by Margalit Fox
Besides Slater, conspicuously absent from the box were several people whose testimony could have helped him. They included Dr. John Adams, the first medical man at the crime scene, who was not on the witness list for either side. As a result, the jury never heard his conclusion that Miss Gilchrist had been bludgeoned to death by the chair. Writing to Conan Doyle in 1927, William Park said that Slater’s most recent legal team had “never heard of a case where the Doctor first on the scene was rejected by the Crown.”
Also not on anyone’s list was a Glasgow man named Duncan MacBrayne. A greengrocer in Slater’s neighborhood, he knew Slater well by sight. In February 1909, MacBrayne told the police that at eight-fifteen on the night of the murder he had seen Slater calmly standing on his own doorstep. At that hour, as the Crown’s case had it, Slater—after killing Miss Gilchrist, weaving frenziedly through the streets, plunging into the subway, riding to an outlying part of town, and hiding there for a time—was working his way stealthily home on foot, arriving there at about nine-thirty. The defense was never informed of MacBrayne’s statement.
But the most striking omission of all was the absence of testimony from Miss Gilchrist’s niece Margaret Birrell. For in an interview with the police shortly after her aunt’s death—material that was never shared with the defense—she said that on the night of the murder Helen Lambie had come running to her house to say that she had seen the killer and knew exactly who he was.
*1 We know the physical arrangement of the room because cameras were allowed in British courts until the 1920s.
*2 Unlike in England, where “subway” refers to an underground pedestrian passage and “underground” to a subterranean metro line, the word “subway” in Scotland, as in the United States, denotes the metro. Glasgow’s subway system, the world’s third-oldest after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro, opened in 1896.
*3 At this point, as the historian Ben Braber has pointed out, the judge, Lord Guthrie, should have instructed the jury to disregard evidence about Slater’s character, as it was irrelevant to the crime with which he had been charged. Not only did Lord Guthrie fail to do so, but in his own subsequent charge to the jury, he drove the point about Slater’s alleged pimping home even further.
*4 When Holmes, in the 1891 tale “A Scandal in Bohemia,” describes the actress Irene Adler—the only woman who ever truly bewitched him—as “this young person,” Conan Doyle could be assured that his readers knew precisely what those words telegraphed.
Chapter 10
“UNTIL HE BE DEAD”
On day four, May 6, 1909, Slater’s lawyer, Alexander McClure, called the last defense witnesses. There remained only the closing statements from both sides, followed by the judge’s charge to the jury. As things played out, any one of these alone would have been enough to sink Slater.
Ure, the Lord Advocate, spoke first, “crushing the while his handkerchief in his clenched right hand, as though it were a symbol of the prisoner’s fate,” the Scottish criminologist William Roughead wrote. Speaking for nearly two hours, without notes, Ure addressed the jury with an amalgam of whichever facts best suited the drama, a cocktail of preposterous logic (anyone immoral enough to be a pimp, he implied, was immoral enough to be a murderer), plus more than a few outright untruths:
Up to yesterday afternoon I should have thought that there was one serious difficulty which confronted you—the difficulty of conceiving that there was in existence a human being capable of doing such a dastardly deed. Gentlemen, that difficulty, I think, was removed yesterday afternoon [during Cameron’s testimony] when we heard from the lips of one who seemingly knew the prisoner better than any one else…that he had followed a life which descends to the very lowest depths of human degradation, for, by the universal judgment of mankind, the man who lives upon the proceeds of prostitution has sunk to the lowest depths, and all moral sense in him has been destroyed and has ceased to exist. That difficulty removed, I say without hesitation that the man in the dock is capable of having committed this dastardly outrage.
The motive for Miss Gilchrist’s murder, Ure continued, in “a house situated in a respectable and very quiet…street,” was robbery. (The assertion glossed over the fact that apart from the brooch, nothing was taken.) “We shall see,” he told the jury, “how it was that the prisoner came to know that she was possessed of these jewels.” Ure never made good on that promise.
“I come now,” Ure continued, “to his flight from justice”:
I say, deliberately, “His flight from justice,” because I am going to demonstrate that there was one reason, and one reason only, for his leaving Glasgow at that time, and that was to escape the hands of justice….It is said that a fortnight, or three weeks, or a month before he spoke of going to America. I dare say he did; I am certain he did. There is no doubt whatever he had made up his mind, as soon as the deed was accomplished, that he would not stay in this country one moment longer than was absolutely necessary….I say that his flight was precipitated, and the moment fixed by the publication of his description in the newspapers at two o’clock on the afternoon of 25th December.*1
In conclusion, Ure told the jury:
Gentlemen, I have done….I do not for a moment deny that you have to-day to discharge the most serious and the most responsible duty which you will probably have to discharge during the whole course of your natural lives. On your verdict undoubtedly depends a man’s life….He may be, and probably is, the worst of men; but he is entitled to as fair a trial as if he was the best of men. He may be one of the most degraded of mortals, he may be a cheat, he may be a robber, a burglar, or the worst of characters, but that does not infer that he committed murder….Gentlemen, he is entitled to justice, to no less than justice, but to no more than justice. My submission to you is that his guilt has been brought fairly home to him, that no shadow of doubts exists, that there is no reasonable doubt that he was the perpetrator of this foul murder.
After Ure’s speech came the defense summation. Addressing the jury, McClure invoked the breakdown of the brooch clue, the conflicting descriptions of the “watcher,” Lambie’s mercurial evidence, and the allegations that Slater was a pimp. (“That, however,” he said delicately, “is a subject we are not to go into.”)
“Can you lay your hands on your hearts now and say that you are convinced that this is the man who committed that murder?” he asked the jurors. “If you are, then the responsibility is yours, and not mine.”
McClure’s address was commendable in many ways. But he failed to do two critical things: point out the inaccuracies in Ure’s speech and dispel the innuendo with which Slater had been tarred. “Clarence Darrow could have done it standing on his head,” Hunt wrote. “McClure was not quite the man for such a test.”
The judge’s charge to the jury, which came next, reached new heights of manipulative excess. Lord Guthrie was by all accounts a fair-minded jurist, but he inevitably carried the prejudices of his time, place, and class. He was from a distinguished, righteous background. His father, the Rev. Thomas Guthrie, had been a leader of the Free Church of Scotland; in the 1840s the elder Mr. Guthrie had helped found a Ragged School, devoted to educating slum children, in Edinburgh.
Lord Guthrie himself, a temperance crusader, became president of the Boys’ Brigade in 1909; the organization had been founded in Victorian Glasgow to save street children from lives of crime. It is likely that he saw Slater as embodying the very evils of which he and his father had sought to rid Scotland’s cities. Addressing the jury at the close of the trial, he said:*2
You have heard a good deal about [a] class of evidence—the evidence, first, of character….About his character…there is no doubt at all. He has maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women, and he has lived in a way that many blackguards would scorn to live….
I use the name “Oscar Slater.” We do not know who that man is. His name is no
t Slater….He is a mystery….We do not know where he was born, where he was brought up, what he was brought up to, whether he was trained to anything.*3 The man remains a mystery as much as he was when this trial began….A man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favour which is…a reality in the case of the ordinary man….
Mr. McClure spoke of his witnesses being a credible body of witnesses. You have seen them. You know their occupation, you know how Antoine’s fate is bound up with the prisoner’s in the past and will be in the future, you know what kind of person the servant is, and in what employment she has been, and it is for you to say whether it is a credible body of evidence or not….
Gentlemen, the case is entirely in your hands….If you think there is no reasonable doubt about it, then you will do your duty and convict him; if you think there is, then you will acquit him.
* * *
—
THE JURY RETIRED AT 4:55 p.m. Scottish criminal cases may be decided by majority verdict, and jurors have three verdicts from which to choose: “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven,” a verdict that in the sardonic parlance of Scottish lawyers is said to mean “not guilty, and don’t do it again.” The three-verdict system, the permissibility of a majority vote, and the odd number of jurors—fifteen—were mechanisms instituted centuries ago to preempt hung juries.
At 6:05, the jury reentered the courtroom. It returned a verdict of nine guilty votes, one not guilty, and five not proven—enough to condemn Slater.*4 After the verdict was read aloud, there came an outburst that William Roughead, who was present, described as the most painful utterance he had ever heard:
“My lord,” Slater cried, “may I say one word? Will you allow me to speak?”
“Sit down just now,” Lord Guthrie admonished him.
“My lord,” Slater persisted, “my father and mother are poor old people. I came on my own account to this country. I came over to defend my right. I know nothing about the affair. You are convicting an innocent man.”
Addressing McClure, the judge said: “I think you ought to advise the prisoner to reserve anything he has got to say for the Crown authorities. If he insists on it, I shall not prevent him now—will you see what he says?”
“My lord,” Slater continued, “what shall I say? I came over from America, knowing nothing of the affair, to Scotland to get a fair judgment. I know nothing about the affair, absolutely nothing. I never heard the name. I know nothing about the affair. I do not know how I could be connected with the affair. I know nothing about it. I came from America on my own account. I can say no more.”
Slater fell silent, and Lord Guthrie donned the traditional black cap to pronounce sentence: “The said Oscar Slater to be carried from the Prison of Edinburgh, thence to be forthwith transmitted to the Prison of Glasgow, therein to be detained till the twenty-seventh day of May, nineteen hundred and nine, and upon that day between the hours of eight and ten o’clock forenoon, within the walls of the said Prison of Glasgow, by the hands of the common executioner, to be hanged by the neck upon a gibbet until he be dead, and his body thereafter to be buried within the walls of the said Prison of Glasgow.”
The trap door opened, and Slater descended. As a result of his outburst, William Park wrote, an act was passed not long afterward “whereby a prisoner, once the verdict is announced, may be hustled downstairs to the cells without the interval of waiting for it to be recorded and signed.”
Slater was consigned to Duke Street Prison to wait out the twenty-one days he had left to be alive. With no criminal appeals court in Scotland, his sentence seemed incontestable. But as the execution drew near, public hostility toward him was replaced by a growing disquiet. “During the trial Glasgow had been living through an atmosphere like that of Salem,” Conan Doyle’s biographer Pierre Nordon has written. “With the verdict, the fever subsided; a vague shame felt by some, and a conviction that Slater was innocent on the part of fewer still, combined to create a wave not exactly of sympathy but of tolerance towards the prisoner.”
On May 17, Slater’s solicitor, Ewing Speirs, drew up a formal entreaty to John Sinclair, the Secretary for Scotland, requesting the commutation of Slater’s death sentence.*5 His entreaty, a document known in Scottish law as a memorial, was a model of legal argument, reprising the case against Slater in all its flaws. It included a cogent explanation of why Slater himself did not testify:
The Memorialist thinks it is only fair to [the] prisoner to point out that he was all along anxious to give evidence on his own behalf. He was advised by his Counsel not to do so, but not from any knowledge of guilt. He had undergone the strain of four days’ trial. He speaks rather broken English—although quite intelligibly—with a foreign accent….Your Memorialist, who has all along acted as Slater’s Solicitor since he was brought back from America…begs respectfully to state his absolute belief in Slater’s innocence….
May it therefore please the Right Honourable the Secretary…to take this Memorial into his most favourable consideration, and thereafter to advise His Most Gracious Majesty to exercise his royal prerogative to the effect of commuting the sentence passed upon the prisoner.
The memorial was accompanied by a public petition on Slater’s behalf, signed by more than twenty thousand people.
Crown authorities, meanwhile, resolute in the belief that they had convicted the right man, parceled out the £200 reward offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Miss Gilchrist’s killer. Mary Barrowman received half, very likely a year’s income for her family, with the balance divided among several other witnesses.
The Crown was also busy arranging Slater’s execution. The gallows, which had been on loan to Inverness for a hanging there, arrived at Duke Street and were erected near his cell. An inveterate tinkerer, Slater, “somewhat to the astonishment of his warders,” Hunt wrote, “took a technical interest in the intricacies of ‘the drop.’ ”
On May 25, 1909, forty-eight hours before Slater was to be hanged—he had just arranged to be buried with a photograph of his parents—Secretary Sinclair, on authorization from King Edward VII, commuted his sentence to life at hard labor. “It was a curious compromise,” a British journalist later wrote. “Slater was held to be too guilty to be released, yet not guilty enough to be hanged.”
Slater was told of the reprieve by a prison guard, who, in a memorable act of kindness, slipped him some candy. “Should you visit Duke Street Prison again,” Slater would write from Peterhead to Reverend Phillips of Glasgow, “please inform this good old man Gov that the officer who gave me 3 pieces of sweets in the condemned cell after I was reprieved, shall have 3 pieces of gold for it, when I am free.”
That day would not come for almost twenty years.
*1 Slater’s name did not actually appear in the papers until December 26, the day he set sail on the Lusitania.
*2 The excerpts from Lord Guthrie’s charge to the jury quoted here are taken from the court stenographer’s official transcript, long thought to have been lost. What was not known until years after Slater’s trial was that in supplying a copy of his charge to William Roughead for inclusion in his Trial of Oscar Slater, first published in 1910 and widely understood to be an official record of the case, Lord Guthrie had significantly revised its content. (The judge’s revised version made his charge, if anything, rhetorically stronger in its condemnation of Slater than the charge he actually gave.) Roughead was later able to obtain a copy of the official transcript, and the fourth edition of his book, published in 1950, reproduces both versions of Lord Guthrie’s charge. The actual charge is given here.
*3 By the time of Slater’s trial, all of these facts had been reported in the Scottish press.
*4 Had the case been heard in England, the divided jury would have guaranteed Slater a new trial.
*5 The Secretary for Scotland (known from 1926 on as the Secretary of State for
Scotland) was the senior British government minister in charge of Scottish affairs.
Chapter 11
THE COLD CRUEL SEA
Through my small window I can see the north-sea. We call it here German Sea, and all day I dream of olden times.
—OSCAR SLATER, IN A LETTER TO HIS PARENTS, 1914
Peterhead prison was born of the violent North Sea outside its doors. By the late nineteenth century, the port of Peterhead had become a major center for whaling, a lucrative enterprise that sent oil, meat, and bone round the world. But the storm-tossed sea posed a perennial danger to the whalers and their crews, and to Peterhead’s fleet of small fishing vessels. Conan Doyle himself described the lashing he and his shipmates took in 1880 aboard the Arctic whaler Hope:
It was, I find by my log, on February 28th at 2 p.m. that we sailed from Peterhead, amid a great crowd and uproar….We ran straight into bad weather and the glass went down at one time to 28.375, which is the lowest reading I can remember in all my ocean wanderings. We just got in to Lerwick Harbour*1 before the full force of the hurricane broke, which was so great that lying at anchor…we were blown over to an acute angle. If it had taken us a few hours earlier we should certainly have lost our boats—and the boats are the life of a whaler. It was March 11 before the weather moderated enough to let us get on, and by that time there were twenty whalers in the bay.
