Martin S. Wathen

The Innocence Of Oscar Slater, And How Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Helped Set Him Free.

December 21st 1908. The biting chill of a Glasgow December wielded it’s glacial grasp on the home of Marion Gilchrest. She lay in a pool of her own blood. Clear signs of physical beating besieged her face. Dead before her discovery at the hands of her servant – Helen Lambie. The 82 year old had amassed a hefty fortune over her lifetime and, in turn, quite the collection of jewels. This, seemingly the motive for such a heinous act of violence. This further evident when Gilchrest’s horrified maid credited a single article missing amongst her collection of jewels. One golden brooch. A piece in the shape of a crescent moon, with several diamonds tracking down one side. Such an article, at the time, approximately valued £3,000 – hundreds of thousands when adjusting to today's inflation. The foundations of such a transgression seems torn from the pages of a turn of the century crime novel. A story from the genius of Agatha Christie, or Raymond Chandler. But this was far from fiction. Ironically, with the venomous tentacles of prejudice, it took one of the genre’s best to bring the investigation back to reality. The real-life work of an iconic author to save the life of a wrongfully convicted man. This author, Sherlock Holmes’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.