For the first 47 years of her life Marion Gilchrist was a rôle model of the stereotypic, self-sacrificial, Victorian spinster daughter, who, either by misfortunate circumstance or dutiful design, suffered the season for marriage and its fulfilment in motherhood to pass over her as she devoted herself to the loving care of a widowed father. He, James Taylor Gilchrist, cast in the heroic mould of the founding fathers of the city of Glasgow, was a self-made man. The son of a Glasgow shoemaker, he rose, across the harsh span of 50 industrious years, from apprentice millwright to consulting engineer. On New Year’s Day 1821, at the age of 22, he married 20-year-old Christina Finlay, a weaver’s daughter, and, in the best tradition of that era, was to father a substantial family of three sons and six daughters.

Wednesday’s child, Marion, was born on 18 January 1826. At the age of 12, she had seven siblings. By the time of her violent death, some 70 years later, out of all that jolly company only four sisters – herself, Christina, Elizabeth and Jane – would remain.

By the early 1870s, the heroic mould of James Taylor Gilchrist was beginning to show the cracks of time, a fissure here, another there; starting to break up. This gradual fragmentation broke clean on 10 January 1873, when, at the age of 74, he succumbed to congestive apoplexy, which is to say cerebral haemorrhage.

Now, Marion, a week and a day short of her 47th birthday, was alone. She was to become even more alone, isolated from her kind and kin, when the terms of her father’s will became known. He had, with the exception of a legacy of £100 to his then unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, and the sum of £24 per annum to his son, Marshall, left everything of which he died possessed to his daughter, Marion.

This, predictably, caused trouble. Marion’s siblings felt that she had somehow done them out of their patrimony. There were family ructions; bad feelings and resentments were expressed, dividing the family as only money can. There ensued the virtual severance of all connections between Marion and her sisters and their offspring. By 1908, only three out of that whilom amplitude of nephews and nieces had, theoretically at any rate, contact or commerce with wickedly rich Aunt Marion. We know that Janet’s daughter, Margaret Dawson Birrell, and brother James’ daughter, Mary Greer Gilchrist or McCall, visited her. So, too, did her ‘courtesy nephew’, Francis James Charteris.

It would have been about the middle of the year 1877, that Marion, aged 51, with mother, father, three brothers and a sister lying below that sad stone urn marker of mortality in the Necropolis, and four sisters living – to whom it was as if she were already interred with those others’ bones – closed the door of the home where all those years she and her father had lived, 140 West Campbell Street, behind her, and closed it also upon the Gilchrist family life and companionship which she had, prior to the publication of her father’s will, all her days known. She moved off now to that flat in West Princes Street, where, 30 years into the future, her fate would come to meet her up the cold stone stair.

The life that prim Miss Gilchrist spinsterishly lived at neat and tidy, spick and span, polished and cosy No. 15 Queen’s Terrace was a withdrawn and secluded one, keeping herself most exclusively to herself, owing and being owed by no one. By definition, such a life is difficult to reconstruct. It is only through the sly eyes of servants, the imprudent lips of the occasional visitor or friend, and by keeping a cocked ear for rumour, that it is possible to gain a glimpse here, a hint there, a small insight somewhere else, beyond the carefully erected barriers.

It was shortly after Miss Gilchrist’s move to West Princes Street that Maggie Galbraith came into her service as a maid. Maggie believed herself to be only 16. Actually she was 21. Previous writers appear to have experienced difficulty in identifying her. She is clearly recorded at New Register House in Edinburgh as having been born on 11 September 1856, in the hamlet of Borve, near Castlebay, on the Outer Hebridean island of Barra. Her father: John Galbraith, a shoemaker. Her mother: Isabella McKinnon or Galbraith.

The shoemaker’s daughter was to stay with Miss Gilchrist for 12 years, until, in 1889, she was married from her mistress’ house to David Ferguson, a railway goods’ guard from Greenock. Throughout the following 19 years of Marion Gilchrist’s life, the Fergusons were to remain on the most intimate terms with her. They frequently visited her, and, after they had moved from Glasgow to Kilmarnock in 1903, were often invited to stay at her flat with her. And she would often go to stay with them in their little house in Kilmarnock.

Each summer it was Miss Gilchrist’s habit to take the whole Ferguson family away with her to a house at the coast, which she would rent for a couple of months. They became, in effect, her surrogate family – Maggie, the daughter she never had; David and Maggie’s children, her grandchildren. The daughter born to the Fergusons in 1892 was, at Miss Gilchrist’s own request, named after her, Marion Gilchrist Ferguson, and was from the beginning the apple of her eye. Subsequently, a son, David, and another daughter, christened Maggie Galbraith, completed the Ferguson family.

A servant lost may have been a friend gained, but filling the domestic gap was far from easy. Between Maggie’s departure and the arrival, sixteen years later, of Helen Lambie, Miss Gilchrist endured a succession of young women servants, good, not-so-good and indifferent. Most of them came and as rapidly went, vanishing unmourned into the lumber-room of things past. One of these, Jane or Jeanie Hay Duff, who arrived in 1895 and left in 1900, testified interestingly that Miss Gilchrist was ‘generally reputed to be a very wealthy person of means, and as having a lot of jewellery. I found in talking to other maids that this seemed to be well known in the neighbourhood’.

On 13 October 1905 young Nellie Lambie trundled her modest tin trunk to the bed alcove beside the kitchen at No. 15. Despite the fact that Miss Gilchrist kept a tight-ship economy, Nellie liked her mistress – ‘She wasn’t very liberal in her housekeeping, but she was a kind lady. I don’t know of anyone who had any ill-will to her or was likely to have injured or murdered her. I’ve never heard anyone speak ill of her.’

Nellie was able to fill in a few more names of callers in the, albeit thin, visitors’ book for No. 15. There was Miss Gilchrist’s niece, Margaret Dawson Birrell, there was Mrs Charteris, that is the former Mrs Elizabeth Greer or Gilchrist, and her daughter, Mrs McCall – ‘I have heard Miss Gilchrist speak of Mrs Charteris and her daughter as people who came to the house to watch and see what was going on.’ As regards male visitors, they were either ‘gentlemen from the church or business gentlemen. She had two nephews named Birrell. I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they stay. Neither of them was ever in Miss Gilchrist’s house to my knowledge’.

It is a well recognised fact of social history that in those days the servants’ hall was a regular hotbed of snobbery, tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence. Its occupants would boast to, and vie with, each other regarding their master or mistress’ wealth and status. This, by some weird mechanism of reflected glory, would decide their own below-stairs standing! Nellie insisted that her sole object in telling folk about Miss Gilchrist’s fine jewellery had been ‘to show that I was in a good place, and that my mistress was a person of means’.

There have been those who have professed to find in Miss Gilchrist’s excessive-seeming concern about her admittedly valuable trinkets, evidence of something alarmingly more than eccentricity. Did all this obsession with those bright baubles, that fixation about men in presses and burglars under beds, transgress the boundary lines of normalcy? Did it add sinister significance to Report No. 759 in the Glasgow Police Information Book, which I discovered held in Strathclyde Regional Archives.1 The report, dated 22 December 1908, 2.45am, written by Detective Inspector Pyper, contains the following most unexpected, and here for the first time revealed, paragraph:

Miss Gilchrist was insane for a time a few years ago and was under the guardianship of a Mrs McLelland, wife of the late Mr James McLelland, of Thomson & McLelland, Writers, 180 West George Street, who were her agents.

On 3 August 1892, at the age of 66, Marion Gilchrist had indeed signed what is known in Scotland as a Factory or Commission; that is a deed granted by A empowering B to act for him in one of several transactions, which is the equivalent of a Power of Attorney in English law. Miss Gilchrist’s business affairs were to remain in the hands of Messrs McLelland, Thomson & Towers Clerk until 1905, when she removed them into the professional care of James Macdonald.

John Stewart, a senior partner of the Glasgow firm of stockbrokers, Struthers & Stewart, who had known Miss Gilchrist all his life – he was 52 – and had been her stockbroker since 1889, was very upset by the rumours which were being bandied about Glasgow regarding her. It was being said that she was a resetter – the Scottish term for a receiver of stolen goods – and that men frequented her house in connection with this; that she had uncut and unset diamonds and other precious stones; that she was Nellie Lambie’s mother; that she had had an illegitimate daughter and that Mrs Ferguson was that daughter. These stories were, of course, all arrant nonsense.

Mr Stewart’s last glimpse of Miss Gilchrist was on Friday, 18 December, when she had called at his office.

At three o’clock on Saturday, 19 December 1908, Miss Margaret Dawson Birrell took afternoon tea with her aunt. She had made it one of her customarily short visits.

I spent an hour with her. She seemed in particularly good health then, although she was hardly a strong woman. At that visit she pressed me strongly to come back soon and see her, and I promised to come back very soon.

She did. Within 48 hours … to find Aunt Marion an unrecognisably battered cadaver.

Two weeks to the day after Miss Gilchrist’s murder – Monday, 4 January 1909 – the morning papers revealed the identity of the prime suspect, the man with the twisted nose: Oscar Slater.

On the previous Saturday (2 January), he had been delivered to Room 76, Post Office Building, at the lower end of City Hall Park, the office of Commissioner John A Shields, of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, before whom he was arraigned. Mr Charles Fox, counsel for the British Government, most oddly ignoring the fact that that ticket, being for a brooch of his own which Slater had pawned, had not the slightest significance as regards Miss Gilchrist’s murder and her missing brooch, had asked that the pawn-ticket found on Slater be made part of the record in the case. This was consented to by Mr William A. Goodhart, attorney, who, together with Mr Hugh Gordon Miller, had been retained to represent Slater.

The hearing for the granting of the requested extradition warrant was set for 19 January at 2pm Bail was refused and Slater was committed to the Tombs Prison. If, as he was so often and so passionately to declare, Slater was both innocent of the crime and ignorant of the circumstances surrounding and the people involved in it, then it was a truly Kafka-esque situation in which he found himself blindly entangled.

Back in Scotland, a warm and grateful feeling murmured across Glasgow like an audible sigh, palpable as the breath of the mistral. With Slater under lock and key, everything, it seemed, was neatly parcelled, nicely tied up. But prophetic indeed were the words of that day’s Glasgow Evening Times: ‘The case in reality is only beginning …’

All of this American activity had, of course, been taking place beyond the ken of the Glasgow police and public. The first that they knew of it was when they read about it in the newspapers. Knowing now that Miss Gilchrist’s killer was safely ‘entombed’, the police were determined to attend to the permanent closure of the door and make the rock-seal secure.

Like his father before him – William Hart, who had prosecuted Madeleine Smith in 1857 – James Neil Hart was Procurator-fiscal. In Scotland, the police never prosecute. Their responsibility is the investigation of crime, and once a person has been arrested control of the investigation passes to the Fiscal. He is a full-time civil servant, and must be either an advocate or, more usually, a solicitor. Fiscal Hart had for some time now been toiling away in his office at County Buildings, in Ingram Street.

One of the people into whose conduct he had been closely inquiring was a 37-year-old widower named Patrick Nugent, who had, for a time, paid court to Nellie Lambie. And she had stated that she had told Nugent that Miss Gilchrist was very well-off and had jewellery. On 31 December Detective Officer John Trench had been despatched in search of Nugent and had found him residing with his Irish family – including four brothers, all miners – at Carfin, a mining town two miles north-east of Motherwell. A local constable described Nugent to Trench as ‘a low-class bookmaker, convicted several times for betting offences, who had the local reputation of being a rake, two women in Carfin having had children by him’.

Nugent told Trench that he had met Nellie Lambie at a dance at New Year 1908, and had walked out, briefly, with her. She had on one occasion admitted him to Miss Gilchrist’s while her mistress was from home. He was in the West Princes Street flat for about three hours. He had had tea and she had shown him Miss Gilchrist’s room, and played the piano to him. He had given Nellie up because he was a Roman Catholic and she was a Protestant. He had since met and married someone else.

Trench had also visited Nellie Lambie’s family at Holytown, about 11 miles south-east of Glasgow, and reported: ‘Her parents and relatives are in poor circumstances, and the local constable describes them as a “rum lot”.’ But he heard nothing to Nellie’s detriment.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Fiscal Hart received a telegram informing him that Crown Counsel thought that the Gilchrist murder was a case in which ‘two officers should proceed to New York if apprehension effected and demand for surrender granted’. Accordingly, Hart sat himself down at 11pm in the fine, spacious grey stone house at 25 Newark Drive, a leaf-bowered corner of Pollokshields, where he lived a bachelor life, and wrote nominating his Chief Sheriff Criminal Officer, William Warnock, and Detective Inspector John Pyper to undertake the mission. The decision was also subsequently taken that because, judging by previous Home Office experience, the American court would not be satisfied without having oral witness-identification of Slater, Arthur Adams, Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman should accompany Warnock and Pyper to New York. The company of five embarked from Liverpool aboard the White Star liner Baltic, on 13 January.

As the Baltic slipped quietly out past the Bar, some determined police legwork was being carried on in Glasgow. Miss Annie Armour, a booking clerk at Kelvinbridge subway station, some half-mile from Miss Gilchrist’s, was interviewed. She remembered a man – dark, medium height, clean-shaven, wearing a high collar, light overcoat, waterproof, she thought, collar half turned up, and a darkish hat or cap – who came rushing into the turnstile, threw down a penny without speaking a word, and, before she could give him his ticket, dashed off down the stairs to the platform. Widespread inquiries failed to net this odd bird.

Throughout those January days the taking of statements went relentlessly on, especial attention being accorded to those who stood in close relation to the deceased lady, either by ties of blood or bonds of affection.

Her nephew, George Gilchrist Birrell, said:

My parents are dead. I have one sister alive, Maggie Dawson Birrell. I have two brothers: James Aitken Birrell, 103 Rolland Street, and Wingate Birrell, whose address I don’t know, but I have been told he is in London. He was in the Army, but I think deserted. Our family and Miss Gilchrist were not on visiting terms.

Margaret Dawson Birrell, interviewed, said that her mother had died in 1896. Since then she had been seeing her aunt

several times in a year, but not often. My brothers, George and James, occasionally visited me, but they never used to talk of Miss Gilchrist and her house, nor did I to them. I am quite sure they do not know anything about any property which she had.

Statement of James Aitken Birrell:

The deceased was my aunt. I knew whereabouts she lived, but I did not know her house in West Princes Street. It is over forty years since I last saw her and I did not correspond with her. I never heard that my aunt was possessed of a quantity of diamond jewellery until after this investigation began.’

His wife, 40-year-old Mrs Mary Nimmo or Birrell, knew her though – only too well. Listen to this precognition, given at Glasgow on 12 February 1909:

I knew of the deceased Miss Gilchrist as my husband’s aunt, but I only saw her once to my knowledge, and that was, so far as I can recollect, about seven years ago.2

At that time my husband and I were in rather straitened circumstances, and I was about to be confined. My husband told me that he understood his aunt was a kindly person. I suggested that he should call on her and see whether she would give us any assistance, but he would not do so. I proposed that I should call on her and my husband said I might please myself in that respect.

Accordingly, I did call on her one forenoon at her house in Queen’s Terrace. I found Miss Gilchrist and explained to her who I was, and asked if she could give my husband a little assistance. She received me kindly enough, but she said she did not know my husband and she did not want to know him, and she refused to give any assistance, and said he should apply to his friends.

I explain that I was about half an hour sitting in the drawing-room before Miss Gilchrist appeared. I think she had been dressing. I had not more than three or four minutes’ conversation with her when she did come.

Miss Gilchrist was dressed with a black satin gown and wore two diamond rings and a gold chain. I think I am right in saying she also wore a diamond crescent brooch in her dress. I told my husband that Miss Gilchrist wore two diamond rings, and I may have said that Miss Gilchrist was gorgeously or handsomely dressed. I thought she was very handsome. I never saw her again. I only heard of her murder on the Tuesday night (22 December), when my husband came home with a newspaper and told me.

My husband was at that time in the employ of the Income Tax Office in St Vincent Street, and so far as I remember was at work then from about 6.15 till 9 or 9.30pm. He was much shocked when he heard of the murder.

Mrs Maggie Galbraith or Ferguson says:

Miss Gilchrist was very confiding with me and yet she never told me much of her private affairs. Last year she told me that she had left my family and me something, adding – if we got it, as she said she knew she had enemies who might interfere with the disposal of her property after she was dead. I did not think that the enemies she spoke of would do her personal harm. She also told me some time this year that she was getting sour at Mrs McCall, who had been saying that she was to get all her money. I said I thought that Miss Birrell was entitled to something as she had to work hard and was not married like the others. I had never any friends at deceased’s house, and I don’t think my husband would have any either. He called at Miss Gilchrist’s house on Monday, fourteenth December, 1908, and again on Thursday, seventeenth December, 1908, about purchasing a dog for her. Miss Gilchrist was a good friend to me while living, and I would sooner have had her living than as it is now. I have no idea who could have done the deed.

At the request of Fiscal Hart, Mrs Mary Greer Gilchrist or McCall was seen at her home, Boscombe Court, Bossoney, Bournemouth, by an officer of the Hampshire police. She told him:

Miss Gilchrist was my aunt. We were very good friends and devoted to each other. The last time I saw her alive was on Monday, tenth February, 1908, when I left her after nursing her through an illness for three weeks. This was the last occasion I was at her house in Glasgow, until after the murder was discovered. Helen Lambie was then in the employ of my aunt. During the three weeks I was nursing my aunt I saw a good deal of her jewellery. She was in the habit of keeping her jewellery in an old leather bag in the wardrobe in her bedroom. I have known her to have the bag in bed with her. When the maid, Lambie, was out, my aunt, if required would answer the door herself.

Mrs McCall, when further questioned later, added that her aunt was fond of a bargain and might purchase anything at the door.

I know of her having, during the time of the Glasgow Exhibition, bought some pieces of carpet from foreigners who appeared to have found out her address and called on her with carpets. My aunt told me afterwards that they pressed her into buying them.

The Glasgow News of 23 January 1909, announced: ‘An inventory of the estate of the late Miss Gilchrist has been lodged with the Sheriff-Clerk of Lanarkshire. Her estate has been returned at £15,758 8s 1d’

High stakes.

Bits and pieces had been filtering across the Atlantic from ‘Over There’. The intelligence was that Oscar Slater was maintaining an attitude of cheerfulness and expressing continuing confidence in complete exoneration. He had been brought up again before Commissioner Shields on 19 January, but the proceedings had been of the briefest; a formal adjournment for one week, in order to allow for the party from Liverpool to arrive.

The Baltic steamed into New York on 25 January, five days late. The voyagers from Glasgow were whisked off by cab to Smith & McNell’s Hotel, corner of Fulton and Washington Streets. Next day the messengers of justice were to keep their postponed appointment with Commissioner Shields.

Tuesday, 26 January 1909.

They were standing – Mr Fox, Inspector Pyper, Mr Adams, Nellie Lambie and Mary Barrowman – in the corridor outside the entrance to the court-room. It was just before three o’clock in the afternoon. Three men came bustling along, passed them, and, after some moments of fumbling hesitation, went into the court. According to Inspector Pyper, Lambie and Barrowman simultaneously touched his arm and simultaneously said: ‘Oh, there is the man away into the court.’ A chance encounter in the court corridor … the first flesh-and-blood glimpse afforded Adams, Lambie and Barrowman of the man Slater. Chance – or design? Circumstance carefully orchestrated to assure that witnesses and Slater should happen to be in the right place at the right time, from the prosecution standpoint, that is.

Whatever, this was an incident of supreme importance, for everything turned upon the question of identity. Slater was putting forward a defence of mistaken identity, and it was consequently a prime requirement that nothing should be permitted to interfere with, or in any way prejudice, the process of fair identification.

Already, we know, for an admitted fact, that photographs of Slater had been shown to Adams and Barrowman. The reason that none was shown to Lambie was that she had plainly stated that she had never seen Miss Gilchrist’s visitant’s face. If, however, as by interested parties claimed, Lambie’s and Barrowman’s recognition of the handcuffed man in the corridor was – handcuffed hints apart – spontaneous, genuine, effected without guidance, guile, hint or prompt, nod or wink, then the occasion of the actual identification was there and then, and their subsequent pantomime of ‘identifying’ that same man in court was pure farce. Lambie, asked if she could see present in the court the man she had seen on the night of the murder, replied with commendable caution: ‘One is very suspicious, if anything’, and went on to say that she had identified the man by his walk. He didn’t walk straight and was ‘sort of shaking himself a little’ as he walked. She demonstrated a somewhat stilted specimen walk. Then, amid dead silence, pointed a finger at Slater.

Slater’s counsel, Mr Miller, asked her: ‘What were you all doing pointing to this man when I saw you standing in the door?’ To which, with pert impertinence, she rejoined: ‘That was my business and none of yours.’

Young Mary Barrowman acquitted herself well. She answered counsel’s questions clearly and unhesitatingly. Asked by Mr Fox: ‘Do you see that man here today?’ she looked from face to face for fully half a minute amid breathless suspense. Then, after another sweep of the crowded court-room with her keen eyes, she stooped, peered over at Slater’s two bulky, lawyers who had been standing partially in front of him, slowly pointed a finger at Slater and said: ‘That man here is very like him.’

Then it was the turn of Arthur Montague Adams. He had known Miss Gilchrist since he was a little boy. He was not, alas, the most observant of mortals. He had not noticed Slater passing by in the corridor outside the court. He had not noticed the crookedness or otherwise of the nose of the man in Miss Gilchrist’s hall. He had not noticed the man’s hat. Asked by the Commissioner, point-blank, ‘Is there anybody in the room here that you identify as that man?’ Adams’ reply was: ‘I couldn’t say positively. This man (indicating Slater) is not at all unlike him. Very much like him.’ Questioned as to whether he had noticed anything remarkable about the man’s way of walking, Adams said, ‘No. I thought he walked like a commercial traveller’, which rather cryptic definition he enlarged to: ‘Just an ordinary walk.’

Mr Miller: ‘You don’t swear this is the man you saw?’

Adams: ‘No, sir.’

The second day of the hearing turned out to be little more than an entr’acte – the wearisome reading out of deposition after deposition.

The third and mammoth day of the drama was Friday, 29 January.

Mary Barrowman was recalled. Mr Miller asked her if it was not so that in her deposition she had described the man whom she had encountered in West Princes Street as tall and thin? Yes, she said, she had. Miller asked Slater to stand up. Then, as he stood there, comfortably sleek, well-covered, not very tall, Miller, glancing over to the Commissioner, remarked: ‘I ask your Honour to take judicial notice of the prisoner at the bar.’ At this, Mr Fox shot out of his seat. ‘Wait a moment,’ he called out. ‘Now, Mary, attend to me. Do you think this man standing here (indicating Slater) is tall?’

‘I do,’ answered Barrowman.

‘And thin?’

‘Yes.’ Without another word, Fox resumed his seat. And Mary went back to hers. Mr Adams (recalled) was the last witness of the day. Mr Miller asked him: ‘Are you prepared to say that this defendant here, Oscar Slater, is the man whom you saw in the hall?’

‘Well, no sir,’ said Adams.

As both sides had now finished with the evidence of the witnesses from Glasgow, they were, the Commissioner told them, at liberty to sail for home.3 Further hearing of the case was adjourned for one week.

However … on the afternoon of 3 February, Mr Miller released a bombshell. He informed the Commissioner that his client was willing to waive extradition and return voluntarily to Glasgow to stand his trial.

As Miller presented it, Slater’s decision implied the accused’s confidence in his ability to clear himself of unjustified suspicion. The truth is that this was not the heroic, self-confident choice of innocence which popular belief has ever since held it to have been. In fact, Slater had been presented with Hobson’s choice. His American lawyers had put it to him that although the evidence adduced against him was circumstantial and the fight over his extradition was likely to be a long one, there was little doubt that ultimately international comity would force his reluctant return to Glasgow. How much better for him, then, to go willingly; such a step would assuredly create an infinitely more favourable impression on a Scots jury.

The Court of Mr Commissioner Shields convened for the last time in the matter of Oscar Slater on Saturday morning, 6 February. Mr Fox asked that the defendant be remanded in the custody of the United States Marshal to await the action of the Secretary of State; that was the issue by the proper authorities in Washington of the warrant for his extradition.

In this topsy-turvy case of the exceptional which did not prove the rule, one may perhaps be excused for applying the appropriate topsy-turvy Shakespeareanism that valour was not, for Slater, the better part of discretion.

1 (Reference SR/22/63/10)

2 It will actually have been in 1901. Mary Birrell’s daughter, Margaret May, was born on 27 May 1901. Tragically, she died a little over two months later.

3 Adams, Lambie and Barrowman sailed for Liverpool aboard the Baltic on Saturday, 30 January 1909.