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.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Feel free to join the Strange Company staffers in winter's first snowball fight.

No, most medieval people did not marry when they were very young.

The landscape of Antarctica.

Cows are pretty darn smart.

The world's oldest restaurant.

The souvenir-hunters of Waterloo.

The practice of "dowsing for corpses."

An 1828 mutiny on the high seas.

One for "The Moon is Weird" file.

A roundup of recent poltergeist events.

The world's longest-running lab experiment.

Scandal at an overcrowded cemetery.

The eternal battle between writers and editors.

Some real-life Robinson Crusoes.

The fossilized structures that give scientists fits.

A house that became a "cat temple."

A "Brazilian Roswell."

The life of "Einstein's sidekick."

The failed attempt for force America to use the metric system.

Boleskine is high up on my list of "Houses that maybe shouldn't be restored," but perhaps that's just me.

The Harvard scientist who thinks he's found Heaven.  Literally.

Maria Clementina Sobieska, sort-of Queen of England.

Japan's "underwater Atlantis."

The surviving ruins of an influential architect.

The man who tried to fly to Mars.  (Spoiler: it didn't work.)

An orphanage of horrors.

The casseroles of the Great Depression.

A man asks his wife to shoot him.  She obliges.

C.A. Mathew's photos of Spitalfields.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at an unsolved murder in Scotland.  In the meantime, it's ukuleles-a-go-go!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This evocative tale of a missing person’s ghost appeared in the “Democratic Northwest,” October 18. 1894:

Fully 20 years have passed since Lizzie Clark, an orphan with a heritage, disappeared from a hotel in Dallas City, Illinois., as completely as if the earth had swallowed her up. In all that western country there has never been a stranger case than the disappearance of that girl, and there has never been a greater ghost mystery than has been and still is occasioned by the evidently disembodied spirit of the girl. 

The story of Lizzie Clark has been county history. She was an orphan and had some property and money.  A guardian had been appointed, and Lizzie, being ambitious to add to her little store, set about to work in a hotel hard by the river's edge. Through the dining room of this hotel runs the line between Hancock and Henderson counties, so that often a guest reached from Hancock into Henderson county when after butter.  A country swain and his lass, if seated opposite each other at this board, are in different counties. Many a man wanted for some offense in Hancock county has sat at this table in Henderson county and grinned at the sheriff of Hancock county. 

It was one afternoon about 20 years ago that Lizzie Clark, who had been washing dishes in the kitchen, stepped into the yard of the hotel.  She was seen to leave the kitchen by several working around the house, who paid no attention to the girl, but that was the last ever seen of her. Those who saw her step out into the yard heard no scream, no stifled moan, no struggling, but there are people yet living who believe that the girl was suddenly seized, strangled, concealed in the house until dark, and then cast into the dark river. Be that as it may, the murderers, if they remained in the same locality long, have been amply tormented since. It is said that the murderers did not leave the locality for some time thereafter, and yet, again, others say the girl was never murdered, but drowned herself, and that her ghost is not one of a murdered person, but one of a suicide. All one can gain from the different stories and theories is that the girl was dealt with foully in some manner, and that her ghost still haunts the locality.

Of course every effort was made to ferret out the mystery. Detectives hunted high and low, money was spent to no purpose, and finally the guardian of the girl's estate turned her money and property over to the county authorities, in whose hand it remains to this day because there is no kith or kin to claim it. 

The girl's ghost was first seen in December, 1887, when a party of duck bunters were returning to Dallas City from the islands. An excursion steamer had become disabled late in the season and was lying on the bank of the island across the bay. She was in a rather bad fix.  It was expected to leave her there during the winter. As the hunters neared the craft a form in white was seen to run out upon the upper deck. It was a young girl's figure, and she was evidently being pursued, for from across the water came screams, and then the following words: "'Leave me alone, leave me alone, or I will drown myself!" With that the specter flung itself into the river. There was a splash, and the cold waters closed over the white body. Several times during that winter the ghost of Lizzie Clark was seen at night and at early candle light around the disabled steamer.

When the steamer was taken away next spring, workmen and steamboatmen heard pitiful screams from the willows on shore as the boat moved away. The spirit did not leave the island, and it is believed now that she was buried on the island after the murder.  

Of later years, however, the girl's ghost has been seen in a skiff at night, and it was only a few evenings ago that one of the St. Louis and St. Paul fast steamers ran into the spectral thing.  The pilot did not see the ghostly craft until too late. He says he saw a boat of white that looked more like floating fleece than anything else. In the boat was a young girl in white raiment, but there were blood clots on the white dress. “She was rowing swiftly. When the prow of the steamer struck this frail craft, it cut through it like mist.  The ghostly occupant only laughed a sort of uncanny laugh--a half scream--and when we had passed I saw the spectral craft dancing on the waves behind. I doubt if an ordinary skiff could have lived in the waves of our steamer, right under the paddles." Thus spoke the pilot, and he is a man of few words and sterling integrity. 

"Have you seen Lizzie Clark's boat?" is now the question that goes from one mouth to another during the summer season. The question is not asked so often in winter from the fact that the poor girl's spirit does not seem to roam so much. Hunters have come into Dallas shaking with fright and calling for a dram to brace their nerves, saying that while coming down from the islands above on the ice they had met Lizzie Clark walking rapidly toward them.

She always wears that white dress, and the blood stains on the neck are plain. The girl's eyes are always staring wide open, as if she were being suffocated. Her spirit has been known to step out from behind a clump of dead trees at the head of the island and face passersby. She will give them a terrible look and then scream piteously. In an instant more the spirit has disappeared.- - Chicago Times.

There is a sequel to our little tale:  In March 1915, a skeleton of a human female was unearthed around the grounds of the hotel where Lizzie had worked, leading to the assumption that these were the remains of the long-missing girl.  It was said that Lizzie’s employers had been “bad characters, utterly devoid of decent principles.”  Lizzie was said to have been in “deep trouble” with the hotel proprietors, presumably because she knew too much of their evil doings.  The obvious conclusion was that Lizzie’s mouth had been permanently shut.

After the skeleton was found, Lizzie Clark’s unhappy ghost was never seen again.

The Baron and the Ghost

On December 24th, 1922, the “Weekly Dispatch” carried a Christmas ghost story narrated by the wonderfully named Alexander Peregrine Fuller-Acland Hood, Lord St. Audries.  It is described as a genuine experience of his, but it is certainly colorful enough to fit in with any fictional collection of spooks and apparitions:

Do you believe in ghosts ? Or are you one of those fortunate persons who have no fear of the unseen? Or, again, do you belong to the great majority who keep an open mind, but who like to feel on Christmas Eve that, after all, just round the corner, in the mysterious darkness, something might happen?...

I believe in ghosts, and not only on Christmas Eve, for it was a perfect summer evening, in July, 1920, tranquil and moonlit, that the astounding experience befell me, which the editor of The Weekly Dispatch has requested me to relate.

I was staying in Devonshire with an old Oxford friend who had taken orders. I had been living a delightful, care-free existence in the open air, bathing and playing tennis, in fact, doing everything but think of ghosts.

Then one night at dinner the conversation turned, as it often does, to the psychic, and the usual discussion took place. Paul, my Oxford friend, had been reading stories by Algernon Blackwood, and was still deeply affected by the impression they had made on him. His brother Philip, a clever, cool-headed young man, who was spending his long vacation at home, openly scoffed at his foolishness, and a keen argument took place.

Finally Paul leaned forward and said: "Well, we have an opportunity of testing all these theories." I asked him what he meant.

And then he explained. Not a mile away, on the farthest side of the hill, standing off the road in a desolate and overgrown garden, was a house which I had often noticed. We will call it Weir Court (not its correct name). This house has been empty for years. It had an evil reputation. Grass had grown thick on the deserted drive, bats had built their nests in the blank windows, the roof had fallen in, making the top floor unapproachable. But no workmen would venture to repair the roof, and, though the house was for sale, no tenant could be found for it.

"Why not go there and see and test for yourselves?"

The question came from Philip, who did not believe anything he had not thoroughly tested for himself. And something in his tone of cool scepticism made me feel that I should like to take him at his word.

And so it came that eventually, at about ten o'clock, we set out. The night was very still, with that luxuriant beauty that one associated with a Devonshire midsummer. We must have looked a strange trio as we walked along the lonely road, Paul with a candle and matches in his hand and a crucifix in his pocket, Philip swinging a stick and whistling an air from "Mignon," myself wondering what was in store for us.

"Here we are," said Paul, after we had been walking about twenty minutes.

I shall never forget the strange and sinister appearance of that house. It stood back from the roads in a garden tangled with undergrowth, the plaster was falling from the walls, and not even the moonlight could give any glamour to its gaunt nakedness.

To enter the house it was necessary to climb a high gate, to go down some steep area steps, and to skirt the outside until one arrived at the front. It was then possible to enter by means of a window giving into the basement.

This we accomplished. The window was old and without a sash, and I remember that Paul decided to prop it up with a stick, " in case anyone wants to come out in a hurry." It was lucky that he did so.

We stepped into the basement, Paul holding the candle. Never was there such a scene of desolation. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling and the floor was littered with rubble, so that it was impossible to move one's foot even an inch without waking the echoes-a point I would ask you to remember.

"This way," said Paul, pointing to the stairs. We went up the stairs, which were rickety but safe, and found ourselves in a large hall.

Our first plan was to examine the house thoroughly. It was right at the beginning of this examination that what I may term the prelude to the adventure took place. We had been to the front room and had looked over every nook and cranny, Philip keeping up a running fire of conversation, which was, in some ways, rather comforting. And then suddenly he stopped. I looked at him. His face was dead white and over part of it there seemed to be creeping a shadow. Then he spoke, in a blank, expressionless voice :

"The candle-quick-the candle," and he staggered down the stairs. We found him in a state of collapse outside.

.This is Philip's account, which he has written for me:

"To tell the honest truth, I was bored with the whole proceeding. I did not believe in psychic phenomena, and considered it foolish to waste a wonderful evening in tramping round an old house. And so when we started to examine the rooms I admit that I treated the whole thing as a joke.

"When we came out into the hall I was thinking, to be quite precise, of the foreign policy of Queen Elizabeth, in which I was specialising at the moment. Then suddenly I felt what I can only describe as an anæsthetic. I have had several operations for my throat in the past, and each one has always affected me in precisely a similar way. That is to say, a black film has gradually stolen over my brain, from left to right. The right half of my brain remains active till the last; the left is gradually paralysed.

"To the smallest detail this was what happened then. It was so sudden that it took me completely by surprise. I had just enough presence of mind to get out before I collapsed. For I knew that the whole trouble came from a small room on the right down the corridor at the end of the hall.

"I have no explanations to offer."

That is the account of Philip, the confirmed sceptic.

Naturally, after what had happened, we felt trepidation about leaving Philip. However, he affirmed after a few minutes that he felt perfectly all right as long as he remained in the garden." Nothing would induce him to go back to the house. Paul and I returned with the candle in order to search the house from top to bottom. This we did with absolute thoroughness. Not a cupboard, not a crack in the wall escaped us. We paid particular attention to the little room from which Philip said the evil influence emanated. It was bare, desolate, and unromantic, with a few shreds of dirty green paper hanging from the walls.

We, therefore, went out again, empty-handed. Then I determined, by what irresistible force I do not know, to return. Something called me. Philip's experience had made me feel that, after all, there were things to discover in that house. On the other hand Paul, I imagined, whether on account of his mentality or on account of the crucifix which he carried, was not a good " subject."

Of course they endeavoured to dissuade me. However, I persisted, and it was arranged that I should whistle from time to time to show that I was still alive, and that they should whistle back.

I took the candle and gingerly climbed back through the window. I admit that I felt a little creepy as I ascended the silent stairs and heard the voices of my friends drift farther and farther away. But as I entered the hall, a broken patch of moonlight fell on the floor through the cracked roof and reminded me of the sane, wholesome world outside.

I should here point out that not only was the house empty (our search had been meticulous) but that there was no possibility of anybody entering it without passing Paul and Philip, and, in any case, without making a considerable noise on the rubbled floor.

I sat down at the bottom of the stairs--it was the only place to sit--and waited. There was absolute silence. Opposite me were the two large front rooms, and to the right of them a corridor onto which gave the small room from which I had felt all the evil influences coming. The door of the room, which was some twenty feet away, I watched intently.

I buried my head in my hands and fell to wondering what type of people had inhabited this strange house in the past. Weird tales ran through my brain of some of the things which had been seen here which Paul had told me as we walked along, tales of a strange man who had been the last tenant, and who had never ventured outside, but had taken in provisions through the door with his white hands--long, thin, with fingers pale as death. And how those hands had been seen on the wall, tapping, tapping.

I pulled myself together and thought of more cheerful things. I whistled again, the echoes resounding shrilly against the cold walls. From outside came the answering whistle. That reassured me and I turned my attention again to the little room.

Suddenly I felt that all was not well. Somebody, something, was trying to make me go away. The air was charged with a hostile influence. I knew I was not wanted. And I knew that the force came from the little room with the open door down the corridor which I was watching.

I leant forward and looked into the semi-darkness. As I looked I felt, as though it were a keen wind, this influence growing stronger and stronger. I summoned every effort of will power and tried to rise to my feet.

It happened. Out of the door, down the dark passage, something rushed, like an immense bat, towards me. I say something, because in the few seconds in which the episode lasted I had no time to see clearly. It was black from head to foot, and it seemed to be built in the form of a very powerful man. But two things made me know that it was no human being that sprang towards me. First, I could see no face. There was just a hideous blank, that was all. And secondly, though it came with huge leaps over the rough, rubbled floor, it made no noise. There was absolute silence all the time.

Now, I am not a small man. As a matter of fact, I am six foot two in my socks, and I think I may say that I am built in proportion to my size. Moreover, I was in the best of condition, and seated as I was in a defensive position, I think I may say that it would have taken a pretty powerful man to knock me over.

But when this thing dashed out I was struck backwards with an irresistible force. And as I fell I felt a sensation of incredible evil, as though the forces of Hell were conspiring against me. And with it something warm, not physically warm, but with a psychic warmth that cloyed and enveloped.

The rest is told in a few words. For a moment the whole world was blank, and then I found myself fighting, struggling with I know not what, down the steep stairs. Who or what it was, if it was one or two or a dozen, I do not know. All I know is that I saw nothing, and that I just managed to fight my way outside, where I sank down onto the grass.

The rest is best told by Paul, from whose written narrative I quote.

"When Lord St. Audries first went into the house we naturally felt somewhat anxious as to what would happen. After all, he was our guest, and after my brother's experience I did not feel that I was justified in letting him go in alone. However, when he whistled I felt reassured. I whistled back and waited with interest but without fear.

"I think about a quarter-of-an-hour must have passed without anything uncanny happening. I was just about to turn to my brother to suggest that we should call him back and go home, when something so extraordinary happened that I must narrate it in detail.

"The night was absolutely windless. That is an important point. I noticed that a tall belt of poplar trees at the end of the garden were without movement of any sort. It therefore follows that what we heard and felt was, whatever else it may have been, not wind.

"With absolute suddenness, sweeping over our heads, something came. I could not call it a wind, though I felt it. I could not call it a noise, though there was in one's ears a sensation of rushing. A second afterwards there came from the house one of the most terrible cries I have ever imagined, as though somebody had been violently stabbed in the back. It was Lord St. Audries' voice and was followed by the sound of a heavy crash.

"Aghast, I turned to my brother. He rushed to the entrance. Then we realised that we could not get in, for the place was pitch dark, and so blocked up that it was quite impossible to force an entry. A cloud had drifted over the moon, and it was impossible to find our way through the wreckage of the basement without a candle.

"We therefore ran at full speed to the neighbouring house, whose tenants I fortunately knew, in order to obtain a light. As we vaulted the gate the whole house resounded with violent shocks and shouts.

"We secured the candle and tore back. The noise in the house was indescribable. And then it suddenly ceased and we saw Lord St. Audries advancing towards us, covered with dirt and plaster."

That is Paul's narrative.

I offer no explanation for this story beyond saying that it is true in every detail. However, the following points may be of interest:

(1) It has transpired that the small room which was the centre of the trouble was once a bathroom in which some fifty years ago a particularly atrocious murder had been committed by a semi-insane doctor who had afterwards committed suicide.

(2) No dog will venture into the garden of the house, and many refuse even to pass it. 

(3) On the next night to my experience (at midnight to be precise) the inhabitants of the neighbouring house, who are also confirmed sceptics, were awakened by the sound of a violent report which, they allege, came from "Weir Court."

The house is still standing there and it remains without a tenant.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

One of the Strange Company staffers is on jury duty, and I hear things are going about the way you'd expect.

The glow of life.

The multiple meanings of the word, "fetching."

The Hudson Valley Bigfoot hunters.

In which ancient Athens creates a goddess.

A historic London toilet.

The remains of a 3,000 year old royal menagerie.

Famous writers and their day jobs.

The icky baths of Pompeii.

Australian miners just saw something weird in the sky.

An ancient medieval ship is making archaeologists very happy.

An assortment of literary conspiracy theories.

The Anglo-German blockade of Venezuela.

The DNA of one of the last Siberian shamans.

It's always awkward when a corpse turns up very much alive.

The unsolved murder of Benjamin Nathan.

The saga of a Harlem tramp cat.

When New York City nearly seceded from the U.S.

Some really freaking old canoes.

A prolific grave-robber in Pennsylvania.

Charlie Chaplin in the East End.

A prisoner of the Aboriginal.

The fear of psychic powers.

The long history of men showing off their legs.

The disappearance of a poker player.

The mysterious Green Stone of Hattusa.

The passing of a cat who loved a Japanese museum.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll meet a particularly sinister ghost.  In the meantime, here's a little classical guitar.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

One of the more unusual “death omen” stories appeared in the “Sentinel and Democrat,” April 10, 1844:

Mr. Ponting, a tailor, now residing in Bedfordbury, leading from New street to Chandos street, Covent garden, was in the autumn of the year 1819, accompanied by Mrs. Ponting, at Turnham green, when they called on a friend of the name of Smith, who still resides there. They walked into the garden attached to the house, and their attention was fixed on an apple tree which carried a good show of fruit. Mrs. Ponting was in a thriving way, and, from fatigue or some other cause, was induced to lean against the tree which she and her husband had been looking at., Whether she fell against it, or otherwise shook it with violence. we are not informed, but the tree was shaken, and all the fruit, with the exception of a single apple, was the next moment strewed on the ground. 

Though vexed at the accident, Mr. and Mrs. Ponting attached no vast importance to it, nor did their friends at the moment, but in the course of the day Mrs. Smith took an opportunity of communicating with Mr. Ponting on the subject. The lady spoke to this effect that she was much disturbed at what had happened, and it was her fear that the accident was nothing less than an omen of death. Her impression, which she could not get rid of, was that Mrs. Ponting would not get well through her expected confinement.

From one apple being left on the tree uninjured, she concluded that the child would live, but the mother she mournfully predicted would not recover. A few months set the question at rest. Mrs. Ponting gave birth to an infant and died: the child lived to grow up. But this is not all.

Our informant goes on to add that the tree, though up to that period it had in most years brought a good crop, since the year 1819 has never in any season borne more than a single apple. The tree, which was named “Elizabeth," after the lady whose early departure it was supposed to shadow forth, is still standing, and may be seen by the curious.

The Crossbow Murder

Arlene Hoffman

“Death by crossbow” sounds like something you’d see in medieval records, or an episode of “Midsomer Murders,” not in a modern-day upscale Southern California neighborhood.  But as the following case will show, life is full of surprises.

Arlene Hoffman led a busy life in the background of California’s often-twisted, but admittedly rarely dull, political scene.  She began her involvement with politics  when she worked for the millionaire industrialist and art-collector Norton Simon, who made a failed Senate run in 1970.  She participated in Jesse Unruh’s unsuccessful 1973 campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles, and went on to become the secretary for Fred Harper, a well-known political consultant who disappeared off the coast of Baja California in 1974.

In 1976, Hoffman was called as a witness before the Orange County Grand Jury.  The hospital she was then working for was run by Dr. Louis Cella, who at the time was California’s largest campaign contributor.  Cella was being investigated for billing Medi-Cal for phantom patients, and then steering the money to numerous political campaigns.  Cella was eventually convicted of income-tax evasion, Medicare and Medi-Cal fraud, embezzlement, and conspiracy.  Investigators suspected that Hoffman was assisting Cella in his dodgy political schemes, and then lying about it to try to protect her employee, but apparently they could not prove any criminal activity on her part.  Probably the most notorious campaign Cella and Hoffman were involved in was when they helped to elect Robert Citron to the position of Orange County Treasurer-Tax Collector.  Citron subsequently pleaded guilty for his role in Orange County’s 1994 bankruptcy, which was, at the time, the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

One might be pardoned for thinking that Mrs. Hoffman was something of a political jinx.  However, despite her involvement in an impressive list of political misadventures, in December 1994, the 57-year-old Hoffman was hired as personal secretary to Jim Silva, who had just been elected to the Orange County Board of Supervisors.  Hoffman, who was recently widowed (her husband Joel died of cancer in March 1994,) appeared to be getting her life back on track.  The medical costs from Joel’s long illness forced the couple into bankruptcy, but those proceedings had recently concluded, and Arlene had just received a $500,000 life insurance payment.  Those who knew Arlene described her as a kind, eminently trustworthy and dependable person.  She was devoted to her only child, 25-year-old Charles, whom the Hoffmans had adopted when he was in his mid-teens.  (After serving four years in the Marine Corps, in 1994 Charles was a student at Fullerton College.)

On December 30, 1994, Hoffman unaccountably failed to show up for work.  Calls to her cell phone went unanswered.  When nightfall began to arrive with no word from Hoffman, Jim Silva became concerned enough to call Sheriff Brad Gates to have deputies visit Hoffman’s Laguna Niguel condo.  When the officers entered her residence, they found Hoffman’s body lying in the hallway, with a fatal wound in her chest caused by a “hunting-type arrow,” possibly fired by a crossbow.  (The arrow was never recovered.)  Sometime between 7:30 p.m. on December 29 and 7:30 the following morning, someone committed a very unusual murder.

Hoffman’s front door was found unlocked, and there was no sign of a break-in.  Nothing appeared to be missing from the condo.  Hoffman’s poodle was found wandering around the entryway, but a previous owner had arranged for the animal’s ability to bark to be surgically removed.  The dog was still wearing a leash, suggesting that Hoffman had been attacked immediately after taking her pet for a walk.  Police found partial fingerprints on a stairway that they believed belonged to the killer, but no match was ever made.

This proved to be one of those murders where the investigation hit an immediate brick wall.  Despite her proximity to some shady political dealings, police found no obvious link between them and her murder.  Everyone who had even the slightest contact with Hoffman was interviewed.  Every archery and sporting goods store in the area was investigated for possible leads.  At every turn, investigators came up empty-handed.  As far as anyone could tell, no one had a motive to kill Arlene Hoffman--except, someone did.

To date, the case remains one of those unsettling mysteries.