Burke and Hare (18 page)
Authors: Brian Bailey
The lecture began at one o’clock. Burke’s cranium was sawn off and his brain exposed. According to the author of the contemporary
West Port Murders
, ‘the amount of blood that gushed out was enormous, and by the time the lecture was finished, which was not till three o’clock, the area of the class-room had the appearance of a butcher’s slaughter-house, from its flowing down and being trodden upon’.
14
While Monro was delivering his lecture, students who had failed to get in were clamouring at the door, and police had to be called, but the officers were outnumbered by unruly students and a noisy affray broke out in which windows were broken and the police had to use their batons. Several men on both sides were injured. Order was only restored when Professor Christison negotiated an agreement whereby medical students were to be allowed into the lecture room, fifty at a time, to view the remains after Monro had finished with them.
Next day, the general public was also permitted to file past the corpse, which had by then been restored to a less gruesome condition, although the shaved head showed continuous stitching where the skull had been replaced, with signs of blood still on it. The procession began at ten o’clock in the morning, and by dusk it was estimated that 25,000 people had passed through. Seven women were among these spectators. The fact that women had been among the crowd watching the execution had drawn some comment in Edinburgh, but the news that seven members of the gentle sex had viewed the butchered corpse caused considerable shock.
Scott noted:
The corpse of the Murderer Burke is now lying in state at the College, in the anatomical class, and all the world flock to see him. Who is he that says we are not ill to please in our objects of curiosity. The strange means by which the wretch made money are scarce more disgusting than the eager curiosity with which the publick have licked up all the carrion details of this business.
15
But then, until the mid-twentieth century, British justice had an infallible instinct for increasing morbid curiosity and depravity by making the punishment even more gruesome and horrific than the original crime.
When all the gawping was over, the flesh was stripped from the bones and the skeleton was preserved as an exhibit in the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh University, where it remains to this day, a mark of celebrity, like a marble statue in a public square or a wax effigy in Madame Tussaud’s. But whereas they are mere likenesses of their subjects created by art, this
is
the subject, accorded the honour of perpetual visible corporality which neither saints nor emperors aspire to. Burke’s ghost must have smiled with satisfaction.
Sensational pamphlets and broadsheets flooded the streets. One ‘reported’ the last words of Mrs Docherty as she was being suffocated, ‘God abandoned! and thou, hideous carrion, your time is at hand – the wrath of Heaven, even now, is ready to fall on your heads. I – I – shall be the last.’ Another imaginative piece of journalism gave Burke’s last dying speech. It was on the streets of Newcastle before news of the execution could possibly have arrived there.
Phrenologists claimed to have measured the heads of Burke and Hare to find consistencies in the external variations in shape which could be identified as characteristic lesions of the brain in murderers. The leader of these pseudo-scientists was George Combe, a solicitor, who was among those who had been allowed to see Burke’s corpse before Monro lectured on it. He had recently published
Essays on Phrenology
and founded
The Phrenological Journal.
Thomas Stone, President of the Royal Medical Society, poured scorn on this theory, which he described as a hypothesis ‘which has been decidedly rejected by the most enlightened men in Europe, and which, from its earliest existence, has appealed rather to the credulity of the vulgar, than to the judgment of men of science’.
16
In due course, the ‘official’ and
Courant
confessions were published simultaneously, in spite of a further temporary injunction against the
Courant
version, granted to the afore-mentioned solicitor Smith, who claimed that the so-called ‘
Courant
confession’ had been intended by Burke for him, but had been given to the editor of the
Courant
by a turnkey named Wilson. On 27 January, the day before his execution, Burke had signed a paper authorising the demand of this confession from the
Courant
and its delivery to the Sheriff’s Office. He referred to this document as the one ‘which I signed for – Ewart’, and said that although it was correct ‘so far as I had time to examine it’, the declaration made before the Sheriff was ‘the only full statement that can be relied on’.
It seems clear that Burke was being pestered in the condemned cell by lawyers acting for various interested parties, some anxious to prevent premature publication of the full details, and the
Courant
eager to capitalise on what it saw as a major ‘scoop’. Neither Smith nor the paper wanted their scoop to be upstaged by release of the ‘official’ confession, so they promptly came to some agreement, and both confessions were printed in the press on 7 February.
And so at last the full story of the Burke and Hare crimes was revealed to the public, and although the extent of the murders was established only on the basis of the criminals’ own statements, there was no compelling reason to believe that they were lying or hiding the truth. Sixteen is the number of murders attributed to Burke and Hare ever since, although doubts remained for many years afterwards, even among those involved in bringing the pair to justice.
Lord Cockburn, whose memoirs were published twenty-seven years after the trial, recalled that ‘it was nearly certain that, within a year or two, Burke and Hare had murdered about sixteen people, for the sale of their bodies to anatomists; and after his conviction Burke confessed this’.
17
Popular rumour naturally tended to put the figure much higher, but without the benefit of the slightest evidence. A Glasgow printer named Muir published a broadsheet purporting to be Hare’s confession to murdering, with his accomplices, ‘between 30 and 40 individuals in the City of Edinburgh’. But idle speculation and misinformation surrounded the whole affair. An anonymous American lawyer got the story so wildly wrong that he described the execution of both Burke and Helen McDougal on 22 January.
18
Sir Robert Christison’s characteristically cautious impression was quite different. In his autobiography, published after his death in 1882, he wrote that there was ‘reason to suppose that this atrocious trade had been carried on during the whole winter of 1827-28. Burke, indeed, was said to have admitted after conviction, that sixteen victims had been murdered by his copartnery. But villains of his rare stamp are apt to indulge in the strange vainglory of exaggerating their actual wickedness.’
19
Owen Dudley Edwards repeatedly ascribes seventeen murders to the pair. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, however, we may take it that Burke and Hare between them killed sixteen people in the course of nine months – an average of one every seventeen days.
NOTES
1
Caledonian Mercury
, 1 January 1829.
2
Letter of 4 January 1829, Grierson, p. 89.
3
Glasgow Herald
, 10 June 1814.
4
Tanner’s Close and the slum area around it were demolished in 1902.
5
Grierson, p. 102.
6
Henry Cockburn,
Memorials of His Time
, (Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1856), p. 458.
7
Atlay, p. 42(n).
8
‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’,
Letter to the Lord Advocate.
9
Ibid.
10
Quoted in Roughead, p. 64.
11
Ibid, p. 65.
12
Grierson, p. 131.
13
Sir Walter Scott,
Journal
, (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1950 edn), p. 583.
14
Ireland,
West Port Murders
, p. 254.
15
Scott,
Journal
, p. 585.
16
Thomas Stone,
Observations on the Phrenologial Development of Burke, Hare, and Other Atrocious Murderers
, (Edinburgh, 1829).
17
Cockburn, p. 456.
18
Quoted in George Ryley Scott,
The History of Capital Punishment
, (London, Torchstream Books, 1950), pp. 49-50.
19
Robert Christison,
The Life of Sir Robert Christison, Bart
, (2 vols, Edinburgh, Wm Blackwood & Sons, 1885), Vol I, p. 308.
9. HARE
T
he Hares remained in prison all this time. They had been locked up for their own safety at first, but when it became clear that William Hare was soon to be released, as no further action was to be taken against him by the Crown, Daft Jamie’s mother and sister, both named Janet Wilson, petitioned the Sheriff to have Hare detained in prison so that he could not cheat justice by fleeing to Ireland. It was their intention to bring a private prosecution for the murder of Jamie.
Press and public were at one in their fury that Hare seemed likely to get off scot-free. Many believed that the malevolent Hare was the worst of the evil pair. The general opinion was that Hare was not only the original instigator of the homicidal partnership, but also the one with most blood on his hands in the actual killing of their victims. Hare, ‘the vilest of the two monsters’, according to Lonsdale, ‘suggested a fresh stroke of business, namely, to inveigle the old and infirm into his den and
“do for them”.
1
This slimy character, it was commonly maintained, had led Burke on throughout this grisly catalogue of crime, and had ended by treacherously sending his partner to the gallows, to save his own neck. He had not shown the slightest sign of remorse for his actions and, in fact, had given some appearance of being quite pleased at getting himself off the hook at Burke’s expense.
Nevertheless, the Lord Advocate’s position was clear, however much he and everyone else might regret it. If it had not been for Hare’s testimony, Burke, as well as Nelly, would almost certainly have won a Not Proven verdict. Rae had used Hare to bring Burke to justice, and had guaranteed him immunity from prosecution if he testified against his erstwhile partner. If he now went back on his word, it would bring discredit on himself and the honour of his country.
We have already noticed Professor John Wilson’s impressions of Hare in prison, and Sir Walter Scott was of a like mind as regards Hare:
This Hare is a most hideous wretch so much that I was induced to remark him from having observed his extremely odious countenance once or twice in the Street where in general I am no observer of faces but his is one which there is no passing without starting & I recognized him easily by the prints.
2
Another character-sketch of him was provided by the afore-mentioned James Maclean, who told Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe that Hare was a man of ‘ferocious and tyrannical disposition, much inclined to quarrel, and very obstreperous when in liquor’. Maclean, a fellow-hawker as well as a fellow-Irishman, related how, during the summer of 1828, he was returning from the shearing
3
at Carnwath with Hare, Burke and others when they all went into a public house at Balerno, near Currie, for some refreshment:
The reckoning being clubbed, Hare snatched up the money from the table, and put it into his pocket; when Burke, fearing lest a disturbance should take place in the house, paid the whole amount. After they left the inn McLean observed to Hare it was a
scaly
trick to lift the money with an intention to affront them. On this Hare
knocked the feet from under
McLean, and when prostrate on the ground, gave him a tremendous kick on the face. His shoes being pointed with iron plates, commonly called
caulkers
, he wounded McLean severely, laying open his upper lip.
4
When speculation was rife about the possible number of the pair’s victims, Maclean himself was thought likely to be one of them, as he had gone missing. But he had been paying a visit to Glasgow and returned to Edinburgh in due course.
When a public subscription was announced to raise the costs of a private prosecution for the killing of the popular Jamie, the Edinburgh public, urged on by the
Caledonian Mercury
, responded at once, and by 16 January Mrs and Miss Wilson were able to retain Mr Francis Jeffrey as counsel and petition the Sheriff for Hare to be charged with the murder of James Wilson.
Three days later, while this new development was being considered by the law authorities, Margaret Laird was released, as the Crown could not proceed against her and she was not named in the private action against her husband. As she made her way back to the Old Town with her child in her arms, she was inevitably recognised, and a mob gathered to follow and pelt her with stones and mud. She, like McDougal earlier, had to be rescued by police and locked up again for her own safety. A few days later she was freed again, and after apparently wandering about the country in tatters, ended up a fortnight later in Glasgow, where she was again given refuge from the mob in a prison cell.
She occasionally burst into tears while deploring her unhappy situation, which she ascribed to Hare’s utter profligacy, and said all she wished was to get across the channel, and end her days in some remote spot in her own country in retirement and penitence.
5
She remained in Glasgow for some time, nevertheless, trying to get aboard vessels bound for Ireland. Lucky at last, she was eventually assisted by the authorities in securing a passage on board the
Fingail
from Greenock to Belfast on 12 February.
6
Hearsay identified her with a woman called Mrs Hare, employed as a nursemaid in Paris thirty years later, but we may pass a verdict of Not Proven on this highly improbable story.