Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  His views on hysteria had a punitive tone. He said that she described the outstanding symptoms of that illness. A certain want of truthfulness and candour were also characteristic. The fear of impending calamity was of the nature of an insane delusion. (This was undoubtedly an old-fashioned view.) Hysterical women would do almost anything to excite sympathy. It appeared to him that the nurse in this case had been watching the wrong person: she should have watched the patient. He thought that there was a strong possibility of Mrs Saunders carrying out such a scheme as might here be suggested. He was cross-examined forcefully and admitted that he could not say that Mrs Saunders exhibited neurotic signs in the witness-box, but it had to be borne in mind that hysterics were often able to behave in an apparently normal way. He considered it strongly probable that Mrs Saunders used strychnine to excite sympathy for herself. He noticed one significant thing: she left the box with a self-satisfied smile on her face. ‘Did she now?’ the Solicitor-General mocked him. ‘Well, I didn’t see it, and I don’t think the jury saw it either. It must have been meant for you, Sir Thomas, as you were sitting beside the box!’ The courts had never been receptive to the opinion of alienists, but what was that to the male jury and the crowd of Saunders’ supporters who had come into Edinburgh from the country. The damage had been done, and Mrs Saunders, her reputation in tatters, was presented as some kind of dangerous, scheming lunatic.

  The gamekeeper strode into the witness-box, a manly figure, sure of himself. He was led through his contention that his wife was suicidal, which she had denied. She often said that she would do something to herself. On the occasion of her previously mentioned exit down by Boglehill to the shore, her mother asked him to follow her, keeping out of sight. Three-quarters of a mile from home, she suddenly retraced her footsteps. He facetiously asked her if the water had been too cold for her – rather a grim jest, he conceded – and she said, ‘I will do it some day’. Whenever she heard of a suicide, she became frightened and dwelt on it. She bucked up on hearing that she might inherit some property. He thought that she was not strong enough to go to the ball at Aberlady. He tried some of the marmalade and thought it had a horrid smell, with a little speck of white on it. His wife took a biscuit from behind a shutter. He tasted it and after going downstairs felt a clammy taste in his mouth and a burning in his throat, but he did not tell his wife so, because it struck him that there was some underhand plot in the house to put him in blame.

  The summing-up leaned towards the accused – ‘The question of Not Guilty or Not Proven might be of great moment to a man in the position of the accused’ – and the gamekeeper was unanimously found Not Guilty. He was rapturously received with cheers and handshakes. Mrs Saunders flew free from the Lodge for a new life elsewhere, and later her husband divorced her on the grounds of her desertion. The decree was granted by Lord Ormidale, the same judge who had sat at his criminal trial. Under the new law, no doubt Saunders would have put forward his wife’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE FRENCH SCHOOLMASTER’S WIFE

  Eugène Marie Chantrelle was an incendiarist of the mind, sizzling with fantasies of blowing the whole lot of them to Kingdom Come, and in particular his mother-in-law in her house at 5 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, and in general, ‘Would that I [he said] could but place a fuse in the centre of this earth, that I could blow it to pieces, and with it the whole of humanity! I hate them!’

  This new Guy Fawkes, a Frenchman, was a failed doctor, born in 1834 at Nantes, where he attended medical school. When his father’s shipping business foundered, he became erratic, attending classes at Strasbourg and Paris, but never qualifying, although he surely thought that he was just as good as any registered practitioner. His taste for violence and arson was formed, no doubt, at the barricades in Paris during the coup d’état of 1851, where he received a sabre-wound in the arm. As he had espoused the wrong, Republican side, he withdrew to America where his doings are unknown. He will have been up to no good.

  Chantrelle was a priapic man, fully capable of rape, as afterwards came to light. When he descended on Edinburgh in 1866, however, he was still guarding his reputation and the respectable citizens gladly accepted him as a schoolmaster, even entrusting their adolescent daughters to his care. Textbooks and primers on French and Latin flowed from his pen and he was considered an ornament to the cultural life of the city. At first there was an air, a style about him, and he was of good continental address. One who observed him noted that he was a ‘powerfully-built, square-shouldered, good-looking, cultured man. He had finely-cut features, with a moustache and mutton-chop whiskers and a good crop of well-trimmed hair’. He spoke near-perfect idiomatic English, with a fascinating French accent. None knew that he had already had a conviction in England for an outrage ‘of a very gross nature’ upon one of his pupils, and had served a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment.

  Newington Academy, in Arniston Place, was one of the private schools where Chantrelle taught French. In 1867, a pupil, Elizabeth Cullen Dyer, aged 15, the daughter of a commercial traveller, attended his classes. By her photographs, she was a beauty, with long golden hair, and when, perhaps, she was 16, Chantrelle seduced her. This was no rape: extant early letters show that she was as besotted by her exotic lover as Madeleine Smith by Pierre Emile L’Angelier ten years previously. Pregnancy came as a bombshell, and, against his nature, Chantrelle allowed himself to be manoeuvred into marriage. He had not been netted before and the best explanation for his compliance is that he was still intent on making a go of it in Edinburgh. Otherwise, he would have decamped without a qualm.

  The wedding took place on August 11th 1868, when he was 34 and she was 17. In a photograph, taken soon afterwards, she is large and miserable and he is saturnine. Her mouth turns down in a rictus of foreboding. A respectable household was set up at 81a George Street, his bachelor quarters, where in conditions which became somewhat cramped, they occupied a parlour, dining-room, kitchen and ‘class-room’ on one floor, and two bedrooms, a servant’s bedroom, closet and bathroom above. Chantrelle strutted a bit, swollen with the importance of his new situation in life. There was always a maid (once he had had a black manservant) and he became a Freemason. (Well, he said so, and, to be more particular, a member of the Red Cross Knight Order of Masons.)

  Baby No. 1, Eugène John, was born on October 22nd 1868, delivered by Chantrelle himself. Madame Chantrelle (her girlish identity lost so soon) usually nursed her babies for one month, but not her first-born. Probably a wet-nurse was employed, and then unpasteurised cow’s milk was offered. One son did not survive. Louis was born in 1871, and ‘the baby’ was born on December 6th, 1876. There was thus no failure of ‘marital relations’ but the marriage, as a relationship, was a total failure. We should now call it an abusive one. The dapper, muscled husband raged with explosive fire in the trap which he had not sought and began to strike out in anger. The wife was seen with a black eye; he threw a candlestick at her and threatened to ‘smash’ the children and make mincemeat of her.

  He drank heavily and we should say now that he was an alcoholic. His maid knew that he drank a bottle of whisky a day at home, and since he was not much at home anyway, and had little interest in meal-times, who knows how much more he drank in surroundings which he found more convivial. His breakfast, diagnostically, was one cup of tea with whisky in it. However, these things are cultural, and many a Victorian husband survived on years of drinking to excess, and certainly Chantrelle’s famous libido was unimpaired. Far from it. He was a frequent visitor to the brothels of Clyde Street. A detective saw him there.

  Gossip about the schoolmaster’s two vices was beginning to circulate and business was falling off. He took it out on his wife and repeatedly threatened to poison her by untraceable means. It was a martyrdom. Twice she appealed to the police for protection, and sometimes went home to Mamma but always returned. She consulted a lawyer about a divorce, but nothing came of it. Her uncle was a doctor and he could have helped h
er more, but marriage was sacred. Still the raging husband waved his loaded pistol at her and discharged it at the bedroom door for target practice. He shot up the brothels, too, when the mood took him. Behaving badly was his way of life.

  Holidays from this tindery ménage were taken at Portobello by the sea and one day in their lodgings, Eugène got hold of Papa’s pistol and accidentally discharged it. Louis and Papa were both slightly wounded and the incident turned Chantrelle’s mind towards the benefits of insurance payments. It should be said that in 1877 he owed £200 and had 17s. 11d. in the bank. The butcher was pressing him very hard. After first making prudent enquiries as to the exact nature of accidental death in insurance terms, Chantrelle approached another firm, a new one, going under the name of the Accidental Assurance Association of Scotland, and insured the life of his wife for £1,000. ‘Mamma,’ she said on a visit home, ‘my life is insured now and you will see that my life will go soon.’ ‘Nonsense!’ quoth Mamma, ‘there’s no fears of that.’ But still she said, ‘I cannot help thinking it; something within me tells me that it will be so.’

  One week later, it was Hogmanay at No. 81 George Street, and there was a semblance of truce. Madame had been out and about, buying presents for the children, and posting off greetings cards. Papa was home for supper, for once, and a bottle of champagne was on the table, together with a contribution from Mamma – shortbread and a cake. When midnight struck, all the bands in the Castle garrison began to play, and master and mistress and maid stood at the open window to welcome in the New Year of 1878.

  Next morning, Madame woke with a headache and nausea. There has never been an explanation for this malady, whether it was a hangover, migraine (for she did complain to her mother about her headaches) or dosage from husband, by way of a pre-med. Mary Byrne, the Irish maid (illiterate according to Chantrelle) departed on her servant’s holiday. Eugène was sent out to buy a duck for supper. Madame vomited a clear fluid like water into the parlour fire. Eugène held her head, as she had often done for him. Somehow, she managed to steam the duck à I’oignon. When Papa rolled in, he sent to the Hanover Hotel for some grapes and four bottles of lemonade. The family dined at 5pm, but Madame could eat nothing at all and retired to bed at 6pm, taking the baby in with her. At 9.45pm, Mary the maid came home and went up to the bedroom. The gas was lighted. Madame was ‘very heavy-looking’. She asked Mary to peel an orange for her.

  At about midnight (Chantrelle takes up the story) he went up to the other bedroom, where he slept, for various logistical reasons, with the two elder boys, and undressed before venturing into his wife’s room. She was still awake, and had been reading the Family Herald. There was some matrimonial chit-chat, and some kind of amatory connection. The baby woke up and began to babble. His wife said that she would not be able to sleep and begged him to remove Baby, which he did. He kissed her and left her alone for the night.

  Mary the maid crept down from her narrow bed, the next morning at 7am-ish, to make a cup of tea for her mistress. She was about to light the kitchen fire, when she heard a moaning noise, rather like the cat. She ran upstairs and was surprised to find that the gas was out, although it was usually kept burning all night, and that the baby was not, as it should be, in bed with its mother. There was no smell of gas. In the pale daylight, she saw Madame lying white and unconscious, partly on her side on the bed, like Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton, with her eyelids closed. Intermittently, she emitted a deep moan. There was vomit on her golden hair which seemed to have come out of its usual bedtime plait, and green-brown stuff on the bedclothes.

  The frightened girl knocked three times at her master’s door and entered. In the small iron bed lay Chantrelle, wide-awake and looking at her, and all three children, squashed together but asleep. She told him what was wrong, and went back to her mistress. He took his time to dress in the bare minimum for decency – his drawers, a flannel shirt, stockings and slippers. He stood at his wife’s bedside. The maid suggested a doctor. ‘I hear the baby crying,’ he said, and sent her out to check. She found that all the children were still fast asleep. The only noise in the house was the terrible, meaningless moaning. She went back to Madame and caught Chantrelle in the act of coming back from the window, as if after raising the bottom sash. Did she not notice a smell of gas? he asked her. She did not, but turned off the meter in the kitchen. The master dressed and went off for a doctor, not the nearest one, too old to be woken at such an early hour, he thought, but young Dr Carmichael of No. 42 Northumberland Street, whom he knew from the Masons.

  It was 8.30 in the morning when a real doctor stood at the patient’s bedside. His first thought was that she was dying. There was now a strong smell of gas, and they carried her into the other bedroom. They could not find the leak. The doctor wrote a note for delivery to Dr Henry Littlejohn which read: ‘If you would like to see a case of coal-gas poisoning [then still a rarity] come up here at once.’ The maid was sent for a bottle of brandy to be administered as an enema, a remedy then for heart-failure. Dr Carmichael could not help noticing that the level in the bottle kept going down, as the grieving husband helped himself to it – a coarse gesture, one would have thought, and afterwards held against him.

  Dr Littlejohn turned up at 9.30am and found Dr Carmichael desperately trying to produce artificial respiration. He advised removal to the Royal Infirmary, and himself reported the apparent leak of gas to the Gas Company. Mamma arrived, with her own doctor, Dr Gordon of George Square, and he helped Dr Carmichael with artificial respiration. At one stage, Chantrelle was asked to help, but he could not seem to stick to it. At one o’clock, the dying woman was taken to the hospital, where Dr Maclagan, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence, examined her. His immediate opinion was that this was a case of narcotic poisoning, not gas inhalation. There was no smell of coal-gas. There was no pulse at the wrist, and the heartbeat was intermittent. They carried on the artificial respiration and applied another brandy enema and an electrical stimulus, but they knew that it was hopeless. By 4.00pm she was dead. Chantrelle told his hated mother-in-law that they had murdered his wife in the infirmary with their inept treatments. She observed that he did not bother to show distress to her, but then she did not expect him to do so.

  The post-mortem took place at the Royal Infirmary on January 3rd, and no cause, absolutely no cause, of death was found. On the 4th, two gas-fitters and a criminal officer went to No. 81a and searched the premises until they found Chantrelle’s ‘leak’. A bracket had been removed in the architrave of the window of Madame’s bedroom, and when they opened the shutter they saw a freshly broken gas pipe. The fracture had obviously been caused by bending the pipe backward and forward, which could have been done very quickly in two turns. Confronted with this evidence, Chantrelle denied any knowledge of the pipe. This was foolish, because another gas-fitter had been called out in August 1876 on report of a leak, and had found an escape of gas from a small hole in precisely that same pipe. He remembered that Chantrelle had watched the operation with interest as he tightened the pipe, remarking with typical philanthropy, ‘It must have been that damn dirty German’ – apparently a former tenant.

  The funeral of Elizabeth Chantrelle at the Grange Cemetery on January 5th was dramatic, pre-Raphaelite even, in its staged perfection. Chantrelle had her buried in her wedding dress, and he made a show of trying to fling himself into the open grave. Those present were naturally surprised but no doubt, except for mother-in-law, thought that guilt over his long course of cruelty had brought about a release of remorse. On his return home, he was arrested for the murder of his wife. Behind the scenes, chemical analysis had been made of stains of vomit on the dead woman’s nightdress and sheet, and three-quarters of a grain of opium in solid form had been found, accompanied by portions of grapes and orange. The same fruits had also been recognized in the contents of the stomach.

  Thinking now that even if opium might have escaped absorption in the stomach, it might have passed into the intestines, which had not, unaccountably
, been retained, the experts arranged an exhumation on January 10th for the purpose of removing the intestines. Yet again, the results of analysis were negative. The investigations made by the police were proving more successful. It turned out that Chantrelle kept a veritable miniature pharmacy in a locked cupboard in his class-room, which contained harmless homeopathic drugs side-by-side with poisons such as arsenic and tartar emetic. On November 25th, 1877, he had bought in from Robertsons’ chemists a drachm, i.e. 60 grains of extract of opium comprising 30 doses, each capable of taking a human life. Extract of opium is the stronger form. Most suspiciously, this hoard of opium was nowhere to be found in Chantrelle’s den.

  As the situation stood, Chantrelle had not been clever enough by half. He had certainly honoured his boast that he could administer poison to his wife in such a way that the whole Faculty of Edinburgh could not detect it, but, though he had had ample time to clear up, he had left stains of poisoned vomit patent for all to see. The faked gas leak was clumsily staged, and should have been done earlier. Bricks of circumstantial evidence grew into a castle, and on 8th and 9th January, the prisoner made his pre-trial declarations. He was beginning to rant and ramble, deprived as he was of his supportive alcohol, and he does not always appear quite sane, although his sanity was never at issue.

  The chief burden of his storm of words was that his wife had twice been unfaithful to him – with a bank clerk, and a neighbour – and that he had nobly forgiven her. She had had her ‘peculiarities’. Jealousy. Threats of suicide. (Some there were, it is true in her immature love-letters.) He used to find her stooped over her washing tub in the bedroom with her head bent forward and her nose on the edge of the tub, as if about to immerse her face in the water. She read ‘penny trashy novels’. She used to take chloral. (Of which there was a very minute trace in the tissues of the stomach.)