Medical Detectives by Robin Odell Page B

Bronte could say was, ‘It was not there when I saw the larynx.’ Sir Bernard would not be moved from his position and his reply to Cassels’s question on the matter put it beyond further debate; ‘It was a bruise and nothing else. There are no two opinions about it’. As Sydney Smith put it in his autobiography, ‘The oracle had spoken. There was nothing more to be said.’
    Smith later mentioned an incident in Spilsbury’s laboratory at University College Hospital when he and Bronte were shown the larynx preserved in formalin. ‘I can’t see any sign of a bruise, Spilsbury,’ said Smith with nodding approval from Bronte. ‘No, you can’t see it now,’ replied Spilsbury, ‘but it was there when I exhumed the body.’ Smith recorded that Spilsbury listened attentively and politely to his arguments but added, ‘Had I known him then as well as I came to later, I would have realised why I was wasting my time. He could not change his opinion now because he had already given it.’
    Sidney Fox, who, in a devastating admission in court, said that he had closed the door to his mother’s room after discovering the fire and running for help, was found guilty of murder. He was a greedy little man and a poseur of the type that it has been said would sell their own grandmother. In his case, he throttled his mother for the insurance money and his guilt was perhaps so borne in on him that he did not bother to appeal against his conviction.

    Thus began the decade of the 1930s, which produced more headline-snatching cases and rumbles of violence to come. One of Spilsbury’s first cases in the new decade was the sensational ‘Blazing Car Murder’. Appropriately enough, the incident occurred on Guy Fawkes Night in November 1930, when two youths returning from a bonfire night dance in Northampton, saw a burning car on the road near Hardingstone. There was a person in the car but rescue was out of the question because the blaze was too fierce.
    The following day, the police decided to remove the charred corpse from the vehicle and away from public curiosity. The burnt-out wreckage of the car was pushed off the road to allow normal traffic to proceed without hindrance. These actions would later be heavily criticised. The owner of the car was traced by means of its still intact registration number, to Alfred Arthur Rouse, a commercial traveller, who lived in north London. But the identity of the person incinerated in the blaze remained uncertain.
    Following reports of the burning car incident in the newspapers, Rouse returned to London from Wales where he had been visiting his girlfriend, and was greeted by detectives. The two young men who had arrived at the scene of the blaze in Hardingstone Lane, identified him as the person who had startled them by suddenly materialising out of the smoke. Rouse told the police that while travelling to Leicester on his firm’s business, he stopped on the Great North Road to give a lift to a man who said he wanted to travel to the Midlands.
    He explained that, first, he lost his way and then ran out of petrol. Before walking a short distance down the road in order to relieve himself, he asked his travelling companion to fill the car’s fuel tank from a spare can of petrol which he provided. At this point, Rouse said he noticed a big flame and realised that the car was on fire. He rushed towards the blaze and tried to free the man who was trapped inside the vehicle but was beaten back by the ferocity of the flames. Then, in his statement to the police, he said, ‘I lost my head.’
    The fire had been tremendously fierce and the destruction wrought on the unfortunate individual caught inside the car was swift. The lower parts of his legs had been burned away as had the hands and forearms. There was massive destruction of the chest and abdomen and the head had burst in the intense heat. The body was never identified and even its gender was in doubt. Spilsbury, nevertheless recorded the victim