The Press: British Mystery Story

Britain’s reigning crime sensation, touted by Picture Post as “Scotland Yard’s biggest investigation of the century,” has been making headlines for a month: YARD PROBES DEATHS OF 300 RICH WOMEN; YARD PROBES MASS POISONING. Papers reported plans to exhume bodies, test cemetery soil, investigate wills and drug sales. But despite a spate of stories about the Case of the Eastbourne Deaths, many a reader stumbled bewildered through such a maze of hints, irrelevancies and non sequiturs that it was hard to figure out what the uproar was all about. Reason: the tough British laws of libel and contempt that forbid newspapers to identify a suspect or connect him with a crime in any way until the police have charged him, or to tell the story of a crime until the trial.

Eastbourne (pop. 58,000), where geraniums hang from lampposts, is Britain’s most genteel seaside resort and a mecca for wealthy widows who await death in its pleasant Victorian surroundings. For years the teacups buzzed with talk of a local doctor with a large, loyal practice, who doted on his aged patients. He met them at the station after their visits to London, took them for drives in the country, rushed to the bedside at any hour with soothing words.

But some relatives of the doctor’s late patients complained that they left him too much money when they died. The police received notes, sometimes anonymous, even suggesting—without any facts—that he had hastened their deaths. They ordered an inquest on one of the patients (verdict: suicide) and, as the buzz of gossip rose, called in Scotland Yard.

Jigsaw Fragments. The Yard sent Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam, a homicide specialist whose quiet, aristocratic looks have inspired the press to call him “The Count.” From London dozens of newsmen burst into Eastbourne like an explosion of profanity at a church tea. They camped in once-quiet hotel lobbies, queued up at the municipal clerk’s office to buy samples of death certificates, trailed police cars and pounded on the doors of frightened old ladies. They dredged up every rumor in town—and their editors printed whatever they thought they could get away with.

Often the stories seemed almost incomprehensible jigsaw fragments except to those aware—as all Eastbourne is—of some rumors that the papers dared not print. For example, on Page One, London’s conservative Daily Telegraph merely reported that Hannam had interviewed the 72-year-old mother of Sir John Hunt, who led the Mt. Everest expedition, but offered no clue as to why or what resulted beyond the fact that she “described an incident which occurred at a small bridge party she gave about twelve years ago.” Another account told of reports that letters written by relatives to aging women were sometimes withheld from them—without saying who might have withheld them. Still another blind story said: “The name of a person in whom the police are particularly interested was found to have occurred in at least four wills . . .” Elsewhere appeared sinister suggestions of a hypnotic, “evil-eye killer.”

Whispers. Other papers were bolder. One dovetailed a story about “startling” but undisclosed evidence in the case of “25 deaths” at Eastbourne with another dispatch covering the doctor’s testimony at the inquest where one of his patients was found to have taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. The boldest paper managed to tell much of the story—and even run a picture of the doctor—by a slick trick: it got the doctor’s lawyers to approve a sympathetic story that named him as the victim of a malign whispering campaign—and managed to print many of the whispers (“murder”) in the course of deploring them.

By week’s end neither Scotland Yard nor the newspapers had reported a single actual crime or victim, or any evidence to decide the question posed by one tabloid: “Mass murderer or vicious poison pen?” But the story had produced some evidence about British journalism. Most Britons and some Americans believe that the country’s rigid press laws are superior to U.S. standards. Yet the laws have bred a technique of trumpeting sensation with small regard to facts. The very inability to name a suspect emboldens editors to print gossip and rumor about what he may have done. Whether Eastbourne deaths prove the year’s big crime story or an ugly case of slander, the British press will have shown that tough laws may result in puzzling readers, but are no proof against an orgy of sensationalism.