That Monday evening, feeling a chill wind of insecurity, Dr Smith repaired to the manse, where he told the minister that he was ‘disappointed’ with ‘that McDonald widow’ because she had been saying that her son had been murdered. Mr Moir observed that it seemed to him that there was a good deal of mystery about the tragedy, which ought to be looked into. He faced Dr Smith and asked him bluntly, ‘Where were you on Saturday night?’ The doctor reeled off a series of calls and events. If some stranger had done the deed, said the minister, it was curious that the body had been found so easily, as it was a path seldom used by anyone except the McDonalds, the doctor, and the minister. He asked Dr Smith how it was that he found the body, and he said that he had heard the brother’s lamentations.
On Tuesday, November 22nd, Dr Smith spoke to a friend, James Greig, a local farmer, who told him that the Fiscal had been asking about insurance policies. The doctor had been inclined to deny all association with the insurances, but he now admitted to Greig that he expected to get £1,500 or £1,000 from them. Well then, said his friend, only joking, ‘They’ll blame you for pistolling McDonald!’ And so they did, for they came for the doctor that very day and arrested him for murder. Detained at Peterhead awaiting trial, he made three inconsistent and lying declarations. He swore that there was no tryst. He himself had not effected any insurances. The late William Milne had done it for his (the doctor’s) benefit. Milne gave him the money for it. He was not even sure if he had the policies. There were three of them, he believed, and he did not know the conditions. He certainly did not know that he stood to benefit on the death of William McDonald. Anyway, he did not expect the sums to be paid out, because it was a case of suicide. He was convinced that it was suicide.
Whose pistol was it? (The bullet found in the brain fitted the pistol, incidentally.) Not William’s, said the family. Not mine, said the doctor, cheerfully owning up to one broken pistol discovered at his home by the police. However, enquiries revealed that at the end of August that year he had bought a second pistol from a shop in Peterhead, paying 4s. 6d. for it. He had also bought two dozen percussion-caps. Confronted with the pistol which had killed William McDonald, the shop assistant could not swear that it was the one which he had sold to Dr Smith, whom he knew. He could only say that it was of the same class and of similar make. This was, of course, extremely lucky for the doctor, but, even so, he was unable to account for a second pistol which had come into his possession and his defence lawyers were to make no attempt to show what had become of it. This point speaks for itself.
Gunpowder was found at Dr Smith’s house, but he quickly accounted for it by saying that he required it for use in an ointment for a patient named Margaret Reid. It was by way of a repeat prescription. He had not opened the new packet. Gunpowder is composed of charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur. It must, presumably, have been in clinical use, because Dr Smith could otherwise have expected the derision and disbelief of his peers. Sulphur, certainly, was widely used for skin complaints, but it was immediately obtainable in non-explosive compound. It is difficult to justify the need for the other two components. (The treatment of haemorrhoids, perhaps!) Anyway, the previously dispensed pot of ointment, on retrieval from Margaret Reid, contained no gunpowder at all, no doubt to her relief. The packet of gunpowder had in fact been opened, and the string of it cut. The contents weighed only one and three quarter ounces, whereas two ounces had been sold to him. Dr Smith was well equal to this difficulty; the procurator fiscal must have burst the packet during his brutal search of the premises. Indeed the fiscal did confess that a small quantity, ‘not half a teaspoonful’, had been spilt at the time, but the fiscal ‘made a pinch of it, and put it back’. Joseph Harkom, gunmaker of Edinburgh, deposed that it would not take more than the eighth part of a quarter of an ounce of gunpowder to fire the ball in question from the pistol found, but this was not entirely against Dr Smith who could say that the large quantity acquired by him demonstrated its medicinal use.
However, the actual process of acquisition of the packet proved to be an embarrassment to the doctor, because it evidenced a furtiveness and an urgency quite out of keeping with an innocent use. On the day before the death, he had gone over to New St Fergus and tried, without success, to buy some gunpowder for the purpose of shooting crows. In the end, he had bought the two ounces of the stuff from McLeod’s shop in his own village, ‘a little before dark’ on the exact day of the death, the Saturday evening when the shutters were still down and people lingered in the shops in the relaxed time before the Sabbath.
Alibi was the corner-stone of Dr Smith’s defence, and he had laid a winding trail, deliberately studded with clues as to time. Time was of the essence, because the distance from the doctor’s house to the ditch in his field was only 500 yards, which, according to a land surveyor, could easily be walked in three minutes and forty-five seconds. The time of the pistol-shot was put by several witnesses at 7.35 or 7.36pm on the Saturday evening, the specificity easily achieved by the fact that the death had occurred so close to the village that the shot had been heard and the flash seen.
It will be remembered that William McDonald left the cartwright’s shop at 7.30pm. According to Dr Smith, he himself had been at home from 7.00 until 7.35pm, when he made the first of several calls on patients, all situated in the main street, close to his house. Evidence showed, however, that there was a window between 7.15 and 7.50, when his movements were secret. It was tight, but the presumption is that he engineered a second tryst with his victim between 7.30 and 7.35pm and was back at a patient’s house at 7.50. The clock that was slow was nearly his undoing.
To look at the evidence more closely: at 7.15pm, Elspeth McPherson was on her way to fetch water from a well, and she recognised Dr Smith near the cartwright’s shop, ‘walking slowly towards Black Dikes Road’. Two other witnesses also placed him near the cartwright’s at the same time. Dr Smith was proved to have spent one hour at the Free Church Manse, from ‘about’ 6.00pm to 7.00pm, attending a sick servant. He had not been expected. Then, he said, he went straight home, where he brought in some dahlia roots from the garden. Next, he said, he left home at 7.35pm to visit a patient, Miss Isabella Anderson, and there he took up a candle to look at the clock, and drew Miss Anderson’s attention to the time – 7.35pm. What he did not anticipate was that she would later swear that the clock was a quarter of an hour slow, and therefore he did not arrive until 7.50pm.
After about five minutes, during which he did not sit down, (but she saw nothing untoward in his appearance or demeanour) he moved on to visit Mr and Mrs Pirie (he was the village farrier). Here he stayed only two minutes saying that he had to see Mrs Manson, who lived over the way, and would shortly return, which he did, after some ten minutes. (He was keeping on the move, to baffle enquiry.) Mr Pirie offered him a seat by the fire because it was raining heavily, but after first taking it, he rose and took one ‘far back at the side’.
Over at the Mansons’, the doctor was not expected. Mrs Manson had given birth to a baby earlier that day, and was surprised to see him. He moved his chair behind her, and sat down without taking off his hat. She thought that he did not want her to look at him. He did not stay long and afterwards she said to her husband that she did not know what was the matter with Dr Smith – he kept wiping his face and she thought that his nose was bleeding.
While under arrest at Robertson’s inn, before removal to Peterhead, the doctor made a determined attempt to pervert the course of justice, by instructing the landlady’s daughter, in a whisper, to go to Miss Isabella Anderson (whose clock was slow) and ask her if she could remember that it was 7.35pm when he called on her. If she could remember that, ‘everything would be all right’. But, said Miss Anderson, she understood that she was wanted to say something different from the truth, and she would not be swayed.
On the Sunday, while still a free man, the doctor had leaned heavily upon William Fraser, who rang the 8 o’clock curfew at the church every night and therefore had a particular awa
reness of time. He it was who was a principal witness as to the timing of the shot at 7.35pm. The doctor listened as he told his tale to the constable, and returned later on his own and asked the bellman if it would not be at 7.45pm that he had heard the report.
The doctor’s servants did their best for him. Martha Cadger said that she let her master in between 7.25 and 7.30pm, and that ten minutes later he went out by the back door to the offices. She followed him out to feed the pig, and saw him in the garden with a spade. He came home at 9 o’clock and the next morning she saw some dahlia roots in the house which had not been there on the Saturday.
Eliza Park was not so helpful. She, too, said that her master came in at 7.30pm and went out again in ten minutes, but she admitted that the house clock was five or ten minutes fast. Some dahlias were brought in on the Sunday. Alexander Dugid (a follower?) who was in the kitchen that evening, said he left to go home at 7.45pm. He heard the doctor’s step in the passage at about 7.30pm.
The trial of Dr William Smith took place in Edinburgh, occupying the 12 th to 14th April 1854. A first, void, trial had begun on March 13th, but on the second day it had been halted because one of the jurymen had been ‘overcome by mental excitement’ and had been certified as unfit to continue his duties. This must have been an interesting spectacle. The defence produced a surprise witness, last on in the case. This was Adam Gray, described for extra probity as ‘brother to the Provost of Peterhead’ and he was brought to show that, in spite of the denial of the whole clan of McDonalds, William had been in possession of a pistol, in fact the pistol at issue. On September 15th 1848, William had asked him, ‘You pick up things at roups [auctions] – have you no gun that you could sell me?’ Gray asked if he was going to poach, but he said that it was to frighten rooks from the crops (which would be more in character). Gray then sold him a ‘useless’ pistol for 4s. 6d., which he identified as the pistol exhibited in court by a notch on the stock. Gray’s documentary evidence as to the sale proved somewhat shaky. There was some blustering. ‘Everyone keeps a jotter as he likes,’ he suggested. ‘It may be a queer book, but it is true.’ It turned out that he had a previous conviction for firing a gun at a trespasser.
William’s mother did some serious damage to the defence by recounting that William had told her that Dr Smith had forbidden him to tell anyone about their meetings. When her son met the doctor at his stable door in the evening at ‘bell-ringing’ there was a mark set on the door to show that the doctor would be coming to the tryst. Evidence that Dr Smith had been seen, a few weeks before the death, practising with a pistol near that stable door did him no good at all.
The Lord Justice-Clerk, however, would have none of it. He charged the jury that it had not been substantiated that murder had actually been committed. He attached importance to the evidence of the brother to the Provost of Peterhead. The doctors could not say if murder or suicide lay behind the shooting. The pistol had not been proved to belong to Dr Smith. Thus instructed, after a bare ten minutes, the jury returned a verdict of Not Proven by a majority. Four had been for Guilty. Hisses in the crowded court-room demonstrated public opinion and the doctor, after a strategic delay, left the building with some difficulty. He did try to get the insurance companies to pay out, but they resisted him and the actions were abandoned. So common is the name of William Smith (and he might have changed it, anyway) that it would be arduous to discover how long he lived on and practised, unshriven.
CHAPTER 11
THE WILD GEESE
The unwanted wife, wrongly incarcerated in an asylum, has, of late, been a subject for study. Some, but not all, of the attention has been of Feminist hue. John Sutherland, in Victorian Fiction (Macmillan, 1995) shows that Thackeray, Dickens and Lytton all arranged to have their wives put away, with the connivance of pliable alienists. Mrs Georgina Weldon, formidable ‘Plaintiff in Person’, who escaped the attempt in 1878 to take her away, was a fine example. She sued and sued the whole lot of them – certifying physicians, asylum proprietor, and family friend who signed the statutory order – and won substantial damages. She had been vulnerable, because she was a spiritualist, and much was made in court of her having had a pet rabbit which had ‘appeared’ at a séance. Mrs Elizabeth Saunders fits well, one might say, into a line of wives subject to masculine conspiracy.
Her husband, John Saunders, five years her junior, was a gamekeeper of Mellors-ish aspect, a tall, well-built man of fresh complexion, popular with sporting men of the neighbourhood, and thought of as a good fellow. In 1913, the year when things went wrong, he was 32 and she was 37. They lived at Gosford West Lodge, on the Gosford House estate, East Lothian, by the Firth of Forth, where he was in the employment of the Earl of Wemyss. Lodge houses are only miniature mansions, however handsomely decorated, and at this particular doll’s-house, a most peculiar domestic set-up had evolved. There were just two bedrooms: in one, slept the gamekeeper, in the other, the wife, her aged mother, and the wife’s 21-year-old niece, who had been co-opted to do the housework. John Saunders resented this bizarre arrangement and his anger shows in a remark to his mother-in-law that he was nothing but a lodger in his own home. He was not the master of the doll’s-house.
The basic problem that gnawed at the marriage was the longstanding, intractable, intermittent neurotic illness of the wife. Make no mistake, she was ill, but it was not a madness. John Saunders had known her for years before they were married on May 24th 1901, and he took her on in the full knowledge that she was ‘delicate’ and in the habit of consulting doctors. He could not complain that he had been deceived, and it could have been that very ‘delicacy’ which attracted him. No doubt he thought that marriage would cure her.
Elizabeth Saunders was a very neurotic woman indeed, and she showed many classic symptoms of anxiety: panic attacks, hypochondriasis, feelings of weakness, a sense of impending doom, depression and a spoilt enjoyment of life, fretful dissatisfaction with the status quo, especially where she lived, and (a minor indication) bolting her food. Not all her days were bad, and good external factors could relieve the stress and lift her mood. She was not easy to live with and an exceptionally patient husband was needed. Anxiety was not much rated in those days, and doctors faced with a miserable female patient of this type leaned heavily on the vague diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’. Hysteria in its true sense of the production of ‘conversion symptoms’ arising from unconscious drive to seek attention was recognised, and there probably was an element of hysteria in Elizabeth’s illness.
Psychiatry was none too hot in the early 1920s, and the treatment prescribed for her was quite antiquated, with a reliance on sedation by bromide. (Not that Valium would have done her any good!) It was no wonder that she could not get up in the morning and dust the doll’s-house, as she lay there, pole-axed by sedation and depression. She and Freud would have had a field day, analysing the root cause of her problems. The most effective of the series of doctors who tried to treat her adopted a reassuring, paternalistic approach. This was helpful. Others who took a tough line, implying that she was lazy, malingering, ‘introspective’, too taken up with herself, and ought to snap out of it, naturally got nowhere.
The marriage was childless, but the husband was eager, although it was awkward to articulate such things, to indicate that ‘marital relations’ were still in place. The wife would have had to drift into, or be persuaded into, what should have been the matrimonial bedroom. Perhaps it was thought that she was not strong enough to bear children. By the age of 37, suffering from ‘bad teeth’ and ‘dyspepsia’, she was beginning to be classified as ‘of a certain age’ by doctors who thronged to write her off.
As her outbursts of frustration and blame, interpreted as ‘bad temper’, showed no sign of improvement, it is hardly surprising that the gamekeeper took to staying out late at night, which caused her further anxiety and a modicum of suspicion. He had excellent innocent reasons for absence. He was in the Reserve, and went regularly to Aberlady to shoot. He was a conscientious worker,
known to the factor of the estate to be out on duty at night more than any other keeper at Gosford. He was often after the wild geese (presumably to drive them away). Elizabeth objected when he went off on his bicycle on Wednesday and Saturday nights and had given up asking where he was going. She lay awake worrying that something would happen to him. He always said it was work.
In defence, he began a campaign of criticism, complaining about her extravagance over food. He attacked her about the presence of her niece, who had been with them for a year, not believing that she herself did not feel up to the housework. The mother’s presence he seems to have tolerated better. Actual, overt quarrels, heard by others, were beginning to break out, and, in fact, they had – when they confronted it – been on bad terms for quite a while.
Some hand began now in January, 1913, to sprinkle strychnine into this cauldron of discontent. The niece, Mary Douglas Chirnside, noticed it first. Her daily duty was to prepare trays for her aunt and grandmother, and to take them up breakfast in bed. The gamekeeper would usually be hanging around the kitchen while this was going on. Only Elizabeth took toast. Perhaps her mother was too edentulous. Only Elizabeth appears to have eaten marmalade. Maybe all the others ate porridge. It makes sense. Little pots of cream, too, were on special daily order for Elizabeth alone.
One morning, the breakfast menu included bread, already spread with marmalade from a jar in the kitchen, and the niece noticed an untoward white powder on the slice. She tasted it, and found that it was bitter, but when she asked the husband to taste the marmalade, he said there was nothing wrong with it. She decided not to take that piece of bread up to her aunt and laid it aside. She did not know what became of it. On January 17th, Elizabeth sat up in bed and toyed with her breakfast of toast, bread and butter and tea, but she did not much enjoy it because there was a ‘very nasty bitter taste’ on her toast.
Classic Scottish Murder Stories Page 12