The Imperfect Crime

Kenneth Barlow, a male nurse who often gave injections (including insulin) to patients in north of England hospitals, thought he had it figured out. Colleagues quoted him as saying: ''You could commit a. perfect murder with insulin. It cannot be traced." Last year Barlow, 38. had his chance. His second wife. Elizabeth, was pregnant, and neither wanted the baby. He started to give her injections of ergometrine to induce an abortion. On a May night. Elizabeth Barlow, 30, was found drowned in the bathtub.

As Barlow told it to the police, she had returned to their Bradford home at lunch time from the laundry where she worked, done some housework, and gone to bed right after tea. At 9:20 p.m., Barlow said, he found she had vomited in bed, so he changed the linen. She took off her sweat-soaked pajamas and went to take a bath. He dozed. At 11:20 he awoke, found her in the tub, drowned. He pulled the plug and, said he, tried artificial respiration to no avail.

Death by Drowning. When the pathologist arrived he found a little water still standing in the crook of the dead woman's arm. That hardly tallied with the story of vigorous efforts to restore respiration. And there was no sign that Elizabeth Barlow had splashed or struggled. Death was due to drowning, but she had let herself drown in a relaxed, apathetic if not comatose state. Why?

It took a whole crew of doctors, pharmacists and experts from the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory, using 1,220 mice, 150 rats and 24 guinea pigs, to find out. After four puzzling days, a sharp-eyed pathologist found four injection marks in Mrs. Barlow's buttocks, two on each side. From each site he removed part of the underlying tissue for analysis, suspecting insulin. Barlow's boast had been half right: insulin is almost impossible to detect. But by extraordinarily ingenious methods described in the British Medical Journal, the drug sleuths found a way to prove that there had been 84 units of insulin in Mrs. Barlow's buttocks when she died, and 240 units may have been injected. She was no diabetic, had no need for any insulin.

Murder by Insulin. The damning sequence brought out in court: Barlow must have switched from ergometrine injections to insulin. These made his wife stuporous and complaisant. Then he gave her still more. She sweated abundantly and vomited. Comatose in the tub. she made no effort to save herself as she slid under the water, which soon filled her lungs.

The verdict: murder: It was Britain's --perhaps the world's--first case of murder in which the aid of insulin was proved. Said the bewigged Mr. Justice Diplock: "But for a high degree of detective ability, [it] would not have been found out. Those responsible for the scientific research ... are to be very highly congratulated for [their] skill and patience." Barlow was sentenced to life imprisonment. The medical researchers are churning out bushels of data to help colleagues find the flaw in any such "perfect crime.''

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