The jury at the Old Bailey was out for about forty-five minutes. On April 15, 1957, after seventeen days, the longest murder trial in England up to that time, it found Dr. John Bodkin Adams not guilty of murdering his patient Edith Alice Morrell. The Attorney General then did something almost without precedent. Rather than try Adams on the second indictment, for the death of Gertrude Hullett, he entered a nolle prosequi and dropped it. Adams left the court never having been convicted of killing anyone, and he never was, but what he had done in Eastbourne has been argued over ever since.
Adams came from Randalstown in County Antrim, qualified in medicine at Queen's University Belfast, and settled in 1922 in Eastbourne, a Sussex resort with an unusually wealthy and elderly population, where he built a very large practice. He was a lay preacher of the Plymouth Brethren, a poor diagnostician by the account of colleagues, and a diligent cultivator of rich patients. Many of them remembered him in their wills. Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard and his team later examined the wills of 132 former patients, dating from 1946 to 1956, from which Adams had benefited; he had received money, silver, jewelry, a Rolls-Royce and a Jaguar. He had signed cremation forms declaring that he had no financial interest in the deaths.
The case began with Gertrude Hullett, known as Bobby, a widow of about fifty. Her husband, Jack, had died on March 14, 1956, at seventy-one, of what Adams had diagnosed as a probably cancerous bowel obstruction, leaving Adams £500 from an estate of £94,644. Four months later she fell into a coma, and she died on July 23, 1956. A nurse who attended her was reported to have said to Adams, "You do realise, doctor, that you have killed her?" The pathologist Francis Camps argued that she had been poisoned; Patrick Devlin, the judge who would try Adams, thought it clear that she had taken her own life, and that the extent of Adams's part in her death, if any, was uncertain.
Hannam's theory was that Adams made elderly patients dependent on heroin and morphine, induced them to leave him legacies, and then killed them with larger doses. He assembled a file he considered strong enough for four murder charges. Camps came to believe that Adams had killed 163 patients, the figure that has followed the case ever since. Adams was arrested on December 19, 1956, and indicted on two counts, for Morrell and for Hullett.
Edith Alice Morrell, born in 1869, was a wealthy widow partly paralyzed by a stroke, and she had died on November 13, 1950, at eighty-one, after being given large and rising doses of heroin and morphine. Her body had been cremated. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, chose to prosecute her death first, a choice that was questioned at the time, though Devlin considered it the stronger of the two cases. Many others then and since thought the Hullett case the stronger.
Manningham-Buller led the prosecution himself. The defense was led by Geoffrey Lawrence, hired by the Medical Defence Union, in his first capital case. Lawrence's decisive move was to produce the nurses' own daily record books, which contradicted what the nurses told the court about the doses. The medical experts divided. Dr. Arthur Douthwaite was adamant that Adams had killed Morrell; Dr. Michael Ashby was more hesitant, and Devlin, summing up, called Ashby the key witness, whose borderline evidence made it unsafe to convict. Adams did not give evidence. Devlin told the jury that a doctor was entitled to do all that was proper and necessary to relieve pain and suffering even if it incidentally shortened life, the principle later known as double effect, and directed them not to convict unless they rejected every argument for the defense. He accepted afterward that it had been a summing-up for an acquittal.
Manningham-Buller then withdrew the Hullett indictment, partly, in his own words, because that case would again rest on Ashby's evidence. Devlin later described the nolle prosequi as an abuse of process, used to conceal the weaknesses of the prosecution. Later in 1957 Adams was convicted on thirteen lesser counts, among them prescription fraud, lying on cremation forms, obstructing a police search and failing to keep a dangerous drugs register. He was fined £2,200, resigned from the National Health Service and was struck off the medical register. He was restored to it in 1961 and practiced in Eastbourne until his death on July 4, 1983, leaving more than £400,000.
The police remained convinced that he had killed many patients, and much of the press agreed; one Fleet Street journalist of the day said the authorities had felt they must prosecute even though the case was not quite ready. His defenders saw a greedy, careless doctor who eased the deaths of the dying at a time when the law had not settled what a doctor could do. The only verdict a jury ever gave concerned Edith Morrell, and it was not guilty.