Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  As for Bury’s trade, the delivery of sand and sawdust has possibilities. Donald Fraser comments that he would have known the byways of Whitechapel as well as anyone. Euan MacPherson proposes that he could have kept a set of clean clothing in the cart to change into if bloodstained. We may suppose that sand and sawdust were in demand for shovelling over the floors of shops, lodging-houses, public houses, and slaughterhouses – with which Jack the Ripper has often been linked. Neat as it is to imagine Bury as a frequenter of the Whitechapel abattoirs, the reality may be that his horse merely plodded around Bow and Bromley! Sand and sawdust is a heavy load, and a large, slow draught-horse would have been needed to convey it.

  The marriage, a fatal choice for Ellen, was doomed from the beginning. Her charm for him was that she had an impressive inheritance of shares left to her by an aunt who had died seven years previously. It took him a couple of months to winkle out this treasure, when, in June, he prevailed upon her to cash-in her holdings to realise the sum of £200 – a large amount indeed for a working-class couple at that time. This, too, of course, was doomed. His attraction for her is unknowable: there is a physical description – a small, thin man, five foot two inches in height and weighing a little over nine stone. Cockney sparrow springs to mind, but he came from Wolverhampton!

  Soon, indecently soon, on the Saturday after the wedding, Bury’s violence came into the open. His landlady heard screams and found him standing over his new bride, whom he had knocked to the floor, a large knife in his hand with which he was threatening to stab her. The argument, naturally, had been about money. For the rest of their stay with her, the landlady, at Ellen’s request, held the key to the Burys’ door. Matters did not improve: Bury would spend all his wages on drink, and sometimes his employer’s takings as well. There were regular beatings at home. In the August of 1888, they vacated their lodgings, saying that they were going to Wolverhampton. In fact, they took rooms at 11 Blackthorn Street, Bow, until December, and that, then, would have been a very famous address as Jack the Ripper’s lair, if Jack he had been.

  Their next home was at 3 Spanby Street, but disaster had struck – Mr Martin of Bromley had, by now, sacked his useless driver – and within a month the broken pair visited Ellen’s married sister, Margaret Corney, who begged Ellen to leave her husband, but she would not. Bury told Margaret Corney that they were going away, not to Wolverhampton, but to Dundee, where he had secured jobs for both of them with a jute firm. They had no known family or friends in Scotland, and this was a drastic uprooting, or reinvention of themselves, for a couple in such humble circumstances, rather like an emigration. The decision has been thought to be mysterious, and certainly Dundee was the chief centre of the jute trade, but Bury was to make no effort to gain employment there. If he were mad, he might have entertained some delusion about Dundee.

  Somehow, there was enough money left to book their passage on the steamer Cambria, leaving Gravesend on January 19th, to arrive in Dundee the following evening, a Sunday. They spent that night on board and disembarked on the Monday morning, with no home and no job and very little cash. They walked the cold streets, all their worldly goods humped on Bury’s thin, bowed back in a large white-wood box which he had had specially made in London. Whether or not this coffin-box shows premeditation, and was always intended for a double purpose, who can say? In this guise, they obtained lodgings, late in the afternoon, with a Mrs Jane Robertson at 43 Union Street. There they stayed for only eight days, because Bury said the rent of eight shillings a week was too dear. The landlady was not sorry to see them go; she was so afraid of Bury that she would not enter his room, and asked her daughter to deal with him when he was leaving.

  Bearing their box as penitents used to bear their coffins on their backs, off they went on January 29th, the rough, rootless, unlikeable couple, out of place in Dundee, to move into their new home, which Bury had already acquired by a gross cheat. Not too drunk, he had gone to estate agents in the Cowgate and enquired about two-roomed flats to let. They had given him the keys to view a basement flat under a shop in a tenement at 113 Princes Street, and he had held on to them. Now they moved in, quasi-squatters, with no intention of paying rent. Not too drunk, he had, meanwhile, turned to the Church in the hope of a handout, but the Reverend Edward John Gough, of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, had been unmoved, even though Bury had brought along his bruised wife for extra sympathy. Mr Gough suggested that he should try the shipyards. Bury threw in a lie or two when the minister asked for a reference from London clergy: as it happened, although he and his wife had attended several churches, he had not made himself known to any clergyman.

  The last free fortnight of Bury’s life passed in a grey alcoholic haze, shot through with one crimson episode. Heaven knows how he found the money. Handy at 129 Princes Street was a public house run by Alexander Patterson, who proved friendly, and there the London misfit spent his days, a regular, slumped, out of commission. Another habitué was David Walker, a house painter, perhaps of a generous disposition, because he spent time with Bury. Back home in her bare, unfurnished rooms, with the long box a principal feature, her few personal possessions emptied out around her on the floor, cold, waiting passively for the next assault, Ellen eked out her last fortnight on earth. She made one friend of her own, Marjory Smith, who had the shop above: she naturally asked why the Burys found themselves in Dundee, and Ellen’s explanation was that she had thought that the change might stop her husband’s drinking. This seems unlikely to have been the real reason: it was William Bury who made all the life and death decisions in that household.

  During this period, Bury acted strangely, in that he ventured into the public gallery of the Sheriff Court at Dundee and watched the proceedings. He was surely there for a purpose, whether insane or practical. There is no innocent explanation of his desire to acquaint himself with the process of law in Scotland. He was no tourist, sightseer, or Dr Johnson, but a petty criminal soon to sink further into iniquity.

  On Monday, February 4th, Bury went with a specific purpose to Mrs Janet Martin’s provisions shop, a few doors along Princes Street, and bought a length of rope. ‘This will do nicely, thank you,’ he said as he made his selection. Night came – drinking time – and both the Burys, husband and wife, left Patterson’s alehouse at closing time. Bury was drunk, and she was ‘reasonably sober’.

  In the early hours of the following Tuesday, the 5th, three loud screams woke up David Duncan, a 44-year-old labourer who lived at 101 Princes Street, some 20 to 30 yards away from the Burys’ basement, across the communal backyard. He got up and listened for half an hour. He thought that the noises came from the Londoners’ flat but he heard no more, his fire was cold and dead, and he went back to bed. From that night onwards, the blind (if there was one, or perhaps it was a part of the fittings) at the Burys’ back window on to the yard stayed down.

  Five drinking days passed. Bury told his friends in Patterson’s that his poor wife was ill. Her name cropped up in conversation quite naturally. On Sunday the 10th, he went to see David Walker, the house-painter, and found him still in bed at noon. They chatted of this and that, and Bury picked up his friend’s copy of the People s Journal and read out for interest a paragraph about an elopement which had ended in suicide. Walker then said, ‘Look and see if there is anything about Jack the Ripper, you that knows the place.’ Bury started and threw the newspaper down. Later that day, as if activated by his friend’s chance remark, Bury walked into the Central Police Office in Bell Street and asked to see the officer in charge, as he had some important information. Lieutenant Parr took him into a side-room and as soon as they entered, Bury is said to have blurted out, either ‘I’m Jack the Ripper!’ or ‘I’m a Jack the Ripper!’ Never in crime could the disputed indefinite article have been of such importance. Parr failed to make any contemporaneous note but there seems to be no strong reason to repudiate the report that Bury did invoke Jack the Ripper, especially, as we shall see, in the light of a certain message on a wall, u
nless, to be very cautious, that is apocryphal.

  Bury was excited, agitated and rambled as he told his story that his wife had committed suicide and he had then, like Jack the Ripper, or in his persona as the real Jack the Ripper (he did not define further) committed Ripper-ish atrocities upon her dead body. In finer detail, he went to his bed drunk, he said, and when he woke up on the following morning, he found his wife of less than a year lying dead on the floor with a rope around her neck. Then, and he could offer no explanation, it was inexplicable, he must have been out of his mind, he had no idea what came over him, he fell on her and mutilated her body with a knife. She was dead, she was dead, he hadn’t killed her and now he wanted to get it all off his conscience. The body was still there in his room – it was terrible – he had squeezed it into his wooden travelling box. He seemed surprised when he was detained.

  Lieutenant David Lamb, head of CID, proceeded to Princes Street, incredulous, no doubt, but bound to make investigation. The large wooden box loomed in the empty back room. Two boards on the top were loose. He prised them open and saw within a layer of bedclothes. Underneath were female legs and feet. The police surgeon, Dr Templeman, was called out urgently, and he found that the naked body was lying on its back, doubled up. The legs were folded and the right leg was broken. There were a large number of cuts and slashes across the abdomen and one at least was very deep because there was an extrusion of viscera. The neck was bruised and a piece of ‘cord’, with hair caught in it, was found in the room and also a bloodstained knife, with little attempt at concealment. Small fragments of what seemed to be burned cloth (never explained) were recovered from ashes in the grate.

  The remains of Ellen Bury were removed to the mortuary for post-mortem, at which, quite probably photographs, now long since lost, were taken. We come now, as promised, to the writing on the wall, which still brings with it a sort of resonance of terror if we pause to think about it. Euan MacPherson has the exact location: ‘There was a back entrance to the tenement block which comprised a stairway and an old door, and on that door Lieutenant Lamb found the words JACK THE RIPPER IS AT THE BACK OF THIS DOOR. At the turn of the stair, (also?) in chalk, was a further message JACK THE RIPPER IS IN THIS SELLAR.

  Now, either William Bury wrote these words, or someone else did so. It is well known that Jack the Ripper graffiti appeared all over the kingdom and beyond. However, the coincidence that some daft scribbler chose the exact spot where a rippering had been done or was to be done (for we do not know how long the writing had been there) is hard to swallow. Bury could read and write. The strongest possibility is that he wrote the words himself, and about himself, as a perceived other person, in a very frightening, insane outburst. There is no point in saying that it is a hoax on his part, when a real woman lay dead and mutilated behind the old dark door. It is possible that, although his befuddled mind had not worked it out properly, he was trying to suggest that Jack the Ripper, not he, had committed the murder.

  On March 28th 1889, William Henry Bury was put up at the Dundee Circuit Court before Lord Young. He pleaded Not Guilty, still adhering to his ludicrous story of his wife’s suicide. Insanity was not pleaded and it would have been a hopeless endeavour in that climate. The Crown produced a peculiar forgery, the work of the accused, which purported to be a contract between him and Malcolm Ogilvy and Co., merchants of Dundee, its terms stating that Bury was to be employed for seven years at £2 per week, and his wife, if she so wished, for £1 per week. It is not divulged for whose eyes this paper was intended.

  Dr Templeman gave his version of the sequence of the attack on Ellen Bury. A blow on the side of the head, as evidenced by bruising, was severe enough to have caused a loss of consciousness. She was stabbed and mutilated before dying from strangulation by the rope. For the defence, two doctors argued that the strangulation was of a suicidal nature and that the wounds had been inflicted after death. One hapless doctor, named Kinnear, admitted during cross-examination that he was of only five months’ qualification, and had never seen or heard of a case of suicide by strangulation! (Taylor: ‘This method of suicide must be regarded as of rare occurrence, but there is no doubt that it is quite possible to strangle oneself by means of a ligature.’)

  The jury convicted unanimously, but added an unexpected recommendation to mercy. Lord Young enquired the grounds, wondering, perhaps, if they agonised about Bury’s mental state, and the foreman, (flustered, perhaps) replied that it was due to the conflicting medical evidence. Fierce, now, the judge refused to accept the rider, and sent the jury back until they returned with a plain verdict of Guilty. It was that same Reverend Gough, who had turned him away, who chose, or was chosen, to minister to Bury in the condemned cell. A reprieve failed, and Bury wept for hours. On the appointed day, he rose at 5.00am, ate his breakfast, and lit a cigarette. ‘This is my last morning on earth,’ he addressed a warder. ‘I freely forgive all who gave false evidence against me.’ The Reverend Gough, according to the newspapers, revealed, as he left the prison after the execution, on April 24th 1889, that Bury had left a written confession in which he admitted that he had killed his wife and then mutilated her body. He was not going to admit to mutilating her first, was he?

  It is stated in the Scots Black Kalendar that Bury made a detailed confession and it or a supplementary document (it is not clear which) was forwarded to the Home Office, and that it contained some startling revelations on the Whitechapel murders, never made public. Additionally, ‘He was well known in the East End of London, and several of his landlords gave him a bad character, while bloodstains were found in his rooms.’ How like a much more famous ‘Lodger’ of bad character, Dr Forbes Winslow’s candidate for Jack the Ripper, the nocturnal G Wentworth Bell Smith, given to hanging his bloodstained shirts on the towel-horse!

  Although told about the crime, Scotland Yard, inundated with information about Jack the Ripper suspects, showed no interest, and no officer travelled to Dundee to interview William Bury. It had been suggested in the New York Times of February 12 th 1889, that Bury was a likely Ripper who had murdered his wife because she suspected his identity. Donald Fraser (who does not believe that Bury was Jack the Ripper) finds that neither the ‘confession’ nor the ‘writing on the wall’ were mentioned at the trial.

  Theoretically, there is no reason why Jack the Ripper, if a married man, supposing that he had not lost the taste for slaughter, left the country, committed suicide, or been placed in an asylum, should not have turned on his own wife in his own home. Killing Mary Jane Kelly in her room at Miller’s Court might not have been the apogee of his animus against women. The difference in modus operandi (for the real Ripper, having, it is thought, strangled his victim, always cut the throat) could be explained along the lines that you would approach your unsuspecting (or even suspecting) wife in a different way from a prostitute in a dark alley. But it still does not feel right.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE QUEST FOR NORAH

  When my husband, Richard, (delving into the rows of books which spread like the rhizomorphs of the dreaded honey fungus along the corridors of our house) first drew my attention to the Farnario case – as appeared to be the spelling of the name – I was surprised to find that there was no single book devoted to so interesting and promising a mystery. I also could not understand why it was not better known outside Scotland.

  The locus was the island of Iona (or Icolmkill) in the Inner Hebrides, and I remembered seeing a television programme which celebrated its numinous, and, yes, luminous atmosphere, a sacred place to which the spiritually seeking young, especially, are drawn, and where some older in-comers have settled, unable to leave, rooted in a sense of purity and meaning in life.

  My first source was Alisdair Marshall’s Scottish Murder Stories. On the front cover, in strong black and white, there is a drawing of a young woman lying dead on a moor. Her hair streams back on-end from her brow and her face is frozen in a mask of fear. Her dark robe is decorated with pentagrams and planets. One hand is c
lenched in a death rigor, the other grips a long-bladed knife. In the background, a couple of crofters and a collie dog, with sticks for searching, are walking away towards a level bay and seagulls. They have not yet found her.

  The facts which I gleaned from Alisdair Marshall’s splendid, colourful essay, entitled Psychic Murder?, were that in the autumn of 1929 (his 1928 must, I think, be a misprint) an eccentric woman, named Norah Emily Farnario, came to Iona, where she boarded on a croft. The island was at that time exceptionally isolated, two days’ travelling from Glasgow, with no roads, electricity, running water, daily papers, radio or telephone, but she wanted peace and serenity. Her home was in London, she was unmarried, aged 33, the daughter of an Italian academic and an English gentlewoman. In her appearance, she was singular and exotic, deliberately not in fashion, her hair worn in two long plaits, and her clothing Bohemian, arty-crafty, hand-woven in vivid dyes. Hair was raven-black and eyes were deep and intense.

  On Iona she was thought (at first, perhaps) to spend most of her time writing poetry, but in London she had been involved in spiritualism, theosophy, thought-reading and faith healing. More importantly, she had been a member of the Alpha and Omega occult group, and had been an associate of Mrs Mathers, medium and sister of the philosopher, Henri Bergson. Samuel Liddell Mathers, husband of Mrs Mathers, was a leading light of another group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

  Her hosts on the croft naturally found her somewhat strange. She spoke of visions, spiritual healing and messages from the spirit world. At night she kept two oil lamps alight in her room, but they did not prevent the ornate silver jewellery which she wore all the time from mysteriously turning black. She liked to roam the island on her own and her favourite hidden place was a marshy spot surrounded by steep rocks, thought to be the site of a pre-Christian village. Here, with the spirits of the dead, she spent many lonely hours, apparently impervious to the chills of autumn.