#william park

An elderly woman had been bludgeoned to death and robbed of a small diamond brooch. Witnesses disagreed as to the height and age of the man seen loitering near the apartment, but police decided that the culprit was Oscar Slater, a German Jew regarded by them as part of a “thoroughly bad lot”. Slater had tried to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch four days after the murder and had then sailed with his girlfriend to the United States on the SS Lusitania. He was extradited and brought to trial in the Edinburgh High Court on May 3 1909.

At trial, it was proved that the pawn ticket related to the brooch pawned a month before the murder and that Slater had booked his ticket on the Lusitania six weeks before the murder. His alibi was dismissed. A majority of the jury found Slater guilty and he was sentenced to death. A petition for clemency raised 20,000 signatures. Two days before Slater was scheduled to die, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. 

Conan Doyle then set to work. He discovered, among other things, that witnesses had been bribed to identify Slater and that Slater had a good alibi; that the victim almost certainly knew her murderer, and that she had not been killed with a hammer produced by the police but with a large chair. There were calls for a retrial, but it took another 15 years and another book for Slater to obtain justice. In 1927 a journalist named William Park published The Truth About Oscar Slater. A few weeks later Slater was released and pardoned. He served 19 years for a murder he did not commit.

More Info: The Oscar Slater Case - Conan Doyle