Nonetheless, Slater remained a prisoner at Peterhead for some nineteen years. This was not a time when a German convicted of murder could presume on the goodwill of the British public. The author Thomas Toughill writes in his magisterial account of the case:
Slater … was not a model prisoner. He protested his innocence from the outset and openly resented the treatment he received. There were, it is said, occasions when his attitude led to the exchange of blows. Any hopes he had that he would have his sentence reviewed after fifteen years, in effect 1922, came to nothing.
Visitors were shocked by Slater’s appearance. ‘I found him sitting like a frozen thing at the barred window of his cell,’ one lady, who was not his wife, recalled. Slater had refused to take anything but bread and water for almost a month, and a doctor warned the woman that the prisoner would die if the fast continued.
Following John Trench’s death in 1919, his widow provided Conan Doyle with a copy of his last will and testament. It reaffirmed the obsession of Trench’s life and career by ‘adhering again to my statement of 23 April 1914’, in which Helen Lambie was said to have positively identified her employer’s killer. Attached to the will were some of the former detective’s private notes on the Slater case.
Later that year, Francis Charteris was appointed Professor of Materia Medica at Glasgow University, a position he held for most of the next three decades. Lieutenant Trench’s allegation against Charteris and his family was never legally substantiated, and would seem to have relied, as much as anything else, on Trench’s quotation from memory of witness statements of which no record existed and which the individuals themselves denied were ever made. There must still be a suspicion that he harboured a grudge of some sort against his superior officers. Nonetheless, Trench’s evidence to the 1914 inquiry was among the most courageous demonstrations of opposition to what he called ‘the whole foul edifice’ of the police investigation into Marion Gilchrist’s murder. Conan Doyle would come to remark that ‘this officer showed commendable fibre’, and not a little of the Holmes technique, in his overall contribution to the case.
Late in 1919, Doyle again signalled his support for Slater by putting his name to an open letter calling for his release.
During the next eight years, Conan Doyle struggled to reconcile his pragmatic and materialist approach to life with his escalating crusade on behalf of spiritualism. Doyle’s attitude to the Slater case mirrored this internal conflict. His famously rational ‘Sherlock Holmes’ side continued to worry away at the problems of the physical evidence and witness testimony presented at the trial. In time, Doyle came to the brink of obsession in his repeated musings on the exact nature of the weapon that had been used to kill Marion Gilchrist. Was it a box-opener? A chair leg? An antique fire iron?
The ‘puny hammer’ nominated by the police struck Doyle as:
Ludicrous… It was said by the prosecution to bear some marks of having been scraped or cleaned, [but] the police do not appear to have pushed the matter to the obvious test of removing the metal work, when they must, had this been indeed the weapon, have found some soakage of blood into the wood.
Doyle wrote this in 1912. More than twelve years later, in his memoirs, he was still drawn to the hammer. ‘A case [against Slater] was made up in the most absurd manner,’ he wrote:
The frail hammer was evidently the instrument which had beaten in the woman’s skull. The handle might have been cleaned. Then surely there had been blood on it. The crown got a conviction, and the wretched foreigner was condemned to death.
Some of Doyle’s repeated examination of the effects of a blunt object being driven into a human eyeball showed the same unflinching approach (with a similar, shudder-inducing result) of the notorious razor-slicing scene in Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.
But there was more to Doyle’s campaign than just the anatomical fixations of a former oculist. He also continued to fire off letters on the affair to a variety of friends, editors and politicians. He made public appearances, and put his name to successive petitions for a retrial. He encouraged, and in some cases subsidised, other campaigners, notably William Park, on Slater’s behalf. ‘I became very obstinate at a certain point in my life,’ Doyle reflected when he was 70. ‘I knew I was confronted by official incompetence and wickedness, and I was determined to do all I could for [Slater], not just for his sake but to establish a principle.’
While continuing to follow the traditional route of writing letters and signing appeals, Doyle also increasingly adopted the ‘psychic line’ in the Slater investigation. He seems to have had a particular rapport with the Falkirk Spiritualist Society and its secretary, John Stoddart, who had once known the murder victim. Stoddart wrote to Doyle in February 1925, ‘“Stephanus” (a medium) has informed our circle about a missing document from Miss Gilchrist’s papers, named the real criminal, can reveal where the murder weapon is, and insists that Oscar Slater will not suffer the death penalty.’ Doyle thought this a notable feat of ‘mediumistic prophecy’ – the weapon was apparently a burglar’s jemmy, subsequently dumped in the river Clyde – although as Slater had been officially reprieved more than fifteen years before Stephanus made his prediction, and this fact had been splashed over every British newspaper, there may also have been more material means at work.
In the same week the spiritualists met in Falkirk, a convicted house-breaker named William Gordon was released from Peterhead Jail. Unbeknownst to the authorities, concealed in his dentures he carried a message written on waxed paper which had been given to him by his fellow inmate, Oscar Slater. It was a direct appeal for Conan Doyle’s help. Slater had little new to say in his brief note, but something about the sheer desperation of its author’s plea stirred Doyle to act. It was ‘literally a case of word of mouth,’ he observed.
The campaign for Slater’s release gathered renewed momentum as a result. Doyle again wrote to the Secretary of State for Scotland, but received only the reply that ‘This Office has considered your representations, but does not feel justified in advising any interference with Slater’s sentence’. It appeared to the editorial writer of the Glasgow Herald, whose headline read ‘Case Closed’, and to others, that that concluded the affair. Such observers again underestimated Doyle’s obstinacy and resilience. Throughout 1926 he continued to furnish William Park with both money and technical advice for the latter’s long-delayed account of the Slater affair.5
Published in July 1927 by Doyle’s own Psychic Press, Park’s book was an instant success. As a contemporary reviewer said, ‘It has the fortitude to ask questions about a miscarried case at a time when the problem is not that people just don’t know better, but that people just don’t care.’ No less a figure than Edgar Wallace, the prolific mystery author (and future creator of King Kong) wrote in a starred review in the Morning Post, ‘Slater has served 18 years for a crime of which anybody but a fool might know that he is guiltless’. The mass-market Daily News in turn ran a series of front-page articles both on the book and the Slater case in general. Questions were again asked in parliament, to which the Scottish Lord Advocate replied that he would be ‘very much surprised’ if the government saw fit to release the prisoner. As William Roughead later sardonically noted, ‘His lordship was destined to experience that sensation.’
Park’s book, to which Doyle wrote an introduction, can lay claim to being a forerunner of the sort of literary forensic reappraisal of notorious criminal cases that the writer Ludovic Kennedy popularised some forty years later. Commonplace now, the genre barely existed in the 1920s. Park was also a pioneer of the ‘factional’ narrative widely used to this day by thriller writers to establish verisimilitude.
Along with the page-turning style, the book contained one or two genuine revelations. The Glasgow Police, for example, had apparently misrepresented the testimony of Slater’s acquaintance Allan McLean about the diamond brooch being hawked around the Sloper Club in the days following Marion Gilchrist’s murder, and had done so
‘to make a case against the suspect where none otherwise existed’. (‘This may explain why McLean hanged himself,’ Park wrote to Doyle in November 1927.)
There was a question of whether Judge Guthrie had edited his final address to the jury when it came to publishing the official transcript of the trial. ‘The old rascal re-wrote the speech [and] introduced wholesale paragraphs and sentences he never said,’ Park confided to Doyle, although for compelling legal reasons he tempered these remarks in print. But the book’s one true bombshell, which was found in the papers forwarded by Lieutenant Trench’s widow, was a page Trench had torn from the police files at the time of the 1914 inquiry. This showed that Superintendent Ord had originally written in a departmental review of the case, ‘The clue when first received against Slater was very much less strong than against other suspects’. However, somewhere between Ord writing this in 1909 and it being presented to the inquiry five years later, the crucial phrase had been doctored to read ‘not stronger than against other suspects’. ‘You will be the hero when this comes out,’ Doyle generously wrote to Park while preparing Park’s book for publication. He added, ‘I was told from spirit séances a little while ago that it was all about to be cleared up.’
Spurred by the success of The Truth About Oscar Slater, the weekly Empire News (formerly The Umpire, the paper which had once alerted Doyle to the Edalji affair) went to the trouble of tracking down the now 39-year-old Helen Lambie, who had emigrated to Peoria, Illinois, after the war. She had since had an unhappy married life that had produced two daughters, both of whom she named after Marion Gilchrist. Historians of the Slater case have tended to find fault with Lambie’s testimony, which seems to them to be inconsistent on certain key points, and her interview with the News gives some backing to that view. The headline read, ‘Why I believe I blundered over Slater’. In the story that followed Lambie apparently recanted her statement given at the time of the trial, and instead remarked:
It is quite true that I [recognised Marion Gilchrist’s killer], because when I returned from buying the paper that night and encountered the strange man coming from the house he did not seem strange to me … When I told the police the name of the man I thought I knew they replied, ‘Nonsense! You don’t think he could have murdered and robbed your mistress!’ They scoffed so much at the notion of this man being the one I had seen that I had allowed myself to be persuaded that I had been mistaken.
On reading this, Conan Doyle, who had never been impressed with Lambie’s evidence, fired off a syndicated article on the case. When it was published, he sent a copy of it to Park. But before doing so, Doyle crossed out the paper’s ‘anemic’ headline and wrote in the more direct, ‘Confession of Lambie. End of the Slater case’.
However, on closer examination, Lambie’s Empire News interview may not have been the ‘incontestable’ and ‘definitive’ statement Doyle believed. In a letter home to her mother, whom she presumably had no reason to lie to, Marion Gilchrist’s former maid offered yet another account of the events following her employer’s death. ‘No one [from the press] has come here,’ Lambie wrote on 13 November 1927:
… so we will see how far they will go. I can see plainly now all is a frame-up, and Conan Doyle has no statement from me in my handwriting. He says he has a copy, so Conan Doyle knows he is working on a false statement. The Government will not allow themselves to be fooled by falseness, and if I come forward on my own accord no one will pay [my] expenses … Conan Doyle may give up, [as] falseness will never clear or get Slater free. He should have got hanged years ago. They should hang him yet, as he is the man and no other man. Conan Doyle is only aggravating and causing an agitating in the papers to get the public on his side.
This contradiction did not sit well with the Slater purity narrative, and in time Lambie, whom Doyle now called ‘a woman hungrily alive to the sound of her own righteousness’, went to the trouble of swearing out a statement which she had notarised on 18 December 1927. It read:
I wish to put a denial to the statement recantly [sic] published in Newspapers. There is no truth in that statement. Connan [sic] Doyle used a false statement. I would not blame another man. Slater is the man that I saw coming out of the house of Miss Gilchrist. I am as strong and of the same mind as I was at the trial.
Meanwhile, the Daily News enjoyed a scoop of its own when it tracked down 34-year-old Mary Barrowman, whom it found living in distressed circumstances in Glasgow. On 5 November 1927, she had this to say to the paper about the events of nineteen years earlier:
Regarding the proceedings in New York, where I was confronted with the prisoner for the first time as far as speaking to his identification was concerned … I only said that Slater was very like the man I had seen [on 21 December 1908].
It was when I returned to Glasgow that the question of Slater being positively the man was brought before my notice. This was done by Mr Hart, the Fiscal.
This gentleman was most severe in his treatment of me as a witness. He made me appear at his office day after day to have a meeting with him.
It was Mr Hart who got me to change my statement from being ‘very like the man’ to the emphatic declaration that Slater was the man.
It was a remarkable development, and it further galvanised Conan Doyle. From the summer of 1927 onward he was increasingly prepared to advise the Slater camp, to sit on boards and committees, contribute articles, and above all to win over those in a position of authority. As we’ve seen, he was not a man to be easily swayed from his position, nor to dwell on any possible opposing point of view. On 2 November, Doyle wrote to the editor of the Manchester City News in reference to Lambie, ‘What a story! What a scandal! She says that the police made her say it was Slater. Third degree! What a cess pool it all is!’ There was a similar note of outrage (if one tinged by ego) when he told another editor:
I was up against a ring of political lawyers and others who could not give away the police without also giving away themselves … Oscar Slater never knew that Miss Gilchrist existed … The faked police persecution of their own honest Inspector [Trench] was a shocking business.
But perhaps the one imperishable contribution Conan Doyle made to the outcome of the Slater case was to send a copy of Park’s book, and some accompanying notes from Trench’s papers, to the Scots-born former prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald in turn took up the sword and wrote to the Scottish Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, demanding a ‘handsome and generous’ resolution to the case in which ‘the authorities strove for [Slater’s] conviction by influencing witnesses and with-holding evidence’.
MacDonald went on to invite Gilmour to ‘minutely inspect’ the page torn from the Glasgow Police log, in which the line ‘very much less strong’ had been ‘sexed up’ to read ‘not stronger than’. Shortly after this, the government suddenly decided that perhaps there had been some irregularities to the Slater case after all, and on 7 November Gilmour informed the House of Commons, ‘The prisoner has now completed eighteen and a half years of his life sentence, and I feel justified in deciding to authorise his release on licence as soon as suitable arrangements can be made’.
Even this seeming capitulation, which left a good deal unsaid, failed to satisfy Doyle. The Slater business ‘will surely develop into a big political issue unless there is some inquiry into the scandal,’ he wrote to the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, on 13 November. ‘I regret that I cannot believe in the “thorough investigation” by the Scots Office alluded to in your former letter. There are limits to human stupidity and this is beyond them.’
Shortly before noon the following day, Oscar Slater walked free from Peterhead Jail and after lunch in a nearby hotel boarded a train back to Glasgow. It was eighteen years, ten months and twelve days since he had first been taken into custody. In his fulsome letter of thanks to Doyle, Slater revealed that he had ‘meant to take Peterhead for twenty years, [and] then if no help came to end my life’. He was accompanied on his homecoming journey by a rabbi and a reporter from
the Glasgow Daily Record. The next morning’s paper described Slater as ‘looking remarkably fresh … his face was wreathed in smiles as he accepted congratulations on his freedom, [although] he allowed his nerves just now are a little on edge’. He had been breaking rocks in the Peterhead prison quarry until 11 a.m. on the morning of his release.
There were extraordinary scenes on Slater’s arrival that evening at Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Station, where a crowd of some 300 spectators had gathered to get a look at the notorious figure. A reporter perched on a stepladder asked him if he was going out to celebrate. ‘No, I’m going to bed,’ he replied. Slater spent his first night of freedom at the rabbi’s home in Kelvingrove Street, less than a mile away from the scene of Marion Gilchrist’s murder.
So happy was he when he heard the news, that Conan Doyle sat down at Windlesham to consult with the spirits, and more particularly with Pheneas, the 7,000-year-old sage from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. Speaking through Lady Doyle’s mediumship, Pheneas predicted that Slater would be completely exonerated from the charge of having murdered Marion Gilchrist, but that in time he and almost everyone else on earth would perish in a global apocalypse that might take the form of a great flood or earthquake. To protect themselves, Pheneas urged Doyle and his family to buy a large house at Bignell Wood, on the edge of the New Forest, as this would afford at least some degree of shelter in the coming crisis. (It may be purely coincidental to find the spirit proposing this particular beauty spot in southern England, which had long been a favourite retreat of Lady Doyle.)
While Doyle dutifully did this, in time also publishing the starkly titled essay, ‘A Warning’, that he distributed to friends and fellow believers to prepare them for the worst, Slater himself moved into a modest home in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. He would live there for another twenty penurious years, during which he fell into ill health, wrote an unpublished memoir, remarried, and spent much of his spare time whittling driftwood. Although the government never deported him as they once threatened to do, early in the Second World War he was briefly interned as a German national.
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 27