Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Mr Smith’s sister-in-law described Mrs Smith’s ‘hysterics’. Once she had taken her out of church in that state, and the fit had made her insensible so that she forgot she had been in church and could not speak correctly, even the second day. (There is an organic tinge to these symptoms: surely there was not one epileptic in the jury box and another in the dock!)

  The presence of droves of rats at the farm was a vital issue for the defence, in order to justify Mrs Smith’s acquisition of arsenic and also to suggest an available means for Margaret Warden to kill herself, but the Crown brought a number of witnesses to deny sight of even a whisker at the relevant time. Rats had, probably, damaged the horse-harness, but that was ‘last Whitsunday’.

  Mr Lyon Alexander, surgeon of Dundee, was brought to show that Mrs Smith had been incompetent to make a true declaration. Called out in a great hurry to Denside on October 2nd, he had found her in a state of ‘stupor and insensibility’ and ‘talking of persons as present who were not’. It appeared to be a ‘violent nervous attack’ and he did not consider that she was in a fit state to be examined on suspicion of having committed a crime. Temporary loss of memory would have been a feature. He had administered antispasmodics, and left. When he saw her the next evening, in prison, she was vague about what had passed the night before. Her friends told him that she had received a severe nervous shock during the day on hearing that a grandchild had nearly drowned. Another medical man, John Crichton, surgeon of Dundee, examined Mrs Smith in gaol, two months later, and found her in convulsions, foaming at the mouth with attendants applying hot flannels. If he could give the complaint a name, he would call it violent hysteria, approaching to epilepsy. She could not speak coherently, and in his considered opinion, she was not feigning the symptoms.

  Unimpressed, the Court let in the two declarations, against which her counsel had fought a strong yet losing battle. In the end, though, they proved to have done her little harm. The case for the Crown was closed and the Defence began to call witnesses about rats. There was no parade of 48 witnesses to show Margaret Warden as a suicide. Andrew Murray, the ratcatcher referred to in Mrs Smith’s second statement had been drawn to court by the inducement of a curious advertisement inserted in the Dundee Advertiser of January 25th: ‘To the benevolent’ it was headed, and it ran on: ‘Andrew Murray, Rat-catcher is particularly requested to call at Mr Smith’s, Farmer [etc.]. All his expenses will be paid.’ Mr Smith, and his agents, MacEwan and Miller, writers in Dundee, also asked for information regarding a middle-aged woman, lately travelling in Fife, selling matches, accompanied by a ten-year-old boy carrying, like Marcel Proust seen entering a brothel, a white mouse in a box.

  Murray testified that he had left some rat poison, consisting of arsenic, anise (aniseed), and oatmeal at Denside when he had been there ‘in the way of business’ some three and a half years previously. Two years later, he had been to the Mill of Affleck, then owned by Mr Smith, and had left some medicine with Mrs Smith at that time. Called in by the advertisement, he had recently found traces of vermin at Denside – ‘the small Scots rat, and mice siclike’ – but he had not actually seen any. It does seem that Murray was scarcely worth the advertisement, and damaging, to boot.

  Mrs Hamilton, an itinerant pedlar of odds and ends, was the wanted woman, and she, too, had been persuaded to testify that she knew Margaret Warden well. She had been a frequent caller at Denside, where Mrs Smith had allowed her to sleep in the barn. Margaret had confided in her, weeping and imploring. What was she to do, being not able for her work, and she had got rough usage from her own mother and brother on a former occasion? Come, now, the pedlar had comforted her, a mother’s heart was aye kindly, and she would be the first to pity her. No, no, the girl had said, she would be tossed and handled in the way she was before and she would put an end to herself.

  The boy with the mouse in the cage was not prodillea, but Mrs Smith’s agents had found Robert Easson, merchant of Broughty Ferry, who remembered that a boy had come to his shop on the Monday or Tuesday of the week in which Margaret died, and asked for twopence-worth of arsenic, which was refused. The implication was, of course, that the girl had sent him on that errand.

  The tests as proving the presence of arsenic were attacked with great fire by the defence. It was a rehearsal for the later great arsenic trials such as Madeleine Smith. There was, too, the matter of yellow particles found in the deceased’s stomach, where white arsenic might have been expected. Professor Christison considered that white arsenic might have been converted into the yellow, sulphuretted form by a chemical process after death. (The reader may recall that in my previous volume, Scottish Murder Stories p.54, I said that I had searched in vain for such a case, although I had learnt from Taylor that the change was known to occur.) The yellow specks did not benefit Mrs Smith, anyway, because she had admitted to Jean Norris that she had ‘King’s yellow’ in her possession.

  Calm and collected, showing no signs of hysteria or epilepsy, she sat like a thinking statue, listening to all the evidence. The Lord Advocate began his closing speech at 11 o’clock at night, and he spoke for two hours. As the day died and the lights were brought, one of the candles placed on the rim of the dock flickered in a cross-draught and ran down unevenly on one side, whereupon Mrs Smith coolly kept lifting the candle and turning it round.

  Sir William Rae came to the matter of the rats, and mentioned that Murray’s small, black Scots rat was, in fact, extremely rare in Scotland! If, he went on, it were argued that Mrs Smith was only guilty of an attempt to procure abortion, the word ‘arsenic’ alone was a sufficient answer: no one could use that without a deadly purpose. (That, however, as we have seen, was not always the case.) The dead girl’s rank in life precluded the notion that she had felt her shame to be worse than life. (An interesting social comment, but the better view, if pushing for suicide, was surely that she despaired because she felt abandoned by all who should have cared for her.)

  It was a weakness in the Crown case that there was a vagueness attached to the exact times of the administration of arsenic, not to mention the quantity, and Jeffrey, for Mrs Smith, vigorously milked this grey area. His speech lasted for another two and a half hours. He asked the jury to marvel at the calm and cheerful manner in which his client had ministered to the dying girl, day after day. (But that, of course is the art and conduct of the classic poisoner.) He referred to Mrs Smith’s previous good character. He still clung to the original diagnosis of cholera and pooh-poohed the wonders of science – blunders, more likely. Six witnesses had spoken of suicide. Rats there were at Denside. Mystery befogged the case. Not Proven would be the just verdict.

  By now, it was 3 o’clock in the morning. The jury had been listening for 18 hours. When the judge began his charge, they struggled to their feet, but, contrary to custom, they were not told to resume their seats and were forced to stand for two and a half hours. Such a feat of endurance was thought to have coloured their response to the judge’s admonitions. The Lord Justice-Clerk summed up against Mrs Smith, and when their ordeal was over, the jury expressed a wish to retire. They returned the following afternoon with a unanimous verdict of Not Proven. It was an unpopular result, and feelings ran high.

  Lord Cockburn in 1838, upon reading Lockhart’s Life of Scott, recorded in his diary these words: ‘Lockhart mentions Scott as having gone to see my old client, Mrs Smith, who was guilty, but acquitted, of murder by poison ... Sir Walter’s remark upon the acquittal was: “Well, sirs, all I can say is, that if that woman was my wife, I should take good care to be my own cook!” ’

  CHAPTER 26

  THE POSTMAN ONLY KNOCKED ONCE

  The watcher in the bracken had made himself a kind of deer’s ‘harbour’ or bed, but it was the tactics of warfare, not stalking, that he was employing. Since the hours of darkness, possibly all night, he had been waiting patiently. He was armed with a sawn-off shotgun, and he was wearing overalls. His lair was close enough – a few hundred yards – to the house in the Highlan
ds for him to be able to calculate exactly when all the members of the McIntyre family had gone out, except for Catherine, a housewife of 47, left all on her own and unprotected, expecting no sudden inrush of evil. Too close, and the Cairn terrier could have scented his adrenaline, and become suspicious. If only a more formidable dog had been around the place ...

  The husband, head shepherd on the Tombuie Estate, went off to work very early. The two daughters, Annie and Mary, were, in fact, on holiday in the Isle of Arran. Archie, the son, also a farm worker, said goodbye at about 8.00am, and as he walked along the road, he actually saw a movement in the four-foot-high bracken but thought that it was probably one of the deer. He walked on. The watcher had made a mistake, and, if challenged, he could well have used that gun.

  An alien predator loose in the peaceful countryside, Stanislaw Myszka, aged 23, was a deserter from the Polish Army in Exile. For a time, he had been resident at Taymouth Castle, by the shores of Loch Tay, near Kenmore, in Perthshire, which was in use as a resettlement centre for some 800 Polish soldiers who elected to stay in Britain after the war and build up new lives. They were beginning to find Scottish wives.

  Tower Cottage, the Mclntyres’ home, set high on the slopes of Bolfracks Hill above Loch Tay, could be seen from the castle. It was not an ordinary Highland cottage, being built in parts of differing design and materials around a stumpy, machiolated watchtower, once, by the look of it, a small fortress, but now far from impregnable. Myszka was undoubtedly familiar with the cottage and the nature of its occupants. Local knowledge must have drawn him there to its special feature – McIntyre was holding £90 in cash in readiness to pay it out in wages to the under-staff on the estate.

  That Friday, 26th September, 1947, Catherine McIntyre did not stop to wash up the breakfast dishes when her husband and son had gone, because she wanted to write a letter to her daughters before the postman called at 10.00am. He would take the letter away with him, since the isolated house was nowhere near a postbox. In the afternoon, she was going out to have tea with her friend, Mrs McKerracher, whose husband had a neighbouring farm. Her day was mapped out pleasantly. She sat down at the table in the kitchen and began to write ...

  Outside, the Polish soldier began to run and duck down the hill. He got to the door and knocked. The terrier yapped. Or perhaps he just burst in. He flourished his shotgun. His primary intent might have been robbery with whatever violence proved necessary and his victim may have hoped to survive. When he had finished, he returned to his lair and cleaned himself up as well as he could. The bloodied overalls came off and his brand new suit went on. It was thought that it was at this stage, not earlier, that he gave himself a ‘dry-shave’ and threw the razor-blade into the bracken. He decamped, with his spoils.

  At 10.00am, the postman called. There was no reply when he knocked, so he left the Mclntyres’ two newspapers on the step and continued on his round. At 5.15pm, Archie came home for his tea. The doors were locked, the dog was barking furiously outside and the newspapers were still on the step. He remembered that his mother had been planning to go out visiting, and thought that she must have been delayed for some reason. He sat down on the doorstep and began to read one of the newspapers. At 5.30pm, McKerracher appeared, somewhat worried, saying that Mrs McIntyre had never turned up for tea. They wondered if she had had an accident in the house.

  Archie fetched a ladder and climbed through the kitchen window. All was silent, and wrong. The breakfast dishes were still in the scullery sink, unwashed, and the letter to the girls lay, unfinished, on the table, stopped in mid-sentence. He searched the first floor, then the second, calling for his mother. The door to his own bedroom was locked, which did not make sense. He fetched an axe and broke the door down. Mother was lying dead on one of the beds in his room, with a mattress taken from another bed squashed on top of her body. Her hands and feet were tightly tied with black bootlaces, and she had been gagged with a scarf. Finally, her head had been severely battered in a murderous attack.

  The police were called out. Blunt old black cars began to mass outside the towered cottage. One of Archie’s suits had been stolen from his wardrobe and the shepherds’ wages had gone, of course. Archie recalled the movement in the bracken, and the hideout, sown with its clues, was quickly discovered. The razor-blade was there, and part of a bloodstained handkerchief. Nearby, a local constable found the shotgun, in pieces, with the butt stained with blood; two cartridges; and a pair of overalls covered with blood. Also found, was a railway ticket stamped Perth to Aberfeldy, dated for the previous day, which was identified by railway officials as of the type issued only to soldiers in uniform. Taymouth Castle immediately sprang to mind, and, using a team of interpreters, the police began to question all the Polish soldiers who had been billeted at the centre.

  There was no description of a suspect to go on, but details of the shotgun were broadcast, and a gardener who lived at Old Meldrum, in Aberdeenshire, thought that he recognized it. He had recently lent just such a gun to a farm grieve, who had found it missing when he wanted to use it. The police went to interview the gardener and the grieve, and learnt that a Pole named Stanislaw Myszka had been employed on the farm there, before moving south to Perth in search of a new job, during the week of the murder. After a few days, he had returned to Old Meldrum with a new suit, and he seemed to be in funds, although there was no sign of a job. The grieve and his wife identified the fragment of a bloodstained handkerchief as part of one which they had given to the Pole.

  A taxi driver might have carried Myszka from Aberfeldy to Perth: he remembered a foreigner who looked as if he had been sleeping rough and paid his fare from a thick roll of banknotes. This could have been the same man who had been spotted coming out of a wood, before taking a bus to Aberfeldy. A girl from Ardallie, newly married to one of the Polish soldiers based at Taymouth Castle, reported that a friend of theirs, called Stanislaw Myszka, who had been chronically short of money, had suddenly taken them on a shopping spree.

  The now named fugitive was caught by two constables after a chase through a disused RAF airfield at Longside, near Peterhead, where he had been sleeping in one of the disused huts. The photograph of Myszka under arrest, in handcuffs, shows a very young, small, pinched, ratty man, hunched and stumbling, wearing a large, pale cap and a strained, striped suit of ‘demob’ cut, obviously not his. At the police station, Catherine McIntyre’s gold wedding ring was found hidden in his shoe.

  Professor John Glaister conducted the post-mlStem at Perth. His findings were that ‘Death resulted from fracture of the base of the skull, with subdural haemorrhage, the result of very considerable violence, together with superimposed respiratory embarrassment.’ There were four deep lacerated wounds on the head. Beard hairs were noticed on the razor-blade which Myszka had discarded in the bracken. Professor Glaister had a special interest in hair and had indeed published A Study of Hairs, in 1931. He asked for samples of Myszka’s shaved hairs to be brought to him from Perth Prison and compared them, mounted on slides, with the original shaved hairs. All were fair to very light brown and ‘their gross and detailed structural characteristics matched’. Before DNA, it was only possible to state that hairs were ‘consistent with a common source’. Hair was not so accurate as fingerprints for purposes of identification. The perameters of its use were carefully defined at Myszka’s trial at Perth.

  The special defence of insanity had been lodged but it was an uphill struggle because this was a clear murder for gain. Possibly there was an element of mental disturbance in the man due to war trauma, loss and deprivation, and anomie in a foreign land, but of course his compatriots at the Castle had suffered similar misfortunes and they had not gone on the rampage. It was said that he had been made ill by worry after hearing that his children, who had been living in France, were to be repatriated to Poland. He was hanged at Perth on February 6th, 1948.

  CHAPTER 27

  BRUTALITY

  ‘Tarzan’ was what they called James Keenan around the street
s of Lanark in 1969. It must have been said ironically, because, although he went in for weight-lifting and was presumably strong and muscled, he was a small man, about five feet tall. One feels that his size was a formative element of his personality, as evidenced by his choice of a compensatory hobby. In his photograph, which is very striking, he does not look like a murderer, his face fine and thin, his eyes very dark, melancholy, a Chatterton one could have believed, without knowledge.

  His relatives, as reported, all concurred on the harmony of his marriage. At the time of the tragedy, people who knew the couple seemed to be reluctant to speak out. Someone must have been aware that they were disagreeing over the upbringing of their child – if that, offered by Keenan, were the real source of trouble – and someone must have suspected that he had a short fuse. Not that anyone outside the vortex could have prevented the outcome. The crime was said to have been out of character but that is the nature of matrimonial murder! ‘The privacy of marriage is a shocking thing. We try to present our own, particularly if we are women, in a good light, or, if men, in no light at all. We struggle not to listen to the secrets of other people’s marriages. Thus marriages live in isolation, sometimes becoming, for want of compassion and criticism, more bizarre, more cruel, more wild or more eccentric, than any of us can possibly imagine.’ (In Hilary Bailey’s Mrs Mulvaney.) There does seem to be a measurable period of premeditation in fetching an axe and killing your wife with it. An argument over the correct way to bath the baby scarcely seems provocation for such a brutal murder.