time of her death. The much more recent death of Hullett, who died aged 50 without suffering from any somatic illness and whose body had not been cremated (and contained twice the fatal dose of barbiturates) would have made a much more convincing case. The prosecution relied on three main bases: the amounts of opiate drugs prescribed by Adams for Mrs Morrell, Adams's verbal admission that he had himself injected almost all the amounts prescribed and statements taken from Mrs Morrell's nurses in August and November 1956. The statements of nurses Stronach and Randall suggested that Adams had increased the frequency of injections and the amount of each injection throughout the period they had nursed Mrs Morrell, and that many of the injections Adams gave were of drugs taken from his bag, which he had prepared himself rather than asking the nurses to prepare, and they were unaware of the contents of these injections. These two nurses repeated these allegations when questioned by Manningham-Buller, but under cross examination they were forced to admit that it was they and the other two nurses that usually made up the injections to be administered either by them or Adams, and that they had recorded the relatively few injections already prepared by Adams and had also recorded their nature on at least some occasions. Another nurse recalled that these were said to be vitamin injections, and it was also clear that the amounts of opiates injected were constant until September 1950, when another doctor first increased the dosage. The leading Defence counsel Sir Frederick Geoffrey Lawrence, QC, had been briefed by the Medical Defence Union with the additional task of obtaining a ruling on whether medical treatments that might shorten the life of a terminally ill patient were legal. Lawrence, a "specialist in real estate and divorce cases [and] a relative stranger in criminal court", who was defending his first murder trial, convinced the jury that there was no evidence that a murder had been committed, much less that a murder had been committed by Adams. He emphasised that the indictment was based mainly on testimonies from the nurses who tended Mrs Morrell, and that there were discrepancies between the evidence given by different witnesses. Then, on the second day of the trial, he produced notebooks written by the nurses, detailing Adams's treatment of Morrell. The prosecution claimed not to have seen these notebooks: