Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Slater turned out to be very accommodating. He was willing to return to Scotland to answer the accusation. He knew he was innocent, could prove it and was positive that this ‘misunderstanding’ could be cleared up relatively easily. He could not know that the authorities were already determined to pin the murder on him and would stoop to any depth to secure his conviction. He could not know how close he would come to being hanged.

  The initial British court hearing was in the Edinburgh High Court on 3 May 1909, over four months after the murder. The police had by this time decided not only that Slater had committed the murder, but that he had committed it with a small hammer that he owned. They had also mustered a dozen witnesses who claimed to have seen Slater near Miss Gilchrist’s apartment on the day of the murder. This was hardly significant as Oscar Slater and Marion Gilchrist lived only four blocks apart.

  This evaporation of the evidence against Oscar Slater is another of the hallmarks of his case, especially in view of the apparent determination of the authorities to get a conviction. That Slater should have been seen a number of times on the streets of Glasgow two hundred yards from his own home could hardly be presented as significant evidence tying him to the murder, at least not in any trial that was fair. The pawn ticket turned out to be even weaker evidence against him. The defence lawyer was able to show that the pawn ticket belonged to a brooch pawned several weeks before the murder, so it could not possibly have been the one stolen from Marion Gilchrist. Similarly, the voyage to North America had been booked six weeks before the murder; it was very far from being a moonlight flit.

  Slater said in court that he had been at home with his girlfriend and her servant at the time when the murder was committed. This alibi was simply swept aside. The Lord Advocate, Alexander Ure, decided that Slater must be hanged. The jury was not so sure. It was not a unanimous verdict, but a majority found him guilty. Oscar Slater was sentenced to be hanged on 27 May 1909.

  There was widespread public disquiet about the verdict, and about the evident determination of the authorities to pin the murder on Slater. A petition for clemency was launched immediately, raising 20,000 signatures. Two days before the execution was due to take place, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, with hard labour. Slater escaped the gallows. He had his life, but he still had to endure a cruel and unjust sentence. Naturally he wanted to prove his innocence and get out of prison. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had read about the Oscar Slater case some years later in the book Notable Scottish Trials and had been struck then by the fact that Slater had been convicted on suspicion based on no more than prejudice; it had been based on no solid evidence whatever. Doyle did not approve of Slater as a person. He thought him a reprobate, but he was sure he had not committed the murder for which he was convicted.

  It proved a long, slow process and many people felt that even if he had not committed the murder he probably had something to do with it. He was an unpleasant person and he was generally regarded as immoral. Doyle took his time. He spent three years thoroughly researching the case and in 1912 produced a book called The Case of Oscar Slater. It went through all the evidence raised against Slater at his trial and showed, detail by detail, how it simply could not be made to prove Oscar Slater’s guilt.

  The matter of the assumed name, for instance, was less suspicious than it was made to appear in court for the simple reason that Slater was travelling with his mistress. Slater was trying to avoid being detected by his wife, not evading the police. Slater had indeed possessed a small hammer as mentioned in the trial, but it was far too small to have inflicted the wounds on Miss Gilchrist’s head. Doyle said that a forensic investigator at the crime scene had declared that a large chair, which was found dripping with blood after the crime, seemed by far the likeliest murder weapon. The matter of Miss Gilchrist opening the door and letting someone she knew into her apartment strongly suggested that the murderer was well known to her in some capacity or other. Oscar Slater and Marion Gilchrist did not know one another at all. Everything pointed away from Oscar Slater as the murderer.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book raised a storm of indignation against the injustice that had been done against Slater. Now many people were ready to demand either a pardon or a retrial. But the authorities were adamant that nothing was going to be changed. Even Doyle’s book made no difference as far as they were concerned. Then, much later, in 1925, William Gordon was released from Peterhead Prison; unknown to the authorities, Gordon was carrying a desperate message written on greaseproof paper, hidden under his tongue. The desperate message was Oscar Slater’s cry for help to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Slater hoped to reactivate his old ally and enlist his help in getting justice for him.

  Doyle was moved by this desperate plea and tried once again to help Slater. He fired off a fusillade of letters. But there was no new evidence that Doyle or Slater knew of. They were no further forward.

  But even after this long period, it was possible for new information to emerge. In 1927 a new book about the case came out, The Truth About Oscar Slater, written by William Park, a Glasgow journalist. Park decided, just as Doyle had done, that Miss Gilchrist had known her murderer and went on to speculate that Miss Gilchrist had had a disagreement with the man about a document that she possessed. Park inferred this from the fact that Miss Gilchrist’s documents had been disturbed and rummaged through, presumably by the murderer. During the argument she was pushed and hit her head. Her attacker then had to decide. He could leave Marion Gilchrist to recover and then probably have him charged with assault – or he could make sure she did not recover, in other words kill her. He decided to kill. The laws of libel made William Park hesitate and stop short of naming the killer, but he clearly believed that this was a family squabble, and that it was Miss Gilchrist’s nephew who had murdered her.

  The book was a sensation. The newspapers were full of the story and it was then that significant new information – or information long withheld – started to come out. A grocer called MacBrayne confirmed Slater’s alibi; he had actually seen Slater on his own doorstep at the time of the murder, when he had said he was at home. Mary Barrowman and Helen Lambie were traced. Now they were ready to admit that they had been bribed and coached by the police to make a false identification. One cannot help wondering how many innocent people, over the centuries, have been sent to their deaths or to long prison sentences by bribed perjurers like these two women.

  The official records show that several police officers perjured themselves, deliberately lying in order to make the case against Slater stick. One police officer stood out as a man of integrity throughout, and that was Detective Lieutenant John Trench. He said he didn’t believe Helen Lambie’s identification. Trench’s persistence led to a closed (ie secret) enquiry into the police conduct of the case in 1914. The enquiry merely protected the existing state of affairs by announcing that there were ‘no grounds for recommending that the conviction be overturned.’

  Trench had been concerned about the Slater case for several years. Dismissed by the Chief Constable and hung out to dry by the Secretary of State, he could see no way forward – other than to go public. He consulted a lawyer, David Cook, and a journalist, William Park. Before he went further, Trench wanted to protect himself against further reprisals and approached Dr Devon, who was one of the Prison Commissioners. Devon was impressed by the evidence and wrote to McKinnon Wood on Trench’s behalf. Wood replied on 13 February that he would give Trench’s written statement his ‘best consideration’ – weasel words that meant nothing.

  For stepping out of line, he was victimized by fellow officers and suspended from the force on 14 July 1914. The specific reason given for his suspension was that he had, without the express permission of his Chief Constable, communicated with persons outside the police force information he had acquired in the course of his duty. On 14 September, Glasgow magistrates found Trench guilty as charged and he was dismissed from the police force. Trench thought he had acted properly in passing informat
ion to the Secretary of State for Scotland, McKinnon Wood, and accordingly wrote to him to say that he saw ‘your invitation to send the information and your acceptance thereof as ample protection against any breach of discipline.’ McKinnon did not reply.

  War broke out and (the now elderly) Trench joined up as a drill instructor. He was preparing to leave with his regiment for the Dardanelles when he was arrested on a charge of handling stolen property. The lawyer David Cook was arrested simultaneously on the same charge. Clearly the vendetta and the corruption were continuing. Trench and Cook were acquitted in August. The judge directed the jury, ‘There is no justification at all which would enable you to return a verdict of guilty.’ The episode nevertheless did frighten Trench and Cook into making no further comment about the Oscar Slater case. Trench died at the age of fifty in 1919 and Cook died two years afterwards. Neither of them really recovered psychologically from their betrayal by the police force.

  But as the trickle of new information, especially about the Barrowman and Lambie evidence, was published in the newspapers it became impossible for the authorities to keep Slater in prison any longer. On 8 November 1927, the Secretary of State for Scotland issued a statement: ‘Oscar Slater has now completed more than eighteen and a half years of his life sentence, and I have felt justified in deciding to authorize his release on licence as soon as suitable arrangements can be made.’ A few days later, Oscar Slater was released, though not pardoned.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle despaired at the sheer wickedness of the Scottish authorities who refused to admit that they had been wrong. But he also despaired of Slater. It says much about Conan Doyle’s probity that he was prepared to put himself to considerable trouble and expense to help a man he really disliked intensely. Because Slater was released but not pardoned, his case had to be reopened and re-tried if he was to be exonerated. It would be only then that Slater could apply for compensation for the eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment.

  Conan Doyle and others gave money so that Slater could pay the legal fees. In the end, Slater was cleared of all the charges brought against him and awarded £6,000 in compensation. Conan Doyle naturally assumed Slater would pay back his supporters for the legal fees they had given him, which is what the honourable Sir Arthur would have done in the same circumstances. But Slater was embittered by his time in prison, and resented the fact that he had been put in a position where he had been forced to buy a re-trial; he should not have been asked to pay anything. He regarded the £6,000 as his. Conan Doyle was a wealthy man and did not really need to have back the £1,000 he had put into Slater’s fund, but he was shocked that Slater was not prepared to pay him back. Slater was not an honourable man. Conan Doyle wrote to Slater, ‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses. If you are indeed responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known.’

  When Oscar Slater died in 1949, the newspaper notice read, ‘Oscar Slater Dead at 78, Reprieved Murderer, Friend of A. Conan Doyle’. Conan Doyle and many other people had gone to a lot of trouble to prove that Slater was not a reprieved murderer. They had gone to a lot of trouble to prove that he was not a murderer at all. It is doubtful whether Conan Doyle ever thought of Slater as a friend, either. But then, not everything we read in the newspapers is true.

  Oscar Slater certainly did not kill Marion Gilchrist, but somebody did. Who was the real murderer? Nobody knows who killed Miss Gilchrist. It remains a great unsolved crime, though several theories have been floated. There are some significant pieces of evidence that point to the possible motive and the curious ‘coincidence’ of Helen Lambie’s popping out to buy a newspaper just when the murderer was about to call.

  Marion Gilchrist was well off. She had collected jewellery for years. By the time she was murdered she had a collection worth £3,000 then, and probably worth £60,000 in today’s money. To build this collection, she often bought from shady backstreet dealers. It may possibly have been one of these who attacked her. Helen Lambie also revealed that she was expected to make herself scarce whenever one of these less than legitimate dealers was due to call. Was there rather more than coincidence to Helen Lambie’s absence from the building at the time of the murder? Had she been asked to make herself scarce by Miss Gilchrist so that she could have a confidential conversation with a caller she was expecting? Or was she asked to make herself scarce for the murderer himself? Either way, it seems likely that Helen Lambie knew more about the situation than she ever revealed.

  The murderer was also able to let himself in with his own door key, or was let in by Miss Gilchrist; either way, he must have been well known to the old lady, probably a regular dealer, a friend, or a relative who hoped to inherit. Maybe the theft of the brooch was meant to put the police off the scent and make them think the motive was robbery, when the real motive was something else, such as inheritance. And that brings us back to William Park’s intriguing theory about the unnamed nephew.

  Sinking of the Lusitania

  On 7 May 1915, at a time when Britain and Germany were at war, the passenger liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish coast. Over a thousand lives were lost and there was consternation in the United States at what appeared to be an unprovoked attack on American civilians sailing on an unarmed passenger ship. It was an undeclared act of war. It was an atrocity, or at least so it was described at the time. The question in many of the cases discussed in this book is who committed the crime. In this case it much more a question of the nature of the crime and whether a crime was committed at all.

  The ship was a huge luxury liner, built by John Brown on Clydeside and launched in 1906. With her identical twin sister ship the Mauretania, she was the flagship of the Cunard fleet, sailing on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1907. The two ships were built specifically to compete with the big German liners of the time. Just as the British and German militaries competed with each other in an arms race, the big commercial companies were locked in economic war. There was in effect, before the First World War broke out, already a commercial war going on in the North Atlantic.

  The Lusitania and Mauretania were built to be big, beautiful and fast. They were to be a little smaller than the White Star’s Olympic class ships, the sister ships Olympic, Titanic and Britannic, but faster. The speed of the transatlantic crossing was vital to commercial success. The current fastest liner was said to hold the Blue Riband; the Lusitania won the Blue Riband in 1907. Once the White Star Line, Cunard’s main British competitor, announced their Olympic class trio, Cunard decided to add a third ship. She was to be the Aquitania. She would be slower but bigger and more luxurious, and therefore bear comparison with the Titanic.

  There was yet another war going on, too. American businessmen were keen to buy into this prestigious transatlantic race, and were not prepared to let the German liners go on winning. The American financier J. P. Morgan planned to buy up all the North Atlantic shipping lines he could, including the British White Star Line. In 1903, the chairman of the Cunard Line, Lord Inverclyde, used these threats, which were in effect threats to Britain’s political as well as commercial prestige, to Cunard’s advantage. Inverclyde lobbied the Balfour government for a huge loan to enable him to build two fast ships. The government agreed, but with the conditions that Cunard remained exclusively British and the two ships met Admiralty specifications. The British government also agreed to pay Cunard an annual subsidy of £150,000 to maintain the Lusitania and Mauretania in a state of readiness for war. This was a very significant step, given the events of 1915, when the official British and American position would be that the Lusitania was not a warship but an innocent merchant vessel. The fact was that the British government intended from the time when the Lusitania’s keel was laid in 1904, ten years before the outbreak of war, to use her for war work. The huge annual payments for her upkeep proved that. The British government agreed to pay an extra £68,000 a year to have the two ships carry Royal Mail.

  The ship
was launched in 1906, which marked the completion of her hull, and in July 1907 she underwent her sea trials. It was found that when she steamed at full speed violent vibrations were set up in her stern and she was taken back to the yard to have stronger braces fitted in the stern. In August she was delivered to Cunard for service. The White Star’s Olympic class ships were planned but not yet built, so at the time she went on her maiden voyage the Lusitania had the distinction of being the largest ship afloat.

  In October 1907, the Lusitania took the Blue Riband from North German Lloyd’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. This brought to an end the German domination of the North Atlantic. Was there now, perhaps, a score to settle in the minds of some German mariners? In 1909 the Lusitania handed the Blue Riband to her sister ship, the Mauretania, but the loss of the Blue Riband from a German flagship to the British Lusitania may still have remained a source of grievance. The Blue Riband would not return to Germany, ironically, until some time after her humiliating defeat in the First World War.

  The Lusitania made an average speed of 24 knots on the westbound crossing, or 44.4 km per hour. It was partly confidence in this speed that led to a serious risk being taken in 1915. It was thought she could outrun any U-boat, and steam out of danger. She could comfortably steam 10 knots faster than a submarine, even with one of her boilers shut down. This complacency was misplaced, as it completely overlooked the possibility of an ambush, which is what happened, whether by design or by chance.

  The Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, the U-20. For such a big ship, it sank surprisingly quickly, going down in only eighteen minutes. The huge loss of life was due in part to this rapidity: 1,198 of the 1,962 people on board were drowned.

  The rapidity of the sinking is hard to understand. The Titanic was very badly damaged over a large area of her starboard side below the water line and probably her bottom too, but managed to remain afloat, thanks to her watertight bulkheads, for two and a half hours before sinking. Why did the Lusitania sink so quickly? The Titanic and her sister ships had transverse bulkheads, running across the ship. The Lusitania had transverse bulkheads, but she had longitudinal bulkheads too, running along each side, separating the boiler and engine rooms from the coal bunkers that ran along the sides.