Classic Scottish Murder Stories (32 page)

Less romantically, however, Cockburn goes on to say that, ‘She had left everything she had, amounting to £4,000 or £5,000, to her friend. He took the legacy,
but refused to pay the costs of her defence,
which her agent only screwed out of him by an action.'

For our purposes now, the most telling, if tantalizing, part of Lord Cockburn's account is his view that ‘If some circumstances which were established in a precognition, taken by the orders of Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, after her conviction, had transpired on the trial, it is more than probable that Jeffrey, whose beautiful speech, on the bad elements in his hands, is remembered to this hour, would have prevailed on the jury to restrict their conviction to culpable homicide.'

The reference to culpable homicide indicates that Cockburn had provocation not self-defence, in mind, since a successful plea of self-defence exonerates the defendant outright. However, Walter Grieve, the medical student, braver than his friends, did say that he saw the deceased strike Elizabeth MacDonald on the head. Moreover, there was medical evidence of an assault on her. Mary McKinnon surely knew by the time that she picked up the knife that her henchwoman had received the injury most feared by all
women, whatever the century, a hard blow on the breast. A person may kill to prevent the murder of another. She was placed in a defensive position, fearing she knew not what future violence.

The three minutes' lapse of time – if Kerr was correct – between taking up the knife and delivering the fatal blow, to which one might add the deliberate selection of the sharpened knife, went strongly against a plea of provocation. Who knows what really happened in the dark kitchen? A legal definition of provocation (Lord Jamieson in 1938) seems to represent Mary McKinnon's position: ‘Being agitated and excited, and alarmed by violence, I lost control over myself, and took life, when my presence of mind had left me, and with no thought of what I was doing.'

We shall never know what atrocious behaviour, previously concealed, had come to light. Who was the new informant with the conscience? It had to be someone who was in the kitchen or could see into the room, at the relevant time. That lets Johnston out. Otherwise, he would have been a promising candidate. Was it an aged crone? Or was it one of the young gentlemen, letting the side down?

I
f someone cursed with second sight had told Lord Cockburn then that a particularly callous murder would be committed over a century later at the picturesque site which he was visiting, I doubt if he would have turned a hair. As a famous circuit judge, regularly trying capital murders, he had few illusions about man's inhumanity to man, and found solace in nature and beauty.

On September 26th, 1844, he had gone to the lighthouse... 'Yesterday was given to an expedition to the lighthouse on the island of Little Ross, about six or seven miles below Kirkcudbright. Some rode and some drove ... till we all came to the alehouse on the peninsula of Great Ross, where we took boat, and after about a mile's sailing, were landed on the island. It is one of the lesser lights. All its machinery was explained to us by a sensible keeper. I never understood the thing before. The prospect from the top, and, indeed, from every part of the island, is beautiful. But I was more interested in the substantial security and comfort of the whole buildings, both for scientific and for domestic purposes. No Dutchman's summerhouse could be tidier. Everything, from the brass and the lenses of the light to the kitchen, and even to the coalhouse, of each of the two keepers, was as bright as a jeweller's shop.'

Quite so: a lighthouse is a potent symbol of order in chaos, where harmony and reason prevail. Inside the tower of light there should be a safe stillness. It was unheard of for keeper to
turn on keeper, as sadly happened here in 1960. An unsuitable individual had, somehow, slipped through the net. It was not even a specially isolated posting. One keeper's wife lived in on the island, and they kept chickens. The victim thought the world of his keeper-killer and suspected no evil to the end.

The murder was discovered earlier than the killer would have expected, as if there were some measure of retribution, and he was soon captured. Thomas Robertson Collin, a bank manager of Strathdee, Kirkcudbright, was the involuntary
deus ex machina.
Thursday, August 18th, was a local holiday, and he and his 19-year-old son, an architecture student, decided to go sailing in the bay, which widens out to the Irish Sea, with the rushing Solway Firth to the east, and a rocky coast riddled with smugglers' caves. It was not a pleasant place to be at the mercy of the elements, and when the weather deteriorated after an hour or so's sailing, at 12.30pm, they thought it safer to put in at Little Ross Island, which stands at the mouth of the bay, and wait for the next tide. Lord Cockburn's descriptive powers show the significance of the Kirkcudbright tide, which ‘rises at an average about 20 or 25 feet, and often a great deal more – sometimes 35. This great flow fills up all the bays, making a brim-full sea for three miles above the town, and for six or eight below it. It is then a world of waters.'

Harmless trespassers, seeking respite as they were, the Collin pair felt obliged to state their business, but there was no sign of life at the lighthouse and the two keepers' cottages. Apparently the lighthouse was not continuously manned during the hours of daylight, because Collin assumed, at first, that one man was out fishing, and the other sleeping. A telephone rang from time to time. At 4 o'clock, on the brink of leaving with the tide, feeling slightly uneasy, he made one last reconnoitre, and boldly looked through a rear window. A still, human form was lying on a bed, under the bedclothes, with just the head showing.

Collin ran round to the front of the cottage and entered. ‘What's the matter?' he called out, but there was no reply. He approached the body of the man and found no pulse and the hand cold. He removed the towel which was draped over the head, and underneath it there was a great deal of blood. Three pieces of rope lay on the bed, there was more on the floor, and a pool of blood. Outside, he told his son to try to get the attention of one of the fishing boats which were bobbing in the bay, and then he used the telephone in the lighthouse to call the police and a doctor.

Robert Milligan, a Kirkcudbright fisherman, was out that day, and he spotted young Collin waving frantically from the rocks. He came ashore, and soon identified the dead man as Hugh Clark, aged 62, relief lighthouse keeper, a native of Dalry, Castle Douglas. A World War I veteran, he had been a postman for 40 years. The three living men standing on that island searched in fear for the other keeper who should have been there – Robert McKenna Cribbes Dickson, a young man, 24, who was in charge of the lighthouse while the principal keeper, John Thomson, was away on holiday with his wife. Collin's son examined the lighthouse logbook, and found that the last entry had been made at 3.00am on the previous morning. There was a .22 rifle lying against a wall in a storeroom, but it turned out to be unconnected with events.

The situation was beginning to feel like the great mystery of the Eilean Mor lighthouse, located in a much more lonely environment right out in the Atlantic Ocean, 25 kilometres west of the Hebridean island of Lewis. Lashed by gales on the most northern of the seven Flannan Isles, known as the Seven Hunters, Lord Cockburn would have found this a major light! It was completed in 1899. On Boxing Day, 1900, the tender
Hesperus
landed a relief keeper, together with stores and belated Christmas presents. She was a week late, after heavy storms. Normally she came every six weeks.

Here, too, as at Little Ross, there was no sign of life. Three
keepers had vanished from the face of the rock. Their boat was still in its cradle. Two sets of oilskins and sea boots were missing, but the third was intact. The last entry in the log was dated December 15th. There had been a fierce, destructive gale. Later, too late, it was discovered that a freak wave would occasionally wash over the west landing.

A fisherman's launch, quickly scrambled, now brought to Little Ross two police officers and a doctor. When Dr Rutherford turned the body over to examine the back of the head, a bullet fell out of the left eye socket. There were a couple of bullet holes in the bedhead. It was not a case of suicide, with three head wounds, decidedly not self-inflicted. Clark appeared to have been shot while asleep. His legs were sticking out of the bed in an odd way, but the doctor thought that this was the result of a reflex action. Death had occurred about 10 hours before the body was discovered.

Glasgow detectives, called in to assist, estimated that bullets had been fired from a shortened rifle, because the direction of the shots was from the narrow space at the window side of the bed where there was very little room to move. The angle was tight. The ropes seemed to be part of an abandoned plan.

The theory that Dickson, too, had been murdered by a third party who had then vanished from the island, spiriting away the second corpse, never got off the ground, although, at that stage, nothing to Dickson's detriment was current. John Thomson, the principal keeper, considered him to be a good, responsible employee, on cordial terms with the murdered man. Mrs Thomson had noticed that he did not talk much, but he often had coffee with them, and he was ‘very helpful with feeding the chickens'. Thomson interrupted his holiday to return to the lighthouse and found that his .22 rifle was missing, and about £30 had been taken from his cash-box, on which, in due course, Dickson's fingerprints were verified.

Dickson as he fled had left a trail of hot clues. Dr
Rutherford had placed the murder at about 6 o'clock in the early hours of Thursday, August 18th. The young man had then rowed off in Hugh Clark's dinghy, which was found ‘tied up perpendicularly' on rocks at Manor Hole in Ross Bay on the mainland. Its precarious position showed that it had been beached at high tide, which was given as between 4.00 and 6.00am. In fact, the plane of the boat was so steep that the outboard motor touched the rocks below.

Moving on to Ross Farm, where Hugh Clark had kept his old 10hp Wolseley car when he was on duty, Dickson drove off in the vehicle without being heard. Mrs Catherine Leslie, who lived at the farm with her son, seeing the car gone, knew that Clark had not taken it, because two ancient overcoats which he used to cover the tyres to protect them from the sun, were strewn across the road instead of being neatly folded on the grass at the side. Robert Maxwell, a dairyman employed at Ross Dairy actually saw Dickson drive past in Hugh Clark's car at 9.10 on the Thursday morning. This seems rather late. The distances were not great. Had he been sitting and thinking somewhere, stunned?

Worse, he had then crashed the old grey car, colliding with a van in Maxwelltown, and had given the van driver his real name on a scrap of paper – ‘R. Dickson. Ross Lighthouse'. The following afternoon, the Wolseley was found abandoned in Summerville Road, Dumfries. Before 9.10 on the Thursday, however, Dickson had engaged in some proactive doings; he had telephoned a car-hire company in Dumfries, giving his name as Thomson, and arranged to hire a car for two days. Later that morning, he turned up and collected a Hillman Husky, producing a driving licence in the name of John Thomson. He seemed to have a great deal of cash in hand as he paid out the requisite £7. Off he drove, many miles south-east across the Pennines as far as Selby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Perhaps he was making for the coast and a passage abroad.

What he had not allowed for was the unscheduled arrival
of the bank manager on the island. It emerged that mail and supplies were delivered to Little Ross every Wednesday. George Poland, a fisherman of Kirkcudbright, had performed that service for the Lighthouse Commissioners for 20 years, and on the day before the murder, on his regular visit, he had handed two registered letters to Dickson, who, we may remember, was keeper in charge for the time being. One envelope contained Hugh Clark's wages, the other, money for paying the tradesmen. Dickson had opened the first envelope and handed Clark his cash. The older man had put it in his pocket. Theoretically, then (and the attack could have been deliberately timed for an early Thursday morning) Dickson had a whole week in which to escape before George Poland came again. The reality, however, must have been that it would soon have been noticed that the lighthouse was unmanned, and we have the detail that the telephone was ringing and not being answered. How often did those ‘tradesmen' call from Kirkcudbright, anyway?

The description of the hired car and the missing man was circulated nation-wide. At 8.15am on Friday the 19th, two constables on duty in Yorkshire stopped the Hillman Husky. PC John Lister opened the car door and took hold of the driver's hands. He seemed very surprised to be apprehended, but freely admitted that he was Robert Dickson. When cautioned, he said, ‘All right, I know all about it.' There was a loaded rifle between the front seats. The barrel had been shortened and the wooden butt had been sawn off just behind the trigger. They found a quantity of ammunition in the car and there was over £80 in cash in Dickson's pockets, together with John Thomson's driving licence. The principal keeper identified the rifle as his .22, and said that it had been sawn into three pieces. The sawn-off butt of a rifle was discovered in a cupboard in the lighthouse workshop.

On November 27th, 1960, Robert McKenna Cribbes Dickson was brought up at the High Court in Dumfries before
Lord Cameron, charged on indictment with capital murder and thefts of
(inter alia)
the victim's car, boat and wages. He pleaded Not Guilty. Chief Detective Inspector Thomas Joyce of the Glasgow CID, who had led the investigation, stated that Dickson held a Royal Navy educational test certificate, but his service was described on discharge as ‘fair'. His background was beginning to become clear. The defence brought extensive psychiatric evidence. Dr Andrew Wyllie, superintendent of Aberdeen Royal Mental Hospital, testified that he had first seen Dickson in 1957 after he had taken an overdose of aspirins on his way back to the navy after being absent without leave. He gave a history of falling from a horse followed by severe headaches. There had been tears as he recounted his history, admitting to a period in an approved school and theft of a car, and as he spoke he went through the motions of smoking without a cigarette. His diagnosis had been that of psychopathic personality and he had been treated as a voluntary patient at the hospital. Dr Wyllie now described him as ‘episodically on the borderline of insanity with reactions which were abnormal under conditions of stress'.