In the autumn of 1679, the judicial machinery of the Scottish state focused its attention upon a woman identified in the legal records as Helen Herkertson. Her case, documented under the reference C/LA/3096, arrived before the courts on September 24 of that year. Despite the meticulous nature of the proceedings, the surviving documentation offers no information regarding her origins or place of residence, leaving her background obscured by the passage of time.
The process against Helen was significant in its scale, involving a list of eleven witnesses prepared to testify in the proceedings initiated on the same day as her trial (T/LA/1496). Yet, she did not face her accusers in the courtroom. Helen appears on a fugitive roll originating from Dumfries, indicating that she had fled the jurisdiction rather than submit to the trial. By the time the final records were consolidated, the entry beside her name carried the grim notation: "dead." Thus, the legal pursuit of Helen concluded not with a verdict, but with her disappearance from the reach of the law and her eventual entry into the registers of the deceased.