Like Harold Shipman he, too, was a family doctor who had been accused of murdering his patients. The cherubic Ulsterman sipping an orange juice in front of me at a reception in London was suspected of killing as many as 25 of his elderly women patients with morphine and heroin injections and his murder trial at the Old Bailey in 1957 gripped national attention for 17 days and filled acres of news space, writes Wesley Boyd..
Dr John Bodkin Adams ran a successful private practice in the genteel seaside resort of Eastbourne for 35 years before his arrest. He was from Randalstown, Co Antrim and had been educated at Coleraine Academical Institution and Queen's University, Belfast. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he was what was known in the Ulster of his youth as "good-living", regularly attending church services and prayer meetings. He went into practice in Eastbourne in the early twenties and opened his surgery each day with readings from the Bible.
His widowed mother joined him there and lived with him until her death in 1943. She was the possessive type. When her son fell in love with Norah O'Hara, the daughter of a local butcher, and wanted to become engaged to her in 1935 she refused to let him marry into "trade".
The doctor's practice flourished and by the late 1930s he had more than 2,000 patients on his list. Many of them were frail and rich widows. Eastbourne was a popular retirement haven for the moneyed classes and most women outlived their husbands. Bequests to doctors were not uncommon; a practitioner would charge only nominal fees during the life of the patient on the understanding that he would be rewarded in the will.
Adams, however, appeared to benefit from this custom more than other local doctors. After his trial it was revealed that he been a beneficiary of more than 130 wills and had been left large sums of money, jewellery, canteens of silver cutlery, furniture and cars, including two Rolls Royces. One family contested a will in court but Adams won.
Among his fellow doctors the joke was that Adams did his rounds with a bottle of morphine in one hand and a blank will form in the other. Suspicions were aroused that he was using undue influence on elderly women who were dying. Codicils in his favour were reputed to have been added to wills a short time before the patients died. Some of the widows changed their wills saying they wanted to be cremated instead of buried, as they had originally requested.
Following the death of one of his patents, 87-year-old Mrs Alice Mortell, a wealthy widow, Scotland Yard was called in to investigate the allegations. It was claimed that Adams had killed Mrs Mortell with drug injections because he believed he would benefit from her will. When he was arrested he told police: "She wanted to die. That cannot be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor."
The police began leaking stories to national newspapers that they had a mass murderer on their hands. One crime reporter, Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express, would not accept the police leaks, mainly because he did not trust the officer in charge of the case. He refused to follow the "Dr Death" line being trotted out by the other papers despite heavy pressure from his news desk. His indignation against Scotland Yard's conduct of the investigation was such that he provided Michael Foot, editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune (and later leader of the British Labour Party), with information for articles denouncing the Yard's actions.
At his Old Bailey trial Adams spoke only six words when he was formally charged with murder: "I am not guilty, my lord." Much of the case against him rested on the testimony of four nurses who had attended Mrs Mortell. They said the doctor had given her large injections of morphine and on one occasion, when she was unconscious, another large injection. Backed by this evidence Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney General (known at the Bar as Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner), was confident he would destroy Adams in cross-examination and send him to the scaffold. But Adams's counsel, Mr Geoffrey Lawrence, declined to put him in the witness box. Instead he produced the nurses' original notebooks which had been found in an old cabinet. They showed the nurses' memories to be defective. The "large injection" was simply a mild sedative and no morphine had been administered on its own.
In his summing-up Mr Justice (later Lord) Devlin said that if treatment had been given with the intention of killing the patient, it was murder; if it was intended to relieve pain and had the incidental effect of shortening life, it need not be murder.
After an absence of 44 minutes the jury found John Bodkin Adams not guilty. The Crown did not proceed with a second charge of murdering another patient. He was convicted of some lesser charges, including failing to keep a register of dangerous drugs, fined and struck off the Medical Register.
Adams sought and received massive libel payments from almost all the national papers in Fleet Street for prejudging the outcome of his trial. He took no action against the Daily Express and ordained that Percy Hoskins would receive £1,000 in his will.
Four years later his appeal to be reinstated on the Medical Register was granted and he resumed practice in Eastbourne. He was quickly back on his old social rounds with the Camera Club, the Wine and Food Society and the Ulster Association. It was at a reception for delegates of the Ulster Association in the old Ulster Office in Lower Regent Street, London that I met him when I was covering the event for my newspaper in the 1960s. The Ulster Association was a support group for the Unionist government at Stormont and had branches all over Britain. The stout doctor with his round face chattered cheerfully as he moved around the room bringing greetings from the Eastbourne loyalists.
He died 20 years ago, aged 84, leaving £400,000 in his will. His ashes were taken back to Ulster and placed in his parents' grave. Lord Devlin wrote a book about the case called Easing the Passing. The title derived from a remark made by Adams when he was being questioned by Scotland Yard: "Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked."