Word of Slater’s impending release had trickled out to the British press and become a sensation. One reporter, posing as the chauffeur, managed to sneak into the car carrying Slater and Reverend Phillips from the prison. Another infiltrated their private compartment on the train to Glasgow. How did it feel, he asked Slater, to have been freed at long last? “The best plan,” Slater replied, “is to go to Peterhead and find out!”
At Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Station, a throng of pressmen met the train. Whisked by Phillips and his grown daughter into a waiting car, Slater was taken to the minister’s house. There, too, a mob of reporters and photographers awaited. How did he feel? Slater was asked again and again. “I am tired,” he said. “I have not slept for the last five nights, since I heard I was coming back again. I want rest. I want rest.”
He dined with the Phillips family that evening, and stayed the night. Soon afterward, he paid a visit to Glasgow police headquarters, where his odyssey had begun so long ago: as a paroled convict, he was required to report to the police once a month. Now gaunt, grizzled, and nearly bald, Slater was much changed from the dapper, dark-haired, well-built man of two decades before. At headquarters, he asked after many of the principal actors in his case—Chief Inspector Pyper, Superintendent Ord, Sheriff Warnock—and was told that all were retired or dead.
From Conan Doyle, he received a warm, welcoming letter:
Dear Mr. Oscar Slater,
This is to say in my wife’s name and my own how grieved we have been at the infamous injustice which you have suffered at the hands of our officials. Your only poor consolation can be that your fate, if we can get people to realise the effects, may have the effect of safeguarding others in the future.
We will still work in the hope of getting an inquiry into these iniquities and eventually, as I hope, some compensation for your own undeserved suffering.
Yours faithfully,
Arthur Conan Doyle
Slater replied ardently, his English unalloyed by eighteen years in a British prison:
Sir Conan Doyle, you breaker of my shackels, you lover of truth for justice sake, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the goodness you have shown towards me.
My heart is full and almost breaking with love & gratitude for you [and] your wife dear Lady Conan Doyle and all the upright men and women, who for justice sake (and that only) have helped me, me an outcast.
Till my dying day I will love and honor you and the Dear Lady, my dear, dear Conan Doyle, yet that unbounded love for you both, makes me only sign plainly.
Yours,
Oscar Slater
SLATER WAS FREE, BUT what remained was to have him exonerated. In 1926, Scotland had established its first court of criminal appeals, partly as a result of the agitation by Conan Doyle and others on Slater’s behalf. But as constituted, the new court was of no help to Slater himself: It was empowered to hear only those cases tried after October 31, 1926. It would take a special act of British Parliament to have the Slater case grandfathered in.
Aided by Ramsay MacDonald, Conan Doyle prepared to take Parliament on, writing a pamphlet that pressed for judicial review. It was distributed to every member of the House of Commons. On November 16, 1927, Secretary Gilmour presented to Commons a special bill that would let Slater’s case be reheard. It passed into law on November 30.
To represent Slater, supporters hired Craigie Aitchison, one of Scotland’s foremost criminal lawyers. “Many lawyers rated [Aitchison] the greatest to have practised at the Scottish bar,” the Guardian wrote in 2009. “In his many defences in murder trials he never lost a single case.” Aitchison did not come cheap, and a public subscription was begun to meet his fees.* The funds raised were not enough to cover the expected costs, and Conan Doyle agreed to make up the difference himself, an act of generosity he would come to regret.
THE APPEAL OF OSCAR SLATER against His Majesty’s Advocate opened on June 8, 1928, at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, in the same courtroom in which Slater had been sentenced to hang. Presiding was a five-judge panel headed by the Lord Justice General (Scotland’s highest-ranking criminal judge), James Avon Clyde. Representing the Crown was the Lord Advocate, William Watson. Slater, accompanied by Reverend Phillips, sat in the gallery. Conan Doyle was there, returned to the city of his birth to cover the appeal for the Sunday Pictorial newspaper. It was the only time that he and Slater met face-to-face.
The judges insisted that the hearing not retry the original case, ruling that no new evidence could be introduced unless it stemmed from newly discovered facts. They also barred testimony from Slater. “In these circumstances,” they wrote, “it would be quite unreasonable to spend time over his examination now.”
Slater, who did not understand the legal wellsprings of the decision, was incensed. With characteristic hotheadedness, he decided to torpedo the appeal, wiring the participants that he wanted the proceedings called off. This, in turn, incensed Conan Doyle. “I think his brain is about turned by all that he has gone through,” he said in an interview. “I told him that he was a very foolish fellow to even think of withdrawing, and insisted that it would go on in any case, whether he liked it or not.” (In private, Conan Doyle was far more immoderate, writing to Roughead, “I was in a mood to sign a petition that the original sentence be carried out.”) Gradually Slater’s supporters prevailed on him, and he agreed to sit quietly in the gallery.
Because the trial would not be reprised, few original witnesses were allowed to testify. As a result, neither Detective Pyper nor Superintendent Douglas, both influential in the murder investigation, would be available for Aitchison to cross-examine. “I am very anxious to get Detective Pyper into the box,” Park had told Conan Doyle earlier that year. “This man, I am sure, we can bring to earth as a Liar of the first water.” He added: “Slater described to us how he was identified at the…police office. Superintendent Douglas took each of the witnesses by the shoulders, went down the line of presented men, pushed the witness towards each man and asked, ‘Is that him.’ When the witness came to be opposite Slater, Douglas gave a violent push this time & shouted in unmistakable signification, ‘Is this him?’ ”
Nor would Miss Gilchrist’s niece Margaret Birrell, to whom Lambie had run after the crime, be called—though her testimony, Park pointed out, would have been of little help. “This woman will die before she emits the name now,” he said. “It involves ruin, the possible hanging of her cousin & other terrible things. No: She will not squeal.”
Without these witnesses, it was vital that Helen Lambie give testimony, which, in light of her 1927 recantation, the judges were going to allow. “This woman,” Aitchison declared, “holds the secret.” But Lambie was nowhere to be found. She had left Pittsburgh, and efforts to trace her had been unsuccessful. She was eventually discovered living in Peoria, Illinois, with her husband, Robert Gillon, who worked in the coal mines there, and their two daughters, Margaret and Marion. In June 1928, the Peoria Star published an article under the headline “Slayer’s Fate Is in Peorian’s Hands.”
“Wiping her suds-covered hands on her apron,” it read, “Mrs. Gillon, a slender, ruddy faced woman, appeared at the door of her humble little home in the rear of a barber shop in answer to the reporter’s long knocking. On the floor of the kitchen were heaps of clothing, ready for the electric washer that was at work some feet away….Each question she answered with a ready, ‘That’s my business.’ ”
Lambie refused to become involved. In December 1927, two months after her recantation in the Empire News, she issued another statement, recanting the recantation. Written in a huge, childish hand, the original boasts spelling and punctuation to rival Slater’s:
I wish to put a denial to the statement recentaly published in the Newspapers there is no truth in that statement. Connan Doyle used a false statement I would not blame another man Slater is the man that I saw coming out of the house of Miss Gilchrist I am as strong and of the same mind as I was at the trial If Slater would tell the truth he is not an Innocent man
From Helen Lambie now in the USA
In a letter to Conan Doyle, Park dismissed the new statement. “Lambie will go down as a shifty wretch,” he wrote. “I suggest that [her] mother was seen by someone at this end who was anxious that Helen should disavow the interview. That would be the Glasgow police or a representative of the Birrell-Charteris conspiracy….Lambie could not steer through a day’s severe cross-examination.”
Asked to come to Scotland for the appeal, Lambie dug in her heels. She could not legally be compelled to return, and the case went ahead without her.
SLATER’S APPEAL RESUMED ON July 9, 1928. Witnesses testifying on his behalf included William Roughead, who had interviewed John Adams, the first physician on the scene, for his book Trial of Oscar Slater. Dr. Adams had died in 1922, and Roughead was allowed to testify to their interview: “He expressed a very strong view that the hammer could have no possible connection with the crime, in view of the injuries that he had observed,” Roughead said. “He said he first looked at the head, saw the injuries, and then it occurred to him was there anything in the room likely to cause them. Looking round…he noticed this chair, an ordinary Victorian chair, and he saw the back leg ‘dripping’—as he described it to me—with blood….He said that leg must manifestly have been in contact with the wounds.”
U.S. marshal John W. M. Pinckley came from America to recount what had happened at the extradition hearing, when he led Slater past the witnesses:
Q. Was it possible for either Lambie or Barrowman to be under the impression that the man who was handcuffed to you was not a prisoner in custody?
A. I do not see how it could be….
Q. You are satisfied that [Lambie] did see you coming down the corridor along with the prisoner?
A. She must have.
Q. If she had eyes to see?
A. Yes.
The acknowledged star of the appeal was Slater’s lawyer, Craigie Aitchison. Addressing the judges, he spoke for some fourteen hours, dissecting every aspect of the investigation, manhunt, and prosecution. Conan Doyle set the scene in the Sunday Pictorial; it bears noting that even in 1928 his description is suffused with the Victorian idea about the link between physiognomy and character:
For three days I have sat in the well of the court. For three days a dignified row of five Scottish judges have sat at the back of me. For three days my whole vision has consisted of one man in front of me, and of the court-room crowd behind him. But that one man is worth watching….
It is a Pickwickian figure. His face is as pink as a baby’s, and a baby might have owned those eyes of forget-me-not blue. A little heavy the face, but comely and fresh-complexioned withal, redeemed from weakness by the tight, decided lips.
Yes, it is for fourteen hours exactly that he has been talking. He has been untangling the difficulties of a most intricate case.
Deft to the last degree has been that disentanglement. It is a miracle of analysis. What I recall most clearly are those blue eyes, and the little plump, capable hands.
He talks and talks with a gentle melodious voice, clearing up the difficulties. Those little plump hands accentuate points. There comes an objection from the judges. The blue eyes seem pained and surprised. Up fly the little plump hands. Once more the gentle voice takes up the tale….
And then suddenly one’s eyes are arrested. One terrible face stands out amongst all the others. It is not an ill-famed face nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible none the less for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is….It is Slater….
Scotland may have erred both in administration and in her Judiciary twenty years ago, but it cannot be denied that she has vindicated her civilisation…by assembling a court which could have had weight and dignity enough to try the Kaiser in order to expiate an old-time miscarriage of justice to an unknown alien.
After Aitchison sat down, Watson, the Lord Advocate, argued the Crown’s case for upholding Slater’s conviction. The judges then retired to deliberate. When court reconvened on July 20, 1928, they issued rulings on four points of law. Slater was seen to lean forward, one hand cupping his ear.
The first ruling upheld the original verdict. So did the second. So did the third. Then the judges ruled on the fourth point: whether the conviction should be overturned as a result of misdirection by the trial judge, Lord Guthrie. As the ruling unfolded, Slater’s prospects looked darker than ever. “That a man should support himself on the profits of prostitution is regarded by all men as blackguardism, but by many people as a sign of almost inhuman depravity,” the judges began. Then, significantly, they continued:
It cannot be affirmed that any members of the jury were misled by feelings of this kind in weighing the question of the appellant’s guilt, but neither can it be affirmed that none of them were. What is certain is that the judge’s charge entirely failed to give the jury the essential warning against allowing themselves to be misled by any feelings of the kind referred to. It is manifestly possible that, but for the prejudicial effect of denying to the appellant the full benefit of the presumption of innocence, and of allowing the point of his dependence on the immoral earnings of his partner to go to the jury…the proportion of nine to five for “guilty” and “not proven” respectively might have been reversed….
The instructions given in the charge amounted to misdirections in law, and…the judgment of the Court before whom the appellant was convicted should be set aside.
Peter Hunt described what happened next: “It was some moments before Slater realised that he had won. [Then] the smile of triumph which had, for a moment, flickered across his face, gave way to a dark scowl.” Hotheaded, romantic, and impractical as always, Slater had sought nothing less than complete vindication—not on a technicality but because he was neither a murderer nor a pimp, two truths that he burned for the world to acknowledge. He had been exonerated, but he remained, in his view, dishonored. “I Oscar Slater, was not guilty of the terrible charge of murder and, equally not guilty of the infamous life that has been ascribed to me not only at my trial twenty years ago but repeated in the decision of the Court of Appeal,” he said in a statement afterward. “I will tell the whole truth and dispel this calumny.”
In a letter to Conan Doyle that betrays the deep Victorian concern with reputation, Slater revealed his mixed emotions:
Dear Sir Arthur,
Many thanks for your Congratulations and from the bottom of my heart many, many thanks for your great work.
Sir Arthur, they went too far in throwing muck at me in an open Court, yet I don’t care—but I care for my relatives and friends and I must do something for their sake.
This cruel 5 judges…who knew the frame up of my case, should have limited themselves a little and in not doing so, even the layman in the street know now that my character was the staff for the Crown to lean on.
I will fight and expose them all. All of them who I know have taken my confidence have betrayed me. I shall fight regardless of consequences.
Yours very sincerely,
Oscar Slater
Conan Doyle, who was grateful for the verdict, knew the battle was finished. “My own connection with the case ends now that I have succeeded in establishing Slater’s innocence,” he told the press. But as he would discover to his disgust, his association with Slater was far from over.
* A record of donors includes the crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, who contributed three guineas—three pounds and three shillings.