On January 23, 1925, William Gordon, lately known as Prisoner 2988, was released from His Majesty’s Prison Peterhead, a Victorian fortress on Scotland’s raw northeast coast. Gordon would very likely have passed into history unremarked except for his possession of a vital anatomical feature: he wore dentures. Beneath his dentures that day, furled into a tiny pellet with a scrap of glazed paper rolled round it to keep it dry, he carried an urgent note from a fellow convict. Though prison officials had made a thorough search of Gordon before releasing him, no one thought to examine his gums. And so the message, which would culminate nearly three years later in Oscar Slater’s release from life at hard labor, was spirited into the world.
Where earlier efforts to free Slater had been initiated by lawyers, this last, desperate stratagem was set in motion by Slater himself. He had slipped Gordon the note, written in pencil on a fragment of brown tissue paper, during a meeting of the prison debating society. A clandestine pellet like this was the safest means of communication between them: like most British prisons of its era, Peterhead maintained a regimen of enforced silence. Prisoners, supervised round the clock by armed guards, were allowed to speak to one another only in direct connection with their work. By 1925, Slater had already been disciplined for talking to a fellow convict through a ventilator between cells.
Slater’s message, now fragile and faded, has been preserved in the archives of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Bearing many of the hallmarks of his idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and syntax, it reads:
Gordon my boy, I wish you in every way the best of luck and if you feel inclined, then please do what you can for me. Give to the English public your opinion regarding me, personally and also in other respects. You have been for 5 years in close contact with me and so you are quite fit to do so.
Friend, keep out of prison but especially out of this God-forsaken hole. Farewell Gordon, we likely may never see us again, but let us live in hope, that it may be otherwise.
Your friend
Oscar Slater
P.S. Please don’t forget to write or see Connan D.…
That Gordon carried out Slater’s instructions can be gleaned from a second communication, an anonymous letter that reached Peterhead in mid-February. Addressed to Slater, it said:
Just a few lines to try to cheer you up. You have staunch friends in the outside world, who are doing their utmost for you so you must not lose heart. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bids me say that you have all his sympathy, and all the weight of his interest will be put in the scale on your behalf….We should like to get a line from you, if you are allowed to write. In the meantime keep up your heart & hope for the best, & rest assured we are doing our utmost for you.
The letter, which prison officials strongly suspected came from Gordon, was suppressed on arrival. But though Slater did not know it, his anxious note had accomplished its purpose: it persuaded Conan Doyle, who had long sought, with immense energy but disheartening results, to commute his sentence, to take up the case one last time.
THE CRIME FOR WHICH Oscar Slater had barely escaped the hangman’s noose was, in the words of a late twentieth-century writer, “a case of murder which has frequently been described as without parallel in criminal history.” It was stunningly violent, its victim refined, wealthy, and more than slightly eccentric. Under pressure to solve the case, the police soon announced that they had a suspect: thirty-six-year-old Oscar Slater, who had arrived in Glasgow that year with his young French mistress, nominally a music hall singer but probably a prostitute.
In the eyes of Edwardian Glasgow, Slater was in every way a desirable culprit. He was a foreigner—a native of Germany—and a Jew. His dandified, demimonde life affronted the sensibilities of the age: Slater billed himself variously as a dentist and a dealer in precious stones but was believed to earn his living as a gambler. Even before the murder, the Glasgow police had been monitoring him in the hope of having him arrested as a pimp. (In the decorous diction of the times, the charge they sought to press was “immoral housekeeping.”)
Slater’s trial took place in Edinburgh in May 1909, with the case against him founded on circumstantial evidence and outright fabrication. “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” Conan Doyle wrote. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.” The words are Sherlock Holmes’s, spoken in an 1891 story, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” They stand as a precise augury of the Slater affair.
The jury deliberated for seventy minutes before finding Slater guilty, and the judge sentenced him to hang. The pronouncement had a terrible finality: there was no criminal appeals court in Scotland then. (Pardons, when they were occasionally granted, were by prerogative of the British monarch.) By the time, nearly three weeks later, that Slater’s sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, he had made arrangements for his own burial. Transported to Peterhead, he paced his tiny cell, hewed granite, and railed at his jailers for much of the next two decades.
IN LATE 1911 OR early 1912, Slater’s lawyers asked Conan Doyle to lend his support to their cause. Though he deplored Slater’s ungentlemanly life, Conan Doyle, a Scotsman himself, soon came to believe that the case was a stain on the British character. He trained his diagnostic eye on every aspect of the crime, manhunt, and trial; wrote The Case of Oscar Slater, his scathing 1912 indictment of the affair; penned a stream of letters to British newspapers; edited, published, and contributed a trenchant introduction to The Truth About Oscar Slater, the 1927 book by the journalist William Park; and lobbied some of the most powerful officials in Britain.
The reprieve came at last in November 1927. In 1928, after a criminal appeals court was established in Scotland—a development brought about partly by Conan Doyle’s agitation—Slater’s trial was reviewed and his conviction quashed. The hearing, which Conan Doyle covered for a British newspaper, marked the only time in their long association that he and Slater met face-to-face. Then, after the triumphant resolution, came the bitter, highly public rupture.
These developments form the long, painful sequel to an exceptionally strange event that occurred in Glasgow in December 1908, about a week before Marion Gilchrist’s death—more than a week before Slater even knew of her existence. Though the fact would not be widely known for years, Miss Gilchrist told at least one person that week that she knew she was going to be murdered.