Classic Scottish Murder Stories (2 page)

At first, after passing through the Castle woods, the foothills to Goatfell were green and mossy moor, the air sultry and buzzing with insects. The terrain was peppered with other holiday-makers (one of them was going at a tremendous rate, trying to break the speed record for the ascent) and seven men in all encountered the couple, one fair, the other dark, as they ascended steadily. The fair one self-contained in front said not a word, but the dark one was happy to exchange pleasantries, as was his disposition.

The climb to the summit at 2,866 feet is a stiff walk by well-defined tracks along the ridges, not a feat of mountaineering, but it is not recommended for those suffering from any degree of vertigo, nor for those sensitive beings who become depressed as they contemplate the insignificance of man against the jagged vastness of nature. The grey granite peaks and deep ravines can make some people long for home.

Surely it was just such a place as this that was in Tennyson's mind when he wrote in
The Passing of Arthur
how Sir Bedivere

‘swiftly strode from ridge to ridge'

and

‘The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang,

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.'

Rose and Laurie were last seen at the top around 6pm, standing on a big boulder, apparently discussing and pointing out a different, more difficult route for their descent. Exactly what came next, what was said and done, or done, or merely happened, could have been known only to a golden eagle as it soared.

Three hours later, a shepherd, David McKenzie, sighted Laurie, very tired and on his own, coming down the lonely route of Glen Sannox, but thought no more of it at the time. At about 10pm, Laurie ordered beer and whisky at the Corrie Hotel and said that he was going to walk the six miles to Brodick. He was innocent of bloodstains. The next morning at 11am, Mrs Walker discovered that her two lodgers had disappeared without payment. She had been bilked before, and did not bother to report her loss to the police.

Laurie had, in fact made himself scarce by the early boat, carrying his own yellowish-brown bag, and Rose's black one. Rose was supposed to be on holiday until the 18th, and therefore, at first, he was not missed. Two collie dogs belonging to a farmer named Davidson knew precisely where he lay, but their master did not believe them. When Rose should have alighted from his train in London, fit and hearty after his holiday adventures, his brother, Benjamin, who was there to meet him, was very worried indeed, and the investigation began.

Wet and misty weather defeated search-parties, until a dazzling sun broke through on Sunday August 4th, and a gathering of 200 searchers in divided groups set off at 9am. It was a fisherman from Corrie, Francis Logan, who made the discovery when he tracked an unpleasant smell to a large, granite boulder lying in a gully which led steeply down into Glen Sannox from the ridge of north Goatfell.
Coire-na-fuhren
– Gully of Fire – is the name of the desolate place where they found the remains of the clerk from Tooting. Wedged underneath the boulder and hidden by a man-made
constructure of 42 separate stones plugged with heather (for was not Laurie a skilled pattern-maker?) was stretched, face down, fully clothed, the poor, slim body of Edwin Robert Rose. All the pockets of his jacket were empty, and one of them was turned inside out. The skirt of the jacket was turned back over the head, which, with the face, was frightfully smashed, shattered. There was a fracture on the top of the left shoulder blade, and the highest vertebra was lying loose. Strewn higher up the gully without attempt at concealment, possibly in a line of descent, lay Rose's walking-stick, his knife, pencil, and a button and his waterproof, ripped in two parts. His tweed cap
had
been partly hidden, folded into four and flattened beneath a sizeable stone in the stream which trickled down the ravine.

‘John Annandale' was a wanted man. At its coarsest polarity, the question was ‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?' The permutations of the old tragedy are still hotly discussed. They go like this...

– The death was a pure accident: Rose fell and all the injuries were caused by that fall.

– Laurie pushed Rose down, and he died of the resultant injuries.

– Laurie pushed Rose down, and then finished him off with a stone.

– Laurie ascended Goatfell with the full, premeditated intention of killing Rose; i.e. he was a dangerous homicidal maniac, muttering, withdrawn and restless.

– Laurie, a known thief, ascended Goatfell with the full, premeditated intention of robbing Rose. Some violence to that end might have been in contemplation.

– In order to rob, and to escape, Laurie knew that only outright murder would succeed.

– At the summit, a sudden brainstorm overcame Laurie, a disturbed individual, and a town-rat, as a result of the dizzy surroundings, the exertion, and the toothache. Thus inflamed, he turned on Rose and felled him.

– It began as an accident. On the tricky descent, Rose slipped and hurt himself. Looking down at the fallen man in his finery, helpless, the De'il entered into Laurie's unstable mind, and he murdered for gain on sudden impulse.

– There was an argument or confrontation when they drew breath at the summit. Money could have been an issue. Sex, too. Suppose that Rose had made an approach to Laurie in the shared bed in which fate had placed them in such heady conditions of privacy. (Or vice versa.) Suppose that some covert sexual ambivalence lurked deep in Laurie, and confusing shame and recognition had overwhelmed him.

– If the death had been accidental, the concealment of the body was an act of panic, because Laurie feared that he would not be believed. The thefts from the body and its concealment were not necessarily a concomitant of murder.

And so the alternatives breed and multiply. Laurie gave them his full attention. As he escaped from the island, the intention, or effect, of the concealment of the body, whether an improvised endeavour, or pre-planned, was to allow ‘John Annandale' to disappear, and John Laurie to revert unsuspected to his previous existence.

As a matter of fact, the concealment of the body may be a sign that murder was not premeditated. If the old photographs of the scene of the crime are studied, it can be seen that the ground is singularly bare of cover, treeless, with no hope of digging into the granite. Only rocks and boulders were available. Anything like a new cairn would have been conspicuous. There were other walkers around, and someone might have looked down from the ridge and seen what Laurie was about. The concealment was cunningly executed, and lasted for longer than he could have hoped.

Recklessly, he had not returned immediately to his life as John Laurie in Glasgow, but had retraced his steps to his previous lodgings at Port Bannatyne, Rothesay, where he was known as ‘John Annandale', and coolly sat out the remains of
the holiday which he had interrupted for his stay in Arran. He strutted around wearing Rose's chocolate-brown striped tennis jacket and yachting cap.

James Gillon Aitken was the man who forged the link between Laurie and ‘Annandale', and Laurie should have feared him and avoided him at all costs. He was a grain merchant from 3 Lansdowne Place, Shawlands, Glasgow, and he knew Laurie under his real name from having met him in Rothesay the previous year. This year, he was actually on the
Ivanhoe
when Rose made the fatal connection with Laurie. He saw them together. And when, back at Rothesay, he met Laurie again, he could not help noticing that he was wearing a cap very similar to his new friend's. It was on the tip of his tongue to say so.

When they were both home in Glasgow, they met by chance in Hope Street, and Laurie tried to bluff it out. By that time (July 31st) the disappearance of Edwin Rose was in all the newspapers. ‘What do you know about the Arran mystery?' Aitken asked, blunt and suspicious. Was not Rose the name of the tourist he had intended to go to Brodick with?

Laurie ‘hummed and hawed'. The man a'missing, he lied like a schoolboy, ‘Must be a different Mr Rose from the Mr Rose who was with me, for he returned with me and then proceeded to Leeds.'

Persisting, Aitken ‘twitted' him about the yachting cap: ‘Whose cap were you wearing on yon Friday night?' ‘Surely you don't think I am a...' (He did not finish the sentence, but Aitken thought that the word hovering could have been ‘thief' not ‘murderer'). Laurie's luck had now evaporated and once the body had been found, he decamped and went on the run – always prone to flee, a great if ultimately unsuccessful escapee – increasingly losing his grip, rootless, but not over troubled with his conscience. Alerted by Aitken, the police followed his trail to Liverpool, where, at 10 Greek Street, he had abandoned some white shirts which had belonged to Rose and upon which,
with a rubber stamp, he had impressed ‘John W. Laurie'.

From Liverpool, he had written on August 10th to the
North British Daily Mail
an egregious letter, not at all insane, in which he sought, rather childishly, to give the impression that he was about to commit suicide. Should that fail, he was also rehearsing his defence. Written in a fair, board school hand, in the style of a Marie Corelli romance, salient passages read: ‘I rather smile when I read that my arrest is hourly expected. If things go as I have designed them, I will soon have arrived at that country from whose bourne no traveller returns...

As regards Mr Rose, poor fellow, no-one who knows me will believe for one moment that I had any complicity in his death... We went to the top of Goatfell, where I left him in the company of two men who came from Loch Ranza, and were going to Brodick.'

Some content of the letter can be taken as a proclamation of Laurie's heterosexuality. It can, too, if we wish, be taken to show anti-social conduct, morbid jealousy, with a paranoid flavour:

‘Three years ago I became very much attached to Miss –, a teacher, – School, and residing at –. My affection for this girl was at first returned ... until I discovered that she was encouraging the attentions of another man, –, teacher, –, who took every opportunity to depreciate me in her estimation. Since then I have been perfectly careless about what I did, and my one thought was how to punish her enough for the cruel wrong she had done me; and it was to watch her audacious behaviour that I went to Rothesay this and last year.'

Was it thoughts of the perfidious teacher which tormented Laurie's mind as he paced the lane behind Wooley's Tea Rooms? Was she lucky, perhaps not to have been subjected to some murderous assault by his hands – pushed from the pier to drown without pity? We may feel that the superior social class of the teacher, and the usurper, together with that of Edwin Rose, was a part of the darkness in Laurie's mind.

A second letter, this time to the editor of the
Glasgow Herald,
dated August 27th and posted in Aberdeen, suggested that, ‘Seemingly there was a motive for doing away with poor Rose; it was not to secure his valuables. Mr Rose was to all appearance worse off than myself; indeed, he assured me that he had spent so much on his tour that he had barely sufficient to last till he got home.'

Run to earth in a wood some three miles from Hamilton, he was found with his throat cut, but not too deeply. ‘I robbed the man, but I did not murder him' he said in an important admission. He was from now on willing to own up to the items which he had stolen from Mrs Walker's ‘lie-to', but it proved difficult to establish that he had taken items from Rose's pockets on the mountainside. Did he mean that Rose died by accident and he rifled the body there and then and hid it, or did he imply that others did the deed after he had left Rose intact?

The second alternative was certainly the force of his defence at the trial in Edinburgh which opened on November 8th, 1889. The Dean of Faculty argued for him that all of Rose's injuries were consistent with an accidental fall, and very likely, ‘at these Fair holidays, there would be plenty of people on the island who would steal from the body.' The Prosecution adhered to the plain theory of repeated blows by Laurie with a stone, followed by theft at the scene. Weighty and learned medical experts brought for either side effectively cancelled one another out, as was reflected in the verdict of Guilty, by a majority of one, seven voting for Not Proven. Hangman Berry would soon be required. An agitation, however, gained strength, based on the feeling that Laurie must have been insane to have performed such a gross, excessive and inappropriate series of acts. A petition pleaded that there was insanity in Laurie's family and that he himself had a significant history. This had not been an issue at the trial, where the defence was a classic criminal's fight against circumstantial evidence. A visiting lunacy commission was convened, and the convicted man was pronounced insane.

He was very, very lucky. An available statistic for English crime shows that in 1893, of the 256 prisoners sentenced to death for murder in the previous nine years, only eight were committed to Broadmoor as insane, 145 were hanged, one was pardoned and 102 were sent to penal servitude.

Somewhere in official records the alientists' report must lie. It is difficult to conceive that Laurie was suffering from ‘mania', as they called schizophrenia in those days. Perhaps they found his illness to be ‘meloncholia': there may have been previous suicide attempts. His obsession about the teacher could have been accounted a ‘monomania'. Or perhaps the diagnosis was ‘moral insanity', an abandoned term closest to our ‘psychopathy', defined by Dr JC Pritchard (1786-1848) as ‘Madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral disposition and natural impulses without any remarkable disorder or defect in the intellect... ‘

The death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and Laurie was held at Perth Penitentiary, and then Peterhead. He escaped in thick fog in 1893, but was quickly caught by a warder on a bicycle. In 1910, he was transferred to Perth Criminal Asylum, which was a department of Perth Penitentiary, not a separate asylum. He was by now suffering from progressive dementia, i.e. some type of deteriorating process, not insanity. There he died on October 5th 1930, aged 69. It was said that he had enquired about confessing before he was respited, but as Dr Forbes Winslow, the celebrated English alienist who was about at that time, and who would undoubtedly have found him insane, said in another context, ‘Of course, it was only to be expected that after Mrs Pearcey's death [by judicial hanging, after murdering her lover's wife and baby] a full confession would be circulated far and wide. This is always done to justify carrying out the last operation of the law'.