The Law Killers (29 page)
A post-mortem revealed that the 15-inch poker had been used to inflict a number of blows, but none of them particularly severe or by themselves likely to have been the sole cause of death. It was concluded that she may have been left alive by her assailant but had died from the shock of what had taken place. Certainly, it seemed unlikely that whoever had wielded the poker had set out to commit murder, otherwise the feet would not have been tied together or the phone cables cut. It looked as though robbery had been behind the attack, for the house also had the appearance of having being ransacked. All the doors and windows were locked, but since the front door had a check-lock it would have closed up behind anyone passing through.
When news of the gruesome find spread through the refined, leafy suburb, those who knew Miss Milne were shocked, but not hugely surprised. It was no secret that she had money. Her brother, a tobacco manufacturer, had died nine years earlier and she had continued to live in the vast house, enjoying an annual income of £1,000 from the considerable sum he had also left. At that time, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, that amount of money facilitated an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle.
Friends had advised against her remaining in the mansion, particularly after she had dispensed with the services of a servant maid and a gardener, but she had shrugged off their concerns. Some said she was absolutely fearless.
She was also happy to flaunt her wealth. Apart from her travels at home and abroad, she enjoyed attending concerts in Dundee and frequently travelled into town to shop and dine in the best restaurants. Sometimes on these journeys she carried significant amounts of money, a practice she never attempted to conceal. On one occasion, she told a fellow traveller on a tramcar that she was carrying eighty sovereigns in her purse. She would do the same in shops.
Those who knew her best described her as an ‘agreeable creature’ but with ‘indefinable peculiar habits’ and an oddly contrasting lifestyle. In many ways she lived economically, making many of her own clothes and allowing the extensive grounds at Elmgrove to become overgrown. Yet she adored expensive jewellery, spent considerable sums on her numerous trips and holidays and gave generously to her church.
Socially, she was equally contradictory. She could be withdrawn and reclusive and although she had visitors, she seldom paid return visits. On her jaunts outwith the city, however, it seemed she mixed freely, made friends easily and would correspond with them.
At that period Broughty Ferry was not yet formally part of Dundee (that came the following year) and the area had its own police force. The first action of Chief Constable J. Howard Semphill was to call in Detective Lieutenant John Trench of Glasgow Police, an experienced and celebrated detective who had been engaged in the famous Oscar Slater case four years earlier. In a remarkably similar set of circumstances, Slater had been convicted of murdering a wealthy spinster in Glasgow.
Trench arrived in Dundee the day after the discovery of Miss Milne’s body and at once began to question the robbery theory, just as the local officers were doing. Why, they all wondered, would someone who came to steal forgo the easy pickings of valuable rings on the fingers of Miss Milne, the gold chain round her neck, plus seventeen sovereigns in a bedroom drawer? They also considered that the apparent upheaval which had been put down to a ransacking could merely have been part of the confused manner in which Miss Milne led her life – for although her mansion had many rooms, she lived almost entirely in only one of them, reading and teaching herself foreign languages. She used to dine on a corner of a large table, the remainder of which was piled with books and magazines, which also lay in disarray on chairs amidst other scattered objects. Significantly, there was no sign of a forced entry, which suggested that the dead woman had known her killer, or at least had been happy to admit him or her. Nor was there any indication of anything having been stolen.
Intriguingly, it seemed she may have had a recent visitor. In the room, a tray had been set with a cup and saucer and teapot. A half-eaten meat pie was on a plate. A cigar stub was also found in the fireplace.
Trench made another find. Under a chest in the hall he came upon a two-pronged carving fork. Later, when he examined Miss Milne’s clothing, he discovered holes which could have been consistent with the fork having been driven into her body. Whether or not that had happened was never established, for by that time Miss Milne had been buried and permission was not given for an exhumation.
The post-mortem had indicated that the petite spinster might have met her end some two to three weeks before she was found, giving a possible date of death around the middle of October. Enquiries revealed that Miss Milne, a regular church-goer, had attended a service on 13 October, but not since, and had also been seen two days after that. However, a church elder delivering Communion cards had called at the large house on 16 October but had received no answer. It seemed Miss Milne had met her fate earlier that day. A copy of
The Courier
found in the house had apparently been read, but
The Evening Telegraph
of the same date was unopened. The actual date of her death was to prove crucial.
The enigma of the mansion house murder, and the widespread press coverage of the subsequent investigation guaranteed enormous interest in Dundee and further afield. On the following Sundays, hundreds of trippers travelled from the city into Broughty Ferry to peer intently into the Elmgrove grounds, hoping for a glimpse of police activity or one of those on the periphery of the inquiry. The early announcement of a £100 reward for information leading to an arrest added to the allure. The money, a significant sum at the time, also helped produce a steady procession of witnesses.
James Don, a dustman, had a particularly material piece of information to impart. He told Detective Lieutenant Trench that he had been sweeping in Grove Road in the early hours of 16 October when he saw a man emerge from the gateway at Elmgrove at 4.30. On seeing the street-sweeper, the figure withdrew back into the shadows, only to reappear a moment or two later before walking briskly away, looking neither right nor left, coughing slightly but failing to acknowledge the presence of Mr Don. The observant dustman described the secretive stranger as being dressed entirely in black and wearing a bowler hat and overcoat. He said he was about 5 feet 8 inches in height, aged thirty to forty and sharp-featured with a fair moustache. A man of the same description, but with ‘piercing eyes’, was said to have boarded a tramcar which departed from nearby Ellislea Road at 5.30 a.m. to take workers into Dundee. Then a taxi driver came forward to say he had picked up a similar male in Dundee the prior evening and had dropped him in the vicinity of Miss Milne’s mansion.
Neighbours spoke of having seen an open-top four-seater car parked near Elmgrove on the evening of 15 October. Its lamps had been left burning and it had remained in the street without its driver for about an hour before vanishing at around 9 p.m. The same people said they had noticed a light shining from an upstairs landing window of Elmgrove during the same period.
Of even greater interest to the police, however, was the picture that started to emerge of an unexpected side to the church-going and reclusive Miss Milne. It transpired that on her trips away from Broughty Ferry she led a distinctly different type of existence from the almost solitary one she had at home. The elderly spinster who preferred to dress in youthful, almost gaudy clothes, revelled in the attention of younger men and made numerous acquaintances among them. Several wrote to her, some even sending poems.
The unlikely femme fatale did not trouble to hide her double life from her acquaintances. She would return from a holiday to speak at length about the gentlemen she met, although she never mentioned names, and would giggle girlishly when discussing them. ‘She was more like a young girl on holiday than a woman nearing her allotted span,’ was how a lady friend acidly put it. After one visit to London, Miss Milne excitedly told a neighbour how she had become acquainted with a ‘college-bred’ man and was considering inviting him to Broughty Ferry.
Two women who knew her observed Miss Milne in action for themselves. A few weeks before her violent end, Miss Milne was spotted by them enjoying a sailing holiday on a cargo steamer in the Scottish Highlands accompanied by a good-looking man of about thirty-five. They had seen her with the same man in Glasgow the previous week, when they had all attended a meeting of shareholders of Caledonian Railways.
A maid in a large house overlooking Elmgrove also had an intriguing tale to tell. She revealed how, in the second week of October, she had looked into the garden of the mansion from an upstairs window of her employer’s home and was startled to see a man in evening dress pacing back and forth. She was especially surprised because it was mid-forenoon. The inappropriately dressed figure seemed unaware that he had been spotted, for he was deep in meditation and continued to walk about, hands in pockets, for more than ten minutes. The astonished maid told police that the stranger was about six feet tall, aged between thirty and forty and ‘very handsome’.
A young boy also came forward to say he had witnessed a man in a tall hat entering the grounds of Elmgrove in the period leading up to the day when the spinster was probably killed. Another of those with a story was a gardener who had been inside the mansion on 19 September when a man arrived on the doorstep. Miss Milne became coy and said it was the friend she had been expecting. The gardener explained that the visitor sounded German when he spoke and he assumed him to be the man Miss Milne had previously been so animated about when she revealed how they had met on one of her lengthy stays in London.
All of this was naturally of deep interest to Chief Constable Semphil and Detective Lieutenant Trench, but it did not point to a single suspect, for the descriptions and circumstances of the men differed in some cases. It did, however, give a useful indication of the extent of Miss Milne’s associations away from home and the part younger men played in the life of the elderly murder victim. Like the picture of Miss Milne’s double life that began to emerge, the identity of a possible suspect became more confused.
The investigation was made even more complex by an officer from the dead woman’s church who described to police how he had called at Elmgrove on 21 October to collect a charitable donation from Miss Milne. She did not answer the door, he said, but he was certain he had seen her standing at an upstairs bedroom window. When he called back later the same day, he again received no reply. However, he noted that on this occasion the shield on the front door keyhole was lifted when it had not been earlier. If the church officer was correct, it completely contradicted the evidence that Miss Milne had perished on 16 October. On the other hand, if he had indeed seen a woman, but who was not Miss Milne as he had naturally assumed her to be, that opened up the possibility that the killer may have been a woman, or that there was a female accomplice.
Chief Constable Semphill travelled to London to liaise with Scotland Yard and enquire into the spinster’s activities there and any friends who may have visited her during her stays in the Palace Hotel in the Strand. The continuing investigation and detailed coverage it was given daily in the press had built up major interest in the goings-on in the Broughty Ferry mansion house. Police forces across the land had also been alerted to the hunt for the killer. Ten days after the discovery of the body, police in Maidstone in Kent took more notice than their colleagues elsewhere after they arrested a Canadian for obtaining board and lodgings by fraud. Described as well educated and handsome, he appeared in some ways to match the description of a man sought for the Elmgrove killing, although there was no known connection to the events in Broughty Ferry. The man, Charles Warner, was jailed for fourteen days and as he went off to prison a phone call was placed to the investigating officers in Scotland. At the same time, a photograph of Warner was sent north.
Although the picture was of relatively poor quality, five of those in Broughty Ferry who had seen males in and around Elmgrove at the vital times said they believed Warner was the same man. Amidst great excitement, the five – three women and two men – were put on a train for England to see if they could make a positive identification. When they alighted from the overnight express in London, they were met by a large throng of sightseers, reporters and photographers, for by now the case had also attracted the interest of Londoners.
The next day Warner was taken into the yard of Maidstone Prison and one by one the Broughty Ferry group entered to view a line-up of prisoners. Four of the five picked him out; one of the women said she was uncertain. The tall Canadian was led away protesting his innocence and accusing the witnesses of having colluded.
A few days later, after the conclusion of his short sentence on the minor fraud charge, Warner was met at the prison by Chief Constable Semphill and Trench and arrested for the murder of Miss Milne. He was manacled and taken away in a cab to journey north on the next train to Scotland. A large crowd was at the prison gates to witness the departure. Bizarrely, the cab was stopped en route to the railway station at a nearby bank and Warner, handcuffed to Trench, was allowed to enter to collect money which had been wired to him. As he re-entered the taxi after the transaction, he told reporters who were following in close pursuit, ‘You know they have arrested an innocent man.’ At the railway station, where the air was heavy with smoke and the smell of magnesium from the flash cameras, he continued to inform the large posse of newsmen that he was blameless. News of Warner’s arrest spread north and when his train pulled into Dundee a crowd of more than a hundred people, plus a large contingent of police, waited on the platform for a sight of him – although it was 5.30 in the morning.