Bloody Valentine

by Douglas Skelton

  Pritchard had been brought from Calton Jail at eight that morning. A huge crowd had followed the prison wagon up the High Street and into Parliament Square. At three minutes past ten, he was brought into the courtroom to take his place in the dock. His brother Charles had been given special permission to sit with him and the customary two policemen. Dressed in black – he was, after all, still in mourning for his wife and mother-in-law – the accused took off his hat and gave the spectators a chance to size him up.

  According to one description, he was tall, stout and well built – although his weeks in prison had seen him lose some weight. His hair was long but he was bald on top and he sported what is now known as a comb-over. But the most distinctive thing about him was his beard, of which he was inordinately proud. In fact, one of the only complaints he made while in prison was that he was not allowed pomatum, an apple-scented ointment, to treat his whiskers.

  When the three judges took their seats on the bench, the accused rose and bowed solemnly. Then he sat back down and adopted his now customary melancholy but calm demeanour as he listened to the evidence against him. Only occasionally during the five-day trial did he show any form of emotion: when two of his children told the court how happy they were with mama and papa a handkerchief was pressed to his eyes; when mention was made of his wife, he showed sadness; and, finally, when Mary McLeod gave her evidence. Then, according to one observer, a change came over him and the calm appearance was replaced by a distinctly malignant look. For Mary McLeod, albeit with some hesitation, was the one witness who changed everything for him. Once her testimony was over, Pritchard was revealed as a calculating adulterer who had, in all probability, turned killer.

  In the summer of 1864, Mrs Pritchard had caught her husband kissing the then fifteen-year-old Mary in one of the bedrooms of the house. Afterwards, an affronted Mary spoke to Mrs Pritchard and offered to leave but the woman would not hear of it. She told Mary she would speak to her husband who, she said, was a ‘nasty dirty man’. However, the affair did not stop there. Under pressure in the witness box, Mary admitted that the accused ‘had connection’, a euphemism for sexual intercourse, with her and she ‘became with child to him’. On being told of this, he said he would put it right and gave her some medicine. Soon after, she suffered a miscarriage.

  And still their affair continued. Their ‘connection’ carried on. He gave her presents – namely, a ring, a brooch and a locket. His fondness for handing out photographs of himself saw him giving her his likeness to put in the locket. Mary was wearing the locket in court but there was no photograph inside because, she said, she had torn it up. He had even promised the girl marriage. On being questioned in court regarding this, Mary became somewhat incoherent, being unwilling to say exactly what Pritchard promised her. Under pressure from the prosecution and the Court – even to the extent of threatening her with prison – she admitted, ‘He said that when Mrs Pritchard died, if she died before him, and I was alive, he would marry me.’

  Mary had been arrested at around the same time as Pritchard but, after two days in custody, she was released without charge. The defence tried to suggest that it was the girl who committed the murders in order to have Pritchard all to herself but it was a halfhearted attempt and never really held much water. It was, as the prosecution insisted, murder with a doctor’s finger in it.

  It is not necessary for the prosecution to provide a motive for murder but it always helps. His affair with young Mary was one possible motive. Either he wanted his wife out of the way so that they could be together (possible but unlikely) or Mary Jane had threatened to expose him for the dirty old man he was (equally as possible but equally as unlikely). Then there was his financial state to consider. He was considerably overdrawn at the bank and he would have stood to inherit some cash but not enough to merit the extreme action he had taken. Similarly, no real motive was established for the murder of his mother-in-law. Perhaps she suspected he was systematically poisoning her daughter and so had to be silenced. Perhaps she just got in the way of his plan. She had also caught him dallying with young Mary and perhaps that contributed to his desire to kill her.

  In the end, the jury took only fifty-five minutes to find him guilty of both charges. On passing sentence, the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Inglis, said, ‘The evidence leaves in the mind of no reasonable man the slightest doubt of your guilt.’ He put the black cap on and pronounced sentence of death. Pritchard was

  to be taken back to Glasgow under escort, to be fed bread and water until 28th July and, on that day, between the hours eight and ten forenoon, to be taken furth the said prison to the common place of execution of the burgh of Glasgow, or to such place as the Magistrates of Glasgow shall appoint as the place of execution, and there, at the hands of the common executioner, be hanged by the neck until dead; and ordain his body thereafter to be buried within the precincts of the said prison of Glasgow, further ordain his whole moveable goods and gear to be escheat and forfeit to the Crown.

  As he removed the black cap, he added, ‘Which is pronounced for doom. May God Almighty have mercy upon your soul.’

  Dr Pritchard bowed deeply, first to the jury and then to bench and, leaning heavily on the arm of the police officer to his right, was helped down from the courtroom to the cells.

  The verdict was met with no uproar. Even in 1865, there were those who deplored the idea of capital punishment and appealed for mercy for the cruellest of murderers. But, for Pritchard, there was no such plea. As they had for John Thomson, the kind-hearted abolitionists kept their silence.

  For his part, the condemned man contented himself with reading the Bible and ingratiating himself with his jailers – and in implicating his former lover in his crimes. He admitted he had killed his dear wife but that young Mary had been involved by knowingly serving her the poisoned food. This was greeted with universal disbelief. One Episcopalian minister told him he did not believe a word he had said and that his crimes were almost unexampled. Pritchard was sitting on his bed. He threw himself back, stretching out his hands, and said, ‘Do you know, Doctor MacLeod, I now understand how Jesus suffered from the unbelief of men in His Word.’

  In a second confession, he claimed he had killed Mary Jane with chloroform, again insisting Mary McLeod had been involved. But of the murder of his mother-in-law he was innocent. Still this was not accepted. Finally, he admitted both murders and fully cleared Mary McLeod of any involvement. He had committed the crimes while under ‘a species of terrible madness and the use of ardent spirits,’ he said.

  His last letter was to his wife’s brother, Dr Michael Taylor. It began:

  Farewell, brother, I die 20 hours from now. Romans viii, 34 to 39 verses. Mary Jane, Darling Mother, and you, I will meet, as you said the last time you spoke to me, in happier circumstances. Bless you and yours, prays the dying penitent.

  Rain fell during the night of Thursday-Friday 27–28 July and the morning was dampened by constant drizzle. The scaffold, as was the custom, had been erected on Glasgow Green, opposite the High Court and the South Prison. The city’s main Fair was underway and the Green was filled with stalls and booths, which had to be removed in order for the public hanging to take place. Perhaps the Fair was the reason so many people turned up to witness Pritchard’s end. Some estimates state there were upwards of 100,000 thronging the Green, with 750 police officers – most of the city’s force – keeping order and pushing the crowds behind specially constructed barriers.

  The object of their interest had been brought from the North Prison the previous evening and lodged in its southern counterpart. As he sat in the condemned cell awaiting his final hour, the streets around Jail Square were filled with people picking their vantage spot to view the morning’s entertainment. The day dawned damp and grey and the streets began to clog. Preachers, never the men to miss the opportunity of a crowd to harangue, drifted among the people distributing religious tracts with words of warning against the descent into sin. By six in the morning the crowd had g
rown considerably and clouds of pungent smoke rose towards the looming skies as innumerable pipes were fired up. It was a fitting send-off for a man who once wrote a paper on the uses and misuses of tobacco. Faces pressed against every window in every building with a view of the square while lines of people could even be seen across the river.

  At 7.15 a.m., a ripple of excitement washed through the masses as hangman William Calcraft climbed the steps of the scaffold to make his pre-execution checks. Then, at eight, the star attraction made his appearance, his head held high, still dressed in mourning but fashionably so. He walked steadily towards his death – ‘as if marching to music’ said one observer. As the crowd shouted insults – not just at him but also at the hangman for, despite the enjoyment many had from a ‘topping’, his duties were never popular. From the platform, Pritchard announced, ‘I acknowledge the justice of my sentence.’ He did not waver as the hood was pulled over his head and Calcraft draped the noose around his neck, experiencing a little trouble with Pritchard’s long hair and bushy beard. Although he retained his composure throughout, a slight swaying from side to side did betray his anxiety. The bolt was drawn and his body made the last drop. A low moan seeped from the crowd and one reporter described how ‘he shrugged his shoulder more than half-a-dozen times, his head shook and the whole body trembled’. Calcraft reached out to the rope to steady the swinging body then let it go. The body twisted in the noose a few times and the kid gloves Pritchard had been holding slipped from his fingers. After a minute, the convulsions eased until there was only some twitching in the hands. And, two minutes later, Dr Pritchard was still. His was the last public execution in Glasgow.

  An open coffin yawned beneath the drop and, after the body had hung for a time, it was simply allowed to fall into it. It landed with such force that it damaged the wood and a team of joiners had to rush forward to repair the break. His body was buried in the graveyard of the South Prison, a stone with the letter P rudely scratched on it marking the spot. But his body would not be permitted to rest in peace. In 1910, when the court buildings were being renovated, the body was exhumed. The coffin shattered under the blows of workmen’s shovels but the remains inside were found to be remarkably intact. The clothes, including a pair of elastic-sided boots, that he wore on the scaffold were still in relatively good condition. Both the boots and the skull were purloined by an enterprising workman and later sold.

  Someone, then, was literally walking around in dead man’s shoes.

  5

  FRENCH KISSES

  Eugène Marie Chantrelle

  There was nothing like a sensational murder trial to get Victorian Britain buzzing. Of course, the principal players in the mortal tragedy had to come from the proper classes. Violent death was not uncommon among the denizens of the slum-lands and thieves’ kitchens that clogged the nation’s cities and so was not of interest to polite society. The poor and the starving and those of loose morals were, for the most part, better out of sight and out of mind. But a trial involving the middle or upper classes was different – and, in the early summer of 1878, Edinburgh was agog with a case that brimmed with sensation. There was a handsome Frenchman, a beautiful young girl, seduction, sexual adventure, jealousy, violence and, finally, murder. Hell, this case had it all.

  Although his Edinburgh employers at Newington Academy were not aware of it at first, Frenchman Eugène Marie Chantrelle had a chequered past. As time went on, they looked at him differently but, at first he seemed to be just what they were looking for to tutor their young ladies. In December 1865, he presented credentials that seemed to prove he had gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Paris although it is now doubtful he ever graduated. He told the Academy’s proprietor James McLachlan that he had come direct from Paris to Edinburgh to study medicine but had dropped out after a year. In actual fact, the then thirty-one-year-old Chantrelle had studied for five years in Strasbourg and Paris, as well as the single year in Edinburgh. He had been born in Nantes and had taken a medical course there but, by 1851, he was in Paris manning the student barricades during the communistic rebellion of that year. During one skirmish, a sabre-wielding soldier wounded the young Chantrelle. At the end of hostilities, he found himself on the losing side and realised that life in France was too hot for him so he took himself off to America. His movements there are shrouded in mystery but, by 1862, he was in England teaching French at several schools.

  What Chantrelle would not have told his potential employer in Edinburgh was that he was a man of enormous sexual appetites – and that they had already earned him a nine-month spell in prison for sexually assaulting one of his pupils in England. Naturally, had Mr McLachlan known this, he would never have offered the man the position at his school. But he did not know and so Chantrelle took his place among the staff of the Arniston Place school, teaching the proper young ladies French and Latin. And it was in the classroom that his eye fell on fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Cullen Dyer.

  Mr McLachlan described her as ‘short in stature, good-looking, prepossessing in manner and well liked’. He also said she was of a lively and cheerful disposition, kindly and malleable except when she was thwarted – if she were put down in her class she would show how she felt. She was also high spirited but of quick temper. Chantrelle, being Chantrelle, would have been aware of her immediately and she, it seems, was also well aware of him. He was, despite being more than twice her age, an attractive man – tall, well built, well dressed and magnificently whiskered in the style of the day. Add to that the fact that he had an accent that could melt a lady’s heart in just a few syllables and it is little wonder a young girl would fall for him.

  He insisted he had known her for eighteen months before anything romantic took place between them. According to him, they met by chance at a lecture out of school while she was in the company of her brother John. As they walked home afterwards, John disappeared with another young lady, leaving Elizabeth alone with the older teacher. It proved the beginning of their courtship – although the ever-gallant Monsieur insisted that nothing could take place between them until he had first met with her parents. At least that was what he said later. At Elizabeth’s suggestion, he duly turned up at the Dyer house only to find that the young girl had not first asked her father’s permission.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, the affair was swiftly common knowledge among the girls of the Academy and it was finally brought to Mr McLachlan’s attention by a school superintendent who said that M. Chantrelle was ‘paying particular attention to Miss Dyer’ and giving her presents of jewellery. According to the superintendent, ‘it was notorious among the other pupils’.

  Elizabeth’s mother had complained previously that her daughter was not coming home from school at the proper hour so, after some inquiry, Mr McLachlan informed her that Elizabeth was going to the house of M. Chantrelle for extra lessons. On being challenged, Elizabeth refused to end the inappropriate liaison. The situation was a bit of a mess – and it was about to get worse. At some stage, the private tutoring changed from the romance languages to the language of romance. It soon became obvious that there were more than just verbs being conjugated, for at the age of sixteen, Elizabeth Dyer fell pregnant. Chantrelle, however, expressed some doubt over paternity. In a letter, she assures him, ‘I tell you I never gave myself to anyone but you.’ In another, she pleads, ‘If it was broken off I would die. You think perhaps that I do not mean it but really I could not live without your love.’

  Her family was, quite naturally, outraged. There was some friction between Chantrelle and her father – so much so that Elizabeth wrote, ‘Will you settle it with Papa and tell him to say yes or no? If no, then we must be married without his consent as I could not live without you …’ At one point, in October 1867, she released him from all his promises and was expressing a desire to die but, by the following April, after her pregnancy was discovered, she was back in the full flush of romantic love, writing, ‘All I want on earth is to be always with you. I would be as happy a
s the day is long, which I am not now … I tell you again, Eugène, that no one ever had me, never ….’

  Chantrelle was, according to his own letters, ‘ready to fulfil all my engagements with you when the time comes, even though it should bring me shame and misery.’ So, in August 1868, the couple were married in her father’s house in Buccleuch Place. She was already seven months pregnant by this time and she gave birth to their first son in October. Chantrelle, citing his medical training, delivered the child himself in their home at 81a George Street. They eventually had four children together although one did not survive.

  They remained married for over nine years but it was not a happy match. Despite having done the decent thing and married the girl, no doubt against all his natural instincts to flee the city, Chantrelle proved to be a far from ideal husband. He had lost his position at Newington Academy through the scandal and often found himself in straitened financial conditions. But he never lost his taste for wine, women and song. He was a regular customer at various brothels in Castle Street and St James Square. There, his sexual appetites, violent nature and pretensions to medical qualifications earned him a number of nicknames – including ‘The Bawdy Doctor’ and ‘The Black Doctor’. According to one brothel keeper, he was considered ‘a very dirty man by the girls’ and ‘a horrible man in his practices’.

  Barbara Kay, who kept Polly Scott’s house in Castle Street, said he was a customer for years, sometimes attending three or four times a week. One girl, Annie Clark, said he ‘had been very beastly’ and had taken unnatural liberties with her but had not ‘had connection’ with her, which meant there was no actual intercourse. What those ‘unnatural liberties’ were can only be guessed at – although another girl said he was ‘a very coarse man’ who used to carry surgical instruments around with him and he wanted to use them on the girls. It was stated that he would have several girls in the room with him at one time, all naked, and he would select one or two to go to bed with him. He generally supplied champagne and paid around ten shillings for their favours – a tidy sum in those days.