THE CASE OF OSCAR SLATER.
ON May6th, 1909, a man named Oscar Slater was found guilty of the murder of Miss Marion Gilchrist, an old lady who lived in a flat in Glasgow, and he was sentenced to death. On May -26th, twenty-four hours before the date fixed for his execution, he was reprieved. His sentence was com- muted to penal servitude for life, and that sentence he is now serving. From the beginning of his trial many people believed him to be innocent; twenty thousand signatures were obtained for a petition in his favour; his solicitor worked for him untiringly after his sentence; and finally Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has presented his case in a pamphlet (Hodder and Stoughton, 6d.), which has had the effect, among other results, of convincing so eminent a lawyer as Sir Herbert Stephen of the accused man's innocence. That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle should associate himself in an effort to obtain justice for a condemned man will strike the public, doubtless, as a fact to be treated with interest and with respect; they will remember that he has so associated himself with other cases. When, however, a trained lawyer of the distinguished position of Sir Herbert Stephen definitely and emphatically approves Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's pleading
and argument, interest and respect must begin to border on conviction, even upon a cursory view of the facts of the case. A thorough and careful examination of those facts will, we believe, convince any unbiassed reader that the whole matter deserves all possible publicity and investigation.
Let us briefly record the facts. In the year 1008 Miss Marion Gilchrist, an old maiden lady, was living at a first-floor flat in 15 Queen's Terrace, Glasgow. She had lived there for thirty years. She was well off, and indulged in the hobby of a collection of jewels, which, to the value of about three thousand pounds, she kept hidden in a wardrobe in a bedroom. She was attended in her flat by a single maid- servant, Helen Lambie, aged twenty-one ; and, for fear of robbery, she had two patent locks attached to the door of her flat. It was the custom of this maidservant to go out each day at seven o'clock and buy her mistress an evening paper, a proceeding which generally took her about ten minutes. On the evening of December 21st, 1908, Helen Lambie went out to get the paper a minute or two before seven, leaving her mistress in the dining-room reading a magazine ; she took the keys with her, shut the flat door behind her, and closed the hall door downstairs. At about seven, Mr. Arthur Adams and his two sisters, the occupants of a dining-room immediately below Miss Gilchrist's dining-room, heard a heavy fall, followed by three sharp knocks. It had been arranged by Miss Gilchrist with the Adamses that incase of alarm she would knock on the floor, and Mr. Arthur Adams thereupon rushed out to see what was the matter. Miss Gilchrist's flat and his rooms, although in the same building, had separate front doors, so that he ran out of his hall door and through the hall door belonging to the flat, which was open. On the first floor he found Miss Gilchrist's door shut; he rang three times, and received no answer, then, thinking that there could be nothing wrong, he returned to his sisters. They persuaded him to go up again, and as he stood by the flat door for the second time, Helen Lambie came back up the stairs. They consulted together, the maid opened the door with her two keys, and they went in. Here we have no space to enumerate a large number of small points as to Lambie's behaviour, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes as "only explicable, if it can be said to be explicable, by great want of intelligence and grasp of the situation." To begin with, she differs from Adams as as to what she did upon opening the door. She says she remained on the mat. Adams is positive that she walked several paces down the hall. Next, as Adams waited half in and half out of the door, a man appeared walking from the spare bedroom at the back of the hall; he passed Lambie, who made no exclamation and did not seem astonished, and having passed Adams, rushed downstairs. Lambie then went, not into the flat dining-room, but into the kitchen; there she turned up the gas, apparently to satisfy herself that a clothes line and pulleys had not fallen; she had told Adams before they entered the flat that these pulleys must have caused the noise he had heard below. Adams asked the girl where her mistress was; she went into the dining-room and called out to him. Adams went in and saw Miss Gilchrist's body on the hearthrug, with a skin rug thrown across her head. Nearly every bone in the face and skull had been smashed, one eye being driven into the brain. In the spare bedroom a box containing papers had been forced open, but there were some valuables lying about (a watch, lic.) which had not been taken. Later it was discovered that a single crescent diamond brooch worth 240 or 250 was missing, but the collection of jewels had not been touched ; they were hidden among the dresses in the wardrobe. No weapon was found in the flat, and though the furniture in the dining-room was spattered with blood, there were no marks on the box containing papers or upon anything else in the bedroom.
So much for the first stage of the story. The second stage concerns Oscar Slater. On Tuesday, December 22nd, the Glasgow police circulated a description of the murderer, based on the descriptions given by Adams and Lambie. On December 251h they circulated another description, differing in several points from the first ; details had been added and altered on account of evidence supplied by a young girl of fifteen, Mary Barrowman, who stated that she was passing the scene of the murder shortly after seven p.m. on Decem- ber 21st, and saw a man rush from the house. Next, on the evening of December 25th, the police came across what seemed to be a definite clue. It was brought to their notice that a German Jew of the assumed name of Oscar Slater had been trying to dispose of the pawn ticket of a crescent diamond braoch of about the same value as the missing jewel. On raiding his lodgings he was found to have left Glasgow with his mistress, one Andre Antoine. Three days later, the Glas- gow police found that the couple had sailed on December 2tith on the Lusitania for New York under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Sando. The police thought now that they had got their man. Slater was arrested on arrival at New York; Adams, Lambie, and Barrowman were sent out to identify him for purposes of extradition; they did identify him, Adams with doubts and reservations, but in any case Adams and Barrowman had been shown photographs of him before being asked to identify, and Lambie had seen him led down a passage between two officers. Their identification, however, was unnecessary, for Slater voluntarily said he would come back to Scotland to stand his trial. He was back in Glasgow on February 21st, and his trial began on May 3rd. But before the trial came on the case, as originally framed by the police, had collapsed. The reason why they started out to arrest Slater on suspicion was that he had pawned a brooch which might have been Miss Gilchrist's. This brooch, on inquiry, turned out to belong to his mistress, and to be one which he had pawned many times before. So that all the evidence as to identification on which they rested their cast at the trial was in respect of a man who had acted perfectly legally with another woman's property. Nor, as a fact, from first to last, did the police ever put forward one single piece of evidence or any link of any sort or kind to connect Slater with Miss Gilchrist. As to the sailing for America under an assumed name, it was proved that for weeks before the crime was committed Slater had made arrangements for emigration and, according to his own account, the reason why he assumed the name of Sando was because he feared pursuit from his real wife and wished to cover his traces. This may or may not be true; it is a conceivable, even if it is a disreputable reason. At all events, he made no secret about his departure ; he carried off his luggage in a perfectly open manner, and when it was opened there was found nothing whatever to incriminate him; there was no clothing stained with blood, and though there was a hammer, it was a small, light weapon which could not have inflicted the fearful wounds which caused Miss Gilchrist's death. Finally, on the point of identification with the man who had been seen leaving Miss Gilchrist's flat, he set up a complete alibi. He was identified as, or said to be very like, the man who was seen going out of the flat door by Adams and Lambie ; and by other witnesses he was also identified as, or said to be like, a man who for some weeks past had been seen loafing about the street in which Miss Gilchrist lived. For the discrepancies between the evidence of these witnesses the reader must be referred to the evidence given at the.trial; it is sufficient here to say that the discrepancies were great.
Then why did the jury convict ? They did convict, by a majority of nine to six, and perhaps mainly for three reasons. In the first place, public feeling was running very high. The case for the prosecution was conducted with considerable heat, and Slater's antecedents, which were disreputable though not criminal, were not such as made the task of defence easier. In the second place, the Lord Advocate, prosecuting for the Crown, made a serious allegation which was not true in fact, and which, uncorrected by the judge and the defending counsel, must have weighed heavily in the minds of the jury against the prisoner. The Lord Advocate stated that Slater, having given in his name to Cook's Agency in Glasgow as Oscar Slater, found on December 25th his name and a full description in the Glasgow papers, "and he sees that the last thing in the world that he ought to do, if he studies his own safety, is to go back to Cook's office as Oscar Slater." Consequently, the argument runs, he fled to Liverpool and so to America. But that is not the fact. It was not until the evening of the 25th that the police even heard of his existence, and his name did not appear in the papers till several days later, when be was on the high seas. The point is of vital importance, but was not brought out at the trial. In the third place, Slitter's counsel probably made the greatest mistake in not putting him in the box. He himself, it seems, wished to give evidence, but his antecedents were bad, and his counsel feared that the long list of sordid adventures which would be drawn from him by cross-examination would tell too strongly on the minds of an
Edinburgh jury. Probably his failure to go into the box told more strongly still. However that may be, he was convicted by nine votes to six—a difference of opinion which in England would have resulted in a new trial. By Scottish law the ver- dict of the majority is enough, and as in Scotland there is no Court of Criminal Appeal, Slater, reprieved from execution, is serving a sentence of penal servitude for life. We have stated the main facts of the case. For details and further arguments the reader must be referred to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's pamphlet and the evidence given at the trial. It is difficult, if not impossible, to read that evidence and not to come to the conclusion that there has been a gross miscarriage of justice, and to that conclusion, we cannot doubt, the atten- tion of the Home Secretary will be directed.
We are by no means supporters of the no-punishment theory of some modern humanitarians, but hold that crime must be met with chastisement. But it is essential that such chastisement shall fall only on the guilty. The notion of an innocent man enduring penal servitude for life is unbearable. It is a wrong which cannot wait a convenient time for remedy, but must be set right hot-foot. Unless some new facts have come to light, and assuming that the facts are as they have been stated above, Oscar Slater should be released at once as a man convicted without sufficient, or indeed any, evidence of guilt. To keep him a day longer in prison on a punctilio is a crime too hideous to contemplate.
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