Death is a frequent caller at Eastbourne, Britain's quietly expensive and very respectable Channel resort. Like an old friend of the family, sometimes without warning, but always observing the amenities, it drops in on those who have long expected a visit, for Eastbourne is a spa where wealthy Britons in the afternoon of life retire to await its end, lapped in the comfort of hoarded memories, expensive motorcars and the fellowship of their own kind. Noisy intruders are seldom permitted to disturb the genteel gossip and endless bridge games that help time pass for the oldsters in Eastbourne. Yet, last week, all of Britain was abuzz with the awful speculation that skulking, sudden death had forced its way into Eastbourne.
A Token of Gratitude. The speculation was focused on the demise of Eastbourne's eccentric old (81) Mrs. Edith Alice Morrell. The cause, according to a death certificate duly filed by her physician, was "cerebral thrombosis," i.e., a stroke. In three decades of practice at Eastbourne, the physician, kindly, pudgy Dr. John Bodkin Adams, had eased the end for many an octogenarian patient, and Mrs. Morrell's timely passing caused scarcely a ripple at the bridge tables. The old lady was cremated. Her son gave Dr. Adams her old Rolls-Royce and a valuable chest of family silver as a token of gratitude for his care, and there, but for some skeptics, the affair might well have rested, marked only by the perfunctory clucking of tongues that serve as the death-bell's tolls in Eastbourne.
There were in Eastbourne, however, some who were rude enough to question the orderly process of life and death in anonymous letters to Scotland Yard.
The result, after a series of visits by smoothly operating Detective Herbert ("The Count") Hannam, was the arrest of kindly Dr. Adams. Last week, in a preliminary court hearing to determine whether the doctor should stand trial for murder, a prosecutor for the Crown declared in so many blunt words that Mrs. Morrell had not died of cerebral thrombosis, but "because she was poisoned by drugs which Dr. Adams administered."
Pre-Mortem Post-Mortem. "Easing the passing of a dying person is not all that wicked," the doctor, according to police, had said at his arrest. "She wanted to die." But in making his case against the owlish physician, who sat quietly in dock making notes for his own lawyer on a pad, Prosecutor Melford Stevenson got permission from the presiding magistrate "to deal with the deaths of two other patients of Dr. Adams who died in circumstances which the Crown says exhibit similarity to the death of Mrs. Morrell." These two were wealthy Alfred John Hul-lett, 71, and his wife, Gertrude, 50, who died within four months of each other in 1956.