Today’s Arduous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
At around midnight on May 3, 1957, a doctor was summoned to the Yorkshire home of thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth Barlow. When the doctor arrived, Barlow had a tragic tale to tell. All night long, his wife, Elizabeth, had been ill. At 9:20 p.m., while in bed, she had vomited. Barlow had changed the sheets, then joined his wife in bed. Some time later, she had complained of “feeling too warm” and got up to take a bath. Barlow dozed off to sleep. When he awoke at 11 p.m., he found that Elizabeth was not beside him and hurried to the bathroom. There he had found her submerged in the water. At first he had tried to pull her out, but she was too heavy for him. So he had removed the plug and tried to revive her with artificial respiration.
Elizabeth still lay in the empty bath on her right side. Although there were no signs of violence on the body, the pupils were strangely dilated, a feature that the doctor thought worthy of investigation. For this reason, he listened with interest, all the while wondering how someone who claimed to have made “frantic efforts” to haul his wife from the bath had managed to keep his pajamas so dry and avoid splashing the bathroom floor. Another incongruity was spotted by Dr. David Price, the medical examiner—Elizabeth Barlow still had water in the crooks of her elbows, hardly likely if she had received artificial respiration.
Two hypodermic syringes were found in the kitchen, which Barlow, a nurse, explained by saying he had been giving himself injections of penicillin to treat a carbuncle. He denied giving his wife any injections. Traces of penicillin in the needles seemed to bear out Barlow’s story.
An autopsy revealed that Elizabeth Barlow had been a normal, healthy woman, and there were no visible injection marks on the skin. She was two months pregnant, but Price could find nothing to account for the sudden onset of fainting in the bath. Analysis of the bodily organs told much the same tale: no trace of poison or any other metabolic weakness likely to result in loss of consciousness.
On May 8, still dissatisfied, Price took a magnifying glass and went over every inch of the dead woman’s skin, looking for injection marks of a hypodermic needle. Mrs. Barlow’s freckly complexion made this an arduous task, but after two hours of painstaking inspection, Price found two tiny puncture marks on the left buttock and another two in a fold of skin under the right buttock. Cutting into the skin and tissue around the marks, Price saw the minute inflammation consistent with recent injections.
But what substance had been injected? A council of doctors and scientists from around the country, headed by Dr. Alan S. Curry of the Home Office Forensic Science Service, was convened to consider the baffling facts. Barlow, the nurse, had efficiently described his wife’s symptoms—vomiting, sweating, weakness, and pupil dilation. After much debate the panel agreed that everything pointed to hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, a disorder that can, in extreme cases, lead to death. Had Barlow injected his wife with a massive overdose of insulin, then her blood sugar could have plummeted to a lethal level. All of which sounded plausible, except that Elizabeth Barlow’s heart blood had registered a sugar level way above average— completely opposite what might have been expected.
Despite this setback, the panel would not be dissuaded from its belief that insulin—for the first time—had been used as a murder agent. They knew that Barlow frequently injected insulin at work and that he had once joked to a patient: “If anybody ever gets a real dose of this, he’s on his way to the next world.” Another comment was even more enlightening. Barlow had confidentially advised a fellow nurse that insulin was the ideal choice for a “perfect murder,” because it dissolved in the blood and could not be traced.
He was right, there were no prescribed tests for detecting insulin in the body, but eventually the panel was able to solve the conundrum of Elizabeth Barlow’s high sugar level. In several cases of violent death, biochemical research had shown that the liver often flooded the bloodstream with sugar in the last few moments before death as a survival aid. If this reached the heart before circulation stopped, then the blood there would register an unusually high blood sugar level. Which meant that Mrs. Barlow could have been given an insulin overdose.
To confirm their hypothesis, the team conducted an unusual experiment. First, a number of mice were injected with insulin. They trembled, made feeble noises, became comatose, and died. Then, other mice were injected with extracts of the tissue surrounding the injection marks on Mrs. Barlow’s body. Exactly the same reactions were observed. It was noted that mice injected with matter from the left buttock died more rapidly than those given tissue from the right, suggesting that the left injection had been administered last. The data gathered from this experiment confirmed that the quantity of the insulin remaining in the body was eight-four units, although the actual dosage must have been much higher.
But what of the commonly held belief among doctors—and Barlow—that insulin disappeared very quickly from the body? Once again, new research came to the aid of the examiners. it was known that acidic conditions preserved insulin, and it now appeared that formation of lactic acid in Mrs. Barlow’s muscles after death had prevented its breakdown.
Bradford police had already discovered that Barlow was no stranger to sudden death: just a year earlier, his first wife had died in mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty-three. The cause of death was never satisfactorily explained, and he had married Elizabeth soon afterward.
On July 29, 1957, Barlow was arrested and charged with murder. At first he persisted in denying that he had injected his wife at any time, until presented with the evidence. Then he admitted injecting her with ergonovine to induce an abortion. In fact, the forensic experts had already anticipated that very defense—no abortifacient drugs were found.
At Barlow’s trial, the defense suggested that as Mrs. Barlow fainted and slid under the bath water, her body had reacted by releasing a massive dose of insulin into the bloodstream, causing coma and death. This theory was briskly dealt with by Dr. Price. He reckoned that to account for the eighty-four units of insulin found in Mrs. Barlow’s body, her pancreas would have had to secrete an incredible—and unheard of—fifteen thousand units!
Barlow was found guilty and imprisoned for life.
Culled from: The Casebook of Forensic Detection
Vehicular Suicide Du Jour!
A twenty-five-year-old divorced man drowned in his own auto after it plunged into Lake Erie. He had been seen stopping his vehicle by the water and then driving into the lake at a high rate of speed. Despite the fact that the auto floated for a few minutes, the driver did not attempt to escape. Postmortem toxicological studies were negative for alcohol or common drugs. He was suspected of slaying his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend who had been found stabbed to death in their home just before his immersion in the lake. The man also had a police record of juvenile manslaughter, traffic violations, and aggravated robbery.
Culled from: Car Crash Culture
I searched but I couldn’t find this story in the newspaper archive. If anyone tracks it down, please send it my way!