she had written in April 1956 and had placed with her will, which indicated that she had contemplated suicide then. A second post mortem conducted by a Home Office pathologist concluded that the cause of death was barbiturate poisoning. After the second post mortem, the investigation was taken over from Eastbourne police on 17 August 1956 by two officers from the Metropolitan Police's Murder Squad. The senior officer, Detective Superintendent Herbert Hannam of Scotland Yard, was known for having secured a conviction in the Teddington Towpath Murders in 1953, although the defence counsel, Peter Rawlinson, called into question Hannam's evidence on how the confession was obtained. In view of the opinion Hannam later expressed, that detectives must sometimes ignore the law, his methods are open to question. He was assisted by Detective Sergeant Charles Hewett. Hannam was in the unusual position that, instead of having to find a suspect for a known crime, he had a known suspect in Adams but needed to link him to more serious crimes than forging prescriptions, making false statements and mishandling drugs. Devlin suggests that Hannam became fixated on the idea that Adams had murdered many elderly patients for legacies, regarding his receiving a legacy as grounds for suspicion, although Adams was generally only a minor beneficiary. Investigators decided to focus on cases from 1946 to 1956 only. Of the 310 death certificates examined by Home Office pathologist Francis Camps, 163 were considered by Camps to be worthy of further investigation. This was because, firstly, a very high proportion, some 42% of all 310 of Adams's deceased patients, were diagnosed as having died of cerebral thrombosis or cerebral haemorrhage against an average in the late 1950s of around 15% for elderly, bedridden patients. Secondly, the 163 certificates related to Adams's patients that had died while in a coma, which could be suggestive of the administration of a narcotic or barbiturate as well as the cause stated. The police took numerous statements from nurses who had treated Adams's patients and their relatives. Some were generally favourable to him, but others claimed Adams had given patients "special injections" of substances that were unknown to the nurses and which Adams refused to disclose to them. The statements also claimed that his habit was to ask the nurses to leave the room before injections were given and that he would also isolate patients from their relatives, hindering contact