Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (1932)
by Edwin M. Borchard
Case #37

Oscar Slater

SCOTLAND

Miss Marion Gilchrist, a woman eighty-three years old, had made her home for thirty years in Glasgow, Scotland, in the second-floor apartment of the brownstone building at 15 Queen's Terrace. She was in comfortable circumstances and was attended by one servant, Helen Lambie, a girl of twenty-one, who had been with her three years.

Friends seldom called on Miss Gilchrist and relatives, even more rarely. Her only intimate friend, whom she saw frequently, was a Mrs. Ferguson, who had formerly been her servant.

Miss Gilchrist had one interest. She collected jewelry and, at the time of her death, her collection was estimated to be worth about £3,000. This jewelry she kept in her apartment; and looking at the various brooches, pendants, and rings appears to have been one of her intense pleasures. From time to time she had expressed anxiety lest she be robbed and for protection she had placed two patent locks on her front door.

Every evening about seven o'clock Helen Lambie went out to get her mistress an evening paper, with which she returned before doing the rest of her shopping.

On December 21, 1908, the girl went out as usual, a minute or two before seven. At about seven Arthur Adams, who lived with his two sisters in the apartment below Miss Gilchrist's, was startled by "a noise from above, then a very heavy fall and then three sharp knocks."

Adams went up to investigate. Miss Gilchrist's door was closed. He rang three times but got no answer, although he heard a sound inside which he described as the breaking of sticks. He thought that Helen Lambie was engaged in household duties of some kind and so, after listening a minute or two, he returned to his apartment. His sisters, however, were not convinced that all was well for they had heard the sound repeated, and sent him back. He rang again. As he stood listening the servant girl returned from her errands. Adams told her what he had heard. She suggested that the clothesline pulleys in the kitchen had fallen and made the noise the Adams' had heard, despite the fact that the Gilchrist kitchen was not above the Adams' dining-room, in which they had been sitting, and that the old lady had been left in the livingroom, which was directly above it. It was from this room that the sound had come.

The girl then opened the door, while Adams stood on the threshold. As the girl was going into the kitchen, a well- dressed man appeared and walked quietly out of the apartment past Adams, whose suspicions were not aroused until the man had passed him. Finding the pulleys in the kitchen intact, the girl, at Adams' suggestion, went into the livingroom to look for her mistress.

There they found the old lady lying upon the floor near the chair in which Lambie had left her. A fur rug was thrown over her head. Nearly every bone in her skull had been crushed by blows. Although still alive when discovered by Lambie and Adams, she died without regaining consciousness.

A number of articles of value in the apartment had not been taken, though they were in plain sight, and nothing was missing except a single crescent diamond brooch worth about £50. The murderer had left no clues.

The only guides the police had were the descriptions supplied by Lambie and Adams of the man who had walked out of the apartment. Adams described him as a well-featured man of the commercial-traveler or clerk type, dressed in dark trousers and light overcoat. He was not sure whether the man wore a mustache, nor could he describe his hat or the color of his overcoat. Lambie's description was confined to the fact that he had worn a round cloth hat, a three-quarter length gray overcoat, and had walked peculiarly.

The police circulars based upon these facts were altered on Christmas Day by reason of details supplied by Mary Barrowman, a girl of fifteen, against whom the man had brushed as he dashed out of the building. She had fixed his age at twenty-eight or thirty years and said that he was clean shaven and had a nose slightly twisted to one side. There were several discrepancies in these descriptions, such as the color of the overcoat and the shape of the hat.

Late on Christmas afternoon the police came upon a definite clue which led them to Oscar Slater, a German who was shown to have earned his money by the sale of jewels and by gambling operations. He had attempted to sell a pawn ticket on a diamond brooch of about the same size and value as that missing from Miss Gilchrist's home. When the lodgings occupied by Slater and his mistress were raided, it was found that they had left Glasgow the same night for London or Liverpool. Three days later the police discovered that they had sailed for New York on the Lusitania.

Slater was arrested on the dock in New York. His seven trunks were impounded and sealed. Two officers, accompanied by Adams, Helen Lambie, and Mary Barrowman, left Glasgow at once. Adams and Mary Barrowman identified Slater in court at New York as a man exceedingly like the person they had seen on the night of the crime.

The question of extradition was speedily settled by Slater himself, as he volunteered to return for the trial, which began on May 3, 1909. Before that date, however, the prosecution's case had practically collapsed, for it had been established beyond a doubt that the brooch represented by the pawn ticket was not the one missing from the Gilchrist home. It was shown that Slater had owned his brooch for a long time and had been in the habit of pawning it whenever he needed funds. This disclosure was apparently kept from the jury.

The fact that Slater had left Glasgow in what seemed to have been unpremeditated haste was explained by witnesses at the trial who said that the defendant had received two letters on December 21. One, they said, was from a friend in London who informed Slater that Slater's wife had been bothering him for money, and that Slater ought to be on his guard against her, and the other was from a former partner of Slater's, asking him to come to San Francisco.

Upon the return to Glasgow a careful search of the trunks failed to disclose anything of a suspicious nature except a small hammer of such fragile construction as virtually to eliminate it as a weapon capable of inflicting such wounds as were found on Miss Gilchrist's body.

The material elements of the prosecution's case having been explained away, the Crown was forced to rely upon witnesses. There were two sets of these. The first were the three who said that they had seen the murderer – Adams, Lambie, and Mary Barrowman. The others were twelve persons who testified that on various dates they had seen a man loitering near Miss Gilchrist's house in a suspicious manner. All of these, with varying degrees of certainty, were willing to identify the defendant as the loiterer.

The Crown produced no evidence connecting the loiterer with the crime. The twelve witnesses did not agree as to his appearance, either as to height, weight, age, features, or dress. The total effect of their evidence did not furnish a fair picture of the man, though the prosecution sought desperately to make the descriptions given approximate the general appearance of Slater.

Testimony showed Slater's movements on the day of the crime. He had given his servant notice. His actions about the time of the murder were not of an unusual nature. He had dispatched communications to a London bank with which he had dealt and to a jeweler who was repairing his watch. Two witnesses testified to having seen him in a billiard-room between 6.20 and 6.40, when he left for his home, which was about a mile from the billiard-room and a quarter of a mile from Miss Gilchrist's house. His servant testified that he had dined at his customary time – about seven. The steward of a gambling club testified that he had seen Slater about 9.45 and that he had shown no nervousness or anxiety.

Several acquaintances testified that at that time Slater had a short mustache. Both Adams and Lambie now testified that the man they had seen was clean shaven, though before Adams had not been sure.

When Slater engaged his passage on the Lusitania, he had made no secret of his plans, but had given his true name and address and stated that he would take his berths at Liverpool, which he did. The fact that he later took passage under the name of Otto Sando he explained by saying that he had good reason to fear pursuit by his real wife, a belief which was shown to have some basis in fact.

What may have convinced the jury finally was later proved to have been an error on the part of the Lord Advocate. In his address to the jury, the Lord Advocate twice pointed out that, after giving his true name at the ticket office, December 25, Slater saw his name and description in the Glasgow papers, with the result that he never went back to the ticket agency but instead, after packing his trunks, remained in the house until time to take the train. The error in this assertion lies in the fact that Slater's name did not appear in the papers on the twenty-fifth and that it was nearly a week later before it was published along with his description – by which time he was in mid-ocean.

It was not difficult to demonstrate to the jury that Slater's character was by no means all that the conventions might have demanded, but no actual criminal record was introduced against him. He appears to have suffered several moral lapses and to have been unsteady and rather mobile in his employment.

The fact that Slater did not take the witness stand in his own defense also probably told against him heavily. His counsel felt that he should not testify, for reasons which have never been disclosed. It is possible that he feared the effect upon the jury of any cross-examination which would elicit the story of Slater's amours and general moral depravity.

The jury returned a verdict of guilty after deliberating an hour and ten minutes. Of the fifteen jurors, nine were for conviction, five felt that the Crown had not proved its case, and one favored a verdict of not guilty. Scotch law provides that a majority verdict suffices.

Upon hearing the verdict Slater protested his innocence and complete ignorance of the whole affair. He was sentenced to death.

On May 17 a memorial, signed by twenty thousand persons, was presented to the Secretary of State for Scotland by Slater's counsel, Ewing Speirs, petitioning for a stay of execution. No action was taken on this petition until May 25, two days before the execution was to take place, when a telegram from the Undersecretary of State for Scotland ordered a stay of execution.

On July 8, 1909, Slater was removed to Peterhead, the prison in which he was to serve his commuted sentence of life imprisonment. The interest which had led twenty thousand persons to sign the original memorial continued unabated, but the Crown authorities were slow in granting it formal recognition, although it soon spread to England and gradually gained international prominence.

Not until April 23, 1911, was an inquiry ordered and then the Home Office instructed the Sheriff of Lanarkshire to investigate certain allegations about the case made by a Glasgow detective named Trench. This investigation was held in secret, thereby causing a storm of protest. Two months later the Government issued a White Paper giving a report of the findings. Detective Inspector Trench, who had an enviable record, was a gold-medal officer, and once had been assigned to guard the person of the King, said that two days after the murder he was ordered to visit Miss Birrell, a niece of Miss Gilchrist, for the purpose of finding out what Lambie had told her when she came to inform Miss Birrell of Miss Gilchrist's death. He reported that Miss Birrell had said that Lambie had named the murderer. As Miss Birrell later denied the story and as Trench's statement was not accepted, the Government decided not to disclose the identity of the person named. It appeared also that the prosecution had been active in persuading the principal witnesses to identify Slater. Trench was, in fact, dismissed from the service, despite his previous exemplary record.

As the years passed, greater and greater pressure was brought to bear on the Government for Slater's release. The late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the eminent people who interested themselves in Slater's behalf. The public dissatisfaction with the case led to the creation by Parliament of a Court of Criminal Appeal for Scotland which, had it existed before, would have made unnecessary such an inquiry as was conducted by the Sheriff of Lanarkshire.

After serving eighteen years Slater was, in 1927, released on parole. In 1928 he was finally exonerated by this Court of Criminal Appeal after a retrial under a special act and soon thereafter was granted £6,000 by Parliament as indemnity for nearly a score of years' imprisonment for a crime he did not commit.

Slater's counsel in the Court of Criminal. Appeal based their attack on the conflicting evidence as to identification and on the Crown's failure to produce all the evidence known to it. Lambie, who had married and gone to America, refused to return for this trial. Mary Barrowman, who was now thirty-four years old, signed an affidavit that she had never meant to identify Slater positively, but had been influenced by the prosecutor. It was largely on her testimony that Slater was convicted. She had received a much larger portion of the reward offered for the capture of the murderer than any of the others who shared it.

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Had Slater been tried in England or America, it is probable that he would not have been convicted, for a unanimous jury would have been required. He missed the hangman's rope by just two days. That respite enabled him at least to save his life, though it prolonged his detention to eighteen years. His somewhat unsavory past weighed heavily against him, although no minor factor in the case seems to have been the artificial construction of a case by the prosecution. To coach witnesses to make identifications is a serious delinquency; and it appears not to be unusual. The suppression of the testimony of Detective Trench and the mystery surrounding the person named to Miss Birrell by Lambie as the murderer might almost lead to the conclusion that the Government may have had some ground to believe that Slater was not guilty, although it seems difficult to credit the English or Scotch Government, whose administration of justice ranks high, with such knowledge or belief. Probably the War delayed the exhaustive examination which the Court of Criminal Appeal later made. At all events, Parliament somewhat atoned for an irreparable wrong by granting Slater £6,000 and he, like Beck, may derive what satisfaction he can out of the fact that his misfortunes led to the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal, with power to review a jury's findings of fact. Possibly another Beck or Slater tragedy will thereby be avoided.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. "Trial of Oscar Slater," Notable Scottish Trials, ed. William Roughead (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1910).

2. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Case of Oscar Slater (New York: Geo. H. Doran Co., 1912).

3. Doyle, Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1924), pp. 216-220.

4. "True Tales of 'Sherlock Holmes,'" Literary Digest, December 27, 1930, pp. 26, 28.