The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE SECRET OF IRELAND’S EYE by William Roughead

Here is a case in which the outcome was almost certainly a miscarriage of justice. William Kirwan, an artist, was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death. In the event he was reprieved and served nearly thirty years of penal servitude. But subsequent medical opinion suggests that the woman died of natural causes. Kirwan appears to have been a victim of some intangible intuition on the part of the Dublin Court that he was guilty, although the evidence strikes the modern reader as flimsy in the extreme. Journalist Richard Lambert believed the case to have been beset by “a sort of nightmarish atmosphere, a murk in which judges, witnesses, lawyers and jurymen seem to stray as if bewitched… If the law at that time had allowed the accused to go into the witness box and undergo cross-examination, the mystery would probably have been dispelled.” This unravelling of the mystery is by the Scottish lawyer and writer William Roughead (1870-1952). Roughead rejected the label of “criminologist”, preferring to be described as a teller of “plain tales from jails” but he agreed that his study of criminology had encouraged his admiration for the ingenuity of the human race. Dorothy Sayers hailed Roughead as “the best showman that ever stood before the door of a chamber of horrors” and he is especially celebrated in America. President Roosevelt collected Roughead’s works, and his relaxed, but acute, style has earned him a cult status that has eluded him in Britain.