Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Mr Simpson of Dunbar achieved some popular acclaim for this feat of interpretation, but when, seven years later, he foretold the loss of the local fishing fleet wrecked off Dunbar, unfairly, he was more blamed than approbated. John Kello, his secret disclosed, withdrew to consider his options. He could flee abroad or stay and face the music. If he repented privately, would that do? Mr Simpson pressed him so hard that in the end Kello believed that God spoke through him, and he voluntarily made his way to Edinburgh and there confessed his crime to the Bench and the Church. Condemned to be hanged and his body to be cast on the fire and burnt to ashes, he seems to have got off lightly, considering the ingenuity of the times, unless his cloth or his contrition saved him from worse penalty. Suspicion of witchcraft was undoubtedly attached to his name and he might have expected the flames on the hill.

  At first, his whole property was forfeit to the Crown, but by one of those rare ameliorations for which we anxiously scan the pages of history, the three children were allowed an inheritance. And so the minister of Spott was hanged in Edinburgh on October 4th, 1570, for the ‘crewell and odious murthure’ of his wife. How the mighty periods of his repentance rolled from the scaffold as he delivered his last homily, ‘to the great gude example and comfort of all the behalders’! He also left a posthumous confession. John Kello really takes the biscuit. To come to the pulpit with red hands, his wife left hanging from a hook, and preach a Sunday sermon, is unparalleled in hypocrisy. But was it hypocrisy to blame the temptations of the Devil – ‘Thir were the glistering promises whairwith Sathan, efter his accustomed maner, eludit my senses’ – when all around him shared his structure of beliefs?

  CHAPTER 23

  THE WHITEINCH ATROCITIES

  Sometimes a dreadful murder can illuminate the most unremarkable area and reveal the everyday lives of the hoardes of scurrying people, otherwise obscure, soon forgotten. The obvious example is Whitechapel at the time of Jack the Ripper. Such a place, although by no means a depraved slumland, was Whiteinch at the turn of the century. The name means ‘White Island’ and it is situated on the north bank of the Clyde, beyond Partick, some three and a half miles from the centre of Glasgow. It grew up around the great shipyards in the middle of the 19th century, after dredging of the area. Quite self-contained, Whiteinch had a distinctive identity of its own, and because of the employment created by shipbuilding, it was never a region of no hope.

  The inhabitants were mostly workers and their families, living in specially built ‘workers’ cottages’, and tenements. The whole district was informed with a spirit of self-improvement, with workers’ education, a good library, a public school, and Victoria Park with its grotto – a grove of fossils found on site in the mudflats when the park was being laid out. Some villas housed the lower management and professional classes such as engineers. Trams ran and a steam passenger ferry plied between Whiteinch and Linthouse.

  Here, at 1122 Dumbarton Road, at the foot of one of those classic, red sandstone tenements (now replaced by modern flats) lived 50-year-old Miss Lucy McArthur, who kept a small dairy, with the shop at the front, and the room which was her solitary home at the back. Providing a vital service to the neighbourhood, she had plenty of customers and the business was surprisingly prosperous. It was her mistake, in her innocence as a woman living alone and handling cash, to have made herself a target for evil by letting it be known that she had £500 to fall back on.

  On November 8th, 1904, early morning, her young ‘message girls’, Jeanie and Sarah Platt, knocked as usual at her shop door in order to collect the milk to deliver to her customers. There was no reply and the door was locked, which immediately alarmed them, because she was well known for her punctuality – the sort of person you could set your clock by. The girls went round for help to Mrs Macdonald, a neighbour who lived in the same close. She knew how to use the washing-house key to open the door. They peered inside. It was a scene of spattered blood and scattered bottles. Jeanie, the older girl, was sent to Whiteinch Police Office to report that something was wrong at the dairy, and Detective Inspector Mackenzie walked back to the shop with her and entered cautiously. There were signs of a mortal struggle and the drawers of the counter were open and empty.

  Behind the counter, in the corner by the window, lay the battered body of Miss McArthur, the skull very obviously fractured. The hands were tied with two pieces of old, plaited cord, and a red cotton handkerchief was tied around the neck. She had been dead for ‘several hours’. The inspector then entered the living premises, using the separate door in the close, which is not recorded as having been locked (for surely Miss McArthur intended shortly to return there). As he went in, he heard a tinkle, and, looking down, found the bloodstained key of the shop, outside on the threshold. In this inner room there was no disorder, only a tableau of sparse daily life. The gas light was still ablaze and the kettle had boiled dry on the gas burner at the fireplace, which was also still alight. A bullock’s head was in a pot on the fire. Apparently Miss McArthur had been preparing the delicacy known as potted head, possibly for her customers.

  The corpse was raised and placed on a stretcher, whereupon the broken handle of a small hatchet, bloodstained and with adherent human hair, was seen on the floor. The steel head of the hatchet, similarly stained, was lying on the top of a box nearby. It was a typical household axe of the type used for breaking coals or sticks, the wooden shaft about 12 inches long, and with a hammerhead as well as a blade. It turned out that Miss McArthur, who, after all, was not an old woman, had put her trust in a bank. There was no hoard under the bed. Her bank books were found in the shop, and they did indicate, however, that she must had had a considerable sum of cash lodged somewhere on the premises, which was now missing. Moreover, on the day before the murder was discovered, a substantial account had been paid out to her, and she had her rent money, too, in readiness. A couple of £1 notes were lying on the floor beside some articles of clothing, and £6 10s was undisturbed in a hatbox.

  The precise purpose for which Miss McArthur had withdrawn a considerable sum from the bank can only be a matter for conjecture. She could already have spent it. The assassin might have had some special knowledge that she was in funds. Whether or not he had searched her private room is not disclosed. One would surmise that she would have concealed a significant amount of money in the private premises, as in the hatbox (if that actually was in her room). Or did she by double bluff work out that the shop would be safer? Why did he tie her up and then kill her? Death must have come to her for psychological reasons – panic, excitement, frustration ... Of course, she had seen him and could identify him. Perhaps, indeed, she knew him.

  The likelihood is that he was a local man, since he knew the circumstances of his quarry, and since he must, like Jack the Ripper, have been covered in blood as he fled. He was helped by darkness. Miss McArthur had been engaged in a little speciality cooking by gaslight on the previous November evening, presumably before bedtime. Surely she would not in the normal course of events have opened up her premises in the middle of the night (unless she was forced into the dairy)? On the other hand, we know from Jack the Ripper researches that in poor areas people were coming and going all night long, back and forth to work, slaughtering horses, and doing a spot of cobbling in the back yard ...

  The police offered a reward of £200, but the murder remains unsolved to this day.

  Later, it was officially conjectured that the same hand could have struck down Miss Marion Gilchrist, aged 82, in that famous and considerably more upmarket case of December 21st 1908. The victim here lived alone except for a maid at 15 Queen’s Terrace, 49 West Princes Street, Glasgow and her circumstances seemed to be known to her killer. It was no secret that there was a treasure trove of jewellery kept in the flat. Detective Trench was asked to investigate the possibility that Oscar Slater, convicted and released after 18 years, had been involved in the Dairy Murder, but he found that Slater had not been in Glasgow at the relevant time. Anyway, the police valued an im
pression of a hobnailed boot found at the scene in 1904, and Oscar Slater was an out-and-out dandy.

  The Whiteinch tenements were under scrutiny again in the 1920s. A cruel and nasty murder took place, and although poverty, need, and greed were supposed to have been at the root of the crime, they scarcely seem sufficient explanation. Elizabeth Benjamin, whose life was to be cut short at the age of 14, lived with her family in Dumbarton Road, where her father ran a credit drapery business from their home. A photograph of the sad girl in her best clothes has survived: small, pinched face, worldly-wise; luxuriant hair crowned by a best quality, shiny bow; pale, cotton, long-sleeved dress, with a necklace (coral?), a round brooch at the neffiand a narrow, plaited belt. She smiles, pluckily, but her brow is anxious.

  The family was Jewish, and if the murder had not been so soon solved, a racial element might have been suspected. The contemporary newspapers made a point of mentioning that the girl was a ‘Jewess’. During the October of 1921, her father was ill, and she took on responsibility for the shop. Her elder sister, Esther, and her grown-up brother, Maxwell, both worked the tenements on a daily basis. On Mondays, the shop was closed, and Elizabeth trudged off on her own with a heavy suitcase packed with goods to sell on the doorstep. She was also charged with collecting customers’ instalments, so that she was steadily garnering small sums of cash. On October 31st, Elizabeth Benjamin did not go home. Her last known call was at 4.00pm.

  At 11.00pm, her family went to the police and reported her missing. Eight hours passed. At 7.00am, on November 1st, a woman found a girl’s body in the back green of a tenement at 67 George Street, and covered it with a cloth. A photograph taken on site shows the peculiar position of the corpse, lying right at the bottom of the court, parallel with the wall, and with the feet in long boots stretched out and awkwardly protruding a few inches through the side railings as if the distance had been misjudged. Detectives working with Professor John Glaister, and his son, found no signs of a struggle. The body had been brought to the stark place where it lay, because the ground underneath it was dry, while the clothing and area around it were damp. The wrists had been methodically tied after death, to fashion a kind of handle for transportation. There were several misleading head wounds, exposing the bone of the forehead, which had probably only stunned the girl. The actual cause of death was asphyxia, caused by a small pocket handkerchief, which had been tightly jammed down the throat. There was no indication of sexual assault – the girl was virgo intacta - although the skirt was pulled up around the waist, either in an attempt to suggest a sexual motive or as a result of sheer haste and panic in the hours of darkness.

  The body was removed to the police office, where Maxwell identified his murdered sister. The killers – for there were two – were not at all difficult to trace. Faced, as ever, with the problem of the disposal of the body in a crowded district, they had resorted merely to removing it from their home and dumping it in the court of the tenement in which they lived, in the full knowledge that the police would be bound to question them. The detectives soon concentrated their enquiries on a young married couple, William and Helen Harkness, living at number 67 with their little boy. Dr Sutherland, police surgeon, found bloodstains on their stairs and doorstep. The husband’s tool of his trade, a riveter’s reamer, bore stains which turned out to be human blood, as did those on the couple’s clothing and furniture. Seventy articles were taken to the forensic medicine department for examination.

  The police discovered the victim’s suitcase in a back court nearby. Her cash book was still inside it, and neatly showed that she had had £1 9s 8d in her possession. Maxwell said that when his sister had left home in the morning she had had £1 in silver. The women of Whiteinch had been paying over to her small sums ranging from 1s to 3 s 6d.

  William and Helen Harkness were arrested, and someone must have cared for their son. On January 30th, 1922, they were put on trial at the High Court of Justiciary, Glasgow. Although they had lived in low poverty, in spite of the husband’s trade at the shipyards, they look a spick enough pair in the dock, as if they are off to the dancing, he with wavy hair, she with pert features under a narrow-brimmed hat. The reality was, however, that both drank too much and they were badly in debt. The principal witness for the Crown was William Harkness’s own brother, John, who lived at Douglas Street. He was 33, two years older than William. AtlSrst he, too, had been co-accused of the murder and kept in custody for three months with the charge hanging over him. His story was uncorroborated and defence counsel, naturally, made much of that. Moreover, he had not formerly been on good terms with the Harkness couple. But he had helped them to dispose of the body.

  He stated that he had been at his mother-in-law’s home in Dumbarton Road on October 31st, 1921, when Helen Harkness (the accused woman) had called to say that brother Willie wanted to see him. This surprised him, since he was not on speaking terms with William and Helen. She asked him to join her for a drink in a public house where both had two glasses of whisky and he also drank half a pint of beer. She said she was in trouble and he agreed to go round to number 67. He arrived there at 8.00pm. Helen implored him, ‘Surely you will help us? He is your own brother, your own flesh and blood.’

  Then it was that William admitted that he had struck a woman on the head. They had been desperate for money. After all the trouble, they only got a pound and a few shillings. Helen said it was a lousy pound, and she would rather have had the factoress (rent collector to the tenement) and then they would have got about £50. They asked John Harkness to help them carry the body down to the Clyde or the canal. William took his brother to the washhouse and unlocked the door. Their light was just one candle, and a ‘bundle’ could be seen in the gloom, lying on the floor by the boiler, with the legs in their long boots sticking out.

  For some reason (by whose counsel?) there was a change of plan and the two men carried the body to the back court where it was found. William cleaned up the washhouse floor. John was asked to jump over the railings and dispose of another bundle in the ashpit of a nearby close: he chose number 69. Probably this was bloodstained clothing. The house was full of smoke. Helen had been burning something in a bucket. John put the fire out with water. For the first time he noticed that there was blood about the place. He opened the window to let the smoke out. During all this, William’s little boy was lying in bed. They showed John ‘the woman’s’ suitcase. William wanted to burn it, but John was against it. He was getting disgusted and said that he was going back to his mother-in-law’s. They stowed the suitcase in a common jute bag and put it in a back court several closes away.

  The following evening, John went back to his brother’s house. William handed him a newspaper, and for the first time he learnt that the ‘woman’ was a girl of 14. ‘I see that she was gagged,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ said Helen, ‘She was a strong little bugger. My legs are all black and blue where she kicked me.’ She had bitten William’s finger.

  That was the brother’s story, and the jury believed him. It was curious, perhaps, that no one had witnessed the suspicious activities and come forward to corroborate his account, but the reason might have lain in solidarity in the tenements. There was some trouble during the trial when the court adjourned for lunch, and John was assaulted in the tearoom. No witnesses were brought for the defence. Counsel for the wife said that there was no evidence that she had suggested the robbery, but there was no doubt that her husband had struck the girl. ‘Once you strike a blow, you have to finish it,’ he had told John Harkness. However, the expert evidence about the asphyxia was very telling: hard as the defence tried to show that the handkerchief was a gag, Professor Glaister decisively blocked suggestions that the girl in her struggle could have drawn it in accidentally. It was rolled up in a tight ball and jammed back in the throat.

  Husband and wife were both convicted of murder. He held her hand and patted her on the back as she cried when they were sentenced to death. For some reason, although she had, according to the evidence of John H
arkness, said some vixenish things, there was a unanimous recommendation of mercy for Helen Harkness, presumably because of her gender and the fact that she had a young child. She was reprieved on February 18th and spent 15 years in prison, before being released on March 3rd, 1937. William Harkness was executed on February 21st, 1922. When the appointed day dawned, he had to be woken by his warders. To the end, all his concern had been for his wife. As for his brother, he seems to have been a marked man: on New Year’s Eve, 1926, he was assaulted in a Glasgow bar, and died from his injuries the next day.

  CHAPTER 24

  DEATH OF A HERMIT

  The urge to leave family and home, if there is one, and set off on the open road as a tramp can indicate mental illness. From time immemorial, society has fluctuated in its tolerance, sometimes blessing the humble vagrant on his way, and sometimes seeking to cage him. These days, of course, the situation is complicated by drug abuse. If the individual happens upon a makeshift shelter which no one else wants, bearing a resemblance to a home that appeals to him, he will stay there for years if left in peace, gradually transmogrified into a hermit, growing increasingly anti-social, more like a nervous animal, avoiding by instinct those who would hurt his mind, wound his body, and deprive him of his small cache of treasures. His home becomes a blot on the landscape, noisome, shunned.

  In such insanitary conditions lived Old Mick in the bounds of Huntlygate Farm, on the outskirts of Lanark, in 1952. Michael Connelly, aged 79, was thought to have come over from Ireland at the turn of the century. Ugliness crouched in a corner of a mead. His tumbledown shack, six feet by four, propped up by branches, was open-sided and little more than a field-shelter for beasts. Corrugated iron, now thought somewhat chic, was a part of the construction, and dangling sacking, when not thrown up, provided a curtaining when needed over the yawning open wall.