Bodies, Traces and Spaces: Historical perspectives on twentieth-century homicide
investigation and forensic medicine.
Convenor: Dr Neil Pemberton
Contact: neil.pemberton@manchester.ac.uk
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.