Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  Conan Doyle had long believed the gulf between science and the spirit to be bridgeable. First attracted to spiritualism in the 1890s, he had been exploring it with quiet, methodical skepticism ever since. Now the pull of the field, with its central belief in an afterlife and its promise of a vanished past that remained discernible in the present—allowing the living to converse with departed loved ones—became consuming. “Those who, in later years, professed astonishment that someone as down to earth as Conan Doyle should espouse spiritualism,” his biographer Russell Miller has written, “failed to appreciate that the movement in the late Victorian era, far from being dominated by cranks and charlatans, attracted some of the country’s leading scientific minds.”

  To his quest to determine whether life endured beyond death, Conan Doyle brought (or so he felt) the same brand of empirical investigation that he applied to the detection of crimes. His work involved attending séances by a spate of professed mediums, writing extensively on the subject, and releasing his findings through the Psychic Press, the publishing house he had founded. “How thorough and long were my studies,” he wrote, “before I was at last beaten out of my material agnostic position and forced to admit the validity of the proofs….When, on the other hand, it is found that the medium has introduced false drapery or accessories…we are in the presence of the most odious and blasphemous crime which a human being can commit.”

  On questions of spiritualism, it is clear that Conan Doyle’s ardent personal longing eclipsed his scientific acumen. By the 1920s, he had come to believe almost unreservedly in ghosts, fairies, and the reality of life after death. In his books, articles, and lectures of the period, he espoused the conviction that Spiritualism embodied fundamental human truths more fully than Christianity did. Not surprisingly, Miller wrote, this stance did not sit well with many observers:

  At Windlesham, Conan Doyle became accustomed to receiving hate mail, most of which he disregarded, but there was one particularly vituperative letter, dated 16 December 1919, from Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s former lover and a relatively recent convert to the Roman Catholic church: “Sir, What a disgusting beast you are with your filthy caricatures of ‘Christ.’ The proper way to deal with such a man as you would be to give you a thrashing with a horse whip.”…Douglas accused Conan Doyle of promoting spiritualism for the sake of money and notoriety, “in short for the same purposes and with the same flat-footed low persistence as you worked your idiot ‘Sherlock Holmes’ business.” He went on to prophesy that Conan Doyle’s “blasphemous ravings” would bring a “dreadful judgement” on him and signed himself “Yours with the utmost contempt.” Conan Doyle replied the following day, with a masterful and succinct dismissal: “Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me.”

  But even in the opinion of more moderate critics, Conan Doyle’s involvement in spiritualism, and the public derision it aroused, may well have undercut his efforts on Slater’s behalf.

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  AS THE 1920S UNSPOOLED, Slater’s sisters continued their correspondence, with Malchen in particular assuming their mother’s role as the keeper of the lamp in the window. “In vain I have waited so many months for a sign of life from you,” she wrote in 1923. “As soon as you possibly can, dear Oscar, let us hear something from you….Life is still very hard for Germany….I pray daily to the dear God that your innocence will come to light and you will gain your freedom.”

  Some time later, Slater wrote: “You write me in your letters that there is no wonder if I have lost interest in you….But you are very far wrong dear Malchen. I can only lose interest in you when I cease to exist. I think daily of you all.”

  Phemie, too, wrote regularly. “Max speaks often about you and the children do so as well,” she wrote in March 1924. “Magda, Erna, Erich and Hans are married. Walter is still single and an eighteen year old daughter (Lilli) is most unfortunately lost by death during the war. My old Max (he is now 60 years old) is still quite robust and must still work skillfully and earn money….If only there were a prospect of your being seen again! Our dear parents always prayed to God for that, but unfortunately they left this life so quickly….From your loving sister, Phemie, Max and all 5 children.”

  The following September, she wrote: “I have just come from the grave of our dear blessed parents and send as a greeting a few leaves therefrom….We would take you in gladly, myself as well as Malchen. You know well that Max had always plenty to spare for you and our brotherly love is not extinct….Our dear mother would rejoice with all her heart, if she had seen how we are sticking to you and how willingly we would have you in our midst.”

  By the mid-1920s, Slater’s lot at Peterhead had improved in one respect: after fifteen years, and many requests, he had been relieved of hard labor in the quarry and now worked in the prison carpentry shop. But though his letters from this period express relief at the new assignment, they remain shot through with despair.

  “I don’t know if there is a Being in this wide world (Cannibals included) who feel how I feel,” he wrote expressively to a Glasgow friend, Samuel Reid, in 1924. “It [has been] 15½ years that I was thrown into prison for a crime, of which I feel myself guiltless….At the present time I feel like bursting….Will not a little allowance be made for the great doubt in my case?” Slater’s smuggled message of 1925 would bring about that allowance at last.

  * At the conclusion of World War I, after much of Silesia was awarded to Poland, Beuthen became known as Bytom and Breslau as Wrocław.

  Chapter 18

  THE PURLOINED BROOCH

  In early 1925, on receiving Gordon’s message, Conan Doyle wrote to Sir John Gilmour, the Secretary for Scotland. “After a careful analysis of the case I am personally convinced that Slater never knew that such a woman as the deceased ever existed until he was accused of her murder,” he said. “Apart, however, from the original question of guilt or innocence, the man has now served 15 years, which is, as I understand, the usual limit of a life sentence in Scotland when the prisoner behaves well. I would earnestly entreat your kind personal attention to this case, which is likely to live in the annals of criminology.”

  Conan Doyle clearly expected a reply: he was accustomed to having his views heard and, on subjects other than spiritualism, taken seriously by Britain’s leading lights. “The big atmosphere of Conan Doyle ran as an undiminished force throughout my twenty-one years under his roof,” his son Adrian recalled. “As a little boy, I would be lifted to the window by a goggle-eyed nurse to watch my father and the then Prime Minister of England pacing slowly up and down the lawn in earnest discussion.”

  This time Conan Doyle got no answer. But he did receive a letter from the Glasgow journalist William Park, with whom he had been corresponding about the case since 1914, when Park became an impassioned supporter of Trench and Cook. Now Park, who had continued investigating the case on his own, contacted Conan Doyle again. “You may take it there will be no move for Liberation,” he wrote. “Slater will never get out. It is my own intention, however, to publish at some later date a new book on the case. I shall go into the system of faking witnesses, suppressing those favourable to the prisoner and getting those not so favourable to cook their statements. It can be proved that the authorities put into the box at least one known perjurer.”

  Moved by Park’s letter, Conan Doyle wrote to Gilmour again. On February 28, 1925, one of Gilmour’s underlings sent a terse reply: “I am directed by the Secretary for Scotland to say that he…does not feel justified in advising any interference with Slater’s sentence.”

  “I need not say that I am disappointed,” Conan Doyle shot back. “I have done my best to set this injustice right. The responsibility must now lie with you.”

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  SLATER HAD NOW BEEN imprisoned for so long that a third generation of his family had begun wr
iting. “You will be astonished to hear from me, whom you will scarcely remember at all,” read one letter, from September 1925, written just before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year:

  I am the old-time little Erna, the daughter of your sister Phemie….We have had hard luck too. There were the war years which brought to us…heavy sorrow so that life was a burden, and financially we were thoroughly ruined. Then came the illness of our youngest (Lilli) and her death. After that it was just one blow after another. Poor Uncle Georg, his wife Anna, our dear grandparents—all these passed over in about two years. There were bitter hours and many tears….Mother lets rooms and wears herself out with them. Papa is very much aged. Life is indeed very hard. It goes best with Aunt Malchen. Her husband remains an employee and has neither worry nor care.

  A happy, healthy New Year to you with hearty greetings and kisses from us all, especially your niece Erna, now Mrs. Meyer.

  In reply, Slater wrote warmly:

  I was astonished to get a letter from you after seventeen years, still I say “Better late than never.” I, at any rate, have forgotten none of you and daily think of you all; time and distance can not make me colder….I still remember vividly the good times I had at Telegraph Street,* and I remember the English breakfast. At any rate I am now forced to exclaim, “Frau Meyer, for the last seventeen years I have not breakfasted on ham and eggs.”

  I can imagine very well that the various deaths in your family have caused you all much grief and sorry—especially to your dear mother. I have also felt these fateful blows both physically and mentally….When I take into consideration all the circumstances and also my age I also cannot complain of my health. You must understand, my dear Erna, that after I have been for so long shut off from the world I have not much to write about….Do not grieve over my lot and please do not forget my motto—“Learn to suffer without complaint.”

  Soon afterward, Malchen’s daughter, Käthe, known by the fond diminutive Kätel, began corresponding. “We have received your loving letter and are delighted that you want to know us children better,” she wrote. “We truly believed we might only make your lot harder if we were always writing to you….I hope to be married this year. You know the man very well indeed; he is Sam Tau, his first wife was Martha Jungmann from Beuthen. He is about eighteen years older than I, but that is nothing where there is love.”

  By the time Slater replied several months later, the wedding had taken place. “Among other things your dear mother also says in regard to your marriage—‘Katie has not even a penny of money—not even a chair has she,’ ” he wrote, adding:

  The first thing, quite clearly is not necessary always for a marriage, for a good wife is worth far more than money; but I am worried about the second item, and I wish that I could help you….Thirteen or fourteen years back my dear late mother sent me your photograph and since that time it has had an honoured place between the photos of my dead parents. Daily I contemplate the deceased and you….I am very sorry indeed to hear that your father is not quite well, perhaps he will have recovered again. I also learn that the times in Germany are very bad but in this country where 1½ millions people have no work one does not dance on roses.

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  AFTER THE DISMISSIVE REPLY from Gilmour’s office, Conan Doyle knew that the Secretary would do nothing. The Crown clearly wanted to avoid the public inquiry, and public scandal, that would arise were the conduct of the police and the procurator fiscal made widely known. But there was another reason for keeping Slater in prison, one of which Conan Doyle may not have been aware: As a series of government memorandums shows, officials did not know what to do with Slater if he were paroled—“released on license,” in British parlance. The subject had been under high-level private discussion as early as 1924, when Slater was approaching the fifteen-year mark at Peterhead, the standard length of time before parole could be considered. As the memorandums make clear, the Crown did not want him to stay in Britain after his release but was uncertain whether it could deport him back to Germany.

  As British officials eventually learned, a German who had lived outside Germany for more than a decade automatically lost his citizenship. A memo on the subject from July 1924 appeared to seal Slater’s continued incarceration. “Apparently we cannot get rid of Slater,” it read. “In these circumstances I think that he should be allowed to remain where he is meantime. Case will come up for reconsideration when 20 years have been served.”

  Slater might not have been able to hold out that long. As his time at Peterhead wore on, he was increasingly volatile, as his disciplinary records attest:

  Aug. 14, 1914: Destroying prison property—Chamber (crockery) & a pane of glass.

  May 13, 1916: Talking. Idleness. Using filthy & abusive language, also threatening to assault an officer with a hammer.

  Sept. 25, 1917: Quarrelling with & assaulting a fellow prisoner on the works.

  July 14, 1921: Willfully destroying prison property (2 new library books).

  Dec. 20, 1924: Breaking a food dish.

  Nov. 16, 1925: Attempting to assault an officer.

  April 3, 1926: Offending against good order and discipline ie handing a packet to another Convict.

  He vowed he would not pass the two-decade mark alive. “Poor Slater told us…that he intended to endure Peterhead till the end of 20 years,” the journalist William Park later informed Conan Doyle. “If then no help came he intended to take his life. ‘I will show them that Oscar Slater can die bravely,’ was his sworn resolve to find an exit to his woes.”

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  PARK WAS A DEDICATED journalist but something of a loose cannon. As his long exchange of letters with Conan Doyle makes clear, his personal life was a shambles: he drank to excess, had made an unhappy marriage, and was often desperate for money—a New Grub Street for the twentieth century. Professionally, he was tenacious, a fine attribute in a journalist but a liability when tenacity starts to shade into monomania. “This strange, self-tortured fanatic, whose avowed intent it was to disembowel the Glasgow police,” Peter Hunt has called him, adding:

  Park was a remarkable man. Tall, broad-shouldered, rather delicate in appearance, well educated with a fine ear for music and a photographic memory, he had known nothing of the case until Trench made it clear to him.

  An exceptionally clear thinker, impatient of slower minds, overfond of whisky, he had one fault, a tendency to accept as proven facts which had not been thoroughly checked. Though he did much for Slater, he could never quite rid himself of the popular journalist’s approach to facts for their “story” value. His correspondence with Conan Doyle shows an impassioned nature, slightly fanatic, seizing proof here and there without proper regard for all the circumstances.

  He had got it into his head (and it must be admitted that events seemed to justify him) that the police were wrong from start to finish, corrupt through and through, perjured, vindictive, irresponsible, callous. He approached the Slater case, not merely as an individual mistake but as characteristic of what he considered an entirely corrupt system.

  Fortunately, Park had Conan Doyle to sustain him editorially and financially: he sent Park money more than once. Under Conan Doyle’s close supervision, Park began work on a book, The Truth About Oscar Slater, based on documents and his own reporting, including an extensive interview with Trench’s widow. It is clear from their correspondence about the emerging manuscript that Conan Doyle vetted every page of it and made copious suggestions. Conan Doyle went on to release the book himself, through his publishing house, the Psychic Press.

  Dedicated to John Thomson Trench, The Truth About Oscar Slater appeared in July 1927. As Conan Doyle had before him, Park laid out, with great cumulative impact, the chain of illogic and inconsistencies in the case. His reporting uncovered things that even Conan Doyle had not found, including two instances of fabric
ation by police and prosecutors.

  In the first instance, Park discovered that the Crown had obtained the search warrant for Slater’s flat under false pretenses. The application for the warrant, made by the procurator fiscal, James Hart, was dated January 2, 1909—the day Slater arrived in New York on the Lusitania. In it, Hart argued that searching the flat was essential because Slater had already been charged with Miss Gilchrist’s murder and had “absconded” from Scotland. As Park pointed out, Glasgow officials knew that neither of those assertions was true. On the basis of Hart’s application, however, the warrant was granted.

  The second fabrication involved the failure of the brooch clue, a fact of which police were also aware by the time Slater reached New York. “Now that the whole world was looking on,” Park wrote, “to have released their arrested man would have been to confess their blunders….But, if to proceed was the order, what were they to proceed on?”

  The answer, he explained, could be found in a document that Trench had copied from Glasgow police files. Before he died, he gave the copy to Park. In that document, written early in the investigation, Glasgow police weigh the value of the brooch clue relative to evidence against other potential suspects. As originally worded, the text described the brooch clue as “very much less strong” than evidence against others. But in the document’s official version, those words had been replaced with a penciled substitution. The altered text described the brooch clue as merely “not stronger” than the other evidence.

  Conan Doyle crowned Park’s book with a long, forceful introduction. “It is certain that the case of the alien German Jew, who bore the pseudonym of Oscar Slater, will live in the history of criminology as a miscarriage of justice of a character very unusual in the records of our Courts,” he wrote. “There is not one point of the evidence which does not crumble to pieces when it is touched.” He continued: “Who is to blame for this great and persistent miscarriage of justice?” There follows a J’accuse-style list, which includes the judge, Lord Guthrie; the Lord Advocate, Alexander Ure; a series of Secretaries for Scotland; and Sheriff Millar, “but above all, the Procurator Fiscal and the police.”