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John Watson
LAURIE
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Robbery
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder:
July 15,
1889
Date
of arrest:September 3,
1889
Date of birth: 1864
Victim profile: Edwin Robert Rose,
32
Method of murder:
Battering with a
stone
Location: Isle of Arran,
Scotland, United Kingdom
Status: Sentenced to death. Commuted to life in prison.
Transferred to Perth Criminal Asylum in 1893. Died in the asylum
in 1930
On 12th July 1889 Edwin Rose, a clerk from London,
was travelling on the steamer from Rothesay to the Isle of Arran for a
holiday, when he met 25-year-old Laurie. Laurie was a pattern-maker from
Glasgow and was travelling under the name of John Annandale. He invited
Rose to share his lodgings on the island. The pair made friends with two
other young men and the four of them went boating and walking together.
Laurie had proposed to Rose that the two of them
climb Goatfell. One of the other men took Rose to one side and warned
him to be wary of Laurie and not to go on the climb with the man. The
other two men left the island on 14th July, at the conclusion of their
holiday, and the next day Rose and Laurie left their lodgings without
saying where they were going. Their landlady assumed that they had
absconded to avoid paying their bill.
Rose's brother arrived on the island on the 27th July.
He had become concerned when his brother had not returned from his break.
He found out that his brother had set out to climb Goatfell on the 15th
in the company of Laurie. A search involving 200 islanders found Rose's
body hidden under a pile of rocks. He had been beaten to death and
robbed. A shepherd was found who had seen Laurie coming down Goatfell on
the 15th, alone and exhausted. Laurie had also been seen the next
morning leaving the island.
When news of the killing reached the mainland Laurie
left his job and moved to Liverpool. He couldn't resist writing to the
newspapers to tell them that 'I smile when I read that my arrest is
expected hourly.' On 3rd September he was spotted
boarding a train at Fernigair and was chased by a local constable. When
he was trapped in a local wood he tried to cut his throat but the wounds
were only superficial.
He appeared at Edinburgh charged with murder. He
admitted robbing Rose but denied killing him, contending that he had
died as the result of a fall. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
This sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after he was found to be
of unsound mind. He was transferred to Perth Criminal Asylum in 1893
after a short escape from Peterhead Prison. He died in the asylum in
1930.
John Watson Laurie
John Watson Laurie was the longest serving prisoner
in Scotland.
Born in Coatbridge in 1864, he became a pattern-maker
for one of Glasgow's locomotive engineering works.
In 1889, Laurie was jilted by his fiancee after a
scandal over money stolen from his work place.
But he was never charged over the incident as his
family repaid the cash.
He went in search of the woman at the favourite Clyde
coast summer holiday resort, Rothesay, on the Island of Bute.
Failing to find his fiancee, and short of funds, he
met up with an English tourist, Edwin Robert Rose, and they decided to
take a trip to Arran.
While there, they climbed Goat Fell.
But Laurie descended alone and was later seen wearing
his climbing companion's distinctive hat.
Listed missing by relatives, Rose's body was
eventually found in a gully below Goat Fell and following an exhaustive
search Laurie was caught and tried for murder.
Witnesses claimed to have seen Rose at different
times on the fateful day, discrediting Laurie's version of events and he
was convicted and sentenced to death.
However, Laurie's sanity was very much in question
resulting in his sentence being commuted to life.
Rather than being sent to a state hospital for the
criminally insane he was to spend much of the rest of his life in one of
Scotland's toughest prisons at Peterhead.
He was eventually transferred to Perth Prison where
he died in 1930, having served 40 years and 11 months, the longest
period anyone has ever been incarcerated in Scotland.
Mountain-top death: Did he slip or was he pushed?
Craig Howie
A Scotsman and an Englishman went
up a hill and only one came down alive, or so the old joke goes.
But more than a century after the
Scotsman, John Laurie, was convicted of killing Edwin Rose on the isle
of Arran's Goatfell peak in July 1889, a deadly serious controversy
still surrounds a case of "murder in the mountains", a violent death and
possible miscarriage of justice that still haunts Scottish hillwalkers
to this day.
Rose's decomposed body was found
hidden in a howff, or hut built of rock, on a remote
mountainside near Arran's main town of Brodick, three weeks after he had
left London for a week's summer holiday on Scotland's west-coast
islands. His skull was shattered, his spine badly broken.
Laurie, 25 years old, was
subsequently arrested after two months on the run, having fled first
from Arran then subsequently his Lanarkshire hometown of Coatbridge,
where on his apprehension by police he attempted suicide with a
cut-throat razor.
"I robbed the man," Laurie stated
on his arrest and later in his defence, "but I did not murder him."
Laurie would protest his innocence until his death more than 40 years
later in 1930, age 69, in the lunatic division – as it was then known -
of Perth Prison.
In a trial at Edinburgh's High
Court, held in a relative frenzy of media activity and amid massive
public interest, Laurie was tried and convicted of murdering the
32-year-old Rose. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in
prison. But with the benefit of history and hindsight, the case leaves
open more questions than it ultimately answered.
The two men had met in Rothesay,
on Bute, and struck a friendship. Rose, was a well-to-do fellow, working
as a builder's clerk in London and travelling with several companions.
Laurie, a pattern-maker at
Springburn's Atlas Iron Works, travelling alone and seemingly an odd
fellow, was, according to The Scotsman, described in the
criminal trial as "square-shouldered but slightly built, and walks with
a rolling gait. His teeth are a conspicuous part of him, and are
remarkably white and regular. He is exceedingly fond of dress, and was
often seen in knickerbockers."
Both men would stay at a hotel in
Rothesay, but Laurie, mysteriously, would check himself in under the
name of Annandale, leaving a calling card to that effect. Rose,
meanwhile, was apparently warned by several of his friends that Laurie
looked a nasty piece of work.
Fast fact
The genesis of the name Goatfell
is disputable.
"Field" is the Norse name for mountain or fell, and the four sides of
the peak are all Norse names.
However, the Gaels believe Goatfell comes from the Gaelic terms:
Gaoithbheinn, "Mountain of the Wind", or the literal translation
Beinn-Gaibhre.
After a few days climbing and
walking together around Bute, Rose and Laurie sailed on the
mid-afternoon ferry to Brodick, where they would then strike for the
summit of Goatfell, an easily accesible peak, though the going could get
treacherous in the wet weather common to the west.
Nobody knows just what transpired
on the descent from the summit, but certain facts appear indisputable.
Rose's body was found purposefully concealed in a 42-stone crypt, having
died of massive injuries to the head and body. Several of his belongings
- a hat and walking cane - had been found further up the isolated
corrie. The pair had been seen by at least five witnesses on the summit
of Goatfell at about 6.20pm, but none had witnessed their descent.
Laurie was seen at the Corrie Bar
in Brodick that evening, ordering drinks just before 10pm. The following
day, he left the island without paying his lodging bill and was seen by
several witnesses clutching a striped jacket later revealed to be
Rose's.
The discovery of Rose's body
coupled with Laurie's apparent odious behaviour was enough to spark a
manhunt. Laurie was apprehended "lurking in the vicinity" of Hamilton,
The Scotsman reported, after giving up his job and apparently a
girlfriend before drifting for several months between Glasgow, Aberdeen
and Liverpool.
The trial, sensational in its day
and held "with every manifestation of public interest", saw queues
forming outside the public gallery each day, all seeking to hear
first-hand the gruesome nature of the crime.
The Crown's ultimately successful
case rested on circumstantial evidence surrounding the nature of Rose's
injuries backed by behavioural reports that convinced the jury of
Laurie's murderous intention. Laurie, meanwhile, claimed that Rose had
met two others on Goatfell summit and ascended with them.
From the archive
The Goatfell Tragedy The Scotsman
4 September 1889
Crucially, the case skipped over
details involving the cause of death. Initially the Crown had claimed
Laurie battered Rose with a stone, causing his horrendous injuries,
though this was easily disproved by the testimony of the Queen's
surgeon, Patrick Watson.
Not a drop of blood was found on
Laurie's clothes, or indeed anything that linked him to the murder,
though clearly he had robbed Rose of his possessions.
So a fall was suggested, if not
proven. A stream runs through the slippery Coire nam Fuaran, about 700ft
below the lower of the two cols between North Goatfell and Mullach
Buidhe, where climbers on one side could negotiate an exposed drop of
10ft, or on the other a drop of 32ft. So if Rose indeed slipped, it
seems likely that Laurie stole his effects and hid the body.
Yet the murderer – if there was
one at all – had clearly not sought to hide evidence. A folded cap and
walking stick were found in the vicinity, the cane openly visible and
placed consistent with a fall. And the solicitor-general based the
charge of murder upon what he called Laurie's "conduct" and his run from
the law.
With hard evidence of murder in
the balance, it seemed crucial for the Crown to play the behavioural
card as Laurie's motive. In reality, the Crown had proved nothing,
though the jury convicted by a majority of one after just 45 minutes'
deliberation. The verdict resonated throughout the island community and
the mainland, as well as sending a chill through hillwalking circles.
"The obvious idea is that an
opportunity came where Laurie could give Rose a push and then rob him
and then take his gear, and that somebody who lies a lot is inevitably
under suspicion," says Robin Campbell, archivist of the Scottish
Mountaineering Club, who has written extensively about the case.
"But why would Laurie kill him?
The evidence is circumstantial and weak, and, my guess, it was an
accident. Rose died in the accident, Laurie decided to take what he had
and stuff him under a boulder. The medical evidence presented by the
Crown was also dubious at best."
Noting that the peak is "only an
hour" from Arran's Glen Sannox, Campbell says the spot remains popular
among hillwalkers today. You can, in fact, spend a night in the same
howff in which Rose was found, though Campbell doesn't recommend it.
"Murder in the hills is easy,"
Campbell says, adding, "who can prove a push or a fall?".
