In the winter of 1650, the legal machinery of the Scottish witch trials turned toward Dumbarton, where Johne McWilliam, a slater by trade, found himself ensnared in a process that would ultimately cost him his life. Identified in the records as a man of middling socioeconomic status, Johne occupied a position of moderate stability within his community, working a skilled craft that required both physical dexterity and a presence throughout the burgh's rooftops and construction sites. The archival fragments documenting his case, specifically catalogued under C/EGD/16, indicate that the judicial proceedings against him reached their formal commencement on the 2nd of December, 1650.
The subsequent trial, noted in the records as T/JO/1144, provides a stark and final conclusion to his experience within the Dunbarton justice system. While the specific evidence, testimonies, or individual grievances brought forward against the slater remain absent from the surviving documentation, the outcome is clearly stated. The commission tasked with the oversight of his trial confirms that Johne was executed following the judicial process. Though the details of his final moments were not preserved, the record serves as a somber testament to the formal mechanisms of the mid-seventeenth-century state and the vulnerability of individuals like Johne when confronted by the prevailing witchcraft legislation of the era.