October 16, 2023 • 46 mins
One of the most incredible stories in true crime is the tale of Arthur Conan Doyle and how he helped free a man…who was innocent of murder. Author Margalit Fox offers us a deep dive into the characters in her book, Conan Doyle for the Defense.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Arthur Conan Doyle, world famous as the author of the
Sherlock Holmes stories, played real life detective himself and freed
a man wrongly convicted of murder. Why on earth wasn't
this story better known.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:52):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked Present Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. One of the most incredible stories in
true crime is the tale of Arthur Conan Doyle and
(01:15):
how he helped free a man who was innocent of murder.
Author Martlitte Fox offers us a deep dive into the
characters in her book, Conan Doyle for the defense. Tell
me where it makes the most sense to start with
this story, which we're going to unravel like a Sherlock
Holmes mystery. Who do we want to start with the
(01:37):
victim or the would be killer the victim?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And it really does start on the proverbial dark and
stormy night. This is Glasgow, Scotland, a few days before
Christmas nineteen oh eight, and it was indeed raining. It's
Glasgow after all, And on that night a wealthy eighty
two year old woman lived in Glasgow all her life,
(02:00):
very very rich. Her name was Marion Gilchrist. On that
night she was brutally murdered, beaten and bludgeoned to death
by a mysterious intruder. Now, Miss Gilchrist was a jewelry collector,
and she kept thousands and thousands of pounds of jewelry
(02:22):
secreted in odd places in her elegant Glasgow flat. And
this is thousands of pounds in nineteen o eight. It
was a lot of swag. Despite this fact, when the
police came and interviewed Miss Gilchrist's maid, the maid reported
that only a single item of jewelry was missing, a
(02:44):
diamond brooch in the shape of a crescent moon. That
was the primary clue the police had to go on
and it led to all of the terrible events that followed.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
So where was the maid when this happened? Was she
in the house or did she leave and come back?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
She was out for just ten minutes, from about seven
at night to ten after seven, buying the evening paper.
When she returned, she saw, to her surprise, she said,
a dark haired man exit Missus Gilchrist's flat and tear
down the stairs of the apartment building and out into
(03:26):
the street. The maid, Helen Lambead's, then entered the flat
to find her mistress severely beaten and expiring on the floor.
She died a few minutes later.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
So, if you are a member of the police force
and investigator in nineteen oh eight in Glasgow, where do
you go first?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What did they do?
Speaker 1 (03:46):
They started interviewing, obviously the housekeeper and her family. I presume, to.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
My knowledge, the maid's family was not interviewed. Missus Gilchrist,
the murder victim, had little family. She was, in the
diction of the Times, a spinster. She was not on
great terms with her nieces and nephews. She seemed, frankly
rather a nasty woman though, you know, very upright righteous,
(04:11):
you know, good church going Scottish lady of the Edwardian age,
and again fabulously rich. So the police really had only
two things to go on at first, the missing diamond
brooch and this mysterious dark haired man that fled the apartment.
A couple of days later, the police received a tip
(04:33):
that a local man, an immigrant German Jewish gambler named
Oscar Slater, had pawned a diamond crescent brooch. Ah, they
think this is a serious clue. So they take the
maid Helen to the pawn shop and she immediately says,
it's the wrong brooch. My mistress brooch had a single
(04:57):
row of diamonds, and this brooch in the pawn shop
up is set with three rows of diamonds. As Arthur
Conan Doyle later said, at that moment, the very bottom
of the case should have dropped out, for it meant
that if Slater were indeed guilty, it would have meant that,
by pure chance, out of all the men in Glasgow,
(05:19):
the police had pursued the right man, which of course
was not the case. So the police knew within a
week of the crime that Oscar Slater's broach was not
the one missing from the crime scene. They knew that
Oscar Slater was not their man, and yet they arrested him.
They framed up a case against him, they railroaded him.
(05:43):
He was tried, he was convicted. And the question, of
course is why, knowing full well that Oscar Slater was
not their man, did the police go after him anyway.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Well, let's go back a little bit for some historical contexts.
In nineteen a in this area of Scotland. Is this
high crime? Is there the expectation of an older woman
can be alone in her home and have it not
be broken into? Was this a surprising crime.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Well, it was shocking given the ethos of Edwardian bourgeoisie.
It was very much shocking in the context of its
time and place. Mss Gilchrist, of course, lived in a
very fashionable part of town, and fashional people were not
supposed to be crime victims. A woman of reading and
(06:34):
bearing like eighty two year old wealthy Marian Gilchrist was
not supposed to have anything like this toucher. It was
a time of rising immigration, including the immigration of many
Central and Eastern European Jews, and therefore in Britain as
a whole, and in Scotland as well, a corresponding uptick
(06:59):
in British anti Semitism. And it was the classic thing
we saw then we see it now where for various reasons.
As a society modernizes, as urbanization takes hold, as crime rises,
the upper classes get very anxious. They get very self
(07:20):
protective of life and limb and property, and they need
to locate their anxiety in some bogeyman that the historian
Peter Gay brilliantly calls the convenient other. Today we call
it profiling. And of course that kind of behavior was
(07:41):
alive and well in nineteen oh eight when Mss Gilchrist
was murdered an Oscar Slater, foreigner immigrant and by the
standards of the day lowlife. He earned his living as
a gambler. He frequented pool halls, he earned money at
the racetrack and car playing, and even before the murder
(08:03):
the Glasgow police had Oscar Slater in their sights to
try to have him arrested as a pimp. It's not
clear that he ever was a pimp, but the charge
they sought to press. This is the one moment of
levity in an otherwise dark story was called immoral housekeeping.
Now I've been guilty of immral housekeeping myself in a
(08:25):
somewhat different way. So it becomes very clear why did
the police railroad Oscar Slater, knowing he was not guilty
of the murder, was that he was someone they wanted
to run out of Glasgow. Anyway, along comes this terrible
murder with enough circumstantial evidence that they have plausible deniability
(08:49):
to make a case against this immigrant jew and it's
pretty clear their thinking was, we want to get rid
of Slater. He might as well be hanged for a
sheep as a lamb, and of course he very nearly
was hanged.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Let's go back and talk about Oscar Slater as a character.
Tell me a little bit just about what his life
was like, and what his life was like in Scotland.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Oscar Slater was born to a working class, I would say,
actually working poor Jewish family in Silesia. He was the
favorite child of the family. His father was a baker
who I believe was out of work a lot due
to certain physical infirmities. The family lived in just this dusty,
(09:34):
little one horse coal mining town in Silesia. Oscar was
happy go lucky, carefree, footloose. As a young man, there
was nothing in this town for him, so he roamed
all over Europe. He lived in Hamburg, he lived in London,
and he lived a couple of times prior to nineteen
(09:55):
oh eight in Glasgow, so he was already to some
extent in the sights of the Glasgow police. He billed
himself as a dentist and a dealer in precious stones,
but he supported his rather downified life. He was a
beau brummel who dressed in incredible threads and lived very
(10:17):
much above what Edwardian bourgeoisie would consider to be his
station in life, and he supported this lifestyle through racetrack, betting,
card playing and billiards. He lived with his French mistress
and so Osgar Slater was tarred by association with his mistress,
(10:38):
and though he was never demonstrated to be a pimp,
the Glasgow police assumed that he was and were trying
to build a case against him as a pimp by
the time he resettled in Glasgow for his third stay
there in the autumn of nineteen oh eight, about two
months before the murder of Marian Gilchrist, a woman who
(11:03):
by the way, he had never met and of whom
he had never heard until he was suddenly arrested for
her murder.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Did he have an alibi?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
He did, indeed, which the police suppressed. The case against
him as it unspooled over time was just a quagmire
of the subornation of perjury, the suppression of exculpatory evidence.
Witnesses who could have alibied him were never called. Other
(11:33):
witnesses were told what to say on the stand to
incriminate him, and the entire case, from start to finish,
was a textbook example of how police and prosecutors ken
railroad an innocent man, so he.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Is convicted and he is sentenced to the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right, that's right. Another thing that police seesed upon to
paint Oscar Slater as guilty. Marian Gilchrist was murdered on
December twenty first, nineteen o eight. A few days later,
around Christmas time, Slater and his mistress sail out of
(12:15):
Glasgow on a long land trip to New York. There
was an economic depression going on in Scotland at the time.
Even for a gambler like Slater, times were hard and
he wanted to make a new start in America. He
planned this trip for a long time. Needless to say,
the police chose to see it as evidence of guilty flight.
(12:38):
And so what do they do. They take the maid
and two other witnesses who saw this mysterious man leaving
Miss Gilchrist's flat. They put them on another ship. They
take them to New York, and they coached them as
to what to say to try to extradite Slater from
America and bring him back to Scotland for trial. They
(12:59):
even showed some of the witnesses his picture. They even
point Slater out as he's being walked down the hall
to his extradition hearing by US Marshals. And so right
from the very beginning, even months before his actual trial,
the case against him is already being fabricated. Slater eventually
(13:20):
naively decide to waive extradition, and, knowing full well he
is innocent, he goes back to Scotland and chooses to
stand trial of his own volition. And that is where
the terrible consequences start to unfold. Indeed, in May of
nineteen oh nine, after a four day trial at which
(13:43):
much perjury is borned, coached witnesses are parroting the lines
that police and the Crown prosecutors have given them. Alibi
witnesses are never called. It's just an orgy of the
manufacture of crimination. The jury deliberates for an hour and
(14:04):
ten minutes before finding Slater guilty. The judge dons the
traditional black cap and sentences in to hang.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
What is the time period in nineteen oh eight or
nineteen oh nine when he's convicted. How long are they
typically on death row before the execution happens. It's surely
not as long as it is now.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
It's much shorter, twenty one days. And this is the
really chilling thing. He's been sentenced to death now here.
Of course, your lawyers would appeal. Guess what there was
no criminal appeals court in Scotland then death sentence meant,
with rare exceptions, you would die. The only possible way
(14:51):
to get around it was to have your sentence commuted
by the British Marnock. In that case, Edward the seventh,
I literally have to get the king to get you
out of jail. And what chance did a penniless German
Jewish immigrant gambler have for the king to take notice?
(15:12):
So Oscar Slater is remanded to prison to wait out
the three weeks he has to remain alive. He can
literally hear his jailers hammering the gallows together outside his cell.
He has literally made arrangements for his own burial. When,
forty eight hours before he is to ascend the scaffold,
(15:36):
his sentences commuted to life at hard Labor. What had
happened was this, there was enough public unease about the verdict.
I think enough aggressive thinking people realized how flimsy the
case was against him. They realized the role that xenophobia
(15:57):
and anti Semitism were playing. That a public petition was
got up to commute his sentence that twenty thousand residents signed,
and Slater's lawyers sent that petition to the crown, and
indeed King Edward the Seventh commuted his sentence to life
at hard Labor. So Slater, within two days of being hanged,
(16:20):
is instead dispatched northward to his Majesty's prison. This remote
place that was eventually called Scotland's Gulog, this remote granite
fortress on a wind swept outcropping in northeast Scotland.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
How does Arthur Conan Doyle become involved? I know, that
literary figures in the eighteen hundreds in the early nineteen
hundreds often followed these really high profile cases and used
them in their books. Is that what happened has captured
his attention for some reason.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
We believe that in late nineteen eleven early nineteen twelve,
Slater's lawyers beseech Conan Doyle to look into the case.
Conan Doyle, who is at this point world famous, is
the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. And remember he
trained as a physician, and he was very articulate about
(17:17):
saying he created the character of Holmes and the home
stories to try to bring this tradition of scientific rationalism
that was infusing the Victorian age to the formerly rather
scattershot genre of the detective story. He gave a wonderful
(17:38):
newsreel interview in nineteen twenty seven that I believe one
can still find on YouTube. Mostly he's talking about spiritualism,
which was his other great passion, But at some point,
of course, the interviewer presses him to talk about Holmes,
and he says, it always annoyed me how in the
old fashioned detective stories the detective seemed to come upon
(17:59):
his solution by chance or else. The reader was never
told how he got there. I wanted to create a
detective who employed the methods of science step by step,
so readers could follow his thought process and see how
he arrived through the use of logical reasoning at the solution. Now,
(18:21):
the public knew that Conan Doyle had become famous for this,
so they often beseeched him to look into real life cases, deaths,
disappearances and so on, and he did so. He was
a great humanist. He took up a number of social
causes in his life, and among them were the solution
(18:42):
of real life crimes, and he did indeed solve a
number of them using these rationalist methods that he had
endowed homes with.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
So Arthur Conan Doyle is reading about this case, which
is well covered. I'm sure most people know he's from Scotland.
What were the specific things do you think caught his
interest with this case? Everything you've talked about I'm assuming
zinophobia everything.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Right, and specifically the lack of logical reasoning that really
got Conan Doyle's goat right away. As he said, each
clue against Slater crumbles to pieces when it is examined.
The failure of the police once they had Slater in
(19:43):
their sights to consider any other alternative, and Conan Doyle
was incensed again. Knowing both as a physician who had
to make diagnoses and as a crime writer who had
to have his hero follow clues, he knew full well
the danger of fixating on one solution at the outset
(20:05):
to the exclusion of all other possibilities. And when you're
talking about a man's life, you know that takes on
a whole new level of urgency. The more deeply Conan
Doyle read the trial transcripts, studied newspaper coverage of the case,
the more he became convinced that although Conan Doyle as
(20:28):
the Victorian man from Central casting upright moral, he came
from poverty, but of course, at this point was one
of the best compensated writers in the world. He deplored
Slater's ungentlemanly life. He called him a disreputable rolling stone
of a man. But Conan Doyle was so moral and
(20:52):
so eminently rationalist that he realized the railroading of Slater
and the necessity to write this terrible injustice that had
been done to him, took precedence over any level of
personal antipathy against the man that he might have.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Where does he start. Does he start with the crime
scene or with the victim or the physical evidence?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Crime scene's long gone, the victims long buried, and so
you know, he was a man of letters, so he
started by reviewing the trial transcripts, reviewing press coverage. I
suspect that he, as Holmes did, had, you know, albums
and albums of newspaper clippings about crimes. We do know
Conan Doyle had a vast, extensive personal library of books
(21:43):
about true crime, some of which he bought from the
estate of W. S. Gilbert, The Gilbert of Gilbert and
Sullivan kind of a fun little historical footnote. So he
was very, very widely read in all aspects of true
crime and what we today would call for a rend.
This is the most remarkable thing about the case. Today,
(22:05):
wrongful convictions are overturned, not often enough, but they can
be overturned by virtue of modern forensics, particularly DNA testing.
None of that existed in nineteen oh eight when the
murder happened. In nineteen twelve, when Conan Doyle published his
monographs on the murder, the case of Oscar Slater. None
(22:28):
of that existed in nineteen twenty seven when Slater was
finally released from prison, or in nineteen twenty eight when
his conviction was formally quashed. All through the agency of
Conan Doyle, done the old fashioned way, through shoe leather
reading and intense rationalist thought, as well as because Conan
(22:54):
Doyle was by this time one of the most famous
and in a sense powerful men in Britain, he did
a lot of back room brokering and lobbying with some
of the most powerful figures in British politics to try
to get this case on the agenda and to try
to bring public attention to it. He wrote a lot
(23:16):
of letters to newspapers as well, because in those years
that was the primary forum for public discussion of social affairs.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
What do you think his strongest counter evidence was in
this case where he said listen to this, and finally
people listened because it sounded irrefutable coming from him.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Well, there were many things, starting with the ludicrous identification
or non identification of the pawn broach. It was very
clear the maid was taken to the pawn shop by
the police. She said right away, Oh no, that's not
my mistress's broach. It looks totally different, but pretty soon
(24:02):
because the police knew that the brooch clue was worthless,
that clue was kind of swept under the rug. Conan
Doyle brought it out again and said, the police knew
within days that Oscar Slater was not their man. That
should have been the end of it. Why wasn't it?
And there were many other instances like that where Conan Doyle,
(24:26):
just reading closely, could see where witnesses had seemingly spontaneously
changed their story. People who couldn't identify Slater as the
man seen leaving Marion Gilchris's apartment suddenly identified him. And
so all of these consistencies. Conan Doyle, as both a
(24:49):
man of science and a craftsman of detective stories, was
singularly well positioned to ferret out and bring to.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Life so bad witnesses and of course that very bad
misidentification the housekeeper's timeline right that ten minutes she stepped
out and stepped back in. Is Conan Doyle making the
assumption that this is someone who was clearly lying in wait,
or was he thinking maybe this was an inside job
involving the housekeeper?
Speaker 2 (25:21):
What we do know. Conan Doyle was an Edwardian man
of rectitude and bearing. He wasn't good to tar anyone.
But it's very clear, and it's there between the lines
of his monograph on the case, that the housekeeper knew
more than she could ever be persuaded to tell. Many
(25:43):
many years later, right before Slater was released, she publicly
recanted her identification of Slater as the man she'd seen
leaving the flat. She was by this time living in America.
The newspapers tracked her down there and with great fanfare,
published this recantation. Now she later recanted the recantation. Her
(26:05):
story is kind of all over the map over time.
She clearly knew more than she was saying. There is
also evidence that she actually identified the man she saw
leaving the flat. She knew who it was. It was
not Slater, and it may have been a relative of
the dead woman. One of the most striking aspects of
(26:29):
the crime scene, and this was something that Conan Doyle
in his writing on the case, threw into sharp relief,
was not only was there only the one piece of
jewelry stolen, allegedly, with this vast horde of jewelry secreted
all around the apartment, but in one of the bedrooms
of the flat a box had been broken into and
(26:53):
it contained not jewelry but papers, And the floor of
the room was littered with papers, as if the mysterious
intruder had been flinging them about looking for something. So
one of the things Conan Doyle homed in on in
his work, he said, what kind of document, save a will,
(27:15):
could excite that kind of frenzy in an intruder? And
so there is very strong implications that there may have
been a fight among family members over this rich old
lady's estate while she was still alive.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Well where did all the money go once she was murdered?
Who inherited all of this?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
She changed her will just a few weeks before she
was murdered, and strikingly, she was very paranoid. She had
three locks on her door, she hit her jewelry all over.
She apparently told someone about the week before she died
that she felt certain she was going to be murdered.
(27:56):
This fact was not known for years now. That could
be us a parenoid old lady whose mind is slipping,
or it could be someone who quite reasonably has reason
to fear. Various relatives before she died, she changed her
will to leave the vast bulk of her estate to
(28:17):
one of the very few people she got along with
it was a former maid of hers, now a grown
woman with a grown daughter, and this maid and her
daughter were going to pretty much get all the money. Well.
Marian Gilchrist had lots of nieces and nephews, and it
is certainly within the realm of possibility that one or
(28:38):
more of them, being aware that she had changed her
will or was about to change it, might not have
taken that news in the most kindly fashion.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Is the idea that perhaps this relative, if there is
a relative who did this, paid her current housekeeper to
leave the door locks unlocked, and when the housekeeper slipped out,
the person came in, took the broach, and then left,
So it was an inside job.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
That is one scenario. It is certainly within the realm
of possibility. Skipping ahead, even now, over one hundred years on,
there has been no suspect identified definitively. Who killed Marion
Gilchrist on that December night in nineteen oh eight will
forever remain a mystery. At the end of my book,
(29:26):
I do have a section that talks about some of
the more likely theories more likely candidate, and certainly one
likely scenario is that it was an inside job within
her extended family. We do know this is a frightened,
oled woman with three locks on the door. She had
(29:46):
the technology, as we do in apartment buildings today, to
buzz someone in who was on the street who wanted
to visit. Her flat was on the second floor. She
could buzz them in from her apartment, and while they
were ascending that flight of stairs, she had plenty of
time to open her flat door peek around, and if
(30:07):
it was someone she didn't know, someone scary, she had
time to shut the door, bolt her three locks and
be safe. The fact that someone just came in strongly
suggests that missus Gilchris admitted him and it was therefore
someone she knew and felt at least reasonably comfortable with.
(30:28):
The brooch actually was one of the few, very few
pieces of jewelry that was visible. Miss Gilchrist did kind
of nutty things like secreting jewels in pockets of dresses
that were hanging up in the wardrobe. She pinned brooches
behind the drapery, so most of the tons of jewelry
(30:50):
that was in the flat was not visible to the
naked eye when you walked in. The brooch was sitting
with a few other pieces in a little dish for
odds and ends on a dress table in one of
the bedrooms. So Conan Doyle conjectured that the mystery man
the assailant, He was let in by this frightened old lady.
(31:12):
They may have had some discussion at some point. She's
bludgeoned deaths. He goes into the bedroom, wrenches open this
wooden box, looking for papers, perhaps a will. Then he
hears the nate coming back. She's only gone for ten minutes. Remember,
he doesn't know who it is. Maybe it's a neighbor,
maybe it's the police. You know, the killing has made
(31:34):
a lot of noise. Missus Gilchrist, by pre arranged signal
has wrapped on the floor three times as she was
dying to alert the neighbors downstairs that she needed help.
Conan Doyle conjectures that because this diamond broach was visible,
the assailant simply slipped it into his pocket at the
(31:54):
last minute as a kind of blind to make everything
that transpired look like robbery by some random stranger, when
in fact it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
At all, what is the reaction of the local police
who have been investigating this, have nailed down Slater, have
put him on death row, and now you have this
literary icon, Arthur Conan Doyle coming in and messing everything up.
Were they furious or did they sort of sit down
and shut up? Because of the political power he wielded
(32:24):
in nineteen oh eight nineteen oh nine.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
They wielded a lot of power themselves, and they, with
the Crown prosecutors in Scotland, formed a blue wall of silence,
impassivity and intractability. They stonewalled any attempts to undo what
they had done. And from the very beginning it's clear,
(32:47):
you know, this was a boushois woman, a rich woman,
a respectable woman. This was an age that was all
about social standing and social respectability, the kind of person
who shouldn't be murdered. Therefore, the case was a sensation
in the newspapers. You know, the newspapers were screaming in
a rich old lady murdered in nice part of town,
(33:10):
how can this be? The police, therefore, were under enormous
pressure to solve the case. So along comes this circumstantial
clue that happens to link them through this crescent broach
to Oscar Slater, a disreputable man, no murderer, but a
gambler whom they want to run out of town anyway,
(33:32):
So they seize on this wrap him up in the
Gilchrist murder as a handy fellow to convict. They are
literally killing two birds with one stone, getting rid of
Slater and getting, as they say on law and Order,
getting a collar in a high profile case. They're under
great pressure to close, so, needless to say, they are
(33:55):
not going to do anything to undermine or reverse that
scenario and expose all of the corruption, the lying, the
subornation of perjury, the witness tampering that has gone on.
So in nineteen twelve, as the result of his investigation,
Conan Doyle publishes a monograph, The Case of Oscar Slater.
(34:18):
He deliberately keeps the price low it's sixpence because he
wants the book to be widely bought, and the book lands,
nothing happens. I think it was simply too soon. It
was only four years after the murder, This brutal, sensational
case was still fresh in public memory, and there was
still this lather whipped up by the police and the
(34:40):
prosecutors and the press of anti immigrant, anti Jewish sentiment
against Oscar Slater. So Conan Doyle had a very hard
time just four years later in persuading the public that
the police had attached and convicted the wrong man. Fast
forward to nineteen twenty five. At the has been in
(35:01):
Peterhead Prison since nineteen oh nine, raking up massive blocks
of granite, you know, under the blistering sun or in
the freezing cold in the prison. Huare literally you know,
fed on bread and water and gruel. One of his friends,
a fellow convict named William Gordon, is being paroled. Now
Gordon as a striking thing about him. He wears dentures,
(35:24):
and so under his dentures the day he gets paroled,
furled into a tiny pellet, is a note from Oscar
Slater saying please go see Conan Doyle. And of course
the prison officials do a body search of William Gordon
when he's about to be released, but no one thinks
to examine his gums. So he actually does spirit this
(35:44):
note out of prison. He goes to see Conan Doyle
and persuades him. You know, thirteen years after his monograph
has come out to take up the case one last time.
And it's only then when public sentiment against Slater has
more or less abated. A lot of the most nefarious
(36:05):
principles in the case against him, police officers, member of
the Crown Prosecution Office, a lot of them have died.
It's only then that it becomes possible for Conan Doyle
to take up arms once more. And this time the
time is right. That was the beginning of the end
of Slater's incarceration. He's released at the end of nineteen
(36:27):
twenty seven. His conviction is formally washed the next year.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
What is life like for Oscar Slater after his release.
He's been there for so long. His wife, I'm presuming
is gone. This is just a brand new life for
someone who obviously is going to be heavily institutionalized.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
That's right. And he's not released till twenty seven, and
with a war in between. Remember his families in Germany.
So one of the most gut wrenching things is for
the whole of the war from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen,
Slater can exchange no correspondence with his family. You know,
(37:08):
his parents are already elderly, and after the war he
gets a letter from one of his sisters back in
Germany saying, you know, dearest Oscar, I must now tell
you about the deaths of our dear parents. All of
his correspondence has been preserved, which was a boon for me,
and the letters are, especially that one, are just gut
(37:29):
wrenching to read. So he's in prison from nineteen oh
nine to the end of nineteen twenty seven. When he
goes into prison, he's in his late thirties. When it
comes out, he's only in his mid fifties, and photographs
from his discharge he looks like a man of almost ninety.
I mean, the years have not been kind to him,
(37:52):
nor would they be to anyone who was breaking up
blocks of granite in the quarry every day for eighteen
and a half years. He adjusted to life on the
outside really remarkably well. He lived in a small town.
He lived in air Seaside Town, not too far from Glasgow.
He started an antiques business. He was always a tinkerer,
(38:15):
so he would buy and refurbish things. He had a
modest income in the form of reparations from the state
for his wrongful incarceration. He was apparently convivial well liked
by his neighbors. Here's the thing. When he got out,
he was a man without a country. The Scottish authorities
badly wanted to send him back to Germany on his release.
(38:39):
The case was so notorious they didn't want any reminders
of it hanging around, particularly not the flesh and blood
big reminder in the form of Oscar Slater himself. They discovered,
to their dismay that a German who had been out
of Germany for ten years or more lost his citizenship.
And of course Oscar Slater had been locked him in
(38:59):
Scotland for eighteen and a half years, so he couldn't
go back to Germany. He was in a sense stateless,
so he stayed in Scotland, in this country where these
terrible things had happened. As you say, his French music
hall mistress slash sex worker left the scene very very early.
Slater remarried a much younger Scottish woman, apparently very very
(39:23):
happy marriage, liked by his neighbors. He died in his
bed in Air, Scotland in nineteen forty eight in a
blood chilling way. This terrible case that almost cost him
his life and left him as a man without a
country may well have saved his life, because he, as
a Jew, was not able to be back in Germany
(39:45):
in the nineteen forties. And one of the most devastating
things of the book is we've gotten to know his
parents and his sisters through their loving letters to Slater
in prison and his to them. His parents, by this
time had died of natural causes, his sisters never made
it out of the Holocaust. So, in the bitterest of
(40:08):
bitter ironies, this terrible, wrongful conviction ultimately may have saved
his life.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Did he reconnect with Arthur Conan Doyle after this? Did
they have many conversations about this? Or when the case
was done that was it?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They actually met in person only once. Conan Doyle, again
for various reasons, held Slater somewhat at arm's length. He
approached the case purely as an intellectual and ethical problem.
He did not correspond with Slater directly. Again, he in
good and bad ways. Conan Doyle was a Victorian man.
(40:44):
He had tremendous morality, tremendous probity, but he was not
free of Victorian class prejudices, and it was clear that
he found Slater's kind of denimond life distasteful, so he
handled the case by himself and through intermediaries. He and
Slater actually only met once at the nineteen twenty eight
(41:08):
hearing to formally overturn Slater's conviction. Conan Doyle was there
covering the case for a British newspaper. They greeted each
other very warmly. One of the things that was really
a kick in the chest to me when I was
researching the case was I spent a week at the
National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. The case was in Glasgow,
(41:32):
but there was a change of venue and the trial
was moved to Edinburgh, the capital, so there are records
on the case in both cities. At the National Records
of Scotland in Edinburgh, I spent a week going through
all of these files on the case that are in
date order over about twenty years. And the very last
folder in the last filebox had a heading that took
(41:55):
my breath away in not an a good way. The
heading was Conan Doyle the Slater, and I thought, my god,
Conan Doyle actually had to threaten to take Slater to
court to recoup some of the costs that he had
outlaid in the course of exonerating him. And I was
(42:16):
so rattled when I saw that. I said to myself,
I'm going to go back to my hotel. I'm going
to go to sleep, and in the morning when I
come back to the archive, this file won't be here.
And of course it was, and I had to deal
with it. What happened was this, partly with Conan Doyle's help,
(42:36):
Oscar Slater had gotten six thousand pounds compensation for wrongful
imprisonment from the British government. That was a lot of
money in nineteen twenty eight. Now Conan Doyle had outlaid
a certain amount of money in getting things printed and published,
in paying people who did some of the legwork, and
(43:00):
although he could well afford to pay again he was
such a principled man, he was shocked and embittered and
scandalized when Oscar Slater declined to reimburse him for that outlay.
And of course, from Slater's point of view, Conan Doyle
was rich, he didn't need the money, whereas he Slater
(43:21):
was from a poor background. He'd spent almost twenty years
in jail. This was the money he was going to
live on. So they were both right and what was
so painful but so telling about this last coda to
the story was that even after all of this time,
all of Conan Doyle's involvement in the case, neither one
(43:42):
of them was really equipped to understand the other, and
there was still this kind of unbridgable class difference between
the two. In the end, the case was settled more
or less amicably without it actually having to come to trial,
but there was this really bitter rupture between the two
men at the end, very very painful, but again very
(44:06):
much a product of its time.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And luckily you have a hero in Arthur Conan Doyle
who has acquired all of these real life skills of
a detective. And I know that he was, you know,
by the end of Sherlock Holmes, by the end, he
was sort of sick and tired of it, and this
was such a fantastic application of his skills.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
The Oscar Slater case was truly Conan Doyle's last stand
as an investigator of real life crime, and it was
a terrible, dark and painful case, but it was ultimately
a triumph for both Conan Doyle and Slater in that
he not only got Slater released, he got him officially exonerated,
(44:49):
he got the formal conviction quashed, even got him some compensation,
and so all of this wound down over sort of
nineteen twenty eight, nineteen two twenty nine, and then Conan
Doyle died in nineteen thirty, so it was truly the
last hurrah of this upright, complicated, ultimately extremely moral, extremely
(45:14):
rationalist victorian man. And I say, you know, it was
perhaps only with Conan Doyle's death in nineteen thirty what
historians call the Long nineteenth century was well and truly over.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi, Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga Executive
(45:59):
produce used by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked. Email us at
info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll also take your
(46:20):
suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Arthur Conan Doyle, world famous as the author of the
Sherlock Holmes stories, played real life detective himself and freed
a man wrongly convicted of murder. Why on earth wasn't
this story better known.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:52):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked Present Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. One of the most incredible stories in
true crime is the tale of Arthur Conan Doyle and
(01:15):
how he helped free a man who was innocent of murder.
Author Martlitte Fox offers us a deep dive into the
characters in her book, Conan Doyle for the defense. Tell
me where it makes the most sense to start with
this story, which we're going to unravel like a Sherlock
Holmes mystery. Who do we want to start with the
(01:37):
victim or the would be killer the victim?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And it really does start on the proverbial dark and
stormy night. This is Glasgow, Scotland, a few days before
Christmas nineteen oh eight, and it was indeed raining. It's
Glasgow after all, And on that night a wealthy eighty
two year old woman lived in Glasgow all her life,
(02:00):
very very rich. Her name was Marion Gilchrist. On that
night she was brutally murdered, beaten and bludgeoned to death
by a mysterious intruder. Now, Miss Gilchrist was a jewelry collector,
and she kept thousands and thousands of pounds of jewelry
(02:22):
secreted in odd places in her elegant Glasgow flat. And
this is thousands of pounds in nineteen o eight. It
was a lot of swag. Despite this fact, when the
police came and interviewed Miss Gilchrist's maid, the maid reported
that only a single item of jewelry was missing, a
(02:44):
diamond brooch in the shape of a crescent moon. That
was the primary clue the police had to go on
and it led to all of the terrible events that followed.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
So where was the maid when this happened? Was she
in the house or did she leave and come back?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
She was out for just ten minutes, from about seven
at night to ten after seven, buying the evening paper.
When she returned, she saw, to her surprise, she said,
a dark haired man exit Missus Gilchrist's flat and tear
down the stairs of the apartment building and out into
(03:26):
the street. The maid, Helen Lambead's, then entered the flat
to find her mistress severely beaten and expiring on the floor.
She died a few minutes later.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
So, if you are a member of the police force
and investigator in nineteen oh eight in Glasgow, where do
you go first?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What did they do?
Speaker 1 (03:46):
They started interviewing, obviously the housekeeper and her family. I presume, to.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
My knowledge, the maid's family was not interviewed. Missus Gilchrist,
the murder victim, had little family. She was, in the
diction of the Times, a spinster. She was not on
great terms with her nieces and nephews. She seemed, frankly
rather a nasty woman though, you know, very upright righteous,
(04:11):
you know, good church going Scottish lady of the Edwardian age,
and again fabulously rich. So the police really had only
two things to go on at first, the missing diamond
brooch and this mysterious dark haired man that fled the apartment.
A couple of days later, the police received a tip
(04:33):
that a local man, an immigrant German Jewish gambler named
Oscar Slater, had pawned a diamond crescent brooch. Ah, they
think this is a serious clue. So they take the
maid Helen to the pawn shop and she immediately says,
it's the wrong brooch. My mistress brooch had a single
(04:57):
row of diamonds, and this brooch in the pawn shop
up is set with three rows of diamonds. As Arthur
Conan Doyle later said, at that moment, the very bottom
of the case should have dropped out, for it meant
that if Slater were indeed guilty, it would have meant that,
by pure chance, out of all the men in Glasgow,
(05:19):
the police had pursued the right man, which of course
was not the case. So the police knew within a
week of the crime that Oscar Slater's broach was not
the one missing from the crime scene. They knew that
Oscar Slater was not their man, and yet they arrested him.
They framed up a case against him, they railroaded him.
(05:43):
He was tried, he was convicted. And the question, of
course is why, knowing full well that Oscar Slater was
not their man, did the police go after him anyway.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Well, let's go back a little bit for some historical contexts.
In nineteen a in this area of Scotland. Is this
high crime? Is there the expectation of an older woman
can be alone in her home and have it not
be broken into? Was this a surprising crime.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Well, it was shocking given the ethos of Edwardian bourgeoisie.
It was very much shocking in the context of its
time and place. Mss Gilchrist, of course, lived in a
very fashionable part of town, and fashional people were not
supposed to be crime victims. A woman of reading and
(06:34):
bearing like eighty two year old wealthy Marian Gilchrist was
not supposed to have anything like this toucher. It was
a time of rising immigration, including the immigration of many
Central and Eastern European Jews, and therefore in Britain as
a whole, and in Scotland as well, a corresponding uptick
(06:59):
in British anti Semitism. And it was the classic thing
we saw then we see it now where for various reasons.
As a society modernizes, as urbanization takes hold, as crime rises,
the upper classes get very anxious. They get very self
(07:20):
protective of life and limb and property, and they need
to locate their anxiety in some bogeyman that the historian
Peter Gay brilliantly calls the convenient other. Today we call
it profiling. And of course that kind of behavior was
(07:41):
alive and well in nineteen oh eight when Mss Gilchrist
was murdered an Oscar Slater, foreigner immigrant and by the
standards of the day lowlife. He earned his living as
a gambler. He frequented pool halls, he earned money at
the racetrack and car playing, and even before the murder
(08:03):
the Glasgow police had Oscar Slater in their sights to
try to have him arrested as a pimp. It's not
clear that he ever was a pimp, but the charge
they sought to press. This is the one moment of
levity in an otherwise dark story was called immoral housekeeping.
Now I've been guilty of immral housekeeping myself in a
(08:25):
somewhat different way. So it becomes very clear why did
the police railroad Oscar Slater, knowing he was not guilty
of the murder, was that he was someone they wanted
to run out of Glasgow. Anyway, along comes this terrible
murder with enough circumstantial evidence that they have plausible deniability
(08:49):
to make a case against this immigrant jew and it's
pretty clear their thinking was, we want to get rid
of Slater. He might as well be hanged for a
sheep as a lamb, and of course he very nearly
was hanged.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Let's go back and talk about Oscar Slater as a character.
Tell me a little bit just about what his life
was like, and what his life was like in Scotland.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Oscar Slater was born to a working class, I would say,
actually working poor Jewish family in Silesia. He was the
favorite child of the family. His father was a baker
who I believe was out of work a lot due
to certain physical infirmities. The family lived in just this dusty,
(09:34):
little one horse coal mining town in Silesia. Oscar was
happy go lucky, carefree, footloose. As a young man, there
was nothing in this town for him, so he roamed
all over Europe. He lived in Hamburg, he lived in London,
and he lived a couple of times prior to nineteen
(09:55):
oh eight in Glasgow, so he was already to some
extent in the sights of the Glasgow police. He billed
himself as a dentist and a dealer in precious stones,
but he supported his rather downified life. He was a
beau brummel who dressed in incredible threads and lived very
(10:17):
much above what Edwardian bourgeoisie would consider to be his
station in life, and he supported this lifestyle through racetrack, betting,
card playing and billiards. He lived with his French mistress
and so Osgar Slater was tarred by association with his mistress,
(10:38):
and though he was never demonstrated to be a pimp,
the Glasgow police assumed that he was and were trying
to build a case against him as a pimp by
the time he resettled in Glasgow for his third stay
there in the autumn of nineteen oh eight, about two
months before the murder of Marian Gilchrist, a woman who
(11:03):
by the way, he had never met and of whom
he had never heard until he was suddenly arrested for
her murder.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Did he have an alibi?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
He did, indeed, which the police suppressed. The case against
him as it unspooled over time was just a quagmire
of the subornation of perjury, the suppression of exculpatory evidence.
Witnesses who could have alibied him were never called. Other
(11:33):
witnesses were told what to say on the stand to
incriminate him, and the entire case, from start to finish,
was a textbook example of how police and prosecutors ken
railroad an innocent man, so he.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Is convicted and he is sentenced to the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right, that's right. Another thing that police seesed upon to
paint Oscar Slater as guilty. Marian Gilchrist was murdered on
December twenty first, nineteen o eight. A few days later,
around Christmas time, Slater and his mistress sail out of
(12:15):
Glasgow on a long land trip to New York. There
was an economic depression going on in Scotland at the time.
Even for a gambler like Slater, times were hard and
he wanted to make a new start in America. He
planned this trip for a long time. Needless to say,
the police chose to see it as evidence of guilty flight.
(12:38):
And so what do they do. They take the maid
and two other witnesses who saw this mysterious man leaving
Miss Gilchrist's flat. They put them on another ship. They
take them to New York, and they coached them as
to what to say to try to extradite Slater from
America and bring him back to Scotland for trial. They
(12:59):
even showed some of the witnesses his picture. They even
point Slater out as he's being walked down the hall
to his extradition hearing by US Marshals. And so right
from the very beginning, even months before his actual trial,
the case against him is already being fabricated. Slater eventually
(13:20):
naively decide to waive extradition, and, knowing full well he
is innocent, he goes back to Scotland and chooses to
stand trial of his own volition. And that is where
the terrible consequences start to unfold. Indeed, in May of
nineteen oh nine, after a four day trial at which
(13:43):
much perjury is borned, coached witnesses are parroting the lines
that police and the Crown prosecutors have given them. Alibi
witnesses are never called. It's just an orgy of the
manufacture of crimination. The jury deliberates for an hour and
(14:04):
ten minutes before finding Slater guilty. The judge dons the
traditional black cap and sentences in to hang.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
What is the time period in nineteen oh eight or
nineteen oh nine when he's convicted. How long are they
typically on death row before the execution happens. It's surely
not as long as it is now.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
It's much shorter, twenty one days. And this is the
really chilling thing. He's been sentenced to death now here.
Of course, your lawyers would appeal. Guess what there was
no criminal appeals court in Scotland then death sentence meant,
with rare exceptions, you would die. The only possible way
(14:51):
to get around it was to have your sentence commuted
by the British Marnock. In that case, Edward the seventh,
I literally have to get the king to get you
out of jail. And what chance did a penniless German
Jewish immigrant gambler have for the king to take notice?
(15:12):
So Oscar Slater is remanded to prison to wait out
the three weeks he has to remain alive. He can
literally hear his jailers hammering the gallows together outside his cell.
He has literally made arrangements for his own burial. When,
forty eight hours before he is to ascend the scaffold,
(15:36):
his sentences commuted to life at hard Labor. What had
happened was this, there was enough public unease about the verdict.
I think enough aggressive thinking people realized how flimsy the
case was against him. They realized the role that xenophobia
(15:57):
and anti Semitism were playing. That a public petition was
got up to commute his sentence that twenty thousand residents signed,
and Slater's lawyers sent that petition to the crown, and
indeed King Edward the Seventh commuted his sentence to life
at hard Labor. So Slater, within two days of being hanged,
(16:20):
is instead dispatched northward to his Majesty's prison. This remote
place that was eventually called Scotland's Gulog, this remote granite
fortress on a wind swept outcropping in northeast Scotland.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
How does Arthur Conan Doyle become involved? I know, that
literary figures in the eighteen hundreds in the early nineteen
hundreds often followed these really high profile cases and used
them in their books. Is that what happened has captured
his attention for some reason.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
We believe that in late nineteen eleven early nineteen twelve,
Slater's lawyers beseech Conan Doyle to look into the case.
Conan Doyle, who is at this point world famous, is
the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. And remember he
trained as a physician, and he was very articulate about
(17:17):
saying he created the character of Holmes and the home
stories to try to bring this tradition of scientific rationalism
that was infusing the Victorian age to the formerly rather
scattershot genre of the detective story. He gave a wonderful
(17:38):
newsreel interview in nineteen twenty seven that I believe one
can still find on YouTube. Mostly he's talking about spiritualism,
which was his other great passion, But at some point,
of course, the interviewer presses him to talk about Holmes,
and he says, it always annoyed me how in the
old fashioned detective stories the detective seemed to come upon
(17:59):
his solution by chance or else. The reader was never
told how he got there. I wanted to create a
detective who employed the methods of science step by step,
so readers could follow his thought process and see how
he arrived through the use of logical reasoning at the solution. Now,
(18:21):
the public knew that Conan Doyle had become famous for this,
so they often beseeched him to look into real life cases, deaths,
disappearances and so on, and he did so. He was
a great humanist. He took up a number of social
causes in his life, and among them were the solution
(18:42):
of real life crimes, and he did indeed solve a
number of them using these rationalist methods that he had
endowed homes with.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
So Arthur Conan Doyle is reading about this case, which
is well covered. I'm sure most people know he's from Scotland.
What were the specific things do you think caught his
interest with this case? Everything you've talked about I'm assuming
zinophobia everything.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Right, and specifically the lack of logical reasoning that really
got Conan Doyle's goat right away. As he said, each
clue against Slater crumbles to pieces when it is examined.
The failure of the police once they had Slater in
(19:43):
their sights to consider any other alternative, and Conan Doyle
was incensed again. Knowing both as a physician who had
to make diagnoses and as a crime writer who had
to have his hero follow clues, he knew full well
the danger of fixating on one solution at the outset
(20:05):
to the exclusion of all other possibilities. And when you're
talking about a man's life, you know that takes on
a whole new level of urgency. The more deeply Conan
Doyle read the trial transcripts, studied newspaper coverage of the case,
the more he became convinced that although Conan Doyle as
(20:28):
the Victorian man from Central casting upright moral, he came
from poverty, but of course, at this point was one
of the best compensated writers in the world. He deplored
Slater's ungentlemanly life. He called him a disreputable rolling stone
of a man. But Conan Doyle was so moral and
(20:52):
so eminently rationalist that he realized the railroading of Slater
and the necessity to write this terrible injustice that had
been done to him, took precedence over any level of
personal antipathy against the man that he might have.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Where does he start. Does he start with the crime
scene or with the victim or the physical evidence?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Crime scene's long gone, the victims long buried, and so
you know, he was a man of letters, so he
started by reviewing the trial transcripts, reviewing press coverage. I
suspect that he, as Holmes did, had, you know, albums
and albums of newspaper clippings about crimes. We do know
Conan Doyle had a vast, extensive personal library of books
(21:43):
about true crime, some of which he bought from the
estate of W. S. Gilbert, The Gilbert of Gilbert and
Sullivan kind of a fun little historical footnote. So he
was very, very widely read in all aspects of true
crime and what we today would call for a rend.
This is the most remarkable thing about the case. Today,
(22:05):
wrongful convictions are overturned, not often enough, but they can
be overturned by virtue of modern forensics, particularly DNA testing.
None of that existed in nineteen oh eight when the
murder happened. In nineteen twelve, when Conan Doyle published his
monographs on the murder, the case of Oscar Slater. None
(22:28):
of that existed in nineteen twenty seven when Slater was
finally released from prison, or in nineteen twenty eight when
his conviction was formally quashed. All through the agency of
Conan Doyle, done the old fashioned way, through shoe leather
reading and intense rationalist thought, as well as because Conan
(22:54):
Doyle was by this time one of the most famous
and in a sense powerful men in Britain, he did
a lot of back room brokering and lobbying with some
of the most powerful figures in British politics to try
to get this case on the agenda and to try
to bring public attention to it. He wrote a lot
(23:16):
of letters to newspapers as well, because in those years
that was the primary forum for public discussion of social affairs.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
What do you think his strongest counter evidence was in
this case where he said listen to this, and finally
people listened because it sounded irrefutable coming from him.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Well, there were many things, starting with the ludicrous identification
or non identification of the pawn broach. It was very
clear the maid was taken to the pawn shop by
the police. She said right away, Oh no, that's not
my mistress's broach. It looks totally different, but pretty soon
(24:02):
because the police knew that the brooch clue was worthless,
that clue was kind of swept under the rug. Conan
Doyle brought it out again and said, the police knew
within days that Oscar Slater was not their man. That
should have been the end of it. Why wasn't it?
And there were many other instances like that where Conan Doyle,
(24:26):
just reading closely, could see where witnesses had seemingly spontaneously
changed their story. People who couldn't identify Slater as the
man seen leaving Marion Gilchris's apartment suddenly identified him. And
so all of these consistencies. Conan Doyle, as both a
(24:49):
man of science and a craftsman of detective stories, was
singularly well positioned to ferret out and bring to.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Life so bad witnesses and of course that very bad
misidentification the housekeeper's timeline right that ten minutes she stepped
out and stepped back in. Is Conan Doyle making the
assumption that this is someone who was clearly lying in wait,
or was he thinking maybe this was an inside job
involving the housekeeper?
Speaker 2 (25:21):
What we do know. Conan Doyle was an Edwardian man
of rectitude and bearing. He wasn't good to tar anyone.
But it's very clear, and it's there between the lines
of his monograph on the case, that the housekeeper knew
more than she could ever be persuaded to tell. Many
(25:43):
many years later, right before Slater was released, she publicly
recanted her identification of Slater as the man she'd seen
leaving the flat. She was by this time living in America.
The newspapers tracked her down there and with great fanfare,
published this recantation. Now she later recanted the recantation. Her
(26:05):
story is kind of all over the map over time.
She clearly knew more than she was saying. There is
also evidence that she actually identified the man she saw
leaving the flat. She knew who it was. It was
not Slater, and it may have been a relative of
the dead woman. One of the most striking aspects of
(26:29):
the crime scene, and this was something that Conan Doyle
in his writing on the case, threw into sharp relief,
was not only was there only the one piece of
jewelry stolen, allegedly, with this vast horde of jewelry secreted
all around the apartment, but in one of the bedrooms
of the flat a box had been broken into and
(26:53):
it contained not jewelry but papers, And the floor of
the room was littered with papers, as if the mysterious
intruder had been flinging them about looking for something. So
one of the things Conan Doyle homed in on in
his work, he said, what kind of document, save a will,
(27:15):
could excite that kind of frenzy in an intruder? And
so there is very strong implications that there may have
been a fight among family members over this rich old
lady's estate while she was still alive.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Well where did all the money go once she was murdered?
Who inherited all of this?
Speaker 2 (27:35):
She changed her will just a few weeks before she
was murdered, and strikingly, she was very paranoid. She had
three locks on her door, she hit her jewelry all over.
She apparently told someone about the week before she died
that she felt certain she was going to be murdered.
(27:56):
This fact was not known for years now. That could
be us a parenoid old lady whose mind is slipping,
or it could be someone who quite reasonably has reason
to fear. Various relatives before she died, she changed her
will to leave the vast bulk of her estate to
(28:17):
one of the very few people she got along with
it was a former maid of hers, now a grown
woman with a grown daughter, and this maid and her
daughter were going to pretty much get all the money. Well.
Marian Gilchrist had lots of nieces and nephews, and it
is certainly within the realm of possibility that one or
(28:38):
more of them, being aware that she had changed her
will or was about to change it, might not have
taken that news in the most kindly fashion.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Is the idea that perhaps this relative, if there is
a relative who did this, paid her current housekeeper to
leave the door locks unlocked, and when the housekeeper slipped out,
the person came in, took the broach, and then left,
So it was an inside job.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
That is one scenario. It is certainly within the realm
of possibility. Skipping ahead, even now, over one hundred years on,
there has been no suspect identified definitively. Who killed Marion
Gilchrist on that December night in nineteen oh eight will
forever remain a mystery. At the end of my book,
(29:26):
I do have a section that talks about some of
the more likely theories more likely candidate, and certainly one
likely scenario is that it was an inside job within
her extended family. We do know this is a frightened,
oled woman with three locks on the door. She had
(29:46):
the technology, as we do in apartment buildings today, to
buzz someone in who was on the street who wanted
to visit. Her flat was on the second floor. She
could buzz them in from her apartment, and while they
were ascending that flight of stairs, she had plenty of
time to open her flat door peek around, and if
(30:07):
it was someone she didn't know, someone scary, she had
time to shut the door, bolt her three locks and
be safe. The fact that someone just came in strongly
suggests that missus Gilchris admitted him and it was therefore
someone she knew and felt at least reasonably comfortable with.
(30:28):
The brooch actually was one of the few, very few
pieces of jewelry that was visible. Miss Gilchrist did kind
of nutty things like secreting jewels in pockets of dresses
that were hanging up in the wardrobe. She pinned brooches
behind the drapery, so most of the tons of jewelry
(30:50):
that was in the flat was not visible to the
naked eye when you walked in. The brooch was sitting
with a few other pieces in a little dish for
odds and ends on a dress table in one of
the bedrooms. So Conan Doyle conjectured that the mystery man
the assailant, He was let in by this frightened old lady.
(31:12):
They may have had some discussion at some point. She's
bludgeoned deaths. He goes into the bedroom, wrenches open this
wooden box, looking for papers, perhaps a will. Then he
hears the nate coming back. She's only gone for ten minutes. Remember,
he doesn't know who it is. Maybe it's a neighbor,
maybe it's the police. You know, the killing has made
(31:34):
a lot of noise. Missus Gilchrist, by pre arranged signal
has wrapped on the floor three times as she was
dying to alert the neighbors downstairs that she needed help.
Conan Doyle conjectures that because this diamond broach was visible,
the assailant simply slipped it into his pocket at the
(31:54):
last minute as a kind of blind to make everything
that transpired look like robbery by some random stranger, when
in fact it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
At all, what is the reaction of the local police
who have been investigating this, have nailed down Slater, have
put him on death row, and now you have this
literary icon, Arthur Conan Doyle coming in and messing everything up.
Were they furious or did they sort of sit down
and shut up? Because of the political power he wielded
(32:24):
in nineteen oh eight nineteen oh nine.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
They wielded a lot of power themselves, and they, with
the Crown prosecutors in Scotland, formed a blue wall of silence,
impassivity and intractability. They stonewalled any attempts to undo what
they had done. And from the very beginning it's clear,
(32:47):
you know, this was a boushois woman, a rich woman,
a respectable woman. This was an age that was all
about social standing and social respectability, the kind of person
who shouldn't be murdered. Therefore, the case was a sensation
in the newspapers. You know, the newspapers were screaming in
a rich old lady murdered in nice part of town,
(33:10):
how can this be? The police, therefore, were under enormous
pressure to solve the case. So along comes this circumstantial
clue that happens to link them through this crescent broach
to Oscar Slater, a disreputable man, no murderer, but a
gambler whom they want to run out of town anyway,
(33:32):
So they seize on this wrap him up in the
Gilchrist murder as a handy fellow to convict. They are
literally killing two birds with one stone, getting rid of
Slater and getting, as they say on law and Order,
getting a collar in a high profile case. They're under
great pressure to close, so, needless to say, they are
(33:55):
not going to do anything to undermine or reverse that
scenario and expose all of the corruption, the lying, the
subornation of perjury, the witness tampering that has gone on.
So in nineteen twelve, as the result of his investigation,
Conan Doyle publishes a monograph, The Case of Oscar Slater.
(34:18):
He deliberately keeps the price low it's sixpence because he
wants the book to be widely bought, and the book lands,
nothing happens. I think it was simply too soon. It
was only four years after the murder, This brutal, sensational
case was still fresh in public memory, and there was
still this lather whipped up by the police and the
(34:40):
prosecutors and the press of anti immigrant, anti Jewish sentiment
against Oscar Slater. So Conan Doyle had a very hard
time just four years later in persuading the public that
the police had attached and convicted the wrong man. Fast
forward to nineteen twenty five. At the has been in
(35:01):
Peterhead Prison since nineteen oh nine, raking up massive blocks
of granite, you know, under the blistering sun or in
the freezing cold in the prison. Huare literally you know,
fed on bread and water and gruel. One of his friends,
a fellow convict named William Gordon, is being paroled. Now
Gordon as a striking thing about him. He wears dentures,
(35:24):
and so under his dentures the day he gets paroled,
furled into a tiny pellet, is a note from Oscar
Slater saying please go see Conan Doyle. And of course
the prison officials do a body search of William Gordon
when he's about to be released, but no one thinks
to examine his gums. So he actually does spirit this
(35:44):
note out of prison. He goes to see Conan Doyle
and persuades him. You know, thirteen years after his monograph
has come out to take up the case one last time.
And it's only then when public sentiment against Slater has
more or less abated. A lot of the most nefarious
(36:05):
principles in the case against him, police officers, member of
the Crown Prosecution Office, a lot of them have died.
It's only then that it becomes possible for Conan Doyle
to take up arms once more. And this time the
time is right. That was the beginning of the end
of Slater's incarceration. He's released at the end of nineteen
(36:27):
twenty seven. His conviction is formally washed the next year.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
What is life like for Oscar Slater after his release.
He's been there for so long. His wife, I'm presuming
is gone. This is just a brand new life for
someone who obviously is going to be heavily institutionalized.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
That's right. And he's not released till twenty seven, and
with a war in between. Remember his families in Germany.
So one of the most gut wrenching things is for
the whole of the war from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen,
Slater can exchange no correspondence with his family. You know,
(37:08):
his parents are already elderly, and after the war he
gets a letter from one of his sisters back in
Germany saying, you know, dearest Oscar, I must now tell
you about the deaths of our dear parents. All of
his correspondence has been preserved, which was a boon for me,
and the letters are, especially that one, are just gut
(37:29):
wrenching to read. So he's in prison from nineteen oh
nine to the end of nineteen twenty seven. When he
goes into prison, he's in his late thirties. When it
comes out, he's only in his mid fifties, and photographs
from his discharge he looks like a man of almost ninety.
I mean, the years have not been kind to him,
(37:52):
nor would they be to anyone who was breaking up
blocks of granite in the quarry every day for eighteen
and a half years. He adjusted to life on the
outside really remarkably well. He lived in a small town.
He lived in air Seaside Town, not too far from Glasgow.
He started an antiques business. He was always a tinkerer,
(38:15):
so he would buy and refurbish things. He had a
modest income in the form of reparations from the state
for his wrongful incarceration. He was apparently convivial well liked
by his neighbors. Here's the thing. When he got out,
he was a man without a country. The Scottish authorities
badly wanted to send him back to Germany on his release.
(38:39):
The case was so notorious they didn't want any reminders
of it hanging around, particularly not the flesh and blood
big reminder in the form of Oscar Slater himself. They discovered,
to their dismay that a German who had been out
of Germany for ten years or more lost his citizenship.
And of course Oscar Slater had been locked him in
(38:59):
Scotland for eighteen and a half years, so he couldn't
go back to Germany. He was in a sense stateless,
so he stayed in Scotland, in this country where these
terrible things had happened. As you say, his French music
hall mistress slash sex worker left the scene very very early.
Slater remarried a much younger Scottish woman, apparently very very
(39:23):
happy marriage, liked by his neighbors. He died in his
bed in Air, Scotland in nineteen forty eight in a
blood chilling way. This terrible case that almost cost him
his life and left him as a man without a
country may well have saved his life, because he, as
a Jew, was not able to be back in Germany
(39:45):
in the nineteen forties. And one of the most devastating
things of the book is we've gotten to know his
parents and his sisters through their loving letters to Slater
in prison and his to them. His parents, by this
time had died of natural causes, his sisters never made
it out of the Holocaust. So, in the bitterest of
(40:08):
bitter ironies, this terrible, wrongful conviction ultimately may have saved
his life.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Did he reconnect with Arthur Conan Doyle after this? Did
they have many conversations about this? Or when the case
was done that was it?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They actually met in person only once. Conan Doyle, again
for various reasons, held Slater somewhat at arm's length. He
approached the case purely as an intellectual and ethical problem.
He did not correspond with Slater directly. Again, he in
good and bad ways. Conan Doyle was a Victorian man.
(40:44):
He had tremendous morality, tremendous probity, but he was not
free of Victorian class prejudices, and it was clear that
he found Slater's kind of denimond life distasteful, so he
handled the case by himself and through intermediaries. He and
Slater actually only met once at the nineteen twenty eight
(41:08):
hearing to formally overturn Slater's conviction. Conan Doyle was there
covering the case for a British newspaper. They greeted each
other very warmly. One of the things that was really
a kick in the chest to me when I was
researching the case was I spent a week at the
National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. The case was in Glasgow,
(41:32):
but there was a change of venue and the trial
was moved to Edinburgh, the capital, so there are records
on the case in both cities. At the National Records
of Scotland in Edinburgh, I spent a week going through
all of these files on the case that are in
date order over about twenty years. And the very last
folder in the last filebox had a heading that took
(41:55):
my breath away in not an a good way. The
heading was Conan Doyle the Slater, and I thought, my god,
Conan Doyle actually had to threaten to take Slater to
court to recoup some of the costs that he had
outlaid in the course of exonerating him. And I was
(42:16):
so rattled when I saw that. I said to myself,
I'm going to go back to my hotel. I'm going
to go to sleep, and in the morning when I
come back to the archive, this file won't be here.
And of course it was, and I had to deal
with it. What happened was this, partly with Conan Doyle's help,
(42:36):
Oscar Slater had gotten six thousand pounds compensation for wrongful
imprisonment from the British government. That was a lot of
money in nineteen twenty eight. Now Conan Doyle had outlaid
a certain amount of money in getting things printed and published,
in paying people who did some of the legwork, and
(43:00):
although he could well afford to pay again he was
such a principled man, he was shocked and embittered and
scandalized when Oscar Slater declined to reimburse him for that outlay.
And of course, from Slater's point of view, Conan Doyle
was rich, he didn't need the money, whereas he Slater
(43:21):
was from a poor background. He'd spent almost twenty years
in jail. This was the money he was going to
live on. So they were both right and what was
so painful but so telling about this last coda to
the story was that even after all of this time,
all of Conan Doyle's involvement in the case, neither one
(43:42):
of them was really equipped to understand the other, and
there was still this kind of unbridgable class difference between
the two. In the end, the case was settled more
or less amicably without it actually having to come to trial,
but there was this really bitter rupture between the two
men at the end, very very painful, but again very
(44:06):
much a product of its time.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And luckily you have a hero in Arthur Conan Doyle
who has acquired all of these real life skills of
a detective. And I know that he was, you know,
by the end of Sherlock Holmes, by the end, he
was sort of sick and tired of it, and this
was such a fantastic application of his skills.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
The Oscar Slater case was truly Conan Doyle's last stand
as an investigator of real life crime, and it was
a terrible, dark and painful case, but it was ultimately
a triumph for both Conan Doyle and Slater in that
he not only got Slater released, he got him officially exonerated,
(44:49):
he got the formal conviction quashed, even got him some compensation,
and so all of this wound down over sort of
nineteen twenty eight, nineteen two twenty nine, and then Conan
Doyle died in nineteen thirty, so it was truly the
last hurrah of this upright, complicated, ultimately extremely moral, extremely
(45:14):
rationalist victorian man. And I say, you know, it was
perhaps only with Conan Doyle's death in nineteen thirty what
historians call the Long nineteenth century was well and truly over.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi, Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga Executive
(45:59):
produce used by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked. Email us at
info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll also take your
(46:20):
suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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