John Bodkin Adams (21 January 1899 – 4 July 1983) was a British general practitioner, convicted fraudster, and suspected serial killer. Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of his patients died while in comas, which was deemed to be worthy of investigation. In addition, 132 out of 310 patients had left Adams money or items in their wills.
Adams was tried and acquitted for the murder of one patient in 1957, while another count of murder was withdrawn by the prosecution in what was later described as "an abuse of process" by the presiding judge Sir Patrick Devlin, causing questions to be asked in Parliament about the prosecution's handling of events. Adams was found guilty in a subsequent trial of thirteen offences of prescription fraud, lying on cremation forms, obstructing a police search and failing to keep a dangerous drugs register. He was struck off the Medical Register in 1957 and reinstated in 1961 after two failed applications.
Adams's first trial received worldwide press coverage and was described as "one of the greatest murder trials of all time" and "murder trial of the century". The trial also had several important legal ramifications. It established the doctrine of double effect, whereby a doctor giving treatment with the aim of relieving pain may lawfully, as an unintentional result, shorten life. Secondly, because of the publicity surrounding Adams's committal hearing, the law was changed to allow defendants to ask for such hearings to be held in private. Finally, although a defendant had not been required within recorded legal history to give evidence in his own defence, the judge underlined in his summing-up that no prejudice should be attached by the jury to Adams not doing so.
Scotland Yard's files on the case were initially closed to the public for 75 years, and would have remained so until 2033. Following a request by historian Pamela Cullen, special permission was granted in 2003 to reopen the files, and these have since been used by several researchers.
Early years
John Bodkin Adams was born and raised in Randalstown, Ulster, Ireland, into a deeply religious family of Plymouth Brethren, an austere Protestant sect of which he remained a member for his entire life. His father, Samuel, was a preacher in the local congregation and by profession was a watchmaker; he also had a passionate interest in cars which he would pass on to John. In 1896, Samuel was 39 years of age when he married Ellen Bodkin, aged 30. John was their first son, followed by a brother, William Samuel, in 1903. In 1914, Adams's father died of a stroke. Four years later, William died in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
After attending Coleraine Academical Institution for several years, Adams matriculated at The Queen's University of Belfast at the age of 17. There he was seen as a "plodder" and "lone wolf" by his lecturers and, partly because of an illness (probably tuberculosis), he missed a year of studies. He graduated in 1921, having failed to qualify for honors. In 1921, surgeon Arthur Rendle Short offered Adams a position as assistant houseman at Bristol Royal Infirmary. He spent a year there but did not prove a success. On Short's advice, Adams applied for a job as a general practitioner in a Christian practice in Eastbourne, Sussex.
Eastbourne
Adams arrived in Eastbourne in 1922, where he lived with his mother and his cousin, Sarah Florence Henry. In 1929, he borrowed £2,000 (equivalent to £104,247 at 2011 prices) from a patient, William Mawhood, and bought an 18-room house called Kent Lodge, in Trinity Trees (then known as Seaside Road), a select address. Adams would frequently invite himself to the Mawhoods' residence at meal time, even bringing his mother and cousin. He also began charging items to their accounts at local stores without their permission. Mrs Mawhood would later describe Adams to the police as "a real scrounger". When Mr Mawhood died in 1949, Adams visited his widow, uninvited, and took a 22-carat-gold pen from her bedroom dressing table, saying he wanted "something of her husband's". He never visited her again.
Gossip regarding Adams's unconventional methods had started by the mid-1930s. In 1935, he inherited £7,385 from a patient, Matilda Whitton; her whole estate amounted to £11,465, equivalent to £430,931 and £669,007 respectively at 2011 values. Whitton's will was contested by her relatives but upheld in court, though a codicil giving Adams's mother £100 was overturned. Adams then began receiving "anonymous postcards" about him "bumping off" patients, as he admitted in a newspaper interview in 1957. These were received at a rate of three or four a year until the Second World War, and then commenced again in 1945.
In 1939 or 1941, Adams started injecting a Mrs Agnes Pike with drugs, including morphine. After some time in Adams's care, Mrs Pike's health deteriorated so much that the family, alerted by the proprietor of the guest house Mrs Pike was located in, called another doctor, Philip Mathew. Mathew established that there was no medical reason for Mrs Pike to be treated. Adams's drugs, notably the morphine, put Mrs Pike in such a state that she was unable to recall her own name or age. She was removed from Adams's care and after about eight weeks she made an almost full recovery; she regained her mental faculties and was well enough to go out and do her own shopping. This was a rare case of Adams's victim surviving.
Adams stayed in Eastbourne throughout the war, and in 1941 he gained a diploma in anaesthetics and worked in a local hospital one day a week, where he acquired a reputation as a bungler. He would fall asleep during operations, eat cakes, count money, and even mix up the anaesthetic gas tubes, leading to patients waking up or turning blue. In 1943, his mother died, and in 1952 his cousin Sarah developed cancer. Adams gave her an injection half an hour before she died.
Adams's career was very successful; the journalist Rodney Hallworth later claimed that, by 1956, he was reputed to be the wealthiest doctor in England, although without citing any evidence. A similar, and similarly unsourced, claim that "he was probably the wealthiest GP in England" was made by Cullen. He attended some famous and influential people in the region, including MP and Olympic medal winner Lord Burghley, society painter Oswald Birley, Admiral Robert Prendergast, industrialist Sir Alexander Maguire, the 10th Duke of Devonshire, Eastbourne's Chief Constable Richard Walker and many businessmen. After years of rumours, and Adams having been mentioned in at least 132 wills of his patients, on 23 July 1956 Eastbourne police received an anonymous call about a death. It was from Leslie Henson, the music hall performer, whose friend Gertrude Hullett had died unexpectedly while being treated by Adams.
Police investigation
On the day Mrs Hullett died, 23 July 1956, the Eastbourne coroner notified the local Chief Constable that, from his post mortem, her death did not appear to be natural, and the police began to take statements from individuals who had been in contact with her shortly before her death, many of whom believed that she had committed suicide. One of Mrs Hullett's friends, who was also her executor, provided three letters she had written in April 1956 and had placed with her will, that indicated that she had contemplated suicide then. A second post mortem conducted by a Home Office pathologist concluded that the cause of death was barbiturate poisoning. After the second post mortem, the investigation was taken over from Eastbourne police on 17 August 1956 by two officers from the Metropolitan Police's Murder Squad. The senior officer, Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard, was known for having secured a conviction in the Teddington Towpath Murders in 1953, although the defence counsel, Peter Rawlinson, called Hannam's evidence on how the confession was obtained into question. In view of the opinion Hannam later expressed, that detectives must sometimes ignore the law, his methods are open to question. He was assisted by Detective Sergeant Charles Hewett. Hannam was in the unusual position that, instead of having to find a suspect for a known crime, he had a known suspect in Adams but needed to link him to more serious crimes than forging prescriptions, making false statements and mishandling drugs. Devlin suggests that Hannam became fixated on the idea that Adams had murdered many elderly patients for legacies, regarding his receiving a legacy as grounds for suspicion, although Adams was generally only a minor beneficiary.
Investigators decided to focus on cases from 1946 to 1956 only. Of the 310 death certificates examined by Home Office pathologist Francis Camps, 163 were considered by Camps to be worthy of further investigation. This was because, firstly, a very high proportion, some 42% of all 310 of Adams's deceased patients, were diagnosed as having died of cerebral thrombosis or cerebral hemorrhage against an average in the late 1950s of around 15% for elderly, bedridden patients. Secondly, the 163 certificates related to Adams's patients that had died while in a coma, which could be suggestive of the administration of a narcotic or barbiturate as well as the cause stated. The police took numerous statements from nurses who had treated Adams's patients and their relatives. Some were generally favorable to him, but others claimed Adams had given patients "special injections" of substances that were unknown to the nurses and which Adams refused to disclose to them. The statements also claimed that his habit was to ask the nurses to leave the room before injections were given and that he would also isolate patients from their relatives, hindering contact between them. However, several of the witnesses whom Hannam had questioned verbally refused to give sworn statements to confirm their allegations against Adams. During the trial, the assertions of Mrs Morrell's nurses that they did not know what Adams was injecting or that he did not give injections in front of them were disproved by the contents of their own note-books.
Obstruction
On 24 August, the British Medical Association (BMA) sent a letter to all doctors in Eastbourne reminding them of "Professional Secrecy" (i.e., patient confidentiality) if interviewed by the police. The police were frustrated by this move, although some local doctors ignored it and gave statements relating either to deceased patients or, in one instance, one that was alive. The action of the BMA was part of a concerted attempt by it to secure better terms for its members, whose pay had remained virtually static since the National Health Service had been set up in 1948 this action later led to talk of an all-out strike.
The Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (who customarily prosecuted cases of poisoning or delegated them to the Solicitor General), wrote to the BMA secretary, Angus Macrae, "to try to get him to remove the ban". The impasse continued until on 8 November Manningham-Buller met Macrae to convince him of the importance of the case. During this meeting, in a highly unusual move, he passed Hannam's confidential 187-page report on Adams to Macrae. His intention was to convince the BMA of the seriousness of the accusations and for the need to obtain cooperation from local doctors. Macrae took the report to the President of the BMA and returned it the next day. Convinced of the seriousness of the accusations, Macrae dropped his opposition to doctors talking to the police.
It has been speculated that Macrae also copied the report and passed it on to the defence, and conspiracy theorists have claimed that Manningham-Buller did so with the intention of assisting the defence case, but there is no evidence of this. However, the incident does call Manningham-Buller's competence into question, and he was strongly criticized at the time.
On 28 November 1956, opposition Labor Party MPs Stephen Swingler and Hugh Delargy gave notice of two questions to be asked in the House of Commons regarding the affair, one asking what "reports [the Attorney-General] has sent" to the General Medical Council (GMC) in the "past six months". Manningham-Buller replied that he had "had no communications" with the GMC, but only with an officer of it. He did not mention the report. Instead, he instigated an investigation into a leak, later concluding that Hannam himself had passed information regarding the meeting with Macrae to a journalist, probably Rodney Hallworth of the Daily Mail.
Meeting Hannam
On 1 October 1956, Hannam met Adams[ and Adams asked "You are finding all these rumours untrue, aren't you?" Hannam mentioned a prescription Adams had forged: "That was very wrong [...] I have had God's forgiveness for it", Adams replied. Hannam brought up the deaths of Adams's patients and his receipt of legacies from them. Adams answered: "A lot of those were instead of fees, I don't want money. What use is it? I paid £1,100 super tax last year" Hannam later mentioned, "Mr Hullett left you £500". Adams replied, "Now, now, he was a life-long friend [...] I even thought it would be more than it was." Finally, when asked why he had stated untruthfully on cremation forms that he was not to inherit from the deceased, Adams said:
Oh, that wasn't done wickedly, God knows it wasn't. We always want cremations to go off smoothly for the dear relatives. If I said I knew I was getting money under the Will they might get suspicious and I like cremations and burials to go smoothly. There was nothing suspicious really. It was not deceitful.
Search
On 24 November, Hannam, Hewett and the head of Eastbourne CID, Detective Inspector Pugh, searched Adams's house with a warrant issued (in Pugh's name) under the Dangerous Drugs Act 1951. When told they were looking for, "Morphine, Heroin, Pethidine and the like", Adams was surprised: "Oh, that group. You will find none here. I haven't any. I very seldom ever use them", he said. When Hannam asked for Adams's Dangerous Drugs Register, which was at that time the record of those controlled drugs ordered, but not how they were used, Adams responded: "I don't know what you mean. I keep no register." He had not kept one since 1949, although such failures were not uncommon at that period. When shown a list of dangerous drugs he had prescribed Morrell, and asked who administered them, Adams said, "I did nearly all. Perhaps the nurses gave some but mostly me". This was later contradicted by the contents of the nurses' notebooks produced during his trial. Hannam then observed, "Doctor, you prescribed for her 75 – 1/6 grains heroin tablets the day before she died." Adams replied, "Poor soul, she was in terrible agony. It was all used. I used them myself [...] Do you think it is too much?"
Devlin suggested that Hannam generally considered what a suspect said in interrogation was the best form of evidence, and that the police and prosecution case was based to a significant degree on admissions that Hannam had recorded Adams making. He considered that Hannam's records were reasonably accurate, although putting emphasis on matters that might assist a prosecution, as was the practice at the time. However, Devlin considered that proof of guilt should be based as far as possible on facts, rather than pre-trial statements to the police, and that an admission had to be taken as a whole, so that Adams's statement that he had used all 121⁄2 grains or 75 tablets of heroin could not be divorced from his claim of Mrs Morrell was in terrible agony.
Adams opened a cupboard for the police: amongst medicine bottles were "chocolates – slabs stuck – butter, margarine, sugar". While the officers inspected it, Adams walked to another cupboard and slipped two objects into his jacket pocket. Hannam and Pugh challenged him and Adams showed them two bottles of morphine; one he said was for Annie Sharpe, a patient and major witness who had died nine days earlier under his care; the other said "Mr Soden". He had died on 17 September 1956 but pharmacy records later showed Soden had never been prescribed morphine. Adams was later (after his main trial in 1957) convicted of obstructing the search, concealing the bottles and for failing to keep a Dangerous Drugs register. Later at the police station, Adams told Hannam:
Easing the passing of a dying person isn't all that wicked. She [Morrell] wanted to die. That can't be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor.
In the basement of Adams's house, the police found, "a lot of unused china and silverware. In one room there were 20 new motor car tires still in their wrappings and several new motor car leaf springs. Wines and spirits were stored in quantity." Hallworth reports that Adams was stockpiling in case of another World War. On the second floor, "one room was given over to an armory six guns in a glass-fronted display case, several automatic pistols". He had permits for these. Another room was used "wholly for photographic equipment. A dozen very expensive cameras in leather cases" lay around.
Sexuality
In December, the police acquired a memorandum belonging to a Daily Mail journalist, concerning rumours of homosexuality between "a police officer, a magistrate and a doctor". The "doctor" directly implied Adams. This information had come, according to the reporter, directly from Hannam. The 'magistrate' was Sir Roland Gwynne, Mayor of Eastbourne (1929–31) and brother of Rupert Gwynne, MP for Eastbourne (1910–24). Gwynne was Adams's patient and known to visit every day at 9am. They went on frequent holidays together and had spent three weeks in Scotland that September. The 'police officer' was the Deputy Chief Constable of Eastbourne, Alexander Seekings. Hannam interviewed Gwynne on 4 February 1957, following which Gwynne severed all connection with Adams. Hannam's record of the interview makes no reference to any homosexual acts (which were a criminal offence in 1956), and the police instead gave the journalist a dressing-down.
Adams became engaged around 1933 to Norah O'Hara but called it off in 1935 after her father had bought them a house and furnished it. Various explanations have been suggested: Surtees suggests that it was because Adams's mother did not want him to marry "trade" though he also quotes a rumour that Adams wanted O'Hara's father to change his will to favour his daughters. Adams remained friends with O'Hara his whole life and remembered her in his will.
Arrest
Adams was first arrested on 24 November 1956 on 13 charges including false representation on cremation certificates and granted bail. He was arrested on 19 December 1956 and charged with the murder of Mrs. Morrell. When told of the charges, he said:
Murder... murder... Can you prove it was murder? [...] I didn't think you could prove it was murder. She was dying in any event.
Then, while he was being taken away from Kent Lodge, he reportedly gripped his receptionist's hand and told her: "I will see you in heaven."
Hannam considered he had collected enough evidence in at least four of the cases for prosecution to be warranted: regarding Clara Neil Miller, Julia Bradnum, Edith Alice Morrell and Gertrude Hullett. Of these, Adams was charged on one count: the murder of Morrell, but with the death of Mrs Hullett (and also that of her husband) being used to prove 'system'. Although it was usual in 1956 for only one count of murder to be indicted, evidence of other suspected murders not being tried could be given, provided each such instance would, on its own facts, be capable of proof beyond reasonable doubt and strikingly similar to the case tried.
Adams and Eves
On 22 February 1957, the police were notified of a libelous and potentially prejudicial poem about the case titled Adams and Eves. It had been read at the Cavendish Hotel on the 13th by the manager in front of 150 guests. An officer spent ten days investigating and discovered a chain of hands through which the poem had passed and been recopied to be redistributed. The original author was not discovered; an unnamed Fleet Street journalist was suspected.
Patients
Edith Alice Morrell
Morrell was a wealthy widow who suffered a stroke on 24 June 1948 while visiting her son in Cheshire. She was partially paralyzed and was admitted to a hospital near Chester, where she received morphine injections for nine days from 27 June, prescribed by a Dr Turner. Cullen suggests that Adams, supposedly her usual doctor, arrived there on 26 June, the day before she was first prescribed morphine for the pain. However, the Attorney-General's opening speech states that Mrs Morrell was transferred to Eastbourne on 5 July 1948, only then becoming one of Adams's patients, and that he first prescribed morphine on 9 July, adding heroin on 21 July. Mrs Morrell was not expected to live more than six months or so, but survived her stroke for over two years, suffering also from arthritis. Between July 1948 and August 1950, she received routine evening injections of morphine and heroin and her condition was stable, but from then, as her condition deteriorated, the dosages increased. An expert witness for the prosecution claimed that Mrs Morrell would have become addicted, but the only apparent symptoms of this were attributed by the defense's expert to a second stroke.
Mrs Morrell left an estate of £157,000 and made eight cash bequests of between £300 and £1,000. Cullen claims that in some of the several wills she made Adams was bequeathed large sums of money and her Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (valued at £1,500). This appears incorrect and, in her will of 5 August 1950, the only outright bequest Mrs Morrell made to Adams was a chest of silver cutlery worth £276. This will also awarded him a contingent right to the car and a Jacobean court cupboard, but only if Mrs Morrell's son predeceased her, which Devlin noted was unlikely. A codicil of 13 September 1950 cut Adams out of her will completely. and she died on 13 November 1950 aged 81 without any further changes to her will. Adams certified the cause of death as "stroke" and on inspecting the body, slit her wrist to ensure she was dead. Despite the last codicil, Mrs Morrell's son gave Adams the Rolls-Royce which was 19 years old, and the chest of silver cutlery. After Mrs Morrell's death, he also took away an infrared lamp she had bought herself, worth £60. Adams billed Morrell's estate for 1,100 visits, costing £1,674 in total. The police estimated that Adams had visited Morrell a total of 321 times during her treatment. On her cremation form, Adams stated that "as far as I am aware" he had no pecuniary interest in the death, thereby avoiding the necessity of a post-mortem.
Gertrude Hullett
On 23 July 1956, Gertrude Hullett, another of Adams's patients, died aged 50. She had been depressed since the death of her husband four months earlier and had been prescribed sodium barbitone and also sodium phenobarbitone. She had told Adams on frequent occasions of her wish to commit suicide. When questioned by the coroner, Adams said that he personally gave Mrs Hullett two barbiturate tablets each morning, initially of 71⁄2 grains each, a normal dose, later reduced to two tablets of 6 grains each, then 5 grains. However, he did not ensure that she took both tablets daily and no attempt had been made to retrieve any that had been prescribed to the late Mr Hullett but unused when he died.
On 17 July, Hullett wrote out a check to Adams for £1,000 – to pay for an MG car her husband had promised to buy him. Adams paid the check into his account the next day, and on being told that it would clear by the 21st, asked for it to be specially cleared – to arrive in his account the next day. On 19 July, Hullett is thought to have taken an overdose and was found the next morning in a coma. Adams was unavailable and a colleague, Dr Harris, attended her until Adams arrived later in the day. Not once during their discussion did Adams mention her depression or her barbiturate medication. They decided a cerebral hemorrhage was most likely. On 21 July, Dr Shera, a pathologist, was called in to take a spinal fluid sample and immediately asked if her stomach contents should be examined in case of narcotic poisoning. Adams and Harris both opposed this. After Shera left, Adams visited a colleague at the Princess Alice Hospital in Eastbourne and asked about the treatment for barbiturate poisoning. He was told to give doses of 10 cc of Megimide every five minutes, and was given 100 cc to use. The recommended dose in the instructions was 100 cc to 200 cc. Dr Cook also told him to put Hullett on an intravenous drip. Adams did not.
The next morning, at 8.30, Adams called the coroner to make an appointment for a private post-mortem. The coroner asked when the patient had died and Adams said she had not yet. Harris visited again that day and Adams still made no mention of potential barbiturate poisoning. When Harris had left, Adams gave a single injection of 10 cc of the Megimide. Hullett developed bronco-pneumonia and on the 23rd at 6.00 a.m. Adams gave Hullett oxygen. She died at 7.23 a.m. on 23 July. The results of a urine sample taken on 21 July were received after Hullett's death, on the 24th. It showed she had 115 grains of sodium barbitone in her body – twice the fatal dose.
An inquest was held into Hullett's death on 21 August. The coroner questioned Adams's treatment and in his summing up said that it was "extraordinary that the doctor, knowing the past history of the patient" did not "at once suspect barbiturate poisoning". He described Adams's 10 cc dose of Megimide as another "mere gesture". The inquest concluded that Hullett committed suicide: it was described as a "travesty" as, in the opinion of Cullen; with an ongoing police investigation, the inquest should have been adjourned until the investigation had concluded. However, the coroner asked Superintendent Hannam whether the police wished him to adjourn the inquest, to which Hannam replied that he had no application to make. After the inquest, the check for £1,000 disappeared.
Hullett left Adams her Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn (worth at least £2,900) in a will written five days before her overdose. Adams sold it six days before he was arrested.
Before the trial
Case selection
Charles Hewett, Hannam's assistant, was quoted as saying that both officers were astounded at Manningham-Buller's decision to charge Adams with the murder of Morrell, since her body had been cremated and therefore there was no evidence to present before a jury. This assertion was published after the deaths of both Hannam and Manningham-Buller. This shows a misunderstanding of the principle of corpus delicti, and his assertion that traces of drugs found in exhumed remains were more compelling as proof against Adams was disputed by Devlin, as the exhumations and subsequent post-mortems yielded nothing of interest. and as the pathologist concerned did not consider that the levels found were significant. Cullen also describes Morrell as "the weakest" case of the four the police deemed most suspicious. Devlin, who regarded none of the cases mentioned by Hallworth as being as strong as the Morrell case, despite it being six years old, suggested that, in an investigation covering a ten-year period, the police were unable to find a better case than the Morrell one.
In 1957, it was the job of the police to investigate reported crimes, to determine if one had been committed and arrest a suspect. It was then the job of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), or in very serious cases of the Attorney-General or Solicitor-General, to review the police case and decide whether to prosecute and, in more serious cases, what offences to prosecute. What to prosecute depends on legal issues and Devlin states that, to succeed in the murder case against Adams, the prosecution had to show, firstly, there had been an unnatural death, secondly, an act by Adams was capable of being murderous (such as an injection so large as to cause death) and finally Adams's intent to kill. The Attorney-General thought he had evidence that Adams had prescribed large quantities of opiates to Mrs Morrell, Adams's own admissions that he had used them all on Mrs Morrell and injected all or almost all of them himself, and a medical expert's testimony that the only possible reason to inject so much over a short time was to kill her.
Cullen mentions Mrs. Morell, Mr and Mrs Hullett, Clara Neil Miller and Julia Bradnum as cases that Hannam regarded as warranting prosecution. However, in the cases of Mr Hullett, Clara Neil Miller and Julia Bradnum there was no certainty of an unnatural death, as there was evidence in the committal hearing that Mr Hullett died of a heart attack and, at their exhumations, the pathologist concluded Miller had died from pneumonia, and the condition of Bradnum's body did not allow a cause of death to be stated, so none of these were good cases. Mrs Hullett had died an unnatural death, of a barbiturate overdose, but there was no evidence or admission that Adams had persuaded her to take that overdose and, had Mrs Hullett's case been brought to trial after Adams's first acquittal, Devlin believed that a second acquittal was virtually certain. In these five cases, Adams may have contributed to the deaths in some way, but this would not have been sufficient for a capital murder conviction.
Committal hearing
The committal hearing opened in Lewes on 14 January 1957. In accordance with the legal rule applying in 1957, Adams was charged on the single count of murdering Mrs Morrell, but the prosecution also alleged he had killed Mr and Mrs Hullett in a similar fashion, and introduced evidence relating to them as evidence of system, which the prosecution also wished to refer to in the Morrell trial. Despite the objections of the defence that this evidence was inadmissible, the magistrates allowed it but, in cross examination, the defence forced an admission from the Crown's expert witness that Mr Hullett died of a coronary thrombosis. The hearing concluded on 24 January when, after a five-minute deliberation, Adams was committed for trial on the Morrell charge.
Melford Stevenson, who led the crown's case at this hearing, made an explicit claim that Adams's instructions to specially clear Mrs. Hullett's check two days before her death showed that he knew she was to die very soon, using her wealth and foreseen death as evidence of critical similarities to the deaths of Mrs Morrell and Mr Hullett. He also made an implication, unsupported by evidence, that Adams had been involved in the administration of the drugs that caused her death. Devlin considered the police case that there were similarities in deaths of Mrs Morrell and Mrs Hullett was not well founded, as the claimed similarities were not distinctive. Had the police found two recent cases similar to Mrs Hullett's, where a patient had died of an overdose of pills prescribed by Adams, that might have shown system, but the police found no such cases.
The Chairman of the magistrates was Sir Roland Gwynne, but he stepped down because of his close friendship with Adams. An exhibit that supported Melford Stevenson's evidence, the check written out for £1,000, went missing after the hearing, instigating a further police investigation. While the culprit was not found, Scotland Yard suspected the local Deputy Chief Constable of Eastbourne, Seekings, of having misplaced it to help Adams. Seekings was known to have taken holidays with Adams and Gwynne, and looked after Gwynne's finances while he was in hospital in January 1957.
Following the committal hearing, the Attorney-General advised Devlin that he would not be using the evidence regarding the Hullets in the Morrell trial, but seeking a second indictment relating to Mrs Hullett, which he did on 5 March 1957. Had this been proceeded with, a second committal hearing would have been required. The trial on the indictment relating to Mrs Morrell started on 18 March 1957 at the Old Bailey, with that relating to Mrs Hullett held back for a possible second separate trial. Three days later, a new Homicide Act came into effect; a single murder by poison became a non-capital offence. Adams, having been indicted on both charges before this date, would still face the death penalty if convicted. The Home Secretary would be less likely to grant clemency in the case of a second murder conviction in the Hullett case, as this would make it far more difficult politically to sentence Adams to life imprisonment, particularly as a double murder could still be capital under the 1957 Homicide Act, and Devlin considered that the Attorney-General's aim in bringing forward a second indictment was to make it more likely that Adams would hang.
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