Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (19 page)

Within a few months evidence of their sin, evidence of their shame, would be apparent. What happened then took on a divergent pattern. Sometimes their young man was respectable and willing, sometimes even in a position to propose marriage. That would mean a change of status, a change of way of life, but no impairment of their respectability - many a good marriage was celebrated with the wife months pregnant. Sometimes the girl had a mother, aunt, or married sister, who would look after the baby and make herself responsible for the child’s upbringing. Sometimes a gin-or whisky-sodden midwife performed a crude and dangerous abortion. If that happened, then the girl would probably only have to change her post; it might be possible simply to give out that she had been ill. Sometimes in a dark corner, a nearlycrazy girl, her mind turned by shame, fear and the execrations hurled at her by family, employers or upper servants, would stifle the infant whose existence seemed the cause of her distress. Sometimes she threw the child on the parish or left it wrapped up on a doorstep. Sometimes she advertised the infant for adoption or care. There were always plenty of applicants. The whole thing was all too common. Over 7% of births in virtuous churchgoing Edinburgh were illegitimate.

Three girls who found themselves in this predicament between the Spring of 1887 and September 1888 were Catherine Gunn or Whyte, Violet Duncan Tomlinson and Elizabeth Campbell. All were domestic servants. All were brought ‘ to bed of unwelcome children, bastards for whom respectable society offered nothing. All had themselves a respectable position to maintain. They never met, but they all had this in common and were linked more particularly by the solution they sought.

Some solution, however desperate, had to be found. All had families who were not prepared to take on the child, and they could do nothing themselves. Elizabeth Campbell died in childbirth. Violet Tomlinson was maddened by the strain and shame, and consequently confined. Only Catherine Gunn survived, demure in the black uniform and starched cap of her trade. `Witness was in domestic service and could not keep the child.’ What was to be done?

In the case of Elizabeth Campbell who had died in childbirth,. her sister looked after the baby from May 1887 to August, when the seducer, being known, was persuaded to take up his responsibility. He was not long in acquitting himself of it, for he straightway advertised for foster-parents. A couple presented themselves, a little woman in her late twenties and a man some thirty years older. The woman said the man was her father and that their name was Stewart. Finlay, the seducer, then gave Stewart £5 and the baby. He considered that he had done his bit; £5 was a tidy sum with which to launch his bastard on the world. He also handed over the child’s birth and vaccination certificates, and he recommended to the Stewarts that they should not let the Andersons (the baby’s uncle and aunt) know where it was. Doubtless he considered that this injunction would save him any possible trouble in the future.

The Stewarts took the child to their lodging in Dalkeith Road, where they were known by the name of Pearson. They had not been together long, and were not of course father and daughter. Pearson, Mike to his acquaintance, was a big bald dirty grey-bearded man, of indeterminate age, but certainly at least fifty. He described himself, from time to time, as a labourer, though in the period when anything is known of him, from May 1887 to February 1889, his labour was intermittent. The woman was called Jessie King or Kean, of Irish extraction, a Roman Catholic. In Court she appeared to the dramatic Roughead, whose first case this was, `mean, furtive, shabbily sinister, like a cornered rat’. Those who saw her in more ordinary surroundings found her unremarkable. Their landlady at Dalkeith Road, Mrs Penman, said she had seen them both the worse for drink. It was a bond between them.

Why they took the name of Stewart on this occasion, and why they pretended to be father and daughter, were questions never determined. Natural duplicity, guilt even before the act, may be advanced as a reason at least as probably as any imputation of premeditated villainy. Pearson was anyway careless as to which name he used, often calling himself Macpherson. In court he was to be asked why he had used so many names. `How many?’ he replied. His explanation of the name Macpherson was revealing; it stamps his type. `I have gone under the name of Macpherson since I was a boy. I used to go to Highland gatherings, and Macpherson was an appropriate name to take at such gatherings. They would find (he continued) his name in The Scotsman of 1857 as the winner of a first-class prize… .’ The Scotsman of 1857 … it was then 1889, and here was this great dirty drink-sodden lout harking back over thirty years to his moment of glory. Perhaps his first-class prize had sustained his self respect these three decades.

Of Jessie’s past nothing is known. She had taken up with Pearson that May, when he had lodgings in Gifford Park. They stayed six months at Dalkeith Road. The baby was seen by various neighbours as well as Mrs Penman. One of these, formerly a nurse, looked after it on occasion, and found it a fine healthy infant. Then it disappeared, was simply no longer in Jessie’s possession. `She had sent it away to its aunt’; that was the explanation given, but no aunt ever received the baby. No one saw it again. Its body was never discovered. The £5 were, one assumes, exhausted.

Pearson and Jessie removed to Ann’s Court, Canonmills, where their landlady was a Mrs Mackenzie. They were living there when, sometime in the Spring of 1888, Alexander Gunn was acquired. Elizabeth Gunn had borne twin sons, who for some months had been looked after by a nurse called Mrs Mackay. For reasons never explained it became difficult to continue this arrangement. Accordingly Alexander’s availability was advertised, and out of twenty-nine replies received, Jessie was selected. One wonders what the other twenty-eight applicants were like, that they should have appeared manifestly inferior to her. She now called herself Mrs Macpherson, and this time received only £2 with the child. She told her landlady that, `it was the child of her husband’s sister and her own brother’. It was sorely a superfluous lie, the unnecessary precision of detail also marking her as an habitual liar. The nurse, Mrs Mackay, had some conscience, perhaps also some affection for the child. She called at Ann’s Court in April or May and found all well. Again Jessie had begun successfully. She was making an effort to look after Alexander, even though her landlady had had occasion to check her for giving the baby spirits: `the child was crying when she poured whisky over its throad’. However, she employed the daughter of a neighbour called Burnie to nurse the baby; Janet Burnie looked after him each day from ten in the morning till six at night. Perhaps Jessie had taken a job; certainly Mike Pearson had begun to work about a month after they moved into Ann’s Court.

However, one morning when Janet arrived, she found no child. This baby too had simply disappeared (not that Janet had ever heard of the Campbell one of course). Mr Macpherson told her, `the child was away across the water for the good of his health’. When Mrs Mackay called round again that September, the Macphersons had departed also, leaving no address. They had in fact moved to Cheyne Street, Stockbridge, where they had taken rooms, still under the name Macpherson.

By now, September 1888, Jessie was pregnant herself. Her condition did not stop her from responding to another advertisement, this time from Mrs Tomlinson. Violet, Alice’s mother, who had been in domestic service, was now in hospital, leaving a bastard on her mother’s hands. Jessie’s tender was accepted by the baby’s grandmother as `being the lowest’, evidence of the old lady’s tender affection. Jessie said she wanted the child for her sister, Mrs Macpherson, `who was married to the Duke of Montrose’s piper’. This was a flight of grandeur indeed, possibly in honour of Macpherson’s glorious past.

She took the child back to Cheyne Street in a cab. Isabella Banks, her landlord’s daughter, saw them arrive. Jessie threw the child up in the air, caught her at the full stretch other arms, pulled her down to her face, and held her tight there. `My bonnie wee bairn’, she crooned. She asked Isabella to hold the child while she paid the cabbie, and then took her back, saying that the baby’s mother would come soon. She asked the girl to go out and buy some beer. Isabella never saw the baby again.

Nor did anyone else. Jessie told Mrs Banks that she `had put it away’, and she told James Banks, `that she had got a child and £25 to keep it; and that she had given it and £18 away’. The Bankses did not question any of this at the time, though the three of them had each been told a separate story, but there were other circumstances which made them feel that the Macphersons were not entirely satisfactory lodgers. The disappearing child was strange enough in itself, especially as Mrs Banks one day saw a baby’s hat on Jessie’s bed. Whose was it, she asked, and found herself less than convinced by Jessie’s assurance that it was part of the layette for the baby she was herself expecting; perhaps she could not believe that this slatternly and drunken couple would be exercising such forethought. Then there was the case of the coal-closet which the Macphersons obstinately kept locked. On one occasion when Mrs Banks asked for the key she was displeased to find it refused. Jessie made the excuse that the closet was full of dirty clothes. Finally, Mrs Banks claimed to find something suspicious in the fact that Mr and Mrs Macpherson `had a private and peculiar chap’ (knock). This is another example of how literally almost anything can be made to seem suspicious and sinister in a Court of Law. There can be few married couples who do not have similar private signals of recognition; it is something which establishes the special nature of lovers’ relationships, like the use of pet names; but it sounds grim in a trial. Quite clearly, if the Macphersons had their `private and peculiar chap’, it was evidence of a guilty secret.

That they, or at least Jessie, had such secrets was soon to be apparent. But first Jessie left to have her baby and returned without one. Presumably it was stillborn or had died almost at once. That could have surprised nobody: of 394 deaths in Edinburgh the following February, 63 were of children of under one year. Certainly this child disappears completely, the note that Jessie went off expecting to be confined being the only record of its existence.

Then on 26 October a group of boys were playing around Cheyne Street. On the narrow and muddy green they discovered a parcel rolled up in a waterproof coat. One of the boys kicked it, thinking it was an old pair of boots. The kick was oddly squidgy. Investigation revealed the body of a child. They went to the police at once.

Their find was examined the next day by Sir Henry Littlejohn, still Police Surgeon, and Dr Joseph Bell, most celebrated- as one of the originals of Sherlock Holmes. They discovered it to be a male child, about a year old. The body had been wrapped in an oilskin and was partly mummified. There was a ligature round the neck. The cause of death could not be exactly established, but the presumption that it was strangulation was obviously strong.

The news of the find alerted and alarmed the community of Cheyne Street. Fortunately nobody there, or in the streets immediately around, had recently lost a child, so that the search had all the thrill of the race without any of the concomitant anxiety. Horror rather than pain was the dominant note, one much more easily endured, even indeed rather enjoyable. Joseph Banks however was inevitably suspicious of his lodgers. They behaved mysteriously. There had been a child in their possession and then it had vanished. Now the body of a child had been found. Either its sex had not yet been revealed or, more probably, Mr Banks had never known that the Tomlinson baby, which had made so brief an appearance in his house, was a girl, for he immediately assumed that the body on the green might be the baby his daughter had seen arrive in the cab. He went to the police.

They acted quickly on his information. A Detective Officer, James Clark, called upon Mrs Macpherson. He asked her what had become of the baby she had brought there in the cab. She produced a pair of baby’s shoes, for no reason that one can think of, and stated that the child was now with her sister, the wife of the Duke of Montrose’s piper; as if the noble connection would give ballast to her tale. Clark was not satisfied however. He had been told of the coal-closet; the Bankses were certain this was a suspicious circumstance. He said he would have to make a search.

Jessie broke down straight away. `Get a cab, it’s there’, she sobbed, pointing at the closet. This must have surprised Clark, who presumably at this time was hoping merely to find something in the cupboard that would connect Jessie with the body on the green. He opened the closet. `On the bottom shelf was the body of a female child wrapped in a canvas cloth.’ Littlejohn and Bell’s subsequent examination established the age - six weeks - and that `the lower part of the face was tightly enveloped in cotton cloth’. Again the cause of death could not be absolutely established; either suffocation or strangulation was possible.

There was still more, however. On the top of the cupboard Clark saw a horrible corresponding mark, the stained outline of a small body. Clearly the other baby, the one found on the green, had lain there; this was Alexander Gunn. The little girl, Alice Tomlinson, who had been wrapped in layers of newspaper, cloth and oilskin, had been dead since September; Alexander since April or May. Alice had died here in Cheyne Street, Alexander in Canonmills. He had formed part of the Macphersons’ luggage when they flitted.

Jessie was taken to the Police Station. Macpherson (or Pearson) soon followed. She made no comment in her first declaration, while he, possibly an old hand at these matters, denied everything. Next day however she made a second declaration in which she admitted the two murders with which she had already been charged.

This declaration was clinching. Her admissions to Clark had no force binding in law, but the jury would be expected to take her declaration into account. As the Lord justice-Clerk put it at her trial: `In this country persons were not subjected to what they were subjected to in other countries, namely to have every scrap of conversation they might have with police officers and other officials brought up in court’. (That was a hit at English practice of course). However, since the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act of 1887,’ a prisoner, in emitting a declaration was entitled to have the assistance of a law agent’ and any admissions made in such circumstances were legally valid. This meant that Jessie’s declaration could by itself put the rope round her neck.