A Shooting in Portencross

Mary Gunn

Northbank Cottage was a pleasant little home in Portencross, Scotland, on the Ayrshire coast.  Northbank was a fairly remote place, but surrounded by picturesque beauty, which would have made it a desirable location for anyone who did not fear loneliness.

In May 1913, a family trio moved into the cottage:  Sixty year old retired farmer/evangelist Alexander MacLaren, his wife Jessie, and Mrs. MacLaren’s forty-nine year old sister Mary Speir Gunn.  Mary was arguably the most notable member of the household: She had worked as a telephone operator, at a time when that was a highly unusual profession, particularly for a woman, and in her youth, was so pretty that she was known as the “Beauty of Beith.” She was still considered a very attractive woman.  The little family had a sterling reputation, and seemed quite fond of each other.

On the evening of October 18, the household had their tea, and then settled down around the fireplace in the parlor.  It was a peaceful scene: the two women knitted while Alexander read aloud from a book by W.W. Jacobs, Mary’s favorite author.  They did not bother to draw the blinds in the room, as it was a rainy night and their isolated location ensured they rarely got passers-by.

Alexander’s reading was abruptly interrupted by a frightening noise: a combination of a blast and the sound of glass shattering in the window opposite Mary.  A barrage of gunshots filled the room.  Mary suddenly clutched her chest and cried, “Oh, Alex, I’m shot!”  She dropped to the floor.  Jessie dashed to the other side of the room, with her husband yelling at her to drop to the floor.  It was only then that Alexander realized that one of the shots had shattered his left index finger.  The shots stopped, followed by an eerie silence.

Alexander ran out of the house, but the shooter had disappeared into the darkness.  After a futile search around the cottage, he ran for Portencross, which was about half a mile away.  The first house he reached was of a farmer named Alexander Murray.  He dashed into the house shouting, “Come down!  Come down!  We are all shot!”  Murray and his wife came out onto the landing to find MacLaren standing in the hall, hysterical and bleeding from his hand.  MacLaren screamed at them, “I’m shot, my wife’s shot, and Miss Gunn’s shot!”  He turned and ran back out into the night.

Murray went to the house of the local Laird, where he learned that MacLaren had just been there, after which the Laird--who had one of the very few houses in the area with a telephone--called police.

When officers, accompanied by a doctor, arrived at Northbank, they found Jessie standing in a daze, blood streaming from her back.  The doctor instantly saw that Mary was dead.  She had been shot three times, with one of the bullets piercing her heart.  The doctor led Jessie to bed, and extracted a bullet from her back.  He did not consider the wound to be life-threatening.  Outside the shattered window, police were able to make out several pairs of footprints, as well as a bullet.

At first, police evidently believed Alexander was either the intended victim, or the perpetrator.  However, the footprints found outside the window did not match his boots, and it was soon determined that his shotgun could not have been the murder weapon.  Investigators next assumed that this had been a botched robbery attempt--except, what burglar would fill a room with bullets, and then leave?  A personal motivation made little sense, either.  The three victims lived quiet, inoffensive lives, with no known enemies.  With little to go on other than unidentifiable footprints in the mud and a few bullets, the police were stymied.  They followed a number of leads about the inevitable “mysterious strangers” seen in the area at the time of the murder, but those all went nowhere.  The murder of Mary Gunn began to drift towards the “cold case” file.

"Daily Mirror," October 22, 1913, via Newspapers.com

There was one curious footnote to this particularly odd shooting.  One year after Mary’s murder, Elizabeth Gibson, who ran a Portencross boarding-house with her husband Andrew, sued Alexander MacLaren for slander.  The suit stated that MacLaren “falsely and calumniously made statements to the effect that she had participated in or had guilty knowledge of the murder of the defendant’s sister-in-law, Miss Mary Gunn, at Portencross on October 18th last year.”  The report went on to state that as a result of MacLaren’s statements, “an estrangement has resulted between herself and her husband, and her business has suffered very seriously.”

The trial was scheduled to begin on March 19, 1915, but before those proceedings could begin, Mrs. Gibson suddenly and mysteriously dropped the action, meaning she had to pay all the costs for the case, not to mention losing her hope of getting damages from MacLaren.

That proved to be the last official word on the Portencross Mystery.  As it seems virtually impossible that the murder will ever be satisfactorily “solved,” all we can do is speculate using the few clues available.  Jack House, who devoted a chapter to the case in his book “Murder Not Proven,” suggested that the murderer was Alexander MacLaren.  House theorized that Alexander, maddened by a hidden passion for his fetching sister-in-law, secretly bought a heavy revolver and snuck out of the cottage on the fatal night with the intention of murdering his inconvenient wife.  However, in his excitement, he accidentally killed the wrong woman.  As for why Jessie MacLaren did not turn her husband in, House proposed that the shock of the event caused her to have amnesia.

While we certainly live in a world where anything is possible, I personally find House’s lurid scenario to be unconvincing.  Stephen Brown’s 2018 book, “Who Killed Mary Gunn” offered a more plausible “solution.”  Seizing upon Elizabeth Gibson’s aborted slander suit, Brown speculated that Andrew Gibson was having a secret love affair with Mary Gunn, leading to Andrew’s jealous wife taking violent steps to eliminate her rival.  Brown thought it was likely that Mrs. Gibson dropped her lawsuit after it was privately pointed out to her that suing someone for calling her a murderer when she really was a murderer could lead to unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, Brown’s theory is too loaded with “what-ifs” to be the “last word” on the case. Also, neither “solution” to the murder addresses what I find most puzzling: The remarkably messy and slapdash manner of the shooting.  It did not appear to be the action of an assassin with a particular target in mind.  Rather, it looks like someone just stood outside the window randomly spraying the room with bullets.  The fact that Mary was fatally wounded seems to have been a case of appalling bad luck rather than a deliberate “hit job.”  This led me to consider a variation of Brown’s theory:  Perhaps Andrew Gibson had an interest in Mary that was completely unrequited, but deep enough to cause his wife a good deal of resentment.  Perhaps, in her anxiety to cool her husband’s passion, Elizabeth Gibson picked up a gun and went to the MacLaren cottage not to murder anyone, but just to put enough of a scare into the family to drive them far away from Portencross--and Andrew.  Unfortunately for everyone concerned, Elizabeth proved to be a more lethal marksman than she intended.  Or, for all we know, nobody has stumbled across the true solution to the case.

Northbank Cottage is still standing, the last surviving witness to the murder.  What a pity its walls cannot talk.