Nearly 250 years after the killing of a government agent in the Highlands, the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission has been asked to look again at the facts and put right what is regarded as one of the country�s earliest miscarriages of justice.

DAVID ROSS and IAIN GRANT

It may prove to be one of the oldest murder cases ever to be re-examined by Scotland's legal authorities.

Nearly 250 years after the killing of a government agent in the Highlands, the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission has been asked to look again at the facts and put right what is regarded as one of the country's earliest miscarriages of justice.

The murdered man was Colin Campbell of Glenure, the Red Fox, a government agent who was on his way to evict local tenants, Stewarts of Appin, and replace them with his own relatives. The murder was central to the plot for one of Scotland's most celebrated novels, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

On the afternoon of Thursday, May 14, 1752, Campbell was riding a horse and was shot dead in the woods near where the Ballachulish Bridge now stands - a murder which convulsed the British establishment. The killer was never caught, yet another man was hanged despite everyone knowing he could not have pulled the trigger.

Now a Glasgow lawyer has lodged papers with the review commission, asking that body to right a historical wrong and clear the name of one Seumas a' Ghlinne, or James (Stewart) of the Glens.

John Macaulay is pressing for Stewart to be formally exonerated of the crime.

He has exhaustively researched the original transcripts of the trial and argues there was not a shred of evidence against Stewart.

Stewart, a Jacobite, was tried in what amounted to a kangaroo court held in Inveraray in September 1752. Of the 15 jurors 11 were Campbells; the senior of the three judges was the Duke of Argyll, the staunchly Hanoverian chief of Clan Campbell; and the court sat without break from five on a Friday morning until seven on the Sunday morning, leaving one juror to shout at a defence advocate: "Pray sir, cut it short. We have had enough."

Mr Macaulay said yesterday: "It went through what they termed due process at the time but the whole thing from start to finish was a farce. The conviction just doesn't stand up to any sort of scrutiny and needs to be quashed."

James of the Glens had an unshakeable alibi and the Crown accepted that, on the day of the murder, he had been at Aucharn, several miles away. Neither was there any evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy.

The main witness saw a man with a gun some distance away but was unable to identify who he was.

Mr Macaulay believes the lack of identification was fatal to the conviction.

He is not alone in that view. At a ceremony in Lettermore to mark the 250th anniversary of the Appin murder, Sir Niall Campbell, 78, a lawyer descended from a half brother of the Red Fox, said: "...that man should never have been convicted on the evidence produced, and the trial should never have been conducted the way it was, even by the standards of that time."

As millions of readers of Kidnapped over many generations know, when Campbell was shot in the Wood of Lettermore, a man with a gun was seen running away, up the hill.

In the novel, an eyewitness, David Balfour, follows him up the brae, where he eventually comes across his one-time travelling companion, Ailean Breac Stewart (Allan Breck), armed only with a fishing rod.

Several books have been written on the subject, including Ian Nimmo's Walking With Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail. Many conclude that James Stewart was the victim of a show trial at a time when passions were running high in the aftermath of Culloden.

James Hunter's Culloden and the Last Clansman argues that a murder conspiracy was indeed hatched by the Stewarts of Appin, including Ailean Breac who would have had to leave the country anyway as a known British army deserter.

So everything was to point to his guilt, but it was probably a better shot who did the deed. The murderer's name wasn't revealed until Hunter's book was published in 2001.

Then Anda Penman, 89, a descendant of the Stewarts of Appin, identified Donald, the son of Stewart of Ballachulish as the real killer, having kept a secret that was passed on by word of mouth through her family for more than two centuries.

A spokesman for the review commission confirmed that the papers had been lodged and would be considered.