John Adam stands out somewhat from our other sinners lapped in the flames of the everlasting bonfire. But for constitutional stirrings of lust, avarice and sloth, he could have taken the yellow brick road to fulfilment, instead of the primrose way to the high lonely gallows-tree beside the Moray Firth.
Although not of a confessing disposition, his eyes dazzled, and he covered them, when he saw what he had done. The old Adam was locked into his soul, and began to emerge when he was only 14 years of age. He was a thinker, and, in small measure, a leader, but the contemplation of man’s place in the world and in society led him into dissatisfaction with his low station in life. His physical presence was strong, compelling, and he had power over women. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a womaniser, a fleet-footed seducer. Maidens and widows, all fell beneath his flails. Prevarications – plain lies and damned lies – tripped from his tongue, but when he was a stripling he was valued for the wondrous tales he told.
Born all fresh on New Year’s Day in 1804, from crofters’ stock, he was the son of an elder of the Kirk, whose righteousness proved to be an impossible model. The father died when John Adam was 14, and that was when the lurking faults in his character began to influence the pattern of his life. He was handsome and obliging, but popularity had done him no good. Now it was his turn to manage the old 20-acre farm of Craigieloch, Lintrathen, near Forfar, of which his ancestors had been tenants for 300 years. His widowed mother turned to him to step into his father’s shoes, but, in suggestive words, ‘he proved unequal to the duty’, a disappointment, and was sent away to work on another farmstead. There he grew up, and returned to his rightful place after five years of exile, with his tendency to idleness and disregard for the truth well noted.
At the age of 20, he was admitted a member of the Kirk and sat in his father’s pew, a regular and devout communicant. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his faith, but his private behaviour did not match up to his public face. His fields became neglected, weeds spouted, while he gadded about, sightseeing, or rather visiting the ladies in whom he had now developed a consuming interest. They had no resistance, and misunderstood his attentions. Within a bare two months of his formal reception into the Church of Scotland, there was a resounding scandal, when he was convicted before the Kirk Session of the seduction of two young women of the parish. In each case, the father was an elder, and great was the repulsion felt, because one girl, who was deaf and dumb, was his own cousin. His company was no longer sought, and he was forced to move away.
John Adam had strayed from the path and was henceforth a restless wanderer, discontented, pursued for vengeance. Agricultural labouring was all that he had to offer, and he found employment at Carrisbank Farm, near Brechin, no more than 20 miles distant, where he was attracted to a young woman named Jane Brechin [sic]. Unusually, she saw through him, and, perceiving that he did not intend marriage, turned him down. Stung by this unwonted rejection, he walked out, taking a similar job near Aberdeen. Jane Brechin had made a mortal mistake.
Aberdeen widened Adam’s horizons, and he got in with a group of freethinkers who were drawn to Deism – that movement which evinced a strong aversion from Christianity, and held the belief that the lights of nature and reason are sufficient guides. Adam himself purchased a copy of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason from a chapman at a fair in Aberdeen, and it became, as it were, the textbook of his set. Enraptured by Paine’s crude and homely logic, his fiery Republicanism, and criticisms of the Bible, Adam abandoned his strong grounding in the Kirk.
This group of his was, in some ways, wild and loose, but he stood apart, not abandoned to the fleshpots, preferring to seduce the respectable class of women. Soon Aberdeen could hold him no more. His philandering had become notorious, and he had to flee to Lanarkshire. At last, for the first time in his life, he felt true love for a girl, and proposed marriage. The date was set and he intended to be at the altar. I hope that this part of his history is correct, but I suspect that it is his own voice that can be heard, inventing retrospectively.
The story of John Adam is punctuated by luminous set pieces, tableaux of the imagination. His talent for oneiric narrative was quite remarkable. In anticipation of the wedding, he later said, for effect and sympathy, he had a precognitive dream: at the hour of midnight, his betrothed appeared at his bedside, blanched and beshrouded as for the grave. ‘John,’ she prophesied, ‘we shall never be married, but, mark, you will die an awful death.’ In terror he awoke, and in dread he lived through the hours of the day, until it was after noon, and he obtained permission to go to see his affianced. Long miles he walked to her father’s house, and arrived with the darkness. As he approached, he heard the sound of psalm singing from within, and, through a chink in the shutters, he saw that the room was draped in white. Friends and neighbours were singing around the bed on which there lay the corpse of his intended bride. She had died suddenly that morning.
Recovered from the shock, and his brush with the supernatural, he dallied elsewhere in compensation, until, in 1831, he was compelled to escape to Glasgow, where he enlisted in the 2nd Dragoon Guards, quartered in the city. He looked very fetching in his uniform, and no woman was safe from his charms. By now he had sunk so low as to rob enamoured widows of their savings.
In the winter of 1833-4, he was with his regiment at Warkworth, in Northumberland, and encountered Dorothy Elliot, the 18-year-old daughter of a well-off innkeeper. From the evidence available, this, in fact, was the one for whom he felt a constant love, but since his time was running out, who can tell how long those tender feelings would have lasted. Back in Scotland in March, 1834, he deserted from his regiment and made his way down to Warkworth to persuade Dorothy to elope with him. Overcome with the romance of his approach, she agreed, on condition that there would be a marriage ceremony at the end of the first stage.
However, John Adam was too flighty a bird to be netted, and by ruse and excuse, lie and procrastination, he put her off and bore her home triumphantly to meet his relatives at Lintrathen, where she passed as his newly-wed, and all rejoiced. After an enjoyable visit, the happy pair left for Inverness by various ambages, in order to avoid the military authorities. Adam experienced some difficulty in cashing a purse of English banknotes, which were, alas! the proceeds of robbery, but he prevailed, and the couple went on to Dingwall, and lived as Mr and Mrs John Anderson. Adam delved in the local quarries, and there was domestic bliss until the autumn of 1834. Dorothy was pregnant, the English money was spent, the quarry work was too hard, and underpaid, and it was time for a variation in their circumstances.
Judged by his previous form, Adam would have summarily abandoned his responsibilities, but, surprisingly, he schemed to keep his family together, although the method that he came up with was as wicked as could be. Telling Dorothy that he had to visit an aged aunt from whom he had great expectations, he set forth. Dorothy had not heard of such a benefactrix, but she had found her quasi-husband ever bad at communication, and she raised no objection. He was not, anyway, a man whom you would lightly cross. His mission was to seek out Jane Brechin, the woman who had spurned him. He had heard that she had done well for herself and was in a good way of business in Montrose.
Dressed in his best bib and tucker he materialized in Jane’s thriving little shop and presented himself as a lost suitor from the misty past who had long pined for her romantically and regretted his former bêtises. Not married, older, she was flattered, and this time she gave in, especially when he asked her to marry him. She was to join him at his house near Inverness. The wedding was set for March 11th, 1835, after due proclamation in church, at her mother’s house in Laurencekirk.
Adam helped her to sell up the shop and lodge the proceeds in the bank. It was a small fortune. Then he left and laboured in the quarries of Dingwall, until the date came near, when his presence was again required at the side of his invalid aunt. The Reverend John Cook, parish minister of Laurencekirk, conducted a valid marriage ceremony, although perhaps it might have been voidable later if the bride had survived, if the Kirk had such provisions. John Adam was caught at last, but it did not really count, because he was working through the grades of a master plan which would leave him a widower very, very soon.
The couple left by the afternoon coach for the north. The honeymoon night was spent in Aberdeen, then on to Inverness, where Adam installed his bride in respectable lodgings with Hugh and Janet McIntosh at Chapel Street. They were kind people and could not help noticing that during the next few weeks, Mr Adam never spent a full night there, so pressing were his business concerns elsewhere. He kept turning up back in Dingwall, shining with good news: the aunt had died, leaving him all her furniture and a legacy of £100 or so, which he proceeded to place on deposit in the National Bank under the name of John Anderson.
At last the Montrose carrier arrived at Chapel Street with Jane’s furniture, which was supposed to improve the messuage at the matrimonial home in waiting, but she was downcast when Adam abandoned her once again, insisting on going on before her with the chattels to make all shipshape for her reception. His true destination, of course, was Dingwall, where Dorothy was overjoyed to receive the aunt’s heirlooms – a chest of drawers, a tent-bed, and a trunk. John Urquhart, a sawyer, and his wife, Christina, with whom the ‘Andersons’ lodged, witnessed the coming of the aunt’s worldly goods, and were also rather baffled by John’s variant excuses for his absences – visiting a brother or collecting monies left to him by an uncle in India.
There John Adam could have left his fraud and he debated his options within himself. It was noticed that he paid unco’ heed to the sermon as he sat in his usual pew in the parish kirk of Dingwall on Sunday, March 29th.
On Monday, the 30th, he was dining with his wife at the lodgings in Inverness. Her new home was ready, he told her. She heard the tidings with great joy, and packed a small basket of personal effects, including a pair of stockings which she was proudly knitting for her husband. Her whole luggage consisted of this basket, some clothing in a bundle, and an umbrella. The McIntoshes had grown fond of the often abandoned bride, and quite possibly suspicious of the comings and goings. They demurred when Adam delayed the journey until the evening, saying that it was too late to set off, but Adam said that they were going only a few miles beyond the ferry after a short stage. They could surely not get further than Redcastle that night, Hugh McIntosh persisted, but Adam said shortly that they might.
It was dusk when the couple left the coach and boarded the ferry at Kessock. Roderick McGregor, the boatman, conveyed them across the Stygian waters to the north side of the Beauly Firth: they sat together in the stern, and by the light of the boat lamp he recognized the man from a previous occasion when he had been travelling with some furniture. John Adam sloped ashore, taciturn as ever, but his wife sweetly bade the ferryman goodbye, before she followed in her husband’s tracks, all trusting, down the way to Dingwall, across the lonely promontory of the Black Isle.
It was 10 o’clock that night when Adam returned to his lodgings at Dingwall. The family had gone to bed and left the door unlocked for him. He seemed tired, as well he might after engaging in some strenuous physical activity and tramping some 12 miles over moorland by moonlight. He brought with him a basket, a bundle, and an umbrella which he represented as the last relics of his aunt. It was slightly awkward that, as Dorothy found when she examined them, the body linen was marked JB, and one nightdress had not been washed since last usage, but Adam was quick to devise some explanation. More difficult, but not insuperable, to account for were the half-knitted hose with the wires still in them.
The next day, Adam resumed his work in the quarries, after mentioning to Dorothy that he was thinking that they might emigrate to America very shortly. Days passed, and then on Friday, April 10th, John Adam’s battered bride, her life snuffed out, pitiful to behold, was discovered on the moor of Mulbuie. Three Highland lasses, who could speak only Gaelic, Jane and Peggy Stewart and Betty Gray, with a lad named John Campbell, had been planting out fir-trees on the Braes of Kilcoy. In the evening, Jane and John went to rest in a roofless cottage beside a disused peat-road. The walls were partly tumbledown, and the girl noticed a piece of gauze veiling which was sticking out of the rubble. John told her not to touch it: some poor person must have thrown it away. However, when they looked around, they saw a woman’s shoe, embedded in soil. They began to dig with the spades which they had with them, and realized that there was a woman’s body buried underneath the stones and soil.
William Forbes, a cottar (cottager) was summoned from his home at Muckernich of Kilcoy, and the clothed body was uncovered. A great stone was seen to be lying flat on the face. The Procurator Fiscal and surgeons from Dingwall were called out to the ruined cottage, and, after preliminary examination, the body was taken to the Town House at Dingwall. John Jones, surgeon, had noted that the dead woman had lain in a corner, and the mass of débris – turf, stones and sand – appeared to be part of the wall, which had been pushed down for the purpose of concealment. In view of the strength of the standing walls, it could not have fallen by accident.
At post-mortem, a heap of clotted blood was found under the head, and the jawbone was fractured at both sides of the head. The tongue protruded an inch out of the mouth and blood issued from the nose. On the scalp were two lacerated wounds which corresponded in size and shape with stones found near the corpse.
No identification was possible as yet; the dead woman appeared to be a stranger to the district. Handbills did the trick: they were distributed widely, bearing the description of a woman aged about 40, clad in a purple stuff gown, with a black silk bonnet and veil. She was wearing a new wedding ring, her linen was marked JB, and there was a pillbox in her pocket, labelled J. Mackenzie, Chemist and Druggist, Forres. (Did the coach pass through Forres on the way to Inverness from Montrose, and did she feel ill on the long journey?)
When John Adam was home from the quarry that night, his wife was full of the news of the mysterious woman in purple. ‘They say it is the body of a married woman, John,’ she told him in all her innocence, ‘for there is a ring on her finger such as married women wear. From her dress of home-made stuff, they think that she must be the wife of some Highland shepherd. How I feel for her husband, poor man, when he hears of her mangled state.’ Adam showed no reaction and dourly went about his affairs, removing his £100 deposit from the bank and arranging the emigration details. But he was too late, because reports of the gruesome murder spread across the counties, and, especially in Inverness, the oft-deserted bride with the new wedding ring, who had been wafted away at even, was very well remembered.
On the Sunday, after midnight, officers arrested John Adam in his bed for the murder of Jane Brechin, his lawful wife. Poor, pregnant Dorothy, his wife in all but formality, who had hoped for marriage, was astonished by the revelations and was left behind with the Urquharts to comfort her while Adam was harried in handcuffs to the Town House. Once there, he was deliberately confronted with a ghastly spectacle, which strangely echoed his previous supernatural dream: ‘Attendants with their candles stood round the table on which lay the silent figure of the murdered woman, still in her marriage dress, while her comely features bore the marks of brutal violence.’
Waiting grimly for the sinner were various persons from Inverness and they identified both the dead and living. He denied everything. The candles guttered, the gloom of the death-chamber was overwhelming, and one of the women fainted to the floor. John Adam faltered, too: in a brief moment of weakness, he put his hands over his eyes. ‘I am not accustomed to such sights,’ he apologised to the Procurator Fiscal.
The Fiscal now proceeded upon a ‘trial by touch’ – that centuries-old ordeal perhaps unexpected in the Age of Reason, or rather a modified form of the rite. If Adam were indeed the murderer, the body should have bled or spoken in tongues, or he should have collapsed or confessed, or some such portent. ‘Take that hand in your own, and say if you know it,’ Cameron the Fiscal ordered Adam, and, undaunted, he took in his own the clammy hand of the dead woman, and said that he did not know it. ‘Lay your hand on that face, then, and say if you ever saw it before. Then place your hand on that bosom and say if your hand was ever there before.’ Boldly Adam placed his hand as directed, and swore, ‘I have never seen this woman before, either alive or dead.’ ‘Very well,’ said the Fiscal, ‘we are all in the presence of God.’
As if this confrontation were not drama enough, when they removed Adam to the prison at Inverness to await trial, they took him by the scenic route across the moor of Mulbuie, calculated to pass the very scene of the murder, but if they hoped that he would break down and confess, they were sadly disappointed, because he refused to look at the crumbling cottage, and the mournful file continued along the track in the lea of the fir plantation to doom.
The trial of John Adam took place at Inverness on the one day of September 18th, 1835. He was not wearing his usual wig, in order, no doubt, to thwart identification in court and sow doubt, and it was seen that the strikingly handsome man, tall and dark, was, in fact, as bald as a slug, with side-whiskers in compensation for the superior deficiency. He looked older than his years, which was perhaps not such a good idea, making him more menacing.
The alarming indictment charged that he did with a stone or other hard instrument strike his wife two or more violent blows on the head, whereby she was severely wounded and was stunned, and did then violently strike or dash down upon the side of her head a large stone, whereby the jawbone on both sides of her head was fractured, whereof she immediately died; or that she was suffocated by pressure after the assault by means of throwing down upon her part of an old wall, consisting of turf and stones and other materials, and covering her person therewith.
Two large stones, bloodstained, brought on a cart from the scene of the crime backed up the indictment chillingly. John Adam, as expected, pleaded Not Guilty and lodged special defences: alibi – that he was at the quarry at the relevant time; his good character; prejudice by publication of untrue, improper and cruel statements in the press. John Jones, the surgeon, identified the two stones. One had been found beneath the head. The other, weighing 28lbs, had lain above the head, and its corners corresponded to the bi-lateral fractures of the jaw. The image of John Adam, tall and used to weights, with the massive stone uplifted in his arms, biblical fashion, made a powerful impression in court.
Cross-examination brought up a difficulty in the medical evidence, which was just about Adam’s only hope, except that other evidence against him was overwhelming: Mr Jones admitted that his first impression was that of a person very recently dead – up to some two or three days previously. The body seemed quite fresh, with blood flowing from the nose, but the way in which it was covered, and the atmosphere excluded, would go far to retard putrefaction. Obviously, Adam wanted the time of death to be set as long as possible after he had been seen vanishing into the dusk with Jane on March 30th.
Mrs Margaret Munro, of Mill Street, Montrose, a cousin of Jane Brechin, identified John Adam as the very man. Jane’s basket and umbrella, and the half-knitted stockings (finished by pregnant Dorothy), had been retrieved from Adam’s lodgings at Dingwall and brought to court as exhibits: these were eagerly identified by those who had known her. Mrs Janet Mcintosh remembered a significant conversation: Jane had told her that her husband was providing her with a comfortable home somewhere between Dingwall and Beauly. She herself had speculated that it must be at Maryburgh, since there was no other place so situated, but Jane said that was not the right name. Of course, for her destination was a ruined cottage with no name in the middle of nowhere.
The evidence as to the manner in which Acfim had abstracted Jane’s life savings, having obtained her signature, was particularly damning, even if the agent of the British Linen Company’s bank at Montrose was totally unable to identify Adam without his wig as the very man who had withdrawn £96 from Jane’s account. The defendant’s two declarations, read, made a poor impression. The first, dated two days after arrest, was a cobweb of lies: he was verily John Anderson, of Dalkeith, legally married to Dorothy Elliot, and Jane Bunton, his spinster aunt, had bequeathed to him her choice effects. (He was thinking of the tell-tale initials on the linen.)
On May 7th, there had been some considered modifications. He did admit to knowing Jane Brechin and visiting her at Montrose, but it was to demand repayment of certain sums which he had lent to her. She had refused to refund the cash on any consideration except marriage. That was precisely why he had married her, and visited her occasionally at her lodgings in inverness. She had signed the money over to him. On March 30th, she had taken him aside and told him that she wanted to vacate the lodgings immediately, because they were too cold, and she left with him that evening, with her basket, bundle and umbrella. When they arrived at the Windmill, near the ferry, he observed that the boat was about to start, and hurriedly separated from Jane – he hastening down to the ferry, to get back to Dingwall, and she returning to the town, presumably in search of new lodgings. Since then, he had never seen Jane Brechin, and, as a matter of fact, he was not by any means convinced that the corpse shown to him was that of his wife, since the features were so altered and destroyed. This was all a brave and despicable try, but of course it was at variance with the proven facts.
For the defence, Counsel submitted that the possibility that the woman had been killed accidentally by the falling of the wall had not been excluded, and the prisoner was entitled to the benefit of the doubt. The medical men could not swear that the injuries had been inflicted during life. There was an argument that Adam had deceived Jane Brechin and then merely deserted her. It was not proved that the woman seen with him on the ferry was his wife. It was an ingenious speech, greeted with applause, but the verdict, and it was unanimous, was Guilty.
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.