Author | Sir Sydney Smith |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Autobiography |
Publisher | David McKay Co., New York |
Publication date | 1959 (1st edition) |
Media type | |
Pages | 318 |
Mostly Murder is the 1959 autobiography of forensic pathologist Sir Sydney Smith. [1] [2]
The book is a memoir about the most notorious crimes Smith solved in his career, [3] which extended across the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Egypt and Sri Lanka. [4]
The book has run through many British [5] and American [6] editions and has been translated into several languages. [7] [8]
Guy Paul Morin is a Canadian who was wrongly convicted of the October 1984 rape and murder of his nine-year-old next-door neighbour, Christine Jessop of Queensville, north of Toronto, Ontario. DNA testing led to a subsequent overturning of this verdict. On October 15, 2020, the Toronto Police Service announced a DNA match identifying Calvin Hoover as the one whose semen was recovered from Jessop’s underwear. Hoover killed himself in 2015.
Henry Chang-Yu Lee is a Chinese-born American forensic scientist.
Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury was a British pathologist. His cases include Hawley Crippen, the Seddon case, the Major Armstrong poisoning, the "Brides in the Bath" murders by George Joseph Smith, the Crumbles murders, the Podmore case, the Sidney Harry Fox matricide, the Vera Page case, and the murder trials of Louis Voisin, Jean-Pierre Vaquier, Norman Thorne, Donald Merrett, Alfred Rouse, Elvira Barney, Toni Mancini, and Gordon Cummins. Spilsbury's courtroom appearances became legendary for his demeanour of effortless dominance.
Munir Said Thalib was an Indonesian activist. Founder of the Kontras human rights organisation and laureate of the 2000 Right Livelihood Award, Munir was assassinated in 2004 while travelling to Utrecht University to pursue a master's degree in international law and human rights. He is one of Indonesia's most famous human rights and anti-corruption activists.
The CSI effect describes the various ways in which the exaggerated portrayal of forensic science on crime television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation influences public perception. The term was first reported in a 2004 USA Today article describing the effect being made on trial jurors by television programs featuring forensic science.
The Shark Arm case refers to a series of incidents that began in Sydney, Australia, on 25 April 1935 when a human arm was regurgitated by a captive 3.5-metre tiger shark, resulting subsequently in a murder investigation and trial.
Brothers Thomas and John Clarke were Australian bushrangers from the Braidwood district of New South Wales. They committed a series of high-profile crimes which led to the enacting of the Felons' Apprehension Act (1866), a law that introduced the concept of outlawry in the colony and authorised citizens to kill bushrangers on sight. Thomas was proclaimed an outlaw on 31 May 1866.
Buck Ruxton was an Indian-born physician convicted and subsequently hanged for the September 1935 murders of his common-law wife, Isabella Ruxton, and the family housemaid, Mary Jane Rogerson, at his home in Lancaster, England. These murders are informally known as the Bodies Under the Bridge and the Jigsaw Murders, while Ruxton himself became known as The Savage Surgeon.
Mahadevan "Satha" Sathasivam, or Satha as he was known, is one of the greatest batsmen from Sri Lanka whom Garry Sobers called "the greatest batsman ever on earth," and Frank Worrell called him "the best batsman he had ever seen". He was the first, and probably the only, man to captain three national teams. Sathasivam played cricket in the 1940s through the 1960s. He was captain of the Ceylon team in 1948, and then captain of the Singapore team, and finally captain of the Malaysian team. He was accused and acquitted of murdering his wife, which gained much attention in Ceylon.
Autopsy is a television series of HBO's America Undercover documentary series. Dr. Michael Baden, a real-life forensic pathologist, is the primary analyst, and has been personally involved in many of the cases that are reviewed.
Richard Walter was an American forensic psychologist for the Michigan prison system until his retirement in 2000, and a self-styled "crime scene analyst" who has been characterized as one of the creators of modern criminal profiling.
Sir Sydney Alfred Smith CBE OPR FRSE, was a forensic scientist, pathologist and one of the pre-eminent medico-legal specialists in the world. From 1928 to 1953, Smith was Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, a well-known forensic department of that time. Smith's iconic 1959 autobiography Mostly Murder has run through many British and American editions and has been translated into several other languages.
The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: "[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb..." The four essential protections included are prohibitions against, for the same offense:
Sidney Harry Fox was a British petty swindler and convicted murderer. He was executed for the murder of his mother in an attempt to obtain money from an insurance policy on her life. His case is unusual in that it is a rare example of a known matricide in the United Kingdom.
Professor John Glaister was a Scottish forensic scientist who worked as a general practitioner, police surgeon, and as a lecturer at Glasgow Royal Infirmary Medical School and the University of Glasgow. Glasgow University's Glaister Prize is named in his honour.
On the night of September 6, 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean was murdered in Dallas, Texas, by off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer Amber Guyger, who entered Jean's apartment and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered Jean's apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar, was initially charged with manslaughter. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias because Jean—an unarmed black man—was killed in his own home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on a charge of murder. On October 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment the following day. The ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.
State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin was an American criminal case in the District Court of Minnesota in 2021. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was tried and convicted for the murder of George Floyd, which occurred during an arrest on May 25, 2020, and led to global protests over racial injustice and police brutality. A 12-member jury found Chauvin guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. It was the first conviction of a white police officer in Minnesota for the murder of a black person.
Gerald Roche Lynch OBE FRIC DPH (1889–1957) was a British forensic scientist and public health analyst associated with several infamous murders as a medico-legal expert. An expert on poisons he appeared as an expert witness in multiple murder cases in the 20th century.
Michael Weir is a British double murderer and serial burglar who was the first person in English legal history to have been convicted of the same crime twice. In 1999, he was jailed for the murder of 78-year-old war veteran Leonard Harris. Weir's conviction was quashed a year later at the Court of Appeal on a technicality, only for him to be re-convicted in 2019 in a 'double jeopardy' case after new evidence was found. Weir was also convicted in 2019 of the murder of 83-year-old Rose Seferian, who was also killed during a burglary five weeks after Harris, which made additional history as the first time a second murder charge was added to a double jeopardy case. Upon Weir's conviction at the Old Bailey in December 2019, Justice Maura McGowan told the jury that they had made "legal history".