![]() Not remotely daunted, the police, as Fox so neatly summarizes, followed the (il)logical syllogism: “All murders are committed by undesirables Oscar Slater is an undesirable therefore, Oscar Slater committed the Gilchrist murder.”Īnd so in 1909, after a brief and farcically prejudiced trial, Slater was convicted. When the pawnbroker was located, however, Gilchrist’s maid was firm: The brooch he held was not the one belonging to her mistress. Why, the man was even living under a fake name and was planning to leave the country - all the evidence they needed to conclude he was a criminal ready to flee. Searching for the stolen diamond brooch, the police heard of a man attempting to sell a pawn ticket for exactly that, and they thought they had hit the jackpot. This lack of income, or the financial demands of his wife, might be why Slater had already booked himself a ticket to America. They rented a flat not far from Gilchrist, and Slater bought some tools to fix it up, pawning a brooch to keep himself liquid. ![]() The police thought he was a pimp, in part because his music-hall entertainer girlfriend was said, shockingly, to entertain men at home in his absence. On one of those stays he had married an alcoholic Glaswegian, and now, to avoid her demands for money, he had taken an assumed name. Slater was 36, a cheery rolling stone who had previously lived in New York, Paris, Brussels and in Glasgow at least twice before. Or was it? It was the missing brooch that doomed Oscar Slater. ![]() The crime seemed impulsive, and not for gain. A doctor identified a chair leg as the murder weapon money lying in plain sight was untouched, as was Miss Gilchrist’s substantial jewelry collection, save for a single diamond brooch. Inside, they found a battered and dying Miss Gilchrist. On the last night of Marion Gilchrist’s life, the elderly woman was left alone when her maid went to fetch the evening newspaper on her return, the maid met a neighbor, alerted by noise overhead and the sight of a man rushing past on the stairs. ![]() The murder took place around Christmas 1908, and was both brutal and tawdry. ![]() Margalit Fox, a recently retired obituaries writer for The New York Times, is adept at disinterring the bones of long-buried bodies, and in “Conan Doyle for the Defense” she sets out to follow him in righting wrongs. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion.”Īnd twice in the following decades, Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was to put himself in the same position in the real world, harrying the police, examining data and giving a specialist’s opinion to correct what he saw as travesties of justice. In 1890, one of fiction’s first, and certainly greatest, “consulting detectives” proclaimed his place in the world: “I am,” Sherlock Holmes announced, “the last and highest court of appeal in detection.” When the police are out of their depths, Holmes declared, “the matter is laid before me. CONAN DOYLE FOR THE DEFENSE The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer By Margalit Fox Illustrated. ![]()
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