David Malcolm 1899-1946

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.