The Ability to Kill (14 page)

His murder of Mrs Taylor, his mother-in-law, is easier to explain.

Early in 1865, when he began to poison his wife, Mrs Taylor came from Edinburgh to nurse the invalid. It now seems reasonably certain that her suspicions about the true nature of the illness were aroused, and that she made the stupid mistake of telling her son-in-law about them. At all events, within two weeks of her arrival she was dead. Mrs Pritchard lived on wretchedly for a further three weeks; then she, too, died.

An anonymous letter to the authorities led to an autopsy on Mrs Pritchard, the exhumation of Mrs Taylor and the arrest of Pritchard. The writer of the letter is said to have been another doctor practising in Sauchiehall Street.

The hanging of Dr Pritchard was the last public execution to take place in Glasgow. The behaviour of the crowd was curious. Immediately after the hanging, many were observed shedding tears; and when Calcraft, the hangman, came down from the scaffold he was booed.

An incredible amount of poisoning seems to have gone on in Scotland during the earlier part of the nineteenth century. In the year 1827, for example, there were no less than three cases of murder by arsenic. In 1843 a Scottish poisoning case was
even brought to the official notice of the President of the United States.

If you drive out of Glasgow to Renfrew and then two miles along the main Renfrew-Greenock road to the village of Inchinnan, you will see the ‘Town of Inchinnan’ Farm. The grey, harled house with its whitewashed outbuildings stands back about a hundred yards from the main road, in the middle of flat farming country. It is owned today by Matthew Gilmour.

In 1842, the owner was Mr Gilmour’s great-uncle, John, and in November of that year he married a Miss Christina Cochran. She was an attractive girl, the eldest daughter of an Ayrshire farmer and apparently an excellent match for John. What he did not know about her was that she was already in love with a local youth who could not afford to marry. The marriage with John Gilmour was of her parents’ devising.

It lasted about six weeks, and Christina refused to consummate it. On the day after Christmas, she told her maid to buy her some arsenic; and two days later her husband became very sick. He recovered, however, and early in January she bought some more arsenic. A few days after that her husband died. Christina returned to her parents’ farm.

Rumour soon got busy. When Christina’s father heard that John Gilmour’s body was to be exhumed, he demonstrated his opinion of the situation by hustling her off to Liverpool and putting her on board a ship bound for New York. In June 1843 the Scottish police applied to the State of New York for her extradition on a charge of murder.

Her New York lawyer pleaded that she was insane. When a panel of doctors had decided that she was only pretending to be insane, he appealed to President Tyler. The President was unmoved, and in the end Christina was taken back to Scotland to be tried. There, however, the jury could not quite bring
themselves to believe that so young and gentle a girl could poison her husband. Perhaps the fact that her father and brother had destroyed a letter from her to her lover admitting the purchase of the arsenic, made their task easier. At all events they brought in a verdict of Not Proven, and the prisoner was free.

Jessie M’Lachlan of Glasgow was not so fortunate.

17 Sandyford Place is now occupied by a medical research trust. In 1862 it was the home of John Fleming, an accountant, and his family. With them, too, lived his eighty-seven-year-old father, James Fleming. The family used to go away to their Clydeside villa for the week-ends, leaving the old man and a servant girl named M’Pherson in charge of the town house.

One Monday afternoon in July the Flemings arrived home to find the old man apparently alone. He said that the girl M’Pherson had gone away. In fact, she was lying in her basement room, hacked to death with a butcher’s cleaver. When this was discovered, a doctor was immediately sent for. After some thought, he gave his opinion. ‘This,’ he said shrewdly, ‘is certainly not suicide.’ His name, happily, was Dr Watson.

On the Wednesday, old Mr Fleming was arrested. Then, Jessie M’Lachlan, a former servant of the Fleming family, was found to have pawned some silver stolen from the house, and she was arrested in his place. She stood trial for murder and was convicted. She had made the fatal mistake of trying to lie her way out of the situation in which she found herself. Only after her conviction did she tell what sounded like the truth.

The dead girl M’Pherson had been a friend of hers and, on the Friday night, Jessie had called in to sit with her and share a bottle of rum. Old Fleming had been there. After a while, the old man had sent Jessie out to get another bottle. When she returned, she found M’Pherson lying senseless with a head wound. Old Fleming said that he had not meant to hurt her.
When the girl recovered consciousness, she told Jessie that the old man had ‘attempted to take liberties with her’ and that when she had threatened to tell his son, he had hit her. When Jessie had said that they must call a doctor, the old man had locked the doors and said that nothing must be known of the matter. When Jessie had tried to force her way out of the house, the old man had attacked the injured girl again, hitting her with the cleaver until she died. Then, he had told Jessie that she was an accessory to the murder and that they must fake a robbery. Jessie had lost her head and agreed, taking away with her the silver and some clothing he gave her to lend colour to the robbery story.

The judge decided that this was a ‘tissue of wicked falsehoods’ and promptly sentenced her to death. But others were not so certain. Old Fleming had a peculiar reputation. Jessie’s sentence was commuted to penal servitude.

She served fifteen years in prison and later went to America. She died at Port Huron, Michigan.

But it is Madeleine who must rate as America’s most distinguished Scottish murder immigrant.

In the winter of 1856 there moved into 7 Blythswood Square, Glasgow, a family named Smith. Mr Smith was a highly respected architect. Mrs Smith was a staid, submissive Victorian wife. They had five children. Madeleine was the eldest.

In the previous year she had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance to a young Channel Islander, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, who worked as a clerk for a seed merchant. To the nineteen-year-old Madeleine he had seemed a romantic figure. He had lived in Paris and fought with the National Guard in the French revolution of 1848, or so he said. He talked of love and broken hearts and suicide and dramatic plans for emigrating to South America. He was most unlike the worthy sons of her father’s friends.

In fact, he was a vain, snobbish, calculating little prig. Nothing sums him up better than his own letter to his ‘Mimi’ (as he called Madeleine) written the morning after he had seduced her. ‘I am sad at what we did,’ he wrote; ‘I regret it very much. Why, Mimi, did you give way after your promises?… I have given you warning long enough to improve yourself. Sometimes I think you take no notice of my wishes.…’

A few months after their first meeting, Mr Smith got to hear of the acquaintance and forbade it. Dutifully, Madeleine wrote to L’Angelier ending their correspondence. But he was not put off so easily. He had made up his mind to marry into the Smith family and so acquire the respectability and financial security he craved. He therefore enlisted the services of a sentimental elderly lady, who had befriended him, as a go-between. Soon the relationship was resumed clandestinely. The seduction was accomplished in the garden of Mr Smith’s country house on the Clyde, the following year.

Now, Madeleine may have been inexperienced, but she was no ordinary Victorian miss. One thing that emerges clearly from the hundreds of letters that she wrote to L’Angelier (and which deeply shocked the court at her trial) is her frank enjoyment of the physical side of their relationship. ‘For it is a pleasure, and no one can deny that. It is but human nature. Is not every one who
loves
of the same mind? Yes.’ In 1856 that was an unforgivable indecency; except to Madeleine. To her, it was a simple fact, and not even the incessant preaching of her lover could change her opinion. She was a clear-sighted and determined young woman. When the family moved to Blythswood Square, she elected to sleep in the basement so that she could admit L’Angelier through the area door at night. There were bars over the windows of the room, and he used to rattle his cane against them as he passed along the pavement outside, to signal his arrival. Sometimes, it would
be unsafe for him to come in. Then, she would pass a letter to him through the bars and they would talk softly. At other times, when the rest of the family were sound asleep and the coast was clear, he would be admitted and she would make cocoa for him in the kitchen.

By the end of 1856, however, both were getting tired of this arrangement; he, because he wanted to be accepted openly by her family and enter by the front door; she, because she was tired of his preaching and fault-finding, and because her common-sense now told her that there was no future in their relationship. At one point she had offered to leave her family, marry him and live on his clerk’s wages if he were willing. When he had refused, that had been the end for her. She had at last seen through him. There were quarrels. In January, 1857, she became engaged to a friend of her father’s, a Glasgow merchant named Minnoch.

L’Angelier’s reaction to her cool note informing him that the affair was at an end and requesting him to return her letters and portrait, was terrifying. Yes, he would return her letters, but to her father, who should now know of everything that had passed between them, and that she was, in effect, already Mrs L’Angelier. Madeleine wrote back frantically begging for mercy. ‘Do nothing ’til I see you,’ her letter ends: ‘for the love of heaven do nothing.’

L’Angelier relented after a few days, but only on condition that their relationship was resumed, and on the understanding that she was not in fact engaged to Minnoch. She had gained a little time. The reconciliation took place on February 12. During that week, she tried unsuccessfully to buy prussic acid. On the 21st, she succeeded in buying arsenic, ‘to kill rats.’ Twenty-four hours later, L’Angelier drank cocoa she made for him and was very ill. He recovered. On March 21 she wrote to him: ‘Come to me, sweet one. I waited and waited for you,
but you came not. I shall wait again tomorrow night, same hour and arrangement. Do come, sweet love, my own dear love of a sweetheart.’

He obeyed the summons. In the early hours of the morning of the 23rd, he staggered back to the door of his lodging, so doubled up with pain that he was unable to use the door key. His landlady let him in and sent for a doctor. Later that day, he died.

When Madeleine was arrested, Mr and Mrs Smith took to their bed and stayed in it until after the trial. Authority respected their feelings; even spared them the ordeal of giving evidence. However, Madeleine had no need of their moral support. In spite of the revelations about her private life and in spite of the great danger that she was in, she remained completely calm and self-assured throughout the nine days of her trial. Even the verdict of Not Proven produced from her no more than a faint smile, though in a letter she wrote a few days later, she expressed herself as pleased with the loud cheers that greeted the announcement of it.

The house in Blythswood Square is safely preserved by the authorities of the Agricultural College which now occupies it, and the adjacent property. Even Madeleine’s basement room, that famous room with its barred windows, is still intact. It is now one of the college staff lavatories.

And Madeleine herself?

Four years after the trial, she married George Wardle, a London artist and an associate of William Morris. She had three children, became a Socialist, started the fashion of using mats on the dinner table instead of a tablecloth, and numbered among her acquaintances the young G. B. Shaw. When her husband died she lived for a time in Staffordshire and then emigrated to America, where she met a Mr Sheehy and lived with him until he died in 1926. When she was ninety, a
Hollywood film company found her and tried to persuade her to appear in a film about her own story. She refused and was threatened with deportation as an undesirable alien. But she fought back and won. She always had. She died in 1928, and was buried under the name of Lena Wardle Sheehy in Mount Hope Cemetery, New York.

She was a remarkable woman. Perhaps the Society would consider putting some flowers on her grave. I am sure that Scotland would appreciate the gesture.

Gentlemen, I have received a number of private requests from members for information about the current murder situation in France.

Several of these requests have been made almost furtively; others in such equivocal terms that I have only been able to guess at their real meaning. However, all of them seemed to be based on a common attitude. As one member remarked with a leer: ‘Put the words “France” and “murder” side by side, breathe on them gently and—
click
—you have
crime passionel.
Right?’

Others were even more enthusiastic. France, they assured me, is the country in which the heart rules the head, where the feelings of the deceived husband or the discarded mistress are fully understood by toddlers of both sexes long before they learn to read, where love conquers all. Nowhere else, they said, have juries so much sympathy for the unhappy killer; nowhere else is justice so benevolent. And was there not a famous criminal lawyer who said that, if he had committed murder and hoped to get away with it, he would sooner be tried by a French court than any other in the world? Almost certainly there was. France is the one place where the murderer is understood and appreciated.
Vive le crime passionel
!