The Daily Telegraph
Wednesday 16 November 2011

Former Manchester Grammar pupil, Derek Barrowcliff, who worked as a pathologist on a number of post-war murder cases, including the bizarre Stratford Tombstone Murder of 1954 in which a local midwife was found drowned in the River Avon, has died aged 92.

Olive Bennett's woollen scarf had been used to anchor her body to a heavy Victorian tombstone that had been uprooted from the graveyard at Holy Trinity Church and thrown into the nearby river.

As was normal in those days, when the case proved to be beyond the resources of the local police, Scotland Yard was called in. Det Ch Supt John Capstick, one of the best-known detectives of the day, relied on Barrowcliff's post-mortem findings. These confirmed that the 45-year-old midwife had spent the evening before her death drinking in local pubs.

To all intents and purposes Barrowcliff was appointed a Home Office pathologist on the strength of his work on this baffling case. The murder remains unsolved to this day, despite the News Of The World offering £100,000 in 1974 for information leading to the identity of the killer or killers. The midwife's ghost is said to haunt the stretch of the river where she was drowned.

Barrowcliff's work as a forensic specialist was highlighted again in 1969 during the Stoneleigh Abbey poisoning case, when he detected signs of arsenic in the hair of the victim – the wife of the chauffeur employed at the Abbey. The case attracted much national attention due to the unwavering assertion of Lord Leigh (the Abbey's owner) that his chauffeur was innocent of the crime. In the event, the chauffeur was convicted in 1970 and jailed for life – his motive having been an infatuation with a 20-year-old typist.

The so-called "gentle poisoner" showed such outward concern and tenderness towards his wife that he almost fooled doctors into thinking she had died of natural causes.

But Barrowcliff, who performed the post-mortem, overturned a GP's initial finding on the death certificate that the victim had died of gastroenteritis. As one of his students later wrote, Barrowcliff "kept his diagnostic antenna twitching"; he was the only one of 20 doctors who examined the body to suspect arsenical poisoning.

He was back in the limelight later in the 1970s, when his research on the propensity for corpses to bleed was quoted in the controversy over the authenticity of the so-called Shroud of Turin. Barrowcliff gave an expert opinion in the case of Hans Naber, a German black marketeer and convicted fraudster, who claimed to have had a vision in 1947 in which Jesus told him He had survived the Crucifixion to rise again from the tomb.

Naber claimed too much blood was present on the shroud for it to have swathed a dead body. Corpses do not bleed, he asserted – or at least the large quantity of blood on the shroud did not correspond to the blood emissions from a typical corpse. In his eyes, the shroud proved that Christ had only been wounded.

But Barrowcliff had shown that bodies do indeed bleed after death for a time, and demonstrated that cuts on the back of the head of a corpse (comparable to the wounds made by the Crown of Thorns) "would bleed freely, continuously".

In 1966 he was also the pathologist in the case of Randolph Turpin, the champion boxer who committed suicide after being declared bankrupt. Turpin shot himself through the heart in the café where he lived at Leamington Spa, having reportedly also tried to shoot one of his small daughters.

One of Barrowcliff's own daughters, Sophie, then about nine years old, took the initial phone call from the police. The note she wrote for her father, which he kept, read: "Dad Quick! There has been murder done at Rustle Street" ("I was particularly proud of my spelling of what was in fact Russell Street," she recalled).

Derek Ford Barrowcliff was born on April 6 1919 in Nottingham, but brought up in Manchester, where he attended Manchester Grammar School.

From there he went up to University College, Oxford, to read Medicine; while there he gained a half blue in lacrosse. He completed his clinical training at the London Hospital.

In the late 1930s, with many other idealists of his generation, he made his way to the Pyrenees to assist in the relief work for those fleeing the Spanish Civil War.

After qualifying he served in the RAMC (1947-49), stationed at Colchester, and was greatly amused to be elevated, faute de mieux as he perceived it, to the rank of half-colonel.

A chance encounter with a leading pathologist of the time inspired Barrowcliff to follow a similar career path. Appointed to Warwick Hospital in 1950, he became consultant and head of the path lab, a post he held until he neared retirement, remaining all the while a staunch supporter of the NHS.

Over the years his casebook acquired some oddities, such as one dating from 1960 when he was called in to examine the skeleton of a boy, aged about five, which was found embalmed in a box in the basement of a Victorian villa in Leamington.

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