Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Wrongfully Imprisoned Man
Anti-Semitism put Oscar Slater in jail. The author of Sherlock Holmes got him out.
It was one of the most notorious murders of its age. Galvanizing early 20th-century Britain and, before long, the world, it involved a patrician victim, stolen diamonds, a transatlantic manhunt, and a cunning maidservant who knew far more than she could ever be persuaded to tell. It was, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in 1912, “as brutal and callous a crime as has ever been recorded in those black annals in which the criminologist finds the materials for his study.”
But for all its dark drama, and for all the thousands of words Conan Doyle would write about it, his account of this murder was no Sherlock Holmes tale. It concerned an actual case: a killing for which an innocent man was pursued, tried, convicted, and nearly hanged. This miscarriage of justice would, in his words, “remain immortal in the classics of crime as the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy.” It would also consume him — as private investigator, public crusader, and ardent nonfiction chronicler — for the last two decades of his life.
The case, which has been called the Scottish Dreyfus affair, centered on the murder of a wealthy Glasgow woman. Just before…
