Madeline Smith, Maid or Murderess

Good evening. This is Crime Classics. I am Thomas Highland with another true story of crime. Listen. That's the way the doorbell sounded at number 14 Pembroke Street in Glasgow, Scotland. That's the way it sounded if a fellow was impatient.

If he had just come home from Madeline Smith's house on a March day in 1857 and really wanted in. His name was Pierre Émile Longe-Le-A and the door was in his way. Why didn't someone answer anyway? Here comes his land lady. She gasped because Pierre was her favorite lodger and he looked terrible. Awful standing there on the doorway, swaying.

Before he fell on his face. Dead. My report to you on Madeline Smith made or murderous. H. Crime Classics, a series of true crime stories from the records and newspapers of every land from every time.

Your host each week, Mr. Thomas Highland, connoisseur of crime, student of violence, and teller of murders. Now once again, Mr. Thomas Highland. Even in the middle 1800s, Kelvin Grove Park was a place to be reckoned with in Glasgow, in the springtime particularly.

A bane place, a place of greens and merry shouts, where gambled the bequilted young people, or the more serious ones where they strolled hand in hand toward some magical and shady and secret glen. In a street which paralleled the park, Pembroke Street, there was a red brick house.

It was owned by Mary Perry, a woman of 50, who liked imaginative men, young men of elegance and foreign flavor, like her lodger Pierre Enil Lange-Leis. In all my travels the world over my dear Manor-Zilpiri, I have never seen such a girl, once in algae or perhaps.