On Saturday, December 8, 1956, 26-year-old Mary Davies of New
York City arrived in the Ashland, Pennsylvania office of abortionist Dr.
Robert Douglas Spencer.
As a physician, Spencer (pictured) was typical of criminal abortionists.
What was unusual about him was that rather than sneak the woman in
through the back alley, Spencer plied his abortion trade openly.
The Fatal Abortion
According to Spencer, Mary was alone, and reported that she'd been
bleeding for about two weeks. He didn't examine her, but gave her
medication for pain and Ergotrate to stop the bleeding. He told her to return the following day for her
abortion.
Mary returned at about 10 AM on the 9th. He administered 13 ccs. of Evipal in a 10% solution to induce anesthesia. "I injected that solution into
the vein of the left arm and in ten seconds she was asleep." Spencer
said that the next thing he noticed was that Mary wasn't breathing. Mary did not respond to medications intended to revive her, so Spencer attempted to resuscitate her with
oxygen. He called his assistant, Mildred Zettlemoyer, into the room to
assist him.
Mary still was not responding, so Spencer had Zettlemoyer call the
laboratory assistant, Steve Sekunda, and tell him to come to the office.
Spencer put a breathing tube into Mary's throat, but had to work blind
because the light on his scope wasn't working. He resumed artificial
respiration. By the
time Sekunda arrived, at around 11:30, Spencer had concluded that Mary
was dead.
Preparing for Trial
William J. Keuch, chief detective of Schuylkill (pronounced "school
kill") County detective, said that when he'd asked Spencer what a
young woman from New York City was doing in Spencer's office in Ashland,
Spencer answered, "I'm well known in the east. I specialize in women's
diseases." Women, Spencer told Keuch, came to him from all over.
Spencer wasn't arrested until after 12 weeks of investigation, which
included sending Mary's organs to Dr. Milton Helman, a member of the New
York Medical Board, for toxicology review..
When the case was finally ready to go to court in May of 1958, the
entire trial was derailed when, during jury selection, one woman asked
to be excused because, she said, "I served on a jury in which Dr.
Spencer was involved before." This statement was considered prejudicial
to Spencer, thus tainting the other jurors.
Trial
The defense seemed to be based mostly on raising reasonable doubt that Mary had actually been pregnant at the time of the abortion. Different experts testified about how they'd drawn their conclusions. The argument evidently worked. Proceeding with an abortion procedure if the patient wasn't actually pregnant, evidently, regardless of Spencer's intention to abort a viable fetus, would not be considered a crime even if the patient died
Spencer's Response
Spencer's widow, Eleanor, told author Patricia Miller that her husband had
been quite stricken by Mary Davies' death. He continued to perform
abortions, however, along with his regular medical practice, up until
the trial.
Spencer briefly stopped doing abortions after the trial, "for a month or
so," his widow said. But he resumed his business and eventually got
entangled with a fellow named Harry Mace who set up a business for
himself rounding up abortion patients and bringing them to Spencer.
Spencer's widow lamented that Mace flooded Spencer with patients,
pressuring him to rush through abortions. Spencer's health began to
fail. He was arrested again, due to the attention from Mace's
activities, but died in 1969 before the case went to trial.
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