Classic Scottish Murder Stories (15 page)

The dark day came on Saturday November 19th, 1853. From dawn to eve, William laboured on the farm, his head full of plans. In a few days' time he was going to see his Mary Slessor at Mintlaw market, and on the following Tuesday he was going to see his brother, Charles, who had just left home to work on a neighbouring farm, Langside. That Saturday evening, he had an immediate appointment or ‘tryst' with Dr Smith at his stable door in the village, and had to be there at 6 o'clock. He set off in the ‘gloaming', on foot, before 5 o'clock and the tryst may be presumed to have taken place, because by 7 o'clock we can place him, perfectly happy, in the still open and lighted shop of James Smith, the village cartwright. Here he ordered some hames to be made (those being the two curved bars of a draught-horse's collar), and also a grub-harrow for turnips. He said he would be needing some palings for the farm. For half an hour he stayed talking to some friends, in excellent spirits, before saying that it was getting late and he needed to be away home. It was just before 7.30pm when he left the shop.

That night, he did not come home, and on the Sunday morning, his brother Robert went out to look for him. The nearest way down to the village was by a path leading through Dr Smith's six-acre field to a road which went toward the doctor's stable. There was a break in the hedge which crossed the field, and in this sheltered place Robert found his brother lying dead in a ditch. There was what looked like a bullet wound in the right cheek, and the face was pitifully blackened with gunpowder. The body lay on its back in about one inch of water, and he pulled the head up on to the bank. When he did this, he found a pistol beside the ditch, four feet distant from the head in its original position. Robert McDonald ran to fetch the doctor, but he was out, so he left a message and returned to the ditch. He stood there, crying. Soon he saw Dr Smith and James Pirie, the village farrier, coming up from the main road. Dr Smith stood over the body. He seemed horrified. ‘God preserve us!' he exclaimed, holding his hands to the sky. He picked up the pistol: ‘That's the thing that's done it.' All three of them drew the body out of the ditch. The doctor said that William was ‘partly shot and partly drowned'. The wound was caused by a wad (the packing used to keep the charge in the gun), not by a bullet – that was his opinion, and it was a clear case of suicide. No-one (except the jury) ever accepted that opinion.

They carried the body to the nearest house, that of James Fordyce, where a preliminary search of the clothing was made. There was neither powder nor shot in his pockets, only a watch and snuffbox. William never carried money. He was wearing a kind of ‘polka' (a tight-fitting jacket, often knitted, generally given as a woman's garment) the pockets of which were too small to hold the pistol. A small point, but relevant. The body was trundled off home to Burnside by cart, and Dr Smith made for the farm on foot to break the news to Mrs McDonald. On the way, he met Mr Alexander Moir, Minister of the Free Church and informed him that William had shot himself. Bereaved Mrs McDonald would not accept it. Her son had never had a pistol.
There had been no family quarrels (for the doctor kepttrying to insinuate that idea) and her son did not have a pistol. She must have been suspicious when she asked Dr Smith if he had met her son, as arranged, at the stable door at 6 o'clock, and he denied that there had been any such arrangement.

Dr William Smith, friend of the family, certified the death:

He took over all the funeral arrangements, pressing first for Tuesday, which was changed to Wednesday by forces outside his control. Rashly, he observed to the mother that if Boyd heard what had happened, he would soon be out. Boyd was the procurator fiscal, well known to the other professional man, and, sure enough he did arrive from Peterhead on the Monday morning. A post-mortem and an examination of the locus were carried out on that same day.

Dr Comrie, who practised in Peterhead, and Dr Gordon, a retired naval surgeon from New St Fergus, inspected the ditch and found that it was 18 inches deep with longish grass and decayed matter at the bottom, under about an inch of stagnant water. The impression of the body showed up clearly. The surrounding ground was hard and dry with no sign of any
struggle. On the west bank, there was a mark of blood, which was incomprehensible if the deceased had stood in the ditch and shot himself. He had not suffocated or drowned. Death was instantaneous and the pistol must have been fired only a few inches from the head – say three to twelve. If shot by another, that person would have had to be at his side. On tracing the course of the wound to the cheek, the doctors found a pistol bullet lodged in one of the convolutions in the middle lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain. If the man had shot himself, he must have been sitting in the ditch. If he fell outside the ditch, it would have been a matter of a few seconds for another person to put the body into the ditch. An accident was inconceivable. (This had been one theory which Dr Smith had put about.)

Neither doctor would commit himself on the option between suicide or murder, except that Dr Gordon, who had actually known William McDonald, was in a position to give his professional opinion that he was not of suicidal disposition. He also shrewdly commented that, after making some experiments, he would have expected a suicide to have held the pistol closer to the head, and he thought it remarkable that the pistol had been aimed a little above the gums, whereas a suicide traditionally aimed at the ear or temple.

That Monday evening, feeling a chill wind of insecurity, Dr Smith repaired to the manse, where he told the minister that he was ‘disappointed' with ‘that McDonald widow' because she had been saying that her son had been murdered. Mr Moir observed that it seemed to him that there was a good deal of mystery about the tragedy, which ought to be looked into. He faced Dr Smith and asked him bluntly, ‘Where were you on Saturday night?' The doctor reeled off a series of calls and events. If some stranger had done the deed, said the minister, it was curious that the body had been found so easily, as it was a path seldom used by anyone except the McDonalds, the doctor, and the minister. He asked Dr Smith how it was that he found the body, and he said that he had heard the brother's lamentations.

On Tuesday, November 22nd, Dr Smith spoke to a friend, James Greig, a local farmer, who told him that the Fiscal had been asking about insurance policies. The doctor had been inclined to deny all association with the insurances, but he now admitted to Greig that he expected to get £1,500 or £1,000 from them. Well then, said his friend, only joking, ‘They'll blame you for pistolling McDonald!' And so they did, for they came for the doctor that very day and arrested him for murder. Detained at Peterhead awaiting trial, he made three inconsistent and lying declarations. He swore that there was no tryst. He himself had not effected any insurances. The late William Milne had done it for his (the doctor's) benefit. Milne gave him the money for it. He was not even sure if he had the policies. There were three of them, he believed, and he did not know the conditions. He certainly did not know that he stood to benefit on the death of William McDonald. Anyway, he did not expect the sums to be paid out, because it was a case of suicide. He was convinced that it was suicide.

Whose pistol was it? (The bullet found in the brain fitted the pistol, incidentally.) Not William's, said the family. Not mine, said the doctor, cheerfully owning up to one broken pistol discovered at his home by the police. However, enquiries revealed that at the end of August that year he had bought a
second
pistol from a shop in Peterhead, paying 4s. 6d. for it. He had also bought two dozen percussion-caps. Confronted with the pistol which had killed William McDonald, the shop assistant could not swear that it was the one which he had sold to Dr Smith, whom he knew. He could only say that it was of the same class and of similar make. This was, of course, extremely lucky for the doctor, but, even so, he was unable to account for a second pistol which had come into his possession and his defence lawyers were to make no attempt to show what had become of it. This point speaks for itself.

Gunpowder was found at Dr Smith's house, but he quickly accounted for it by saying that he required it for use in an
ointment for a patient named Margaret Reid. It was by way of a repeat prescription. He had not opened the new packet. Gunpowder is composed of charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur. It must, presumably, have been in clinical use, because Dr Smith could otherwise have expected the derision and disbelief of his peers. Sulphur, certainly, was widely used for skin complaints, but it was immediately obtainable in non-explosive compound. It is difficult to justify the need for the other two components. (The treatment of haemorrhoids, perhaps!) Anyway, the previously dispensed pot of ointment, on retrieval from Margaret Reid, contained no gunpowder at all, no doubt to her relief. The packet of gunpowder had in fact been opened, and the string of it cut. The contents weighed only one and three quarter ounces, whereas two ounces had been sold to him. Dr Smith was well equal to this difficulty; the procurator fiscal must have burst the packet during his brutal search of the premises. Indeed the fiscal did confess that a small quantity, ‘not half a teaspoonful', had been spilt at the time, but the fiscal ‘made a pinch of it, and put it back'. Joseph Harkom, gunmaker of Edinburgh, deposed that it would not take more than the eighth part of a quarter of an ounce of gunpowder to fire the ball in question from the pistol found, but this was not entirely against Dr Smith who could say that the large quantity acquired by him demonstrated its medicinal use.

However, the actual process of acquisition of the packet proved to be an embarrassment to the doctor, because it evidenced a furtiveness and an urgency quite out of keeping with an innocent use. On the day
before
the death, he had gone over to New St Fergus and tried, without success, to buy some gunpowder for the purpose of shooting crows. In the end, he had bought the two ounces of the stuff from McLeod's shop in his own village, ‘a little before dark' on the exact day of the death, the Saturday evening when the shutters were still down and people lingered in the shops in the relaxed time before the Sabbath.

Alibi was the corner-stone of Dr Smith's defence, and he had
laid a winding trail, deliberately studded with clues as to time. Time was of the essence, because the distance from the doctor's house to the ditch in his field was only 500 yards, which, according to a land surveyor, could easily be walked in three minutes and forty-five seconds. The time of the pistol-shot was put by several witnesses at 7.35 or 7.36pm on the Saturday evening, the specificity easily achieved by the fact that the death had occurred so close to the village that the shot had been heard and the flash seen.

It will be remembered that William McDonald left the cartwright's shop at 7.30pm. According to Dr Smith, he himself had been at home from 7.00 until 7.35pm, when he made the first of several calls on patients, all situated in the main street, close to his house. Evidence showed, however, that there was a window between 7.15 and 7.50, when his movements were secret. It
was
tight, but the presumption is that he engineered a second tryst with his victim between 7.30 and 7.35pm and was back at a patient's house at 7.50. The clock that was slow was nearly his undoing.

To look at the evidence more closely: at 7.15pm, Elspeth McPherson was on her way to fetch water from a well, and she recognised Dr Smith near the cartwright's shop, ‘walking slowly towards Black Dikes Road'. Two other witnesses also placed him near the cartwright's at the same time. Dr Smith was proved to have spent one hour at the Free Church Manse, from ‘about' 6.00pm to 7.00pm, attending a sick servant. He had not been expected. Then, he said, he went straight home, where he brought in some dahlia roots from the garden. Next, he said, he left home at 7.35pm to visit a patient, Miss Isabella Anderson, and there he took up a candle to look at the clock, and drew Miss Anderson's attention to the time – 7.35pm. What he did not anticipate was that she would later swear that the clock was a quarter of an hour slow, and therefore he did not arrive until 7.50pm.

After about five minutes, during which he did not sit down,
(but she saw nothing untoward in his appearance or demeanour) he moved on to visit Mr and Mrs Pirie (he was the village farrier). Here he stayed only two minutes saying that he had to see Mrs Manson, who lived over the way, and would shortly return, which he did, after some ten minutes. (He was keeping on the move, to baffle enquiry.) Mr Pirie offered him a seat by the fire because it was raining heavily, but after first taking it, he rose and took one ‘far back at the side'.

Over at the Mansons', the doctor was not expected. Mrs Manson had given birth to a baby earlier that day, and was surprised to see him. He moved his chair behind her, and sat down without taking off his hat. She thought that he did not want her to look at him. He did not stay long and afterwards she said to her husband that she did not know what was the matter with Dr Smith – he kept wiping his face and she thought that his nose was bleeding.

While under arrest at Robertson's inn, before removal to Peterhead, the doctor made a determined attempt to pervert the course of justice, by instructing the landlady's daughter, in a whisper, to go to Miss Isabella Anderson (whose clock was slow) and ask her if she could remember that it was 7.35pm when he called on her. If she could remember that, ‘everything would be all right'. But, said Miss Anderson, she understood that she was wanted to say something different from the truth, and she would not be swayed.