Patrick Mahon and Emily Kaye - Case  One

In 1920 she was thirty-four, but still unattached. In 1923, when she went to live at the Green Cross Club in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury, she was employed as a shorthand-typist by a firm of chartered accountants with offices in Copthall Avenue. One of the partners, Mr Hobbins, for whom she worked; had been appointed, as the result of a debenture holder's action, receiver and manager' of a concern called the Consols Automatic Aerators, Ltd, of Sunbury-onThames. In turn Mr Hobbins had appointed, as sales manager under him, a salesman with the firm named Patrick Herbert Mahon. Mahon often visited the offices in Copthall Avenue, and so became friendly with Emily Kaye.

If Mahon had tried to pick her up in the street, as he did with Ethel Duncan and, no doubt, many others, she would probably have put him firmly in his place. She was accustomed to looking after herself, this friendship, in every respect but one, was quite in order. Mahon was actually four years younger than herself although he actually believed her to be twenty-nine as this is what she told him, was a man in an excellent position, earning an excellent salary, and the trusted deputy of Mr Hobbins. He was good-looking, dressed well, and had an easy charm that made him popular,not only in her office, but in Richmond, where he lived, and was in some demand. He was honorary secretary of a bowls club there, and in a book in which members wrote descriptions of themselves he wrote beside his name, "A Broth of a Bhoy, who deserved to have been born at sea." He had been christened plain Herbert, but Patrick seemed more in keeping with his surname and with the character he sedulously cultivated. He was very vain, and must always, even in the most daunting circumstances, make a good impression. He had other interesting qualities: he quoted the Latin classics and spoke French fluently, and, like St Francis, whom he resembled in no other way, he had a remarkable influence over animals. Those who like to think that animals know good people from bad will be distressed to learn that Mahon had only to whistle and birds came to him, and that dogs and cats deserted their masters and mistresses to follow him home.

With Emily Kaye his blandishments succeeded only too well. She was at a dangerous age, and she fell passionately in love with him. It was a slight drawback that he was married, a fact he could not conceal at her office had he wished to, since Mrs Mahon was also employed by the firm in Sunbury, and was often on the telephone. She had, indeed, found her husband his post there, after a curious episode of which Miss Kaye, at any rate at first, knew nothing. Mahon doubtless spun to her the tale he told Miss Duncan, probably his regular gambit that his married life was a tragedy. The courage and ready smile with which he bore his sorrows may further have endeared him to Mr Hobbins's secretary, who seems to have made no attempt to discover the truth about his home life, as, in the circumstances, she could easily have done. Mahon, in fact owed everything to his wife, of whom nothing but good is known; and hers was the tragedy. In view of events, and of Mahon's character as a persistent philanderer, his version of the relationship between him and Emily Kaye may very well be true that she was a determined and possessive woman, who would not let him go. Moreover, after they began to go about together the inevitable happened, and early in 1924 she probably knew that she was going to have a child.

In the meantime Miss Kaye's employment in Copthall Avenue had been terminated. With her experience and excellent references she should have found other work easily, but except for a month, when she took a temporary post, she seems to have done nothing after October 1923. Having money put by, she was in no immediate need of work; and, besides, she had a different future in view. At the Green Cross Club, where Mahon sometimes called for her he was known as Derek Patterson, or "Pat" for short. This apparently was her own suggestion; a girl at the club had friends who knew him, and it would be a nuisance if rumours reached his wife. It was all one to Mahon, who would call himself anything. Wife or no wife, he was now Emily Kaye's fiance, and in March 1924 she was showing her friends a diamond and sapphire engagement ring, and writing to her sister about going to South Africa with "Pat," who had a good post waiting for him there. She was realising her invested capital of rather over £600 and nearly half this sum, in three £100 notes, passed into Mabon's hands: His story of transactions in francs was not convincing, still less his explanation of the different false name and address he gave when changing each note; but, as the judge observed during the trial this financial episode was of secondary importance.  Miss Kaye undoubtedly gave the notes to Mahon: On April 7th she herself was buying 7,400 francs with most of the balance of her capital She had already arranged to give up her room at the club; and that same day she finally left Guilford Street:

Ten days later, on the l7th, her friend Miss Warren received a letter from her. Though dated the l4th, and, written on the notepaper of an Eastbourne hotel, it had been posted only the previous evening that of the l6th, and in. London SW1. In it was the news that Pat, and Emily Kaye were together and were going to paris for easter, which fell on the following weekend. They would be in London for a short time before setting out on their "final journey." It is improbable that this really meant a voyage to South Africa; Mahon's story is worth nothing, and he certainly had no intention of leaving England; and it has been seen that Emily Kaye, having burnt her boats, had no scruples about small deceptions. Whatever plan was in her mind; by the time her letter reached-Miss Warren she had already gone on her final journey.

At the Pevensey end of the Crumbles, on the Wallsend Road, stood what had been Langney Coastguard Station-a terrace of small white-washed, single-storied quarters and a larger detached residence, with half a dozen rooms, still known as the Officer's House. The whole group of buildings was enclosed by a brick and concrete wall, from which the shingle sloped to the sea. Inland stretched a flat and desolate country, and the next nearest habitation, in 1924, was some distance away. Close at hand was the spot where Irene Munro's body had been found. It was not, it might be thought, an ideal scene for a romantic and illicit love affair.

People lived there, however, and the Officer's house, which for letting purposes was styled a bungalow, was the property of a Mrs Hutchinson. At the end of March that year she asked her friend Mr Muir, who lived in the Victoria neighbourhood, to advertise that the bungalow was to let. The advertisement ; appeared in the Daily Telegraph of April 4th, and that day a Mr Waller telephoned about it. There was an interview, Mr Waller saw the bungalow, and agreed to take it from April 11th  at a rent of 3 1/2 guineas a week. On the following day, as it happened, Muir again met Mr Waller, who was carrying a bag, in Victoria Street. He was to have cause to remember the date and place of that meeting.

Easter came and went Good Friday was the l8th and in  a boarding-house in Pagoda Avenue, Richmond, Mrs Mahon was beginning to worry about her husband's erratic movements. For two week-ends he had been away, sending her telegrams from Eastbourne, Bexhill, and Vauxhall Bridge Road, and giving explanations more plausible than convincing. An acquaintance had seen him at Plumpton Races on Easter Monday, which suggested that he was up to old tricks that had cost her dear before though not so dear as some of his other ones. As one more week-end came round, the last in the month, and he was absent again, she searched the pockets of his numerous suits for a clue. She found a cloakroom ticket from Waterloo. A friend who had been in the railway police agreed to investigate. At Waterloo he withdrew a locked Gladstone bag, and by forcing open the ends discovered enough to send him straight to Scotland Yard.

This was on May Day, a Thursday. Chief Inspector Savage  examined the bag that evening, and left an officer to watch the cloakroom. For a few hours more Mrs Mahon was left in ignorance of the fact that the contents of the bag were beyond her worst imaginings. She was told only that they had nothing  to do with betting or bookmakers, as she had feared. The ticket was back in her husband's coat pocket, and her mind must have been more or less at ease, for he was with her that night,
and she held her tongue. The next evening, that of Friday, May 2nd , a very good-looking young man, whom Mr Muir was to recognise as Waller, called at Waterloo for his Gladstone bag, and was stopped by  Detective Constable Thompson. Taken to Kennington Road Police Station, he was asked to explain how this piece of luggage came to contain a number of bloodstained articles, including a cook's knife, and a racquet case marked E.B.K., all sprinkled with disinfectant. A story about dog's meat failed  to account for the blood, for it was human; and presently, after long intervals of silence, Patrick Mahon began to tell a very different tale.

It was not the truth either; that was to be laboriously established., largely by Bernard Spilsbury, in what, technically speaking, was one of the masterpieces of his long and immensely varied professional career.   After sifting all the evidence available it was obvious that the police could not make out a very good case against the accused, yet nothing was to be gained by waiting, and it was agreed to take the case to court with but a poor hope of success. As it proceeded, the case against the accused gradually revealed itself, until by the end there was no shadow of doubt about his guilt. "It gradually took shape as in building up a jigsaw puzzle," said Spilsbury. These are very instructive observations, if only because they read rather surprisingly today, when the case against Mahon appears to have been as complete from the beginning as such a case could be. No one now believes his story, nor did the police believe a word of it then; the difficulty lay in disproving it beyond that `shadow of doubt' which haunts every jury in a trial for murder. Spilsbury's remarks are instructive, again, because they are typical; there is not a word to suggest that has own enormous labours, and the weight of his reputation, put the coping stone on the no less thorough constructive work of the C.I.D.

Mahon's story, told at Kennington on May 2, brought the local police to the Officer's House the next day; and on the morning of Saturday,the 4th, Chief Inspector Savage and other officers travelled to Eastbourne. With them were, Spilsbury and his new assistant, Mrs Bainbridge. The widow; of a former professor at Bart's who had been Spilsbury's friend, she had applied for work at the hospital after her husband's death. Sent to the pathological department to help in the museum, she developed an interest in post-mortem work, and was allowed (an unusual privilege) to watch Spilsbury in his laboratory. A highly intelligent woman, she became before long his assistant, and wrote up his findings at his dictation as he went along. She held this post until her early death a few years later. Spilsbury soon appreciated the convenience of having a secretary, and as Mrs Bainbridge's nerves proved equal to the most grisly tasks she was presently accompanying him on cases that took him far from the hospital, and even out of London. The crime at the Crumbles was the first major investigation in which she shared. It was to prove the most shocking. After that long day's work at the Officer's House, much of it in the spring sunshine in a small high-walled courtyard which was part of the shingly garden, Spilsbury himself, inured to horrors, said the human remains discovered there were the most gruesome he had ever seen. The front door of the house opened into what was now called the lounge, comfortably furnished in a commonplace style, with a wallpaper of shrubs in pots, a cretonne covered settee and chair, a good carpet, and two oil-lamps on a corner cupboard. An incongruous addition-the police had brought it from the scullery-was a two-gallon saucepan on the brick hearth. In the more utilitarian dining room another big saucepan stood in the fireplace, beside a saucer and a flimsy coal-scuttle in the form of a cauldron with hollow tripod legs, one of them bent. There was solid, old-fashioned stuff in the  bedrooms, and in one of them, as well, a capacious fibre trunk with the initials E.B.K. painted on it, a leather kitbag, and a square hat-box. A galvanised iron bath and an enamelled basin had converted a large scullery into a bathroom.

When Spilsbury and his companions, watched by a growing  crowd of spectators, entered the bungalow on that May morning, the saucepans had been uncovered, and the contents of the trunk and the hatbox, which now stood in the scullery, lay exposed. Spilsbury put on his long white apron and rubber gloves and went from room to room, picking up objects, examining them, turning them over, and collecting them in the scullery. He looked at the appalling luggage, peered into the saucepans and the bath and the basin. Then he had the kitchen table taken into the little courtyard, beyond which the police  were digging among the pebbles and coarse grass of the garden. For three hours he worked there, Savage and other officers standing by, and Mrs Bainbridge making notes. Altogether  Spilsbury spent eight hours in the bungalow that day. When he left, after dusk, hundreds of people still stood staring on the Crumbles, and among the cars drawn up on the road. There had been found, in the order in which Spilsbury described them at the trial.  On a rusty tenon saw, grease and a piece of flesh. Articles of female clothing, greasy and bloodstained, some with soot or coal-dust on them. On the cauldron-shaped coal scuttle, two minute specks of blood. In the saucer near it, solidified fat. The two gallon saucepan in the same fireplace was half full of a reddish fluid, with a thick layer of grease on the surface; this contained a piece of boiled human flesh, the skin adhering to it.

The metal fender was splashed with grease. There was more grease deposited in the second saucepan, and smeared in the bath and basin. In the hat box, among soiled articles of clothing, were thirty seven pieces of flesh, cut or sawn. All were human, and all had apparently been boiled. The big fibre  trunk held four large pieces of human body, sawn apart, but not boiled. On one of these pieces, a left chest and shoulder, there was a bruise over the shoulder blade, the result of a blow inflicted before death; if only a few minutes before, it had been, in Spilsbury's opinion, a heavy blow. There was also in the  trunk a biscuit-tin containing various organs.  This was not all, the police had already found a large stain of human blood on a carpet, the blood having soaked through to a felt drugget beneath, and then to the floor-boards. In the  leather kitbag were a woman's brush and comb; a good wristwatch, and jewellery. There were six hats, and other articles from a woman's wardrobe, in the bedrooms. There was an axe, its haft broken. Among the cutlery, an inventory of which was in Mahon's pocket, was a carving-knife; the distinction between this and the cook's knife found in the Gladstone bag at Waterloo, emphasised by Spilsbury in his evidence at the trial, had an important bearing on Mahon's own story. So had the construction and condition of the coal cauldron. Finally, in fireplaces and in a dustpan was a quantity of coal and other ash; and this Spilsbury sifted with his customary infinite care, recovering from it nearly a thousand fragments of calcined bone, much merely dust, but many of the splinters still identifiable as human. Some he was able even then to fit together.  In short, these horrible disjecta membra comprised most of a female human body. The skull and upper part of the neck, and the lower portion of one leg, were missing. Flesh and bone went back with Spilsbury to Bart's; and that night, after the staff had left, he began his final task in the preparation room, next to the post mortem room. He worked till 6 am the next morning, carried out his usual duties during the day, and resumed work on the remains in the evening. By the second morning, that of May 6th, he had discovered all that it was possible to discover, medically speaking, about the fate of Emily Kaye.

If this was not much it was as a feat of reconstruction probably one which no other man could have accomplished. Remnants by the hundred, such as Spilsbury himself never before or after handled, boiled and burnt, sawn, hewn, and pulverised, all fragmentary and many minute, were pieced together during those two nights' single-handed labour. Trunk and organs were reassembled; from a mound of brittle incinerated bone-dust portions of the legs, the tibia, the right femur, and left radius were sorted and united. There were particles of both hands. When Spilsbury employed the hackneyed comparison of the jigsaw puzzle to describe the case as a whole he must have been thinking of its grimmer application to his own masterpiece.

His conclusions are set out in sufficient detail in his evidence at the trial, when he said: "All the material which I have examined, portions of the trunk, the organs, pieces of boiled flesh, and those fragments of bone which I have been able to identify, are all of them human, and correspond with parts of a single body: there are no duplicates at all. The four pieces of chest and abdominal wall fit accurately to form one trunk, and the organs in the tin box, togethex with the fragments of organs attached to the four pieces of trunk, form a complete set of human organs, with the exception of certain missing portions, of which the uterus and one ovary are the most important. The body was that of an adult female of big build and fair hair. She was pregnant, in my opinion, at the time of her death, and at an early period, probably between one and three months. There was no indication of any previous pregnancy or of pregnancy which had run its full term. The organs were those of a healthy person, and the adhesions round the right lung were the only indications of previous disease. No disease was found to account for natural death, and no condition which would account for unnatural death."

As these last words reveal, in one sense all this patient and intricate work went for nothing. before Spilsbury left London for the Officer's House he knew that the remains were those of a woman named Emily Kaye. What the police wanted to be told was how she had died, and that not even he could tell them. He could, however, say how she had not died, and so undermined the whole structure of Mahon's defence.

If Mahon's detention at Waterloo had not taken him completely by surprise, or if he had given thought beforehand to the story he might some day have to tell, it is just possible that he would have escaped the gallows. But among the lies he told three were fatal; one was easily disproved by routine police inquiries, and the other two by Spilsbury.

Mahon had not been detained for many hours before the police discovered that they knew a good deal about him. Of Liverpool-Irish stock, with a certain quick intelligence as well as plausible manners and good looks, his youth had been outwardly exemplary. Like Thorne and other murderers, he was regular in attendance at Sunday school, and later at church, and active in various social affairs. He was good at games. He married, in 1910, when he was only twenty, a girl two years younger. A year later he was taking another girl to the Isle of Man with money obtained by forged cheques. Bound over for this offence, he was soon sentenced to twelve months for embezzlement. This was in Wiltshire; some time after his release he appeared at Sunningdale, in Surrey. He could not keep away from women, and apparently the notoriety of his love affairs cost him his job there. He picked up others where he could, chiefly on race courses, and then, in 1916, he broke into a bank and stunned a maidservant with a hammer. It was in character that he lingered until his victim had recovered her senses, when he tried his blandishments on her, kissing and fondling her, and explaining that he had not really meant to hurt her. He was tried at the Guildford Assizes before Darling, who proved insusceptible to charm of manner; and when Mahon went to prison again it was for five years.

It was this episode which gave Emily Kaye a hold over him. She was lining a drawer with a clean sheet of newspaper, and as she pulled out the old sheet she saw on it a report of the trial at Guildford. Young Mrs Mahon had stood by her husband throughout. There were two children of the marriage, but the younger one, a boy, died while his father was in prison. Mrs Mahon, in the meantime, had come to London and found work with the Consols Automatic Aerators Company at Sunbury. When Mahon had served his sentence her recommendation secured him a position with the firm as salesman. She herself, by her own endeavours and ability, in time became secretary. Mahon, it will be noted, always came back to her; and it is a tragic aspect of this case that with her help he might now have made something of his life. When the company was put in the hands of a receiver he too was promoted, at a salary of £750 a year. Not a soul in Kew or Richmond, except his wife, knew that he was an ex-convict and still under observation by the police. Murderers who have to account for a dead body adopt one or other of certain well-worn explanations. The explanation used by Mahon was the quarrel, the struggle, and the accidental death. But his story, concocted during that nerveracking evening at Kennington Road police-station, was full of improbabilities and more serious defects, and later versions did not improve it. Miss Kaye travelled to Eastbourne on April 7th. Mahon joined her on the 11th, a Friday, to take over the Officer's House, returning to London for the night. He had already given false names, addresses, and references all over the place when changing the first two £100 notes and to Mr Muir. Meeting Muir the next morning, that of Saturday, the l2th, in Victoria Street, he told another and apparently unnecessary lie, either from force of habit or as part of a plan already formed, but never carried out. He was then on his way to the bungalow, and after the meeting he made some purchases, among them a cook's knife and a tenon saw, also called a cook's saw. In his first statement to the police Mahon said he bought these implements on the l7th, when Emily Kaye was dead; only at the police-court hearing at Hailsham, when a duplicate invoice from the ironxnonger's shop was produced did he admit that, as he put it, he had made a mistake about the date. It was a vital and fatal mistake. The reasons he proceeded to give for making such purchases while Miss Kaye was alive carried no weight at all when produced at so late a stage.

Since, however, this afterthought was his only counter to the charge of premeditation, Mahon attempted to bolster it up by denying that he used the cook's knife on the body. Emily Kaye had handled it, and for sentimental reasons he preferred to cut her up with the carving-knife belonging to the bungalow. At the trial Spilsbury was recalled to dispose of this nauseating piece of hypocrisy. The carving knife could not have done the work. "It would be no good to cut through skin." A much sharper knife had been used. Nor was there the faintest trace on the carver of the blood which must have spurted over it and
into the junction of blade and handle; on the contrary, grease and emery-powder showed that it had last been used for normal domestic purposes. On the cook's knife, designed to slice raw flesh, Webster's tests had found suggestions of blood.
The next most disastrous mistake in Mahon's story was his account of how his victim died: In a struggle with him Emily Kaye fell backward, carrying him with her, and striking her head on the cauldron-shaped coal-scuttle. These scuttles were sold for a few shillings by the thousand, insubstantial things of which the legs tended to buckle and the bottoms to wear through quickly. When Spilsbury was in the witness-box Curtis-Bennett, who led for the Crown, questioned him on this point, as did the judge.

Curtis-Bennett first asked, "In your opinion could Miss Kaye have received rapidiy fatal injuries from falling upon that coal-cauldron ?"  "No, in my opinion she could not," replied Spilsbury. Mr Justice Avory then intervened: "Just put it in another way. Do I understand in your opinion a fall upon that coal cauldron would not cause her rapid death?" "That is so." In answer to J. D. Cassela, for the defence, Spilsbury amplified these concise replies:  "No fall on the coal-cauldron such as you haye described would be capable of infiicting such injuries to the head as to cause rapidly fatal resuits, If that particular cauldron, filled with coal, were the one referred to, a sufficiently severe blow to produce such in, jury would have crumpled up the cauldron."

Setting aside all Mahon's other shifts, prevarications, and downright lies, probably nothing did him more harm with the jury than the true story of Ethel Duncan. Late on the evening of April 10th, the day before he and Emily Kaye took over the Officer's House, he met Miss Duncan in Richmond. Out of work and unhappy, she was walking home in the rain; Mahon, heedless of his entanglement with Miss Kaye, to say nothing of his devoted wife waiting for him a few streets away, or of plans of murder which probably were then taking shape in his thoughts, succumbed at once to the impulse to philander with a nice looking young woman. A few days later, on Wednesday the l6th, Miss Duncan was having dinner with him at Victoria. Emily Kaye had been dead barely twenty-four hours. While her body lay locked in a spare bedroom, Ethel Duncan spent the next weekend, that of Easter, with Mahon at the bungalow. His explanation of this episode, so tragic for Miss Duncan,and so extraordinary at first sight, was that for some days after the murder he could not bear to be alone in that house; and this no doubt was the truth. But it did not go down well with those who heard and saw him.  For he made a poor impression in the witness-box. He did his best; he bought a new suit for the occasion, and contrived somehow to darken his face to give the effect of tan. (An innocent reporter wrote of him in the dock: "The bronzed hue of his fine features was a tribute to the extent to which prisoners are now allowed open-air exercise.") He is said to have been confident, almost until the end, that his looks and charm would spellbind the jury, and even Mr Justice Avory. But his manner was either too jaunty or too dramatic. Avory, in his most chilling way, kept recalling him to the point with such interjections as "All this is so vague;" or "You were asked what you did, not all this imagination." Under Curtis-Bennett's cross-examination Mahon must have begun to feel hope slipping away; and, before that, a startling coincidence shattered his self assurance. At Brixton Prison he had told Cassels how he built up a great fire in the bungalow, and in it placed Emily Kaye's severed head. The day was stormy, and as the long fair hair flamed up the dead eyes opened, and, at the same instant, thunder crashed overhead and lightning blazed. Terrified, Mahon ran out into the rain.

Now, on the third day of the trial, Cassels was again questioning him about thosE fearful hours when he was cutting and sawing and boiling the remains of the woman who had loved him: The July weather was dark and sultry, and as Cassels began to ask about the head, and Mahon replied, again a thunderclap reverberated through the courtroom, and the lightning flashed. Mahon shrank back, gripping the edge of the witness box. He was white and shaken as he answered the further questions with which the day's hearing closed. He was not acting then; but there remains an element of mystery about his disposal of the head. The most ghastly item in this catalogue of horrors is his account of how he broke it up with a poker. Spilsbury's meticulous sifting of ash and bone, which produced so much else, found no trace of it. It was considered doubtful whether it could have been wholly destroyed by an ordinary coal-fire, though to settle an argument Spils-bury put a sheep's head on such a fire and reduced it to unrecognisable ashes in four hours. Yet speculation is still un-resolved. Did Mahon get rid of the head, half burnt and pounded to powder, by throwing it into the sea, or (as he got rid of certain other remains) from a railway carriage? It is believed that he killed Emily Kaye by a blow with the axe on her head or neck so violent that it splintered the haft. In such a case he must cause the head to disappear completely, so that should suspicion fall on him he could put forward his story of the quarrel and the accident. Prolonged efforts were made, in vain, to find the head. Dogs were employed, and acres of shingle were raked and riddled. There was rejoicing over the discovery, in a brickfield near Pevensey, of bone fragments and a dental plate; but the bones were not human, and the plate was not Miss Kaye's. Nor was a human leg found on Wimble-don Common the limb missing from the Crumbles remains. Mahon having been convicted, his appeal failed, as it was bound to fail, and he was hanged on September 9th. According to the biographers of Curtis-Bennett, he was "doubly hanged." It seemed that he had a certain amount of knowledge of the procedure of the executioner. He knew that his feet must stand within two chalk-marks as the rope was adjusted round his neck. He knew that immediately after the fixing of the hood the execu-tioner would move swiftly to a lever and cause the platform on which he stood to swing away from under him. As he sensed that Pierrepoint moved to the lever, Mahon jerked his bound feet forward in a wild attempt to place them on the stationary part of the platform. At that moment the lever was pulled and his body swung back, the base of the spine striking with terrific force against the sharp edge of the platform. That blow killed him, and half a second later the spine was again broken at the neck by the jerk of the rope.'
Spilsbury's case card notes that the spine was dislocated between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, and that between the sixth and seventh vertebrae there was much displacement  backward of the upper part. There is no mention, however, of any bruise resulting from the blow against the edge of the platform, which seems to dispose of the story. At this point it may be asked how Spilsbury's filing cabinets come to contain a ca.rd for the murderer, as well as one for his victim; and the answer is of considerable interest. A reporter who knew Spilsbury was surprised to meet him at Wandsworth Prison on the morning of the execution. He was carrying the inevitable black bag. Asked why he was there, he replied that he was performing the post-mortem on Mahon's body. He was doing the routine work of the prison, and doing it in his usual painstaking way. The normal practice in such post-mortems is to open the neck to confirm the obvious cause of death. Spilsbury, however, opened the body right down, and then spent another hour examining the brain, a portion of which he took away with him. To the coroner, who suggested that he was being unnecessarily thorough, he said, "I must do this in my own way." It was his first autopsy of this kind, but by no means his last. It had occurred to him that here was a form of sudden death, not uncommon, which no one before had thought of investigating with the thoroughness applied as a matter of course to other fatalities. It must also have struck him that a series of such investigations would have a comparative value of their own.

In every case the time of death would be known to a second, and the post-mortem could be carried out at the statutory hour, or at any other precise interval, after hanging. From 1924 onward the heading "Judicial Hanging" is found once or twice a year among his cards, and latterly much more often. Altogether he must have performed at least fifty of these prison post-mortems. Whether or not his researches advanced medical  science, they produced one curious and interesting by product. He went into the whole matter with his friend Bentley Purchase, the coroner, who has had his own wide experience of judicial executions; and at their recommendation the drop, which is varied according to a formula involving simple calculations of weight, and which, for obvious reasons, must not be too long, was increased on humanitarian grounds by three inches.

This information has been adapted from the excellent book entitled ‘Bernard Spilsbury his life and his cases’ by Browne and Tullett
 

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