Whatever way it was viewed, the lady who lived alone in the mansion house could never be described as an ordinary Dundee spinster. Miss Jean Milne was eccentric but friendly, well read, fluent in foreign languages and something of a traveller. She was extremely comfortably off and the 23-apartment house she had quietly occupied for much of her life was set in its own grounds in an exclusive area of upmarket Broughty Ferry. Although she was sixty-nine years of age, she preferred to dress colourfully and youthfully and there was an occasional glint in her eye that hinted at more adventurous living on the frequent holidays she spent in London and on the continent. Those who believed she led a double life were not mistaken. When she came to die, it somehow wasn’t all that surprising that her passing was surrounded by mystery and intrigue, as baffling today as it was in the genteel period of her killing in 1912.
In the October of that year she suddenly went missing. She had last been seen around the middle of the month, but then she just vanished. No one was particularly surprised, or worried, for she had spoken of returning to London once more before the year was out. Most of her friends and contacts assumed she had just departed a little earlier than intended. On 2 November the postman was unable to insert mail into the letterbox of her mansion, Elmgrove, which stood in tree-filled splendour on a two-acre corner site where Strathern Road met Grove Road, because of an accumulation of letters already there. That puzzled him, because on her travels away Miss Milne always made arrangements to have her mail redirected, even sending a card to post office headquarters when she was due to return. He informed the police.
An officer called at the mansion late that evening but received no reply. Reluctant to force an entry in case Miss Milne was indeed at home but sleeping, and because a fellow officer had been reprimanded for doing precisely that on a previous occasion, he left. The next morning at 9 a.m. he returned with Mr Coullie, the local joiner, and they broke in through a window. The silence that enveloped the freezing house was broken by the gasps of both men at what confronted them.
Miss Milne lay dead in the hall two feet from the bottom of the carpeted staircase leading to the upper rooms. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse and her feet were bound together with curtain cord. The stairs, floor and walls were splattered with blood and, beside her body, which had been partially covered with a white sheet, lay a bloodstained poker with hair attached. Garden shears, which had been used to cut the telephone wires, had been discarded nearby. Despite her age and fragile frame, it seemed Miss Milne had made a determined effort to fight off her attacker, which was consistent with the reputation she had among her acquaintances for being ‘plucky’. Furniture was upset and a glass vase had shattered. Further along the hall lay her straw hat with its lining soaked in blood. More blood stained a gas lamp high up on a wall. Her false teeth were also broken.
A post-mortem revealed that the 15-inch poker had been used to inflict a number of blows, but none of them particularly severe or by themselves likely to have been the sole cause of death. It was concluded that she may have been left alive by her assailant but had died from the shock of what had taken place. Certainly, it seemed unlikely that whoever had wielded the poker had set out to commit murder, otherwise the feet would not have been tied together or the phone cables cut. It looked as though robbery had been behind the attack, for the house also had the appearance of having being ransacked. All the doors and windows were locked, but since the front door had a check-lock it would have closed up behind anyone passing through.
When news of the gruesome find spread through the refined, leafy suburb, those who knew Miss Milne were shocked, but not hugely surprised. It was no secret that she had money. Her brother, a tobacco manufacturer, had died nine years earlier and she had continued to live in the vast house, enjoying an annual income of £1,000 from the considerable sum he had also left. At that time, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, that amount of money facilitated an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle, similar to the sort that around £100,000 would provide a century later.
Friends had advised against her remaining in the mansion, particularly after she had dispensed with the services of a servant maid and a gardener, but she had shrugged off their concerns. Some said she was absolutely fearless.
She was also happy to flaunt her wealth. Apart from her travels at home and abroad, she enjoyed attending concerts in Dundee and frequently travelled into town to shop and dine in the best restaurants. Sometimes on these journeys she carried significant amounts of money, a practice she never attempted to conceal. On one occasion, she told a fellow traveller on a tramcar that she was carrying eighty sovereigns in her purse. She would do the same in shops.
Those who knew her best described her as an ‘agreeable creature’ but with ‘indefinable peculiar habits’ and an oddly contrasting lifestyle. In many ways she lived economically, making many of her own clothes and allowing the extensive grounds at Elmgrove to become overgrown. Yet she adored expensive jewellery, spent considerable sums on her numerous trips and holidays and gave generously to her church.
Socially, she was equally contradictory. She could be withdrawn and reclusive and although she had visitors, she seldom paid return visits. On her jaunts outwith the city, however, it seemed she mixed freely, made friends easily and would correspond with them.
At that period Broughty Ferry was not yet formally part of Dundee (that came the following year) and the area had its own police force. The first action of Chief Constable J. Howard Sempill was to call in Detective Lieutenant John Trench of Glasgow Police, an experienced and celebrated detective who had been engaged in the famous Oscar Slater case four years earlier. In a remarkably similar set of circumstances, Slater had been convicted of murdering a wealthy spinster in Glasgow.
Trench arrived in Dundee the day after the discovery of Miss Milne's body and immediately went to the scene with Chief Constable Sempill where the pair carried out a detailed examination of the interior of the house. The following day they returned to do the same in the grounds and round the exterior of the mansion. Trench determined that since there was no sign of a forced entry, Miss Milne had probably come upon a chance thief who had entered while she was in the garden and had died at his hand after tackling him. He further deduced that robbery was the motive because three purses found in the house contained no money.
Such a scenario ignored most of the evidence. In the bedroom where one of the empty purses had been located, Sempill had found another purse and this contained 17 sovereigns (worth about £1,700 today). Apart from a single missing ring, nothing appeared to have been stolen. Indeed, Miss Milne still wore a considerable amount of expensive jewellery, including six rings, a watch, ear-rings and neck-chain, all made of gold. Other valuables lay openly elsewhere in the mansion. An opportunist thief who took the time to rifle three purses was unlikely to have missed the easy pickings they provided. The initial observation that the apparent upheaval in the house was due to a ransacking was admitted by Trench himself to have more probably been the result of the confused manner in which Miss Milne led her life – for although her mansion had many rooms, she lived almost entirely in only one of them, reading and teaching herself foreign languages. She dined on a corner of a large table, the remainder of which was piled with books and magazines, which also lay in disarray on chairs amidst other scattered objects. The lack of a forced entry was also just as indicative of the likelihood that the dead woman had known her killer, or least had been happy to admit him or her, than it was of an opportunist thief slipping in unseen while she was in the garden.
Intriguingly, it seemed she may also have had a recent visitor for in the room a tray had been set with a cup and saucer and teapot. A half-eaten meat pie was on a plate. A cigar stub was also found in the fireplace.
Trench was informed of another find. A two-pronged carving fork, smeared with blood, had been discovered in the hall, lying close to the victim. Although this might have seemed an important piece of evidence, scant significance was attached to it by the two specialists who carried out the post-mortem. Dr Sturrock, a local doctor who was also the Broughty Ferry Police Surgeon, and who made the initial examination of the corpse at the scene, pointed out two small puncture wounds on the side of Miss Milne’s chest, but these were dismissed by the two experts as maggot holes. When Dr Sturrock suggested an inspection be made of the victim’s back, they merely lifted one of her shoulders and, after a cursory look, said that only ‘post mortem marks’ were present.
The existence of the carving fork and its apparent connection to Miss Milne’s death continued to trouble Dr Sturrock, however, and some two weeks later he pressed Trench and Sempill to have Miss Milne’s clothing closely examined. This revealed a series of twin holes corresponding to the size of the carving fork and consistent with it having been used to stab her about twenty times through her clothing, mainly on her back but also on her breasts and wrist. Traces of blood were found on parts of the clothing indicating that it had come from some of the wounds. Although any injuries were clearly not life-threatening, their full extent and part in Miss Milne’s ordeal were never established, for by that time she had been buried and permission was not given for an exhumation.
The post-mortem had indicated that the petite spinster might have met her end some two to three weeks before she was found, giving a possible date of death around the middle of October. Enquiries revealed that Miss Milne, a regular church-goer, had attended a service on 13 October, but not since, and had also been seen two days after that. However, a church elder delivering Communion cards had called at the large house on 16 October but had received no answer. It seemed Miss Milne had met her fate earlier that day. A copy of The Courier found in the house had apparently been read, but The Evening Telegraph of the same date was unopened. The actual date of her death was to prove crucial.
The enigma of the mansion house murder, and the widespread press coverage of the subsequent investigation guaranteed enormous interest in Dundee and further afield. On the following Sundays, hundreds of trippers travelled from the city into Broughty Ferry to peer intently into the Elmgrove grounds, hoping for a glimpse of police activity or one of those on the periphery of the inquiry. The early announcement of a £100 reward for information leading to an arrest added to the allure. The money, a significant sum at the time, also helped produce a steady procession of witnesses.
James Don, a dustman, had a particularly material piece of information to impart. He told Detective Lieutenant Trench that he had been sweeping in Grove Road in the early hours of 16 October when he saw a man emerge from the gateway at Elmgrove at 4.30. On seeing the street-sweeper, the figure withdrew back into the shadows, only to reappear a moment or two later before walking briskly away, looking neither right nor left, coughing slightly but failing to acknowledge the presence of Mr Don. The observant dustman described the secretive stranger as being dressed entirely in black and wearing a bowler hat and overcoat. He said he was about 5 feet 8 inches in height, aged thirty to forty and sharp-featured with a fair moustache. A man of the same description, but with ‘piercing eyes’, was said to have boarded a tramcar which departed from nearby Ellislea Road at 5.30 a.m. to take workers into Dundee. Then a taxi driver came forward to say he had picked up a similar male in Dundee the prior evening and had dropped him in the vicinity of Miss Milne’s mansion.
Neighbours spoke of having seen an open-top four-seater car parked near Elmgrove on the evening of 15 October. Its lamps had been left burning and it had remained in the street without its driver for about an hour before vanishing at around 9 p.m. The same people said they had noticed a light shining from an upstairs landing window of Elmgrove during the same period.
Of even greater interest to the police, however, was the picture that started to emerge of an unexpected side to the church-going and reclusive Miss Milne. It transpired that on her trips away from Broughty Ferry she led a distinctly different type of existence from the almost solitary one she had at home. The elderly spinster who preferred to dress in youthful, almost gaudy clothes, revelled in the attention of younger men and made numerous acquaintances among them. Several wrote to her, some even sending poems.
The unlikely femme fatale did not trouble to hide her double life from her acquaintances. She would return from a holiday to speak at length about the gentlemen she met, although she never mentioned names, and would giggle girlishly when discussing them. ‘She was more like a young girl on holiday than a woman nearing her allotted span,’ was how a lady friend acidly put it. After one visit to London, Miss Milne excitedly told a neighbour how she had become acquainted with a ‘college-bred’ man and was considering inviting him to Broughty Ferry.
Two women who knew her observed Miss Milne in action for themselves. A few weeks before her violent end, Miss Milne was spotted by them enjoying a sailing holiday on a cargo steamer in the Scottish Highlands accompanied by a good-looking man of about thirty-five. They had seen her with the same man in Glasgow the previous week, when they had all attended a meeting of shareholders of Caledonian Railways.
A maid in a large house overlooking Elmgrove also had an intriguing tale to tell. She revealed how, in the second week of October, she had looked into the garden of the mansion from an upstairs window of her employer’s home and was startled to see a man in evening dress pacing back and forth. She was especially surprised because it was mid-forenoon. The inappropriately dressed figure seemed unaware that he had been spotted, for he was deep in meditation and continued to walk about, hands in pockets, for more than ten minutes. The astonished maid told police that the stranger was about six feet tall, aged between thirty and forty and ‘very handsome’.
A young boy also came forward to say he had witnessed a man in a tall hat entering the grounds of Elmgrove in the period leading up to the day when the spinster was probably killed. Another of those with a story was a gardener who had been inside the mansion on 19 September when a man arrived on the doorstep. Miss Milne became coy and said it was the friend she had been expecting. The gardener explained that the visitor sounded German when he spoke and he assumed him to be the man Miss Milne had previously been so animated about when she revealed how they had met on one of her lengthy stays in London.
All of this was naturally of deep interest to Chief Constable Sempill and Detective Lieutenant Trench, but it did not point to a single suspect, for the descriptions and circumstances of the men differed in some cases. It did, however, give a useful indication of the extent of Miss Milne’s associations away from home and the part younger men played in the life of the elderly murder victim. Like the picture of Miss Milne’s double life that began to emerge, the identity of a possible suspect became more confused.
The investigation was made even more complex by an officer from the dead woman’s church who described to police how he had called at Elmgrove on 21 October to collect a charitable donation from Miss Milne. She did not answer the door, he said, but he was certain he had seen her standing at an upstairs bedroom window. When he called back later the same day, he again received no reply. However, he noted that on this occasion the shield on the front door keyhole was lifted when it had not been earlier. If the church officer was correct, it completely contradicted the evidence that Miss Milne had perished on 16 October. On the other hand, if he had indeed seen a woman, but who was not Miss Milne as he had naturally assumed her to be, that opened up the possibility that the killer may have been a woman, or that there was a female accomplice.
Chief Constable Sempill travelled to London to liaise with Scotland Yard and enquire into the spinster’s activities there and any friends who may have visited her during her stays in the Strand Palace Hotel. The continuing investigation and detailed coverage it was given daily in the press had built up major interest in the goings-on in the Broughty Ferry mansion house. Police forces across the land had also been alerted to the hunt for the killer. Ten days after the discovery of the body, police in Maidstone in Kent took more notice than their colleagues elsewhere after they arrested a Canadian for obtaining board and lodgings by fraud. Described as well educated and handsome, he appeared in some ways to match the description of a man sought for the Elmgrove killing, although there was no known connection to the events in Broughty Ferry. The man, Charles Warner, was jailed for fourteen days and as he went off to prison a phone call was placed to the investigating officers in Scotland. At the same time, a photograph of Warner was sent north.
Although the picture was of relatively poor quality, five of those in Broughty Ferry who had seen males in and around Elmgrove at the vital times said they believed Warner was the same man. Amidst great excitement, the five – three women and two men – were put on a train for England to see if they could make a positive identification. When they alighted from the overnight express in London, they were met by a large throng of sightseers, reporters and photographers, for by now the case had also attracted the interest of Londoners.
The next day Warner was taken into the yard of Maidstone Prison and one by one the Broughty Ferry group entered to view a line-up of prisoners. Four of the five picked him out; one of the women said she was uncertain. The tall Canadian was led away protesting his innocence and accusing the witnesses of having colluded.
A few days later, after the conclusion of his short sentence on the minor fraud charge, Warner was met at the prison by Chief Constable Sempill and Trench and arrested for the murder of Miss Milne. He was manacled and taken away in a cab to journey north on the next train to Scotland. A large crowd was at the prison gates to witness the departure. Bizarrely, the cab was stopped en route to the railway station at a nearby bank and Warner, handcuffed to Trench, was allowed to enter to collect money which had been wired to him. As he re-entered the taxi after the transaction, he told reporters who were following in close pursuit, ‘You know they have arrested an innocent man.’ At the railway station, where the air was heavy with smoke and the smell of magnesium from the flash cameras, he continued to inform the large posse of newsmen that he was blameless. News of Warner’s arrest spread north and when his train pulled into Dundee a crowd of more than a hundred people, plus a large contingent of police, waited on the platform for a sight of him – although it was 5.30 in the morning.
Not everyone was convinced of his guilt. The only evidence against him seemed to be that he was handsome and vaguely fitted the description of a man seen around Elmgrove at the material times. The witnesses had made their first identifications from a poor photograph and it was not unnatural that they would want to seem helpful, especially since they had become something of celebrities in their own right. Witnesses in London who were acquainted with Miss Milne had never seen him in her company. More importantly, Warner protested that he had been on the continent at the time she was supposed to have been murdered. As supporting evidence, the Canadian recalled that he had pawned a waistcoat in Antwerp on 16 October and even managed to produce the ticket.
Chief Constable Sempill departed at once for Belgium, taking the pawn ticket with him. Following the instructions given to him by Warner, the policeman located the shop and found that the pawnbroker’s records confirmed the accused man’s account. Next, Semphill travelled to Amsterdam to check another part of Warner’s story – that the British Consul there had issued a passport to the Canadian on 17 October. That, too, was established beyond doubt. The case against the protesting man being held in jail in Dundee dissolved. A short time later he was released.
That was as close as the police came to solving the mystery of the mansion house murder in Broughty Ferry. After Warner had been set free the investigation floundered, all impetus gone, and one of the most celebrated murder mysteries of the 20th century stuttered to an inglorious end. Although much of the evidence suggests that the spinster with the widely contrasting lifestyles died on 15 or 16 October at the hands of some stranger she met on her romantic expeditions away from home, that is by no means certain. The lightness of the blows which hastened her end could have been inflicted by a female, and one witness, the church officer, was emphatic he had seen a woman standing at an upper window five days after that. What if she had been the killer? The proposition that a woman might have been the attacker fits with the fact that none of the poker blows were severe enough to have killed Miss Milne. And the curious infliction of what apparently amounted to ‘prods’ with the carving fork could hint at a form of torture rather than an attempt to kill. No-one ever explained either why a flower vase full of urine was found on a back stairway, despite the mansion having several toilets and bathrooms. Additionally, the floor of the hall close to where Miss Milne lay dead was littered with spent matches. What was their significance?
Much of that may support the notion subsequently whispered by locals that the dastardly deed was the work of a demented young woman whose parents lived close by. It was said she was usually detained in the Dundee lunatic asylum but was occasionally released for “holidays” with her wealthy family. Could she have visited and returned again after initially attacking Miss Milne? It was also claimed that after the murder she was never again permitted home.
Detective-Lieutenant John Trench endured his own form of torture after the case against Warner collapsed. When the Canadian had been arrested, the detective promptly abandoned his ‘strong’ chance-thief theory, switching to a conviction of Warner’s guilt.
This appeared to have less to do with actual evidence than personal prejudices and the fact that the man they detained in London had a nomadic lifestyle and used a variety of aliases.
In his official statement, previously held privately by the police for almost a century, it is revealed that Trench had rapidly come round to the idea the murder was of such a brutal nature that it was likely to have been the work of a ‘maniac or foreigner.’ In a further demonstration of ‘impartiality’, he describes Warner as being ‘very, very coarse and vulgar.’ And, oblivious to the opinion of witnesses that the man they’d seen was handsome, stated that the suspect ‘has a particularly repulsive face.’ More bizarrely still, Trench disputed that Warner was a Canadian, claiming he had ‘all the peculiarities of an accomplished American crook who had probably served many terms of imprisonment on the Continent or in America.’ Just to round things off, he confided that Warner struck him as a ‘particularly bad man who, I would say without hesitation, was capable of committing any crime.’
To Trench’s credit, he returned to Glasgow disappointed but contrite, subsequently agonising at length about how he had jumped to conclusions and how he and Sempill had arrested a perfectly innocent man for a murder which had taken place when the accused was hundreds of miles away in a foreign land.
It may have been these thoughts which prompted him to consider again the case of Oscar Slater, the man he had helped convict of the murder of the Glasgow spinster four years earlier. Trench had long felt uneasy about the quality of the evidence which had put Slater in the dock and after returning from Dundee he was even more convinced that an injustice had been done. He played a prominent part in demanding a review of the case and his agitation caused so much trouble he was thrown out of the police, eventually being reinstated. He died with Slater still incarcerated in Peterhead Prison. Sadly, he never knew that the information he had passed to a journalist led to the publication of a book which ultimately forced the authorities to re-examine the circumstances of the murder of the Glasgow spinster. They found that Oscar Slater had indeed been innocent and after almost nineteen years in prison he was freed, his conviction quashed.
Miss Jean Milne's unsavoury and untimely demise is likely to forever remain a mystery but, as far as Oscar Slater at least was concerned, it was not entirely in vain.
On her death, Elmgrove, the mansion where she lived and died so mysteriously, was bequeathed to the Church of Scotland and, under a new name, eventually became a care home for the elderly. Miss Milne’s sole heir to her financial estate was her closest relative, Frank, a nephew. He was also a young man who lived in London and during that last summer she spent there he visited her twice at the Strand Palace Hotel. He was such a favourite of his aunt that earlier that year she had bought him a car.