The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  ‘To my mind,’ Glaister testified:

  These stains had been subjected to the influence of water. When a waterproof coat gets wet with rain, the water keeps on the surface of the cloth. I do not know whether it was rain that got on the stains or whether they had been subjected to washing, but they were not stains [as] I should have expected them to be after immediate effusion on the cloth. They were paler in colour. We could not tell whether the coat had been actually scrubbed or whether there had simply been rain upon it.

  Although there was a certain amount of further give and take in the matter of the physical evidence, the central police contention that Slater, an acknowledged lowlife, had gone to Marion Gilchrist’s flat armed with his coal hammer, had used this to kill her when interrupted in the commission of a robbery, if not at the outset, and had then fled with his morally equivocal lady friend to America, where he was apprehended and positively identified by three unimpeachable eyewitnesses (one of whom, Helen Lambie, may or may not have previously fallen prey to his animal lusts) proved sufficient for a Scottish jury. After a four-day trial, in May 1909 at the High Court in Edinburgh, the panel of fifteen voted nine for ‘Guilty’, five for ‘Not Proven’, and one for ‘Not Guilty’. In England, this same division (with 40 per cent not satisfied by the Crown’s case) would have resulted in a new trial, but was enough here for the judge to impose the death penalty, at least until modified by subsequent events.

  Doyle again betrayed his personal misgivings about the accused, which several of the jurors seem to have shared, when he wrote in a book-length article on the case published in August 1912:

  Oscar Slater might conceivably have committed the murder, but the balance of proof and probability seems entirely against it. One cannot feel the same burning sense of injustice over the matter [as with Edalji]. And yet I trust for the sake of our character not only for justice, but for intelligence, that the judgement may in some way be reconsidered and the man’s present punishment allowed to atone for those irregularities of life which helped to make his conviction possible.

  Doyle was characteristically confident of his position in a letter he wrote later that month to his mother:

  You may rely upon it that I have made no mistake over the Slater book. He is as innocent as you or I … You must refresh your memory about the facts. No connection of any kind was ever proven between him and the old lady and maid. Your woman’s wit will tell you that the maid would not have eagerly sworn his life away if he had been her lover. Trust my judgement.

  Certainly, the trial evidence as a whole showed that both the police investigation, and the testimony of the expert witnesses, fell some way short of the ideal Sherlock Holmes methodology. Neither Professor Glaister nor Edinburgh University’s distinguished forensic scientist, Harvey Littlejohn (son of Doyle’s old lecturer, and partial model for Holmes, Henry Littlejohn) thought to remove the head of Slater’s coal hammer and test it for bloodstains. Nor could they agree whether the hammer was of sufficient size and weight to have inflicted such damage in the first place. Opinion of the auger, or drill bit, found in Marion Gilchrist’s backyard was similarly divided. Professor Glaister thought this ‘gave no indications of the presence of blood’, and dismissed it as the murder weapon, while William Robertson, a doctor of medicine and science at Edinburgh University, felt it ‘more likely to have caused the wounds than the hammer’. Neither man could say with any certainty how the auger had come to be smeared with ‘irregular dark blemishes’ like bloodstains, or to be covered in matted grey hair, nor could they give an opinion as to whether the hair and alleged blood had even belonged to the victim. ‘We are in the region of speculation,’ Glaister admitted.

  The prosecution rapidly gave up the idea of presenting an airtight scientific case against Slater. A more general hypothesis, along with the Crown’s continual aspersions on the defendant’s character, would have to suffice. The one witness to show a modicum of Holmes’s technique of assessing the clues, or ‘trifles’, and deducing from them what might have happened was William Warnock, the sheriff who had accompanied the Glasgow identification party to New York. He later claimed in court that ‘I made it a point to observe the prisoner’s mode of walking, and did so observe it’, a key factor, he believed, in establishing Slater as the man who had hurried past Lambie and Adams on the night of the murder, but not one that impressed itself with anything like the same force on the eyewitnesses themselves.

  Taken as a whole, the trial showed that the state of scientific criminology in 1909 still lagged far behind the level Doyle had routinely described in the Sherlock Holmes stories over the course of the last twenty-two years. Although Holmes is known for having anticipated actual developments in fields such as toxicology, ballistics and crime scene investigation in general, he’s as adept at interpreting the psychological clues in a case as he is at observing the material evidence. The detective’s first appearance in a short story, 1891’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, contains the plot device of Holmes (or, technically, Watson) crying ‘Fire!’, and thus tricking the female protagonist, Irene Adler, into rushing to save her most prized possession – an amorous photograph of her and the king.

  As a rule, Holmes wasn’t a man to be easily shocked. So he would have been fully alive to the possibility that Marion Gilchrist might have met her end at the hands of a family member, and that the motive for this, if not narrowly financial, lay concealed somewhere back among the riddle surrounding the paternity of her alleged illegitimate daughter some forty years earlier. Had there been more than one such child born out of wedlock, as several anonymous letters suggested? Slater’s counsel, Alexander McClure, alluded to the matter of the deceased’s ‘obscure [and] recondite’ past in the course of a courtroom exchange with a Glasgow Police officer named John Trench:

  Q: Have you heard that [Miss Gilchrist] was the mother of the servant girl Lambie?

  A: No.

  Q: But of another?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Have you heard that she was the mother of Slater?

  A: No.

  The exchange continued:

  Q: Have other men been in custody with this case besides Slater?

  A: I believe there were several men arrested shortly after the murder.

  Q: And a number of witnesses failed to identify these men?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Have a number of witnesses failed to identify Slater?

  A: There have been a number of people who have seen him who did not know him at all.

  The whole question of proper identification loomed large at Slater’s trial, and a more spirited defence counsel might have made something of the obvious discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony. Apart from the mixture of coats, hats, caps, complexions, walks and noses variously described in court, there was the evidence of Annie Armour, a Glasgow Subway booking clerk who had been on duty at the nearby Kelvinbridge Station on the night of Marion Gilchrist’s murder.

  Armour recalled that an ‘excited looking’ man had appeared at her booth sometime between 7.30 and 8 that evening. Instead of the normal transaction, this individual had ‘come rushing in, flung down a penny, [and] ran clattering downstairs’ to jump on a departing train. The Crown’s clear implication was that the agitated man had in fact been Slater fleeing the scene of the crime. Armour was vague about the matter of the passenger’s trousers, boots and hat, but testified that she was ‘quite certain he had no moustache at all’.

  By contrast, Arthur Adams told the court that the man who had pushed past him in Marion Gilchrist’s hallway roughly half an hour earlier might have been clean shaven or, equally, might have had a ‘very little’ moustache, while no fewer than four members of the McHaffie family, who lived directly opposite Miss Gilchrist in West Princes Street, testified that they had seen a Slater-like figure loitering outside on several occasions prior to the murder, and that this individual had been ‘dark hued’ and ‘moustached’. A Glasgow police constable named Christopher Walker corroborated these last
points when he described a man he had noticed on the street not long before the murder, ‘looking in a slanting direction’ towards Miss Gilchrist’s flat. He had subsequently identified the watcher as Slater. Constable Walker told the court, ‘He was of dark complexion, and with a moustache.’

  Slater’s trial at Edinburgh before the austere figure of 60-year-old Lord Guthrie has been portrayed as a miscarriage of criminal justice which resulted from a pre-existing and pervasive animus towards the accused that approached the worst excesses of the People’s Court under the notorious Nazi judge, Roland Freisler. It’s true that Guthrie refrained from bellowing and gesticulating at the prisoner, shouting down the reasonable pleas of the pathetic figure standing before him in the dock. Several misleading statements on the part of the prosecuting Advocate General went uncorrected, but so, too, did those of the defence witnesses. A letter Slater had written in German to his friend Max Rattman, for instance, was rendered in court as, ‘Dear Max, Having left Glasgow suddenly, I am very sorry I was not able to say goodbye’, while to some experts the better translation would have been not ‘suddenly’ but ‘unexpectedly’ or ‘surprisingly’, which was perhaps to convey less of the sense of a man making last-minute business arrangements and more that of a fugitive from the law. Similarly, in his final address to the jury, the judge was rightly at pains to point out that the material evidence against the defendant was ‘weak’, and that ‘It is not for him to disprove the charge, but for the crown to prove it’. Conan Doyle himself wrote, ‘In his summing-up of the case [the judge] recapitulated the familiar facts in an impartial fashion.’

  When it came to Slater’s character, however, Lord Guthrie left the jury in little doubt of his true feelings. ‘He has maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women, and has lived a life that many blackguards would scorn to live,’ Guthrie thundered:

  That is an illustration of what I mean when I talked of evidence being double-edged. It is nothing remarkable to find a man of that kind taking a wrong name, telling a lie about his destination, going by different names, murder or no murder … If you or I had told false stories about where we were going, if we were to travel under an assumed name, there would be a strong inference that we had been doing something of a serious kind that we wanted to conceal. In the case of a man like Slater, whose life has been a living lie, that inference does not necessarily arise. The man’s life has been not only a lie for years, but is so to-day …

  ‘The Lord Advocate,’ Guthrie concluded:

  … founds on the prisoner’s admittedly abandoned character as a point in support of the crown. He is entitled to do so, because a man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favour which is a form in the case of every man, but a reality in the case of the ordinary man.

  Following this summation, the jury members returned an hour and ten minutes later to record their verdict. Several observers, among them the Edinburgh lawyer William Roughead, remarked that at the word ‘guilty’ a palpable shock had run through the courtroom. Abandoning the air of studied composure he had shown throughout the previous four days, Slater himself had then leapt to his feet and made his pitiable appeal to the judge. ‘A scene more painful it is fortunately the lot of few to witness,’ Roughead wrote, ‘and none who did so on this occasion is likely to forget it. The prisoner was then removed, and the court rose.’

  In a stone-walled cell at Glasgow’s Duke Street Prison, Slater slept fitfully on his first night as a condemned man. The threadbare blanket provided little comfort against the cold of an early spring thunderstorm. In the next cell, another inmate taunted him as a ‘dirty Jew’ and graphically outlined the fate that awaited him in less than three weeks’ time.

  Early the next morning, a slot in the door scraped open, and through it appeared a tiny portion of bread and jam on a tin plate. Slater would hardly recall the next years with fondness, but those first few days of confinement had driven him ‘closest to the edge’, he later admitted. His fellow convicts were not sympathetic to the cold-hearted German who stood condemned of bludgeoning an elderly Scotswoman to death. The prison staff in turn addressed him as ‘Fritz’, ‘animal’, ‘scum’ and ‘swine’. Slater was not allowed books, newspapers or tobacco; he could not write letters. There was no Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland in 1909, and the condemned man’s only hope was that someone on the outside such as a public-spirited (or circulation-conscious) newspaper editor would raise a petition on his behalf.

  This was essentially what happened. Summarising Slater’s recent trial, the Glasgow Herald wrote, ‘The first emotion caused by the news of this verdict in the case of nine out of every ten who read the evidence closely, must have been one of intense surprise’. A deluge of letters and notes soon came in to the paper to support this belief. Slater’s solicitor Ewing Speirs also rallied support on his client’s behalf, and on 17 May, just eleven days after the guilty verdict, presented the Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Pentland, with a petition containing over 20,000 signatures. That same week, Lord Guthrie wrote to the Scottish Office with his own thoughts on the trial. Although he ‘resolutely believed’ Slater was guilty, he wondered if it might not be an occasion when ‘the prisoner could be respited [reprieved]?’ There were, however, limits to this apparent show of official compassion. In the event of any such relief, the Secretary of State noted, ‘The case would not be one for release under the ordinary practice at the end of twenty years’.

  The ambivalence about Slater’s proper punishment was finally resolved in a scribbled note from Lord Pentland to his principal assistant. On 25 May, less than forty-eight hours before he was due to hang, Slater was told that his sentence was being commuted to one of life imprisonment. It was noted that he had stood rigidly to attention to receive the delegation that brought him the news, and that he broke down in tears on hearing it.

  Within a year, William Roughead published his bestselling The Trial of Oscar Slater, a transcript of the proceedings which included both a critical commentary on the original police investigation and a possibly sardonic dedication to the trial judge, Lord Guthrie. As a result, several other well-placed commentators in turn took up the case. What was compelling in Slater clearly wasn’t the moral fibre of the man himself, nor any particular sense of gratitude he showed to his many supporters. It was the fact that the police had never put forward one single piece of hard evidence, or a link of any sort, to connect him with Marion Gilchrist. It was enough, apparently, that Slater bore a general resemblance to the man described by some of the eyewitnesses, and that shortly after the crime he had fled to America under an assumed name, accompanied by a French whore.

  Provocative as this last point was to the sensibilities of an Edinburgh jury, one has to ask the question: did Slater receive the same treatment he might have expected if he had not been a German-Jewish immigrant of admittedly lax morals? If a respectable young Scot of roughly the same physical type had hurriedly gone off on a Christmas visit to New York with his fiancée, would it have been thought right to bring him back in handcuffs and charge him with the murder? Would it also have been thought right to convict him on the evidence, knowing that he could hang as a result?

  It would be three years before Conan Doyle became actively involved in the Slater case. He had politely declined when originally approached by the defence team to write about the trial. Doyle’s interest seems to have been stirred by a new edition of Roughead’s work that appeared in May 1912, as well as by the more practical consideration that he had just sent off his own latest book, The Lost World, an adventure yarn that brought dinosaurs back to life three generations before Steven Spielberg did, and thus had a certain amount of time on hand.

  The result was the 18,000-word, sixpenny pamphlet The Case of Oscar Slater, which led to a renewed public debate on the convicted man’s trial and sentence and, in time, to heated questions in the House of Commons addressed to the Home Secretary. ‘It will make a huge uproar,’ Doyle had confidently predicted of his
own contribution to the case. It did, although as he also foresaw, the officials involved in Slater’s prosecution simply denied or ignored his central thesis that Miss Gilchrist’s murderer had been interested not in her jewellery but in family papers kept in her flat. Doyle wrote:

  What confronts you is a determination to admit nothing which inculpates another official and as to the idea of punishing another official for offences which have caused misery to helpless victims, it never comes within their horizons.

  It was the beginning of an eighteen-year struggle. Swallowing his personal distaste for the convicted man, Doyle displayed much the same mixture of crusading zeal, occasional forensic acuity and undoubted persistence once embarked on a cause familiar from the Edalji case. As we’ve seen, he was not a man to be easily deterred, nor one to dwell unduly on any opposing point of view.

  There were certain general similarities, too, between the mystery surrounding Marion Gilchrist’s death and the plots of several Sherlock Holmes tales. The core premise of a man wrongly accused of murder, which it turns out actually involves another party altogether, with contributing motives including thwarted love, greed and blackmail, lies at the heart of 1891’s ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892), the police, investigating the theft of a fabulous jewel, wrongly arrest a character with a lowlife reputation, while in ‘The Priory School’, published in 1904, suspicion in a kidnapping case falls on a ‘silent and morose’ German named Heidegger, only for Holmes to unravel a thread again involving bitter family intrigues over a disputed inheritance.