John Bodkin Adams was born in Randalstown, County Antrim, on January 21, 1899, qualified in medicine at Queen's University Belfast, and settled in 1922 in Eastbourne, a Sussex town with an unusually wealthy and elderly population. He built a very large practice among them. He was a Plymouth Brethren lay preacher, a poor diagnostician by the account of colleagues, and an assiduous cultivator of rich patients. The press called him Doctor Death.
Between 1946 and 1956 some 163 of his patients died in circumstances the police later regarded as suspicious. Many had been prescribed large and rising doses of heroin and morphine. A great many changed their wills in his favour shortly before dying, and he received money, silverware, jewellery, a Rolls-Royce and a Jaguar. He signed cremation forms declaring he had no financial interest in the deaths.
He was tried at the Old Bailey in 1957 for the murder of Edith Alice Morrell, an eighty-one-year-old stroke patient who had died in 1950. It ran seventeen days, the longest murder trial in England to that point. The defence produced the nurses' own day books, which contradicted their evidence about the doses given, and Adams did not go into the witness box. The judge, Patrick Devlin, directed the jury on what became known as the doctrine of double effect: that a doctor may lawfully give treatment to relieve pain even if it shortens life. The jury acquitted him in forty-six minutes.
A second indictment, for the death of Gertrude Hullett, was then withdrawn by the Attorney General by nolle prosequi rather than tried, a decision Devlin later described in print as an abuse of process. Adams was convicted the same year on thirteen counts of prescription fraud, lying on cremation forms and failing to keep a dangerous drugs register, fined and struck off. He was restored to the medical register in 1961 and practised until he died on July 4, 1983, leaving over four hundred thousand pounds.
He was never convicted of any killing, and this entry does not treat him as a murderer. What he was, exactly, remains the argument: a man who systematically killed wealthy patients for their legacies, or an incompetent and greedy doctor who eased the deaths of the dying at a time when the law had not decided what that meant.