The Kate Escape

A murder that might not have been murder. A family history filled with tragedy. Illicit love, bigamy, incest. And a daring escape from jail. This is the story of Katherine...

Distaff of Legend, Part three

(Pictured: Helen MacDougall at the time of the trial) Aided by their partners, Helen MacDougall and Maggie Laird, killers William Burke and William Hare are in the money. But they...

Distaff of Legend, part two

(Pictured: Maggie Laird at the time of the trial) Burke and Hare are two of Scotland’s most notorious murderers, but they were aided and abetted by two women. In the...

Distaff of Legend (part one)

They called them bodysnatchers but they weren’t. They were murderers. And they didn’t work alone. SCOTLAND is only a small country but it has many cases of foul murder that...

The Third Verdict

Controversy has dogged Scotland’s Not Proven verdict for decades. Douglas Skelton looks at the history of the ‘Bastard Verdict’ HERE’S a wee legal riddle: When can a man be cleared...

A taste of poison

Nine years following the Castle Toward case, a woman who poisoned her neighbour and a lodger caused something a fashion sensation – for the tartan she wore was subsequently shunned...

Tipping the Doctor

POISON, they say, is a woman’s weapon, the perception being that there is something decidedly unmanly in slipping a victim a noxious substance rather than facing up to him with...

Chain of Death part two: Murder upon murder

In 1969, a robbery in the Scottish coastal town of Ayr left Rachel Ross dead and her jeweller husband Abraham injured. Safeblower Paddy Meehan was jailed for life, but there...

A lethal dose of arsenic

Yesterday I passed the house where, in the 19th century, a young woman is said to have fed her former lover poison and murdered him. I wrote about the case,...