Three Times Buried is the story of a notorious nineteenth-century Scottish murder – a story of illicit romance, torn loyalties, poison and suicide. 

It is closely based on the true story of Widow Lovie and her son John, an Aberdeenshire tenant farmer who was tried in 1827 for poisoning his servant girl, Meggy McKessar. 

In 1826, the lively Meggy McKessar comes to live and work at the farm of John Lovie and his mother. It’s a hardscrabble existence in a bleak, poverty-stricken part of the world, but the Lovies enjoy a status slightly higher than the McKessars. 

Widow Lovie is worried that Meggy McKessar will tempt her son away and threaten her peaceful life. There has been trouble with a woman before: the inscrutable John Lovie is ‘under church scandal’ – and therefore unable to marry – for refusing to admit paternity of an illegitimate child. 

When there is a sudden death at the farm, suspicion falls on Lovie. To some of his neighbours, he is a hardworking and respectable farmer who cares for his ageing mother – but to others, he is a calculating predator. John is arrested and tried for murder at Aberdeen. 

The courtroom is packed, and tensions run high during the sensational trial. Grim conditions of nineteenth-century Scottish farm life provide a bleak and suspenseful atmosphere for this story of cruelty, poverty and hardship. 

Three Times Buried tells the story of the murder, the investigation and the trial from the points of view of some of the witnesses, including Lovie’s seventeen-year-old farmhand, the dead girl’s sister, and, most powerfully, the only witness to corroborate the accused’s defence – his loyal widowed mother. 

The case was so notorious in its day that it inspired a folk song.