Free Medical Detectives by Robin Odell Page A

and finally shot himself. Spilsbury was dead himself by then but his part in helping Merrett to retain his freedom in Edinburgh twenty-seven years earlier did not go unremarked. Indeed Sir Sydney Smith demonstrated some venom when he wrote in his memoirs, ‘The slackness of the police and the credit given to the misleading evidence of Spilsbury and Churchill, who had made a mistake and were too stubborn to admit it, allowed Merrett to live – and to kill again.’ Thus, Spilsbury’s excursion into the realm of the defence expert was pursued by controversy.

    A few weeks after the case against Merrett was found controversially Not Proven, Spilsbury was involved in an enquiry that was merely sensational – it concerned a trunk deposited at the luggage office at Charing Cross railway station in London. It had been left on 6 May 1927 and was soon the subject of attention on account of the awful stench which it emitted. The trunk was opened under police supervision and it was not long before Spilsbury had the task of making a close examination of its contents.
    The putrefying remains in the trunk proved to be the dismembered body of a woman. From bruises and other indications, Spilsbury was able to ascertain that the woman, whose identity was unknown, had been asphyxiated. Articles of clothing in the trunk carried laundry marks and one bore a tab with the name, ‘P. Holt’, printed on it. The garments were traced to an address in Chelsea and the body in the trunk was identified within twenty-four hours as that of Minnie Bonati, a married Italian lady of promiscuous inclinations who had been working as a cook.
    Within a week, a taxi driver had come forward to report that on 6 May he had been hired by a man who lived in Rochester Row to drive him to Charing Cross railway station. He easily remembered the incident as his fare needed assistance to move a heavy trunk. A search of the premises resulted in the discovery that an estate agent by the name of John Robinson, who rented a furnished room in the building, was absent. Robinson was apprehended in London on 19 May and, after a false start, when neither the taxi driver nor the porter at Charing Cross left luggage office could positively identify him, he gave himself away during questioning.
    Robinson’s story was that he had met Mrs Bonati and taken her back to his office. There, she had demanded money and became aggressive. She hit out at him and, in the resulting scuffle, he retaliated and she fell, dazed, to the floor. Later, he found that she was dead and, faced with disposing of her body, decided on dismemberment. By an extraordinary coincidence or piece of copycat planning, Robinson went in search of a suitable knife and found what he wanted at the shop in Victoria Street where, three years previously, Patrick Mahon had bought his implements of destruction. He then obtained a trunk in Brixton and, under the very noses of the officers of Rochester Row police station, had it transported with its grim contents to Charing Cross.
    Robinson’s thin story line was readily disproved in court and his trial for murder lasted only two days. The medical evidence proved conclusively that the bruises on Bonati’s body were not the result of a fall but of a succession of blows followed by asphyxiation. Asked how the bruises had been caused, Spilsbury’s reply was characteristically direct; ‘Most of them were caused by direct violence,’ he said. In what must have been seen as virtually a lost cause by the defence, the indefatigable Dr Bronte was produced to repute Spilsbury’s findings and lend weight to the accused man’s account of an accidental death. His arguments proved equally thin and Robinson was found guilty.

    It was not long before the two pathologists were again pitched into the arena as opponents. Between April 1928 and March 1929, three members of the same family in Croydon died of arsenical poisoning. Edmund Creighton Duff was a former Colonial civil servant who