James Bennett was born in 1894 and served in the Royal Artillery during the Great War, losing a leg and part of an arm, and becoming an invalid. His injuries did not prevent him from opening a successful shoe repair shop in Edinburgh, which he managed for many years (writes JAN BONDESON).
In 1922, he moved into the ground floor flat at 25 Earl Haig Gardens, Trinity, a quiet and secluded square owned by the Scottish Veterans’ Garden City Association and reserved for disabled ex-servicemen.
He married twice and had issue with both wives; one of his daughters got married and left home, but in 1959, his 25-year-old younger daughter Irene was living with him in the flat. She had a job as a typist, but still managed to cook, clean and look after the flat, and help her invalid father with various daily chores.
In spite of his maimed condition, the now 65-year-old James Bennett remained hale and hearty: he walked with the help of a wooden leg and a heavy stick. He had sold the shoe shop three years earlier, after inheriting money, and liked to go out drinking beer with his old soldier friends.
On Saturday November 21 1959, James Bennett went out in the afternoon to drink some beer. Mrs Mary Brunton, who lived next door at No. 26, could hear him returning home by taxi late in the evening, before hobbling inside.
Some time after, there was a heavy thud from next door, and Irene gave a scream.
Mrs Brunton thought it might just have been a domestic argument, but still she went out to look through a window, but the house was in darkness and nothing could be heard from its interior.
On Monday November 23, Mrs Brunton noticed that the milk, rolls and newspapers were still on the doorstep of No. 25 at 1.15 pm. She looked through the bedroom window and saw James Bennett lying motionless in bed. She went and told her husband, and he called the police. It turned out that James Bennett was lying dead in his bed, with a single bullet from a .22 rifle lodged in his brain. The body of Irene Bennett was lying on the floor nearby, with multiple bullet wounds to the head and chest regions.
The police soon found out that Irene Bennett had been seeing a man named Alexander Bain Stirling, a 24-year-old car salesman from Loanhead, although she had stopped consorting with him after discovering that he was married already.
He had taken this rejection badly and had been pestering her, and she had told a neighbour that she was quite worried what this demented suitor might be capable of. Since Stirling was known to be driving a new red Ford Zephyr, registration TFS 53, the headline of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch was ‘Red Car Murder Hunt Steps Up!’.
The reporter of course also went to see and photograph the city’s most famous recent murder house: “All was quiet in Earl Haig Gardens to-day. Only a solitary constable patrolling outside, and the freshly boarded-up front window of No. 25, gave a clue to yesterday’s tragic discovery. Many of the blinds in houses around the square were drawn as a mark of respect for Jimmy Bennett, the man everybody knew and liked.”
It turned out that Alexander Main Stirling was an adopted child, who had done his national service in the RAF, and had no previous convictions for serious crime.
He lived in Morningside with his wife and two children but worked as a sales assistant at his father’s second-hand car firm in Loanhead. A description of him was issued by the police: “About 5ft 10in tall, clean shaven, dark brown hair, chubby face, blue eyes, straight nose and thin lips. They say he may be wearing a sports jacket and flannel trousers, and a bluish grey overcoat of thin material.”
The hue and cry was up for Alexander Main Stirling all over Britain, but the fugitive had a head start of several days. The police speculated that he might be quite some distance away from Edinburgh, if he had been driving night and day.
But on November 24, Police Constable Raymond May was cycling along Southgate Street, Gloucester, when he spotted a red 1959 Ford Zephyr with the ‘right’ registration number travelling north towards the town centre.
He went to the nearest telephone to alert the patrol cars. Soon afterwards, Constables Ronald Savage and Stanley de Gama saw the red Ford Zephyr two miles away on the road from Gloucester to Painswick.
They gave chase in their powerful patrol car, and drove in front of the Ford Zephyr, forcing it to stop. They made a dash for the doors, but the tired-looking, bleary-eyed Stirling made no attempt to resist or escape, merely saying ‘It’s all right, I know what you want me for.’
The two patrol constables made sure that Alexander Main Stirling was taken into custody, and that the car, the contents of which included a .22 rifle with a silencer and a plentiful supply of ammunition, was properly searched.
Stirling was back in Edinburgh on November 25, where he was formally charged with murder, and appeared in court the following day. He appeared quite despondent after his dramatic attempt to escape had failed.
When Alexander Main Stirling faced trial at the High Court of Edinburgh on March 8 1960, he wished to plead guilty to the capital murders of James and Irene Bennett, but this was not accepted.
There was much public interest in the trial, with 50 people queuing up outside the court. Mrs Elizabeth Smith, the sister of Irene Bennett, testified that she had known about Irene’s association with Stirling, and that her father had disapproved of it.
She identified several of the items taken from the escape car as belonging to her sister. A number of friends and colleagues of Irene Bennett testified that she had told them that she had wanted the affair with Stirling to end, and that she had been annoyed with his impudence.
Mr and Mrs Brunton told how the murders had been discovered, Stirling’s father explained his background in life, and a miner identified the .22 rifle produced in court as the one he had lent to Alexander Main Stirling, at the latter’s request.
After the police and forensic specialists had given evidence, Mr Grant the Solicitor-General addressed the jury. He pointed out that the murder weapon had been identified, and that it had been in Stirling’s possession at the time of the murders, that property belonging to Irene Bennett had been found in the escape car, and that Stirling’s palm prints had been found on the window through which the murder made his entry into the flat.
The jury took just 11 minutes to reach a verdict of Guilty, and Lord Thomson donned the traditional black tricorne hat when he passed sentence of death onto the prisoner.
Alexander Main Stirling heard the death sentence with the same calm indifference he had displayed throughout the trial. In prison awaiting execution, he refused to see any visitors, and threw away all letters and notes addressed to him.
But on March 18, just 12 days before the execution date, he asked for counsel to frame an appeal, claiming that the verdict was contrary to the evidence, and that Lord Thomson had misdirected the jury. The Criminal Appeal Court turned it down, however, and the day of reckoning seemed to loom for the creature Stirling.
But still, this cowardly double murderer received a last-minute reprieve, and was spared the gallows with what must have been a very narrow margin. Instead he entered a prison cell, where he would have to stay for many years to come.
In August 1970, it was announced that Stirling had been released by royal prerogative since he suffered from an incurable disease. He died from carcinoma of the oesophagus at an Edinburgh nursing home a few weeks later, aged just 35.
This is an extract from Jan Bondeson’s Murder Houses of Edinburgh (Troubador Publishing 2020).
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