Classic Scottish Murder Stories (39 page)

He had the whole night in which to eliminate the signs of carnage, and he was just about as thorough as anyone could be in those circumstances, although it was probably not a good idea to leave the remains of a super-size container of scouring powder half-burnt in the ashes in the fireplace. It must have been smeared with blood. At some stage in the proceedings, he carried his heavy parcels outside and stowed them in the boot of his car. Formed and still forming in his brain were a series of subterfuges, errands and disposals. Everything depended on his manner, his ability to appear normal and act appropriately, in which he succeeded remarkably well – until he encountered Detective Chief Superintendent William Muncie, one week later.

The next morning, he took his now motherless child to his own mother's house, and presented himself at 10 o'clock as arranged at his sister-in-law's, appearing cool and detached, composed and caring, chatting with his mind on automatic pilot during the 14-mile journey to hospital, while behind him, the parcels were rolling around in the boot of his car. Straight on next to his mother-in-law's home to enact a prepared performance. ‘Is she here?' he shouted, bounding up the stairs like a character in a farce.

The story which he had fabricated was that Elizabeth had walked out the night before after a quarrel when she had let the baby fall in the bath. No, she had not taken any clothes, but he had thrown some money at her as she left – about £50
or £60, which she had put in her purse. Mrs KKzabeth Roberts, her mother, was, naturally extremely worried about her daughter and at her request Keenan drove her to a relative's house to make, of course, fruitless enquiries. It was getting on for 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and he was anxious about the parcels. Politely declining to go on to another relative, he drove off on a circular or rather elliptical tour of disposal. He had too many obligations to range far and wide, but he did the best he could in the time available and was back, playing with his child later that evening.

The torso was dumped in a copse on Thankerton Moor, which had been the site of a prisoner of war camp. One leg was thrown from a bridge into the Water of Leith at Balerno and the other was dropped from a road bridge on to the Aberdeen to Edinburgh railway line, between the northbound tracks. The head was left in a large wood on the Lang Whang road, which runs from Lanark via Carnwath to Edinburgh.

Keenan did not report his wife as a mising person, adhering to his oft-told tale that he was the deserted party and that she had left of her own accord and would return when the money ran out. He moved into his mother-in-law's home as a lodger, saying that he could not bear to stay alone in his own house. His sister-in-law took in the child. He drank in his local public house and played dominoes, the very picture of a wronged man just waiting for everything to get back to normal again.

However, when the remains began to be found – and it did not take long – the situation changed. Until then, Elizabeth Keenan's family had been seething with anxiety, but not with suspicion. The legs came to light first, four miles apart, on March 24th, although, in fact, people had been wondering about the parcel wedged between stones in the middle of the river from the evening of the 21st onwards – so soon. The woman who finally reported it did so because she thought that it looked like a dead baby. The parcel on the railway tracks was, at first, taken to be a dead cat.

A murder squad was set up. Pathologists said that the woman had been well-nourished, a brunette, between 20 and 40 years old, and about five feet two inches in height. Bizarrely, the legs were still in nylon stockings – which showed that the attack had occurred before bedtime. James Keenan's sister-in-law, upon reading the publicity, approached her local constable on the night of the 26th, and told him that her sister had disappeared and she could not help being nervous that the legs might be hers: she did not want to cause any friction, since she thought that it was up to James himself to go to the police and she did not want to be involved.

It was now too awkward and suspicious for Keenan to stay detached, and on the morning of March 26th, he went to Lanark police station to report his wife as missing from 8.45pm on March 19th – an indication perhaps of time of death. She had said that she was going to London, and she took £50 or £60 with her. This was not quite what he had told her mother. He indicated that he was aware that a woman's legs had been found, but he did not seem unduly perturbed.

Detective Chief Superintendent Muncie interviewed Keenan's sister-in-law, and, hearing about Elizabeth Keenan's ovarian operation, obtained her blood group from the hospital to find out if she could be eliminated from the enquiry, but it was the same as that of the legs. Moving on to interview Keenan at his home, Muncie was unimpressed by him at this first meeting, not liking his furtive glances and the way in which his sullen expression never changed.

Keenan stated that his wife had taken with her a leather shopping bag, which would probably have contained some clothing. The wardrobes were full of women's clothing. He could not say what, if any, items had been taken. One would think that smaller, more intimate articles would have been more telling, but he did not even try to lie in this area, remaining vague and difficult to pin down. Rather than expressing his undying devotion to his wife, as one would have
expected, he adopted the hostile pose of only being willing to take Elizabeth back for the child's sake – a clever touch. The policeman's eye noticed that the linoleum beside the bed, which could, conceivably, have borne footprints for purposes of comparison, was exceptionally clean and polished. He took away a pair of shoes. Keenan showed no emotion as he gave his consent. There were no dark blankets to be seen.

James Keenan was Muncie's man – but only to the standard of a hunch. He began to visit the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law frequently, when Keenan was out, having obtained a job as lorry driver's mate, still keeping up his bluff. Elizabeth's mother, frozen with fear and denial, acted strangely: she said at this stage that her daughter had never had any dark blankets in her possession. Muncie thought it most unlikely that £50 to £60 had been available in the house for Elizabeth to take with her. The bookmaker with whom Keenan laid his bets stated that he had been losing for a long time. A relative to whom Keenan owed money had asked him where he had got the money, and, in a corner, he could only say that he had won it on the horses.

Muncie will have known that a woman will only abandon a young child if her life is unbearable, or through mental illness. There was no evidence of either state of affairs. Appeals were made on television nationwide. Keenan cooperated. It appeared that 668 women were missing in the British Isles, and 462 of them were traced as a result of the publicity. Some of them were not pleased. Muncie wondered if Elizabeth could have been involved in an extra-marital relationship. When she worked, she was a flat-bed knitter, a skilled trade, and discreet but negative enquiries were made at her former place of employment.

The street corner near the Keenan's house was a turnaround point for a small, local bus service which left hourly at a quarter to the hour. Was that why Keenan had said that Elizabeth left at 8.45? The driver of the 8.45 bus, however,
knew Mrs Keenan and had not seen her at all that evening. Keenan now made a mistake, telling an identifiable lie. Muncie had kept repeating to the family that no one, except James, had heard his wife speak of leaving for London. One morning, Keenan called at a police station and asked the office to pass a message to Muncie that his wife had told his sister that she was thinking of going to London. His sister remembered no such conversation.

Keenan had studiedly not asked about the shoes which had been taken away. The forensic experts were asking for older shoes, more worn. The mother-in-law, who held a key, was taken to the house, and a suitable pair were selected. She was asked to check if any blankets were missing and she said not. The next day, the decision was made to show her the blanket which had been wrapped around the legs, or rather the two quarters of heather-mixture blanket, making up the one half that had been utilised for the legs. She reacted with all the symptoms of shock. ‘I know that,' she managed to say, and then ‘clammed up'. A doctor was called to her that night, and there was a real feeling that there had been a breakthrough in the case.

Meanwhile, there was an even greater advance when a tinker who had camped near the copse on the prisoner of war site found the torso wrapped in a blanket. It bore the scar of Elizabeth Keenan's ovarian operation, just as Mrs Crippen's remains showed the scar of an operation on the ovaries – in that case for excision. James Keenan was arrested. He had had time to regret using the unusual blankets. Muncie wondered if he had added the detail of the leather shopping bag with some idea of suggesting that his wife might have taken the blankets with her, and then fallen prey to some outside murderer.

It is, of course, in the heat of the moment that mistakes are made. When Mrs Dyer, the baby-farmer, threw an infant into the River Thames at Reading in 1896, one of the sheets of
paper in which it was swaddled actually bore her false name and a give-away address. When Dr Buck Ruxton cast the parcelled portions of his wife and maid into a ravine at Moffat, after dismembering them in the bath, his wrapping materials included an identifiable blouse and woollen rompers, and part of the
Sunday Graphic
of September 15th 1935, which was one of a special ‘slip' edition sold only in Dr Ruxton's home district, and a copy of which was proved to have been delivered to his house in Lancaster. The brown paper carrier bag in which Keenan had wrapped one of his wife's legs bore a distinctive letter ‘A', the mark of an agent for the Household Supply Co, which could, eventually, have led back from a third party to the sister-in-law and thence to Keenan's house.

Because the hands were now available, fingerprinting, with many impressions taken from 40 Wellwood Avenue, was possible at last, but the torso's fingers were withered and at first only seven points of comparison were found, and a minimum of 16 is required for identification. The house was searched. The bath U-bend contents reacted positively to a blood test, as did the panel in front of the bath, almost at floor level. There were no bone particles in any of the U-bends, as had been hoped. Scouring powder had been used vigorously.

The mother-in-law, who had been seen by a doctor, was well enough to state that she had actually given her daughter three heather-mixture blankets as a present after a bedroom fire around Christmas, the traces of which Muncie had observed days previously. She identified the pieces of blanket from the legs and torso, and revealed that she had asked James to leave her house because she could not bear to look at him. At midnight on May 1st, the team achieved a 16 point fingerprint identification.

James Keenan was charged with murder and made no reply. He was searched, and when asked to empty his pockets, he drew out a piece of string to which a shred of material was adhering. Twelve fibres matched fibres from the blanket
around the legs and torso. There was also a twist of blue cellulose acetate fibre which matched a shred on the surface of one of the pieces of blanket. The incriminating blankets had a history all of their own: they bore a wartime utility label and had been a present to Elizabeth's mother from a cousin who had worked at the aforementioned prisoner of war camp, and had bought them at the deplenishing sale over 20 years before.

After a night in the police cells, Keenan made a statement in which he confessed to the murder. He told the police where to find the still missing head, which was retrieved from the wood. The features were well preserved. On June 3rd, 1969, he pleaded Guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

T
he rural idyll has never been the same since Sherlock Holmes' well-remembered words to Watson during a railway journey: ‘You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.'

Man's frail homely castle is just an illusion.
I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down.
There are strange undertones to the sudden entry of Father Christmas,
alias
Robin Goodfellow. The hearth was the symbolic and spiritual centre of the home, the abode of the
lares
and
penates,
the household gods. When cottages were low, humped buildings, with a wide primitive chimney which filled the room with smoke when the wind blew hard, that chimney was a possible means of ingress for an intruder, especially frightening if you lived alone with no one to hear your cries. The symbolism of ravishment is only too obvious.

Miss Mary Smith, a quiet woman of 63, lived on her own in a lonely, one-roomed cottage by the wayside at Redhill, in the parish of Auchterless. She was last seen alive and well during the evening of Monday, April 9th, 1849. A fair was being held that day at the village of Badenscoth. It had a reputation for a degree of rowdiness, and although not really worried, Mary had casually remarked to someone that she was not afraid of anybody, ‘except that lad, Jamie Robb.' Prophetic words, and truly reported.

James Robb, aged 22, was the Nogood Boyo of the district. He was a stout, strong young man, employed as a labourer at a slate quarry – heavy work. Living at his father's house, near Redhill, he was not some marauding stranger, some casual itinerant, but knew Mary Smith's circumstances, for sure. He would not have slipped down the chimney of a cottage packed with sturdy menfolk to get a light for his pipe without a by-your-leave as he was soon to claim inventively.

On the Tuesday morning, when there was no sign of her moving around outside her home, people who knew her and were in the habit of speaking to her as they passed became concerned. Their behaviour gives the lie to Holmes' jaundiced view of ‘these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.'