There was never any dispute as to the cause of death. Dr McQueen, of Cumnock, conducted a post-mortem, and Professor Harvey Littlejohn found strychnine in the blood, stomach and liver of the deceased. The poison was in the icing, not the shortbread, and there was enough of it left to finish off several people. Very little of the shortbread had been taken from the tin – the dosage had been so severe and theCStiect so dire and immediate that there had been no opportunity for second helpings. The bitterness had nearly aborted the murderous plan, which had failed, anyway. Poisoners who used the postal method all shared a reckless disregard of the risk that others would be invited or tempted to taste the bait. Peckish Victorian servants in their sunless kitchens were particularly at risk.
The wrapping paper – discovered on the top of the boiler where the housekeeper had stowed it away – together with the label and the card, were preserved for scrutiny. Enquiries were made of chemists and it was soon proved by the poisons register that Thomas Mathieson Brown had purchased one ounce of strychnine from J W Sutherland of Frazer and Green, chemists, Buchanan Street, Glasgow. That was half a year before, on May 2nd, 1906. No more acquisitions of poison were traced to Brown. He told Sutherland that it was for rats, and the chemist, who had supplied him with his bromide for ten years did not doubt him. Later, he foreswore all knowledge of the complaint for which he was dispensing bromide.
Brown’s stated purpose for acquiring strychnine was to be soundly ridiculed. His GP, Dr Herbertson, was to testify, although only under cross-examination, that he knew that Brown had bought strychnine on more than one occasion to kill rats, but little notice was taken of this pearl of evidence. Mrs Brown kept hens, and rats were a problem. They always had ‘Rough-on-Rats’ on hand in the house. She and the maid used to spread the stuff on scones and put them down at the mouth of the rats’ holes. The formula for this proprietary rodenticide was barium carbonate and arsenic, lethal enough, one would have thought, but she knew that her husband had poisoned rats of his own accord for years. It was not within her knowledge that he used strychnine.
David Murray, a draper, the next-door neighbour fetched by Elizabeth Thorburn, when all were rigid at Woodside, had conceived a violent dislike and suspicion of Brown, and was to relate what seemed to him to be his sinister, unfeeling and inappropriate behaviour, which heavily told against him. It was the day after the tragedy, when the Browns were visiting Uncle William with their condolences on the death of his housekeeper. Apparently, Brown never looked Murray in the face, never mentioned the death, nor his best friend’s frightening illness, and paced the room, prattling about the mineral wealth of New Cumnock and the need for 2,000 new houses to be built. We know that it was his epilepsy that was speaking, but that was nothing to the draper, and he became annoyed and said sharply, ‘Mr Brown, death by strychnine is a hell of a death!’ whereupon he rushed to the window and complained that ‘the machine’ (just a car, surely?) was long in coming. As he grew more excited and incoherent he began to boast – nothing on earth had the power to upset him, even if pins were stuck into his body from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, and he had three bullets in him, put there by North American Indians. This babbling was supposed to be evidential of murderous guilt. Mrs Brown hustled him out of Uncle William’s parlour and took him home. She did not let him go to Miss McKerrow’s funeral – these occasions could bring on a fit, as could certain colours or even the sight of some people.
Unstable as he undoubtedly was, Thomas Mathieson Brown seemed the ideal suspect and weak links of circumstantial evidence were being forged together. Sergeant Harper came to arrest him on Wednesday, November 28th, when he was playing with the children. His house was searched, and, triumphantly, they found some icing sugar and a small pestle and mortar, in which there was a residue of white powder, but it was harmless and no strychnine whatsoever was traced at Ardnith House by plain means or chemical analysis. The chemist, in May, had told him to dispose of any that he did not use. Violet Lambie, the maid, owned to the icing sugar which she kept in the kitchen press, and none of it, she swore, could have been used without her knowledge. Indeed, a sufficient quantity to ice a cake of shortbread would have made a sizeable reduction in her store of the sugar. Mrs Brown was absolutely sure that her husband could not ice a cake. He took no interest in domestic matters, and she never saw a more helpless man in the kitchen.
The half-baked conjecture of the prosecution was that Brown bought the shortbread on the day and iced it in Glasgow, using a pre-prepared deadly mixture. It would have made more sense if the cake had been one that he had treated previously. There must have been some privacy at Ardnith House. True, no one saw him leave with a parcel, but, equally, no parcel was spotted when he was presumed to have bought the shortbread, first thing in the morning, before he had his bath. Just how big was the ‘tin box’? Much was left when four people had taken a polite piece. It had to be large enough to be produced as the pièce de résistance at the little soirée. I think that we can all envisage a typical tin of a flat cake of shortbread and it is not a small object.
Anyway, the provenance of the tin of shortbread was not satisfactorily established. The Crown was pretty sure that it came from the Argyle Street bakery supplied by William Skinner and Sons, Glasgow, but no assistant was brought to identify Brown as a customer early on the Monday morning. George Skinner, manager, was sure that the tin was one of theirs, as was the label, with Skinners’ address cut off, and the printed card for messages, and the brown paper wrapping. The ‘nipping’ around the edge of the cake was ‘similar’ to that done in their bakery. The icing had been put on by an unskilled hand. He had no reason to doubt that the cake had been made by his firm.
But wait! The man on the shop floor, James Moir, foreman baker, thought that, judging by the ‘nipping’, it was not a Skinners’ cake. Is he suggesting that some skilled hand packed a counterfeit cake into a Skinners’ box? He seemed happy enough that it was a Skinners’ box, since none of the firm’s rivals used boxes of that pattern. And then, his colleague, the foreman confectioner, could not say if it was verily a Skinners’ cake.
A ludicrous attempt was made to place Brown at the bakery. Euphemia Glass, manageress, produced the ribbons used in the cash register early on the Monday. The fourth entry showed a sale to the value of 2 s 4d. The price of a tin of shortbread of the relevant type was 2s 3d. A penny-worth of sweets, it was suggested, could account for the rounding-up. One would think that the fourth customer of the day could feasibly have been memorable. If Euphemia Glass had witnessed Brown in mid-transaction, demanding wrapping materials, that would have been a different proposition. Anyway, the sweets were not seen by anyone until he was on the express train. He could just as well have bought them at Cooper’s, or elsewhere.
No one saw Brown in the Kilmarnock post office, either. The postal markings on the killing parcel showed beyond a doubt that someone had posted it from there on the morning of Brown’s trip to town. Unhappily for the Crown, however, all the clerical staff at the post office stated that the markings showed that it must have been posted before 11.30am. William Dixon, chief porter at Kilmarnock Station, indubitably the right man to ask, swore that Brown’s 11.00am express from Glasgow arrived precisely at 11.30am.
The only direct evidence against Brown (and the trial judge is my authority here) was that relating to the handwriting on the label and the card. It was admitted by those defending him that there was an unfortunate resemblance between Brown’s handwriting and that on the label. The Crown brought two expert witnesses, an engraver and a lithographic writer, to say that he had, indeed written the label, and also the card, although in that latter case he had disguised his hand. The defence relied on a single, impressive witness, Dr Birch, handwriting expert at the British Museum, who opined that it was impossible to state that the label, the card, and specimen letters written by Brown were all in the same hand. The writing on the card was upright, that on the card backhanded, and it would not be safe to assume that one p
erson was responsible for both. However, Peter Dowie, Secretary of the Lanemark Coal Company, who knew Brown intimately, was certain that he had written the label. He could not say if he had written the message on the card. If it were his work, it was in a disguised hand.
Brown was incarcerated at Ayr, and, because of his known psychiatric history, two alienists – Dr John Carswell, Certifying Surgeon in Lunacy to the Glasgow Parish Council, and Donald Fraser, MO, Riccartsbrae Lunatic Asylum, Paisley, were brought in to examine him. They were admirably thorough, seeing him four or five times in all. So dark was their view of his mental state that he seems to bear small resemblance to the respectable husband and citizen, playing with the children at home and dealing with the shopkeepers of Glasgow.
Dr Carswell observed that Brown’s general aspect was excitable and impulsive – which would seem to be quite appropriate, since he knew that he was already indicted for the murder of Miss McKerrow – and that he saw everything from an unreal point of view, with his mental processes distorted. The case was absolutely incurable. Later, the doctor told the court that one of the most common influences contributing towards homicidal impulses was the fury that occurred in connection with epileptic attacks. No doubt, but epileptic furore simply does not explain the preparation and despatch of the poisoned cake, a project which was so conspicuously premeditated. There was no fit around the operative time, and we have to look to Brown’s delusional areas for a morbid motive for attempting to murder his best friend. No paranoid thoughts about Uncle William were ever elicited or surfaced spontaneously. All of those close to him stressed his normal and humane reaction to the death. William Lennox himself said that Brown seemed very sorry about what had happened, which contradicts Murray the draper’s impression.
The two doctors certified that Thomas Mathieson Brown was of unsound mind and not capable of pleading to the indictment. However, Brown strongly desired to plead Not Guilty and his law agent and counsel supported his wish to have a trial. On March 18th, 1907, his case was duly heard, but the jury returned a majority verdict that he was insane at the time of trial, and he was borne off to the fate which he had most shunned – tobea ‘Pleasure man’ at the Criminal Lunatic Department, Perth. Not unlike our modern Dr Shipman, he was described as a quiet, respectable-looking man of middle-age, who ‘presented no appearance of mental aberration except that he wore a beard’. He plainly conducted himself well in confinement, being conditionally released in May, 1907, when he was removed to the Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries. He died at Ayr County Asylum.
Brown’s case appears in Scottish law books, illustrating the principle that although the result of the act done may not be that which was intended, the perpetrator may still be guilty of a criminal act. Real doubts remain. The crystals of strychnine in the icing on the shortbread were found by the Edinburgh city analyst to be very small, and much smaller than those in the strychnine bought by Brown six months earlier. This assumes that he had kept and used precisely that supply for his murderous purpose. It was suggested that he pounded up the strychnine in a mortar and thereby reduced the size of the crystals. But can crystals be reduced in this way? My researches have shown experts to be divided on this crucial point.
Is it possible that a killer from Kilmarnock, man or woman, motivated by some old grudge, as in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, or driven by outright insanity, posted the poisoned parcel, and that it was coincidental that Brown was out and about on the same day? It was too easy to blame the neighbourhood epileptic who actually knew the intended victim. Prejudice was at work.
CHAPTER 25
THE LIGHT-HEADED CUTTY
1 ‘Flighty little trollop’ would seem to convey the spirit of the description.
‘Cutty’ is usually given as ‘a short stump of a girl’, sometimes used playfully.
2 Not traced. I suppose you could steep lozenge sweets in water, or wine, and make a kind of sweet cordial. Or, as a long-shot: fake, i.e. non-alcoholic wine, from losenger (obs.) – a deceiver.
Molly Whittington-Egan is a lawyer and full-time crime writer. She is married to the leading criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan and lives in the town of Malvern in a house crammed full of murder memorabilia. She has written several books on murder as well as co-authoring a number with her husband.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Khaki Mischief: The Agra Murder Case
Murder on the Bluff: The Carew Poisoning Case
Stockbridge Baby Farmer
Scottish Murder Stories
Jack l’éventreur
(a translation of the novel by Jean Dorsenne)
Dr Forbes Winslow: Defender of the Insane
With Richard Whittington-Egan
The Story of Mr George Edalji (Ed.)
The Bedside Book of Murder
The Murder Almanac
Murder On File
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First published in 2007. Reprinted May & November 2010.
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Classic Scottish Murder Stories Page 38
