The Square Mile of Murder Revisited by A.M. Nicol
Glasgow’s Notorious Square Mile of Murder
Murder at 7 Blythswood Square, Glasgow.
Madeleine Hamilton Smith, a socialite from an upper-class Victorian family in Glasgow, faced trial at Edinburgh High Court in 1857. Smith was accused of murdering her secret lover, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a lowly packing clerk ten years her senior. Was a Victorian jury willing to convict a young woman of her class and send her to the gallows? Was she guilty?
Murder at 49 West Princes Street, Glasgow.
In December 1908, 83-year-old Marion Gilchrist was beaten to death during a robbery at her home on West Princes Street. Suspicion fell on Oskar Slater, a German Jew. He who was duly convicted despite obvious flaws in the Crown’s case. He was sentenced to death. Was he guilty? Or did the police and Crown pervert the course of justice to convict an innocent man?
Murder at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow.
Jessie McPherson, a servant girl at 17 Sandyford Place, was brutally murdered in 1862. Her friend, Jessie McLachlan, stood trial for the crime at Glasgow High Court. McLachlan maintained her innocence. Nevertheless, she was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Was she an innocent victim of a corrupt and incompetent legal system… or a brutal murderer?
Murder at 131 Sauchiehall Street.
Edward William Pritchard, an English doctor, moved to Glasgow in 1859.
In 1863, a fire broke out at the Pritchard home at 11 Berkeley Terrace. It began in the room of a servant girl, Elizabeth McGirn, who made no attempt to escape, suggesting she may have been drugged or already dead when the fire started. Pritchard was suspected, but never prosecuted.
After the fire, Pritchard moved with his wife, Mary Pritchard and mother-in-law, Jane Taylor to 131 Sauchiehall Street.
In 1865, his mother-in-law, age 70, died, followed a month later by her daughter. Suspicion fell on Edward Pritchard after an anonymous letter was sent to the authorities. The bodies were exhumed and found to have been poisoned.
Pritchard was convicted at the High Court in Edinburgh and hanged in front of thousands at the Saltmarket in Glasgow in 1865. He was the last person to be publicly executed in the city.
Was he the murderer? And if so, was he also responsible for the death of Elizabeth McGirn?