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‘I did it and I did it right’

Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, 1857

Although he earned his living as a travelling hawker, John Booth had a home in Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, where he lived with his wife Mary and two children, aged nine and six years old. Mary’s parents, James and Jean Barclay, kept a small crockery shop in the village, roughly 250 yards from their daughter and son-in-law’s home.

According to contemporary newspapers, the whole family were looked upon by their neighbours as ‘a queer set’. Described as ‘something approaching what is known as the genus tinker’, Jean Barclay read tealeaves and practiced palmistry, something which displeased her son-in-law immensely, especially since Jean tried to persuade Mary to follow in her footsteps. She also played cards on Sundays, which Booth saw as a bad example to his children. In the past, he had been charged with threatening his mother-in-law but when he was brought before magistrates, they too took a dim view of Jean’s activities and it was she who was reprimanded and cautioned rather than her son-in-law. However, although he was discharged on this occasion, John Booth was no angel – he had several previous convictions, including one in 1849, when he served forty days in prison for breach of the peace, malicious mischief and assault.

Booth spent a lot of time away from home and there were persistent rumours in the village that his wife was unfaithful while he was away travelling the local gossip was that whenever Booth left his home, more than one man took advantage of his absence to call on Mary for sexual favours. Although Booth didn’t entirely believe the rumours, he was a short-tempered man, who was fond of a drink when he had money in his pockets and the constant whispers and innuendo upset him, so there would almost always be quarrels on his arrival home from one of his trips. Jean invariably took her daughter’s side against him, which irritated Booth still further.

On 8 July 1857, Booth was away at a fair, which took place about eight miles from his house. When he returned home, Booth was later to say that he had ‘ocular proof’ that the rumours about his wife’s infidelity were true. A furious row ensued and although Mary Booth protested her innocence, Booth threatened to ‘do for her’. The following day, Booth got tipsy and went into the village druggist’s shop, where he asked for six pennyworth of laudanum. When asked why he wanted it, he told the druggist that his wife had a bowel complaint but, seeing that Booth was drunk, the druggist sold him a phial of harmless medicine. Booth went straight home and waved it triumphantly in Mary’s face. ‘Ye’ve long had the victory – ye’se has it to the end,’ he told her, before dramatically draining the contents and throwing the empty phial in her face. The draft had no ill effects, although the fact that Booth was prepared to take an overdose of poison because of Mary’s behaviour seemed to bring the couple to their senses and for the next few days they lived together in relative harmony.

The domestic peace lasted until 21 July, when Booth and several of his friends were drinking in the village. There was a fair the following day and one of Booth’s drinking companions taunted him, saying that once Booth was out of the way, he would go and visit his wife, where he was assured of the warmest of welcomes. A physical fight broke out between Booth and Thomas Moneur and, once Booth had knocked Moneur down, he went home to deal with his errant wife.

He arrived home at about 10 p.m., having been drinking whisky, beer and porter for much of the afternoon and evening. Mary Booth was in bed and he went into their bedroom and quietly asked her if she was asleep. When she said that she wasn’t, he asked her to get up and help him untie his shoelaces and when she didn’t immediately do as he asked, he angrily ordered her to get out of bed. As soon as she complied, Booth swung at her with a knife, cutting her arm.

For a few moments, Mary and her husband grappled for possession of his knife and Mary was stabbed again on the thigh, before she happened to notice that the door was open. Quickly, she seized her chance to escape and ran out of the house, heading as fast as she could towards her parents’ shop.

She pounded desperately on the door and when James Barclay opened it, she rushed into the house, telling her father that her husband was after her with a knife. She was dressed only in her nightclothes and James could clearly see the cut on his daughter’s arm, which fortunately was only superficial. As Mary tried to hide, Booth burst through the door waving his knife and demanding to know where she was.

As Mary cowered behind her mother, Booth suddenly rushed at his mother-in-law and slashed her arm. James Barclay picked up a spade and when Booth lashed out at Jean with the knife a second time, James hit him over the head. The blow did little more than stun Booth momentarily but it allowed Jean to dodge past him and run out of the house and across the street, where she rapped on her opposite neighbour’s window shouting, ‘Murder!’ She then made the fateful decision to return to her own house, where she was met by Booth still wielding his knife.

Jean was stabbed several more times. ‘He’s murdered me,’ she said in apparent astonishment to the neighbours who were beginning to gather at the house. Meanwhile Booth calmly dropped his knife and went outside, where he sat quietly awaiting the arrival of the police. Tragically, Booth’s nine-year-old son, James, who was staying overnight with his grandparents, had watched the entire tragedy unfold.

Neighbours ran for a surgeon and the village constable, James Tarves, both of whom arrived within minutes. As surgeon John Ingram examined Jean Barclay and pronounced her dead, Tarves concentrated on Booth, who offered no resistance to being arrested. ‘I did it and I did it right,’ Booth repeatedly told the constable, adding that they would find the knife he used ‘to do the job’ on the floor, somewhere near the body. Tarves noted at the time of the arrest that Booth ‘appeared to have had a dram’ but judged him to be sober and to know perfectly well what he had done.

There being no lock-up in the village, Booth was detained overnight at a pub and the following morning, he was taken to East Prison in Aberdeen. He made no attempt to deny murdering Jean Barclay and claimed that he had done so gladly because of the bad example that she set her daughter. Booth’s only regret was that he had failed to mete out the same punishment to his wife. He was charged with one count of wilful murder and one count of stabbing his wife, with intent to kill or maim but declined to give any statement other than what he had already said on the matter. Meanwhile, a post-mortem examination on his victim showed that she had been stabbed seven or eight times with a sharp instrument and had wounds on her head, neck, arms and chest. The fatal wound was located between the fifth and six ribs and had penetrated Jean Barclay’s heart, causing her to bleed to death within minutes. According to Ingram and surgeon Francis Ogston, who examined the body, all of the wounds resulted from blows with a knife, given with great force.

When Booth was brought to trial at the Autumn Circuit Court at Aberdeen, he pleaded guilty to culpable homicide, an offence defined as causing loss of life through wrongful conduct or ‘wicked recklessness’, but without intention to kill. (The offence would equate manslaughter under English law.) However, the prosecution was eager to secure a conviction for the capital offence of murder. In his closing speech, the counsel for the prosecution told the jury that he had no intention of wasting words. The fact that Booth had killed the victim was indisputable. The jury had heard the evidence and it was up to them to decide whether they could see anything in the circumstances that might lead them to reduce the charge from murder to culpable homicide.

Booth’s court-appointed defence counsel, James Moncrieff, made no attempt to argue the facts of the case but reminded the jury that there was no motive shown for the murder on Booth’s part and that the legal distinction between murder and homicide was nothing more than the presence or absence of evil intent. The fatal stabbing occurred in the middle of a confused struggle and the defence maintained that the fact that Jean Barclay sustained a number of non-fatal wounds actually showed that Booth had no intention of inflicting a mortal wound. The defence seemed intent on urging the jury towards a verdict of guilty of culpable homicide on the grounds that such a verdict would allow ample time for the prisoner to reflect on his actions and repent, hopefully leaving this world a better person than the speedy termination of his life by judicial hanging would allow.

In summing up, the Lord Justice Clerk John Hope, then the most senior judge in Scotland, began by explaining the legal difference between murder and culpable homicide to the jury. He agreed that there was no proven enmity on the part of the prisoner towards the deceased but argued that, contrary to the defence counsel’s closing speech, enmity was not a necessity for the offence to be classed as murder. Hope argued that it had been proven that there was an intention to do harm to the victim, since Booth never turned his knife against James Barclay when he stepped into the fray in his wife’s defence but instead continued to attack the deceased and dropped his weapon immediately after she was mortally wounded. Hope then further contradicted Moncrieff, picking up on his depiction of a ‘confused struggle’. The only struggle was actually with James Barclay, who was attempting to defend his wife and daughter, said Hope, and during that struggle, Booth made no attempt to use his knife.

After the initial attack on Mary Booth, that knife was used only against Jean Barclay. A person without evil intent might deprive another of his life by one single stroke of the knife but in this case the knife had been used no less than eight times and, in Hope’s opinion, unless the jury could find any alleviating circumstances, this was a clear case of murder. It took the jury just forty minutes of deliberation to decide that they agreed with the judge and pronounce John Booth guilty of murder.

As Hope was preparing to pass the death sentence, Booth interrupted him, asking to be allowed to speak. When permission was granted, he claimed that several of the witnesses in court had not spoken the truth. ‘I will speak the truth, as I shall answer to God,’ he promised before commencing a lengthy speech. ‘For seven years, I have suffered from my wife and her mother, who I am now accused of murdering,’ he stated, continuing to list some of his grievances against Jean Barclay’s drinking and immoral conduct. ‘I actually, positively and truly, before you and before God, see’d another man – a married man – having to do with her carnally with my own eyes,’ he insisted, saying that when he challenged Jean about her scandalous behaviour, she called him a liar to his face.

Booth continued by saying that he had never made any attempt to stop his wife from seeing her mother – on the contrary, he firmly believed that they should enjoy each other’s company and that a mother should set a good example for her daughter to follow. However, Booth’s son spent a lot of time with his grandparents and, according to Booth, was encouraged to be cheeky and foul-mouthed towards him. Booth had heard rumours that, while he was incarcerated in 1849, Jean Barclay was sleeping with other men in his house. Booth then claimed that, shortly before the stabbing, a man named William Saunders had told him that he had seen Mary ‘having connection’ with another man and asked Booth what he intended to do about it. ‘Can you do nothing? Can you stand that?’ Saunders asked Booth, who described himself as ‘thunderstruck’ by the revelations about his wife. ‘I stood and did not reply a word to him,’ Booth said but, deciding that he had to investigate the rumours, then claimed that he and another man had ‘see’d with their own eyes’ a man ‘in the very act of carnal dealings’ with his wife. Booth was so distraught that he bought poison intending to kill himself but, having swallowed it, was so drunk that he almost immediately vomited it up again, before it could take effect. His second suicide attempt failed because he was sold an innocuous liquid by the village druggist.

Having finished his speech Booth sat down again and the Lord Justice Clerk resumed sentencing. ‘From the tone of mind in which you are speaking and the manner in which you have addressed me just now it would be useless for me to address anything further to you,’ he told Booth before donning the black cap. Booth was told that he was to be taken back to East Prison in Aberdeen and detained there, fed only bread and water, until 21 October, when he would be hanged by the neck until dead and then buried within the confines of the prison.

The sentence of death was appealed on the grounds that Booth had acted under such extreme provocation that he was scarcely responsible for his actions and many of the local and national papers carried editorials on his behalf. ‘Here is not a person whose character and antecedents are calculated to excite sympathy in his favour,’ opened one such piece, ‘So whatever feeling of regret or dissatisfaction the verdict has occasioned is entirely due to the circumstances which had driven him to the terrible crime for which he is condemned to suffer.’

It was argued that for many years, Booth was ‘subjected to every shame and degradation which it is possible for a man to suffer by the infidelities of his wife, the connivance of her mother and the taunts and jeers of his acquaintances’. Yet, although this situation was subsequently confirmed by many people, the newspapers bemoaned the fact that none of the details of Booth’s unhappy existence had been used to further his defence.

Traditionally, the killing of an adulteress by an injured husband was regarded almost as justifiable homicide and this was true even in the days when stealing anything to the value of twelve pence was a capital crime. Booth was guilty of a different crime but nevertheless, it was a crime of the same class. He was obviously in pursuit of his wife when the offence was committed and, at the time, was apparently burning with all the rage excited by her conduct and from his quarrel with the man Moneur, a notorious character, who subjected him to all manner of insults. The lapse of time which the law makes an element in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter relates entirely to the assault on the wife, whereas the fatal attack on her mother was clearly a momentary and unprecedented impulse, born from a belief in her connivance in his wife’s infidelities but aggravated by ‘The chance medley of a struggle’.

Many of the contemporary newspapers printed allegations that, at the time she was stabbed, Jean Barclay was actually battering her killer with a rolling pin. ‘We hear of a spade and a rolling pin without getting any clear conception of how and when they were used,’ wrote one newspaper, whose editor seemed to be of the opinion that Booth was in a state of blind fury at the time of the killing and that, in confronting him, Jean Barclay unwittingly became the focus of his frenzied rage. Some newspapers questioned why Booth’s counsel had not seen fit to plead temporary insanity as a defence.

‘The only things that are clear are that the long, maddening provocations of years had at last passed all endurance and that, with the distorted notion of justice and his drink-distracted brain the author of his disgrace and suffering, he [Booth] killed the first one of them that came to hand.’ The newspapers made much of the fact that Booth was defended ‘on the poor’s-roll’ – in other words, because he was unable to raise the necessary money to pay for his defence, it was provided for him free of charge. ‘Had this poor creature or his friends been master of fifty pounds, he would have escaped the gallows,’ concluded many of the newspapers of the time.

In the run-up to his execution, Booth remained cool and composed, never once denying his crime or trying to excuse it, although he expressed deep contrition for what he had done. An appeal for clemency was made on his behalf but Home Secretary Sir George Grey saw no reason to interfere with the due course of the law so, on 21 October 1857, Booth kept his scheduled appointment with executioner William Calcraft. He made a brief, calmly spoken statement to the assembled crowd of spectators, urging them to flee from any wrath that may happen to them and turn to Christ. ‘Now I will bid you all farewell and may God, in His infinite mercy, forgive you as I expect at this moment he will forgive me my transgressions.’ With that, the executioner drew the white hood over Booth’s face and he was heard praying quietly as the drop fell, killing him instantly.

Booth wrote several letters before his death, including a written statement, which he asked to be published, once he had been hanged. Headed ‘East Prison, Aberdeen, 20 October 1857’, it read:

The statement which I made in Court at my trial has given me and gives me still the utmost uneasiness and pain, for what will a man not say or do for his life. And I implore in the near prospect of death and eternity that that sad speech will be forgotten and never remembered against my dear wife and children. And further, it is my anxious desire that the black deed of which I am guilty and for which I am to suffer, will never operate against the interests of my dear wife and children. I do from my heart implore my dear wife to forgive whatever I have said and done that has wronged her and I earnestly pray that God may be gracious unto her and the children and bless them.

Note: Although nearly all of the newspapers name the victim as Jean Barclay, some reports name her as Joan or Jane.