A woman walked down Duke Street pushing a battered pram. Her young daughter sat on top of what was inside. To the passing crowds, nothing seemed unusual. But when the pram was lifted down from a truck, its cover slipped, and from beneath the rug appeared a small bare foot and the top of a boy’s head.
From an upstairs window, a neighbour was watching. She realised something was terribly wrong. It was June 1923. In the industrial town of Coatbridge, about nine miles east of Glasgow, the ironworks and coal mines that built the region still filled the air with smoke and the sharp smell of furnaces.
The years after the Great War were hard. Trade had declined, wages had fallen, and unemployment pressed heavily on working families across Lanarkshire. Yet that week, a travelling carnival had arrived, and in the long summer evenings the streets were full of music, street vendors, and children playing. At number two Newlands Street, a woman named Susan Newell lived in a rented room.
She was about thirty, married to John Newell, a man who worked on the Glasgow Underground, and mother to an eight-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage. Their household suffered from a lack of money and, lately, a great deal of quarrelling. Newspapers remained the main way such families learned about the wider world; radio was still a novelty only a few months old. It was an ordinary street in an ordinary town on an ordinary summer evening, yet before that week was over, a pram would be pushed from that same door into the heart of Glasgow carrying a burden no passer-by could have imagined.
Born Susan McAllister in 1893 in the west coast town of Oban, Susan Newell grew up in poverty. As a young woman she made her way, as many did, to Glasgow, then the largest and most crowded city in all of Britain, drawn by the promise of work in the shipyards, printworks, and mills. There she married a man named McLeod and in time gave birth to a daughter, Janet. The Great War, which took so many, took her husband as well.
He was killed while on military service, and Susan was left a widow with a small child to raise alone. Life for a single mother in the city was precarious, measured in overdue rent and meagre meals. In 1922 she remarried, to John Newell, a former soldier who had found work on the Glasgow Underground. The family reportedly enjoyed a period of some stability.
Janet, now of school age, attended the local school, and the family kept their lodging as best they could. But the peace did not last. John Newell, by the testimony of those who knew the family, was a man given to drink. Susan was known for a temper that could turn suddenly and violently.
As the postwar crisis deepened and work grew scarce, their disputes multiplied. Money was short, and they had received notice of eviction more than once. By mid-June 1923, the marriage had broken down entirely. The victim of what was to come was no part of these troubles.
He was a thirteen-year-old boy named John Johnston, who sold newspapers on the streets of Coatbridge after school and during the holidays, carrying evening editions from door to door. By all accounts he was an ordinary, hardworking lad, earning a few pennies wherever he could, as many boys his age did then. That evening, he was about to knock on a door he had no reason to fear. The final days before the crime can be traced with some certainty through the records.
By the summer of 1923, the Newells had been given notice to quit their room on Newlands Street. Their landlady, Mrs Young, had grown tired of the constant disturbance and, after only three weeks, told them they must leave. The marriage, already strained, was nearing its end. On the nineteenth of June, matters turned to outright violence.
Susan attacked her husband and struck him on the head, injuring him badly enough to draw the attention of the police. John filed his complaint at the local station, but the officers, treating it as no more than a domestic quarrel, declined to follow it up, and Susan was never questioned about the claim. The following day, the twentieth of June, brought another argument. That evening, wishing to calm matters, John Newell packed a small bag and left the house to get away from the tense atmosphere.
Susan and her daughter remained at home. It so happened that that day was carnival day in Coatbridge, and the town was busy with preparations for the festival. The young John Johnston saw in the crowds a chance to sell more papers, so he began walking the streets and knocking on doors. The records indicate that another boy met him around six o’clock in the evening and handed him nine newspapers to sell.
At about a quarter to seven, John knocked on the door of number two Newlands Street. No one witnessed what happened behind those walls except those who were inside. What is known from the incident is this. Susan let the boy in and took a paper from him.
When he pressed her to pay for it, something inside her broke. She closed her hands around the boy’s throat and strangled him to death. When her grip finally loosened, John Johnston was dead. His father later told the court the boy would not have been carrying more than a few pennies.
Her daughter Janet had spent the afternoon playing. She returned home to find the boy’s body on the sofa and her mother beside it. The eight-year-old child was forced to help wrap the small body in an old rug. Susan then lay down to sleep, leaving behind the dreadful question of what she would do next.
By morning, she had reached an answer. Dawn broke on the twenty-first of June, warm. Susan Newell and her daughter carried the wrapped body down the stairs and placed it in an old pram, covered with the rug, and set out on foot for Glasgow, with little Janet sitting on top of the bundle. The sight of a woman pushing a pram piled with what looked like household belongings, accompanied by a small child, was not unusual at the time.
Many noticed them along the road, but no one found anything suspicious. The distance was long, and after a while a passing truck driver offered them a lift. Susan accepted, and he carried them to the eastern end of the city, where he set them down on Duke Street, one of Glasgow’s oldest and longest streets. As the pram was lowered from the truck, the secret came undone.
The bundle came apart, revealing a small foot at one end and the top of the boy’s head at the other. The truck driver apparently noticed nothing and drove on. But a woman watching from the window of a nearby house saw clearly what was hidden beneath the rug. She decided at once to follow, and with the help of her sister kept watching the strange pair, asking a passing man to hurry and fetch the police.
Realising she was under observation, Susan left the pram at the entrance to a tenement and tried to slip away. When she found herself watched, she made a bold attempt to escape by climbing a high wall, but the alarm had been raised, and a policeman waited for her on the other side and arrested her. She was taken to the police station and questioned. Susan had prepared her story and drilled her daughter in it as well.
She told the police that her husband had killed the boy, that she had tried in vain to stop him, and that he had forced her and her daughter to carry the body away. For a time, little Janet backed this account. When the police looked for John Newell, they did not have to search far. He came forward of his own accord, surrendering himself at a police station some distance away.
He was arrested as well, and both husband and wife were charged with murder. With the accused in custody and the body recovered, the formal proceedings began. On the twenty-second of June, an autopsy was performed at the central Glasgow police mortuary. The results were clear and grave.
John Johnston had died of strangulation. There was no accident, no natural cause of death. The boy had been killed by another person, and the marks on his body indicated how. The case attracted one of the most distinguished specialists of his field.
Professor John Glaister, who held the chair of forensic medicine at the University of Glasgow, was among the medical witnesses involved. In the weeks that followed, while Susan Newell remained in custody awaiting trial, she was examined to assess her mental state. The question of her sanity would form the core of her defence, so the doctors had to determine whether she understood the nature of her act. Their conclusion, when it came, was that she was not insane, but responsible before the law for what she had done.
The physical evidence, though simple, was damning in its clarity. There was the pram in which the body had been carried for eight miles. There was the rug in which the child’s body had been wrapped. And there was the route itself, reconstructed from the accounts of those who had seen the woman and her daughter on the road from Coatbridge to the truck, and from the truck to the entrance of the tenement on Duke Street where the load had finally been set down.
Piece by piece, the movements of that dreadful journey were fixed, and the story Susan had prepared came apart beneath the weight of what witnesses had observed. The legal process moved with deliberation. On the twenty-sixth of June, Susan and John Newell appeared before the sheriff court in Airdrie, where they were formally charged with murder. They made no plea and were both returned to prison.
In September they appeared before the sheriff court in Glasgow, where each pleaded not guilty, and the husband lodged a special defence of alibi, insisting he had not been present when the boy died. Their trial was set for the High Court on the eighteenth of September. The trial of John and Susan Newell began on the eighteenth of September 1923, in the High Court of Justiciary in Glasgow, before the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Alness. The case gripped public attention and drew large crowds.
Around seventy witnesses were summoned, and on the first day alone at least forty gave evidence. The case against the husband did not last long. John Newell was able to prove, through the testimony of several witnesses, that he had been elsewhere when the boy died and had no hand in the killing. On the second day, the charge against him was withdrawn, and the judge, noting that he should never have stood in the dock, released him.
He left the court without so much as a glance at his wife. Against Susan, the most damning evidence came from her own daughter. Janet told the court how she had returned from playing to find the body of John Johnston on the sofa, and how she had helped her mother wrap it and carry it away. She also told how her mother had pressed her to say that the stepfather had done the deed if the police questioned her.
For the defence, it was argued that Susan Newell suffered from mental disturbance and could not be held responsible for the act. The prosecution objected, and its medical witness found her of sound mind. Her own lawyer argued the killing had not been planned, driven by no clear motive, but was a sudden, momentary act. The jury withdrew to consider their verdict.
In little more than half an hour, about thirty-five minutes, they returned. Their verdict was guilty, though not unanimous; one juror dissented, but they all joined in a strong recommendation of mercy. Lord Alness pronounced the sentence in the old Scottish form, that she be detained until the tenth of October and hanged by the neck until dead. The sentence was read, and a dead silence fell.
The verdict roused a great deal of public sympathy. The lack of unanimity among the jury, their own plea for mercy, and the condemned woman’s poverty, abandoned by a husband who left her with nothing, led many to hope for a pardon. A petition was drawn up and presented to the Secretary of State for Scotland, Viscount Novar, demanding commutation to hard labour. He refused to intervene.
Working against her, in part, was the fact that no woman had been hanged in Scotland since Jessie King thirty-four years earlier, in 1889, and that the law north of the border should be seen as stern as it was in England, where Edith Thompson had been executed only ten months before. It was decided that no pardon would be granted to Susan Newell. When the news was brought to her, she is said to have shown emotion for the first time, crying out for her daughter before collapsing. On the morning of the tenth of October 1923, the sentence was carried out within the walls of Duke Street Prison in Glasgow.
The hangman was John Ellis, assisted by William Willis. On the scaffold, Susan was calm, but as the final preparations were made, she freed her hands from the restraints and tore the white hood from her face, telling Ellis plainly not to place it over her head. Rather than draw out the scene, he proceeded without it, and she went to her death with her face uncovered. Those present noted that she faced her end with courage and composure.
She never admitted the crime for which she was executed. She was buried within the prison grounds as the sentence required, and remains to this day the last woman to be executed in Scotland. The case, known in the papers of the time as the pram tragedy, left questions never fully answered. There was no loot to be gained; the boy had carried only a few pennies.
There was no plan, no stalking, only a request for money and a sudden, fatal loss of control. Why John Johnston had to die at all is something the records cannot tell. Duke Street Prison itself outlived Susan Newell by little more than a generation. Its prisoners were moved and its gates closed in 1955, and in 1958 the great building was demolished to make way for a housing estate.
Only part of the old boundary wall remains, standing near the university, worn by rain and time. Behind it, somewhere in that quiet ground, rests a young mother from Oban, and with her the memory of a summer evening in Coatbridge, when a newspaper boy knocked on the wrong door.