The Ability to Kill (13 page)

How different, indeed, is the attitude in Scotland!

Of course, Scottish murder has always had a special full-bodied flavour of its own; burgundy to the English claret. Perhaps it is something in the soil of Scotland; perhaps it is something in their laws. Where else can you find expressed such manifest and magnificent ambivalence towards the murderer as in the Scottish legal verdict of ‘Not Proven’? Let the envious English (or American) purist object that an accused person is either guilty or not guilty and that the Not Proven verdict merely permits a jury of palterers to hedge. The Scots know a good murder mystery when they see it, and are good-naturedly reluctant to punish the author if they can reasonably avoid doing so. As Miss Tennyson Jesse suggests, the verdict of Not Proven is an admonition: ‘We’ll let you off this once, but don’t do it again.’

Nor are the Scots ashamed of their murder buildings.

In 1561, David Rizzio, a native of Turin, went to Edinburgh in the suite of the ambassador of Piedmont. He was a handsome fellow and also an excellent bass singer. Mary, Queen of Scots, wanted a bass singer, and after a while Rizzio entered her service. Quite soon he became her
valet de chambre
and finally her private secretary for correspondence with France. Her marriage to the young Lord Darnley, her cousin, in 1565 did nothing to undermine Rizzio’s position. After a few
months, however, Darnley, who presumably could not sing a note, demanded the ‘crown matrimonial’ which would have made him royal, independently of the Queen. On Rizzio’s advice, Mary refused. Darnley, who had been friendly with Rizzio, now professed to have discovered that he was the Queen’s lover, and began to plan his murder.

On the evening of March 9, 1566, the Earls of Morton and Lindsay, at the head of a troop of their men-at-arms, burst into Mary’s supper room in the Edinburgh palace of Holyrood. Rizzio was there with her; and before her eyes they dragged him out and killed him with their daggers.

There is no mystery or fascination about the murder of Rizzio. It was a shoddy piece of butchery. Yet, the Scots make no attempt to hush up the affair. They do not change the name of the Royal Palace of Holyrood or rearrange the rooms so as to confuse the murder student. They let a brass plaque into the floor at the spot where Rizzio was done to death, so that all who wish to do so may reconstruct the crime for themselves.

Unfortunately, the installation of engraved metal plaques is an expensive business; but the Scottish attitude towards murder remains as liberal as ever; even when the murderer is not of noble birth. A murder tour of Scotland is an invigorating experience.

Edinburgh, whose citizens will perhaps forgive me, has never had quite the cachet as a murder-city that Glasgow has. After all, where else but in Glasgow is it possible to find in, or within a few hundred yards of, a single city street, the locations of no less than four
classic
murder cases; cases that have been argued and re-argued by murder-tasters throughout the civilised world? However, by less exalted standards of comparison, Edinburgh is still richly endowed. The names of Burke and Hare alone would qualify it for inclusion among the topten murder cities of the Western world. Add to them such
names as those of Lady Warriston (who killed her husband), Nicol Muschet and the Reverend Mr Kello (who killed their wives) and John Donald Merrett (who, having been acquitted on a charge of killing his mother in 1927, did kill his wife and mother-in-law in 1954) and it is evident that Edinburgh’s record must be treated with respect.

It was in the year 1600 that Lady Warriston, having ‘conceived one deadly rancour, hatred and malice’ against her husband, the Laird, ‘for the alleged biting of her in the arm and striking her divers times,’ incited her servants to strangle him. They did. As a result, all except one were tried, convicted and condemned to death by being burnt. The one, Robert Weir, was not caught until four years later. He was executed by being broken on the wheel. Lady Warriston, in view of her social position, was finally beheaded instead of being burnt. Her public execution was remarkable for the vast crowds which attended it (at four o’clock in the morning) and for her sanctimonious declarations of repentance. It is tempting to assert that the house of Warriston is still there; but truth to tell the old place was rebuilt in the eighteenth century. However (trust the Scots), the whole affair was celebrated in a number of popular ballads entitled
The Laird of Warriston
, no less than three variants of which were still being sung and recited two hundred and fifty years after the commission of the crime that inspired them.

This excellent custom of commemorating famous crimes in verse has persisted in Scotland. What student of murder does not know these famous lines?

A crisp enough summary of the affair, though not as accurate as one could wish. To call Hare a thief merely in order to make a rhyme for ‘beef’ is mere ribaldry. The facts are more interesting.

In 1827, William Hare kept a doss-house called Log’s Lodging in Tanners Close, a dark alleyway off the West Port, a slum street lying south-west of Edinburgh Castle. One of his permanent lodgers was a cobbler named William Burke. Both men had originally come from Ireland to work as labourers on the Union Canal.

In November of that year, an old army pensioner named Donald who had been lodging with Hare, died just before his quarterly pension was due. As a result, he died owing Hare a quarter’s rent—four pounds.

Brooding over this bad debt and wondering how it might be recovered, Hare had an idea.

The Edinburgh medical school had long suffered from a shortage of subjects for dissection, the number of dead bodies allocated by law for the purpose having proved quite inadequate to the needs of the new department of anatomy. For a while, the students themselves had repaired these deficiencies by stealing bodies from graveyards; but gradually the practice of ‘body-snatching’ had been placed on a more business-like footing by professional ruffians known as Resurrection Men. The ‘black market’ price paid by the school for a body in good condition was anything up to ten pounds.

It was Hare’s idea, then, to sell Donald’s body to ‘the doctors’; and because he needed someone to help him, he confided in his lodger, Burke.

Burke was willing. That night, the pair removed the body from the coffin, which had been nailed down by the parish undertaker in preparation for the funeral. Then, having weighted the coffin with timber from the tanning yard near
by and re-sealed it, they set out with the body in a sack to call on Professor Munro of the anatomical school. On the way there, they stopped a young man and asked him to direct them. Learning their errand, the young man, who was a student of Professor Munro’s rival, the brilliant anatomist Dr Knox, directed them to the latter’s rooms at 10 Surgeon’s Square. Knox’s assistants were on duty that night. They naturally assumed, when Burke and Hare arrived, that they were dealing with ordinary Resurrection Men. They paid seven pounds ten shillings for Donald and added a fatal invitation. They would be glad, they said, to see Burke and Hare again when they had another body to dispose of.

To every sort of business enterprise there come, sooner or later, the clear-thinking men who break through the established order of things to achieve a new synthesis, a new rationalisation of the law of supply and demand. It was so with Burke and Hare. That night a single thought process illuminated both their minds. If you could get seven pounds ten apiece for dead bodies, why grub about, as the Resurrection Men did, stealing the things? Why not simply manufacture them?

During the next eleven months, Burke and Hare, assisted by their women, murdered no fewer than sixteen persons and sold their corpses to Dr Knox. The victims were mostly friendless down-and-outs, spotted by one or other of the quartet as suitable. The method was to offer the victim free bed and board for the night, make him (or her) dead drunk and then smother him. In the morning, they would undress the corpse, put it in a tea chest and inform Dr Knox that they had another subject. The doctor would send a porter that evening to meet them at the back of the Castle and to take delivery. As the doctor approved of the subjects being ‘so fresh,’ he usually paid the top price—ten pounds. He asked no questions.

In the summer of 1828, the men quarrelled over the division of the spoils, and Burke, the senior partner, went off in a huff to live in another lodging. But now they needed one another and the association was soon resumed. If they had not become careless about concealing their handiwork while it was awaiting delivery, they might have lasted longer. On the night of October 31 they murdered an old woman named Mrs Docherty, stripped off her clothes and left her body under a heap of straw in the house. A Mrs Gray, one of Burke’s fellow lodgers, was curious to know what was there. When he was out of the way, she had a look. Then, she and her husband went to the police.

The game was up. Hare and Mrs Hare promptly ‘turned King’s Evidence’ and so secured legal immunity for themselves. It was their evidence that hanged Burke. Helen M’Dougal (Burke’s lady), was acquitted. Hare, however, had a worse fate than hanging in store for him. Incensed by the deal made with him by the Public Prosecutor, a Scottish crowd tried to lynch him. Escaping, with difficulty, to England, or so the story goes, he was there recognised by a crowd of workmen who threw him into a lime pit. The lime blinded him. The remainder of his life he spent in London, begging along Oxford Street.

Dr Knox was an arrogant man and his bland efforts to disclaim all responsibility for the crimes of his jackals met with small success. His professional downfall was complete. He died in London of apoplexy in 1862.

Tanners Close is still there, as dark and as squalid as ever, though Log’s Lodging House was demolished in 1902. In its place stands a tenement building with a small glum-looking shop behind it. The shop belongs to a dealer in ladies’ and gents’ second-hand clothing.

And so to Glasgow.

The years from 1857 to 1865 were undoubtedly the Golden period of Scottish murder. In that brief space of time, and in a city area of less than a square mile, were enacted three of the most celebrated murder cases of all time; those of Madeleine Smith, Jessie M’Lachlan and Dr Pritchard. In 1908 further lustre was added to the area by the Oscar Slater case.

Sauchiehall Street is in the centre of Glasgow. Number 249 is a smart dress shop. The two floors above it are owned by the same people who own the dress shop, and are tricked out with cream and green paint and wrought-iron window boxes.

In 1865 there was no shop below. The three floors made a single private house. The number on the front door was 131
^*
and the owner was Edward William Pritchard, the poisoner.

Dr Pritchard began his professional career as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy. In 1850 he married Mary Jane Taylor, the daughter of an Edinburgh merchant. In 1851, and with the financial assistance of his wife’s family, he set up in private practice at Filey in Yorkshire. He did not last long there. ‘He was fluent, plausible, amorous, politely impudent and singularly untruthful,’ wrote a man who knew him at that time. ‘His amativeness led him into some amours that did not increase the public confidence in him as a medical man; and his unveracity became so notorious that, in his attempts to deceive others, he succeeded only in deceiving himself.’

They have shrewd eyes in Yorkshire. They missed only one important aspect of his character; his capacity for cold-blooded cruelty.

He began to practise in Glasgow in 1860. Almost from the beginning his professional colleagues disliked and distrusted him, and his attempts to join the various medical societies
were unsuccessful. Blithely attributing these set-backs to professional jealousy, Dr Pritchard embarked on a personal publicity campaign. He gave lectures on the subject of his travels (on one such occasion he claimed to have ‘hunted the Nubian lion in the prairies of North America’), he supplied photographs of his handsome bearded face to local shops for sale, and he cultivated the local Freemasons. After a while he succeeded in building up a fairly substantial practice, although his habit of attempting to seduce his women patients led to troublesome incidents.

One night in May, 1863, a significant event occurred. While Dr Pritchard was alone in his house with a young servant girl, the house
^†
caught fire. As a result, the girl lost her life, and Dr Pritchard put in a big claim on the insurance company for some jewellery which he said had been destroyed. The insurance company refused to pay. Moreover, the circumstances of the girl’s death were so suspicious that, after the post mortem examination, Dr Pritchard was closely questioned by the police. No further action was taken against him, however. Perhaps the fact gave him confidence. When he moved into the Sauchiehall Street house the following year, he had already seduced the dead housemaid’s successor, Mary M’Leod, a girl of fifteen, and told her that he would marry her if Mrs Pritchard should die before him.

However, Pritchard’s motive for murdering his wife has never been clearly established. In his three confessions he attributed his crime variously and unconvincingly to his infatuation with Mary M’Leod, to a ‘species of terrible madness’ and to the excessive use of ‘ardent spirits’; but the habit of unveracity was too much for him; his ‘confessions’ are self-contradictory, and in one of them he even claimed that the housemaid Mary was an accessory to the murder of Mrs
Pritchard. The probability is that he murdered his wife partly for her small income and partly because he was tired of her. She certainly knew about his affair with Mary (she had caught him with her in a bedroom) and she probably knew about his other amorous exploits, too. Moreover, he was in constant financial difficulties from which her family had on several occasions been obliged to rescue him. Mrs Pritchard cannot have been a very sympathetic helpmate at the time. There is a discernible malevolence in the method of killing her which he chose. He poisoned her, very slowly and painfully, with doses of antimony and aconite.