by Robin Odell
Another kind of interchange occurs as the result of violent contact, for example, during a struggle between victim and assailant or in a hit-and-run incident. In the early hours of 28 July 1950, a Glasgow taxi driver cruising down Prospecthill Road on his way to Kilmarnock, saw the mangled body of a woman lying in the road. His immediate reaction was that she had been run down by a fast-moving vehicle. He called the police and PC William Kevan arrived at the scene.
Kevan was a veteran police officer with over twenty years’ service which included experience of investigating many traffic accidents. As he paced the area and looked for the signs normally associated with a hit-and-run incident, he realised that the evidence did not add up. To begin with, he thought the injuries to the woman were far more severe than those normally associated with such incidents. What he found more vexing was the complete absence of any debris at the scene. There was usually broken glass and dirt shaken off the underside of the vehicle when contact was made with a pedestrian. Added to this were curious tyre marks in the road. There were two sets of brake marks and the body lay across them. One set of marks had been made by a vehicle travelling in a westerly direction while the other set, slightly curving, had been made by a vehicle moving in the opposite direction. His suspicions well and truly aroused, PC Kevan called in his CID colleagues.
The post-mortem examination of the victim bore out the constable’s initial impression that the incident was not what it seemed. Dr James Irvine and Dr Andrew Allison found gross injuries of a type and extent not normally seen in motor accidents. There were thirty external wounds, together with severe internal injuries, yet only superficial abrasions on the legs. When the doctors discovered that a bruise on the woman’s head had been made before she died, while other injuries to the face had been caused after death, the whole incident took on a more sinister aspect. The conclusion to be drawn from the forensic evidence was of a woman probably unconscious from a blow to the head when she was run over and killed; then, once dead, the vehicle was reversed and she was run over a second time. All the tyre marks, which PC Kevan had been astute enough to note on his inspection of the road, were made by the same car, so there was no suggestion that two vehicles were involved.
The dead woman was not identified until a friend, worried by her absence, reported the matter to the police. Catherine McCluskey, a forty-year-old unmarried mother, had left her two children with a friend in order that she could have an evening out; it was an evening that ended in disaster. When Rose O’Donnell identified McCluskey’s body in the mortuary, she said, ‘She told me she was going out with a bobby.’ A neighbour confirmed the dead woman’s liaison with a police officer whom she claimed was the father of her three-month-old baby and was expected to pay her maintenance. Corroboration of this came from the Glasgow Assistance Board when an official said McCluskey had applied for assistance after the birth of her second child, but refused to name the father, saying only that he was a policeman.
Suspicion was quickly directed at PC James Ronald Robertson by his fellow officers’ observation of his movements. Robertson was unusual among the lowly paid ranks of the police at that time in that he could afford to run his own car. During the course of his duty on the night of 28 July, he absconded for a period, telling a fellow officer, ‘I’m off to see a blonde.’ When Robertson returned to duty well after midnight, it was noticed that he was perspiring a great deal and looked somewhat dishevelled. He explained his appearance saying that he had to stop to carry out repairs on the exhaust system of his car. One of the last duties he performed on his shift was to record the details of the hit-and-run incident in Prospecthill Road, telephoned in by a divisional officer.
Robertson was questioned the following day and found to be in possession of a number of stolen goods. Asked about Catherine McCluskey, he admitted knowing her and said he had picked her up in his car by prior arrangement and she wanted him to drive her a distance of some fourteen miles to Neilston to stay with a friend. He told her he could not abscond from duty for the length of time it would take to drive to Neilston and back. They argued and he told her to get out of the car. She complied and he drove off; then, having second thoughts, he stopped and reversed the car to go back for her. While reversing along the hundred yards or so that he had travelled, he noticed an increase in the exhaust noise of the car. He stopped, and walking round the car, found Catherine McCluskey trapped beneath it with her clothing caught up in the transmission shaft. He realised that he had accidentally run her down. On finding McCluskey under the car and realising that she was dead, he tried to pull her clear, a task which he found nigh on impossible due to the low ground clearance of the vehicle. Climbing into the driver’s seat, he engaged first gear and drew forward slightly with the result that the body dropped free onto the road. He said, ‘The hopelessness of the situation seemed to be overwhelming. I started the car up and drove away.’ This was the account that Robertson gave to fellow officers and, such was its flimsiness, that he was immediately arrested.
Robertson’s lies soon became apparent when his car was examined by officers from the traffic department. The bodywork showed no signs whatever of superficial damage that usually resulted from collision with a pedestrian. The evidence was on the underside of the car in the form of blood and hair, but did it substantiate his account of what had occurred?
This was where John Glaister stepped into the scene. He examined all the artefacts of the incident and came up with his own reconstruction. Robertson’s uniform was entirely free of blood which seemed strange in view of his account that he had struggled to free the mangled body from beneath his car. By a strange contrast a heavy, rubber truncheon of a non-regulation type which he had in one of his pockets was slightly bloodstained. Glaister next went along to the garage at police headquarters where Robertson’s car was housed. ‘I spent several days there,’ he said, ‘crawling around underneath the car.’
Glaister found nothing to support Robertson’s story; there was a complete lack of the evidence of interchange which occurs when a person is knocked down by a motor vehicle. The tyre marks in the road at the scene of the incident, combined with the gross injuries to the victim, told their own gruesome tale. It appeared that McCluskey, already dead or unconscious, lay in the road and was run over from different directions. Thirty-three-year-old Robertson, a policeman for five years, was sent for trial on a charge of murder. He appeared at Glasgow High Court before Lord Keith and was defended by John Cameron KC.
Defence counsel tested Glaister on his medical evidence and, in particular, on the injuries to the victim’s legs, Cameron suggested that because a great deal of flesh had been torn from the knees, it was difficult to assess how the injuries had been caused. The Professor’s reply was to the effect that the injuries were not to the knees as such but to the inner aspects of the knees and he added rather dryly, ‘my experience of the female anatomy is that a woman doesn’t stand presenting that part to an oncoming car.’ Counsel was at pains to establish the possibility that the victim’s death resulted from an accident. He asked Glaister, ‘If there is no proof that this woman was laid down insensible in the track of the advancing car, can you in any sense eliminate the possibility of an accident?’ Choosing his words with meticulous care, the witness replied, ‘To this extent, that it is my opinion that the injuries were caused by a forward motion of the car going at some speed. I do not mean at a colossal speed, but I mean at some appreciable speed, and I think that that was done on more than one occasion.’
This damning assessment plainly ruled out death by accident. Robertson might have got away with his callous act if he had not made the mistake of reversing and then driving forward over his victim again to ensure she was dead. But then he did not understand the principle of interchange which as Glaister noted later, had in this case, ‘operated both by its absence and its presence’. James Robertson was found guilty by a majority verdict; eight members of the fifteen-strong jury voted for conviction and seven for acquittal. He was hanged
at Barlinnie Prison in December 1950.
Like most medical detectives, John Glaister had his share of poison cases and he was fascinated by the features which put poisoning into a class of its own. He acknowledged that, of all forms of murder, poisoning was both the most cruel and the most difficult to solve. Because poisoning is a crime founded on careful, premeditated planning in which the poisoner, acting alone, takes every precaution to avoid suspicion and escape detection, circumstantial evidence plays an important role. The value of circumstantial evidence has often been derided, usually by defence lawyers, but, equally, its virtues have been praised by various judges. Lord Coleridge described circumstantial evidence as being a mere gossamer thread linking a suspect to a crime, yet it might be strong enough to convict. When circumstances connect closely with each other, they can form a strong web, constituting a level of proof which will satisfy a jury. In a case of poisoning, this type of evidence might be the only kind that has a chance of leading to a successful prosecution.
The knowledge and skill of the forensic pathologist, aided by toxicology and scientific method, can add decisively to the circumstantial evidence available in cases of poisoning. The ease with which symptoms of poisoning can assume the cloak of disease and the apparent reluctance of general practitioners to think of poison in domestic deaths, lent weight to the arguments of those who persuaded John Glaister to write The Power of Poison in 1954. He did so, as he noted in his preface, ‘as the result of promptings from several quarters’. He used a number of historical cases to illustrate the difficulties of assessing suspicion of poisoning.
One such case was that involving Eugène Marie Chantrelle, a Frenchman who taught in Edinburgh in the 1860s. The amorous teacher seduced a teenage pupil and he married her when she reached the age of sixteen. Within months she had born her first child and her life degenerated into misery as her husband resorted to beating her and issued threats of greater violence. In October 1877, contrary to her wishes, Chantrelle insured his wife for £1,000, the terms of the policy being that the insurance would be met only in the event of accidental death.
On New Year’s Day in 1878, Elizabeth Chantrelle was unwell and retired early to bed. The following morning, the maid found Mrs Chantrelle in some distress. She had been vomiting and the room smelled of gas although the gaslight in the room had been extinguished. Chantrelle, who was sleeping in the nursery with the three children, was called to attend to his wife. He remarked that something was wrong with the gas supply and, after opening the window, went off to fetch a doctor. While the master was out of the house, the maid noticed a plate containing pieces of an orange and grapes, together with a tumbler partly filled with lemonade, on Mrs Chantrelle’s bedside table. Later that morning Chantrelle told her he had drunk the lemonade and asked her to wash the empty glass.
Chantrelle was absent for about half an hour and, when he returned, he was on his own. A short while later, Dr Carmichael arrived and examined the patient who he believed to be suffering from coal-gas poisoning. He decided a second opinion was needed and sent for Dr Harvey Littlejohn, the city’s police surgeon and also a toxicologist. The two medical men believed Mrs Chantrelle was dying and arranged for her to be admitted to hospital where she succumbed soon after arrival.
Littlejohn noticed the smell of gas as soon as he entered the bedroom and asked Chantrelle about it. ‘That’s the difficulty, I can’t make out,’ was the reply. When the dead woman was subjected to post-mortem examination, there were none of the usual signs associated with coal-gas poisoning and blood tests proved negative. What was of diverting interest was Littlejohn’s conclusion, having seen the woman while still alive, that her symptoms were more consistent with opium poisoning. This view was substantiated by the traces of the narcotic in the vomitus on the bedclothes. But no opium was found in the stomach, although there were the remains of fruit eaten some time before death.
The whole of Edinburgh’s medico-legal fraternity became fascinated by the mystery of Elizabeth Chantrelle’s death and the French teacher found himself up against a formidable array of forensic expertise when he was tried for murder in the High Court of Justiciary.
Littlejohn reported that the stain on the bedclothes contained about three-quarters of a grain of opium which was nearly a poisonous dose. He had experimented by mixing opium and lemonade and found that the cordial had little effect on the taste of the mixture. He had found opium and other drugs in Chantrelle’s house and it was known that the Frenchman had bought extract of opium from a druggist in the city. Dr Douglas Maclagan, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, examined Mrs Chantrelle when she was admitted to hospital and did not think she was suffering from coal-gas poisoning. He believed the signs were more indicative of narcotic poisoning.
The university’s Professor of Chemistry, Dr Crum Brown, and Professor of Materia Medica, Thomas Fraser, added their testimony to the investigation of Mrs Chantrelle’s death. They endorsed their colleagues’ opinions and Crum Brown experimented with various preparations of opium to see if he could duplicate the staining effect found on the bed linen. He concluded that the most likely form of opium used was the solid or semi-solid variety.
All the experts agreed that Mrs Chantrelle had died as the result of narcotic poisoning. It looked therefore as if the leak of coal gas was either coincidental or a deliberately contrived diversion. That it was the latter was proved by employees of the Edinburgh Gas Company who examined the gas supply in the house. The gas bracket on the mantelpiece of the bedroom which appeared to be the only source was functioning perfectly. The gas supply was turned off at the meter when the fitter inspected the house. The meter was working normally and, turning on the supply, the fitter returned to the bedroom where he immediately noticed an escape of gas, but not from the mantelshelf bracket. Closely examining the room, he found a place near the window frame where a gas bracket had been removed. There was a fractured pipe between the woodwork and the wall. Lying on the window ledge was a section of gas pipe which fitted the gap in the supply pipe.
As John Glaister wrote in his account of this unusual case, ‘The evidence, considered as a whole, was entirely circumstantial, and the unification of the links, when finally made to form an unbroken chain which established the guilt of the prisoner in the minds of the jury, must surely be considered instructive by those who have an interest in criminology.’ Suffice it to say that the jury found Chantrelle guilty by a unanimous decision and he was subsequently hanged for his crime. The case was certainly instructive in bearing out the maxim of forensic medicine that things are not always as they seem. The affair also highlighted the quality of Scotland’s forensic system, particularly the willingness, later pursued by Glaister, to draw in experts from other disciplines.
Another Scottish case in The Power of Poison and one which drew together Glaister himself and Sydney Smith as expert witnesses for the prosecution was the Oxgang Farm affair. Mrs Margaret McMillan was charged with both attempted murder and murder in a case of arsenic poisoning. The victim was her husband, thirty-nine-year-old Robert Brennan McMillan, who died on 6 January 1940 at his Dunbartonshire farm after a period of gastric illness. McMillan had a history of illness going back to 1937 when his mother noticed his yellow colour which she attributed to jaundice. He also suffered from gastric upsets and neuritis.
Mrs McMillan senior visited her son in the presence of his wife on 3 January 1940 when he complained that his throat was raw down to his stomach. He vomited twice while she was there and she sought reassurance from her daughter-in-law that if he became worse she could call her. On 5 January, she received a telephone message informing her that the doctor on his visit that day had given a satisfactory report on her son. Robert McMillan died the next day. Eleven grains of arsenic were found in his stomach and intestinal tract.
It was known that McMillan had used arsenic around his farm for killing rats. An acquaintance who worked at a glass factory where arsenic was regularly used in large quantities as part of
the processing, obtained 2 or 3lb of the poison, which he handed in a paper bag to McMillan. One night, in March 1937, he helped the farmer lay poison traps by spreading the arsenic on slices of bread and placing them strategically around the farm. In December 1939, he supplied Mrs McMillan with about 1lb of arsenic, which he took from the large storage drum at the glassworks. She had complained about rats in her bedroom and he supplied the poison at her request. Following Robert McMillan’s death, and the news that his friend had been poisoned, he called at the farm and spoke to the widow. He expressed his anxieties about having to answer questions from the police and she told him there was nothing to worry about. When he enquired specifically about the quantity of arsenic he had given her, she told him that McMillan had flushed it down the drain.