This is the sixth in a 11-part investigation into the 1934 ‘Bow Cinema Murder’. You can read all entries in the series here.
Once the police were on site at the Eastern Palace Cinema, they started gathering forensic evidence. This was partially to aid the investigation, but also to start building an evidence base to use if and when the case would go to court. The items which were recovered from the crime scene included a piece of flooring; human hair and samples of bloodstains. After a thorough search of the cinema, the police also recovered the murder weapon: a small axe, or hatchet. This was also handed over for investigation. Forensic investigations were undertaken by the same specialists who also did the post-mortems of the victims of crime: forensic pathologists.
The pathologist initially appointed to the Bow Cinema Murder case was Dr Francis Temple Grey, a retired Royal Navy surgeon and previously employed as pathologist for the Ministry of Pensions. He was in his late 40s in 1934 and had a deep scientific interest in biochemistry. On 8 August, the day after the murder, he presided over the autopsy of Dudley Hoard at Poplar Mortuary. The post-mortem was also attended by Donald Summers, the police surgeon who had attended Hoard immediately after the attack; Dr Normal Brown, who had treated Dudley in St Andrew’s Hospital; and the most famous pathologist in Britain, Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
Bernard Spilsbury was a Home Office pathologist and a celebrity. He had made his name during the notorious murder trial of Dr Crippen, where Spilsbury’s expert evidence nailed Crippen’s conviction. Spilsbury was also responsible for the conviction of a host of other notorious killers, from George Smith, the ‘Brides in the Bath murderer’, in 1915; to Patrick Mahon in 1924. Spilsbury was a workaholic and a brilliant orator, which made him successful both as a pathologist and as an expert witness. His reputation remained untarnished during his lifetime, although in recent years some of his assertions, including those on which basis Crippen was convicted, have been refuted.
In 1934 though, Bernard Spilsbury was considered the best pathologist to have on a case. He was specifically asked to attend the postmortem of Dudley Hoard, and undertake forensic examinations, by Norman Kendall, the Assistant Commissioner for Crime at the Metropolitan Police. As Kendall later wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Tindal Atkinson, he considered Temple Grey a ‘notoriously untrustworthy witness’ when it came to giving evidence in court.[1] Kendall was worried that, if the case were to go to court, Grey would potentially make incorrect or unclear statements that may confuse the jury and jeopardize a conviction. To avoid having to call Grey to the stand, Kendall wanted to make sure that Spilsbury was involved in every step of the forensic investigation, so that he could act as a witness instead. Throughout the investigation, the police continued to worry that they had not built a sufficiently strong case, and be on the look-out for anything that may undermine a ‘guilty’ verdict.
There’s no record of how Temple Grey felt about having Sir Bernard Spilsbury watching over his every move. His report of Dudley’s autopsy noted that Dudley had suffered from nine cuts, six fractures, and three brain injuries. It seemed that Dudley got hit on his head from behind; fell onto the carpet; then got up again; and moved with his assailant out of his flat and up the stairs to the cinema balcony, where he eventually collapsed. There were copious amounts of blood on the floors and walls of the flat and cinema which marked out this trajectory. The pathologist took a photo of Dudley’s skull, and drew a diagram to indicate where the cuts and fractures had been found.
When examining the axe, it was found that it mostly contained blood on the back and left-hand side, implying that Dudley and Maisie had been hit with the blunt back of the axe head. Hairs of both Maisie and Dudley were found on the axe; his below hers, which showed that he had been attacked first. It provided irrefutable proof that the axe had been the weapon used in the attack; that both Dudley and Maisie had been attacked with the same weapon and therefore presumably by the same person; and that Maisie’s initial statement on how the attack had panned out matched the evidence. It did not, however, bring the police any closer to catching their killer.
DNA was of course completely unknown during the 1930s, so there was no possibility to match any of the blood found in the cinema to either the victims or the perpetrator. Fingerprints were known, and had first been used to successfully convict two murderers in 1905. That case, the murder of a shopkeeper and his wife in Deptford, bore some striking resemblances to the Bow Cinema Murder.[2] Yet as soon as fingerprinting evidence became commonplace, would-be criminals knew to wear gloves. The Bow Cinema murderer had followed this advice too, and fingerprints played no significant role in the investigation. Instead, the police were to rely on the killer’s behaviour after the murder, which was so erratic that it very quickly made them sure they had found the guilty man.
[1] ‘Defendant: Stockwell, John Frederick. Charge: Murder’, CRIM 1/734, National Archives
[2] Colin Beavan, Fingerprints: Murder and the race to uncover the science of identity (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), pp. 1-19
Interwar London 