Classic Scottish Murder Stories (31 page)

After perhaps half an hour, it was time to go home, but the young gentlemen had not lived up to their promise and their entertainment had not been sufficiently remunerative. They
were pressed to take a further half-mutchkin each. Elizabeth MacDonald was the most vociferous in resenting their leaving the premises and she ‘opposed their going'. Gradually, things were starting to get nasty. Walter Grieve saw Kerr lift up a chair and slam it down. The tinder had been lit. Elizabeth MacDonald pressed for payment, claiming, wrongly, that the chair was broken.

Welsh, Wilkinson and Johnston decided on a quick exit and were lucky to get out of the house when a servant opened the outside door for them. For a moment, we shall leave them there, going up the steps to the street. Meanwhile, Henry Kerr left the room with the bed and the sofa and made his way to the kitchen, trying to get out of the house and arguing with the strumpets. Elizabeth Gray gave his coat a slight pull, in the passage. Howat came, too. There were some women in the kitchen whom Kerr had not seen before, especially two crones, who appeared to be servants to the curious ménage. The kitchen door was then locked on them, but only temporarily. As he persisted in trying to escape, Elizabeth MacDonald seized Kerr with both hands and tore the frill of his shirt and his vest. She tripped him and he landed on all fours on the ground. His hat flew off. When he struggled to his feet, she grabbed him again, like a she-cat, angry and swearing. He took hold of her gown and tripped
her.
She fell, but he had not thrown her down. The door was opened. Round about now, Walter Grieve, the medical student, looked into the kitchen and saw William Howat strike Elizabeth MacDonald on the head. Both Kerr and Grieve were aware that the solicitor's clerk was seriously intoxicated.

Kerr went out into the passage and Grieve said, ‘Don't strike a woman.' ‘Certainly not,' he replied with drunken dignity. She was still provoking him. Wilkinson and Welsh had appeared in the passage, having returned to help their friends when they heard a disturbance, women's cries and a ‘quarrelling with tongues'. Johnston, who had had more than
enough of the discreditable night out, had decamped. Five men were now at loose in the dark, unfamiliar, hostile house. Shapes of people were going back and forth along the passage.

Seeing a new quarry, Elizabeth MacDonald flew at Wilkinson with clenched fists and struck him a blow on the chest. ‘You b****!' he said. ‘Why do you strike me?' He was furious, and Welsh held his hands to stop him from hitting her. The light in the passage went out as a result of the commotion. Kerr returned to the kitchen to extricate Howat. At some stage, Alexander Welsh heard Elizabeth MacDonald scream out. He thought this was when Howat hit her on the head, but Kerr was quite clear that Welsh and Wilkinson had not yet come back from the street. Could this have been another assault on the aggressive woman? She now had another go at Kerr. Grieve saw her take up a candlestick, as if to use it, and he took it away from her.

As the fracas had worsened, Mary Curly had run to fetch her mistress, Mary McKinnon, who was hob-nobbing with her crony, Samuel Hodge, a grocer, at his house in the Cowgate. June Lundie, of Leith Walk, was also a guest. This new group moved fast to 82 South Bridge. Madame went in like a fury and stormed along the passage to the kitchen, which had become the centre of the storm. ‘Stand back, let me get a knife, and I'll let you see me settle the ****!' she shouted. Then she went deliberately to the dresser-table at the back of the door, put both hands into the knife-box and there was a rattling noise as if she were making a selection. Kerr's next glimpse of her was as she loomed in a dark corner with a table knife in her hand. It was some nine or ten inches long, sharpened to a point, with a black handle. She sprang at Kerr, but he parried her blow with his arm. Several of the women restrained her. Kerr told her that he would have thought she had more sense. She did not recognize him from his previous visit, and said nothing. He spoke to his friends in the passage – Welsh was restraining Wilkinson. Then he saw Howat keeping the women at bay.
There were no cries: it was quiet. As Kerr saw it happen, Mary McKinnon aimed a blow at Howat with her right hand, which she raised above her shoulder, making a sweep until the blade reached his left side. It was a ‘back blow' with the point of the knife turned downwards.

Kerr seized her by the back of the neck and tripped her up, that being, apparently, his favourite manoeuvre when dealing with unpeaceable women. Turning to his friend, he found a scratch below his right eye, and blood flowing from his left side. Kerr placed him on a chair, and he breathed, ‘Henry, she has given me enough,' before losing consciousness. The focus now shifts. Objective outsiders, professional people there to help and investigate, dispel the fumes of alcohol and mindless aggression. The bemused figures blundering around in the semi-darkness are sobering up and realizing that something terrible has happened.

The police were called. James Stuart, apprentice to Mr Law, surgeon, arrived at the same time. An agitated Mary McKinnon met him and told him that some people had come into the house and knocked down several of the inmates. He found Howat seated on a chair in a corner of the kitchen: his breathing was impeded and he was in a state of stupor. On examination, there was a large wound in the chest. Mr Black, police surgeon, also attended and Howat was conveyed to the Royal Infirmary. The police, bombarded with discrepant accounts, removed all parties to the police office for statements to be taken. The brothel-house keeper was detained. She claimed that Wilkinson had stabbed Howat. William Howat lingered until February 20th, having emitted a dying declaration and after he had identified Mary McKinnon as his attacker: she was brought to his death-bed.

And so the trial of Mary McKinnon on the charge of murder began on March 14th, 1823, before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh. She pleaded Not Guilty and was prepared for a fierce fight for her life, represented at some
expense by the impressive legal team of Francis Jeffrey and Henry Cockburn. The prisoner in the dock did not present the appearance of a typical harridan, being aged only about 30 and having a fallen air about her. Her counsel were to bring Captain Brown, formerly Superintendent of Police, to attest to her superior background. Her father had been quartermaster in the same regiment as that in which he had been adjutant, and he had known her from her 15 th year. He had always considered her as inclining towards a humane disposition. She had been debauched by an officer, and afterwards shamefully neglected by her parents, to which he attributed her subsequent way of life. He had never considered her house as more disorderly than others of the same sort. (A desperate point.)

Her written statements were put in and read, to the effect that she had kept a ‘licensed tavern' for several years: on the night in question, she was sent for because a party had entered her house in a state of intoxication. She had found a riot, with cries of murder; acts of violence were committed, furniture destroyed and she herself knocked down. If the deceased had received any blow in the scuffle which ensued, it was in circumstances which must free her from guilt.

James Johnston, who had made an excuse and left, was lucky not to be called by the Crown, but the other four survivors were there, disgraced in Edinburgh, revealed as players in a fatal brawl. Their own and joint endeavour was to minimise their drunkenness and to reduce the violence offered by them to the unruly women. Mary McKinnon's staff were loyal to her to the point of blatant perjury. Elizabeth MacDonald so incensed the Lord Justice Clerk with her contradictions that he said that he would feel it his duty to tell the jury that they ought not to give the slightest credit to her! After she had been cautioned, the second half of her evidence was taken down in writing, and perhaps she was then a little more careful.

No one believed the stout one, but what she said was that Wilkinson and the dead man were much intoxicated and the others hearty. She and Wilkinson quarrelled, because Wilkinson had been taking improper liberties with her. He struck her in the passage and struck her in the kitchen. Kerr came into the kitchen and hit her on the breast with a candlestick, making it black and blue. (There obviously was a candlestick on the scene.) A short time later, he punched her in the face and made her bleed. One of the old women, Margaret McInnes, took the candlestick from him as she was washing her face. Unfortunately, the bloodied face came after the candlestick attack, and here she prevaricated and became muddled and reprimanded by the Court. Coaxed by Jeffrey, who was permitted to examine her in the interests of truth, she expressed herself as now uncertain about the timing of the incident, an important one, as we shall see.

Chastened, perhaps, Elizabeth MacDonald continued: the door was not locked and the men could have left at any time. The disturbance was so serious that she sent Mary Curly for the prisoner, who might be a protection to them. Her mistress had no sooner come into the kitchen than she was knocked down by Wilkinson, who tore her cap: ‘Murder!' she cried, but got up again. Wilkinson attacked her again in the passage, holding her by the wrist, and she begged the police, who had by then arrived, to take that man away from her, because he was breaking her arm. After this, Elizabeth MacDonald saw Howat sitting in the kitchen, and thought he was asleep; the last time she had seen him was when he was lying on the bed in the room in which they had been drinking, apparently intoxicated.

Elizabeth Gray, a young girl, was not caught in any inconsistencies. One of the party threw himself on a bed, and the others called for toddy. One ‘used improper freedom' with Elizabeth MacDonald, who called them something on the lines of a ‘parcel of low fellows'. (Her objections seem out of place,
since she was chief prostitute in a brothel, but no doubt the lesser money offered for the wrong services was at the root of some of the trouble.) She, Elizabeth Gray, saw Elizabeth MacDonald lying on the kitchen floor at the beginning of the row. One of the men (she was totally unable to distinguish the revellers) hit
her
on the back of the neck, and she fell in the passage. Later, she saw her mistress, whom she had seen going into the kitchen, out in the passage with her cap off and her hair hanging about her neck.

Old Margaret McInnes said that her mistress was knocked down as soon as she went into the kitchen. She herself had been struck by some of the men and they had put her out into the passage.

Mr Black, the police surgeon at the scene, was the first witness for the defence, and his observations were very important, even if they did not receive much attention in court. He attended stout Elizabeth MacDonald at 82 South Bridge several days after the incident. She was in bed and said that she had received a blow on her left breast, apparently from a fist. (Not a candlestick.) When she had been brought to the police office on the night of the 8th, she had marks on her face from blows.

The surgeon had also attended the prisoner for some days after her arrest. She had seemed much troubled in body and mind, complaining that her head was hurt, and she showed him a mark on her side which she attributed to the disturbance at her house. Although he never saw any such symptoms, she also claimed to have a ‘spitting of blood'. James Christie, turnkey in the lock-up-house, did see her spit blood five or six mornings after she came there. It was only after she washed herself.

John Smith, a boy about 15 years of age, had some new evidence not corroborated by the other defence witnesses. He knew the prisoner and he was in Hodge the grocer's house when a girl named Curly came in and said that some men were
going to put Elizabeth MacDonald on the fire. He ran ahead of Mary McKinnon and when he got to the house, some of the men were preparing to put Elizabeth on the fire, but she resisted. The prisoner sent him for the watchmen; he found them at the head of Blair Street and brought them down. (Before going to Hodge's, he had been sent on an errand to the Abbey, so he, too, was on Mary McKinnon's staff.)

Closing for the Crown, the Solicitor General set the moral tone of the forum. Captain Brown's testimony had rendered the case even more painful and melancholy, and he would not judge harshly those vices which arose from degradation. There were passions which his sex had contributed to form. Marked depravity was exhibited by the witnesses on both sides, and they had committed wilful and horrible perjury. He referred to self-defence or provocation but was himself satisfied that there was no justification for the use of a lethal weapon.

And indeed the Lord Justice Clerk strongly favoured Kerr's evidence and ruled that, in point of law, there was nothing before the court that would support self-defence or provocation. It was interesting, however, that the jury, convicting by a majority, begged leave to recommend mercy, again by a majority. The Court could not discern any grounds whatsoever for such a recommendation. Dire and thunderous were the final improving homiletic words from the Bench and the poor creature in her black figured sarsnet gown, black bonnet and veil, swooned and shrieked and groaned.

The trial of the brothel-house keeper had been greatly enjoyed by the populace and 20,000 excited persons attended the execution at the head of Libberton's Wynd on April 16th, the body afterwards delivered over to Dr Monro, Professor of Anatomy, for public dissection. Lord Henry Cockburn, distinguished Scottish judge, kept a remarkably frank diary, and in
Circuit Journeys
(published posthumously in 1888) recorded that Mary McKinnon died ‘gracefully and bravely;
and her last moment was marked by a proceeding so singular, that it is on its account that I mention her case. She had an early attachment to an English Jew, who looked like a gentleman, on the outside at least; and this passion had never been extinguished. She asked him to come and see her before her fatal day. He did so; and on parting, finally, on her last evening, she cut an orange into two, and giving him one half, and keeping the other herself, directed him to go to some window opposite the scaffold, at which she could see him, and to apply his half to his lips when she applied her half to hers. All this was done; she saw her only earthly friend, and making the sign, died cheered by this affection.'