Have you ever come across a crime scene photo involving one
of your ancestors?
My second cousin thrice removed, David Malcolm, was born
towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in the soon-to-be royally famous
village of Glamis, north of Dundee. When
he was a young boy, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in South
Dakota. Here, they moved to a homestead,
and David tried his hand at farming, then mining, and according to a cousin was a skilled carpenter and housebuilder. However, he found his calling as he served
two terms as deputy sheriff of Butte County, prompting him to run for
sheriff. This he did successfully, and
in January of 1945 he took office.
A year later, he and Special Agent Tom Matthews were part of
an interstate manhunt for an escaped convict serving a sentence for murder, who
had been on the run for over a week from Minnesota. They were unfortunately the first to
apprehend him, and he shot them both dead.
The crime scene photo – which I found on the open web in a
gallery of local history pictures – is of the murder scene, taken after dark. Two bodies lie prone next to cars on a
country road, surrounded by men, who, bizarrely all seem to be standing around
just chatting, one of them even balanced on a pair of crutches. It was probably the event of the century in
the sleepy Black Hills town of Spearfish, normally best known for its teacher
training college.
David was buried in the county graveyard. His killer was only indicted for the murder
of Special Agent Matthews, but at the trial David’s widow Edith gave evidence
of her husband’s final hours. He had
received phone calls about the fugitive, and according to Edith, “He went into
the office, put on his holster, gun and hat and jacket and came out in the
kitchen and said goodbye to me.” That
was the last time she saw him alive.
It took a jury barely two hours to find his killer guilty,
despite the public defender’s alternative plea of manslaughter. South Dakota was a state that imposed the
death penalty, and given the heinous crime, it was no surprise when it was
pronounced in this case. When the state
had re-introduced capital punishment in 1939, they got several prisoners to build
an electric chair, using one borrowed from Illinois as their template. From then until 1946 three men were sentenced
to death in the state, but all received commuted sentences of life imprisonment
instead. David’s killer would be the
chair’s first victim.
Back in Scotland, the Malcolm family must have heard of the
tragedy. On one of the gravestones in the kirkyard at Glamis, another member of
the family is mentioned as having died in South Dakota (quite a few of the Malcolms
seem to have emigrated there), which was the clue that led to me following
their trail and learning about David’s untimely demise. There was clearly transatlantic communication
between the two branches of the family, so it’s very likely that the sad news
was reported in letters home.
Thanks to the assistance of a friend in the U.S., I’ve been
able to finally see what David Malcolm looked like. This photograph was published with his
newspaper obituary, which incorrectly gives his age as 57 - an understandable mistake if this is a good likeness of him. He was, in fact, only
47, and has what my mother would call a “lived-in
face”.
David is honoured with an inscription on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.
