Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (20 page)

Still she made an effort to put the best construction possible on what she had perforce to admit. She denied intent. She had been very pleased to have the Gunn child, but by the end of May they had found themselves unable to support him. The £3 she had received with him was exhausted. She had tried to have him admitted to a home, but she had been refused because the child was illegitimate. (This may have been true.) She was in despair. Whether she had made any attempt to approach the baby’s family by way of Mrs Mackay was not stated; the presumption must be that she did not. At any rate, one Monday, `when very much the worse for drink’, she had strangled the child. Pearson had been out at the time; he had known nothing of the death. She had wrapped the child in an oilskin and hidden the body in a box, which had later been transported to Stockbridge with them.

The,Tomlinson death had been accidental. She had given the baby whisky to stop her crying and had overdone it. The child had been killed and, in a panic, she had concealed this body too. Feeling perhaps that the closet was over full, she had taken out the Gunn boy and exposed his body on the green. This was an action as stupid as it was macabre. The Green lay just outside her door, a mean bare spot, where no body could hope to lie concealed. The stream of Water of Leith runs some three hundred yards away, and, though certainly shallow and frequently choked, might yet seem a more sensible place of hiding. Even if for some reason she had decided against the Water, one would have thought that she might have had the sense to go farther from home. A body found in Cheyne Street was sure to promote questioning around, and, even though there was no, or at least little, ostensible connection between the Gunn baby and Stockbridge, certainly no evidence that he had ever been there, yet the disappearance of the little girl might be fresh in people’s minds. Any police investigation was likely, one would think, to lead to the Macphersons. That this simple line of argument does not appear to have occurred to Jessie may be taken as the full measure of her stupidity; just as the place of concealment in the coal`-closet is evidence of her moral insensibility.

She was charged with three murders, there being sufficient suspicion attached to the Campbell baby also. The Prosecution were to drop this charge eventually, since there was no body and no evidence of death; it had at least the advantage that the baby’s father, David Finlay, who had so callously felt he could shed his responsibilities at the cost of £5, was exposed in the witness box to public obloquy and judicial reproach. Jessie never admitted responsibility for this death, but there can be little doubt that the wretched child died while in her hands. Since his death was never registered, the assumption that he went the same way as the other two is not likely to be challenged.

The trial itself was a foregone conclusion. Interest lay in the horror of the circumstances, in the appearance of Jessie and her lover, and in the evidence given by Pearson. Roughead, whose first case this was, compared the pair to that great scene in Weir ofHermiston when Hermiston is faced by the wretched Duncan Jopp and his miserable paramour. This comparison invests the Macphersons with the glamour of great literature; the Stevensonian echo can be heard in Roughead’s prose:

`The miserable little creature in the dock - mean, furtive, shabbily sinister like a cornered rat; her truculent robust paramour, with his dirty, grey-bearded face and his bald head, upon which a monstrous wen, big as a hen’s egg, rose eminent on his naked scalp.’

Since we have already been told that he was bald, the `naked scalp’ is a piece of superfluous information, but it undeniably enhances the description’s operatic quality. Roughead has of course stopped short of any Romantic idealisation of the murderess (for he was certain that Macpherson, `that sometime ornament of the Highland Games’, as he calls him with superior irony, was every bit as guilty as Jessie; indeed the likely instigator.) One could go further indeed, and say that Roughead’s tone places the wretched pair with something of the same Augustan contempt that Cockburn offered Haggart. Nevertheless there is a note of glamour here: murder is something exciting; murders have something `sinister’ and ‘monstrous’ about them. This obscures the fact that murderers are often, in the first instance, rather people who are incompetent at living; Jessie King certainly was. Of course, if you are going to hang someone, it is more satisfactory, morally a good deal more acceptable, if you can present him as a monster rather than be compelled to recognise him as a miserable derelict or simply a moral defective. Which is not to say that the act of murder is not itself unspeakably horrible, that the revulsion felt from the murderer is not proper; but horror lies also in the waste, emptiness and the wilderness of the murderer’s inadequacy as a human being, in the failure of any sympathetic imagination.

Jessie gave no evidence, but all the little pieces contributed by the landladies, the nurses, the relatives who had handed over the babies, the two girls, Isabella Banks and Janet Burnie, and finally by the detective James Clark, built up a picture of a wretchedly incompetent person. She should never have been entrusted with a baby, not so much because she was evil - she was very doubtfully that - but because she was weak, shifty, lying, drunken and incapable. There is no real reason to suppose that she took on these babies as a callous commercial enterprise, killing them off as soon as the money was exhausted; she would hardly have employed Janet Burnie to look after little Alexander Gunn if that had been her attitude. The most vivid picture in the case is that offered by Isabella Banks, of Jessie emerging from the cab, throwing the sixweek old Alice Tomlinson into the air, then pressing her against her cheek, as she crooned `my bonnie wee bairn’. Impossible to dismiss this simply as glutinous and revolting sentimentality and hypocrisy; the horrid possibility presents itself: Jessie King really liked babies; she was just no good at looking after them, and could not cope with the demands they made. It may be that each time she thought it would be all right; this time there would be no hideous accident, no moment when she found the effort intolerable.

Pearson’s evidence was vivid and interesting. He stood there in the witness box rather than the dock in the finest tradition of that style of justice which is always prepared to reward one scoundrel that another may be hanged. He was socius criminis, there to consign his crony to the gallows, as Hare had done for Burke. Only this time, one might think, there was a difference, and one which renders the whole business even more obnoxious. Jessie’s declaration, though exculpating Pearson, was sufficient to incriminate herself. One wonders therefore why no more determined attempt was made to press the case against Pearson. Certainly Roughead, from the gallery, had no doubt that he was the dominant partner. It may have been felt however that an attempt to convict Pearson would invalidate Jessie’s confession, and that somehow or other both would contrive to cheat justice. It was better not to risk it.

Accordingly, Pearson stood there in the box, heavyshouldered, pot-bellied, obsequious and yet powerful. He was informed by the Lord justice-Clerk that, as he had been put in the box to give evidence, he could not be charged with anything arising out of proceedings there, except perjury; and he gave a quick furtive little lick to his lips, meanwhile darting small bloodshot eyes around. Oh yes, he remembered Alexander Gunn being bought. The child seemed about a year old, but he knew nothing of its parentage. He had had no objection to Jessie’s keeping it. Only, after a bit, well, there was a shortage of money. She had spoken of getting the child into a home - Mrs Stirling’s Home for Children in Causewayside. (There was in fact no such home there, but a Miss Stirling did keep a Home in Stockbridge. Whose lie this was cannot be established - it sounds like Pearson distancing himself from the action.) Well, the child had gone, and she had said it was in the Home. He had wished to visit, but Jessie had put him off, saying male visitors were not allowed, or only on certain days. Why, had he told Janet Burnie that, `the child had been sent over the water’? He had understood that children from Miss Stirling’s Home were sent to Canada; that was what he had meant by over the water. Oh yes, he had several times expressed a desire to take the child a present. Jessie had then told him he could see Alexander running about Causewayside in a blue gown. This ridiculous flight of fancy on the part of the aged athlete - Alexander being then barely a year old - was allowed to pass unchallenged; possibly Counsel was struck dumb by his matchless effrontery. So much for Alexander: Pearson had of course been absolutely ignorant of the contents of the boxes which he had transported from Canonmills to Stockbridge, and it was Jessie kept the key of the coal-closet.

The cross-examination was not rigorous. The money from Finlay and Mrs Mackay had gone on keeping up their house; he was sure of that. Then came the matter of his names. His `how many?’ speaks volumes. Pearson/Stewart/Macpherson was absolutely ready to account for anything and everything that the police already knew; it was though first a matter of making sure just how much they knew, so that he might learn what he had to account for. Then he launched himself forth, but the judge, hitherto indulgent, stopped him before he could expatiate further on his athletic achievements; he stood down and lumbered out of the Court. Did he give Jessie a backward look? Had he glanced at her while he secured the rope round her neck?

The verdict was a formality. The jury were out for only four minutes. She was sentenced to be hanged on 11 March, just three weeks ahead. `All that you have done’, said the Lord Justice-Clerk, `can be blotted out, if you will but repent and turn from it. Listen, I beseech you, to the ministrations you will receive… .’ She can of course have expected nothing else, but she can never have sufficiently imagined what it would feel like in experience. `Her face’, wrote The Scotsman reporter, `became ghastly pale and she gave vent to repeated groans of the most heart-rending description.’ She had to be carried fainting from the courtroom.

Her mood in the next few days was suicidal. Roughead, with odious irony and a callousness which he was accustomed to attribute to his murdering subjects, wrote: `Twice or thrice she tried to commit suicide by strangling herself with strips torn from her skirt, and similar improvised ligatures. But her hand had lost its cunning, for she was less successful than in her previous essays in thuggery.’ How nice, one may reflect, to know what thuggery really means, and to be superior to guilt, misery and despair. Fortunately for Jessie, and indeed for decorum, she had those about her who could fortify her. A Roman Catholic priest, Canon Donlevy, and two Franciscan nuns, were constant in their ministrations. She came to some peace of mind as a result; her despair seems to have been transmuted into penitence.

An agitation for a reprieve was started in Stockbridge. Feelings perhaps ran less high there than might have been expected considering the revolting nature of the crimes, if only because none of the little victims came from that quarter itself. The public, sensitive to the position of a woman, in an age which made a cult of feminine virtues, was disturbed by the promised execution. Even the foreman of the jury sent a telegram to the Secretary of State: `Don’t like to interfere with the administration of justice, but if there is any ground for further investigation, let accused have benefit.’ There was of course no such ground; the only further investigation that could have made sense would have attempted to establish the guilt of the unspeakable Macpherson; and that was prevented by the immunity he had been granted. (Connoisseurs of the criminal mind may like to ponder the contrast between Macpherson, willing to let the woman he had lived with hang that his own skin might be saved, and the notorious Ned Burke, who, as Owen Dudley Edwards has shown in his recent study, devoted his own Defence to the exculpation of his mistress, Helen MacDougall. Yet Burke is a synonym for villainy, while Macpherson/Pearson is unknown.)

Meanwhile, The Scotsman recognised the changing mood of the public, its susceptibility to the gentler and more humane emotions. In an unusually thoughtful leader, the newspaper looked forward to a time when a softening of public taste might mean that the public would `demand for its own sake rather than that of the criminals fully and justly convicted of taking away life, that Capital Punishment also shall be a thing of the past.’ That was prescient; we have arrived there today, the strongest case against capital punishment resting on its deleterious and debasing effect on the public imagination and on the odious excitement it so easily generates. It is after all the block, the gallows, the electric chair that give a ghoulish glamour to murder.

That time had not yet come and there were no grounds for a reprieve. None of the doubt that surrounded the Chantrelle case existed on this occasion, and there had been no suggestion that Jessie was not responsible for her actions, though it was recognised that she was `of a low moral and intellectual type’.

The morning of 11 March dawned bright and frosty. The hangman was the celebrated Berry. A group of sightseers had assembled on the Calton Hill -‘of a motley character, largely composed of idlers and loafers’ - in the hope of getting at least a glimpse of the procession to the scaffold. Within the prison, emotion and tension ran high. Several of the female warders showed `eyes red with weeping’. By contrast Jessie was now calm, supported still, as she would be right to the end, by Canon Donlevy and the two nuns. Since public executions had been abandoned, it had been customary to allow the press in to view proceedings, on the grounds that, otherwise, some people might remain unconvinced that the execution had in fact been carried out. At the last moment however it was decided that, following a recent English precedent in the case of the execution of a woman, the reporters should not be permitted to view the actual drop. This information was conveyed to the press as the procession was even on its way to the gallows. Some of the reporters would have challenged it, but they felt that a prolonged or vigorous altercation at that moment would be insensitive; accordingly they gave way and remained behind in a little room. The last they saw of Jessie, she was walking blindfolded, with a crucifix held before her, as Canon Donlevy recited the litany. They heard her say with him, `Christ have mercy upon me…’ A few moments later they heard `the dull thud of the drop’.