Classic Scottish Murder Stories Read Free Page A

the
Glasgow Herald,
dated August 27th and posted in Aberdeen, suggested that, ‘Seemingly there was a motive for doing away with poor Rose; it was not to secure his valuables. Mr Rose was to all appearance worse off than myself; indeed, he assured me that he had spent so much on his tour that he had barely sufficient to last till he got home.’
    Run to earth in a wood some three miles from Hamilton, he was found with his throat cut, but not too deeply. ‘I robbed the man, but I did not murder him’ he said in an important admission. He was from now on willing to own up to the items which he had stolen from Mrs Walker’s ‘lie-to’, but it proved difficult to establish that he had taken items from Rose’s pockets on the mountainside. Did he mean that Rose died by accident and he rifled the body there and then and hid it, or did he imply that others did the deed after he had left Rose intact?
    The second alternative was certainly the force of his defence at the trial in Edinburgh which opened on November 8th, 1889. The Dean of Faculty argued for him that all of Rose’s injuries were consistent with an accidental fall, and very likely, ‘at these Fair holidays, there would be plenty of people on the island who would steal from the body.’ The Prosecution adhered to the plain theory of repeated blows by Laurie with a stone, followed by theft at the scene. Weighty and learned medical experts brought for either side effectively cancelled one another out, as was reflected in the verdict of Guilty, by a majority of one, seven voting for Not Proven. Hangman Berry would soon be required. An agitation, however, gained strength, based on the feeling that Laurie must have been insane to have performed such a gross, excessive and inappropriate series of acts. A petition pleaded that there was insanity in Laurie’s family and that he himself had a significant history. This had not been an issue at the trial, where the defence was a classic criminal’s fight against circumstantial evidence. A visiting lunacy commission was convened, and the convicted man was pronounced insane.
    He was very, very lucky. An available statistic for English crime shows that in 1893, of the 256 prisoners sentenced to death for murder in the previous nine years, only eight were committed to Broadmoor as insane, 145 were hanged, one was pardoned and 102 were sent to penal servitude.
    Somewhere in official records the alientists’ report must lie. It is difficult to conceive that Laurie was suffering from ‘mania’, as they called schizophrenia in those days. Perhaps they found his illness to be ‘meloncholia’: there may have been previous suicide attempts. His obsession about the teacher could have been accounted a ‘monomania’. Or perhaps the diagnosis was ‘moral insanity’, an abandoned term closest to our ‘psychopathy’, defined by Dr JC Pritchard (1786-1848) as ‘Madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral disposition and natural impulses without any remarkable disorder or defect in the intellect... ‘
    The death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and Laurie was held at Perth Penitentiary, and then Peterhead. He escaped in thick fog in 1893, but was quickly caught by a warder on a bicycle. In 1910, he was transferred to Perth Criminal Asylum, which was a department of Perth Penitentiary, not a separate asylum. He was by now suffering from progressive dementia, i.e. some type of deteriorating process, not insanity. There he died on October 5th 1930, aged 69. It was said that he had enquired about confessing before he was respited, but as Dr Forbes Winslow, the celebrated English alienist who was about at that time, and who would undoubtedly have found him insane, said in another context, ‘Of course, it was only to be expected that after Mrs Pearcey’s death [by