Classic Scottish Murder Stories (16 page)

On the Sunday, while still a free man, the doctor had leaned heavily upon William Fraser, who rang the 8 o'clock curfew at the church every night and therefore had a particular awareness of time. He it was who was a principal witness as to the timing of the shot at 7.35pm. The doctor listened as he told his tale to the constable, and returned later on his own and asked the bellman if it would not be at 7.45pm that he had heard the report.

The doctor's servants did their best for him. Martha Cadger said that she let her master in between 7.25 and 7.30pm, and
that ten minutes later he went out by the back door to the offices. She followed him out to feed the pig, and saw him in the garden with a spade. He came home at 9 o'clock and the next morning she saw some dahlia roots in the house which had not been there on the Saturday.

Eliza Park was not so helpful. She, too, said that her master came in at 7.30pm and went out again in ten minutes, but she admitted that the house clock was five or ten minutes fast. Some dahlias were brought in on the Sunday. Alexander Dugid (a follower?) who was in the kitchen that evening, said he left to go home at 7.45pm. He heard the doctor's step in the passage at about 7.30pm.

The trial of Dr William Smith took place in Edinburgh, occupying the 12 th to 14th April 1854. A first, void, trial had begun on March 13th, but on the second day it had been halted because one of the jurymen had been ‘overcome by mental excitement' and had been certified as unfit to continue his duties. This must have been an interesting spectacle. The defence produced a surprise witness, last on in the case. This was Adam Gray, described for extra probity as ‘brother to the Provost of Peterhead' and he was brought to show that, in spite of the denial of the whole clan of McDonalds, William
had
been in possession of a pistol, in fact the pistol at issue. On September 15th 1848, William had asked him, ‘You pick up things at roups [auctions] – have you no gun that you could sell me?' Gray asked if he was going to poach, but he said that it was to frighten rooks from the crops (which would be more in character). Gray then sold him a ‘useless' pistol for 4s. 6d., which he identified as the pistol exhibited in court by a notch on the stock. Gray's documentary evidence as to the sale proved somewhat shaky. There was some blustering. ‘Everyone keeps a jotter as he likes,' he suggested. ‘It may be a queer book, but it is true.' It turned out that he had a previous conviction for firing a gun at a trespasser.

William's mother did some serious damage to the defence by recounting that William had told her that Dr Smith had
forbidden him to tell anyone about their meetings. When her son met the doctor at his stable door in the evening at ‘bell-ringing' there was a mark set on the door to show that the doctor would be coming to the tryst. Evidence that Dr Smith had been seen, a few weeks before the death, practising with a pistol near that stable door did him no good at all.

The Lord Justice-Clerk, however, would have none of it. He charged the jury that it had not been substantiated that murder had actually been committed. He attached importance to the evidence of the brother to the Provost of Peterhead. The doctors could not say if murder or suicide lay behind the shooting. The pistol had not been proved to belong to Dr Smith. Thus instructed, after a bare ten minutes, the jury returned a verdict of Not Proven by a majority. Four had been for Guilty. Hisses in the crowded court-room demonstrated public opinion and the doctor, after a strategic delay, left the building with some difficulty. He did try to get the insurance companies to pay out, but they resisted him and the actions were abandoned. So common is the name of William Smith (and he might have changed it, anyway) that it would be arduous to discover how long he lived on and practised, unshriven.

T
he unwanted wife, wrongly incarcerated in an asylum, has, of late, been a subject for study. Some, but not all, of the attention has been of Feminist hue. John Sutherland, in
Victorian Fiction
(Macmillan, 1995) shows that Thackeray, Dickens and Lytton all arranged to have their wives put away, with the connivance of pliable alienists. Mrs Georgina Weldon, formidable ‘Plaintiff in Person', who escaped the attempt in 1878 to take her away, was a fine example. She sued and sued the whole lot of them – certifying physicians, asylum proprietor, and family friend who signed the statutory order – and won substantial damages. She had been vulnerable, because she was a spiritualist, and much was made in court of her having had a pet rabbit which had ‘appeared' at a séance. Mrs Elizabeth Saunders fits well, one might say, into a line of wives subject to masculine conspiracy.

Her husband, John Saunders, five years her junior, was a gamekeeper of Mellors-ish aspect, a tall, well-built man of fresh complexion, popular with sporting men of the neighbourhood, and thought of as a good fellow. In 1913, the year when things went wrong, he was 32 and she was 37. They lived at Gosford West Lodge, on the Gosford House estate, East Lothian, by the Firth of Forth, where he was in the employment of the Earl of Wemyss. Lodge houses are only miniature mansions, however handsomely decorated, and at this particular doll's-house, a most peculiar domestic set-up had evolved. There were just two bedrooms: in one, slept the gamekeeper, in the other, the wife, her aged mother, and the wife's 21-year-old niece, who had been
co-opted to do the housework. John Saunders resented this bizarre arrangement and his anger shows in a remark to his mother-in-law that he was nothing but a lodger in his own home. He was not the master of the doll's-house.

The basic problem that gnawed at the marriage was the longstanding, intractable, intermittent neurotic illness of the wife. Make no mistake, she was ill, but it was not a madness. John Saunders had known her for years before they were married on May 24th 1901, and he took her on in the full knowledge that she was ‘delicate' and in the habit of consulting doctors. He could not complain that he had been deceived, and it could have been that very ‘delicacy' which attracted him. No doubt he thought that marriage would cure her.

Elizabeth Saunders was a very neurotic woman indeed, and she showed many classic symptoms of anxiety: panic attacks, hypochondriasis, feelings of weakness, a sense of impending doom, depression and a spoilt enjoyment of life, fretful dissatisfaction with the status quo, especially where she lived, and (a minor indication) bolting her food. Not all her days were bad, and good external factors could relieve the stress and lift her mood. She was not easy to live with and an exceptionally patient husband was needed. Anxiety was not much rated in those days, and doctors faced with a miserable female patient of this type leaned heavily on the vague diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia'. Hysteria in its true sense of the production of ‘conversion symptoms' arising from unconscious drive to seek attention was recognised, and there probably was an element of hysteria in Elizabeth's illness.

Psychiatry was none too hot in the early 1920s, and the treatment prescribed for her was quite antiquated, with a reliance on sedation by bromide. (Not that Valium would have done her any good!) It was no wonder that she could not get up in the morning and dust the doll's-house, as she lay there, pole-axed by sedation and depression. She and Freud would have had a field day, analysing the root cause of her problems. The
most effective of the series of doctors who tried to treat her adopted a reassuring, paternalistic approach. This was helpful. Others who took a tough line, implying that she was lazy, malingering, ‘introspective', too taken up with herself, and ought to snap out of it, naturally got nowhere.

The marriage was childless, but the husband was eager, although it was awkward to articulate such things, to indicate that ‘marital relations' were still in place. The wife would have had to drift into, or be persuaded into, what should have been the matrimonial bedroom. Perhaps it was thought that she was not strong enough to bear children. By the age of 37, suffering from ‘bad teeth' and ‘dyspepsia', she was beginning to be classified as ‘of a certain age' by doctors who thronged to write her off.

As her outbursts of frustration and blame, interpreted as ‘bad temper', showed no sign of improvement, it is hardly surprising that the gamekeeper took to staying out late at night, which caused her further anxiety and a modicum of suspicion. He had excellent innocent reasons for absence. He was in the Reserve, and went regularly to Aberlady to shoot. He was a conscientious worker, known to the factor of the estate to be out on duty at night more than any other keeper at Gosford. He was often after the wild geese (presumably to drive them away). Elizabeth objected when he went off on his bicycle on Wednesday and Saturday nights and had given up asking where he was going. She lay awake worrying that something would happen to him. He always said it was work.

In defence, he began a campaign of criticism, complaining about her extravagance over food. He attacked her about the presence of her niece, who had been with them for a year, not believing that she herself did not feel up to the housework. The mother's presence he seems to have tolerated better. Actual, overt quarrels, heard by others, were beginning to break out, and, in fact, they had – when they confronted it – been on bad terms for quite a while.

Some hand began now in January, 1913, to sprinkle
strychnine into this cauldron of discontent. The niece, Mary Douglas Chirnside, noticed it first. Her daily duty was to prepare trays for her aunt and grandmother, and to take them up breakfast in bed. The gamekeeper would usually be hanging around the kitchen while this was going on. Only Elizabeth took toast. Perhaps her mother was too edentulous. Only Elizabeth appears to have eaten marmalade. Maybe all the others ate porridge. It makes sense. Little pots of cream, too, were on special daily order for Elizabeth alone.

One morning, the breakfast menu included bread, already spread with marmalade from a jar in the kitchen, and the niece noticed an untoward white powder on the slice. She tasted it, and found that it was bitter, but when she asked the husband to taste the marmalade, he said there was nothing wrong with it. She decided not to take that piece of bread up to her aunt and laid it aside. She did not know what became of it. On January 17th, Elizabeth sat up in bed and toyed with her breakfast of toast, bread and butter and tea, but she did not much enjoy it because there was a ‘very nasty bitter taste' on her toast.

The next morning, a Sunday, she could not eat the toast, because it was so bitter, and she felt annoyed. She wondered if the gas cinders which had been used to toast the bread might have caused the funny flavour. Her niece agreed that it tasted bitter. On Wednesday, the 22nd, it happened again. Her niece brought her just half a slice of buttered toast, and she ate part of it. When she got up, she felt sick, shaky, and very giddy, so she took some baking soda in hot water and vomited up a quantity of white, frothy matter. She had no idea what was wrong, and did not even feel particularly under the weather or depressed.

The following day, a horrible and dramatic scene occurred. She ate some of the toast, felt the bitterness for the fourth time, ate some bread and jam and drank her tea, but the tea was exceedingly bitter and she did not drain the cup. Three minutes later, her legs went numb, with a sensation of twisting. Then
there came a shaking, and a strange feeling in her back. and a choking in her throat. She had to grip the back of her neck with her hand. Her top set of false teeth were out, and her lower teeth became fixed in her upper gums. She could not open her mouth. She wanted to vomit. There were twitchings in her body, which kept recurring if she moved. Down below in the kitchen, Mary heard a knock, and went upstairs to find her aunt rigid, with her head thrown back and her mouth clamped shut. She seized Mary in a fierce hold, and could not let go. There were three attacks, and then she vomited frothy stuff and felt some relief although quite prostrate and weak. Mary telegraphed for her aunt's usual doctor, Dr Millar of Tranent, but he was not able to attend immediately and sent his assistant, Dr Gamble, who did not arrive until the evening. What he saw was an hysterical person, in a nervous condition, not seriously ill, and he prescribed bromide. The patient said never a word about twitchings or spasms.

The next morning, Dr Millar himself arrived. He had treated Mrs Saunders for seven years and was confident that he could handle her. She suffered from nervous depression and he was used to her complaints. She did look as if she had had a bad turn. She threw up her hands and said that she had been poisoned. He thought this was pure imagination and advised her to put the idea right out of her mind, but he thought her condition grave enough to engage a resident nurse.

Nurse Elizabeth Ellen Cameron of East Linton arrived on Friday, the 24th. She was a good choice, an excellent qualified nurse of the East Lothian Nursing Association, and she had the advantage of knowing the patient from a previous nervous illness, so that she could compare the present symptoms. There had to be a change in the sleeping arrangements: she slept with her patient, mother and niece moved into the husband's bedroom, and husband slept in the kitchen. Nurse found Mrs Saunders in a state of collapse and she did not allow her to go downstairs to the kitchen for a fortnight. Meanwhile, the nurse
listened carefully to her patient, who told her about the bitter toast, and in consequence of what she had heard, she tasted the marmalade in its jar in the kitchen, and found it bitter. She took a sample and gave it to Dr Millar when he visited again. A new jar of marmalade was obtained and the husband complained that the first jar had not been emptied.

Nurse Cameron was also suspicious about some wheaten biscuits, bought specially for the patient. They were in a box on the mantelshelf in the kitchen and she thought they had been tampered with. On February 8th, when she was back on her feet, Elizabeth felt like trying a biscuit, and took one from the box. She saw that there was a glistening white powder on it, which looked like baking powder, and she hid it behind a shutter in her mother's bedroom. When her husband asked for proof that her food was being interfered with, she produced the biscuit and broke off a bit for him to taste. He said there was nothing wrong with it. Nurse gave one of the biscuits to Dr Millar; it appeared to him to have been scraped, and there was a white powder on it. He, too, was becoming suspicious.