David Bowen (Coroner)

David Aubrey Llewellyn Bowen (born January 31, 1924 in Pontycymmer, Bridgend , Wales ; † March 31, 2011 ) was a British forensic scientist who worked on solving numerous well-known capital crimes , such as the serial killer Dennis Nilsen , who numerous young men in attracted his apartment in north London , which he then murdered and dismembered.

Life

After visiting the Caterham School and the Garw Secondary School in his hometown Pontycymmer studied Bowen medicine at the University College of Wales in Cardiff and graduated with a Master at Corpus Christi College of the University of Cambridge from. After further training at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, he worked at the West Middlesex and London Chest Hospitals before doing his military service in the Royal Army Medical Corps between 1947 and 1949 .

After his discharge from military service in 1949, Bowen completed advanced training courses at the Royal Marsden Hospital in the subjects of clinical pathology and histopathology before he took up a position as a demonstrator at Donald Teare's Chair of Forensic Pathology at the Medical School of St George's, University of London in 1957 .

As head of the Forensic Medicine of Charing Cross Hospital from 1973 to 1989 and as Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of London from 1977 to 1989 Bowen in the elucidation of some 500 murder and was homicide cases with.

Solving the Dennis Nilsen murders

In February 1983, attended Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Peter Jay, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department ( CID ) of Hornsey him in his office at Charing Cross Hospital and showed him several pieces of skin and four small bones , which in a house in Muswell Hill were found in which pipe blockages were reported. The scraps of skin had some fine hairs and appeared to have been partially cooked. It was initially suspected that it came from the skin of a chicken , but Bowen found that it was human skin from the neck area, while the bones were two hand and two finger bones. A few indentations on the surface of the skin suggested that Bowen might have been someone who was being strangled .

On Bowen's advice, DCI Jay returned to the apartment building, where he waited for the arrival of tenant Dennis Nilsen, a 37-year-old Manpower Services Commission employee . That same evening Bowen was commissioned with an initial examination of the apartment, where he noticed an unpleasant smelling air in the room. In two plastic bags in the cloakroom, he found human tissue that had been expertly removed from the chest area , as well as an almost complete human torso . He also found the upper half of a second torso with arms but no hands, a rotten skull, and the newly decapitated head of Nilsen's last victim. Overall, Bowen counted the main parts of two human bodies as well as a largely dismembered third body, which, however, was easily identified by fingerprints . In this case the head had been parboiled in a soup pot on Nilsen's stove . In the interrogation that followed, Nilsen admitted that the other two died in March and September 1982.

At the address in Cricklewood , previously inhabited by Nilsen , twelve other bodies were found that the latter had hidden under the floorboards. Nilsen buried remains in the garden to make room for new victims. He had previously burned the corpses on large fires and smashed the remains with a heavy roller. However, Bowen and a coworker found enough bones in the garden soil to determine that six bodies had been hidden there.

The Railway Murders and other well-known criminal cases

In the subsequent criminal trial against Nilsen, the jury found him guilty of six murders. The case went down in British criminal history because most of the bodies were found in a single perpetrator.

Four years after the Nilsen case, Bowen worked to solve the so-called " Railway Murders ", two of which were committed by John Duffy and three by his close friend David Mulcahy. In 1988, Duffy was charged with a third murder - of Anne Lock - which was not charged for lack of evidence. After ten years in prison, Duffy accused Mulcahy of complicity in around 25 rapes and three other murders near suburban train stations in north London, including the unsolved murder of Anne Lock. Unlike the other two victims, she was suffocated by a stocking stuffed into her mouth.

In September 2000, Bowen was another witness before the High Criminal Court, the Old Bailey , and said in cross-examination over the tape holding the hands were tied by Anne Lock, with its accurate representation of the type of bondage previously made by Duffy statement confirmed. In the end, Mulcahy was sentenced to life imprisonment for three murders, seven rape and aiding and abetting rape in five other cases .

Other known criminal cases that Bowen helped solve during his forty-year career also include:

• the assassination of Ross McWhirter , co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records , who was killed in an IRA attack on November 27, 1975 outside his home in north London ;
• the death of teacher Blair Peach, who was killed in an anti - racism demonstration in London in 1979 ;
• the killing of Police Constable Keith Blakelock, who died in 1985 in rioting at Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham ;
• Carrying out the autopsy after the bomb attack on the Baltic Exchange building in London in April 1992.

Another famous case during his forensic work was the death of Adolf Hitler's deputy , Rudolf Hess , in the Spandau War Crimes Prison on August 17, 1987. Hugh Thomas, Hess's doctor , sought Bowen's advice on the death. Bowen examined two different medical reports, one commissioned by the four victorious Allied powers (United Kingdom, United States , Soviet Union and France ) and the other by Rudolf Hess's family.

While the victorious powers believed that the prisoner hanged himself with an electric cable that was found in Hess's cell, Bowen agreed with von Hess's son, who questioned this thesis of suicide. Bowen concluded that the hanging suicide usually left a few times on the neck or internal tissue due to the short-term blood loss. In the case of Hess, the autopsy found bruises in deeper tissue layers. Bowen concluded that such bruising, as is unlikely to occur in the case of hanging, is a sign of strangulation .

Even after his retirement, Bowen was a sought-after professional. In 1999 he was asked to make a report on the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi , the director of Banco Ambrosiano known as the “ Banker of God ” . He was found hanged on June 18, 1982 under Blackfriars Bridge in London. He was hired by Italian insurance companies to manage a £ 4 million life insurance policy for Calvi's widow and son. This assumed that Calvie was murdered and not suicide committed what the police concluded. Bowen believed that Calvi was forcibly taken to the bridge, presumably by boat, and that he was the victim of a plot. In fact, it wasn't until 2007 that five Italians were charged with the murder of Calvis.

In addition to his forensic medicine activities in Great Britain, he has also worked for universities in Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka . Bowen also wrote more than 50 articles in journals , and in 2003 he wrote an autobiography called Body Of Evidence .

Web links

• THE TELEGRAPH: Professor David Bowen (obituary, April 12, 2011)