Detour No 4... St George's Road and West Princess Street...

As found on Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

Oscar Slater before his arrest and after.

            The final case in Jack House's book is that of Oscar Slater. Slater was a German Jew who spent 19 years in prison and was very nearly hanged for the murder of Miss Mary Gilchrist which he certainly never committed. The murder took place on the 21^st December 1908 at 51 West Princess Street, just off St. George’s Street and about 5 minutes’ walk from Charing Cross.

51 West Princess Street as it is and as it was.

Mary Gilchrist was 83 years-old and afraid of burglars. She had told her downstairs neighbours that, if ever she needed help, she would knock down to them. On the evening of her death the neighbours were in their dining room when they heard three knocks. Was that the signal? Arthur Adams was persuaded by his sisters to go upstairs and check. He rang several times but got no answer. He went back downstairs. But one sister was certain something was wrong and told him to go back. He did, and as he stood at the door listening, he heard footsteps behind him. It was Miss Gilchrist’s maid, Nellie Lambie. She had been out for the evening newspaper. He waited till she opened the door and as she went into the kitchen a man appeared at the bedroom door to the right. He walked up to Adams as if to speak to him, brushed past and rushed down the stairs. Nellie Lambie showed no surprise and Adams guessed she knew the man. When he asked where Miss Gilchrist was, Lambie went into the dining room and screamed. The old woman was in front of the fireplace with a rug thrown over her head, the floor covered in blood. Adams ran after the man who had passed him.

When Adams returned, he found that Nellie Lambie had called a policeman. They removed the rug. Although Miss Gilchrist had been battered over the head she was still breathing. Adams ran for a doctor but by the time the doctor arrived the old woman was dead.

A rudimentary search discovered a jewellery box which had been smashed open with some jewellery strew around beside it. When asked if anything was missing, Lambie said a diamond brooch was gone. When asked about the man who had run off, Lambie said she hardly saw him and Adams didn’t get a very clear look at his face because he had left his glasses downstairs. Pawn shops were alerted to be on the look-out for the brooch.

The hallway of Miss Gilchrist's flat.

The man who ran off was described as between 25-30, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches, slim, dark hair, clean shaven, dressed in a light grey overcoat and dark cloth cap. Adams said the man appeared to be a gentleman. The police worked on the theory that Miss Gilchrist knew her killer otherwise it would have been impossible for him to enter the flat and kill her in the ten minutes the servant was gone for an evening paper.

A further odd detail of the case was that Miss Gilchrist had thousands of pounds worth of jewellery hidden all over the house, some of which were fastened behind curtains, wrapped in bed sheets, and in the pocket of clothes in her wardrobe. The police wondered if Nellie Lambie knew of this and, if so, might she have mentioned it to a boyfriend?

The Glasgow public were outraged that an elderly woman might be killed in her own home in the 10 minutes that a maid was out of the house. The newspapers put pressure on the police to find the killer quickly. A reward was offered for information. On Christmas Eve, a 14-year-old message girl turned up who claimed to have had a good view of the man Arthur Adams had seen. Her description was so different from Adams that rather than dismiss the girl's evidence the police concluded two men must have been involved. The second man was described as tall, with a nose turned to one side, perhaps the right side, she thought. He wore a fawn coloured overcoat, dark trousers, a tweed cloth cap and brown boats.

    On Christmas Day, a bicycle dealer and gambler told the police that a German Jew called Oscar was trying to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch. He didn't know Oscar's address but knew the building and close-entrance and showed them to it. It was 400 yards from Miss Gilchrist’s flat.

Oscar Slater was a gambler and dealer in jewellery, most of which he had received in lieu of gambling debts. He lived at 69 St. George’s Road with his girlfriend Andrée Junio Antoine. Antoine was also a prostitute who received callers during the day when Slater was out. When the police called on Slater they discovered he and his girlfriend had left Glasgow that same day for Liverpool to catch the Lusitania to New York.

'They're on the run!' concluded the police.

Even when it was discovered that the brooch he had pawned had no connection with Miss Gilchrist and, in fact, had been pawned over a month before the woman was murdered, the 'fact' that he had gone ‘on the run’ with his girlfriend and that they were travelling under the false names of Mr and Mrs Sando told the police they were guilty. Slater, it later developed, had changed his name because his ex-wife had tracked him down and was after him for money he didn’t have, something she had frequently done before.

He was arrested on docking at New York on January the 2^nd 1909. Slater had no need to go back to Scotland to face a trial. The brooch ‘clue’ was the only thing that had drawn the police to Slater and was worthless, having no connection with the murder. Slater’s American representative felt the same about the ‘identification’ of him as the suspect. The Glasgow police had brought Arthur Adams, Nellie Lambie, and the message girl, to New York to identify Slater. When they first saw Slater he was handcuffed between two New York cops, one of whom wore a badge of identification, the other of whom was very tall, with Slater in the middle, looking very much the prisoner. ‘Is that the man?’ the Glasgow policeman asked the women, pointing to Slater. ‘That’s the man!’ they said.

Slater rejected his attorney's advice and was determined to go back to Scotland and prove his innocence.

The police made a great deal of Slater being in a hurry to leave Glasgow. He had been in no hurry, though. His plans to leave for America had been ongoing since the 7^th of December. He had been to America before and was going again because he had the opportunity to run a gambling club in San Francisco. At his trial, the evidence against Slater had no substance but the Lord Advocate was determined to prove his guilt despite all evidence to the contrary, and no matter how legitimate or illegitimate the 'evidence' might be. A fantasy journey was concocted for Slater between a billiard hall in Renfield Street - where the Odeon cinema now sits - and Miss Gilchrist’s flat, with no witnesses produced who saw him make the journey. A very real witness to his whereabout was not called by the prosecution and, as the defence were told nothing of this witness, neither could they call him either. It was, in modern parlance, a stitch-up.

The Lord-Advocate of the trial was described as a man never troubled by doubts or difficulties, or considerations of the other side’s strength. For him, there was no other side. He was what psychologists term, a 'Right' man, that is, a man who always needs to be right and find it inconceivable that he could ever be wrong. ‘He could not see that any other view than his was possible.’ At the start of his summation he told the jury it would be shown in his argument how Oscar Slater came to learn of the old woman’s jewellery - then he never mentioned the jewellery again. He made an attempt to explain how Slater got into the flat of a woman terrified of burglars, with a double-locked door, and a close-door which needed to be opened by Miss Gilchrist by a handle mechanism upstairs in her flat. He also said Slater was ‘gasping and panting for money’ and had made a ‘flight from justice’ after his name and description had appeared in the newspaper. But Slater had £30 on him when he left Glasgow, a sizable amount for the time, and his name had never appeared in any newspaper. The Lord-Advocate spoke for two long-winded hours. Then it was the prosecution’s turn. The prosecutor spoke of Slater’s lifestyle, that he was ‘the ruin of men… the ruin of women… We do not know whether he ever did an honest day’s work in his life.’ A decent man, said the prosecutor, might be presumed innocent until proven guilty but in Slater’s case that presumption might be dispensed with given his lifestyle.

Slater was sentenced to be hanged. The people of Glasgow doubted the verdict and 20,000 of them singed a petition for the commutation of his sentence. After some debate on the case, Slater’s sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

He was told of this two days before he was due to be executed.

In 1910, William Roughead published a book entitled The Trial of Oscar Slater detailing the faults of the case against Slater. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up Slater’s case, but more importantly, and unknown to Slater, a Glasgow policeman who believed Slater to be innocent was ready to prove it, to the detriment of his career, pension, and ultimately his life. He was Detective Lieutenant John Thomas Trench. Trench had been involved in Slater’s case from the beginning. According to him, Nellie Lambie knew and named the man who ran from the flat that night, a man also known to Miss Gilchrist. But after the brooch led the police to Slater, Trench’s superiors dropped every other avenue of enquiry. Trench was a conscientious cop. He presented his doubts to the Scottish Secretary. The Scottish Secretary asked Trench to present the written details of his evidence. A secret enquiry was undertaken. And it was a farce.

Trench stated that he had interviewed Miss Gilchrist’s niece who told him that, on the night of the murder, Nellie Lambie had come to her door in a very excited state, told her that Miss Gilchrist had been murdered and said, ‘I saw the man who did it.’ She identified him, but his name was removed from the report and the initials A.B. inserted. Trench also noted that Lambie could not identify a sketch of Oscar Slater and said she did not know the man. As for the message girl who provided evidence, Trench had proof that she was not where she said she had been so could not have seen anyone run from the murder scene. The problem was that Miss Gilchrist’s niece later denied Nellie Lambie had mentioned A.B. to her. And she had good reason for the denial. The man was her cousin.

Everyone called to the enquiry contradicted Trench or denied what he said. He was suspended from duty. He invoked the protection of the Scottish Secretary who had asked for his report but Trench was dismissed from the Glasgow police.

Trench.

When war broke out in 1914, Trench joined the Army despite being 45 years-old. He was to leave with his regiment in 1915 when the Glasgow police called at his barracks and arrested him on a fraudulent charge of resetting stolen jewellery, arresting his lawyer on the same charge. The Lord-Justice summed up the shifty-evidence and directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. Trench re-joined his regiment in Egypt, left the Army in 1918 and died the following year, aged 50. His lawyer died two years later. It is said both of them were deeply upset over the nature of their arrest and trial under false charges, seemingly as revenge for their questioning of the Slater case.

A journalist friend of Trench’s took up the case and, 8 years later, published at Arthur Conan Doyle’s instigation The Truth about Oscar Slater. William Park’s book stated that the man who killed Miss Gilchrist was ‘on intimate terms’ with her and that the servant also knew him. He was after a document which she possessed - her will. The crime writer Edgar Wallace reviewed the book and wrote that it was made obvious that not only had Nellie Lambie known the killer but he had been in the house before she went for the newspaper. Many newspapers took up renewed interest in the case to the embarrassment of the Glasgow police and the Scottish judicial system.  It was said that an Old Bailey jury would have stopped the case halfway through. ‘… anybody but a fool might know he was guiltless,’ wrote Wallace.

In 1927, the Empire News produced a statement from Nellie Lambie in which she stated she knew the man who ran. She had told the police but they said she was talking nonsense and pressured her to identify Slater. In another newspaper, Mary Barrowman, the 14-year-old message girl, now a middle-aged woman, said the Procurator Fiscal rehearsed her evidence for two weeks. The Secretary of State for Scotland said Slater would be released but the press were not happy claiming this was a measure to avoid an enquiry into the whole case. The Scottish authorities, from the Secretary of State down to the constables who denied Trench’s evidence, compounded their culpability in the miscarriage of justice by continuing to cover up their failings to the bitter end. Oscar Slater was finally released 4 days later. He had been in prison for 19 years.

Despite being a free man, Slater was still determined to prove his innocence. An appeal in the case of Oscar Slater against His Majesty’s Advocate was held in 1928. But Slater was told he would not be allowed to give evidence, at which he was incensed and threatened to call off the appeal. Persuaded by friends to continue, he left the case in the hands of his advisors. Nellie Lambie was in the United States and refused to attend and she could not be forced to do so. The five judges hearing the appeal, reluctantly, very reluctantly, as is evident from their comments, quashed Slater’s conviction, but only on a technicality. Slater was awarded £6000, roughly £315 for every year in prison. Adjusted for inflation this is the equivalent of £373,807 in 2019 terms. Out of that, Slater had to pay his legal fees. He also sent £200 to William Park, author of The Truth about Oscar Slater.
Slater died in 1948 at the age of 75.

Slater after his release.

Many years after the trial, the message girl finally confessed that she had not been in West Princess Street the night of the murder, but her mother was an alcoholic and had wanted a share of the reward. She had received £100 for her evidence.

            Jack House had his own theory as to what had happened that night long ago. Miss Gilchrist’s background becomes relevant. She was on bad terms with all her relatives. Her father had left her a large sum of money which had led to family quarrels. Miss Gilchrist had an illegitimate daughter which her family knew of and she planned to leave all her money to her daughter and grand-daughter. Despite the fact that the family were already well-off, they wanted the will changed in order that they might get a share of her money, rather than have it go to some bastard child. Two men, believes House, called on her that night, both relatives – Dr. Charteris and Austin Birrell. Dr. Charteris was a nephew of Miss Gilchrist and later became a professor at St Andrew’s University. House believes he was certainly the man that passed Adams on the stairs… but not the murderer.  A nephew of Birrell’s told House, ‘the whole family knew that Uncle Austin had done the murder’. He had been arguing with Miss Gilchrist over her will when he struck her. She had fallen and hit her head. Then Birrell seized a nearby chair and repeatedly beat her over the head and chest with it until the doorbell rang. While he had been killing the old woman, Charteris was looking for the document. When  Adams left the front door the first time, Birrell left the flat. By the time Adams and Lambie arrived, Charteris had found the document and strolled past them. Both men then ran along West Princess Street but were not seen by Mary Barrowman because she wasn’t there. However, they were seen by schoolteacher Agnes Brown, but she was not called by the prosecution because her evidence contradicted Mary Bannerman’s and Bannerman was willing to identify Oscar Slater. The police had called on Charteris and Birrell to tell them of the murder. They appeared shocked and said they knew nothing about it. The weren’t questioned any further. Why should they be? They were both respectable gentlemen. Respectability was the key to all the murders, House believes. Madeleine Smith was the respectable daughter of a respectable man, while L'Angelier was a French adventurer. Pritchard was a respectable medical man, above suspicion, as was Old Fleming. And who was Oscar Slater? A Jewish gambler with a girlfriend who was a prostitute. House concludes that the respectability of the Glasgow police also had to be protected at all costs. They closed ranks against Trench, the man House calls the real hero of the Slater case, a man who risked and lost everything for the sake of an innocent man and a wrongful conviction he attempted to right.

Professor Charteris is front row, second from left.

            A few years ago, a new pub opened on St George’s Street called the Oscar Slater. It wasn’t far from West Princess Street where the murder took place and was under the flat where Oscar Slater had lived. I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the pub with a couple of friends. The pub walls were filled with documentation and memorabilia relating to the case. It was then that I discovered I had been in the murder house. We were talking about the Slater case, of which I knew very little. One of my friends had recently seen a documentary on the Slater case and realised that a mutual friend of ours had lived in Miss Gilchrist's flat. The flat, like almost all the others in that section of the West End had been converted into bed-sits and shared accommodation long ago. Our friend had lived there for a few years. I had not only been in the flat, I had been in the murder room without knowing it. It had been converted into a bedroom. Miss Gilchrist must be a peaceful spirit because no one complained of any ghostly activity. The Oscar Slater pub, as good as it was, didn’t last long. Pubs seldom do on that side of the motorway. It cuts them off from the business of the main section of Sauchiehall street.

Oscar Slater's.

Detour No. 3... Berkeley Street, Royal Crescent and Sauchiehall Street...

As found at Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

          

The irresistibly seductive Dr. Pritchard. 

    The third of Jack House’s celebrated cases is that of Dr Edward William Pritchard – ‘the human crocodile’. Dr Pritchard was the last man to be hanged in public in Glasgow. There is no dispute about Pritchard’s guilt, he confessed to two of the murders before he was hanged. House called Pritchard 'loathsome' and notes that he was hypocritical enough to have his wife’s coffin lid unscrewed so that he might kiss her one last time – after torturing her to death by slow poisoning. House believes that Pritchard did not murder for gain, revenge, elimination, jealousy, or even lust of killing, but… for fun. He had enjoyed committing each one of his murders.

            His first murder occurred in 1863, around the corner from Sandyford Place were Old Fleming had hacked Jess McPherson to death. Pritchard's servant, Elizabeth McGirn, was burnt to death in her attic room. Pritchard had been at home with his sons while his wife, three daughters, and other servant were away.  A newspaper report of the incident pointed out that, ‘the damage to the dwelling is, we understand, covered by insurance.’ But Pritchard had to accept a smaller sum than his original claim because no trace was found among the debris of the jewellery he had claimed was lost in the fire.

A house similar to Pritchard's at 11 Berkeley Street which no longer exists.

During the fire, a policeman had been passing, saw the flames and banged on the door. Pritchard opened it, claiming he had only just been awakened by his sons' cries moments before, but the policeman noted that he was fully dressed. The police also became aware of rumours that the servant girl was pregnant. Dr Pritchard, it seemed, had a reputation in England for 'interfering' with his domestic staff as well as his patients, single or married, and for which reason he’d come to Scotland two years previously. But Pritchard wasn’t charged. The case was put down to accidental death. The servant, it was said, was in the habit of reading in bed by the light of a gas lamp. After Pritchard was found guilty of the other two murders it was speculated that the servant girl hadn’t attempted to escape the fire as she was already dead or had been drugged when the fire was started by Pritchard. Pritchard never confessed to her killing, only those of the other two.

Following the fire the family moved across the road from where Old Flaming had lived to 22 Royal Crescent and hired a new servant girl to replace the dead one. She was described as a good-looking fifteen-year-old. When his wife was on holiday with the children at Dunoon, Pritchard began an affair with her.

Pritchard's house to the left at Royal Crescent

    Pritchard left England not only because he the affairs he was having with patients, he was also in debt. He had become a notorious figure in the locality. The locals said of him that ‘if he spoke the truth it was only by accident’. He claimed to have gone to King’s College for his medical studies but King’s College knew nothing about him. His diploma as Doctor of Medicine had been bought from the University of Enlagen where he had 'studied' in absentia. Despite glowing testimonials to his abilities, when he arrived in Glasgow he was regarded with suspicion. Some openly suggested his testimonials were forged. He also claimed to be a friend of Garibaldi and walked around Glasgow with a cane with a presentation inscription from Garibaldi. Unfortunately for his story, a number of people had seen him with the ornate cane long before when it bore no inscription. He was also in the habit of presenting complete strangers with a photograph of himself as though he were a star of the stage.

After moving from the house where the fire had occurred, Pritchard soon moved again, this time to an even grander house at 131 Sauchiehall Street, which no longer exists, and which wife's family paid for. He was, it is said, a charmer and his mother-in-law adored him. But before long, despite his growing practice, he was in debt again. More seriously for Pritchard, his new servant was pregnant and his wife had caught them together. There were rows. He told the servant that he’d marry her if his wife died. A few months later his wife became ill. Pritchard had bought his poisons from the same two pharmacists that had supplied Madeleine Smith, which is not surprising as her old home was only a minute's walk from Pritchard's. After a holiday in Edinburgh - without Pritchard - his wife returned in glowing health. She was soon ill again. Pritchard called in her cousin, a retired doctor. She looked better than he expected and he concluded that her illness was not serious. After he left, it became serious, so much so that Mrs Pritchard demanded to see another doctor. The new doctor, Dr Gairdner, called three times and each time became more unhappy with the treatment the sick woman was receiving. He recommended that she go and stay with her brother in Edinburgh, who was an old friend of his and also a doctor, a man by the name of Taylor. But Pritchard objected that she was too ill to travel.

On hearing that her daughter was seriously ill, Mrs Pritchard’s mother arrived from Edinburgh to look after her. She was 70 but strong, healthy and good at managing household affairs. She was also an opium addict. Her favourite pick-me-up was Battley’s Sedative Solution.

Everything went well until Mrs Pritchard decided she would like some tapioca. Her son was sent to buy some and, after he returned, the bag of tapioca sat on a hall table next to Pritchard’s surgery until the cook used it half an hour later. By the time the cook had prepared it, Mrs Pritchard had changed her mind and her mother ate it. Afterwards, the mother was violently ill. Soon, both women were regularly ill, until one day the old woman collapsed. Pritchard called in Dr Paterson who lived a few doors away. He looked at the old woman and was of the opinion she was under the influence of a narcotic. Pritchard told him she was an opium addict and had been ‘swigging’ from the bottle. The old woman died in the early hours of the morning and two-thirds of her estate passed to her daughter. Her son-in-law wrote her death certificate.

By an odd coincidence, the poison Pritchard used to kill his mother-in-law and his wife was called Fleming’s Tincture of Aconite - no relation to the Fleming family.

Pritchard’s wife died about three weeks later. After his wife’s death, Pritchard burst into tears and begged a servant to shoot him. Then, a few moments later, he recovered his composure and wrote a letter to his bank concerning his overdraft. Next, he wrote his wife’s death certificate, but that same morning the Procurator Fiscal of Glasgow had received an anonymous letter concerning the suspicious nature of the deaths of Mrs Pritchard and her mother. Many believed Dr Paterson was behind the latter as he was the only one in a position to have any doubts concerning the deaths of both women. He denied this. The police began an enquiry. After taking his wife to Edinburgh for burial, Pritchard returned to Glasgow and was arrested at Queen Street station. His wife’s family thought the police were behaving very stupidly but both bodies were examined and discovered to be full of antimony.

At his trial, Pritchard favourably impressed the courtroom. But each day, as more details of his crimes were revealed, opinion changed. They began to see a man, as the newspaper report says, of ‘consummate villainy and diabolic cruelty… a perfect fiend in human shape’. The final touch that ended any doubts was when the servant, Mary McLeod, revealed the details of their relationship and ‘rent aside the curtain which had hitherto veiled the inner life of that apparently happy home’.

The defence, of course, tried to blame the murders on the servant but the jury were unanimous in finding Pritchard guilty of both murders. When Pritchard left the court, he took off his hat and bowed to the waiting crowd as though it had all been a performance. While in prison, he wrote a confession in which he attempted to implicate Mary McLeod. This was ignored. He made a more detailed second confession in which he revealed that Mary McLeod had been pregnant and that he’d produced a miscarriage, which his wife knew of. He also stated that the day before her death, his mother-in-law had caught him in his consulting room with Mary McLeod. He denied that he killed his mother-in-law and claimed that she had killed herself by drinking an overdose of Battley’s Sedative Solution but he did confess to killing his wife.

A week before he was hanged, Pritchard made his third and final confession. In that, he finally confessed to killing his mother-in-law and his wife in a fit of ‘terrible madness’ and that Mary McLeod knew nothing of the poisonings. He was hanged on the 28^th July, 1865 and around 100,000 people turned up to watch the event, some arriving as early as the night before to secure a good view. 

    

Victorian domestic bliss. Pritchard, with wife, mother-in-law, and children.

Detour No. 2... Sandyford Place...

As found at Top 40 Glasgow Blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

17 Sandyford Place

The second of House’s cases is that of Jess McPherson who was found murdered at 17 Sandyford Place in 1862. House describes the scene as ‘one of the most savage Glasgow murders…’. She had been hacked at forty times with a meat cleaver. It was said to have taken place on a lovely summer’s night of Friday July 4^th through to Saturday July 5^th. The house was owned by John Fleming, a wealthy and respectable accountant who also owned and rented some ‘squalid’ property - a respectable business man with a side-line as a slum landlord. Fleming's wife was dead and he lived in the house with his son and elderly father, known as Old Fleming, as well as the servant Jess McPherson. That weekend he had gone to his country house in Dunoon with his son and his sister, leaving his father at home with the servant.

Old Fleming

            The old man, who said in court that he was 87 and then later that he was 78, had been described by Jess McPherson as an old devil. He was forever asking her to marry him. He had a fondness for servants as it was later discovered, being called before the kirk as a young man of 27 when he got a servant girl pregnant. When his son and grandson came back to Glasgow on Monday morning they went to work. It wasn't till that evening, when they returned to Sandyford Place, that the body was discovered. Old Fleming claimed he hadn't seen Jess McPherson since Friday. The police were called… eventually, and a post-mortem carried out. The doctor determined that the lightness of some of the blows to Jess McPherson’s body indicated a female or a weak man had inflicted the blows. Three small naked footprints of a woman were found which were not McPherson’s and some of her best clothes were missing. Various other bloodstains were located around the house, including some on Old Fleming’s shirts. It was also noted that someone had attempted to wash blood from the floor in the murder room. Old Fleming also mentioned that some silver plate was missing.

A little later, a pawnbroker remembered some plate had been pawned and each piece bore the letter F - for Fleming. A woman who signed herself Mary McDonald pawned them. By coincidence, on the same day the pawnbroker took his news to the police, Old Fleming was arrested for the murder of Jess McPherson. Acting on information received – possibly from Old Fleming - the police then arrested Jessie McLachlan, a former servant of the Flemings and a very good friend of Jess McPherson. She admitted pawning the silver pate which Old Flaming had given her and using the false name which he had suggested as well as the false address. She made a long and detailed statement about her activities, most of which was nonsense and the police knew it was nonsense. McLachlan’s own husband had led the police to a box containing some of the missing dead woman’s clothes. McLachlan then claimed the murdered woman had given her the clothes to be cleaned and when she learned of the murder she panicked and hid them. The bloody footprints were also found to be identical to McLachlan’s. Old Fleming was released and she was charged with murder.

            At the trial, Old Fleming was called as a witness. His activities that weekend were dissected by the defence council but the judge in the case, Lord Deas, kept interrupting for the sake of ‘the old innocent’. Despite the judges attempts to protect the 'respectable' old man, there was one part of his testimony which produced a sensation in the court. The milk boy had sworn that when he called at Sandyford Place at his usual time on Saturday morning at 7:40am, Old Fleming had answered the door, fully dressed. The defence lawyer asked Old Fleming why he had not let Jess McPherson answer the door to the milk boy.

‘On Saturday morning, you mean?’ asked Old Fleming.

            ‘Yes, on Saturday morning.’
            ‘Jessie?’ said Old Fleming. ‘We ken’t it was a’ ower wi’ Jessie afore that.’
            I’ll translate for an English audience: ‘We knew it was all over with Jessie before that.’

The old man had already testified that he did not know she was dead until the Monday. And who was the ‘we’?

Lord Deas did his best to help the old man out of the difficulty but the point was made. The judge also did not allow other information concerning the behaviour of Old Fleming to be brought up in court. After all, said the judge, he was not the party being charged with murder. The jury was out for fifteen minutes. Jessie McLachlan was found guilty.

Jessie, who couldn't stop herself from talking to the police even when she had nothing to say relevant to the case, wished for a statement to be read. A long statement. A very long statement. Yes, she had lied. She had been at the house on the night her friend was murdered. She had taken around some drink, she said, and she, Old Fleming, and the dead woman had shared it. During the drunken conversation that followed, Jess McPherson mentioned that if she told what she knew about someone it would frighten them. The old man, gathering that this was an insinuation for his benefit was not happy. Shortly afterwards, he gave Jessie McLachlan money to go and buy more drink. When she returned, she found her friend moaning on the floor of her room with a severe cut across her face. She wondered what had happened but her friend was almost senseless and the old man claimed not to know. The old man then began to clean the blood on the floor while McLachlan nursed her friend. The old man then spilled the basin of water over McLachlan’s dress, boots, and stockings, and she took them off to dry - which was why her bare footprints were found in the room. The old man did not want to send for a doctor and neither did the injured woman when she had recovered enough to make her intentions known.

While McPherson lay on the bed recovering, she told McLachlan the cause of the trouble in the house. The old man had been out one night recently and returned drunk. In the early hours of the morning, he had climbed into her bed and ‘tried to use liberties with her’. The next morning, he begged her not to say anything to his son who was already none too happy with the old man's drinking and associating with servants. The old man had been terrified ever since then that she might mention what had happened to someone. He had offered her money and, as she was leaving for Australia soon, she was determined to make him pay before she left. When McLachlan had gone out earlier for more drink, she and the old man had quarrelled about ‘her tongue breaking loose’ and ‘hinting a threat to tell’. He had followed her out of the kitchen and hit her across the face with something that had floored her.

McLachlan confronted the old man with this. He begged her not to speak and promised to make it worth her while. When McPherson suddenly became worse, McLachlan wanted to go for a doctor. The old man wouldn’t hear of it. Finally, McLachlan went upstairs to look out on the street and was about to leave for a doctor when she heard the noise from downstairs. She rushed downstairs and discovered the old man hacking at her friend with a meat chopper. He had been sure she was going to die, he said, and did not want her talking to anyone before she did - so he helped her on her way. He told Jessie McLachlan that if he was arrested he would say she had done it and, either way, both of them would face the charge, but... if they made it look like a burglary…
    She pawned the silver and disposed of the clothes. The old man promised to set her up in business and told her she would never want again.

It took forty minutes to read out her full statement to the court.

The court, obviously enough, was very excited. But not Lord Deas. He had made his own mind-up, despite the fact that other evidence had come to his attention which he was well aware placed even more suspicion on the old man. He would not allow the defence to reveal it in court. Jack House, who had covered many trials, says of Lord Deas: ‘I know of no other convicted person who was sentenced in so cruel and vindictive a manner as Lord Deas used towards Jessie McLachlan.’

On sentencing Jessie McLachlan, Deas said, on that night, ‘… you did most barbarously and most cruelly murder that unsuspecting woman. There is not upon my mind a shadow of suspicion that the old gentleman had anything to do with the murder.’ He then pronounced the death sentence.

The amount of disagreement with the verdict was such that a petition was organised in Glasgow to delay the execution until a further investigation was made. The petition spread throughout Scotland and even into England where a more balanced view of the case had been presented in the press. A week before the execution, the Home Office contacted the Lord Provost of Glasgow who was told to delay the execution. On the instruction of the Lord Advocate a private investigation was begun. After an official enquiry, the Lord Provost received a second letter. Jessie McLachlan was reprieved but she was told she would spend the rest of her life in prison.

In years to come, all of the Flemings subsequently left Scotland. The Daily Telegraph twice called for an investigation into Old Fleming’s background. It was found that on that beautiful summer weekend of the murder he had a fire going continuously, as he admitted, which was plenty of time to get rid of blood-stained articles of clothing, although he missed a couple of his shirts. And he never did explain, thanks to Lord Deas, why he was fully dressed when he answered the door so early to the milk boy which was normally the servant's job.

Jessie McLachlan served fifteen years before being released and emigrate, eventually, to America where she died. Old Fleming remained in Scotland and was dead  by the time of her release. He was buried in the kirkyard at Anderson. The kirkyard is gone. It is something else of Glasgow’s history which has disappeared with the building of the motorway slicing its way through the heart of the city.

Blythswood Square... led astray by Madeleine Smith...

As found at Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

A Victorian beauty?...

    Jack House was a Glasgow journalist with the Evening Citizen who went on to become an author, broadcaster and historian of old Glasgow. His book, Square Mile of Murder, was first published in 1961. (Actually, I've measured House's square mile on a map and it is in fact a square half-mile, but then 'square mile' sounds more euphonious. Another interesting point is that at the extreme southern-west corner of House's square is St. Joseph's Roman Catholic chapel, where the serial killer Peter Tobin worked before murdering the young Polish women, Angelika Kluk, who helped there before burying her under the chapel floor. It was this murder that led to his capture. It is believed he may have been responsible for over fifty killings although the exact number is unknown. I intend a section on this incident at a later date.) As he points out in his introduction ‘all the best murders in Glasgow have taken place in the West End in the spring or the summer’. The random shootings in the early 90s took place in the spring. House's book concerns itself with four historic and famous cases of the Victorian and Edwardian era, beginning with the Madeleine Smith trial of 1857; the case of Jessie McLachlan in 1862; the trial and execution of Dr Pritchard, the ‘human crocodile’, in 1865; and the miscarriage of justice of Oscar Slater, condemned in 1909. Despite the late-date of Slater’s trial, and as House points out, all the cases are essentially Victorian as the judgement of guilt or innocence hinges upon... respectability.

The Square Mile in question encompasses Blythswood Square where Madeleine Smith 'allegedly' poisoned her lover, Pierre Emile L’Angelier in her father’s home; Sandyford Place, where Jessie McLachlan is charged with murdering her friend (and which is part of Sauchiehall Street but set off from the main road and independently named); Berkeley Terrace, around the corner from Sandyford Place, where Dr Pritchard murdered one of his victims, his other two murders being committed in Sauchiehall Street towards Blythswood Square; and the final location being West Princess Street, in a flat which I have been inside, as has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and where Oscar Slater was said to have beaten to death Marion Gilchrist. By an odd coincidence, the crazy bastard who began shooting at random in the 1990s did so at almost exactly the centre of Jack House's Square Mile of Murder. I wonder if he'd ever read the book? Another minor coincidence is that Madeleine Smith’s home was not far from the one in which the architect John James Burnet grew-up and Smith’s father was a prominent architect who would certainly have known Burnet’s father. Anyone familiar with Glasgow will know the work of Madeline Smith's father. He designed the McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street and supervised Stirling’s Library, Miller Street. Both are still there, as is Madeleine Smith’s house at Blythswood Square and it has hardly changed since her time.

Smith's home as it was in 2017 when it sold for £2.45 million. Smith's bedroom window was on the side-street to the right, leading to Sauchiehall Street. She is said to have leaned out of it to give L'Angelier his lethal hot-chocolate.

As Smith knew it.

 Madeleine Smith was acquitted of poisoning her lover, which she almost certainly did. The jury had no trouble finding her innocent. She was the daughter of a respectable and wealthy architect. She was also the archetypal Victorian beauty – in pictures of her as a teenager she looks remarkably like the illustrations for David Copperfield's sister in Dickens’ book. In later pictures, such as the one above, she doesn't fit the modern criteria of beauty. She looks strict, stern, and forbidding. Her lover, L’Angelier, was considered a foreigner – he was born on Jersey and his father was French – and was a near penniless clerk in a seedsman store, earning, at most, ten-bob a week - 50p. At the trial, he was accused of attempting to blackmail her. His one fault seems to be that he took her love seriously. The impression I get from Madeleine Smith is that it was all just a game. She was very flirtatious, aware of her beauty, loved the attention of men, and seems fascinated by the effect she was having on L’Angelier. On a couple of occasions, she very calmly called the affair off at her father’s insistence, only taking it up again at the insistence of the distraught L’Angelier. Madeleine liked to play parts. In her later years, when she had abandoned her family to live elsewhere, she called herself Lena, and, in letters when she was younger, she sometimes adopted the name Mimi. As House points out, when she wrote as Mimi she wrote as a completely different person, her personality and hand-writing, as expressed in the letters, completely changed. She might be labelled a split-personality in a court-room today.

I have an image for the 101 views. Picture Madeleine Smith, sitting in the dock, simpering before the gaze of the all-male jury. Every now and again, she flickers her eye-lashes. No tears though. She remains cool throughout. Ah! The ignominy, the infamy of sitting before the jury while her private life is picked apart by that cad of a prosecutor, her private letters read out for the titillation of the public gallery, which is full. Whenever a salacious detail is mentioned she bows her head slightly and conjures up a blush which appears like a drop of blood on the petal of a pure white rose. ‘The shame of it! That this innocent woman’s suffering should be prolonged on account of that filthy seducing Frenchman! My God…! If he weren’t dead already we’d lynch him!’ You can feel the jury’s mounting anger. She’s loving the attention of all the men - the jury, the cops, the judge, the newspapermen. They’re ready to acquit immediately, to hoist her on their shoulders and lead her on a victory parade down Sauchiehall Street – if the trial hadn’t taken place in Edinburgh. Thousands, literally, gathered in the street to see her. A reporter wrote; ‘The personal appearance of Miss Smith… is the point on which most attention seems to be fixed in the court…. Every day sees hundreds at the door of the court who would willingly expend guineas in obtaining a look at the young lady…. Others, who are privileged to sit in the court… may be seen surveying the slight figure in the dock with eyes that never weary of gazing upon it.’

   Jack House calls her ruthless as well as romantic. As soon as she met a more preferential suitor (earning £3000 a year to L’Angelier’s £52 - and that was after his wages were doubled), the tone of her letters cooled-down. She still professed her abiding love to L’Angelier on the 23^rd of January 1857. On January 28^th she accepted the other man’s proposal of marriage. Sixty years later, she could not even remember L’Angelier’s first name. She called him Louis rather than Emile...  a man for whose murder she had faced the prospect of the gallows.

‘Whatsisname?’

If anyone went to the trouble to read Madeleine Smith’s letters, it was obvious that she was the one seducing the very proper L’Angelier who was embarrassed and ashamed about having had sex with her before marriage. But she assured him he was already her husband and continually referred to him as such, even after she was engaged to the other man.

The motive for the murder was simple enough. She asked L’Angelier to return all her letters to him before her wedding. He said he regarded her as his wife and would show all the letters to her father to prove their intimacy, hoping the father would compel her to marry him. She pleaded with him not to do so and asked to meet with him again, secretly. A few days later, he wrote in his diary:

Thus. 19 Feb. Saw Mimi a few moments

was very ill during the night

    Madeleine had given him coffee and chocolate with a dash of arsenic which she'd bought that day - for the garden of their country home, as she claimed. As the days passed, she bought arsenic again and again – to kill rats.

    While she was on holiday with her family, L'Angelier began to feel much better.

    But by Monday 23^nd March, L’Angelier was dead, having met with Madeleine the night before and come home from her house unwell. Post-mortem examination of L’Angelier discovered enough arsenic to kill forty men. On March 31^st Madeleine Smith was arrested and charged with his murder.

    The defence’s main point was that L’Angelier was the sort of man who would commit suicide. Why? Because he was French. Probably his temperamental Gallic nature.

Madeleine Smith was found Not Guilty on the first charge of administering poison. Of the second charge, and of the charge of murder, she was found Not Proven. House calls this a peculiarly Scottish verdict which means… 'Go away, and don’t do it again!' Not Proven is a judgement exclusive to Scotland and one which has been contentious for over 100 years. It means the jury considers there to be suspicion but not enough evidence to convict. We think you're guilty but we can't prove it. Or, in Madeleine's case, we know you're guilty but we don't want to convict - the filthy Frenchman deserved it. Madeleine Smith’s defence lawyer sank into his seat and put his hands over his head – he seemed to have known that he was responsible for freeing a guilty woman. When he left the court, he did not shake hands with her.

During the course of the trial, Madeleine had received ‘several hundred letters, all from gentlemen, some offering me consolation, and some their hearths and homes.’ She heard nothing, though, from the man she was engaged to who was reported to be ill, to which she replied; ‘I don’t much care’. He never saw her again. The £4000 cost of her defence was paid for by a few leading Glasgow merchants. One old bachelor alone gave £1000.

David Lean turned the story into a 1950 film called Madeleine, starring Ann Todd in the title role.

'Hot chocolate, dear?'

Madeleine Smith lived on for seventy years. As the saying goes, her father was left a broken man by the trial. He died five years later. Her mother took to her bed and never left it. Her younger sisters never married. Madeleine didn't give a damn. She married an art teacher she met in Plymouth and became Lena Wardle. They moved to Bloomsbury where she became a noted hostess and met George Bernard Shaw and became friends with Karl Marx’s son-in-law. Some twenty years later her husband left for Italy for the sake of his health. He didn’t take his wife with him, recovered his health, and managed to live for another 20 years, never meeting her again. Apparently, he had seen a look in her eye he did not like. At the age of 80, she emigrated to America where she married again and became Lena Sheehy. Somerset Maugham wrote in his Writer’s Notebook that H.B. Irving had been a neighbour of hers in 1907. When Irving discovered her identity and confronted her with the knowledge, she is reported to have said of L’Angelier’s murder that, yes, she did it. ‘And what’s more… I’d do it again.’

She died in New York at the age of 92.

In later years, Blythswood Square became a notorious haunt for prostitutes. The buildings diagonally to the left of Madeleine Smith's old home at Blythwood Square was, until relatively recently, the RAC Club hotel with a gym and swimming pool in the basement. A friend of mine had a girlfriend who was lifeguard there in the early 90s. Some nights she finished at midnight and he would wait outside for her. He was young at the time, innocent and boyishly pretty, and when the expensive looking car with the business man in the driver's seat pulled in - after having already passed a couple of times - he thought the man must be lost and looking for directions. Needless to say, my friend had been shocked, shocked and outraged, to find the man had thought he was a rent boy and it was a pick-up. And what had happened? 'Ha!' he'd said, concluding his story. 'Easiest thirty-quid I ever made.'