The Invention of Murder (57 page)

Two days earlier, a man named Scott had arrived at Ardlamont, introduced as an engineer who was advising Monson on the purchase of a yacht. The next evening, Monson and Hambrough went fishing. Monson could swim well, Hambrough not at all. The boat capsized, and Hambrough was rescued and brought to shore. Monson claimed the boat had hit a rock and foundered, although locals were puzzled: there were no rocks in the bay. The next morning, none the worse for their unexpected dip, Monson, Scott and Hambrough went out shooting. Estate workers heard a shot, and saw Scott and Monson return to the house. It was ten minutes before they re-emerged, without their guns, to announce that Hambrough had accidentally shot himself. The outdoor workers rushed to the spot where the body lay, on a turf dike beside a ditch. Monson now said that he and Scott had heard the shot, rushed over and found Hambrough lying in the ditch, from which they had lifted him before returning for assistance. Monson telegraphed Tottenham, although not Hambrough’s parents, and when they finally arrived, according to the Major, Monson had told him that their son had been the only one to have a gun, had been entirely alone, and that he had attempted, but failed, to insure Hambrough’s life.

The Procurator Fiscal had been prepared to declare the death an accident until he discovered that Hambrough’s life, contrary to Monson’s statement, had been insured in Mrs Monson’s favour. Only on 24 August, therefore, did a proper investigation begin, two weeks after the young man’s death. It was found that the doctor who examined the body had never seen a gunshot wound to the head before; that Scott had vanished soon after the discovery of the body, and no one knew where he was or, even more suspiciously, who he was; no scorch marks were found around the wound, casting doubts on the theory that Hambrough had shot himself. Monson was arrested and charged with murder on 30 August; on 30 October another charge, of attempted murder by drowning, was added.

This crime had everything: a hunting lodge, high (and low) finance, an upper-class family, a mysteriously vanishing witness, and more. Throughout October and November the newspaper rumour-mill went into the kind of overdrive it had displayed in only a few exceptional cases. Scott had not been found, said
Woman
magazine, because he was in reality ‘a woman in man’s guise’; the
Aberdeen Weekly,
by contrast, thought he was ‘a scion of a noble English family’, while
Lloyd’s
couldn’t decide – he was a bookmaker known as ‘Long Ted’, or Monson’s valet, or in prison. According to the
Aberdeen Weekly,
when the Procurator Fiscal asked Mrs Monson to identify a photograph which he thought might show Scott, she replied that it was her deceased brother, and then threatened her questioner with a pistol. The
Daily News
denied a report that a portion of a skull had been found, saying it was a hoax: some ‘friend or foe of Monson’ had obtained another human skull (according to the paper this was ‘easy’), and had planted it to confuse the investigation. Several newspapers discussed Monson’s influence over Hambrough, and reported that his father had attributed it to hypnotism. The
Daily News
wanted to have its cake and eat it, reporting and denying wild rumours in the same article: ‘It is not true’, it said sternly, that Major Hambrough had ever had a shooting estate where a mysterious fatality had occurred. The
Glasgow Herald
took a similar tack, denying its own rumour that Monson had been appointed guardian to Cecil by Major Hambrough’s father (who had actually died eleven years before Cecil was born).
Reynolds’s
was not even sure if the crime was popular or not. It reported that ‘the Ardlamont mystery has not turned out the boom that was expected’, before going on to say that ‘young fellows’ in Edinburgh were so anxious to attend the hearings that they dressed up as lawyers. These were the highlights: most papers contented themselves with rumours of financial profligacy, attempted frauds, possible arson and more.

At the trial all the witnesses agreed that they had seen no blood in the ditch, while blood had pooled under Hambrough’s body, suggesting that he had died on the dike, and not falling into the ditch as Monson claimed. Then there were Monson’s financial confusions. Mr Jerningham, who had signed the Ardlamont lease as Hambrough’s trustee, was shown to have no connection to him, but was instead supported by Tottenham, now identified as a moneylender. Scott still remained unidentified, and unlocated. Finally, much emphasis was placed by both sides on the forensic possibilities. Had the nearby trees been marked by shot, as if by a man shooting from a distance, or were the marks just weather damage? At what distance would a skull shatter as Hambrough’s had? The actual trees were dug up and transported to Edinburgh and entered in evidence. To demonstrate their theories, both sides produced models and actual skulls (some reports claimed they were horses’ skulls, others that they came from ‘some known person’ so as to avoid Hambrough’s skull being displayed in court in front of his parents).
*
Dr Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon and Conan Doyle’s acknowledged source for Sherlock Holmes, testified for the prosecution on gunshot wounds, together with his assistant Dr Watson (first name not John but, exotically, Heron).

The trial lasted an astonishing ten days, and frequently appeared to be more a theatre, a place to be seen, than a courtroom. The
Weekly Herald
even set out its advertisements like a playbill, with the participants described as if in a cast of characters: the ‘IMPECUNIOUS LANDOWNER’, the ‘MYSTERIOUS SALLOW MAN’. Nearly seventy journalists attended the trial, with another twenty ‘colour writers’ and fifteen artists, and between them they telegraphed over 1.6 million words to their various newspapers.
†
(Compare this to Jessie King, an impoverished working-class woman charged with murdering three babies in her care in Edinburgh four years previously:
The Times
had devoted a whole twenty-three lines to her case. The same paper carried nineteen articles, over thirty-five columns, on Monson.) The
Aberdeen Evening Express
had an extra edition out on the street ten minutes after the verdict was given in court. The
Aberdeen Weekly
had reported that Edinburgh bookmakers were giving odds of 9–4 on a guilty verdict, but Monson slipped through the net: in less than an hour the jury came back with a verdict of ‘not proven’, and he was released.

Monson was now in the unusual position of being able to turn himself into entertainment. Not for him shy retirement from the public gaze. Only days after the end of the trial, the
Daily News
reported that he had been offered £40 a week to give talks on his experiences, and a month later he was scheduled to deliver ‘the first of a course of lectures’ at the Prince’s Hall in Piccadilly, with ‘scenery, and. realism without stint. The trial, the tragedy, and life in gaol will all come in.’ Monson, however, failed to appear as promised, although he did show up at the Westminster Aquarium in 1895, to give a twenty-minute description of his travails, which ended by him pathetically assuring the audience that his life had been ‘ruined’ by ‘a malicious system of law’. It may be that that lecture went off well enough for him to be encouraged to do more, for three months later advertisements appeared in the newspapers challenging him to undergo hypnosis onstage, to ‘solve’ the mystery. These, it became clear, were placed by a theatrical producer named Morritt who was secretly working with Monson.

In the interim, the mysterious Scott was finally discovered to be a bookmaker named Edward Sweeney. He too capitalized on the public’s interest, and with the ubiquitous Mr Morritt staged a performance at the Prince’s Hall, which sounds extraordinarily pointless: ‘Scott is pinioned to the seat. which is then suspended by pulleys to the back of a sloping easel, the chair and subject remaining … in full view of the spectators. A pistol shot is fired, the stage momentarily darkens, and the subject has disappeared, while a chair drops from the clouds on to the floor.’ Evidently people were going simply to see one of the actors in the Ardlamont drama – what he actually did was of less matter. The
Graphic
even thought this was worth illustrating (overleaf).

Long before this, waxworks exhibitions across the country had greeted the case with delight. McLeod’s Wax-Works in Aberdeen advertised ‘Up-to-date Sensation! Realistic Representation of the Plantation with young Hambrough lying shot dead! The Rowan and Lime Trees, Turf, and Earth’, complete with a tableau of Monson, Mrs Monson and Scott ‘in consultation in the Drawing-room’. In Liverpool, ‘REYNOLDS’S Grand Xmas Carnival’ included ‘A correct Likeness of ALFRED. J. MONSON’ alongside marionettes, a humorist, a wizard, a hypnotist, and ‘England’s EDUCATED FLEAS’, which made a simple ‘representation’ of ‘the discovery of Hambrough’s body’ in Cardiff sound tame.

The entertainment industry was walking a narrow line, however, as Madame Tussaud’s (and its cousinly arm, Louis Tussaud of Birmingham) found to its cost. By the end of the first day of the trial, Madame Tussaud’s had a model of Scott on display, together with a scene of the shooting. A few days after the verdict, Louis Tussaud advertised in the
Birmingham Daily Post:

Monson filed for an injunction against both exhibitions, claiming that by displaying him in the Chamber of Horrors, they were implicitly stating that he was guilty of murder, despite the not proven verdict. At the hearing, Louis Tussaud’s lawyers said that ‘a gentleman’ had arrived one day, claiming to be a friend of Monson’s and warning the exhibition’s secretary that it was illegal to show a person without his consent. When the secretary robustly replied that it was no such thing, the friend changed tack and said Madame Tussaud’s in London had offered Monson ‘a large sum of money’ to reproduce him in effigy. ‘The secretary, not believing this, laughed, and asked why Monson did not accept.’ When no fee was forthcoming, the incensed friend threatened legal action. Tussaud’s lawyers mildly added that as Monson had agreed to give lectures and write a book, it could hardly be said that he wanted no publicity: he just wanted to make sure he saw the financial rewards himself. Madame Tussaud’s in London added that Monson’s figure was not in the Chamber of Horrors, but in ‘Napoleon Room No. 2’, together with Napoleon, Mrs Maybrick, Wellington relics and Piggott, an Irish adventurer and forger. Monson’s lawyers countered that Mrs Maybrick had been found guilty of murdering her husband, and that her model and Monson’s were placed entirely apart from Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. And while Louis Tussaud, too, had placed his model ‘adjacent’ to the Chamber of Horrors, his advertisements made no such distinction.

Monson’s injunction was granted, but on appeal Madame Tussaud’s added evidence that Tottenham had offered, on Monson’s behalf, to sell them Monson’s gun and clothes for £50; for another £50 he offered that Monson would sit for his model. After the first £50 was paid, and the gun and suit handed over, Tottenham wrote to say that Monson ‘declined to recognize or consent’ to this agreement, and returned the cheque, asking for the gun and clothes back. Madame Tussaud’s refused, having bought the items in good faith. In court the waxworks’ lawyers noted that while Monson was claiming that Tottenham had stolen the items from him and sold them against his express intention, Monson had at the very same time signed a contract with Tottenham to write his story: ‘Tottenham had practically stolen your clothes, and you were entering into a contract with a thief?’ Monson: ‘Yes.’ The judges reversed the previous decision, and declined to allow the injunctions.

Monson, never one to give up the smell of cash, now sued for libel, having been defamed, he claimed, by having had a model of himself placed in the company of murderers. One of his complaints was the use of the word ‘mystery’ in the phrase ‘the Ardlamont Mystery’, which implied doubts that Hambrough had shot himself. He was forced to admit, however, that his own pamphlet was entitled
The Ardlamont Mystery
(this apparently had not occurred to him previously). After endless testimony of Tottenham and Monson lying, cheating, forging, doctoring letters, reneging on agreements, defrauding each other and anyone else within sight, the judge reminded the jury that libel had to lower a man’s reputation in the eyes of the world. The jury found that Monson had been libelled, and valued the damage to his reputation at one farthing: one-quarter of a penny, the lowest possible denomination.

It may have been fear of litigation that kept others away from the story. There appear to have been no plays, and only one story, Catherine Louise Pirkis’s ‘The Murder at Troyte’s Hill’ (1894), with the female detective Loveday Brooke saving the day. Set in Scotland, it tells of Sandy, Mr Craven’s lodgekeeper, who is found shot dead. Craven’s son Harry is ‘as much a gentleman-blackleg as it is possible for such a young fellow to be’, and suspicion falls on him. Sandy had been with the Craven family in South Africa, where Monson had worked in the civil service before becoming a tutor.

Monson remained in the public gaze, which may have kept writers away from his story. In 1896 an Alfred Wyvill, living on the Isle of Man, claimed on his insurance after a fire at his house; he was revealed to be Monson, and was prosecuted for perjury. In 1898 he was again charged with attempting to defraud an insurance company, and finally went to gaol, sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

Cecil Hambrough died an ugly death, but Monson, with his cheap shyster life, had distracted attention from that, and focused it instead on the money scramble. The case of Eleanor Pearcey, however, was not about money. Her brutal, violent crime was somehow not even seen as threatening. Eleanor Pearcey became one of Madame Tussaud’s most popular exhibits, and a subject for many jokes.

At seven o’clock on the evening of 24 October 1890 a man was returning home in north London when he noticed a woman lying at the side of the road. It would have long been dark, the area was only partly built-up, and the road had no street lamps as yet. Still, there was enough light for him to see her by. ‘At first,’ reported the newspapers, ‘he paid no particular attention to what he had seen, but continued his way homewards.’ The world was then a harsher place, and a ‘very respectably dressed’ woman, in a black cashmere dress and an imitation fur jacket, could lie in the dark on the road without causing alarm. It was only ‘on reflection’ that the home-bound clerk decided that perhaps the woman was not drunk, but had been taken ill, and turned back to have a closer look. When he approached, he found her head wrapped in a ‘cardigan jacket’. Removing that, he saw by the light of a match that she was neither drunk nor ill; she was dead, with her throat cut.