Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Adam listened quietly as the judge sentenced him to death, and then cried out, in a loud, pulpit voice, ‘You have condemned an innocent man! I am condemned at the bar of man, but I will not be condemned at the bar of God!’ The effect was electrifying, and then suddenly he struggled violently with the warders and a hidden razor fell to the ground. In the condemned cell, still posing as an innocent, he asked for the ministrations of the Reverend Alexander Clark, who declared that, personally, he had no doubt but that he was addressing a murderer of the deepest dye. It was thought at the time that Adam saw no advantage in confessing, because he secretly had no belief in an afterlife, and also imagined that an admission of guilt would chain him absolutely to the gallows. They watched him night and day for a suicide attempt, and he complained that the lighted candles disturbed his rest.

  Two days before the end, he wrote to the only woman he had cared for – Dorothy Elliot. The letter was said to have been inscribed in his own blood, but, supervised as he was, that seems unlikely. Dorothy, all tears, was allowed to visit him in his gloomy cell, the night before execution. ‘Oh, tell her to beware of bad company!’ he charged the clerical posse as they led her away.

  On Friday, October 16th, 1835, John Adam was taken to the Longman’s Grave, beside the Moray Firth, decked out in the obligatory long black camlet robe. When he reached the scaffold and stood upon the drop, he found himself gazing across the bright and glittering waters of the Firth to the far ridge of Mulbuie. He at once turned round and stood with his back to the sea and his face to the people as the executioner approached and did his job.

  A deep grave was hewn out beneath the pavings of the old Inverness jail, and he was lowered into it in a standing position. Thus, too, most curiously, was Ben Jonson buried in 1637, with his coffin upright, although in his case it was at his own request, in order, it was said, to extract the promise from King Charles the First of a place in Westminster Abbey.

  John Adam confided to an admiring prison crony, for posthumous onward circulation, a confession and a last ghostly revelation, worthy of M R James. He had, he admitted, first sought to suffocate his bride, commando-style, by pressing his thumbs below her ears. ‘What do you mean, John? Oh, dear me!’ she had protested. Afterwards, fleeing along the high road to Dingwall, by the alternating light of the moon as it slid in and out of the clouds, he beheld a figure coming towards him, and he jumped over a wall and hid. But then, when he went back to the road, he saw the same figure still advancing, and as he walked forward it kept always at a like distance from him. He took to his heels and made for Maryburgh, preceded by his shadow. Afraid to enter the village, he sat down by the roadside and lit his pipe, to steady his nerves, whereupon the phantom of the moors vanished.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE BABES IN THE QUARRY

  There is something awesome about laked quarries, that makes us draw back from the lip of the bank. I know of a place, an abyss, where dark slopes of granite, hewn out in flakes and harbouring sparse purple weeds, fall sheer, straight into a black tarn of unguessable depth, horribly clouded with swaying, brown algae. In a nightmare, thick eels might lie along sunken ledg es, as they are said to do in Loch Ness. Denton Welch, the ’40s writer, could have had such a loathsome cauldron in mind when he wrote in his diary of ‘ponds dark as molasses treacle where the antlered branches are covered with hair-fungus-moss’. Elliott O’Donnell, author of frightening books on the supernatural, would choose a sunless man-made lake as the setting in which a box-headed elemental spirit might rear up from its den behind a rock and stilt ever forward, with its set yellow eyes aglimmer.

  Hopetoun Quarry was deep and dangerous, 1000 yards long, with a curve, and 40 yards wide. The only access was by a winding cartroad, and it was so overhung by trees that you came upon the lonely mere suddenly, and with a shock. It was said no bird sang there, but you don’t have to believe that. In the year of 1913, on a hot Sabbath morning in June, two countrymen stopped to rest in the shade of the bending trees by the quarry. They were off the beaten track because Tam Duncan, a ploughman, was showing the new grieve, John Thomson, around the boundaries of Riddrie Mains, a farm, which lay near the village of Winchburgh in West Lothian, 12 miles west of Edinburgh.

  A bundle was floating on the turgid waters where insects buzzed and hummed. It looked like pieces of wood, or perhaps an old scarecrow. There was something human about the shape, something not quite right. Using a broken branch as a grapple, they dragged the lumpish mass as far as the bank. Then they could see that the object was, in fact, two small bodies, tied together with a length of window-cord, which broke when they tried to lift them out of the water. The police were called, and the local police surgeon, Dr Cross, who must have been behind the times, because he considered that a postmortem would be a useless procedure, since the bodies had obviously been in the lake for a long period.

  Unconvinced, the Procurator Fiscal ordered the remains to be taken to the mortuary at Linlithgow, where Professor Harvey Littlejohn and a young Dr Sidney Smith soon demonstrated the value of forensic science. Their major findings fall under the headings of clothing, sex, age, and contents of stomach, and they led to rapid identification. The bodies were dressed identically in poor quality garments which were nearly rotten: shirts, stockings with garters under the knees, and boots. Breeches were not mentioned but were presumably present. A very substantial clue as to identity was provided by a faded, nearly invisible mark on one of the shirts – the stamp of a poorhouse (workhouse) at Dysart, in Fife.

  Gender was not immediately obvious, and investigation of internal glandular structure was necessary to define that both bodies were male. The heights, by direct measurement, were three feet seven and a half inches, and three feet two inches. These were the average heights of a boy of six to seven years, and one of four years. The condition of the teeth confirmed the estimate. The smaller boy still had all his milk teeth. The brown hair of both boys had been cut shortly before death.

  The case was unusual because of the extreme degree to which the transformation to adipocere had progressed by reason of long immersion in water, estimated as between 18 months and two years. As a result, the internal organs were remarkably well-preserved and yielded another evidential find. The stomachs were intact, and the contents largely undigested. The boys’ last meal had been Scotch broth. Barley, potatoes, whole green peas, turnips and leeks were present, and had been consumed about one hour before death, which suggested that the boys had lived locally or at least had not been brought from a distance to be disposed of at the quarry.

  It was not possible to discover the cause of death. There was a small injury in the scalp of the elder boy, with no evidence of fracture nor of whether it had been inflicted before or after death. There was no doubt, from the circumstances, that a double murder was committed, but, so terrible was the crime, that there seems to have been a taboo attached to speculation about the method of killing. I shall respect those scruples, except to comment that one of several variables is indeed too frightful to contemplate.

  From the start, the pathologists thought that the boys had walked willingly along that winding track to their deaths, in the company of someone they knew. The most obvious suspect to search for had to be some poor, crazed woman unable to cope with her family, deluded perhaps, and the crime was also uncomfortably reminiscent of the deeds of the Victorian baby-farmers. There was never any discussion in those perhaps more innocent times that the murders were sexually motivated.

  The pathologists were more concerned to assess length of time of immersion in the lake, by reference to progression of adipocere, than to address the question of how long the bodies had been floating on the surface. It seems unlikely that they could have been visible and not noticed for some one and a half years, however remote the quarry. It is not known how or if they had been weighted. The boots might have been a factor in maintaining submergence. Taylor informs us that in winter an unimpeded body may stay down for up to six weeks. In summer, the period may be
as short as two to three days. Children rise more quickly. The answer may be that the bodies in the quarry were weighted, or had snagged, or that they had been rising and falling, and by chance had not been spotted when they were uprisen.

  The police came knocking at the doors of snug cottages in Winchburgh and Broxburn and asked about two little boys, missing, although not reported, since before Christmas 1911. A suspicion which had lain, repressed, in the depths of their minds, now floated up in the memories of a handful of people who had eschewed gossip and dismissed presentiments of evil. We should not hasten to condemn them.

  Patrick Higgins was a red man, coloured by the dust of the brickworks where he worked as a labourer, but not permanently stained like Thomas Hardy’s reddleman, whose whole person, horse and cart were saturated with red ochre. His aspect, dark and thick-set as he was, was ogreish as he fried up his meals on a spade and drank rough soup from the pail of his trade. Two small boys called him father, and they had not been seen since one evening in late November, 1911. John was about seven years old at that time and his brother, William, about five. Even their dates of birth had somehow got lost. Patrick, now aged 40, was a man of poor reputation, shiftless, but not of criminal habits. The story was that he had been a fine soldier in India but had been a broken man since the death of his wife – a local woman – in 1910. The reality was that he had already given her a hard time, drinking and neglecting his family. Since her death, his motherless bairns had been the ones to suffer his neglect on their own. They were a burden and a drain on his drinking money.

  In January, 1911, John and William were taken into the poorhouse at Dysart. The parish applied to Higgins for their maintenance, and when he refused to comply, he was sent to prison for two months. After his release in August, he boarded them out in Broxburn with a widow, Elizabeth Hynes, whom he had known since he was a boy. He was incorrigible, although earning 24 shillings a week, and never gave the widow a penny. The local Inspector of Poor warned him that he would be taken back to prison unless he mended his ways. By September, they were all three virtually homeless, sometimes reduced to sleeping at the brickyard. These were children at risk, were they not? And the Lord Justice-Clerk was later to berate the parish authorities for failing in their duty towards the paupers for whom they were responsible. Some people took pity on the shabby, cowed little boys, almost unnoticed as they were shuttled from pillar to post by a red, angry man, always in his cups. Then, one evening in November, a kind woman gave them a good, filling meal of Scotch broth.

  It was a wet, stormy night in which to be out. Hugh Shields, a miner, saw Higgins and his two sons walking away to the east. Hours afterwards, Paddy came back alone. ‘The kids are all right now,’ he said over a drink. ‘They’re on their way to Canada.’ James Daly, another miner, also saw Paddy and his boys walking towards Winchburgh, between 7.00 and 8.00pm. Later that night, after about three hours, Paddy Higgins lurched into a bar in Winchburgh, a drowned rat, and out of breath.

  He told Daly a different story, a tall one: he and the kids had caught the 8.30 train to Edinburgh, and a lady in the compartment had taken a fancy to one of the boys, and had offered to give him a home. Where one went, the other would have to go, he spoke out straight. Then a second lady who was with her offered to have the other boy. Higgins had hopped off the train at Ratho and run back to Winchburgh in time for a celebratory drink. He had not made a note of the ladies’ addresses, but they had his. Paddy had no address, Daly objected, registering somewhere, perhaps, a whiff of suspicion. ‘Yes, I have: Patrick Higgins, Winchburgh Brickworks.’

  Llewellyn Richards, a third miner, was present and heard this fairytale. Both he and Daly saw nothing unusual in Paddy’s manner. Back he went to his niche at the brickworks to sleep, and there told Alexander Fairnie, a brick-turner, all about the benevolent ladies on the Edinburgh train. Some time afterwards, Fairnie asked him how his boys were getting on. ‘They’ve gone to glory,’ Paddy said. Several months after that, he called on Mrs Hynes and told her that they had both drowned. Still no one did anything about it.

  It took only a day or two to find Patrick Higgins in 1913. Four policemen, anticipating resistance from the strong red man took him by surprise at a lodging house in Broxburn at 2 o’clock in the morning. The keeper was new, and took them up to a cubicle containing two beds. One of the occupants owned to being the wanted man – ‘That’s me they want, I believe’ – and went quietly, as if he had no cares in the world. He would give no account of himself and said that he did not know where his boys were.

  They brought him up at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh on September 11th, 1913, and he comported himself like a soldier on a charge, expressionless and standing to attention when called by name. Coming and going to the dock, he nodded and winked at acquaintances. His plea was Not Guilty: it was argued for him that anyone could have killed the boys. There was no direct evidence. A special defence had been lodged, to the effect that he was insane and not responsible for his actions at the time when he was alleged to have committed the crime.

  It appeared that Patrick Higgins suffered, or had suffered, from epilepsy. There was more to his mental profile than drunkenness and problems of personality. It was put, or, more importantly, proved, that epilepsy had been the reason for his discharge from the army. He had, in fact, served six or seven years with the Scottish Rifles in India, so that the affliction could not have been with him as a very young man, and there was some vague talk of injury to the brain.

  A general practitioner from Broxburn, Dr Kelso, was brought to say that Higgins’ mother had consulted him shortly after Patrick had left the army. She had asked the doctor to see if her son was ‘right in the head’ because she had woken in the middle of the night to find Patrick standing in the middle of the room, waving a poker in a threatening manner. I suppose that we must take this as true, since the doctor is speaking, and not a mother trying to save her son’s life. The mother had witnessed Patrick’s ‘shaking fits’ and seen him fall out of bed, more than once, but his symptoms were complicated by alcohol. A quarryman had several times seen him in the throes of a fit, foaming at the mouth. A former police constable had twice seen him in convulsions in the streets of Winchburgh. An Edinburgh doctor who had examined Higgins while awaiting trial in Calton Jail had found marks of wounds on his head that could well have been incurred during the violent movements of fits. Dr Keay, of Bangour Asylum, could find no evidence of epilepsy and quaintly observed that Higgins was of average intelligence ‘for a man of his class’.

  It was futile to deny that he was an epileptic, diagnosed and discharged as such from the military service. He apparently took no medication and had not sought the help of Dr Kelso, who would have said if he had been treating him. Drink may have triggered his fits. He himself had instructed his lawyers that he had been free from epilepsy since India, unless he had been drinking. The fact that medical observers saw no sign of epilepsy when they confronted him in his cell in 1913 was neither here nor there. There was, however, no evidence as to frank insanity to support the mother’s lurid experience. Doctor after doctor found no symptoms of derangement. All remarked on his cold indifference, but, as the Lord Advocate said ‘callousness, coldbloodedness and deliberate cruelty were not insanity.’ Against him, there was the element of premeditation. Why else, except with the intention of harming them, would he have led his children late and in driving rain along a track to nowhere?

  The jury returned a unanimous verdict of Guilty, although not until they had asked the judge a series of questions, and they were scrupulous in adding a recommendation to mercy, based on the long gap between the crime and the trial, and also on the lack of expert evidence as to Higgins’ mental state at the time of the murders. Patrick Higgins stood to attention as Lord Johnston condemned him to death. He had no chance of a reprieve and on October 1st, 1913, he was hanged and his body buried in a plain black coffin in the prison grounds. The murderer was a lapsed Roman Catholic and Canon Stuart, of St Mary�
��s Cathedral, said prayers beside him to the end. He went very bravely. His last words were – ‘The Lord Jesus receive The Canon let it be known that Higgins had confessed to him the justice of his sentence, but if he had been favoured with a full account of his actions at the quarry, he did not say so. ‘Drink and, through drink, neglect of religion have brought me down,’ he had said, but words of contrition relating to his lost boys are somehow missing.

  After the hangman, John Ellis, had done his job and the black flag had been hoisted, in the world outside, the crowds who had stood on the top of Calton Hill were moving off for a day at Musselburgh Races. Others scrambled down from the monumental canons. It was said that a blind fiddler played ‘The Lost Chord’.

  Sir Sidney Smith recorded a piece of doggerel that appeared in a university magazine:

  Two bodies found in a lonely mere,

  Converted into adipocere.

  Harvey, when called in to see ‘em,

  Said, ‘Just what I need for my museum’.

  Times and manners change, but the final episode of the Hopetoun Quarry tragedy would now be regarded as unacceptable practice by professional men. In 1913, a spot of latter-day ‘body-snatching’ was a jolly jape, all, of course, in the best interests of science. During the autopsy in the Linlithgow mortuary, Dr Smith was taken with the idea of keeping specimens of the perfect adipocere formation for teaching purposes. Professor Harvey Littlejohn, approving the idea, actually co-operated by asking the two police officers present to go outside with him. Surreptitiously, Smith then packed up the two heads, a leg and an arm from each, and all the internal organs, and the two doctors travelled back to Edinburgh by train with the parcels on the luggage-rack, an embarrassing and dubious procedure in itself. The specimens were displayed in the Forensic Medicine Museum at the University. No parent was left alive to grieve and make protest.