Classic Scottish Murder Stories (35 page)

On Sunday, August 24th, 1952, a sizzling hot day, at noon, two boys walking in the lea came across the shack, and there, crumpled over a box of fruit, was the body of Old Mick, his head horrifically battered. He was facing inwards and had
been hit from behind. For one whole week he had been dead and not missed, last seen alive on Friday, August 15th, presumably when he drew his pension. The police found sad relics of his life – a torn Catholic bible, one old pipe, two shabby spectacle cases, and an ancient candlestick.

The murder weapon was a lemonade bottle: the broken bottle neck, speckled with blood, lay beside the corpse and a rusty chisel could also have been used. There was a bloodstained towel. One set, and one set only of footprints going into and out of the shack, was discovered. No cash was hidden away and theft of the pension money was the obvious motive. Hermits attract thieves, like flies to rotten fruit.

The following morning, the murder was the talk of Lanark, and a certain young woman felt compelled to go to the police to tell them about George Francis Shaw, a 25-year-old Irish labourer with flashy good looks, the father of her three children. She could not understand how he could have been in a position to give her £2 on Sunday, August 17th, since he had been out of work for a fortnight after losing his job at a farm in the district, and the regular maintenance which he paid her was never that much. She had felt quite touched, at the time, but now she had a terrible suspicion.

That evening, Superintendent Hendry tracked Shaw down in a bar and took him in for questioning. He admitted that on Friday, August 15th, he and his friend, George Dunn, a farm worker, aged 22, also from Ireland, had met an old man on the bridge on the Lanark-Carstairs road. Dunn, not he, had hung back and spoken to him briefly before running on to catch up Shaw. No, definitely not, never, said Shaw, he did not know Old Mick, even though he himself had lived in Lanark for two years. He had never been to the shack. Hotly he denied that he had been anywhere near Huntlygate Farm on the weekend of 16th-17th August. Brightly there burned in Hendry's mind the knowledge that two young men had been seen on Friday, the 15th, boarding the Carstairs bus at the Huntlygate Farm stop.

Leaving it there for the moment, the superintendent had George Dunn brought in. He immediately owned to knowing Old Mick, and kept asking if Shaw had been arrested. A difficulty was beginning to show up in the investigation. The superintendent realized that Dunn was ‘simple' and questioned him with caution, accordingly. Further enquiries were made, and it turned out that Shaw had been spotted with Dunn in a hotel in Lanark on August 17th. Shaw was flush with cash and bought a round of drinks. Later, at the cinema, he and Dunn talked to a 17-year-old girl, offering her cigarettes from a silver case.

Now to a detail which is ludicrous and inexplicable, yet profoundly incriminatory. During interviews, the police discovered that both young men were wearing Old Mick's socks. Somehow, by some unguessable means, the officers had found out that the old man had owned two pairs of socks – one on, one for washing in the ditch, presumably – and his corpse was
sans
socks.

Shaw and Dunn were charged with the murder, and Shaw, the ‘normal' man, was interrogated continuously for a week, but would not confess. Superintendent Hendry put the comprehensive question, ‘You struck him on the face and hands with a brick, iron bar and bottle, robbed him of two pairs of socks and a sum of money, didn't you?' ‘No, that is not true,' Shaw insisted. All that Dunn would say was ‘Ask Francis' (i.e. Shaw). Even when told that, as had been established, the single pair of footprints to and from the shack matched the hobnails on his boots, he looked blank and said again, ‘Ask Francis.'

George Shaw and George Dunn were brought up for trial at the High Court in Glasgow in December. Counsel for the Crown stated that he did not intend to show which of the defendants actually killed the old man. In law, if each knew that the other intended at least serious violence to the victim, or one incited the other, then both were equally guilty of
murder. In 1849, it was laid down that ‘If they joined in reckless assault upon the party – reckless whether he live or die – and the party be killed, all joining are guilty, though it is proved that one particular blow caused the death, and though it cannot be proved by whom the particular blow was struck. If united in a murderous and brutal assault, all are responsible.'

Shaw's counsel stated at the outset that since he understood that it would be argued for Dunn that he was mentally abnormal, and therefore not fit to stand trial, his client, Shaw, should be tried separately, later on. This was disallowed, and the joint trial proceeded. The medical evidence was that Dunn had a mental age of eight and would be easily led by a stronger personality. Dr Thomas Curran stated that he was ‘feeble-minded'. Dr Angus McNiven, who had assessed him in prison, was of the same opinion, further defining the case by saying that the diagnosis was not of insanity, but that the degree of mental impairment meant that Dunn could not understand the difference between right and wrong
as a normal person would.
This seems very fair, since Dunn would certainly have known that battering an old man to death would not be approved of, but the mind assessing what was going on was not a mature one. Dr David Anderson, medical officer at Barlinnie Prison, stated unequivocally that Dunn had no sense of moral responsibility, was illiterate, and did not appear to understand the gravity of the charge.

A bread salesman was brought by the Crown to testify that, in the June, Old Mick had told him that he had enough money for his own funeral without being a burden to anyone. George Shaw was put in the witness box. He said that he had been
near
Huntlygate Farm on the day
before
the murder, but that he and Dunn had spent the day in Carstairs on the Saturday. This seems like routine wiliness, but which
was
the actual day of the killing? Old Mick was last seen on the Friday, and two young men had been seen boarding the bus at the farm on the
Friday. Shaw and Dunn were flashing money around on the Sunday. On the face of it, the murder could have been committed at any time from Friday to Sunday between the markers. So why was Shaw so sure that the Saturday was the time to place himself elsewhere? Anyway, he was unable to provide an actual alibi, which might not have mattered too much, except that the police had been to Carstairs to enquire and no-one had even seen two young men in the village.

Both defendants were found Guilty of murder, by a majority of 11-3. The jury foreman stated that they considered that Dunn was indeed ‘feeble-minded', and the judge ordered that he was to be detained in the asylum at Carstairs. This left George Shaw alone and exposed, and he was sentenced to be hanged. He appealed. The Lord Justice-Clerk presided at the six-day hearing and many and learned were the arguments. George Dunn had declined his right to appeal. There was a lack of direct evidence. Their lordships felt that whoever had robbed the old man must have killed. The socks were important. The appeal failed. Shaw joked like a jackass as he was led away with his boot-black hair gleaming. ‘Right, boys, make it a good one!' he told the press photographers.

He did not meet the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, with the same joke at Barlinnie Prison on January 26th, 1953. His last words were said to be, ‘I am as innocent as anyone,' which could, in the case of a better brain, have been some deep, philosophical insight along the lines of guilt, but was, no doubt, an idiomatic means of emphasis. Some tender hearts felt uneasy. There were notional variations of the series of events at the shack. Anyway, a psychopath and a simpleton had hit a defenceless old hermit on the head, himself eccentric if not mad, and approaching senility. He had not put his trust in mankind, and he was proved right.

I
n terms of caricature, which express a loathing of her unnatural act, Mrs Mary Smith's own counsel described her as a beaky character, ‘like a vindictive masculine witch'. Sir Walter Scott stood further back and saw ‘a face to do or die, or perhaps to do to die. Thin features, which had been handsome, a flashing eye, an acute and aquiline nose, lips much marked, as arguing decision, and, I think, bad temper – they were thin and habitually compressed, rather turned down at the corners, as one of a rather melancholy disposition.'

Mrs Smith was indeed much studied, an unsympathetic figure in the dock, as she conjured up a smokescreen of doubt to veil her deeds, and all in court searched for the truth hidden behind that strong, hawkish face. I have not yet said that the Wife o' Denside, as she was hymned in broadsheets, was actually to walk free, the verdict Not Proven, but there was, as we shall see, explanation enough for the jury's quaint variance from the general reception of the evidence.

The case was a wonder at the time, and widely argued. They spoke of little else in Dundee. The charge was that during one autumnal week in 1826, with full murderous intent, Mrs Smith had administered arsenic to her servant-girl, Margaret Warden, under the guise of attempting to procure an abortion. The girl died, and the foetus perished within her.

The cruelty took place in a fine rural setting, a working farm wherein thoughts of the beauties of nature had no relevance, only profit, stark gain from grain and roots and the
suffering of beasts. By extension of the ‘pathetic fallacy' of literature, the environment of a murder can, traditionally, reflect and intensify its horror. If there were no evocation of the environment, a true crime writer's account would be considered ‘bare' and at a disadvantage in a comparison with the embroidery of untrue crime writers.

Where the murder is exceptionally horrible to contemplate, there is an element of softening the reality by merging it into the greater scene. Older writers tended to expatiate too far on the grace and grandeur of certain settings, until relevance was lost. Enough to say that the farm at West Denside, in the county of Forfar, stood on an eminence in a field facing south to the Firth of Tay, with panoramic views of Dundee, estuary, sea, and the Bell Rock Lighthouse. The house, a low, crouching building of one storey under a grey slate roof, was fronted by a terrace from which a flight of steps led down to fields, later to a garden girdled by a high boxwood hedge.

Farmer David Smith, a remote figure, older than his wife and quite possibly feared by her, unless that were one of her pretences, held a string of three farms: Dodd, East Denside, and West Denside, where he had chosen to reside. There was a goodly measure of prosperity, and driving ambition and greed for more. There were two sons, Alexander, the elder, and George, who were both employed on the farm. One daughter was married to the foreman, James Miller. Farm workers were of both sexes. Women were not exempt from toiling in the fields: the 20th century landgirls were not a new phenomenon. It was better than working in the mines. Tess of the d'Urbervilles hacked swedes, drew reeds, and fed the threshing machine.

Margaret Warden, a lassie of a ‘passionate and impulsive temper', was employed indoors and outdoors, and she was allowed to sleep in the kitchen. She was never Mrs Smith's favourite, but there under sufferance, and, lately, under punishment. Her father had died when she was 15 years old,
and the widow had been left in some destitution with one son and two daughters. Mrs Machan, a sister of Mrs Smith, had taken pity on the family, and used her influence to place young Margaret at Denside. Mrs Warden was eternally grateful to the Smiths. It was a matter of receiving charity gratefully. The social difference was very marked and Mrs Smith was known to be stuck-up at the best of times.

Greater, then, was the shame when, at the age of 21, Margaret gave birth to an illegitimate baby whose father was never revealed, which was born and reared at her mother's home at Baldovie. After a period of rehabilitation, the outcast was allowed back at Denside, again through the good offices of propitiatory Mrs Machan. With her sin ne'er forgotten, she laboured to restore her reputation.

Even greater, then, was the disgrace when, at the end of July, 1826, Mary Smith discovered that her treasured younger son, George, groomed for advancement, was receiving Margaret Warden's favours. Plans for wedlock seem to have hung in the air. Such was the baffled and bitter wrath of the Wife o'Denside that we may wonder – only guessing – if another member of her precious family had been the first to press or practise the arts of love upon the girl who was there and helpless. Later attempts were made to portray the situation as an ‘Upstairs-Downstairs' seduction and aftermath, but these were much humbler circumstances. An old print of a swooning servant-girl in a decent, if plain, wooden bed with ample bed-linen is way off the mark. Margaret slept in the box bed in the alcove in the kitchen, and her fellow-servant, Jean Norrie, shared that primitive couch. There was little comfort and less privacy.

Love might find a way, but Mother soon found out. Someone told Mrs Smith. The story was that she discovered the couple
in flagrante delicto,
or some approximation thereto, in the shadow of the barn beside the house. Abuse, vituperation, poured from the widow's thin, acid mouth, and twice betrayed,
doubly defenceless, Margaret fled to her mother's cottage. There she was ill-received and again reviled, and returned to Denside. After a bare fortnight, she was back with her mother. Within a week, Mrs Smith drove over in the trap which she used to take her dairy produce for sale in Dundee and tried to persuade Margaret to go with her to that town to see a doctor. Margaret refused.

It was high summer and typhus and cholera were rife in the district and Mrs Warden somehow thought that avoiding disease was Mrs Smith's design. She assured her that her daughter had been bled quite recently and was no risk to herself or anyone else. Mrs Smith had other preoccupations, suspicious as she was that Margaret was with child, and hot for certainty.