Classic Scottish Murder Stories (42 page)

On the night of Friday, April 16th, 1830, there was an explosive quarrel and clash of wills in the house. Blows were exchanged. Catherine had allowed in a woman who was supposed to have tried to poison her husband, and James, disapproving, had forcibly evicted her. Kate was annoyed. She sent her servant to bed before her, which was unheard of. The girl heard her imprecation – ‘Lord God, if anybody would give him poison, and keep my hand clear of it!' The servant slept. James slept in the kitchen with his mouth open, as always. Kate lay in the room opposite. The servant woke. Mistress was there ‘on her stocking soles' telling her to get up
because James was taken ill and making a noise. Mistress smiled as she imparted this information.

The servant went down and found James Humphrey writhing in agony and roaring out, ‘I'm burned – I'm gone – I'm roasted!' ‘You must have taken bad drink,' Kate kept suggesting. ‘Oh! Woman, woman, whatever I have gotten, it was in my own house.' There were burn marks on the bedclothes. Several people had come in to help. A child put its lips to a glass that was standing on the table, and cried out that it had been burnt. The servant noticed that there were three glasses where only two had been when Master retired for the night. The clues were strewn as thick as leaves: a phial of oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid), kept by the window, which, the day before, had contained three or four teaspoons of the stuff, kept in those days to use in solution as a ‘tonic' and so on, was now nearly empty.

A doctor was called, but he was tending a dying man. Kate remarked
sotto voce
to her servant, ‘Take care of my keys, come of the *** what like.' A neighbour bent over the sufferer and asked him what ailed him. ‘Bad work, bad work,' was the reply. ‘May God Almighty forgive them who have done this to me.' Over and over again he insisted that he had got no drink but from his own Kate, and never mentioned his spluttering, burning awakening. Kate at his bedside was seen to be wringing her hands and kissing him. The Reverend Mr Hart was in attendance, and he earnestly enquired if Humphrey had any suspicion of his wife. ‘No, no,' said James, steadfast to the end, and so he died, on Sunday morning.

Catherine Humphrey was brought up at the Autumn Circuit, and her dignity and decent appearance were remarked upon, but the jury voted to a man for Guilty. A few days after capital sentence had been passed upon her, she made a full confession, admitting that she had poured the oil of vitriol down her husband's throat as he slept. In such a way did the ghost of Hamlet's father complain, ‘Sleeping within my
orchard/ My custom always of the afternoon,/ Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,/ With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,/ And in the porches of my ears did pour/ The leperous distilment.'

Jealousy and malice, Kate Humphrey said, had led her to commit the cruel crime. An immense crowd came to witness the hanging of the woman in black. She did not raise her eyes to glimpse the human race that she was leaving. But she dropped her handkerchief as a signal to the executioner that she was ready and was heard to say quietly ‘Oh! My God!' She struggled a little on the rope, and twice raised her hands.

The grounds for Mrs Humphrey's expressed jealousy were not revealed, but vitriol is, of course, traditionally the remedy of choice for a woman scorned – topically, in the face, or internally, if she can find a way. Anne Inglis was another dangerous fury, and she, too, gave ample advance warning of her intent. These murders from sexual jealousy were premeditated but not kept secret, rather broadcast to the whole world. Patrick Pirie was the betrayer who died for his fault. Anne was his servant at Malheurust (an unhappy name) in the parish of Alva. He was a bachelor of 32 when he took her to bed, with sweet promises, but then he began to court another, and marriage was spoken of, whereupon Anne Inglis vowed revenge. There would be a burial before there was a bridal, was how she put it. The funeral bak'd meats would coldly furnish forth the marriage tables! In the spring of 1795, shortly before the proposed marriage, Patrick Pirie was laid low with vomiting and severe pains all over his body, but he was a strong man and within a fortnight was on his feet again. That was when he accepted a draught of ale from the hand of Anne Inglis. After nine days of agony – vomiting, pains, great heat in the stomach and swelling in the extremities – he died, blaming his servant, Anne. The body was opened and terrible inflammation of the stomach was observed: the inner coat was corroded and actually separated from the contiguous lining.
The physicians did look for arsenic, but there was no trace.

On the day after the autopsy, a search was made of a chest belonging to Anne Inglis and, lo and behold! blatantly within, when it could have been removed, was a paper parcel of blue vitriol. She bleated that it was for the toothache, although this was the first that anyone had heard of it. It was remembered that on the day before her master's death she had been seen with some teacups whose rims were smeared with a bluish powder. One of the cups contained something that looked like quicksilver. Could this mean that she had added mercury to the vitriol? Again, we have overt signals of what she had been at, and by now we might be thinking that Anne Inglis was a little simple, but the unexpected resolution of this tale is that the jury acquitted her.

The medical evidence had been that if blue vitriol had been administered, no trace of it would have been found in the stomach, due to the medicines prescribed, and the evacuations. It was thought that the jury might have been influenced by the doctors' further comment that, unless they had been told of the suspicion, they would not have concluded that this was a death by poison, since there were no external appearances to support the proposition.

Blue vitriol is copper sulphate, powerfully corrosive salts with a pronounced metallic taste. In 1886, a man named Reynolds tried to kill his wife with blue vitriol in spruce and peppermint water. (The green tops of spruce-tree were mixed with a solution of sugar or treacle.) In 1884, a servant-girl, Mary Baker, poisoned her mistress with copper sulphate in a jug of beer, but failed to kill, because the taste was soon noticed. One ounce is given as the fatal dose. Its main domestic use seems to have been as a greener of vegetables (a bad idea) but not as a cure for toothache. The vomited matters should have been blue in Patrick Pirie's case, but no doubt there was no expert standing by to analyse them.

J
ohn Adam stands out somewhat from our other sinners lapped in the flames of the everlasting bonfire. But for constitutional stirrings of lust, avarice and sloth, he could have taken the yellow brick road to fulfilment, instead of the primrose way to the high lonely gallows-tree beside the Moray Firth.

Although not of a confessing disposition, his eyes dazzled, and he covered them, when he saw what he had done. The old Adam was locked into his soul, and began to emerge when he was only 14 years of age. He was a thinker, and, in small measure, a leader, but the contemplation of man's place in the world and in society led him into dissatisfaction with his low station in life. His physical presence was strong, compelling, and he had power over women. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a womaniser, a fleet-footed seducer. Maidens and widows, all fell beneath his flails. Prevarications – plain lies and damned lies – tripped from his tongue, but when he was a stripling he was valued for the wondrous tales he told.

Born all fresh on New Year's Day in 1804, from crofters' stock, he was the son of an elder of the Kirk, whose righteousness proved to be an impossible model. The father died when John Adam was 14, and that was when the lurking faults in his character began to influence the pattern of his life. He was handsome and obliging, but popularity had done him no good. Now it was his turn to manage the old 20-acre farm of Craigieloch, Lintrathen, near Forfar, of which his
ancestors had been tenants for 300 years. His widowed mother turned to him to step into his father's shoes, but, in suggestive words, ‘he proved unequal to the duty', a disappointment, and was sent away to work on another farmstead. There he grew up, and returned to his rightful place after five years of exile, with his tendency to idleness and disregard for the truth well noted.

At the age of 20, he was admitted a member of the Kirk and sat in his father's pew, a regular and devout communicant. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his faith, but his private behaviour did not match up to his public face. His fields became neglected, weeds spouted, while he gadded about, sightseeing, or rather visiting the ladies in whom he had now developed a consuming interest. They had no resistance, and misunderstood his attentions. Within a bare two months of his formal reception into the Church of Scotland, there was a resounding scandal, when he was convicted before the Kirk Session of the seduction of two young women of the parish. In each case, the father was an elder, and great was the repulsion felt, because one girl, who was deaf and dumb, was his own cousin. His company was no longer sought, and he was forced to move away.

John Adam had strayed from the path and was henceforth a restless wanderer, discontented, pursued for vengeance. Agricultural labouring was all that he had to offer, and he found employment at Carrisbank Farm, near Brechin, no more than 20 miles distant, where he was attracted to a young woman named Jane Brechin [sic]. Unusually, she saw through him, and, perceiving that he did not intend marriage, turned him down. Stung by this unwonted rejection, he walked out, taking a similar job near Aberdeen. Jane Brechin had made a mortal mistake.

Aberdeen widened Adam's horizons, and he got in with a group of freethinkers who were drawn to Deism – that movement which evinced a strong aversion from Christianity,
and held the belief that the lights of nature and reason are sufficient guides. Adam himself purchased a copy of Tom Paine's
Age of Reason
from a chapman at a fair in Aberdeen, and it became, as it were, the textbook of his set. Enraptured by Paine's crude and homely logic, his fiery Republicanism, and criticisms of the Bible, Adam abandoned his strong grounding in the Kirk.

This group of his was, in some ways, wild and loose, but he stood apart, not abandoned to the fleshpots, preferring to seduce the respectable class of women. Soon Aberdeen could hold him no more. His philandering had become notorious, and he had to flee to Lanarkshire. At last, for the first time in his life, he felt true love for a girl, and proposed marriage. The date was set and he intended to be at the altar. I hope that this part of his history is correct, but I suspect that it is his own voice that can be heard, inventing retrospectively.

The story of John Adam is punctuated by luminous set pieces, tableaux of the imagination. His talent for oneiric narrative was quite remarkable. In anticipation of the wedding, he later said, for effect and sympathy, he had a precognitive dream: at the hour of midnight, his betrothed appeared at his bedside, blanched and beshrouded as for the grave. ‘John,' she prophesied, ‘we shall never be married, but, mark, you will die an awful death.' In terror he awoke, and in dread he lived through the hours of the day, until it was after noon, and he obtained permission to go to see his affianced. Long miles he walked to her father's house, and arrived with the darkness. As he approached, he heard the sound of psalm singing from within, and, through a chink in the shutters, he saw that the room was draped in white. Friends and neighbours were singing around the bed on which there lay the corpse of his intended bride. She had died suddenly that morning.

Recovered from the shock, and his brush with the supernatural, he dallied elsewhere in compensation, until, in
1831, he was compelled to escape to Glasgow, where he enlisted in the 2nd Dragoon Guards, quartered in the city. He looked very fetching in his uniform, and no woman was safe from his charms. By now he had sunk so low as to rob enamoured widows of their savings.

In the winter of 1833-4, he was with his regiment at Warkworth, in Northumberland, and encountered Dorothy Elliot, the 18-year-old daughter of a well-off innkeeper. From the evidence available, this, in fact, was the one for whom he felt a constant love, but since his time was running out, who can tell how long those tender feelings would have lasted. Back in Scotland in March, 1834, he deserted from his regiment and made his way down to Warkworth to persuade Dorothy to elope with him. Overcome with the romance of his approach, she agreed, on condition that there would be a marriage ceremony at the end of the first stage.

However, John Adam was too flighty a bird to be netted, and by ruse and excuse, lie and procrastination, he put her off and bore her home triumphantly to meet his relatives at Lintrathen, where she passed as his newly-wed, and all rejoiced. After an enjoyable visit, the happy pair left for Inverness by various ambages, in order to avoid the military authorities. Adam experienced some difficulty in cashing a purse of English banknotes, which were, alas! the proceeds of robbery, but he prevailed, and the couple went on to Dingwall, and lived as Mr and Mrs John Anderson. Adam delved in the local quarries, and there was domestic bliss until the autumn of 1834. Dorothy was pregnant, the English money was spent, the quarry work was too hard, and underpaid, and it was time for a variation in their circumstances.

Judged by his previous form, Adam would have summarily abandoned his responsibilities, but, surprisingly, he schemed to keep his family together, although the method that he came up with was as wicked as could be. Telling Dorothy that he had to visit an aged aunt from whom he had great expectations, he
set forth. Dorothy had not heard of such a benefactrix, but she had found her quasi-husband ever bad at communication, and she raised no objection. He was not, anyway, a man whom you would lightly cross. His mission was to seek out Jane Brechin, the woman who had spurned him. He had heard that she had done well for herself and was in a good way of business in Montrose.

Dressed in his best bib and tucker he materialized in Jane's thriving little shop and presented himself as a lost suitor from the misty past who had long pined for her romantically and regretted his former
bêtises.
Not married, older, she was flattered, and this time she gave in, especially when he asked her to marry him. She was to join him at his house near Inverness. The wedding was set for March 11th, 1835, after due proclamation in church, at her mother's house in Laurencekirk.