Chapter 4 THE MAN IN THE DONEGAL CAP

On December 21, 1908, the day Miss Gilchrist died, Oscar Slater received two letters from abroad. One was from a London friend, a man named Rogers, who wrote to warn Slater that his estranged wife, seeking money, was on his trail. Slater had already been planning to move to San Francisco at the behest of John Devoto, a friend from his American sojourn. Providentially, the second letter offered an answer to the problem described in the first. It was from Devoto himself, again urging Slater to come over and join him in business.

Slater promptly gave Schmalz, the maid, a week’s notice. (To deflect inquiries on his wife’s behalf, he instructed her to tell callers that he had gone to Monte Carlo.) It was during his last days in Glasgow that Slater, preparing for his move, did the two things that would put the police on his trail. First, he telegraphed Dent’s in London to ask that his watch be repaired and returned at once. Second, to raise money for his passage, he began canvassing his cronies in Glasgow’s gambling clubs, trying to sell the pawn ticket for his diamond crescent brooch. By 7:00 p.m. on December 21, he had returned to St. George’s Road and was, Antoine and Schmalz later testified, eating supper at home.

The next four days saw his continued preparations. At about 8:30 on Christmas night, he and Antoine left their flat, with hired porters carrying their ten pieces of luggage. At Glasgow’s Central Station, they boarded the night train to Liverpool. Arriving at 3:40 a.m., they checked into the North-Western Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Slater of Glasgow. At the hotel, Liverpool’s chief detective would later confirm, “the chambermaid had a conversation with the woman, who told her that they were about to sail by the Lusitania for America.”*1

On December 26, Slater bought two second-class tickets aboard the Lusitania, leaving for New York that day. In an apparent effort to put his wife off the scent, he booked them in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Sando. By now the Glasgow police, alerted by the Liverpool authorities, considered him a fugitive from justice, brooch clue or no brooch clue.

“The pawned brooch,” Conan Doyle would write long afterward, “was one which belonged to Slater, and the police became aware of this fact…before Slater sailed for America.” He added: “Slater, moreover, had been extremely open about his movements, he had made his preparations for going to America with the greatest deliberation, and carried them out in the same leisurely and open manner after the date when the crime was committed as he had done previously….Such being the case, how is it that a cable was sent to New York to have him arrested on arrival?”

But just such a cable was sent by the Glasgow authorities:

ARREST OTTO SANDO SECOND CABIN LUSITANIA WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH THE MURDER OF MARION GILCHRIST AT GLASGOW. HE HAS A TWISTED NOSE. SEARCH HIM AND THE WOMAN WHO IS HIS TRAVELLING COMPANION FOR PAWN-TICKETS.

On January 2, 1909, when the Lusitania steamed into the Port of New York, local police detectives boarded the ship and arrested Slater. That was the first, he said, that he heard the name Marion Gilchrist. Searching him, they found the pawn ticket for the diamond brooch: he had never been able to sell it. Antoine was dispatched to Ellis Island; Slater was confined in the Tombs, the gritty house of detention in lower Manhattan that still stands, to await extradition. From there, in February, he would write to his Glasgow friend Hugh Cameron—a shady underworld character known as “the Moudie.”^*2 Though Slater did not know it, it was Cameron who had pointed Glasgow detectives toward the pawnshop where he had left his diamond brooch.

“Dear Friend Cameron!” his letter begins:

Today it is nearly five weeks I am kept here in prison for the Glasgow murder.

I am very downhearted my dear Cameron to know that my friends in Glasgow…can tell such liars about me to the Glasgow police….

I hope my dear Cameron that you will still be my friend in my troubel and tell the truth and stand on my side. You know the best reason I have left Glasgow because I have shown to you the letter from St. Francisco from my friend, also I have left you my address from St. Francisco….

The police is trying hard to make a frame-up for me. I must have a good trial, because I will prove with five people where I have been when the murder was committed.

Thanking you at present, and I hope to have a true friend on you, because every man is able to get put in such an affair and being innocent.

My best regards to you and all my friends—I am, your friend,

Oscar Slater,

Tombs, New York

“It is a measure of Cameron’s friendship,” one modern British writer noted drily, “that he immediately showed this letter to the Police.”

From this point on, the duplicity of the British authorities becomes truly naked. Between its social paranoia and its scientific advances, the Victorian era was preoccupied with identifying and vanquishing invaders of all sorts: microbes, criminals, foreigners. The Slater case, which sprang in large part from late Victorian ways of casting the convenient Other, would hinge crucially on questions of identification—identification that, as Glasgow officials would soon demonstrate, could be manufactured willy-nilly as the need arose.

On January 13, 1909, Detective Inspector Pyper and William Warnock, the chief criminal officer of the Glasgow sheriff court,^*3 set sail for New York, accompanied by their three star witnesses: Helen Lambie, Arthur Adams, and Mary Barrowman. They arrived on the twenty-fifth. At Slater’s extradition proceedings, which began the next day, the British Crown would bring all needed mendacity to bear on its efforts to see him returned to Scotland.

THE HEARING FOR THE EXTRADITION of Oscar Slater, alias Otto Sando, opened in the Federal Building in lower Manhattan before John A. Shields, a United States commissioner for the Southern District of New York. Arguing for the Crown was an attorney named Charles Fox. Slater was represented by two American lawyers, Hugh Gordon Miller and William A. Goodhart. Because the Crown’s case was slender, Slater’s lawyers were confident he would prevail. As Goodhart wrote, “At the time of the arrest of Slater it was decided to resist extradition because…the pawn ticket constituted the Government’s chief evidence and knowing that there was nothing to that, I advised a fight.”

But the Crown was more than ready. Its strategy from this point forward would center not on the pawn ticket, which it knew to be worthless, but on witness identification of Slater as the man seen fleeing Miss Gilchrist’s home. To hedge their bet, Glasgow officials showed Slater’s photograph to Adams and Barrowman before the extradition proceedings started. They did not bother to show it to Lambie, who said she had not seen the suspect’s face, though that story would soon change.

The first identification of Slater in New York took place before the extradition proceedings even began. As the hearing was about to start, Slater, flanked by two U.S. deputy marshals, was led down the hallway to Commissioner Shields’s chambers. One marshal, John W. M. Pinckley, to whom he was visibly handcuffed, was six foot four. (Slater was about five foot eight.) The other wore a large badge marked “U.S.,” adorned with red, white, and blue stars.

Standing in the hall as the three men passed were Mr. Fox, the Crown counsel; Inspector Pyper; and the three witnesses. As Marshal Pinckley would testify long afterward, when he passed the group with his prisoner, he saw Fox indicate Slater with his thumb and say to the witnesses something like “Is that the man?” or “That’s the man.”

Under questioning by Fox in chambers, Lambie offered suggestive testimony:

Q. Do you see the man here you saw that night?

A. One is very suspicious if anything.

Though she said she had not seen the intruder’s face on the night of the murder, Lambie testified that she had noticed something peculiar about his walk—“he was sort of shaking himself a little”—a detail she had never mentioned before.

Q. Is that man in this room?

A. Yes he is, Sir.

After further questioning, she indicated Slater.

Another striking feature of Lambie’s testimony was her account of what the intruder had worn. Just after the murder, her description of the man’s clothing had differed markedly from Barrowman’s—so much so that the police thought two men were involved. (Lambie had described the intruder as wearing a gray overcoat and round cloth hat; Barrowman spoke of a fawn-colored waterproof coat and a Donegal cap.) Now, at the extradition hearing, Lambie’s description had dovetailed remarkably with Barrowman’s: both young women testified that the man exiting Miss Gilchrist’s flat had worn a fawn-colored waterproof and Donegal cap.

Next to testify was Barrowman, who reiterated her description of hat and coat. Asked whether Slater resembled the man she had seen in West Princes Street that night, she replied, “That man here is very like him,” an assertion that would be considerably strengthened by the time the case came to trial. She repeated her claim that the man she had seen “had a slight twist in his nose.” (Slater’s nose, though somewhat convex, had no discernible twist.) She also admitted having been shown a photograph of Slater in Fox’s office earlier that day.

Adams, to all appearances the only mature, reflective adult among the three witnesses, took the stand. He would say only that Slater was “not at all unlike” the man he had seen on Miss Gilchrist’s landing. In glimpsing the intruder, he had noticed neither the peculiarity of walk described by Lambie nor the peculiarity of nose described by Barrowman.

The hearing continued for several days, with others testifying for the Crown and still others, including friends from his past American sojourn, for Slater. Slater himself, doubtless on the advice of counsel, who were concerned about his awkward, heavily accented English, did not testify on his own behalf. But his testimony may well have seemed unnecessary, for as the hearing unfolded, the Crown’s case for extradition proved increasingly weak.

“I never doubted his innocence,” Slater’s lawyer William Goodhart wrote to Conan Doyle some years later. “It has always seemed to me, from my knowledge of the class of identification presented before our Commissioner at the extradition proceedings, that a grave doubt existed as to the identity of Slater as the man seen leaving the home of the victim on the night of the murder.” Yet on February 6, 1909, as proceedings were about to reconvene for the day, Slater’s lawyers announced that their client had chosen to waive the balance of the hearing. He would return to Scotland of his own volition and stand trial.

Slater’s decision, amid proceedings that seemed almost certain to end in his favor, betrays several facets of his character. One is his mercurial temperament, a trait that would manifest itself repeatedly during his prison years and again after his release. Another was almost certainly a concern with finances: his modest reserves had already been exhausted in legal fees.

There appeared also to have been a third reason, one that more than any other attests to Slater’s complex personality. Despite his decadent lifestyle, he was as concerned with reputation as any bourgeois of his era and wanted badly to clear his name. But beneath his foppish sophistication, Slater was in some ways breathtakingly naive. He knew full well he was innocent and so chose to put his faith in the Scottish justice system. A trial, he felt certain, would vindicate him once and for all.