Dr David Kelly
The Seven Ages of Death
For reasons I won’t go into at this stage I’m back to thinking about death. (I can hear my children groan – they maintained it was my obsession when they were growing up because my research focused on it for many years.) Anyway, in the process I’m hovering up books on all sorts of aspects of the subject.
The first one I want to share with you is The Seven Ages of Death by Richard Shepherd.
I’m instantly intrigued. It starts with that classic speech from Shakespeare‘s As you Like it:
All the world’s a stage … through to Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,
and the author uses it as his framework for a vast amount of material accrued from years of clinical experience as a forensic pathologist. It takes us through each of the seven stage of life, from infancy to extreme old age, by means of cases he has investigated, liberally fleshing the facts out with biological and medical explanations alongside personal thoughts and experiences. Delightfully engaging and readable. Well, for me at least (but I suspect my medical background helped here).
His is a fascinating profession working alongside the dead and their grieving relatives.
Death is my life.
Here is the spirit of compassion and scientific discovery.
Grief walking into my office is a familiar sight, but still it never fails to affect me. The office is a place where paperclips and lists and calendars are devoted to the smooth running of our daily lives and yet here is an emotion so immense that it mocks the most carefully planned filing system.
It’s certainly a case of ‘in at the deep end’. Even the most hardened detectives quail at the prospect of entering the mortuary and seeing a tiny scrap of humanity lying on the stark metal bench, minus any soft comforting wraps or toys. What’s more, everyone knows the victim had no say, no choice, in what happened to him. And indeed, there can be a frightening tension between the rights and interests of the parents and those of the baby. This is vividly conveyed by the case of a father who had a deep distrust of conventional medicine, but who failed to recognise a metabolic disorder that would have been picked up on routine tests. The child died at just 6 months of age with nothing more telling externally than a severe case of nappy rash. The collision between the father’s right to reject medicine and the baby’s right to survive is brutal in this case.
We see this conflict too in examples of older children who are the subject of accident or murder by parents who lack the resources or skills to cope. And there’s often a fine line between an accident and murder as Shepherd vividly illustrates with a case of a seven-year-old girl who was reported to have run away from home, and been found in a park apparently strangled by her necklace. But why were her tiny trainers free from mud? And why was her bag neatly packed with grown-up essentials? Because her mother set the scene to cover her crime.
A similar fine line separates the deaths of two teenagers who were camping in a tent. They apparently dragged the smouldering remnants of a cheap barbecue into the tent to warm themselves. The girl’s body showed the clear signs of carbon monoxide poisoning but the boy’s body was found at the foot of cliffs a distance away, with a much lower level of carbon monoxide in the blood. Was it deliberate or a tragic accident? Shepherd takes each tiny piece of evidence and painstakingly pieces a story together. That’s his job. And he must remain calm and resolute in the face of all the other professionals wanting precise and rapid results yesterday. And in the face of the powerful reactions and grief of the bereaved families.
It’s his eagle eye that sees beyond an accusation that a young man pushed his older brother off a wall resulting in a fatal head injury. Never mind the witnesses who corroborated the ‘pushing’ story, Shepherd noticed something odd about the victim’s legs. There was something much more sinister behind this fall than anyone had ever contemplated; something which had far-reaching consequences for this bereaved family – an inherited disorder carried by the mothers and biding its time in the sons.
When it comes to the thirties apparently it’s very often extreme behaviour that kills this cohort. Shepherd introduces a high-profile case to illustrate this; that of Gareth Williams –the so-called ‘Spy in the Bag’. Shepherd was the third pathologist to examine Gareth’s body – already badly decomposed when it was discovered squeezed into a padlocked hold-all in a very hot bathroom in his flat, with the keys to the padlock beneath him inside the bag. At this point a different kind of post-mortem examination comes into play: a psychological one. The victim was found to have spent thousands on women’s designer dresses, shoes and wigs, to have been into bondage and being restrained in tight places. Shepherd meticulously weighed up the evidence to form his considered judgement and presents a compelling argument for auto-asphyxiation in spite of the conspiracy theories abounding in this front-page case.
Such was his reputation that Dr Shepherd was also consulted in the case of the scientist Dr David Kelly, a UK expert in weapons, who was found dead shortly after being publicly humiliated in the matter of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq during Tony Blair’s time as prime minister. The detailed records of what Dr Kelly’s wife said, and the evidence of severe psychological stress Dr Kelly was under, are harrowing and extremely powerful, illustrating the compassionate understanding of humanity alongside impressive medical knowledge that characterise the author’s own modus operandi.
But he is also refreshingly and bruisingly honest in his reflections about his own mistakes and personal issues – drinking, smoking, weight-gain, and he admits to both his own limitations and those of forensic medicine itself. As he gets older he’s also quite brutal about the effects on health and wellbeing which accompany the ageing process. He gave me biological permission to be less than I was, and not to beat myself up about it! I liked that!!
I’m a fan of the BBC series Silent Witness and Forensics: The Real CSI, both based around forensic pathology, and this book took me through the same process of deeply insightful detective work to reveal the lives as well as the deaths of those who end up on the post mortem table.
Conspiracy or human tragedy?
Remember the nation holding its breath a decade ago? The Blair administration reeling from widespread dissent about the war in Iraq? The scandal about leaked reports saying that the case for war had been ‘sexed up’? Government scientist Dr David Kelly named as the source, facing a hostile inquiry from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee? Found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home a couple of days later? Rumour and counter-rumour abounding.
It’s not dead yet. Author and crime novelist Robert Lewis is today in the Peppers Theatre recounting his take on the events surrounding this terrible human tragedy involving his fellow Welshman. I know his book, Dark Actors, has been roundly slaughtered in some quarters, but I am determined to give him a fair hearing.
He was a 23 year old undergrad in Aberystwyth when it happened, but he’s talked to a lot of the people who were involved at the time. He’s clearly been a committed biographer, and today he’s totally to grips with his subject, an accomplished speaker, but careful to defer courteously to those who hold other views. He admits he approached this project rather like a murder mystery it was his job to unravel, but he soon realised that the truth was immensely more complicated than he had anticipated.
To begin with, Dr Kelly’s life was totally eclipsed by his death, and the real man, the quiet civil servant, the background operator, was ‘hard to find‘. He’d spent his life in a closed secretive world and the Kelly who was emerging seemed to be something quite different from the grey, reticent person seen on TV, crushed by the questions fired by the FASC. He was in fact a hard-edged leading expert in biological warfare, working for the Ministry of Defence, the Arms Control Department and the Foreign Office, at the very heart of government security. He was accustomed to talking to powerful authority figures foreign or homegrown, confident, centred and direct (as witnessed by the transcripts of his interview by the Intelligence and Security Committee).
Under the expert guidance of the chair, Al Senter, who has done his homework admirably thoroughly, Lewis teases out the anomalies and questions: in the records given by reporters Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts and their actions; in Downing Street’s responses; Kelly’s own changing evidence; in the reasons given for his summary dismissal from Kuwait; the tampered-with evidence at the death scene; the mystery of the missing dental record; discrepancies in the Hutton and subsequent inquiries. So many incongruities and inexplicable anomalies. So much speculation. Lewis admits he met with a series of closed doors and broken lines of communication, but he concludes, a life cloaked in silence and secrecy is ‘indicative of something‘.
Sinister undertones even creep into Robert Lewis’ own life when he traces the last steps of Dr Kelly into the woods, but hears the voice of the paramedic saying the scientist didn’t die there, the body was moved. What then is Lewis mirroring? And then he finds the last chapter of his book, Dark Actors, circulating on the net before he’s even finished it. I can only wonder at his courage in appearing at the Festival without a motorcade of police guarding him: any one of us sitting in the Peppers Theatre might be a threat!
I’m going to give you a break from daily posts few a few days – other fish to fry! Have a good relaxing weekend.
Summer holidays
Holiday time is here again for Scottish schools, and my calendar has several weeks blocked out in indelible ink for the grandchildren who come to stay every summer. A lovely excuse to forget work and get out and about exploring this beautiful and historic land. We’ve made for the sea several times just to escape the intense heat!
Also written in capital letters in the diary are assorted slots for the Edinburgh International Book Festival – always a highlight in the year. As usual some sessions were sold out before tickets even went on sale to the public (grrrr! Why do they do that?), but by dint of buying them on the first available day, I have seats for events about topics as diverse as fleeing a religious cult; a journey into dementia; a history of the Dukes of Devonshire; the neuroscience of memory; the death of Dr David Kelly; the ethics of dying; one woman’s experience of acute encephalitis; and the role of storytelling in maintaining sanity. Sounds pretty good to me.
I’ve also had invitations from elsewhere to attend a debate on assisted dying and to showcase my work in an arts and ethics symposium, both in August, so lots of excitement ahead.
On the Over my Dead Body book front things are moving steadily. Lots of double checking needed to be sure every step is taken on sure foundations, but this week the final final details are going off to the cover designer, and as soon as he’s worked his magic, the whole thing goes to the printer. Too late then for any more tweaking … Help! Hard to believe we’re in the home straight.