‘The sudden alarm which seized me suspended my faculties, and it was some time before I could perceive the awful situation in which I was placed and the suspicions which must naturally arise from my having delayed to make the circumstance instantly known. I at length found that concealment was the only means by which I could rescue myself from the horrid imputation, and I resolved to bury the body as well as I was able.’
It was no good. The forensic evidence of stab wounds in the throat and eye socket told a different story. Maria could not have shot and stabbed herself to death. A verdict of guilty was passed. Corder wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. He knew he was guilty. Then he was sentenced to death, which had a huge effect on him. When he got back to the gaol, the governor, Mr Orridge, pressed him as hard as he could to confess. Corder shouted, ‘I am a guilty man’, and then produced a written confession. After that, he quietened down. He attended a service in the prison chapel before being taken off for execution. Just before the hanging he said feebly, ‘I am justly sentenced and may God forgive me’.
After the execution, there was spirited bidding for the rope. People were prepared to pay as much as a guinea an inch for it. Huge sums were offered for the pistols and dagger used in the Murder at the Red Barn, but they became the property of the Sheriff of the county.
James Greenacre
It was 1836 and there was building work going on in the Edgware Road in London, about a quarter of a mile from the place where the Regents Canal emerges from under the pathway.
The buildings under construction were dwellings, to be called Canterbury Villas, and they were very nearly finished. On 28 December, 1836, a bricklayer on the site by the appropriate name of Bond noticed a package wrapped in sacking, carefully and very deliberately hidden behind a paving-stone. He moved the stone to get a better look and was horrified to see a pool of frozen blood. He called the clerk of works and another of the building workers over and together they opened the package. Inside they were horrified to find the trunk of a human body; the head and legs had been removed. It turned out to be the body of a woman aged about fifty. The head had been removed in a clumsy and amateurish way, the neck part sawn through, part broken off. The legs had been taken off in the same clumsy way.
In truth, the busy building site was a very foolish place to try to hide a body. It was bound to be discovered very quickly. The murderer must have been either stupid or insane. In the event, in the very swiftest of murder trials, it was never really established which.
An inquest held on the body on 31 December, 1836 at the White Lion in Edgware Road returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’. The victim remained unidentified.
Shortly afterwards, there was great excitement in the locality when it was reported that a human head had been discovered. It was found in the Ben Jonson Lock on the Regents Canal, in the reach running through Stepney Fields. The trunk, which by then had been buried, was exhumed to see if it matched the head. A surgeon named Girdwood declared that the head and trunk did indeed belong to one and the same body. This was a step forward, but there was still no clue as to the identity of the murderer or the identity of the victim. The head was preserved in spirits and kept at Mr Girdwood’s house, where people could go and inspect it if it was thought that they could contribute to an identification.
No further progress was made on this unusual and macabre case until 2 February. Then a labourer named James Page was cutting osiers in a bed near Cold Harbour Lane in Camberwell, when he saw a large bundle covered with sacking lying in a ditch, partly under the water. He just happened to see it as he stepped over the ditch while he was working. Page was curious and lifted the bundle out of the water. He saw what looked like human toes sticking out of it and became alarmed. He called to a fellow worker who was close by, and together they opened the package. It contained a pair of human legs. They were taken off to Mr Girdwood, who confirmed that the legs too belonged to the body found in the Edgware Road.
On 20 March, a major breakthrough came. A broker from Goodge Street in the Tottenham Court Road applied to the Paddington churchwarden for permission to inspect the remains of the dead woman. This was Mr Gay, and he was concerned about the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of his sister, Hannah Brown, who had left her lodgings on Christmas Eve and had not been seen or heard of since. He was now very worried about what might have happened to her. Obviously he feared that she might have been murdered. When Mr Gay saw the head floating in the bottle of spirits, he identified it as that of his sister; his horror at this recognition can only be imagined.
The police made enquiries about Hannah Brown, and discovered that she had recently been courted by a man called James Greenacre. She had been about to marry Greenacre. She left her lodgings in Union Street Middlesex Hospital, to accompany her husband-to-be to his house in Carpenter’s Buildings, Camberwell, to prepare for their wedding the following Monday. She had last been seen in the company of James Greenacre. James Greenacre was naturally the man the authorities most wanted to speak to next.
The magistrates at Marylebone police office issued a warrant for Greenacre’s arrest. After great difficulty, Greenacre was taken into custody on 24 March at his lodgings at No 1 St Alban’s Place in Kennington Road. It was discovered that he was living there with a woman called Sarah Gale and her child; he was not just living with Sarah Gale, he was cohabiting with her. The arrest of Greenacre and Gale took place under circumstances that confirmed the mounting suspicion of guilt. Inspector Feltham and a police constable went to Greenacre’s lodgings and found him in bed with Sarah Gale. Inspector Feltham told Greenacre the reason for his visit and at first Greenacre said he did not know anyone called Hannah Brown. Later he admitted that he had known her and had been on the point of marrying her but that she had disappeared. He did not know where she was.
Greenacre and Gale got dressed. Greenacre then told Feltham it was lucky he had come to see him that night as the next day they were sailing to America. It was an odd way of expressing the situation. Lucky for Inspector Feltham, certainly, and lucky for justice too; but certainly very unlucky for James Greenacre and Sarah Gale. The story about the imminent voyage to America certainly had every appearance of being true, because there were boxes all round the flat that were packed, closed and tied up with rope ready for travel. The boxes were opened by the police, and they were found to contain many items that had belonged to Hannah Brown. There were even more incriminating items still, including pieces of an old cotton dress that corresponded exactly with the cloth that the body had been wrapped in when first discovered in the Edgware Road.
The trial of Greenacre and Gale opened at the Old Bailey on 10 April, 1837. Greenacre was charged with the wilful murder of Hannah Brown. Sarah Gale was charged with being an accessory after the fact, in other words with helping Greenacre in the full knowledge of what he had done. The judges were Lord Chief Justice Tindal, Mr Justice Coleridge and Mr Justice Coltman. Public interest in the case was very great, because of the macabre dismemberment of the victim and her dispersal round London: the court was packed. The trial was very short, reaching its conclusion on the second day. The judge began his summing up at 6.15 p.m. The jury returned a guilty verdict after only fifteen minutes. Greenacre was sentenced to death and hanged on 2 May, 1837; Gale was sentenced to transportation – she would have to spend the rest of her life in Australia, which some would say was a fate worse than Greenacre’s.
Oscar Slater
‘the murder of Marion Gilchrist’
It was on 21 December, 1908 that Marion Gilchrist was battered to death in her apartment in Glasgow. Miss Gilchrist was what used to be called ‘a maiden lady’ of 82. She was looked after by a servant, Helen Lambie, and the violent murder happened during the very short time when Helen was out buying a newspaper. She was out for as little as ten minutes, yet in that time an assailant managed to get into Miss Gilchrist’s apartment, beat her to death and make off with a small diamond brooch. One peculiarity of this case is that the police disc
overed that only the one small diamond brooch was stolen, when Marion Gilchrist had a large collection of jewellery.
The family in the apartment underneath Miss Gilchrist’s, the Adams family, heard noises, unusual noises, and Arthur Adams went upstairs to investigate. It had sounded like three knocks on the ceiling. Miss Gilchrist was an old lady and was perhaps in difficulties of some kind, possibly having a stroke or a heart attack or possibly she had fallen over and broken her leg; maybe she was signalling for help. When Mr Adams reached Miss Gilchrist’s door he rang the bell. There was no answer, though he could hear noises inside the apartment. He went downstairs again, but was urged by his sisters to check that Miss Gilchrist really was all right. He went back upstairs and was standing in front of the door when Miss Lambie arrived back from her errand. It was at this moment that they both saw a man down in the hallway of the building. This was a semi-public area, so it did not strike either of them as unusual – perhaps another tenant or a visitor. There was no reason to connect this person with Miss Gilchrist.
Mr Adams told Miss Lambie what he had heard and the two of them went into the apartment. Together they found Miss Gilchrist; she was lying near the fireplace with her head brutally smashed in.
Oscar Slater, the man who emerged as the chief police suspect, had been living in Glasgow for about six weeks, with his French girlfriend. He claimed to be a diamond-cutter. Whether he was or not, the police – and others – thought he was a ‘bad lot’. This assessment of Slater was based mainly on the lowest of prejudices; Oscar Slater was German, he was Jewish and he had a French mistress. But it must be admitted that he was also running an illegal gambling operation.
The day after the murder, Mary Barrowman, a girl of fourteen, told the police that at about the time when the murder had been committed she had bumped into a man hurrying out of the Gilchrist address. Mary described this man as tall, young, and wearing a fawn cloak and a round hat. This description was evidently of a different man from the one Mr Adams and Miss Lambie saw. They described their man as ‘about five feet six inches, wearing a light grey overcoat and a black cap’.
The police found out that Oscar Slater tried to sell a pawn-ticket for a diamond brooch just four days after the murder, and assumed that this brooch must be Miss Gilchrist’s brooch. Even more suspicious was the fact that Slater and his girlfriend had then sailed for America on board the Lusitania, and Slater had used an assumed name for the passenger list. The police had been under a great deal of public pressure to find the villain who had committed this murder. Within five days they had their man – or, at least, a man. They cabled the police in America to take Slater into custody and then showed a picture of Slater to the three witnesses. The two girls, Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman, obligingly identified Slater as the man they saw immediately after the murder; Mr Adams did not. It was the two girls who were sent off to America, on a free return trip, for the extradition proceedings. The trip to America looks suspiciously like a bribe.
Slater turned out to be very accommodating. He was very willing to return to Scotland to answer the accusation. He knew he was innocent, could prove it, and was positive that this ‘misunderstanding’ could be cleared up relatively easily. He could not know that the authorities were already determined to pin the murder on him and would stoop to any depth to secure a conviction. He could not know how close he would come to being hanged.
The initial British court hearing was in the Edinburgh High Court on 3 May, 1909, over four months after the murder. The police had by this time decided not only that Slater had committed the murder, but that he had committed it with a small hammer that he owned. They had also mustered a dozen witnesses who claimed to have seen Slater near Miss Gilchrist’s apartment on the day of the murder. This was hardly significant as Oscar Slater and Marion Gilchrist lived only four blocks apart.
This ‘evaporation’ of the evidence against Oscar Slater is another of the hallmarks of his case, especially in view of the apparent determination of the authorities to get a conviction. That Slater should have been seen a number of times on the streets of Glasgow two hundred yards from his own home could hardly be presented as significant evidence tying him to the murder, at least not in any trial that was fair. The pawn-ticket turned out to be even weaker evidence against him. The defence lawyer was able to show that the pawn-ticket belonged to a brooch pawned several weeks before the murder, so it could not possibly have been the one stolen from Marion Gilchrist. Similarly, the voyage to America had been booked six weeks before the murder; it was very far from being a ‘moonlight flit’.
Slater said in court that he had been at home with his girlfriend and her servant at the time when the murder was committed. This alibi was simply swept aside. The Lord Advocate, Alexander Ure, decided that Slater must be hanged. The jury was not so sure. It was not a unanimous verdict, but a majority found him guilty. Oscar Slater was sentenced to be hanged on 27 May, 1909.
A petition for clemency was launched immediately, raising 20,000 signatures. Two days before the execution was due to take place, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, with hard labour. Slater had his life, but it was still a cruel and unjust sentence. Naturally he wanted to prove his innocence and get out of prison. Doyle had read about the case some years earlier in the book Notable Scottish Trials and had been struck then by the fact that Slater had been convicted on suspicion based on prejudice, and on no solid evidence whatever. Doyle did not approve of Slater as a person. He thought him a reprobate, but he was sure he had not committed the murder for which he was convicted.
It proved a long, slow process interesting people in Slater’s case. Many people felt that even if he had not committed the murder he probably had something to do with it. He was an unpleasant person and generally regarded as immoral. Doyle took his time. He spent three years thoroughly researching the case and in 1912 produced a book called The Case of Oscar Slater. It went through all the evidence raised against Slater at his trial and showed, detail by detail, how it could not be made to prove Oscar Slater’s guilt.
The matter of the assumed name, for instance, was less suspicious than it was made to appear in court for the simple reason that Slater was travelling with his mistress; he was trying to avoid being detected by his wife, not the police. Slater had indeed possessed a small hammer as mentioned in the trial, but it was far too small to have inflicted the wounds on Miss Gilchrist’s head. Doyle said that a forensic investigator at the crime scene had declared that a large chair, dripping with blood, seemed the likeliest murder weapon. The matter of Miss Gilchrist opening the door and letting someone she knew into her apartment strongly suggested that the murderer was well-known to her in some capacity or other. Oscar Slater and Marion Gilchrist did not know each another at all.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book raised a storm of indignation against the injustice that had been done against Slater. Now many people were ready to demand either a pardon or a re-trial. But the authorities were adamant, and nothing changed. Even Doyle’s book made no difference. Then, much later, in 1925, William Gordon was released from Peterhead Prison; unknown to the authorities, Gordon was carrying a desperate message written on greaseproof paper and hidden under Gordon’s tongue. It was Oscar Slater’s cry for help to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Slater hoped to re-activate his old ally and enlist his help in getting justice for him.
Doyle was moved by this desperate plea and tried once again to help. He fired off a fusillade of letters. But there was no new evidence that Doyle or Slater knew of. They were no further forward.
But even after this long period, it was possible for new information to emerge.
In 1927 a new book about the case came out, The Truth About Oscar Slater, written by William Park, a Glasgow journalist. Park decided, just as Doyle had done, that Miss Gilchrist had known her murderer and went on to speculate that Miss Gilchrist had had a disagreement with the man about a document that she possessed. Park inferred this from the fact that Miss Gilchrist’s documents
had been disturbed and rummaged through, presumably by the murderer. During the argument she was pushed and hit her head. Her attacker then had to decide. He could leave Marion Gilchrist to recover and then probably have him charged with assault – or he could make sure she did not recover, in other words kill her. He decided to kill. The laws of libel made William Park hesitate and stop short of naming the killer, but he believed that Miss Gilchrist’s nephew murdered her.
The book was a sensation. The newspapers were full of the story and it was then that significant new information – or information long withheld – started to come out. A grocer called MacBrayne confirmed Slater’s alibi; he had actually seen Slater on his own doorstep at the time of the murder, when he had said he was at home. Mary Barrowman and Helen Lambie were traced. Now they were ready to admit that they had been bribed and coached by the police to make a false identification. One wonders how many innocent people have been sent to their deaths or to long prison sentences, over the centuries, by bribed perjurers like these two women. A detective called Trench said he had never believed Helen Lambie’s identification. For breaking ranks in this way, Trench was persecuted by his fellow officers, charged with concealing evidence, and he had to leave the police force. As this new information was published in the newspapers it became impossible for the authorities to keep Slater in prison any longer. On 8 November, 1927, the Secretary of State for Scotland issued a statement: ‘Oscar Slater has now completed more than eighteen and a half years of his life sentence, and I have felt justified in deciding to authorize his release on licence as soon as suitable arrangements can be made.’
Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers) Page 7