Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder

by Malcolm Archibald

  It was obvious that there had been a murder, but there seemed no motive until questions were asked. The prime suspect was John Adam, and the motive seemed to be theft. He was arrested and appeared before the circuit court at Inverness on 18 September 1835. Adam was bald but handsome, with side-whiskers and a set expression on his face.

  When James Beattie, agent for the British Linen Company Bank at Montrose, appeared, he said that Jean Brechin often put money into a deposit account. He also said that an unknown man produced the receipt and withdrew the money on 9 March. David Hill was the agent for the Montrose branch of the National Bank. He also said that Jean Brechin put in sums of money, but he was able to identify John Adam as the man who made the withdrawals.

  The court then heard John Adam’s own story, or rather stories. He had given three versions, at three different times. In his first and second statement, Adam claimed that his name was John Anderson. He said he had never been to Montrose in his life and did not know Jean Brechin. In his third statement he admitted his name was indeed John Adam and he came from Lintrathen, Forfarshire. In 1831 he enlisted in the Dragoon Guards, but deserted in 1834 when they were at Derbyshire. Around that time, he met Dorothy Elliot and they acted as man and wife, although they never formally married.

  Adam stated he had met Jean Brechin in Montrose last Martinmas (11 November), and added he was hoping she would repay a loan he had made to her before he joined the army. Brechin, according to Adam, refused to part with a penny unless he agreed to marry her. As Adam wanted his money back, he returned to Montrose at the end of February, married Brechin at Laurencekirk and withdrew her money from the banks. After they were married, they travelled together to Inverness. They parted company when he took the ferry at Kessock and he had never seen her again. It was not quite a plausible tale.

  The Procurator Fiscal had Adam brought to the corpse of his wife and made him lay a hand on it. It is possible this event was part of the old Scottish superstition of trial by touch, when the dead body was supposed to bleed when its murderer laid a hand on it, but more likely the Fiscal was merely hoping to scare Adam into a confession. Adam touched Brechin and swore he had never seen her before in his life.

  The defence pointed out that Brechin had never been seen alive on the north side of the Kessock Ferry, and argued that it was possible she had been killed by the wall falling on top of her. The jury were having none of it and found Adam guilty of murder.

  When Lord Moncrieff donned the black cap, Adam knew he was condemned. Moncrieff’s statement may have been rhetoric, but the words, to an audience brought up with strict religion, must have struck home to many of them. ‘John Adam,’ Lord Moncrieff said, ‘Unhappy and miserable man! The jury have unanimously found you guilty … in a dark hour of your existence, the Prince of Darkness took advantage of you and in a bloody action almost unparalleled in enormity, has sealed your guilt.’

  John Adam, alias John Anderson, was condemned to be hanged ‘at the usual place of execution in Inverness on Friday, 16 October next.’

  ‘You have condemned an innocent man,’ Adam claimed. ‘I am condemned at the bar of man, but I will not be condemned at the bar of God!’ He wrote a single letter, to Dorothy Elliot, who visited him in his cell. He also made what could be a true confession to a cellmate. He finally admitted he had strangled his wife by pressing his thumbs below her ears and on his subsequent flight to Dingwall he had seen a ghostly figure.

  He was hanged at Longman’s Grave at the south shore of the Beauly Firth, with the scaffold giving him a view to the Black Isle and Millbuie Ridge, where his wife was murdered. It was said he turned his back on the view and faced Inverness instead.

  Murder in North Uist

  The Outer Isles are places of pristine seas and unsurpassing beauty. However, they have a dark history of violence and bloodshed, of raid and feud. Even in the nineteenth century when the days of the clans were long gone, there were ugly reminders of the passions that lingered beneath the surface.

  On Thursday, 26 June 1856, a visitor found an old woman named Margaret MacLean lying dead in her bed in her isolated cottage in Claddach Kyles Paible in North Uist, fifteen miles inland from Lochmaddy. Nobody was quite sure of MacLean’s age, but she was presumed to be over seventy but less than eighty. A pauper who lived alone in a black house of dry stone and turf, she followed a solitary life, so there was no real concern when she was seen on Monday, 20 June and then not seen for a few days. As her door was padlocked, any casual passers-by would believe she was away somewhere, possibly visiting a distant friend or relation.

  As the days passed with no sign of her, the neighbours in the clachan began to wonder, and on the Thursday they forced open the door and found Margaret MacLean lying dead. There were marks on her neck and throat that suggested she had been strangled, while the house had been stripped of everything portable.

  The neighbours tried to think of any strangers they had seen recently, but there were none. However, some people had seen a woman called Catherine Beaton loitering around the cottage on the previous Saturday. They knew it had been Saturday because it was the same day that a steamer from Glasgow had called, and with the slow pace of life in Uist, such things marked the passage of time.

  Catherine Beaton was a bad character for the island. She already knew the inside of Inverness Prison, where she had been incarcerated for theft on more than one occasion, so the locals were quick to accuse her of the murder. When Beaton’s house was searched, some of MacLean’s possessions were found inside and she was arrested and escorted to the jail at Lochmaddy.

  The case came to the Circuit court in Inverness in September and lasted fourteen hours and continued into the following day. Without any proof, the jury could not convict Beaton of murder, but theft seemed quite obvious and the judge gave her six years’ penal servitude.

  Murder in Assynt

  Second sight may be scoffed at, or may be accepted as a fact. In the twenty-first century people may be more sceptical than they were in the nineteenth, but at that time in the Highlands, many people lived with what was sometimes thought of as more of a curse than a blessing. In the case of the Assynt murder, second sight was accepted as part of life.

  Murdoch Grant was one of many peddlers who wandered the highways and byways of Scotland. In March 1830 he was in Assynt in western Sutherland, looking for custom. When he was not working as a peddler, he lived at Strathbeg, at Lochbroom, a man known and well liked by his neighbours. At a time when shops were few and far between outside the towns, peddlers such as Grant provided a necessary service to the scattered communities they served. He was a distinctive and popular man in his tartan coat and waistcoat, his loose trousers and his bonnet, so when Grant disappeared that spring his absence was noted and commented upon. It was four weeks later that somebody noticed a body floating in Loch Torr na h Eigen, but news spread fast in rural Scotland and half the neighbourhood gathered as men waded into the loch to pull the corpse ashore.

  After so long immersed in water the body was misshapen but the clothes helped identify it as Murdoch Grant, but there was speculation if he had been killed, or had simply fallen into the loch and drowned. It was a classic case of ‘did he fall or was he pushed?’ Somebody pointed out that his pack was missing, and as peddlers never travelled without their pack, thoughts turned to murder and robbery. The Reverend Gordon, the local minister, was among the crowd. He considered himself a friend of Grant and he immediately suspected murder and robbery. Grant’s head was severely battered, and some people thought there was evidence of a fight on the heather nearby, although that could have been entirely unconnected with the death. Overall, people could not understand how Grant could have fallen into the loch himself, and his pack was clearly missing. He had carried a mixture of banknotes and pack goods to the value of around £40, which was a great deal of money in 1830. He had so much money at the one time because he had been gathering up debts that were due to him.

  With the community in doubt what to do, t
hey turned to probably the best-educated man in the community for advice. Hugh McLeod was the local schoolmaster, the son of Roderick McLeod, the tenant of Lynmeanarch. He was a familiar and trusted figure. McLeod gave his opinion that Grant must have simply tripped, banged his head and drowned. Yet despite McLeod’s assertion, some people continued to suspect foul play and searched for the murderer.

  With no policeman or other figure of authority in the area, the local people used an ancient Scottish method of finding the killer. ‘Ordeal by touch’ was hallowed by tradition. Any suspect had merely to touch the body, which was supposed to bleed if handled by the murderer. Of course, the idea was flawed, as the corpse would not issue blood, but there was also some sense there, for if people believed strongly enough in the efficacy of the method, the murderer would be loath to prove his guilt in such a public manner.

  One by one the inhabitants of the locality touched the body of Murdoch Grant, and one by one they proved their innocence, to the satisfaction of themselves and their neighbours. But one man refused to put himself to the test. Hugh McLeod was having no part of such a silly superstition and refused to touch the body. He was far too educated and sophisticated for such beliefs. Rather than doubt his innocence, his neighbours began to scoff at their own credulousness.

  The crofters and cotters – a cotter was a landless man – asked McLeod to inform the authorities about the discovery of Grant. He took on the task quite willingly, told the magistrates that poor Murdoch had fallen and drowned in the loch, and returned home. Murdoch’s body was returned to Loch Broom and given a Christian burial. However, despite the officials’ acceptance of the accidental nature of the peddler’s death, Alexander Grant, Murdoch’s brother, was not so easily convinced.

  Alexander Grant was convinced that Murdoch had been murdered. He pressed the authorities to disinter the body, pushing forward his reasons until they did so. The doctor who examined the mouldering corpse tended to agree with Alexander Grant; the indentations on the skull were not like those from a fall, but very like those inflicted with a weapon of some kind. He also said that ‘Murdoch Grant was dead before he was committed to the water, because, had he, when alive, been thrown into the loch, it is most probable that a quantity of water would have been found in the stomach which … was perfectly empty.’

  Alexander Grant was obviously a determined man. He began a thorough search around the loch for his brother’s missing pack and money. Neither was to be found. It was now that the second sight came into play. Kenneth Fraser was a local man, also known as Kenneth the Dreamer. He claimed he had dreamed of the murder and saw Murdoch’s pack under a cairn. Now the Highlands are littered with cairns, the piles of loose stones that are used as way markers, or to signify the burial of somebody important, or for other often forgotten reasons, but Fraser’s description of the cairn was so precise that many of the local population recognised it. They looked beneath the cairn but there was no pack. Instead, there were a scattering of Murdoch’s possessions. No dead man could have put them there, so the theory of murder and robbery looked more accurate.

  In the meantime, Hugh McLeod was spending more money than he had ever earned, especially since he had given up his teaching position. Despite pleading poverty not long before, McLeod had changed a £5 note, and could not explain from where he got such a sum. The finger of suspicion pointed at him, and the authorities questioned him for a few days at the village of Lochinver, and then escorted him to Dornoch Jail. James Stewart, a King’s Messenger, had been present when Grant’s body was fished from the loch. Now he searched McLeod and his home at Lynmenmnich. He took Grant’s stockings from McLeod’s legs and found Grant’s tartan trousers in McLeod’s house, as well as a hammer, which could well have matched the indentations on Grant’s skull. When blood was found on McLeod’s coat, the ex-teacher claimed it came from a bird he had shot. Nobody was convinced.

  While he waited within the jail, McLeod experienced his own second sight. He had a dream in which his father came to him. His father was standing beside a coffin in a graveyard and told Hugh he only had another year before he would fill the coffin. Not surprisingly, McLeod worried as he lingered in Dornoch Jail. The days merged into weeks and months, and his trial was postponed. It was 26 September 1830 before he appeared before the court. He pleaded not guilty, but there were a number of witnesses who gave evidence against him. These included the Widow Mackay of Drumbeg, who had knitted Grant’s stockings and identified the pair McLeod had been wearing at her work. There was also a young girl named Isobell Kerr, who had met McLeod on the hillside. McLeod had said to her, ‘You need not be saying that you saw me,’ which was taken as evidence he had not wished to be seen there on the day of the murder.

  However, it may have been the evidence of Kenneth Fraser that drove the final nail into McLeod’s gallows tree. Fraser was a tailor as well as a seer, and in April 1830 he had gone for a drink with McLeod. McLeod had £1 and 11 shillings, which he claimed to have earned working as a schoolteacher at Lochcarron. He also asked Fraser to say nothing about the money, or the red pocketbook in which he carried it. They spent a couple of days drinking amiably, with McLeod footing all the bills. Fraser also told the court about his dream where he had seen the pack lying under a cairn:

  I was at home when I had the dream in the month of February. It was said to me in my dream, by a voice like a man’s, that the pack was lying in such a place. I got a sight of the place just as if I had been awake: I never saw the place before. The voice said in Gaelic, ‘The pack of the merchant is lying in a cairn of stones near their house.’

  The voice did not name the McLeods, but Fraser was shown the house, illuminated by the sun and with a burn passing McLeod’s house. Fraser had no other knowledge of the pack except from his dream.

  The court heard that McLeod had been penniless before 19 March, so he had been even refused credit for a gill of whisky. However, after that date he flashed a £5 note around and a number of notes of smaller denominations. He had not given any plausible account to explain from where he obtained this money.

  McLeod still maintained his innocence, but the judge and jury disagreed, and he was sentenced to hang. He was taken below, still arguing his innocence. ‘The Lord Almighty knows I am innocent,’ he said. ‘I did not think in this country one would be condemned on mere opinion.’

  As the time for his execution approached, McLeod must have realised there was no escape and worried about the state of his immortal soul. He confessed to the murder and explained how he had gone about it. Hugh McLeod wanted more from life than a cottar’s income. He rose to become a teacher at Loch Broom, but he had expensive tastes and wanted more. In March 1830 he met Murdoch Grant in Drumbeg and gave the pedlar an offer nobody could refuse: he said he would purchase everything Grant had. Grant agreed, and the next day the men met near Loch Torr na h Eigen. As they walked past the loch, McLeod forced a quarrel with Grant and produced a hammer that he had borrowed from his father. He thumped Grant on the head, chest and in the ribs, robbed him, hit him some more to make sure he was dead and tumbled the body into the loch. He also threw the hammer in the water. As usual in Scotland, there were plenty of stones nearby to keep the body submerged, but Grant glared balefully from under the clear water of the loch. With Grant disposed of, McLeod rifled his pack for whatever was worth having and hid the remainder in one of the many lochans that were nearby.

  He was hanged at Inverness on 24 October 1830, one of only a handful of men executed there in the nineteenth century. He was just twenty-two years old.

  Mass Murder in Benbecula

  In the nineteenth century murders were rare events in the Hebrides, but in 1857 there was a triple murder, and it occurred on one of the quietest of all the islands. At a time when Scotland was still discussing the Madeleine Smith poisoning case in Glasgow, this new tragedy should have filled column inches in the newspapers and occupied people over the breakfast table, but instead it was given minimum attention and was quickly forgotten. Yet it
was a story of drama and tragedy that rocked the little communities at the time.

  On 9 July, Mr Briscoe, Inspector for the Board of Supervision, and Mr Macdonald, the local banker and Inspector of the Poor, arrived on the island of Benbecula, the central island of the trio of North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist, in the Western Isles. Briscoe was coming to visit an elderly pauper named Mary Macphee. On the road to the village of Nunton, the men met Macphee’s niece and asked after the old lady, and also about her brother, who was known to be unstable. The girl said that both were fine, and she took them to her aunt’s house.

  The house appeared empty but as they were about to leave, Briscoe thought Mrs Macphee was asleep on the bed. He checked and found her dead, with her throat slashed, her face ripped and her skull battered. There was also a pair of handcuffs on the ground, smeared with blood. Not surprisingly, the niece screamed, which attracted the neighbours. Led by Briscoe and Macdonald, the whole concourse crossed to nearby Linecate, where the middle-aged relatives of Mary Macphee lived with their unstable twenty-four-year-old son, Angus Macphee.

  The house was in darkness but a short search found the hideously butchered bodies of both the occupants. Briscoe gave a quick warning to the crowd that had gathered outside the door, telling them that Angus Macphee must have gone mad and would be roaming the island. He told them to carry weapons in case Macphee attacked them next, and to guard the fords that led to North Uist, the next island north. With the local people alerted and possibly terrified, Briscoe sent a messenger to Lochmaddy, the chief town of the three islands, to inform the sheriff of the murders. However, the messenger refused to go. It simply was not safe with a mad murderer on the loose.