Susan Newell

On 10 October 1923 Susan Newell was hanged at Duke Street Prison in Glasgow for the murder of John Johnston, a thirteen-year-old newspaper boy from Coatbridge. She was the first woman executed in Glasgow for around seventy years, and the last woman ever to be executed in Scotland. Her case still raises uncomfortable questions: about a crime that nobody witnessed, about a child who gave evidence against her own mother, and about why a jury’s strong plea for mercy was ignored.

The first name in this story should be John Johnston’s. He was a schoolboy who sold newspapers in the streets of Coatbridge to earn a few pennies, and he died for no reason anyone has ever been able to explain.

A hard life

Susan Newell was born Susan McAllister in Oban in 1893, into a poor family. Her first husband was killed in the First World War, leaving her with a young daughter, Janet. By 1923 she had remarried. Her second husband, John Newell, was a former soldier who worked on the Glasgow subway, and the family lived in a single rented room in Newlands Street, Coatbridge. The marriage was troubled, and accounts from the time describe a household living in poverty and conflict.

Coatbridge, 20 June 1923

On the afternoon of 20 June 1923 John Johnston went out to sell newspapers. Early that evening another boy gave him nine papers to sell. He never came home. The evidence later heard in court suggested that he had gone into the Newells’ room, perhaps to deliver or sell a paper, and that he was strangled there. No one saw what happened, and no clear motive was ever established.

The go-cart

The next morning Susan Newell and her eight-year-old daughter left Coatbridge on foot, pushing a small go-cart with a heavy bundle on it, along the road towards Glasgow. A passing lorry driver offered them a lift and helped to lift the cart aboard. He set them down in the East End of Glasgow, on Duke Street, by grim coincidence the street where the prison stood.

Local people noticed the woman with the bundle and grew suspicious. They called the police and watched as Newell went into a back court and came out without the bundle. When it was opened, it was found to contain the body of John Johnston. Newell was arrested on the spot. A post-mortem the next day confirmed that the boy had been strangled.

The trial

Both Susan Newell and her husband were charged with murder. John Newell had gone to a police station in Haddington, and he was able to show that he had been at his brother’s funeral at the time the boy died. When the case came to trial at the High Court in Glasgow before Lord Alness on 18 September 1923, the charge against him was soon withdrawn.

The most painful evidence came from Janet, Susan Newell’s daughter, then about eight years old, who described how the boy’s body had been taken through the streets on the cart. Newell’s defence argued that she was insane and could not be held responsible, but the plea was rejected. The trial, expected to last several days, ended on the afternoon of the second day. The jury took about half an hour to reach a majority verdict of guilty, with one juror dissenting, and its foreman told the court that the jury unanimously and strongly recommended mercy.

The petition

A petition was sent to the Secretary of State for Scotland, Viscount Novar, asking that the sentence be reduced to penal servitude. It pointed to her poverty, to the fact that she had been abandoned by her husband and left homeless and penniless, and to the jury’s recommendation. Many people also felt deeply uneasy about hanging a woman, something that had not happened in Glasgow in living memory. The Secretary of State declined to intervene.

Execution at Duke Street

Susan Newell was hanged at Duke Street Prison on 10 October 1923. Accounts of the execution say that she refused to wear the hood customarily placed over the head of the condemned. She was buried within the prison walls, as the law then required.

No woman was executed in Scotland again. Capital punishment for murder was suspended in Britain in 1965 and abolished in 1969, and the last executions in Glasgow took place at Barlinnie in 1960. Duke Street Prison itself closed in 1955 and was demolished, so nothing remains of the place where her life ended.

Questions that remain

Historians who have looked at the case have raised several questions. Why would a woman with no apparent motive kill a child she barely knew? Was her state of mind properly understood by the doctors of the day, at a time when the law on insanity was narrow and mental illness poorly recognised? Was it right to rely on the evidence of a young child against her own mother? And why was a jury’s strong recommendation of mercy set aside, when such recommendations were often followed?

None of these questions changes the fact that a thirteen-year-old boy lost his life. But together they explain why the case of Susan Newell is still remembered, both as a dark moment in the history of Scottish justice and as part of the argument that eventually ended the death penalty. More of the cases that shaped Glasgow’s courts are gathered on our famous crimes page.

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