Authors: Brian Bailey
An old woman of the name of Campbell, from Ireland, came to Edinburgh some days ago, in search of a son, whom she found, and who afterwards went out of town, in search of work. She took up her lodgings on Friday, in the house of a man named Burt or Burke, in the West Port. It appears that there was a merry making in Burke’s that night; at least the noise of music and dancing was heard, and it is believed the glass circulated pretty freely among the party. The old woman, it is said, with reluctance joined in the mirth, and also partook of the liquor, and was to sleep on straw alongside of Burke’s bed. During the night shrieks were heard; but the neighbours paid no attention, as such sounds were not unusual in the house. In the morning, however, a female, on going into Burke’s, observed the old woman lying as if dead, some of the straw being above her. She did not say any thing, or raise any alarm; but, in the evening, circumstances transpired which led to a belief that all was not right, for, by this time the body had been removed out of the house, and, it was suspected, had been sold to a public lecturer. Information was conveyed to the police, and the whole party taken into custody. After a search, the body was found yesterday morning in the lecture room of a respectable practitioner, who, the instant he was informed of the circumstance, not only gave it up, but afforded every information in his power. The body is now in the police-office, and will be examined by medical gentlemen in the course of the day. There are some very strong and singular circumstances connected with the case, which have given rise to the suspicions.
3
Professor Christison and Mr Newbigging, a local surgeon, carried out a post-mortem examination and concluded that there was justification for a suspicion of death by suffocation, such as strangling, smothering or throttling, but that this could not be proved by medical science. Christison, later Sir Robert, was then a young Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University. He became one of the leading early figures in forensic medicine, partly on the strength of his meticulous examination and presentation of the evidence in the case of Mrs Docherty. He soon had a reputation as an unimpeachable witness. Many years later he became President of the British Medical Association and was one of Queen Victoria’s physicians.
Burke, Hare and the two women were charged with murder and brought before Mr George Tait, the Sheriff-substitute, later that day. The prisoners then made statements in the presence of Mr Tait and the Procurator-Fiscal, Archibald Scott. Burke told a ludicrous tale about a hooded stranger in a greatcoat who came on the Friday evening asking where he could get a pair of shoes mended, and Burke took him home. While he was mending the shoes, the man remarked about the place being quiet and asked Burke if he could leave a box there for a short time. Burke agreed, and the man went out and came back shortly with a box, which he put down near the bed, untying the rope round it. Burke, who had his back to the man, heard him handling straw. When he had paid for his shoes and left, Burke found a dead body among the straw. He did not notice whether it was a man or a woman! He left it there until the stranger came back for it the following day, bringing a porter with him. He said he would give Burke two guineas for his trouble in keeping the body for him. He proposed to take it to one of the doctors in Surgeons’ Square, and Burke put him in touch with Paterson. He was then shown the dead body of a woman in the police office, and he thought it was the body under the bed, but it had ‘no likeness to Mary Docherty, who is not nearly so tall’. Mrs Docherty had left his house at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon he said, seen by Nelly McDougal, Margaret Laird and Mrs Connoway, and had not come back. He admitted that he had splashed whisky about to prevent any smell from the dead body, and said that blood on the pillow-slip resulted from his having struck Nelly McDougal on the nose. Blood on the sheet was due to the fact that Nelly was menstruating at the time. Burke was then asked if the man who brought the body, and afterwards came back with the porter, was William Hare. Burke said it was!
Nelly McDougal said that Mary Docherty had left at two o’clock on Friday afternoon. The corpse in the police office was not hers, as it had grey hair, whereas Mrs Docherty’s was dark. McDougal had no knowledge, she said, of a body being in her house, until she was arrested. She had neither spoken to Gray about it, nor offered him money to keep quiet. Her explanation of the blood on the sheet and pillow-slip agreed precisely with Burke’s.
A week later, on 10 November, Burke and McDougal made further statements. Burke now said that Mrs Docherty was in his house on the Friday, not Saturday, and during their Hallowe’en drinking, he and Hare had fallen out and started fighting. Their wives tried to separate them, and when the fighting stopped, they realised that Mrs Docherty was missing. They searched and found her lying dead under the straw. Burke and Hare then decided to strip the body and sell it to the surgeons, and later stuffed the stiff corpse into a box, which may have caused some bruising. They roped it up with a clothes line and got the porter McCulloch to carry it to Surgeons’ Square. Burke said that he had not done any harm to the woman, and his opinion was that she had been ‘suffocated by laying herself down among the straw in a state of intoxication’. Young Broggan, Burke added, had no knowledge of any of this business. McDougal’s second statement was brief and consistent with her first, adding only that she had thrust Mrs Docherty out of the door by the shoulders after she had become troublesome, and never saw her afterwards.
We have no exact knowledge of either Hare’s or Maggie Laird’s original statements, but the
Courant
reported that Hare had accused the lad Broggan of striking Mrs Docherty in the passage and killing her.
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The authorities were satisfied, however, that John Broggan was entirely innocent, and he was released. Burke, McDougal, Hare and Laird were kept in custody in the Calton jail throughout November, while further enquiries were being made and legal tactics considered.
The Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae, was faced with a dilemma. The prosecuting authorities had a corpse, an apparent motive, several witnesses, and four suspects in prison. But unfortunately, the medical men were unable to say with certainty that the woman had been murdered, and bearing in mind the reluctance of Scottish juries to convict on circumstantial evidence when the sentence would be death, they could not count on a successful outcome. Moreover, even if it were established beyond doubt that the woman
had
been murdered, it would be impossible to prove who had committed it.
Sir William decided at last that the only way in which any of the four could be brought to justice was for one to testify against the others. He came to the conclusion that the principal party in the affair was William Burke. Although it would be possible for McDougal to testify against Burke, since she was not married to him, she was simply saying nothing. And Margaret Laird could not testify against her husband, Hare. So Hare was the only choice, and the Lord Advocate authorised an approach to be made to him. He may well have been encouraged in this tactic by Hare’s readiness to implicate the innocent boy, Broggan, in the murder.
On 1 December, Hare was offered immunity from prosecution if he would disclose the facts about Mrs Docherty’s murder and any other such crimes committed by Burke. Hare needed little persuading to turn King’s Evidence, and he must have sung like a canary, detailing the series of murders and laying all the blame, naturally, on his erstwhile friend. As Hare could not testify against his wife, Margaret Laird was also guaranteed her freedom.
Rae had already written to the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, to inform him that an Irishman was to be tried on
two
counts of murder only, ‘as we are most anxious to conceal from the public the extent to which such crimes have been carried, and of which fortunately little idea is at present entertained’.
Outrage quickly grew among the population as the gang’s activities were revealed in the newspapers, which printed sensational and inaccurate stories to boost their circulations, and the flames of anger were fanned by popular broadsheets sold in the streets. All missing persons were suddenly assumed to be victims of the murderous partners, and streetwise children went round chanting a new rhyme of monosyllabic words and names:
Up the close and doon the stair,
But and ben
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wi’ Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox the boy who buys the beef.
Among those who learned of the arrest of Burke and Hare was Janet Brown. She went to the police, told them about the disappearance of her friend Mary Paterson and identified the prisoners in whose company she had last seen her. And a local baker claimed to have seen one of Constantine Burke’s sons wearing a pair of trousers which he, the baker, had given to Daft Jamie.
The Lord Advocate was now confident that a successful case could be brought against Burke for the murders of Mary Paterson, James Wilson and Mrs Docherty, and against Nelly McDougal in the case of Mrs Docherty. Within a few days of Hare’s treachery, Burke and McDougal were committed for trial.
NOTES
1
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
, March 1829.
2
Thomas Ireland (publisher),
West Port Murders
, (Edinburgh, 1829), pp. 121–22.
3
Edinburgh Evening Courant
, 3 November 1828.
4
Ibid, 6 November 1828.
5
‘But and ben’ – a two-roomed house; also used as an adverb meaning ‘back and forth’.
7. TRIAL
W
ith characteristic Presbyterian indifference to the most important holy day in the Christian calendar, the trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal commenced at ten o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve, before the High Court of Justiciary in Parliament Square. Burke and McDougal had been brought from the Calton jail the night before to the cells below the court, in the imposing building where the Scottish Parliament had sat until the union with England in 1707, and where the king, George IV, wearing the kilt and the Royal Stuart tartan, had been entertained at a magnificent banquet in 1822. The Parliament Hall was lined with statues and portraits of eminent Scots beneath a heavy hammerbeam roof of Scottish oak, and was divided into two parts by a screen, the High Court occupying one end and the Sheriff’s Court the other.
The huge, loyal crowd which had cheered the king along the New Town’s Princes Street six years earlier now reverted to a vast incensed mob in the Old Town’s Lawnmarket, High Street and Cowgate, clamouring to get into the courtroom. Local police were reinforced by a contingent of 300 drafted in to help preserve the public peace and keep the approaches to the court clear. Troops of cavalry and infantry were on standby in case of disturbances which the police could not contain. By nine o’clock the court was full to overflowing, and the first public act of the Lord Justice-Clerk, the Right Honourable David Boyle, was to order the opening of a window, which let a cold winter draught through the stuffy crowded room. Throughout the trial many of the lawyers wrapped their gowns round their heads, giving them the appearance of an assembly of monks.
Lord Boyle was supported on the bench by Lords Pitmilly, Meadowbank and Mackenzie. The prosecution team was led by the Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae. The leading defence counsel were Sir James Moncrieff, the Dean of Faculty, for Burke, and Mr Henry Cockburn for McDougal. It was claimed as a tribute to Scottish justice that such distinguished counsel gratuitously represented the destitute prisoners, but there were hints in the press that fees were paid from some anonymous source. Even so, ‘Had they been tried in England, not all the wealth of the Indies would at that date have rendered it possible for counsel to do more than cross-examine witnesses on their behalf.’
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A list of fifty-five witnesses had been drawn up by the prosecution, chief of whom would be William Hare. The others included Dr Knox, his students Fergusson, Jones and Miller and his former assistant Paterson, as well as Janet Brown and Burke’s brother Constantine, whose sons Richard and William were also listed. Items produced in evidence would include clothing belonging to all three victims as well as a linen sheet and pillow-case, a plan of certain houses in Wester Portsburgh, and a brass snuff-box and spoon.
The lengthy indictments accused Burke of murdering Mary Paterson or Mitchell, James Wilson, and ‘Madgy or Margery, or Mary McGonegal or Duffie, or Campbell, or Docherty’. Helen McDougal was accused only of the last crime. Counsel for the defendants (or ‘pannels’ in Scottish law) immediately objected to the trial proceeding on this accumulation of separate charges, which would be prejudicial to both prisoners.
Mr Patrick Robertson, for Burke, stated that, so far as he could discover from the records of the court, ‘this is the first case in which it was ever attempted, on the part of the prosecutor, to charge, in one libel, three murders, committed at different times’. He argued that it was inconsistent with the principles of Scottish law to force a pannel to defend himself against three unconnected charges of murder at once, and that the minds of the jury members would inevitably be prejudiced against Burke in one case by evidence produced in connection with the others, and against McDougal by evidence in connection with alleged crimes she was not charged with. He pointed out that in English courts it was not customary to combine two felonies in the same indictment. Although the prisoners were to be tried under the law of Scotland, it surely could not be wrong to ascertain ‘how those persons would be dealt with in the other end of the island’.
2
Mr Robertson thought their Lordships would ‘not be inclined to form a precedent, which, in the
first
place, would be injurious to the law of the country; and, in the
next
place, would be injurious to the unhappy persons now brought to this bar’.
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