Bloody Valentine

by Douglas Skelton

  But someone had given Agnes Montgomery prussic acid. Once murder had been alleged and Thomson arrested, the body was exhumed from Eaglesham Kirkyard and was handed over to doctors for examination. But the body had been in the ground for almost three weeks and was bloated with gases and greatly decomposed. There were no wounds but the face was much disfigured and very dark, nearly black, in colour. The swollen tongue protruded between the front teeth while the eyeballs, the corneas quite opaque, bulged from their sockets. The skin was a greenish-yellow colour and greasy to the touch. The fingers of the right hand were firmly bent inward.

  When the stomach was opened, the doctors detected the smell of bitter almonds and this suggested death by poisoning. But, even though they could confirm that death was not caused by injury or illness and had actually found minute traces of hydrocyanic acid – more commonly called prussic acid – the authorities could not be certain it had killed her until a proper chemical analysis was carried out. For this, they would need an expert.

  On 6 October 1857, the Paisley procurator fiscal sent Superintendent Hunter of Renfrew County Police to the Crown Office with a letter and a tin box filled with certain items. The letter read:

  … from the nature of the substance alleged to have been administered, as well as from the state of decomposition in which the body was found, it will be proper that an analysis should be made by some properly qualified person in Edinburgh, accustomed to such matters. I have accordingly, by direction of the sheriff, caused a portion of the stomach and other parts of the body brought away to be sealed up in a jar by Dr McKinlay, in whose custody they have remained since the body was raised, and I now send them by the Bearer, Mr Hunter, superintendent of our County Police, enclosed in a tin box, soldered up in his presence, that you may have the goodness to give directions for them to be placed in the hands of the person usually employed for the Crown in such cases in Edinburgh for analysis, I have directed the bearer to await your directions and to place the Box with its contents in the hands of such person personally …

  Inside the tin box, sealed in airtight glass jars, were one half of the stomach, a portion of the right lobe of liver, one half of the heart, one half of the spleen, one half of a kidney and portions of the duodenum, ileum, colon and rectum. The stomach, though much distended by flatus, contained neither solid nor liquid matter. And the heart and large blood vessels contained no blood.

  The man who ultimately received Superintendent Hunter’s grisly cargo was Dr Douglas McLaglan and it was the lack of blood in the majority of the samples that caused him problems. After his initial tests proved negative for poisons, he commented:

  It is in no respect surprising to me that I did not obtain better results even had I been assured otherwise that Agnes Montgomery must have swallowed prussic acid; for besides the well known difficulty of finding this very volatile poison in bodies dead for some time I must observe that I have seldom in the course of my experience met with articles less fitted for medico-legal purposes than those which I have had to operate on.

  However, the prosecutors were not to be deterred and, after some insistence from the Crown Office, Dr McLagan reluctantly agreed to have another try. This time, thanks to the blood in the spleen, he found ‘unequivocal proof of the presence of prussic acid’. Traces of the poison were also found in the pint bottle from which Thomson had poured the whisky in the Mason murder attempt. However, there was none on fragments of glass found by James Watson in the garden after his daughter had said she had seen Jack stamp on a small bottle there. Thomson had claimed he used prussic acid as hair dye so samples of his hair and beard had been snipped while he was in prison. However, Dr Daniel Mckinlay stated that he had found the samples uniform in colour from root to point. The whiskers were jet black and the hair very dark brown, approaching black. The doctor applied prussic acid to the samples but said it made no difference to colour.

  And so, on 22 December, John Thomson came to trial and, although the prosecution could produce no clear motive for the murder of Agnes Montgomery or the attempted murder of Mr and Mrs Mason, it would prove to be a black Christmas for him. On 24 December, after being absent from the courtroom for just ten minutes, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Thomson was to hang on 14 January 1858. Unusually, there was no attempt to obtain a commutation of sentence.

  The case had excited public attention and it was estimated that around 20,000 people thronged the streets of Paisley for the execution – a large number of them women and young girls, it was noted somewhat disapprovingly by one reporter. The crowd was, by and large, well behaved. The Glasgow Herald noted that ‘there was but little noise and almost an entire absence of the disgusting sights that are too frequently to be seen around a gallows tree’. The gallows were erected outside the County Buildings, much to Thomson’s discomfort. He had apparently shown remorse over his crimes after sentence but had refused to see any of his relatives. He had requested that he should be hanged in prison but this was refused. He would face the public and the public would see him dangle.

  Although he had appeared faint on the morning of his execution, Thomson went to his death in a composed manner. He had requested that no clergy attend him. This was something of a break in tradition for condemned men but there were three ministers on hand should he change his mind. When hangman William Calcraft loosed the trap and Thomson’s body fell, a number of men and women close to the scaffold fainted with fright. His body hung for half an hour before being taken down ‘in such a brisk and disgusting way as to cause loud shouts of disapprobation from the crowd’. As the Glasgow Herald again reported, instead of being lowered down, the cord around the neck was merely loosened and the hangman’s assistant ‘in the most revolting way, carried it, head and legs together, off the scaffold’.

  Thomson’s was the ninth execution in Paisley since 1700. Earlier hangings had taken place at Gallow’s Green, where George Street crossed Maxwellton Street. One of the men who had met their end at the hangman’s noose had been sentenced to death for nothing more than the theft of some green kale. However, another, Alexander Provan, had murdered his wife and was not only hanged but also had his right hand struck off. The last execution before Thomson had been that of William Pirrie in October 1837. During a fit of jealousy, he had murdered his wife in a frenzied attack with a three-edged file. Prior to the attack, he had taken the precaution of locking their children out of the house.

  So why had John Thomson killed Agnes Montgomery? Was it because she had spurned his offer of going away together? Was he more interested in her than she with him? Was he so obsessed with her that he decided that if he could not have her then no one else would? Or was he punishing her for something that no one else knew about? Thomson himself remained silent about his crimes apart from a brief comment he reportedly made in prison. He said he had no option but to commit murder – that he was ‘impelled to the commission of crimes through an influence for which he could not account’.

  It transpired that whatever demons had forced him to poison Agnes Montgomery and attempt to kill the Masons had lain dormant in him for seventeen years. Prior to his execution, he confessed to another murder that he committed at the age of just nine when he was growing up near Tarbert. He said he had pushed another young boy into a quarry hole and drowned him. And, as he swung on the end of that rope before the Paisley crowd, perhaps he saw the creatures that tormented him fly off in search of fresh victims. Human nature being what it is, they would not have had very far to look for candidates.

  4

  DO NO HARM

  Dr Edward Pritchard

  She was not dead, he said, only in a faint.

  She was not dead, he said, but only needed some hot water to restore the heat to her body.

  She was not dead, he said, for he was a doctor and he knew these things.

  But she was dead, her body already cooling as it lay on their bed, what little colour there had been draining from her pale flesh. The two servants standing uselessly at the bedside k
new this – and so did the tall bearded man who knelt at his wife’s side, her lifeless hand in his.

  ‘Is she dead, Patterson?’ the doctor asked his cook, the elder of the two women.

  ‘You should know, doctor, better than I,’ she replied.

  And then the tears came and he cried out to the corpse, ‘Come back, come back, my dear Mary Jane! Don’t leave your dear Edward!’ Then he said, ‘What a brute! What a heathen!’ and asked one of the servants to fetch a rifle and shoot him.

  But they did not for one of them felt the man was merely grief-stricken. It had, after all, been a difficult year. His beloved mother-in-law had been taken from them suddenly, not three weeks before, and now his wife had finally succumbed to whatever malady had been attacking her for some months. He had every right to be overly demonstrative. But the other servant knew more. She knew he was not as devoted a husband as he appeared on this dark March night. For she had been his lover at least since the summer before. He had made her pregnant. He had promised marriage if his wife died. And now, here his wife was, lying dead in their matrimonial bed. The question in the young servant’s mind now was, ‘Would he keep his promise?’

  Perhaps he would have – but there was no new wife ahead of Dr Edward Pritchard. All that was in his immediate future was arrest, prison, a celebrated trial and an agonising death in front of 100,000 jeering spectators.

  Edward William Pritchard first met Mary Jane Taylor in Portsmouth in 1850. She was the daughter of a wealthy Edinburgh silk merchant and he was a young doctor with the Royal Navy, then serving on HMS Hecate. There had been very little doubt that the boy Pritchard would serve with the navy, even though he showed an early interest in the medical profession. His father was a sea captain, two of his uncles were admirals and two brothers also served with the Senior Service, one as a surgeon. So young Edward merged the two ambitions. By the age of twenty-one, Edward was on board HMS Victory – which, in a former life, was Lord Horatio Nelson’s flagship – serving as assistant surgeon. In the same year, 1846, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. During the next four years he sailed the seas on Her Majesty’s Service, serving in the Pacific, Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

  It was while the Hecate was home on leave that the dashing young officer attended a ball and met the future Mrs Pritchard. Mary Jane was visiting her uncle, a retired naval surgeon and, at the ball, she was introduced to the striking young doctor who looked so handsome in his uniform – especially as his skin was burnished by foreign suns. They met, they fell in love and Pritchard proposed. With the full approval of her family, they were married that autumn. However, they did not have long to enjoy married life for the new bridegroom was still a serving officer and subject to the call of duty. Soon he was off on the Hecate again, braving the wind and the foam for Queen and Country, while his wife went home to her mother and father in Edinburgh.

  In March 1851, Pritchard resigned from the navy and set himself up in medical practice at Hunmanby and Filey in Yorkshire where he remained for six years. There, he published books on local subjects and submitted articles to medical journals but, it would appear, he also built himself a reputation for self-publicity and wandering hands. He became a Freemason and used his position there to further his own ends. He even had himself photographed in the official Freemason robes and had them made into calling cards handed out liberally. His love of himself was exceeded only by his love of women and there are suggestions that he was capable of more than a medical inspection when confronted with a pretty patient. During his six years in Yorkshire, he made few friends and, when he left the area under a cloud of debt and amid a storm of gossip, no one, it seems, was sorry to see the back of him.

  In 1857, he purchased a Doctor of Medicine diploma from the University of Erlangen in Germany and, two years later, set off for Egypt and the Holy Land as a private medical aide to a well-set-up gentleman. There was, however, no desert sun for poor Mary Jane, who returned to the cold winds of Edinburgh for a year.

  Finally, in 1860, the wanderer returned to set up home and a new practice in Glasgow. Moving into their new house at 11, Berkeley Terrace was to mark a new beginning for the Pritchard family. Now with young children, perhaps he could put his restless ways behind him and build a future for them all. But Pritchard, who had been described by one Yorkshire acquaintance as the ‘prettiest liar’ who spoke the truth only by accident, was too much of a con man to change now. He exaggerated his medical prowess, forged letters of introduction and reference and generally so alienated the city’s medical establishment that they wished to have nothing to do with him. His attempts to join medical bodies and societies were met with failure. But you cannot keep a bad man down and Pritchard, exuding bonhomie and charm, took a new approach to garner popularity. If he could not win the stuffy pill-pushers and sawbones over, then he would appeal to the city’s artistic nature. He had, after all, already proved himself a Man of Letters with his books on Filey and about his travels to the Pitcairn Islands. He joined artistic societies, became director of the Glasgow Athenaeum and discovered a new skill as lecturer, amazing a rapt audience with descriptions of his travels across the globe. That he was well travelled cannot be denied but, even at the time, it was noted that his tales grew with the telling and he often gave differing accounts of the same journey.

  His public esteem was significantly increased by his claim that he was personally acquainted with General Garibaldi – and he had a walking stick supposedly inscribed by the Liberator of Italy to prove it. But this particular claim really took the biscuit with the cognoscenti, for the inscription had been made on his own orders and the closest he ever got to Garibaldi was knowing the man’s name.

  Despite Pritchard’s attempts to better his social standing, it became evident that you cannot always teach an old doctor new tricks. In the Empire’s Second City, he joined a number of Masonic Lodges, including the Knights Templar of the Glasgow Priory and the Lodge of St Mark, of which he became Master. But, just as in Yorkshire, his enthusiasm for the Craft stemmed from self-aggrandisement and the social connections such a membership afforded. He still thought highly of himself – he continued to have photographs taken for printing on calling cards – but, although his practice was busy enough, he never won the hearts or minds of his fellow medicos.

  However it was in Glasgow he did learn one new skill. For it was here he may have become a killer for the first time.

  At around 3 a.m. on 5 May 1863, a police constable, walking his beat in Berkeley Terrace, in the city’s west end, saw smoke billowing from the top floor of a house on the north side of the street. He rushed across the road and rang the doorbell. The door was opened quickly by Dr Pritchard, who explained his sons, who had been alerted by smell of smoke and the sound of breaking glass, had already awakened him. His children were safe, he said, and his wife was away from home for the night, but his serving girl, Elizabeth McGirn, could not be roused from her attic room, which seemed to be source of the blaze. The police officer tried to fight his way in but the flames had taken hold of the top part of the house by that time and so he rushed to Anderston police station to raise the alarm. The Central Fire Brigade station was contacted by telegraph, firefighters were soon on the scene and the blaze efficiently tackled.

  Elizabeth McGirn was, of course, dead – her charred body being found on her bed. She lay on her back with her left arm by her side and what was left of her right bent outwards. However, the arm from hand to elbow had been almost entirely consumed. Her head was blackened and the flesh of her chest burned away to reveal her ribcage. Her toes were charred but her legs, presumably protected by the blankets, were relatively unmarked.

  The fire, it was ascertained, had broken out at the top of the bed, presumably because she had left the gas jet on after falling asleep while reading, although the book must have been totally destroyed by the flames. The bed hangings ignited and the flames spread throughout the room and thereafter to the entire top floor.

  But the q
uestion as to why had she not tried to escape remained. The position of the body showed no sign of her having panicked or even having been aware of the blazing room. The door was only a few feet away but she lay on the bed as if she were asleep. It was suggested that she had been suffocated by smoke while she slept but was it likely that she would have been overcome so quickly by smoke that she did not make any attempt at all to escape? Or was she already dead when the fire started? Or at least drugged?

  Rumours soon circulated that there was more between Dr Pritchard and the unfortunate girl than a simple master-servant relationship. It was hinted that the girl was pregnant but this was not confirmed at the post-mortem. Pritchard was put to some questioning but no further action was taken although he did have a spot of trouble claiming the insurance money regarding the damage to his house. However, after a bit of legal wrangling, a settlement figure was reached and, in the spring of 1864, the family were once again on the move. This time, however, they did not have far to go – just around the corner really, first to Royal Crescent and then to a new house in Clarence Place, Sauchiehall Street.

  Whether Pritchard murdered Elizabeth McGirn after getting her pregnant or just to keep her quiet when his incessant womanising threatened to get him into trouble, we will never know. But it was in Clarence Place that his talent for murder really took hold.

  At first, Mary Jane Pritchard thought she had merely caught a chill or, at worst, a dose of influenza. She developed headaches and was often sick and her subsequent depressions forced her to take to her bed. However, up until that time, her constitution had been far from delicate. As William Roughead, the doyen of Scottish crime writers, pointed out, she was a robust woman of thirty-eight who had given birth to five children in fifteen years and had put up with the various ‘vicissitudes incidental to … matrimony with her unconventional consort’.