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theft, from Rose.
    As we have seen earlier, conditions in the jail at that time were horrendous but nonetheless the victim’s brother declaimed in letters to the press that Laurie had got off lightly. He would have much preferred the Glasgow man to swing – which might have been a real miscarriage of justice. No blood was found on Laurie’s clothes and there was medical evidence that a fall could have killed Rose. The evidence was mainly circumstantial but he still had to listen to a judge in a black cap initially pronounce his doom.
    In reporting the sensational trial of Laurie, the Scotsman said: “It was held with every manifestation of public interest.” Queues formed each day to hear at first-hand the gruesome nature of the crime. The public fury at Laurie was fuelled by the revelation that on the evening of the death of Rose he was seen drinking in the Corrie Bar, and later he carried around a striped blazer belonging to Rose. But if it had been carefully planned crime rather than an opportunistic theft Laurie was remarkably careless, leaving several obvious clues that showed he had been beside the body. And other climbers had seen them at the summit of Goatfell. What really happened will never be known. But that trip north to Peterhead got Laurie a place in the jail’s history. He was one of the first men to escape from it.
    The story was told in the local press under the, to these days, tame headline: EXCITING INCIDENT AT PETERHEAD PRISON – THE ESCAPE AND CAPTURE OF LAURIE. Not quite how The Sun or the Daily Record would put it today. But the story was, as one news editor of mine liked to say, a belter. The first escaper had been an Aberdeenshire burglar, much lower down the pecking order of infamy than Laurie. This hapless fellow had barely gone half a mile when he stumbled into the arms of a policeman. However, the paper noted that on this occasion, “fleet of foot as he was”, Laurie never got out of sight of the prison either.
    By the time of his escape he had been in the prison for a couple of years or so and despite being difficult early in his term he had been of such good behaviour latterly that he had become a prisoner of the “first class” and had privileges not given to the normal con. He was said to be of surly disposition and a regular in making groundless complaints about conditions in the prison but he was a first-class workman entrusted with valuable tasks in the carpenters’ shop. This facilitated his escape, as he was in a gang erecting scaffolding used during work on warders’ houses when he made a break for freedom. It seemed the perfect opportunity on a foggy morning to leap over some of the planking used in the scaffolding and leg it away from the prison.
    Once over the wall, however, there was no real cover for an escaper to hide in the days before the prison was surrounded by houses, and despite crossing a hayfield and leaping over a few dry stane dykes, one of the prison civil guards caught him almost immediately. Not much of an escape compared to the feats of those who later managed to get out of cells and over the walls and stay on the run for days at a time, but an escape nonetheless. Back in the prison his mental condition was reassessed and he was sent to Perth Criminal Asylum for the Insane and he died in 1930.
    Laurie had originally arrived in Peterhead after some months of probation in Perth prison immediately after his trial and when he was taken north his status as a “lifer” was marked with a black crêpe band on his arm. A newspaper of the day wrote about his life in jail after escaping the noose. Despite the somewhat archaic language, this was a feature that would have graced any tabloid today. The writer answered the questions about the Arran Murderer’s life in jail. It was said that his work in the prison was not hard but irksome – teasing piles of hessian into oakum, tarred fibres used in wooden ships. On his arrival in Peterhead in 1890 he wore Perth