Classic Scottish Murder Stories (25 page)

Five drinking days passed. Bury told his friends in Patterson's that his poor wife was ill. Her name cropped up in conversation quite naturally. On Sunday the 10th, he went to see David Walker, the house-painter, and found him still in bed at noon. They chatted of this and that, and Bury picked up his friend's copy of the
People s Journal
and read out for interest a paragraph about an elopement which had ended in suicide. Walker then said, ‘Look and see if there is anything about Jack the Ripper, you that knows the place.' Bury started and threw the newspaper down. Later that day, as if activated by his friend's chance remark, Bury walked into the Central Police Office in Bell Street and asked to see the officer in charge, as he had some important information. Lieutenant Parr took him
into a side-room and as soon as they entered, Bury is said to have blurted out, either ‘I'm Jack the Ripper!' or ‘I'm a Jack the Ripper!' Never in crime could the disputed indefinite article have been of such importance. Parr failed to make any contemporaneous note but there seems to be no strong reason to repudiate the report that Bury did invoke Jack the Ripper, especially, as we shall see, in the light of a certain message on a wall, unless, to be very cautious,
that
is apocryphal.

Bury was excited, agitated and rambled as he told his story that his wife had committed suicide and he had then, like Jack the Ripper, or in his persona as the real Jack the Ripper (he did not define further) committed Ripper-ish atrocities upon her dead body. In finer detail, he went to his bed drunk, he said, and when he woke up on the following morning, he found his wife of less than a year lying dead on the floor with a rope around her neck. Then, and he could offer no explanation, it was inexplicable, he must have been out of his mind, he had no idea what came over him, he fell on her and mutilated her body with a knife. She was dead, she was dead, he hadn't killed her and now he wanted to get it all off his conscience. The body was still there in his room – it was terrible – he had squeezed it into his wooden travelling box. He seemed surprised when he was detained.

Lieutenant David Lamb, head of CID, proceeded to Princes Street, incredulous, no doubt, but bound to make investigation. The large wooden box loomed in the empty back room. Two boards on the top were loose. He prised them open and saw within a layer of bedclothes. Underneath were female legs and feet. The police surgeon, Dr Templeman, was called out urgently, and he found that the naked body was lying on its back, doubled up. The legs were folded and the right leg was broken. There were a large number of cuts and slashes across the abdomen and one at least was very deep because there was an extrusion of viscera. The neck was bruised and a piece of ‘cord', with hair caught in it, was found in the room and also a
bloodstained knife, with little attempt at concealment. Small fragments of what seemed to be burned cloth (never explained) were recovered from ashes in the grate.

The remains of Ellen Bury were removed to the mortuary for post-mortem, at which, quite probably photographs, now long since lost, were taken. We come now, as promised, to the writing on the wall, which still brings with it a sort of resonance of terror if we pause to think about it. Euan MacPherson has the exact location: ‘There was a back entrance to the tenement block which comprised a stairway and an old door, and on that door Lieutenant Lamb found the words JACK THE RIPPER IS AT THE BACK OF THIS DOOR. At the turn of the stair, (also?) in chalk, was a further message JACK THE RIPPER IS IN THIS SELLAR.

Now, either William Bury wrote these words, or someone else did so. It is well known that Jack the Ripper graffiti appeared all over the kingdom and beyond. However, the coincidence that some daft scribbler chose the exact spot where a rippering had been done or was to be done (for we do not know how long the writing had been there) is hard to swallow. Bury
could
read and write. The strongest possibility is that he wrote the words himself, and about himself, as a perceived other person, in a very frightening, insane outburst. There is no point in saying that it is a hoax on his part, when a real woman lay dead and mutilated behind the old dark door. It
is
possible that, although his befuddled mind had not worked it out properly, he was trying to suggest that Jack the Ripper, not he, had committed the murder.

On March 28th 1889, William Henry Bury was put up at the Dundee Circuit Court before Lord Young. He pleaded Not Guilty, still adhering to his ludicrous story of his wife's suicide. Insanity was not pleaded and it would have been a hopeless endeavour in that climate. The Crown produced a peculiar forgery, the work of the accused, which purported to be a contract between him and Malcolm Ogilvy and Co., merchants
of Dundee, its terms stating that Bury was to be employed for seven years at £2 per week, and his wife, if she so wished, for £1 per week. It is not divulged for whose eyes this paper was intended.

Dr Templeman gave his version of the sequence of the attack on Ellen Bury. A blow on the side of the head, as evidenced by bruising, was severe enough to have caused a loss of consciousness. She was stabbed and mutilated
before
dying from strangulation by the rope. For the defence, two doctors argued that the strangulation was of a suicidal nature and that the wounds had been inflicted
after
death. One hapless doctor, named Kinnear, admitted during cross-examination that he was of only five months' qualification, and had never seen or heard of a case of suicide by strangulation!
(Taylor:
‘This method of suicide must be regarded as of rare occurrence, but there is no doubt that it is quite possible to strangle oneself by means of a ligature.')

The jury convicted unanimously, but added an unexpected recommendation to mercy. Lord Young enquired the grounds, wondering, perhaps, if they agonised about Bury's mental state, and the foreman, (flustered, perhaps) replied that it was due to the conflicting medical evidence. Fierce, now, the judge refused to accept the rider, and sent the jury back until they returned with a plain verdict of Guilty. It was that same Reverend Gough, who had turned him away, who chose, or was chosen, to minister to Bury in the condemned cell. A reprieve failed, and Bury wept for hours. On the appointed day, he rose at 5.00am, ate his breakfast, and lit a cigarette. ‘This is my last morning on earth,' he addressed a warder. ‘I freely forgive all who gave false evidence against me.' The Reverend Gough, according to the newspapers, revealed, as he left the prison after the execution, on April 24th 1889, that Bury had left a written confession in which he admitted that he had killed his wife and then mutilated her body. He was not going to admit to mutilating her first, was he?

It is stated in the
Scots Black Kalendar
that Bury made a detailed confession and it or a supplementary document (it is not clear which) was forwarded to the Home Office, and that it contained some startling revelations on the Whitechapel murders, never made public. Additionally, ‘He was well known in the East End of London, and several of his landlords gave him a bad character, while bloodstains were found in his rooms.' How like a much more famous ‘Lodger' of bad character, Dr Forbes Winslow's candidate for Jack the Ripper, the nocturnal G Wentworth Bell Smith, given to hanging his bloodstained shirts on the towel-horse!

Although told about the crime, Scotland Yard, inundated with information about Jack the Ripper suspects, showed no interest, and no officer travelled to Dundee to interview William Bury. It had been suggested in the
New York Times
of February 12 th 1889, that Bury was a likely Ripper who had murdered his wife because she suspected his identity. Donald Fraser (who does not believe that Bury was Jack the Ripper) finds that neither the ‘confession' nor the ‘writing on the wall' were mentioned at the trial.

Theoretically, there is no reason why Jack the Ripper, if a married man, supposing that he had not lost the taste for slaughter, left the country, committed suicide, or been placed in an asylum, should not have turned on his own wife in his own home. Killing Mary Jane Kelly in her room at Miller's Court might not have been the apogee of his animus against women. The difference in
modus operandi
(for the real Ripper, having, it is thought, strangled his victim, always cut the throat) could be explained along the lines that you would approach your unsuspecting (or even suspecting) wife in a different way from a prostitute in a dark alley. But it still does not feel right.

W
hen my husband, Richard, (delving into the rows of books which spread like the rhizomorphs of the dreaded honey fungus along the corridors of our house) first drew my attention to the Farnario case – as appeared to be the spelling of the name – I was surprised to find that there was no single book devoted to so interesting and promising a mystery. I also could not understand why it was not better known outside Scotland.

The locus was the island of Iona (or Icolmkill) in the Inner Hebrides, and I remembered seeing a television programme which celebrated its numinous, and, yes, luminous atmosphere, a sacred place to which the spiritually seeking young, especially, are drawn, and where some older in-comers have settled, unable to leave, rooted in a sense of purity and meaning in life.

My first source was Alisdair Marshall's
Scottish Murder Stories.
On the front cover, in strong black and white, there is a drawing of a young woman lying dead on a moor. Her hair streams back on-end from her brow and her face is frozen in a mask of fear. Her dark robe is decorated with pentagrams and planets. One hand is clenched in a death rigor, the other grips a long-bladed knife. In the background, a couple of crofters and a collie dog, with sticks for searching, are walking away towards a level bay and seagulls. They have not yet found her.

The facts which I gleaned from Alisdair Marshall's splendid, colourful essay, entitled
Psychic Murder?,
were that in the autumn of 1929 (his 1928 must, I think, be a misprint) an eccentric woman, named Norah Emily Farnario, came to Iona,
where she boarded on a croft. The island was at that time exceptionally isolated, two days' travelling from Glasgow, with no roads, electricity, running water, daily papers, radio or telephone, but she wanted peace and serenity. Her home was in London, she was unmarried, aged 33, the daughter of an Italian academic and an English gentlewoman. In her appearance, she was singular and exotic, deliberately not in fashion, her hair worn in two long plaits, and her clothing Bohemian, arty-crafty, hand-woven in vivid dyes. Hair was raven-black and eyes were deep and intense.

On Iona she was thought (at first, perhaps) to spend most of her time writing poetry, but in London she had been involved in spiritualism, theosophy, thought-reading and faith healing. More importantly, she had been a member of the Alpha and Omega occult group, and had been an associate of Mrs Mathers, medium and sister of the philosopher, Henri Bergson. Samuel Liddell Mathers, husband of Mrs Mathers, was a leading light of another group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Her hosts on the croft naturally found her somewhat strange. She spoke of visions, spiritual healing and messages from the spirit world. At night she kept two oil lamps alight in her room, but they did not prevent the ornate silver jewellery which she wore all the time from mysteriously turning black. She liked to roam the island on her own and her favourite hidden place was a marshy spot surrounded by steep rocks, thought to be the site of a pre-Christian village. Here, with the spirits of the dead, she spent many lonely hours, apparently impervious to the chills of autumn.

As the weeks went by, her behaviour changed insidiously, with agitation, anxiety, and disjointed, rapid speech, sometimes incoherent. She told her hosts not to be alarmed if she went into a trance, even if it lasted for as long as a week. She was not to be disturbed if that should happen and they were on no account to call a doctor. Not an early riser, a creature of the night, one morning she put in an appearance just before dawn and the
crofters noticed the unusual pallor of her face and the way in which her hair, not plaited, lay loose in disarray on her shoulders.

Hysterically, she told them that she had to leave the island immediately. Rambling, she spoke of a rudderless ship that went across the sky. Although they explained carefully to her that it was quite impossible to leave Iona because it was Sunday and the ferry did not run on the Sabbath, she packed up all her belongings in a great hurry and made her way to the landing place. There she stood, a forlorn figure, surrounded by her baggage, gazing out across the Sound towards Mull as if willing a boat – any boat – to appear and take her off. None came and she dragged herself back to the croft, a picture of dejection, and locked herself in her room. (That was when, perhaps, with hindsight, they should have sent for a doctor.)

After a few hours, she emerged, and she seemed to have aged by years, but to have become resigned, passive. She talked quite normally, and perhaps she ate something before going off to bed, but when they knocked at her door the next morning, they found that she had vanished. Whether her bed showed that she had slept at all is not recorded, but her clothing and jewellery were in a neat pile at the bedside. The crofters raised the alarm when she had not returned by noon, and the islanders joined in a search until the light failed early in the evening. (The island covers about 2,000 acres and is rocky on the west coast, which explains the difficulty. Norah's special hideaway was presumably the first place they went to, but she was not there.)

The night was apparently bitterly cold and the frosted island was bathed in moonlight. At dawn, the search party was out again with sticks and dogs and it was a collie that found her. It barked until they drew close and its hackles must have bristled. She was two miles from the village (which may mean two miles from the croft where she lodged) in a desolate area of peat-bogs. Her body lay spread-eagled on the heather, naked except for a long black cloak with occult insignia, and a black-tarnished
silver chain around her neck. Her face was frozen in a rictus of terror. It looked as if she had been running away from something, because the skin of her toes and the balls of her feet were torn, but her heels were unhurt. A long, steel knife was clenched in her hand, and her fingers had to be prised open to take it away. Underneath her body they found the rough outline of a cross gouged out in the turf by the knife. Later, there were reports of blue lights in the area, and there were rumours of a man in a cloak and a sighting of the dead woman on the day when she disappeared.