Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (11 page)

If so, it failed to fortify him. When Mrs Moffat returned in the morning, he told her he had passed a miserable night. Shortly after her arrival there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find George Ferguson, a Sheriffs Officer, standing there. He had come to take Bennison into custody. It is noteworthy that suspicion was sufficiently strong to persuade the authorities to come to this decision even before the exhumation, which was in fact fixed for the next afternoon, Saturday 20 April. Bennison was still in bed when Ferguson arrived, and at first protested pathetically that he was too ill to accompany him. The objection was disregarded. He was carried off to jail.

On the Saturday morning he was brought back to the house by Ferguson and a police officer named Fallon. They took possession of the iron pot in which the porridge had been cooked, of the wooden bowl and of the tub into which jean had vomited. They searched for evidence of rats. Both concluded that there was no way in which rats could have gained admission to the flat or even to the coal cellar. As Ferguson put it at the trial, the plaster in the cellar was `entire’. There could be little doubt that the rats were on the run.

The exhumation was carried out that afternoon in Spring sunshine. Bennison identified the body as being that of `my dear Jean’. It was just over a week since she had eaten the porridge, less than a week since he had summoned Dr Gillespie, and only five days since he proclaimed that `she had gone to glory’. Now here were her mortal remains exposed again on the April afternoon, with him standing hand-cuffed beside the coffin, staring down on her face. In those few days the world had been turned upside down.

She was taken off for dissection by Dr MacLagan, and Bennison returned to jail, where he emitted the first of three declarations that he would make before his trial. In this he gave his account of the relations subsisting between him and Jean, admitting that they slept in different rooms, information that some would find sufficient cause for suspicion in itself. He then recounted his movements from the Friday evening to the Monday, stressing his many attempts to fetch medical assistance andJean’s opposition to this endeavour. He defended the innocence of his relationship with Margaret Robertson, and asserted that she had visited the house for tea before his wife’s death. Finally he admitted the purchase of the poison, but stood by the story that he had handed it over to his wife to sop up the rat-holes, and had never seen it since. He was to cling to this story; there was little else he could do, and it is anyhow always hard to disprove negatives. This first declaration made no mention of his previous marriage. The second, made on 14 June, denied it, and the third of 24 June, admitted it and described the circumstances. In it he asserted that he had confessed everything to jean `who told him never to mention it even to her sister’. It is always convenient thus to tax the dead with responsibility.

The charge of bigamy, in itself of interest only to students concerned to disentangle the complexities of nineteenthcentury marriage law, was yet to be of more general importance, for it was only the bigamy which could deprive Bennison of the reputation of a previously unblemished character. If the bigamy were to be proved, then his unscrupulousness and treachery would be clearly demonstrated; it would be shown that lust had once already corrupted the operation of his conscience, that all his piety had already proved an ineffectual barrier against the force of his animal passions, and that he was essentially unworthy of trust. Even if he were to be acquitted of the bigamy on a technicality (the defence was that members of the Church of Ireland could not contract a valid marriage celebrated according to other rites) the point would have been made by the Crown. Bennison’s character would not survive the charge. Nothing else in his life, subsequent to this double marriage, showed him to be other than a good Christian and an honest man. The charge of bigamy did not establish motive, but it made the imputed motive more substantial. He had done the same sort of thing before. that is, he had permitted lust to overcome the moral scruples that should have guarded him from sin.

The trial came on in June. It was not a complicated case and required no elaborate preparation - the machinery of the law moved fast and smoothly in the mid-nineteenth century. It aroused, as any murder trial does, considerable interest. Such things were rare enough in Edinburgh. The last hanging had taken place six years before. Consequently, even though the characters and the setting of the crime were both drab, the public galleries of the court were thronged `by highly reputable parties’, as the Evening Courant put it.

They had defied rival attractions to attend. A Grand National Archery meeting was being held in Warrender Park and had itself attracted a field of distinguished competitors. Another draw was the Edinburgh Gymnastic Games in Belleville Park, Holyrood (the Running High Leap was won with a fine Jump of 5 ft 1 inch, and the degree of organisation may be gauged by the Evening Courant’s frank admission concerning another event: `we did not ascertain the names of the winners’.) Farther down the coast a regatta was being held at Dunbar, and all over the South of Scotland farmers delighted in the `warm fostering weather’ which was bringing on the crops after a mean spring.

Evidence for the Prosecution was led by the SolicitorGeneral. (In Scotland the Prosecution begins with evidence; there is no introductory speech in which the Counsel outlines his case. This procedure is generally, and doubtless correctly, considered advantageous to the defence; the evidence is presented starkly, without the preliminary and prejudiciary gloss which an accomplished Counsel may cast on it.) The Crown’s array of witnesses was long and impressive. They first dealt with the charge of bigamy, and the fact of the double marriage was clearly brought out. Whether this technically amounted to bigamy remained to be resolved; there was a case on the other side. What however was no longer in doubt was Bennison’s behaviour; it had been markedly unprincipled. No jury could believe him innocent of past duplicity, hence incapable of present. His character as an honest man was gone in the first hour of the trial. Hence each piece of evidence suggesting religious zeal merely served to stamp him a hypocrite.

Helen Glass was the weightiest of the Crown’s witnesses. She alone spoke with long knowledge of Bennison. She made a good impression. It was obvious that she considered Bennison guilty, and wanted him punished; but she did not make the mistake of representing him as a monster. She even paid the little tribute to his earlier behaviour towards her sister, which has already been noted. She impressed the jury as being a devoted sister, honestly and without malice disturbed by the manner of Jean’s death, and therefore determined that the circumstances should be explained and the guilt brought to judgment. That was all. Nor did she yield under crossexamination. She admitted that she had heard of her sister’s illness on the Saturday night, but she had been nursing a sick friend, and had not immediately realised the seriousness of Jean’s condition. When she did, she came to her at once, and did not leave her bedside till death separated them. She admitted also that there had been a slight connection between jean and Margaret Robertson, but she did not protest about this. She left the slightness - a couple of bonnets sent for mending to speak for itself, and stand in unvarnished contrast to the number of meetings reported between Bennison and the young girl. Finally she stoutly dismissed the possibility of suicide, employing just the right religious language to convince of Leith Walk.

It was not moral disapprobation alone that convicted him. The medical evidence was sufficiently damning. It was given by the celebrated Dr MacLagan, and it finished Bennison. From the arsenic found in Jean’s stomach, tissue and liver, they had no doubt that she had taken sufficient to cause death. There was however no chemical evidence that any of the articles of food examined by them had been the vehicle for the poison. There was no evidence of arsenic in the iron pot in which the porridge had been cooked; it gave signs however of having been carefully cleaned, an action which in other circumstances might bespeak good housekeeping but in a murder trial is a clear pointer to guilt. There was evidence that the wooden tub had contained arsenic. Curiously enough there was none in the dog. Dr MacLagan then stood down, having made it absolutely clear that jean had died of arsenic poisoning. Compared to that fact, the exact means of administration was unimportant. Unless the jury could be convinced that she had killed herself (and that verdict would fly in the face of Helen’s evidence), or that she had taken the poison accidentally (which they had no reason to conclude), there was only one answer at which they could arrive. Any doubts they might have had as to the importance of establishing the method were to be swept away by the Lord justice-Clerk in his summing-up. `It was murder’, he said, `if an article was so placed that it was likely to be taken, even if it was not actually administered.’ In effect this meant that they did not have to be certain of the means of administration in order to convict Bennison. The purchase of the poison, the establishment of motive, the record of his behaviour from the time she took ill, these were sufficient.

The defence seems to have thought so too. Mr Crawford’s cross-examination of witnesses had been less than pressing; his conduct of the defence case was languid. True, he brought forward the Robertson sisters, but they seemed more anxious to save Margaret’s reputation than Bennison’s life. No doubt their reasoning, their instinctive reaction perhaps, was sound enough. He was doomed; she would live, and it was better she should not be tagged with the description of a murderer’s whore. In this limited aim they were successful. Mr Crawford brought forward the wire-worker Alex MacMurray and his eleven dead rats, but they had too much to contend with. Finally he was reduced to the argument that Bennison would have run away if he had been guilty. He can hardly have believed it himself; certainly it failed to impress the Court. Crawford can hardly be blamed; it was an open and shut case. No wonder that he concentrated much of his attention on trying to disprove the bigamy; there was interesting legal matter there.

The Court’s summing-up was unequivocal; the jury concurred. They were only out twenty minutes. Sentence was passed. Bennison was to be `taken to the prison of Edinburgh, there to be detained and fed upon bread and water until Friday the 16th day of August and then….’

If the sentence of bread and water sounds unnecessarily harsh, the reader should reflect that the mean diet was supposed to encourage penitence.

That was not. Bennison’s immediate frame of mind. He cried out `in a strong Irish accent, “I am innocent before God, and I pray God this night for those who have come and stood there, declaring anything but the truth against William Bennison as he can testify from his own conscience and his own soul. I do certainly forgive them this day, and they know themselves what they have done …”’

So the language persists, and, in high emotion, the speaker falls back on the stereotypes of his intellectual fashion, as a means, if nothing else, of evading the realities of his situation. The last phrase is arresting. It echoes Christ’s cry on the Cross: `Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Not surprisingly, Bennison could not rise to a like magnanimity: on the contrary he was sure that his enemies knew very well just what they had done.

The cry of innocence silenced the Court for a moment, as it must always do. There is something inescapably horrible in that instant in a murder trial when the accused, by now convicted, refuses to accept the verdict, but clings with vain intensity to the hope of life. They led him away still protesting innocence.

He continued to do so for the next week, sleeping badly and refusing to eat. He was not ready for death. Outside there was little public sympathy for him, and attempts to have him certified as insane met with equally sparse response. It is notable that only twenty-three out of the hundred and sixty workmates at Shotts’ signed a petition asking that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. Meanwhile Mr Hay offered Bennison his spiritual ministrations. At last, from a mingled hope, loneliness and nostalgia for the emotional release that he knew confession would bring, Bennison gave way. He admitted it all. Everything in his religion inclined him to this course, and would probably have done so even had he been innocent. As it was, with his confession, he felt himself as one received back in the fold. Confession expunged the dreadful isolation in which he had approached despair. With confession, he could again be washed in the Blood of the Lamb. He made the best case for himself too, asserting that he had regretted giving jean the poison almost as soon as he had administered it; certainly on the Saturday. Thenceforward he had lived in a mixture of hope and dread. This account of his emotional state was not entirely convincing. He had shown himself agitated on the Saturday and Sunday, but the complacency with which he had viwed Jean’s ascension to endless bliss contradicted what he now maintained.

Nevertheless it was the best he could do. The confession was forwarded to the Home Secretary in the hope that it would procure a reprieve. Bennison began to eat and sleep, even to put on weight. He was allowed to see his daughter, and saved up some of his allowance of bread and milk for her. (It would seem that there had been some alleviation of his diet.) The interview was said to be `affecting’. He even saw Helen Glass on whom the care of the little girl would devolve. They exchanged forgiveness. Meanwhile Bennison engaged in long sessions of prayer and Bible-reading with Mr Hay and the Prison Chaplain.

Attempts were made to persuade him to admit to having killed his first wife. He continued to deny this however. One witness did come forward claiming knowledge of the mysterious death in Airdrie, but, since he dated it two years late, it is probable that he was one of those sensationseekers wont to concern themselves with murder cases. At any rate Bennison could not be budged. He had not murdered his first wife and that was that. Since admission would have permitted him to indulge in a new orgy of confession, it seems likely that he was telling the truth.