Who Stole The Earl's Body?

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 94, 20 April 1940, Page 4 (Supplement)

Who Stole The Earl's Body?

PRIOR to the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, the pre-eminence of Scotland's medical schools was dearly bought in traffic with body-snatchers and worse. It was the revelation of the hideous activities of Burke and Hare that proved the necessity of the Anatomy Act, and since its passing there has been, in the annals of British crime, only one case of body-snatching.

This case, however, is a most curious one, for, although Charles Soutar was sentenced to five years' penal servitude for the crime, the jury's verdict only half-solved the mystery. Who Soutar's accomplices were he never betrayed, although the crime was certainly never planned nor carried out single-handed by an illiterate rat-catcher such as he was. Indeed, it is most unlikely that Soutar had ever hoard of the Stewart case in America, which seems to have inspired a Scottish parallel.

Mausoleum Robbed In 1878, the body of Stewart, an American millionaire, was stolen and held to ransom and, despite a reward of 25,000 dollars offered by the widow, was never claimed. Three years later, on December 3, 1881, the British publiclearned that the body of the late Earl of Crawford and Balearres had b&eu stolen from the family vault at Duneclit House near Aberdeen, where his lordship had been buried nearly twelve months before- The parallel was obvious, although the Dunecht case at first offered more baffling' mystery than its American predecessor.

As eighth Earl of Balcarres and twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford, the dead nobleman was one of the leading British.

By--F. Reeder

peers, while in hk hobbies, astronomy and antiquarian lore, his erudition was such as to bring him fame amongst savants all over Europe. When he died at Florence on December 13, 1880, his body was embalmed and placed in a triple coflln, the inner one of soft Italian wood, the middle one of lead, and the outer one of oak, and brought to Dunecht House, where a newly-built mortuary chapel and mausoleum, superseding the old family vault of the Lindsays at Wigan, was awaiting its first tenant.

After the burial there, on December 29, the. stejis leading into the vault were blocked with four immense slabs of Caithness granite, the interstices between which were filled with lime. Ou Sunday, May 29. five months after the funeral, members of the bouse staff noticed a pleasant aromatic smell coming from the vault, and a crevice between two of the stones was found. This was filled with lime, the stones were cemented over, a considerable thickness of earth was laid on top, and grass was sown.

The body was, however, gone from the vault by then, though only the ghouls that took it knew this. On September 8, Mr. William Yeats, Aberdeen, commissioner of the. Dunecht Estates, received the following letter:—"Sir, The remains of the late Earl of Crawford are not beneath the chapel at Dunecht, as you believe, but were removed hence last spring, and the smell of decayed flowers ascending from the vault since that time will, on investigation, be found to proceed from another cause than flowers.— Nabob."

This letter was dismissed by Mr. Yeats as a cruel hoax, but on the morning of Thursday, December 1, it was found that the turf at tlie mouth of the tomb had been disturbed, and one." of the fifteen hundredweight stone blocks had been levered up. Further investigations revealed that the. triple coffin had been opened, and the body stolen, while the aromatic odour noticed the previous May came from the sawdust in which the embalmed coritse had been packed. The tarnishing of the cut edges of the lead eoftin 6ho\ved that the robbery had occurred a long time previously, "Nabob" Writes Again Weeks passed in futile search for the body, while a £.">0 reward to "Nabob," if be would return the body was unclaimed. He sent, however, on December S.i, the following letter to Mr. Alsop, the family "s lawyer in London: — '•Sir, The Late Karl of Crawford. The body is still in Aberdeenshire, and I can put you in possesion of the same, as soon as you bring one or more of the desperadoes who stole it to justice, so that I may know with whom I have to deal. 1 have no wish to he assassinated by resurrectionists, nor suspected by the public of being an accomplice in such dastardly work, which I most assuredly would be unless the guilty party arc brought to justice. Had Mr. Yeats acted on the hint 1 gave him last September, he might have, found the remains as if by accident and hunted up the robbers at leisure, but that chance is lost, so I hope you will find your men and make it safe and prudent for me to find what you want.

I\S. Should tliev find that an outsider knows their secret, it may bo removed to another place.—Nabob. By December .10 the reward for a clue had been raised to £(>OO, of which the family offered £">OO and the Government £100. Nothing was heard by the public

for another five months, but in the meantime, Charles Soutar, aged 42, a vermin-killer, who had been dismissed from the Dunecht estate for poaching some three years before, was under suspicion. To several acquaintances, he had hinted that he knew something of the mystery, but was afraid to speak, and word of this came to the police, who arrested Soutar on July 17. Soutar's Story -Admitting authorship of the "Nabob" letters, although no one. believed he could have composed them unaided, Soutar said that he had taken this means of telling the family, because he feared the vengeance of the graverobbers. His story was that one night about the end of April or the beginning of Slay, 1881, while poaching in Crow "Wood, near Dunecht House, he ran into four masked men, who recognised him and, at the point of a revolver, warned' him that if he breathed a syllable of what he had seen they would kill him. Keleased, he. left the wood, but returning the next day he found a body, wrapped in a blanket, concealed near where be had met the men. At the time lie thought it was that of a man who had been murdered, but when he learned of the sweet smell that had come from the Dunecht vault, he recollected the peculiar odour of the corpse which, he decided, must be that of the dead earl. liven with Soutar's directions to guide them, it. took a party of twenty keepers and police eight hours' search before they fc und the body, wrapped in a blanket, buried about a foo . below the surface. The remains were subsequently rcburied in the. old Lindsay vault in the Govan parish church, while Soutar went to trial.

The Court proceedings elicited little, Soutar having admitted writing the letters, though he denied the. theft of the body or the subsequent opening of the tomb f: draw attention to the theft and he stuck to the story of the four men in the wood. The jury disbelieved him, and took only 35 minutes to reach a unanimous verdict of "guilty." But the directing brain behind the plot was never known.