Who did kill Marion Gilchrist on that rainy December night? Conan Doyle held fast to the belief that it was her nephew Francis Charteris, a view shared by some later writers on the case. (Acutely aware of the rumors, Charteris, who died in 1964 after a distinguished career as a physician and educator, maintained to the end of his life that he had nothing to do with the crime.) Other observers have pointed fingers at various members of Miss Gilchrist’s extended family; still others have posited a ring of professional thieves, or a murderous collaboration between Helen Lambie and one of her suitors.
The eminent commentator William Roughead, while refraining from naming names, was of the opinion that more than one man was involved. “Miss Gilchrist must have been killed by somebody,” he wrote in the 1929 edition of Trial of Oscar Slater. “Twenty years’ reflection on the facts as proved in Court confirms me in the view…that two men were concerned in the affair, one of whom either made off between Mr. Adams’s visits to the door, or waited—like Raskolnikov—in the empty flat above until the coast was clear. If the reader, when studying the evidence, will keep in mind this hypothesis…he may find it helpful, as explaining the many difficulties created by the disparate accounts of the appearance and movements of ‘the man.’ ”
On the subject of who murdered Miss Gilchrist I remain resolutely agnostic. Any “solution” advanced eleven decades after the fact can only be the product of undiluted speculation. I do believe, however, that Lambie took to her grave far more information about the crime than she ever disclosed—including the killer’s identity. That was the view of Conan Doyle, who wrote, in 1930, “I see no prospect of getting to the bottom of Miss Gilchrist’s death unless Helen Lambie makes a confession. She undoubtedly knows more about the matter than has ever been made public.” But Lambie never obliged. She returned to Scotland with her family in the 1930s and later settled in the north of England. She died in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in 1960, at seventy-three.
Mary Barrowman, who later in adulthood worked as a charwoman, married twice. She was believed to have become an alcoholic; her two children were removed from her care by the state. In Square Mile of Murder, his 2002 study of four Glasgow killings, including Miss Gilchrist’s, the Scottish newspaperman Robert House wrote: “Many years after the trial of Oscar Slater, Mary Barrowman turned up at a certain house in Glasgow. She said she wanted to confess. She had not been in West Princes Street at all on the night of the murder. Her mother, who was an alcoholic, had made her tell the story so that she could share in the reward.” Barrowman died in 1934, at forty, from cervical cancer.
Arthur Adams, seventy-three, was found dead of natural causes on January 3, 1942, at his home at 14 Queen’s Terrace, directly below the flat in which Miss Gilchrist had met her end. In a noteworthy turn of fate, his death certificate was signed by Dr. John S. M. Ord, son of Superintendent John Ord of the Glasgow police.
In 1969, a Glasgow magistrate, John Young, began a campaign for the posthumous rehabilitation of Detective Lieutenant John Thomson Trench. After considering the matter, city officials concluded that it was not within their legal power to have the case for his dismissal reopened. In 1999, however, a plaque honoring Trench was installed in the Glasgow Police Museum. Unveiled in the presence of his sole surviving child, eighty-seven-year-old Nancy Stark, it read: “There are now appeal processes for both criminal cases in the courts and police discipline hearings, which neither Mr Trench nor Mr Slater had the benefit of at that time. The fact that these safeguards are now in place and have been for many years, is perhaps a fitting legacy to the hardship that these individuals endured in the spirit of truth and justice.”
His Majesty’s Prison Peterhead (known under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II as Her Majesty’s Prison Peterhead) was by the late twentieth century considered one of the worst penal institutions in Britain—“Scotland’s gulag, a prison of no hope,” commentators called it in 1991. It closed in 2013 and is now the Peterhead Prison Museum.
Peterhead’s most famous inmate, Oscar Slater—dandy, gambler, foreigner, scapegoat, Jew—remained an exotic enough figure that from time to time in later years rumor swirled round him in the newspapers. “Will Wed a Kaffir, Says Oscar Slater,” a New York Times headline crowed in 1929, the year after his exoneration, adding: “Scot Who Got $30,000 for False Murder Conviction Plans to Live in Africa.”
The reality was far more prosaic. Slater remained in Scotland to the end of his life, settling near Glasgow in the seaside town of Ayr. Sociable and well liked by his neighbors, he did a modest business restoring and selling antiques. In 1936, after his estranged first wife died, he married Lina Schad, a Scotswoman of German parentage some thirty years his junior. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one.
Though Slater had long since lost his German citizenship, the outbreak of World War II threw his Germanness into relief once more. At the start of the war, he was briefly interned, along with his wife, as an enemy alien. Afterward, the couple resumed their congenial life in Ayr. Unable to abide the name Oscar Slater, he once again lived as Oscar Leschziner.
“With the war over, a few golden years remained to Oscar,” the British writer Richard Whittington-Egan, who interviewed Lina Leschziner before her death in 1992, has written. “Sometimes, for sheer joy of life, he would stand foursquare on Rabbie Burns’s Auld Brig and sing at the top of his lungs’ bent, the wind carrying his weird-accented song away across the melodious waves….Possessed of a good singing voice, he much enjoyed listening to music. He went frequently, too, to the theatre and the cinema. He was, always had been, a great walker. He was also a great talker. After all the years of enforced silence, he liked nothing better than a good crack. A very generous man, he was forever giving his mite to charities—in particular those concerned with the plight of sick or homeless children.”
Oscar Leschziner died of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Ayr on January 31, 1948, at seventy-six, having outlived nearly all the principals in the case against him. He never returned to Germany. That was almost certainly just as well: on July 27, 1942, more than a thousand Jews were deported from Breslau, in his home region of Silesia, a group out of which barely two dozen would survive. Among the thousand were Slater’s sister Phemie, murdered at Treblinka, and his beloved sister Malchen, murdered at Terezin—racialized, identified, apprehended, transported, exterminated.