When Katherine Nairn fell in love with the dashing Patrick Ogilvie in 1765, it would have been the perfect match – but for the fact that she was already married to Patrick’s older brother, Thomas. In Scottish law, the relationship was more than adulterous: it was incestual, and when Thomas banished Patrick from the family home, it became murderous. Patrick bought laudanum and arsenic, which Katherine used to poison her husband. The trial that followed was chaotic, and, following a number of short reprieves, so was Patrick’s execution. Katherine, also sentenced to hang, pleaded pregnancy, and shortly after giving birth to a girl in January 1766, escaped from the Edinburgh Tolbooth. She was never recaptured. Now fresh material from the Signet Library’s collection of historic trial literature has shed new light on the case.
The new material includes the manuscript warrant for Katherine’s arrest in the hand of the Lord Justice Clerk Sir Gilbert Elliot, a diagram of the house in Perthshire where the murder took place drawn by the Macer of the High Court of Justiciary and two unique broadsides about Patrick’s execution. Also present is a news clipping from the Westminster Magazine of June 1777 stating that Katherine had become a penitent in a convent in Lille, Belgium, pasted onto a note with a handwritten eyewitness account confirming her presence there. The new finds are in an appropriate place, as the chief account of the trial was written by the great Writer to the Signet William Roughead, who appears to have come across them himself whilst researching his book in the mid-1920s.
