213. The Murder of Marion Gilchrist
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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. And we are back. We are back. I know it doesn't feel like we were gone from you guys, but we were just on a week vacation. Long time. That's probably the longest vacation we've ever taken. It was great though. We had fun. Decompressed a little bit. And here we are. We're back recording. Ready to go. And on top of that,

Four days from now? Yeah. We will have our first live show in Phoenix, Arizona. As of the time of recording this, there are still some tickets left to the 945 show. The 730 show is sold out. So the 945 show on Thursday, there's some tickets.

Find while you can. We hope to see you guys there. Thank you so much for supporting us. Yeah. Arizona listeners, there's a few tickets left to the second show. If you've been wanting to see it again, it is next week. It's our first show of the spring tour and we are so excited. All right. Was your 10 seconds about our vacation or? Well, kind of. Okay. While we were on vacation, Peyton and I had the wonderful pleasure of riding some bikes. Oh God.

And I just have a couple things to say about it. First of all, we went like 12 miles up and down hills. We didn't know it was going to be like that. Not on purpose. We were exhausted, done at the end. It was insane. But what I want to talk about is the seats that they have on bikes. It's not a beach cruiser. It's like a regular mountain bike or... No, just like a bike. I don't know what you would call...

You know when you just see someone out biking with the whole uniform on? It's like those seats. Why? Like, why are they so... They're uncomfortable on purpose. And I don't understand. And someone said, oh, well, you wear the pants with the inserts. That doesn't... Why? When you could just have the insert on the seat. That's what I'm trying to say. Why not just have a comfortable seat? Then you can wear whatever pants you want. So there must be something I'm missing. I know we got some bike gangs up in here somewhere. Some of our listeners.

So let us know what we're doing wrong. But that seat is no, I will not ride a bike again until that's fixed. And all I know is for us, never ever ride bikes and then ended up going at 12.5 miles up and down. Um,

My butt's still hurting. How's yours? Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty freaking bad. On top of that, I got my hot take of the week. I feel like these are going to be a little controversial sometimes. So I don't want to lose any listeners. I don't want people getting mad. So if you get mad, then sorry. But my hot take of the week, we can kind of just breeze past this as soon as I say it. Unless Peyton wants to say something else on it. But I think every state should have the death penalty. Oh!

Was that too hot of a take? I was trying to get it true crime related. Do we got to take that out? No. Are you sure? No, you can keep that. That's your choice, your opinion. That's my hot take of the week. I think every state should have the death penalty. And we'll just kind of leave it at that.

I feel like I need to set the record that I'm not Team Garrett on this. Peyton disagrees with me on this, and that's what makes this podcast work so well. On that note, let's hop into today's case. Okay.

Our sources for this episode are Conan Doyle for the defense by Margaret Fox, Circumstances of Unexplained Savagery, The Gilchrist Murder Case and Its Legacy by Anne-Marie Kilday, The Case of Oscar Slater by Arthur Conan Doyle, University of Glasgow, National Records of Scotland, The Glasgow Police Museum, Glasgow Times, The North American Review, Oxford Open Learning, and BBC. If that is not pronounced Glasgow and I just said it that many times, that's going to be bad. By the way, if you're watching on YouTube,

And my lip is bleeding. My lips got really burned, so I'm just throwing it out there right now. All right. If you love narratives about crime and police investigations, you've probably read a Sherlock Holmes story at some point or heard of it. Even if you're not a fan of detective stories, you may have checked them out anyway because Holmes is a classic literary figure.

Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 57 short stories and four full-length novels about Sherlock Holmes. Great movies, by the way.

That's not counting the countless adaptions, movies, TV shows, and other reimaginings that have come out over the years. So it's no wonder why Sherlock Holmes is wildly popular. He can solve the most complex mysteries solely with his powers of observation. It's pretty impressive, actually. But we all know Sherlock Holmes is fictional. He's never solved a crime in real life. At least in theory.

But the legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes actually played a role in helping to bring justice in more than one real murder case. And we're going to be talking about that today. So let's go all the way back to December 21st, 1908.

That's a long time ago. That evening, right around 7 p.m., a 21-year-old woman named Helen Lambie went out to buy a copy of the evening paper. Helen worked as a maid for 83-year-old Marion Gilchrist.

Now, from the sound of it, Marion was quite the loner. She lived all on her own and she never had friends over. The only visitors who ever came by were Marion's business associates like her lawyer, maybe her financial managers. She was very careful about who she let into her home because Marion was wealthy and constantly afraid that someone might try to rob her.

In fairness, she lived in Glasgow, Scotland, and the city was changing rapidly in the 1900s. The population was exploding, and with it, crime rates were going up. Every day, the newspapers were full of stories about robberies, assaults, murders.

It left Marion feeling very frightened of the outside world, and she had her apartment set up to be extremely secure. She had a safe in her bedroom, and she hid her most valuable jewelry in her clothing drawers so it would be harder to find.

Marion also had a deal with her downstairs neighbors that if she ever felt unsafe, she'd knock on the floor three times so then they could come up and rescue her. That was assuming that they were able to get in. See, her apartment had its own private entrance. The other tenants in the building had to use other doors to get into the building.

Even those downstairs neighbors didn't have a key to Marion's area, and visitors had to go through two sets of doors just to get inside. One opened to the streets, then guests would walk down a long private hallway and up the stairs to the second door, which would be deadbolted from the inside.

Marion was very particular about who she'd open that inner door for. Even those business associates all had to be carefully vetted before Marion would let them in. This meant every evening when Helen went out to buy a paper, remember Helen is the maid, she pulled the inner door closed behind herself and then she locked it.

it. Helen did have her own key, but if Marion wanted, she could have bolted the door from the other side to stop her from coming back in. Now, once the door was secure, Helen walked down that private hallway and out the door to the street, and she closed and locked this door too. Then finally, she could run her errands. That night, she only took about 10 minutes.

to get her copy of the paper. Before Helen could unlock the door and go back inside the house, she spotted a man on the street.

His name was Arthur Adams, and Helen knew him because he lived in the unit beneath Marion's. Arthur told Helen that he was worried about Marion, his upstairs neighbor, and her boss. In the past 10 minutes, so during the brief window that Helen was gone, Arthur had heard a loud noise coming from Marion's apartment. It reminded him of that secret code they had where she was supposed to knock on the floor if she needed help.

But since he couldn't get through the private door or into the hallway, he'd run outside to look for help. It was just sheer luck that he ran into Helen at that moment.

This was really concerning, so Helen unlocked both of the doors and let Arthur into the apartment. And at first, they didn't see anything suspicious, but they decided to search the entire apartment to see if they could find Marion. Helen walked into the kitchen just in time to see a man coming out of one of the bedrooms. This wasn't Marion's room. It was a spare room. Now, to be clear, this wasn't Arthur and

And Helen didn't know if any other man was supposed to be there at this time. She also didn't recognize the guy who was acting weirdly casual as he just strolled through the house. He went right past Helen, right past Arthur without saying a word. That's weird. Then the moment he got to the top of the staircase, he breaks out into a run. He sprints the rest of the way out to the street.

So Arthur is like, doesn't even know what's happened in the room. He begins to chase him because now there's a guy running from the house. But he lost track of the man as soon as he got outside. And since he couldn't find the intruder, Arthur ran to the police station instead to report what had happened, that there had been a stranger in this house.

Now, the whole situation was very weird and Helen was terrified. So she runs into the same bedroom that the man ran out of to check on Marion. But Marion wasn't there. So Helen kept looking. When she did find her boss, she was lying on the dining room floor. A rug had been pulled up over her, but it couldn't hide the puddle of blood that was all around her. Her face was completely smashed in.

her head wasn't even the same shape anymore. Needless to say, Marion was dead. And whoever had killed her, presumably the man that went running out of the house, had trashed her room.

Marion kept a lot of her personal papers in a wooden box, and the attacker had broken its lid open, then dumped all of the documents all over the floor. Weirdly, he'd also lit the gas lights in the spare bedroom. The matchbox he'd used was still sitting near the fixtures. Helen and Arthur thought the man could have been a robber, but when they checked over Marion's things, only one item was missing.

It was a brooch that Marion liked to wear when she was having dinner or tea. It was shaped like a crescent and had a single line of diamonds along one edge. Now, weirdly, this wasn't the only expensive piece of jewelry that Marion owned. She had a lot of rings, she had a watch, other valuable items sitting literally out in the open. If the killer had really wanted to rob her, he could have helped himself before he walked out.

But for whatever reason, the brooch was the only thing he took from 83-year-old Marion. It's like a real-life Sherlock Holmes murder. There's two entrances, basically. She already has it locked up. There's only one thing missing. Yeah. She's dead. Two witnesses.

Two witnesses. Interesting. Okay. So the police arrived pretty soon afterward and they began investigating. Right away, they determined that there was no sign of forced entry. Now this made sense because Marion's apartment was almost impossible to get into if she didn't let you in for herself.

This told the police that the killer must have been someone she knew or trusted. She had to have opened the door so her murderer could come inside. But given how isolated Marion was and how few friends she had, they couldn't imagine who the attacker could be.

They put out a call for tips. You know, a few witnesses came forward. One young woman said she saw someone run out of Marion Gilchrist's apartment at around 7 p.m. The running man actually bumped into her and then kept going. Her description did match the same man that Helen and Arthur had already reported. They all agreed that the suspect was clean-shaven, he had dark hair and

which was just generic enough that the killer could have been about anyone. But a few days later on Christmas, someone approached the police station with an even better tip in this case. This man said that he suspected someone named Oscar Slater.

Oscar was a German immigrant who was new in town. He also had dark hair. He had recently shaven off his mustache. And ever since December 21st, which was the day of Marion's murder, Oscar had been trying to sell a pawn ticket he had for a crescent-shaped diamond-studded brooch. So basically...

Oscar had pawned a brooch, but now he didn't want to go back to the pawn shop and pick it up for some reason. Assuming the brooch was the one that had gone missing from Marion's apartment, it sounded like Oscar was afraid that he'd be caught and arrested if he returned for it.

And even more suspiciously, Oscar did have a criminal history. For his whole life, he'd been drifting from one town to another. During that time, he'd used a lot of different aliases to avoid arrest. In fact,

Oscar Slater wasn't even his real name. But in the interest of clarity, I'm going to keep calling him Oscar because that's how he's best known today. He had been arrested three times for violent crimes. Once he got into a fight while he was drunk, he was slapped with a disorderly conduct charge.

Another time he allegedly injured another man during a confrontation. He went all the way to trial, but the jurors found him not guilty. And then his third arrest was for threatening a police officer. Apparently, he told a patrolman that he was going to shoot him.

even though Oscar didn't have a gun on him at the time. When he wasn't threatening people or getting into brawls, Oscar worked as a pimp. And if he needed to make it sound like he had a legitimate job, he'd tell people he bought and sold jewelry. So the police also suspected he was involved in some kind of illegal bookkeeping, and they'd been investigating him for a while for that possible crime, even before anyone had connected him to Marion's case.

So the police put out another call for tips. This time they want to learn more about Oscar, particularly any information that put him at the scene of the crime. Are you catching the media buzz around Sono Bello? Yes. Their micro laser fat removal is crazy popular because it makes stubborn fat disappear in just one visit.

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They learned that several weeks before the break-in, a dozen witnesses saw a man who fit Oscar's description standing on the street outside of Marion's apartment. It's just, I'm still trying to think about it because if he went in there to rob something...

Like he would have grabbed more than what he grabbed. Right. So he obviously went there to kill her. Why did he kill her? Yada, yada, yada. I'm sure we'll get to it. She's in her 80s. But she's in her, yeah, just none of it is, none of it's really adding up. She never really went outside. Like she never, she didn't have many acquaintances or friends. So why kill her? Well, and also it was a pretty violent death. Like her face was smashed in. So people are like, maybe Oscar was casing the joint. Maybe.

Maybe waiting for the maid, Helen, to leave so he could break in. The fact that the murder happened during the slim 10-minute window that Marion was alone did make it seem like the killer must have been watching the place. That too. It's like the one time. But the most damning evidence against Oscar was the fact that he fled the country less than a week later.

after the murder. Wow. So Marion died on December 21st and then Oscar spent the next seven days trying to offload that pawn ticket. Then he and his significant other hopped on a ship from Glasgow to New York City on the 26th. Now that journey took 12 days but the police could send a telegram to the United States in an instant which was what they did.

The American officials used the rest of their time to draw up a warrant for Oscar's arrest once he landed on U.S. soil. Okay, a telegram, man. I know, kind of crazy, right? It's funny, huh? So the very first day he arrived in the States, police were waiting on the docks to apprehend Oscar. The moment, literally, that he got off the boat. When they arrested him, the police found a hammer in his pocket. By now, an autopsy had confirmed that Marion had been beaten to death. So they're like...

Maybe this hammer is the murder weapon? The evidence was stacking up, but the police couldn't just send Oscar back to Scotland for his trial. They had to go through an extradition process, and Oscar hired a lawyer who had the power to slow down or stop the procedure. So while they navigated the situation, police officers on both sides of the pond did what they could to keep the investigation moving forward.

Glasgow's detectives arranged for several eyewitnesses to travel to New York. Helen, Arthur, and the other passerby came to view Oscar in a suspect lineup. So Oscar stood with 11 other men, and the witnesses had to pick which individual was the man that they saw running out of the apartment.

Weirdly, the woman who bumped into the killer on the street had a hard time. She looked at the dozen men and said none of them looked like the guy who'd run into her. But the police weren't willing to accept a non-answer. They said that she had to pick someone. So

So the woman gave all the men another look over before she pointed at Oscar. So in the end, the three witnesses did agree, even if it took some prodding to kind of get there. So it doesn't work like that these days. I think you would get in trouble. You can't make someone pick someone, right? No. If they don't remember, then it goes, all right, you don't remember, move on. Because even then, in court, they're just going to be like, you forced her to pick someone. You forced her, yeah. But anyway.

I mean, when you have all three point to the same guy and you have the evidence, you have him trying to pawn the brooch, him leaving town, the hammer seems obvious him being seen there before the murder.

It feels like Oscar had to be the killer. But even with all the evidence that was stacked against him so far, and I'm saying evidence back in this day because I don't know if all this evidence was stand-up today, Oscar said he didn't do it. His attorney agreed and suggested that he should fight his extradition back to Scotland. Basically, he could have appealed to the American authorities and tried to stop them from sending him back for the murder trial. But instead...

Oscar insisted on boarding a ship back to Glasgow. He said he wanted his day in court so he could prove he was innocent. And he thought the evidence was actually on his side. In fact, some of the clues that initially seemed to implicate Oscar started to fall apart when his lawyer dug into them. For example, that brooch that he pawned wasn't Marion's. It couldn't be. Marion's

Marion had one single row of diamonds on her brooch. Oscar's had three rows and he pawned it in early November, which was two full months before the murder even took place. So clearly he didn't steal that specific brooch from the apartment. The timeline wouldn't fit.

And as for the fact that he left the country right after the homicide, it was because Oscar had learned about a new business attorney. He'd received a letter in the mail on December 21st, the day of the murder, urging him to get to San Francisco as soon as possible. So Oscar said he had already been planning to leave town hours before she was even murdered. And he still had a copy of that letter to prove this timeline. Even the witnesses who picked him out of the lineup were a little questionable.

See, the police made Oscar stand with a bunch of men who didn't fit the killer's description at all. None of them were probably clean shaven. Right. Got it. Specifically, the murderer and Oscar both had dark hair, but the other men in the lineup had lighter colored hair. Or beards. And right before the witnesses looked at the lineup, the police actually showed each a photo of Oscar, which is like...

Okay. You literally can't do that. That's dumb. So he was fresh in their minds when they went in. All right. So it's obviously not Oscar. Well, there were also problems with the other 12 witnesses who saw someone loitering outside of Marion's apartment before the murder. Their descriptions of the man varied a lot. Some said he had a mustache. Some said he was shaven. Some said he was wearing a black hat. Others were like, no, it was brown or tan. A few of them said he had a bent nose, while others were just like, no, it wasn't.

It was a straight nose. Basically, no one could prove that these witnesses had even seen the same man hanging around Marion's apartment, let alone that that man was Oscar. And as for the hammer in his pocket, Oscar couldn't prove it wasn't the murder weapon. But interestingly, no one could prove it was either. All the police knew was that Marion's killer had beaten her with a blunt object. They couldn't say that it was a hammer.

But one of the chairs in her bedroom had blood all over one of its legs, leading some to believe that it wasn't a hammer at all. It was the leg of the chair that she had been beaten with. So despite all of this, they take Oscar to trial. Weird. Okay. So Oscar's trial came down to the question of which version of the story seemed more persuasive. Did this man who bore a resemblance to the killer, who had a criminal history, and who fled right afterward do it?

Or had the police charged an innocent man?

Everyone had an opinion and the trial became big news in Scotland. I'm trying to figure out where the guy is that said it was Oscar in the first place because he's obviously going to come into play. He's suspicious, right? Yeah. So that's where this is starting not to make sense. So a ton of spectators actually turned up to watch the trial live. Every morning before the courthouse could open up, people would line up outside like bargain shoppers before Black Friday. And

And the more these people heard during the hearing, the more convinced they were of Oscar's innocence. The prosecutors didn't do themselves any favors either. They noted that Oscar was clean-shaven and so was the man who was spotted at Marion's apartment. They even brought in a hairdresser who testified that she'd shaved Oscar's mustache off around the time of the murder, specifically four days after it.

Meaning even their own witness admitted that Oscar actually still had a mustache on the day of the murder. But the prosecutors acted like it was a huge deal that Oscar had shaved around that time. Maybe they were hoping the jurors were having a hard time keeping track of the dates. Like, I don't know. They also talked a lot about Oscar's criminal history and they hit on the fact that Oscar lived with a woman that he wasn't married to, which at the time...

Not so great, but... It's so funny because these days... It's like that has literally nothing to do with murder. That's so funny. I guess they thought maybe the jury would just disapprove of this. Now, obviously, this sounds a little backwards hearing it today, but it fits with how a lot of

people understood crime and criminals in the early century. Attitudes were starting to change, but the change was happening slowly. When it was time to vote on his verdict, nine jurors thought Oscar was guilty. Only one said he was not guilty, and five voted for

Not proven. In the Scottish criminal justice system, not proven is the same as like a neutral vote here. It means it's not clear if the accused did it or not. If a person is found not proven, they still get to go free just like if they're not guilty. Still, the guilty votes outnumbered the other ones. So Oscar was convicted. Wow. There's no way he did it. There's no way. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Holy crap.

Holy crap. This is a little weird when you think about what you said earlier. Yeah, but...

Okay. Not sure. Still thinking about this one. Now, understandably, a lot of people in Glasgow were outraged. Almost everyone who'd watched the trial thought Oscar was innocent. By hanging too. That's nuts. And all the newspapers that covered the case highlighted how little evidence there was against him. It seemed like the officials were going to execute someone who had nothing to do with this murder. More than anything,

More than 20,000 people signed a petition demanding the authorities to re-examine Oscar's case. And the outcry was enough for them to reopen his file. Thanks to this, he got a reduced sentence to life in prison. Okay, see? There we go. But no one was willing to completely overturn his conviction. Now, Oscar learned this news just one day before he was supposed to be hanged.

His life was saved just in the nick of time. But Oscar still didn't want to spend the rest of his life behind bars, especially because the prison was dreary. Every day he spent hours breaking concrete blocks in the yard, even when it was raining or snowing. The only food he ever got to eat was broth and bread.

Seven days a week, 365 days a year. That would be Oscar's life. Dang, prisons were hardcore over there. So he reached out for help to the one person that he could think of who might be able to assist him.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. This seems fake. This doesn't seem real. Like I said, Doyle was the famous author who created the character Sherlock Holmes, but just because you know how to write good mysteries doesn't mean you can solve murders. You can solve them in real life. In fact, before he became an author, Doyle had been a doctor. He based the character of Sherlock Holmes on one of his professors from medical school. Well...

I kind of take that back, though, because just because you're not a detective, I mean, I feel like you've done enough true crime stories. I would trust you to solve a murder. I wouldn't.

Well, I would. That's all that matters. So that man that he based the character off of taught his students to pay close attention to patients' symptoms when they were making diagnoses. The professor said it was super important to follow the evidence, make logical conclusions rather than just rely on gut instinct or hunches. Doyle had the idea to use the same principles in his detective novels, which obviously were a smash hit. But again...

That didn't mean Doyle had experience investigating crimes. Since Sherlock Holmes had become such a popular character, other falsely accused people had actually reached out to Doyle before. Basically, they wanted him to use his powers of observation to help them get out of unfair convictions. And Doyle did actually have a pretty good track record of solving crimes that police officers couldn't. That's pretty awesome. So...

When he heard Oscar's story, especially about all the evidence that kind of seemed to exonerate him, Doyle agreed to take on the case. He was going to help Oscar get his conviction overturned and go free.

So Doyle interviewed the eyewitnesses for himself, and he reviewed all the evidence, cooperating with the police to get access to their findings. He published an 80-page essay laying out all of the reasons that he thought Oscar did not do this murder. Wow. This was in 1912, so four years after the murder and three years after Oscar's conviction.

That essay got a lot of attention and tons of people were talking about it, but it didn't move the needle in terms of the criminal justice system. Oscar didn't get a new trial. He stayed behind bars, but he wasn't willing to give up even as more years went by.

He found another ally in a member of Glasgow's police force, Detective Lieutenant John Thompson Trench. Trench was a highly decorated police officer with a great track record of solving the most difficult crimes. From the beginning, Trench was convinced that Oscar was not the killer. He said that every step of the way during the initial investigation, during Oscar's trial, during the public outcry afterward, that Oscar did not do this.

In 1914, so two years after Doyle published his essay, some law enforcement officials agreed to review Oscar's case once again. And Trench was one of Oscar's most outspoken supporters this time around. He shared all the evidence he had that helped to demonstrate Oscar's innocence.

He also reported on some gut feelings and repeated some rumors that couldn't be verified. So this was basically the opposite of author Conan Doyle's method. Trench wasn't sticking to the facts. He was throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick.

And this backfired, honestly. Trench couldn't back up the evidence that he'd submitted. Specifically, he accused one of the eyewitnesses of lying because she'd changed her story a couple times. You can't prove that. Yeah. In reality, actually, Trench got two different witness testimonies confused. So he was like, oh, she changed, but it was actually two different people. Come on, man.

So this was obviously a devastating mistake. The rest of the police force didn't like that Trench was accusing them of mishandling this case, so they pounced on his error. Pretty much overnight, Trench's reputation was destroyed. Six months after the inquiry, in September 1914, Trench was fired from the police force. He never got his old position back.

The former detective lieutenant died five years later, and none of this did Oscar any favors. He was still fighting to be declared not guilty. So now we're in 1925, 17 years after the murder. That's horrible, man. He writes another letter to Arthur Conan Doyle, begging him to take, just try again. Just try again. Like, try again to get me out.

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P-R-O-S-E dot com slash M-W-M-H. Now, the prison guards didn't want Oscar communicating too much with the outside world. He knew they wouldn't actually deliver the letter if he tried to send it from the prison's mailbox. Yeah.

So instead, Oscar gave the note to another inmate who was scheduled to be released soon. This other prisoner slipped the paper between his dentures and his gums. So even though the police gave him a full pat down to make sure he wasn't smuggling anything out, they didn't look at his mouth. He got out of prison and before long, the note made its way to Doyle.

It was just the nudge the famous author needed. Once again... How do you put a note between your teeth, your dentures, and your gums? It would get all soaking wet. I mean, I don't know. I guess it works, but that seems pretty crazy. Something I will never have to do. You do it for the bit. You do it too for a check. What? It was a TikTok thing. Oh. So once again...

Sherlock Holmes author is publicly campaigning for Oscar's release. And this time the authorities listen. They reopen the case once again and finally publicly acknowledge that there probably wasn't enough evidence to justify Oscar's conviction. 17 years in prison. 17 years in prison. What's crazy is it still happens today. Yeah. And his sentence is overturned.

So on November 14th, 1927, Oscar Slater was released from prison and finally he was a free man. But this wasn't a completely happy ending for him. All told, Oscar spent 19 years behind bars for a crime that he did not commit. And his life wasn't exactly easy. Afterward, during World War II, Oscar spent some time in an internment camp because he was ethically German. So once again, he was locked up even though he hadn't done anything wrong. Mm-hmm.

And Oscar, who was Jewish, lost some family members in the Holocaust too. So his life just ended up being one tragedy after another. And then he passed away in 1948. Oscar wasn't the only person, though, who was denied justice in this story. Marion's murder was never solved, meaning her killer was getting away with it. It's been 116 years since this homicide. So whoever did it,

They are definitely dead, probably by old age by now. No, you're freaking kidding me. We went for 38 minutes, whatever, in, and this is a cold case? Well, hear me out.

So over the years, different historians and criminologists have tried to figure out who really beat her to death. One popular theory is that Marion was killed by a member of her own family. Again, she was pretty wealthy. And at one point, her will said her 80,000 pound fortune was going to go to a particular relative. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $12.7 million today. Yeah.

Interestingly, right before her murder, Marion changed her mind. She said instead she was going to leave her fortune to one of the maid's families. So the idea is maybe one of her relatives killed her for their inheritance and then went through her papers in the hopes that they could destroy that new will. Okay. If no one could find the updated paperwork, they might have to follow the original one. Where did the money actually end up going? Do we know? No, it was never public. I couldn't find it. Interesting, because that would tell a lot. Right.

And I'm sure there's a million different theories, but... Well, and, you know, it would make sense why that was more important than stealing jewelry, if that was the motive for the murder. And Detective Lieutenant John Trench, who investigated the crime until he was fired for advocating on Oscar's behalf when Oscar was then just later released, he also thought Marion was killed by a family member. In his notes, he called the suspect A.B. It's not...

clear what he was referring to, but according to Trench, A.B. was the same relative who was originally supposed to inherit the fortune. He must have gotten inside Marion's apartment because she recognized him and then he beat her to death the moment he was in the dining room. And as for the maid, Helen, who didn't recognize the intruder, well, apparently she later told a friend that she did know him. It was one of Marion's family members and she was hesitant to tell the police because

his identity because maybe he would come after her. Why does this stuff always happen? I don't know, but apparently the relative Helen named was the same person that Trench had already identified. So she said it was the same guy that Trench said. Unfortunately, Trench only heard that Helen had confirmed A.B.'s identity secondhand. He couldn't get her to admit that she recognized the man during any official interrogation. Because maybe she wasn't on it. Maybe.

Maybe he said, hey, if you unlock the door for me, because I have the only spare key, then I'll give you some money. Maybe. Trench went to his grave without ever publicly naming his suspect. It's likely we'll never know who A.B. was or if Trench was right.

So that's the story of Marion Gilchrist and of Oscar Slater. He was saved by detectives who set aside their assumptions and followed the evidence to its logical conclusion, which is exactly what Sherlock Holmes did in all of his books, movies, and TV shows. This whole account just goes to show, while it's true that real life can sometimes inspire great novels, there are also times where truth is stranger than fiction. And that is our case for today.

I'm kind of annoyed it was a cold case. You let me down there at the end, but I don't know. I mean...

We don't really have anything to go off of. Well, at least Oscar got out. Yeah, I think the best part is that Oscar, who served 19 years in prison, eventually got out. That is so long. You know, there's so many, like... So long. Devastating parts of the cases we cover. Murder, you know, the family that live, whatever, whatever. Serving wrong full time has to be one of the worst. Because then it's like two victims.

Yes. It's like there's two victims of this case and it's just a very natural process that you almost forget solving the case because you're so worried about getting the innocent person out of prison. Right. What are the chances that my hot take this week is that and then you give us a case about someone who was wrongfully in prison. Yeah. I had no idea what the case was going to be. We're just always in the same wavelength. But I don't know. That's wild.

Yeah, I mean, it was a long time ago. Everyone that was involved is pretty much gone. Yeah, they're gone now. But yeah, it's an interesting case and one that a lot of people still look into to try to figure out. All right, you guys, that was our episode. And we will see you next time with another one. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye.