Richard Whittington-Egan - The Oscar Slater Murder Story. New Light On a Classic Miscarriage of Justice

Richard Whittington-Egan

NEIL WILSON PUBLISHING GLASGOW

I am only too well aware that this book will raise strife and cause contention. You cannot blow away the dust of over a hundred years accepted error and prejudice without provoking argument, refutation, accusation and violent dissension. People strongly resent their well-embedded beliefs and received opinions being challenged, let alone uprooted.

Particularly emotive will be my revelations as to the newly-canonised Detective Lieutenant Trench. Strictly, the fact of his multiple dishonesties is irrelevant to the fact of his seemingly-selfless delayed action in support of what I am entirely happy to accept as his genuine belief in the blamelessness of Oscar Slater in the murder of Miss Gilchrist; but it is important because, as they say in court, it goes to show character.

Far more important, though, is the recognition that, as I am able to show here, whatever his morality, Trench got a number of crucial facts wrong. Never in any way deeply involved in the official investigation of the murder, in no sense on the inside track, he was a pretender with an inflated notion of his acquaintance with the facts. He had no right, and no apparent reason, to assume Dr Charteris guilt as a corollary to Slaters innocence. Lieutenant Trench not only suspected the wrong man, but also attached to him a spurious motive. He was fitting up Charteris, even if perhaps in a perfectly well-intentioned way. And, following Trenchs martyrdom, the faithful have been continuing the good work, taking a leaf ironically from the book of the Mr Ure whose methods they profess to despise.

It has been something of a convention with the pro-Slaterian faction to make scapegoats of the Glasgow police, to accuse them of grasping at straws and proclaiming them sturdy evidential twigs, of railroading Slater to the execution shed. I am in no way in accord with this point of view. It is, indeed, manifestly unfair.

To take just one example. In the matter of forensic investigation the accusation has been wrongly levelled against the police that they totally neglected fingerprinting. Untrue. I put into evidence for the first time the following extract from a letter addressed, on 24 February 1909, to the Chief Constable of Glasgow by Melville L. Macnaghten of Scotland Yard, to whom specimens of Slaters fingerprints, together with the box of papers found broken open in the spare bedroom, had been despatched. Macnaghten wrote: The work box, which is being returned today, has been examined, but finger prints sufficiently clear for purposes of comparison cannot be found.

All previous accounts of the Slater case have, quite properly as I think, accepted the innocence of the panel, but it is in the transference of the conviction of his innocence to a conviction of murder to an innocent man Dr Francis Charteris or, perhaps, Wingate Birrell that, I contend and facts confirm, so many writers have been in serious error. In breach of truth, too, for the authors of book after book, eschewing the burdensome business of original thought and research, of finding out things for themselves, have simply followed uncritically in the narrative footprints of their predecessors. Sadly, few have felt the need to conduct any sort of wide-ranging personal investigation.

Facts have been lost sight of and falsehoods, learned by repetition and rote, have become accepted truths. And yet, with the exception of a handful of new disclosures, some significant, some such as the much-vaunted anonymous letters wildly and without any demonstrable evidence accusing Wingate Birrell of the murder providing mere misleading hearsay, all of the facts have been there all of the time awaiting discovery and recognition.

Make no mistake, very considerable archival sources exist out there. In Edinburgh there are the official papers lodged at West Register House; there are birth, marriage and death certificates at New Register House; there are the papers preserved at the Crown Office; there is the very considerable William Roughead Collection in the Signet Library. There are also to be found, by those who take the trouble to look for them, certain scattered police papers and the documentings of various legal personages. There are records preserved now in Austin, Texas. There are the newspapers relating to the transatlantic life of Helen Lambie or Gillon which are to be seen in the Peoria Public Library. There was, until a few years ago, Oscar Slaters widow, Mrs Lina Leschziner, living in Glasgow. And there were still a number admittedly steadily waning over the years of surviving actors who had played parts in the tragedy, to be contacted and interviewed, as, indeed, I contacted and interviewed them.

There were new discoveries waiting to be made. I was fortunately able to make them. And every new fact presented here can be sourced for the sceptic.

Beyond a tendency to accept the entire blamelessness of Oscar Slater in the matter of the death of Marion Gilchrist, I came to the subject tabula rasa, with no preconceived notions. At one stage, later, I began to suspect Wingate Birrell of having killed his aunt, but more closely focused investigation failed to dredge up a single piece of what I felt I could regard as real evidence remotely supportive of such a conclusion.

I cannot and do not for one moment believe that Dr Francis Charteris or Archibald Hamilton Charteris, or Mrs Elizabeth Charteris, their mother, was in any way involved. These persons were all comfortably situated financially. They had no expectation of benefiting from Miss Gilchrists will to any significant extent if at all. Even if the motivation had been, as has been suggested ad nauseam, to get their hands on Miss Gilchrists revised will, what would have been the point of that? To destroy it? Ridiculous. All that she would have retained in her possession would have been a copy of the original document, lodged, as Archibald, a solicitor, would well know, safely beyond the grasp of marauding hands with her law agent. To have a sight of the new provisions of the altered will? What practical good would that have done the Charterises? No, there is absolutely no good reason to postulate any Charteris or Birrell involvement.

I do offer an alternative to the somewhat curling-at-the-edges familiar familial solution, but, I emphasise, it is only a suggested possible scenario.

I lay absolutely no claim to having solved the Oscar Slater mystery. What I have done is to find sound reasons for the exoneration of people unsoundly suspected, even accused.

Richard Whittington-Egan

I am primarily indebted to the former Lord President, Lord Emslie, for his permission to examine the Slater papers and productions lodged at the Justiciary Office in Edinburgh, and to Mr A H Hutson of that office, who made their proper display to me his especial concern.

I am grateful, too, for willing help extended to me by the Faculty of Advocates, and also by Mr George H. Ballantyne, former Librarian of the Signet Library.

The late Lord Cameron was a good friend and a continual source of inspiration to me throughout the many years of research involved in the writing of this book.

Most helpful also were Mr Craigie Aitchison, son of the late Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Craigie Aitchison, who so ably argued, and won, Slaters case before the Court of Appeal; Mr Norman Crombie Macpherson, son of the late Norman Macpherson, of Messrs Norman Macpherson & Dunlop, SSC, Edinburgh, Slaters agents in the matter of that appeal; and Mr Colin Shaughnessy, of Shaughnessy, Quigley & McColl, the successors of Messrs. Joseph Shaughnessy & Sons, the firm of Glasgow solicitors with whom Oscar Slaters agent, the late Ewing Speirs, and subsequent to his untimely death, Alex Shaughnessy, were associated.