Some crimes become part of the national memory, but many others gradually disappear into the shadows of history.
The story of Dr John Bodkin Adams belongs to the latter category, although nothing about its capacity to shock is diminished. Northern Irish journalist Andrew Johnston brings the case back into unsettling focus during Ulster’s Doctor Death: The Killer Case of John Bodkin Adams. This was an engaging and often darkly humorous account of the Ulster-born doctor who settled in Eastbourne and became associated with the deaths of elderly patients, as well as accusations that he manipulated their wills and took advantage of those who trusted him.
Johnston is an engaging speaker and part of the fascination comes from the way he allows the extraordinary details of the case to accumulate. He shows court photographs, images of Adams’s house and pictures of the people caught up in the story. These are not simply historical illustrations.
They gradually give the case a more human face. Adams operated in an era when the word of a doctor carried enormous authority. That medical status appears to have been central to his ability to move through the lives of his patients with such confidence. He also possessed charm, another quality that seems to have helped him gain their trust. Alongside the medical authority was an extraordinary appetite for wealth.
Adams coveted the cars of his patients and benefited from valuable legacies. Rolls-Royces feature more than once in the story, as do wills altered in his favour. It creates the disturbing impression of a man wanting more money, more possessions and, chillingly, there are always more patients dying around him.
Johnston also touches on the curious network of establishment figures surrounding the case. There is a sense that Adams was operating in a world where authority protected authority. The tour guide/writer recounts episodes involving patients being shot, with suicide offered as an explanation.
The recurring suggestion that vulnerable patients had taken their own lives becomes increasingly disturbing, particularly when accounts from relatives questioned whether suicide was plausible. One of the cases surrounding Gertrude Hullett was officially recorded as suicide, despite continuing controversy over the circumstances of her death.
Adams’s apparent familiarity with firearms adds another unsettling detail to the portrait Johnston constructs. It is another example of how the story seems to acquire a darker dimension the further into it we go, and Johnston gradually brings more to light, holding the audience’s attention throughout. Much is also made of Adams’s Plymouth Brethren background. He came from a deeply religious family and maintained that identity throughout his life, yet the picture that emerges is of a man with a peculiar sense of his own importance, apparently convinced that his position and authority entitled him to something from the people in his care.
The bizarre stories peppered throughout the show leave the audience alternately slack-jawed and amused by the sheer audacity of the man. Some already know the story and nod along. Others laugh at the oddity of what they are hearing, before the next detail reminds us that behind the eccentricity are real deaths and real families. That uneasy mixture of humour and horror works because Johnston never turns the victims into mere supporting characters in a murder mystery.
The fascination lies partly in the question of how Adams could have operated for so long while apparently accumulating wealth, possessions and influence around him. Ulster’s Doctor Death is as much about the case as it is about power, respectability, money and the authority granted to those who occupy positions of trust. Johnston is a sufficiently engaging storyteller to make an old case feel disturbingly alive again.
Adams may have disappeared from public memory for many, but the audacity of the story remains.
