Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  Slater arrived in Glasgow for what appeared to be the third time on October 29, 1908. A few days later he was joined by his mistress, Andrée Junio Antoine (known professionally as Madame Junio and familiarly as Antoine), and their maid, Catherine Schmalz. He spent the next few weeks settling in and, unwittingly, forging the first links in the chain of circumstantial evidence that would soon be drawn around him. Under the pseudonym Anderson, he rented a flat at 69 St. George’s Road, a north-south thoroughfare in central Glasgow that crosses West Princes Street; the building was little more than five minutes’ walk from Miss Gilchrist’s home. That turned out to be the first link in the chain.

  On November 10, Slater went to a hardware store and bought a set of inexpensive tools with which to fix up his new flat. Those tools—in particular the small hammer that came with the set—became the chain’s second link. In early December, needing to have his watch repaired, he mailed it to Dent’s, a London watchmaker. That would provide the third link.

  By then, Slater had already visited a Glasgow pawnbroker, where, in exchange for an initial loan of £20, he left a crescent-shaped brooch set with diamonds. That was the fourth, and most damning, link of all.

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  THAT AUTUMN, STRANGE THINGS had begun happening in and around Miss Gilchrist’s house. In September 1908, her Irish terrier fell ill and died: Helen Lambie thought it had accidentally eaten something poisonous; the old woman believed that something far more deliberate was at work. Then, during the first three weeks of December, as more than a dozen local residents would later say, a man was seen loitering in West Princes Street. He seemed to be watching Miss Gilchrist’s house.

  “The ‘watcher’ was seen at irregular times and in varying types of clothing,” Peter Hunt wrote. (As described by some witnesses, his attire included checked trousers, fawn spats, and brown boots.) “There was subsequently some confusion as to his appearance. One says he had a moustache; another says he did not; one says he did not speak like a foreigner; others say he looked like a foreigner.”

  In mid-December, about a week before Miss Gilchrist’s murder, an agitated Helen Lambie paid a surprise visit to her ex-employer, Agnes Guthrie. As Guthrie later recalled, Lambie had much to say about recent goings-on in the Gilchrist home. “I was informed by her that she had some remarkable experiences at the house of Miss Gilchrist,” Guthrie said. “She gave me a very long story about her peculiarities. Miss Gilchrist had a lot of jewellery and had taken unusual ways to secrete it in the house, under carpets, etc., and had told her that she felt sure there was a man coming to murder her, and that the dog had been poisoned.”

  The truly surprising thing, which Lambie implied in a later conversation with Guthrie—and confirmed outright to Miss Gilchrist’s niece Margaret Birrell immediately after the murder—was this: It was no random stranger whom Miss Gilchrist feared but instead one or more people she knew very well.

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  ON THE AFTERNOON OF MONDAY, December 21, 1908, Miss Gilchrist left her flat to pay bills, returning at about four-thirty for tea. That night—a rainy evening—at five minutes to seven, one of the Adams sisters, Rowena Adams Liddell, was walking back to Queen’s Terrace with her mother. As they approached their front door, she saw the “watcher” gazing up at the building. As she later testified for the prosecution at Slater’s trial:

  Before I reached the door of the house I saw a dark form leaning against the railing, just under my mother’s dining-room window….I gave a good stare—almost a rude stare—and I took in the face entirely, except that I did not see his eyes. He had a long nose, with a most peculiar dip from here [pointing to the bridge of the nose]. You could not see that dip amongst thousands. He had a very clear complexion; not a sallow nor a white pallor, but something of an ivory colour. He was very dark, clean-shaven, and very broad in this part of the head [points to the cheekbone or temple]. He had a low-down collar. His cap was an ordinary cap, I think, of a brownish tweed. He was very respectable….After I passed him I looked over my shoulder, and he glided from the railing and disappeared.

  At a minute or two before seven, Helen Lambie left her mistress’s house to buy Miss Gilchrist’s evening paper. She planned, once she returned with it, to go out again to do the household shopping. From Miss Gilchrist, who sat by the dining room fire reading a magazine, Lambie obtained a penny for the newspaper and a half sovereign for the other purchases.*4 Taking the penny but leaving the half sovereign on the dining room table, Lambie left the flat.

  “Lambie took the keys with her, shut the flat door, closed the hall door downstairs, and was gone about ten minutes upon her errand,” Conan Doyle wrote. “It is the events of those ten minutes which form the tragedy and the mystery which were so soon to engage the attention of the public.”

  Directly below Miss Gilchrist’s flat, Arthur Montague Adams, a forty-year-old flutist and musical instrument dealer, sat wrapping a Christmas present. At seven o’clock, Adams, his sister Rowena, and another sister, Laura, heard a loud thud from above. Three sharp knocks followed.

  To reach Miss Gilchrist’s flat, Adams had to exit his own front door at 14 Queen’s Terrace and ring the bell of the close door at No. 15. Stepping outside, he was surprised to see the close door standing open. He climbed the stairs to Miss Gilchrist’s landing and pulled the bell rope at her front door. “I rang hard—rude rings,” Adams later testified. There was no answer. Listening for any sound from within, Adams heard something like splintering wood; he assumed, he said, that it was Lambie “breaking sticks in the kitchen” for kindling. Hearing nothing more, he returned to his flat and told his sisters that everything seemed to be all right.

  The sisters, meanwhile, had been hearing noises so violent that they thought their ceiling “like to crack.” More alarmed than ever, they sent Adams back upstairs. On the landing, he pulled the bell again. He had his hand on the bell rope for another ring when, at about 7:10, he saw Lambie coming up the stairs with the paper. He was surprised to see her, as he had imagined she was in Miss Gilchrist’s kitchen the whole time.

  As she climbed the stairs, Lambie later said, she noticed a footprint, damp with rainwater, on each of two bottom steps; she was certain the prints had not been there when she went out. Reaching the landing, she was equally surprised to see Adams: “He was never a visitor at the house,” she said, “and I was astonished to find him there.”

  As Lambie unlocked the door of Miss Gilchrist’s flat, Adams told her about the fearsome noises. She seemed unconcerned. “Oh, it would be the pulleys,” she said, implying that the clotheslines, which hung suspended in the kitchen by a set of pulleys, had fallen down. Adams told her he would stay there, just in case, and remained on the doormat.

  After Lambie opened the door, Adams later recalled, she walked straight into Miss Gilchrist’s entrance hall. (Lambie’s memory differed: in her recollection, she remained on the doormat.) From wherever she stood, Lambie saw a well-dressed man come toward her from the direction of Miss Gilchrist’s spare bedroom; the gaslight in that room, which had been off when she left the house, was now lit. The man left the flat, walked blithely past Lambie and Adams, and took to the stairs. As both she and Adams later told the police, his clothing bore no visible traces of blood.

  “I did not suspect anything wrong for a minute,” Adams later testified. “I saw the man walk quite coolly till he got up to me, and then he went down quickly, like greased lightning, and that aroused my suspicions.” Lambie, meanwhile, went straight to the kitchen, checked the pulleys, and called out to Adams that they were fine. She then went into the spare bedroom.

  “Where is your mistress?” Adams called out to her. Lambie stepped into the dining room. “Oh, come here!” she cried.

  “The spectacle in question was the poor old lady lying upon the floor close by the chair in which the servant had last seen her,” Conan Doyle wrote
. “Her feet were towards the door, her head towards the fireplace. She lay upon a hearth-rug, but a skin rug had been thrown across her head. Her injuries were frightful, nearly every bone of her face and skull being smashed. In spite of her dreadful wounds she lingered for a few minutes, but died without showing any signs of consciousness.” Miss Gilchrist had been beaten so savagely that autopsy photographs depict a face that looks as though it had never been human.

  Adams rushed downstairs and out the close door. He saw a few people at the end of West Princes Street and ran toward them but could not spot the intruder. He was soon joined in the street by Lambie and his sisters. Adams next ran for a policeman and a doctor; Lambie ran a few streets to the west, to the home of Miss Gilchrist’s niece Margaret Birrell. What Lambie told her that night—along with both women’s later disavowal of the exchange—would haunt the case long afterward.

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  LAMBIE RETURNED TO MISS GILCHRIST’S flat later that evening. By then Adams had brought a doctor (coincidentally also named Adams) and a police constable. After examining Miss Gilchrist’s body, Dr. John Adams surveyed the dining room, which was awash in blood. Looking for a weapon, he homed in on a heavy dining room chair whose back left leg dripped with blood. The chair’s spindle-shaped legs, he observed, appeared to correspond to a set of odd, spindle-shaped wounds on Miss Gilchrist’s body. “Dr. Adams surmised that that assault was committed by a number of heavy blows with the chair,” Hunt wrote. “If the murderer was standing up, and on the body of his victim, he would be able to use great, but uncontrolled force. This would account both for the wide area of the wounds and the apparent lack of blood on the murderer himself, for he would be protected to some extent by the seat of the chair, interposed between himself and the body.”

  Throughout the evening, a string of Glasgow police detectives joined the scene. Noteworthy among them for their roles in advancing the case against Slater were Detective Inspector John Pyper, who arrived at 7:55, and a senior official, John Ord, superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Glasgow police, who arrived later that night.

  Pyper took in the crime scene. Miss Gilchrist’s reading glasses and her magazine lay on the dining room table. The half sovereign was on the rug beside her hand. No blood was found outside the dining room. There was no sign of a struggle in the entrance hall, nor had the flat door been forced. In the spare bedroom, a wooden workbox, of the kind Victorian women used to store sewing supplies, had been wrenched open. Its contents—papers—lay scattered on the floor. The killer, who had evidently lighted the gas in that room, had left his matches behind. The matchbox (bearing the ironically apt trade name Runaway) was not the brand used in the house. On a dressing table in the spare room was a dish that had held several pieces of jewelry, among the few Miss Gilchrist left in plain sight. While most of them, including a watch and some rings, remained untouched, Lambie told Pyper that a crescent-shaped diamond brooch, valued at £50, was missing.*5

  Pyper questioned Adams and Lambie about the man they saw leaving the flat. Adams, who was nearsighted and hadn’t been wearing his glasses, could describe him only generally as “well featured and clean-shaven,” with “dark trousers and a light overcoat.” Lambie said that she had not seen the intruder’s face and would not be able to identify him. She described him as having worn a three-quarter-length gray overcoat and a round cloth hat.

  At 9:40 that night, the Glasgow police department issued its first internal bulletin about the crime:

  An old lady was murdered in her house at 15 Queen’s Terrace between 7 and 7-10 p.m. to-day by a man from 25 to 30, 5 feet 7 or 8, think clean shaven. Wore a long grey overcoat and dark cap.

  Robbery appears to have been the object of the murderer, as a number of boxes in a bedroom were opened and left lying on the floor: large sized crescent shaped gold brooch set with diamonds, large diamonds in centre, graduating towards the points, is missing and may be in possession of the murderer. The diamonds are set in silver. No trace of the murderer has been got. Constables will please warn Booking-Clerks at railway stations, as the murderer will have bloodstains on his clothing. Also warn Pawns on opening regarding brooch and keep a sharp lookout.

  The next two days brought no leads. During this time, Oscar Slater, apparently oblivious of the crime, was preparing to leave town. In 1908, Glasgow, a city dependent on manufacturing and trade, was in the midst of a severe depression. Even for gamblers, times were hard. That autumn, after receiving a letter from an old American crony inviting him to San Francisco, Slater made arrangements to move there, via Liverpool and New York.

  In the days before he sailed, Slater wrapped up his Glasgow affairs. He found a tenant to take over his flat on St. George’s Road. He visited his barber to collect his shaving things—in those less hygienic times, many men kept their own razor at their barber’s—and told the barber of his travel plans. He mailed a five-pound note to his parents in Germany as a holiday gift. To raise cash for his journey, he tried to liquidate some of his belongings, including the pawn ticket for his diamond crescent brooch.

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  ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, two things happened that would affect the case for years. The first was the entrance into the investigation of a Glasgow police detective named John Thomson Trench. A highly respected officer, Trench would work on the Gilchrist case only tangentially. But as a result of his later condemnation of the investigation and trial, he would emerge, in Conan Doyle’s words, “not merely as an honest man, but…as a hero.”

  The second event of December 23 would have repercussions lasting nearly two decades. That day, a local woman, Barbara Barrowman, told the police that her fourteen-year-old daughter, Mary, had seen a man fleeing Miss Gilchrist’s building on the night of the murder.

  Mary Barrowman was an errand girl for a bootmaker in Great Western Road, a major thoroughfare one block north of West Princes Street. Encouraged by her mother to come forward, she told detectives that shortly after 7:00 p.m. on December 21, as she was walking along West Princes Street on a job for her employer, she saw a man run out of the close door of Miss Gilchrist’s building:

  He looked towards St. George’s Road and immediately turned westwards. I wondered what was wrong, and turned round and watched him, following a few yards, and saw that he turned into West Cumberland Street, running all the time.

  I went and delivered my message and returned to the shop by Woodlands Road, and after leaving our shop at 8 p.m. I went to my brother’s shop at 480 St. Vincent Street, and while going there I again passed along West Princes Street and saw a crowd opposite No. 49 and learned of the murder, and I then thought of the man I had seen running out of the close there. He was a man about 28 or 30 years of age, tall and slim build, no hair on face, long features, nose slightly turned to the right, dressed in a fawn overcoat-like waterproof, dark trousers, brown boots, and tweed cloth hat of respectable appearance.*6

  I did not see any other person near the close or about, but I think I could recognise the man again, although I could not say that I ever saw him before.

  Barrowman’s description differed markedly from the one in the police bulletin. Where Lambie had described a man with a gray overcoat and round cloth hat, Barrowman spoke of a fawn-colored waterproof coat and a tweed hat of the kind, she later elaborated, known as a Donegal cap. As a result, the police now assumed that two men were involved. On Christmas Day, 1908, they issued a second internal bulletin:

  *1 Equivalent to about £1.3 million, or $2 million, in today’s money.

  *2 More than £250,000, or nearly $400,000, today.

  *3 Archival records sometimes give Pryor’s first name as Marie or May.

  *4 A half sovereign equaled half a pound. Its value in 1908 is equivalent to about £55, or $70, today.

  *5 About £4,000, or $6,000, today.

  *6 Slater was th
en thirty-six, stocky, of medium height, with a short mustache and a convex, or Roman, nose.

  Glasgow City Police

  MURDER

  About 7 p.m. on Monday, 21st December current, an old lady named Marion Gilchrist was brutally murdered in a house at 15 Queen’s Terrace, West Princes Street, where she lived, the only other occupant being a servant woman, who, about the hour mentioned, left the house to purchase an evening paper, and on her return in less than fifteen minutes afterwards found that her mistress had been brutally murdered in the room in which she had left her.

  On her return with the paper the servant met the man first described leaving the house, and about the same time another man, second described, was seen descending the steps leading to the house, and running away.

  Descriptions.

  (First) A man from twenty-five to thirty years of age, 5 feet 7 or 8 inches in height, thought to be clean shaven; wore a long grey overcoat and dark cap.

  (Second) A man from twenty-eight to thirty years of age, tall and thin, clean shaven, nose slightly turned to one side (thought to be the right side); wore a fawn-coloured overcoat (believed to be a waterproof), dark trousers, tweed cloth hat of the latest make, and believed to be dark in colour, and brown boots….