10
THE LAST DROP
Susan Newell, 1923
It was the biggest event the towns of Coatbridge and Airdrie had seen for many a long year. The streets were thronged with people, some fanning themselves against the heat of the summer's day. Traffic was brought to a standstill as the procession passed through, a band at its head and the children marching in close order behind. It was quite a sight. It was a pity it marked such a sad occasion. The death of a child – any child – is tragic but it is doubly so when that child is taken from his or her parents in a violent fashion.
Young John Johnston was such a child. And, as his white-draped coffin was lowered into its grave, one question hung in the summer air as if plucked by the cool breeze from the minds and lips of all present. The question swirled round the mourners and touched the grieving parents and weeping sisters. It breathed among the crowd gathered respectfully at the cemetery gates. It whispered to the people still clogging the streets.
Why had this young boy's life been so cruelly cut short?
Why had this happened?
Why?
But only one person knew the answer and she was, at that moment, in a prison cell a few miles away to the west. And she was keeping her silence.
Susan Newell had not had much of a life. She was born in 1893 into a family of thirteen children. Poverty and hardship appeared to be the bywords of her existence in which there was never enough money and seldom any joy. She and her first husband did have one child – little Janet McLeod. That must have made her happy momentarily until the reality that this was just another mouth to feed struck home.
The first marriage failed and she took up with another man, John Newell, a former soldier with the Scots Guards. But the daily grind of Susan's life had taken its toll on her temperament and she became quick to rile and swift with her fists. More than once she struck her new husband and this led to more arguments, more anger.
By 1923, the family was living in a rented room in the home of Mrs Annie Young in Newlands Road, Coatbridge, but the landlady was reaching the end of her tether regarding the almost constant rows. One June weekend, events reached a climax and the angry words and raised voices from the rented room tipped Mrs Young over the edge. She'd had enough, she told them. She wanted them to leave, she said. It was Sunday night and she agreed to let them stay until Monday but her mind was made up – they had to be gone by the Tuesday.
John Newell had also had enough. He stormed from the house, leaving his wife and stepdaughter behind. Later his fears of facing charges of wife desertion were replaced with something infinitely more terrifying – trial for capital murder.
John Johnstone was a bright boy of thirteen who regularly helped his friend, James McGhee, on his newspaper round. On Wednesday 20 June 1923, he rushed home from school to have his tea with his mother and then went out to meet James. A short time later, John took nine papers and trotted off to deliver them and collect money due.
Annie Young saw the young boy pushing open the Newell's door, which he did without knocking. She heard Susan Newell's sharp voice telling him to come in and shut the door. The young boy did as he was told.
No one knows for sure what happened inside the cramped little room. The only certainty is that this was the last time anyone other than Susan Newell saw John Johnstone alive.
Robert Johnstone, his father, returned home from work at around 5.10 p.m. for something to eat before he and his wife went off to attend the Coatbridge Cattle Show – something of a gala event and an attraction to more than just farmers. They came back at 9.15 p.m. to find that young John had not shown up. One of his daughters said that John had come in earlier but that he had then gone out again – she thought to the pictures. Mr Johnstone knew the picture show did not finish until 10.30 p.m. so he remained unconcerned and prepared for bed.
However, worry began to flutter in his mind by 11 p.m. when there was still no sign of the boy. He got up, dressed and went to the picture house which was, by then, in darkness. The father, growing more concerned with each step, walked the streets for an hour before reporting the boy's disappearance to the police. An officer said that young lads occasionally went back to the farms with the animals in the cattle show but inquiries at the showground proved fruitless. No one had seen the boy. It was an anguished Robert Johnstone who went home to spend a sleepless night – his mind filled with thoughts of his missing son.
The following day, with little else to do but wait, he went to work. That morning police contacted him and asked him to attend Glasgow's Eastern Police Headquarters. They had a body for him to identify. It was, of course, his son.
But who would want to kill such a young lad? And how had he ended up over 10 miles away in Glasgow? The answers prompted a trial judge to dub the case ‘stranger than fiction’.
After she had seen the boy going into the Newell's room, Mrs Young had heard three strange noises. She called them ‘dumps’ but she thought nothing of them at the time. She was, after all, used to hearing loud noises from that particular room. Later that Wednesday night, Mrs Newell asked her landlady if she had a box and Mrs Young presumed it was to pack her personal belongings in before vacating the room. Mrs Young had no box, however, so Susan Newell turned and walked away. The landlady heard her go out and then return five or ten minutes later. Finally, at about 2.30 a.m., the woman heard Mrs Newell leave once again, this time with her young daughter in tow.
Six-year-old Janet had been playing in the street and had seen the paper boy going into the house but had not seen him come back out again afterwards. Later, her mother came out with an empty jug in her hand and told the little girl to come with her. They walked through the streets to Duff's Public House and Janet waited outside while Susan Newell went in. She came back with some whisky and the jug filled with beer. Then she took her daughter's hand and returned home.
The first thing Janet saw when she went into the room was the boy lying on the couch. Even at her tender years, she recognised a dead body when she saw one. Her mother told her to sit down and be quiet and Janet knew the woman's moods well enough to do as she was told. Susan sat in silence, drinking deeply from the jug of beer and the bottle of whisky and staring at the corpse, at the blood now caking on his head, at the eyes dull and lifeless. She did not like seeing his dead face so she covered it with a pair of her husband's underpants.
As she drank, she pondered the problem that has faced murderers since the beginning of time – what to do with the body. She used a poker to try to prise up the floorboards but they were nailed down too tightly. Then she went across the landing to ask Mrs Young for a box. Finally, she decided to move the corpse out of the room altogether. Out of the street. In fact, out of the town.
There was an old go-kart under the bed so she hauled it out and wrapped the little body in a bed sheet. Then, in the early hours of the morning when the streets were quiet and deserted, she trundled it out of the house and headed off down the road with her six-year-old daughter perched on top of the grisly bundle.
Susan Newell hauled the corpse to Glasgow Road where the kart developed a fault and she had trouble manoeuvring it. The sky was beginning to lighten and a woman offered to give her a hand but she politely turned it down. Then a lorry coughed to a halt beside them and the driver, the magnificently moustached Thomas Dickson, offered his assistance. Susan Newell explained she was going to Glasgow to look for rooms to rent. As luck would have it, Mr Dickson was heading to Glasgow to pick up a load and would be glad to give them a lift.
Susan Newell thought about this for a second, then thanked him and said he could drop them off anywhere. Refusing any help, she hefted the go-kart on to the back and then she and her daughter climbed into the cab. Dickson took them down Edinburgh Road into Glasgow's east end. At the corner of Netherfield Street and Duke Street, he stopped and was thanked for his kindness. Again he offered to help drag the kart down from the truck but the woman was adamant that she could manage.
However, althoug
h she had been able to hoist the kart on to the truck, taking it back off again proved more difficult. As she pulled at it, her bundle toppled and Dickson reached out to steady it. Panicking, Mrs Newell angrily slapped his hand away. No doubt peeved at the way he had been treated when all he was doing was being a good Samaritan, the lorry driver drove away, completely unaware that he had been helping a killer dispose of a body.
But Susan Newell's luck had run out. As the bundle fell, the bed sheet slipped and John Johnstone's foot was revealed. Dickson had not noticed it but someone else, who just happened to be looking out of her window at that particular moment, had spotted it. And, as Susan Newell rearranged the cover, sharp-eyed Mrs Helen Elliot, standing at her window at 802 Duke Street, caught a glimpse of a child's head.
This wasn't right. This wasn't right at all.
The woman charged out into the landing of the tenement and battered on the door of her neighbours. She told them what she had seen and asked them to keep an eye on the woman and child in the street while she ran to fetch the police.
Susan Newell, the body now again fully covered, had thrown the bundle over her shoulder and left Janet to handle the near-useless go-kart. She was heading towards the city and a ‘coup’, or dump, where she had planned to leave the corpse. There was little thought of what would happen after that, little thought of the witnesses she had left behind – although she had already primed the little witness wheeling the go-kart at her side. However, she only managed to reach the mouth of the close at 850 Duke Street before the dead weight over her shoulder took its toll. This will do, she decided, and stepped into the tenement building.
As she disappeared into the gloom of the close mouth, witnesses stopped a police officer on patrol and told him there was a woman in number 850 with what looked like a dead body in a bag. The policeman stopped Susan Newell when she emerged from the close and took her back inside. Lying on the cold stone floor to the rear of the ground-floor corridor he found John Johnstone's body, still wrapped in the bed sheet.
Susan Newell had her story all ready. ‘My husband did that,’ she said.
Under questioning at the police station, she said that she and John Newell had been quarrelling when the paperboy came in the door. The lad had cried out when he had seen her husband raising a fist to strike her so John Newell had grabbed the boy to shut him up, throwing him on the bed. And there he choked the life out of him.
Mrs Newell said that she had fainted at that point but, when she had come round, her man was gone and the boy lay dead on the bed. In a state of shock, she had fed her own daughter and then they had wheeled the body to Glasgow. It was all to protect her husband, she said. Ask my daughter.
So they did – and little Janet confirmed everything.
The only problem was John Newell hadn't been in the room at the time that John Johnstone had been murdered. But that tiny little fact didn't stop the police from charging him with the killing when they caught up with him – and nor did it prevent the procurator fiscal from later pursuing a capital murder charge against him. Ex-soldier John Newell had three months of hell ahead of him for something he did not do.
On 25 June, young John Johnstone was buried in New Monkland Cemetery. The procession began in his home in Coatbridge's Whifflet Street and followed roads through the town and neighbouring Airdrie to the graveyard.
He had been a popular lad. Friends from his Boys’ Brigade company attended in full uniform, as did children from the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides and pupils from his school. The memorial stone to be placed at the head of his grave simply read, ‘In memory of John Johnstone from his playmates.’
As the procession left the family home, things proved too much for one of his sisters, May, who collapsed and had to be helped back inside. It was not the only display of emotion that day, as many of the women among the thousands who lined the streets wept openly. Shops along the route closed as the cortège marched past to the slow beat of the Salvation Army band at its head and window blinds were drawn as a mark of sadness over the loss of an innocent.
On the same day, a Monday, the Newells appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court to be charged with the boy's murder. The indictment read that they had beaten him on the head with a blunt instrument, throttled him and broken his neck. It emerged later that the left side of his head had also been burned. An expert witness believed that his face had been held against a lit gas ring. The obviously nervous twenty-nine-year-old Susan Newell pleaded not guilty while her husband lodged a special defence of alibi. However, this was only a formal appearance and the real drama would take place in September.
A public, hungry for details of what had become known as the ‘go-kart murder’, began queuing up outside Glasgow's High Court of Justiciary at 4 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 18 September 1923. By the time the doors opened at 9 a.m., over 1000 people were standing in the Saltmarket but only 100 of them could get in. The rest had to gather in the street, impatiently awaiting news from inside the courtroom. That impatience boiled over when the two accused were driven up to the gates. The crowd surged around the police van, eager for a glimpse of the arch-villains, and were held back by a small army of police officers.
Seventy witnesses had been called and forty of them were heard on the first day. Among them was the dead boy's mother, still in her mourning black. During her testimony, the emotion of talking about her little boy's final hours and the prospect of handling his jersey proved too much and the proceedings had to be halted to give her time to recover. All the while, ashen-faced Susan Newell craned forward in the dock, watching and listening intently.
But, out of all the evidence given by witnesses that day, the most forceful and most damaging was that of little Janet McLeod. She was crying softly as she was led into the court and seated on a chair, a woman officer standing by her side to comfort her. Originally, she had told police that her stepfather had killed the ‘wee laddie’ but, in court, she admitted she only said that because her mammie had told her to. Her stepfather had not been there, she said.
Hesitantly, the young girl told the court about her mammie calling her in and her seeing the little dead boy on the couch; of the walking trip to Glasgow; of getting ‘a hurl’ on the go-kart on top of the dead boy. All the while, Susan Newell listened to her daughter verbally signing her death warrant, her eyes darting backwards and forwards but otherwise her face emotionless. The only time a trace of emotion crossed her face was when her counsel described the trip to Glasgow with her daughter sitting on the go-kart. As he talked, Mrs Newell wiped away a few tears that welled up in her eyes.
Finally, John Newell's ordeal came to an end. There was no evidence to link him in any way to the murder – in fact, he had provided a very detailed alibi for his movements on the day John Johnstone had died. After he had left the rented room following their most recent argument, Newell had attended his brother's funeral on the Tuesday and stayed for a while at his father's house. He had then spent the night in a lodging house, in the Pollok area of Glasgow, before travelling to the east end of the city where, on the Wednesday night, he had gone to a show in a music hall. A barman there recalled undercharging him for a round of drinks. He had then visited his sister and finally felt he should report to a police station to see if he was wanted for wife desertion. On being told he was not, he had taken a room at another lodging house and, on the Thursday, hitched a lift to Leith and then on to Haddington. It was while he was there that he had read in the newspapers about the murder and handed himself in to the local police. The police and the procurator fiscal had known of this alibi from the very beginning and everything he had told them would have been easy to check but they had proceeded with the murder charge against him regardless.
On the second and last day of the trial, the charges against John Newell were finally dropped and he was able to walk from the dock a free man. He walked away from the woman he must have once loved without a glance. She, however, never took her eyes off him.
There was no question that S
usan McAllister Newell had murdered the boy. The only question was over her state of mind at the time. If it could be proved that she was insane, she could escape the hangman. However, despite valiant attempts by her defence counsel to prove otherwise, a succession of medical witnesses testified that she was mentally competent. They found her cool, certainly, but she answered their questions easily. One damned her as being of the ‘tinker class’ and having a ‘want of moral fibre’. But she was sane, he said.
The legendary Professor John Glaister, Chair of Forensic Medicine at the University of Glasgow, had also examined her. He had no doubts about the soundness of her mind although he allowed that she was not of ‘high intelligence’ and he could not rule out the possibility of temporary insanity at the time of the murder. However, it was reckoned that she understood the severity of the charge against her – the very fact that she had tried to cover up the killing showed that she could tell right from wrong – and so the plea of insanity was not accepted. In the end, the all-male jury took only thirty-five minutes to reach a majority verdict of guilty but added a unanimous recommendation for mercy.
The presiding judge, Lord Alness, had some words to say before passing judgement.
The story which has been unfolded to us during these two days is a pathetic and even a poignant one. Moreover, it is a strange story.
The sequel to this boy's death, however it occurred, is such that if a novelist wrote it, probably a lasting public judgement would pronounce it quite incredible. But, as we know, truth is often stranger than fiction.
Despite the jury's plea for mercy, the judge had no option but to pronounce the severest penalty of the law on the woman for her crime. Draping the black cap on his head, he sentenced her to be hanged on 10 October.
Deadlier Than the Male Page 15