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 by the women of Glasgow for a number of years.
Elizabeth Jaffray, sometimes known as Nickleson, Shafto or Jeffrey, murdered her two victims in Carluke in Lanarkshire. Ailing Ann Newal, or Carl, died on 5 October 1837 after eating some meal and water with whisky prepared by her ‘kindly’ neighbour, who told her it was medicine.
Jaffray’s lodger, Highland miner Hugh Munro, met his death on 30 October after first eating some porridge and then some rhubarb. Her motive was that old faithful, money. The Crown stated that she owed Munro £5 but could not pay it back, so decided that murder would be the cheapest way out of the debt. However, villagers believed that she merely wanted him out of the way to take in a more profitable lodger.
Her motive for killing her neighbour? It was believed she had discussed the easiest way to poison someone with poor Mrs Newal, so that made her a liability.
Following a trial that lasted 18 hours, Mrs Jaffray was found guilty and sentenced to hang. However, ‘a few Quakers and other eccentric individuals’ campaigned to have the sentence commuted. A broadsheet went on to say that ‘these characters say it was a mighty piece of unheard-of cruelty to execute BURKE!’
‘But we have no patience with them,’ the writer continued. ‘Their mawkish ravings are an outrage on nature and common sense, how humane, and kind, and charitable they are to the cold blooded murderer – while not a sigh is given for the innocent butchered victims!’
Mrs Jaffray was executed in Glasgow and a large crowd clustered on the Green to see her go. She had refused to confess to her crimes and feeling against her ran high. As she stepped onto the platform wearing a shawl in the distinctive red and black check of the Rob Roy tartan. Such was the revulsion for her crimes that the design immediately went out of disfavour.
The poison she had used was arsenic which she had purchased under the pretext of poisoning rats. That very substance was allegedly used by another woman six years later.
Everyone knew that Christina Gilmour was unhappy in her marriage to Renfrewshire farmer John Gilmour. He was not the man she wished to have by her side. The match was only six weeks old when he died after a violent illness, setting tongues wagging over rat poison she had purchased. What made matters worse, she had fled the country with the aid of her brother. By that time, the heavy mortsafe, which protected her husband’s corpse from bodysnatchers, had been hauled off and the body examined by experts. The rumours proved correct – his body was riddled with arsenic traces.
A dogged Superintendent of Renfrewshire Rural Police traced Christina’s movements to Liverpool, where she had taken ship for New York in the company of a man she didn’t know until introduced by an intermediary. Supt George McKay took a faster vessel and was on the quayside to meet her. Her companion, who had proved to be far from a gentleman during the voyage by making unseemly advances, vanished into the crowds.
The 24-year-old suspected murderess gamely battled extradition. Her US lawyer cited a recent extradition treaty between the two nations that stated a person accused of a crime could only be sent home if there was clear evidence of criminality. During the hearing she even feigned insanity. It was all to no avail for in August 1843 she was sent home to face the legal music.
In January the following year, Christina Gilmour stood in the High Court at Edinburgh to face trial for murder.
During the two day trial, dressed in black, a simple gold wedding band on her left hand, she listened dispassionately to the evidence. She heard witnesses speak of her purchases of arsenic. She relived her late husband’s extended, agonising death. She watched as medical witnesses produced a grisly succession of the dead man’s internal organs to illustrate their belief that he had been poisoned.
The law prohibited accused persons from giving evidence but their declarations could be read into the record. In it she denied murdering her husband. The arsenic was not to kill rats, as she had claimed at the time, but to kill herself, such was her unhappiness in her marriage. Her husband was not a bad man but he was not the man for her.
Her defence counsel raised the possibility that John Gilmour had killed himself. He already kept arsenic around the house for the control of vermin and he had shown a somewhat dramatic nature during his courtship when he had threatened to kill himself if Christina, dithering over another man who she saw as her real love, did not agree to marry him. He knew his wife was unhappy, it was even said that the marriage was unconsummated, and it was possible those earlier thoughts of taking his own life had resurfaced.
Would this attempt to raise the famed shadow of a doubt be enough to save this young woman from the gallows?
The jury was out for only an hour.
Christina, a cup of water in her hands, sat immobile as the fifteen men delivered their verdict on whether she would live or die. The packed courtroom hushed, as if everyone present was holding their breath, and the solemn voice of the Clerk floated towards the high ceiling.
‘The jury, after a careful and mature consideration of the evidence brought before them in this case, are unanimously of the opinion that John Gilmour died from the effects of arsenic poisoning.’
That much was expected, the medical evidence had been so compelling. But had the jury decided that his wife had in fact laced his food and drink with the poison? Journalists’ eyes watched for some emotion from the woman in black sitting in the dock but there was none. Then the Clerk spoke again.
‘But find it not proved against the prisoner at the bar, as libelled.’
The court room erupted, for there was strong support for the accused, and the judge demanded order, finally quietening the public gallery with strong threats of contempt. Still Christina’s blank expression did not change. There was not even as much as a flicker of emotion as she left the court. She later returned to her father’s home in Ayrshire and died in Stewarton, aged 87 and still in widow’s weeds, having never married again.
Thirteen years later, Madeleine Smith stood accused of poisoning an inconvenient and mercurial lover with arsenic concealed in hot chocolate. Perhaps Christina read of it and sympathised with the plight of a woman wrongly accused. Or perhaps she smiled a secret smile…
You can find my brief account of the Madeleine Smith case here:
