The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Conan Doyle, although typically robust in his criminal defence, never concealed his personal distaste for Slater, whom he described as ‘a disreputable, rolling-stone of a man’ and thus quite different to the subject of his earlier public campaign. ‘In one respect,’ Doyle wrote in his memoirs:

  The Oscar Slater case was not so serious as the Edalji one. Slater was not a very desirable member of society. He had never, so far as is known, been in trouble as a criminal, but he was a gambler and adventurer of uncertain morals and dubious ways – a German Jew by extraction, living under an alias.

  Slater appears to have left and reconciled with Antoine several times during these years, in which he described himself variously as a gym instructor, an impresario and a commodity trader, moving around between various cheap hotels, often leaving no forwarding address, and in general living a life not dissimilar to the fictional Arthur Daley, if conspicuously lacking that character’s comic flair. There is no evidence that he ever seriously practised as a dentist.

  Some doubt exists as to Slater’s whereabouts in September 1902, when 30-year-old Patrick Leggett fatally stabbed his estranged wife Sarah in her Glasgow home. Rapidly tried and convicted, he was executed in the grounds of Duke Street Prison the following November. Several anonymous letters later came into Doyle’s possession that accused Slater of being an accomplice to the crime, allegedly by handling the victim’s jewellery, although this was never proven. We know that he was back in Glasgow in mid 1905, when he befriended a bookmaker’s clerk named Hugh Cameron, who went by the nickname of ‘Moudie’ or ‘Mole’. Cameron later confirmed the generally poor impression people had of Slater’s character when he told a court, ‘He was a gambler [and] he lived on the proceeds of women’.

  When difficulties arose for him in Glasgow, Slater spent several months in lodgings around central London, with rooms, or at least accommodation addresses, at 33 Soho Square and 36 Albemarle Street. The latter was only a few doors away from Doyle’s publisher John Murray and adjacent to Brown’s Hotel, where the author often stayed when visiting town. Although the two men moved in different circles, they shared a London pastime: both liked to attend the nearby theatre, and Slater later spoke of his ‘high feeling of excitement [as] the lights went down and another performance was set to begin’. Those nights in the dark were probably the closest he had yet come to his benefactor.

  On 29 October 1908 Slater took the train back to Glasgow, where his mistress Antoine joined him a few days later. After moving between several modest hotels, they settled in a rented flat at 69 St George’s Street, where Slater advertised himself as ‘A. Anderson, Dentist’. A fellow German émigré named Max Rattman later told a court of this period:

  I saw him nearly every day … I met him generally in Gall’s public-house, and I met him at various clubs in the evening, sometimes in the Mascot Club, in Virginia Street, and sometimes in the Motor Club, in India Street, and I met him in Johnston’s billiard saloon, opposite the Pavilion, in Renfield Street.

  Rattman added that Slater had frequently been in dire financial straits due to his gambling habit. ‘Some of his debts were [incurred] at the Mascot or the Motor,’ he recalled, ‘although the bulk of his money was lost at the Sloper Club’, an establishment Rattman did not personally frequent and which was closed by the licensing authorities a year or two later.

  Several other witnesses spoke both of Slater’s precarious finances during the autumn of 1908 and of his stated plans to return to America as a result. Another member of Glasgow’s German community, first coming across him that November in the Sloper Club, remembered his countryman as ‘neatly dressed and almost clean shaven, with a high domed head and a stubbly moustache’. Photographs taken of Slater at around this time show a seemingly respectable individual with a passing resemblance to the actor Sir Ben Kingsley. ‘He looked you in the eye and spoke in a level voice,’ his compatriot noted. Only when Slater offered his ‘slightly moist and deathly cold’ hand did his new acquaintance realise that he was ‘face-to-face with a frightening human being’.

  The instinctive belief of the Glasgow Police that here was a German Jew of dubious morals fleeing to America with a French fancy woman in his bed and a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch in his pocket, and thus that he had savagely assaulted Marion Gilchrist, never quite fitted the hard facts of the case as Conan Doyle and others later established them. The brooch, for instance, had never at any time belonged to the murder victim. Oscar Slater had owned it on and off for several years, and had frequently pawned it when funds ran low.

  Nor was his departure on the Lusitania as sudden and unpremeditated as was initially thought. Doyle’s lifelong dread of moral irregularity met with a matching ability to rise above any personal prejudice and simply marshal the evidence of a case when he wrote:

  In the Bohemian clubs which [Slater] frequented – he was by profession a peddling jeweller and a man of disreputable, though not criminal habits – it had for weeks before the date of the crime been known that he purported to go to some business associates in America. A correspondence … showed the arrangements which had been made, long before the murder, for his emigration.

  Antoine, he added, was ‘just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her wayward and feather-brained outlook, or perhaps in consequence of it, he found the type of gratification he sought’.

  Doyle later established that Slater had received two letters on the morning of 21 December 1908, the day of Miss Gilchrist’s death. One was from a friend in London, telling him that Slater’s abandoned wife was enquiring after him and wanted money. The second was from John Devoto, a former business acquaintance, inviting Slater to join him in San Francisco. ‘It was the spur,’ Doyle noted. Between them, the two communications served as a sudden call to action, converting Slater’s latent desire to move further afield into a definite plan. Since both the sea voyage and the brooch were thus false clues, the only logical conclusion to be drawn by the prosecuting authority in the case was that the police had by pure chance arrested the right man. As Doyle remarked with some understatement, ‘The coincidence involved in such a supposition would seem to pass the limits of all probability’.

  Nor did the police ever convincingly reconstruct the events immediately preceding Marion Gilchrist’s death, leaving this to the diligence and tenacity of the unofficial investigators. Doyle’s timeline established that Slater had, in fact, spent much of 21 December preparing for his imminent Atlantic crossing. He dismissed the maid who worked at the St George’s Street flat, telling her after breakfast that morning that ‘I could go away some[where] to find another situation’. Later that afternoon, he wrote both to a post office in London to extract some money he had on deposit there, and to a jeweller urgently asking them to return the watch they were repairing for him.

  Witnesses testified that Slater was in Johnston’s Billiard Hall between about 6.15 and 6.30 that evening, and both his mistress and his servant testified under oath that he had dined at home as usual at 7 p.m., just as Marion Gilchrist was being brutally attacked in her flat some quarter of a mile away. A local shopkeeper saw Slater standing ‘quite calm’ outside his front door in St George’s Street just after 8 that night, and thought nothing more of it until he read the next day’s newspaper. As the two men casually nodded to each other, an ambulance wagon had raced past them on its way to the murder scene.

  At 9.45 p.m. Slater was attempting to raise a loan from the management of the Motor Club on India Street, a not uncommon activity on his part. The dismissed maid, who had no logical reason for perjuring herself, swore that she had seen ‘no change in [her] employer’s ordinary habits’ either on the evening of 21 December or in the days that followed as she worked out her notice and he prepared to leave for America.

  It is not immediately easy to see the logic for such a violent attack as transpired in West Princes Street that night being committed by a complete stranger who had already decided to emigrate. It was never established that Slater had
at any time known of Gilchrist’s existence during the seven weeks they lived in the same Glasgow neighbourhood, and at best he only partly fitted the description provided by Arthur Adams, Helen Lambie and the other eyewitnesses. Moreover, it was an odd sort of burglary for an outsider to have pulled, as the police strongly suggested had been the case. As Doyle noted:

  When [the murderer] reached the spare bedroom and lit the gas, he did not at once seize the watch and rings which were lying openly exposed upon the dressing-table. He did not pick up a half-sovereign which was lying on the table. His attention was given to a wooden box, the lid of which he wrenched open [presumably the ‘breaking of sticks’ heard by Adams]. The papers in it were strewed on the ground. Were the papers his object, and the final abstraction of one diamond brooch a mere blind?

  Around 6 p.m. on the evening of Christmas Day 1908, a Sloper Club regular named Allan McLean entered the Glasgow Central Police Station and made a statement. He had read Mary Barrowman’s description in the afternoon paper of the man ‘about 28–30 years of age, tall and slim build, no hair on face, long features, nose slightly turned to the right’, whom she claimed had rushed past her in the street on the night of the murder. McLean told the authorities that this sounded broadly like his acquaintance Oscar Slater, and that what was more Slater had recently been trying to sell a pawn ticket for a valuable diamond brooch that had come into his possession. As a result of this information, a Detective Inspector Powell went to the St George’s Street flat, where he found only the dismissed maid, Catherine Schmalz, packing her bags. Schmalz told him that ‘Mr Oscar’ and ‘Madame’ had left just hours earlier, taking all their belongings with them. She thought they might have gone to London.

  Early on 26 December, the Glasgow Chief Constable wired his colleagues in Scotland Yard with the request that they apprehend Slater, who could be easily identified by his travelling companion – ‘a woman about 30, tall, stout, good looking, dark hair, dressed dark costume, sable furs, large black hat’, another administrative slip since Antoine was slim and 23.

  There was still some doubt as to the fugitives’ destination, however, because the following morning a cable arrived for the Chief Constable of Nottingham, asking him to keep a watch for ‘Slater, alias Anderson, who left here hurriedly with a woman on Friday last, and may have gone to your city as two single railway tickets were issued for passengers by the 9.30 p.m. train’. At some stage, late on 27 or early on 28 December, Schmalz then suddenly remembered that her former employer had in fact gone, under an alias, to Liverpool en route to America. The Glasgow Police in turn cabled New York, ‘Arrest OTTO SANDO second cabin Lusitania. Wanted connection with the murder of Marion Gilchrist here. He has a twisted nose. Search him and the woman who is his travelling companion for pawn tickets.’

  The events that followed in some way foreshadowed the dramatic sea chase that served as the climax to the arrest of Dr Crippen eighteen months later. In both cases, the suspect was detained while travelling incognito in the company of a mistress as their ship completed its Atlantic crossing, and in due course both men were returned home for trial. In the meantime, Slater was taken to the Tombs Jail in New York (despite its uncompromising name, actually an eight-storey tower block in French chateau style, if with no pretensions to comfort), which would remain his home for the next six weeks. The official cable confirming his arrest remarked that he had made ‘no trouble’ on his capture, and that he had had the grand sum of 40 cents on him in local currency.

  The police in Glasgow were evidently satisfied that they had got their man. The proceedings to extradite Slater began almost immediately. Subsequent attempts to suggest that the German Embassy in Washington might intervene, or even offer sanctuary, were to no avail. The official consensus was clearly that Slater had murdered Marion Gilchrist in the execution of a burglary.

  A series of anonymous letters, however, questioned whether the thrust of the Glasgow investigation might not be better directed towards the victim’s own family members. The first such note reached the police as early as Christmas Day 1908 and read, ‘Regarding the murder of the old woman, if you look for a relative, you will I think come out on top’. Another note, dated 5 January, suggested that the writer had a friend who had known Miss Gilchrist, and that ‘on her last visit to deceased [this person] was shown a box by deceased who told her that it contained papers her nephew was very anxious to get from her’. There was considerably more in this vein over the coming weeks.

  As in the Edalji case, there were significant differences in the handwriting and phrasing of the various letters, and more particularly in the violence of their language, but taken as a whole the correspondence seemed to point squarely towards the idea that Miss Gilchrist had known her assailant. Another note of 5 January teasingly told the police that the author knew ‘something about the broch [sic]’, and that he or she was ‘willing to come & give you the details in the first place, only I don’t want my name put in the papers’.

  On 12 January 1909, William Warnock, Chief Criminal Officer of Glasgow’s Sherriff Court, and Detective Inspector John Pyper of the city’s Western Division set sail for New York on board the SS Baltic. They were accompanied by Arthur Adams and Helen Lambie, the two witnesses who had seen a man brush past them in the hallway of Marion Gilchrist’s flat, and by Mary Barrowman, the young teenager who had been walking up West Princes Street on the night in question.

  Some discrepancy exists in the account of what happened when the Glasgow party arrived in Manhattan’s federal building in order to identify Slater. Lambie remembered plainly enough:

  When I went into the courtroom I found a number of people there. I sat in a chair. I saw the man in the room that I had seen in the lobby of my house; I recognised him and I identified him.

  Mary Barrowman was similarly convinced. ‘I remember standing in a corridor or passage to the law court,’ she testified:

  There were three men coming along the corridor and in between the [outer] two men I saw this man, the man I had seen on the night of the murder. I told Mr Pyper that this was him coming. I had no difficulty in telling that he was the man.

  Another version has Barrowman saying in New York, ‘That man here is something like him,’ which she amended at Slater’s trial to ‘very like him’. Arthur Adams, who was near-sighted, recalled at trial only that ‘I pointed out Slater, but I did not say that he was the man. I said he closely resembled the man.’ When asked by the police commissioner in New York if he positively recognised anybody in the courtroom as the individual he had seen in Glasgow, Adams replied, ‘I couldn’t say definitely. This man [Slater] is not at all unlike him.’

  Significantly, Slater himself did nothing to prevent his extradition back to Scotland. Given the chance to contest the writ for his removal, he said only, ‘I will go home’. Slater told his Glasgow friend Hugh Cameron of his intention to return in a scribbled note dated 2 February 1909, and this letter, half craven, half defiant, captures some of the essence of the man:

  Dear friend Cameron – To-day it is nearly five weeks I am kept here in prison for the Glasgow murder. I am very down-hearted to know that my friends in Glasgow like [Motor Club manager] Gordon Henderson can tell such liars about me to the Glasgow police … I don’t deney I have been in his place asking him for mony because I went brocke in the Sloper Club. Only I will fix Mr Gordon Henderson. I will prove with plenty of witnesses that I was playing there mucky, and I am entitled to ask a proprietor from a gambling house when I am broke for money … He would not mind to get me hangt and I will try to prove that from a gambling point, I am right to ask for some money. I hope nobody propper minded will blame me for this …

  I shall go back to Glasgow with my free will, because you know so good than myselfs that I am not the murder.

  I hope my dear Cameron that you will still be my friend in my troubel and tell the truth and stand on my side … I really was surprised I don’t have seen your statement because I think you was too strait forvard for th
em. They only have taken the statement against me and not for me …

  Keep all this quiet because the police is trying hard to make a frame up for me. I must have a good lawyer, and after I can proof my innocents befor having a trail, because I will prove with five people where I have been when the murder was comitted.

  Thanking you at present, and I hope to have a true friend on you, because every man is able to get put in such a affair and being innocent.

  My best regards to you and all my friends – I am, your friend

  Oscar Slater

  Tombs, New York.

  On Slater’s return to Glasgow later that month, the police examined the seven pieces of luggage that had accompanied him on both his recent Atlantic crossings. Among other items, they discovered what was described in court as a ‘small hammer’, about 1ft long, weighing less than ½lb, which the maid Catherine Schmalz had used for breaking up the coal into suitably sized pieces for the fireplace at the St George’s Road flat. Conan Doyle was unimpressed by the Crown’s later suggestion that this was the implement that had bludgeoned Marion Gilchrist to death:

  The [hammer] was clearly shown to have been purchased in one of those cheap half-crown sets of tools which are tied upon a card, was an extremely small and fragile instrument, and utterly incapable in the eyes of commonsense of inflicting those terrific injuries which had shattered the old lady’s skull.

  Even if one accepted the prosecution thesis that this was indeed the murder weapon, Doyle wondered why it was that the pockets of Slater’s overcoat, also impounded by the police, showed no trace of bloodstains. John Glaister, the forensic medicine expert, was asked about this latter point during the trial. He admitted that there was ‘no definite sanguin[ary] residue’ to be found anywhere on Slater’s clothes (the more you study the state of prevailing Edwardian criminal investigation techniques, the more you appreciate Sherlock Holmes), although some twenty-five ‘brownish-red marks’ microscopically detected on the sleeves of the accused’s coat struck him as suggestive.