She Stands Accused

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I am persuaded that the reason why so many women murderers have
made use of poison in their killings is primarily a simple one, a
matter of physique. The average murderess, determined on the
elimination of, for example, a husband, must be aware that in
physical encounter she would have no chance. Then, again, there
is in women an almost inborn aversion to the use of weapons.
Once in a way, where the murderess was of Amazonian type,
physical means have been employed for the slaying.

In this regard Kate Webster, who in 1879 at Richmond murdered and
dismembered Mrs Julia Thomas, springs to mind. She was, from all
accounts, an exceedingly virile young woman, strong as a pony,
and with a devil of a temper. Mr Elliot O'Donnell, dealing with
her in his essay in the ``Notable British Trials'' series, seems
to be rather at a loss, considering her lack of physical beauty,
to account for her attractiveness to men and to her own sex. But
there is no need to account for it. Such a thing is no
phenomenon.

I myself, sitting in a taberna in a small Spanish port, was once
pestered by a couple of British seamen to interpret for them in
their approaches to the daughter of the house. This woman, who
had a voice like a raven, seemed able to give quick and snappy
answers to the chaff by frequenters of the taberna. Few people
in the day-time, either men or women, would pass the house if
'Fina happened to be showing without stopping to have a word with
her. She was not at all gentle in manner, but children ran to
her. And yet, without being enormously fat, 'Fina must have
weighed close on fifteen stone. She had forearms and biceps like
a coal-heaver's. She was black-haired, heavy-browed,
squish-nosed, moled, and swarthy, and she had a beard and
moustache far beyond the stage of incipiency. Yet those two
British seamen, fairly decent men, neither drunk nor brutish,
could not have been more attracted had 'Fina had the beauty of
the Mona Lisa herself. I may add that there were other women
handy and that the seamen knew of them.

This in parenthesis, I hope not inappropriately.

Where the selected victim, or victims, is, or are, feeble-bodied
you will frequently find the murderess using physical means to
her end. Sarah Malcolm, whose case will form one of the chief
features of this volume, is an instance in point. Marguerite
Diblanc, who strangled Mme Reil in the latter's house in Park
Lane on a day in April 1871, is another. Amelia Dyer, the
baby-farmer, also strangled her charges. Elizabeth Brownrigg
(1767) beat the feeble Mary Clifford to death. I do not know
that great physical difference existed to the advantage of the
murderess between her and her older victim, Mrs Phoebe Hogg, who,
with her baby, was done to death by Mrs Pearcy in October 1890,
but the fact that Mrs Hogg had been battered about the head, and
that the head had been almost severed from the body, would seem
to indicate that the murderess was the stronger of the two women.
The case of Belle Gunness (treated by Mr George Dilnot in his
Rogues March[1]) might be cited. Fat, gross-featured, far from
attractive though she was, her victims were all men who had
married or had wanted to marry her. Mr Dilnot says these victims
``almost certainly numbered more than a hundred.'' She murdered
for money, using chloral to stupefy, and an axe for the actual
killing. She herself was slain and burned, with her three
children, by a male accomplice whom she was planning to dispose
of, he having arrived at the point of knowing too much. 1907 was
the date of her death at La Porte, U.S.A.

[1] Bles, 1934.

It occurs when the female killer happens to be dramatical-minded
that she will use a pistol. Mme Weissmann-Bessarabo, who, with
her daughter, shot her husband in Paris (August 1920), is of this
kind. She and the daughter, Paule-Jacques, seem to have seen
themselves as wild, wild women from the Mexico where they had
sometime lived, and were always flourishing revolvers.

I would say that the use of poison so much by women murderers has
reason, first, in the lack of physique for violent methods, but I
would put alongside that reason this other, that women poisoners
usually have had a handy proximity to their victims. They have
had contact with their victims in an attendant capacity. I have
a suspicion, moreover, that a good number of women poisoners
actually chose the medium as THE KINDEST WAY. Women, and I might
add not a few men, who would be terribly shocked by sight or news
of a quick but violent death, can contemplate with relative
placidity a lingering and painful fatal illness. Propose to a
woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an incurably
diseased dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the
chances are that she will shudder. But--no lethal chamber being
available--suggest poison, albeit unspecified, and the method
will more readily commend itself. This among women with no
murderous instincts whatever.

I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not
only by women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or
himself ahead as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant
upon the victim. No need here, I think, to number the cases
where the ministrations of murderers to their victims have
aroused the almost tearful admiration of beholders.

I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the
chance which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the
illness induced by it will pass for one arising from natural
causes. This is ground traversed so often that its features are
as familiar as those of one's own house door. Nor shall I say
anything of the ease with which, even in these days, the
favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic, can be obtained
in one form or another.

One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of
power which gradually steals upon the poisoner. It is a
speculation upon which I am not ready to argue. There is,
indeed, chapter and verse for believing that poisoners have
arrived at a sense of omnipotence. But if Anna Zwanziger (here I
quote from Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry's essay on her in his Twenty
Human Monsters), ``a day or two before the execution, smiled and
said it was a fortunate thing for many people that she was to
die, for had she lived she would have continued to poison men and
women indiscriminately''; if, still according to the same writer,
``when the arsenic was found on her person after the arrest, she
seized the packet and gloated over the powder, looking at it, the
chronicler assures us, as a woman looks at her lover''; and if,
``when the attendants asked her how she could have brought
herself calmly to kill people with whom she was living--whose
meals and amusements she shared--she replied that their faces
were so stupidly healthy and happy that she desired to see them
change into faces of pain and despair,'' I will say this in no
way goes to prove the woman criminal to be more deadly than the
male. This ghoulish satisfaction, with the conjectured feeling
of omnipotence, is not peculiar to the woman poisoner. Neill
Cream had it. Armstrong had it. Wainewright, with his reason
for poisoning Helen Abercrombie--``Upon my soul I don't know,
unless it was that her legs were too thick''--is quite on a par
with Anna Zwanziger. The supposed sense of power does not even
belong exclusively to the poisoner. Jack the Ripper manifestly
had something of the same idea about his use of the knife.

As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set
you the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged,
obscenely mutilated and slain children in one of his castles
alone--his total of over two hundred children thus foully done to
death. I will set you Gilles against anything that can be
brought forward as a monster in cruelty among women.

Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the
sanctimonious Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his
diary (quoted by Mr Roughead) recording the death of the wife he
so cruelly murdered:

March 1865, 18, Saturday. Died here at 1 A.M. Mary Jane, my own
beloved wife, aged thirty-eight years. No torment surrounded her
bedside [the foul liar!]--but like a calm peaceful lamb of God
passed Minnie away. May God and Jesus, Holy Ghost, one in three,
welcome Minnie! Prayer on prayer till mine be o'er; everlasting
love. Save us, Lord, for Thy dear Son!

Against the mean murders of Flanagan and Higgins I will set you
Mr Seddon and Mr Smith of the ``brides in the bath.''

% IV

I am conscious that in arguing against the ``more deadly than the
male'' conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my
book no great service. It might work for its greater popularity
if I argued the other way, making out that the subjects I have
chosen were monsters of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders
in blood, that they were prodigies of iniquity and cunning,
without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy, facinorous to a degree
never surpassed or even equalled by evil men. It may seem that,
being concerned to strip female crime of the lurid preeminence so
commonly given it, I have contrived beforehand to rob the ensuing
pages of any richer savour they might have had. But I don't,
myself, think so.

If these women, some of them, are not greater monsters than their
male analogues, monsters they still remain. If they are not,
others of them, greater rogues and cheats than males of like
criminal persuasion, cheats and rogues they are beyond cavil.
The truth of the matter is that I loathe the use of superlatives
in serious works on crime. I will read, I promise you, anything
decently written in a fictional way about `master' crooks,
`master' killers, kings, queens, princes, and a whole peerage of
crime, knowing very well that never yet has a `master' criminal
had any cleverness but what a novelist gave him. But in works on
crime that pretend to seriousness I would eschew, pace Mr Leonard
R. Gribble, all `queens' and other honorifics in application to
the lost men and women with whom such works must treat. There is
no romance in crime. Romance is life gilded, life idealized.
Crime is never anything but a sordid business, demonstrably poor
in reward to its practitioners.

But, sordid or not, crime has its human interest. Its
practitioners are still part of life, human beings, different
from law-abiding humanity by God-alone-knows-what freak of
heredity or kink in brain convolution. I will not ask the
reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal with the
thought attributed to John Knox:

``There, but for the Grace of God, goes ----'' Because the
phrase might as well be used in contemplation of John D.
Rockefeller or Augustus John or Charlie Chaplin or a man with a
wooden leg. I do not ask that you should pity these women with
whom I have to deal, still less that you should contemn them.
Something between the two will serve. I write the book because I
am interested in crime myself, and in the hope that you'll like
the reading as much as I like the writing of it.

II. A FAIR NECK FOR THE MAIDEN

In her long history there can have been few mornings upon which
Edinburgh had more to offer her burghers in the way of gossip and
rumour than on that of the 1st of July, 1600. In this `gate' and
that `gate,' as one may imagine, the douce citizens must have
clustered and broke and clustered, like eddied foam on a spated
burn. By conjecture, as they have always been a people apt to
take to the streets upon small occasion as on large, it is not
unlikely that the news which was to drift into the city some
thirty-five days later--namely, that an attempt on the life of
his Sacred Majesty, the High and Mighty (and Rachitic) Prince,
James the Sixth of Scotland, had been made by the brothers
Ruthven in their castle of Gowrie--it is not unlikely that the
first buzz of the Gowrie affair caused no more stir, for the time
being at any rate, than the word which had come to those
Edinburgh folk that fine morning of the first day in July. The
busier of the bodies would trot from knot to knot, anxious to
learn and retail the latest item of fact and fancy regarding the
tidings which had set tongues going since the early hours.
Murder, no less.

If the contemporary juridical records, even what is left of them,
be a criterion, homicide in all its oddly named forms must have
been a commonplace to those couthie lieges of his Slobberiness,
King Jamie. It is hard to believe that murder, qua murder, could
have been of much more interest to them than the fineness of the
weather. We have it, however, on reasonable authority, that the
murder of the Laird of Warriston did set the people of ``Auld
Reekie'' finely agog.

John Kincaid, of Warriston, was by way of being one of
Edinburgh's notables. Even at that time his family was
considered to be old. He derived from the Kincaids of Kincaid,
in Stirlingshire, a family then in possession of large estates in
that county and here and there about Lothian. His own property
of Warriston lay on the outskirts of Edinburgh itself, just above
a mile from Holyroodhouse. Notable among his possessions was one
which he should, from all accounts, dearly have prized, but which
there are indications he treated with some contumely. This was
his wife, Jean Livingstone, a singularly beautiful girl, no more
than twenty-one years of age at the time when this story opens.
Jean, like her husband, was a person of good station indeed. She
was a daughter of the Laird of Dunipace, John Livingstone, and
related through him and her mother to people of high
consideration in the kingdom.

News of the violent death of John Kincaid, which had taken place
soon after midnight, came quickly to the capital. Officers were
at once dispatched. Small wonder that the burghers found
exercise for their clacking tongues from the dawning, for the
lovely Jean was taken by the officers `red-hand,' as the phrase
was, for the murder of her husband. With her to Edinburgh, under
arrest, were brought her nurse and two other servingwomen.

To Pitcairn, compiler of Criminal Trials in Scotland, from
indications in whose account of the murder I have been set on the
hunt for material concerning it, I am indebted for the
information that Jean and her women were taken red-hand. But I
confess being at a loss to understand it. Warriston, as
indicated, stood a good mile from Edinburgh. The informant
bringing word of the deed to town, even if he or she covered the
distance on horseback, must have taken some time in getting the
proper authorities to move. Then time would elapse in quantity
before the officers dispatched could be at the house. They
themselves could hardly have taken the Lady Warriston red-hand,
because in the meantime the actual perpetrator of the murder, a
horse-boy named Robert Weir, in the employ of Jean's father, had
made good his escape. As a fact, he was not apprehended until
some time afterwards, and it would seem, from the records given
in the Pitcairn Trials, that it was not until four years later
that he was brought to trial.

A person taken red-hand, it would be imagined, would be one found
in such circumstances relating to a murder as would leave no
doubt as to his or her having ``airt and pairt'' in the crime.
Since it must have taken the officers some time to reach the
house, one of two things must have happened. Either some
officious person or persons, roused by the killing, which, as we
shall see, was done with no little noise, must have come upon
Jean and her women immediately upon the escape of Weir, and have
detained all four until the arrival of the officers, or else Jean
and her women must have remained by the dead man in terror, and
have blurted out the truth of their complicity when the officers
appeared.

Available records are irritatingly uninformative upon the arrest
of the Lady Warriston. Pitcairn himself, in 1830, talks of his
many ``fruitless searches'' through the Criminal Records of the
city of Edinburgh, the greater part of which are lost, and
confesses his failure to come on any trace of the actual
proceedings in this case, or in the case of Robert Weir. For
this reason the same authority is at a loss to know whether the
prisoners were immediately put to the knowledge of an assize,
being taken ``red-hand,'' without the formality of being served a
``dittay'' (as who should say an indictment), as in ordinary
cases, before the magistrates of Edinburgh, or else sent for
trial before the baron bailie of the regality of Broughton, in
whose jurisdiction Warriston was situated.

It would perhaps heighten the drama of the story if it could be
learned what Jean and her women did between the time of the
murder and the arrest. It would seem, however, that the Lady
Warriston had some intention of taking flight with Weir. One is
divided between an idea that the horse-boy did not want to be
hampered and that he was ready for self-sacrifice. ``You shall
tarry still,'' we read that he said; ``and if this matter come
not to light you shall say, `He died in the gallery,' and I shall
return to my master's service. But if it be known I shall fly,
and take the crime on me, and none dare pursue you!''

It was distinctly a determined affair of murder. The loveliness
of Jean Livingstone has been so insisted upon in many Scottish
ballads,[2] and her conduct before her execution was so saintly,
that one cannot help wishing, even now, that she could have
escaped the scaffold. But there is no doubt that, incited by the
nurse, Janet Murdo, she set about having her husband killed with
a rancour which was very grim indeed.

[2] A stanza in one ballad runs:

``She has twa weel-made feet;
Far better is her hand;
She's jimp about the middle
As ony willy wand.''

The reason for Jean's hatred of her husband appears in the dittay
against Robert Weir. ``Forasmuch,'' it runs, translated to
modern terms,

as whilom Jean Livingstone, Goodwife of Warriston, having
conceived a deadly rancour, hatred, and malice against whilom
John Kincaid, of Warriston, for the alleged biting of her in the
arm, and striking her divers times, the said Jean, in the month
of June, One Thousand Six Hundred Years, directed Janet Murdo,
her nurse, to the said Robert [Weir], to the abbey of
Holyroodhouse, where he was for the time, desiring him to come
down to Warriston, and speak with her, anent the cruel and
unnatural taking away of her said husband's life.

And there you have it. If the allegation against John Kincaid
was true it does not seem that he valued his lovely wife as he
ought to have done. The striking her ``divers times'' may have
been an exaggeration. It probably was. Jean and her women would
want to show there had been provocation. (In a ballad he is
accused of having thrown a plate at dinner in her face.) But
there is a naivete, a circumstantial air, about the ``biting of
her in the arm'' which gives it a sort of genuine ring. How one
would like to come upon a contemporary writing which would throw
light on the character of John Kincaid! Growing sympathy for
Jean makes one wish it could be found that Kincaid deserved all
he got.

Here and there in the material at hand indications are to be
found that the Lady of Warriston had an idea she might not come
so badly off on trial. But even if the King's Majesty had been
of clement disposition, which he never was, or if her judges had
been likely to be moved by her youth and beauty, there was
evidence of such premeditation, such fixity of purpose, as would
no doubt harden the assize against her.

Robert Weir was in service, as I have said, with Jean
Livingstone's father, the Laird of Dunipace. It may have been
that he knew Jean before her marriage. He seems, at any rate, to
have been extremely willing to stand by her. He was fetched by
the nurse several times from Holyrood to Warriston, but failed to
have speech with the lady. On the 30th of June, however, the
Lady Warriston having sent the nurse for him once again, he did
contrive to see Jean in the afternoon, and, according to the
dittay, ``conferred with her, concerning the cruel, unnatural,
and abominable murdering of the said whilom John Kincaid.''

The upshot of the conference was that Weir was secretly led to a
``laigh'' cellar in the house of Warriston, to await the
appointed time for the execution of the murder.

Weir remained in the cellar until midnight. Jean came for him at
that hour and led him up into the hall. Thence the pair
proceeded to the room in which John Kincaid was lying asleep. It
would appear that they took no great pains to be quiet in their
progress, for on entering the room they found Kincaid awakened
``be thair dyn.''

I cannot do better at this point than leave description of the
murder as it is given in the dittay against Weir. The editor of
Pitcairn's Trials remarks in a footnote to the dittay that ``the
quaintness of the ancient style even aggravates the horror of the
scene.'' As, however, the ancient style may aggravate the reader
unacquainted with Scots, I shall English it, and give the
original rendering in a footnote:

And having entered within the said chamber, perceiving the said
whilom John to be wakened out of his sleep by their din, and to
pry over his bed-stock, the said Robert came then running to him,
and most cruelly, with clenched fists, gave him a deadly and
cruel stroke on the jugular vein, wherewith he cast the said
whilom John to the ground, from out his bed; and thereafter
struck him on his belly with his feet; whereupon he gave a great
cry. And the said Robert, fearing the cry should have been
heard, he thereafter, most tyrannously and barbarously, with his
hand, gripped him by the throat, or weasand, which he held fast a
long time, while [or until] he strangled him; during the which
time the said John Kincaid lay struggling and fighting in the
pains of death under him. And so the said whilom John was
cruelly murdered and slain by the said Robert.[3]

[3] And haifing enterit within the faid chalmer, perfaving the
faid vmqle Johnne to be walknit out of his fleip, be thair dyn,
and to preife ouer his bed ftok, the faid Robert cam than rynnand
to him, and maift crewallie, with thair faldit neiffis gaif him
ane deidlie and crewall straik on the vane-organe, quhairwith he
dang the faid vmqle Johnne to the grund, out-ouer his bed; and
thaireftir, crewallie ftrak him on bellie with his feit;
quhairvpoun he gaif ane grit cry: And the faid Robert, feiring
the cry fould haif bene hard, he thaireftir, maift tyrannouflie
and barbarouflie, with his hand, grippit him be the thrott or
waifen, quhilk he held faft ane lang tyme quhill he wirreit him;
during the quhilk tyme, the faid Johnne Kincaid lay ftruggilling
and fechting in the panes of daith vnder him. And fa, the faid
vmqle Johnne was crewallie murdreit and flaine be the faid
Robert.''

It will be seen that Robert Weir evolved a murder technique
which, as Pitcairn points out, was to be adopted over two
centuries later in Edinburgh at the Westport by Messrs Burke and
Hare.

% II

Lady Warriston was found guilty, and four days after the murder,
on the 5th of July, was taken to the Girth Cross of Holyrood, at
the foot of the Canongate, and there decapitated by that machine
which rather anticipated the inventiveness of Dr Guillotin--``the
Maiden.'' At the same time, four o'clock in the morning, Janet
Murdo, the nurse, and one of the serving-women accused with her
as accomplices were burned on the Castle Hill of the city.

There is something odd about the early hour at which the
executions took place. The usual time for these affairs was much
later in the day, and it is probable that the sentence against
Jean ran that she should be executed towards dusk on the 4th of
the month. The family of Dunipace, however, having exerted no
influence towards saving the daughter of the house from her fate,
did everything they could to have her disposed of as secretly and
as expeditiously as possible. In their zeal to have done with
the hapless girl who, they conceived, had blotted the family
honour indelibly they were in the prison with the magistrates
soon after three o'clock, quite indecent in their haste to see
her on her way to the scaffold. In the first place they had
applied to have her executed at nine o'clock on the evening of
the 3rd, another unusual hour, but the application was turned
down. The main idea with them was to have Jean done away with at
some hour when the populace would not be expecting the execution.
Part of the plan for privacy is revealed in the fact of the
burning of the nurse and the ``hyred woman'' at four o'clock at
the Castle Hill, nearly a mile away from the Girth Cross, so--as
the Pitcairn Trials footnote says-``that the populace, who might
be so early astir, should have their attentions distracted at two
opposite stations . . . and thus, in some measure, lessen the
disgrace of the public execution.''

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