Archibald Thompson Hall was born in Glasgow on July 17, 1924, into a poor but respectable family. Seduced at sixteen by a much older wealthy woman, he acquired a taste for expensive hotels, good wine and other people's houses that shaped everything he did afterwards. He also used the name Roy Fontaine, taken from Joan Fontaine, and this archive holds an entry under that name too; they are the same man.
He was a jewel thief and a confidence man from his teens, was twice assessed as mentally unstable, escaped from hospital twice, and spent much of the 1950s and 1960s in prison. What he had was charm and an extraordinary capacity to present himself as exactly the servant an upper-class household wanted, with references he had written himself. The British press called him the Monster Butler.
In 1977 he was working as a butler at Kirtleton House in Dumfriesshire for Lady Margaret Hudson. An old associate, David Wright, turned up, recognised him and began stealing and threatening to expose him. Hall shot him on a rabbit shoot and buried him.
He moved to London to work for Walter Scott-Elliot, a former Labour MP, and his wife Dorothy. In December 1977, with an accomplice named Michael Kitto, he killed Dorothy Scott-Elliot, then drove her husband around Scotland for days with the body in the car before killing him too. He killed Mary Coggle, an associate who would not give up Mrs Scott-Elliot's mink coat, and then his own half-brother Donald, a convicted sex offender he found repellent and who had discovered what he was doing.
He was caught in January 1978 at a hotel in North Berwick, where staff became suspicious of the guests and police found Donald Hall's body in the boot. He was convicted in Scotland and in England and given whole life terms. He wrote a memoir, made an escape attempt on the way to court, and died at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth on September 16, 2002, one of the first prisoners in England to die under a formally confirmed whole-life tariff.