Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  When they were both home in Glasgow, they met by chance in Hope Street, and Laurie tried to bluff it out. By that time (July 31st) the disappearance of Edwin Rose was in all the newspapers. ‘What do you know about the Arran mystery?’ Aitken asked, blunt and suspicious. Was not Rose the name of the tourist he had intended to go to Brodick with?

  Laurie ‘hummed and hawed’. The man a’missing, he lied like a schoolboy, ‘Must be a different Mr Rose from the Mr Rose who was with me, for he returned with me and then proceeded to Leeds.’

  Persisting, Aitken ‘twitted’ him about the yachting cap: ‘Whose cap were you wearing on yon Friday night?’ ‘Surely you don’t think I am a...’ (He did not finish the sentence, but Aitken thought that the word hovering could have been ‘thief’ not ‘murderer’). Laurie’s luck had now evaporated and once the body had been found, he decamped and went on the run – always prone to flee, a great if ultimately unsuccessful escapee – increasingly losing his grip, rootless, but not over troubled with his conscience. Alerted by Aitken, the police followed his trail to Liverpool, where, at 10 Greek Street, he had abandoned some white shirts which had belonged to Rose and upon which, with a rubber stamp, he had impressed ‘John W. Laurie’.

  From Liverpool, he had written on August 10th to the North British Daily Mail an egregious letter, not at all insane, in which he sought, rather childishly, to give the impression that he was about to commit suicide. Should that fail, he was also rehearsing his defence. Written in a fair, board school hand, in the style of a Marie Corelli romance, salient passages read: ‘I rather smile when I read that my arrest is hourly expected. If things go as I have designed them, I will soon have arrived at that country from whose bourne no traveller returns...

  As regards Mr Rose, poor fellow, no-one who knows me will believe for one moment that I had any complicity in his death... We went to the top of Goatfell, where I left him in the company of two men who came from Loch Ranza, and were going to Brodick.’

  Some content of the letter can be taken as a proclamation of Laurie’s heterosexuality. It can, too, if we wish, be taken to show anti-social conduct, morbid jealousy, with a paranoid flavour:

  ‘Three years ago I became very much attached to Miss –, a teacher, – School, and residing at –. My affection for this girl was at first returned ... until I discovered that she was encouraging the attentions of another man, –, teacher, –, who took every opportunity to depreciate me in her estimation. Since then I have been perfectly careless about what I did, and my one thought was how to punish her enough for the cruel wrong she had done me; and it was to watch her audacious behaviour that I went to Rothesay this and last year.’

  Was it thoughts of the perfidious teacher which tormented Laurie’s mind as he paced the lane behind Wooley’s Tea Rooms? Was she lucky, perhaps not to have been subjected to some murderous assault by his hands – pushed from the pier to drown without pity? We may feel that the superior social class of the teacher, and the usurper, together with that of Edwin Rose, was a part of the darkness in Laurie’s mind.

  A second letter, this time to the editor of the Glasgow Herald, dated August 27th and posted in Aberdeen, suggested that, ‘Seemingly there was a motive for doing away with poor Rose; it was not to secure his valuables. Mr Rose was to all appearance worse off than myself; indeed, he assured me that he had spent so much on his tour that he had barely sufficient to last till he got home.’

  Run to earth in a wood some three miles from Hamilton, he was found with his throat cut, but not too deeply. ‘I robbed the man, but I did not murder him’ he said in an important admission. He was from now on willing to own up to the items which he had stolen from Mrs Walker’s ‘lie-to’, but it proved difficult to establish that he had taken items from Rose’s pockets on the mountainside. Did he mean that Rose died by accident and he rifled the body there and then and hid it, or did he imply that others did the deed after he had left Rose intact?

  The second alternative was certainly the force of his defence at the trial in Edinburgh which opened on November 8th, 1889. The Dean of Faculty argued for him that all of Rose’s injuries were consistent with an accidental fall, and very likely, ‘at these Fair holidays, there would be plenty of people on the island who would steal from the body.’ The Prosecution adhered to the plain theory of repeated blows by Laurie with a stone, followed by theft at the scene. Weighty and learned medical experts brought for either side effectively cancelled one another out, as was reflected in the verdict of Guilty, by a majority of one, seven voting for Not Proven. Hangman Berry would soon be required. An agitation, however, gained strength, based on the feeling that Laurie must have been insane to have performed such a gross, excessive and inappropriate series of acts. A petition pleaded that there was insanity in Laurie’s family and that he himself had a significant history. This had not been an issue at the trial, where the defence was a classic criminal’s fight against circumstantial evidence. A visiting lunacy commission was convened, and the convicted man was pronounced insane.

  He was very, very lucky. An available statistic for English crime shows that in 1893, of the 256 prisoners sentenced to death for murder in the previous nine years, only eight were committed to Broadmoor as insane, 145 were hanged, one was pardoned and 102 were sent to penal servitude.

  Somewhere in official records the alientists’ report must lie. It is difficult to conceive that Laurie was suffering from ‘mania’, as they called schizophrenia in those days. Perhaps they found his illness to be ‘meloncholia’: there may have been previous suicide attempts. His obsession about the teacher could have been accounted a ‘monomania’. Or perhaps the diagnosis was ‘moral insanity’, an abandoned term closest to our ‘psychopathy’, defined by Dr JC Pritchard (1786-1848) as ‘Madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral disposition and natural impulses without any remarkable disorder or defect in the intellect... ‘

  The death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and Laurie was held at Perth Penitentiary, and then Peterhead. He escaped in thick fog in 1893, but was quickly caught by a warder on a bicycle. In 1910, he was transferred to Perth Criminal Asylum, which was a department of Perth Penitentiary, not a separate asylum. He was by now suffering from progressive dementia, i.e. some type of deteriorating process, not insanity. There he died on October 5th 1930, aged 69. It was said that he had enquired about confessing before he was respited, but as Dr Forbes Winslow, the celebrated English alienist who was about at that time, and who would undoubtedly have found him insane, said in another context, ‘Of course, it was only to be expected that after Mrs Pearcey’s death [by judicial hanging, after murdering her lover’s wife and baby] a full confession would be circulated far and wide. This is always done to justify carrying out the last operation of the law’.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE GERMAN TEA-PLANTER

  The victim in the Broughty Ferry case was universally described as an elderly, rich, eccentric recluse. This is a stereotype. The author is no fierce feminist, but has always thought that contemporary writers diminished Miss Jean Milne’s posthumous dignity. Let us look at each element of the labelling in turn. Her age was 65, not ancient, and William Roughead, who should have known better and himself lived to a good old, productive age, would persist in calling her a ‘little frail old woman’. This was no wispy, gossamer person, but sprightly, and she lived with hope.

  Rich she certainly was, on her income of £1,000 per year in 1912. Her main expense, or extravagance, was to spend months at a time on holiday in London hotels. She also bought clothes and she gave unknown sums to charity. Her money came to her upon the death, nine years previously, of her brother, who was a tobacco manufacturer of Dundee. She had lived on, alone, in the substantial house which they had shared.

  Now we come to the eremitical element. No woman who had really given up the world would regularly go away on sprees to the capital, staying at smartish hotels such as the Bon
nington and the Strand Palace. No real hermit is seen every Sunday on show in church, attends Home Mission meetings, and tours the Highlands. Hermits do not have telephones. It is surprising, moreover, how many people came forward with gossip and called themselves friends of a woman supposedly so isolated.

  Finally, and the last two elements merge, she was stamped with the seal of eccentricity. If only we knew more of her private history, there could be a solid explanation of her circumstances. She might always have been a little different. Whatever the hereditary factors, past events, old frustrations or sadnesses, she was still interested, very interested, in the company of men.

  Her choice of living without companion or servant was eccentric. This must be conceded. There were ample funds for a married couple to be engaged to keep her large Victorian property, Elmgrove House, and its two-acre garden in a decent state of equilibrium, although, as we now recognise, the most respectable-seeming butler can become seized with jealous rapacity. There is a certain type of religious woman who trusts that God will watch over her, and closes her mind to the evil in the world. Miss Milne may very well have been of this disposition. It is not fearlessness, but innocence.

  Perhaps, too, she reasoned that the city was dangerous, and her decorous suburb was safe. She could hardly have been unaware of the fate of Miss Marion Gilchrist, aged 82, who had been murdered in her own home in Glasgow in 1908, in spite of impressive security apparata and a living-in servant. The truth is that both women were magnets to malefactors. A dog would have been a good idea. Miss Gilchrist’s red Irish terrier would have made her killer think twice when the moment came, but he had been poisoned.

  The most eccentric element of Miss Milne’s life-style must be her neglect of the house. No doubt she calculated that it would see her out, and would survive, as indeed it did, even if most of the 14 rooms were never used nor touched. She had carved out for herself a capsule of one bedroom upstairs, one living-room downstairs, and a kitchen and bathroom. Did she sometimes wander those closed and cobwebbed rooms with candle in hand in the mode of Miss Faversham? One feels that she would have known her Dickens and her Scott, but her favourite reading was of the devotional kind. Candlelight flickered as she read with undrawn blinds late into the evening, for it was a personal quirk that she used gas only for cooking and heating. Did she look under the bed at night, and lock the bedroom door?

  She worried more about the garden than the housework, employing jobbing gardeners from time to time, and she went out with rake and trowel herself, but it was an impossible task, and a wilderness had overtaken her. She kept remarkably cheerful, and this, then, was the setting for the murder of Miss Jean Milne, which is still unsolved, a mystery left to futurity in a state of muddlement. Who was the gentleman friend who came to supper? And who was the woman seen at the upper window when Miss Milne lay dead below?

  During that last year of 1912, something ‘kittenish’ had been observed in her behaviour. She had spent four months at the Strand Palace from April 9th to August 2nd, and while there, as she indiscreetly told her occasional gardener, John Wood, she had met a ‘German gentleman’, a tea-planter. A woman friend found her positively coquettish when she confided that she had met a gentleman who had taken her about and been so very kind to her. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility, she hinted, that she was going to acquire a companion for life.

  She expected a letter from him, and it appears that he travelled up to see her, because at 5.30pm on September 19th, John Wood who was ‘shutting up the house’ and about to leave, admitted a visitor bearing all the hallmarks of being the German tea-planter. ‘You have come!’ Miss Milne is said to have cried, skipping along the passage ‘like a lassie’ to greet him. ‘I expected you earlier.’ Imagine the gossip which will have burned around that genteel neighbourhood!

  The following day, she left Broughty Ferry for Glasgow, where she embarked in the Chevalier for a cruise around the coast to Inverness. On the return journey, someone recognised her on board the Caledonian Canal steamer in the company of a tall, handsome man, with whom she left the boat at Fort Augustus. By September 26th, she was home again, resuming her normal routine.

  John Wood later supplied a detailed description of the expected visitor. He was about 40 years old, some five feet eight or nine inches in height, stoutish and well-made, with fair hair and a slight fair moustache, fresh complexion, and a cheery expression. He was elaborately dressed in a dark morning-coat, deep cut waistcoat and dark trousers, and the whole topped somewhat incongruously with a soft, round tweed hat. He carried a cane to complete the gentlemanly effect. The voice that issued was deep and guttural. Who could reasonably doubt that this pyknic figure was the German tea-planter in person?

  We may contemplate this apparition with some anxiety. What were his intentions? Miss Milne obviously felt that the kindly attentions which he had paid to her were romantic. It would be cruel to mock her. William Roughead refers to her misfortunately as ‘in her new avatar [incarnation] of an antique charmer’. This might have been side-splitting at the time, but now seems like a disservice to the ‘venerable anchorite of Broughty Ferry’.

  Although, of course, such things do happen, the age-gap of 25 years would appear to be too extreme. Why would he have approached this singularly unprotected lady in the public rooms of a hotel? What could she have known reliably of his background? Suppose that all were platonic, even if she did not view it thus: a mere holiday friendship, a lonely foreigner, a genuine desire to help so vulnerable a creature and a shared liking of devotional literature? Yet he does not sound like a man who would lack company.

  It is very difficult to dismiss the suspicion that the real interest of this urbane man of the world lay in Miss Milne’s wealth. It is not necessary to suggest that he was an actual con-man – although he might have been. Down on his luck, perhaps, he might have spotted a glint of the seven valuable rings which she sported on her fingers when dressed up, or even when tending her garden. They were a token of her real status in life, however passée the figure that she cut, and he might have seen the light of hope. Miss Milne, meanwhile, was experiencing a different kind of hope.

  Towards the middle of October, she ordered some wine and whisky from a local merchant, specifying that they should be of the same quality as her brother used to get. ‘I am expecting a gentleman friend to dinner’, she told him proudly. The sadness of this incident nearly speaks for itself. And then, the last time that she was seen alive was on Tuesday October 15th, scuttling about her business in Dundee and Broughty Ferry. The previous Sunday, she had attended St Andrew’s United Free Church, and on Monday 14th she had been at a Home Mission meeting in Dundee. After her shopping expedition on that Tuesday, she was missed, her absences remarked, but not so acutely that anyone felt inspired to take action until the postman, for the usual obvious reasons, went to the police on Saturday November 2nd.

  On Wednesday October 16th, after sunset, David Kinnear, an elder of the church had called at Elmgrove with her Communion card for the following Sunday, but found the house in darkness without the glow of candlelight. He knocked and rang repeatedly but there was no response and he went away. No Miss Milne came to church on the Sunday. On Friday October 18th, a telephone operator tried with admirable old-fashioned persistence to put a trunk call through to Elmgrove from London.

  On Monday morning, October 21st, the mysterious woman at the window appeared. Alexander Troup saw her. He had been a gardener at Elmgrove in the days when Miss Milne’s brother was alive, but appeared now (should one say in his avatar) as collector for the Broughty Benevolent Trust. When he came to tell his tale, he had not, apparently mistaken the day, because his statement was corroborated as to his being despatched then to Elmgrove. As he approached the house, he saw at an upper window, partly hidden by the curtain, a woman whom he identified as Miss Milne. Although he rang the front-door bell twice, there was no reply. The cover of the lock was down, and when he returned in the afternoon, it was up. Again, no-one opened t
he door, and the windows were blank. He went away.

  Troup’s sighting cannot be taken at its face-value, but still needs to be examined. As an officer entrusted with funds, it is not likely that he was a liar, an alcoholic, or otherwise of confused mental state. The woman’s shape was not a clinical hallucination. It could have been a ghost – of Miss Milne, or of someone else. How good was Troup’s eyesight? It could have been a trick of light, an honest mistake, the more so since he expected to see Miss Milne (perhaps she had often peered down at him when he called) or was looking especially closely for her, having heard that she had not recently been seen around. If he saw a real woman, it was not Miss Milne.

  On Sunday morning, November 3rd 1912, when Miss Milne should have been preparing for church, the police approached the cold and silent house and forced an entry through the locked front door. Other exits and windows were long disused and ‘hermetically sealed’. A joiner broke a window-pane in the kitchen, opened the catch, climbed in, and in some manner breached the front-door lock. He will have been the first person to see Miss Milne’s body, which lay, fully dressed, in the hall, at the foot of the stairs.

  This was no hermit’s natural end. There had been a violent struggle. On the third step of the stairs there was a large splash of blood, and more on the railings and wall, with some bloodstained hairs adhering. Several wounds to the head were the apparent cause of death, and death’s instrument lay in blood beside the body: the same poker which Miss Milne had often flourished as she chased away the apple-scrumping boys who trespassed into her wilderness. Therefore, this was the weapon which she would have taken up if the occasion should have arisen – if she had time and opportunity. The force of the attack had actually broken the poker. It was about 13 inches long, made of ordinary cast-metal, with a round head. The break was new because it had broken about half an inch from the head, and both parts bore stains of blood.