An Intruder at Eastbourne

Death is a frequent caller at Eastbourne, Britain's quietly expensive and very respectable Channel resort. Like an old friend of the family, sometimes without warning, but always observing the amenities, it drops in on those who have long expected a visit, for Eastbourne is a spa where wealthy Britons in the afternoon of life retire to await its end, lapped in the comfort of hoarded memories, expensive motorcars and the fellowship of their own kind. Noisy intruders are seldom permitted to disturb the genteel gossip and endless bridge games that help time pass for the oldsters in Eastbourne. Yet, last week, all of Britain was abuzz with the awful speculation that skulking, sudden death had forced its way into Eastbourne.

A Token of Gratitude. The speculation was focused on the demise of Eastbourne's eccentric old (81) Mrs. Edith Alice Morrell. The cause, according to a death certificate duly filed by her physician, was "cerebral thrombosis," i.e., a stroke. In three decades of practice at Eastbourne, the physician, kindly, pudgy Dr. John Bodkin Adams, had eased the end for many an octogenarian patient, and Mrs. Morrell's timely passing caused scarcely a ripple at the bridge tables. The old lady was cremated. Her son gave Dr. Adams her old Rolls-Royce and a valuable chest of family silver as a token of gratitude for his care, and there, but for some skeptics, the affair might well have rested, marked only by the perfunctory clucking of tongues that serve as the death-bell's tolls in Eastbourne.

There were in Eastbourne, however, some who were rude enough to question the orderly process of life and death in anonymous letters to Scotland Yard.

The result, after a series of visits by smoothly operating Detective Herbert ("The Count") Hannam, was the arrest of kindly Dr. Adams. Last week, in a preliminary court hearing to determine whether the doctor should stand trial for murder, a prosecutor for the Crown declared in so many blunt words that Mrs. Morrell had not died of cerebral thrombosis, but "because she was poisoned by drugs which Dr. Adams administered."

Pre-Mortem Post-Mortem. "Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked," the doctor, according to police, had said at his arrest. "She wanted to die." But in making his case against the owlish physician, who sat quietly in dock making notes for his own lawyer on a pad, Prosecutor Melford Stevenson got permission from the presiding magistrate "to deal with the deaths of two other patients of Dr. Adams who died in circumstances which the Crown says exhibit similarity to the death of Mrs. Morrell." These two were wealthy Alfred John Hul-lett, 71, and his wife, Gertrude, 50, who died within four months of each other in 1956.

By each of their deaths, said the prosecutor, Adams stood to profit financially, though he had specifically said otherwise in requesting permission to cremate Mr. Hullett. Shortly before Mrs. Hullett's death, the Crown contended, Adams had banked a check she had made out to him for -L-1,000 and asked to have it cleared in a hurry. Why had he done this? "We say," said the prosecution, "that it was because Dr. Adams knew quite well that Mrs. Hullett was going to die that weekend." Furthermore, the doctor had requested a post-mortem on his patient even before she died. The postmortem, when it was made, established the fact that Mrs. Hullett died of an overdose of barbiturates, but even though a coroner's inquest called it suicide, the Crown insisted last week that "the circumstances amount to murder by Dr. Adams, whether [Mrs. Hullett] administered the fatal dose herself or whether she did not."

In the case of Mrs. Morrell, the question was not of who administered the drugs, but of whether they were necessary at all. "From the dosage which she received during the last five days," said the prosecution, "there^ seems to be little doubt that large doses were given to a woman, already unconscious in a coma, who had no need of these drugs at all."

As the court pondered the evidence, calling up specialist after specialist to give his expert opinion, Dr. Adams smiled blandly, took his notes and occasionally chuckled at the mispronunciation of some difficult medical terms. In the palm-strewn lobbies of Eastbourne's hotels, aged widows gossiped and fingered their heavily insured necklaces, and retired colonels humphed over the bad news from Egypt. But topic No. i was something none of their newspapers could say under Britain's strict libel and contempt laws: that the doctor may also have quickened the deaths of a dozen or more other Eastbourne patients.

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