Slater, Oscar

Miss Marion Gilchrist, 82, has long lived in Glasgow . She was a hermit; the only one she talked to was her young maid Helen Lambi. On December 21, 1908, Helen left the house to buy an evening newspaper. She was absent for less than ten minutes ^[1] . Miss Gilchrist was sick for a long time and always checked that the double front door was securely locked. To open the door, I used a special device - a long wire coming from the lock on the door to her apartment on the second floor. Returning with the newspaper, Helen saw at the door of Miss Gilchrist the excited tenant of Arthur Adams's lower apartment. He explained that he heard some noise in the apartment of a neighbor, and then a thud. He called Miss Gilchrist and without waiting for an answer, Adams went upstairs.

Helen opened the door with her key. The moment they were about to enter, an unfamiliar man appeared from the interior rooms. He suddenly pushed Helen and Adams away and fled. A maid and a young neighbor carefully entered the apartment. Miss Gilchrist lay in the living room in front of the fireplace, covered with a carpet. Her head was broken. Miss Gilchrist's jewelery collection, valued at more than three thousand pounds, was almost untouched. Only a diamond brooch worth about fifty pounds disappeared. But the box with the papers was open, its contents are scattered around, as if looking for some paper. Adams ran to the police, and Helen rushed to the house of Mrs. Margaret Birrell, Miss Gilchrist's niece. There the maid said she recognized the killer. For some reason, Mrs. Birrell scolded her.

The police came under pressure from the public to arrest the criminal. There was only one version - the killer is 36-year-old Jew Oscar Joseph Slater, who left for America. The argument in favor of Slater’s guilt was that the suspect pledged a diamond brooch to the murdered woman at the cost of the stolen one. He did this before heading to America on an ocean liner, along with his French mistress. In New York , at an English request, Slater was immediately arrested and taken to Glasgow . It turned out that the brooch that Slater mortgaged belonged to him for many years and was pledged three weeks before the murder. Nevertheless, the police ignored this fact. Slater was the only suspect. Slater had an alibi that her lover and his maid could confirm. However, the police refused to take this circumstance into account.

Oscar Slater was born on January 8, 1872 in the city of Opole in Upper Silesia. Around 1893 , evading military service, he went to London, where he worked as a bookmaker. In 1899 he moved to Edinburgh , and in 1901 to Glasgow. Slater claimed to be a gymnastics teacher and a dentist , but was known to the police as a pimp and gangster who contacted thieves, robbers, and sellers of stolen goods. However, Slater was not tried before the murder charges of Marion Gilchrist.

In 1909, Oscar Slater was found guilty by jury and sentenced to death . Slater Judge Charles John Guthrie filed a petition for a change of sentence signed by 20,000 people. ^[2] Two days before the execution, the sentence was changed to life imprisonment .

Revision

Arthur Conan Doyle received letters of assistance in large numbers. He rarely responded to them. In 1906, he sought the acquittal of George Edalzhi , a lawyer from Birmingham , an Indian by birth, who was sentenced to 7 years for killing domestic horses. Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet about the innocence of a lawyer and was able to convince the court to review the case and acquit Edalji.

Conan Doyle found out about Slater during pretrial detention. “ When I got acquainted with the facts, I realized that this unfortunate person has the same attitude to murder as I do, ” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography about the Slater case. Conan Doyle wrote the pamphlet The Oscar Slater Case, in which he cited a number of arguments about Slater's innocence. Despite the persuasiveness of his arguments, Slater could not be reconsidered. Conan Doyle launched a persistent press campaign. In the end, an official government investigation was appointed. But nothing came of it. Only in November 1927, 18 years after Slater’s conviction, he was released. A second trial was appointed. In July of the following year he was pardoned (he was never rehabilitated) and received 6 thousand pounds in compensation. During the Second World War, Slater, as a foreigner, was interned. He died in 1948 at the age of 72.

An additional investigation did not lead to anything. Helen Lambi did not say about whom, as she said earlier, she recognized in a man who had run out of the apartment.
Many were convinced that the killer was a well-known person in the city with whom the police did not want to get involved. Conan Doyle never publicly expressed his suspicions, but shortly before his death, he said that he knew who the killer really was: “ The police covered this man, because he was a famous city dweller who for some reason really wanted to get to the personal papers of miss Marion Gilchrist. He escaped punishment, but for me it is much more important that the innocent is free . ” The murder of Marion Gilchrist remains unsolved to this day.

• In 2001, writer Richard Wittington-Egan wrote a book about the Slater case, The Oscar Slater Murder Story .

• Oscar Slater. Victims of bias
• The Case of Oscar Slater
• Glasgow's dark side
• 100th anniversary of a notorious Glasgow murder
• List of unsolved murders in the UK