view that he was a murderer. The writer Sybille Bedford, present at Adams's trial, was adamant that he was not guilty. Many publications were sued for libel during Adams's lifetime, showing the prevalence of the rumours that surrounded him. After Adams's death, writers were more free to speculate. In 1983, Rodney Hallworth and Mark Williams concluded Adams was a serial killer and probably schizophrenic: "In the opinion of many experts Adams died an unconvicted mass-murderer". Percy Hoskins, writing in 1984, was of the opposite opinion, adamant that Adams was not guilty but merely "naive" and "avaricious". In 1985, Sir Patrick Devlin, the judge, stated that Adams may have been a "mercenary mercy killer" but, though compassionate, he was at the same time greedy and "prepared to sell death": "He did not think of himself as a murderer but a dispenser of death [...] According to his lights, he had done nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong in a doctor getting a legacy, nor in his bestowing in return [...] a death as happy as heroin could make it." He also "could be convinced that Dr Adams had helped to end Mrs Hullett's life". In 2000, Surtees, a former colleague of Adams, wrote a more sympathetic account of him as being the victim of a police vendetta. In 1986, The Good Doctor Bodkin Adams, a television docudrama based on his trial, was produced with Timothy West in the lead. After 2003 These writers, other than Devlin, who read and based his account on the papers from the committal proceedings and the case papers for the Hullett case before it was discontinued, based their opinions almost entirely on the evidence given in court regarding Morrell. The police archives were opened in 2003 at the request of Pamela Cullen, who speculates that Adams was acquitted more due to the way the case "was presented than [to] Doctor Adams' lack of guilt". She also highlights the fact that Hannam's investigation was "blinkered" from the perspective of motive: Hannam assumed monetary gain was the driving force because during the 1950s, little was known of what really motivated serial killers, i.e. "physical needs, emotions and often bizarre interpretations of reality". The apparently incompatible accounts of Adams as a barely competent doctor lavish in his use of heroin and morphia with his successful and lucrative medical practice may be explained by the medical profession's attitude to end-of-life