In 1913, bodies of two children were discovered in the Hopetoun quarry near Edinburgh. Although the bodies had been in the water at least eighteen months, a man named Sir Sydney Alfred Smith was able to provide the police with vital information. He determined how much time before their deaths the two boys had eaten their last meal, proved that they must have walked to the quarry, and hypothesized that they had been killed by someone they knew. The two boys had never been reported missing, but Smith’s evidence led to the arrest of the children’s father, Patrick Higgins, and to The first execution in Scotland of the century.
Smith, a committed scientist to the last, during this case Smith secreted away the heads of both children, a leg and an arm from each of them, and all their internal organs. He installed them as specimens in the Forensic Medicine Museum at the University, where they are still used as teaching examples of advanced adipocere - a form of decomposition that happens to dead bodies subject to moisture.
