Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  The next morning, a Sunday, she could not eat the toast, because it was so bitter, and she felt annoyed. She wondered if the gas cinders which had been used to toast the bread might have caused the funny flavour. Her niece agreed that it tasted bitter. On Wednesday, the 22nd, it happened again. Her niece brought her just half a slice of buttered toast, and she ate part of it. When she got up, she felt sick, shaky, and very giddy, so she took some baking soda in hot water and vomited up a quantity of white, frothy matter. She had no idea what was wrong, and did not even feel particularly under the weather or depressed.

  The following day, a horrible and dramatic scene occurred. She ate some of the toast, felt the bitterness for the fourth time, ate some bread and jam and drank her tea, but the tea was exceedingly bitter and she did not drain the cup. Three minutes later, her legs went numb, with a sensation of twisting. Then there came a shaking, and a strange feeling in her back. and a choking in her throat. She had to grip the back of her neck with her hand. Her top set of false teeth were out, and her lower teeth became fixed in her upper gums. She could not open her mouth. She wanted to vomit. There were twitchings in her body, which kept recurring if she moved. Down below in the kitchen, Mary heard a knock, and went upstairs to find her aunt rigid, with her head thrown back and her mouth clamped shut. She seized Mary in a fierce hold, and could not let go. There were three attacks, and then she vomited frothy stuff and felt some relief although quite prostrate and weak. Mary telegraphed for her aunt’s usual doctor, Dr Millar of Tranent, but he was not able to attend immediately and sent his assistant, Dr Gamble, who did not arrive until the evening. What he saw was an hysterical person, in a nervous condition, not seriously ill, and he prescribed bromide. The patient said never a word about twitchings or spasms.

  The next morning, Dr Millar himself arrived. He had treated Mrs Saunders for seven years and was confident that he could handle her. She suffered from nervous depression and he was used to her complaints. She did look as if she had had a bad turn. She threw up her hands and said that she had been poisoned. He thought this was pure imagination and advised her to put the idea right out of her mind, but he thought her condition grave enough to engage a resident nurse.

  Nurse Elizabeth Ellen Cameron of East Linton arrived on Friday, the 24th. She was a good choice, an excellent qualified nurse of the East Lothian Nursing Association, and she had the advantage of knowing the patient from a previous nervous illness, so that she could compare the present symptoms. There had to be a change in the sleeping arrangements: she slept with her patient, mother and niece moved into the husband’s bedroom, and husband slept in the kitchen. Nurse found Mrs Saunders in a state of collapse and she did not allow her to go downstairs to the kitchen for a fortnight. Meanwhile, the nurse listened carefully to her patient, who told her about the bitter toast, and in consequence of what she had heard, she tasted the marmalade in its jar in the kitchen, and found it bitter. She took a sample and gave it to Dr Millar when he visited again. A new jar of marmalade was obtained and the husband complained that the first jar had not been emptied.

  Nurse Cameron was also suspicious about some wheaten biscuits, bought specially for the patient. They were in a box on the mantelshelf in the kitchen and she thought they had been tampered with. On February 8th, when she was back on her feet, Elizabeth felt like trying a biscuit, and took one from the box. She saw that there was a glistening white powder on it, which looked like baking powder, and she hid it behind a shutter in her mother’s bedroom. When her husband asked for proof that her food was being interfered with, she produced the biscuit and broke off a bit for him to taste. He said there was nothing wrong with it. Nurse gave one of the biscuits to Dr Millar; it appeared to him to have been scraped, and there was a white powder on it. He, too, was becoming suspicious.

  Then there was the special cream. Twice, after the bottle had been left in the cupboard for some time, the nurse and the niece found it so bitter that they poured it down the sink. This was before Mrs Saunders was allowed downstairs. On the first day that she did come down, the nurse took some cream out of the bottle for the patient as soon as she received it from the milkman, and replaced the bottle with the residue in the cupboard. Two hours later, the nurse and the niece found it to be bitter, and they could see that it had been shaken up. This bottle was given to the doctor. The nurse swore that Mrs Saunders was not in the kitchen during that two-hour period. The portions of cream saved for her were ‘perfectly all right’.

  Dr Millar communicated with the police, and the suspect samples were taken to Dr Sydney Smith and Professor Harvey Littlejohn at Edinburgh University for analysis. They found about a third of a grain of strychnine in total in the spoilt cream, the one biscuit, the marmalade sample taken by the nurse, and the top layer of the first jar of marmalade. The quantity of poison found ‘was not usually accounted a fatal dose, but it was a dangerous one and had caused death’. The strychnine present was, however, only the tip of the iceberg when we consider the amount taken by Mrs Saunders, put in the cream, and scattered on the other wheaten biscuits, where it glittered sinisterly in the gaslight. The fatal dose is usually given as from half to two grains.

  John Saunders was arrested and his superiors and colleagues were ‘dumbfoundered’. Dr Gamble, alerted by his previous failure to spot anything seriously amiss, made a thorough search of the house for poison and found Rodine (the rat poison containing phosphorus), but no strychnine. The police, of course, were on the same track, but could find no evidence of purchase of strychnine by Saunders. He denied ever possessing, handling, or using strychnine. It was quite customary for gamekeepers to buy strychnine against vermin. It was, in fact, the poison associated with gamekeepers. George Little Bell, Gosford Kennels’ head gamekeeper, had some relevant information: he himself had taken over from the late William Saunders, (John Saunder’s father), a quantity of strychnine which he kept in a safe place. He had never given any of it out to John Saunders.

  The trial of the gamekeeper for the attempted murder of his wife began on April 23rd 1913, in the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh. The proceedings were remarkable for the unusual counterbalance between the evidence of the alleged victim, who had found the inner strength to speak out, without actually accusing her husband, and to perform well, and between the accused, who gave evidence on his own behalf and was notably confident. The force of the trial was the endeavour by the defence to blame the wife herself for the plague of strychnine. The trial became, in effect, a kind of Commission in Lunacy, with a procession of male doctors called to construct the impression that the wife was a near-insane hysteric. They argued that Mrs Saunders, in order to blame her husband for making her ill, or to make him move elsewhere, or to stop him from staying out late at night, and to keep her niece, either feigned (rather well) the symptoms of strychnine poisoning, having somehow got hold of a medical textbook, or produced a genuine hysterical fit for the same reasons, but at an unconscious level.

  There was a suggestion that, having scattered strychnine abroad, she never actually ingested any of it. Where she was supposed to have got hold of the poison was not hazarded. Although a gamekeeper’s wife might be thought to be in a stronger position to hold strychnine than the wife of a village postman, the husband denied ever having it. The defence could not have it both ways. It was implied, although not seriously argued, that she had secretly crept down the stairs while supposedly half-lifeless in her bed, in order to get at the cream. An even more bizarre accusation was that she had purposively taken in enough strychnine to produce the symptoms, having the scientific acumen to gauge the dosage to a nicety, or, in the alternative, had taken it recklessly, being of suicidal disposition at the best of times.

  One thinks of the Hay poisoning case of 1922, in which Mrs Katherine Armstrong, slowly poisoned by arsenic, was placed in Barnwood Asylum. Her husband, Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, convicted of her murder (although it has recently been strongly argued that he was innocent) fostered the belief that she was delu
ded and hypochondriacal, a self-doser.

  Early in the Saunders trial, the defence strategy began to unfold as Elizabeth Saunders was cross-examined. She ‘could not say’ that a dread of being poisoned was one of her longstanding anxieties. She certainly had had a previous experience of poisoning from an accidental overdose of a medicine, and she had since been very careful to look at the directions on medicine bottles. Although under strong pressure, she did manage to slip in the comment that during their 12 years of marriage, her husband had seemed to take a delight in tormenting her and in teasing her about her bad health. Wasn’t he trying to stiffen her up and take more interest in life? (counsel asked). Perhaps, she allowed.

  The doctors who attended her (counsel took her on) were very firm with her. Her husband had told her that Dr Martine of Haddington had told him that she was lazy. She gave that doctor up in 1906. When she had asked him to prescribe something to brace her up, he had said that it was best to let nature do its own work. She admitted that she was very easily vexed, and often felt apprehensive that some calamity was going to befall her. Over the years, she had taken a lot of medicine, but only what was prescribed. When Dr Gamble called, she did not tell him about her frightening convulsion because he told her that she had worked herself up into such a state, and if she were in the Infirmary, she would have a screen put round her bed, and would not be allowed to worry. She felt that if she told him the facts, he would tell her that it was all nervousness, and she did not like to be spoken to in such terms.

  However hard she was pressed, she would not admit to any suicidal thoughts. It was true that she had walked out of the house one night after some ‘dispeace’ but she did not make for the seashore, only towards her brother’s house. One Sunday morning, after some words, she had left home for Boglehill, intending to reach the tram and go to her sister in Edinburgh. On reflection, however, she had realised that it would be selfish to leave her aged mother stranded in her husband’s house, and had gone back to the Lodge. Her mind was not full of the fear of poison when she thought the toast was bitter: as a matter of fact she was thinking of going to a ball at Aberlady at the time.

  Her husband had sometimes put pepper and salt in her food for fun’. She wanted to leave Gosford, but her husband would not do so, saying that he had a comfortable place there. She could not remember shouting and screaming at nights, but she did remember a ‘seizure’ of some kind, four years previously, which had greatly distressed her. Whether she had twitchings on that occasion, she would not say. Once, in an electric tram in Dundee she had indeed become nervous because of the high wind: there was a scene and she had to get out. She had not said in 1912 that some day her husband would find her in the sea, and she could not remember his ever swearing at her.

  Nurse Cameron, cross-examined after her powerful account of the discovery of the adulterated food, was asked about the previous illness, in the summer of 1912, when Mrs Saunders woke up one morning convinced that something dreadful was going to happen to her, suffered from horrid dreams, and wanted to leave Gosford, where she was not happy. During the last illness her patient had shown less self-control than in the previous one. Once, Mrs Saunders did go downstairs at night when her husband was out; she seemed to be worrying about him. In fact, she always worried about her husband when he was out late, because his job could be dangerous.

  The first doctor in the witness-box was Dr Gamble and he was anxious to tell the court that he had informed Dr Millar that he had found, at that first visit, some symptoms which he could not account for: the patient told him that she was afraid of something coming over her, and she lacked the will power to conquer it. She would not tell him what she was afraid of. Dr Millar, under cross-examination, revealed that Mrs Saunders had asked him if there were any risk that she might do something to herself. She mentioned a friend who had drowned herself: was she likely to do that? He had reassured her. (So her poison phobia and her suicide phobia – if they amounted to that – were now strongly before the court.)

  There were times, Dr Millar testified, when Mrs Saunders was on the border line between sanity and insanity, but she was now improving in health. Nervous patients often imagined their symptoms and things that did not exist. If the person who put the poison on the biscuit meant it to be consumed by somebody else, he went very poorly about his business: the thing was so apparent. This comment was a godsend to the defence. The doctor was not asked about the cream on these lines, presumably because the tampering was not ‘apparent’ in that agent. He was re-examined as to his imputation of insanity, and moderated his opinion as attached to a previous illness, two years previously.

  Professor Harvey Littlejohn, for the Crown, said that he had heard the evidence and was of the opinion that all the symptoms spoken of by Mrs Saunders were indicative of poisoning by an overdose of strychnine. Taken altogether, no doctor could attribute such symptoms merely to hysteria. Somehow, though, the defence managed to get him to say that he had never known a murder case where the dose of strychnine (0.323 grain) was so remarkably small. This seems past the point and may not have been accurately reported. Saunders was a case of attempted murder and the crime charged reflected an ongoing course of conduct. Apart from the quantity of strychnine already destroyed or lost before analysis of the samples, if the case had proceeded to the full charge, obviously chemical analysis of Mrs Saunder’s organs would have yielded a higher figure.

  The case for the Crown was closed, and the defence began its full-scale attack on the mental responsibility of the wife. Dr Martine was the physician who had attended her in 1905 and 1906, and whose services she had dispensed with, finding him unsympathetic. Her diagnosis was hypochondriasis, he said now uncompromisingly, and he prescribed Valerian (which used to be specifically prescribed for hysteria, often in combination with bromide). On his last visit, he told her that she had better get up: there was plenty to do in the house. He formed the opinion that the husband treated his wife most kindly; he was more than patient, and there was an extraordinary demand on his patience. The Reverend Dr McEwen, parish minister of Gladsmuir, spoke of the accused’s kindness and courtesy to the wife, and the reassuring fact that he was a total abstainer. He considered that Mrs Saunders was a very nervous and excitable woman. After this rather un-ministerial comment, the Crown extracted the information that Saunders was not, as it happened, a member of his congregation. Dr Johnstone, another assistant to Dr Millar, was cautious. He used the word ‘introspective’. When he saw Mrs Saunders in April 1912, she was worse. The husband was quite good to her.

  On the second day of the trial, a consultant, Dr George Lovell Gulland, testified that on October 11th 1905, he was called in to examine Mrs Saunders by the then locum tenens of Dr Martine. His evidence referred to a previous illness and was extremely adverse to her. He had found the patient to be of poor physique, bad mental balance, hysterical, too much interested in her own symptoms, hypochondriacal, but with a substratum of real defect. That is, for instance, she had bad teeth and bolted her food. But on top of this, there was considerable mental debility.

  He would be quite prepared to say that when he first examined Mrs Saunders she was on the border line between sanity and insanity. His view was confirmed when he saw her again later. A woman in such a condition tended to think that the world centred in her. Her whole object was to draw attention and sympathy to herself. Such a condition was apt to prevail at a certain period in life. If an hysterical woman had once read or heard of the symptoms of poisoning by strychnine, it would be quite possible for her to simulate these by suggestion. A person in a real fit of strychnine rigidity would seize another person or an object, but would be far too rigid to let go during the continuance of the fit. (But it was in evidence that when her niece came up to see what was wrong, Mrs Saunders gripped hold of her and could not relax her grip.)

  Cross-examined, he said that Mrs Saunders was treated in the Chalmers Hospital, Edinburgh, for three weeks in 1906. Dr Gulland had not been in court during Mrs Saunders’
examination (as he had demonstrated). The Solicitor-General then read out to him the evidence relating to the symptoms and he agreed that they did resemble those of strychnine poisoning, with the exception of the fixing of the teeth in the upper jaw. There was no special stiffness or locking of the jaw in strychnine poisoning. It was not to be taken as characteristic of the condition. (An interesting piece of nit-picking! Let us see how well he had remembered his Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence. Yes: Taylor has a differential table with strychnine set against tetanus and in strychnine the illness ‘Does not commence in, nor especially affect, the jaw’.)

  Dr Sillar, assistant to Sir Thomas Fraser, Edinburgh, gave expert evidence as to the analysis of the samples of food. The Crown cross-examined and elicited opinions which would have been more useful to the defence. He said that he had heard Mrs Saunders give her evidence, and believed that she was not of normal mind. Challenged, he would not say that she struck him as being actually of unsound mind, but he would not concede that she showed no sign of mental instability, although she did seem to testify with clearness and intelligence. In fact, he would prefer not to give any definite opinion as to her mental state. Nor could he offer an opinion that life would have been lost if she had taken the poison stated to have been present in other food in the house.

  The final expert witness called by the defence to destroy the credibility of Mrs Saunders was a consultant psychiatrist of some eminence, Sir Thomas Smith Clouston, born on Orkney, 1840, and soon to die in 1915. His appointments included Physician Superintendent of the Royal Asylum, Morningside, Edinburgh, and Medical Superintendent of the Cumberland and Westmorland Asylums. He stated that he had a long and wide experience of nervous and neurotic conditions, and had heard the evidence in the case. He had not been given the opportunity to examine Mrs Saunders professionally and had had to be content with observing her in the witness-box.