Serial Killer Doctors Read Free Page A

in 1921, taking up a job as an assistant houseman at Bristol Royal Infirmary. A year later, he accepted a position at a Christian practice in Eastbourne.
    In Eastbourne, Adams initially lived with his mother and his cousin, Sarah Florence Henry but in 1929, he borrowed £2,000 from William Mawhood, one of his patients, in order to purchase Kent Lodge, an 18-room house in the upmarket area of Seaside Road, now known as Trinity Trees.
    Adams was already acting strangely towards patients. In the case of Mawhood, for instance, he often turned up uninvited for dinner, even, on occasion, bringing his mother and cousin. When he went shopping, he was in the habit of charging items to the Mawhoods’ accounts, without their permission.
    By the mid-1930s, rumours were already circulating about Adams and how he often seemed to be so well thought-of by his patients that they wrote him into their wills shortly before they died. In 1935, for instance, Matilda Whitton bequeathed him £7,385, which in today’s terms is around £380,000. Mrs Whitton’s family contested the will but it was upheld, although the judge did overturn a codicil giving Adams’ mother £100.
    During the Second World War, he remained in Eastbourne but was infuriated by the fact that the other doctors in the town rejected him as a member of a pool system that was created to cover the patients of doctors who were called up. Apart from the rumours of dishonesty that surrounded him, he was also thought not to be a very good doctor. He had gained a degree in anaesthetics in 1941 but had been known to fall asleep during operations and confuse the gasses being used.
    Nonetheless, he continued to practise after the war until Leslie Henson made his fateful telephone call.
    Eastbourne police handed the case over to the Metropolitan Police Murder Squad in 1956. The senior investigating officer was Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard, the man responsible for solving the infamous 1953 Teddington Towpath Murders involving the killing and rape of two teenage girls near Teddington Lock on the River Thames. Hannam and his team examined cases between 1946 and 1956, with Home Office pathologist Francis Camps finding 163 deaths that he considered suspicious. Camps had previously done invaluable work on the case of notorious serial killer, John Christie, who strangled at least eight women in his flat at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London. He noted the numerous occasions on which Adams had given patients what he termed ‘special injections’, refusing to divulge to other medical staff present what was in the syringe and asking them to leave the room before he administered the injection.
    The weight of the medical establishment lined up behind Adams, however. The British Medical Association, for instance, wrote to every doctor practising in Eastbourne to remind them of their obligation of ‘Professional Secrecy’, prohibiting them from revealing anything about Adams to the police. Hannam succeeded, however, in convincing the BMA of the seriousness of the allegations and eventually the ban was rescinded.
    On October 1, Hannam met Adams and Adams claimed that his inheritances were mainly in lieu of the fees he would have charged. When Hannam asked him, therefore, why he had not stated his financial interest on cremation forms, Adams replied: ‘Oh, that wasn’t done wickedly, God knows it wasn’t. We always want cremations to go off smoothly for the dear relatives. If I said I knew I was getting money under the will they might get suspicious and I like cremations and burials to go smoothly. There was nothing suspicious really. It was not deceitful.’
    A search of Adams’s surgery uncovered the fact the he had not kept a dangerous Drugs’ Register since 1949. During the search he also surreptitiously slipped a couple of items into his pocket. When challenged about them, they turned out to be bottles of morphine, one for a patient named Annie Sharp who