Peter Queen and Chrissie Gall

In the early hours of a November morning in 1931, Peter Queen walked into a Glasgow police station and told the officers that they would find his partner, Chrissie Gall, dead. She was, and Queen was charged with her murder. What he actually said at that police counter became one of the central questions of the trial, and the case brought two of the most famous forensic experts in Britain into a Glasgow courtroom to argue that no murder had happened at all.

Chrissie Gall’s death was a private tragedy before it was a legal argument, and accounts of her life describe a woman who struggled for years with drink and with an unhappy situation that she could see no way out of.

Two unhappy lives

Peter Queen was the son of a Glasgow bookmaker. He had married young, and the marriage had broken down. His father employed Chrissie Gall as a nursemaid to look after the family’s children, and over time she and Peter fell in love. Because Queen was still married, they could not marry, and the accounts of the case describe Chrissie as deeply troubled by living with him outside marriage. She drank heavily.

For a time the couple lived with friends, James Burns and his wife, before taking a home of their own in the summer of 1931.

November 1931

On 20 November 1931 a friend, Mrs Johnson, called and found Chrissie drunk. She returned later with her husband, by which time Queen was home and Chrissie had gone to bed. The visitors left at around eleven at night. In the early hours of the next morning Queen arrived at the police station.

The police later said that he told them he thought he had killed his wife. Queen insisted that his words had been quite different: that he had said his wife was dead, and that they were not to think he had killed her. A single misheard word, or a single honest memory, separated a confession from a denial.

Chrissie was found in bed, strangled with a ligature. Accounts differ on its details: some describe a clothes line, while the forensic photographs later kept by Sir Sydney Smith are described as showing a scarf tied round her neck and fastened to the bed. There were no signs of a struggle.

The experts

The absence of a struggle was the heart of the defence. Queen’s lawyers called Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the most famous pathologist in England, and Professor Sydney Smith of Edinburgh, one of the founders of modern forensic medicine. Both gave the opinion that the marks on Chrissie’s neck and the scene in the room were consistent with suicide. A woman being strangled by a man, they argued, would be expected to fight, and there was no sign that she had.

The other explanation, put forward then and since, is that a woman as drunk as Chrissie had been that evening might never have woken, and so could have been killed without resisting. Glasgow was itself a centre of forensic medicine, home to the father and son Professors John Glaister, and the case became a contest of medical opinion as much as of facts.

The verdict

The trial took place in Glasgow in January 1932. The jury did not accept the defence experts. They found Peter Queen guilty of murder but added a recommendation to mercy, and he was sentenced to death. Petitions followed from members of the public, members of parliament and Glasgow councillors, and the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Queen was eventually released, and he died in 1958.

A case that still divides

Sydney Smith never accepted the verdict. In his memoirs, Mostly Murder, published in 1959, he devoted a chapter to the case and described it as a wrongful conviction, a rare example of a jury rejecting firm and agreed expert evidence. Others have read the same facts differently and believed the jury was right. Because the only other person who knew what happened in that room was Chrissie Gall, the truth cannot now be settled.

The case sits alongside Glasgow’s other great disputed verdicts, from the "not proven" of Madeleine Smith to the wrongful conviction of Oscar Slater. More of the city’s cases are gathered in Glasgow’s famous crimes.

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