Similar, too, is a generalizing tendency, where Fox’s historical knowledge skates on thin ice. Fox, seemingly to forestall this harsh truth, several times suggests a comparison to the cover-up in the Dreyfus case she also cites a former police inspector who said Gilchrist’s murder was “without parallel in criminal history.” This overstatement does more harm than would a quiet acknowledgment that Conan Doyle’s involvement was the only thing preventing Gilchrist’s murder from falling into a pit of oblivion. It was nasty and brutal, but it wasn’t, in and of itself, interesting. The problem is the sheer ordinariness of the crime. (Conan Doyle dryly pointed out that this was the case for “practically every man in Scotland.”) It would be about another two years before Conan Doyle’s interest in the case was piqued, and he published “The Case of Oscar Slater,” detailing some of its more egregious elements: the lack of any evidence that Slater knew of Gilchrist and her jewels the police’s assertion that the murder weapon was the hammer Slater had bought to make repairs to his flat, yet without any evidence that this bloody tool had stained his clothes when he carried it away again the claim that the reason the jewels were untouched was that Slater, a stranger, did not know where they were. Not remotely daunted, the police, as Fox so neatly summarizes, followed the (il)logical syllogism: “All murders are committed by undesirables Oscar Slater is an undesirable therefore, Oscar Slater committed the Gilchrist murder.”Īnd so in 1909, after a brief and farcically prejudiced trial, Slater was convicted.
When the pawnbroker was located, however, Gilchrist’s maid was firm: The brooch he held was not the one belonging to her mistress. Why, the man was even living under a fake name and was planning to leave the country - all the evidence they needed to conclude he was a criminal ready to flee. Searching for the stolen diamond brooch, the police heard of a man attempting to sell a pawn ticket for exactly that, and they thought they had hit the jackpot. The police thought he was a pimp, in part because his music-hall entertainer girlfriend was said, shockingly, to entertain men at home in his absence. On one of those stays he had married an alcoholic Glaswegian, and now, to avoid her demands for money, he had taken an assumed name. Slater was 36, a cheery rolling stone who had previously lived in New York, Paris, Brussels and in Glasgow at least twice before.
Or was it? It was the missing brooch that doomed Oscar Slater. The crime seemed impulsive, and not for gain. A doctor identified a chair leg as the murder weapon money lying in plain sight was untouched, as was Miss Gilchrist’s substantial jewelry collection, save for a single diamond brooch. Inside, they found a battered and dying Miss Gilchrist. On the last night of Marion Gilchrist’s life, the elderly woman was left alone when her maid went to fetch the evening newspaper on her return, the maid met a neighbor, alerted by noise overhead and the sight of a man rushing past on the stairs.
The murder took place around Christmas 1908, and was both brutal and tawdry.