The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Lambie testified that she had closed both the door of the flat and the street door behind her, and then briskly made her way to the shop around the corner. Ten minutes later, she returned to a scene of ‘the most sanguinary and appalling carnage’. Hardened Scottish police officers blanched at the sight.

  It was the beginning of a criminal case that included a manhunt that would lead across the Atlantic to the Tombs Prison in New York, touched upon some of the most prominent families in Glasgow, sent a man to jail for nearly nineteen years, ruined the career of a probably honest policeman, and came to obsess Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed it would ‘remain immortal in the classics as the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy’, for the rest of his life.

  This was Doyle’s description of the crime scene:

  The poor old lady [was] lying upon the floor by the chair in which the servant had last seen her. Her feet were towards the door, her head towards the fireplace. She lay upon a hearth-rug, but a skin rug had been thrown across her head. Her injuries were frightful, nearly every bone of her face and skull being smashed. In spite of her dreadful wounds she lingered for a few minutes, but died without showing any sign of consciousness.

  The official police report was more graphic:

  There were wounds on the right cheek extending from the mouth, wounds on the right forehead, and of [sic] the right side of the head. There was a deep hole on the left side of the face between the eye socket and the left ear … The left eyeball was entirely missing, having been driven into the cavity of the brain or having been gouged out. The right eye was partially torn out of its socket by the deep fracture of the right side of the brow. There was much blood on or among the hair of the head. On the carpet rug beneath the head on both sides was a considerable amount of clotted blood, and fluid blood had soaked into the substance of the rug. Between the head and the fender of the fireplace a piece of brain tissue weighing about three-quarters of an ounce, as well as smaller pieces, and several pieces of bone covered with blood were found. Two of these pieces were retained.

  This was ‘ghastly enough for anyone’s taste,’ Doyle admitted. But there were also several curious circumstances surrounding the crime that added to its air of Holmesian intrigue.

  In December 1908, the flat below Marion Gilchrist’s was occupied by a young musician named Arthur Adams, his mother, and three of his five unmarried sisters. They were on somewhat formal terms with their upstairs neighbour. One of the sisters, Rowena, testified that shortly before 7 on the night of the crime she had noticed a man:

  … leaning against the railing [outside] … I only saw a dark form, [but] I took in the face entirely, except that I did not see his eyes. He had a long nose, with a most peculiar dip from here [pointing to the bridge of the nose]. You would not see that dip amongst thousands.

  A few minutes later, Arthur Adams, sitting in the dining room of his flat, heard a sound ‘like a thud, [followed by] three distinct knocks, as if wanting assistance up above’. Alarmed at this, he had gone upstairs and repeatedly rung the doorbell of Miss Gilchrist’s flat, but received no answer. He recalled:

  After I had been standing at the door for half a minute or so I heard what I thought was the servant girl breaking sticks in the kitchen. It seemed as if it was someone chopping sticks. At that time I did not know whether Miss Gilchrist’s maid-servant was out or not. I waited fully a minute or a minute and a half at the door.

  At that, Adams, who was of the view that ‘the best neighbour [is] the one who leaves you alone, rather than always calling at the door’, had returned downstairs to his own flat and reported his findings to his family members waiting for him there. His sister Laura was unconvinced. At her urging, Adams ‘once again ascended to Miss Gilchrist’s door, where [he] rang the bell for a fourth or fifth time’. As he was standing there, uncertain of what to do next, he suddenly heard footsteps coming up behind him. ‘This was the servant girl, Helen Lambie,’ Adams related. ‘When the girl came up I told her I thought there was something wrong, or something seriously wrong. She told me that it was the pulleys in the kitchen that I had heard.’

  According to the evidence at trial, Lambie had then unlocked the front door of the flat and passed into the faintly lit hallway. Or at least that was Adams’s account. In what was to be the first of several eyewitness discrepancies in the case, Lambie herself remembered that she had remained ‘frozen’ on the landing beside her neighbour. Both parties agreed that a moment later a slim, early middle-aged man wearing an overcoat had suddenly appeared from inside the flat and come towards them.

  Since Lambie had looked straight at this individual and said nothing, Adams ‘did not suspect anything wrong for the minute’. Whether Lambie then spoke at all was never fully clarified, but the evidence suggests that she remained calm as the man passed by her. Adams recalled:

  I thought he was going to speak to me, till he got by me and ran off, and then I suspected something wrong, and by that time the girl ran into the kitchen and put the gas up and said it was all right, meaning her pulleys. I said, ‘Where is your mistress?’ The girl went into the dining-room. She said, ‘Oh! Come here!’ I just went in and saw this horrible spectacle.

  At that point Adams and Lambie both ran downstairs, the former now thinking to give chase to the man they had seen leaving the flat. It was already too late. He had disappeared ‘as if swallowed up by the night’. Abandoning the search, Adams was at least able to alert a passing police constable.

  Lambie, for her part, also ran into the street – not in pursuit, but to knock furiously at the nearby door of Miss Gilchrist’s niece, Margaret Birrell, and tell her what had happened. It was the beginning of a night of terror for Miss Birrell as she listened to the ‘ghastly lore’ the maid sobbed out. Her long-suppressed account of their conversation would eventually provide one of the case’s most sensational twists. Writing three years after the fact, Conan Doyle was left to conclude that Lambie’s ‘whole reasoning faculty had deserted her’ from the moment she had first come home to find her downstairs neighbour waiting anxiously on her doorstep.

  In particular, there was the curious incident of Lambie’s attitude to the shadowy figure seen leaving Miss Gilchrist’s flat. Like the dog in the night, she had done nothing. Lambie ‘did not gasp out “Who are you?” or any other sign of amazement,’ Doyle remarked, ‘but allowed Adams to suppose by her manner that the man might be someone who had a right to be there’. Even on entering the flat, Lambie, who was then aged 20, and of modest education, had unhurriedly inspected the kitchen and spare bedroom rather than rushing to check on her employer. ‘She gave no alarm,’ Doyle wrote:

  It was only when Adams called out, ‘Where is your mistress?’ that she finally went into the room of the murder … It must be admitted that this seems strange conduct, and only explicable, if it can be said to be explicable, by great want of intelligence and grasp of the situation.

  When the police came to investigate the crime scene they found no obvious sign of a murder weapon, although the attending doctor speculated that the victim may have been struck by a ‘few, heavy swinging blows from the back leg of a wooden chair, the assailant while wielding it stamping upon the body and thereby fracturing the ribs’. There was little pretence beyond this of any worthwhile forensic examination of the premises. Similarly, the fire irons and the furniture near where the body lay were seen to be spattered with blood, but again the authorities avoided the sort of chemical or microscopic analysis that might have suggested itself to Sherlock Holmes.

  Miss Gilchrist’s set of gold false teeth was found lying on the floor beside her. Her magazine and reading glasses were next to each other on the dining room table, as if she had laid them there before greeting a visitor. John Glaister, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University, later testified, ‘My view is that the old woman when she saw a stranger entering her room stood to her feet, that she was struck with something, and was knocked down’. Asked how many blows might have been
inflicted, Glaister replied:

  There must have been several – a very large number I should say, to give a rough guess, judging from the wounds and the size of them, anything between twenty and forty … It must have been a furious assault, a continuous assault, [done] with almost lightning rapidity.

  The Glasgow Police officers who attended the scene may have lacked Holmes’s powers of deductive reasoning, or in some cases even the more basic gift of observation, but their search of the premises still yielded up certain unmissable clues. A wooden box, for instance, lay on the ground in the middle of the flat’s spare bedroom. It had been prised open and its contents, piles of legal documents, were strewn around the floor. There was no blood to be seen either on the papers or anywhere nearby. The intruder had evidently lit the gas lamp in the room, and left the matchbox (the ‘Runaway’ brand) behind him when he fled.

  Helen Lambie later testified that a single crescent diamond brooch, worth some £50, was missing from the flat. The balance of Miss Gilchrist’s sizable jewellery collection was untouched. It comprised sixty-two individual pieces and was officially valued at £1,875 6s 3d, or roughly £140,000 ($200,000) today, though some estimates put these figures significantly higher. Most of the valuables were kept hidden among the dresses in Miss Gilchrist’s wardrobe. Perhaps understandably, she had often expressed concern about the possibility of being attacked and robbed. Nothing else had been taken. There was no sign of a forced entry.

  On the morning after the attack, a police inspector searched the small backyard of Queens Terrace and found a ‘piece of an old broken auger’ (or drilling tool) lying there. Professor Glaister told the court that he had examined this and ‘detected a number of grey hairs attached to it’, but could not swear that these were the victim’s. Nor could the professor conclusively say whether stains on the auger were blood or merely rust. This particular weapon ‘might have been used in the commission of the crime, [but] could not have produced all the wounds we found,’ he testified.

  There were several other aspects of the Gilchrist case that seemed to qualify it as the plot of one of the more gothic Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Had it all been a premeditated killing, the police wondered, or a burglary that had gone wrong? If theft was really the intruder’s primary motive, as the authorities came to believe, it was curious that he had contented himself with a single item. How had the solidly middle-class and never-married Miss Gilchrist been able to afford a collection that was worth ten times more than a professional woman’s average annual salary in the first place? Had she herself, as local rumour had it, been a criminal receiver?

  Then there were the singular circumstances of the victim’s family history. Miss Gilchrist appeared to be on poor terms with many or most of her immediate relatives, and had taken extraordinary precautions concerning her personal safety, another plot device familiar to several Holmes stories. In recent years, she had had no less than four locks fitted on her front door, and had installed a lever that worked much like a buzzer might today in order to control access to her flat from the street. An apparently ‘ferocious’ Irish terrier watchdog joined the household in December 1907, but was seemingly poisoned just three months before its owner’s death.

  Miss Gilchrist had made out her will in May 1908, and revised it again six months later. The main beneficiaries were a 44-year-old former maidservant named Margaret Ferguson (née Galbraith) and Ferguson’s family. It has been suggested that this individual was in fact Miss Gilchrist’s illegitimate daughter, although there are no clear-cut records to that effect. Whatever its true nature, the couple appear to have enjoyed an unusually warm working relationship. In general, Miss Gilchrist was said, even in middle age, to be a ‘difficult, and sometimes impossible, mistress’, who later in life developed into a ‘distinctly quarrelsome’ character who believed ‘agents’ were on her trail, and, more plausibly, that the local shopkeepers were systematically cheating her. By her early eighties she seems to have become a somewhat regal but generally fair employer, if not one untouched by the sort of self-indulgent dottiness that sometimes accompanies old age.

  As Conan Doyle later noted, there was also the matter of the ‘enigmatic, and often contradictory’ eyewitness descriptions of Miss Gilchrist’s suspected killer. Rowena Adams testified that she had seen a tall, long-nosed man wearing an ‘ordinary cap’ and a heavy tweed coat loitering in front of 15 Queens Terrace a few minutes before the crime. The figure who then passed Arthur Adams and Helen Lambie in the hallway also had a hat and coat, but had shrunk in size. A few days later, a 14-year-old shoemaker’s apprentice named Mary Barrowman came forward to claim that she had seen someone ‘in a dark suit of clothes, Donegal hat [and] dark brown boots’ sprinting away from the house that evening before disappearing into the crowd. ‘I was at the lamp-post when he ran up against me,’ she testified. ‘It was quite bright there [and] I had a good look at him coming towards me.’ (Here some discrepancy exists with Arthur Adams’s memory that the street was both dark and completely empty when, in turn, he had run out of the front door in hot pursuit of the fugitive.)

  Meanwhile, Agnes Brown, a 30-year-old schoolteacher, remembered two men tearing from the scene a few minutes after the murder. One wore ‘a three-quarter length grey-coloured overcoat’ and ‘had both hands in his pockets as he ran away’ – a curious detail. The other seemed to be more heavily set, wore a navy blue overcoat with a velvet collar and carried something in his left hand – ‘it might have been a walking stick, but I thought it looked clumsier than that’.

  Although there were certain inconsistencies in the accounts of all five eyewitnesses, taken as a whole their testimony was enough for the police to publish a more particular description in the Christmas Day editions of the Glasgow newspapers. This led them to their man. Early in the morning of Saturday, 2 January 1909, a party of six American detectives boarded the RMS Lusitania as she lay off New York Harbour after a stormy Atlantic crossing and arrested a second-class passenger who gave his name as Otto Sando, a dentist on his way to Chicago, and ultimately San Francisco.

  This was only the latest of the various instances of mistaken or disputed identity that came to characterise the Marion Gilchrist case. ‘Sando’ was in fact a 36-year-old German Jew who had been born Oscar Joseph Leschziner in Opole, one of those marginal towns batted around between Prussia and Poland at regular intervals throughout the nineteenth century, where his father was a baker. Having left Germany to evade military conscription, he would eventually come to settle in Glasgow under the assumed name of Oscar Slater.

  When detained on the Lusitania, Slater was found to be in possession both of a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch of about the same size as the stolen one, and, perhaps just as damning for his prospects in the eyes of a typical Edwardian Scots jury, a 23-year-old travelling companion named Andree Antoine, popularly known on the streets of Glasgow as Madame Junio, who was not his wife.

  Slater was then a solid, barrel-chested figure, hard-faced, with rapidly receding dark hair and a noticeably crooked nose. It had long ago been broken in a bar fight. Despite or because of this blemish, he generally impressed people as someone who could look after himself. More than one of Slater’s acquaintances would remark that there was something a little frightening about him – ‘You thought he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted,’ a family friend recalled of him even in his older age.

  When the police returned him to Glasgow in February 1909 Slater said only:

  I am a native of Germany, married, a dentist, and have no residence at present. I know nothing about the charge of having assaulted Marion Gilchrist and murdering her. I am innocent.

  Slater did not speak during his subsequent trial, evidently because he thought that his heavy foreign accent might prejudice the jury against him. In the event, the first they heard from him was when he rose to his feet immediately following their verdict to spontaneously address the court. ‘My Lord, what shall I say?’ Slater enquired in his broken English:

 
I came over from America, knowing nothing about the affair, to Scotland to get a fair judgement. I know nothing of the affair, absolutely nothing. I never heard the name. I know nothing about the affair. I do not know how I could be connected with the affair. I know nothing about it. I came from America on my own account. I can say no more.

  The trial judge, Lord Guthrie, made no direct comment on this outburst, but instead slowly assumed the traditional black cap and sentenced Slater to be hung in Duke Street Prison, Glasgow, three weeks from that date.

  When Slater first arrived in Glasgow at the age of 28 in March 1901, he had some money left from his days as a bank clerk and unlicensed bookmaker in Opole, and he managed to keep his head above water for a year by gambling and occasionally trafficking in small amounts of stolen jewellery. He seems to have avoided any contact with the law and, up to a point, led a comparatively respectable life, marrying a local woman, playing billiards most afternoons at the Crown Hall rooms near his lodgings in Sauchiehall Street, and strolling around town dressed in an immaculate dark suit and a bowler hat.

  By early 1902, however, Slater’s funds had dried up and his marriage had fallen apart. He left his digs without paying the rent he owed, or troubling to formally divorce his wife, and spent the next few years living off his wits as far afield as London, Brussels and New York. It was alleged that during this period he had managed the affairs of several prostitutes and that one of them, the young Frenchwoman Andree Antoine, had become his common-law wife.