Free Classic Scottish Murder Stories by Molly Whittington-Egan Page B

Christina was arrested off Staten Island. McKay recognised her from a previous encounter, depleted and ravaged as she was by sea-sickness and the strain of fighting off the advances of Simpson the shoemaker. A treaty for extradition in such cases was just in place, and proceedings were brought in June before United States Commissioner, named Sylvanus Rapalyea. Thomas Warner, of the New York Bar, tried every angle to defeat the treaty. Christina was quite sane enough to feign insanity, but she had led a sheltered life and her play-acting would not have fooled any doctor worth his salt. She sat on the floor like a pixie, cut her hands with scissors, said that she liked to see the flies licking up the blood, and saw her grandmother lying on her bed in her holding-cell. She also expressed a preference for going home in a coach, rather than a ship, but perhaps she intended an irony.
    All pleas having failed, Christina’s passage to Scotland on the packet
Liverpool
was not a smooth one, and there was time for reflection. At night, she was locked in her cabin with an unofficial wardress (just as a real lunatic would have been) while McKay kept guard outside. Back at Paisley, she made a judicial declaration before the Sheriff, and what she said was wily and to the point, with lies and distortions. There was an implication that her husband might have committed suicide: ‘He said to me shortly before his death that I had broken his heart. I suppose that he said this because I told him often before that he had broken mine and that I could not be to him as a wife.’
    She sought to reduce her acquisitions of arsenic from three to two, admitting the arsenic for rats, which she burnt in front of Mary Paterson, without, she said, ever opening the packet, and owning to the black silk bag incident, which she deliberately fused with the third, known purchase from Wylie the chemist. She ‘rather thought’ that she dropped the bag. The purpose of this poison was her own suicide, because she felt that they were all tired of her and would not let her have peace. She did not take it, but kept it in her pocket until the string came off the paper and some of the contents were spilt. There it stayed, until she discovered it after Gilmour’s death, when she had gone home to her parents. Her mother took possession of it.
    The trial of Christina Gilmour, in Edinburgh, began on January 12 th 1844. Like all those Victorian women accused of murdering their husbands, she provided an interesting spectacle in her black dress and veil, forbidden at that time to speak, and held to the words of her declaration. The defence freely conceded that John Gilmour had died of arsenical poisoning, but argued that, grieved by the state of the marriage, he had killed himself. In the alternative, he had poisoned himself by accident. His actual possession of arsenic, kept as a rodenticide, was neatly proved by the evidence of Mary Paterson that he had moved the ‘kist’ or chest which containedhis stock of the poison into the bedroom, from the kitchen, on the occasion of his marriage. There it was, available for him to rifle when he felt the suicidal urge, or to use clumsily against the rats. No explanation was given for the transference from kitchen to bedroom. Perhaps he felt that with the kitchen in proper use, there might be a mistake. He must have kept the kist locked, or why would Christina have travelled for miles in search of arsenic? Why did she not, theoretically, ask him to dole out some rat poison for her to use?
    A broken heart, said Counsel for Christina, might lead to suicide, but not to murder and, in spite of the strong circumstantial evidence, the corporate mind of the jury revolted from the notion of the guilt of one of so ‘very gentle, mild, fine disposition’ (John Anderson’s words) who had held her husband’s head when he vomited. Arsenic is a cruel agent of death – and we now know that it is