The Oscar Slater Murder Story by Richard Whittington-Egan

Author:Richard Whittington-Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906476731
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

The petition setting out the grounds on which Slater’s appeal was based had been completed by 2 March 1928, and despatched to the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for Scotland. The petitioner was meanwhile residing quietly in Ayr.

I await the result of the coming re-trial of my case with the confidence in British justice which kept me alive for 18 years, and saved me, though often driven to despair, from seeking by my own hand the death to which I, an innocent man, had been condemned long years before for a crime I never committed.

So spoke Oscar Slater, not, one suspects, without a considerable degree of ventriloquous aid and sentimental splinting on the part of ‘Our Man in Ayr’, author of what the Daily Express of 27 March 1928, claimed to be

the first exclusive statement by Oscar Slater, whose manhood years lie buried in Scotland’s Sing Sing … He is here in a peaceful Scottish seaside town, in the land of Burns amid the inspiring Lowland grandeur which saw the birth of Scotland’s champion of liberty and justice, who in words of poetic fire cried to the world for humanity to the oppressed, and arraigned it for ‘Man’s inhumanity to man.’

Maintaining his alarmingly high note, this Daily Express very Special Correspondent, marches blithely on to, and over, the top.

No scene could be more in harmony with the cause of a man about to join battle with all the powerful forces of the State … which branded him as the foulest criminal known to human law – a murderer. Oscar Slater, still by prison law a convict, is in appearance the antithesis of a murderer. The keen winds of the western seas which wash this rugged Scottish coast have brought back the glow of health to his cheeks … He is tall, brown, erect, and sprucely-dressed, and carries himself with the air of a guardsman.

Extending the portrait, the Empire News informed its readers:

He spends his time in walks in the surrounding country. He is a wonderfully vigorous walker, 14 miles at a stretch not being too much for his physical strength. A kindly and genial atmosphere – the people of Ayr have been most kind and sympathetic in their mixings with him – has melted out the real man from that icy figure released in November last. There is a ruddy healthy bloom on his cheeks; there is a sturdy strength in his swinging gait. His mind, too, has freshened up. He laughs and jokes; joins in stories over the fireside; and can ‘crack’ a good one, too. With keen interest and confidence he awaits the ordeal of the rehearsing of his case.

The Lord Justice-General, Lord Clyde, having received the Scottish Secretary’s letter and Slater’s petition, and pondered upon them for some four and a half weeks, replied, on 13 April, that he held the said petition as a note of appeal by the said Oscar Slater, and appointed him to lodge a Supplementary Note containing such further specification and

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