John Bodkin Adams (21 January 18994 July 1983) was a British general practitioner, convicted fraudster, and suspected serial killer. He was born to Samuel and Ellen Adams. The family were listed as ‘Christian Brethren’. Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of his patients died while in comas, which was deemed to be worthy of investigation. In addition, 132 out of 310 patients had left Adams money or items in their wills.
Adams was tried and acquitted for the murder of one patient in 1957, while another count of murder was withdrawn by the prosecution in what was later described as "an abuse of process" by the presiding judge, Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin, causing questions to be asked in Parliament about the prosecution's handling of events. Adams was found guilty in a subsequent trial of thirteen offences of prescription drug fraud, lying on cremation forms, obstruction of justice during a police search and failing to keep a dangerous drugs register. He was struck off by the General Medical Council in 1957 and reinstated in 1961 after two failed applications.
Adams's first trial was described as "one of the greatest murder trials of all time" and dubbed the "murder trial of the century."The Times, 11 June 1985, p. 10 The trial also established the doctrine of double effect, whereby a doctor giving treatment with the aim of relieving pain may lawfully, as an unintentional result, shorten life. Because of the publicity surrounding Adams's committal hearing, the law was changed to allow defendants to ask for such hearings to be held in private. Furthermore, although a defendant had not been required within recorded legal history to give evidence in his own defence as part of the right to silence in England and Wales, the judge underlined in his summing-up that no prejudice should be attached by the jury to Adams not doing so.
Scotland Yard's files on the case were initially closed to the public for 75 years and would have remained so until 2033. Following a request by historian Pamela Cullen, special permission was granted in 2003 to reopen the files, which have since been used by several researchers.
Early years John Bodkin Adams was born and raised in Randalstown, Ulster, Ireland, into a deeply religious family of Plymouth Brethren, an austere Protestant sect of which he remained a member for his entire life. His father, Samuel, was a preacher in the local congregation and a watchmaker by profession; he also had a passionate interest in cars which he would pass on to John. In 1896, Samuel was 39 years of age when he married Ellen Bodkin, aged 30. John was their first son, followed by a brother, William Samuel, in 1903. In 1914, Adams's father died of a stroke. Four years later, his brother died in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
After attending Coleraine Academical Institution for several years Adams matriculated at The Queen's University of Belfast at age 17. There he was seen as a "plodder" and "lone wolf" by his lecturers and, partly because of an illness (probably tuberculosis), he missed a year of studies. He graduated in 1921, having failed to qualify for honours. In 1921, surgeon Arthur Rendle Short offered Adams a position as assistant houseman at Bristol Royal Infirmary. He spent a year there but did not prove a success. On Short's advice, Adams applied for a job as a general practitioner in a Christian practice in Eastbourne, Sussex.
Eastbourne
Adams arrived in Eastbourne in 1922, where he lived with his mother and his cousin, Sarah Florence Henry. In 1927 the Eastbourne Gazette released an article which highlights the suspicious nature of Adams' practice. A patient Frederick Eykyn, whom a will worth £3642 was released upon his death, was found died by gunshot wound in his coal cellar. While his widow acknowledged his nervous depression, she was insistent he was in a fine mood the night before his death, never made apparent any suicidal ideation or owned a firearm. Adams disputed this being one of the first on the scene the Sunday morning Eykyn was found, Eykyn being his long-term patient. In 1929, he borrowed £2,000 (equivalent to £100,753 at 2022 prices) from a patient, William Mawhood, and bought an eighteen-room house called Kent Lodge,Guilty on 14 Charges – Time in Trinity Trees (then known as Seaside Road), a select address. Adams would frequently invite himself to the Mawhoods' residence at mealtime, even bringing his mother and cousin. He also began charging items to their accounts at local stores without their permission. MrsMawhood would later describe Adams to the police as "a real scrounger". When Mr Mawhood died in 1949, Adams visited his widow, uninvited, and took a 22-carat-gold pen from her bedroom dressing table, saying he wanted "something of her husband's". He never visited her again.
Gossip regarding Adams's unconventional methods had started by the mid-1930s. In 1935, he inherited £7,385 from a patient, Matilda Whitton; her whole estate amounted to £11,465, equivalent to £416,489 and £646,588 respectively at 2022 values. Whitton's will was contested by her relatives but upheld in court, though a codicil giving Adams's mother £100 was overturned. Adams then began receiving "anonymous postcards" about him "bumping off" patients, as he admitted in a newspaper interview in 1957. These were received at a rate of three or four a year until the Second World War, and then commenced again in 1945.
In 1939 or 1941, Adams started injecting a Mrs.Agnes Pike with drugs, including morphine. After some time in his care, Mrs.Pike's health deteriorated so much that the family, alerted by the proprietor of the guest house Mrs.Pike was in, called another doctor named Philip Mathew. Mathew established that there was no medical reason for MrsPike to be treated. Adams's drugs, notably the morphine, put her in such a state that she was unable to recall her own name or age. She was removed from Adams's care and after about eight weeks she made an almost full recovery; she regained her mental faculties and was well enough to go out and do her own shopping. This was a rare case of Adams's victim surviving.
Adams stayed in Eastbourne throughout the war, and in 1941 he gained a diploma in anaesthetics. He worked one day a week in a local hospital, where he acquired a reputation as a bungler: he would fall asleep during operations, eat cakes, count money, and even mix up the anaesthetic gas tubes, leading to patients waking up or turning blue. In 1943 his mother died, and in 1952 his cousin Sarah developed cancer. Adams gave her an injection half an hour before she died.
January 1945, Adams attended an event hosted by the Y.W.C.A, a Christian group that collected charity during war times to house nurses. The event, alongside Adams, was attended by prominent British socialites for instance; Deborah Cavendish the Duchess of Devonshire, lady Helen Violet, and lady Andrew Cavendish.
Adams's career was very successful; the journalist Rodney Hallworth later claimed that by 1956 he was reputed to be the wealthiest doctor in England, although without citing any evidence. A similarly unsourced claim that "he was probably the wealthiest GP in England" was made by Cullen. Adams attended some famous and influential people in the region, including MP and Olympic medal winner Lord Burghley, society painter Oswald Birley, Admiral Robert Prendergast, industrialist Sir Alexander Maguire, the 10th Duke of Devonshire, Eastbourne's Chief Constable Richard Walker and many businessmen.
After years of rumours and Adams having been mentioned in at least 132 wills of his patients, on 23 July 1956 Eastbourne police received an anonymous call about a death. It was from Leslie Henson, the music-hall performer, whose friend Gertrude Hullett had died unexpectedly while being treated by Adams.
Police investigation On 23 July 1956, the day MrsHullett died, the Eastbourne coroner notified Walker that from his post-mortem her death did not appear to be natural. The police began taking statements from individuals who had been in contact with her shortly before her death, many of whom believed that she had committed suicide. One of her friends, who was also her executor, provided three letters she had written in April 1956 and had placed with her will, which indicated that she had contemplated suicide then. A second post mortem conducted by a Home Office pathologist concluded that the cause of death was barbiturate poisoning.
After the second post-mortem, the investigation was taken over from Eastbourne police on 17 August 1956 by two officers from the Metropolitan Police's Murder Squad. The senior officer, Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard, was known for having secured a conviction in the Teddington Towpath Murders in 1953, although the defence counsel, Peter Rawlinson, called into question Hannam's evidence on how the confession was obtained. In view of the opinion Hannam later expressed, that detectives must sometimes ignore the law, his methods are open to question.26 October 2017 "Yesterday" TV channel, "Murder Maps" Series 3 Episode 3 presented by Nicholas Day He was assisted by Detective Sergeant Charles Hewett. Hannam was in the unusual position that, instead of having to find a suspect for a known crime, he had a known suspect in Adams but needed to link him to more serious crimes than forging prescriptions, making false statements and mishandling drugs. Devlin suggests that Hannam became fixated on the idea that Adams had murdered many elderly patients for legacies, regarding his receiving a legacy as grounds for suspicion, although Adams was generally only a minor beneficiary.
Investigators decided to focus on cases from 1946 to 1956. Of the 310 death certificates examined by Home Office pathologist Francis Camps, 163 were considered by Camps to be worthy of further investigation. This was because, firstly, a very high some 42% of all 310 of Adams's deceased were diagnosed as having died of cerebral thrombosis or cerebral haemorrhage against an average in the late 1950s of around 15% for elderly, bedridden patients, and secondly the 163 certificates related to Adams's patients who had died while in a coma could be suggestive of the administration of a narcotic or barbiturate as well as the cause stated. The police took numerous statements from nurses who had treated Adams's patients and their relatives. Some were generally favourable to him, but others claimed Adams had given patients "special injections" of substances that were unknown to the nurses and which Adams refused to disclose to them. The statements also claimed that his habit was to ask the nurses to leave the room before injections were given and that he would also isolate patients from their relatives, hindering contact with them. However several of the witnesses whom Hannam had questioned orally refused to give sworn statements to confirm their allegations against Adams. During the trial, the assertions of MrsMorrell's nurses that they did not know what Adams was injecting or that he did not give injections in front of them were disproved by the contents of their own notebooks.
Obstruction
On 24 August the British Medical Association (BMA) sent a letter to all doctors in Eastbourne reminding them of "Professional Secrecy" (i.e. patient confidentiality) if interviewed by the police. The police were frustrated by this move, although some local doctors ignored it and gave statements relating either to deceased patients or, in one instance, one who was alive. The action of the BMA was part of a concerted attempt to secure better terms for its members, whose pay had remained virtually static since the National Health Service had been set up in 1948; this action later led to talk of an all-out strike.