London Mystery

An upstairs-downstairs case

Acquaintances were not concerned when ex-Labor M.P. Walter Scott-Elliot, 82, and his second wife, Dorothy, 60, failed to reappear in their elegant Chelsea neighborhood after Christmas. After all, Scott-Elliot, an old Etonian and onetime Coldstream Guardsman, had instructed his London bank in mid-December that he and his wife would spend the holiday in Italy. Telephone callers to their flat, filled with $200,000 in antiques and heirlooms, were informed that the Scott-Elliots were indeed away. Not until a Newcastle antiques dealer became suspicious of two men offering him quantities of Meissen china, Minton pottery and silverware much too cheaply did the truth begin to emerge.

Tracing a license number that the alert antiques man had jotted down, police found the car rented out to Scott-Elliot. They visited the Chelsea flat, then forced their way in when no one answered: the place was ransacked and spattered with blood. A quick, incomplete inventory showed that at least $6,000 worth of valuables were missing, including not only china and silverware but also a collection of 142 Edwardian silver pennies that were 700 years old.

What followed the discovery would lave been fit fare for such fictional British sleuths as Miss Jane Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. Before the denouement last week, the Scott-Elliot case led police on a macabre trail across the snow-covered Scottish Highlands. The final toll: five corpses, including those of the Scott-Elliots.

Actually, the first body surfaced even before the Newcastle antiques man's suspicions were aroused. On Christmas Day, the bound body of a woman dressed in men's clothes was found in a stream beside a road near Dumfries. She was Mary Goggle, 50, known as "Belfast Mary." Mary had once worked for Dorothy Scott-Elliot as housekeeper and cook; she was fired, but reappeared in the Chelsea neighborhood in early December. Was Belfast Mary also, detectives wondered, the female in another episode of the case? A "brassy woman" in mink coat and red dress had turned up at the Tilt Hotel in Blair Atholl, Scotland. She was with three men, one of them elderly. Under the watch of the others the old man--possibly Scott-Elliot, with the woman posing as Wife Dorothy--was fed in his room during the overnight stay. The next morning they pressed him to pay the $120 bill for the four. Two days later, the two younger men returned to the hotel --alone.

In mid-January, unbeknown to detectives already investigating the Scott-Elliots' disappearance, the case took another turn. Norman Wight, an innkeeper near Edinburgh who likes to cater to "the right sort of people" and thus makes a habit of reading Wanted posters, became suspicious of two male guests (" 'What do you make of them?' I said to the wife"). He summoned police, who checked out their car. In the trunk was the nude body of Donald Hall, 37, brother of Archibald Thompson Hall, 53, the Scott-Elliots' butler. Only three days earlier, the younger Hall had been released from prison after serving three years for burglary.

By this time, police, using dogs trained to smell out decomposing bodies and accompanied by two informants, literally under wraps to hide their identities (an eager crime reporter oohed over the "fawn" blanket thrown over one of them), were scouring the country from Inverness to Edinburgh. On Jan. 17 they found Scott-Elliot's body, chewed by foxes, amid rhododendron bushes in remote Glen Affric, 35 miles from Inverness. Five days later, they were led to Mrs. Scott-Elliot, face down in a roadside gully 100 miles from where her husband's corpse had been uncovered. In the interval, police dug up the fifth body. He was David Wright, a 30-year-old gardener and gamekeeper, who disappeared last July.

Police refused to discuss Wright's precise connection with the case, but at week's end Archibald Hall was charged with having killed him by shooting him through the back of the head. Hall was also charged with having done in his employer, by strangling him "on a piece of waste ground." Hall's acquaintances were shocked. Recalled a Chelsea porter: "He looked like a millionaire himself. He used to speak to the staff in clipped accents." A woman friend fondly remembered the perfume he gave her, the love letters he wrote. But she also recalled that she bought him a Jaguar car and wrote him checks before he "led her a dog's dance" and disappeared. -

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.