Classic Scottish Murder Stories (3 page)

T
he victim in the Broughty Ferry case was universally described as an elderly, rich, eccentric recluse. This is a stereotype. The author is no fierce feminist, but has always thought that contemporary writers diminished Miss Jean Milne's posthumous dignity. Let us look at each element of the labelling in turn. Her age was 65, not ancient, and William Roughead, who should have known better and himself lived to a good old, productive age, would persist in calling her a ‘little frail old woman'. This was no wispy, gossamer person, but sprightly, and she lived with hope.

Rich she certainly was, on her income of £1,000 per year in 1912. Her main expense, or extravagance, was to spend months at a time on holiday in London hotels. She also bought clothes and she gave unknown sums to charity. Her money came to her upon the death, nine years previously, of her brother, who was a tobacco manufacturer of Dundee. She had lived on, alone, in the substantial house which they had shared.

Now we come to the eremitical element. No woman who had really given up the world would regularly go away on sprees to the capital, staying at smartish hotels such as the Bonnington and the Strand Palace. No real hermit is seen every Sunday on show in church, attends Home Mission meetings, and tours the Highlands. Hermits do not have telephones. It is surprising, moreover, how many people came forward with gossip and called themselves friends of a woman supposedly so isolated.

Finally, and the last two elements merge, she was stamped
with the seal of eccentricity. If only we knew more of her private history, there could be a solid explanation of her circumstances. She might always have been a little different. Whatever the hereditary factors, past events, old frustrations or sadnesses, she was still interested, very interested, in the company of men.

Her choice of living without companion or servant was eccentric. This must be conceded. There were ample funds for a married couple to be engaged to keep her large Victorian property, Elmgrove House, and its two-acre garden in a decent state of equilibrium, although, as we now recognise, the most respectable-seeming butler can become seized with jealous rapacity. There is a certain type of religious woman who trusts that God will watch over her, and closes her mind to the evil in the world. Miss Milne may very well have been of this disposition. It is not fearlessness, but innocence.

Perhaps, too, she reasoned that the city was dangerous, and her decorous suburb was safe. She could hardly have been unaware of the fate of Miss Marion Gilchrist, aged 82, who had been murdered in her own home in Glasgow in 1908, in spite of impressive security apparata and a living-in servant. The truth is that both women were magnets to malefactors. A dog would have been a good idea. Miss Gilchrist's red Irish terrier would have made her killer think twice when the moment came, but he had been poisoned.

The most eccentric element of Miss Milne's life-style must be her neglect of the house. No doubt she calculated that it would see her out, and would survive, as indeed it did, even if most of the 14 rooms were never used nor touched. She had carved out for herself a capsule of one bedroom upstairs, one living-room downstairs, and a kitchen and bathroom. Did she sometimes wander those closed and cobwebbed rooms with candle in hand in the mode of Miss Faversham? One feels that she would have known her Dickens and her Scott, but her favourite reading was of the devotional kind. Candlelight flickered as she read with undrawn blinds late into the evening, for it was a personal
quirk that she used gas only for cooking and heating. Did she look under the bed at night, and lock the bedroom door?

She worried more about the garden than the housework, employing jobbing gardeners from time to time, and she went out with rake and trowel herself, but it was an impossible task, and a wilderness had overtaken her. She kept remarkably cheerful, and this, then, was the setting for the murder of Miss Jean Milne, which is still unsolved, a mystery left to futurity in a state of muddlement. Who was the gentleman friend who came to supper? And who was the woman seen at the upper window when Miss Milne lay dead below?

During that last year of 1912, something ‘kittenish' had been observed in her behaviour. She had spent four months at the Strand Palace from April 9th to August 2nd, and while there, as she indiscreetly told her occasional gardener, John Wood, she had met a ‘German gentleman', a tea-planter. A woman friend found her positively coquettish when she confided that she had met a gentleman who had taken her about and been so very kind to her. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility, she hinted, that she was going to acquire a companion for life.

She expected a letter from him, and it appears that he travelled up to see her, because at 5.30pm on September 19th, John Wood who was ‘shutting up the house' and about to leave, admitted a visitor bearing all the hallmarks of being the German tea-planter. ‘You have come!' Miss Milne is said to have cried, skipping along the passage ‘like a lassie' to greet him. ‘I expected you earlier.' Imagine the gossip which will have burned around that genteel neighbourhood!

The following day, she left Broughty Ferry for Glasgow, where she embarked in the
Chevalier
for a cruise around the coast to Inverness. On the return journey, someone recognised her on board the Caledonian Canal steamer in the company of a tall, handsome man, with whom she left the boat at Fort Augustus. By September 26th, she was home again, resuming her normal routine.

John Wood later supplied a detailed description of the expected visitor. He was about 40 years old, some five feet eight or nine inches in height, stoutish and well-made, with fair hair and a slight fair moustache, fresh complexion, and a cheery expression. He was elaborately dressed in a dark morning-coat, deep cut waistcoat and dark trousers, and the whole topped somewhat incongruously with a soft, round tweed hat. He carried a cane to complete the gentlemanly effect. The voice that issued was deep and guttural. Who could reasonably doubt that this pyknic figure was the German tea-planter in person?

We may contemplate this apparition with some anxiety. What were his intentions? Miss Milne obviously felt that the kindly attentions which he had paid to her were romantic. It would be cruel to mock her. William Roughead refers to her misfortunately as ‘in her new avatar [incarnation] of an antique charmer'. This might have been side-splitting at the time, but now seems like a disservice to the ‘venerable anchorite of Broughty Ferry'.

Although, of course, such things do happen, the age-gap of 25 years would appear to be too extreme. Why would he have approached this singularly unprotected lady in the public rooms of a hotel? What could she have known reliably of his background? Suppose that all were platonic, even if she did not view it thus: a mere holiday friendship, a lonely foreigner, a genuine desire to help so vulnerable a creature and a shared liking of devotional literature? Yet he does not sound like a man who would lack company.

It is very difficult to dismiss the suspicion that the real interest of this urbane man of the world lay in Miss Milne's wealth. It is not necessary to suggest that he was an actual con-man – although he might have been. Down on his luck, perhaps, he might have spotted a glint of the seven valuable rings which she sported on her fingers when dressed up, or even when tending her garden. They were a token of her real status in life, however passée the figure that she cut, and he might have seen
the light of hope. Miss Milne, meanwhile, was experiencing a different kind of hope.

Towards the middle of October, she ordered some wine and whisky from a local merchant, specifying that they should be of the same quality as her brother used to get. ‘I am expecting a gentleman friend to dinner', she told him proudly. The sadness of this incident nearly speaks for itself. And then, the last time that she was seen alive was on Tuesday October 15th, scuttling about her business in Dundee and Broughty Ferry. The previous Sunday, she had attended St Andrew's United Free Church, and on Monday 14th she had been at a Home Mission meeting in Dundee. After her shopping expedition on that Tuesday, she was missed, her absences remarked, but not so acutely that anyone felt inspired to take action until the postman, for the usual obvious reasons, went to the police on Saturday November 2nd.

On Wednesday October 16th, after sunset, David Kinnear, an elder of the church had called at Elmgrove with her Communion card for the following Sunday, but found the house in darkness without the glow of candlelight. He knocked and rang repeatedly but there was no response and he went away. No Miss Milne came to church on the Sunday. On Friday October 18th, a telephone operator tried with admirable old-fashioned persistence to put a trunk call through to Elmgrove from London.

On Monday morning, October 21st, the mysterious woman at the window appeared. Alexander Troup saw her. He had been a gardener at Elmgrove in the days when Miss Milne's brother was alive, but appeared now (should one say in his avatar) as collector for the Broughty Benevolent Trust. When he came to tell his tale, he had not, apparently mistaken the day, because his statement was corroborated as to his being despatched then to Elmgrove. As he approached the house, he saw at an upper window, partly hidden by the curtain, a woman whom he identified as Miss Milne. Although he rang the front-door
bell twice, there was no reply. The cover of the lock was down, and when he returned in the afternoon, it was up. Again, no-one opened the door, and the windows were blank. He went away.

Troup's sighting cannot be taken at its face-value, but still needs to be examined. As an officer entrusted with funds, it is not likely that he was a liar, an alcoholic, or otherwise of confused mental state. The woman's shape was not a clinical hallucination. It could have been a ghost – of Miss Milne, or of someone else. How good was Troup's eyesight? It could have been a trick of light, an honest mistake, the more so since he expected to see Miss Milne (perhaps she had often peered down at him when he called) or was looking especially closely for her, having heard that she had not recently been seen around. If he saw a real woman, it was not Miss Milne.

On Sunday morning, November 3rd 1912, when Miss Milne should have been preparing for church, the police approached the cold and silent house and forced an entry through the locked front door. Other exits and windows were long disused and ‘hermetically sealed'. A joiner broke a window-pane in the kitchen, opened the catch, climbed in, and in some manner breached the front-door lock. He will have been the first person to see Miss Milne's body, which lay, fully dressed, in the hall, at the foot of the stairs.

This was no hermit's natural end. There had been a violent struggle. On the third step of the stairs there was a large splash of blood, and more on the railings and wall, with some bloodstained hairs adhering. Several wounds to the head were the apparent cause of death, and death's instrument lay in blood beside the body: the same poker which Miss Milne had often flourished as she chased away the apple-scrumping boys who trespassed into her wilderness. Therefore, this was the weapon which she would have taken up if the occasion should have arisen – if she had time and opportunity. The force of the attack had actually broken the poker. It was about 13 inches long,
made of ordinary cast-metal, with a round head. The break was new because it had broken about half an inch from the head, and both parts bore stains of blood.

Imbued with some vestige of super-ego, unless the intention was concealment, the assailant had partly covered the body with a sheet. The glass door in the hall had been blocked out by tying the curtains in a certain way with a length of common (gardening?) twine. All the murderer's tools were improvisations, not imported as by malice, but borrowed from the immediate domestic environment. Miss Milne was surely still alive when her ankles were tightly bound together with a curtain-cord. The telephone wire had been cut. Professional criminals did that, but not generally with a pair of garden shears. These lay, still
in situ,
in the hall accompanied by a rake and a hoe. She had not necessarily been gardening. With Miss Milne all things were possible, and she might have kept her tools in the hall as a matter of course. The improviser had not stooped to wrench from the fingers of the dead or dying woman those seven precious rings which now ornamented the hands of a corpse. Her gold watch and chain lay openly on the toilet-table in the bedroom, and her silver was untouched. The sum of £17 in gold was found in a purse or handbag in a drawer. She had drawn £20 in gold from her bank at the end of September, and this was assumed to be the balance.

The
Mary Celeste
scene in the living or dining-room was a clue in itself. The table was laid for high tea for two people, with a two-penny meat pie as its centre-piece. This must have been at that time a handsome pork-pie, and not so miserly as it sounds, especially since Miss Milne had not stinted on the liquid refreshments. All fingerprints were soon lost, as the police flailed about in their unsophisticated search.

A post-mortem was very soon carried out. It disclosed that the body was marked all over with many blows inflicted by a heavy instrument such as the poker. Death was caused by cerebral haemorrhage due to blows to the head which, although
numerous, were relatively slight, no-one injury would have killed: it was the totality, and the shock, which ended the life of Miss Jean Milne, Undigested food found in the stomach indicated that she had not long survived the attack.

The hall at Elmgrove in November must have been cold, with the body lying very possibly on tiles, and therefore better preserved than in a warmer environment. Any miscalculation by those performing the post-mortem would have, notionally, put the real date of death further back in time, and would not favour Troup's sighting, which was too recent.

On Monday November 4th, Detective Lieutenant Trench, of the Glasgow City Police was called in for his known expertise in difficult cases. The resemblance to the case of Miss Gilchrist, in which he was later to play an important part, was not lost on him. The Chief Constable of Broughty Ferry, Howard Sempill, escorted him to Elmgrove, where he made some new findings. The local force could hardly have missed the bloodstained towel lying near the kitchen sink, positively saturated with DNA – perhaps some from the killer – if these things had been known, but Trench also found the imprint of three fingers on a piece of paper in the same area. Sent off to New Scotland Yard, (where the Fingerprint Branch had been set up in 1901) they proved to be too blurred to be of any use.