Mystery writers were inspired by true crime stories, and one of the best chroniclers in that line was William Roughead. Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and student of crime. If he didn’t invent the True Crime genre, he certainly helped make it popular in books starting with his 1906 account of the trial of Pritchard the poisoner. His friends included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he worked to clear Oscar Slater, Henry James, who enjoyed Roughead’s true crime narratives, and Edmund Lester Pearson, whose 1924 Studies in Murder, with its centerpiece the Lizzy Borden case, also helped to make true crime a popular literary genre.
This is a summary of a dozen of the crimes that Roughead treats at length in his various books. One is the case of Oscar Slater, wrongfully convicted of a murder that took place in late 1908, who served nineteen years of a life sentence that had already been commuted from a death sentence. Slater’s was one of two cases in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle interested himself, and Doyle committed himself for the first ₤1,000 of the expenses for legal redress for Slater, who was released in 1927 and whose conviction was overturned in 1928. The case had been bungled from the beginning, with many false eyewitness identifications coached by the police, the prosecutor’s absurd mistaken argument that a small tack hammer in Slater’s possession was the murder weapon when photographs and the opinion of the first doctor who examined the victim indicated that a chair was used (the doctor was not called at the trial), and other notorious gaffes, but the telling point in the dismissal was the outrageous bias shown by the presiding judge.
Roughead’s first book in 1906 was about the 1865 trial of Dr. Pritchard the poisoner, and he gives a summary of the case here. Pritchard was tried for poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, but he seems to have dabbled in other methods earlier. He almost surely killed and then burned the corpse of a servant girl in her bed in a top floor room in his house in 1863. The girl was perhaps less tractable than the one he hired and seduced right after the death of the first servant. Of this liaison Mrs. Pritchard apparently knew, and she allowed it to continue. The defense at Pritchard’s trial attempted to put the blame on his servant/mistress, but unsuccessfully. Pritchard’s hanging in July 1865 was the last public execution in Glasgow.
“To Meet Miss Madeleine Smith” describes an especially sensational case, concerning a young woman who apparently poisoned her lover Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a clerk considerably below her social standing. When her parents arranged a marriage for her with a prosperous Glasgow merchant, Smith tried to break off her affair. L’Angelier refused and threated to make her explicit letters public. She bought arsenic on at least two occasions, and he died of arsenic poisoning, but no one saw them together in the days leading up to his death, and the 15-man jury returned the distinctly Scotch verdict of “Not Proven.” The year was 1857, the poisoning took place in Glasgow, and the trial was in Edinburgh.
The Sandyford Murder in July, 1862 was a notorious case in which a servant girl was killed with a cleaver. The murderer was certainly the landlord, James Fleming, but a friend of the murdered girl, Jessie McLachlan, was convicted on Fleming’s evidence as witness for the prosecution, a circumstance that in Scotland sheltered him from being accused of the crime himself.
A dry sense of humor, a pleasantly old-fashioned style to fit these cases out of the dusty annals of the law, and a salting of Scots phrases all enliven this material, which is sensational enough to begin with.
No comments:
Post a Comment