Post by Elly on Sept 8, 2005 19:14:34 GMT 10
What the butler did
JIM GILCHRIST
JANUARY 1978 was a bitterly cold one, made all the chillier by the fact that bodies kept cropping up in lonely locations across Scotland. As temperatures dropped below zero, grim-faced policemen attacked the iron-hard ground with pick-axes and shovels, and deployed tracker dogs trained to detect putrefying flesh.
As the sweat froze on their brows, the searchers uncovered four bodies, in various states of decomposition - one at Kirtleton House Manor, Dumfriesshire, another in nearby Middlebie, one in a bleak Inverness-shire wood, and another near Braco, Perthshire. A fifth was discovered, quite accidentally, by police, curled up in the boot of a car in North Berwick.
The five murders, which made national headlines, were the work of the stylish thief, con-man, jail-breaker and, ultimately, serial murderer Archibald Hall, who became known as "the killer butler".
A debonair, audacious and plausible villain who regarded himself as "a top-class thief" and preferred to call himself Roy Fontaine, Hall's psychopathic tendencies erupted in 1977 after his shooting of a former cellmate and lover precipitated a cold-blooded killing spree.
Now the story of a working-class Glasgow boy, who reinvented himself through service with the aristocracy and through a series of daring burglaries and confidence tricks, could well be made into a film starring Malcolm McDowell, an actor with quite a "criminal history" of his own.
McDowell, who has portrayed blue-eyed psychopaths as diverse as Caligula and gang-leader Alex in A Clockwork Orange, has long nurtured an interest in Hall's extraordinary story, and last year commissioned Hollywood writer Peter Bellwood (who scripted Highlander) to come up with a screenplay. McDowell, who would produce the film, is now looking for a director, as well as the necessary £3-4 million funding.
The actor told The Scotsman earlier this month that he had been interested in the story, which he will shoot largely in Scotland, ever since the late director, Lindsay Anderson, told him about it a dozen years ago. He described Hall as "a wonderful character in many ways. He's a great conman, a fabulous part for an actor".
"We're on our way to getting funding," reports Bellwood from his home in California. "At the moment we have a number of director possibilities, but we want the right person - so much in this story depends on the tone: it's about a serial killer but it's also about one of the world's great conmen.
"Fontaine was the most extraordinary kind of psychopath. Nothing was ever his fault, and, when you embark upon a biopic of someone like this, there are certain dramatic imperatives which have to be accommodated. You're not writing a book with all the interior stuff you can get into a book. There's a certain Greek tragedy aspect to it, too: leaving aside his psychopathology, there is something touching in a way about Hall's personality."
The working title for the project, The Monster Butler, may conjure images of Lurch from the Addams Family but, although Bellwood's script has more than its fair share of black humour, there was nothing very funny about Archibald Hall, who died three years ago in Kingston Prison, Portsmouth, aged 78, while serving multiple life sentences for four murders (the fifth case remains open).
"There's no doubt that I'm addicted to stealing. It's something I show a rare a talent for," Hall wrote in 1999, in his now out-of-print autobiography, A Perfect Gentlemen. If he had stuck to thieving and high society conmanship, he might have remained in criminal folklore as the archetypal amiable rogue, but, as he also admitted, there was "a side of me, when aroused, that is cold and completely heartless". Not for nothing did he and his co-author, Trevor Anthony Holt, subtitle the book, The True Confessions of a Cold-Blooded Killer.
Born in 1924 in Glasgow, Hall started stealing at the age of 15 - the same age at which he was initiated into sex, and into a more sophisticated world, by a divorced neighbour in her thirties. It wasn't long before he discovered his bisexuality, although, as he recounts in the book, just holding jewels was enough to arouse him. "I didn't really make a decision, I just became a thief," he wrote, and among early victims of his often fastidiously conducted burglaries were the Shorts, the Glasgow showbiz couple and parents of Jimmy Logan.
Moving to London on the strength of his ill-gotten gains, Hall's good looks, ambivalent and exploitative sexuality and aspirations to the good life soon found him circulating on the city's celebrity gay scene, conducting, or so he claimed, affairs with Lord Boothby and playwright Terence Rattigan. He also served his first prison stretch, having been arrested in London passing jewellery he'd burgled in Perth, establishing an alternating pattern of porridge and Champagne as, between sojourns at Her Majesty's pleasure, he brushed up on his aristocratic manners and connections by working as a butler, or feigned upper-crust credentials himself - at one point attending a garden party at Holyrood House on an invitation filched from his employer's mail. At least twice he entered into serious relationships with women, one of whom he married and later divorced, but claimed in his memoirs that the great love of his life was David Barnard, a fellow con he met in Hull Prison, and whose death in a car crash in 1974 was a blow from which Hall never recovered.
Three years later, Hall, while working as butler to Lady Margaret Hudson at Kirtleton House, Dumfriesshire, killed for the first time. The victim was David Wright, another prison lover, who joined Hall to work at the manor, threatened to blackmail him about his past and, Hall claimed, tried to shoot him while drunk. He shot Wright while rabbit-hunting, and buried him under boulders in a stream on the estate. Killing Wright, he claimed, really let the genie out of the bottle: "I had released all that was worst in me." And worse was yet to come. Hall became butler to Walter Scott-Elliot, an elderly and wealthy former Labour MP and his much younger wife, Dorothy. True to form, he was planning to drain the couple's bank accounts before going into retirement abroad. "It was a shame I had to kill them," he later wrote, blithely.
But kill them he did, although he blamed his partner-in-crime, a small-time villain by the name of Michael Kitto, for the spiral of brutal violence which ensued. He was showing Kitto round the couple's house in London's Richmond Court one night when they were confronted by Dorothy, whom Hall thought was away. Before she could cry for help, Hall recounted, Kitto gagged her with his hand and the ailing woman slumped to the floor, dead.
The pair then sedated the old man with whisky and sleeping tablets, then, with the help of Mary Coggles, a waitress and prostitute they knew, drove him up to Scotland, his wife's body riding in the boot. This bizarre assembly - with Coggles wearing the late Mrs Scott-Elliot's clothes and wig - made overnight stops before burying the dead woman near Braco, Perthshire, then throttling and beating the old man to death with a spade in a lonely wood near Tomich, Invernesshire. "The old man was a proper gentleman right up to the time he died," Kitto would later assure the High Court.
Coggles's propensity for parading about in her newly acquired fur coat and jewellery made her a liability, so Hall and Kitto decided to do away with her - though not before they both had sex with her. Her body ended up, like Wright's, in a Dumfriesshire burn, where a shepherd found her body on Christmas day.
What finished the pair, though, was their murder of Hall's half-brother, Donald, who, not long out of prison himself, was becoming an embarrassment. After subduing him with chloroform, Hall drowned him in the bath at his holiday cottage in Newton Arlosh, Cumbria. Murder had become second nature to him.
So, in January 1978, for the third time within a few weeks, the pair found themselves driving north with a body in the boot of their car. As snowy conditions worsened, not wanting to be involved in an accident, they halted at a hotel in North Berwick, whose suspicious manager, worried about his bill, phoned the police, who took them to the local station for a routine check, whereupon a detective sergeant opened the car boot...
Escaping out of a toilet window, Hall got as far as Haddington before being caught at a police road-block. Following a botched suicide attempt, on 18 January 1978, he ended up conducting the police through those bitter Highland woods to the makeshift grave of Walter Scott-Elliot. During the ensuing trial in Edinburgh in May 1978, Hall was described as a psychopath - an oft-abused term, agrees Tom Wood, chairman of Edinburgh City Council's action team on alcohol and drugs and a former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police - "but Hall fitted the bill".
In January 1978, Wood was a detective sergeant working on the periphery of the case, and met Hall briefly. "He was very likeable and affable to meet - he used to send Christmas cards to one or two of the cops," recalls Wood. "And that's what made him even more dangerous, frankly. Policemen found him an extremely charismatic and plausible character, but utterly cold-blooded."
Reporting the trial, The Scotsman recorded the advocate-depute, Colin McEachran, commenting that Hall had twice been certified as insane in 1944 (something the murderer conveniently skips in his memoirs).
Hall remained incarcerated until his death in 2002. In California, Peter Bellwood recounts a strange coincidence: "Three years ago, on the morning I finished the script, the BBC were filming at my house for a documentary on Peter Cook, who had been a great friend. The sound man saw this script titled Monster Butler on the table and said, 'Is that about Roy Fontaine? He died yesterday in Portsmouth jail.' The weird coincidence is that I must have written 'fade out' on the script at approximately the same moment that Roy Fontaine died."
If McDowell and Bellwood find their backers, however, the killer butler will live again, on our screens, yet another bogeyman for our times, but one with impeccable manners.
Notorious criminals
heritage.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1267
This article: heritage.scotsman.com/myths.cfm?id=1866422005
JIM GILCHRIST
JANUARY 1978 was a bitterly cold one, made all the chillier by the fact that bodies kept cropping up in lonely locations across Scotland. As temperatures dropped below zero, grim-faced policemen attacked the iron-hard ground with pick-axes and shovels, and deployed tracker dogs trained to detect putrefying flesh.
As the sweat froze on their brows, the searchers uncovered four bodies, in various states of decomposition - one at Kirtleton House Manor, Dumfriesshire, another in nearby Middlebie, one in a bleak Inverness-shire wood, and another near Braco, Perthshire. A fifth was discovered, quite accidentally, by police, curled up in the boot of a car in North Berwick.
The five murders, which made national headlines, were the work of the stylish thief, con-man, jail-breaker and, ultimately, serial murderer Archibald Hall, who became known as "the killer butler".
A debonair, audacious and plausible villain who regarded himself as "a top-class thief" and preferred to call himself Roy Fontaine, Hall's psychopathic tendencies erupted in 1977 after his shooting of a former cellmate and lover precipitated a cold-blooded killing spree.
Now the story of a working-class Glasgow boy, who reinvented himself through service with the aristocracy and through a series of daring burglaries and confidence tricks, could well be made into a film starring Malcolm McDowell, an actor with quite a "criminal history" of his own.
McDowell, who has portrayed blue-eyed psychopaths as diverse as Caligula and gang-leader Alex in A Clockwork Orange, has long nurtured an interest in Hall's extraordinary story, and last year commissioned Hollywood writer Peter Bellwood (who scripted Highlander) to come up with a screenplay. McDowell, who would produce the film, is now looking for a director, as well as the necessary £3-4 million funding.
The actor told The Scotsman earlier this month that he had been interested in the story, which he will shoot largely in Scotland, ever since the late director, Lindsay Anderson, told him about it a dozen years ago. He described Hall as "a wonderful character in many ways. He's a great conman, a fabulous part for an actor".
"We're on our way to getting funding," reports Bellwood from his home in California. "At the moment we have a number of director possibilities, but we want the right person - so much in this story depends on the tone: it's about a serial killer but it's also about one of the world's great conmen.
"Fontaine was the most extraordinary kind of psychopath. Nothing was ever his fault, and, when you embark upon a biopic of someone like this, there are certain dramatic imperatives which have to be accommodated. You're not writing a book with all the interior stuff you can get into a book. There's a certain Greek tragedy aspect to it, too: leaving aside his psychopathology, there is something touching in a way about Hall's personality."
The working title for the project, The Monster Butler, may conjure images of Lurch from the Addams Family but, although Bellwood's script has more than its fair share of black humour, there was nothing very funny about Archibald Hall, who died three years ago in Kingston Prison, Portsmouth, aged 78, while serving multiple life sentences for four murders (the fifth case remains open).
"There's no doubt that I'm addicted to stealing. It's something I show a rare a talent for," Hall wrote in 1999, in his now out-of-print autobiography, A Perfect Gentlemen. If he had stuck to thieving and high society conmanship, he might have remained in criminal folklore as the archetypal amiable rogue, but, as he also admitted, there was "a side of me, when aroused, that is cold and completely heartless". Not for nothing did he and his co-author, Trevor Anthony Holt, subtitle the book, The True Confessions of a Cold-Blooded Killer.
Born in 1924 in Glasgow, Hall started stealing at the age of 15 - the same age at which he was initiated into sex, and into a more sophisticated world, by a divorced neighbour in her thirties. It wasn't long before he discovered his bisexuality, although, as he recounts in the book, just holding jewels was enough to arouse him. "I didn't really make a decision, I just became a thief," he wrote, and among early victims of his often fastidiously conducted burglaries were the Shorts, the Glasgow showbiz couple and parents of Jimmy Logan.
Moving to London on the strength of his ill-gotten gains, Hall's good looks, ambivalent and exploitative sexuality and aspirations to the good life soon found him circulating on the city's celebrity gay scene, conducting, or so he claimed, affairs with Lord Boothby and playwright Terence Rattigan. He also served his first prison stretch, having been arrested in London passing jewellery he'd burgled in Perth, establishing an alternating pattern of porridge and Champagne as, between sojourns at Her Majesty's pleasure, he brushed up on his aristocratic manners and connections by working as a butler, or feigned upper-crust credentials himself - at one point attending a garden party at Holyrood House on an invitation filched from his employer's mail. At least twice he entered into serious relationships with women, one of whom he married and later divorced, but claimed in his memoirs that the great love of his life was David Barnard, a fellow con he met in Hull Prison, and whose death in a car crash in 1974 was a blow from which Hall never recovered.
Three years later, Hall, while working as butler to Lady Margaret Hudson at Kirtleton House, Dumfriesshire, killed for the first time. The victim was David Wright, another prison lover, who joined Hall to work at the manor, threatened to blackmail him about his past and, Hall claimed, tried to shoot him while drunk. He shot Wright while rabbit-hunting, and buried him under boulders in a stream on the estate. Killing Wright, he claimed, really let the genie out of the bottle: "I had released all that was worst in me." And worse was yet to come. Hall became butler to Walter Scott-Elliot, an elderly and wealthy former Labour MP and his much younger wife, Dorothy. True to form, he was planning to drain the couple's bank accounts before going into retirement abroad. "It was a shame I had to kill them," he later wrote, blithely.
But kill them he did, although he blamed his partner-in-crime, a small-time villain by the name of Michael Kitto, for the spiral of brutal violence which ensued. He was showing Kitto round the couple's house in London's Richmond Court one night when they were confronted by Dorothy, whom Hall thought was away. Before she could cry for help, Hall recounted, Kitto gagged her with his hand and the ailing woman slumped to the floor, dead.
The pair then sedated the old man with whisky and sleeping tablets, then, with the help of Mary Coggles, a waitress and prostitute they knew, drove him up to Scotland, his wife's body riding in the boot. This bizarre assembly - with Coggles wearing the late Mrs Scott-Elliot's clothes and wig - made overnight stops before burying the dead woman near Braco, Perthshire, then throttling and beating the old man to death with a spade in a lonely wood near Tomich, Invernesshire. "The old man was a proper gentleman right up to the time he died," Kitto would later assure the High Court.
Coggles's propensity for parading about in her newly acquired fur coat and jewellery made her a liability, so Hall and Kitto decided to do away with her - though not before they both had sex with her. Her body ended up, like Wright's, in a Dumfriesshire burn, where a shepherd found her body on Christmas day.
What finished the pair, though, was their murder of Hall's half-brother, Donald, who, not long out of prison himself, was becoming an embarrassment. After subduing him with chloroform, Hall drowned him in the bath at his holiday cottage in Newton Arlosh, Cumbria. Murder had become second nature to him.
So, in January 1978, for the third time within a few weeks, the pair found themselves driving north with a body in the boot of their car. As snowy conditions worsened, not wanting to be involved in an accident, they halted at a hotel in North Berwick, whose suspicious manager, worried about his bill, phoned the police, who took them to the local station for a routine check, whereupon a detective sergeant opened the car boot...
Escaping out of a toilet window, Hall got as far as Haddington before being caught at a police road-block. Following a botched suicide attempt, on 18 January 1978, he ended up conducting the police through those bitter Highland woods to the makeshift grave of Walter Scott-Elliot. During the ensuing trial in Edinburgh in May 1978, Hall was described as a psychopath - an oft-abused term, agrees Tom Wood, chairman of Edinburgh City Council's action team on alcohol and drugs and a former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police - "but Hall fitted the bill".
In January 1978, Wood was a detective sergeant working on the periphery of the case, and met Hall briefly. "He was very likeable and affable to meet - he used to send Christmas cards to one or two of the cops," recalls Wood. "And that's what made him even more dangerous, frankly. Policemen found him an extremely charismatic and plausible character, but utterly cold-blooded."
Reporting the trial, The Scotsman recorded the advocate-depute, Colin McEachran, commenting that Hall had twice been certified as insane in 1944 (something the murderer conveniently skips in his memoirs).
Hall remained incarcerated until his death in 2002. In California, Peter Bellwood recounts a strange coincidence: "Three years ago, on the morning I finished the script, the BBC were filming at my house for a documentary on Peter Cook, who had been a great friend. The sound man saw this script titled Monster Butler on the table and said, 'Is that about Roy Fontaine? He died yesterday in Portsmouth jail.' The weird coincidence is that I must have written 'fade out' on the script at approximately the same moment that Roy Fontaine died."
If McDowell and Bellwood find their backers, however, the killer butler will live again, on our screens, yet another bogeyman for our times, but one with impeccable manners.
Notorious criminals
heritage.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1267
This article: heritage.scotsman.com/myths.cfm?id=1866422005
