Death among the dreaming spires

Barbara Johnston

When one of her scientific proteges landed a research post in England, Barbara Johnston quickly offered her country house near Oxford.

"She offered it to me and my partner rent-free when I first went to Oxford," recalls Associate Professor Laura Bennet, who has continued Johnston's line of science at Auckland University.

"She helped me enormously getting established."

Johnston later sold the stone building, a former inn dating from the 15th century, but continued to own property in Oxford, including the flat in which she was attacked and killed.

Nine days ago, police found the 55-year-old, once a world leader in fetal research, dead with 49 stab wounds and strangled with her own jumper.

She was fully clothed and in the sole bedroom of the flat in the northern suburbs of Oxford, the university city about 80km northwest of London.

After living in Auckland for 23 years, she had sold her house in St Johns and returned to Oxford in September to be closer to her father Anthony, 80, who had been unwell, and mother Valerie, 79, who lived about 100km northwest of Oxford.

Barbara Johnston had no children, never married and kept pretty much to herself and latterly her family.

She retained Oxford properties while living in her own home in Auckland, and visited Britain every few years.

Police officers bashed down the door of her Woodstock Close home at 1am on Thursday last week after her parents, unable to contact her, became anxious.

On Saturday, 42-year-old Michael Humphries was arrested.

A glazier from Faringdon, a town about 30 minutes' drive from Oxford, he was this week charged with murdering Johnston some time between January 23 and 26 and is in jail awaiting trial.

She is believed to have answered the door to Humphries.

The head of the police investigation, Acting Detective Superintendent Steve Tolmie, indicated to the Weekend Herald that the motive for the "very brutal, ferocious" attack was money.

"It was reported in court there were some of her bank cards stolen and money taken from her accounts."

Just before Christmas, Humphries, who returned to Britain in November after six years in the United States, replaced windows on Johnston's flat and others in the same block of 20.

Tolmie says Johnston was not sexually assaulted and he ruled out any link between the killing and activists opposed to experiments on animals, which Johnston performed during her distinguished career.

Dr Barbara Madeleine Johnston, a physiologist, made important discoveries that have helped save lives through a cot-death campaign and through use of a neonatal cooling cap.

A shy yet talkative and assertive woman, she shifted to New Zealand in 1982 to work at Auckland University's paediatrics department.

She came from the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research at Oxford University, where she had worked for a decade in the foetal research team led by Professor Geoffrey Dawes.

"They made some astounding observations about how the fetus developed," Bennet says, "particularly her areas in respiratory physiology and how the foetus makes breathing movements before it's born."

The head of paediatrics at the Auckland University Medical School, Professor Innes Asher, says after her doctoral studies, Johnston received "excellent training" under Dawes.

"Her doctorate had established her as a world leader in this area of breathing movements of unborn babies, through animal work at the time, largely."

These breathing movements are a kind of practice run for when the fetus leaves the watery womb for the world of air.

Johnston showed that unlike adult breathing, fetal breathing movements are not continuous. In particular, they stop if there is a shortage of oxygen; adults in this situation breathe faster as panic sets in.

Johnston and her Auckland team discovered how the brain controlled these fetal breathing movements and the bio-chemistry involved.

With Professor Tania Gunn, Johnston studied the role of temperature regulation in controlling these movements.

All this knowledge is important in preventing cot deaths (Sids - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

It is thought that babies who die in this way may have a residual fetal pattern of breathing control. They may stop breathing after suffering a shortage of oxygen, which itself may be from sleeping face down.

Says Bennet: "The breathing studies, the temperature studies were very important in the back-to-sleep campaign. It is now, we understand, one of the most important ways of trying to control cot death, making sure that babies lie on their backs and that they are not too heavily wrapped and that we look at their breathing properly."

Johnston and her group's experimental work on hypothermia also had a practical spin-off in the cooling cap.

This relatively simple device, developed by the late Professor Gunn, Professor Peter Gluckman and others, circulates chilled water around the sick newborn's head in a tube while the rest of the body is under a heater.

After international trials it was proven in 2004 to reduce the rates of death, cerebral palsy and other movement disabilities in many full-term babies who had suffered a degree of brain damage during birth injuries - although it did nothing for the most severely injured.

It is thought that the chilling slows cell death long enough for protective mechanisms to repair the brain.

But after Johnston continued her ground-breaking research in Auckland for 13 years, her science career ended in 1995, when it might have been expected to last another 20 years.

She did some science editing work and was offered work at a British research institute but was unable to take the job as it coincided with a cancer scare, although she recovered.

Sources told the Weekend Herald that Johnston said she was made redundant from the university and received a payment, but considered it insufficient and sought more.

In 2002, she began a campaign against Gluckman, dean of the medical school from 1992 to 2001 and currently director of the university's Liggins Institute.

Two sources have this week told the Herald of a dispute with Gluckman, but he denies there ever was one and says there was "no redundancy. She was ... employed on short-term research contracts".

"She left by mutual agreement with the university and I have not been in dispute with her."

In 2002, Johnston contacted Herald reporters about Gluckman on numerous occasions. She had also discussed her complaints with lawyer Olinda Woodroffe before leaving Auckland.

One source says Johnston felt she had been pushed out of her job - which Gluckman denies.

"She felt she wanted to continue respiratory physiology and Peter felt that was old-fashioned and they needed to move on to other areas," the source says.

"His interest was to pursue the neuro-science angle and Barbara was kind of told basically that she had to move into that area or look for another job."

This was compounded by changes to research funding in the early 1990s and the ending of senior research fellowships - she had been a fellow - by the Health Research Council.

Gluckman says the fetal and neonatal breathing work could not progress after its peak in the late 80s and early 90s because of technology limitations and since preliminary experiments did show "any positive direction" so funding dried up.

In neuroscience "her skills were very good" and she was doing pilot work to develop a new field in cardiovascular development.

Gluckman paid tribute to Johnston's scientific achievements and was saddened by her death. Questioned about her social life, he told the Herald: "She lived largely for her work."

Britain's Sunday Times reported Gluckman saying he considered her "a rather isolated person".

"I don't believe she had any relationships at all in the 12 years she worked in the department with me. She was very clever and lived for her work, and didn't seem to have a social life."

The Herald has been unable to find close friends , but several friends and former colleagues have painted a different picture.

"She was a bouncy and outgoing person; almost vivacious," says a man who worked with her at Oxford three decades ago and later in Auckland.

"When I first went to Oxford as a Nuffield fellow, she said I could have a spare bedroom in her house until I got somewhere sorted out," says the man, who declined to be named.

He also remembers her as single-minded and able to cut to the heart of an issue, which could annoy her adversaries.

To her former Auckland neighbours, she seemed private, quiet, guarded - but one adds that when you got her talking, then she wouldn't stop.

"She was quite interested in property things," says another, her neighbour in Hopkins Cres, Kohimarama.

In 2003, the woman and her partner bought Johnston's plain, weatherboard house after the lower half of the steep section had been cross-leased to a developer.

She recalls Johnston as a good friend, but one who was financially astute and assertive about the price she wanted for the house, transferred in a private sale.

"I received a Christmas card from her about three weeks ago. She told me she didn't have time to say goodbye to me before she left. She wanted to be closer to her family. She mentioned that she probably would come back."

Johnston's brother Patrick said from their parents' home that she gave no indication she intended to return to New Zealand.

"So I think she had decided to come home."

From Kohimarama, Johnston shifted to Panapa Drive, a quiet, tree-lined street in nearby St Johns. The rear of the three-bedroom brick and timber house, which she sold for $750,000, opens on to a view of Remuera Golf Course.

The new owners since October, Suzie and Steve Thomson, moved into a house where some maintenance had been let go - tall weeds between the driveway paving stones, both toilets and the dishwasher in need of repairs.

Suzie Thomson attributes this to someone whose "head-space was somewhere else".

On a tour of the house, she points out the room where Johnston did her paperwork.

"The wardrobe was full of file boxes, full to the top."

She recalls her husband visiting with a building inspector before Johnston had left.

"She was upstairs in her bedroom watching tennis; Wimbledon."

Steve Tolmie says Johnston was keen on tennis.

"Her mother said she had been watching the Australian Open."

With the ordeal of a trial ahead of them, her family face a wait of up to two months before they can hold a funeral, following the defence post-mortem and the release of her body by the coroner.