The Mansion House Mystery

When the body of a frail old woman was found battered at the bottom of her mansion stairs in Edwardian Scotland, she was depicted in the press as a sad and lonely recluse. As details of her life and death slowly emerged, Miss Jean Milne proved to be anything but.

James Sidders was a hardy Scottish postie used to being out in all weathers but as he stood on the back steps of Elmgrove, a Victorian mansion in Broughty Ferry near Dundee, he trembled. It wasn’t the cold, dreich, November morning seeping into his bones that made him shiver but a dreadful feeling of foreboding. If he was wrong then he would incur the wrath of the homeowner, the tiny but formidable Miss Jean Milne. If he was right then the 69 year old spinster was in serious trouble. Sidders was worried, very worried, the small post box on the back of the door was full to brimming. Every day it was getting harder to push the mail in. He could try the front door of course but when he had done this on a previous occasion he had received a tongue lashing from Miss Milne and strict instructions never to ring the bell ever again. For three weeks he had quashed his feelings of unease, today if there was no sign of the old woman he’d made a deal with himself to call the police.

When the postman’s call came through to the local police station, the desk sergeant must have raised his eyes to the heavens and uttered a prayer or something worse under his breath. Miss Milne was a familiar figure in a town where everyone knew each other. She had lived alone in her ramshackle and neglected mansion since the death of her brother nine years earlier. When a worried Church Elder had contacted police previously, concerned that Miss Milne was not answering calls, the sergeant had authorised a search of her property. When she returned home safe and sound from an extended holiday, Miss Milne was furious to discover her home and her privacy had been invaded. Determined not to make the same mistake twice, he resolved to wait a few days to see if she turned up. By the 4th November 1912 when the missing woman still hadn’t appeared, the sergeant reluctantly authorised a search of Elmgrove.

It didn’t take long to discover the body of the frail woman. She lay crumpled at the bottom of the stairs and had clearly been dead for some time. Her corpse was partly covered by a white sheet and her ankles had been tied together with the cord from a window blind. A pair of garden shears next to the telephone had been used to cut the line and the hallway where she lay was in disarray. Miss Milne had been beaten about the head with a poker used not only to stoke the fire but to warn off errant children scrumping apples from her small orchard. She had also been prodded and poked by a large two tine fork which had left at least 20 holes in her clothes and punctured her flesh. Her blood was spattered up the walls and her false teeth, shattered and broken, were scattered on the stairs. In the dining room an uneaten pie sat mouldering on the table, a cigar was discarded in the hearth and bizarrely, despite the number of bathrooms in the property, a vase filled with urine was left on the stairs.

Chief Constable Howard J. Semphill was put on the case but soon realised that he needed the support of a more experienced officer. John Trench a decorated police officer from Glasgow was brought in. Trench was thorough, tenacious and honourable. He quickly began to establish a motive for the murder as well as to build up a profile of Miss Milne. From the start Trench did not believe robbery was the cause of the old lady’s death. Miss Milne was ostentatious in her taste for jewellery and wore seven diamond rings, none of which had been removed from her fingers. Upstairs he discovered a gold watch undisturbed on a dressing table and a purse containing £17 in gold coins tucked away in a drawer. There was little food in the house, yet a mutton pie on the centre of the dining table had been arranged as if she was expecting a rare visitor. There were no signs that the house had been broken into.Miss Milne probably knew her killer and let him or her in. A post mortem revealed that Miss Milne had been dead for three weeks, possibly since the 14th October. The blows to her head and body were not heavy enough to fracture her skull, instead Miss Milne had died of shock and blood loss. Trench speculated that the murder was not premeditated but the result of a violent struggle. In all likelihood, he concluded, Miss Milne had picked up the poker to attack or defend herself against her visitor but being a small frail woman it was snatched from her hand and she was quickly overpowered.

Trench’s first impression was that Miss Milne was a stereotypical ‘old maid’. She had lived alone at Elmgrove and had few living relatives. Since her brother’s death she had neglected both the rambling old house and the garden. Despite being wealthy she had dismissed the maid and the full time gardener and chose to live alone shunning visitors and seeing off trespassers with her trusty poker. In the evening she sat in the window of her dining room, the blinds pulled up, playing the organ. It must have been a haunting sight; the old lady, the guttering candlelight, the wild overgrown garden and the doleful sound of the organ drifting through the neighbourhood. Her neighbours had nicknamed Elmgrove ‘Bleak House’ but despite Miss Milne’s eccentricities they were fond of her and concerned for her safety. One neighbour was quoted in the ‘Scottish Courier’,

‘I could not tell you how many times I have advised Miss Milne not to shut herself up in that big house. It was unthinkable that a lady well up in years should prefer solitude…I remember some time ago Miss Milne telling me of an incident which showed how plucky she was. For many years, she had been sitting in her dining room writing or reading. The blinds of this room were never drawn, and she was there in full view of anyone in the garden. Well one night she became conscious of the fact that she was being watched. Lifting her head quickly she saw a man at the window, his face pressed hard against the glass. It was a trying experience, but Miss Milne was no way alarmed. Rising she walked to the window and coolly ordered the man to “clear out.”

Trench soon discovered that there was more to Miss Jean Milne than met the eye. During her time in Scotland the old lady lived sparingly. She occupied two rooms in the mansion which she kept lit and heated, the others she locked. She travelled around by tram and spent her days at public lectures, church or meeting with her financial advisor. Although she had a wide circle of acquaintances she turned down offers to dine or socialise preferring her own company. One neighbour summed her up well;

‘I shall always remember her as a cheery little lady with a good word for all, although she resented intrusion upon her seclusion.’

What most of her friends and neighbours didn’t know was that Miss Milne’s real life lay far away from Scotland. Since inheriting her brother’s fortune she spent months each year travelling abroad and living it up at the Grand Hotel, London. In short Miss Milne was having the time of her life.

Trench travelled to London to find out more of this ‘secret’ double life and discovered that Miss Milne had charmed both guests and staff alike at the Royal Hotel. She was well educated, cultured, musical and fluent in a number of languages. So what if her clothes, like the gentlemen she enjoyed flirtations with, were a little too young, to the other guests she was a delight and to the staff, who were very fond of their frequent visitor, she was the ‘little Scottish canary.’

Trench, probably correctly, believed that Miss Milne’s murderer was one of the younger gentlemen she was enjoying a flirtation with. Fortunately, Broughty Ferry was a small knit community where a stranger stood out like a sore thumb and witnesses soon began to come forward.

James Don was a dustman who knew Miss Milne and her property Elmgrove very well. At 4:30 am on the morning of the 16th October he was in the vicinity when he saw a strange man emerge from the grounds. When the stranger realised that he was being observed, he hastily turned back towards the house and disappeared. He described the man as between 5ft 8” and 5ft 9”, sharp features, very pale complexion and a full moustache. He carried his head erect and swung his arms when he walked. He was dressed in a dark overcoat which reached below his knees and wore dark trousers. ‘All in all a respectable looking gentleman’.

Margaret Campbell, a maid at the next door property, recalled seeing a man walking in Miss Milne’s garden early in October. It was such an unusual occurrence that she had watched the man for a full twenty minutes and recounted what she had witnessed to her employer. Despite it being 10:30 am in the morning the man wore evening dress. Margaret described as him a 6ft tall and ‘very handsome’.

Jessie and Ida McIntosh were passing Elmgrove on the evening of the 7th October when they saw a stranger leaving. The sisters described the man as 5ft 9" with fair hair and a fair moustache. He wore a dark overcoat and was clearly a man of ‘a better class’.

The most interesting witness was John Wood, the jobbing gardener employed by Miss Milne, not just because he met at least one of Miss Milne’s visitors but for the unique insight he gives to Miss Milne’s personality. The following is taken directly from his police statement.

‘She often spoke about meeting ‘ very nice gentlemen’; that was always her particular theme, about getting acquainted with French and German gentlemen. This sort of conversation was a daily occurrence every afternoon I was working at Elmgrove, and she would spend hours in frivolous talk about the nice gentlemen she had made acquaintances of on her travels. After she came home in August 1912 she had a good lot of travelling with a German gentleman and his daughter and living in an hotel in the Strand …She said he was nice and that he always wondered why she travelled about herself, having nobody to look after her, and he was to come and visit her at Elmgrove. She had a letter from him while I was working there…she told me this particular man was a tea planter. The day before Miss Milne left which was the 19th September 1912, I was working there about 5:30 pm. Miss Milne came out and asked me to lock the different doors of the rooms and shut the windows, and she was going away the following day… I locked all the doors and took the keys to her in the hall and the door bell rang…I went and there was a gentleman there… Miss Milne skipped to the door to receive the gentleman. They shook hands very affectionately… The strange gentleman walked right past into the dining room as if he was well acquainted. The gentleman was about 40 years of age, 5ft 8” or 5ft 9” in height, fairly stout, fair hair, slight, fair moustache; bright cheery face ; fresh complexion; smart appearance; dressed in a dark swallow tailed morning coat. He was of gentlemanly appearance and the only man I ever saw going inside Miss Milne’s house in all the time I worked there.’

Posters were quickly distributed to police stations in England and Scotland in a bid to catch the murderer. When Kent Police read the description of Miss Milne’s killer, they contacted Trench. They had recently arrested a Canadian, Charles Warner, for ‘obtaining food and lodgings by fraud’. The debonair and dashingly handsome Warner had been travelling around England and the continent surviving as a gigolo. Trench thought he had his man and travelled down to Maidstone Prison with his five eyewitnesses. Warner was paraded around the exercise yard and four out of the five identified him as the man they had seen at Elmgrove. Trench had taken an immediate dislike to Warner and was prepared to take the witnesses at their word. It wasn’t until the long journey back to Scotland with his prisoner that he began to examine his own prejudices and hasty judgements. Throughout the journey Warner repeatedly protested his innocence and claimed never to have met Miss Milne or to have visited Scotland. When he retrieved a pawn ticket from his jacket pocket and remembered that he had hocked a silk waistcoat in Antwerp at the time of Miss Milne’s murder, Trench made the long journey to Belgium himself to check the alibi. He quickly established that while Warner may have been a lot of things he was not guilty of Miss Milner’s murder. On the 8th January 1913,Warner was released from prison and returned to Canada.

Miss Milne’s handsome visitor was never traced and with Warner gone, the case went cold and has remained so ever since. Occasionally, other theories emerge about the identity of the killer. A Church Elder who called on Miss Milne claims to have seen her at a window on the 12th October when her post mortem proved she must have been dead. Was he mistaken or was this woman Miss Milne’s murderer? Does that explain why the poker was not wielded with enough force to fracture Miss Milne’s skull? We will never know.

Miss Jean Milne was a woman born a century too early. Today at 69, she would not be described as old and would likely be admired for dressing younger than her years, courting younger men and travelling the world. She was intelligent, charming and well educated. Little is known of her life before her brother’s death but one can imagine that she lived the life of a maiden aunt, a confirmed and eccentric spinster. Her death was horrible, gruesome and lonely but should not define her life. I for one prefer to think of this woman not as a victim but a woman who, after her brother’s death, used her inheritance to enjoy what life had to offer and for the last nine years of her life opened her mouth and sang and sang and sang, like ‘the little Scottish canary’ she truly was.

Sources

oldglasgowmurderblogspot.co.uk

‘The Scottish Courier’

broughtyferrycommunitycouncil.org

strangeco.blogspot.co.uk

Unsolvedmurders.co.uk

‘The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne’ Andrew Nicoll

‘The Lawkillers’ Alexander Mc Gregor

Contemporary police files

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