As head of forensic medicine at the Charing Cross Hospital between 1973 and 1989 and professor of forensic medicine at London University from 1977 to 1989, Bowen investigated some 500 cases of murder and suspicious deaths.
David Bowen leaving the house in Melrose Ave, where Dennis Nilsen had buried 12 victims
In February 1983 Det Ch Insp Peter Jay, head of Hornsey CID, arrived at Bowen’s office at Charing Cross and showed him several strips of skin and four small bones which had been recovered from a house in Muswell Hill where blocked drains had been reported. The strips had a few fine hairs and appeared to have been partially boiled; initially they were thought to have come from the skin of a chicken. But Bowen was certain they were human.
“The fine hairs suggest the skin came from the neck area,” Bowen told the officer, “and the bones are from a hand – two main bones and two fingerbones.” Noticing indentations on the surface of the skin, Bowen remarked that it might well have come from someone who had been strangled.
On the strength of Bowen’s advice, the detective returned to north London to await the arrival home from work of Dennis Nilsen, a 37-year-old civil servant with the Manpower Services Commission. “I’ve come about your drains,” said Jay.
That evening Bowen was called to make an initial examination of Nilsen’s flat at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, and was immediately struck by its unpleasant foetid atmosphere. When he examined two plastic bin bags taken from the wardrobe he found human chest tissue, expertly dissected from the rib cage, and an almost-complete human torso. He also found the upper half of a second torso with arms but no hands; a decomposed skull; and the freshly decapitated head of Nilsen’s last victim. In total Bowen counted up the major parts of two bodies plus a recently dismembered one which was easily identified by fingerprints. In this case, the head had been parboiled in a stockpot which Nilsen kept on his stove. Nilsen said the other two had died in March and September 1982.
At his previous address in Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, Nilsen had dismembered another 12 victims and buried them under his floorboards; to make way for newcomers as space became tight, he progressively transferred the remains to his garden, burning them on huge bonfires before crushing the residuum with a heavy roller. Bowen and a colleague identified enough bone fragments retrieved from the topsoil to establish that at least six bodies were represented. At Nilsen’s trial, the jury found him guilty on six charges of murder.
The case occupies its own niche in the annals of murder because, at the time, it involved the disposal of more bodies by one man than in any other case in British criminal history.
Four years after the Nilsen trial, Bowen worked on the Railway Murders, two of which had been carried out by John Duffy and three by his close friend David Mulcahy. In 1988 Duffy had been convicted of two killings but acquitted of a third – that of Anne Lock – because of lack of evidence.
But 10 years into his sentence, Duffy named Mulcahy as his accomplice in some 25 rapes and three murders near suburban railway stations in north London, including the unsolved killing of Mrs Lock. Unlike the other two victims, she had been suffocated by a sock stuffed into her mouth. In September 2000 Bowen returned to the Old Bailey to testify about the tape that had bound Mrs Lock’s hands, and was cross-examined on exactly how the tape had been fastened to her fingers, corroborating the story that Duffy had given. As a result Mulcahy was convicted of three murders, seven rapes and five counts of conspiracy to rape and given a whole life sentence.
David Aubrey Llewellyn Bowen was born on January 31 1924 at Pontycymmer, a former mining village near Bridgend in south Wales. After Caterham School and Garw secondary school, Pontycymmer, he studied Medicine at University College of Wales in Cardiff and took his Master’s degree at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He completed his training at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. House officer posts at the West Middlesex and London Chest Hospitals were followed by a two-year spell with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Discharged in 1949, Bowen trained in clinical pathology and histopathology at the Royal Marsden Hospital, and in 1957 a chance vacancy led to his appointment as Demonstrator in Forensic Pathology at St George’s Hospital Medical School.
In his memoirs, Bowen recalled how a telephone call and an interview led to a job as “bagman” to Professor Donald Teare who, with Francis Camps and Keith Simpson, comprised the “Three Musketeers” covering virtually all the murders and suspicious deaths in the London area. It was a rare chance to gain a foothold in such a specialised sphere, and Bowen seized it.
In the course of a 40-year career Bowen carried out forensic investigations into many notable cases, including the murder of Ross McWhirter, co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records, shot on the doorstep of his north London home by the IRA in 1975; the death of the teacher Blair Peach at an anti-racism demonstration in London in 1979; and the killing of PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death in the riots on the Broadwater Farm estate, Tottenham, in 1985. He also conducted autopsies in the wake of the IRA bomb at the Baltic Exchange in London in April 1992.
In 1999 Bowen was asked to provide a report on the mysterious case of Roberto Calvi, head of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and known as “God’s banker” because of his close ties to the Vatican, who was found hanged below Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. Bowen had been retained by lawyers acting for Italian insurers dealing with a claim by Calvi’s widow on a $4 million life insurance policy. She and her son insisted the banker did not take his own life, as the police had concluded.
Bowen believed that evidence pointed to Calvi having been forcibly taken to the bridge, possibly by boat, and to his having been the victim of foul play. In 2007 five Italians tried for Calvi’s murder were acquitted.
Another celebrated case was the mysterious death in Spandau prison in West Berlin in 1987 of Hitler’s wartime deputy, Rudolf Hess, at the age of 93. A British consultant surgeon, Hugh Thomas, who attended Hess, sought Bowen’s opinion on the cause of Hess’s death. Bowen scrutinised two separate post-mortem reports, one prepared on behalf of the Four Powers (Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France) and the other drawn up on behalf of Hess’s family.
The Four Powers believed that the prisoner had hanged himself using electrical cord he had found in a shed. But Bowen agreed with Hess’s son that the alleged method of Hess’s hanging left considerable doubt about the truth of the matter. Suicidal hanging, Bowen noted, usually leaves few marks on the neck or internal tissues because of the invariably short drop. In Hess’s case the autopsy had found bruising in the deeper neck tissues. Such bruising, Bowen reasoned, while unlikely to occur in a case of hanging, is, however, a feature of strangulation.
Bruising to the top of the head – again as found in Hess’s case – is also unlikely to occur in hanging. “Doubts must remain,” Bowen concluded, “on the reliability of the official statement given concerning the death of Rudolf Hess.”
As well as his London appointments, Bowen was examiner in forensic medicine at the Universities of Saudi Arabia and Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was the author of more than 50 papers in forensic medical and pathology journals. His autobiography, Body Of Evidence, appeared in 2003.
David Bowen married, in 1950, Joan Davis, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Following her death in 1973 he married, in 1975, Helen Landcastle, who survives him with the children of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8446356/Professor-David-Bowen.html
The case occupies its own niche in the annals of murder because, at the time, it involved the disposal of more bodies by one man than in any other case in British criminal history.
Four years after the Nilsen trial, Bowen worked on the Railway Murders, two of which had been carried out by John Duffy and three by his close friend David Mulcahy. In 1988 Duffy had been convicted of two killings but acquitted of a third – that of Anne Lock – because of lack of evidence.
But 10 years into his sentence, Duffy named Mulcahy as his accomplice in some 25 rapes and three murders near suburban railway stations in north London, including the unsolved killing of Mrs Lock. Unlike the other two victims, she had been suffocated by a sock stuffed into her mouth. In September 2000 Bowen returned to the Old Bailey to testify about the tape that had bound Mrs Lock’s hands, and was cross-examined on exactly how the tape had been fastened to her fingers, corroborating the story that Duffy had given. As a result Mulcahy was convicted of three murders, seven rapes and five counts of conspiracy to rape and given a whole life sentence.
David Aubrey Llewellyn Bowen was born on January 31 1924 at Pontycymmer, a former mining village near Bridgend in south Wales. After Caterham School and Garw secondary school, Pontycymmer, he studied Medicine at University College of Wales in Cardiff and took his Master’s degree at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He completed his training at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. House officer posts at the West Middlesex and London Chest Hospitals were followed by a two-year spell with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Discharged in 1949, Bowen trained in clinical pathology and histopathology at the Royal Marsden Hospital, and in 1957 a chance vacancy led to his appointment as Demonstrator in Forensic Pathology at St George’s Hospital Medical School.
In his memoirs, Bowen recalled how a telephone call and an interview led to a job as “bagman” to Professor Donald Teare who, with Francis Camps and Keith Simpson, comprised the “Three Musketeers” covering virtually all the murders and suspicious deaths in the London area. It was a rare chance to gain a foothold in such a specialised sphere, and Bowen seized it.
In the course of a 40-year career Bowen carried out forensic investigations into many notable cases, including the murder of Ross McWhirter, co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records, shot on the doorstep of his north London home by the IRA in 1975; the death of the teacher Blair Peach at an anti-racism demonstration in London in 1979; and the killing of PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death in the riots on the Broadwater Farm estate, Tottenham, in 1985. He also conducted autopsies in the wake of the IRA bomb at the Baltic Exchange in London in April 1992.
In 1999 Bowen was asked to provide a report on the mysterious case of Roberto Calvi, head of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and known as “God’s banker” because of his close ties to the Vatican, who was found hanged below Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. Bowen had been retained by lawyers acting for Italian insurers dealing with a claim by Calvi’s widow on a $4 million life insurance policy. She and her son insisted the banker did not take his own life, as the police had concluded.
Bowen believed that evidence pointed to Calvi having been forcibly taken to the bridge, possibly by boat, and to his having been the victim of foul play. In 2007 five Italians tried for Calvi’s murder were acquitted.
Another celebrated case was the mysterious death in Spandau prison in West Berlin in 1987 of Hitler’s wartime deputy, Rudolf Hess, at the age of 93. A British consultant surgeon, Hugh Thomas, who attended Hess, sought Bowen’s opinion on the cause of Hess’s death. Bowen scrutinised two separate post-mortem reports, one prepared on behalf of the Four Powers (Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France) and the other drawn up on behalf of Hess’s family.
The Four Powers believed that the prisoner had hanged himself using electrical cord he had found in a shed. But Bowen agreed with Hess’s son that the alleged method of Hess’s hanging left considerable doubt about the truth of the matter. Suicidal hanging, Bowen noted, usually leaves few marks on the neck or internal tissues because of the invariably short drop. In Hess’s case the autopsy had found bruising in the deeper neck tissues. Such bruising, Bowen reasoned, while unlikely to occur in a case of hanging, is, however, a feature of strangulation.
Bruising to the top of the head – again as found in Hess’s case – is also unlikely to occur in hanging. “Doubts must remain,” Bowen concluded, “on the reliability of the official statement given concerning the death of Rudolf Hess.”
As well as his London appointments, Bowen was examiner in forensic medicine at the Universities of Saudi Arabia and Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was the author of more than 50 papers in forensic medical and pathology journals. His autobiography, Body Of Evidence, appeared in 2003.
David Bowen married, in 1950, Joan Davis, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Following her death in 1973 he married, in 1975, Helen Landcastle, who survives him with the children of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8446356/Professor-David-Bowen.html
No comments:
Post a Comment