THE MYSTERY OF THE PEARL NECKLACE: Criminal Past Series Day TWO

HE was a dashing young lieutenant whose father’s brave attack on rebels during the Indian Mutiny earned him the Victoria Cross. Fine and upstanding, devastatingly smart, there would come a time when he, too, would become a remarkable figure in military circles.
And she was his wife, a stunning Irish colleen beautifully attired in her sealskin coat trimmed with fox fur wrapped over her opulent black velvet jacket and skirt, finished off with a necklace of rare pearls held together by a stunning diamond clasp.
Surely this striking couple from Heriot Row would be the last people the good citizens of Edinburgh would ever suspect of attempting to pull off an audacious and cunning crime…
It was early evening on Wednesday, 8 February, 1911, and Lt Cecil Aylmer Cameron, 28, and his pretty wife Ruby were making their way home along a bustling West End at Shandwick Place.
The Lieutenant needed to drop into the newly opened branch of Boots to buy, of all things, a hypodermic syringe. His wife, in need of fresh air, stayed outside.
He’d barely entered the shop when Ruby felt a hand from behind grasp at her throat and another pull at the back of her neck. There was a tug from the rough hands and the sudden sensation of her precious pearls slipping away.
Hands reached too for her pearl earrings but somehow, despite her shock, she managed to swipe the probing fingers away before swooning forward in a breathless faint to rest on the shop’s plate glass window, managing only a glance at her attacker as he raced off towards Canning Street, clutching her pearls.
The theft was so daring and swift that no-one in the bustling street seemed aware of what had happened. So stunned was Mrs Cameron that she had not even been able to raise the merest sound of alarm.
Thank goodness the couple had had the foresight to insure the precious jewels - worth around half a million pounds by today’s standards - just two months earlier…
At the nearest police station details of the stolen jewellery - a double row of 116 pearls held by a diamond snap clasp, worth a staggering £6500 - were taken and quickly sent to the insurance company, Lloyds of London.
As news emerged of the robbery of a defenceless woman’s jewels, Edwardian Edinburgh was stunned.
How could such a thing happen to this fine couple amid the evening thrum of Shandwick Place and no-one see a thing?
Mrs Cameron took to her bed, so shocked was she by the assault and theft of this precious necklace, bequeathed to her on the understanding she always wore it.
She spoke to police of her suspicions that she had been followed in the days prior to the crime. And then there was the oddball character who’d suddenly appeared staring through an open door at the couple’s Heriot Row home before claiming he was simply looking for a room to rent.
But police were not convinced. No witnesses from a busy street was one thing.
The fact that the couple had insured the pearls just two months earlier was either amazingly prudent or very fishy.
They opted for the latter. On Monday, 27 February, news emerged that Lt Cameron of 37th Battalion, Royal Field Artillary, and wife Ruby, had been arrested, suspected of attempted to defraud insurance firm Lloyds.
The trial attracted so much interest that only those with tickets were allowed to enter the High Court, leaving crowds to wait outside.
The striking couple - he in a grey suit, she in blue with a sprig of lily of the valley in her buttonhole - stood side by side in the dock to hear claims that they had made up the entire story as part of a hamfisted attempt to defraud the insurers.
The packed courtroom heard no trace had been found of the man said to have given Mrs Cameron the pearls, that letters said to confirm their existence appeared to be false and of a dire lack of witnesses to a robbery in a busy Edinburgh thoroughfare.
Then came details of Lt. Cameron’s poor finances and damning evidence that he’d enquired about how to invest £6000 just days prior to the ‘robbery’. The glittering couple’s fate was sealed - they were found guilty, both to serve three years’ in penal servitude.
But the story did not end there….
Ruby served just a few months of her sentence before being released on the grounds of her ill health. During that time, she confessed to having carried out the fraud alone and insisted her husband’s role had been merely to protect her.
Her husband served his full sentence but on his release a petition for pardon signed by, among many others, five dukes and more than 100 army generals was granted, enabling him to return to his rank of Lieutenant.
A fluent Russian speaker, he went on to serve in France during the First World War, being mentioned in dispatches four times and awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
He took the key role of a spymaster codenamed Evelyn - also known simply as ‘B‘ - in control of a massive spy ring that covered swathes of occupied Europe.
He was later made Chief Intelligence Officer with the British Military Mission to Siberia during the Russian Civil War and rose to the rank of Major in the Royal Artillery.
Quite what happened in the days leading up to 18 August 1924 is not entirely clear. There was talk of further financial problems…hopes of a Military Attaché role which hadn’t materialised… a general air of depression…
Or perhaps someone from his secretive military past, some enemy, had come to exact their revenge…
Major Cameron was found dying, slumped in a chair at his Hillsborough Barracks in Sheffield, on 18 August, 1924, a wound on either side of his head, a gun on the floor.
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The scandal surrounding Lt Cameron and his wife Ruby did not deter Jane Alice Clifford from attempting her own bare-faced fraud just weeks after their court case ended.
Finely dressed and well spoken she fitted in perfectly among the ladies who shopped at Charles Jenner & Company at 48 Princes Street in October 1911.
She calmly ordered an impressive list of goods: a sable cape, matching sable muff, two bracelets, a brooch, a pearl rope, a lace scarf and 10 yards of silk to be paid for by cheque on delivery to 58 Manor Place.
And at jewellers James Ritchie & Son, 118 Princes Street, she picked out a fine stone ring and chain purse worth around £14, again, to be paid on delivery.
Unfortunately Clifford had only five shillings in the bank. When the shop staff attempted to clarify the situation, the finely dressed woman had fled Manor Place.
She got as far as Newcastle, where police opened her suitcase to find the Jenners’ goods - and a receipt for them hidden in, bizarrely, her hair.
In court it transpired Clifford had a string of convictions and, in all, a decade of prison behind her. The judge in the case opted to present her with more - another five years.


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The dramatic suicide of a medical student at the South African Students’ Union in Buccleuch Place in 1915 was shocking enough, but police sent to break the news to his family were met by an even more startling scene.
There they found William Juta‘s mother in law lying dead in bed, a bullet hole through her head. In another room it became clear that the same fate had befallen the man‘s wife, Muriel, 31, and their young child.
The triple murders and suicide shocked the city. Thousands lined the streets to watch the solemn funeral cortege pass by - victims and murderer on their final journey together.
The four coffins were buried in the same plot at Morningside Cemetery.
Sadly, murder within families was not an unfamiliar crime. In 1917 Joseph Wilmot took the lives of his wife, Annie and his two young sons, William, four, and baby Charles, five months, at their Rose Street South Lane home.
He did it, he later told police, because his wife had been ‘nagging’ him.

CRIME FILES
1915: Back street abortion was a bloody business. Having been told that her lover would never marry her, pregnant Margaret Anderson agreed to a visit from herbalist Charles Alder, aka Dr Temple, of West Register Street. Two visits later having undergone his £5 ‘procedures’ the pregnancy was terminated, but, tragically Anderson was in the grip of blood poisoning. Her deathbed statement pointed the finger at ’Dr Temple’, yet the jury found the charge of murder not proven.
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1911: The after dinner coffee at a Dalkeith dinner party tasted strange - and no wonder, it was laced with arsenic. Hard up John Hutchison had his eyes on his father Charles’ life insurance. He slipped arsenic into the coffee pot, killing his father and another guest, poisoning others. He was finally traced to a hotel in England where he took his own life moments before police could arrest him.
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1919: Street performer William Lamb was an unlikely killer, after all, he had no arms - both limbs severed in an accident. Yet he still managed to batter a woman to death at his Candlemaker Row home. Four days before he was due to hang for murder, he was reprieved and given life.
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1913: The murder of two little boys, found roped together in the stagnant water of Hopeton Quarry, was all the more shocking because the killer was none other than their father. Patrick Higgins went to the gallows for his vile crime.
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1911: Joan Black had met the man she wanted to marry, just one thing stood in her way - her illegitimate son. Finding someone to look after the four year old was expensive - £1 a month or a one off payment of £25. So Black took the blue eyed auburn haired James to Newhaven Pier, and threw him into the water where he drowned.
Edinburgh Evening News April 13, 2011