Burke and Hare Read online

  Maggie Laird was pressed to say if she and McDougal had talked about the murder, either while they were in the passage or afterwards, and at last she replied, ‘We were just talking about her, saying, perhaps it would be the same case with her and I.’

  Lord Meadowbank interrupted, ‘Is that to say that you might be murdered; is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You know that Mrs Connoway lived next door there, and you know that there was a Mrs Law lived on the opposite side of the passage; did you not think of going there?’

  ‘I dreaded to go there, as I had left my husband three times. The thing had happened two or three times before, and it was not likely that I should tell a thing to affect my husband.’

  ‘I thought you said you left your house three times altogether.’

  ‘I left it for to go away altogether, for I was not contented to stay – not leading a contented life.’

  The last witnesses for the prosecution were the medical men, Mr Black and Professor Christison. Neither could say definitely that Mrs Docherty had died from violence, although Mr Black’s opinion was that she had, and Professor Christison agreed that there were sufficient grounds for suspicion, but would not go further. There was some discussion as to whether the woman could have suffocated as a result of falling down while intoxicated, as Burke had suggested. The livid hue of the woman’s face, her swollen eyes and the small amount of blood issuing from her nose or mouth could all be consistent, Professor Christison said, with her having fallen down and suffocated while drunk. The Lord Justice-Clerk asked the Professor if he had opened the victim’s stomach. He replied in the affirmative.

  ‘Did you observe anything particular in it?’

  ‘Half-digested porridge.’

  ‘Had it any smell of whisky?’

  ‘No. If it had the smell of whisky, or any narcotic, I should have perceived it.’

  ‘Had the woman been in a dangerous state of intoxication, would there have been the smell of spirits in the stomach?’

  ‘Not necessarily, my Lord.’

  This was no great help to the prosecution, but it completed their case. The two pre-trial declarations of each of the defendants were then read out, and as no witnesses were to be called for the defence, counsel began their final addresses to the jury in the early hours of the morning of Christmas Day. There had been no break for rest or refreshment since ten o’clock the previous morning.

  During the evening, while the trial was progressing, there had been some disturbances out in the streets. A small crowd of youths had set off to march on Dr Knox’s house at Newington. Police had protected the property from them, so they went instead to the university, and succeeded in breaking some of the windows of Professor Monro’s lecture-room.

  The Lord Advocate summed up the Crown’s case in a speech which he began by telling the jury that ‘at this late hour, when you must be exhausted with the long trial in which you have been engaged, I shall endeavour not to detain you long’. He then went through all the evidence in minute detail, after saying that the alleged offences were of ‘so atrocious a description, that human nature shudders and revolts at it’, that such crimes produced terror and dismay, and that he would not allow ‘any collateral considerations, connected with the promotion of science’, to deter him from his duty to ‘bring to light and punishment those deeds of darkness which have so deeply affected the public mind’.

  Sir William Rae suggested to the jury that Hare was telling the truth, and said that all the testimony of the various witnesses tended to show that Burke was ‘the premeditated author, and leading instrument, in the perpetration of this most hideous act’. He also spoke at considerable length to demonstrate beyond doubt that McDougal was an accessory to the murder. Rae took the opportunity to remind the jury members that he had originally intended to try the pannels on three charges of murder, though they must of course confine their attention only to that part of ‘the whole system of atrocity’ he had brought before them today.

  The trial had already been in progress for seventeen continuous hours when, at three o’clock in the morning, the Dean of Faculty commenced his address to the jury on Burke’s behalf. He spoke for two hours. Burke and Hare, Moncrieff said, acted together in the trade of procuring subjects for dissection, ‘though William Hare, with his usual adherence to truth, chooses to deny this unquestionable fact’. Although that trade may be revolting to the feelings of ordinary people, and tend to prejudice them against him, he reminded the jury, Burke was not on trial for procuring subjects for anatomists. And given that that was his trade, the fact of a dead body being found in his possession was no proof of murder. Even if they were convinced that murder had been committed, they must have proof that it was Burke who had committed it. It could have been Hare who murdered the woman – perhaps that was what the two men were fighting about. What was there to restrain the Hares from lying in order to fix the guilt on the prisoners and extricate themselves from the condition in which they stood? ‘What if that cold-blooded, acknowledged villain, should have determined to consummate his villainy by making the prisoners at the bar the last victims to his selfishness and cruelty? What is there to restrain him? Do you think that he is incapable of it?’ If the learned prosecutor had possessed clear evidence on which a jury could convict the defendants of wilful murder, the Hares would have been in the dock alongside Burke and McDougal.

  Moncrieff asked the jury if a man who had just committed a horrible murder would have gone instantly to fetch a ‘surgeon’ (he meant Paterson) to look at the body, or, next morning, ask people in for breakfast with his victim lying naked on the floor. He suggested that the Grays were as habitually drunk as the Burkes, the Hares and the Connoways appeared to be, and pointed out that their testimony was confused and contradictory.

  Moncrieff dwelt on contradictions in other witnesses’ answers. Young Broggan swore that when he had arrived at two or three in the morning, Burke and Hare were in the bed, and he lay down by the fire with the two women. But Hare said that the women were in bed, and Broggan was ‘sleeping in the back part of the bed, behind his aunt, as he is pleased to call her’. Maggie Laird said that the women were on the floor, Broggan in the bed with one of the men, and the other in the chair. ‘There is contradiction for you! If they were capable of judgement, and in a situation to give evidence, it is impossible that mistake or misconception to this extent could take place.’ Whatever may be the truth of the case, he went on, the Hares’ story was ‘a tissue of inventions; and whatever account is to be given of the manner of the old woman’s death, you have not got it from these witnesses’. If a man’s life, or liberty, or character, were to hang on the breath of such witnesses as Hare and his wife, ‘what security could any man have for his existence in society for a single hour?’

  Henry Cockburn rose at five o’clock to speak for McDougal and, like the Dean of Faculty, poured scorn on the testimony of the ‘squalid wretch’ Hare and his repulsive wife, on whom the prosecution so much depended, but who were really ‘the property of the gibbet’. The idea of believing such witnesses in a capital case was shocking. The prosecutor had talked of their being sworn to tell the truth, but ‘what is perjury to a murderer; the breaking of an oath to him who has broken into the bloody house of life?’ Cockburn urged the jury to distance themselves from ‘the cry of the public for a victim’, and ignore the notoriety of the case outside the court. ‘Let the public rage as it pleases.’ Their duty was to decide purely on the evidence in the trial if McDougal had been an accomplice to murder, and their safest course was to find the libel not proven.

  The Lord Justice-Clerk summed up at great length before sending the jury to consider its verdicts. It was half-past eight by this time. Burke sat calmly waiting, but Nelly was nervous and agitated, and Burke did his best to comfort her. The jury took fifty minutes to reach its conclusions. As the members filed back into court, their chairman, John McFie, gave their verdict to a momentarily hushed crowd of lawyer
s and clerks, reporters and spectators, ‘The jury find the pannel, William Burke, guilty of the third charge in the indictment; and find the indictment not proven against the pannel, Helen McDougal.’

  McDougal immediately broke down in tears and Burke said to her, ‘Nelly, you’re out of the scrape.’ The jury had reached a majority verdict, not a unanimous one – two of its members had favoured a not proven verdict in Burke’s case, too.

  Lord Meadowbank went through the ritual of proposing the sentence of death by hanging, and having said that it would be unpardonable for him, after so many hours, to think of going over at length the appalling circumstances which had been revealed, he (already by far the most verbose of the judges) set off yet again. He delivered himself of the opinion that ‘in the whole history of civilized society – there never has been exhibited such a system of barbarous and savage iniquity, or anything at all corresponding in atrocity, to what this trial has brought to light’. Warming to his task, his Lordship went on to say that they would, he believed, search in vain ‘through both the real and fabulous histories of crime for anything at all approaching to this cold, hypocritical, calculating, and bloody murder’. He had not exhausted his superlatives yet, though all those in court, Presbyterian or otherwise, must have been gasping for their Christmas dinners. The case was, he concluded, ‘one of the most terrific, and one of the most monstrous delineations of human depravity, that has ever been brought under your consideration’.

  The Lord Justice-Clerk, with black cap perched on his wig, then made a few mercifully brief remarks, one of them expressing his doubt as to whether he should order Burke’s body to be hung in chains as a deterrent to similar crimes in the future. He opted for the customary sentence of dissection after execution and added that ‘if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes’. He then formally sentenced Burke to be taken back to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh and fed on bread and water only, until Wednesday, 28 January, when he was to be taken to the common place of execution in the Lawnmarket and hanged by the neck until dead, after which his body was to be delivered to Professor Monro to be publicly dissected and anatomised.

  After reminding Helen McDougal that she had not been declared not guilty, and that her own conscience must draw the proper conclusions, the Lord Justice-Clerk dismissed her and the Court rose. It was ten o’clock on Christmas morning. The trial had lasted twenty-four hours without any adjournment for refreshment or pause in concentration.

  ‘No trial in the memory of any man now living,’ the Caledonian Mercury said, ‘has excited so deep, universal and (we may almost add) appalling an interest as that of Burke and his female associate.’7

  Among those present in court during the trial had been a sixty-seven-year-old French sculptress, Marie Grozholtz, better known as Madame Tussaud, who made notes and sketches, and had a model of William Burke on show in Liverpool within a fortnight of his execution.

  NOTES

  1 J.B. Atlay, Famous Trials of the Century, (London, Grant Richards, 1899), p. 24.

  2 William Roughead (ed.), Burke and Hare, part of Notable British Trials series, (Edinburgh, WM. Hodge, 1948 edn), p. 113.

  3 Ibid, p. 114.

  4 Ibid, p. 116.

  5 Ibid, p. 117.

  6 Ibid, p. 120.

  7 Caledonian Mercury, 25 December 1828.

  * * *

  8. BURKE

  * * *

  Probably the only leading figure in the trial who can have sat down to his Christmas dinner in complete satisfaction was Henry Cockburn. He had successfully challenged the Lord Advocate’s intention of trying his client McDougal alongside Burke when he was being charged with three murders and she with only one, and won the right to discredit Hare’s evidence by putting questions which the Lord Advocate and one of the judges thought inadmissible. How far Cockburn believed in his client’s innocence is another matter. The story got around later that he had uttered an aside during his closing speech, ‘Infernal hag! The gudgeons swallow it!’ Of course, he denied that he had said any such thing. Nevertheless, he had saved his client from the gallows. Moncrieff could not save his client, and the Lord Advocate had secured the conviction of only one criminal when he must have hoped at one stage for four.

  Burke and McDougal were kept in the safety of the Parliament House cells for the rest of the day. Hostile crowds filled the streets, besieging the newspapers’ offices for reports of the trial and incensed at the news that only Burke was to receive his just desserts. In the early hours of Boxing Day, Burke and McDougal were removed to Calton jail, where Burke was put in the condemned cell. ‘This is a bloody cold place you have brought me till!’ he complained. His Christmas dinner consisted of bread and water.

  Helen McDougal was released that evening and went home, lying low for most of Saturday. But that evening, she could not resist her need for whisky and went out to get some. She was recognised in no time and a threatening mob soon gathered. They may well have lynched her if police had not got to her first and taken her to the safety of the Wester Portsburgh watch-house, using their batons to get through the crowd, which then regrouped outside, crying for vengeance and smashing some windows. McDougal was smuggled out at the back of the building, dressed as a man, and taken to the police office in Liberton’s Wynd for the night. Police calmed the mob a little by telling them that McDougal was being held to give evidence against Hare.

  Next morning, she was escorted out of the town and went back to Falkirk, but was no more welcome there than in Edinburgh, to which she promptly returned. She called at the Calton jail with Constantine Burke and asked to see Burke, but was refused. Some time afterwards she was apparently in Newcastle, but being a liability to the police there as well, she was escorted to the Durham border, where she disappeared. We cannot place any reliance on a story that she died in Australia forty years later.

  Hare and his wife were also kept in prison for their own safety. ‘With unspeakable astonishment,’ the Caledonian Mercury stated, ‘we have learned that Hare is only detained in jail for his own personal protection until after New Year’s Day.’1 The paper expressed the popular opinion when it asserted that, ‘This subtle fiend was Burke’s master in the art of murder . . .’ Sensational speculation ran riot. A broadsheet published in Glasgow purported to be Hare’s confession to murdering ‘between thirty and forty individuals in the City of Edinburgh’. We need not take too seriously the story Leighton tells of the hideous Hare dancing with glee at the success of his stratagem.

  In a letter to his son Charles, Sir Walter Scott wrote:

  It is doubtless a sad thing this of R. Stephenson [a fraudulent banker] but I rather think not quite so anomalous as the Caledonian trade in dead bodies. Besides a banker’s frolics only affect the rich whereas Mr Burke’s occupation put an end to the Cantabit vacuus of the poor. Any person with the ordinary number of limbs was exposed to be kidnapd for Dr Knox’s purposes – or indeed if he had more or less than the usual share his risque was only the greater.2

  In the view of the public, the trial had fallen far short of achieving justice for the victims of Burke and Hare, and this perception fuelled a growing fury and a dangerous tendency for the mob to take the law into its own hands. At this point, just after the trial, the public had no idea of the extent of Burke’s and Hare’s crimes. But they knew that there was sufficient evidence of their murder of Mary Paterson and Jamie Wilson, and speculation ran wild about how many other murders they may have committed.

  If Burke had been tried for the killing of Mary and Jamie, Dr Knox and his assistants would have been required to testify that bodies identifiable as theirs had been received at Surgeons’ Square, in order to prove the fact of death. The bodies would have been destroyed by the time of the trial, and even if parts of them remained, Sir William Rae would have been well aware of the dangers of trying to prove they were parts of a particular person. Some years earlier, in Glasgow, the body of a M
rs McAlister had been dug up from Ramshorn churchyard, and police and her friends thought they had traced it to the College Street premises of a lecturer, Dr Granville Sharp Pattison. Parts of a female body found in a tub of water included a jawbone with false teeth, which Mrs McAlister’s dentist identified, and a severed finger was recognised as her wedding-ring finger. Other body parts were found underneath floorboards. When Dr Pattison was charged with stealing the body and mangling it to prevent recognition, his counsel requested that the case be heard in camera, owing to the delicate nature of the evidence he was to present. This was refused, but newspaper editors were earnestly requested to give as little publicity as possible to the case, as the details would ‘only tend to inflame the minds of the vulgar’. ‘Our reporter was therefore told,’ the Glasgow Herald said, ‘that he could not be allowed to write down notes of the evidence; which prevents us from laying the case fully before our readers.’3 The paper’s report said simply that the medical witnesses had found it impossible to say whether the body was Mrs McAlister’s or not. In fact, the defence had lost no time in playing its trump card. Mrs McAlister, it was pointed out, had been a mother, as several people had confirmed. But expert medical witnesses testified that a significant part of the body said to be hers was undoubtedly that of a virgin! The case against Dr Pattison was found Not Proven. And who appeared for the defence in this case, along with Mr John Clerk? Why, none other than Mr Henry Cockburn.

  What else might have become public knowledge if Knox had gone into the witness box? A great many people considered that the doctor ought to have been in the dock alongside his suppliers, but he had not even been called as a witness, because, in the case of Mrs Docherty, he had never seen the body. The only person connected with Knox who gave evidence was David Paterson, and his revelations in the witness box made a bad impression on the largely unsuspecting public. He attempted to shift any blame from himself to Knox by writing a letter to the Caledonian Mercury, in which he adopted the classic stance of saying that he had only been obeying his employer’s orders and had been made a scapegoat for Dr Knox. We shall return to this matter in due course.