Bodies, Traces and Spaces: Historical perspectives on twentieth-century homicide investigation and forensic medicine.
Convenor: Dr Neil Pemberton
Contact:
- The Development of Forensic Pathology in London, England: Keith Simpson and the Dobkin Case.
Presenter: Dr Amy Bell (Huron College, UWO)
Forensic pathologists, medical experts specializing in the examination of corpses, were and are called on by coroners to determine the cause of death of bodies found in suspicious circumstances. As forensic pathologists sought greater professional and academic recognition in England in the mid-twentieth century, they argued that their public existence was made necessary by a large number of undiscovered crimes. Despite the fact that criminal cases were only a tiny fraction of their work, forensic pathologists sought to build their reputations on murder cases ‘nearly’ undiscovered and unpunished, using their public role in the court room of the criminal trial to highlight their expertise.
This paper examines the 1942 Dobkin case, in which a skeleton found in the cellar of a bombed-out Baptist church was painstakingly reconstructed by pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. The Dobkin case was of lifelong importance for Simpson, as it was the first case in which he staked his claim for scientific authority in the courts and the press. It was also important in the history of forensic science as one of the first capital cases determined entirely on circumstantial evidence, including the scientific evidence prepared by and collected by Simpson. The Dobkin case will show how Simpson and others sought to inscribe their own scientific expertise on the physical bodies of those who died by violence, and on English medical, legal and policing institutions. Their emphasis on the importance of forensics was part of the wider postwar aims of experts to inscribe order on the city. With the common goals of systematic reform and rationalization, the attempts to reconstruct police investigations and legal evidence on a scientific basis were an integral part of postwar plans for social and urban reconstruction.
- The House of Murder: The Birth of the Crime Scene and the John Christie Case. Presenters: Drs Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton (CHSTM, The University of Manchester)
This paper focuses upon one of the most famous cases of the twentieth century – the 1953 case of the serial murderer John Reginald Halliday Christie, who interned his victims either within the walls of his dingy Notting Hill tenement or buried them in his backyard. As is well known, the case was entangled with an earlier crime that, in many respects, loomed even larger – the murder of Beryl Evans in 1949. That year the bodies of Mrs Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine, had been found ling together in the washhouse of 10 Rillington Place. It was Timothy Evans, the husband and father, who was hanged for the murder of his daughter. For four decades, legal, political, medical and cultural controversies swirled around 10 Rillington Place – which the press morbidly nicknamed the ‘House of Murder’. The Evans and Christie Cases caused intense political, social, medical, scientific and legal controversies over three decades and in this paper we intend show that medical and scientific forensic practices and locations were deeply implicated in the production and the projection of the house into the public and expert imagination.
More specifically, we want to analyse the dynamic interlocking of the practices and locations of forensic pathology and forensic science in the context of an investigation of one house, in which both models were thrown together in a collaborative exercise. We will show how both disciplinary models endeavoured to use the house as an interpretative space that enabled experts to understand the mysteries and conflicting appearances presented by the objects, traces and bodies retrieved from its interior. For us, it is clear that the probing and analysis of this space by investigators proved important to representing at the same time a crime scene, a serial murderer, victimhood and the methods of murder. We will examine how this collaboration and its investigative constructs provoked sustained scrutiny and triggered national controversy, as the investigation of 10 Rillington Place became a lightning rod of anti-capital punishment protest. Thus, one of the central purposes of this paper will be to understand the extent to which forensic practices and knowledge channelled and mediated the political and legal furore that swirled around the house of murder.
- The Laboratory and Forensic Medicine in Scotland, 1900-1945
Presenter: Nicholas Duvall (CHSTM, The University of Manchester)
This paper will explore the role of laboratory techniques and procedures in forensic medicine in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it will focus on practice at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, which at the time had internationally renowned departments in this field. Using a number of case studies drawn from the extensive archives of these universities, and elsewhere, I will demonstrate how disciplines and techniques such as serology and spectroscopy interacted with the traditional forensic space, the post-mortem room, to produce a more comprehensive explanation or account of a death or an injury. The paper will examine laboratory-based forensic medicine both in its natural habitat of the university laboratory, and in the courtroom, where the findings of its practitioners were communicated to lay courts and juries. I will scrutinize how this knowledge was constructed, in both contexts, and in what ways it was challenged, or not, by opposing counsel. A particular feature of the analysis will be an account of the transfer of evidentiary standards associated with the autopsy room to the laboratory, for example involving issues of corroboration, as well as of ways in which the differences between the two spaces meant that new approaches and standards were required. This will, in part, draw inspiration from recent work carried out on the forensic science of the late-twentieth century, such as the histories of DNA-fingerprinting by Michael Lynch, Simon Cole, and others, as well as more general theories of about the formation of scientific knowledge.