Gareth Williams
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.