by Robin Odell
Surprisingly, in view of the horrific nature of Ruxton’s crimes, there were strong petitions in favour of granting a reprieve. Six thousand of Lancaster’s citizens signed petitions asking the Home Secretary to intervene. He declined and Ruxton was hanged on 12 May 1936 at Strangeways Prison. In a unique aftermath, on the Sunday following his execution, Ruxton’s signed confession was published in the News of the World. This was dated 14 October 1935, forty-eight hours after he had been arrested. He sealed the confession in an envelope and entrusted it to one of the newspaper’s reporters with instructions that it must not be opened except on his death. He admitted killing his wife in a fit of jealous anger and then killed Mary Rogerson who had witnessed his crime.
The significant part which John Glaister had played in the Ruxton case won him many plaudits and he found himself a sought-after medico-legal property. Like his Edinburgh colleague, Sir Sydney Smith, he was offered the directorship of Lord Trenchard’s Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratory and, like Smith, he turned it down. He disliked the thought of working in London and the prospects for research were not as reassuring as he would have liked. An important follow-up to the Ruxton trial was the publication, with Professor Brash, in 1937, of a book on the Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case. This was a complete record of the medical and scientific aspects of the investigation which won the Swiney Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Arts. Their use of photo-imposition techniques was an example of pioneering work which found its way into all the forensic medicine textbooks and became a standard procedure in establishing the identity of human remains. In 1942, Keith Simpson made use of the method in his celebrated piece of medical detection in the Dobkin case.
One of his father’s achievements which ‘Young John’ continued was the publication of Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology. This textbook was first published in 1902 and appeared in five editions up to 1931 edited by Glaister senior. His son took over the work and expanded it to include new branches of investigation. Not surprisingly, in view of Glaister’s particular interests and achievements, the text was particularly authoritative on identification and the examination of bloodstains. Later editions paid special attention to poisons and poisoning. During his lifetime, he saw the textbook through a further eight editions and it was to be frequently cited as a source of authority in the courts. This was entirely proper, for he had few, if any, contemporaries as well qualified in medicine, science and the law – the foundation stones of modern medical jurisprudence.
Like his confrére, Sydney Smith, at Edinburgh, Glaister spent the years of the Second World War at the home front. Apart from the violence which human beings continued to mete out to one another on the domestic front, there were the ravages of enemy action to be overcome. Bomb damage at the University of Glasgow meant that Glaister was obliged to work from home until it too was damaged during a night-time air raid. He and his wife stayed with friends and he combined his forensic work with fire-watching duties.
The influx of military personnel from a variety of Allied countries and numerous cultural backgrounds, most of them equipped with firearms, meant that it was, as Glaister put it later, ‘a time of shooting’. Deaths of soldiers from gunshot wounds had to be investigated to determine whether they resulted from accident, murder or suicide. Many incidents stemmed from drunkenness and the casual handling of firearms. When the USA began sending troops to Britain in preparation for the invasion of Europe, Glaister was asked to extend his practice by taking on forensic cases for the US military. The cultural and social impact created by the appearance of young Americans in British communities has been well documented. What it meant for the forensic expert was to pick up the pieces when the two cultures collided and violence erupted.
Brawls sometimes ended fatally when men with time on their hands before the D-Day invasion had differences of opinion, usually over a girlfriend. Once the circumstances were established, justice was swift and Glaister recalled giving evidence at the court-martial of an American serviceman charged with killing a Polish seaman. There was a scuffle in a Glasgow street when a couple of sailors tried to entice two girls away from their American consorts. In the altercation which followed, one of the GIs was stabbed, causing a slight abdominal wound. The greater injury was to his pride for he acquired a knife and went on a hunt for his assailant. He confronted the Polish seaman in Argyle Street and fatally stabbed him in front of several witnesses.
John Glaister gave evidence at the soldier’s court-martial and there was no doubt that he had committed a premeditated killing although, admittedly, he had been provoked. The court, held at the US Army’s temporary HQ in a large house in Glasgow’s West End, found the man guilty of unlawful killing and he was sentenced to death, a verdict later commuted to life imprisonment. He played no further part in the war effort and was sent back to America to fulfil his prison sentence. A war-time shortage of alcohol in its more acceptable forms proved a challenge to Glaswegians and a steady stream of deaths resulted from improvisation. Compass fluid and aircraft fabric dope were among the substitutes, along with methyl alcohol which was used as an industrial solvent. These concoctions caused respiratory and cardiac failure and added to the pathologists’ workload.
As the war in Europe drew to a close, John Glaister had the dubious privilege of being in court for the trial of the only person in Scottish criminal history to be tried twice for murder. Patrick Carraher was a mean man for whom violence was second nature. In August 1938, he had been involved in an argument with three young men and a girl in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. With the argument in full swing, a by-passer decided to intervene, with the laudable intention of pacifying the participants. Carraher drew a knife and slashed the would-be peacemaker across the neck, severing the jugular vein and causing him to bleed to death.
Glaister’s post-mortem revealed a deep slash wound which also penetrated the tissues to a depth of two inches. It was the hallmark of a man whose subsequent history showed a great affinity with the knife. On this occasion, owing to a skilful defence, the charge against Carraher was reduced to one of culpable homicide, the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter, and he was given a prison sentence of three years. When he was released in 1941, he was judged unfit to serve his country on account of physical weakness, but he was soon in action with his knife. By 1943, he was serving a further prison sentence for wounding a man with a razor.
In November 1945, Carraher was told of a brawl taking place at a public house in Townhead. By the time he reached the scene, the fight was over and the protagonists had dispersed, although John Gordon, a spectator at the earlier action, lingered nearby. That was his undoing for he was set upon by Carraher who stabbed him in the neck. Gordon, a Seaforth Highlander who had survived the German prisoner-of-war camps, died within minutes of being carried into the Royal Infirmary. Once again, Carraher was tried for murder but, on this occasion, John Glaister was a spectator rather than a participant in court.
As at the first trial, Carraher’s counsel sought to prove reduced culpability, pleading diminished responsibility, a defence that in 1946 was only available in Scotland. The grounds were that he was a psychopathic personality whose emotional instability had been aggravated by alcohol and persecution mania. The plea won no converts among the jury who brought in a guilty verdict. In a peculiarly Scottish case, the judge, Lord Russell, pronounced sentence of death on the ‘panel’, as the accused was called, using an archaic form of words which Glaister noted in his autobiography:
I decern and adjudge you, Patrick Carraher, panel, to be carried from the Bar to the prison of Barlinnie, Glasgow, wherein to be detained till the twenty-third day of March current, and upon that day, between the hours of eight and ten o’clock forenoon within the walls of the said prison, by the hands of the common executioner, to be hanged by the neck upon a gibbet until you be dead, and your body thereafter to be buried within the walls of the said prison, and ordain your whole movable goods and gear to be escheat and inbrought to His Ma
jesty’s use; which is pronounced for Doom.
John Glaister had devoted a great deal of his professional career to the examination of the minutiae of forensic evidence. A murder committed on a Perthshire Farm in 1947 provided clues which were particularly appropriate to his talents – a few hairs adhering to a discarded safety razor. Catherine McIntyre, the wife of a sheep manager, was found dead in a bedroom of the family home by her son when he returned from work. The room was locked and Archie McIntyre broke down the door with an axe when he realised that something was wrong. His mother had been bound and gagged and suffered severe injuries to her head. A search of the house revealed that money had been stolen and a man’s suit was missing from the wardrobe.
Asked by the police to recall any unusual occurrences, Archie McIntyre mentioned that when he left the house in the morning he had noticed a movement in the deep bracken close to the house. He did not hold this to be particularly significant at the time, assuming that the movement was probably caused by an animal. When he pointed out the spot to the police, investigators found a flattened area among the four foot-high bracken which could easily have provided cover for a man. A thorough search of the vicinity quickly turned up a safety razor blade and a piece of bloodstained handkerchief. Later on, a sawn-off, double-barrelled shotgun with bloodstains on its butt was also found in the undergrowth. Close to the gun were two cartridges, a pair of bloodstained overalls and a railway ticket.
This latter discovery provided the first tangible lead. Issued on 25 September 1947, the day before the murder, for a journey from Perth to Aberfeldy, the ticket was of a type issued only to soldiers in uniform. On the shores of Loch Tay and within sight of the farm at which the murder had been committed, was a resettlement centre for Polish troops who had decided to make their future in Britain after the war. At the time, Taymouth Castle was home to 800 Poles and it was there that police began their enquiries.
The breakthrough came when a gardener at Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire heard a radio report about the killing near Loch Tay in which a description was given of the shotgun found near the scene. He recognised the weapon described as similar to a shotgun he had loaned to a local farm worker. It transpired that the farm worker had reported the gun missing and local enquiries showed that a temporary worker had left at about the same time, stating that he intended looking for a new job in Perthshire. This man was Polish, named as Stanislaw Myszka, who later returned to Old Meldrum wearing a new suit and with money to spend. The farm worker and his wife who had befriended the Pole identified the bloodstained handkerchief found near the McIntyre farm as one they had given to him.
Myszka was traced to a disused RAF camp thee miles west of Peterhead where he had been living rough in one of the huts. He made a run for it when he saw two police officers approaching his lair, but they proved fleet of foot and, after a chase across the fields, they captured him. Among his possessions at the RAF camp were a jacket and waistcoat stolen from the McIntyre home and, when he was searched at the police station, Catherine McIntyre’s wedding ring was found in one of his shoes.
After he and a colleague from Glasgow University had carried out a post-mortem examination of Mrs McIntyre’s body, Glaister turned his attention to the items found near the scene of the crime. The police produced a safety razor blade with what they thought might be beard hairs stuck to it; they supposed it had been used by someone needing a dry shave. ‘… anything to do with hairs or fibres has always particularly interested me,’ wrote Glaister later. ‘I’d like to see this blade,’ he told the police. The blade was produced and his keen eye took in the few short stubble hairs attached to it. He carefully removed these and placed them in a specimen tube, returning the razor blade to the police for fingerprint examination. Knowing that Myszka was in prison, he asked if it would be possible to obtain some of the prisoner’s beard hairs when he shaved in the morning.
In due course, a Perthshire Constabulary vehicle arrived at Glaister’s laboratory and a small container was delivered to the professor. In it were a few tiny fragments of hair which soon found their way onto glass microscope slides and thence were subjected to close scrutiny by the world’s foremost expert on hair evidence. After comparing the known sample of Myszka’s hair with the hairs found on the razor blade, he was satisfied that they matched sufficiently to have come from the same source. He then prepared his findings in readiness to attend as an expert witness for the Crown at Myszka’s trial. Glaister knew that he would be severely tested by the defence because, for all its undoubted forensic value, hair evidence lacked the certainty associated with fingerprints.
As he expected, F.C. Wall KC, defence counsel for Myszka, sought to undermine the worth of Glaister’s evidence. He suggested that while the hair specimens were similar, they were, ‘not too similar to exclude the possibility of it being somebody else’s hair altogether?’ John Glaister’s answer to the question and to the quite proper further probing by the judge, Lord Sorn, was a model of the weight that an expert should put on his professional judgements. He answered, ‘We can never say that hair came from the individual unless we take it from the individual,’ and acknowledged that, ‘As far as we can go is that the characters are so common as to be consistent with a common source.’
The judge made the obvious comparison with fingerprints, pointing out that when similar characteristics are obtained, it is convincing because we know that no two fingerprints are the same. ‘Without enlarging greatly,’ he asked, ‘is there anything of the same nature with regard to hairs?’ Glaister replied that comparing fingerprints involved more direct diagrammatic comparison than was possible for hair. Examination of hair was a more complex procedure involving cellular characteristics, both the general and detailed structure and the coloration. ‘If we were to take at random a bunch of hair from any one head in this court,’ he explained, ‘and put them under a microscope we would notice variations in the head hair of the same subject.’ He went on to say that by careful examination, it would be possible to find dominant features common throughout such samples, ‘it is on that dominating character we do our matching,’ he said.
Lord Sorn asked the witness if ‘… you would not go so far as to say that you might not find two identical hairs microscopically from different heads?’ Glaister replied, ‘I can only say that by matching one sample with another that way, finding the detailed and gross microscopical characters to be identical, it permits us to say they are consistent with a common source. Beyond that I cannot go.’ His balanced appraisal of this aspect of the evidence allowed the jury of eleven men and four women to decide what confidence they could place on it.
Despite Mr Wall’s special defence that Myszka was not guilty because he was insane and not responsible for his actions at the time of the crime, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. It took them only twenty minutes to reach a verdict and, as Robert Jackson put it in his book The Crime Doctors, the additional weight provided by the forensic medical evidence helped the jury to find Myszka guilty. The deserter from the Polish Army in exile was sentenced to death and Albert Pierrepoint carried out his hangman’s duty in February 1948.
The satisfaction in this case for John Glaister was not so much in bringing a murderer to justice but in demonstrating the important role of trace evidence in the investigation of crime. He had spent the best part of his career developing methods which would enable forensic scientists to confirm links between criminals and victims. He called these links the theory of interchange and wrote, ‘I can’t say how the term first came to be used,’ but acknowledged the theory, ‘has always been one in which I have taken a particular interest.’
The principle of interchange is a simple one; it is that no one involved in a crime departs from the scene without leaving some trace of his presence behind or carrying away some trace which links him irrevocably to the scene. It is the scientific principle underlying Sherlock Holmes’s remarkable powers of observation when he was consulted by John Openshaw in 1887 in the case of The Five Orange
Pips.
‘You have come up from the south-west, I see,’ observed Holmes.
‘Yes, from Horsham,’ answered his visitor.
‘That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toecaps is quite distinctive,’ explained the great detective.
The pioneering French criminologist, Edmond Locard, was one of the first investigators to employ scientific methods in this new field. He stated the principle that ‘every contact leaves a trace’ and demonstrated it in a criminal case in 1912. The trace evidence in question was debris taken from beneath the fingernails of a murder suspect. When Locard examined this under the microscope he found epithelial cells coated with a pink dust which proved to be face powder identical to the cosmetics used by the murder victim. This material had been forced under the murderer’s fingernails when he strangled the girl.
‘The scientist’s task,’ said John Glaister, ‘is to examine these links which, in crime, can establish a suspect’s presence at the scene and occasionally even indicate his actions in relation to the incident’. He illustrated the principle from a case in his own files involving two Glasgow robbers and a bungled attempt to blow a safe. They broke into a carpet warehouse and prepared the safe in the manager’s office with explosives and detonator, trailing their wire to a battery at a safe distance. In order to muffle the explosion, they placed some rugs over the safe and, retreating to their refuge, blew the charge. The result was an explosion which, in consequence of being poorly calculated, had not only destroyed the lock but also damaged the safe door so that it could not be opened. In addition, the explosion had caused the rugs to disintegrate, plastering the room with a shower of coloured fibres.
The would-be safe breakers escaped empty-handed but not unmarked. When John Glaister was called in, his eyes no doubt lit up when a detective asked him, ‘We wondered whether these fibres might help.’ By this time, the police had two suspects in custody and Glaister immediately asked to see their clothes. One set of clothing was clean, indicating that its owner had changed after the attempted robbery, but the other set was a kaleidoscope of trace evidence. There were fibres from the selection of coloured rugs blown to smithereens in the warehouse and traces of powder similar to the explosive used in the incident. As a clinching piece of linking evidence, it was found that a footprint at the warehouse matched the worn-down shoe of one of the men’s footwear. His companion had the forethought to change his clothes but not his shoes. Adhering to the heel of the right shoe was a piece of chewing gum in which was embedded a random sample of the myriad of fibres scattered about the warehouse by the explosion. Thus there was ample proof to link both men to the scene of the crime and ample evidence in the hands of John Glaister to convince the court of their guilt. As he wrote later, ‘I doubt if it would have consoled them to know that … they inadvertently furnished university classes with an excellent demonstration of interchange.’
