Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides In the Bath by Jane Robins The Magnificent Spilsbury And The Brides In The Bath: Jane Robins. Or so it seemed until a newspaper report linking two of the deaths aroused suspicion and a police investigation revealed that all three men were one and the same, a self-important fellow named George Joseph Smith who admitted bigamy and deception but denied murder. Thereafter, at Smith’s trial for the murder of one of the women, the young forensic scientist Bernard Spilsbury was called as an expert witness and jousted with Edward Marshall Hall, the pre-eminent jury advocate in capital cases. The author and publishers are plainly hoping to emulate the success of Kate Summerscale’s 2008 bestseller The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder At Road Hill House. While that book linked a sensational murder case from the 1860s with the genesis of detective fiction, Robins links these three murders with the genesis of forensic science in Britain and the man who was to become its legendary exemplar for over 30 years, Bernard (later Sir Bernard) Spilsbury. She also locates these crimes against women in the context of the social and sexual mores of the 1910s. The story is not just a compelling read but is also an intriguing slice of social history. Smith had been preying on women since 1898, usually plain respectable girls of meek dispositions, who were approaching the age when permanent spinsterhood beckoned. Posing as a small businessman he insured the lives of his three victims and ensured they made their wills. He laid false trails by having them complain of headaches, then discovered them drowned in a bathtub, always when a witness was conveniently close by. To a modern mind versed in psychology Smith displayed many of the characteristics of the self-aggrandising psychopath. Yet much of his behaviour seemed in keeping with male attitudes of the time. Smith’s ability to get his wives to hand over their life savings spoke volumes for a time when many women so feared being unmarriageable that blind obedience to their husbands was a norm. There was speculation that Smith possessed the hypnotic powers of Svengali, the villain of a popular novel of the day. Women flocked to his trial for a glimpse of this presumed spellbinder. Although Smith protested his innocence, his own counsel Marshall Hall considered him a murderer. It was just that Hall refused to accept the forensic evidence about how the brides had come to be drowned, preferring to think that Smith hypnotised them before submerging them. Indeed, Robins shows that Spilsbury erred in his conclusion that gooseflesh on one of the disinterred bodies meant that the brides had died of shock following sudden submersion. The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides In the Bath by Jane Robins. Affiliate Disclosure: This site contains affiliate links, if you click on one of these links and make a purchase, we may receive a commission. Click here to learn more. Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947) was a British pathologist who was one of the first well-known expert witnesses both in and out of the courtroom - his area of expertise: forensic pathology. He entered the media spotlight in 1910 when he testified at the murder trial of Dr. Crippen. However, it was the 1915 murder trial of George Joseph Smith (1872-1915), a thief, bigamist, and murderer that established his fame as a medical detective. Smith became known as the Brides in the Bath murderer because of his habit of having his new wives take out life insurance policies that named him as the beneficiary and then drowning them in a bathtub a day or two later. It was this trial that truly brought the field of forensic pathology to the publics attention. Almost overnight, Spilsbury and the science he practiced, became regarded as infallible. In hindsight, Spilsbury was fallible, but that is another story. The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath , by Jane Robins is a cross between a popular history and a biography, Robins begins by alternating chapters between looking at Spilsbury's life and work (including a chapter devoted to the Crippin murder trial), and the actions of Smith. With alacrity, Robins recounts how Smith wooed (using various names), married, and then murdered three women, Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Elizabeth Lofty. She then introduces Detective Inspector Arthur Neil, the man who was destined to put all the pieces together and determined that the three women did not die accidently, as was previously thought. Using good old-fashioned police work, Neil determined that all three women were married to the same man - despite the fact that he used a different name in each case, and that he murdered them after having them write out wills naming himself as heir, and taking life insurance policies in which he was the beneficiary. As Neil was to discover, these were not Smith's only wives. He did not always murder his wives, and merely robbed and deserted several of his wives. He also had one wife, his first, that he hung onto, and would return Edith Pegler whenever he did not have another woman in his life. Once caught, Robins provides a candid look at Smith's trial, the evidence presented, and the public reaction to the trial. In writing this book, Robins not only recounts the case of the Brides in the Bath murders and the resulting trial, but also provides fascinating biographies of both Spilsbury and Smith. Most important, she provides a telling overview on how the science of forensic pathology developed, how Spilsbury became viewed in the courtroom and by the public as a real life medical detective along the lines of a Sherlock Holmes. She also looks at how evidence garnered by forensic pathology came to be accepted in the courtroom and how the public viewed forensic evidence. Robins also examines Spilsbury's later career and how his eminence faded over the years as people began to question how he obtained his evidence, and the conclusions that he derived upon viewing the collected evidence. From first page till last, I found this to be a riveting book, not just because I'm interested in forensic science, but because The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath is also a work of social history that opens a window into a pivotal period of British history. It sheds light upon a time when many women were willing to marry basically anyone who asked simply because the alternative of remaining unwed was deemed so repugnant. It is also an interesting case to examine because Smith's murder trial took place against the backdrop of World War I, and despite the war and the Zeppelins filling the sky's over London, people still waited for hours for a chance of getting into the courtroom to get a glimpse of Smith. As well, his story filled the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the O. J. Simpson trial of the period with all the accompanying fan fare and virtual stardom for the key players at the trial, notably the accused as well as Neil and Spilsbury. The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath is a well written book and a must-read book for fans of true-crime stories, mystery afficionados (how Smith drowned his wives so that all the deaths appeared to be accidental has still not been satisfactorily solved), as well as those interested in the history of forensic science and criminal justice. Related Reviews: The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England , By James Sharpe. A case study of Anne Gunter claim of demonic possession and the resulting witch trials - including her own. Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal Investigation , by Katherine Ramsland. Rather than focusing on modern crimes and current forensic technologies, this book looks at the history and evolution of forensic science and the development of crime scene and criminal investigation techniques. The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robins: review. Between July 1912 and December 1914, Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty were all found dead in the baths of rented houses or boarding rooms in English seaside towns. All three had married precipitately and had made recent wills in favour of their new husband. Each had handed over their life savings and signed new life insurance policies. They were the victims of the notorious “Brides in the Bath Murderer”, George Joseph Smith. The dearth of available men in the years preceding the First World War may, in part, account for why these women allowed themselves to be fatally duped by a man older, poorer and less well-educated than themselves. Adopting different names and styling himself variously as a picture restorer, a framer and a second-hand dealer, Smith had crooked knees and out-turned feet, but his hawkish eyes were as hypnotic as his self- confidence. Promising to set up shop with the women or whisk them off to Canada, he rapidly subjugated their wills to his own, alienating them from their immediate families. Within days or even hours of their weddings, he took each one to a doctor to complain of debilitating headaches or recent, unwitnessed, “fits”. Had Alice Burnham’s father not noticed the similarity between his daughter’s death and newspaper reports of Margaret Lofty's, they might never have come to the attention of Detective Inspector Arthur Neil. Within weeks of Margaret’s death in December 1915, Neil had uncovered enough information to convince him that the three deaths were linked and, when Smith arrived at his Shepherd’s Bush solicitor to collect the insurance payout on Margaret’s life, he was arrested. As relatives and neighbours of the dead women each identified the prisoner, the detective’s suspicions were confirmed. Neil’s problem was that each death had already been adjudged accidental by separate coroners. Doctors had attested to Bessie’s “fits”, Margaret’s headaches and Alice’s weak heart and in each case there was no proof of a struggle. Only the coincidence of the women’s fates and Smith’s callous indifference – they were all buried cheaply and in common graves – pointed to his guilt. As a Scotland Yard operation began, astonishing revelations of Smith’s past life came fast: a woman he had married in 1898 now made the perilous wartime journey to London from Canada to testify that he had repeatedly forced her to steal before abandoning her to a prison sentence. Three women appeared with extraordinary tales of Smith marrying them before robbing them of their cash, jewellery and even clothing and absconding. Astonishingly, a fourth had been married to him for seven years, but had been unconcerned by his regular absences and never questioned the “profits” he brought home. Smith was tried and found guilty of the murder of Bessie Mundy in June 1915. Whereas the Victorians had been sceptical of allowing the laboratory to play a part in detection, science was now allowed a greater role. Fingerprinting was all the rage, there were new tests to differentiate human from animal blood and Conan Doyle’s literary sleuth Sherlock Holmes with his methods of scientific analysis and logical deduction was a popular sensation. Science professionals were beginning to act as expert witnesses in court. Forensic pathologist Bernard Spilsbury gained early renown during the Crippen case by identifying a scar on a patch of decomposing skin that identified the cellar-buried body as Crippen’s missing wife. Exhuming the bodies of Bessie, Alice and Margaret, he now found no evidence either of prior illness or of poisoning. Experimenting with a bath and a “very fine lady swimmer”, he became convinced that Smith had pulled on his victims’ legs, immersing them so suddenly that they died almost instantaneously. In court, Spilsbury was authoritative, determined and apparently infallible, winning the battle between forensic science and old-fashioned theatrical advocacy. For a society seeking certainty in a world turned upside-down, he became a hero and the trial made his illustrious career. The Brides in the Bath and the rise of Spilsbury as the father of modern forensics are both well-worn tales, but Jane Robins has convincingly succeeded in reworking them into a cracking good read. It is a deceptively delicate task to examine trial transcripts, police depositions, letters and newspaper accounts and reforge them with such admirable immediacy. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is, perhaps, a more masterly crime history, but Robins should prepare herself for a summer bestseller. Fleur in her World. Notes from a bookish life on the Cornish coast … The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robins. In June 1915 Britain was at war, and yet a different story filled the front pages of the newspapers and captured the public imagination. The story of the trial of George Smith. He stood accused of marrying a young woman and then drowning her as she bathed. On three occasions. The three young women were swiftly dubbed “the brides in the bath”, and it is they, not George Smith and not the Magnificent Spilsbury, who are at the heart of this book. Bessie Mundy. Alice Burnham. Margaret Lofty. Three very different women, but all three feared that they had been left on the shelf, and wanted nothing more than to secure a husband. That was the greatest possible achievement open to them. But the losses of war and a history of higher male infant mortality meant that potential husbands were in short supply. Maybe that’s why neither Bessie nor Alice nor Margaret resisted when their new husband pulled them away from their family and friends, insisted they make a will, encouraged them to take out life insurance… Jane Robins makes each of their stories compelling, and paints the picture of the society that they lived in perfectly. Yet at the same time there is something timeless about their stories. Bessie, Alice and Margaret all wanted to be loved, wanted someone to put them first. And now, as then, that desire can make women vulnerable. It took some time for their deaths to be linked. But Alice’s father was suspicious, and so was the landlord in whose house Margaret died. And eventually the diligent Inspector Arthur Neil would put together a case and make an arrest. He uncovered George Smith’s history too. Seven marriages. Women manipulated and then abandoned. A chilling, and horribly believable, picture of a psychopath was painted. By the time of the trial the police had 121 witnesses for the prosecution. But an important question remained. Three deaths had been ruled to be accidents by coroners, without any suggestion at all that there had been foul play. How had he done it? The crucial evidence came from one of a new kind of expert witness – a forensic scientist. Bernard Spilsbury, of London’s St Mary’s Hospital, had drawn attention when he gave evidence at the trial of the notorious Dr Crippen. At George Smith’s trial he drew conclusions from goose-flesh and a clutched bar of soap, and put forward a theory of “sudden immersion.” George Smith was convicted on the strength of that evidence and executed on 13 August 1915. Jane Robins tells the stories of the trial, and of Spilsbury’s rise, simply and clearly. It is clear that she has done a great deal of research, and she uses it well. She makes it clear that the evidence is flawed, and that far too much credence is given to expert opinion. Impossible to forget though the extraordinary similarities between the three deaths: women taken to distant lodgings, where their husband made certain that a bath was installed, and then pressed to visit a local doctor with complaints of a minor ailment, and encouraged to take a bath while their husband ran an errand … The moral dilemma of what to do when you have a firm belief of guilt but there are unanswered questions, and maybe insufficient proof, looms large. There were so many questions, there was so much to think about, and yet the book concluded with the story of the rest of Spilsbury’s career, and his eventual decline as the world moved on. That unbalanced things for me. The social history, the extraordinary case, the stories of the three women and the man they married were enough, and they should have been the main focus. The forensic scientist’s story was interesting, but it came from a different angle. Two possible books fought for attention and only one could win. And so I have to say that The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath is flawed, and maybe not quite as good as it could have been. But it is still fascinating, informative, thought-provoking, and definitely well worth picking up. The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robins: review. Jane Robins's The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath is a forensic examination of a murder case and the first expert witness. Andrew Lycett is gripped. As George Orwell noted in a classic essay, the British have an unhealthy fascination with domestic murder. So it was inevitable that in June 1915 their attention should be diverted from wartime reverses by one of the most sensational murder trials ever. George Smith, a plausible psychopath in his early forties, was accused of drowning three women who, in each case, he claimed was his wife. With its unerring instinct for a telling epithet, the popular press dubbed it the Brides in the Bath case, pitching together the intimate rituals of marriage and ablution. The juridical problem was that these deaths in respectable boarding houses over the previous three years had passed without comment at inquests. So Smith’s conviction turned on the performance of a new type of courtroom star, the forensic scientist – in this instance, Bernard Spilsbury, of London’s St Mary’s Hospital, who, after exhumations and laboratory analysis, gathered enough medico-legal evidence to send Smith to the gallows. With the precision of her main character, Jane Robins examines these murders, skilfully drawing out the similarities – how Smith preyed on vulnerable women, married them, took them to distant lodgings where he insisted a bath was installed, required them to make a will and take out life insurance, inveigled them into visiting a local doctor with complaints of a minor ailment, and contrived to be out shortly before they were discovered dead in their baths. Smith might have continued his serial killing if the father of one victim had not noticed in press reports correspondences between the last death and his daughter’s. He sent two articles on these lines to his local police who passed them on to Kentish Town, scene of the latest mysterious demise. There a tenacious detective inspector, in many ways the true hero of this story, made inquiries. It emerged that Smith was the bigamous husband in both cases. But that did not make him a murderer. Nor did the other distraught women who presented themselves, including two who had been robbed of their life savings, and two earlier wives who had been inexplicably spared. Smith’s conviction resulted from Spilsbury’s supposedly scientific demonstration that, despite no signs of struggle, the murderer had whipped up his victims’ legs in their baths, causing sudden drowning. Drawing on a mixture of police files now in the National Archives, Spilsbury’s original notes and a near contemporary book in the series of Notable British Trials, Robins is excellent at setting this story in historical context, showing the pressures on women considered past marriageable age at a time when suffragettes were making their arguments felt. With a nod to Kate Summerscale’s best-selling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, she explores the development and practice of forensic science, drawing useful parallels with the modern expert witness. She is hampered by Spilsbury’s essential priggishness. As she acknowledges, even his evidence would now be questionable. More attractive was Smith’s theatrical defence barrister, Edward Marshall Hall, who later suggested his client had cajoled his victims by using hypnosis.