Free A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee by Malcolm Archibald Page A

the Guild Hall preparatory to be sent to Edinburgh for dissection.
    There was still one final act, however. After Balfour’s execution a cast was made of his head, for at that time the supposed science of phrenology, when so-called experts attempted to explain the character of a person by the shape of his or her head, was popular. The idea was to examine Balfour’s head and see if there was a typical criminal or even murderer’s head. The cast still exists, sitting on a shelf within the Barrack Street storage facilities of Dundee’s McManus Museum.
A Face Full of Vitriol
    Of course not all crimes of passion resulted in murder, and sometimes it was the male partner who was the victim. As Lord Cockburn pointed out, Dundee women could be passionate in their actions, so a Dundee woman scorned was best avoided.
    At midday on 28th December 1864 Princes Street was busy. Carriages and carts clattered over the cobbles, merchants marched purposefully from their places of business, chimney sweeps carried their long brushes, shop keepers watched out of crowded windows, hoping for trade in the post-Christmas lull, blacksmiths and boilermakers, carpenters and cowfeeders, mechanics and millworkers, the myriad workers of Dundee all hustled along, lost in their own lives.
    Young David Nicoll probably should have been at work. Not yet a teenager, he was growing out of boyhood and enjoying the bustle of the expanding city. It was a boom time for Dundee, with the docks packed with ships, the mills and factories buzzing nonstop and jobs for anybody who wanted one, but David was more interested in the drama that played itself out only a few yards from where he stood.
    The woman was a looker, a respectable millworker standing with a handkerchief in her hand. She was at the bottom of Crescent Street, just where it met Princes Street, and had been there for some time, obviously waiting for somebody. Eventually she saw a man and shouted over to him. The man replied, but David did not hear what was said through the growl of traffic. He watched the woman hurry over to the man and they spoke together for some time, but it seemed the man was less enthusiastic about continuing their conversation than the woman was. As David watched, the woman produced a small tin canister and threw the liquid contents in the man’s face, before turning and running away. The man collapsed to the ground, screaming and clutching his face.
    Although David Nicoll did not know it, he had just witnessed a jilted lover’s classic act of revenge.
    It had all started in July 1862, about a month after James Killeen had left Ireland to seek work in Dundee. He had an aunt in Todburn Lane, and while visiting her he had got to know a young woman named Elizabeth Hay, a quiet, decent millworker. Unmarried and in her mid-twenties, Elizabeth lived in Horsewater Wynd while Killeen stayed in his own house in Princes Street. As a cooper he was a skilled man and made a respectable wage, although he would certainly never be rich. The two got on so well that Elizabeth believed Killeen was courting her for marriage, although in his own words he believed ‘it would not answer’.
    After more than two years with Elizabeth, Killeen met and married another woman. It is not difficult to imagine how Elizabeth felt about that, in an age when women married fairly young. Her own words, spoken at her trial, ‘This injured my feelings very much,’ were probably a great understatement. She would undoubtedly be devastated.
    There are two versions of what happened next: James Killeen’s and Elizabeth Hay’s. According to Elizabeth, Killeen and his wife began to spend more than they earned, and he was desperate for money. He came to her door, apologised for the way he had treated her and asked her for a loan of some money. She loaned him £2.
    Killeen had a radically different story. He claimed that he had been married for just over a year when Elizabeth came into his King Street shop. At first Killeen