To put it in with the other statements must, of course, be to base the defence upon its contents. To keep it to the end meant simply a last-ditch appeal which would have to be dealt with by higher authorities; once it was declared, the verdict of the Court could not be altered by anything the prisoner might say.
The essence of the earlier statements had been that Jessie had not been to Sandyford Place at all on the night of the murder. The reader may deduce in advance that the new statement acknowledged it to be untrue. To base any defence upon such an admission, however, was fraught with danger. It would resolve itself simply into a struggle between Jessie and the old man—which had committed the murder? But she would by her own present admission be known to have made lying statements: his story had been accepted by the authorities, and so thoroughly as to have induced them to release him and put him outside further reach by the law. Her new version was impossible of corroboration: James Fleming was now free to testify that it was yet another pack of lies—had been set free for this very purpose. To succeed must entail over-setting this verdict-in-advance in the old man’s favour: and even then, to lay the prisoner open to a charge of accessory before or after the fact. To fail would be to fail absolutely and utterly.
The only alternative was to go all out for a total acquittal on the score that it could not, on the evidence, be proved that the accused had been in the house that night.
But the statement, the wonderful statement?—which, after all, had convinced them—had shaken their presupposition of guilt, three hard-headed solicitors and now Andrew Rutherfurd Clark himself.…
We must keep it for the end, said Rutherfurd Clark, in case things go against us. And meanwhile, we must slant our whole case, our speeches, our examinations of witnesses, so as to lend support to it, if it has to be used at last.
Only Jessie herself, who knew nothing about the complications of the law, was clamorous to the end that the statement should be used. She had told so many frantic fibs which no one could be expected to believe: now here was the truth—or so magnificent a lie that she seemed to think everyone simply must believe it. But either way, she never lost faith. She discussed her case much less nowadays with her prison companions and never to either of them mentioned the statement or hinted for a moment that she hadn’t told the truth when she said she was not at Sandy-ford Place that night. But she spent a lot of time writing on a slate and learning something by heart—she said it was a chapter of the Bible which she was going to recite at her trial—which chapter it was she did not say, nor what good such a course was supposed to be likely to do her; in all probability it was her statement, which she then thought she might have to speak to the Court herself. She said her agents had assured her that all would be well; that she was to keep herself very calm, and that when old Fleming was giving evidence against her, she was to rise up and confront him, saying, ‘Mr Fleming, was it me that did the deed?’ There would be no doubt, her agents had told her (said Jessie) that the old man would shudder at it and that it would be seen that he had done it.
But when the time came Mr Fleming was not so dramatically put to the test; and Jessie rather more prosaically concluded her forecast by inviting Agnes Christie to tea at the Broomielaw when they should both be seeing happier days.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The trial of Jessie M’Lachlan opened in the Old Court, Jail Square, during the Glasgow Autumn Circuit, on Wednesday, September 7, 1862, before the Honourable Lord Deas, one of the Lords Commissioners of Justiciary. The venue was highly prejudicial to the accused. There was enormous local excitement about the crime; it must be impossible to empanel an unbiased jury; such a trial should by every right of justice have been held in Edinburgh where it would have been presided over by the Lord Justice-Clerk and two Lords of Justiciary. As it was it was dealt with by a single, and hostile, judge. British justice blushes for the conduct both before and during the trial of the Jessie M’Lachlan case.
Lord Deas was at this time fifty-eight years of age: a man of ‘dry looks and air’. Keen, cold, clever, ‘incapable of display himself and a great enemy of all forms of judicial sham’, he is described by a contemporary as the most striking personality in Scotland. Mr Roughead records a story of Lord Young who once remarked on the over-long prayer of the minister at the opening of the Court, ‘I suppose when Deas is on circuit they think it right to call the Almighty’s attention to the fact.’ He had a very broad Doric accent which he made no attempt to soften. He called an issue an ‘ishy’, for example, and it is told of him that on one occasion after something of a turn-up with counsel, he asked irritably, ‘Di ye ca’ that an ishy?’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said counsel, ‘I call it an issue.’ His conduct of the case of Jessie M’Lachlan was to be described later by the leading English legal journal as ‘putting his foot fiercely into one scale and kicking against the other.’ At the receiving end was Mrs M’Lachlan. It was during her trial that his nickname became ‘Lord Death’.
Counsel for the Crown were Mr Adam Gifford, Advocate Depute, and Mr Andrew Mure; Counsel for the Pannel (as the accused is called in Scotland) Mr Andrew Rutherfurd Clark, Mr Robert MacLean and Mr Adam Bannantyne. Her solicitors as we know were Mr Joseph Anthony Dixon, Champion of Champions, Mr John Strachan, second only to Mr Dixon, and Mr William M’Whirter Wilson—also ran.
The Old Court no longer stands and nowadays Jail Square is called Jocelyn Square. It had originally been intended as the Glasgow Municipal Buildings but was subsequently taken over, and housed not only the criminal courts but a prison as well. Built in 1814, it was in the Doric style with a double row of fluted columns with frieze and pediment over the splendid entrance. The court room itself was ‘laid with great taste’, lighted by seven great windows; like the present court it was built in the shape of a horseshoe, with a large circular table below the bench, where counsel sit, moving to a spot between the jury and the box to examine witnesses—the jury sits facing the box. The bench and table are of fine pale mahogany and a huge goblet of engraved glass stands in the centre of the table, holding, by tradition, the names of jurors to be picked out at random. The walls were ornamented with Ionic columns with appropriate frieze and cornice, ‘the ceiling in stucco handsomely executed’—it must all have been a great comfort to Jessie. However, much attention had also been paid to the care and convenience of the prisoners in the jail which was housed behind the splendid façade. The authorities had visited the principal prisons in England and ‘received many useful hints’. The cells were ten feet square, each with a window, and on every floor there was a W.C. which ‘tends much to the accommodation and cleanliness of the prisoners’. The condemned cells, however, in one of which Jessie would be housed if she were convicted, faced inward on to a court and received their only light from its well. Let us hope she need not know that the court was paved with the flagstones, initialled and dated, which covered the graves of all those hanged in the square beyond. Still, she would see little of it. The cells were in the basement, made entirely of cast iron built round with stone, lit by a tiny barred window in the three-foot-thick wall and with no fourth wall but only heavy open iron bars. Much attention, however, the records assure us, was paid to the health and comfort of the Unfortunate. But their entrance in the West front was indescribably gloomy, compared with the lovely columned portico on Jail Square, with only ‘a frieze executed in droved rustic work’—whatever that may have been. (The author was shown a short flight of steps and small doorway, said to be a remaining part of the old building, where the condemned were led out to execution. In the street outside, where this door, now half built up, was visible, a flight of starlings chittered and chattered as they do all over Glasgow: and a woman appeared, not very old and rather pretty, with a round, rosy face, and began to feed the birds. It was an odd and touching little incident, directly outside this terrible doorway that had known so much torment of terror and pain; until suddenly the little woman lifted up her head and began to sing, hopping about with a grotesque little dancin
g step. She was mad.)
In the great square beyond, nearly seventy men and women had so far been publicly hanged: and here Jessie M’Lachlan—it is incredible, but it is true—if she is found guilty will also be publicly hanged. For it is only 1862; and the last to die there in public was to be the infamous Dr Pritchard who was not executed till 1865. The gallows, or the ‘wuddie’ as it was familiarly called, were dismantled and kept handy in the vaults below the prison. (‘Gang along up the wuddie, Donal’,’ an old woman is said to have urged her reluctant husband, ‘and be hanged like a man and no anger the laird.’) The hangings, of course, were the principal entertainment of the day; but Jail Square, or Jail Green, housed also the Bird and Dog Market, and the Glasgow July Fair was for a long time held there each summer. It had been prophesied by Alexander Peden that in the nineteenth century ‘lions would be whelped on Glasgow Green’ and when a lioness in Wombwell’s Wild Beast Show did in fact give birth to twins, every auld wife in the city, it is said, paid her sixpence to see them.
There was something not very far removed from a wild beast show in Jail Square on each of the four days of Jessie M’Lachlan’s trial. A wild mob surged, fought and struggled for entrance or for only a glimpse of the great ones going out and coming in. The court was crowded to bursting point. In the galleries was ‘a preponderance of the fair sex’ representing the inevitable fashionably dressed women inseparable from any newspaper account of a sensational trial; ‘numberless gay bonnets nod’ and the few gentlemen present are there possibly less from curiosity than from the need to protect their ladies (reports a gentleman). The newspapers held their breath in anticipation: even the advertisements that day are rather dull, though there is an agreeable propinquity in ‘An experienced girl wanted’, following very closely upon ‘Two experienced Vice Men needed immediately’. But there are some splendid sailings, for Ceylon, San Francisco, Demerara, the Cape of Good Hope … The Carra Linn, Knight Templar, Henrietta, Maid of Orleans, Wolverine, Mountain Ash, Berbice, Alhambra spread wings of sail or are newly coppered and actively loading.…
And through gloomy basement corridors, Jessie is being brought to sit two hours waiting in a cell beneath the court.
Representatives of the press from all over Scotland—more than had ever before attended a Glasgow trial—were assembled: placed in the court, however, one of them acidly reports, in as suitable a position for seeing and hearing nothing, as could conceivably have been devised. If the acoustics were anything like those of the present courts, they may, indeed, well have had difficulty in hearing, and the soft Highland voices, often heavily accented, would not have made matters easier. It may be for this reason that their reports in so many details differ. (Rather than irritate the reader with innumerable alternatives, we have in the following account, chosen in each case the version most likely to be correct, or taken from the most reliable source, except of course where the alternatives materially affect ‘the ishy’. The actual report of the evidence and speeches has been taken from that edited by Mr William Roughead in the Notable British Trials series; compiled by him with much care and toil from various sources. He notes that the reporting of old Mr Fleming’s evidence in the vernacular is the only such instance he knows of.)
As the clock struck ten a blare of trumpets echoing through corridors and ante-rooms, heralded the approach of Lord Death. In the floor of the big dock, a trap door opened and the prisoner appeared, as though rising up out of some tomb to which, in too hasty anticipation of an adverse decision, she had been prematurely confined. The matron of the prison and a female turnkey attended her. She wore the lilac gown and little black shawl and the straw bonnet trimmed with white ribbons, a short black veil covering the upper part of her face. She was deathly pale and very thin and haggard after the long and anxious incarceration, the heart-rending separation from her delicate baby; but she was marvellously controlled, ‘a rare fortitude’, scribbled the reporters, ‘magnificent resolution’, ‘an iron strength’. This outward calm she was to maintain throughout the four days, sitting quiet and still, looking down at her hands and, when obliged to face a witness, doing so frankly and steadily without any sign of shrinking.
Red robed, bewigged, the judge took his seat. The Sheriffs of Dunbartonshire, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire were in attendance. The minister spoke a prayer beseeching the Almighty to grant that justice tempered with mercy might prevail in that court that day—as it transpired either God or Lord Deas was not listening, perhaps because his lordship had already made up his mind; but no one was to know that as yet. There were a few minutes of preliminary whispering and consultation, all eyes were on the ashen-faced woman in the dock. The clerk of the court gave the signal for the macer to read out the indictment.
The Indictment is a long and flourishing affair with some splendid bits of legal phrasing; accusing the Pannel that ‘albeit by the laws of this and of every other well-governed realm, murder, as also theft, are crimes of an heinous nature and severely punishable; yet true it is, and of verity, that you, the said Jessie M’Intosh or M’Lachlan are guilty of the said crime of murder, of the said crime of theft, or of one or other of the said crimes, actor or art or part’ inasmuch as she did wickedly and feloniously attack the said Jessie M’Pherson ‘on the fourth or fifth day of July 1862 or on one or other of the days of that month or of June immediately preceding or of August immediately following’—they were taking no chances on any argument about the date: still, at least they got the year pinned down—‘in or near the house or premises in or near Sandyford Place, in or near Glasgow, then and now, or lately, occupied by John Fleming accountant, now or lately residing there’—nor was there going to be a slip-up as to where the crime was committed; though one might have thought ‘in or near Glasgow’ was erring on the side of cautiousness. And that, having ‘with an iron cleaver or chopper or other similar edged instrument, to the prosecutor unknown’ struck and killed the victim, she ‘farther had wickedly and feloniously stolen and theftuously taken away’ a list of articles, to wit the silver found in Lundie’s pawn and the seven articles of clothing belonging to the dead woman which had been left at Bridge Street Station in the black japanned box. ‘All of which or part of which’, concludes the indictment, ‘being found proven or admitted by the Pannel’s judicial confession, OUGHT to be punished with the pains of law to deter others from committing the like crimes in all time coming.’
The Pannel, in her lilac gown, her straw bonnet and her little thin black shawl—either showing no trace of agitation, or flushed with emotion according to which newspaper was reporting her—pleaded not guilty: and without prejudice to that plea specially pleaded that the murder alleged in the Indictment was committed by James Fleming, ‘now or lately residing with John Fleming, accountant, in or near Sandyford Place, Glasgow.’
The jury, chosen after several rejections, three of which were upheld, were fifteen good men and true of Glasgow and the country round Glasgow: a commission agent, two grocers, a saddler, a ship’s chandler, a brass founder, a coalmaster, a colour merchant, a cartwright, a farmer, a merchant and two dealers in spirits; and Messrs John Stalker and Alex. Phillips, occupations unknown or undeclared. We have the word of Lord Deas for it that the case received from them as great attention as ever he had seen paid by any jury. They were furthermore men of despatch. The trial had taken three days and a half, sitting from ten in the morning till nine at night, a total of nearly forty hours. They took just fifteen minutes to come to their verdict. And as has been said the verdict was both unanimous and unequivocal. There was no question of ‘not proven.’
The opening of a murder trial is, by any reckoning, an extraordinary moment. A life has been taken, a man, woman or child lies dead. It is as though a stone has been thrown at the mirror of a life smashing it to pieces; as though those pieces, correctly reassembled, would mirror, not the life that has been taken, but the image of the murderer. Piece by piece, the broken bits are gathered together, a great heap of fragments to be placed before
the court. Rightly juggled—this discarded, that retained, this displaced, changed about, found to fit in another corner altogether—they begin to form a recognisable reflection. By subtle readjustments here or there, each side seeks to dull or heighten a resemblance. The last piece in place, the judge holds up the patchwork mirror to the jury. Chipped, scratched, clouded, cracked-across, a piece here missing, a piece there not well-fitting—is there yet enough for you to say without reasonable doubt that here is a reflection of that man in the dock? If not—dismiss him: don’t take any chances. But if you are reasonably sure—then this is the face, members of the jury, of a murderer. Just use your good sense, as ordinary people. Are you reasonably sure? It is for you to say. Yes or no? We will do all the rest.
Weeks, months, perhaps of patient assembling of the pieces of a giant patchwork that will take days to complete. And then—all of a sudden the moment has come and gone; almost before anyone noticed it, the first piece of the jigsaw has been placed on the board. It is the strangest mixture of excitement and anticlimax: not least to the quailing heart at the centre of it all. Guilty or innocent—for mistakes have been made before now—will this panel of men playing this fantastic game, declare that mirrored image to be my own?
In Scotland there is no opening address to the jury. The first piece in the game, Her Majesty’s Advocate v. M’Lachlan, was thrown down therefore by the Sheriff-Substitute of Lanarkshire, Alexander Strathern. All he had to say was that ‘shown declarations of the prisoner, dated 14th, 16th, and 21st July, these were emitted by her in my presence, freely and voluntarily, in her sound sober sense and after receiving the usual warning.’ The Court seemed settling down into the jog-trot of its opening stages. But Mr Rutherfurd Clark was up on his feet, fighting to have this very first piece removed altogether from the board. Had not the prisoner’s husband been apprehended also, on a warrant? Were not husband and wife included in the same charge? Was it not true that the husband had left Glasgow on the morning before the murder was committed and did not return till late the following week? And: when had it come to be known to the Sheriff-Substitute that this was so?
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