The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  On 11 October, Slater’s agent wrote to Doyle to say that his client was now prepared to pay £250 towards his costs, but that Doyle’s published comments about Slater being ‘an ungrateful dog and a liar’ raised the prospect of a countersuit for libel. An apology was in order, the agent believed. By then Doyle was on a tour of Scandinavia as part of his mission to bring the psychic gospel to the world, but he wrote to a mutual colleague:

  Dear Mr Reade

  It would be as well that Slater should be warned … [to] be careful what he says or writes. If he repeats the string of lies which he has told, such as that I received £400 for articles from Scotch papers, that I made as much as he did, that I took up his case to gain personal credit … I shall have to declare him once more to be what I consider him to be.

  There was more wrangling between the opposing sets of lawyers throughout October, leading Doyle to write to an intermediary from Copenhagen:

  Do what you can to prevent this perverse and misguided man from plunging into litigation, [for] it will most surely end in his losing that competence which I have gained for him.

  This final estrangement was all the more tragic given the fact that Doyle’s own health was now failing so badly. He broke down several times during his speaking tour, privately complaining of acute breathing difficulties, but refused all offers to curtail his schedule. He had to be carried off when his ship returned to Dover on 7 November.

  Four days later, Doyle gave back-to-back Armistice Day speeches to packed houses, telling his audiences of a recent séance with Einer Nielsen, a Danish medium, and assuring them there was ‘no final death’. As a result, he insisted he felt ‘happier and clearer’ than he had for years. Although Doyle had to postpone a subsequent talk after collapsing in a London taxi, he was able to contribute a long, valedictory piece to the Sunday Graphic. He wrote:

  I have been pronounced to be suffering from a complaint – angina – which is certainly painful and hardly at my age curable, and yet, owing to my psychic knowledge, I am conscious of a profound inward serenity and a deep peace of mind … God does not throw us upon the scrap-heap.

  Something about Doyle’s published remarks – if not the threat of further legal action – apparently stirred even Slater, because later in November he swore out a statement:

  I hereby undertake not to raise any suit against you for damages on account of alleged slander prior to this date.

  Signed

  OSCAR LESCHZINER (Slater)

  Although the Slater case ultimately descended into a morass of public recriminations about legal fees and expenses, the search for Marion Gilchrist’s killer, or killers, wasn’t entirely abandoned. Conan Doyle came to believe that the prospect of bringing the guilty parties to justice was ‘well-nigh hopeless’, but felt duty-bound to continue to press the police to reopen the case even though ‘this could not be more than a gesture’.

  Doyle’s own conclusions about the affair followed on those of William Park, who died not long after Slater won his appeal. Park had come to believe that the key to the case lay somewhere among the three Charteris brothers, Archibald, Francis and John, and Marion Gilchrist’s three nephews, James, George and Wingate Birrell. One or more of these individuals had been in league with Helen Lambie, the theory went, and Lambie herself had later disappeared to America so as not to be available to Slater’s defence. Park told Doyle in a letter of 2 November 1927 that Lambie had let the killer into Miss Gilchrist’s flat before going out ‘for the pretended paper’ on the night of the murder, and had entered into this fatal arrangement for ‘romantic or financial reasons, and possibly both’.

  As Doyle later privately remarked, it was a cast worthy of a Sherlock Holmes tale: a superficially respectable extended family of soldiers and lawyers that was inwardly teeming with mutual jealousies and resentments. Helen Lambie had evidently believed that her mistress would be relieved of her jewels but not physically harmed, Park told Doyle. But something had gone wrong in the execution of the robbery. Perhaps the old woman had struggled with the intruder, fallen, and hit her head. If her visitor was indeed Francis Charteris, a doctor, he would have been quickly able to assess the extent of her injury. At the very least, presuming Miss Gilchrist revived and identified him as her attacker, he would be ruined for life. If she then subsequently died, he would be charged with her murder. In William Park’s view, one he shared with Doyle, Charteris, having swiftly reviewed his options, had plucked up the nerve to finish the old lady off where she lay and then to walk brazenly past Arthur Adams and Helen Lambie before disappearing into the street. Lambie’s eventual departure for America was ‘the most complete sign that Charteris is the man,’ Park wrote.

  Wealthy, elderly spinsters who are attacked in their homes by complete strangers are far rarer than those assaulted by their own family members or acquaintances. Why should that be so? The obvious answer is that the insider has the all-important knowledge about the victim’s circumstances denied the casual intruder, and, as often as not, the access required to successfully carry off the crime in the first place. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to read the transcript of Oscar Slater’s trial today and not conclude that it was a travesty of justice that sent Slater to prison for nearly twenty years. The whole case against him really began with the misapprehension that the brooch he had been trying to sell on spec at various intervals during 1908 was in fact the same one that was removed from Marion Gilchrist’s flat on the night of her murder. As Allan McLean, the young cycle dealer and habitué of Glasgow’s faintly sinister Sloper Club later testified:

  I remember a man visited the club whom I only knew as Oscar … I heard, in the month of December, that he was offering a pawn ticket for a brooch to a friend of mine named Anderson. I heard of the death of Miss Gilchrist on the 21st. I noticed that [Slater] did not return to the club after that, [and] on Friday, 25th instant, went to the Detective Department, Central Police Office, and reported the matter.

  This was commendably civic-minded on McLean’s part, but the case against Slater suffered a serious blow – or at least it should have done – when the police subsequently discovered the pawn ticket still in the suspect’s possession, recovered the brooch, and conclusively determined that it was not the one missing from the room of the murdered woman. As Conan Doyle wrote, ‘The case of the police might well seem desperate after this, since if Slater were indeed guilty, it would mean that by pure chance they had pursued the right man.’ To Doyle, the only remaining question was whether the ‘Establishment’, in the form of the senior ranks of the Glasgow detective bureau, the Lord Advocate, the procurator fiscal’s office and others at different levels of the judicial branch and local government had then swiftly come together in a like-minded alliance to protect the real killer, or if the official investigation was distinguished more by sheer lethargy and ineptitude on the police’s part.

  Inheritance being one of the most obvious motives for a family crime, it’s perhaps worth noting Marion Gilchrist’s circumstances on the day she met her death. Miss Gilchrist had signed her will on 28 May 1908, and added a codicil to it the following November, just a month before her murder. The police examined this document, and thus would have known that the deceased left provision for her sister Jane Birrell, for her putative daughter Margaret Galbraith Ferguson, and other members of the Ferguson family, as well as a lump sum of £5,000 (some £360,000 today) for an individual listed only as ‘James Johnston, residing at Shanghai, China’. It’s been speculated that Johnston was the father of Marion Gilchrist’s illegitimate child.

  There was a married Glaswegian vicar of that name who officiated at the city’s Free Church of Scotland until 1877, when Margaret Ferguson was a girl of about 13, after which he moved to London before serving as a missionary. The will made no reference either to the three Charteris brothers or to Miss Gilchrist’s three Birrell nephews. There was, however, some talk about the family unit in general, and the deceased’s apparent belief that the state would ultimately beco
me the benevolent ‘parent’ for all people, regardless of their individual background or circumstances – further evidence that the 82-year-old lady at the heart of the tragedy was not always the quiet, conventional figure sometimes supposed.

  As we’ve seen, Helen Lambie later reportedly disclosed the name of the man she saw leaving Marion Gilchrist’s flat on the night of the murder, and that individual was Dr Francis Charteris. Charteris was then 33, and steadily building up a private medical practice which he combined with lecturing duties at Glasgow University. In April 1907, he had married a wealthy young local woman named Annie Kedie, and Marion Gilchrist and Helen Lambie had both attended the wedding. Charteris was three years younger than Oscar Slater, of the same general build and, like him, had a somewhat prominent nose. It’s not beyond the realm of belief that a spectator could have mistaken one man for the other if glimpsed on a wet midwinter’s night.

  Charteris then lived at 400 Great Western Road, less than half a mile from the scene of the murder, and by his own admission he had no compelling alibi for the night in question. Speaking more than fifty years later, he told the Scottish Daily Mail:

  I was working alone all afternoon in my laboratory. I had seen no one before the [police] called me, and my surgery was just beside the subway station – the next one to that for West Princes Street. For all that I could prove to the contrary, I might have gone to Miss Gilchrist’s flat, done the deed and returned without being seen.

  To establish a motive, or indeed any real connecting link between Dr Charteris and Marion Gilchrist is another matter, however. It’s true that Helen Lambie said in her disputed October 1927 interview with the Empire News, ‘I knew [Miss Gilchrist] had papers to which she attached far more importance than to anything else in the house’. Commenting a month later in the same paper, Conan Doyle wrote of his belief that ‘there was some romance, some tragedy in [Marion Gilchrist’s] life, dating perhaps far back, but having consequences now which were becoming manifest in her old age,’ another plot twist readily familiar from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Although Doyle failed to develop his point, he seems to have imagined that Dr Charteris, perhaps with Helen Lambie’s collusion, had gone to the victim’s flat on the night of 21 December to purloin these ‘papers’ – presumably containing details of Miss Gilchrist’s illegitimate heir – with a view to subsequently challenging her will. The crime thus had nothing to do with money and valuables per se, and Doyle assumed that the single brooch had been removed as a blind to throw the police off the trail.

  To accept this theory, however, is to believe that a particularly concerted and unusually durable conspiracy had then sprung up virtually overnight to protect the reputation of a largely unremarkable family doctor, and that it continued in effect for the remaining fifty-six years of Charteris’ life, and indeed thereafter. At the very least, the man who assaulted Marion Gilchrist was a reasonably proficient house-breaker, if not a cold-blooded murderer. No evidence of such a spirit was ever shown in the life of this rather shy, retiring doctor, who, full of honours, spent his declining years largely haunting the bar of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

  In later life, both Helen Lambie and Arthur Adams flatly denied that Charteris was the man they had seen leave Marion Gilchrist’s flat on the night of her death. An eminently reliable and well-placed witness, if one who prefers anonymity, adds, ‘The doctor always believed that Slater was innocent, and that members of the household were involved. If he knew anything more about it than that, he took it with him to his grave.’

  Although some sort of family involvement seems the most likely explanation, there’s also a second possibility: that Marion Gilchrist’s death was the tragic result of a common burglary by a gang of thieves, none of whom was the least interested in the contents of her will or private papers. The author Richard Whittington-Egan later gave some credence to this theory in his book The Oscar Slater Murder Story. According to this version of events, a Glasgow hoodlum named James Inglis later confessed that he and three accomplices, Craig, Wilson and Jamieson, had heard about Miss Gilchrist’s jewel collection from a woman who worked as her cleaner, cased the premises, and subsequently took advantage of Helen Lambie’s brief absence on the night of 21 December to let themselves in with a skeleton key and go about their business.

  Jamieson, described as a ‘moral degenerate’ who sometimes worked as a chemist’s assistant, was the one who had committed the actual murder. He had probably been drinking before Miss Gilchrist had stood up to confront him; some deep frustration suddenly exploded into psychopathic violence, the theory goes, after which he had swiftly left through the front door while his associates, forced to abandon their plan by Helen Lambie’s return, made their own escape by climbing out the kitchen window and dropping the 10ft onto the grass at the rear of the flat. They were never seen again.

  A close variant of this story also followed Oscar Slater’s death in 1948, when the Sunday Express published an interview with an anonymous 58-year-old man who said, ‘I know who committed the murder. I wish now to tell the tale that would have saved Slater and sent two men to the gallows.’ Essentially, this was the same burglary-gone-wrong scenario as later emerged in Whittington-Egan’s book. While a man named ‘W’ had kept watch, another man named ‘J’ had rung Marion Gilchrist’s bell. Apparently thinking it was Helen Lambie returning with her evening paper, the old lady had pulled the lever to open the front door, before again settling in her chair by the dining room fire. According to the paper’s informant, ‘J’ had then quickly walked upstairs, where ‘he struck at Miss Gilchrist, but did not knock her out as he expected. So he followed her, striking again and again with his jemmy, until she collapsed.’

  ‘By this time,’ the story continued:

  … the people underneath had become alarmed, and were making for Miss Gilchrist’s. ‘J’ had no time to hunt for money or jewellery. He may have snatched a piece or two hurriedly before he was disturbed, but to the best of my knowledge the two men gained nothing by the murder.

  At the time of the trial, a Miss Agnes Brown, a schoolteacher, told the police that two men rushed past her in West Princes Street. One, she said, had his arm pressed close to his side.

  That was ‘J’, supporting the jemmy under his jacket.

  Over the years, there would be no shortage of other suspects proposed as Miss Gilchrist’s killer. A recurring figure near the top of this list of possible assassins was the dead woman’s maid, Helen Lambie. Lambie, it was known, had stepped out for the paper on the evening of 21 December taking the only set of keys to the Gilchrist flat with her. Could she then have passed these to one Paddy Nugent, her married lover, who had come upstairs from the street and committed the crime while Lambie established her alibi by ostentatiously going off on her errand?

  Little is known of Nugent except that he operated as an unlicensed bookie in Motherwell, and that he broadly matched the description given by Rowena Adams, the victim’s downstairs neighbour, of the man she had seen lingering at the door of the Gilchrist close minutes before the murder. This individual ‘had a long nose, with a most peculiar dip,’ she testified. ‘He had a very clear complexion, not sallow nor a white pallor but something of an ivory colour … He was clean shaven, and very broad in [the] head’ – just one of many eyewitness statements that could be said to have eliminated Oscar Slater as much as incriminated him. (Some Slater scholars have speculated that ‘Nugent’ was one and the same as Hugh Cameron, or ‘Moudie’, the Glasgow bookie’s clerk who befriended Slater, and that the two men had run a small but locally popular Cambridge Street brothel catering to a clientele that included several judges, and whose staff were known to impersonate historical figures such as the late Queen Victoria in ‘highly unorthodox costume’, but this last detail has proved impossible to corroborate.)

  Lambie, in one published account:

  … got away with it simply because, being a maid, she was generally accepted to be stupid. After hours of the most detailed examination in the
witness-box in New York, she still had her wits about her sufficiently to stop [Slater’s agent] Gordon Miller dead in his tracks. Miller never had any doubt about the fact that the girl was guilty, nor that she was very clever.

  Even if you accept that, however, it’s still hard to see how Lambie can be said to have personally gained from her employer’s murder. After returning from her long, impoverished exile in America, she lived in equally straitened (and mostly solitary) circumstances in the north of England, and died there in 1960, aged 72.

  When introducing Sherlock Holmes to the public in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle wrote of his detective’s investigation of a crime scene:

  He whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chatted away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound, as it dashes backward and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.