to her. Devlin gave a legal direction to the jury that they should not conclude that any more drugs were administered to Mrs Morrell than shown in the nurses' notebooks, but this leaves the matter in doubt. The direction was probably necessary because the prosecution's case based on the amounts prescribed was thrown into confusion by the nurses' notebooks, and also because of Dr Douthwaite's attempt to salvage that case by changing the date on which an intent to kill could be first deduced, from 8 November to 1 November, and him speculating on the way in which the reduced dosage could have been fatal. His theories were not accepted by other medical experts.

Robins argues that the evidence given by Adams' partner Dr Harris, that at least some of his visits to Mrs Morrell when Adams was on holiday were not recorded in the nurses' notebook, indicates that they only gave a minimum figure for injections. She concluded from this that all the "missing" opiates, those prescribed but not accounted for in the notebooks, must have injected. There is a very wide gap between the approximately 79 grains of opiates prescribed from 8 to 12 November and the 27 grains recorded as administered up to Mrs Morrell's death early on 13 November 1950. Devlin's summing-up noted that the few "special injections" recorded in the nurses' notebooks as ones not made from these prescriptions and whose contents were unknown could not possibly have accounted for the difference between known injections of opiates and prescriptions for them.

Sister Mason-Ellis stated that Mrs Morrell's nurses had charge of the opiates prescribed and were scrupulous in recording whenever heroin or morphia tablets were made up for injection and how many remained from each prescription after this. She added that any amounts left over at Mrs Morrell's death would have been handed to Adams: this would have been a sizeable amount if this record, which had not been retained, tallied with the nurses' notebooks. Dr Ashby, for the prosecution, accepted that about one-third of the amount prescribed was definitely injected according to the notebooks, a further one third may have been left over at Mrs Morrell's death, but the balance of one third was unaccounted for and available for Adams to inject in addition to that given by the nurses. However, as the nurses had control of the drugs, it is difficult to see how Adams could made injections from that store unknown to the nurses.

References

Sscoulsdon (talk) 16:07, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

• Sscoulsdon, I am not sure what you are trying to achieve with this wall of text, but it sure sounds like original research. Drmies (talk) 16:09, 11 May 2020 (UTC)