by Margalit Fox
EPILOGUE:
WHAT BECAME OF THEM
Who did kill Marion Gilchrist on that rainy December night? Conan Doyle held fast to the belief that it was her nephew Francis Charteris, a view shared by some later writers on the case. (Acutely aware of the rumors, Charteris, who died in 1964 after a distinguished career as a physician and educator, maintained to the end of his life that he had nothing to do with the crime.) Other observers have pointed fingers at various members of Miss Gilchrist’s extended family; still others have posited a ring of professional thieves, or a murderous collaboration between Helen Lambie and one of her suitors.
The eminent commentator William Roughead, while refraining from naming names, was of the opinion that more than one man was involved. “Miss Gilchrist must have been killed by somebody,” he wrote in the 1929 edition of Trial of Oscar Slater. “Twenty years’ reflection on the facts as proved in Court confirms me in the view…that two men were concerned in the affair, one of whom either made off between Mr. Adams’s visits to the door, or waited—like Raskolnikov—in the empty flat above until the coast was clear. If the reader, when studying the evidence, will keep in mind this hypothesis…he may find it helpful, as explaining the many difficulties created by the disparate accounts of the appearance and movements of ‘the man.’ ”
On the subject of who murdered Miss Gilchrist I remain resolutely agnostic. Any “solution” advanced eleven decades after the fact can only be the product of undiluted speculation. I do believe, however, that Lambie took to her grave far more information about the crime than she ever disclosed—including the killer’s identity. That was the view of Conan Doyle, who wrote, in 1930, “I see no prospect of getting to the bottom of Miss Gilchrist’s death unless Helen Lambie makes a confession. She undoubtedly knows more about the matter than has ever been made public.” But Lambie never obliged. She returned to Scotland with her family in the 1930s and later settled in the north of England. She died in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1960, at seventy-three.
Mary Barrowman, who later in adulthood worked as a charwoman, married twice. She was believed to have become an alcoholic; her two children were removed from her care by the state. In Square Mile of Murder, his 2002 study of four Glasgow killings, including Miss Gilchrist’s, the Scottish newspaperman Robert House wrote: “Many years after the trial of Oscar Slater, Mary Barrowman turned up at a certain house in Glasgow. She said she wanted to confess. She had not been in West Princes Street at all on the night of the murder. Her mother, who was an alcoholic, had made her tell the story so that she could share in the reward.” Barrowman died in 1934, at forty, from cervical cancer.
Arthur Adams, seventy-three, was found dead of natural causes on January 3, 1942, at his home at 14 Queen’s Terrace, directly below the flat in which Miss Gilchrist had met her end. In a noteworthy turn of fate, his death certificate was signed by Dr. John S. M. Ord, son of Superintendent John Ord of the Glasgow police.
In 1969, a Glasgow magistrate, John Young, began a campaign for the posthumous rehabilitation of Detective Lieutenant John Thomson Trench. After considering the matter, city officials concluded that it was not within their legal power to have the case for his dismissal reopened. In 1999, however, a plaque honoring Trench was installed in the Glasgow Police Museum. Unveiled in the presence of his sole surviving child, eighty-seven-year-old Nancy Stark, it read: “There are now appeal processes for both criminal cases in the courts and police discipline hearings, which neither Mr Trench nor Mr Slater had the benefit of at that time. The fact that these safeguards are now in place and have been for many years, is perhaps a fitting legacy to the hardship that these individuals endured in the spirit of truth and justice.”
His Majesty’s Prison Peterhead (known under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II as Her Majesty’s Prison Peterhead) was by the late twentieth century considered one of the worst penal institutions in Britain—“Scotland’s gulag, a prison of no hope,” commentators called it in 1991. It closed in 2013 and is now the Peterhead Prison Museum.
Peterhead’s most famous inmate, Oscar Slater—dandy, gambler, foreigner, scapegoat, Jew—remained an exotic enough figure that from time to time in later years rumor swirled round him in the newspapers. “Will Wed a Kaffir, Says Oscar Slater,” a New York Times headline crowed in 1929, the year after his exoneration, adding: “Scot Who Got $30,000 for False Murder Conviction Plans to Live in Africa.”
The reality was far more prosaic. Slater remained in Scotland to the end of his life, settling near Glasgow in the seaside town of Ayr. Sociable and well liked by his neighbors, he did a modest business restoring and selling antiques. In 1936, after his estranged first wife died, he married Lina Schad, a Scotswoman of German parentage some thirty years his junior. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one.
Though Slater had long since lost his German citizenship, the outbreak of World War II threw his Germanness into relief once more. At the start of the war, he was briefly interned, along with his wife, as an enemy alien. Afterward, the couple resumed their congenial life in Ayr. Unable to abide the name Oscar Slater, he once again lived as Oscar Leschziner.
“With the war over, a few golden years remained to Oscar,” the British writer Richard Whittington-Egan, who interviewed Lina Leschziner before her death in 1992, has written. “Sometimes, for sheer joy of life, he would stand foursquare on Rabbie Burns’s Auld Brig and sing at the top of his lungs’ bent, the wind carrying his weird-accented song away across the melodious waves….Possessed of a good singing voice, he much enjoyed listening to music. He went frequently, too, to the theatre and the cinema. He was, always had been, a great walker. He was also a great talker. After all the years of enforced silence, he liked nothing better than a good crack. A very generous man, he was forever giving his mite to charities—in particular those concerned with the plight of sick or homeless children.”
Oscar Leschziner died of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Ayr on January 31, 1948, at seventy-six, having outlived nearly all the principals in the case against him. He never returned to Germany. That was almost certainly just as well: on July 27, 1942, more than a thousand Jews were deported from Breslau, in his home region of Silesia, a group out of which barely two dozen would survive. Among the thousand were Slater’s sister Phemie, murdered at Treblinka, and his beloved sister Malchen, murdered at Terezin—racialized, identified, apprehended, transported, exterminated.
JONATHAN CORUM
JONATHAN CORUM
JONATHAN CORUM
JONATHAN CORUM
LEFT: PETERHEAD PRISON MUSEUM
RIGHT: WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, TRIAL OF OSCAR SLATER (1910)
Marion Gilchrist, in younger days and in old age
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH15/20/1/6
West Princes Street. Miss Gilchrist’s door is at left, the Adamses’ at right.
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH15/20/1/6
The stairs to Miss Gilchrist’s flat bore two mysterious footprints.
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH15/20/1/6
Miss Gilchrist’s entrance hall. Note the three locks on her front door.
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH15/20/1/6
The dining room, the scene of Miss Gilchrist’s murder
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, JC34/1/32/9
Jeweler’s sketch of Miss Gilchrist’s missing diamond brooch
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, JC34/1/32/17
Card printed with one of Slater’s spurious business identities
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, JC34/1/32/14
Another of Slater’s cards, bearing one of his a
liases
WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, TRIAL OF OSCAR SLATER (1910)
Oscar Slater, Continental dandy, circa 1905
GLASGOW CITY COUNCIL: ARCHIVES; TD1560/6/23
Helen Lambie in 1909. “This woman,” one of Slater’s supporters declared, “holds the secret.”
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, JC34/1/32/12
This torn paper wrapper, addressed “Oscar Slater, Esq., c/o A. Anderson,” first put the police on Slater’s trail.
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, JC34/1/32/43
Hotel register signed on the penultimate line “Oscar Slater, Glasgow”
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND JC34/1/32/16
Slater’s 1909 letter from the Tombs in New York to a Glasgow friend, Hugh Cameron. Cameron immediately showed this letter to the police.
© CSG CIC GLASGOW MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES COLLECTION: THE MITCHELL LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Mary Barrowman, with her parents, arrives to testify at Slater’s trial.
WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, TRIAL OF OSCAR SLATER (1910)
The trial of Oscar Slater. Slater is visible seated in the dock, just left of center, between two policemen.
NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH12/11
Warders’ log, Duke Street Prison, Glasgow, 1909, shortly after Slater had been sentenced to death. “He appeared to be very upset and he made the remark wishing he was dead,” an entry from May 7 reads.
PETERHEAD PRISON MUSEUM
Under guard, a work party leaves Peterhead Prison, mid-1930s.
PETERHEAD PRISON MUSEUM
The prison train hauled granite, hewn by convicts, from a nearby quarry.
BOTH: NATIONAL RECORDS OF SCOTLAND, HH15/20/1/6
Before and after: Oscar Slater (top) on his admission to Peterhead Prison in 1909 and (bottom) on his release in 1927
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
Arthur Conan Doyle with his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, 1860s
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
The young doctor. Conan Doyle on his graduation from medical school, 1881
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
Conan Doyle’s medical-school teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, whose diagnostic powers seemed to verge on sorcery. He was the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
The Anglo-Indian lawyer George Edalji. Investigating his wrongful conviction marked Conan Doyle’s first extended involvement in a real-life case.
GLASGOW CITY COUNCIL: ARCHIVES; TD1560/1/1.
This secret message, carried to Conan Doyle in the mouth of a paroled convict in 1925, would bring about Slater’s release.
PETERHEAD PRISON MUSEUM
The Glasgow police detective John Thomson Trench sacrificed his career after voicing doubts about the Slater case.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
Conan Doyle and (part of) Windlesham, his vast home in southeast England
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION—LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
Conan Doyle with Craigie Aitchison, now regarded as the greatest Scottish criminal lawyer of all time, at the review of Slater’s case in 1928
PETERHEAD PRISON MUSEUM
Mary Barrowman in the late 1920s, around the time of Slater’s release. “She is in the streets & has been in prison,” one Scottish journalist discovered.
WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, TRIAL OF OSCAR SLATER (1950)
Dapper again: A post-release Oscar Slater, late 1920s
For D. J. R. Bruckner,
rationalist,
humanist,
stylist,
in memoriam
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conan Doyle for the Defense is in no small part the product of thousands of pages of documents, painstakingly gathered, reproduced, and sent winging across the sea by indefatigable people in a string of archives throughout Britain. They include, at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, Jessica Evershed, Jane Jamieson, Samantha Smart, and Robin Urquhart; at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, Linda Burke, Michael Gallagher, Patricia Grant, Claire McGugan, Barbara McLean, Peter Munro, Susan Taylor, and Nerys Tunnicliffe; at the Peterhead Prison Museum, Alexander Geddes; and, at the Conan Doyle Archives at Portsmouth City Council, Michael Gunton.
Thanks also to Kirsty Wark for a lovely, long-ago lunch in Glasgow, and to Alan Clements and Caitlin Wark Clements for their assistance with this project. My agents, Katinka Matson and Max Brockman, deserve sustained thanks for their support over many years, as does Michael Healey, also of Brockman Inc.
At Random House, I am privileged to work with an extraordinary editor, Hilary Redmon, who, reading an early draft of this book, glimpsed the heart of the story long before I did. Hilary’s assistant, Molly Turpin, has provided able assistance. Other Random House colleagues who have helped bring Conan Doyle to the Defense to life include Nancy Delia, Barbara Bachman, Richard Elman, Sharon Propson, Mary Moates, and Jessica Bonet. The manuscript was copyedited by Sue Warga; Cohen Carruth prepared the index.
At my U.K. publisher, Profile Books, thanks are due to Andrew Franklin, the co-founder and managing director, and to my editor, Cecily Gayford. John Davey, who oversaw the U.K. edition of my previous book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and was to do likewise with Conan Doyle for the Defense, died as this book was nearing completion. He was able to comment incisively on an early draft of the manuscript, for which I am deeply grateful, and I hope that the finished product will stand as a small tribute to his memory.
Daniel Stashower, a biographer of Conan Doyle; Leslie S. Klinger, editor of the definitive edition of the Sherlock Holmes canon; and Ben Braber, a historian of Scottish Jewry, have all read the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions and corrections.
At The New York Times, colleagues present and past have shown remarkable forbearance by day as I wrestled with this book by night and have made working at the paper a continued source of pleasure and pride. Among them are Barbara Baumgarten, Charlotte Behrendt, Tom Caffrey, the late Janet Elder, Bernadette Espina, Neil Genzlinger, William Grimes, Jack Kadden, Peter Keepnews, William McDonald, Robert D. McFadden, Douglas Martin, Dolores Morrison, Amisha Padnani, Sam Roberts, Jeff Roth, Richard Sandomir, Daniel E. Slotnik, Charles Strum, Bruce Weber, and Earl Wilson. As he did for The Riddle of the Labyrinth, the Times graphics editor Jonathan Corum created masterful visual aids for this book.
Laura Otis, a MacArthur Award–winning scholar who studies the fascinating intellectual landscape at the intersection of Victorian science and Victorian literature (and whom I have had the pleasure of calling a friend since the second grade), gave me a much-needed grounding in the era’s scientific and literary currents. Teresa Williams and Ira Hozinsky deserve much thanks for their tireless willingness to hear about this project, and for their cherished friendship over the past three decades.
Finally, more thanks, love, and esteem than I can ever convey in print go to the writer, critic, and teacher George Robinson, my boon companion these thirty years and more.
CAST OF CHA
RACTERS
Arthur Adams: Miss Gilchrist’s downstairs neighbor.
Dr. John Adams: The first doctor at the murder scene; not related to Arthur Adams.
Craigie Aitchison: Slater’s barrister in the 1928 rehearing of his case.
Andrée Junio Antoine (“Madame Junio”): Slater’s mistress; allegedly a prostitute.
Annie Armour: Glasgow subway clerk; witness for the prosecution at Slater’s trial.
Mary Barrowman: Teenage delivery girl who claimed to have witnessed the murderer’s flight along West Princes Street.
