Benbecula, page 11
It is through phrases like this, passed over without further elaboration, that a picture emerges of a troubled family.
Angus Junior, Munro reports, comes over to him and asks for some tobacco before inviting him into the house to smoke, an offer Munro declines. As the three reach the potato field, Angus gives Peggy ‘a private message’. Peggy herself testifies that Angus called her aside and told her that she need not feel afraid, adding, ‘I did not show any symptoms of fright though he said this.’ Angus, she says, ‘was flushed but he was not more excited than usual’.
The evidence of a small boy, Roderick MacMillan, is chilling. ‘I do not know how old I am,’ he says, ‘perhaps I am eight.’ Around noon, Roderick goes to Mary MacPhee’s house to borrow a vessel to fill from the well. ‘When I was at the well I heard screams from Mary MacPhee’s house. The screams were very loud.’ He fills the vessel with water and returns to the house. ‘On reaching the door I distinctly heard Angus MacPhee speaking in a low tone and Mary MacPhee still screaming aloud. I got quite frightened on hearing Angus MacPhee’s voice. I turned away from the door and ran home.’ Unfortunately, his parents were on the shore cutting seaware and could not raise an alarm.
Around 3 p.m., Peggy MacAuley, 20, and Mary Ann MacSween are passing the MacPhees’ croft. They see Angus Senior at work in the potato field and Angus Junior sitting on a nearby hillock with a pair of stockings, ‘striking them against a stone as if he were dusting them’. When they part at the ford to South Uist, Mary Ann MacSween testifies: ‘I was looking over my shoulder which I often did being afraid of Angus MacPhee. I saw him get up and walk away. I called out to Peggy to make haste in case MacPhee should go after her.’
Though nothing is made of it in the statements, a clear picture emerges that Angus was a menace to the young women and girls of the parish.
Mary Wilson, 13, testifies that on the same afternoon while she is cutting grass on the moor, she sees Angus coming towards her from the direction of Liniclate: ‘He was within a few yards of me before I noticed him. He had no coat on him and no shoes but he had stockings. He was walking at his leisure. I got quite afraid and ran off when I saw him. He followed me but stopt when he came in sight of the house.’
Her mother, Margaret Wilson, says that Mary ‘came running to me in apparently great fear’. She puts the time of this incident at around 5 p.m., which, if correct, would mean that this took place after the murders had been committed.
The only further reported sighting of Angus that day occurred much later. William MacPherson, 49, a tenant at Griminish, two miles north of the MacPhees’ home in Liniclate, having heard news of the murders and fearing that Angus would come that way, locks the door of his house. ‘At 11 o’clock,’ he reports, ‘there was a knock at the door and as eleven struck the person who was outside struck the door with a switch corresponding to every strike of the clock.’
He sees Angus pass his window with no cap or coat on him.
There are several accounts of the posse which was mustered at first light, and of the eventual running down of Angus to the small island in an unnamed lochan, the throwing of stones, setting of dogs on him and the firing of shots (blanks, according to the statement of Ewan MacLeod, 38).
However, the most perplexing of the precognition statements is that of John MacPherson, 36, a tenant at Balivanich. MacPherson was a member of the search party that apprehended Angus and later took turns to stand guard over him, but the bulk of his testimony is an account of a lengthy confession made by Angus while being held at Creagorry or Gramisdale.3
My first reaction on reading this confession was that it was implausible and had likely been fabricated in order to provide corroborating evidence to support a charge of murder. There was, after all, no physical or eyewitness evidence. However, certain details contained in his account seem so peculiar, particularly in relation to the killing of Mary MacPhee, that they seem unlikely to be wholly fictitious.
MacPherson begins by reporting that on the Friday (the day after the murders) he asked Angus why he had killed his parents and that Angus responded by saying that he was ‘defaming his character’ by making such an accusation. The following day, however, Angus makes an unprompted confession:
[Angus] said that he had asked his mother for food and she said there was none in the house to give him and that there was no meal, but after this that she baked a small cake for him and put an egg on the fire for him that he only ate a little of it, that she was standing in the door of the bedroom and that he jumped to her and gave her a blow with his fist in the ear which knocked her down, that he stood over her and gave her several blows with his fists, that he then got a stone that was to the back of the front door and with that he put an end to her life . . . He said he dragged her body below one of the beds and drew a cog that was under the bed out of the way to allow him to do it . . . He then said that Mary MacPhee came into the house and asked for his mother and he told her that she had gone to look after a couple of sheep or a cow or to Donald MacDonald’s house, that a little after this he went out. Said Mary MacPhee having left the house whenever he gave that answer and that he went into her house and asked her to go and sleep with him in the bed which she refused to do, that he then desired her to lie down on the floor that she also refused to do that, that he then threw her down and began striking her in the head and face with the said iron [the broken handcuff], that she screamed fearfully, that as he was not getting on so rapidly as he wished he got a stone and with that broke her scull, that before then he had dragged her over to the fire place where he wrapped the bedclothes about her, that he then went out and met his father returning from hoeing the potatoes, that his father said that he had been murdering his aunt, that he said he was not and that he had only been calling in, that his father and he went into his father’s house who asked for his mother and that he gave him the same answer he formerly gave Mary MacPhee, that his father looked so angry, that he rushed upon him and began striking him with his fists and that he had much less difficulty in killing him than the two women, that after he killed him he dragged him up aside his own bed and placed the chest outside of him, and that he then sculked away.
MacPherson’s account of Angus’s confession is corroborated by Ewen MacLeod, 38: ‘On Saturday [Angus] explained particularly how he had murdered his mother and aunt . . . He said he jumped upon his mother and trampled upon her [. . .] He said that he was desirous that his father and mother should put him in a rage before he attacked them by refusing him something.’
MacLeod further reports that Angus said he washed his shirt and vest and left them by a lake ‘with the intention of deceiving those who might be searching for him, and they might think he had gone out on the lake and drowned’.
He concludes: ‘I consider him quite mad. He may sometimes say a few sensible words but very rarely. He is always trying to take off his clothes.’
On reinterrogation, MacLeod adds, ‘He speaks daily of these murders. He starts the subject himself and seems to boast of having committed them.’
Regardless of the minor inconsistencies and discrepancies in the various statements, a clear picture of what occurred emerges. Some time on the morning in question, Angus killed his mother and hid her body. He then, probably shortly afterwards, killed his aunt. After some intervening hours, during which he was seen by various witnesses, he killed his father and fled the scene.
The legal defence of insanity was established both in English and Scottish courts in 1843 after Daniel M’Naughton, a Scottish woodturner, was found not guilty on grounds of insanity of murdering civil servant Edward Drummond, whom he had mistaken for the Prime Minister Robert Peel.
What came to be known as the M’Naughton Rule states:
To establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
Angus was tried at the Autumn Circuit Court in Inverness on 6 October, defended by John Ferguson MacLennan. As was customary at the time, there is no record of the trial and it merited less than two hundred words, under the headline MURDER BY A MANIAC, in the Glasgow Courier: ‘The circumstances of this painful case will be fresh in the recollection of the public. The prisoner attacked his relatives, in revenge it was supposed, for having confined him in handcuffs, and murdered them one after another on 9th July last.’
He was found not guilty on grounds of insanity and ordered to be ‘confined till the further pleasure of the Court’.
This report was carried pretty much verbatim by a number of newspapers, but that was the extent of the interest in the case. The Stonehaven Journal adds the intriguing detail that ‘the prisoner . . . said he was the Christ, and that he had the Divine command to commit the murders, and was doing God[’s] service’.
Given that under Scots law at the time the defendant could not give evidence at his own trial and that there is no mention in any of the precognition statements of Angus engaging in this sort of talk, this seems at best hearsay.
In any case, Angus was sent to the Criminal Lunatic Department at the General Prison in Perth, where he was held under the care of James Bruce Thomson. Thomson, who died in 1873, was an early authority on the then nascent subject of criminal psychology and the author of two pioneering articles, ‘The Hereditary Nature of Crime’ and ‘The Psychology of Criminals’. He also, incidentally, features as a character in my novel His Bloody Project.
Despite exhaustive efforts, I have been unable to locate the records of the early years of Angus’s incarceration (1857–73). However, Professor Rab Houston of St Andrews University describes how ‘during the first three decades of his incarceration at the Criminal Lunatic Department, Angus was more or less continually deranged, experiencing sudden episodes of violent insanity. During these periods Angus was held in a strait-jacket and anklets. He is also reported to be fixated with his genitals and a “chronic masturbator”.’4
Despite the fact that alternative forms of entertainment would have been scarce, it seems unlikely that Angus developed this habit on entering the asylum. Indeed, given the evidence that he was a menace to the female population of Liniclate, the handcuffs made by the blacksmith MacRury might well have been designed to prevent this onanistic behaviour. This might also account for the particular rage Angus is reported to have reserved for these manacles.
This state of violent insanity is consistent with the statement of John MacDonald, the Medical Officer at Lochmaddy Prison, North Uist, where Angus was initially held. ‘I have seen Angus MacPhee,’ he reports, ‘almost daily since his committal to prison. He is quite insane and continues to be in a state of constant maniacal excitement.’
As the decades pass, the annual assessments of Angus’s condition grow ever more perfunctory. The first of the surviving reports, written on 29 January 1873, is the longest, and the delusions afflicting Angus exceed anything reported from his life on Benbecula. He had by this time been incarcerated for sixteen years and his condition does not speak well of the therapeutic environment of the General Prison.
Angus MacPhee has been for a few days rather restless. He does not sleep well and says he is troubled in his mind thinking over his past life. He refers to supposed past injuries inflicted he says by a former attendant. Had an idea that his penis had been injured and is not right and suggested it might be cut off with a chisel and then it would grow in again straight. To have Bromide of Potassium.5 Strictly watched and excluded from the tool room.
The following day he is reported to be ‘furiously maniacal. Restrained in jacket and anklets.’
The next update is from November 1876:
. . . slowly recovering. Has still one hand restrained. Is very confused in his ideas and wandering in his talk, jumping from one subject of conversation to another with the greatest rapidity. It is noticed that every succeeding maniacal attack with which he is affected is always [of] much longer duration than its predecessor . . . Has shown no notice to anyone lately.
A month later, he has been ‘relieved from all restraint’. By mid-1877 he is reported as being ‘one of the best and most constant workers. Still a little confused in his talk but now very quiet’, but the fixation with his genitalia continues. In June of that year he is said to be ‘complaining of enlargement of one of his testicles (on examination found to be quite normal) which he says was hurt by a former attendant.’ In October, ‘[he] says he is in love with one of the female attendants and thinks that his health is breaking down’.
From this point the assessments of his condition run to no more than a few words per year: ‘No change to note’ (1879); ‘Filthy in his habits’ (1883); ‘Dull and despondent’ (1884); ‘He became quite talkative [illegible] then argumentative and dictatorial followed by extreme violent excitement until November when improvement set in’ (1888); ‘Restless and unsettled most of the year’ (1893); ‘Has been more or less dull and [illegible]; kept his bed for a [illegible], thought he was dying of [illegible] and wished to see his [illegible]’ (1897).
The final entry in this chronicle of a dismal existence is from December 1899: ‘Improved. Had no period of excitement during the year but from time to time became dull and despondent. So fairly rational and works well.’
At this point, after forty-two years in the Criminal Lunatic Department, Angus was transferred to Inverness Prison where he died shortly afterwards at the age of sixty-eight.
Reading through these perfunctory notes, the dominant emotion is one of sadness. Angus MacPhee, for whatever reason, was driven to commit three horrifying acts of violence, but his incarceration, physical restraint and drug-induced torpor can also be seen as acts of violence.
Press reports of the murders themselves were a little more lengthy, but despite being described as ‘the most heartrending spectacle ever witnessed in the Highlands’, the incident merited only a single mention in each of the Scottish newspapers. The fullest account was in the Inverness Courier, and, aside from details of the murders and Angus’s capture, it provides a little insight into the circumstances of the MacPhee family.
The unhappy maniac’s father was in comparatively comfortable circumstances, for though his relative Mary MacPhee was on the poors’-roll, he himself was quite independent of parochial relief, and his family . . . were usually well employed on the island. But though the means of the family were adequate to the daily wants of a simple household such as that at Liniclate, it is quite out of the question to suppose that MacPhee could have sent his son to any of the lunatic asylums of the south, and maintained him there at his private charges, and, not being a pauper, the Board of Supervision could not interfere. It is right to add that only ten days before this catastrophe, MacPhee had been examined by Dr MacLean, and he and the priest who ministered to the family considered him unfit for confinement under a Sheriff’s warrant.
The MacPhees were poor, but not unusually so. Reading between the lines, however, a picture emerges of a troubled family. I was struck by the fact that the family consisted of four siblings (Marion, Malcolm, Angus and John) in their twenties, none of whom were married.6 This seems unusual for the time; indeed, the Reverend Finlay M’Rae states that in North Uist ‘early marriages have become habitual for ages back’. There is also the statement of Ranald Munro, a close friend of Angus Senior, that ‘some members of the family had occasionally fits of insanity’. There is the menacing behaviour of Angus towards the young women of the parish, which seems to have predated whatever happened to him at Lochdhar. There is not enough to suggest that the MacPhees were pariahs or outcasts, but there is certainly sufficient evidence to conclude that they were a family who did not have their troubles to seek.
What, finally, are we to make of Angus’s great acts of violence? The words ‘maniac’ and ‘maniacal’ appear frequently in both the press coverage and in the assessments from Perth Prison. It’s a powerful word, maniac: redolent of lack of control, mindlessness and monstrosity. But when we examine Angus’s actions on 9 July 1857, they are not entirely the actions of a maniac. While there is monstrousness in the violence he perpetrated, it appears to have been interspersed with a certain degree of calculation.
Even given the discrepancies in reports of the temperatures of the three bodies, it is clear that the two women were killed some hours before Angus Senior. Having killed his mother, Angus did not immediately abscond or go on a rampage. He took the time to hide her body under the bed in the back room of the house, first removing a chamber pot and then replacing it in front of the bed. He also moved a wooden chest to disguise what he had done. These do not seem to me the actions of a ‘maniac’. Whether he then went to his aunt’s house with the intention of killing her is impossible to say, but having done so, although he made no attempt to move her body, he did cover it with bedclothes, which perhaps suggests some shame or horror at what he had done, or at least a half-hearted attempt to conceal the body. Some five hours later, having killed his father, he finally fled the scene.
He is reported to have stolen a pat of butter from an outbuilding that he then used to wash his shirt, which would presumably have been covered with blood. He allegedly had the idea of leaving his clothes on the shore of a ‘lake’ in order to lead those searching for him to believe he had drowned. Then, when he was apprehended the following morning, there are his initial denials that he was responsible. While all the evidence regarding his actions in the aftermath of the murders should be treated with a degree of caution, all of it suggests that there was a rationality involved. He did not simply run amok, as the reporting of his crimes suggests.
It is more comforting when confronted with dreadful acts of violence to retreat behind the word ‘maniac’, but to do so strips such acts of any meaning. It constitutes a refusal to attempt to comprehend what occurred. Angus MacPhee was not a monster. He was a man, driven for reasons we will never know to commit a series of brutal, transgressive acts, but he was still a man. His life on Liniclate ended tragically, but there is tragedy too in the forty-two years of incarceration he endured in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.
