In January 1978 a snowstorm forced two men driving north from Cumbria to stop for the night at a hotel in North Berwick, on the coast east of Edinburgh. The hotel's owner did not like the look of them or of the hired car they were driving, and called the police. In the trunk officers found the body of Donald Hall. One of the two men, Michael Kitto, was arrested on the spot. The other, Donald's half-brother Archibald Thomson Hall, got away and was caught later that day at a roadblock. In a police cell he tried twice to kill himself with barbiturates he had hidden on his body, and was taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Within days he had confessed to five murders and shown the police where the bodies were.
Hall was born in Glasgow in 1924; most accounts give the date as June 17, and some as July 17. He took the name Roy Fontaine, after the actress Joan Fontaine, and spent most of his adult life as a jewel thief and confidence man, with long stretches in prison. What he had was polish. He could present himself as exactly the servant an old and wealthy household wanted, and write his own references. The British press called him the Monster Butler, and the Killer Butler.
In 1975 he took a job as butler at Kirtleton House in Dumfriesshire, working for Lady Margaret Hudson, meaning to rob the estate; by his own account he came to like the job and his employer. In 1977 David Wright, whom he had met while serving a sentence for theft in Hull prison, turned up, began stealing, and threatened to tell Lady Hudson who her butler really was. The two argued. Hall shot Wright in the back of the head with a rifle and buried him beside a river on the estate.
He left and went to London, where in 1977 he became butler to Walter Scott-Elliot, eighty-two, a former Labour MP and minister, and his wife, Dorothy, in their flat in Chelsea. Both were frail, and Walter took medication that left him drowsy. On December 8, 1977, Hall was drinking with Mary Coggle, an Irishwoman he knew, who introduced him to a small-time thief named Michael Kitto; accounts variously describe Coggle as a former girlfriend of Hall's, a barmaid and a forger of credit cards. That night Hall boasted that he was going to rob his employers, and he took the other two on a tour of the flat. Dorothy Scott-Elliot walked in on them. Kitto smothered her with a pillow.
Hall plied her husband with drugged whisky, put his wife's body in the trunk of the car, and with Kitto and Coggle drove the old man north. Coggle wore a wig and Dorothy's mink coat so that she could pass for her at the banks. They buried Dorothy near Braco in Perthshire. Walter Scott-Elliot, still sedated, was taken to a lonely place near Glen Affric in Inverness-shire, strangled and beaten with a spade, and buried in woods near Tomich. Coggle then refused to give up the mink coat and would not keep quiet. Hall hit her over the head with a poker while Kitto held her arms, suffocated her with a plastic bag, and left her in a stream between Glasgow and Carlisle, near Middlebie. Her body was found on Christmas Day 1977.
Hall and Kitto spent Christmas with Hall's family, among them his half-brother Donald, seventeen years younger, who had served time for housebreaking and whom Hall despised as a child molester. Donald came with them. In January 1978, in Cumbria, he began asking questions. They held a rag soaked in chloroform over his face and drowned him in a bath, put him in the trunk, and set off north. Police said later that Hall had been planning to kill Kitto too.
In May 1978 Hall was sentenced at the High Court in Edinburgh to two life terms for the murders of David Wright and Walter Scott-Elliot, with a recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years, and at the Old Bailey in London to two more for Mary Coggle and Donald Hall, with a whole-life term. He denied murdering Dorothy Scott-Elliot, and that charge was left on file. Kitto was given life for three murders.
He never came out. In 1995 a newspaper printed a letter from him asking for the right to die, and he made several more attempts on his own life. He died at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth on September 16, 2002, at seventy-eight, the oldest prisoner in Britain serving a whole-life term.