Classic Scottish Murder Stories (38 page)

It was a weakness in the Crown case that there was a vagueness attached to the exact times of the administration of arsenic, not to mention the quantity, and Jeffrey, for Mrs Smith, vigorously milked this grey area. His speech lasted for another two and a half hours. He asked the jury to marvel at the calm and cheerful manner in which his client had ministered to the dying girl, day after day. (But that, of course is the art and conduct of the classic poisoner.) He referred to Mrs Smith's previous good character. He still clung to the original diagnosis of cholera and pooh-poohed the wonders of science – blunders, more likely. Six witnesses had spoken of suicide. Rats there
were
at Denside. Mystery befogged the case. Not Proven would be the just verdict.

By now, it was 3 o'clock in the morning. The jury had been listening for 18 hours. When the judge began his charge, they struggled to their feet, but, contrary to custom, they were not told to resume their seats and were forced to stand for two and a half hours. Such a feat of endurance was thought to have coloured their response to the judge's admonitions. The Lord Justice-Clerk summed up against Mrs Smith, and when their ordeal was over, the jury expressed a wish to retire. They returned the following afternoon with a unanimous verdict of Not Proven. It was an unpopular result, and feelings ran high.

Lord Cockburn in 1838, upon reading Lockhart's
Life of Scott,
recorded in his diary these words: ‘Lockhart mentions Scott as having gone to see my old client, Mrs Smith, who was guilty, but acquitted, of murder by poison ... Sir Walter's remark upon the acquittal was: “Well, sirs, all I can say is, that if that woman was my wife, I should take good care to be my own cook!” '

T
he watcher in the bracken had made himself a kind of deer's ‘harbour' or bed, but it was the tactics of warfare, not stalking, that he was employing. Since the hours of darkness, possibly all night, he had been waiting patiently. He was armed with a sawn-off shotgun, and he was wearing overalls. His lair was close enough – a few hundred yards – to the house in the Highlands for him to be able to calculate exactly when all the members of the McIntyre family had gone out, except for Catherine, a housewife of 47, left all on her own and unprotected, expecting no sudden inrush of evil. Too close, and the Cairn terrier could have scented his adrenaline, and become suspicious. If only a more formidable dog had been around the place ...

The husband, head shepherd on the Tombuie Estate, went off to work very early. The two daughters, Annie and Mary, were, in fact, on holiday in the Isle of Arran. Archie, the son, also a farm worker, said goodbye at about 8.00am, and as he walked along the road, he actually saw a movement in the four-foot-high bracken but thought that it was probably one of the deer. He walked on. The watcher had made a mistake, and, if challenged, he could well have used that gun.

An alien predator loose in the peaceful countryside, Stanislaw Myszka, aged 23, was a deserter from the Polish Army in Exile. For a time, he had been resident at Taymouth Castle, by the shores of Loch Tay, near Kenmore, in Perthshire, which was in use as a resettlement centre for some
800 Polish soldiers who elected to stay in Britain after the war and build up new lives. They were beginning to find Scottish wives.

Tower Cottage, the Mclntyres' home, set high on the slopes of Bolfracks Hill above Loch Tay, could be seen from the castle. It was not an ordinary Highland cottage, being built in parts of differing design and materials around a stumpy, machiolated watchtower, once, by the look of it, a small fortress, but now far from impregnable. Myszka was undoubtedly familiar with the cottage and the nature of its occupants. Local knowledge must have drawn him there to its special feature – McIntyre was holding £90 in cash in readiness to pay it out in wages to the under-staff on the estate.

That Friday, 26th September, 1947, Catherine McIntyre did not stop to wash up the breakfast dishes when her husband and son had gone, because she wanted to write a letter to her daughters before the postman called at 10.00am. He would take the letter away with him, since the isolated house was nowhere near a postbox. In the afternoon, she was going out to have tea with her friend, Mrs McKerracher, whose husband had a neighbouring farm. Her day was mapped out pleasantly. She sat down at the table in the kitchen and began to write ...

Outside, the Polish soldier began to run and duck down the hill. He got to the door and knocked. The terrier yapped. Or perhaps he just burst in. He flourished his shotgun. His primary intent might have been robbery with whatever violence proved necessary and his victim may have hoped to survive. When he had finished, he returned to his lair and cleaned himself up as well as he could. The bloodied overalls came off and his brand new suit went on. It was thought that it was at this stage, not earlier, that he gave himself a ‘dry-shave' and threw the razor-blade into the bracken. He decamped, with his spoils.

At 10.00am, the postman called. There was no reply when
he knocked, so he left the Mclntyres' two newspapers on the step and continued on his round. At 5.15pm, Archie came home for his tea. The doors were locked, the dog was barking furiously outside and the newspapers were still on the step. He remembered that his mother had been planning to go out visiting, and thought that she must have been delayed for some reason. He sat down on the doorstep and began to read one of the newspapers. At 5.30pm, McKerracher appeared, somewhat worried, saying that Mrs McIntyre had never turned up for tea. They wondered if she had had an accident in the house.

Archie fetched a ladder and climbed through the kitchen window. All was silent, and wrong. The breakfast dishes were still in the scullery sink, unwashed, and the letter to the girls lay, unfinished, on the table, stopped in mid-sentence. He searched the first floor, then the second, calling for his mother. The door to his own bedroom was locked, which did not make sense. He fetched an axe and broke the door down. Mother was lying dead on one of the beds in his room, with a mattress taken from another bed squashed on top of her body. Her hands and feet were tightly tied with black bootlaces, and she had been gagged with a scarf. Finally, her head had been severely battered in a murderous attack.

The police were called out. Blunt old black cars began to mass outside the towered cottage. One of Archie's suits had been stolen from his wardrobe and the shepherds' wages had gone, of course. Archie recalled the movement in the bracken, and the hideout, sown with its clues, was quickly discovered. The razor-blade was there, and part of a bloodstained handkerchief. Nearby, a local constable found the shotgun, in pieces, with the butt stained with blood; two cartridges; and a pair of overalls covered with blood. Also found, was a railway ticket stamped Perth to Aberfeldy, dated for the previous day, which was identified by railway officials as of the type issued only to soldiers in uniform. Taymouth Castle immediately
sprang to mind, and, using a team of interpreters, the police began to question all the Polish soldiers who had been billeted at the centre.

There was no description of a suspect to go on, but details of the shotgun were broadcast, and a gardener who lived at Old Meldrum, in Aberdeenshire, thought that he recognized it. He had recently lent just such a gun to a farm grieve, who had found it missing when he wanted to use it. The police went to interview the gardener and the grieve, and learnt that a Pole named Stanislaw Myszka had been employed on the farm there, before moving south to Perth in search of a new job, during the week of the murder. After a few days, he had returned to Old Meldrum with a new suit, and he seemed to be in funds, although there was no sign of a job. The grieve and his wife identified the fragment of a bloodstained handkerchief as part of one which they had given to the Pole.

A taxi driver might have carried Myszka from Aberfeldy to Perth: he remembered a foreigner who looked as if he had been sleeping rough and paid his fare from a thick roll of banknotes. This could have been the same man who had been spotted coming out of a wood, before taking a bus to Aberfeldy. A girl from Ardallie, newly married to one of the Polish soldiers based at Taymouth Castle, reported that a friend of theirs, called Stanislaw Myszka, who had been chronically short of money, had suddenly taken them on a shopping spree.

The now named fugitive was caught by two constables after a chase through a disused RAF airfield at Longside, near Peterhead, where he had been sleeping in one of the disused huts. The photograph of Myszka under arrest, in handcuffs, shows a very young, small, pinched, ratty man, hunched and stumbling, wearing a large, pale cap and a strained, striped suit of ‘demob' cut, obviously not his. At the police station, Catherine McIntyre's gold wedding ring was found hidden in his shoe.

Professor John Glaister conducted the post-mlStem at Perth. His findings were that ‘Death resulted from fracture of the base of the skull, with subdural haemorrhage, the result of very considerable violence, together with superimposed respiratory embarrassment.' There were four deep lacerated wounds on the head. Beard hairs were noticed on the razor-blade which Myszka had discarded in the bracken. Professor Glaister had a special interest in hair and had indeed published
A Study of Hairs,
in 1931. He asked for samples of Myszka's shaved hairs to be brought to him from Perth Prison and compared them, mounted on slides, with the original shaved hairs. All were fair to very light brown and ‘their gross and detailed structural characteristics matched'. Before DNA, it was only possible to state that hairs were ‘consistent with a common source'. Hair was not so accurate as fingerprints for purposes of identification. The perameters of its use were carefully defined at Myszka's trial at Perth.

The special defence of insanity had been lodged but it was an uphill struggle because this was a clear murder for gain. Possibly there was an element of mental disturbance in the man due to war trauma, loss and deprivation, and
anomie
in a foreign land, but of course his compatriots at the Castle had suffered similar misfortunes and they had not gone on the rampage. It was said that he had been made ill by worry after hearing that his children, who had been living in France, were to be repatriated to Poland. He was hanged at Perth on February 6th, 1948.

‘T
arzan' was what they called James Keenan around the streets of Lanark in 1969. It must have been said ironically, because, although he went in for weight-lifting and was presumably strong and muscled, he was a small man, about five feet tall. One feels that his size was a formative element of his personality, as evidenced by his choice of a compensatory hobby. In his photograph, which is very striking, he does not look like a murderer, his face fine and thin, his eyes very dark, melancholy, a Chatterton one could have believed, without knowledge.

His relatives, as reported, all concurred on the harmony of his marriage. At the time of the tragedy, people who knew the couple seemed to be reluctant to speak out. Someone must have been aware that they were disagreeing over the upbringing of their child – if that, offered by Keenan, were the real source of trouble – and someone must have suspected that he had a short fuse. Not that anyone outside the vortex could have prevented the outcome. The crime was said to have been out of character but that is the nature of matrimonial murder! ‘The privacy of marriage is a shocking thing. We try to present our own, particularly if we are women, in a good light, or, if men, in no light at all. We struggle not to listen to the secrets of other people's marriages. Thus marriages live in isolation, sometimes becoming, for want of compassion and criticism, more bizarre, more cruel, more wild or more eccentric, than any of us can possibly imagine.' (In Hilary Bailey's
Mrs
Mulvaney.)
There does seem to be a measurable period of premeditation in fetching an axe and killing your wife with it. An argument over the correct way to bath the baby scarcely seems provocation for such a brutal murder.

The small family lived in a council house at 40 Wellwood Avenue, Lanark. Keenan was 35 years old, and his wife, Elizabeth, was 29. They had been married for some 11 years. Elizabeth had had to endure an ovarian operation in order to conceive a child. Having such a procedure in the 1960s must be an indication of how much the wife, and perhaps the husband, wanted a baby. A 14-month-old girl had not brought the happiness that had been expected. Her name was published at the time, but it is kinder not to perpetuate the sadness. James Keenan had not, of late, been doing very well: he had been out of work for several months, and he had been losing money on the horses. Finance was, therefore, another source of stress at home. He liked a drink, but was not an alcoholic.

He attacked his wife on the night of Wednesday, March 19th, 1969. Elizabeth was last seen alive at home that evening, when her brother had called to ask if James would mind running his wife to hospital the next morning, to have a minor operation, since he was unemployed. Who knows if this rankled, but James agreed, and the brother-in-law left at about 7.30pm, when all seemed normal. The fatal matrimonial argument over bathing the baby flared up while Elizabeth was still dressed, and, by implication, at the baby's bath time. It could have happened very shortly after the relative had left and perhaps their supper had been put back, and they were hungry. If the row was actually in the bathroom, he must surely have gone out of the room to fetch the axe from kitchen, lobby, shed, yard... Even so, that was not time enough for cooling off to take place, apparently. Or had he been fantasizing about killing her?

Then Keenan drank a bottle of whisky and the next thing he remembered, he said, was seeing his wife in the bath, cut up
into sections, and he with a hacksaw in his hand. He vomited. There were four parcels to pack: the legs, the torso with the arms intact, and the head. As his thoughts swung and gibbered in the jungle of his mind, he had no intention of giving himself up and concentrated on careful wrapping, in several layers. For this purpose he made the cardinal error of drawing upon materials occurring naturally in his own home environment: a cot blanket; unusually dark, heather-mixture blankets; a paper carrier bag; and so on.