SCOTLAND MURDER CASE GROWS: OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER, JANUARY 19, 1978
When this story crossed the Atlantic, the man at the center of it had not yet been named as anything but a butler. The United Press International report out of Glasgow, printed by the Ogden Standard-Examiner on January 19, 1978, counts three bodies and a police force bracing for more. A former member of Parliament was dead, and so were two people the paper tied to his butler's family. The butler was Archibald Thompson Hall, and in the wire copy he is only a name and an age, the brother of one of the dead.
The case, as the paper tells it, had begun with a woman's body in a stream three weeks earlier. It took a second discovery to make the police see what they had: on the Monday before, the naked and hooded body of Donald Hall, 37, turned up in the trunk of a car. Then, on the Wednesday, Walter Scott-Elliot, 82, the Etonian former Labour member, was found in a shallow grave in Inverness-shire. His wife, Dorothy, 60, had not been seen at their London apartment since December, and police were searching for her and for a gardener missing since July from his home near Dumfries.
The closing lines go back to where the unraveling started. Norman Wight, who kept the Blenheim House Hotel in North Berwick, had not liked the two men who booked in, and he telephoned the police. Officers who visited the Scott-Elliots' apartment found valuable antiques gone. Detective Chief Superintendent George MacPherson would not guess at the final count: "I don't know how many more we may end up with."
This is wire copy written in the first days of the inquiry and reprinted in Utah, not a court record, and it trails the facts in several places. It calls the woman in the stream "Marry Coggle" for Mary Coggle and lists her as Donald Hall's common-law wife; she was an Irishwoman Archibald Hall knew, described variously as his former girlfriend, a barmaid and a forger of credit cards. It calls Donald his brother; he was a half-brother. The paper does not name the missing gardener; the man Hall killed in Dumfriesshire was David Wright. Hall was convicted of four murders, Wright, Walter Scott-Elliot, Coggle and Donald Hall, and the charge for Dorothy Scott-Elliot was left on file.
The Ogden Standard-Examiner ran the story on January 19, 1978, credited "(UPI)" with no staff byline. The scan comes from Utah Digital Newspapers at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, which rates this issue "No Copyright - United States (NoC-US)." No copyright notice appears on the article or on the masthead of the issue; the only notices in it belong to market tables, a syndicated puzzle and an advertisement. The citation and the library's rights statement are under the scan.
Every word below was taken from the scan, and none of it needed an illegible mark, although several lines are letter-spaced in the original. Nothing has been tidied. "Marry Coggle" stands, as do "Cold Stream Guards," the doubled "s" of "Invernesshire" and the missing comma after "North Berwick" in the last sentence. The story is complete in a single block on page 9A and does not jump.
Transcription
Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.
3 BODIES FOUND
Scotland Murder Case Grows
GLASGOW, Scotland (UPI) — A former member of Parliament and two members of his butler's family have been found murdered, and police say they don't know how many more bodies may turn up.
What could become one of Britain's most bizarre murder cases began with the discovery of a woman's body in a stream three weeks ago.
But it was not until the naked and hooded corpse of Donald Hall, 37, was found in the trunk of an automobile last Monday that police realized they had a real mystery on their hands.
The woman found in the stream, Marry Coggle, was listed as Hall's common-law wife. Hall was identified as the brother of Archibald Hall, 52, the butler of Walter Scott-Elliot, an 82-year-old former Labor MP for a northern English district.
On Wednesday, the body of Scott-Elliot — educated at Eton with World War I service in the elite Cold Stream Guards and once married to an Austrian baroness — was found in a shallow grave in Invernesshire, 80 miles north of Glasgow.
Scott-Elliot and his second wife, Dorothy, 60, had not been seen at their London apartment since Dec. 13 but were not reported missing because they were thought to be on vacation.
Police are now searching for two more bodies — those of Mrs. Scott-Elliot and a gardener who disappeared last July from his home near Dumfries.
"I don't know how many more we may end up with," Detective Chief Superintendent George MacPherson said.
Police, who visited the Scott-Elliots' apartment, discovered a number of valuable antiques missing.
Donald Hall's body was discovered in the car trunk after hotelier Norman Wight, suspicious of two men who booked in at his Blenheim House Hotel in North Berwick telephoned the police.
Notes: Kept as printed: "Marry Coggle" (Mary Coggle); "Cold Stream Guards"; "Invernesshire"; no comma after "North Berwick". The article names Archibald Hall only as the butler and the brother of a victim. It does not yet name him as the killer, although he was in custody. Several lines are letter-spaced. No words were illegible.