Deadlier Than the Male

by Douglas Skelton

  The condemned woman took the news as coolly as she had taken most of the evidence during her trial. She rose when her name was called and stood perfectly still as the judge made his speech and pronounced her doom. Finally, she turned away smartly and was led to the cells below.

  Outside, the restless crowd learned of the sentence and tried to rush the gates as she was led into a van to be taken back to her cell at Duke Street Prison. The authorities had learned their lesson from the disorder of the previous day. A small army of police officers had been drafted into the Saltmarket and moved quickly to hold the rabble back. However, the shouting and catcalls from the frustrated mob could still be heard inside the courtroom.

  There had not been a woman hanged in Scotland for almost thirty-four years – seventy in Glasgow – although in 1922 husband and wife Willie and Helen Harkness had been due to die for the brutal murder of Elizabeth Benjamin in Glasgow's Whiteinch area. A few days prior to the execution Mrs Harkness had had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment but her husband had not been so fortunate – he was hanged in the January. The jury had recommended mercy towards Susan Newell and there were moves to have her death sentence quashed. However, the Secretary of State for Scotland decided there could be no such reprieve for the go-kart killer and ordered that her execution proceed as planned. When the condemned woman was given this news, she cried out and shed tears for her daughter. It was her first real display of emotion since the horror began.

  On a bleak 10 October 1923, Susan Newell was led from the condemned cell of Duke Street Prison into the execution room. Two Roman Catholic priests accompanied her, murmuring words of comfort. Her pace was steady, her gaze unwavering and she seemed to have recovered the ‘unnatural calm’ observed by reporters during the trial. As he fumbled with the rope, the hangman, Walter Ellis, showed more nerves than she did. He was never comfortable with hanging women and it is said that this contributed greatly to the deterioration of mind that led to him committing suicide some years later. He had his assistant strap her legs and thighs to prevent her skirts from flapping upwards when he pulled the lever but the experienced hangman failed to tie her wrists properly. Mrs Newell reacted only once to the procedure. When Ellis tried to cover her face with the customary hood, she pulled her hands free and objected, ‘Don't put that thing over my head!’ Ellis agreed to do without it and instantly opened the drop. The lack of a hood meant the witnessing authorities saw her face as she died.

  Susan Newell was the last woman to be hanged in Scotland and the only one to have been executed in Duke Street Prison, which no longer exists (blocks of flats were built on the site near to Glasgow Cathedral and legend has it that ghosts were said to haunt the area for decades afterwards). Walter Ellis said that she died bravely and she was the bravest woman he had ever dropped.

  She also died without ever saying what happened in that rented room in June. Why had she suddenly snapped and killed an innocent lad? Had her husband's desertion and her imminent homelessness caused temporary insanity? Did the boy say the wrong thing? Did he, as some writers have suggested, simply ask for payment, and did that tip her over the edge?

  We shall never know. But eleven years later another Scotswoman found herself facing the gallows, again for child murder. And, like Susan Newell, she told no one what happened.

  11

  SACKCLOTH AND ASHES

  Jeannie Donald, 1934

  The rain had been beating down steadily for some time, slicking the city streets and filling the gutters, the drops reflecting the flashes of the torches as they searched. The sound of raised voices floated through the downpour; men's voices and women's voices, each calling a name – a girl's name. They had been hunting since early evening, looking for a little girl lost, an innocent abroad in the city. But there was no sign of her, no trace of the eight-year-old who had gone missing at lunchtime.

  By midnight, the hunting parties decided to call a halt and resume again at first light. The girl's father, though, refused to give up, refused to give in. He would carry on, he said, until they found his wee lassie. But, by two in the morning the futility of it all penetrated his body with the tears of rain and he decided to go home. He would look again as soon as dawn broke. He would keep looking. Had to keep looking. And hopefully she would be found and everything would be all right again.

  But there was to be no happy ending to this story. The little girl was found but she was dead – bundled into a sack and dumped near to her own front door. First impressions suggested she had been sexually assaulted and then murdered. First impressions, though, can so often be wrong.

  Helen Priestly was last seen alive in the street near her tenement home, in Aberdeen's Urquhart Road, at lunchtime on Friday 20 April 1934. Her mother, Agnes, had sent the girl to the local Coop for a loaf of bread before she was due to return to school. Five-year-old Jane Yule spotted Helen making her way home with the purchase. After that, there was no sign of the eight-year-old for fifteen hours – until her body was discovered the following morning.

  Her father, painter and decorator, John Priestly, came home later that day to find his wife distraught. Helen had disappeared, Agnes told him. She had checked with the school but their daughter had not returned to class after lunch. And so the searches began, lasting all through the night in that cold early spring rainstorm.

  Fears were heightened when a local lad told police that he had seen Helen being taken away by a man. There had been a child abduction a few weeks earlier and the description that the boy gave – a middle-aged man in a long coat with a rip in the back – fitted the suspect in the previous case. Hours later, though, the boy admitted he had made the whole thing up.

  At two the next morning, John Priestly sat in the warm kitchen of his friend, Alexander Parker, who lived across the road. The anguished father was talked into getting some rest and Mr Parker promised to fetch him before dawn to go out again.

  At just before five, unaware that his friend had already left the house, Alexander Parker made his way across the road to the Priestly's tenement. On his way to the stairs leading to the family's first-floor flat, he noticed a sack shoved into a recess near to the ground-floor communal toilet. He moved closer in the gloom and saw a child's foot protruding from it. Peeking inside, he recognised the body of young Helen.

  The news spread swiftly through the four-storey tenement and people came out on to the various landings to see what was going on. Only the tenants of the two flats on the ground floor failed to respond. A William Topp and his wife occupied one. Mr Topp had been part of the search the night before and had already left to begin again. His pregnant wife was so startled by the screams and shouts outside that she collapsed and subsequently miscarried.

  Alexander Donald and his wife, Jeannie, rented the other flat. According to Mrs Donald, her husband prevented her from investigating the noise by saying that there was nothing they could do. The family had not been involved in the search for the missing girl as there was, reportedly, no love lost between them and the Priestlys.

  Agnes Priestly was naturally devastated by the discovery, as Mr Parker said later. ‘Mrs Priestly came running down the stairs, crying “Oh, my bairn! Oh, my bairn!” and made to lift Helen into her arms but I stopped her and assisted her upstairs to the house.’

  Jeannie Donald later stated she heard someone cry out, ‘She's been used!’ but this was never confirmed.

  But little Helen had been used and used badly. The newspapers of the time delicately described her as having been ‘outraged’ but, nowadays, they would call it what it at least appeared to be – sexual assault. And a brutal one at that.

  The youngster had bruises around her throat which suggested strangulation. However, particles of vomit were later found lodged in her throat and these could have caused death by asphyxiation. There was more vomit on her clothes and blood caked on her legs and thighs. The area around her vagina was seriously injured and it appeared as if her killer had violently abused her.

  From th
e start, detectives believed she knew her killer. Helen was a tall lass for her age but she was shy and unlikely to go anywhere with a stranger. She had apparently vanished from a densely populated street, at a busy time of day, yet no one had seen her being taken. Also, the child's body and the sack in which she was found were dry. Considering the heavy rain since the previous night, this suggested that the killer was someone from inside the building. So police concentrated their efforts on the eight flats in the tenement – in particular, given the presumed sex attack, the comings and goings of the men.

  The body was found lying on its right side but evidence of lividity – the post-mortem settling of blood – could be seen on the dead girl's left side. This could have meant that Helen had been kept somewhere else after death and then moved to this spot.

  They had a rough timescale to work on. The ground-floor toilets and the area around the rear door to the building had been searched late on the previous night. The sack had not been there at 1.30 a.m. when Mr Topp had gone out to use the toilet. The girl's father had not noticed it when he had left the building at around 4.30 a.m. to scour the streets in daylight. Whoever had dumped the sack did so just minutes before Mr Parker arrived.

  Once the pathologists got to work on the little body, police also had a rough time of death. A study of the girl's stomach contents revealed that she had died within an hour or two of eating her lunch. That placed the murder at approximately 2 p.m. or even earlier. This created a problem. Every man in the building had an alibi for around that time – they were all at work and with witnesses to prove it. But the girl had been brutally raped – the wounds on her vagina proved that – so it had to be a man they were looking for.

  Again, the pathologists stepped in. Certainly, the injuries had been inflicted before death but by something like a poker or a broom handle. Whoever had done this wanted to give the impression of rape. This discovery changed everything. The killer need not have been a man. In fact, it was more likely to have been a woman trying to deflect suspicion away from herself. But who would do such a terrible thing? And why?

  Because the family did not want the sad event turned into a circus, Helen was buried in a simple but secret ceremony in the city's Allenvale Cemetery on Wednesday 25 April. The police investigation had expanded from the tenement although they still believed their quarry lived there. Meanwhile, word of the killing flowed like the rain across the city and parents grew worried that a sex killer was on the loose. Children were accompanied to and from school, even if the journey was a short one. After all, Helen had only gone a few hundred yards down the street to the shop.

  One line of inquiry centred on the bag in which the body had been found. The canvas flour sack had the word ‘BOSS’ written on it in 5-inch high red letters and was supplied by the Lukena Milling Company of Atchison, Kansas, reaching Britain through a Canadian mill. Filled with cereals, the sacks were shipped to London and then to Glasgow before arriving in Aberdeen. After that, the empty sacks were dispersed to who knew where although one grocer, interviewed as part of the investigation, recalled giving a sack to a ‘woman of the poorer classes’ but he did not remember it having any distinguishing marks. Closer inspection revealed a hole in one corner, where it had perhaps been hung on a hook. There were traces of cinders in the sack and these seemed to match the cinders that had been found on the girl's body. Human hairs were also found clinging to the cloth which did not match those of the murdered child.

  But, on the day of Helen's funeral, police zeroed in on their suspects. Despite interviewing hundreds of people in the four days since the murder had been discovered, detectives remained convinced that the killer lived in the tenement. Their prime suspects were the Donald family. It was well known they had little time for the Priestlys although the precise reason for this appeared to be buried in the past. For their part, the Priestlys said they tried to be civil, although little Helen often called Mrs Donald ‘Coconut’ which did not endear her to the woman. It was also revealed that Helen was in the habit of ‘chapping’ on the Donalds' door and then running away.

  In his account of the case, leading forensic scientist, Sir Sydney Smith – who was, at that time, Chair of Forensic Medicine at Edinburgh University – described the Donalds as ‘dour and taciturn’. He did, however, opine that Mrs Donald was ‘a good looking woman’ who was a regular church-goer and who attended weekly meetings of the Salvation Army. Her husband, Alexander, was a hairdresser. Their daughter, also called Jeannie, was a school friend of Helen Priestly. The two girls apparently did not share their parent's enmity but, on one occasion, young Jeannie had hit the younger Helen and had been told off by Mrs Priestly.

  At 11 a.m. on the morning of the funeral, the police came calling once again at the Donalds' door. They had further questions to ask and some searching to do. Jeannie Donald willingly let them in and agreed to the search. As officers combed the small flat, she was asked once more to account for her movements on the day Helen had disappeared.

  Young Jeannie was a talented dancer, Mrs Donald told them, and she had spent most of the afternoon ironing five dresses for Jeannie's rehearsal that evening. The police asked if she could be more specific about the time she spent ironing and, with her hands tapping the table top to some secret beat, she said it had been from about 2.15 until 4.00. She said that, just after she had finished ironing, young Jeannie had come home and, having had their tea, they had set off for the rehearsal at the Beach Pavilion. Her husband had come to pick them up and all three had arrived home just after eleven at night.

  The police asked Mrs Donald when she had first heard about Helen's disappearance. Mrs Donald told them that it had not been until around four, after she had finished the ironing. She had been out earlier in the day – firstly at the market on The Green and later she had looked at some dress material.

  They then enquired about the time she had come back. She said it had been just after two o'clock. She told them that she had been out for around an hour and that, on her return, she had noticed a lot of people at the corner, including a tearful Mrs Priestly.

  Next they asked if anyone could corroborate the time of her return and she said she had spoken to her neighbour, Mrs Topp, before going into her own flat to begin her ironing.

  The police were with Mrs Donald for thirteen hours. Her husband came home for his lunch and was kept there for questioning. Only their daughter was allowed to return to school in the afternoon.

  Officers found little of evidentiary value in the house – apart from some curious stains on the floor of a cupboard. Dr Richards, the city's police surgeon and a lecturer in forensic science, made a preliminary check and declared the stains to be blood but he said he would have to conduct more stringent tests in his laboratory. Neither Mr nor Mrs Donald were able to explain how the stains got there. They both denied being involved in any way with Helen's death but the investigating officers felt they had enough to charge the couple with the murder.

  Locals were aware that the police had been in the flat for a long time and, in the street, a hostile crowd had gathered around the paddy wagon. Uniformed police forced the press of people back to allow detectives to escort the suspects into the back of the van. They then had to clear the road so that the van could leave and make its way to Police Headquarters in Castle Street.

  However, the murder of a child generates strong feelings and word that arrests had been made in connection with Helen Priestly's killing soon echoed across the city. When the van arrived at police HQ, another crowd of around 2000 people had gathered. Again, officers held the furious and screaming mob back while the man and woman were shepherded swiftly inside.

  Feelings ran just as high on 4 May when hundreds of people milled around outside Aberdeen's Sheriff Court. The Donalds appeared there – in private and so away from the accusing eyes of the public – to be formally charged with assaulting Helen Wilson Robertson Priestly by seizing her, holding her, compressing her throat, cutting or stabbing her and murdering her. However, ju
st over one month later, Alexander Donald was freed. During his six weeks in custody, police had unsuccessfully tried to break his alibi that he was at work and so were forced to concede that the man was innocent of the murder.

  That left only thirty-eight-year-old Jeannie Donald in the shadow of the gallows.

  Mrs Donald's own alibi did not stand up to much scrutiny. Inquiries at the street market at which she claimed to have bought some groceries revealed the prices she'd quoted were from the previous week. Similarly, the shop where she'd looked at the fabric had been closed on the Friday afternoon in question. Police suspected the shopping trip the accused had described had taken place the week before.

  She could certainly have seen the crowd on the corner and Mrs Priestly crying – but from her own window. Mrs Topp confirmed that she had seen Mrs Donald that afternoon in the lobby but she had been standing at the main entrance and it was a good fifteen minutes later than Mrs Donald had said.

  During the search of the flat, police found sacks hanging on hooks with holes in the corners similar to the one that had acted as little Helen's shroud. But none of them had ‘BOSS’ on the front. Moreover, on further examination, the suspicious stains on the cupboard floor proved not to be blood at all. However, tests made on stains on other items in the house – washing cloths, newspapers, a scrubbing brush and a segment of linoleum – did prove positive for blood. Helen had been Group O and the blood found on these items were also Group O. Similarly, bacteria on one of the washing cloths was also found to be of the same type found in Helen's blood, due to a rupture of the child's intestinal canal which had possibly happened during the feigned rape.

  Hairs and household fluff found in the sack were compared to samples from the Donald house. The human hairs were examined closely and bore what was described as a ‘striking resemblance’ to those of Jeannie Donald, samples of which had been obtained from a hairbrush she had used while in prison. The household fluff also matched similar samples taken from the Donald house, and scientists – led by Sir Sydney Smith – decided that the particular combination of materials found was only evident in the Donald home. Samples from other houses in the tenement had been examined but had been found not to match. Studies of the cinders discovered in the sack and on Helen's body proved inconclusive but the remains of a loaf of bread were also taken from the Donald home. This was the kind of bread that Helen Priestly had bought and, according to young Jeannie, was not the same type usually eaten at the Donald table.