About 7 p.m. on Monday, 21st December current, an old lady named Marion Gilchrist was brutally murdered in a house at 15 Queen’s Terrace, West Princes Street, where she lived, the only other occupant being a servant woman, who, about the hour mentioned, left the house to purchase an evening paper, and on her return in less than fifteen minutes afterwards found that her mistress had been brutally murdered in the room in which she had left her.
On her return with the paper the servant met the man first described leaving the house, and about the same time another man, second described, was seen descending the steps leading to the house, and running away.
(First) A man from twenty-five to thirty years of age, 5 feet 7 or 8 inches in height, thought to be clean shaven; wore a long grey overcoat and dark cap.
(Second) A man from twenty-eight to thirty years of age, tall and thin, clean shaven, nose slightly turned to one side (thought to be the right side); wore a fawn-coloured overcoat (believed to be a waterproof), dark trousers, tweed cloth hat of the latest make, and believed to be dark in colour, and brown boots….
That day, Superintendent Ord placed a description of the two wanted men in the evening papers, and Glasgow soon blazed with rumor. “News of the dastardly outrage, so daringly executed in the heart of the city, thrilled the people of Glasgow and Scotland generally,” the Scottish journalist William Park would later write. “The hue and cry for the murderer and his theft of a diamond brooch spread so widely as eventually to embrace the greater part of the civilized world.”
On the evening of December 25, 1908, a Glasgow bicycle dealer named Allan McLean called at police headquarters. He told the police that a man he knew—a foreigner and a Jew—had been trying to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond crescent brooch. The man’s name, he said, was Oscar.