Douglas Skelton
14Oct

Chain of Death part two: Murder upon murder

Posted by: douglasskelton3 Categories: blog entry True Crime
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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 were doubts about his guilt. He insisted he had been in Stranraer planning another robbery along with accomplice James Griffith. Unfortunately, James Griffith was unstable and when police came to interview him he went on a murderous rampage across Glasgow before he was himself gunned down in a flat on a street in the city’s Springburn area.

But that wasn’t the end of the violence…

Meehan spent the next seven years in self-imposed solitary confinement, protesting his innocence. In court, he claimed that the crime had been committed by Ian Waddell, a career criminal with a record for housebreaking and violence. The son of a slaughterhouse sheepkiller, Waddell had been a troubled youth – he’d once assaulted his primary school teacher – and had been in and out of jail on a variety of charges. He had been in the frame for the Ross job from early in the investigation but the Meehan tip-off had deflected the heat. That didn’t prevent him from telling a Scottish newspaper that he was the real killer. 

Meanwhile, Meehan’s case had attracted some heavy-hitting support. His advocate Nicolas Fairbairn and author Ludovic Kennedy campaigned to have the case re-examined. (After his death, accusations of sexual impropriety were made against Fairbairn. He was never charged with any offences while alive.)

The break came in March 1976 when Glasgow crook William ‘Tank’ McGuinness was found unconscious in a Parkhead gutter. He had been kicked near to death and police sat by his bedside for 13 days waiting for word about who had attacked him. ‘Tank’, though, died without breathing a word. However, his passing did unchain lawyer Joseph Beltrami from the shackles of client confidentiality. McGuinness had confessed to him that he and Waddell had pulled the Ross robbery and murder. Beltrami, who also represented Meehan, was now free to tell the authorities and kick-start the process that would clear an innocent man. Waddell was arrested and charged with the Rachel Ross murder. He returned the favour by lodging a special defence of incrimination – he didn’t do it, Paddy Meehan did. The case was found Not Proven.

The man who police believed had given McGuiness his fatal tanking was another Glasgow crook – John ‘Gypsy’ Winning, also known as the Great Escaper. The Romany blood in his veins and his love of freedom and the open air led to him making a total of eight escape attempts from jail or police custody. But his dislike of confinement didn’t prevent him walking a crooked path, for he spent only four years as a free man since the age of 20. Now he faced life inside for murder.

Tank had been an old friend – in fact, they had both escaped from Barlinnie in 1960 using the tried-and-tested method of bedclothes fashioned into a rope to escape the hall and then a real rope to get them over the wall. 

‘You can’t get closer to a man than that,’ Gypsy said. 

However, the prosecution insisted the ‘Tank’ had for some reason been sentenced to death by the underworld and ‘Gypsy’ was the man who did it. McGuinness had been acting like a marked man for some weeks and his home had been broken into by a gunman. Either that or the two old pals had fallen out and in a fit of anger in Springfield Road, Winning had methodically beaten and kicked McGuinness to death. The Crown supported its case with bloodstains on ‘Gypsy’s’ coat that matched the victim’s rare grouping.

Winning denied the charge. ‘Tank’ was a pal and he had no reason to harm him. He’d met him that night, sure, but he hadn’t killed him. If he had given him such a kicking, surely there would be blood on his shoes? And the blood on his coat was easily explained – and backed up by another witness. McGuiness had got into a beef with another man during which his nose was burst open and Winning had helped him, getting the blood on his coat in the process. When he had last seen ‘Tank’ he had been hale if not particularly hearty.

The prosecution might have won their case had procedure not been badly screwed up. The blood sample taken from the dead man had not been properly recorded and therefore could not be lodged as evidence. They couldn’t legally establish that the sample lodged as evidence was, in fact, McGuiness’s blood. Therefore, it didn’t matter whether it was rare and that it matched the spatters found on Winning’s coat. Without that sample they had no case. A directed Not Guilty verdict gave ‘Gypsy’ Winning his last, narrow, escape. He died, aged 51, during a brawl in Dunfermline in 1991.

In May 1982, Ian Waddell and another crook named Andy Gentle became involved in a neighbourhood row in which Mrs Josephine Chipperfield died. She had complained about her 16-year-old daughter being allowed to get drunk at a house party in Buchlyvie Street, Easterhouse.  In retaliation, Waddell and Gentle forced their way into her flat and stabbed her to death. They hid out in a flat in Springburn’s Blackthorn Street, their threatening manner forcing the resident to flee, but Gentle began to fear that Waddell would fire him in for the murder in order to save himself. He throttled the 44-year-old crook with a curtain wire and buried the body in a shallow grave in the back court. 

Gentle also had an extended list of previous, including an eight year stretch for culpable homicide in 1969, and was sentenced to 20 to life for the two murders, although he claimed Waddell had killed Mrs Chipperfield and another man had done for Waddell. He subsequently killed himself in prison. 

This marked end of the astonishing chain of violent death that began all those years before in that little Ayr bungalow.

Meehan was pardoned but never gave up his fight to completely clear his name and prove that he was fitted up by the authorities. Three months after Waddell died, Lord Hunter’s report into the case failed to exonerate him.  

‘The theory of an initial assault by Ian Waddell and ‘Tank’ McGuiness with a follow-up by Meehan and gunman Griffiths to open the safes believed to have been in the house,’ it read, ‘is a possibility that cannot be ruled out.’ 

In 1994, throat cancer claimed Paddy Meehan. 

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28Oct

You Will Die Facing the Monument, part 3

Posted by: douglasskelton3 Categories: blog entry
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Glasgow’s judicial industry was now well-established at the foot of the Saltmarket, with prisoners being kept in the south prison, either ahead of appearing in the adjacent courts or after sentencing. But the area can lay another claim to being the black heart of the city – for this was where the gallows were erected come execution day.

Today, at the mouth of Glasgow Green, there is an archway that once formed part of the Assembly Room building in Ingram Street. Partly designed by Robert and James Adam and built in 1796, the Assembly Rooms were the centre of Glasgow’s social life for half a century (superceding the old Tontine Hotel near the Tolbooth at the Cross) before it was demolished to make way for the city’s main post office.

Its central archway, however, was retained and eventually rebuilt on Glasgow Green. Its current situation bore very little relation to the colour and gaiety of the Assembly Rooms for it was here, between 1814 and 1865, that Glasgow staged its public executions.

The McLennan arch at the mouth off Glasgow Green on the Saltmarket. It looks as if it has always been there but it was not erected here until 1991.

‘You will die facing the monument’ became a well-known Glasgow expression during this time, for one of the last things the condemned saw was Nelson’s column reaching to the heavens from Glasgow Green. In 1819, murderer John Buchanan sought to confound the prophecy which had been laid on him by a friend. He vowed he would never die facing the monument and when he found himself on the scaffold he kept his word by turning to the side.

One man, though, may have ultimately seen a little bit more … and caused panic in a university dissecting room in the process.  

Lanarkshire miner Matthew Clydesdale had killed an 80-year-old old man with a pick axe and was sentenced to hang on 4 November, 1818 with his body to be ‘delivered up by the magistrates of Glasgow, or their officers, to Dr James Jeffrey, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Glasgow, there to be publicly dissected and anatomised.’  Such was the practice then, for trainee doctors and surgeons needed cadavers for research purposes and society at large frowned on the opening up of anyone other than convicted murderers or unbaptised foundlings.

Clydesdale’s execution went without a hitch, courtesy of Glasgow hangman Thomas Young, and the body placed in a cart to be escorted by soldiers to the college dissecting rooms at the top of the High Street. One of the legal stipulations of the sentence was that the dissection could be viewed not just by students and medical men but any members of the general public interested in such a grisly spectacle so there was generally a number of curious laymen packed into the seating area. This time, though, they were in for a shock.

Clydesdale’s body, his face still covered in the white cap, his hands and feet still tied, was laid on the table. So far, so routine. But then there was a change, for instead of Dr Jeffrey slicing and dicing his way through the corpse, it was lifted again, placed in an armchair and the bindings cut away. Into one nostril was placed an air tube, the other end of the tube attached to a bellows and the corpse wired up to an early form of electric battery, known as a voltaic pile.

The object of the exercise about to be carried out by Dr Andrew Ure, Professor of Natural Philosophy, was galvanism, a test of the nervous system, which saw new-fangled electricity being used to seemingly reanimate dead tissue. That same year, author Mary Shelley used the theory to allow her fictional Dr Frankenstein to create the famed creature. When the bellows were blown, Clydesdale’s chest appeared to heave until the corpse seemed to breathe on its own. Then when the battery was activated, a leg shot out with such force that it almost knocked over a student standing nearby. The dead man’s face began to contort and twitch, some swore that it flashed them a ghastly grin. Some accounts state that the eyes opened and the arms and legs moved until finally the cadaver began to rise from the chair but this was a tale that grew in the telling.

Nevertheless, what they did see terrified many of the spectators. Dr Ure later wrote that many of them attempted to flee. ‘One gentleman fainted,’ he noted wryly. The exhibition came to an end when, reports state, Dr Jeffrey seized a lancet (a long surgical needle) and plunged it into Clydesdale’s jugular vein. The creature fell to the floor ‘like a slaughtered ox on the blow of a butcher.’ Apparently – and perhaps not surprisingly – such shocking, not to mention blasphemous, scenes ensured that it was the last time the Glasgow magistrates allowed a felon’s corpse to be sent to the dissecting table. The anatomists in search of knowledge would have to find other means of obtaining their raw materials.

The murderous acts of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1820 did lead to a relaxation of the rules regarding cadavers for the dissection tables but writer Andrew Aird in 1894 recalled fears that there remained ‘cruel men’ in the city’s ‘dark and lonely places’ who ‘lay lurking about supplied with plasters which they stuck over the mouths of such persons as came near them, and whom they put to death….carrying the dead bodies to the dissecting rooms of hospitals or giving them to doctors as “subjects” for dissection. I recollect it was the custom for timorous people when passing the wynds to put their hands upon their mouths, so as to ward off the death-dealing plaster.’

For a time, hangmen in Glasgow were known by their his uniform of a yellow-buttoned blue coat and a blood red collar. One holder of the office. One who didn’t was Archibald McArthur, known as ‘Buffy’. However, it was not vampires he slew but the city’s thieves and murderers. McArthur was just over five foot tall, stout, bandy-legged with a ‘big bullet-shaped head.’ He was said to have been ‘a good-natured, inoffensive creature’, despite his unhappy home life – his wife was known to enjoy a good drink, while his hunchbacked son died young in the Infirmary. The council provided his family with a home in South Montrose Street, near the Ramshorn Kirk, but the post of hangie – or Finisher of the Law – was not a popular one, even though it was his job to despatch rogues into eternity. Mobs took to attacking his home so he moved to an almshouse in the High Street. He died, aged 40, like his son in the Infirmary.

His successor was Tam Young was something of a legend in what was a tight little noose of executioners. The lanky finisher became well-known in the city for the calm, dispassionate way he sent his customers to their doom.

He was a Borderer who was an unemployed labourer in the Calton area when, in 1814, he spotted a newspaper advertisement for the post of Glasgow hangman. Tam took up the position at a salary of £52 per year, plus a guinea for every execution. In addition to a house – within the grounds of the prison, to keep him safe from the ire of the mob – the council also agreed to provide him with two new pairs of shoes every year as well as coal and candles. As additional protection against assault, Tam kept two dogs by his side, one a giant Newfoundland he named ‘Hero’. Over the next 23 years he sent 56 people in Glasgow to their doom – one of them beheaded – and a further 14 in other parts of the country. He was also responsible for administering the public floggings, an event possibly even more horrendous than the sight of a hanging. 

In 1822, Edward Hand was sentenced to be whipped through the streets of Glasgow having been found guilty of an assault in Greenock. He was to receive 80 strokes, twenty at the prison, twenty at Stockwell Street, twenty at Glassford Street and the final twenty at the Cross. If he survived this brutal treatment then he was to be banished for life.

Tam may have been a quiet soul but he was not slow in coming forward when he thought he was not receiving his due or being treated with disrespect. In this instance, he disputed with the magistrates over who should carry out the task of tying Hand to the cart that would wheel him around the town. Part of his duties may have been to perform labouring duties around the jail but this, Young believed, was beneath his station as public executioner. He also queried who it was that would carry the spare cat o’nine tails.

The two issues were resolved, Hand was finally bound to the cart and the portage of the whip was solved by tying it to the end of the cart. Satisfied, Young carried out his office, watched by a large crowd. His naked back lacerated by the eighty strokes, Hand survived and was duly banished. It was the second time that year such a punishment was meted out in Glasgow, while in 1825, cotton spinner John Kean received a similar punishment for attempting to murder a fellow worker. His full eighty strokes, however, were delivered on a platform in front of the prison.

Tam Young died in 1837 following a long illness. The city never appointed an official executioner after that, although there were hangings a-plenty. 

To be continued…

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17Oct

You Will Die Facing the Monument – Part 1

Posted by: douglasskelton3 Categories: blog entry
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Another series of extracts from Glasgow’s Black Heart, my history of the city’s crime and punishment, now out of print.

This time I’m looking at the area between Glasgow Cross and the river, which became the centre of the judicial process. Here were jails, courts – and execution sites.

Part 1 looks at the old Tolbooth.

Apart from the few cells in the police headquarters, Glasgow’s prison provision was catered for by the Tolbooth, built in 1626 on the site of an older structure, and in the next century, a ‘Bridewell’ – a House of Correction – in Duke Street. In addition to crooks, the jails also had to cater for vagabonds and debtors. The Tolbooth jailer was also expected to supply coals for the council and court meetings but in addition to his salary he received monies from the prisoners themselves, particularly the debtors.

In the jail’s early days, for the first eight days incarceration, he could demand two shillings Scots or tuppence a day if the inmate was a townsman or four shillings Scots, fourpence a day, if they were ‘Outintownsmen’. After eight days he received whatever the magistrate decided. Fees for beggars and vagabonds were also fixed by the serving magistrate but were kept low as these were paid out of the public purse. From 1696, the Scottish Parliament passed an Act of Grace which decreed that the creditor at whose hands the debtor was jailed also had to pay towards his or her upkeep. However, not every jailer profited from the arrangement. In 1661, the city treasurer was ordered by the council to give jailer Charles McCleane £20 Scots or One pound, 13 shillings and fourpence Sterling ‘for his extraordinary pains in keeping the Tolbooth and getting no profit thereby, having only thieves and lounes (insane persons) as prisoners.’ 

Prisoners, meanwhile, were allowed to supplement their funds by begging from the windows. They did this by lowering a bag or a basket with a length of rope to the street in the hope that a friend, relative or a kind-hearted stranger would drop in a few pennies. On one occasion, an inmate thrust his head out to see if anyone was making a deposit to his jail fund and ended up wedged between the bars on the window. As a punishment, the jailer left him in that position for some time before he sent someone to cut him free. Naturally, other implements could also be placed in the makeshift hoist, implements that may well have been used in furthering the many escape attempts. In October 1791, convicted thief James Plunkett escaped from the Tolbooth. He was rearrested on 25 November when he tried to steal four pairs of silk stockings from a shop on the Trongate. He was chased into the Saltmarket where he was caught when he stumbled over a bag of stones which was to be used for building a causeway. Determined not to be returned to the jail, he tried to pull his pistol but his pursuers managed to disarm him. He knew the jig was up when someone in the crowd recognised him as the prisoner who had fled the jail the month before, even though he had tried to disguise himself by cutting his hair.

The Tolbooth buildings had first been erected in 1626. All that is left now is the 113 foot high steeple with its four-dial clock. It is imposing enough today, sited in the centre of the confluence of High Street, Trongate, Gallowgate and Saltmarket but in the 17th to 19th centuries it must have been a most impressive sight. And it needed to be, for it was not only the centre of civic authority, but also the symbol of judicial power.  The sheriff court met once a week and, along with the police court, dealt with relatively minor offences. Often the sheriff or the magistrate presiding sat on the bench reading a newspaper or even drinking, paying little heed to the proceedings and only looking up to pass sentence, generally guilty. It was left to a clerk to make sure everything ran smoothly. There was no permanent High Court of Justiciary sitting in Glasgow so more serious cases were dealt with by the West Circuit Court which arrived in the city every April and September amid great pomp and ceremony and situated itself in a room that formed part of the Tolbooth complex. The old judges, more used to the comforts and splendour of Edinburgh, found coming to Glasgow something of a chore. The old building was somewhat cramped, what with the burgeoning civic authority and the legal hierarchy all sharing the same ground with the ever-growing band of miscreants. By 1807, there were just under 2000 criminal cases being heard each and every year. Punishments were swift and hard and not every sentence entailed prison for any length of time. Serious cases, which could include some petty thefts, meant death by hanging (from the Tolbooth condemned cell those who were about to die could salute the gallows paraphernalia dangling from the steeple). Whipping was also common – a record from 1575 said that the common hangman was paid five shillings ‘for scourging of ane hussy throw the town.’ Men could be nailed by an ear to a post and could only get free if they could were able to pull or cut the nail out. A few took the opportunity to wrench their head clear. But others could have their liberty removed for periods of time – and that was the cause of the serious overcrowding. 

By 1807 the old jail was deemed insufficient for purpose. The prison population had exploded to four times the number it could comfortably house and its 32 cells were crammed with criminals and debtors from Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dunbartonshire awaiting trial. Sanitary conditions were intolerable, even in those days when the most basic conditions were something akin to luxury.

Just over a century later, a speaker at the Old Glasgow Club told his audience, ‘Innocent and guilty, young and old, diseased and infirm were confined together, without courtyards for exercise, chapel or infirmary. No wonder that jail fever (typhus) was a scourge, and incarceration was not only punishment, but a direct cause of degradation to those who were convicted of a first offence and not beyond redemption.’

The gentlemen of the town council approached Parliament for the funds to build a new prison but were refused, so the magistrates and bailies resolved to go it alone. They had grand plans – the new facility would house not only a jail but a court house, for the increase in the number arrests obviously had a knock-on effect on the business of trials and sentencing. And a site had been selected that was thought ideal, although as author Bill Knox wrote, ‘their choice was hardly a beauty spot.’

TO BE CONTINUED…

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3Mar

Duke Street Prison TV spot

Posted by: douglasskelton3 Categories: blog entry
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During 2015 I presented some short video features for STV Glasgow on true crime. In the media section of the site you can find links to a couple of them but here’s another.

Duke Street Prison is no longer there. Believe it or not I’m not old enough to remember it ever being there. But like all prisons it has tales to tell. I can only scratch the surface in a three minute piece but there are more in my book ‘Glasgow’s Black Heart.’

If you can stomach seeing me (I’ve got a great face for radio), here’s the link to the feature:

Duke Street Prison

 

Thanks to STV Glasgow and Marco Federici for this.

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17Jun

Setting your baby free

Posted by: douglasskelton3 Categories: blog entry
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So I’ve got a new book coming out. I may have mentioned it once or twice.

Authors can be an anxious bunch at the best of times but more so when they’ve a new title about to hit the shelves.

They’ve sweated over every word, they’ve laboured over every sentence, they’ve strained over every chapter. It’s taken months of blood and tears, of writing and rewriting and chopping and changing and slicing and dicing until, finally, the printed book is in their hands and about to be unleashed on the world.

The launch comes first. That’s when you sit in front of an audience, generally made up of people who know you but ‘proper’ readers are always welcome, and you talk about yourself and your book. They’re fun affairs, very relaxed, and the publishers generally provide free wine, which proves an attraction to friends and relatives who are fed up hearing you talk.

After that, the book’s out there on its own. Your baby, fending for itself with bloggers and reviewers, fighting for breathing room on bookshop shelves, desperate to be face out but often finding itself spine out, until the author or some gallant friends come along and fix things.

Worry lines

I’m sure there are authors who don’t give a tup’penny damn whether people like their books. They may be so certain that people will buy them that they can breeze through this process with a song in their heart and a confident smile on their lips.

I’m not one of them and I don’t know any authors who think that.

I worry. I mean, real worry. I even seek solace in whisky. Okay, I do that even when I’ve not got a book out.

Here’s what goes through my head …

Is it good enough?

Will they like it?

Will it sell?

Does it make sense?

Will it get good reviews?

Will it get ANY reviews?

Will it sell?

Is it too sweary?

Is it too violent?

Should I have taken that sex scene out?

Should I have kept the aliens/dinosaurs/vampires/zombies/superheroes/animated characters in?

And finally…

WILL IT SELL?

My sleepless nights began on Monday night. It’s now Wednesday. The launch is tomorrow.

Now, where’s that whisky..?

Devil’s Knock will be launched in Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow at 7pm. Entry is free but we may charge a fee to get back out again! If you’d like to go, and you are most welcome, please phone the store on 0141 248 4814.

Caron Macpherson of Waterstones Argyle Street introduces Michael J. Malone and Douglas Skelton at the launch of 'Crow Bait' in 2014.

Caron Macpherson of Waterstones Argyle Street introduces Michael J. Malone and Douglas Skelton at the launch of ‘Crow Bait’ in 2014.

 

 

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