by Margalit Fox
In conclusion, Conan Doyle wrote: “Finally, we may ask, what can now be done? I fear very little can be done for Slater. Who can restore the vanished years? But his name may be cleared, and possibly some small provision be made for his declining years….Above all, for the credit of British justice, for the discipline of the police force, and for the teaching of officials that their duty to the public has to be done, a thorough public enquiry should be made into the matter. But let it be a real enquiry, with impartial men who are resolute for truth and justice upon the Bench. Only when this has been done will the public mind be at ease….It is indeed a lamentable story of official blundering from start to finish. But eighteen years have passed and an innocent man still wears the convict’s dress.”
* An apparent reference to Telegraph Street in London. Slater had lived in London during the first years of the twentieth century.
Chapter 19
THE GATES OF PETERHEAD
Park’s book sparked great interest on the part of the press: the time at last seemed to be right. In the years after World War I, the perceived threat to the genteel classes was shifting. By the 1920s, bourgeois anxieties, once focused on foreigners, had begun to attach themselves to first-wave feminism and the woman suffrage movement, socialism, and the dehumanizing use of technology. Amid these concerns, it seems likely that a lone, aging Jewish rogue did not cut the menacing figure he once did. What was more, most of the actors who might have been tarred by the public investigation of his case—including Lord Guthrie, the judge; Hart, the procurator fiscal; and Sheriff Millar—were now dead.
While the press interest was welcome, Conan Doyle knew that news coverage alone would not suffice. In September 1927, resolving to catch the attention of the British government at the highest level, he sent a copy of Park’s book to Ramsay MacDonald, who in 1924 had become Britain’s first Labour prime minister. Though the Labour government had been swept out of office by the Conservatives late that year, MacDonald, now the leader of the Labour Party, remained one of the most powerful men in Britain.*
In MacDonald, Conan Doyle found an influential ally. “I have been going further into the case and am quite convinced that this man has received a most horrible injustice and that the matter must be wound up, not only by releasing him, but by clearing him,” he wrote to Conan Doyle on September 26. “Everybody must be exceedingly grateful to you for the magnificent way you have stuck to the case, in [the] face of so much discouragement and apparent failure.”
Park’s book also moved the English journalist Ernest Clephan Palmer to action. Writing under the pseudonym The Pilgrim, Palmer produced a multipart investigative series on the Slater affair that ran in the Daily News of London from mid-September to mid-October 1927. “Each day Palmer attacked some fresh aspect of the case, the inaccuracies in the Lord Advocate’s speech, Mary Barrowman’s acrobatics, the almost lunatic behaviour of the murderer supposing that he was Slater,” Peter Hunt has written. “He tested Mary Barrowman’s story in West Princes Street and declared that her detailed description of the man running past her was impossible.”
On October 23, the Empire News, based in Manchester, published its own explosive story—touted in its pages, with noteworthy immodesty, as “one of the most dramatic developments in a criminal case ever recorded.” The article was a first-person account by Helen Lambie, who had disappeared from Scotland and was widely presumed dead. The Empire News had found her, living with her husband in America, near Pittsburgh. Her story, stemming from an interview with her there, appeared under the headline “Why I Believe I Blundered over Slater.” It read in part:
It has been said and denied that when first questioned by the police as to whether I had any idea of the identity of the man leaving the house of my mistress on the evening of the murder, I mentioned the name of a man who was in the habit of visiting here.
It is quite true that I did so, because when I returned from buying the evening paper and encountered the strange man coming from the house he did not seem strange to me.
Otherwise, I should have wanted to know more about his presence there….
When I told the police the name of the man I thought I recognised 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 allowed myself to be persuaded that I had been mistaken….
I had my reasons for not looking too closely. The man I thought I saw coming out of the flat had been visiting Miss Gilchrist on another occasion, and I happened to mention his name to my mistress afterwards.
She flew into a temper with me and told me that if I ever displayed the slightest curiosity again about any of her visitors she would discharge me….
There were many circumstances to make it easier for me to accept the notion that Slater was the man….Moreover, we were told that he had been caught trying to escape to America with some of the property of my mistress….
I am convinced that the man I saw was better dressed and of a better station in life than Slater. The only thing they had in common was that when standing end on the outlines of the faces from the left were very much the same.
“What a story!” Conan Doyle wrote afterward. “What a scandal! She says that the police made her say it was Slater. Third degree! What a cess pool it all is! But we have no words of hope from those wooden-headed officials. I shall put on the political screw and I know how to do it. I’ll win in the end but it has been a long fight.”
Park, meanwhile, was trying to locate Mary Barrowman, who had vanished into the Glasgow slums and was believed to have become a prostitute. “She is in the streets & has been in prison,” he wrote to Conan Doyle in the autumn of 1927. “A denial from her would finish the Crown case.” Assisted by Palmer and an unnamed ex-convict, Park found her, and on November 5, 1927, the Daily News printed her recantation:
I, Mary Barrowman, who was a witness at the New York proceedings and at the trial in Edinburgh, desire in the interests of justice to make the following statement: …
Regarding the proceedings at New York, where I was confronted with the prisoner for the first time…I did not feel warranted in then saying after my viewing of him, that Oscar Slater was positively the man I had seen coming down the steps of the house in West Princes Street where Miss Gilchrist was murdered.
I only thought at the time that he was very like the man I had seen, and I did not say in my identification that he positively was the man.
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.
I should say that I was in attendance at his office for the purpose of going over my evidence on at least 15 occasions. I am positive that is an under- rather than an overstatement of the number of my appearances in his office.
It was the same routine every day. He went over my evidence, himself doing all the talking and I for the most part listening. He was so much the director of the things that were to be said that I had no opportunity or very little to have my say.
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.
The furthest I wanted to go was to say he was very like the man, and it was Mr. Hart who really used the words “the man,” and applied them to my statement.
I want to state most definitely that I thought Mr. Hart’s demeanour was not what it should be. He was the party who was laying down what was to be said….
I was just a girl of fifteen years of age then, and I did not fully appreciate the difference between saying that Slater was the man instead of very like the man; and if I had it to say now all
I would declare is that he was very like the man—and that is what I said when I first saw him.
The recantations made it impossible for the government to stonewall Slater’s supporters any longer. On November 10, Sir John Gilmour 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 authorise his release on license as soon as suitable arrangements can be made.”
The news reached Slater on the prison bush telegraph. Reverend Eleazar Phillips, his champion from the beginning, was summoned in secret to Peterhead to escort him out. On Monday, November 14, 1927, at 3:00 p.m., the gates that separated the prison from the world swung open, and Oscar Slater passed through them, after eighteen years, four months, and six days, a free man.
* MacDonald would serve as prime minister again between 1929 and 1935.
Chapter 20
MORE LIGHT, MORE JUSTICE
Word of Slater’s impending release had trickled out to the British press and become a sensation. One reporter, posing as the chauffeur, managed to sneak into the car carrying Slater and Reverend Phillips from the prison. Another infiltrated their private compartment on the train to Glasgow. How did it feel, he asked Slater, to have been freed at long last? “The best plan,” Slater replied, “is to go to Peterhead and find out!”
At Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Station, a throng of pressmen met the train. Whisked by Phillips and his grown daughter into a waiting car, Slater was taken to the minister’s house. There, too, a mob of reporters and photographers awaited. How did he feel? Slater was asked again and again. “I am tired,” he said. “I have not slept for the last five nights, since I heard I was coming back again. I want rest. I want rest.”
He dined with the Phillips family that evening, and stayed the night. Soon afterward, he paid a visit to Glasgow police headquarters, where his odyssey had begun so long ago: as a paroled convict, he was required to report to the police once a month. Now gaunt, grizzled, and nearly bald, Slater was much changed from the dapper, dark-haired, well-built man of two decades before. At headquarters, he asked after many of the principal actors in his case—Chief Inspector Pyper, Superintendent Ord, Sheriff Warnock—and was told that all were retired or dead.
From Conan Doyle, he received a warm, welcoming letter:
Dear Mr. Oscar Slater,
This is to say in my wife’s name and my own how grieved we have been at the infamous injustice which you have suffered at the hands of our officials. Your only poor consolation can be that your fate, if we can get people to realise the effects, may have the effect of safeguarding others in the future.
We will still work in the hope of getting an inquiry into these iniquities and eventually, as I hope, some compensation for your own undeserved suffering.
Yours faithfully,
Arthur Conan Doyle
Slater replied ardently, his English unalloyed by eighteen years in a British prison:
Sir Conan Doyle, you breaker of my shackels, you lover of truth for justice sake, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the goodness you have shown towards me.
My heart is full and almost breaking with love & gratitude for you [and] your wife dear Lady Conan Doyle and all the upright men and women, who for justice sake (and that only) have helped me, me an outcast.
Till my dying day I will love and honor you and the Dear Lady, my dear, dear Conan Doyle, yet that unbounded love for you both, makes me only sign plainly.
Yours,
Oscar Slater
* * *
—
SLATER WAS FREE, BUT what remained was to have him exonerated. In 1926, Scotland had established its first court of criminal appeals, partly as a result of the agitation by Conan Doyle and others on Slater’s behalf. But as constituted, the new court was of no help to Slater himself: It was empowered to hear only those cases tried after October 31, 1926. It would take a special act of British Parliament to have the Slater case grandfathered in.
Aided by Ramsay MacDonald, Conan Doyle prepared to take Parliament on, writing a pamphlet that pressed for judicial review. It was distributed to every member of the House of Commons. On November 16, 1927, Secretary Gilmour presented to Commons a special bill that would let Slater’s case be reheard. It passed into law on November 30.
To represent Slater, supporters hired Craigie Aitchison, one of Scotland’s foremost criminal lawyers. “Many lawyers rated [Aitchison] the greatest to have practised at the Scottish bar,” the Guardian wrote in 2009. “In his many defences in murder trials he never lost a single case.” Aitchison did not come cheap, and a public subscription was begun to meet his fees.* The funds raised were not enough to cover the expected costs, and Conan Doyle agreed to make up the difference himself, an act of generosity he would come to regret.
* * *
—
THE APPEAL OF OSCAR SLATER against His Majesty’s Advocate opened on June 8, 1928, at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, in the same courtroom in which Slater had been sentenced to hang. Presiding was a five-judge panel headed by the Lord Justice General (Scotland’s highest-ranking criminal judge), James Avon Clyde. Representing the Crown was the Lord Advocate, William Watson. Slater, accompanied by Reverend Phillips, sat in the gallery. Conan Doyle was there, returned to the city of his birth to cover the appeal for the Sunday Pictorial newspaper. It was the only time that he and Slater met face-to-face.
The judges insisted that the hearing not retry the original case, ruling that no new evidence could be introduced unless it stemmed from newly discovered facts. They also barred testimony from Slater. “In these circumstances,” they wrote, “it would be quite unreasonable to spend time over his examination now.”
Slater, who did not understand the legal wellsprings of the decision, was incensed. With characteristic hotheadedness, he decided to torpedo the appeal, wiring the participants that he wanted the proceedings called off. This, in turn, incensed Conan Doyle. “I think his brain is about turned by all that he has gone through,” he said in an interview. “I told him that he was a very foolish fellow to even think of withdrawing, and insisted that it would go on in any case, whether he liked it or not.” (In private, Conan Doyle was far more immoderate, writing to Roughead, “I was in a mood to sign a petition that the original sentence be carried out.”) Gradually Slater’s supporters prevailed on him, and he agreed to sit quietly in the gallery.
Because the trial would not be reprised, few original witnesses were allowed to testify. As a result, neither Detective Pyper nor Superintendent Douglas, both influential in the murder investigation, would be available for Aitchison to cross-examine. “I am very anxious to get Detective Pyper into the box,” Park had told Conan Doyle earlier that year. “This man, I am sure, we can bring to earth as a Liar of the first water.” He added: “Slater described to us how he was identified at the…police office. Superintendent Douglas took each of the witnesses by the shoulders, went down the line of presented men, pushed the witness towards each man and asked, ‘Is that him.’ When the witness came to be opposite Slater, Douglas gave a violent push this time & shouted in unmistakable signification, ‘Is this him?’ ”
Nor would Miss Gilchrist’s niece Margaret Birrell, to whom Lambie had run after the crime, be called—though her testimony, Park pointed out, would have been of little help. “This woman will die before she emits the name now,” he said. “It involves ruin, the possible hanging of her cousin & other terrible things. No: She will not squeal.”
Without these witnesses, it was vital that Helen Lambie give testimony, which, in light of her 1927 recantation, the judges were going to allow. “This woman,” Aitchison declared, “holds the secret.” But Lambie was nowhere to be found. She had left Pittsburgh, and efforts to trace her had been unsuccessful. She was eventually discovered living in Peoria, Illinois, with her husband, Robert Gillon,
who worked in the coal mines there, and their two daughters, Margaret and Marion. In June 1928, the Peoria Star published an article under the headline “Slayer’s Fate Is in Peorian’s Hands.”
“Wiping her suds-covered hands on her apron,” it read, “Mrs. Gillon, a slender, ruddy faced woman, appeared at the door of her humble little home in the rear of a barber shop in answer to the reporter’s long knocking. On the floor of the kitchen were heaps of clothing, ready for the electric washer that was at work some feet away….Each question she answered with a ready, ‘That’s my business.’ ”
Lambie refused to become involved. In December 1927, two months after her recantation in the Empire News, she issued another statement, recanting the recantation. Written in a huge, childish hand, the original boasts spelling and punctuation to rival Slater’s:
I wish to put a denial to the statement recentaly published in the Newspapers there is no truth in that statement. Connan 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 If Slater would tell the truth he is not an Innocent man