Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (25 page)

All the same the lies, oddity and general unreliability did not quite amount to a convincing proof of murder. Something more was needed; what was offered was unsatisfactory. Motive is always a problem. The Lord justice-Clerk had weighty and wise advice to offer the jury on the subject. Proof of a motive to commit a crime, however important, would not do in the absence of sufficient evidence to prove the commission of a crime. Even if they were satisfied that a crime had been committed and that there was a motive, they must still ask themselves whether the motive suggested was at all commensurate with the crime suggested. And that undoubtedly offered a difficulty. Donald had, one assumes, been found out, or was at least on the point of being discovered. But nothing very dreadful was likely to happen to him. There would be a row, may even have been one before Rita arrived, but it would blow over, amount to nothing more than a spot of unpleasantness. Nobody could doubt that Mrs Merrett would soon have forgiven Donald. Nobody could doubt that he would not have been able to extricate himself with a show of penance. Could it really be believed that he would kill merely to escape a spot of unpleasantness? Was he that abnormal?

Common sense tends to begin with the question of motive whatever judges may sagely advise. But here, even if the motive could be swallowed, the question of the mechanics of the crime remained uncertain. Rita Sutherland saw mother and son in their sittingroom, mother writing letters, son in the armchair reading a book. She then went through to the kitchen. In a few minutes Donald gets up, puts down his book, stands over his mother, ready to take her letter to the post. Then when she says, `Go away, Donald, you are bothering me’ - a phrase which suggests a pretty low emotional temperature and one that both confirm - he takes out his pistol and shoots her; then picks up his books, drops them on the floor, goes through to the kitchen and says `Rita, my mother has shot herself…’ The jury could be forgiven for thinking that that made little sense either. Furthermore, as the Lord Justice-Clerk pointed out, `the gunshot was fired in the flat at the time when Mrs Sutherland was there. It might have been fired quite easily in her absence.’ Why wait till she was there? She might have come into the room at the wrong moment. A witness on the spot is hardly what the prudent murderer desires.

What of accident? The experts had shown that it was physically possible. Yet three points might be made against this interpretation of events. First, it was simply too well timed, too apt that Mrs Merrett should have a fatal accident just when Donald’s malfeasances had come to light; it was all too pat. Second, though physically possible, it was inherently unlikely in the absence of any supporting evidence. Third, which may be held to be the most powerful argument against the accident theory, were Donald’s words -‘Rita, my mother has shot herself…’ That fixed his interpretation or the one he was putting forward. Otherwise the natural thing to say would have been, `there’s been an accident. . The jury’s dilemma was that none of the explanations made sense. They all involved improbabilities that reason rejected. Least objectionable was murder; all that required was to believe that Donald Merrett was abnormal, though certainly not in any legal sense mad, that he had no moral scruples and an unusally demanding ego. Even so, a douce rate-paying church-going Edinburgh jury was going to find it hard to believe that a wellborn youth from the respectable classes could possibly commit so ghastly a murder for such frivolous reasons.

Probably the long delay before Donald’s arrest told in his favour, though his Counsel proclaimed otherwise. The fact that suicide had been accepted unquestioningly at the time, and that nobody, as the Lord justice-Clerk remarked, had then understood Mrs Merrett’s words in the infirmary as involving her son’s guilt, made the trial appear a sort of afterthought, consequent to and dependent on, the charge of forgery. The police’s working assumption had been suicide. Certainly this meant that investigation at the time had been lax, that the question of Mrs Merrett’s knowledge of the pistol had not been thoroughly examined and that the conflict of Rita Sutherland’s two stories had been ignored. Moreover, the long delay meant that witnesses’ memories were more than usually unreliable and the failure to take a dying deposition from Mrs Merrett had even allowed the Defence to call in question the admissibility of evidence relating to her version of events. There were simply too many contradictions and unexplained revisons of evidence for any jury to feel confident. When Mr Aitchison said that, `he could not understand how the Lord Advocate could throw over the evidence of Inspector Fleming and Dr Rosa and ask them to accept the revised version of Mrs Sutherland…’, the conscientious juryman could only nod his head in sympathetic agreement. After all, he might have thought, what Rita Sutherland said to the Inspector and to Dr Rosa was absolutely clear and established the certainty of suicide … I may myself prefer her revised version, but can I be absolutely sure….? And that is what I need … certainty….

Mr Aitchison made a frank appeal to sentiment. Roughead was to describe his closing address as one of the two best he ever heard; and yet it contained hardly any real argument. It was directed at the emotions, not at the intellect; and in this Mr Aitchison was almost certainly wise. For it was clear enough that the case logically tended towards an admission of murder, however improbable it might seem, if only because all other explanations seemed still less likely; eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Yet proof was not clinching; it could be upset by sentiment.He laid it on thick. `I say with the utmost respect that if you send this lad into life with the verdict of Not Proven, with the stigma which it implies upon him, you are taking a tremendous responsibility on your shoulders….’ That was clever. It implied that they could not convict but admitted that they were unlikely to acquit. The word `lad’, not very apt when one looks at photographs of Merrett, with his hooded heavy predatory features, emphasized the jury’s responsibility; it was almost as if they were in loco parentis to the orphaned Donald; they were the men who would decide his future. Concerning that though Mr Aitchison was ready with promises too: `Send out this lad a free man with a clean bill and, so far as I can judge, he will never dishonour your verdict’. That was asking a bit much, asking them indeed to conflate the murder charge where the evidence was certainly dubious and unsatisfactory with the forgery one where doubt of Donald’s guilt was hardly possible.

The jury found that part of their task easy. Their debate on the murder charge came to less than might have been expected. They were out for only fifty-five minutes. That suggests they took an essentially common sense view of the matter, that they quickly agreed that the technical question had not been resolved and that anything being possible, murder, suicide or accident, the matter just fell back on the simple question; `Do you think he did it?’ They took a vote: five said Guilty; ten thought it `Not Proven’. For all Mr Aitchison’s eloquence, nobody was prepared to say `Not Guilty’.

Their verdict was fair enough. Sufficient doubt remained. Yet few, free of responsibility in the affair, have ever hesitated to proclaim Donald guilty. The chances are indeed strong that he did it. The term `miscarriage ofjustice’ is often restricted to cases where an innocent man is convicted; it may equally fairly be applied to a case like this one, where a guilty man goes free. One cannot help feeling that any thorough and efficient police investigation at the time would have resulted in a more convincing Crown case, offering fewer loopholes and a less easy access to sentiment.

He was sent down for twelve months on the forgery charge, a sentence he greeted `with stoical calm’. A considerable crowd outside the High Court cheered him as he emerged, cigarette in mouth and dived into a van. That was rather strange; he might have been more fairly regarded as a monster. He was seen to wave in jaunty style to two friends, possibly Miss Christie and Scott, more probably the selfstyled Lady Menzies, with whom he had been lodging at the time ofhis arrest, and her daughter whom he was to marry. He served his sentence in the new prison of Saughton. Roughead was properly indignant, describing it as `a sort of penal gardencity, affording in its humane and hygienic regime the advantages of a rest-cure, a criminous nursing home, and combining agreeably punishment with amusement.’ Some exaggeration there, and a view of Saughton more easily held from Belgrave Crescent, just behind Buckingham Terrace itself, where Roughead lived, assiduously and delightedly recording crime in bland ignorance of the stresses that may promote it. Still, in this case, the old man’s scepticism was well enough founded. Not only did Donald Merrett emerge to a life of swindling, false pretences, smuggling, gunrunning, black marketeering, all interspersed with spells in British and Continental jails, but eventually, in 1954, exasperated by his wife’s refusal to give him a divorce, infatuated with a German blonde, and wanting to get his hands on money which he had made over to his wife, he tried to bring off a second `perfect murder’; and botched it, had to kill his mother-in-law as well (clumsily); found that at last his luck had run out; and shot himself in a wood in Germany. So he capped a pointless life, dead to morality, concerned with nothing more than the gratification of the immediate instant. Deeply unpleasant, superficially charming, never advancing beyond the imperative of `I want’, there can be little doubt that Donald Merrett was lucky that Edinburgh spring, little doubt either that he was saved by the prim and unimpeachable respectability of Buckingham Terrace.

Aitchison, Craigie, K. C., Counsel for Merrett, 155, 161 etseq.

Allan, Lord Provost, mobbed 10. Armstrong, Major Henry, Poisoner, 40.

Balfour, Ebenezer, Fictional character, on virtues of porridge 59.

Bagrie, George, incompetent thief, 26.

Baird Anna C, friend ofLizzie Chantrelle, 100 et seq.

Banks, Isabella, evidence of 132, 136.

Banks, Joseph, suspects and informs 134.

Banks, MrsJoseph, landlady, evidence of 132, 138.

Bell, DrJoseph, model for Sherlock Holmes, 133, 165.

Bellingham, William, murders Prime Minister 40. Bennison, Helen, born 52,

interview with father 78. Bennison, jean (nee Hamilton), 5071 passim.

Bennison, William, murderer, 3, 8, 40, 49-80passim.

Berry, hangman, 141-2.

Black, Dr, resourceful criminal, 27. Bonner, Local Government Official, examines gibbet 15.

Borrow, George, writer, quoted 9.

Boswell, James, writer, 147. Brass, Robert, Police Sergeant, evidence of 93.

Brown, Captain, ChiefofPolice, receives reward for exertions 16, on use ofinformers 29, sends Haggart (q. v.) to prison 30.

Brummell, George, dandy, Haggart resembles 38. Bucket, Inspector, fictional detective, 22.

Burke, Edmund, Irish statesman, quoted 1.

Burke, Edward, Irish murderer, 5, selfless behaviour of 141.

Burnie, Janet, child-minder, 131-2, 136-7,139.

Byng, Admiral, encouragement to others 43.

Byrne Mary, maidservant, 90, evidence of98-9, 103-5, insured 103.

Campbell, Elizabeth, maidservant, gives birth and dies 129.

Canning, George, politician, 11. Carmichael, DrJames, physician, called by Chantrelle 107-8, evidence of 112.

Carr, Andrew, evidence of59 Castlereagh Viscount, politician, 11.

Chantrelle, Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’), nee Dyer, 81-126 passim.