At seven o’clock on the evening of Monday, 21 December, an old lady, living alone with one servant in a comfortable flat in a well-to-do Glasgow street, was brutally butchered on her dining-room hearthrug, during the temporary absence of the maid to buy an evening paper. The victim was Miss Marion Gilchrist, eighty-three years of age, a person of reserved and solitary habits, only remarkable in that she possessed some £3,000 of jewels, which she kept hidden among her dresses in her wardrobe.
—“The Slater Case”, in Knave’s Looking Glass (1935) by William Roughead
The murder in Glasgow of octogenarian jewel-fancier Miss Marion Gilchrist remains unsolved today, likely largely because the original investigation by Scottish police into the crime and its circumstances was either astonishingly inept or criminally complicit in the dread deed. The great Scottish criminologist William Roughead—he will be familiar to those of you who have already read Dorothy Erskine Muir’s first true-crime-inspired detective novel, In Muffled Night (1933), which draws on another of Glasgow’s notorious unsolved murders, the 1862 Jessie McLachlan case—was associated with the Gilchrist murder case for years, having:
(1) attended the original trial of Oscar Slater, the man accused of the crime, in 1909;
(2) authored Trial of Oscar Slater for the Notable British Trials Series, which highlighted the gaping flaws in the state’s case, in 1910;
(3) published a revised edition of the book, with even more damning detail, in 1925;
(4) served as a witness at the hearing of Oscar Slater’s successful appeal against his now nineteen-year-old prison sentence in 1928;
(5) published a final revised edition of Oscar Slater in 1929;
(6) produced a concise account of “The Slater Case” in his collection of criminological essays Knave’s Looking Glass, in 1935.
“The Slater Case” was reprinted in 1951, a year before Roughead’s death at the age of eighty-two, in his penultimate book, Classic Crimes, a brilliantly cut jewel of true-crime writing that was reprinted in 2000 by New York Review Books in a fine edition that happily remains in print and available throughout the world today. The essay makes compelling if infuriating reading, as Roughead methodically demolishes the state’s absurd case against the man whom it successfully prosecuted for Marion Gilchrist’s bloody murder.
The police errors (?) in the Slater case were both manifold and grievous. As Roughead notes, with a fortune in jewels (worth some £315,000/$450,000 today) at her elbow, “Miss Gilchrist was morbidly afraid of robbers,” and had made unsanctioned ingress into her domain a daunting procedure indeed; so it seems highly unlikely that the murderer—who had managed to gain entrance to the flat, presumably, during the perilously brief absence of the live-in maid, Helen Lambie—would have been unknown to the victim. When Lambie returned and entered her mistress’s flat in the company of a neighbour, Arthur Adams, who resided downstairs with his two sisters (a few minutes earlier all three of them had heard loud noises emanating from the flat above), they encountered a gentleman, purportedly unrecognized by them, departing the premises. Yet another witness—a fourteen-year-old message girl named Mary Barrowman, who claimed to be in the street at the time (although this claim was challenged)—stated as well that she saw a man running down the steps of the building. Although the police inferred from the disparate descriptions given by the three eyewitnesses that the man leaving the flat and the man running down the stairs were not actually one and the same person, they later altered this view, after they had alighted on a suspect, a thirty-six-year-old native German Jew of rather dubious background named Oscar Slater, upon whom they proceeded crudely to pin the crime.
According to Helen Lambie, out of the hoard of jewellery in her mistress’s flat only a diamond brooch was actually missing. (Miss Gilchrist’s papers had been disturbed as well.) When the police discovered that Oscar Slater had recently pawned a diamond brooch before departing for the United States (a trip planned before the murder took place), this set them on his trail. Even after it was learned that Slater’s brooch was actually a different article from Miss Gilchrist’s missing one (thus rendering the “brooch clue” entirely worthless) and the police failed to establish that their suspect even knew the victim, they clung tenaciously, like a pug on a trouser leg, to the belief that Slater was their man. After a farcical identity parade and constant honing of the eyewitnesses’ recollections, he was brought to trial, convicted on a 9–6 verdict (this being Scotland, unanimity was not required) and sentenced to death by a piously overbearing judge who set a new standard in prejudicial judicial sanctimony.
It is no wonder that the Slater case, like the McLachlan case before it, provoked outrage and protest among thousands of individuals, including, famously, Edinburgh native Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who damned the entire official proceeding as a “lamentable story of official blundering from start to finish”. As in the case of Jessie McLachlan nearly half a century earlier, Oscar Slater’s death sentence was commuted to a term of life imprisonment, of which, as mentioned above, he served nineteen years. All in all, it was surely one of the clearest cases of judicial injustice in Scottish legal history.
For many decades accounts of the Slater case were less concerned with the question of whodunit than with what in hell was done to him? In other words, writers about the affair mostly devoted themselves to pointing out the manifold structural weaknesses in the shaky scaffolding which the state had erected in support of Slater’s shameful conviction. However, in Five to Five, D. Erskine Muir’s second detective novel, the author went looking for another killer. In her review of the novel in the Sunday Times, Dorothy L. Sayers noted that the Gilchrist enigma was one of the most “mysterious of all recent murder cases”, with the quashing of Slater’s sentence having been unsatisfactorily “based on technical grounds which shed no further light upon the central problem of who really did the murder”. “Mr. [sic] Muir” had, Sayers added, “used the opening situation [in the Slater case] as the thesis for an exciting and well-constructed murder story… with a dramatic and soundly argued conclusion”.
Admittedly lacking in the story is the real-life high drama of a monstrously stigmatized man unjustly tried and convicted for a crime he did not commit, but in its place readers will find an engaging murder problem constructed with all the sober rigour of Freeman Wills Crofts and enriched with Muir’s superior descriptive power and skill at the drawing of character. Additionally, we also are treated to a return engagement, after his winning appearance in In Muffled Night, with the upright and tenacious Detective Inspector Woods of the CID, with whom Crofts’ own Inspector French doubtlessly would have been honoured to serve. Readers who peruse further in the stacks of Slateriana that have accumulated over the decades—Roughead’s “The Slater Case” certainly would be a good place to start—will find additional instances, like those concerning the murder weapon and the mysterious “watcher” from across the way, where Muir has drawn on the real-life-crime problem in constructing her fictional one. Surely to the mystery of the cruel slaying of Mr. Simon Ewing, that disagreeable, elderly and infirm collector of jade and jewels, the author has come up with a far more credible solution than the Scottish authorities ever managed to do during their infamous investigation into the murder of Miss Marion Gilchrist.
Curtis Evans
Germantown, TN
28 June 2021