Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  Chapter 16

  THE RUIN OF JOHN THOMSON TRENCH

  In November 1912, nearly four years after Miss Gilchrist’s death, Jean Milne, a sixty-five-year-old Scotswoman, was found murdered in the town of Broughty Ferry, north of Edinburgh, near Dundee. By coincidence, many aspects of the case echoed the Gilchrist killing. The victim was reclusive and rich. Her body was found inside the elegant home in which she lived alone, bludgeoned to death with a poker. The house was full of money and jewelry, yet nothing seemed to be missing. There was no sign of forced entry: the killer appeared to have been admitted by the victim.

  A bevy of witnesses spoke of having seen a man near Milne’s house; based on their statements, the Dundee police circulated the suspect’s description throughout Britain. Police in the English town of Maidstone, southeast of London, identified him at once: Charles Warner, a Canadian vagrant then serving two weeks in the Maidstone jail for evading his bill at a local hotel. Five of the Broughty Ferry witnesses were brought to Maidstone, and all five identified Warner as the man they had seen near Milne’s home. As Peter Hunt recounted, “One of them wept as she said, ‘I know I am putting the rope round his neck, but that’s the man!’ ”

  The Dundee police had requested help from the Glasgow force, a larger department. Detective Lieutenant John Thomson Trench of Glasgow’s Central Division was dispatched to Maidstone, where he arrested Warner and escorted him back him to Dundee. There, twelve more witnesses identified him, and the local procurator fiscal began building a watertight case.

  But something bothered Trench. Though Milne’s body wasn’t discovered until November, police determined that she had been killed several weeks earlier, on October 16. Warner had told Trench that he’d come to Europe from Toronto and spent the past several months traveling around Britain and the Continent. On the actual murder date, he said, he was in Antwerp. Trench asked whether he could confirm the fact through hotel registers. No, Warner replied: he had slept on park benches.

  Then Warner remembered something. On October 16, 1912, he had pawned a waistcoat in Antwerp and had the ticket to prove it. As the case against him gathered momentum, Hunt wrote, “Warner found that his best friend was the man who had arrested him.” Trench went to Antwerp, found the pawnshop, confirmed the date, and redeemed Warner’s waistcoat. On the strength of this alibi, Warner was released. A spate of eyewitnesses had been mistaken.

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  BY THIS TIME, JOHN THOMSON TRENCH was one of the most respected police officers in Glasgow. The son of a Scottish plowman, he had joined the force as a constable in 1893 and was named a detective lieutenant in 1912. Multiply decorated, he would be awarded the King’s Police Medal in 1914 for having been “conspicuous for gallantry in arresting dangerous criminals on several occasions, and [having] a distinguished record in the detective service.”

  Trench was by all accounts well liked. “His manners were easy, his disposition jovial, if a little quixotic at times,” Hunt wrote. “In the opinion of a major whom he served under during the Great War, ‘he was loved by his comrades, scorned to do a mean action, desiring justice for everyone.’ ” He was married and the father of six.

  After playing a peripheral role in the Gilchrist investigation in the winter of 1908–9, Trench had harbored deep doubts about the case. Over time, he covertly copied from police files documents that had been altered or suppressed, including an explosive report that would come to be known as the Secret Document. In 1914, after what seem to have been five years of private agonizing, Trench came forward. His decision would prompt a judicial review of Slater’s case that would play out as bitter farce. It would also cost Trench his career.

  It is unclear what prompted Trench to wait so long to voice his concerns, or what finally moved him to do so. Perhaps the Broughty Ferry case, in which one witness after another had sworn that an innocent man was a murderer, had solidified his doubts about the Slater testimony. Perhaps he thought the King’s Medal, bestowed on him by George V on New Year’s Day 1914, would protect him from official retribution.

  In early 1914, Trench confided his misgivings to his friend David Cook, a Glasgow lawyer. He told Cook that on December 23, 1908, two days after Miss Gilchrist’s murder, his superiors had sent him to the home of her niece Margaret Birrell. Birrell told him that Helen Lambie had not only recognized the murderer but had also named him—a prominent member of Miss Gilchrist’s extended family. On January 3, Lambie told Trench the same thing.

  Cook wrote to Thomas McKinnon Wood, the Secretary for Scotland, requesting an official inquiry into Slater’s conviction. He cautiously set forth Trench’s willingness to testify. “If the constable mentioned in your letter will send me a written statement of the evidence in his possession,” McKinnon Wood replied, “I will give this matter my best consideration.” Trench appeared to interpret this as a guarantee of immunity and sent McKinnon Wood his evidence.

  In March 1914, Cook contacted Conan Doyle. “You will be good enough to treat this letter meantime as confidential,” he wrote. He continued:

  Detective Lieutenant Trench of the Central Division is an officer of ability and integrity. From the time that Slater’s name was mentioned in connection with the murder of Miss Gilchrist until this day, Trench has been of [the] opinion that Slater was an innocent man. I have never had any other view.

  Trench is my intimate friend, and I have frequently spoken to him regarding the case. He has time and again told me that he was not satisfied with the action of the police in the matter….

  I may tell you that the original statement of the girl Barrowman as copied from the Police Books bears no relation to the evidence which she gave at the trial. I venture to say that had the original statement been produced at the trial, Slater would not have been convicted….

  Frankly I am of opinion that Mary Barrowman was not in West Princes Street at or near 7 o’clock. Very probably she was in West Princes Street some hours afterwards, when the public had obtained information that a murder had taken place, and were standing wide mouthed and open eyed gazing at the locus. Barrowman may have been one of the crowd. Being a little late in getting home she took the edge off the greeting which she expected to receive by a little sensationalism….

  With regard to Lambie, Trench is prepared to swear at the enquiry that he received from her on the 3rd of January, 1909, an emphatic statement that another person whose name I need not mention here was the man whom she saw leave the house. This statement persisted in on the 3rd of January was made by Lambie within fifteen minutes of the murderer leaving the house. The police were in possession of the facts, and purposely concealed the information from the defence and from the Court….

  Miss Birrell (niece of Miss Gilchrist) is prepared to swear that Nellie Lambie called at her house at 7-15 pm on the night of the murder, entered the house, declared that her mistress had been murdered and that she saw the murderer—naming him. The information was given to the Police by Miss Birrell on the night of the murder.

  From Windlesham, his elegant home in Sussex, Conan Doyle took up Slater’s case for the second time, joining Cook in pressing high-ranking officials for a review. Before the end of March 1914, Secretary McKinnon Wood indicated that a formal inquiry into the conviction would be held later that spring. The inquiry would review the following five points:

  (1) Did any witness to the identification on the night of the murder name a person other than Oscar Slater?

  (2) Were the police aware that such was the case? If so, why was the evidence not forthcoming at the trial?

  (3) Did Slater fly from justice?

  (4) Were the police in possession of information that Slater had disclosed his name at the North-Western Hotel, Liverpool, stating where he came from, and that he was travelling by the S.S. Lusitania?

  (5) Did one of the witnesses make a mistake as to the date on which she stated s
he was in West Princes Street?

  Trench, encouraged, prepared to tell all; a finding for Slater on one or more points, he knew, could reverse the conviction. But though Trench would testify forthrightly, both he and Cook would be victimized beyond imagining.

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  BY ALL ACCOUNTS SLATER knew nothing of the efforts to reopen his case. His steadfast resolve to accept his lot, so movingly evident in his letters of 1912–13, had long since given way; his renewed stream of letters to prison officials, begun in 1914 and redolent of paranoia, attests as much. A chilling memorandum from Peterhead’s medical officer, written in February 1914, suggests that Slater’s mental state had been evident for some time:

  The convict named in the margin is, in my opinion, insane. On various occasions I have suspected that he was the subject of delusions of persecution and hallucinations of hearing and smell. At present he is highly excited and dangerous. He is extremely impulsive and not able to control his actions. He hears voices, he smells chloroform being administered to him; and he says I give him no treatment and am trying to kill him, which are delusions. He is not safe to be at work and I have requested the Governor to keep him under separate confinement and under strict observation.

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  THE INQUIRY INTO SLATER’S conviction would take place in Glasgow. Conducting the proceedings would be James Gardner Millar, a lawyer who was the sheriff of Lanarkshire. For Slater’s supporters, the appointment raised concerns. “Sheriff Gardner Millar is an eminent lawyer and in a question of Civil Law, I know of no man whose opinion is entitled to more weight,” Cook wrote to Conan Doyle in April 1914. “He however has no experience of Criminal matters. He is a babe in such matters, and the guiding principle with him is the police can do no wrong.”

  Cook’s concerns were quickly borne out. The proceedings, Millar announced, would be held behind closed doors, off-limits to press and public. They would be concerned only with issues of fact—not with the conduct of the trial. Witnesses would not be placed under oath, though they would be instructed to tell the truth. Those conditions, Cook wrote bitterly to Conan Doyle, “suggest to me that the Enquiry will be more or less a farce.”

  Of all the information Trench planned to bring to light, the most explosive was contained in the secret document he had copied from police files, detailing the statement made by Margaret Birrell shortly after the murder. In her statement, Birrell recounted Lambie’s visit, and her naming of a man other than Slater as the intruder. To protect that man, who had not been charged, subsequent police copies of the document redacted his name, referring to him by the pseudonymous initials “A.B.”

  On December 23, 1908, two days after Miss Gilchrist’s death, Trench was assigned by Chief Superintendent Orr to interview Birrell at her home. As he later recounted: “I had particular instructions to question her with regard to [A.B.] and as to what Lambie said when she visited her house on the night of the murder. I visited Miss Birrell and from her received the statement word for word.” Returning to the police station, he recounted what Birrell told him to two superiors, the similarly named Superintendent John Ord and Chief Superintendent John Orr. Orr seemed especially enthusiastic, saying, “This is the first real clue we have got.” Birrell’s statement, as taken down by Trench, reads:

  I am niece of the late Marion Gilchrist, who resided at 15 Queen’s Terrace, West Princes Street. My mother was a sister of the deceased. Miss Gilchrist was not on good terms with her relations. Few if any visited her….

  On her return [from a recent trip] she time and again declared her determination to alter her Will. It was believed by some of her relations that she had done so. She made no secret of her intention. She was positively nasty with any relative who might call….

  I can never forget the night of the murder. Miss Gilchrist’s servant Nellie Lambie came to my door about 7-15. She was excited. She pulled the bell violently. On the door being opened she rushed into the house and exclaimed “Oh, Miss Birrell, Miss Birrell, Miss Gilchrist has been murdered, she is lying dead in the Dining Room, and oh, Miss Birrell, I saw the man who did it.”

  I replied “My God, Nellie, this is awful. Who was it, do you know him?”

  Nellie replied, “Oh, Miss Birrell, I think it was [A.B.]. I am sure that it was [A.B.].” I said to her, “My God, Nellie, don’t say that, a murder in the family is bad enough, but a murderer is a thousand times worse. Unless you are very sure of it, Nellie, don’t say that.” She again repeated to me that she was sure that it was [A.B.].

  The same evening Detectives Pyper and Dornan visited me, and I learned from them that she had told them that it was [A.B.]. I told a number of my friends about it, including a member of the Glasgow Corporation,*1 who communicated with Chief Superintendent Orr. On Wednesday afternoon, 23rd Decr., 1908, Detective Trench visited me, and I told him exactly what Lambie had told me.

  But before December 23 was out, efforts to quash the “first real clue” were under way: the man Lambie had named was a highly placed member of Glasgow society. While Trench was writing up Birrell’s statement, Superintendent Ord was on the telephone to a colleague, Superintendent William Miller Douglas. Douglas ran the police department’s Western Division, which had primary charge of the investigation. “I have been ringing up Douglas,” Ord told Trench, “and he is convinced that [A.B.] had nothing to do with it.” And that, as far as Birrell’s statement went, was that: its existence was never disclosed to Slater’s defense team.

  On January 3, 1909, Trench, carrying a sketch of Slater, was dispatched to interview Lambie. She failed to identify the sketch. As Trench later testified:

  Although I had not spoken to Lambie, I was aware, having taken Miss Birrell’s statement, that she had declared that [A.B.] was the man. I touched on [A.B.], asking her if she really thought he was the man she saw. Her answer was, “It’s gey*2 funny if it wasn’t him I saw.”…My conclusion after meeting Lambie was that if she had had any one to support her she would have sworn to [A.B.]. So much impressed was I that I mentioned the fact to Superintendent Ord next morning, asking if he thought that [A.B.] might not be the man. His only answer was, “Douglas has cleared up all that, what can we do?”

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  MARION GILCHRIST HAD A younger brother, James, who married a woman named Elizabeth Greer. James died in 1870, and three years later Elizabeth Greer Gilchrist married Professor Matthew Charteris, who taught medicine at Glasgow University. The couple had three sons: Archibald, born in 1874; Francis, born in 1875; and John, born in 1877.

  The Charterises were a distinguished line—their forebears included eminent missionaries, theologians, and educators—and Elizabeth’s sons bore out the family’s expectations handsomely: Archibald became a prominent lawyer, Francis became a doctor who like his father taught at Glasgow University, and John became an army officer. By the turn of the twentieth century the family was among the prominent in Glasgow. Francis Charteris further cemented its position with his marriage in 1907 to Annie Fraser Kedie, the daughter of one of the city’s wealthy manufacturers.

  Though not related to Miss Gilchrist by blood, the Charteris brothers, as the sons of her former sister-in-law, became her de facto nephews. They visited her on occasion and by most accounts maintained as cordial relations with her as anyone ever did. Francis Charteris, whose wedding Miss Gilchrist attended, was especially attentive; it was from him that she had received her Irish terrier as a present. Despite these attentions, however, as Margaret Birrell told Trench, “Miss Gilchrist stated to me that none of the Charteris family would finger a penny of her money.”

  Francis Charteris was “A.B.” Though Conan Doyle privately believed that he was the man in Miss Gilchrist’s hall that night, he knew better than to accuse him. Cook, too, urged caution. “I intend to deal delicately with any allegations regarding the Doctor,” he wrote to Conan
Doyle in May 1914. “I have no right—no one has any right to say that Dr. Charteris is the man. We certainly have the right to say that if his name was mentioned by Lambie there ought to be an end of the Slater case.”

  But because the Charteris family appeared to have pulled strings at the highest level to have Lambie’s disclosure suppressed, the hearing into Slater’s case would turn out to be little more than a travesty.

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  THE CLOSED-DOOR INQUIRY INTO the case of Oscar Slater took place in Glasgow from April 23 to 25, 1914. Sheriff Millar heard testimony from some twenty witnesses, several of whom, including Mary Barrowman and the bicycle dealer Allan McLean, largely recapitulated what they had said at trial five years before.

  The police officers who testified formed an implacable blue wall. Chief Superintendent Orr, who now held the rank of assistant chief constable, said that he recalled neither having sent Trench to interview Margaret Birrell nor having said “This is the first real clue we have got.” Inspector Pyper, now chief detective inspector, said that Lambie had never told him about A.B. on the night of the murder and had said she could not identify the intruder.

  Millar also took testimony from Lambie and Birrell. Lambie, now married to a coal miner named Robert Gillon, denied having mentioned A.B.’s name. She further denied having been shown a sketch of Slater by Trench, having been questioned by Trench about A.B., and having told him, “It’s gey funny if it wasn’t him I saw.” Birrell denied that Lambie had told her about A.B. and denied having recounted as much to Trench.

  A few witnesses gave testimony that should have weighed in Slater’s favor, including two not heard at the original trial: the greengrocer Duncan MacBrayne and Colin MacCallum, the bootmaker who was Barrowman’s employer. MacBrayne testified to having seen Slater standing serenely in front of his own apartment-house door at eight-fifteen on the night of the murder—precisely the time he was alleged to have been weaving through the streets of suburban Glasgow after having killed Miss Gilchrist. MacCallum testified that Barrowman had no errand that would have taken her through West Princes Street that night.