Outlander star heard ‘thud’ during stabbing after poetry reading

A star of hit TV show Outlander told a court yesterday he was stabbed as he left a poetry venue to make his way to a football ground.

Tam Dean Burn said he felt “a thud” but did not realise he had been stabbed until he looked round and saw the blade being pulled out.

Mr Burn, 61, said he had given a reading at the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close, in Edinburgh, and was leaving for the Hibs ground at Easter Road.

He agreed that the close led on to the city’s High Street but added: “We didn’t get as far as that.”

He said: “I noticed the person that ended up stabbing me. I recognised him, but I didn’t know where from.”

Mr Burn told the High Court in Edinburgh: “I just felt someone getting a hold of me and a bit of a thud.

“I didn’t realise I had been stabbed until I looked round. I saw him and I saw the blade being pulled back out again,” he said.

He said there was a lot of shouting and the man was pulled off. “He was saying I was a kiddie fiddler. I think he said ‘he deserves to die’,” he told the court.

He made his way back to the poetry library and had realised that he was bleeding after the wound to his shoulder.

Mr Burn said the man was outside shouting and threatening him and Kevin Williamson.

“It was something like ‘they two are going to die, get them out here’. Something along those lines,” he said.

Emergency services arrived and he was taken to an ambulance before going to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for treatment.

Mr Burn said he later realised he had met the man in 1995. He said: “He wanted to be an actor. We were doing a play at the Edinburgh Festival that year.”

He was shown a picture taken through glass doors at the poetry library and said: “That Jonathon Wilson. That’s who stabbed me.”

Wilson, 43, who is currently detained at the psychiatric State Hospital at Carstairs, was charged with assaulting Mr Burn on 2 March this year to his severe injury, permanent disfigurement and to the danger of his life and attempting to murder him.

Wilson has pled not guilty and lodged a special defence maintaining that at the time he was unable because of a mental disorder to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of the conduct.

A judge is carrying out an examination of the facts in the case in the absence of Wilson. Lord Burns is hearing evidence. The hearing continues.