Burke and Hare (16 page)

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

P
robably 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:

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 Mrs 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.

Of the original fifty-five witnesses listed, only eighteen had been called to give evidence. If Sir William Rae had been allowed to proceed against Burke on all three counts in the indictment, then witnesses not called in the matter of Margery Docherty (or whatever her name was) would have been called in evidence relating to Mary Paterson and Jamie Wilson. Some of those omitted might have told very interesting stories, especially Janet Brown, Mary Paterson’s friend. What might Elizabeth Main, an Irish servant in Hare’s lodging-house, have told the court? In his
Courant
confession later, Burke said that ‘Hare’s servant girl could give information respecting the murders done in Hare’s house, if she likes.’ The girl had been in Hare’s employment only since Whit Sunday that year (25 May), and after the Hares were arrested she sold some of their pigs and absconded with the money, but she had been at Tanner’s Close during an active period in the sequence of murders and, according to Burke, had seen James Wilson’s clothes in the house on the day he was killed.

Burke had given these clothes to his nephews, Richard and William, who were also listed as witnesses, along with their parents. If these two boys were grown up enough to make use of the eighteen-year-old Jamie’s clothes, and old enough to give evidence in a court of law, their testimony might have been interesting. Where were they when Burke brought Janet Brown and Mary Paterson to their father’s house, pretending he was a lodger there?

What had Isabella Paterson, the mother of David and his sister Elizabeth, to tell about these affairs, and what was William Pulteney Alison, Professor of Theory of Physic at the university, expected to say? Alas, the public was left in the dark by the Lord Advocate’s decision to pursue the case of Mrs Docherty. Any testimony about Mary Paterson or James Wilson, particularly from David Paterson, would have been liable to damage the promising careers of Fergusson, and Knox’s other assistants. And the Procurator-Fiscal, the Sheriff-substitute and their clerks would probably have had to reveal the contents of Hare’s pre-trial statement as well as Burke’s.

The press echoed the public mood in saying that the conviction of Burke would satisfy neither the law nor the country, and that Hare must be brought to justice. Public revulsion at this monster had the effect of producing some sympathy for Burke, who had now, it was felt, become ‘another of Hare’s victims’. Morbid curiosity began to attract a stream of visitors to Tanner’s Close and Burke’s house nearby to gape at the scenes of their crimes and take away such souvenirs as they could filch.
⁴
Sir Walter Scott wrote to a friend:

Mr and Mrs Gray, who had blown the whistle on the murderers, were now lodging in the Grassmarket with a coal merchant named McDonald. A public subscription was raised to reward the couple, whose unswerving integrity had been instrumental in bringing the killing to an end. But less than £10 was collected for them, and their only reward was the satisfaction of a clear conscience.

In prison, Burke received the ministrations of both Catholic priests and Presbyterian clergy. He was visited by Father Reid and Father Stewart, as well as Rev. Porteous and Rev. Marshall. It was perhaps under their earnest exhortations that he volunteered to make a confession, and did so on 3 January after a week in the condemned cell, thus revealing to the authorities that he and Hare had become the most prolific serial-killing partnership in British judicial records. Burke naturally tried to shift much of the blame onto Hare.