Oscar Slater faced one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Scottish policing history. It is commonly believed that London was the first place in the world to have a police force but it was actually Glasgow.
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00:00It's an incredibly complex and murky case of bad policing, bad forensic science.
00:08A lot of people think that Robert Peel invented policing in 1829 in London,
00:13but Glasgow had a police force in 1800 when Robert Peel was a 12-year-old schoolboy,
00:19and there was another 18 police forces set up throughout the UK before Peel's police.
00:25So it's one of these historical myths that Peel was in fact the inventor of policing.
00:30This is Alistair Dinsmore, founder of the Glasgow Police Museum.
00:34He worked as an inspector of Strathclyde Police from 1965 before retiring in 1998.
00:39The contents of the museum were acquired by Dinsmore's own personal efforts,
00:44from scouring the internet to local libraries.
00:46He tells the story of Britain's first police force over the course of 175 years
00:52through artefacts, stories and images.
00:55Alistair told us a bit about the history of Glasgow policing from his records
00:59and introduced us to some of the most famous cases in Glasgow.
01:02Once things are put into books, they become fact in people's eyes,
01:07and a lot of the history etc in bygone days, especially in the 19th century,
01:15was published in England, London particularly,
01:19where all the people doing that sort of stuff lived.
01:24So the research north of Watford was non-existent,
01:28so they really just thought this was where things started and accepted it.
01:34It's commonly believed that the first police force was founded in London,
01:37but it wasn't, it was actually founded here in Glasgow.
01:39Scottish policing dates back to 1617,
01:42when the first constables were appointed,
01:44though borough police forces were not established until the 19th century.
01:48The role of these earliest police officers
01:50was to replace the town guards of citizens or old soldiers.
01:53The first Police Act was passed here in Glasgow in 1800.
01:57Glasgow appointed their first detective in 1819.
02:03His name was Peter McKinley.
02:04He had been promoted to lieutenant, which was a supervisory role,
02:08but he was one of three at that time made lieutenants,
02:12but he was appointed criminal officer,
02:15and that meant that he had one of his responsibilities
02:18was to deal with the crime and to interview the people and investigate.
02:24Two years later, he got an assistant in 1821,
02:29and they formed the Glasgow Criminal Department,
02:32and that was a forerunner of what we know today as the CID,
02:36and they gradually grew into quite a formidable force,
02:45and they were able to deal with a lot of crimes,
02:51a lot of criminals as well,
02:53because they had to be controlled too,
02:57and surveillance put on them if they were suspected,
03:01et cetera, so they needed numbers.
03:03And in the 1930s, there was a forensic department opened in Glasgow
03:10which dealt with the scientific side of things,
03:14fingerprints and all these kind of things,
03:17and they moved through the Second World War.
03:22Now, women were brought into the police,
03:26there was a woman appointed as a policewoman in 1915,
03:30Emily Miller, and after the First World War,
03:34the numbers of policewomen gradually grew,
03:37and by 1924, they had 11 policewomen,
03:41but they were always in plain clothes,
03:43and they were attached to the CID
03:45and to investigate crimes involving women and children,
03:50and it was a very successful way of doing it,
03:53and by the time the Second World War ended,
03:57there was some of the policewomen were given uniforms
04:01and put out to divisions to do similar work there,
04:04but also as a way of having a woman officer available
04:10for interviewing women and children.
04:13So it's an evolution rather than an instant idea.
04:17You know, everything takes time in most big organisations,
04:21and although the 19th century was,
04:24sort of remained the same pretty much,
04:27the 20th century certainly brought in change,
04:30and we are seeing the benefits today.
04:34In 1811, there were three English criminals
04:38who came up to Glasgow,
04:40and they took a room in a boarding house,
04:43and they would go out at night
04:45and break into the Paisley Union Bank in Ingram Street,
04:49where the locked boxes,
04:52there's no big safes in these days,
04:54and it was big strong boxes,
04:56and they had blank keys
04:58and tried to work out how to get into them,
05:00and then they would send the keys down to London
05:02to a blacksmith who filed pieces off them
05:05and sent them back up by coach,
05:07and they did this for about three or four weeks
05:09until they had the keys that fitted,
05:11and on the 13th of July, 1811,
05:14they decided to break in and steal the money.
05:18So they did that,
05:19and they got away down to London,
05:21and it was 45,000 pounds in gold, silver, and banknotes.
05:25Now that's the equivalent to 12 and a half million today.
05:29So they got down to London,
05:31and the Glasgow police didn't know who had broken in
05:35until the lady who had rented the room to them
05:38said that one day she had been sent to the coach house
05:42with a package by one of the men
05:44to send by coach to London.
05:47So they looked at the register in the coach house
05:49and found that it went to the blacksmith as the addressee,
05:54and they contacted the Bow Street runners
05:59who were court officers down in London
06:03who did warrants, et cetera,
06:05and they arrested them,
06:07but unfortunately, they paid them money to get away.
06:12So that meant that the three men were on the loose again,
06:15but in 1819, one of the men, James McCool,
06:19came to Edinburgh,
06:21and he was trying to bank some of the banknotes from the robbery,
06:25and the chief of police at Leith,
06:28who had been a Bow Street runner,
06:31heard he was in town and arrested him for the robbery,
06:34and he was tried at Edinburgh High Court
06:37and found guilty and sentenced to death,
06:40but unfortunately, he took poison a few days before
06:44and cheated the hangman.
06:46Yeah, interesting.
06:49We've had various other crimes.
06:51We've had bombings in Glasgow.
06:531883, we had bombings.
06:55An Irish group wanted to do political bombings,
07:00and Archie Carmichael at that time
07:03was a detective inspector,
07:05and he was highly thought of and very clever,
07:09and he was known as Glasgow's Sherlock Holmes.
07:11So when the bombings took place,
07:14an expert had told the police
07:16that it had been chemicals
07:17that had been used to cause the explosions
07:20because they had blown up a gas tank
07:22over in the south side of the city,
07:25and they had put a bomb on the aqueduct
07:28trying to blow the bridge
07:30that would carry the canal and flood the city.
07:33So it was a serious incident.
07:35So Archie Carmichael was told
07:37that the chemicals would have come from Europe
07:41because there was nobody made
07:42these volatile chemicals in Britain.
07:45So he went over to Europe
07:46and he found the factory in Antwerp in Belgium
07:50which had made the chemicals
07:51and supplied them to Glasgow.
07:53So he followed the paper trail back to Glasgow
07:56and arrested six men for the bombings,
07:59and they all got life imprisonment.
08:01And Archie Carmichael got a medal
08:04and a financial 20 pounds as a reward from the city,
08:09along with other officers,
08:11to thank them for ridding the city of the bombers.
08:15The police are important.
08:18They were more important perhaps in the early days
08:22because that was the only people,
08:24it was one of the only people
08:25that the residents of the area could turn to.
08:30Nowadays there's so many different organisations
08:33that take responsibility for various aspects
08:36of social care and social life.
08:39But the police is important
08:41because it's got to be there
08:43and be able to respond to crimes, etc.
08:49And we're seeing new ideas coming in with Police Scotland
08:53which I don't necessarily agree with,
08:56but they make their decisions.
08:59But the way it was done,
09:02probably me being a bit of a dinosaur
09:05as far as policing is concerned,
09:07at least the public were getting a service
09:10that they appreciated.
09:12And we see that here in the museum.
09:14We get people of all ages coming in
09:16and even the older ones like myself,
09:21the older visitors always say,
09:24oh, I remember the policeman
09:25and my beat officer around the streets and that.
09:28And if you did anything,
09:29they would clip you in the ear
09:30and you wouldn't dare tell your parents
09:32you got a clip in the ear
09:34because they would give you another clip
09:36for getting it, for being in trouble.
09:38So it was a nice balance.
09:41It was a nice balance
09:42that families looked after their children.
09:45And it wasn't just the rich people or that.
09:48A lot of the poor families were really law-abiding
09:52and had a social conscience.
09:56That's when we talk about people
09:58being able to leave their doors open
10:00and things like that.
10:01And that was true in these days.
10:02But that's gone now.
10:04But the police is still important
10:06to respond to the needs of the community.
10:10And we try to show what it was like
10:14and hope that if you know what things happened before,
10:18that the same mistakes won't be made again.
10:21One of my first memories from when I was a child
10:23is learning how to dial 999 in an emergency
10:26and ask for the police.
10:27Personally, I can't really imagine a life
10:30without the police as an institution
10:32in the background somewhere.
10:33It's really interesting then to think of police
10:36as only part of recent history.
10:38The foundations upon which they work,
10:40the structures that are in place,
10:42how they operate,
10:43considering police are one of the most powerful forces
10:46in the country.
10:47It's all built on less than two centuries of practice.
10:50This is why some cases stick out
10:51and grab our interests more than others do.
10:54Occasionally, the police run into a situation
10:56where they have little or no prior experience.
10:58And it's usually only time that judges their response.
11:01And these anecdotes can be monumental
11:03in shaping the way things are run
11:05and how they approach future situations.
11:07One such case is that of Oscar Slater,
11:09who faced what some consider
11:11to be the biggest miscarriage of justice
11:13in Scottish policing history.
11:14A few years ago,
11:16I got pretty obsessed with the Oscar Slater case
11:21because it's a really interesting case
11:23that has loads of elements to it.
11:25Essentially, the case revolves around
11:30what was probably a murder-robbery
11:34that kind of went wrong in 1908 in Glasgow.
11:41And a woman called Marion Gilchrist
11:46was murdered in her front room
11:50in quite mysterious circumstances.
11:54On the 21st of December, 1908,
11:56an 83-year-old woman named Marion Gilchrist
11:59was brutally murdered in her first-floor flat
12:02in the West End of Glasgow.
12:05She was a rich woman,
12:06having been the sole inheritor of her father's will,
12:09despite having sisters who were passed down nothing.
12:11She was never married
12:12and lived only with her young housekeeper, Helen Lambie.
12:15Her murder took place when Lambie lived with her mother.
12:18She was a young woman,
12:20Helen Lambie.
12:21Her murder took place when Lambie left the flat
12:23following supper to collect a newspaper.
12:26Following a trial,
12:27Slater was found guilty of the murder in May 1909.
12:31He spent 17 years in Peterhead Prison,
12:34much of it in solitary confinement.
12:37If you read the trial transcripts
12:39and all the press reports,
12:41essentially she was locked in her apartment
12:46when the murder took place,
12:48as in, how did somebody get in?
12:50Suspicion fell on her maid that she had.
12:56The very fact that she had a maid in 1908
12:59kind of tells you a bit about what class she was.
13:01There was allegedly a couple of items of jewellery missing,
13:05but kind of later on,
13:06they weren't very sure if that was true or not.
13:08And the police were under a bit of pressure
13:11to find out who did this,
13:13and it was a horrible murder.
13:16This is number 49, Queen's Terrace,
13:18West Regent Street in Glasgow's West End.
13:21Inside the first floor flat
13:22is where Miss Gilchrist met her demise
13:24on the 21st of December 1908.
13:27She inherited the home from her father
13:29along with her wealth.
13:30She lived here with only her housemaid, Helen Lambie.
13:34Just down the street, some 200 yards away,
13:36is where Oscar Slater resided on George Street
13:39and left in the days following the murder.
13:42While they are in close proximity,
13:44Slater claims he never met Gilchrist,
13:46which is likely true as she was known
13:48to rarely leave the house,
13:50nor did they socialise in the same circles.
13:55The one thing about the Oscar Slater case
13:57is loads of mistakes were made as the case went along.
14:03Not just policing mistakes,
14:04there was mistakes in how the case was dealt with
14:08by forensic medical examiners, forensic officers.
14:13So there was lots of problems,
14:15lots of false information, false leads.
14:18But it was a grisly murder of an old lady
14:21who hadn't done anything wrong,
14:24so the police wanted to investigate it.
14:27They kind of put their ear to the ground
14:30in the Glasgow underworld
14:32and they learnt that a man called Oscar Slater
14:39had fled to America
14:43and they sort of did a little bit of digging
14:45into his background
14:47and they decided that he looked like a very good suspect
14:51and why would he flee all of a sudden to America
14:55when he didn't really need to do that
14:59and his business that he ran were in Glasgow.
15:04So they track him all the way to America
15:07and they even send a couple of supposed witnesses
15:14to America to do a line-up,
15:16but even that was flawed
15:17because the police, when they were in America,
15:21showed the witnesses a picture of Oscar Slater
15:24and then said, let's do a line-up.
15:25They already knew what to look for, if you like, in line-up.
15:29So I think they thought Oscar Slater
15:31wasn't a very nice person
15:33and they kind of tried to retrofit the evidence.
15:37What's fascinating about this case
15:39is how Slater was even convicted in the first place.
15:42He had no connection to Miss Gilchrist
15:44and there was nothing to suggest they'd even met.
15:47Even initial investigations suggested the murderer
15:50was someone the woman knew.
15:52Miss Gilchrist had been paranoid about burglars and intruders
15:55during the months previous to her death
15:58and so the door was always locked.
16:00There was no other entry point and no signs of break-in.
16:03Whoever came into the flat was let in,
16:05meaning they had to be familiar with the inhabitants.
16:08Slater was also seen walking near his home on George Street,
16:12calmly and casually, moments after it would have took place,
16:15from a witness who only knew him by acquaintance.
16:18They had no motivation to lie.
16:21Someone who had just committed a murder
16:23would likely be emotional.
16:25Nothing was stolen from the home
16:27apart from a brooch and some papers,
16:29despite the fact Miss Gilchrist
16:31had a large collection of valuable jewellery,
16:33which would be the only plausible motivation for Slater.
16:37The beating she took was so extreme,
16:39a doctor at the scene said
16:41it would have only took a tenth of the blow to have killed her,
16:44pointing to a scenario that the attack was personal,
16:47rooted in history between the murderer and victim.
16:51Oscar Slater was a Jewish German man
16:53who left his home country and moved to London
16:55during the early 1890s
16:58and many believe the motivation behind this
17:00was to escape mandatory military service.
17:03He then moved to Edinburgh and then Glasgow,
17:06also spending time in New York.
17:08On official documents,
17:10he declared himself as a dentist and dealer of rare jewels,
17:13though evidence does suggest
17:15he made an income as a gambler and a pimp.
17:18His unsavoury career choices,
17:21combined with his racial background,
17:23particularly during this period before the First World War,
17:26when antisemitism was brewing across Europe,
17:29our thoughts have contributed
17:30as to why he was treated as he was
17:33during the police investigation
17:35and why his character was up for debate.
17:38Even the move to the US in the days following
17:40did not seem suspicious
17:42once the circumstances around it were analysed.
17:45Slater was not native to Glasgow,
17:47he was there for work.
17:48However, work was not as lucrative as he had hoped,
17:51as he wrote in a letter to a friend in the States.
17:54He had been to New York before
17:55and for some time had been vocal on his ambition to return.
17:59He was offered some work,
18:01of which there was written evidence
18:02that police decided to ignore in their investigation,
18:05and so because he didn't really have anyone
18:07or anything that depended on him in Glasgow,
18:10he decided to set off as soon as he could.
18:12None of the three witnesses outrightly said
18:14that Oscar Slater was the man they saw
18:17on the night of the murder.
18:18At most, they said he resembled them.
18:20There were also circumstances around his move
18:22and how he approached it
18:23that on surface level may be considered shifty,
18:26but when you look into them more, they make sense.
18:29Slater had told the two women moving into his flat
18:32he was moving to Europe and not the US.
18:34However, he was subletting the property,
18:36which was illegal.
18:37Also, these women were sex workers,
18:40which would also be looked down upon.
18:42Slater had rented the furniture in the apartment
18:44from a local business,
18:46and it's clear he did not intend on returning it.
18:48It makes sense he didn't want it to be widely known
18:51where he was going.
18:52His morals may not have aligned
18:53with the society he existed within,
18:56and he may have bended the law on occasion,
18:58but it was not his character that was on trial,
19:00and these weren't motivations
19:02for the specific crime that was committed.
19:04And this meant they ignored a lot of stuff,
19:06they didn't investigate a lot of stuff,
19:09and slowly but surely things started to unravel.
19:14So eventually Oscar Slater is prosecuted
19:17and he's found guilty
19:18and he is sentenced to life imprisonment.
19:24And the key kind of detective leading the case
19:28was a man called John Thompson Trench,
19:31and he started to have doubts
19:35about whether Oscar Slater was essentially a patsy,
19:39which means someone put up to be guilty of something
19:43that he wasn't guilty of
19:44just because he fitted the bill
19:47of what kind of person the police were looking for.
19:50And of course the fact that Oscar Slater was Jewish
19:55and this was 1908
19:58probably added to the police's view of him.
20:04Over time, lots of quite famous well-to-do people
20:07like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
20:09the writer of Sherlock Holmes,
20:12William Roughead, a famous Scottish legal person,
20:16campaigned to say,
20:18look, there's all this other evidence
20:19which shows that Oscar Slater couldn't have done the murder.
20:24So for instance, they timed how fast he could run
20:29or somebody could run from the victim's house
20:33to where Oscar Slater was last seen on the night in question,
20:38and everybody struggled to do the run.
20:41They thought it was impossible.
20:43And other evidence which actually pointed to members of her family
20:48to do the murder
20:49because of cutting them out of her will and so on and so forth.
20:53So there was at least some sort of motive
20:55rather than a random robbery.
20:59Then eventually, with pressure mounting,
21:04the Oscar Slater case was reviewed on appeal
21:07and it was one of the first, I think,
21:08if not the first case of its kind to be reviewed on appeal
21:12because the law changed to enable this to happen.
21:17A sort of panel of judges viewed the case
21:20and on a really flimsy technicality
21:24that really wasn't what it should have been
21:28in terms of disproving Oscar Slater's guilt,
21:32on some legal technicality, he was admonished.
21:36So he was let out of jail.
21:40An innocent man after serving a long time in prison
21:47and during that time he got quite ill and so on and so forth.
21:53And he was given next to no compensation for this.
21:57It's an incredibly complex and murky case of anti-Semitism,
22:03bad policing, bad forensic science.
22:08Thomas Tufhill's investigation on the case
22:10points to Gilchrist's nephew as the murderer
22:14due to an anonymous letter received by police
22:16from a woman who claimed she knew what happened.
22:18She told officers to look for a death notice
22:20of one of Gilchrist's relatives in the newspaper
22:23in the months following the crime,
22:25explaining the man had faked his own death
22:27and moved to New Zealand.
22:28There was a death notice that of Wingate Biddle,
22:31Gilchrist's late sister's son,
22:33who she had recently removed off of her will.
22:35He was on record for being questioned by the police
22:38on the crime within a London address
22:40in the days following,
22:41though it was later realised that the person
22:43they spoke to may have been posing as Biddle.
22:46The letter also claimed that Helen Lambie,
22:48the housemaid, was having an affair with Biddle
22:51and was the one who let him in the apartment
22:53under the impression he was going to speak to Marion
22:56and convince her to put him back on the will.
22:59Lambie had gossiped in social circles
23:01that her new man was about to get very rich
23:04and take her abroad.
23:05And there's a few sort of anecdotal pieces of evidence
23:10through conversations which point to the Biddle side
23:15of her family.
23:16They went with the intent of either
23:18to make her change her will
23:20or they went to rob her of,
23:23she had sort of costume jewellery
23:26and they were disturbed they ended up killing her
23:28and fleeing the scene.
23:29But also the nature of how she was killed.
23:32In a robbery you would do the minimum amount of violence
23:36to get away clean.
23:40You wouldn't inflict numerous blows to somebody.
23:44You'd do what you had to do
23:45and then you'd get out of there.
23:46This person took a long time
23:49to inflict violence on Mrs Gilchrist
23:51and usually that only occurs
23:54when the person knows the other person.