SAVAGE SCOTS SERIAL KILLER
GLASGOW CRIME STORIES Once he started he couldn’t stop and no-one was off limits
HE was the Glasgow conman turned butler who robbed his rich aristocratic clients and in a six-month murder spree even took the life of his own brother.
Unusually for a serial killer Archibald Hall did not commit his first murder until later in life, he was 53. But once he started, he couldn’t stop.
Hall was born and brought up in the Partick area of Glasgow and started stealing when he was 15 and served his first prison sentence at 17.
Hall moved to London in his late teens where he adopted the alias Roy Fontaine, inspired by Joan Fontaine, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca.
However, in later years the director’s 1960 classic Psycho would prove a more chilling comparison.
After moving south he took elocution lessons to get rid of his Glasgow accent, learned etiquette and became an antiques expert during frequent spells in prison – so he knew what was worth stealing.
He graduated to confidence tricks and became a consummate actor, often posing as a member of the aristocracy or a wealthy American.
Openly bisexual, he had a shortlived marriage and a string of relationships with men, including the entertainer Vic Oliver, who he first met in Glasgow.
Oliver, who had been married to Winston Churchill’s daughter, invited him to London where he worked as a waiter at all male parties for the rich, famous and powerful.
At this time, he was said to have met composer Ivor Novello, Lord Mountbatten who was the former Viceroy of India and uncle to Prince Philip, Conservative MP Lord Robert Boothby and playwright Terence Rattigan.
Hall also claimed to have stayed at the French Riviera villa of the writer William Somerset Maugham having been introduced to him by Boothby.
An expert confidence trickster, he reputedly hired an Arab head dress, adopted the name Sheik Mutlak Medinah and lured jewellers to his hotel to show him £300,000 worth of jewels which he then stole.
However, the one person couldn’t con was the police.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, Hall was sentenced to a total of 42 years in prison.
In 1964 he escaped from Blundeston Prison in Suffolk only to be recaptured in 1966 and for this he received another five years on top of the ten he had been jailed for previously.
In 1972 Hall was paroled and around this time he met middle-aged Mary Coggle, a Belfast woman, who became his lover.
By the end of 1973 he was back in prison and stayed there until 1975.
Shortly after his release, Hall obtained a position in the household of Lady Hudson, the widow of a Conservative MP, near Waterbeck in Dumfriesshire.
In 1977, he was visited by one of his former cellmates, David Wright, and gave him a job on the estate.
During this time Hall accused Wright’s girlfriend of stealing valuables belonging to Hudson.
This angered Wright who got drunk one night and then tried to shoot Hall while he was sleeping.
He then realised that his former cellmate was a liability who had a hold over him because of their shared criminal past.
The very next day while out hunting rabbits Hall shot him dead, dug a grave in the bed of a stream and buried the body.
In November that year, four months after his first murder, Hall moved back to London where he obtained a position as butler, this time he to 82-year-old Walter Scott-Elliot and his 60-year-old wife Dorothy.
War veteran Scott-Elliot, who had been a Labour MP, was rich and from an aristocratic Scottish background.
Around this time Hall was introduced to petty thief Michael Kitto, who was with his old flame Coggle in a pub.
The trio decided to burgle the Scott-Elliot home which was full of priceless antiques.
On December 8, 1977, Hall was showing Kitto around the master bedroom when they were confronted by Scott-Elliot’s wife who demanded to know what they were up to.
The two men grabbed the woman and suffocated her with a pillow which in turn woke up her husband.
Hall persuaded Scott-Elliot that his wife had had a nightmare and that he should go back to sleep.
The next day they decided to sedate him with alcohol and pills and dupe him into thinking Coggle was his wife.
They put the body of Scott-Elliot’s wife into the boot of the car and took him to a cottage in Cumberland near the Scottish Border that Hall had rented.
Coggle sat in the back with the former MP in a wig and his wife’s fur coat as they drove north.
The following day Hall and Kitto drove south and buried the body by a lonely roadside near Braco in Perthshire.
Having got rid of the body they drove back to the cottage and left Scott-Elliot there with Coggle still posing as his wife.
Both men meanwhile returned to London and ransacked the house.
Job completed they went back to
Cumberland where they picked up Scott-Elliot and Coggle and headed north into Scotland.
On December 15, near Glen Affric, Inverness-shire, Hall and Kitto used a spade to beat Scott-Elliot to death.
Using the same spade, they buried his body in a shallow grave five miles away near the village of Tomich.
The following day the two men decided to murder Coggle after she refused to hand back the mink coat.
She was attacked with a poker and then suffocated with a plastic bag.
Later that night Hall and Kitto dumped her body in Middlebie, Dumfriesshire.
After Christmas they returned to their Cumberland hide-out and met up with Hall’s brother, Donald, a convicted child sex offender.
When Donald started to ask too many questions about their newfound wealth, Hall decided he would have to go. He was rendered unconscious with chloroform and drowned in the bath.
The next day they once again drove north into Scotland looking for somewhere suitable to dispose of his body.
Because of bad weather they decided to spend the night at the Blenheim House Hotel, North Berwick in East Lothian.
The hotel proprietor was suspicious about his two new guests and telephoned the local police.
Hall had fitted false plates to
their Ford Granada and this was to be his downfall.
Both killers were taken back to the local police station where Hall escaped out a toilet window but was later caught in a taxi heading to Edinburgh.
The police had searched the car and brother in the boot.
Under police interrogation Hall made a full confession, even mentioning the earlier murder of Wright.
On January 18, he helped the police search for Scott-Elliot’s body which they found chewed by foxes.
Days later they dug up Wright, and soon after that Scott-Elliot’s wife was found face down in a roadmeanwhile found his side ditch. Police believe that had he not been caught Hall would also have killed Kitto.
Later that year Hall was convicted of four of the five murders at separate trials at the High Court in Edinburgh in May and then at the Old Bailey in London in October.
Hall was sentenced to life without parole. Kitto was given life imprisonment for three of the five murders and told he must serve at least 15 years.
Hall died in 2002 in Kingston Prison in Portsmouth, aged 78.
But what made the likeable rogue and well-spoken butler to the aristocracy turn into a killer?
In Hall’s 1999 biography, A Perfect Gentleman, he gave a clue to his split personality when he revealed: “There is a side of me, when aroused, that is cold and completely heartless.”
In a newspaper interview in 2011, lawyer and author Allan Nicol who had written a book about Hall, called The Monster Butler, said: “He was a real psychopath who seemed to think he could say what he liked and no one would contradict him.
“He was an evil man who killed even those he knew.
“I think his most hateful crime was the murder of Walter Scott– Elliot.
“Here was this old gentleman whom he drugged and then ferried round the country, with his wife’s body in the boot of the car.”
Perhaps the last word is best left to Hall himself.
Speaking of the change he underwent after Wright’s murder, he said: “I would say to someone who is thinking of killing, don’t. Whatever it is that’s released, you don’t want set free.”