Classic Scottish Murder Stories (40 page)

They opened the door and went in. Mary Smith was lying dead in her bed, which was broken, with the sheets all crumpled and bearing signs of a terrible struggle. The cause of death was not obvious, and was indeed kept secret for a time but it became known that rape had taken place. There were clues aplenty, and good detective work was not lacking. The chimney was a square wooden box about five feet high by two and a half feet wide, positioned about eight feet above the hearth. The soot was examined: it was partly damp and partly dry and it showed to perfection the streaks such as a man's corded dress would make as he slithered down with foul intent.

An unusual composite metal button bearing words and figures was found, broken from its neck or eye, in a lirk or fold in the sheets. A walking stick had been left outside, by the door, and it was thought that James Robb had had it with him at the fair, ‘or one very like to it'. It was easy to assemble a picture of his recent activities. He had left Badenscoth fair at
10.00pm, vowing that he was determined to gratify his passion on somebody before he went to sleep. An acquaintance walked halfway home with him, separating at a point where he would have had to pass Redhill to get to his house that night. The next day, he turned up for work at the quarry at one o'clock. One of his fellow-workmen brushed some soot from his coat and remarked that he must have been in a lum (chimney). There was a button missing from his coat.

George Webster, Sheriff Officer, turfed James Robb out of bed in the middle of the Tuesday night, whereupon he admitted that he had shinned down the chimney, but for the aforementioned innocent purpose. However, the button proved to be an exact match and it fitted the broken eye, with its bright recent fracture, which remained on his coat. When they brought Robb up for trial for murder and ‘raptus' in September, 1849, the hearing proceeded behind closed doors. The jury returned a verdict of Guilty, but recommended mercy, because they thought that he had had no intention of committing murder. For the defence, Mr Shand submitted that since the jury had negatived intent to murder, the sentence should not reflect that crime, but he was overruled.

Lord Cockburn was on the bench, and his diary reveals that Robb had a snowball's chance of surviving the flames of his wrath: ‘It is difficult to drive the horrors of that scene out of one's imagination. The solitary old woman in the solitary house, the descent through the chimney, the beastly attack, the death struggle – all that was going on within this lonely room amidst silent fields, and under a still, dark sky. It is a fragment of hell which it is both difficult to endure and to quit. Yet a jury, though clear of both crimes,
recommended the brute to mercy!
because he did not
intend
to commit the murder! Neither does the highwayman, who only means to wound, in order to get the purse, but kills.'

The cause of death, as discovered by medical experts, was, according to Cockburn, ‘an incipient disease in the heart,
which agitation made dangerous but which might have lain long dormant. The violence of the brute, and the alarm, proved fatal.' Mary Smith, ‘never married, or a mother' – a polite euphemism – died in the young man's very grip, as he fully confessed after conviction. The cause could also have been anaphylactic shock, or suffocation. One cannot help wondering if he might have killed her anyway, after the attack, since she could identify him. He was hanged by Calcraft on October 16th, 1849, solemnly denying his guilt except as to rape and not understanding the niceties of the law.

James Robb may have been just a rascal who got drunk and went too far, but George Christie, perpetrator of the Kittybrewster tragedy better fits the category of brute, or monster. He was a much older man, to start with, aged 51, and he stood out from his fellows, being six feet tall, and of proportionate muscular power. His features were coarse and sensual and his aspect dogged and sullen. Once he had been in the service of the East India Company, receiving a pension therefrom until he was deprived of its benefits around 1850, after being convicted for robbery of silver plate from Murtle House. Since then, he had had to make shift to earn a shilling where he could.

In October, 1852, he was thrashing corn in a barn belonging to Peter McRobbie, a farmer, or gardener, or both, of Sunnybank Farm, Oldmachar, near Aberdeen. The barn and an adjoining small cottage stood at a distance from the main farm, near the Kittybrewster toll bar. McRobbie had put out the thrashing or threshing of his bear (barley) to a contractor named Humphrey, who was employing two men to help him – James Sayer and George Christie.

The cottage was let by McRobbie to a widow of good report, Mrs Barbara Ross, who had living with her at that time her grandson, five or six-year-old John Louden. She, too, was in need of every mite that she could get, and undertook light agricultural work such as ‘cow feeding'. Lately, she had been
supplementing her income by providing meals for 4Ke bear thrashers. On Saturday, October 2nd, she mentioned to George Christie that she was going to sell two pigs – which represented quite a few shillings. Felonious intent might have germinated at that moment. On the Monday night, after the pigs had been sold, Christie was in Aberdeen. At 8 o'clock, he set out for Kittybrewster, telling an acquaintance in Virginia Street that he was going back for something that he had forgotten.

At 9 o'clock, McRobbie walked over to the barn through dark fields to see how the thrashers had been getting on. The door was locked. He knew that Barbara Ross held the key and he looked in the window of the cottage, where he saw Christie walking about with a lighted candle. What looked like a woman's shape was lying in front of the fireplace. He knocked at the door and the light went out. Christie appeared. There was something agitated in his manner. Moaning sounds came from within.

McRobbie wisely did not challenge the looming giant, but simply asked for the barn key, which he was given. Then he went to fetch a neighbour, William Grant, who lived at Muiryfold, and together they knocked at the door of the cottage. Christie came out again and they asked him to go with them to the barn. They enquired what that groaning was inside the house. ‘The boy has a sair belly,' he replied. The two men watched him re-enter the cottage, and very soon afterwards he came out with a bundle under his arm, locked the door, and went off, whistling.

It was now safe to fetch Constable Richardson from Printfield, and he broke the door open and encountered a scene of slaughter. The floor was running with blood and the widow and the boy were lying dead, their bodies fearfully gashed by a bloodied wood-axe which had been left on the table. There were signs of frenzied ransacking. Constable Richardson left several men at the scene and went to inform
the Procurator Fiscal, before setting off with Constable Nicol, one of the night patrol, in search of George Christie.

Humphrey had told them where to find him, and at a house in Lower Denburn, there he was, at half past midnight as large as life, sitting with his woman, drinking hard and muddled in mind. They charged him with the crime and he denied it. He was searched, and a purse containing 14s 6d of silver pig money and a gold ring, soon identified as the property of the late Mrs Barbara Ross, were found on his person. Removed to the watch house at Aberdeen for questioning, he remarked ambiguously, ‘this should have been done long ago'. Bloodstains were discovered on his shoes, the legs of his trousers, and the wristbands of his shirt. He had pawned or sold articles belonging to the widow as soon as he had reached the town.

In prison, his mien was morose and he continued to say that he was innocent. In court at Edinburgh for trial on December 23rd, 1852, still dark of countenance, he sighed deeply when dreadful matters were adduced, as if he felt something inwardly. His Counsel argued that the real murderer could have left the scene before Christie stumbled upon it and was tempted to steal. The medical evidence, following post-mortem, and based upon body temperature, was that the boy had survived the attack for several hours – that is, he had lain there still alive while Christie, unconcerned, selected the poor widow's valuables.

No doubt, this information influenced the minds of the jury, for they returned a unanimous verdict of Guilty. He was sentenced to be fed only bread and water before his execution at Aberdeen on January 13th, 1853. During his last week on earth he tried to starve himself to death but was dissuaded by doctrinal reasoning. He went bravely, a giant dropping like a tree, and someone had loved him to judge by the banshee wail from a woman in the crowd.

In a confession made to the prison governor, he said that he
had been overcome by irresistible rage. He had been, he related, to see Humphrey to collect some outstanding wages, but he had not been at home. Then he had proceeded to the widow's cottage to collect a flagon and a bag which he had left there. She was milking a cow in the byre. She told him that she would not let him have the articles until he had paid her the money which he owed her for milk and food. He flew into a rage and seized the axe. The little boy tried to shield her and got in the way, which further inflamed him. They fled into the cottage, but Christie pursued them, a bellowing monster with an axe, and swung it again and again with all the strength of his long brawny arms. Today, we would test his brain-waves. He was buried in the precincts of the prison, beside the grave of James Robb.

T
he candles lit, it was the hour before supper, and the Laird of Northfield, clad in a nightgown, was sitting in his great chair with his legs crossed jauntily and a pinch of snuff poised between his finger and thumb. He was in good form, almost his usual jocose self, feeling rather better, thank you. Of late, truth to tell, he had been under the weather. The doctor said it was asthma, with a high fever, whatever that meant.

Alexander Keith, who was aged 64, was of that familiar old type – a choleric, hard-riding, hard-drinking landowner, with a large estate in the parish of Gamrie, Banffshire. Just once, he had broken rank by taking a second wife who was right out of his class. Helen Watt was a fisherman's daughter, from the village of Crovie, and family ructions had ensued when he brought her to the big house as his bride, 20 years previously. Relatives refused to speak to the upstart and, in particular, George Keith, the rightful son and heir, the eldest son of the laird's first wife, who had died, had never relented in his animosity. He had left home and set up an establishment in the neighbourhood.

Five children had been born of the new union: in 1756, the second family at Northfield consisted of William (17), Henrietta (15), Elizabeth (13), Alexander (10) and Helen (7). William Keith, the eldest, was his father's favourite – not George, for obvious reasons. Gradually, as Northfield's health had begun to break down – and his drinking habits were
blamed – the relationship between husband and wife had become less idyllic. There were frequent spats or ‘squabbles'. They were out of temper with each other.

Elspet Bruce, a close family servant, once saw Mrs Keith flying out of the house in a passion, crying to God that she wished her husband had broken his own neck when he broke his horse's neck, and then she ‘would not have gotten so much anger by him.' William Taylor of Darfash, loyal retainer of Northfield, heard Mrs Keith say that if God would not take her husband, she wished the devil would: the trouble was that his master liked a dram and Mrs Keith thought that he was extravagant.

Yet he was not an undutiful man, because, being told by his doctors that he had not long to live, and being of the same opinion himself, he had recently executed a valid will to make provision for Helen Keith and her children, in the form of certain charges which the estate could easily support. The main inheritance was, of course, to go to George Keith who was angry and waiting and would have no mercy on the interlopers.

Now, on the evening of November 22nd, 1756, as he sat out of bed and contemplated the affairs of his estate, Northfield felt some remission in his poor health. Perhaps he was not going to die, after all, and the doctors were wrong, as they generally were. Come to think of it, he had not clapped eyes on one of them for eight days. As one finds in these tales, the attending physician was wont to eschew the death-bed if he thought the case was hopeless, and beg not to be sent for again. Northfield's doctor, Mr Chap, surgeon of Old Deer, had taken Helen Keith to one side and told her that her husband was dying: she should not call him back unless he grew better, and meanwhile, here were two blistering plasters to place to the skin.

It had not been a bad day for the ailing laird. There had been some visitors and they had had a good laugh. His friend,
the Reverend James Wilson, who had witnessed his will, had come to see him. James Manson, the shoemaker, had shaved him, as usual, that evening. Soon it was suppertime and his wife and all five offspring were with him in his room to encourage him, but he was not very hungry and took only two spoonfuls of slops consisting of aleberry (corn boiled in beer) or kail-brose (the scum of a broth of greens mixed with oatmeal).

Henrietta and Elizabeth went away to their own room and Northfield was now alone with his wife and 17-year-old son, and the two very young children. What exactly happened next comes only from the separate accounts of Helen and William Keith, and they were noted to be consistent. Northfield asked to be helped into bed, and a pair of blankets, freshly warmed, were wrapped around him, since he was complaining of feeling cold. His wife and young Helen and Alexander shared a bed placed at the foot of the big bed. William was, unusually, staying in the room because his father had said something about being afraid that he might die in the night, and Helen wanted him close at hand.

William threw off all his clothes, except his breeches, and prepared to get into his father's bed, to warm his back. He put out the candle and as he leant over the side of the bed, he thought that he could not hear his father breathing. In a panic, he called to his mother to get up at once and light the candle, for his father was either dead or dying, and then he ran to the door and shouted for the two elder girls and the maid, Elspet Bruce, who emerged from her bed in the kitchen, which was divided by a timber partition from the bedroom. She had heard no untoward sounds that evening.