Classic Scottish Murder Stories (46 page)

As they were about to leave, unwillingly, Helen invited Jean to view the corpse. She did so, gladly, but George Thom refused, in the grip, no doubt, of the host of superstitions attendant on the encounter between dead victim and hypocritical murderer, and Jean chose that moment to tell him, ‘Nelly [Helen] says my brother was poisoned.' That were possible, said George Thom, as poison might have got in the
burn from the toads or the puddocks (frogs). Not so, was Helen's trump-card: the pottage was made with milk, not water from the burn. Thom's preposition was less fantastic than it now appears. Frogs are not poisonous, but there is some poison in toads, and in 1821 many beliefs from folk-lore still made the harmless creature an object of fear and rendered it liable to persecution, like the witch with which it was identified. In medieval times, bandits sometimes forced a toad into the mouth of a hapless traveller.

Let Frank Buckland, the great Victorian naturalist, describe the poison of toads: ‘Like the lizards, they have glands in their skin, which secrete a white highly-acid fluid, and just behind the head are seen two eminences like split beans: if these be pressed, this acid fluid will come out – only let the operator mind that it does not get into his eyes, for it generally comes out with a jet. There are also other glands dispersed throughout the skin. A dog will never take a toad in his mouth, and the reason is that this glandular secretion burns his tongue and lips...'

Anyway, was Thom's parting-shot, he, too, had been taken very ill and had lain three days in bed, all swollen. Such a terrible crime was bound to come out, however, and on the night of August 31st, George and Jean Thom were both apprehended as they slept. Jean was discharged after she had made an exculpatory statement. In September, Thom was tried at the Circuit Court. Mr Barton, druggist in Aberdeen, notably stated that on about August 17th, a man who resembled the prisoner in the dock came to his shop to buy arsenic for rats, but as he did not know him, he actually refused to serve him – a refreshing change from all those other gung-ho suppliers of the past. The actual source of the poison was not traced. We may safely assume that Thom tipped the whole lot – perhaps one ounce – into the salt. It was not recorded that the salt was analysed, and the reason for that is that everyone, including the jury, believed that Thom had
doctored the pottage, not the salt. It was not Gntil he confessed, after the verdict of Guilty by a majority, that it became known that the salt had been the true medium. After sentence of death had been passed upon him, he carelessly brushed his hat with a steady hand and remarked to members of the bar, ‘Gentlemen, I am as innocent as any of you sitting here.'

Once he learnt that there was to be no reprieve, his attitude changed, and he signed a document which entirely exonerated his wife. Gossip flowed around the district: a man named Thomas Gill had been found dead in the harbour at Aberdeen, in November, 1817, and an attempt was now made to link him to the murder. He denied it, and claimed that he had been ill in bed at the time. When his last Sunday on earth came round, they let his sons and a daughter visit him. As one of his sons was embracing him in an agony of grief, he slipped a note into his hand, begging him to sneak in some poison so that he could die before the hangman came. The son went home, shocked by the idea of suicide, and wrote him a letter of refusal. The authorities were told, and from then on the condemned man was always attended by two warders.

He was too weak to stand at the scaffold, a quavering, quivering figure in his shroud, before they hanged him on November 16th, 1821. A part of the 103rd Psalm was sung -'The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy ...' The Aberdeenshire Militia escorted his body to the college for dissection by Drs Skene and Ewing. The corpse was subjected to a series of galvanic experiments which were written up in a scientific journal. Better the wry-necked body of a hanged man than a live animal. By 1821, research was moving on to the nervous system, but, by a curious irony, Luigi Galvani (1737-98) whose whole research was directed towards ascertaining the relation of animal muscle to electricity, had been experimenting on frogs.

T
he 11.45 tram from Buckhaven to East Wemyss swayed and rattled along the road near the coast. Two passengers on that cold, February morning were drawn together by fate, or fell design. The speculation matters, because the robbery and murder that were to come to pass, quite soon now, were either most cunningly premeditated, or were the acts of wild opportunism and impulse. The killer did not deny what he did, but would say only that, ‘I did not know what I was doing. My head was a blank.'

Was Alexander Edmonstone a stranger to his victim, Michael Brown, or, both living in the Fifeshire village of East Wemyss, were they acquainted? Evidence does not seem to have been led that they knew each other. Their backgrounds were different and there was a significant age gap. Michael Swinton Brown, 15 rising 16, was a very nice-looking boy with a future, the much prized son of a stonemason, improving himself as a fledgling in the world of commerce. He worked as an apprentice clerk for Messrs G&J Johnston, linen manufacturers, whose dark, satanic mills lay along the seashore at East Wemyss.

The firm banked inconveniently at the branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland which was situated a mile or so away at the neighbouring fishing village of Buckhaven. It was Michael Brown's important duty every Friday to take the tram to the bank and return with the firm's wages in cash, amounting this morning to £85, carried in a brown leather bag which, no
doubt, proclaimed exactly what it was – a money bag. Alone, the unprotected pseudo-adult made the regular journey, with no variation. It must have been common knowledge, but East Wemyss was a quiet, respectable, tight-knit mining community, unacquainted with the worst type of crime.

Alexander Edmonstone's family were incomers, having moved from Edinburgh to their home at the east end of the village in 1902. He was a young man of 23, a miner or carter, with a tendency to be unemployed. His real interest was motor cars, and he also liked nice clothes, but his problem in life was that he was chronically pecuniarily embarrassed. He had no criminal form whatsoever. Of late, he had not been feeling particularly well. The headaches were killing him.

The date of doom was Friday, February 19th, 1909. Edmonstone behaved unusually that morning. Rising early, he seemed excited, and announced that he was going to try to get a job on the steamers plying between Methil and Hamburg, and might not be back. He took with him a few belongings, which would seem to indicate that he had a bag of some kind with him, but none was ever mentioned, and left home at 10.30am. Methil Dock was about one mile up the coast from Buckhaven and theoretically he could have gone there first by tram and been quickly turned away by the shipping company, but by 11.30am he was undoubtedly in Buckhaven, standing at the corner opposite the Royal Bank of Scotland. Henry Kildair, a Buckhaven miner, knew Edmonstone, and, spotting him there, had a brief conversation with him. The theory was that he was loitering in order to catch Michael Brown as he left the bank, but since Buckhaven was a small place, he could have been doing what unemployed young men do naturally in the town centre.

Brown's day, so far, had been uneventful. He had left his home in Parkhill Terrace, Station Road – where the trams ran past his door – and walked down School Wynd to the factory. Later, he caught the tram and was in Buckhaven at about
11.20am, leaving the bank with his heavy bag at 11.30am ... On the corner, Edmonstone suddenly stopped talking to Kildair, saying that he was going to catch the tram home. James Goldie recognized Brown and Edmonstone,
walking along the tramlines together
towards Muiredge stopping place. Peter Adamson saw Brown board the tramcar at 11.45am, ‘looking solemn' and holding a brown leather bag tightly, followed by Edmonstone.

Alex Chalmers, the tram conductor, said that a boy sat next to a man in his early 20s. This is an ambiguous statement. Was there an element of choice? Who joined whom? Brown was a polite boy. The tram might not have been crowded, because when the aforesaid Adamson alighted at the Rosie pit in East Wemyss, only three passengers were left – Brown, Edmonstone, and a young girl. Sitting together, the presumption is that words were exchanged, and the subject of the brown leather bag might have been raised by either party.

The conductor said that the boy and the man got off the tram at Station Road at the top of School Wynd at exactly 11.54am. The boy left first, the man following close behind. Was Brown trying to shake him off? Was he becoming a nuisance, his conversation an embarrassment in some way? Or was Brown feeling suspicious, frightened, even? If he had been really apprehensive, he could have gone straight to his home in Station Road, instead of heading for the factory. Edmonstone was going in the right direction for
his
home, which would have been reassuring. Several others saw the pair going fast down the Wynd, one behind the other, Brown always in front. George Black actually exchanged greetings in the vernacular with Edmonstone. As they proceeded, it was afterwards postulated that the older man was hanging back in order not to be seen with the boy. It was a busy time of day and School Wynd was well used. The pair do not seem to have been talking to each other. The last sighting was by Mrs Alice Warrender, who watched them briefly from her kitchen
window at her house in School Wynd at 12 o'clock. She knew Michael.

At the end of the Wynd, there was a men's public lavatory, totally roofless, entered through a narrow, two feet seven inch open gap in the continuous wall of the lane. Inside, there was a small yard with the urinal to the right, running parallel to the outside wall, and one doored cubicle, also open to the sky, to the back, on the left. It was most definitely not in a hidden or even secluded place, with East Wemyss school very close, on the opposite side of the thoroughfare. Mrs Warrender was unlucky enough to have a view of the public convenience from her window. She stopped watching Brown and Edmonstone when they were feet away from the ugly little building, but she had noticed that the boy was on the inside of the Wynd, nearest to the urinal.

Those were unsuspicious days and there was no whisper of homosexuality attached to the proceedings at that time, as far as is known. This was scarcely an opportunity for an assignation, since Brown was due back at the factory with the wages at midday and was expected home for dinner at 12.30pm. He was always a good boy. Edmonstone could have calculated that the latrine was the last available place for him to make his strike, although he was taking the risk of being discovered in felonious act,
or
the gap in the wall suddenly presented itself as an unplanned expedient.

There were no witnesses to what happened next. Most likely, Edmonstone pushed the boy through the entrance; or Brown wanted to use the lavatory and Edmonstone followed him in; or Brown went in of his own volition in the hope that Edmonstone would walk on and leave him alone; or both agreed to use the lavatory in a friendly, masculine manner. Once inside, the man attacked the boy fiercely, and he resisted, but had no chance. Edmonstone knew that he had been seen repeatedly with Brown that morning, and he battered him to death. It is most unsatisfactory that the
weapon was never identified. It was thought that the boy's head had been banged on the walls and the floors. Two separate methods of killing were undertaken: a grubby white handkerchief was tightly knotted around Brown's neck and his cap was crammed into his mouth. It was difficult to stifle that young life.

There was blood everywhere. A large pool lay just inside the entrance. Edmonstone
was
nearly caught; once he dragged his victim into the cubicle, and the second time, a man actually heard gurglings coming from the cubicle, but thought that it was the schoolboys, up to tricks.

Alexander Edmonstone fled from the scene, with his booty. There was no point in going home. Following the course of a stream, Back Burn, (according to the map, as also in ‘Back Dykes', but generally given more atmospherically as Black Burn) he escaped to the outskirts of the village, where he emptied the contents of the money bag into his pockets and hid it in some rocks between Court Cave and McDuff's Castle.

Meanwhile, after 15 minutes or thereabouts, a young lad was the first to set eyes on what remained of Michael Brown. Identification was not immediate. His employers did not realize that their clerk was missing until 1.30pm. William Johnston only recognized the body after being shown a pencil and the tram ticket, which was still in the hand. The news of the murder devastated the entire district. Work stopped and School Wynd was jammed with local people. If Spring-Heeled Jack had leapt into that wide-open building the panic could not have been more intense.

Edmonstone was under suspicion, and he had vanished. A Wanted poster was distributed and it was seen that his appearance was almost comically distinctive. His hair was auburn, three teeth were missing from the front of his upper jaw, and AE was tattooed on his right forearm. Bloodhounds were brought to the scene, in a wry memory of Burgho and Barnaby, thwarted trackers of Jack the Ripper, but with no
success, since the scent was cold. All the ships in dock locally were searched, but Edmonstone had had other plans. Fleeing towards Strathmiglo, he had borrowed a brush from a woman pulling hay from a stack, and coolly removed, as far as he could, dark stains from the knees of his trousers. After walking 12 miles north-west of East Wemyss, he entered the drapery at the village and bought a fine new stylish outfit. They were so pleased with the order that they threw in a free tie.

Then on to Strathmiglo Station, splendidly attired, where he caught a train to Perth and spent the night at a Temperance Hotel. He required the maid to clean his very dirty boots. The next morning, after a sustaining breakfast of ham and eggs, he took a train to Glasgow. The police were getting closer all the time. He could not stay. Taking lodgings at 113 Renfield Street, he promptly went out, leaving two parcels on the bed. He had paid for his room. Moving on to Paisley, he planted a faked suicide note on the parapet of the bridge over the River Cart. Just like a false Jack the Ripper confessor, he wrote in red ink:
I murdered Mickey Brown – AE. You will find my body at the foot of water near by. I filled my pockets with stones. I bid goodbye to mother. Goodbye – Alexander Edmonstone.