The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Matters of life and death over years decided at High Court
Outside the courthouse the street was awash with people. Crowds cheered and sang, while politicians in the midst of an election bellowed for justice.
Inside the building there was a reverential hush as a man was called to answer the gravest of charges.
That morning – May 3 1908 – Charles White stood in the dock, accused of a murder that had gripped Dundee for weeks.
It was day one of an epic trial at the High Court in Dundee.
There have been countless dramatic testimonies and emotive judgments since the High Court in Dundee began in the 1860s, right up until sittings were ended eight years ago.
The final hearing was marked with a ceremony in October 2013 at which Lord Kinclaven thanked the community for providing jurors, without which “we could not provide our service of criminal justice”.
Presenting him with a photograph of the building from 1950, Sheriff Richard Davidson said the courtroom had seen “a number of remarkable trials”.
Following this week’s announcement that the High Court is to return to the city in an effort to clear a Covid backlog, we look back at some of those cases, from the crimes of serial killer Peter Tobin, to the 13-hour trial of Londoner William Bury, described as a “possible candidate” for Jack the Ripper.
Viewers from the public gallery craned their necks to get a glimpse of the notorious Charles White as he emerged from a hatch, into the dock of the court.
Dressed in a dark blue overcoat and with a twitching upper lip, White denied murdering drinking buddy Patrick Cooney by attacking him in his home at 68 Ann Street with a bottle, tongs and a poker.
A reporter for the Evening Telegraph and Post noted: “His eyes wandered round the court now and then, and it was easy to imagine that at another time, and on a happier occasion, those eyes could twinkle with fun as he sang songs of his native Ireland.”
White, a barber from Derry/Londonderry, had been on the run for nine weeks after the killing and was apprehended in Norwich only after a casual run-in with an old friend.
When cautioned by police for the murder of Mr Cooney, he replied: “Yes, that’s right.”
The day of the trial had been a busy morning for Dundee. While the crowds pressed up against the gates of the sheriff court building waiting for the trial to begin, a young Winston Churchill was appealing for votes at an open-air rally on Brown Constable Street.
It was standing room only when key witness John Cooney told how he found his father’s body in a pool of blood, under his bed. He ran to a neighbour, shouting: “Something erroneous has happened.”
White was identified at the scene by a young boy, who told the trial he had been asked to run “a message” for him.
After a two-day trial White was found guilty of a reduced charge of culpable homicide and jailed for 14 years.
The most high-profile case ever heard at the High Court in Dundee was the trial of Peter Tobin in winter 2008.
The British media descended on the sheriff court building for the fourweek hearing, which finally ended the 17-year-old mystery of what happened to Falkirk schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton.
The teenager vanished in Bathgate in February 1991, while heading home from a weekend visiting her big sister in Livingston – her first bus ride on her own.
Her remains were found, wrapped in plastic and concealed by a poured concrete cap, in a 6ft deep pit in the back garden of Tobin’s former home in Margate, Kent, in 2007.
It was not until the third week of the trial that jurors heard of a direct link between Vicky and Tobin, when a fingerprint analysis of one of the bin bags used to wrap her body produced four distinct prints, all of them a match for Tobin.
The next three cornerstones of the crown case followed rapidly.
A knife with a piece of the schoolgirl’s skin was found in the loft of the house in Bathgate, where Tobin stayed at the time, and there was DNA evidence from her body that produced partial matches with her killer.
The jury took less than two-and-a-half hours to find him guilty, despite defence counsel Donald Findlay QC’s insistence that there was “not a single scrap of evidence” that Tobin had met her when she was alive.
Tobin, who has been linked to a string of unsolved murders and recently reportedly told a fellow prisoner there was a body buried in Scotland that police had not found, was jailed for a minimum of 30 years.
One of the cases brought before the High Court involved the death of self-employed salesman Harry Falconer, whose remains were found underneath a council house on Macalpine Road, Dundee.
The discovery was made by two electricians who were rewiring the threebedroom property in January 1974.
Mr Falconer’s body, dressed in a shirt, belt, trousers and socks, was lying about seven feet beneath the kitchen floor. Despite a high-profile trial, his case remains open.
The 38-year-old fatherof-four was found directly under a trap door, which had been covered with linoleum tiles, a carpet and furniture.
Mr Falconer was known to drink and take drugs and was last seen between Christmas and Hogmanay in 1972. Two days after the discovery of his body his wife Isabella was charged with murdering him by imprisoning him below the kitchen floor.
The 37-year-old was accused of dragging him to, and dropping him through, the hatchway into a compartment of the foundations of the house while he was unconscious under the influence of drink and drugs.
Mrs Falconer denied the charges during a trial at the High Court in Dundee in
May 1974 and the case was sensationally dropped after the evidence of police surgeon Donald Rushton that Mr Falconer had survived and probably moved after he had dropped down the hatch.
Dr Rushton, under crossexamination, agreed one of his considerations had been the possibility of a suicide attempt by the deceased.
Fiscal depute Donald Macaulay said the case against Mrs Falconer could not be corroborated with the evidence available to prove she was guilty.
Lord Stott described the case as “a strange and mysterious matter”. He said: “In a situation such as this there could be no means of knowing for any of us whether the man was alive or dead when he came into the hatch, and you can only murder a living person, not a dead one.”
“No means of knowing for any of us whether the man was alive or dead...