A COLD, clear Sunday morning in January 1911. City insurance clerk Eric Wilson strode along a cinder path in the Braid Hills, contemplating the rural landscape.
He was walking along a path in the shadow of the Hermitage Woods when something odd caught his eye. On a patch of land in the valley that dips between Blackford Hill and Braid Hills, on a field known to many locals as the Hermiston estate "bog" or the "sheep park", lay what looked disturbingly like the figure of a woman.
Lying on her side, her face covered by her hat, she was respectably if a little shabbily dressed, with her gold wedding ring glistening on her finger.
At first Wilson hoped she was just in a deep, probably drunken, sleep. His hands gripped the fence that separated the path from the field and shook it as hard as he could, yelling out to her.
There would be no answer.
He dashed to a nearby dairy farm for help. Now with farm labourer William Fleming by his side, the lifeless woman's light blue hat was lifted to reveal her features. Both must have reeled at the sight of the blood which had seeped from her staring eyes and streaked her lifeless face.
Now it was becoming horribly clear. This unfortunate woman, only around 30 years old, had been murdered.
Who she was, exactly what had happened to her and, most importantly, at whose hands she met her end, was now a matter for the police to solve.
It was Sunday, January 22, 1911. Generations have come and gone and what shocked Edinburgh at the time is now largely forgotten. But while this was a tragic, wasteful end to a young woman's life, the crime heralded the dawn of a whole new era in police detective work. For the officers investigating the murder victim's grim death on this picturesque landscape, did what none before them had attempted in Scotland.
They called in the hounds.
Today police dogs play a fundamental role in helping to patrol our streets, their unique skills a key weapon in the battle against drugs, in the search for missing people, in crowd control and on the scent of criminals.
It's hard to imagine a modern police force without its unit of highly-trained sniffer dogs and handlers.
But in 1911 when Edinburgh's police force asked for bloodhounds to be brought to this stretch of hillside in the hope they might sniff out the perpetrator of such a dastardly deed, it was the stuff of a Sherlock Holmes story.
While some at the time may well have questioned whether dogs could really help bring a criminal to justice, there was no doubting that the unusual decision to use them helped change the face of policing forever.
Not that the startled insurance clerk or the grim labourer from Braid Hills Dairy Farm had any of that on their minds as they gazed at the lifeless body of 30-year-old Maria Jane Boyle, a mother of two who lived with her husband, a platelayer, in Leith.
Poor Maria must have been a desperate sight for those two startled men as she lay on the cold, hard ground, the pocket of her brown skirt ripped off and lying near the body - the only sign of a possible struggle - her deathly white cheeks stained with blood that had trickled from her eyes, and angry marks on her neck where her attacker had squeezed the life from her.
Within an hour, Edinburgh University's Professor Harvey Littlejohn had confirmed she had been strangled. But it was the remote location of where the deed had been done and the potential that the area still harboured the killer's scent that immediately raised hopes that a new and largely untested method of detective work - using "sniffer" dogs - might well help.
Within hours, a call had been made to Frank Raynor, an accountant from Haddington who had spent five years attempting to train five bloodhounds in tracking scent. He was told to bring his bloodhounds to the scene as soon as possible. They came, one a large black beast called Warboy, by taxi cab.
It was so unique that The Scotsman at the time reported the appearance of the bloodhounds in fascinating detail: "An unusual development in police investigation work in Edinburgh was the requisition of bloodhounds for the purpose of tracking the assailant," reported the paper the day after the murder had taken place. "No sooner had the hounds been set to work than they went off keenly upon what appeared to be a very hot scent."
Police historian Alastair Dinsmore, of the Glasgow Police Museum, says dogs were a rarity in police work in those days. "London police used privately-owned hunting dogs to try to find Jack the Ripper. That was probably the first time dogs had been used in that way. But it was very new for this country. We were well behind the Continent
In Belgium and Germany dogs were used regularly by police to look for murder weapons."
Sadly, Edinburgh's first murder search involving dogs would end in failure. The scent took the dogs, detectives and various other officers for half a mile through the Hermitage Woods. But as they trudged across open ground and over burns, initial optimism faded as the dogs struggled to keep track of the scent.
Miles of ground were covered, but it was eventually assumed the killer had escaped over the burn, unknown to him at the time, a move that earned him his freedom as it washed away the scent and defeated the dogs. Maria's killer was never traced. Even a £100 reward put up by the city magistrates failed to turn up any clues.
It could have been an embarrassing failure for the force. But, as The Scotsman confirmed: "The authorities intend to resume operations with the bloodhounds as they are of the opinion that the possibilities of these agents have not been exhausted."
Precisely when the Edinburgh City Police - later part of Lothian and Borders Police Force - welcomed its first official canine recruits is unclear.
But what is known, is that on a chilly January day, 100 years ago, police found themselves on the trail of a whole new era in fighting crime.
LEAD ROLE
THEY were first used in fighting Edinburgh crime 100 years ago this month, but today's police dogs play a key - and varied - role in keeping our streets safe.
Today's hounds are usually German Shepherds trained in anything from crowd control to finding missing people, sniffing out drugs and even finding buried bodies.
There are 17 "general purpose" police dogs at the dog unit at Fettes, along with five which specialise in finding explosives and eight trained in finding narcotics.
Sergeant Duncan Sutherland, one of the force's dog trainers and handlers, says: "Like every area of the force, the dog unit is looking to the future and how to evolve. One of those areas is wildlife crime, one of the dogs is now trained to sniff out poisons.
"It's hard to imagine a modern force today that wouldn't use dogs."
APPEARED Edinburgh Evening News Jan 13,2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment