Classic Scottish Murder Stories (37 page)

In haste, on the Sunday, two days after her death, Margaret Warden was buried in an aura of shame, not suspicion, in the kirkyard of Murroes. The coffin bore the brief inscription,
M.W., aged 25.
The rumours began within a week. Information was lodged with the Sheriff of Forfarshire, and the body was exhumed by his order on September 30th. They laid the mortal remains of the light-headed cutty on a convenient, flat tombstone and carried out the post-mortem there and then. Carved on the stone underneath, an angel blew his last trump and the four deep occupants arose from their grave.

Dr Taylor was there as signs of a three to four month pregnancy were found. Portions of internal organs, which were well preserved, were removed and sent to the Crown Agent at Edinburgh for analysis to be arranged. Arsenic was present
passim.
Mrs Smith was summoned for judicial examination before Christopher Kerr, Sheriff-Substitute at Dundee, but, no longer capable of knitting her stocking, she announced herself prevented from the stress of travelling, by reason of sudden indisposition. The Procurator Fiscal, Dr John Boyd Baxter, appointed Dr Johnston of Dundee, one of the post-mortem physicians, to test her. If he considered that she was well enough to go with him, it was proposed that her precognition should be taken at an inn known as the Four Mile House, situated midway between Denside and Dundee.

On October 2nd, Dr Johnston examined Mrs Smith at her home and proclaimed her ‘not in excellent health' but fit to meet the requirement. She was unwilling, but induced to travel in the chaise with him, supported by her husband and one of her sons. Not George, presumably. On the way, Mr Smith remarked bitterly that none of his friends could believe the rumours that had been spread abroad about his wife, and there must have been something more in the matter than he knew of, otherwise gentlemen would not be travelling about the country in carriages. He had heard that poison had been found in the stomach of the dead girl? That was the truth, the doctor assured him, and he trusted that none of his family had given it to her.

Unwisely, Mrs Smith piped up, ‘Warden vomited so much before her death that I wouldn't have thought anything could have remained on her stomach.' Her husband hastily offered the suggestion that more than one of his servants had heard the girl say that she would put away with herself. In the lobby of the inn, when Dr Johnston was satisfied that Mrs Smith felt no worse, the judicial examination proceeded in due form. The husband was allowed to stay, and he made no objections. Mrs Smith was observed to be in her sound senses, quite calm and collected, until the last question was put to her, when she became agitated, gasped, and fell back on her chair, but as swiftly recovered.

This was the first of two statements, and it did not match Dr Taylor's recollections. She denied any knowledge of the girl's pregnancy before she died. Margaret was sometimes not well enough to work, and her difficulty in breathing had been worse in the week before her illness. She herself had asked the doctor if the girl was with child because she was of rather loose character. She had given her a dose of castor-oil at bedtime about a fortnight before she became ill, and just one more on the 4th or 5th of September. It was mixed with some lozenger wine
2
in a dram glass or tumbler. She had bought the castor-oil from Mrs Jolly on the previous Friday, together with some mustard and some ‘Arnetta' for dyeing.

To her knowledge, she had never had any poisonous substances about the house except that two years ago a ratcatcher had been brought in and he might have used poison for all she knew. The only drug that she had bought at the relevant time came from Mrs Jolly of Dundee. As she answered the questions about drugs, this was the occasion when Mrs Smith dramatically lost her composure. Since both a medical practitioner and an apothecary were waiting in the wings to attest to her purchase of arsenic for rats, she had clearly blundered, but knew not how to escape other than by plain denial. They committed her that night to the Tolbooth in Dundee for further examination.

The following morning, Mrs Smith's pack of connections prevailed upon the Sheriff Substitute to meet the Fiscal in the place of her confinement to take a second, voluntary statement from her. She wished to tell the truth and to make some corrections. She now recollected that on that crucial Friday she had acquired ‘something to put away rats' from Dr Dick. She was not told that it was poison: there was some writing on
it but she did not know what it said. She did noGalk for arsenic. Mrs Dick advised her to put the stuff into the holes and craps of the walls, and she did that on the following Monday, inserting it into the crevices in the loft above the bothie. (Servants slept in the bothie, and a hen and chicks were kept in the loft.) Margaret Warden had been with her in the kitchen when she got a plate to mix it with meal. No other servant knew about it. Denside was infested with rats. If you went into the byre, they moved away in front of you like a drove of cattle. The servants complained that they disturbed their sleep.

Mrs Mary Elder or Smith was committed for trial on December 28th, 1826, before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh. Those two leading lights of the Scottish bar, Francis Jeffrey and Henry Cockburn, were retained for the defence by the munificence of the stunned and outraged husband. On the day, however, the Lord Advocate moved for a postponement. He had learnt only the day before that the defence was that Margaret Warden had committed suicide and he understood that 48 witnesses were to be adduced in support of that contention. He needed time to examine those persons, by Scottish procedure.

The trial finally got off the ground on February 5 th, 1827, but there was a jinx on it, because at 5.30pm, during the Crown evidence, one of the jurymen, Mr Thomas, blockmaker of Leith, fell into a fearsome epileptic fit, following the unearthly cry which sometimes presages a convulsion. It so happened that the expert witness thus interrupted in full flow was the famous Professor Christison, and he leapt like a mountain goat from the witness box to help the stricken, threshing man – all movement and disorder where formality and restraint should have prevailed. It was a most unusual scene. Other medical men present in court came forward to help, and Thomas was carried insensible into an adjoining room.

After an hour, he was still not fit to return, and Professor Christison gave formal evidence that although he was considerably recovered, a relapse might be expected and his memory was affected. The Lord Advocate was fast on his feet to submit that the jury should be discharged and a date set for a new trial. The hidden agenda was that the Crown was grasping at the chance of more time for preparation, having been put under pressure by the process called ‘running criminal letters' which forced the prosecution to proceed within a limited period. Counsel for Mrs Smith would have none of it, and the Court met on February 12th for seven hours of argument, all the Lords of Justiciary attending. It was an important debate, the first occasion on which the legality of resuming a trial interrupted by the illness of a member of the jury had been determined. Mrs Smith was, as it were, half tried.

Eventually, on February 19th, a full new jury of 15 was empanelled and the case proceeded. When the Crown proposed that Mrs Smith's two damaging statements should be read out, her counsel objected to them, on the ground that she was subject to an ‘hysterical affection' – a wandering and weakness of the mind – and that she was especially afflicted in that way before her first precognition. (This does not mean that her sanity was at issue.) The reading was deferred, and Jean Norrie was called. She ‘remembered of Warden saying in the field one day when she was holing a pickle potatoes that she didna ken what to do and she wad surely do some ill to hersel' ‘. Jean did not believe that Margaret would do it, because she was ‘a rash creature of her words'. She herself had been at Denside since Martinmas, 1825, and milked the cows in the byre, but had never seen a rat there. Her mistress did once tell her that she kept some King's yellow (orpiment i.e. sulphuret of arsenic) to poison the flies.

Mr Smith's sister-in-law described Mrs Smith's ‘hysterics'. Once she had taken her out of church in that state, and the fit
had made her insensible so that she forgot she had been in church and could not speak correctly, even the second day. (There is an organic tinge to these symptoms: surely there was not one epileptic in the jury box and another in the dock!)

The presence of droves of rats at the farm was a vital issue for the defence, in order to justify Mrs Smith's acquisition of arsenic and also to suggest an available means for Margaret Warden to kill herself, but the Crown brought a number of witnesses to deny sight of even a whisker at the relevant time. Rats had, probably, damaged the horse-harness, but that was ‘last Whitsunday'.

Mr Lyon Alexander, surgeon of Dundee, was brought to show that Mrs Smith had been incompetent to make a true declaration. Called out in a great hurry to Denside on October 2nd, he had found her in a state of ‘stupor and insensibility' and ‘talking of persons as present who were not'. It appeared to be a ‘violent nervous attack' and he did not consider that she was in a fit state to be examined on suspicion of having committed a crime. Temporary loss of memory would have been a feature. He had administered antispasmodics, and left. When he saw her the next evening, in prison, she was vague about what had passed the night before. Her friends told him that she had received a severe nervous shock during the day on hearing that a grandchild had nearly drowned. Another medical man, John Crichton, surgeon of Dundee, examined Mrs Smith in gaol, two months later, and found her in convulsions, foaming at the mouth with attendants applying hot flannels. If he could give the complaint a name, he would call it violent hysteria, approaching to epilepsy. She could not speak coherently, and in his considered opinion, she was not feigning the symptoms.

Unimpressed, the Court let in the two declarations, against which her counsel had fought a strong yet losing battle. In the end, though, they proved to have done her little harm. The case for the Crown was closed and the Defence began to call
witnesses about rats. There was
no
parade of 48 witnesses to show Margaret Warden as a suicide. Andrew Murray, the ratcatcher referred to in Mrs Smith's second statement had been drawn to court by the inducement of a curious advertisement inserted in the
Dundee Advertiser
of January 25th: ‘To the benevolent' it was headed, and it ran on: ‘Andrew Murray, Rat-catcher is particularly requested to call at Mr Smith's, Farmer [etc.]. All his expenses will be paid.' Mr Smith, and his agents, MacEwan and Miller, writers in Dundee, also asked for information regarding a middle-aged woman, lately travelling in Fife, selling matches, accompanied by a ten-year-old boy carrying, like Marcel Proust seen entering a brothel, a white mouse in a box.

Murray testified that he had
left
some rat poison, consisting of arsenic, anise (aniseed), and oatmeal at Denside when he had been there ‘in the way of business' some three and a half years previously. Two years later, he had been to the Mill of Affleck, then owned by Mr Smith, and had left some medicine with Mrs Smith at that time. Called in by the advertisement, he had recently found traces of vermin at Denside – ‘the small Scots rat, and mice siclike' – but he had not actually seen any. It does seem that Murray was scarcely worth the advertisement, and damaging, to boot.

Mrs Hamilton, an itinerant pedlar of odds and ends, was the wanted woman, and she, too, had been persuaded to testify that she knew Margaret Warden well. She had been a frequent caller at Denside, where Mrs Smith had allowed her to sleep in the barn. Margaret had confided in her, weeping and imploring. What was she to do, being not able for her work, and she had got rough usage from her own mother and brother on a former occasion? Come, now, the pedlar had comforted her, a mother's heart was aye kindly, and she would be the first to pity her. No, no, the girl had said, she would be tossed and handled in the way she was before and she would put an end to herself.

The boy with the mouse in the cage was not prodillea, but Mrs Smith's agents had found Robert Easson, merchant of Broughty Ferry, who remembered that a boy had come to his shop on the Monday or Tuesday of the week in which Margaret died, and asked for twopence-worth of arsenic, which was refused. The implication was, of course, that the girl had sent him on that errand.

The tests as proving the presence of arsenic were attacked with great fire by the defence. It was a rehearsal for the later great arsenic trials such as Madeleine Smith. There was, too, the matter of yellow particles found in the deceased's stomach, where white arsenic might have been expected. Professor Christison considered that white arsenic might have been converted into the yellow, sulphuretted form by a chemical process after death. (The reader may recall that in my previous volume,
Scottish Murder Stories
p.54, I said that I had searched in vain for such a case, although I had learnt from
Taylor
that the change was known to occur.) The yellow specks did not benefit Mrs Smith, anyway, because she had admitted to Jean Norris that she had ‘King's yellow' in her possession.

Calm and collected, showing no signs of hysteria or epilepsy, she sat like a thinking statue, listening to all the evidence. The Lord Advocate began his closing speech at 11 o'clock at night, and he spoke for two hours. As the day died and the lights were brought, one of the candles placed on the rim of the dock flickered in a cross-draught and ran down unevenly on one side, whereupon Mrs Smith coolly kept lifting the candle and turning it round.

Sir William Rae came to the matter of the rats, and mentioned that Murray's small, black Scots rat was, in fact, extremely rare in Scotland! If, he went on, it were argued that Mrs Smith was only guilty of an attempt to procure abortion, the word ‘arsenic' alone was a sufficient answer: no one could use that without a deadly purpose. (That, however, as we have seen, was not always the case.) The dead girl's rank in life
precluded the notion that she had felt her shame to be worse than life. (An interesting social comment, but the better view, if pushing for suicide, was surely that she despaired because she felt abandoned by all who should have cared for her.)