Dr John Bodkin Adams

Edith Alice Morrell was a patient of Dr Adams who had been partially paralysed after suffering a stroke. Adams supplied her with a cocktail of heroin and morphine to ease her discomfort, insomnia and symptoms of “cerebral irritation”, a condition associated with her illness.

During the period of her palliative treatment, Mrs Morrell made several wills in which Adams received money and items of furniture, while in other versions he was omitted entirely. However, three months before Morrell’s death on 13 November 1949, she added a clause to her will stating that Adams was to receive nothing. Despite this, Dr Adams—who maintained that Morrell had died from natural causes—still received a small amount of money, cutlery, and a Rolls Royce.

The second alleged victim of Dr Adams appeared seven years after Mrs Morrell had died. Gertrude Hullett was another patient of Adams who fell ill and then into unconsciousness. Despite her not yet being dead, Adams called a local pathologist, Francis Camps, to arrange an autopsy. When Camps realised that Hullett was still alive, he accused Adams of “extreme incompetence”. On 23 July 1956, Gertrude Hullett died, and Adams recorded the cause of death as a brain haemorrhage. An official investigation, however, concluded that she had committed suicide. Camps argued instead that she had been poisoned with sleeping pills. Like Mrs Morrell before her, Hullett left several valuable items to Dr Adams, including a Rolls Royce.

Gossip surrounding Adams began circulating within the close-knit seaside community. Whether there was truth in the allegations that Adams was an “angel of death” preying on vulnerable wealthy widows, or whether he was an “angel of mercy” alleviating suffering, remained a matter of dispute. It was the death of Hullett in 1956 that ultimately brought Adams to the attention of the authorities.

The gossip in the town finally led the police to investigate, and they arrested Adams on suspicion of murder. Rumours circulating through the genteel seaside resort suggested that Adams’ bedside manner involved persuading wealthy widows to write wills in his favour before administering a lethal concoction of drugs.

Accusations and hearsay had reached such intensity that the local police felt compelled to act. At the same time, the press seized on the story and, in what became a form of “trial by media”, reinforced the image of Adams as a GP with a sinister agenda. One headline—“Inquiry into 400 wills”—helped fuel public suspicion that he might be a serial killer.

The police investigation continued for several months during 1956. On 1 October of that year, they confronted Dr Adams with their suspicions regarding the death of Mrs Morrell. In his defence, Adams argued that his severely ill patient, suffering intense pain, had wanted to die, and that it was not a crime to ease the suffering of the terminally ill. However, the repeated inclusion of Adams in his patients’ wills continued to raise doubts about his motives, and remained central to the police investigation.

Adams’ trial took place in March 1957. Sir Frederick Geoffrey Lawrence QC, acting as Adams’ defence counsel, argued that the charge was based mainly on testimony from nurses who had attended Mrs Morrell.

Mrs Morrell had been cared for on a 24-hour basis by a team of four nurses. These nurses testified that Dr Bodkin Adams routinely injected patients with very high doses of pain-killing drugs such as morphine and heroin. Although they were deeply shocked and suspicious of this practice, they felt that, as nurses, there was little they could do.

The case initially appeared bleak for Dr Adams, until Lawrence cross-examined one of the nurses. He established that all injections administered to Mrs Morrell had been carefully recorded in notebooks alongside detailed notes of her condition at each stage of her illness. This was standard practice for terminal care.

Lawrence then produced not just one, but eight notebooks that had been overlooked by police investigators. These contained detailed records of Mrs Morrell’s treatment over several years prior to her death, and were also annotated by the nurses themselves. On closer examination, it emerged that their written records did not align with their courtroom testimony, raising questions about the reliability of their recollections.

The defence suggested that the nurses may have been influenced by malicious gossip circulating within the town. In Adams’ favour, only one of the prosecution’s two medical experts was prepared to state definitively that murder had occurred, and Lawrence was also able to challenge the reliability of that witness.

Crucially, Adams was not required to testify, and evidence relating to the Gertrude Hullett case—including further nursing testimony—was excluded from the trial. One nurse who had attended Hullett in July 1956 was reported to have told Adams: “You do realise, doctor, that you have killed her?”

On 15 April 1957, after just 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Despite the not guilty verdict, the police remained convinced that Adams was guilty—not only of the two murders he had been charged with, but of the deaths of many other patients. The press appeared to share this view. A Fleet Street journalist at the time is known to have said that word on the street suggested Adams had killed so many patients, and seemed likely to kill many more, that the authorities felt compelled to prosecute even though the case was “not quite ready”.

After the trial, Adams resigned from the National Health Service. Later that same year he was convicted of forging prescriptions and ordered to pay a fine of £2,200. As a result, he was struck off the Medical Register. Despite the negative publicity, he successfully sued several newspapers for libel.

Adams spent his remaining years in Eastbourne, where his reputation remained deeply divided: some still believed he had murdered at least eight people, while others—particularly former patients and acquaintances—remained convinced of his innocence.

In 1961, he was reinstated as a general practitioner. On 4 July 1983, Adams died at the age of eighty-four. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at £402,970, and it was noted that he had continued to receive legacies up until his death.