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

believed she had come to buy one of the tubs he made, but instead she showed him a portrait and asked if he knew who owned it. He did not know and handed it back, and she pressed two shillings and eleven pence halfpenny, (about fifteen pence) onto him. Killeen tried to hand it back, saying he had enough money, but Elizabeth was insistent. At the beginning of September she met him again, handed over £1 16/- and suggested that he leave his wife, go down to Newcastle and find work there. When he was settled she would come and join him. Naturally, Killeen refused. He refuted any suggestion that he had ever asked for money from Elizabeth.
    During Elizabeth’s trial for assault, Killeen’s legal representative, Mr Campbell, asked him if he had ever asked Elizabeth to forgive him. When Killeen said no, Elizabeth had become agitated, saying, ‘Didn’t you now? Didn’t you?’
    Killeen did sail to Newcastle, but after a few weeks he returned to Dundee. According to Killeen’s account he was barely back when Elizabeth visited him in his aunt’s house. They drank together, but before he could repay the loan Elizabeth left the house.
    Once again, Elizabeth’s version does not agree. She claimed that Killeen was ‘doing well’ in Newcastle and when she heard he was back she called on him to ask for her loan back. She said she had loaned him a full £2 – a lot of money for a millworker in the 1860s – but he refused, instead starting an ugly rumour that she was ‘trying to seduce him from his wife’.
    Once again Elizabeth was emotionally injured. Killeen had hurt her when he had strung her along with hopes of marriage and then rejected her in favour of another woman, and now he had hurt her again when he spread cruel and, according to her, false tales about her. In Elizabeth’s words the rumours ‘affected’ her ‘very much’. Not surprisingly she became ill. One of her friends, Isabella Darling, advised her to take a solution of vitriol (sulphuric acid) for her health. Darling said that a few drops of vitriol in a glass of water helped settle her own stomach and Elizabeth tried the same solution.
    There was more disputing about the meeting between Elizabeth and Killeen on Tuesday 28th December. Both agreed that they met in Princes Street at twelve o’clock, but the accounts of what happened next differ widely. Elizabeth said that she just happened to have her vitriol with her when she met Killeen that day and ‘he spoke cruelly to me’ and gave her a slight push. By the time of her trial she thought the push might have been accidental, but, ‘I took the bottle and threw some drops of the liquid over him,’ she said.
    Killeen said Elizabeth had called over to him, but he told her he wanted ‘nothing to do with her as I was a married man’. At that point Elizabeth put her hands beneath the handkerchief she was carrying and threw a red liquid over his face and his clothes.
    ‘Take that!’ Elizabeth said, and ran away along Princes Street.
    The vitriol landed on Killeen’s face, mouth and neck. He said he felt a ‘burning sensation’ so painful he would ‘as soon have had a pistol bullet through my head’. With the corrosive vitriol burning his eyes and inside his mouth, he yelled for the police and chased after Elizabeth. He caught her outside James Milne’s grocer shop, and they both went inside to try and ease the pain.
    As soon as Milne learned what had happened he cut away the damaged part of Killeen’s clothes and dabbed olive oil on his burned face.‘She must have been an awful woman that would do the like of that,’ he said, but Elizabeth denied everything and blamed Killeen for throwing the vitriol. Milne did mention that her dress was also damaged. Elizabeth also advised that Killeen put water on his burns.
    When they were in the shop somebody handed the near-empty canister of vitriol to David Ogilvy, a police lamplighter. He kept it as evidence, followed Elizabeth into Milne’s and held her