Lethal Witness
Andrew Rose

Sutton Publishing, £20

James Morton

For the first four decades of the last century, Sir Bernard Spilsbury was the expert witness non-pareil. During that period, there was hardly a single sensational murder trial in which he was not called on to give evidence &150; Crippen, Seddon, Armstrong (the only solicitor to hang), the names trip off the pages.


Suave, debonair, articulate and arrogant, he was the delight of the prosecution, judges (‘so clear, so fair,’ said the Lord Chief Justice in March 1935), juries and the newspapers. That year Spilsbury was a public favourite in a poll conducted by the Daily Express, in a list which somewhat dubiously included Mussolini. If Spilsbury said something had happened, whether it was in his special field of pathology or whether he had strayed into firearms, his word was good enough to hang a man or, very rarely, have him acquitted. A newspaper report in 1946 that Spilsbury had advised the defence in a Bristol murder case was generally thought to have contributed to the not-guilty verdict. Unfortunately, Spilsbury was often wrong and, given his tendency to embellish his evidence, his career is as good an argument against the death penalty as any other.


Perhaps the greatest of miscarriages of justice caused by Spilsbury’s implacable hostility to the defendant and his ability to show up inexperienced counsel was that of David Greenwood in the so-called ‘Button’ murder of 1918. Not only was there cogent evidence that Greenwood was not the murderer, but there was also compelling evidence of the guilt of another man. Fortunately, Greenwood did not hang but nevertheless he served 15 years. There were several others, some of whom did hang.

Then there was the case of Sydney Fox, hanged in 1930 for the murder of his mother. Fox was convicted largely on Spilsbury’s evidence but there was compelling evidence from two other pathologists, Sidney Smith and Keith Simpson, that she had not been strangled at all. Not that Spilsbury should have all the credit. Superintendent Walter Hambrook believed that Fox was ‘a devil incarnate’ on the basis of his having blue eyes as, so Hambrook believed, did most murderers. To aficionados, those are the well-known cases but there were others which Andrew Rose examines, including Jack Seymour, hanged in 1931 on the most dubious scientific evidence.

Mr Rose – an immigration judge who has previously dissected the cases against Madame Fahmy, who killed her husband at the Savoy hotel during a thunderstorm, and Steinie Morrison, convicted of the murder of Leon Beron on Clapham Common – has done a fine job, not only with Spilsbury’s court appearances but with what passed as his personal life. His marriage was unhappy and he formed a close attachment to his secretary Hilda Bainbridge, the young widow of a physiology professor. He committed suicide in 1947.

Mr Rose rightly points out that he can only cover a selection of Spilsbury’s cases but he tantalises us with the inquest on the Duff family, making only a passing reference to the barrister William Fearnley-Whittingstall, who blunted Spilsbury’s evidence, so ensuring his client Grace Duff was never charged with the murders.


Perhaps this will be his next investigation. Meanwhile, the thoroughly entertaining Lethal Witness should be compulsory reading for anyone who still believes in the infallibility of the expert.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist