Classic Scottish Murder Stories (33 page)

Dr John Cochrane, a prison doctor, had found Dickson coldly indifferent and unaffected by his situation even when confronted by the gravity of the crime charged and the possible penalty. The superintendent of Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, Dr Angus McIven, who had also been asked to have a look at the prisoner, similarly inclined to the diagnosis of psychopathy bordering on insanity. (CDI Joyce had found Dickson quite lucid and intelligent with nothing abnormal in his behaviour, but he did notice that his general conversation was about motor cars – not, one would have thought, an appropriate topic for someone in his predicament.)

Lord Cameron bent over backwards to ensure that the defendant's mental state was fully ventilated, himself asking the principal keeper, ‘Was there any sign of his being a brooding type of man or a melancholy one?... Was he in any
way irrational or did he appear to act abnormalism any way?' The answer to both questions was in the negative. Dr Edgar Rintoul, who had conducted the post-mortem, testified that the bullets had been fired from a range of about six inches; there were two major injuries, and a suicide would have been incapable of inflicting the second one. The deceased had offered no resistance, which ruled out accident during a struggle.

The Advocate-Depute, in his closing speech, referred to the shooting as a cold, calculated, deliberate, brutal, blackhearted murder, which took the jury back hundreds of years to the type of crime that was committed when people were far less civilised. In his summing up, Lord Cameron contributed to the case the memorable phrase that Dickson had left his trail ‘blazing round the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright'.

The jury speedily returned a majority verdict of Guilty and Dickson was sentenced to be hanged at Saughton Prison, Edinburgh, on December 21st. However, more than a hint of psychopathy had been uncovered, with a possibility of brain damage and he was reprieved five days before the date of execution, to serve life imprisonment. It is wrong to presume that psychopaths are too cold and remote to experience depression. They are, in fact just as likely as any other to commit suicide, upset by the consequences of their aberrant actions, or oppressed by the bleakness of being themselves. Dickson had already evinced a suicidal proclivity when stressed, and, two years into his sentence, he was found dead from a overdose of drugs in his cell at Peterhead Prison.

T
he minister was on form that Sunday morning, when he preached a fiery moving sermon. The turning pebbles of his oratory fell in a silver shower on the bowed heads of his congregation. Mr Kello was transported, his face working with the ripples of the divine afflatus. Poor Mrs Kello was not in her pew, but that was only to be expected, because she had been ailing for some weeks. The minister had confided to certain people, in hushed tones, that his wife had been tempted to put an end to herself. Sick she had been, on and off, and he, too, lately.

The homily over, the plain little kirk emptied and the parishioners went home to their dinner. Spott was just a speck of a village, its name meaning, indeed, a small spot of ground. Set between Dunbar and the sea, three miles to the north, and the rising, red-soiled Lammermuirs, with its own mound, Brant Hill, it had a dark history. In October, 1705, the Kirk Session minutes recorded, ‘Many witches burnt on the top of Spott Loan' and that is where the last wailing witch in the whole of Scotland was done to death.

Witchcraft was in the very air, and the absolute belief that the Evil One stalked the land froze the blood with fear of shadows. There is no evidence, only rumour, that John Kello was connected with witchcraft, or that he was a taker of witches. He himself was to swear that he had not been initiated in ‘wicked practises of the Magicienis' and had no desire to
probe beyond the given Word of God. If you can find a dusty old copy, there is in existence a fine, scary novel,
Mr Kello,
by John Ferguson (Harrap, 1924) which is based on the premise that he was entirely consumed by the occupation of not suffering a witch to live: ‘He lived behind a barred door in the dark, mournful study, where he wrote by sunlight and candlelight year after year upon
The Discoverie of Satan – The Signs by which a Witch may be Condemned'.

What really interested the minister of Spott, however, was his own temporal station in life. Edinburgh would have been more to his taste. A man of the people who had studied hard, an ornament of the reformed Kirk of Scotland, he felt that he was kept down and not receiving adequate respect or recompense. With a little money in hand, he began to dabble in investment in property, enjoying the ‘filthie ocker' (interest), but his luck ran out and his affairs became complicated. He fretted and brooded.

Meanwhile, the parish was glad to be served by the Reverend John Kello, who had bettered himself, a scholar to be sure, and a fine preacher, with an impeccable wife, Margaret (Thomson), also of humble origins, and their three children, Bartilmo, Barbara and Bessie. Alas! The family picture lied; Margaret blocked the minister's ladder, and he had set his sights on the laird's daughter. Secret like a worm in the recesses of his perfidious heart was the hope that he might succeed in marrying a real lady.

Margaret had to die. He laid out rumours of her indisposition and her melancholy, like a scent, let it be known that he had made a will in her favour, as if he had a presentiment that he would predecease her, and watched for an opportunity. Forty days passed, during which the Enemy did not cease from tempting him, and after this significant period, he developed a mysterious illness which, with hindsight, he perceived as a sign from God. Pretending, however, that Margaret was similarly afflicted, he tried to
poison her, but her constitution was so strong that she merely voided the substance.

That Sunday of the resounding sermon, September 24th, 1570, afterwards, he asked some neighbours to come back to the manse with him, to cheer up Mrs Kello. She would appreciate the company. He accompanied them across the kirkyard to his front door, but found it locked from the inside. He appeared puzzled and concerned. There was another entrance, seldom used, which opened into his study, and he left the others to wait outside (just as William Herbert Wallace, five centuries later, caused his neighbours, witnesses, to wait while he went in to see if his wife, Julia, was all right).

Soon they heard his ululations of woe, and, venturing, in, found their minister lamenting by the dangling, crook-necked figure of his wife, swaying on a rope suspended from a hook in the ceiling of her bedroom. The tableau of suicide spoke for itself, and sympathy washed over the widower and his motherless bairns. The real story was that John Kello had strangled Margaret Kello with a towel as she knelt at her devotions. ‘In the verie death,' he confessed, ‘she could not beleive I bure hir ony evill will, bot was glaid, as sche than said, to depairt, gif her death could doe me ather vantage or pleasoure.'

The Reverend Andrew Simpson, of Dunbar, had visited John Kello on his sickbed while his wife yet lived, and Kello had imparted to him a dramatic vision, or dream, or even hallucination, which he had experienced, and when, now Kello went to him for comfort in his role of grieving, bewildered widower, Simpson suddenly became seized with a prophetic force. It was a great moment in the history of crime. He rose to his feet and addressed the shivering sinner:

‘Brother,' he said, ‘I doe remember quhan I visitate yow, in tyme of your grit seiknes, ye did open to me that visione; that ye war caried be ane grym man befoir the face of ane terrible Judge, and to escaip his furie ye did precipitate your
self in ane deip river, when his angelis and messingeris did follow you with two-edged swords; and ever quhan thai struike at you, ye did declyne and jowke [dodge] in the water; while in the end, by ane way unknowin to you, ye did escape.'

Sigmud Freud himself could have done no better as the Reverend Simpson launched into his analysis: John Kello was the author of the cruel murder then conserved in his heart, and he was carried before the terrible judgement seat of God in his own conscience. The messenger of God was the law of the land, before which he would be judged. The water in which he stood was his own vain hypocrisy.

Mr Simpson of Dunbar achieved some popular acclaim for this feat of interpretation, but when, seven years later, he foretold the loss of the local fishing fleet wrecked off Dunbar, unfairly, he was more blamed than approbated. John Kello, his secret disclosed, withdrew to consider his options. He could flee abroad or stay and face the music. If he repented privately, would that do? Mr Simpson pressed him so hard that in the end Kello believed that God spoke through him, and he voluntarily made his way to Edinburgh and there confessed his crime to the Bench and the Church. Condemned to be hanged and his body to be cast on the fire and burnt to ashes, he seems to have got off lightly, considering the ingenuity of the times, unless his cloth or his contrition saved him from worse penalty. Suspicion of witchcraft was undoubtedly attached to his name and he might have expected the flames on the hill.

At first, his whole property was forfeit to the Crown, but by one of those rare ameliorations for which we anxiously scan the pages of history, the three children were allowed an inheritance. And so the minister of Spott was hanged in Edinburgh on October 4th, 1570, for the ‘crewell and odious murthure' of his wife. How the mighty periods of his repentance rolled from the scaffold as he delivered his last homily, ‘to the great gude example and comfort of all the
behalders'! He also left a posthumous confession. John Kello really takes the biscuit. To come to the pulpit with red hands, his wife left hanging from a hook, and preach a Sunday sermon, is unparalleled in hypocrisy. But was it hypocrisy to blame the temptations of the Devil – ‘Thir were the glistering promises whairwith Sathan, efter his accustomed maner, eludit my senses' – when all around him shared his structure of beliefs?

S
ometimes a dreadful murder can illuminate the most unremarkable area and reveal the everyday lives of the hoardes of scurrying people, otherwise obscure, soon forgotten. The obvious example is Whitechapel at the time of Jack the Ripper. Such a place, although by no means a depraved slumland, was Whiteinch at the turn of the century. The name means ‘White Island' and it is situated on the north bank of the Clyde, beyond Partick, some three and a half miles from the centre of Glasgow. It grew up around the great shipyards in the middle of the 19th century, after dredging of the area. Quite self-contained, Whiteinch had a distinctive identity of its own, and because of the employment created by shipbuilding, it was never a region of no hope.

The inhabitants were mostly workers and their families, living in specially built ‘workers' cottages', and tenements. The whole district was informed with a spirit of self-improvement, with workers' education, a good library, a public school, and Victoria Park with its grotto – a grove of fossils found on site in the mudflats when the park was being laid out. Some villas housed the lower management and professional classes such as engineers. Trams ran and a steam passenger ferry plied between Whiteinch and Linthouse.

Here, at 1122 Dumbarton Road, at the foot of one of those classic, red sandstone tenements (now replaced by modern flats) lived 50-year-old Miss Lucy McArthur, who kept a small dairy, with the shop at the front, and the room which was her
solitary home at the back. Providing a vital service to the neighbourhood, she had plenty of customers and the business was surprisingly prosperous. It was her mistake, in her innocence as a woman living alone and handling cash, to have made herself a target for evil by letting it be known that she had £500 to fall back on.

On November 8th, 1904, early morning, her young ‘message girls', Jeanie and Sarah Platt, knocked as usual at her shop door in order to collect the milk to deliver to her customers. There was no reply and the door was locked, which immediately alarmed them, because she was well known for her punctuality – the sort of person you could set your clock by. The girls went round for help to Mrs Macdonald, a neighbour who lived in the same close. She knew how to use the washing-house key to open the door. They peered inside. It was a scene of spattered blood and scattered bottles. Jeanie, the older girl, was sent to Whiteinch Police Office to report that something was wrong at the dairy, and Detective Inspector Mackenzie walked back to the shop with her and entered cautiously. There were signs of a mortal struggle and the drawers of the counter were open and empty.

Behind the counter, in the corner by the window, lay the battered body of Miss McArthur, the skull very obviously fractured. The hands were tied with two pieces of old, plaited cord, and a red cotton handkerchief was tied around the neck. She had been dead for ‘several hours'. The inspector then entered the living premises, using the separate door in the close, which is not recorded as having been locked (for surely Miss McArthur intended shortly to return there). As he went in, he heard a tinkle, and, looking down, found the bloodstained key of the shop, outside on the threshold. In this inner room there was no disorder, only a tableau of sparse daily life. The gas light was still ablaze and the kettle had boiled dry on the gas burner at the fireplace, which was also still alight. A bullock's head was in a pot on the fire.
Apparently Miss McArthur had been preparing the delicacy known as potted head, possibly for her customers.

The corpse was raised and placed on a stretcher, whereupon the broken handle of a small hatchet, bloodstained and with adherent human hair, was seen on the floor. The steel head of the hatchet, similarly stained, was lying on the top of a box nearby. It was a typical household axe of the type used for breaking coals or sticks, the wooden shaft about 12 inches long, and with a hammerhead as well as a blade. It turned out that Miss McArthur, who, after all, was not an old woman, had put her trust in a bank. There was no hoard under the bed. Her bank books were found in the shop, and they did indicate, however, that she must had had a considerable sum of cash lodged somewhere on the premises, which was now missing. Moreover, on the day before the murder was discovered, a substantial account had been paid out to her, and she had her rent money, too, in readiness. A couple of £1 notes were lying on the floor beside some articles of clothing, and £6 10s was undisturbed in a hatbox.