At half-past two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 20 September 1834, Elizabeth Arnot Reid was discovered sitting upon the floor near her bed, her shoulders and head disposed in a manner which the witnesses did not all describe alike. A fragment of blanket was wrapped about the lower portion of her frame. One arm, according to one witness, rested upon a chair; according to another, it hung down by her side. The room did not merely present a corpse to be inspected: it exhibited a posture that was destined to become a prime piece of evidence.
Rather more than nine months later, before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, that very posture gave rise to a graver question: had it been arranged in the wake of a murder, or did it prove nothing whatsoever as to the cause of death? In the pamphlet he published following the trial, the physician John Fletcher openly declared his allegiance. He had acted as medical adviser to the defence and wrote to counteract public opinion, which held the acquittal of Robert Reid to be an outrage. His pages are not the trial itself. They present a medical and polemical reconstruction of the proceedings, whose conclusions must remain those of their author alone.
The Body and the Chamber
Reid, a tailor residing in Pathhead, appeared on 29 June 1835 before the High Court of Justiciary. According to the extract of the indictment transcribed by Fletcher from the newspapers, the crime had allegedly been committed on the 19th or 20th of September of the preceding year. The husband stood accused of having struck his wife upon the neck with an axe or other lethal instrument, fractured one or more vertebrae, or else of having strangled, suffocated, or otherwise murdered her. The libel did not tie itself to a single fatal act; it enumerated several possible paths toward the same mortal end. Reid pleaded not guilty.
Fletcher explains that he was unable to consult an authenticated record of the trial. He states that he appended to his remarks an abstract of the indictment and the list of witnesses as published in the gazettes; with respect to the depositions he examines, he claims to rely upon notes taken during the hearing. Such a caveat is of consequence. The reader is not confronted with an impartial transcript, but with the narrative of a man pledged to the defence, intent upon rectifying what he deemed an unjust and distorted public report.
Elizabeth was fifty-six years of age. Her neighbours described an infirm woman, prone to complaints of pains in the head and back, who walked leaning to one side and had on a former occasion suffered an attack in which she had been rendered speechless and seemingly lifeless. Several witnesses recounted her grievances against her husband; some had heard threats uttered, or had heard her cry out in the night. None, according to Fletcher’s account, professed to have seen Reid strike her.
One utterance, overheard by neighbours during the night preceding the discovery, weighed heavily in the accusation: “Do not strike me on the head; take my life at once.” It might well be interpreted as the echo of a blow. Fletcher proposed an alternative reading: that pain and terror had merely attended an already existing disease. The reported testimony itself does not permit us to discern what act, if any, had provoked the cry.
That morning, according to Fletcher’s reconstruction, Reid left his dwelling about nine o’clock in company with his daughter, returning around two. He then sought assistance; at half-past two, the women summoned to Elizabeth found her dead. Near neighbours had heard neither struggle nor disturbance. The absence of noise might weigh in the balance, yet it left unresolved all that had transpired during that interval of time.
The body was described as supple and limber. Mrs. Thomson, who had assisted in moving it, believed life had only just departed. Other witnesses differed as to the exact position of the head, the right arm, or the legs. Fletcher conceded that Reid might have altered the posture: that, coming upon the body lying on the floor, he might have raised it and covered its nakedness before running for help. Such an act, had Reid performed it, did not prove that he had slain his wife. Yet that concession did not, of itself, demonstrate the charitable explanation deduced by the physician.
The Marks that Appeared After
The prosecution rested in great measure upon what the surgeons believed they had discovered upon the neck. At the initial inspection on Saturday afternoon, no discoloration was reported by any observer. According to Fletcher, none was perceptible either during the subsequent examinations at eight and eleven o’clock that evening. It was not until the following day that Bailie Walker perceived a dark mark beneath the right ear; by four in the afternoon, appearances were likewise noted along the nape of the neck and down the back. This lapse of time transformed the aspect of the skin into a critical question of chronology.
The Crown medical witnesses regarded these appearances as consistent with ecchymosis, and thus with injury sustained during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Fletcher opposed to this deduction the doctrine of cadaveric lividity—the settling of blood that may colour the skin after death when a corpse remains in a static posture. He relied upon the statements he attributed to several witnesses: if these marks were absent for many hours after the presumed demise, they could not, in his estimation, be taken as straightforward proof of a blow inflicted prior to death. The observation depended entirely upon the hour, the position of the corpse, and the manner in which the inspection had been conducted.
At the center of this inquiry stood Charles C. Williams, a surgeon of Dysart, who had performed the initial dissection in the presence of the bailie. He reported finding blood extravasated beneath the skin and a fracture near the upper cervical vertebrae; Professor Christison and the other Crown authorities discerned therein the plain marks of fatal violence. Yet the corpse had been moved and examined repeatedly, without notes being taken at the precise time of the dissection.
Fletcher vigorously impugned Williams’s professional competence and his conduct of the post-mortem examination, alleging that the surgeon was incapable—an accusation that remains the partisan claim of a defence adviser. The fracture of the second cervical vertebra presented an additional difficulty. According to Fletcher, the original report had spoken only of a dislocation, the fracture being recorded only after the exhumation of the body. The bone itself was subsequently lost, having been thrown amidst butcher’s offal, and could never be subjected to scrutiny to ascertain whether disease had rendered it fragile. The charge of murder with an axe remained merely one of the contingencies set forth in the indictment, alongside an unknown weapon or strangulation; none of these hypotheses gained certainty simply by being pleaded at the bar.
The Words Attributed to the Husband
The evidence did not rest with the medical men alone. Neighbours testified that Reid was in the habit of swearing at Elizabeth and had upon occasion threatened her; her brother recalled a threat to “break her neck.” Yet other witnesses described a couple who lived, at times, upon tolerable terms. Fletcher insists upon the total lack of any direct witness to an assault, and connects the deceased woman’s lamentations to her bodily suffering. This explanation remains that of the author; the reported words do not alone establish murder.
Following the discovery, Reid was observed to weep, according to Mrs. Tod. When questioned as to the cause of death, he answered: “We must not tell all tales,” and “things will take their course”; later, he was alleged to have spoken of being delivered from a burden. Such utterances naturally fed suspicion. Fletcher attributed them to an intoxicated and distracted man, without being able to demonstrate what his true intentions were.
Another piece of evidence seemed more damning: an officer asserted that Reid had confessed to the murder following his apprehension, while being conveyed from Edinburgh. To this, the defence opposed the testimony of the gaoler’s wife and the officer himself: the officer had allegedly promised the prisoner that he would “get clear off” if he confessed, and threatened him with the gallows if he denied the charge. When examined before the magistrate, Reid denied the crime, declaring he had been driven to make whatever statement he had uttered. Here again, Fletcher does not record a separate judicial ruling upon the confession; he merely displays a contradiction and presents it as a compelling reason for doubt.
Drs. Robertson, Lizars, and Mackintosh contested several conclusions arrived at by their professional brethren, emphasising Elizabeth’s previous state of health and the inadequacies of the post-mortem examination. Fletcher advanced the hypothesis of disease of the vertebrae followed by a fatal seizure; such a natural cause might well account for certain appearances, but it remained his own theory, not a matter of consensus. He admitted, moreover, that he did not presume to decide whether Elizabeth had indeed been murdered.
A Verdict that Leaves the File Open
The proceedings concluded with the peculiar Scottish finding of “Not proven.” It did not declare Reid “Not guilty”; it signified only that the charge had not been established to the satisfaction of the court. Fletcher termed it an equivocal verdict, remarking that many would have preferred “Not guilty.” His own preference must not be confounded with the decree of the jury. The jurors endorsed neither the Crown’s theory of murder nor the medical explanation tendered by Fletcher.
His pamphlet converted the aftermath of the trial into a second court of appeal. It opens with animadversions upon public prejudice, taxes the press with having given undue prominence to the case for the Crown while slighting that of the prisoner, and proceeds with a dissertation wherein every inculpatory fact is matched with an opposing interpretation. Yet it cannot supply the place of an impartial transcript: it was penned by the very man engaged to counsel Reid, and his resentment against the Crown’s medical witnesses colours every page.
History, therefore, affords us no certainty touching the death of Elizabeth Arnot Reid. It preserves only the memory of a woman whose neighbours bore witness to her infirmities and laments, a corpse subject to a contested examination, a husband arraigned and tried, and a jury that found the evidence wanting. By the bedside, the posture remained an enigma. In the courtroom, “Not proven” closed the trial without illuminating what had passed within the chamber.