The Law Killers by Alexander McGregor

house after falls.
    Sheriff Cox suggested that, as an alternative to the detective’s conjectures, Mrs Connelly may have sustained her assorted injuries by being thrown about.
    ‘I could not equate the scene in the bedroom with an assault,’ responded the officer. ‘In these circumstances the woman could not have moved herself from one side of the bedroom to the other. Everything would have been happening in one corner.’
    Asked to account for the presence of the blood on the purse in the drawer, he explained that it could have come about after Mrs Connelly had attempted to seek help after her falls. Since she had no telephone in the house, she had gone to the purse to collect her house key before departing to alert a neighbour to her plight – but had been unable to do so.
    The police speculation about the events in the house that April day did not meet with any kind of agreement from the forensic scientist who had examined the body of Mrs Connelly. Dr Donald Rushton, bow-tied and peering over the top of glasses positioned on the point of his nose, was customarily categorical in his dismissal of the accident theory, saying it did not equate with the nature and severity of the wounds suffered by the victim.
    ‘On my first visit to the scene I formed the opinion that the deceased had first been assaulted on her bed or at the wardrobe,’ he said emphatically. ‘Had it been accidental, none of her injuries would have spurted blood to that degree. For them to have been caused by her hairnet it would have had to have been a forcible or frantic removal.’ He thought the dead woman could have been assaulted on the bed, then she might have recovered sufficiently to have crawled round it to the place where her body was eventually found. His conclusion was that the majority of her wounds indicated that she had been severely assaulted about the head with a hard object – the sort of which he could not identify – and, in attempting to defend herself, had sustained two injuries to the backs of her hands. Dr Rushton expressed his unhappiness with the idea of the circumstances being explained away as an accident, dismissing the assumptions as implausible and insufficient on medical grounds.
    ‘The injuries were too severe and there were too many of them,’ he said. ‘There were fifteen separate impacts on the body.’ He admitted that a fitter, younger person might have survived the attack.
    Nothing was said at the inquiry, however, to provide any kind of explanation for the lack of signs of a disturbance or forced entry or exit. Nor could anyone account for the absence of unidentified fingerprints. One spot of blood had been found outside the bedroom, on the door inside the living-room leading to the hallway, but that did not produce a foreign print either.
    The conclusion of the evidence at the inquiry presented the Sheriff with a dilemma. He had two widely differing opinions of what might have happened in the pensioner’s flat, each coming from men eminent in their fields but each leaving many questions unanswered. He adjourned the hearing to seek the views of a second medical expert, saying this was the only safe way to deliver a judgement which would be fair to the police, Dr Rushton and Mrs Connelly’s family. It was acknowledged, however, that any new evidence would be based on the available written reports, photographs and interviews and not on first-hand experience of the death scene or the body.
    Two months later, Professor Arthur Harland of Glasgow University told the resumed fatal-accident inquiry that he supported the opinion of Dr Rushton, saying he believed the twelve injuries to the pensioner’s head could only have been sustained by repeated blows ‘of quite unusual violence’. He dismissed the idea of the blood trails on the ceiling having been caused by Mrs Connelly removing her hairnet, but admitted they were likely to have arrived there by someone swinging the hairnet – or a weapon.
    Sheriff Cox