Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Harmless trespassers, seeking respite as they were, the Collin pair felt obliged to state their business, but there was no sign of life at the lighthouse and the two keepers’ cottages. Apparently the lighthouse was not continuously manned during the hours of daylight, because Collin assumed, at first, that one man was out fishing, and the other sleeping. A telephone rang from time to time. At 4 o’clock, on the brink of leaving with the tide, feeling slightly uneasy, he made one last reconnoitre, and boldly looked through a rear window. A still, human form was lying on a bed, under the bedclothes, with just the head showing.

  Collin ran round to the front of the cottage and entered. ‘What’s the matter?’ he called out, but there was no reply. He approached the body of the man and found no pulse and the hand cold. He removed the towel which was draped over the head, and underneath it there was a great deal of blood. Three pieces of rope lay on the bed, there was more on the floor, and a pool of blood. Outside, he told his son to try to get the attention of one of the fishing boats which were bobbing in the bay, and then he used the telephone in the lighthouse to call the police and a doctor.

  Robert Milligan, a Kirkcudbright fisherman, was out that day, and he spotted young Collin waving frantically from the rocks. He came ashore, and soon identified the dead man as Hugh Clark, aged 62, relief lighthouse keeper, a native of Dalry, Castle Douglas. A World War I veteran, he had been a postman for 40 years. The three living men standing on that island searched in fear for the other keeper who should have been there – Robert McKenna Cribbes Dickson, a young man, 24, who was in charge of the lighthouse while the principal keeper, John Thomson, was away on holiday with his wife. Collin’s son examined the lighthouse logbook, and found that the last entry had been made at 3.00am on the previous morning. There was a .22 rifle lying against a wall in a storeroom, but it turned out to be unconnected with events.

  The situation was beginning to feel like the great mystery of the Eilean Mor lighthouse, located in a much more lonely environment right out in the Atlantic Ocean, 25 kilometres west of the Hebridean island of Lewis. Lashed by gales on the most northern of the seven Flannan Isles, known as the Seven Hunters, Lord Cockburn would have found this a major light! It was completed in 1899. On Boxing Day, 1900, the tender Hesperus landed a relief keeper, together with stores and belated Christmas presents. She was a week late, after heavy storms. Normally she came every six weeks.

  Here, too, as at Little Ross, there was no sign of life. Three keepers had vanished from the face of the rock. Their boat was still in its cradle. Two sets of oilskins and sea boots were missing, but the third was intact. The last entry in the log was dated December 15th. There had been a fierce, destructive gale. Later, too late, it was discovered that a freak wave would occasionally wash over the west landing.

  A fisherman’s launch, quickly scrambled, now brought to Little Ross two police officers and a doctor. When Dr Rutherford turned the body over to examine the back of the head, a bullet fell out of the left eye socket. There were a couple of bullet holes in the bedhead. It was not a case of suicide, with three head wounds, decidedly not self-inflicted. Clark appeared to have been shot while asleep. His legs were sticking out of the bed in an odd way, but the doctor thought that this was the result of a reflex action. Death had occurred about 10 hours before the body was discovered.

  Glasgow detectives, called in to assist, estimated that bullets had been fired from a shortened rifle, because the direction of the shots was from the narrow space at the window side of the bed where there was very little room to move. The angle was tight. The ropes seemed to be part of an abandoned plan.

  The theory that Dickson, too, had been murdered by a third party who had then vanished from the island, spiriting away the second corpse, never got off the ground, although, at that stage, nothing to Dickson’s detriment was current. John Thomson, the principal keeper, considered him to be a good, responsible employee, on cordial terms with the murdered man. Mrs Thomson had noticed that he did not talk much, but he often had coffee with them, and he was ‘very helpful with feeding the chickens’. Thomson interrupted his holiday to return to the lighthouse and found that his .22 rifle was missing, and about £30 had been taken from his cash-box, on which, in due course, Dickson’s fingerprints were verified.

  Dickson as he fled had left a trail of hot clues. Dr Rutherford had placed the murder at about 6 o’clock in the early hours of Thursday, August 18th. The young man had then rowed off in Hugh Clark’s dinghy, which was found ‘tied up perpendicularly’ on rocks at Manor Hole in Ross Bay on the mainland. Its precarious position showed that it had been beached at high tide, which was given as between 4.00 and 6.00am. In fact, the plane of the boat was so steep that the outboard motor touched the rocks below.

  Moving on to Ross Farm, where Hugh Clark had kept his old 10hp Wolseley car when he was on duty, Dickson drove off in the vehicle without being heard. Mrs Catherine Leslie, who lived at the farm with her son, seeing the car gone, knew that Clark had not taken it, because two ancient overcoats which he used to cover the tyres to protect them from the sun, were strewn across the road instead of being neatly folded on the grass at the side. Robert Maxwell, a dairyman employed at Ross Dairy actually saw Dickson drive past in Hugh Clark’s car at 9.10 on the Thursday morning. This seems rather late. The distances were not great. Had he been sitting and thinking somewhere, stunned?

  Worse, he had then crashed the old grey car, colliding with a van in Maxwelltown, and had given the van driver his real name on a scrap of paper – ‘R. Dickson. Ross Lighthouse’. The following afternoon, the Wolseley was found abandoned in Summerville Road, Dumfries. Before 9.10 on the Thursday, however, Dickson had engaged in some proactive doings; he had telephoned a car-hire company in Dumfries, giving his name as Thomson, and arranged to hire a car for two days. Later that morning, he turned up and collected a Hillman Husky, producing a driving licence in the name of John Thomson. He seemed to have a great deal of cash in hand as he paid out the requisite £7. Off he drove, many miles south-east across the Pennines as far as Selby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Perhaps he was making for the coast and a passage abroad.

  What he had not allowed for was the unscheduled arrival of the bank manager on the island. It emerged that mail and supplies were delivered to Little Ross every Wednesday. George Poland, a fisherman of Kirkcudbright, had performed that service for the Lighthouse Commissioners for 20 years, and on the day before the murder, on his regular visit, he had handed two registered letters to Dickson, who, we may remember, was keeper in charge for the time being. One envelope contained Hugh Clark’s wages, the other, money for paying the tradesmen. Dickson had opened the first envelope and handed Clark his cash. The older man had put it in his pocket. Theoretically, then (and the attack could have been deliberately timed for an early Thursday morning) Dickson had a whole week in which to escape before George Poland came again. The reality, however, must have been that it would soon have been noticed that the lighthouse was unmanned, and we have the detail that the telephone was ringing and not being answered. How often did those ‘tradesmen’ call from Kirkcudbright, anyway?

  The description of the hired car and the missing man was circulated nation-wide. At 8.15am on Friday the 19th, two constables on duty in Yorkshire stopped the Hillman Husky. PC John Lister opened the car door and took hold of the driver’s hands. He seemed very surprised to be apprehended, but freely admitted that he was Robert Dickson. When cautioned, he said, ‘All right, I know all about it.’ There was a loaded rifle between the front seats. The barrel had been shortened and the wooden butt had been sawn off just behind the trigger. They found a quantity of ammunition in the car and there was over £80 in cash in Dickson’s pockets, together with John Thomson’s driving licence. The principal keeper identified the rifle as his .22, and said that it had been sawn into three pieces. The sawn-off butt of a rifle was discovered in a cupboard in the lighthouse workshop.

  On November 27th, 1960, Robert McKenna Cribbes Dickson w
as brought up at the High Court in Dumfries before Lord Cameron, charged on indictment with capital murder and thefts of (inter alia) the victim’s car, boat and wages. He pleaded Not Guilty. Chief Detective Inspector Thomas Joyce of the Glasgow CID, who had led the investigation, stated that Dickson held a Royal Navy educational test certificate, but his service was described on discharge as ‘fair’. His background was beginning to become clear. The defence brought extensive psychiatric evidence. Dr Andrew Wyllie, superintendent of Aberdeen Royal Mental Hospital, testified that he had first seen Dickson in 1957 after he had taken an overdose of aspirins on his way back to the navy after being absent without leave. He gave a history of falling from a horse followed by severe headaches. There had been tears as he recounted his history, admitting to a period in an approved school and theft of a car, and as he spoke he went through the motions of smoking without a cigarette. His diagnosis had been that of psychopathic personality and he had been treated as a voluntary patient at the hospital. Dr Wyllie now described him as ‘episodically on the borderline of insanity with reactions which were abnormal under conditions of stress’.

  Dr John Cochrane, a prison doctor, had found Dickson coldly indifferent and unaffected by his situation even when confronted by the gravity of the crime charged and the possible penalty. The superintendent of Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, Dr Angus McIven, who had also been asked to have a look at the prisoner, similarly inclined to the diagnosis of psychopathy bordering on insanity. (CDI Joyce had found Dickson quite lucid and intelligent with nothing abnormal in his behaviour, but he did notice that his general conversation was about motor cars – not, one would have thought, an appropriate topic for someone in his predicament.)

  Lord Cameron bent over backwards to ensure that the defendant’s mental state was fully ventilated, himself asking the principal keeper, ‘Was there any sign of his being a brooding type of man or a melancholy one?... Was he in any way irrational or did he appear to act abnormalism any way?’ The answer to both questions was in the negative. Dr Edgar Rintoul, who had conducted the post-mortem, testified that the bullets had been fired from a range of about six inches; there were two major injuries, and a suicide would have been incapable of inflicting the second one. The deceased had offered no resistance, which ruled out accident during a struggle.

  The Advocate-Depute, in his closing speech, referred to the shooting as a cold, calculated, deliberate, brutal, blackhearted murder, which took the jury back hundreds of years to the type of crime that was committed when people were far less civilised. In his summing up, Lord Cameron contributed to the case the memorable phrase that Dickson had left his trail ‘blazing round the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright’.

  The jury speedily returned a majority verdict of Guilty and Dickson was sentenced to be hanged at Saughton Prison, Edinburgh, on December 21st. However, more than a hint of psychopathy had been uncovered, with a possibility of brain damage and he was reprieved five days before the date of execution, to serve life imprisonment. It is wrong to presume that psychopaths are too cold and remote to experience depression. They are, in fact just as likely as any other to commit suicide, upset by the consequences of their aberrant actions, or oppressed by the bleakness of being themselves. Dickson had already evinced a suicidal proclivity when stressed, and, two years into his sentence, he was found dead from a overdose of drugs in his cell at Peterhead Prison.

  CHAPTER 22

  MR KELLO’S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE

  The minister was on form that Sunday morning, when he preached a fiery moving sermon. The turning pebbles of his oratory fell in a silver shower on the bowed heads of his congregation. Mr Kello was transported, his face working with the ripples of the divine afflatus. Poor Mrs Kello was not in her pew, but that was only to be expected, because she had been ailing for some weeks. The minister had confided to certain people, in hushed tones, that his wife had been tempted to put an end to herself. Sick she had been, on and off, and he, too, lately.

  The homily over, the plain little kirk emptied and the parishioners went home to their dinner. Spott was just a speck of a village, its name meaning, indeed, a small spot of ground. Set between Dunbar and the sea, three miles to the north, and the rising, red-soiled Lammermuirs, with its own mound, Brant Hill, it had a dark history. In October, 1705, the Kirk Session minutes recorded, ‘Many witches burnt on the top of Spott Loan’ and that is where the last wailing witch in the whole of Scotland was done to death.

  Witchcraft was in the very air, and the absolute belief that the Evil One stalked the land froze the blood with fear of shadows. There is no evidence, only rumour, that John Kello was connected with witchcraft, or that he was a taker of witches. He himself was to swear that he had not been initiated in ‘wicked practises of the Magicienis’ and had no desire to probe beyond the given Word of God. If you can find a dusty old copy, there is in existence a fine, scary novel, Mr Kello, by John Ferguson (Harrap, 1924) which is based on the premise that he was entirely consumed by the occupation of not suffering a witch to live: ‘He lived behind a barred door in the dark, mournful study, where he wrote by sunlight and candlelight year after year upon The Discoverie of Satan – The Signs by which a Witch may be Condemned’.

  What really interested the minister of Spott, however, was his own temporal station in life. Edinburgh would have been more to his taste. A man of the people who had studied hard, an ornament of the reformed Kirk of Scotland, he felt that he was kept down and not receiving adequate respect or recompense. With a little money in hand, he began to dabble in investment in property, enjoying the ‘filthie ocker’ (interest), but his luck ran out and his affairs became complicated. He fretted and brooded.

  Meanwhile, the parish was glad to be served by the Reverend John Kello, who had bettered himself, a scholar to be sure, and a fine preacher, with an impeccable wife, Margaret (Thomson), also of humble origins, and their three children, Bartilmo, Barbara and Bessie. Alas! The family picture lied; Margaret blocked the minister’s ladder, and he had set his sights on the laird’s daughter. Secret like a worm in the recesses of his perfidious heart was the hope that he might succeed in marrying a real lady.

  Margaret had to die. He laid out rumours of her indisposition and her melancholy, like a scent, let it be known that he had made a will in her favour, as if he had a presentiment that he would predecease her, and watched for an opportunity. Forty days passed, during which the Enemy did not cease from tempting him, and after this significant period, he developed a mysterious illness which, with hindsight, he perceived as a sign from God. Pretending, however, that Margaret was similarly afflicted, he tried to poison her, but her constitution was so strong that she merely voided the substance.

  That Sunday of the resounding sermon, September 24th, 1570, afterwards, he asked some neighbours to come back to the manse with him, to cheer up Mrs Kello. She would appreciate the company. He accompanied them across the kirkyard to his front door, but found it locked from the inside. He appeared puzzled and concerned. There was another entrance, seldom used, which opened into his study, and he left the others to wait outside (just as William Herbert Wallace, five centuries later, caused his neighbours, witnesses, to wait while he went in to see if his wife, Julia, was all right).

  Soon they heard his ululations of woe, and, venturing, in, found their minister lamenting by the dangling, crook-necked figure of his wife, swaying on a rope suspended from a hook in the ceiling of her bedroom. The tableau of suicide spoke for itself, and sympathy washed over the widower and his motherless bairns. The real story was that John Kello had strangled Margaret Kello with a towel as she knelt at her devotions. ‘In the verie death,’ he confessed, ‘she could not beleive I bure hir ony evill will, bot was glaid, as sche than said, to depairt, gif her death could doe me ather vantage or pleasoure.’

  The Reverend Andrew Simpson, of Dunbar, had visited John Kello on his sickbed while his wife yet lived, and Kello had imparted to him a dramatic vision, or dream, or even hallucination, which he had ex
perienced, and when, now Kello went to him for comfort in his role of grieving, bewildered widower, Simpson suddenly became seized with a prophetic force. It was a great moment in the history of crime. He rose to his feet and addressed the shivering sinner:

  ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I doe remember quhan I visitate yow, in tyme of your grit seiknes, ye did open to me that visione; that ye war caried be ane grym man befoir the face of ane terrible Judge, and to escaip his furie ye did precipitate your self in ane deip river, when his angelis and messingeris did follow you with two-edged swords; and ever quhan thai struike at you, ye did declyne and jowke [dodge] in the water; while in the end, by ane way unknowin to you, ye did escape.’

  Sigmud Freud himself could have done no better as the Reverend Simpson launched into his analysis: John Kello was the author of the cruel murder then conserved in his heart, and he was carried before the terrible judgement seat of God in his own conscience. The messenger of God was the law of the land, before which he would be judged. The water in which he stood was his own vain hypocrisy.