Medicine: The Quality of Mercy

When his two elder boys were asleep and his wife had gone to the cinema, George Ernest Johnson, 40, a major in the Royal Corps of Signals, carried his three-month-old son's cot into the kitchen of their home in Epsom, 14 miles west of London. Dipping his finger in tap water, Johnson made the sign of the cross on the baby's forehead and baptized him David Ernest James. Then Johnson took a flexible gas pipe, put it on the baby's pillow and turned on the gas. When he returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, the baby was dead. Johnson...

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