Stephen Brown

Who Killed Mary Gunn? Stephen Brown

One of the reasons the horror of the Portencross Murder endures in the public imagination to this day, is the notion that we too might be sitting in our living room on a peaceful Saturday evening when bullets come raining through our window, shot by an unknown assailant for no known reason. In 1913, this is what happened to Alexander McLaren, his wife Jessie, and her younger sister Mary Gunn. The unfortunate Mary died instantly from a shot to the heart, whilst the other two occupants of that tiny room in a remote cottage, were wounded. The murderer or motive was never discovered, until now. Stephen Brown, West Kilbride local historian, has investigated the crime using records from all the newspapers, including the detailed reports from the local Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald. He believes he has finally found a solution as to who shot the revolver that killed Mary Gunn, and why. In this book he argues that the local police were inadvertently mislead by Alexander McLaren to look for a very specific individual who was actually innocent, and by the time they realised, the real murderer had hidden almost every piece of evidence linking them to the crime. The author details the case from the reports of all the newspapers and revisits the scene of the crime as detailed in the local paper. From this contemporary evidence he has proposed a new theory of who the murderer was, and why they shot the three occupants of the tiny living room in a remote Portencross cottage.