THE HISTORY OF BURKE AND HARE

THE HISTORY
OF
BURKE AND HARE

And of the Resurrectionist Times

A FRAGMENT FROM THE CRIMINAL ANNALS OF SCOTLAND

BY
GEORGE MAC GREGOR, F.S.A. Scot.,
Author of “The History of Glasgow,” and Editor of
“The Collected Writings of Dougal Graham.”

CONTAINING SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

GLASGOW: THOMAS D. MORISON
LONDON: HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO.
1884

PREFACE.

The history of the Scottish nation has, unfortunately, been stained with many foul crimes, perpetrated either to serve personal ends and private ambition, or under the pretence of effecting the increased welfare of the people. These have given life to a large amount of literature, much of it from the pens of some of the most distinguished legal and antiquarian authors the country has produced, such as Arnot, Pitcairn, MacLaurin, Burton, and others. But of all the criminal events that have occurred in Scotland, few have excited so deep, widespread, and lasting an interest as those which took place during what have been called the Resurrectionist Times, and notably, the dreadful series of murders perpetrated in the name of anatomical science by Burke and Hare. The universal interest excited at the time of these occurrences, also, has called forth a great quantity of fugitive literature; and as no narrative of any considerable size, detailing in a connected and chronological form the events which bulk so largely in the history of the country, had yet appeared, the Author considered a volume such as the present was required to fill up an important hiatus in the criminal annals of his country.

In the preparation of this work the Author has had a double purpose before him. He has sought not only to record faithfully the lives and crimes of Burke and Hare, and their two female associates, but also to present a general view of the Resurrectionist movement from its earliest inception until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, when the violation of the sepulchres of the dead for scientific purposes was rendered unnecessary, and absolutely inexcusable. He has, in carrying out this object, endeavoured to give due prominence to the medical and legal aspects of the whole subject; and to the social effects produced by the movement throughout the century and a half during which it flourished in Scotland. In order to do this the Author has consulted books, newspapers, and documents of all kinds, and has sought, where that was possible, to supplement his information by oral tradition. But in addition, he has, in the body of the work, and in the Appendix, brought together stray ballads, and illustrative cases and notes, which help to give a better and fuller understanding of the historical aspect of the question, and of its influence on the minds of the great bulk of the Scottish people.

The Author has to express his thanks to the many gentlemen who have kindly allowed him access to their rare and valuable collections, from which he derived great assistance in the course of his investigations.

Glasgow, May, 1884.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

KEY TO ILLUSTRATIONS

APPEARING OPPOSITE PAGES [85] AND [86] RESPECTIVELY.

References to View of the Interior of Burke’s Room, as it appeared upon the Day after the Trial.

1. The bed, or wooden frame, full of rags and filth.

1. Straw under it.

2. The straw under which the body of the old woman was hid.

3. A chair, on which Hare pretended that he sat during the murder.

4. Two wooden stools.

5. An iron pot, full of potatoes.

6. A cupboard, or wall-press.

7. A window, large for such a den, looking towards the Castle Hill.

8. Implements for shoe-making, old shoes, and rubbish.

A fac-simile of Burke’s signature, carefully traced from his first declaration of 3rd November, 1828.

References to Plan of Houses in Wester Portsburgh, and Places adjacent, reduced from the Plan drawn by Mr. James Braidwoood, 22, Society, 20th November, 1828.

A. House possessed by William Burke.

B. Bed in Burke’s house, filled with case straw, covered with a blanket.

C. The dark mark near C represents the appearance of blood on the floor of Burke’s house.

D. House possessed by Mrs. Connoway.

E. House possessed by Mrs. Law.

F F F F. The dotted line on which the four letters F are placed shows the passage from the street and flat above, and corresponds with the passage in the sunk floor.

G. Steps and door to back court.

H. Passage and stair leading from back court to Weaver’s Close.

I. House possessed by William Hare.

K. Stable possessed by William Hare.

L. Shop possessed by Mr. Rymer.

M. The loose straw at the foot of the bed.

N. The dotted lines S S S S represent the direction of Paterson’s house, distant 208 feet from the point N.

O O O. Private passage to Burke’s house.

P P P P. Common passage to all the houses and cellars on the sunk flat.

R R R R. The strong line marked with the letter R shows the different entries to Burke’s house.

THE HISTORY

OF

BURKE AND HARE.

INTRODUCTION.

The Resurrectionist Movement—Its Contributing Causes and Results.

There is perhaps no portion of the social history of Scotland which possesses greater interest of a variety of kinds than that which relates to the rise, development, and ultimate downfall of the resurrectionist movement. To many persons now living, but who are nearing the verge of the unseen world, the interest is in a sense contemporary, for their younger days were spent under the shadow which so long overspread our country; to those of a later generation the traditions—perhaps the events are scarcely of sufficiently remote occurrence to call the stories of them traditions—of that dreadful time served to make their young imaginations vivid, and render them more obedient to behests of their parents or nurses. How many can remember the time when they were frightened into good behaviour by the threat that, if they did not do what they were told, “Burke and Hare” would take them away; or who, passing by a churchyard on a dark night, with the light of the moon casting a gruesome glamour over the tombstones, recalled to mind the tales of the doings of the terrible resurrectionists. How many children—some of them old men and women now—in their play chanted the lines—

“Burke an’ Hare
Fell doun the stair,
Wi’ a body in a box,
Gaun to Doctor Knox”;

who trembled, even during the day, when they passed the houses occupied by these two men in the West Port of Edinburgh, remembering the fearful deeds that were enacted there. But in addition to the extraordinary impression which the resurrectionist movement made on the minds of the people of Scotland, it must be admitted to have had one good result. In the face of restrictive laws it gave an impetus to anatomical study, which was in the first instance beneficial to humanity; and in the second to the medical schools of this country, notably to the Edinburgh medical school, which attained great reputation at the period when the majority of the subjects for dissection were obtained in a manner revolting to the best feelings of humanity.

This practice of violating sepulchres, which must ever be regarded as one of the foulest blots on Scottish civilization, may be said to have had several contributing causes. The principal of these is admitted on all hands to have been the discovery on the part of the medical faculty that the knowledge they possessed of the human frame was founded rather upon uncertain tradition than upon empirical science; that they were practically ignorant of anatomy; and that if they hoped to make any advance in the art of healing human diseases they must devote more attention to a minute study of the dead subject. Having arrived at this conclusion—and it is a wonder they did not do so earlier—they were met by a difficulty brought about by prejudice. The people of Scotland, even in the most lawless ages, had an almost superstitious reverence for the dead; a reverence, indeed, which they did not always pay to the living. In this they only showed their human nature, and exhibited those instincts which seem to characterise men of all countries and all times. The “something beyond” the mortal sphere caused a peculiar regard for the dead; their belief in a resurrection was rather material, and it was thought impossible by many that when the last trump should sound the dead could rise if the bodies were cut up in dissection. The bodies of the dead, therefore, were carefully entombed to await the last call. The almost insurmountable difficulty, then, that presented itself to the doctors when they awoke out of their dream of ignorance, was where to obtain those subjects upon which they could experiment, and gain that knowledge of which they stood so much in need. The prejudice of the people, it has been stated, was against the subjection of the bodies of their deceased friends to such sacrilegious treatment, even though they were willing, for the most part, to admit that benefit was to be derived from it. As a consequence, science and prejudice came into violent conflict, and the war was carried on by the representatives of the former with a determined persistency that led more or less directly to shocking crime, but ultimately to a modus vivendi that was for the interests of all concerned. These were the two main causes of the traffic; but there were others which, while not bearing so directly upon it, greatly aided its development. It received considerable assistance from the remarkable superstitions long attached to graveyards, the stories of ghosts and of wandering spirits

“Doom’d for a certain time to walk the night”;

of spiteful goblins and playful “brownies,” or of the uncanny dabblers in the forbidden art, whose dominion over the world was only during the midnight hour. It was then that the witches met in solemn conclave with the “father of lies” to plot against the peace of humanity, and that the denizens of the nether hell breathed the free air of earth, away from the choking fumes of the infernal brimstone. Such were the beliefs, and it therefore behoved every well-conducted person to keep the house after night-fall; and when any ventured abroad during the magic hours the working of superstition on minds either naturally credulous, or muddled with deep potations at the village tavern, or both, was sure to produce all kinds of apparitions, more or less fearful. Through this means the men employed by the surgeons to obtain bodies for dissection,—men, generally, whose utter absence of moral principle gave them the power to discredit the fears of their more conscientious countrymen,—were enabled for a time to go about their dreadful work with great immunity. Gradually the people threw off their superstitious feelings about church-yards, and considering themselves safe from unhallowed influences by the presence of numbers, they took guard in the protection of the bodies of their friends. Many skirmishes ensued between these watchers and the resurrectionists, and these have given to Scottish literature a large collection of anecdotes of rather a unique description. Then the large iron cages, or railings, placed over graves, give our churchyards an aspect peculiarly their own. All these matters have made an impression on the Scottish mind which it will yet take generations to efface.

There is, however, another aspect in which the resurrectionist movement can be regarded. It gave rise to a series of the most shocking crimes, committed in Edinburgh by Burke and Hare and their female confederates; and the discovery of these, again, brought about a trial occupying a most prominent and curious place in the annals of Scottish criminal law. In that trial legal points of the utmost importance were involved; and in connection with it the most eminent lawyers of the time were engaged. Were it only because of the great trial with which the movement may be said to have terminated it is deserving the attention of all interested in the history of Scotland. Further than that, it brought about the passing of a measure which relieved the medical faculty of the restrictions to inquiry and investigation under which they had so long laboured, and tended towards the development of a science in which humanity is too deeply interested to neglect.

CHAPTER I.

Early Prohibition of Dissection—Shakespeare’s Tomb—The Progress of Anatomy—Curious Incident in Edinburgh—An Old Broadside Ballad on Body-Snatching—Tumults in Edinburgh and Glasgow—Female “Burkers.”

At the first blush one is apt to think that the resurrectionist movement, culminating in Scotland by the apprehension of Burke and Hare, and the execution of the former, is of modern growth. That this, however, is not the case, is shown by a little investigation into the records of the past. There are numerous instances, in all civilised countries, if not of active body-snatching, at least of prohibitions of it or anything akin. The early Christians put epitaphs on the tombs of deceased relatives calling the curses of heaven upon the sacrilegious hand that dared disturb the ashes of the dead; Pope Boniface VIII. issued a bull condemning even the profane perforation of a skeleton; and who knows but the well-known inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb, written long before the great poet had become the object of a world’s regard, may have been dictated by a similar feeling:—

“Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here:
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.”

Then, again, the desire expressed by the dying Bruce that his heart should be cut from his body and taken to Jerusalem by the faithful Douglas, called forth the malediction of Pope Benedict XII. Mahomet, also, in the pages of the Koran, has forbidden dissection. All these instances show a most pronounced antipathy to the mutilation of the human body after death; and argue two things, first, that it was instinctive, and not a trait in the character of any particular nation or type of civilization; and, second, that unless a molesting cause existed, there would have been no need for the prohibitions. But the advancement of science was not to be bound down by this superstitious reverence for the dead; and, ultimately, in the sixteenth century, with the revival of learning, the bodies of criminals and unclaimed paupers were granted to surgeons for dissection, but then so sparingly that little progress in anatomy was made. The ignorance of the functions of the human body was so great, that the most haphazard methods of cure were adopted. If a sick person recovered it was more by chance than science, and if he died there is little doubt that death was hastened by the ignorance of his so called medical attendant, who clung tenaciously to the traditions of his profession, be the result kill or cure.

The first indication of anything approaching body-snatching in Scotland is to be found in the Fountainhall MS., in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. As the entry is of more than ordinary interest it may be quoted in extenso:—

“6 Februarii 1678.—Four Ægyptians [Gypsies] of the name of Shaw were this day hanged, the father and three sones, for a slaughter committed by them upon one of the Faws (another tribe of these vagabonds, worse than the mendicantes validi mentioned in the code), in a drunken squabble, made by them in a randevouz they had at Romanno, with a designe to unite their forces against the clans of Browns and Bailzies, that were come over from Ireland to chasse them back again, that they might not share in their labors; but in their ramble they discorded, and committed the foresaid murder, and sundry of them of both sydes ware apprehended.... Thir four being throwen all unto on hole digged for them in the Grayfrier Church Yeard, with their clothes on; the nixt morning the youngest of the three sones (who was scarce sixteen) his body was missed, and found to be away. Some thought he being last thrown over the ladder, and first cut downe, and in full vigor, and no great heap of earth, and lying uppermost, and not so ready to smother, the fermentation of the blood, and heat of the bodies under him, might cause him rebound and throw off the earth, and recover ere the morning, and steall away; which, if true, he deserves his life, tho’ the magistrats, or their bourreau, deserved a reprimande; but others, more probably, thought his body was stolen away by some chirurgeon, or his servant, to make ane anatomicale dissection on; which was criminal to take at their owne hand, since the magistrats would not have refused it; and I hear the chirurgeons affirme, the towne of Edinburgh is obliged to give them a malefactor’s body once a year for that effect, and its usual in Paris, Leyden, and other places to give them; also some of them that dyes in hospitals.”

The obligation mentioned in this quotation as lying on the city of Edinburgh, was made under the charter granted by the Town Council to the Surgeons in 1505. This grant of one body in the year would, however, be of little value, and the inquiring spirit that was abroad gradually came to feel that the privilege was little better than none at all. In the last decade of the seventeenth century strenuous efforts were being made to establish a school of anatomy in the city. Alexander Monteith, one of the most eminent physicians of the time, made the following proposal to the Town Council:—“We seek the liberty of opening the bodies of poor persons who die in Paul’s Workhouse, and have none to bury them; and also agree to wait on these poor for nothing, and bury them at our own charge, which now the town does. I do propose if this be granted to make better improvements in anatomy in a short time than have been made by Leyden in thirty years.” Monteith had studied at Leyden. The Edinburgh Faculty were alarmed at the proposal, because they felt that, if it were approved, a privilege which they had hitherto enjoyed as a corporation would be given in a much more extended form to one of their number; and they accordingly put forward an application in which they sought “the bodies of foundlings who dye betwixt the tyme that they are weaned and their being put to schools and trades; also the dead bodies of such as are dead-born, which are exposed; also, suicides, a violent death, and have none to own them; likewise the bodies of such as are put to death by sentence of the magistrates.” Both applications were granted, under condition, however, that the dissections were only to be made during the winter, and that the intestines were to be buried within forty-eight hours after the body was obtained, and the rest within ten days. Such restrictions were unworthy the enlightened policy the authorities were pursuing; and through the very act by which they fed the spirit of inquiry they created an increased appetite for anatomical research, which quickly went beyond foolish conditions, and ultimately led many to adopt the practice of body-snatching. Even yet the supply of bodies was unequal to the demand, and the doctors’ apprentices resorted to robbing Greyfriars Churchyard, then the chief place of burial in the city. Their work was done very stealthily, for no one except the most hardy would in that age venture near a churchyard after the “gloaming.” The matter at last became known, and the College of Surgeons, on the 20th May, 1711, drew up a minute protesting against the practice, saying that “of late there has been a violation of sepulchres in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard by some who most unchristianly has been stealing, or at least attempting to carry away, the bodies of the dead out of their graves.” This discovery caused a terrible sensation in the city, and it spread throughout Scotland. A broadside on the event was printed and hawked about the country. As it marks an important step in the progress of the movement, the quotation of such a lengthy document will be excused:—

“An Account of the most horrid and unchristian actions of the Gravemakers in Edinburgh, their raising and selling of the Dead, abhorred by Turks and Heathens, found out in this present year 1711, in the Month of May.

Dear Friends and Christians, what shall I say,
Behold, the dawning of the latter day
Into this place most bright casts forth its rays—
The like was never seen by mortal eyes.
Methink I hear the latter trumpet sound,
When emptie graves into this place is found,
Of young and old, which is most strange to me,
What kind of resurrection this may be.
I thought God had reserved this power alone
Unto himsell, till he erect’d his throne
Into the clouds, with his attendance by,
That he might judge the world in equity.
But now I see the contrar in our land,
Since men do raise the dead at their own hand;
And for to please their curiosities
They them dissect and make anatomies.
Such monsters of mankind was never known,
As in this place is daily to be shown;
Who, for to gain some worldly vanities,
Are guilty of such immoralities.
The Turks and Pagans would amazed stand,
To see such crimes committed in a land,
As among Christians is to be found,
Especially in Edinburgh doth abound.
There is a rank of persons in this place
That strive to run with speed a wicked race:
They trample rudely on God’s holy law,
And of his judgment they stand not in aw;
For those that are laid in their graves at rest,
This wicked crew they do their dust molest.
Dead corps out of their graves they steal at night,
Because such actions do abhore the light.
The heathen nations, for ought I read,
Was never found for to molest the dead,
That were their kindred, and among them born;
But we to nations all may be a scorn:
In that such crimes is perpetrated here,
As both the living and the dead do deer.
These monsters of mankind, who made the graves,
To the chirurgeons became hyred slaves;
They rais’d the dead again out of the dust,
And sold to them, to satisfy their lust.
As I’m inform’d, the chirurgions did give
Fourty shillings for each one they receive:
And they their flesh and bones assunder part,
Which wounds their living friends unto the heart;
To think that any of their kindred born
Unto the nations, should become a scorn;
For they their bones to other nations send—
As I’m informed, this is their very end.
How may now all the nations us deride,
And call us poor, since that we sell our dead,
Some coyn to get, the living to maintain;
The like in any nation ne’re was seen.
The godly sowe their dust on such cold ground
As do our kirks and chappels compass round,
That they may get their dust in such a field,
So well refin’d, that it to them may yield
A crop most plentiful at the last day,
When they from dust must haste and come away.
But now their dust they take out of the ground,
So that nothing but empty graves is found.
I’m very sorry that such things should be
Practis’d by folk professing piety;
And the religion should be wounded so
By any who under a name do go.
But still I see profession is no grace,
As does appear into the present case;
But more especially at the last day,
When all the world shall be put in a fray,
When stars shall fall out of the firmament,
And sun and moon out of their orbs be rent,
And all this earth into a flame shall burn,
And eliments like liquid mettals run,
And all mankind before God’s throne shall come,
That He may justice do unto each one—
Then shall the separation be made
Between them that are good and that are bad:
The good receiv’d to everlasting glore,
The bad cast down to hell for evermore.
All who to wrong the saints do still desire,
Dead or alive, shall have hell for their hyre,
Unless with speed they do repent of sin,
And do another course of life begin.
But I shall say no more upon this head,
Hoping henceforth they will not raise the dead,
But suffer them to rest into their beds,
And won their bread by following other trades.”

William Burke.
(From a Sketch taken in Court)

Neither such a production as this, nor the mild protest from the College of Surgeons, was likely to put a stop to a practice which was being found useful on the one side and profitable on the other. Dr. Alexander Monro, “primus,” the great anatomist, became Demonstrator of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh, and his fame brought around him a large number of students. These seem to have been making depredations on the churchyards in the city and neighbourhood, and the College of Surgeons again took action, this time by ordering, on the 24th January, 1721, the insertion of a clause in the indenture of apprentices binding them not to engage in the violation of graves. Four years later, however—in April, 1725—the practice had grown to such an extent as to cause popular commotion. The people rose in angry protest against the violation of the sepulchres of their dead, and before the authorities could quell the disturbance the windows of Dr. Monro’s anatomical establishment were destroyed, while the inmates stood in imminent danger of their lives.

Notwithstanding the extreme views the people of Scotland held against the resurrectionists, as the body-snatchers were named, their horrible trade continued to prosper, and it received many recruits. The surgeons, even, gradually dropped into the business; perhaps not themselves engaging in it personally, but at least sanctioning and approving of it by the purchase of the bodies offered them. But besides these, a class of men became resurrectionists as a matter of trade, and no churchyard in the country was safe from their depredations. The law was comparatively powerless, or took refuge under the pretext of the necessity for subjects being procured, but it took no steps to produce a remedy. The people, therefore, took matters into their own hands, and were not slow in punishing any one suspected of body-snatching, as the following story from the Scots’ Magazine for 1742 will show. On the 9th of March of that year the body of a man, Alexander Baxter by name, which had been interred in the West Kirkyard of Edinburgh, was found in a house adjoining the shop of a surgeon named Martin Eccles, in that city. The popular indignation had been raised by the suspicion, amounting almost to certainty, that the churchyards were being desecrated, and it needed very little to cause a tumult. The Portsburgh drum was seized, and beat through the Cowgate. The populace demolished the contents of Eccles’ shop, smashed the windows of the houses of other surgeons, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the authorities were able to quell the riot. Eccles and some of his apprentices were brought before the court charged with the offence of being accessory to the lifting of bodies, but the charge was abandoned for want of proof. Later, on the 18th of the same month, the house of a gardener named Peter Richardson, in Inveresk, was burned by the people on the suspicion that he had some hand in pilfering the village churchyard of its dead; and on the 26th, a chairmaster and carrier were banished the city of Edinburgh for being in possession of a street-chair containing a body, and the chair itself was burned by the public executioner under the order of the magistrates. In the July following, under the sentence of the High Court of Justiciary, John Samuel, a gardener in Grangegateside, was publicly whipped through Edinburgh for having been detected at the Potterrow-port, in the April preceding, selling the corpse of a child which had been buried in Pentland Kirkyard a week before. He was also banished from Scotland for seven years.

In Glasgow, about the same period, a riot of a serious nature occurred. On the 6th of March, 1749, according to the Newcastle Magazine, a disturbance arose in the city on a suspicion in the minds of the citizens that the students in the College had been raising bodies from one of the city graveyards. The windows of the University buildings in the High Street were broken, a large number of people sustained severe injury, and had not the appearance of the military intimidated the mob, the tumult might have assumed much more serious proportions.

But it is curious to notice, in view of the main subject of this work—the history of Burke and Hare—that the crimes of which these men were guilty had a prototype in one committed in Edinburgh between seventy and eighty years before they entered upon their murdering career. In 1752, two women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, were executed for the murder of a boy of eight or nine years of age. They would appear to have been nurses, and they promised to some doctors’ apprentices that they would supply them with a subject, proposing to do so by the abstraction of a body from a coffin, when they were sitting at the death-watch, for it was then the custom—and still is, in some parts of the country—never to leave a corpse in a room alone. They were either unsuccessful in accomplishing this, or were anxious speedily to redeem their promise and obtain their reward, for they took even more reprehensible means to obtain a body. They met the boy and his mother in the street, and invited the woman into a neighbouring house to drink with them. She consented, and while she was sipping her liquor one of them went out to look for the boy. He was discovered leaning over a window, and the woman carried him into her own house, where she suffocated him among the bed-clothes. The mother afterwards searched for her son, but could not find him. Meantime, Torrence and Waldie took the corpse to the surgeon’s rooms, where they were offered two shillings for it, the one who had carried it receiving sixpence additional. They demurred at the lowness of the price, but the students would only increase it by tenpence, which was given them for a “dram.” The facts of the case at length came to light, and the women suffered on the scaffold for their barbarous crime.

CHAPTER II.

Tales of the Resurrectionists—The Students at Work.

What has been related in the preceding chapter are some of the early escapades of the resurrectionists. Throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, these worthies, to call them by a mild name, were the scourge of Scotland, and notwithstanding the utmost vigilance of the people graves were ransacked of their contents and bodies sold to the doctors. But it was in the first three decades of the present century that the horrible trade was in its most flourishing condition. Many tales of the adventures of resurrectionists are told—some of them serious as the subject warrants, others of them amusing in spite of the subject. In this chapter there has been gathered together a number of anecdotes which will illustrate the part the students themselves took in the movement.

Perhaps the Edinburgh district is richer in the tales of the resurrectionists than any other in Scotland. This was only to be expected, for the reputation of the Edinburgh medical school had gone over the world, bringing to it students from all parts. The desire for fame caused a professional rivalry among the teachers, which was taken up by their respective pupils, who were not slow to vie with each other in carrying to the furthest extent the desire to obtain human bodies for dissection. In this they were assisted by the “professional” body-snatchers, and by the beadles and grave-diggers of the churchyards in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Many excursions of this kind were made. Was a body needed? Then several of them joined together, searched out a large bag for the conveyance of the body, and a spade, and their equipment was complete. They had no fear of the watchers who might be set at the churchyard they intended visiting. They trusted to their mother-wit to carry them through any difficulty. At the very worst they could only drop their spoil, and show a clean pair of heels. But here are some of the tales. It would be useless to make any effort to put them in a chronological order. They are stories that have found their way to the public through a variety of sources, without dates, but it is sufficient to know that the events occurred during the present century.

A middle-aged man named Henderson, residing in Leven, Fifeshire, died of fever, and was interred in a neighbouring churchyard. Two young men attending the University of Edinburgh heard of the death, and about a week after the funeral they successfully raised the body from what had been fondly supposed by the relatives of the deceased, to be its last resting-place. While the men were carrying it away, one of them was overtaken by sickness, rendering it necessary that they should seek refuge in an inn at the outskirts of the town. Into this place they carried their ghastly burden, carefully put up in a sack. Curiously enough, the public house formerly belonged to the very man whose corpse they had stolen, and it was then being kept by the widow, for the support of herself and her daughter. The visitors were ushered into a room, in which was a closed-in bed, with wooden door, such as may yet be seen in country houses, and the drink they ordered was taken to them there. No sooner were they fairly begun to discuss the liquor, than the town’s officers roused the landlady, and asked if some thieves who had broken into a neighbouring house had taken refuge on her premises. The men, for some unexplained reason, had by this time taken the body out of the sack, and when they heard the noise made by the constables they threw it inside the bed, and themselves made a hasty retreat by the window. The officers went in chase, but the resurrectionists were too nimble for them and made good their escape. A search was afterwards made in the room occupied by the men, but only the empty bag was found. The widow, however, after the tumult was over, went to the same room to retire for the night, when to her great horror, she found her dead husband lying in the bed which she herself proposed to enter, clad in the grave-clothes she had made with her own hands.

Another story of a somewhat similar adventure is told of Liston, the eminent surgeon, but at this time a student. He had been informed by a country practitioner in one of the villages on the Firth of Forth of the death of a man by a disease whose ravages on his frame should afford some important information to searchers after medical truth. Accordingly, Liston, with one of his companions, dressed themselves as sailors, and set out on board a small boat for the village. There they were joined by the doctor’s apprentice, who was to act as guide. They quickly lifted the body, and placed it in the sack they had brought with them for that purpose. Liston hoisted the ghastly burden on his shoulder, and carried it some distance in the direction of the shore, where their boat was lying. They considered it inadvisable to return to Edinburgh that night, assuming, probably, that if they managed their prize home in the course of the following day their adventure would be more likely to have a satisfactory termination. Accordingly, they placed the bag and its contents behind a thick hedge, where they proposed it should remain until next morning, when they would convey it to the boat. This done, they proceeded to look after their creature comforts, and made their way to a roadside inn. Here they soon made themselves at home. Sitting cosily by the kitchen fire, they gave an order for a supply of good liquor. Under its warming influence they forgot the shocking work in which they had had so recently been engaged, and they amused themselves by flirting with the servant girl, a pretty country damsel. Shortly after midnight, when the companions were proposing to retire to rest, they were alarmed by a drunken shout from the outside, “Ship, ahoy!” The girl explained that the noise came from her sailor brother, Bill, who, she feared, had been drinking. When the door was opened Bill staggered in under the burden of the sack Liston and his comrades had put behind the hedge, and heaving it on the floor he exclaimed—“There, if it ain’t something good, rot them chaps there who stole it.” He said he got the “hulk” behind a hedge when he was lying there trying to wear about upon another tack, and remarking, “Let’s see what’s the cargo,” he proceeded to cut the bag open. The sight of the contents made the girl fly from the house screaming, and she was quickly followed by her brother. The two young men, who had witnessed all under the terror of discovery, seeing a way of escape, took a hasty resolution. There was no safety for them if they remained in the inn, and the turn matters had taken showed them that they must make off as quickly as possible with their booty. Liston again put the dead man on his shoulders and carried him to the boat, leaving the tavern without paying the reckoning. They reached Edinburgh without further adventure, and no doubt they would find some satisfaction in dissecting a subject which was not only interesting in itself but which had also given them so much trouble.

This was not, however, the only exploit of the kind in which Liston was engaged. On another occasion he made an excursion in his boat to Rosyth, near Limekilns, on the Fifeshire shore. The church-yard here, on account of its remoteness from human habitation, and its situation on the side of the Firth, had become a favourite haunt for the resurrectionists. The reason for this expedition was that Liston had seen in a newspaper an account of the drowning and funeral of a sailor belonging to Limekilns. The newspaper also informed its readers, what was the most affecting part of the story, that the young man had been engaged to be married to a girl residing in the district, and that she had become insane through the violence of her grief. This sad calamity had no effect on the young student. He saw in the announcement, melancholy as it was, only the way to obtain a fresh subject, and he took measures to carry the project that had taken possession of his mind into execution. He soon got together a band of kindred spirits, to whom he explained his intentions. The party in the boat arrived at the scene of their intended operations at nightfall, and for a few hours they kept in hiding, until it would be more convenient to begin. As they were about to land they noticed a young woman sitting on a tombstone in the churchyard. Of course they knew nothing of her: but her heart-rending sobs indicated that she was lamenting the death of some loved one whose body had been consigned to its kindred earth. This scene delayed their advance, but it was without effect in turning them from their purpose. At last the woman went away, and the students made towards the place where she had been sitting. They found she had strewn the grave with flowers—“Rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Setting to work they quickly raised the body underneath, and speedily carried it to their boat. The party, one of them wearing in his coat a flower he had picked from the grave, then pushed off; but before they were well away from the scene they again observed the woman running backward and forward in the churchyard with her arms waving, apparently acting under the most intense excitement. Her agonizing cries quickened the use of the oars, and hurriedly they left the heart-rending scene behind them.

Rosyth, it has been said, was a favourite haunt of the resurrectionists, but gradually the people of Limekilns awoke to the knowledge that their Golgotha was being desecrated. A party of students from Edinburgh once made a descent upon the place and narrowly escaped detection. They heard of the burial of a woman who had died in child-bed, and they rowed over the Firth to raise her body. When they got to the grave-yard the weather was wild and stormy; as Burns puts it:—

“The wind blew as ’twad blawn its last;
The rattling showers rose in the blast ...
That night, a child might understand
The Deil had business on his hand.”

After twenty minutes’ work the students had “the tall beauty,” as they had named her, again above the ground, and carried her to the dyke, upon which they laid her until they had climbed over themselves. No sooner had they done this than the plaintive howl of a dog was heard. This incident introduced something approaching a panic among them, and they sought comfort in the contents of their pocket flasks. But their terror was increased by the appearance of a lighted lantern moving about among the tombs. They made for their boat, taking care, however, to carry the corpse with them. The dead woman’s long golden hair had become entangled among the stones, and the rough manner in which they dragged the body away left some of the locks, with a portion of the scalp, on the side of the dyke. They immediately put off, and afterwards saw the lantern stop at the point of the dyke where the body had lain. It was currently reported that the bearer of the lantern was the woman’s husband, and that he recognised the hair entangled on the wall.

The depredators were not, however, always successful in carrying off their spoil. Three students attending the class of Monro, tertius, hired a gig, and paid a visit to a churchyard to the south of Edinburgh, somewhere about the vicinity either of Gilmerton or Liberton. When they had arrived at the place on which they intended to operate, two of them climbed the boundary wall, leaving the others in charge of the conveyance. They soon brought to the surface the recently-buried body of a woman, the wife of a well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately for themselves, these young men were new to the business, and they had omitted to take with them a very necessary instrument of the resurrectionist—a sack. They saw their mistake when it could not be remedied, and they made up their minds to carry the body in the dead-clothes. One of the students had it hoisted on his back, but as he was going along his grasp upon the shroud began to give way, and the feet of the corpse slipped down until they were touching the ground. As the carrier staggered under his burden, the feet of the dead woman came against the ground every now and then, impeding his progress, and causing such a peculiar movement that the youth thought the woman was leaping behind him. The idea struck him that she was alive, and with an oath he flung the body from him on the road, and made for the gig. His companions, as frightened as himself, rushed after him, and the three worthies drove furiously back to the city. Early next morning the farmer was walking along the Edinburgh road, and came upon a white-robed figure stretched out on the footpath. He found it was the body of his wife, clad in her dead-clothes, with eyes wide open and glazed. His first thought was that she had come back to life, and he tried to restore her, though he knew she had been entombed for three days. The task was futile, and he was only restored to reason by the appearance of the Penicuik carrier, who at once divined the cause of the body being where it was found. The woman was buried privately the next night, and an effort was made to hush up the story.

But while the students of the metropolis were active in the body-snatching work, those of Glasgow were following hard behind them. About the year 1813, Mr. Granville Sharp Pattison, a clever anatomist belonging to the western city, drew around him a band of students who committed many a depredation in the graveyards in and near Glasgow. They had rooms in College Street, in the vicinity of the old University, and there they conducted in secret the dissection of the bodies they were fortunate enough to get into their possession. They kept up a system of espionage over the doctors in the city, learning all the details of any peculiar cases they might be attending; and in the event of death there was little scruple about raising a body from which they thought they were likely to gain information. When any expedition was on foot, those who had been chosen to take part in it were careful to show themselves during the evening in some of the most frequented taverns, in order to throw off suspicion, and then they set about their unhallowed work. These men, of course, wrought in secret, but the suspicion gradually grew on the community that the graves of their friends were being violated. At last the suspicion deepened into a certainty, greater vigilance was observed by the city watch in the hope of laying hands upon the offenders, and many people took the precaution of erecting elaborate iron cages over the graves to give greater security against their desecration.

However, an event occurred in Glasgow which caused an extraordinary sensation. A vessel arrived at the Broomielaw with a consignment of what was supposed to be cotton or linen rags. The cargo, done up neatly in bags, was addressed to a huckster in Jamaica Street, but he refused to take delivery, as between £50 and £60 were charged for freight. He said no rags could afford such freightage, and he sent the packages, without examination, back to the Broomielaw. There they lay in a shed for some time, until the dreadful stench proceeding from them caused the city officers to open them. To the horror of the searchers, there were found in them the putrid bodies of men, women, and children. The authorities ordered the remains to be buried in Anderston Churchyard, and this was done. The explanation of the matter was, that owing to the scarcity of subjects for the anatomy classes of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the bodies had been sent from Ireland by some students there; and the price of each corpse varied from ten to twenty guineas each. As ill-luck would have it, the Jamaica Street huckster did not receive the note advising him of the valuable nature of the cargo consigned to him until it was too late, “otherwise,” says old Peter Mackenzie, who tells the story, “there can be little doubt he would have paid the freight money demanded, and pocketed a goodly commission for the traffic entrusted to his care!”

Although this discovery still further alarmed the community, and showed fully the dreadful nature of the conspiracy which those connected with the medical faculty seemed to have entered into against the peace of the country, all the efforts of watchers and others were unable to foil the ingenuity of the students and their accomplices. Notwithstanding the use of trap-guns placed in the churchyards, bodies were stolen, and the trade flourished. There is, however, one instance recorded in which a student was killed by stumbling over one of these guns. He and two companions were in search of a body in the Blackfriars Churchyard, Glasgow. When he dropped dead, his fellow-students were horrified, but the fear of discovery forced them to adopt an extraordinary method of taking away the body of their unfortunate friend. They carried it to the outside of the churchyard, and placed it on its feet against the wall; then they each tied a leg to one of theirs, and taking the corpse by the arms, they passed slowly along the street towards their lodgings, shouting and singing as if they were three roysterers returning from a carouse. Once safely home, the dead man was put to bed, and next morning the story was circulated that during the night the poor fellow had committed suicide. The fatal adventure was thus kept quiet, and it was not until many years afterwards that the true version of the night’s proceedings was made known.

Two other Glasgow students, having heard of an interesting case at the Mearns, a few miles to the south of the city, determined to obtain possession of the body, in order to find out what it was that had baffled the skill of two such eminent practitioners as Drs. Cleghorn and Balmanno. Knowing that their expedition might be spoiled by the numerous watchers, they took the most ample precautions against discovery. They purchased a suit of old clothing in the Saltmarket, and with it they drove out to the Mearns. The body they desired was easily raised, and was carefully dressed in the suit they had provided. Then they placed it between them in the gig, and returned gaily towards the city. The keeper of the Gorbals toll-bar, through which they had to pass, was a suspicious old man, and they thought they might have some difficulty with him. When they came to the bar they halted promptly, and while one was producing the toll-money the other was attending with the utmost solicitude to what he called his “sick friend,” who was, of course, none other than the dead man. The tollman, noticing his efforts, looked at the “sick” friend, and remarked sympathetically, “O! puir auld bodie, he looks unco ill in the face; drive cannily hame, lads, drive cannily.” Once over the bridge, the students lost no time in conveying to their den the prize they had so ingeniously secured. This device, it would seem, was practised with success in other places, for it is said that in Dundee two men conveyed a body, dressed in the clothes of the living, arm in arm, along the streets, and afterwards sent it on to its destination, presumably Edinburgh.

CHAPTER III.

Tales of the Resurrectionists—What the Doctors did.

A record of the share which the doctors themselves took in the resurrectionist work has not been well preserved. Personally they do not seem to have done much, leaving the active operations in the hands of the students and body-snatchers. There was a suspicion, however, that they were not above lending a helping hand in a case of necessity, when they hoped to obtain a special prize. At least they connived at the practice, and undoubtedly benefited by it. It has been more than hinted, that in many outlying places, far from the University centres, a good deal of business of this kind was done by medical men who had with them apprentices whom they had engaged to teach the art and science of medicine, but who found it impossible to do so unless they had, by some means or other, the requisite anatomical subjects. In these country places the churchyards were watched by the villagers in turn, there being a voluntary assessment on the inhabitants for peats to make the fires by which the guardians of the dead sat and smoked their pipes and sipped their whisky during the long dark nights. In a village in the north of Scotland it is a tradition that a medical man set out with his students one night to lift a body which they considered would be of value to them. The watchers, however, surprised them, and the doctor was mortally wounded by a shot fired by one of the defenders. His companions fled, carrying the injured man with them, and a few days afterwards it was announced that he had died by his own hand.

Others, again, laid the churchyards of Ireland under contribution, as a story related by Leighton amply testifies. A young Irish doctor, known under the name of the “Captain,” resided in Surgeon’s Square, Edinburgh, and many a barrel containing the bodies of his compatriots arrived by boat at Leith addressed to him, and he disposed of them to his friends. He was in the habit of telling how, when at home, he relieved his want of a “subject” in a rather clever way. He had been attending a young man who ultimately died and was honestly interred. It struck him that the body was precisely what he wanted, and he drove off to the churchyard for it. On the way back he met the lad’s mother, who asked him if it were “all right wid the grave ov poor Pat?” The “Captain” assured her it was, and drove her home in his gig, which also contained her son’s corpse. “I dhrove,” said he, “the good lady home agin without breaking a bone of hir body, and Pat never said a word.” Once he addressed the body of a woman, lying on one of the Edinburgh dissecting tables,—“Ah, Misthress O’Neil! did I spare the whisky on you, which you loved so well,—and didn’t you lave me a purty little sum to keep the resurrectionists away from you,—and didn’t I take care of you myself? and by J—s you are there, and don’t thank me for coming over to see you.”

A somewhat amusing conflict took place between the students of Drs. Cullen and Monro for the possession of the body of Sandy M‘Nab, a lame street singer, well known in Edinburgh. He died in the Infirmary, and Cullen and several others placed the body in a box, in order to raise it by a rope to their rooms above. Some of the students under Monro, impelled by a similar motive, were searching for the body, and they came upon it in the box. They shifted it to the other side of the yard, intending to lift it over the wall, but they were observed and attacked by their rivals. A great fight followed, until at last the attacking party had to retire, leaving victory—which meant possession of Sandy’s body—with the original body-snatchers.

The doings of the students of Glasgow has already been mentioned, and the influence which Dr. Pattison had in making body-lifting popular among them has at least been indicated. Matters in that city were at last brought to a crisis, and the doings of this gentleman and his colleagues came to light. The Ramshorn and Cathedral churchyards were being robbed of their silent inhabitants almost nightly, and the greatest excitement prevailed in consequence throughout the city. Two deaths from what were considered peculiar causes occurred in Glasgow about the beginning of December, 1813. On the afternoon of the 13th of that month both the bodies were interred, one in the Ramshorn and the other in the Cathedral churchyard. The students accordingly made preparations for raising both of them. The expedition to the Cathedral was highly successful, for in addition to the corpse they went specially for, the young anatomists put another in their sacks, and made a safe journey to their rooms. In the Ramshorn yard, however, the work had been gone about rather noisily, and the attention of a policeman stationed in the vicinity having been attracted, he raised the alarm. The students escaped, but they were seen to disappear in the neighbourhood of the College. The search was stopped for the night, but next day the news spread throughout the whole community. Intense alarm prevailed, and the Chief Constable, James Mitchell, was besieged with inquiries. Many persons visited the graves of their friends to see if all were right. The brother, or some other relative, of the woman—Mrs. M‘Alister by name—who had been lifted from the Ramshorn, quickly found that her body had been stolen. No sooner was this discovery made than a large crowd rushed to the College, and gave vent to their feelings by breaking the windows of the house occupied by Dr. James Jeffrey, then professor of anatomy in the University. The police had to be called to suppress the tumult. At last the magistrates, forced to action by the strength of public opinion, issued a search-warrant empowering the officers of the law to enter, by force, if necessary, every suspected place, in order to find the body of Mrs. M‘Alister, or of any other person. The officers were accompanied by Mr. James Alexander, surgeon dentist, who had attended the lady to the day of her death, and also by two of her most intimate acquaintances. In the course of their search they visited the rooms of Dr. Pattison, in College Street, where they found the doctor and several of his assistants. They were shown over the apartments with all apparent freedom, but they discovered nothing. They had left the house when Mr. Alexander thought they should have examined a tub, seemingly filled with water, which stood in the middle of the floor of one of the rooms. They returned accordingly, and the water was emptied out. At the bottom of the tub were found a jawbone with several teeth attached, some fingers, and other parts of a human body. The dentist identified the teeth as those he had himself fitted into Mrs. M‘Alister’s mouth, and one of the relatives picked out a finger which he said was the very finger on which Mrs. M‘Alister wore her wedding ring. Pattison and his companions were immediately taken into custody. They were removed to jail amid the execrations of the mob, who were with difficulty restrained from executing summary vengeance upon them. This done, the officers dug up the flooring of the rooms, and underneath they found the remains of several bodies, among them portions of what was believed to be the corpse of Mrs. M‘Alister. The parts were carefully sealed up in glass receptacles for preservation as productions against the accused at their trial. On Monday, 6th June, 1814, Dr. Granville Sharp Pattison, Andrew Russell, his lecturer on surgery, and Messrs. Robert Munro and John M‘Lean, students, were arraigned before Lord Justice Boyle, and Lords Hermand, Meadowbank, Gillies, and Pitmilly, in the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, charged under an indictment which set forth, particularly, that the grave of Mrs. M‘Alister, in the Ramshorn churchyard, Glasgow, “had been ruthlessly or feloniously violated by the prisoners, and her body taken to their dissecting rooms, where it was found and identified.” The prisoners were defended by two eminent men—John Clerk and Henry Cockburn. The evidence of the prosecution was clearly against the accused, but the counsel of the defence brought forward proof which as clearly showed that some mistake had been made with the productions. They proved to the satisfaction of the law at least, that the body, or portions of the body, produced in court, and which were libelled in the indictment, were not portions of the body of Mrs. M‘Alister. This lady had been married and had borne children; the productions were portions of the body of a woman who had never borne children. The result was an acquittal. So strong, however, did public feeling run, that Pattison had to emigrate to America, where he attained to an eminence deserving his abilities.

This put an end for a time to the resurrectionist fever in Glasgow, but it was shrewdly suspected that other cases occurred. They must have been few, for the strictest watch was preserved over the graveyards. There was, however, another case which should be mentioned, and occurring, as it did, at a time when the whole of Scotland was struck with terror at the wholesale pillage of churchyards, and the frequent mysterious disappearances of the living, it caused a terrible sensation in Glasgow. In the month of August, 1828, a poor woman in that city was delivered of a child, and on the same evening, some female neighbours observed, through a hole in the partition wall of the apartment in which she resided, that her medical attendant made a parcel of the newly-born infant, and placed it below his coat. When he left the house, they raised the “hue and cry” after him, calling out, “Stop thief,” and telling all they met that the man had a dead child in his possession. An immense crowd soon gathered, the man was attacked, and the body taken from him; and only the opportune arrival of the police saved him from being torn to pieces by the mob. The officers took him and the body to the station-house, the people hooting and howling around them. An examination of the body of the infant was made by several practitioners in the city, at the instance of the authorities, and they certified that it had been still-born. The explanation was, that the young man was a student finishing his course, and that the mother had agreed with him that if he attended her during her illness, he should have the body of the dead child for the purpose of using it as he thought proper.

The result of this revolting work in the West of Scotland was not altogether evil, for, as was said by Dr. Richard Miller, for forty years lecturer on Materia Medica in the University of Glasgow, “these experiments in the Anatomy School of Glasgow, lighted up the torch of science in this quarter of the world, and saved the lives of many invaluable beings.”

CHAPTER IV.

Tales of the Resurrectionists—The Professional Body-Snatchers—A Dundee Resurrectionist Ballad—A Strange Experiment in Glasgow.

The two preceding chapters have been devoted to stories circulated about doctors and medical students who engaged in resurrectionist exploits, but there are many other tales, quite as interesting, told of a very different class of men. Those who entered into this horrible work for the purpose of carrying out their anatomical investigations, can be excused in part; but the men of whom we now speak entered into it with motives not dictated by, and therefore had not the excuse of, a desire for scientific progress, but rather were founded on mercenary greed. Not a few of them were sextons; many of them were drawn from the scum of the population, who, rather than earn an honest livelihood, were ready to engage in any desperate enterprise which would give them a large sum of money. The work of these men, if all stories are true, at times touched the feelings of the anatomists themselves. It is stated that a Professor of the University of Glasgow, going into the dissecting room one morning to view a subject which had been laid out, was horrified to find it was the body of his son, who had been recently interred. A somewhat similar tale is recorded of a student at the University of Edinburgh. He saw on the dissecting table what he believed to be the body of his mother. Half distracted he posted home to Dumfries, and, in company with his father, made an investigation of the grave where his mother had been buried. It was then found he had been mistaken, for they found the body lying silently in its last resting-place.

In connection with the Medical School of Edinburgh were several worthies who have been made immortal by the graphic pen of Leighton. Here is how the author of the Court of Cacus photographs them:—“There was one called Merrylees, or more often Merry-Andrew, a great favourite with the students. Of gigantic height, he was thin and gaunt, even to ridiculousness, with a long pale face, and the jaws of an ogre. His shabby clothes, no doubt made for some tall person of proportionate girth, hung upon his sharp joints, more as if they had been placed there to dry than to clothe and keep warm.” The manners of this man were quite of a piece with his outward appearance. His gait was springy, and his face underwent contortions of the least pleasant kind. The people knew his peculiar ways, and many of them seized every opportunity of tormenting him, generally much to their own intense satisfaction and amusement. Another attendant, and one of Merry-Andrew’s colleagues, was a worthy whose proper name was practically unknown, but who went by the sobriquet of “Spune.” With an exterior suggestive of a broken-down parson, his mental qualities were of the feeblest order, or, being vigorous, they found no fitting expression. The “Spune” always kept his own counsel, performing his duties in such a staid and dignified manner that Leighton feels compelled to say “that you would have said he bore all the honours of the science to the advancement of which he contributed so much.” These two men were slightly touched by scientific aspirations, though it must be admitted that these were not by any means the motives that constrained them to follow their unholy employment. The pecuniary results weighed much more than any scientific considerations with the “Moudewart,” properly called Mowatt, who was another of the group. He had been a plasterer, but he found that to pursue his trade he had to work hard for little, and he took to the business of a resurrectionist simply because he could make more money a great deal easier—a course of conduct perhaps legitimate enough in itself, but one which it would be difficult to justify when the nature of the change is taken into account. However, these three men were the great supports of the anatomical investigators in Surgeon’s Square, Edinburgh. They were assisted by others of less note, important enough in their own way, but undeserving the same particular notice.

These men are believed to have made a great number of purchases in the lower parts of Edinburgh, for not a few drunken, shiftless creatures were willing to sell the bodies of their deceased relatives for a small sum; often an arrangement had been come to before the final separation of soul and body. Indeed, it is to be feared that this was by no means uncommon in all the centres of population. A grimly amusing story is told by Leighton, illustrative of this, and at the same time of the trickishness and love of mischief supposed to be characteristic of the medical student. This is how he tells it:—“One night a student who saw him [Merrylees] standing at a close-end, and suspected that his friend was watching his prey, whispered in his ear, ‘She’s dead,’ and, aided by the darkness, escaped. In a moment after, ‘Merry Andrew’ shot down the wynd, and, opening the door, pushed his lugubrious face into a house. ‘It’s a’ owre I hear,’ said he, in a loud whisper. ‘And when will we come for the body?’ ‘Whist, ye mongrel,’ replied the old harridan, who acted as nurse; ‘she’s as lively as a cricket.’” The unfortunate invalid was terrified, but was unable to do anything to help herself. Merry Andrew slipped out, and went in search of the student who had played such a scurvy trick upon him, but was, of course, unsuccessful. To resume Leighton’s narrative:—“The old invalid, no doubt hastened by what she had witnessed, died on the following night; and on that, after the night succeeding, when he had reason to expect that she would be conveniently placed in the white fir receptacle that has a shape so peculiarly its own, and not deemed by him so artistic as that of a bag or a box, Merrylees, accompanied by the ‘Spune,’ entered the dead room with the sackful of bark. To their astonishment, and what Merrylees even called disgusting to an honourable mind, the old wretch had scruples. ‘A light has come doun upon me frae heaven,’ she said, ‘an’ I canna.’ ‘Light frae heaven!’ said Merrylees indignantly; ‘will that shew the doctors how to cut a cancer out o’ ye, ye auld fule? But we’ll sune put out that light,’ he whispered to his companion; ‘awa’ and bring in a half-mutchkin.’ ‘Ay,’ replied the ‘Spune,’ as he got hold of a bottle, ‘we are only obeying the will o’ God. “Man’s infirmities shall verily be cured by the light o’ his wisdom.” I forget the text.’ And the ‘Spune,’ proud of his Biblical learning, went upon his mission. He was back in a few minutes; for where in Scotland is whisky not easily got? Then Merrylees (as he used to tell the story to some of the students, to which we cannot be expected to be strictly true as regards every act or word), filling out a glass, handed it to the wavering witch. ‘Tak ye that,’ he said, ‘and it will drive the deevil out o’ ye’; and finding that she easily complied, he filled out another, which went in the same direction with no less relish. ‘And noo,’ said he, as he saw her scruples melting in the liquid fire, and took out the pound-note, which he held between her face and the candle, ‘look through it, ye auld deevil, and ye’ll see some o’ the real light o’ heaven that will mak your cat’s een reel.’ ‘But that’s only ane,’ said the now wavering merchant, ‘and ye ken ye promised three.’ ‘And here they are,’ replied he, as he held before her the money to the amount of which she had only had an experience in her dreams, and which reduced her staggering reason to a vestige. ‘Weel,’ she at length said, ‘ye may tak her.’ And all things thus bade fair for the completion of the barter, when the men, and scarcely less the woman, were startled by a knock at the door, which having been opened, to the dismay of the purchasers there entered a person, dressed in a loose great-coat, with a broad bonnet on his head, and a thick cravat round his throat, so broad as to conceal a part of his face. ‘Mrs. Wilson is dead?’ said the stranger, as he approached the bed. ‘Ay,’ replied the woman, from whom even the whisky could not keep off an ague of fear. ‘I am her nephew,’ continued the stranger, ‘and I am come to pay the last duties of affection to one who was kind to me when I was a boy. Can I see her?’ ‘Ay,’ said the woman; ‘she’s no screwed doun yet.’” “Merry-Andrew” and the “Spune” slipped out of the house, followed by the stranger, who pretended to give them chase. The stranger, it came out afterwards, was a student who thought fit to play a practical joke on the two worthies. The dead woman was decently buried, but the nurse quietly put the three pounds in her pocket.

In the course of some transactions in Blackfriars’ Wynd, Merrylees had—so they thought—cheated his two companions to the extent of ten shillings, and this was an offence never to be forgotten or forgiven. A sister of Merrylees, residing in Penicuik, happened to die, and it occurred to his unfeeling heart that he might make a few pounds by raising her body, immediately after the interment. He said nothing, but the “Spune” noticing from his appearance that he had some important project on foot, made inquiries which made him, as he said, “suspect that Merrylees’ sister was dead at last.” The “Spune” told the “Moudewart” so, and they agreed to lift the body themselves, as by doing this they would not only profit to the extent of several pounds, but would also be revenged upon Merry-Andrew for his unfair behaviour towards them. A donkey and cart were procured, and the two companions set out that night for Penicuik, with all the necessary utensils. Between twelve and one o’clock they were at work in the kirkyard. They had hardly begun when they were alarmed by a noise near at hand, but, after listening a moment, they thought they were mistaken, and resumed. At last they got the body above the ground. Then they heard a shout, and behind a tombstone they saw a white-robed figure with extended arms. They fled in terror, and started for Edinburgh in all haste. The apparition was none other than Merrylees, who, having met the owner of the donkey and cart, and been told that his two colleagues were away with them to Penicuik, suspected their design, and had thus frustrated it. Remarking that “the ‘Spune’ is without its porridge this time, and shall not man live on the fruit of the earth,” Merrylees shouldered the body of his sister and set out for the city. Before long he came near his foiled enemies, and raising another shout he forced them to leave their cart behind, as they found their legs would carry them faster home than the quadruped they had borrowed. This was the crowning part of Merry-Andrew’s expedition, for he put his burden in the cart, and managed at last to convey it to Surgeons’ Square.

The professional body-snatchers were, however, sometimes employed by other than doctors—by persons who made use of them for purposes which had not even the excuse of a desire for the advancement of anatomical science. The story is told of two young men from the north, named George Duncan and Henry Ferguson, fellow-lodgers in the Potterow of Edinburgh, who were rivals for the affections of a Miss Wilson, residing in the vicinity of Bruntsfield Links. Ferguson was preferred, and Duncan hated him because of that. At last disease carried the successful suitor away, and his body was interred in Buccleuch burying-ground. Duncan’s hatred went even further than death itself, for he employed a well-known snatcher, who rejoiced in the cognomen of “Screw,” on account of his cleverness at raising bodies, and they went together to the cemetery for the purpose of conveying the corpse of Ferguson to the rooms occupied by Dr. Monro. When they arrived there they found Miss Wilson beside the grave, overwhelmed with grief at the loss of her lover. At last she went away, and soon the body was within the precincts of the college.

In the Dundee district, also, the resurrectionists were able to do a considerable amount of business. There, as elsewhere, the people in the country parts were in a high state of excitement over the frequent depredations made in their churchyards, and it was shrewdly suspected that this was done for the purpose of supplying the Edinburgh doctors with “subjects.” Watches were set, but the superstition of the guardians of the dead, often aided by the whisky they partook of to keep away the cold and raise their spirits among their “eerie” surroundings, made their vigils too frequently of little avail. The wily resurrectionists were too sharp for them, for it was almost a matter of certainty that the body of any one who died of a peculiar disease would disappear within a few days after it had been consigned to the grave. In the village of Errol, in the Carse of Gowrie, such depredations were not unfrequent. About the time that Burke and Hare were operating with so much effect among the waifs of Edinburgh, an incident of a somewhat amusing kind occurred at this place. The parish churchyard was then without a boundary wall, and as it lay in the middle of the village it was customary for the inhabitants to make a “short cut” across it, when passing from one part of the place to another. On one occasion a village worthy had been attending a convivial gathering, and on his way home, at “the witching time of night,” he thought he would take the pathway through the churchyard. As he approached it he saw what appeared to be a black horse feeding in the “isle,” a low part of the yard. To his horror some one jumped on the animal’s back, and made towards him. He took to his heels, and ran as fast as he could, never stopping until he had gained a safe hiding in a farm on the side of the Tay, at a point about two miles to the south-east of the village. When the story obtained currency, the belief was commonly expressed that the horse belonged to a doctor who was in search of an interesting “subject” that had been recently buried.

The churchyard of Dundee, then popularly known as the “Howff,” was laid under heavy contribution to the cause of science, and the most notorious of the local resurrectionists was Geordie Mill, one of the grave-diggers. He was at last caught in his nefarious work, and his memory has been celebrated in a song long popular in the district. This production has now nearly dropped out of memory, but as it is a curious commentary on the transactions of the time, it is worthy of preservation. The following fragments of it are from the notes of Dr. Robert Robertson, Errol, and Mr. James Paterson, Glasgow, two natives of the Carse of Gowrie:—

“Here goes Geordie Mill, wi’ his round-mou’d spade,
He’s aye wishing for the mair folk dead,
For the sake o’ his donal’, and his bit short-bread,
To carry the spakes in the mornin’.
“A porter cam’ to Geordie’s door,
A hairy trunk on his back he bore;
And in the trunk there was a line,
And in the line was sovereigns nine,
A’ for a fat and sonsie quean,
Wi’ the coach on Wednesday mornin’.
“Then east the toun Geordie goes,
To ca’ on Robbie Begg and Co.;
The doctor’s line to Robbie shows,
Wha wished frae them a double dose,
Wi’ the coach on Wednesday mornin’.
“Geordie’s wife says, ‘Sirs, tak’ tent,
For a warning to me’s been sent,
That tells me that you will repent
Your conduct on some mornin’.’
“Quo’ Robbie, ‘Wife, now hush your fears,
We ha’e the key, deil ane can steer’s,
We’ve been weel paid this dozen o’ years,
Think o’ auchteen pound in a mornin’.’
“Then they ca’d on Tam and Jock,
The lads wha used the spade and poke,
And wi’ Glenlivet their throats did soak,
To keep them richt in the mornin’.”

The worthies were, according to the ballad, discovered when lifting the second body, and it concludes with the line,—

“And that was a deil o’ a mornin’.”

It was popularly believed that these men were in the habit of supplying Dr. Knox with bodies taken from the churchyard of Dundee, and there was great indignation against them when the revelations consequent on the apprehension of Burke and Hare were made known.

Before proceeding to deal with the events that led up to the Burke and Hare trial, there is an incident of peculiar interest which deserves to be recorded, but which cannot be properly put under any of the classes into which we have divided these tales of the resurrectionists. In a sense it does not belong to the resurrectionist movement, but as it relates indirectly to it, it may be given. At the Glasgow Circuit Court in October, 1819, a collier of the name of Matthew Clydesdale was condemned to death for murder, and the judge, in passing sentence, as was the custom, ordered that after the execution the body should be given to Dr. James Jeffrey, the lecturer on anatomy in the university, “to be publicly dissected and anatomised.” The execution took place on the 4th of November following, and the body of the murderer was taken to the college dissecting theatre, where a large number of students and many of the general public were gathered to witness an experiment it was proposed to make upon it. The intention was that a newly-invented galvanic battery should be tried with the body, and the greatest interest had accordingly been excited. The corpse of the murderer was placed in a sitting posture in a chair, and the handles of the instrument put into the hands. Hardly had the battery been set working than the auditory observed the chest of the dead man heave, and he rose to his feet. Some of them swooned for fear, others cheered at what was deemed a triumph of science, but the Professor, alarmed at the aspect of affairs, put his lancet in the throat of the murderer, and he dropped back into his seat. For a long time the community discussed the question whether or not the man was really dead when the battery was applied. Most probably he was not, for in these days death on the scaffold was slow—there was no “long drop” to break the spinal cord,—it was simply a case of strangulation.

CHAPTER V.

The Early Life of Burke and M‘Dougal—Their Meeting with Hare and his Wife—Some Notes Concerning the Latter.

Thus far we have traced the genesis, and the ultimate development, of the resurrectionist movement, and it will now be necessary to relate with some detail the connection of Burke and Hare and their female associates with the vile traffic, showing how they, by adding to the brutality inherent in it, ultimately encompassed their own ruin, and unconsciously freed medical science from restrictions tending to stiffle inquiry and prevent progress. About these people comparatively little is known, and certain it is that had it not been for the timidity of the press of the period there would have been abundance of material more or less reliable. James Maclean, a hawker, belonging to Ireland, who was well acquainted with all the parties, furnished a few particulars concerning them to the publishers of what may be called the official account of the trial, issued in 1829, but what he was able to give was very meagre. Maclean’s notes, however, have been supplemented, and, apparently, in some instances corrected, by the subsequent investigations of Alexander Leighton.

The most notorious of these great offenders against the laws of God and man was William Burke. He was the son of Neil Burke, a labourer, and was born in the early part of the year 1792, in the parish of Orrey, about two miles from the town of Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland. Receiving a fair education, he, though of Catholic parentage, first went as servant to a Presbyterian minister, but becoming tired of that kind of employment, he tried in succession the trades of a baker and a weaver. Maclean, however, makes no mention of these two attempts, and says Burke’s “original trade was that of a shoemaker or cobbler.” None of these trades suited his taste, and ultimately he enlisted in the Donegal militia in the capacity either of fifer or drummer—probably the former, as he was known in after life as an excellent player on the flute. During this time he was the personal servant of one of the officers of the regiment; and he married a young woman belonging to Ballina. When the regiment was disbanded he went to live with his wife and family, and he was engaged as the servant of a country gentleman. Here an event occurred which may be regarded as the turning point of what had hitherto been a life of respectability. Burke was anxious to obtain the subtenancy of a piece of ground from his father-in-law, but they quarrelled over the matter. How this dispute came about is unknown, but it was of sufficient severity to cause Burke to leave his wife and family and emigrate to Scotland, and sufficient to prevent him from returning again to his native land. He arrived in this country about the year 1817 or 1818, when the Union Canal, between Edinburgh and the Forth and Clyde Canal, near Camelon, was in the course of construction. Making his way eastwards, Burke obtained employment as a labourer on this important undertaking, and while so engaged he resided in the little hill village of Maddiston, a mile or two above Polmont. It was here that he met Helen Dougal or M‘Dougal, the partner of his guilt, and his fellow-prisoner at the great trial. This woman was born in the neighbouring village of Redding. The record of her career up to her meeting with Burke is not altogether good. In early life she made the acquaintance of a sawyer of the name of M‘Dougal, to whom she had a child during his wife’s life-time. When M‘Dougal became a widower the young woman went to live with him, and though they had never gone through a regular marriage ceremony, cohabitation was sufficient to constitute them man and wife, and she bore M‘Dougal’s name. After a time the couple left Maddiston for Leith, where M‘Dougal worked at his trade. Here he was struck down by typhus fever, and his illness terminated in death in Queensferry House. His female companion and her two children returned to her old place of abode, a loose and dissolute woman, even more so than when she went away. At the time of the trial, in 1828, it was reported that she had had two husbands, one of whom was then alive, but that is uncertain. This, however, is an outline of her life up till the advent of Burke in Maddiston, when she was living there with her two children, a boy and a girl. Burke and she threw in their lot together, and lived as husband and wife. This irregular life came to the knowledge of the priest of the district, who advised Burke to leave M‘Dougal and return to his lawful wife and to his family in Ireland; but he refused to do so, and as a consequence was excommunicated. The early religious training of Burke made him feel uncomfortable under the displeasure of the church, but he would not, nevertheless, carry out the dictates of his priest or of his own conscience. He continued to live with M‘Dougal, not a very happy life, certainly, both of them being somewhat given to drink, but they appeared to have taken a liking for each other which kept them together through every difficulty. For some reason or other, probably because employment in the neighbourhood of Maddiston had become scarce, Burke and his companion removed to Edinburgh, and took up their quarters in what was known as “The Beggar’s Hotel,” in Portsburgh, owned by an Edinburgh worthy of the lower class, Mickey Culzean by name. Here Burke reverted to the trade of shoemaker or cobbler, and whether he was bred to it or not is a small matter, for he seems to have been able to make use of it, when in need, in the way of gaining a livelihood. He was in the habit of buying old boots and shoes, and repairing them; after which M‘Dougal hawked them among the poorer classes in the city, and in this way they were able to make from fifteen to twenty shillings a week.

Burke and M‘Dougal, however, were not long resident in the “Beggar’s Hotel,” when it was burned to the ground, and all their goods were destroyed. Among their possessions so lost were the books belonging to the Burke, and these were—Ambrose’s Looking Unto Jesus, Boston’s Fourfold State, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Booth’s Reign of Grace. It has been said that this little library of theological works belonged to Burke, but, it may be suggested, that they were not of the type to be owned by an excommunicated Roman Catholic; they rather appear, judging from their character, to have belonged to M‘Dougal, for they are all of the kind affected in most Scottish homes of the period. It is worth remembering, however, that Burke was a man of a naturally religious turn of mind, though not bound up in any particular form of faith, and that in all his after actions, brutal and godless though they were, the inward warning voice never left him at peace, except when his senses were steeped in drink.

Culzean, after this disaster, hired new premises in Brown’s Close, off the Grassmarket, and Burke and M‘Dougal moved there with him. Here religious matters attracted Burke’s attention, and for a time his actions to a certain extent were modified by them. He attended services in an adjoining house, and even went the length of an endeavour to reform his landlord, who was an inveterate swearer. This appearance of better things did not, however, continue long, and the old course of life was renewed. It would be difficult to say what would have been the course of Burke’s life had M‘Dougal and he never met; in all probability it would have been less guilty, and would have had a happier result. Had their paths been separate, they might never have been heard of, and a series of crimes disgraceful to humanity might, possibly, never have been committed. But as it happened, it is to be feared that the influence of the one upon the other was for evil. Maclean described Burke as a peaceable and steady worker when free from liquor; and even when intoxicated he was rather jocose and quizzical, and by no means of a quarrelsome disposition. M‘Dougal, on the other hand, was of a dull, morose temper, sober or otherwise. Quarrels between them were of frequent occurrence. One point of dispute between them, and which gave rise to at least one severe disturbance, was Burke’s relations with a young woman, a near friend of M‘Dougal, who became jealous of her. The three lived in the one room, and one occasion the two women fell out so seriously that they sought to settle their differences by force. The man did not interfere until he saw that the younger woman was being worsted. Then he turned on M‘Dougal and beat her most brutally, until, indeed, it was thought she was beyond recovery.

Notwithstanding their apparent incompatibility, the couple kept well together, and when trade in Edinburgh grew dull they removed to Peebles, where Burke wrought on the roads. By this time his habits had not improved; his whole moral character, never very robust, though not without a susceptibility to religious impressions, was on the decline; and gradually he became the associate of men and women whose experience of wickedness was greater than anything to which he had yet sunk. In the autumn of 1827, Burke and M‘Dougal wrought at the harvesting near Penicuik, and returning to Edinburgh, they went to lodge with William and Mrs. Hare, the companions and participators in the crimes that afterwards made them amenable to the laws of the country. Burke met Mrs. Hare, with whom he had previously been acquainted, and over a glass of liquor he mentioned to her that he intended going to the west country to seek for employment. She urged that he and M‘Dougal should take up their abode in her house in Tanner’s Close, Portsburgh, where he would have every facility for carrying on his trade of a cobbler. To this he consented, and he again set up business in a cellar attached to the house, in which Hare, who was a hawker, kept his donkey. Thus were these two men brought into contact, and from this accidental meeting arose that close and intimate connection which enabled them to originate and carry out their diabolical plans against their fellow-creatures.

This William Hare, whose name afterwards came to be so indissolubly connected with that of Burke, was about the same age, and was also a native of Ireland. Brought up without any education or proper moral training, he rapidly slipped into a vagabondising kind of life. His temper was brutal and ferocious, and when he was in liquor he was perfectly unbearable. Before leaving Ireland he was employed in farm work, but better prospects across the Channel made him come to Scotland, where he became a labourer, like his companion in later life, in the construction of the Union Canal, though there is no evidence that they met each other until the year 1827, in Edinburgh. Hare afterwards worked as a “lumper” with a Mr. Dawson, who had a wharf at Port-Hopetoun, the Edinburgh terminus of the canal. While so engaged he became acquainted with a man of the name of James Log, or Logue, who has been described as a decent, hard-working man. Before this time Log had held a contract, on the canal near Winchburgh, at which his wife, a strong-minded, able-bodied woman, laboured along with the men in her husband’s employment, wheeling a barrow as well as the best of them. After this Hare turned a hawker, at first with a horse and cart, but latterly with a hand-barrow. In the interval, Log and his wife, Mary Laird, had opened a lodging-house at the back of the West Port Well, whence they removed to Tanner’s Close, and with them Hare, on his change of employment, took up his abode. A quarrel with his landlord, however, made him seek other quarters; but when Log died in 1826, he returned, and, as Maclean puts it, “made advances to the widow,” and she consenting, the couple were regularly married. Mrs. Log, or Hare, as she had now become, had had one child to her previous husband. Her character, while before not beyond reproach, had been further blackened by her notorious misconduct with a young lodger in the house. This man left her, and Hare stepped in to fill his shoes. The lodging-house, into possession of which Hare had entered on his marriage with the widow of its previous landlord, contained seven beds; and the earnings from his new property gave him the means of drinking without the necessity of working. He took full advantage of his position, became more and more dissolute, and went about bullying and fighting with all and sundry. His wife was not exempt from his brutality, but then she was as ready for drinking and quarrelling as he was himself. With these people Burke and M‘Dougal went to reside, after their return from Penicuik.

Two stories are related by Maclean, who knew all the parties well, which serve to illustrate the characters of Burke and Hare. In the autumn of 1827, Maclean, Hare, Burke, and some others, while on their way from Carnwath, in Lanarkshire, where they had been at the shearing, went for refreshment into a public-house a little to the west of Balerno, a few miles from Edinburgh. The liquor was served, and the party clubbed together to pay the reckoning. The money was placed on the table, and Hare coolly picked it up and put it in his pocket. Burke, knowing the temper of the man, and desiring to avoid a disturbance, paid for the whole of the liquor consumed out of his own pocket. Maclean, however, was more outspoken, and on leaving the house told Hare that it was a scaly trick for him to lift the money with the intention of affronting the company. Hare knocked the feet from under Maclean, and kicked him severely on the face with his iron-shod caulker boots, laying his upper lip open. Mrs. Hare, again, was equally brutal. Once, when returning from his work at the canal, Hare found his wife very tipsy. He remonstrated with her, and then lay down on his bed. She lifted a bucket of water and emptied the contents over him. A desperate struggle followed, and, Maclean adds:—“As usual with her she had the last word and the last blow.”

Helen M^cDougal.
(From a Sketch taken in Court.)

Before concluding this chapter it may be of interest to give the description of the personal appearance of Burke and his wife, as furnished by the Caledonian Mercury of Thursday, the 25th December, 1828. It refers to their appearance at the trial, but it may be taken as generally relating to their looks at the time they entered upon their course of crime:—“The male prisoner [Burke], as his name indicates, is a native of Ireland. He is a man rather below the middle size, and stoutly made, and of a determined, though not peculiarly sinister expression of countenance. The contour of his face, as well as the features, is decidedly Milesian. It is round, with high cheek bones, grey eyes, a good deal sunk in the head, a short snubbish nose, and a round chin, but altogether of a small cast. His hair and whiskers, which are of a light sandy colour, comported well with the make of the head and complexion, which is nearly of the same hue. He was dressed in a shabby blue surtout, buttoned close to the throat, and had, upon the whole, what is called in this country a wauf rather than a ferocious appearance, though there is a hardness about the features, mixed with an expression in the grey twinkling eyes, far from inviting. The female prisoner [Helen M‘Dougal], is fully of the middle size, but thin and spare made, though evidently of large bone. Her features are long, and the upper half of her face is out of proportion to the lower. She was miserably dressed in a small grey-coloured velvet bonnet, very much the worse of the wear, a printed cotton shawl and cotton gown. She stoops considerably in her gait, and has nothing peculiar in her appearance, except the ordinary look of extreme poverty and misery common to unfortunate females of the same degraded class.”

CHAPTER VI.

Death of Donald the Pensioner—Hare’s Debt—Negotiations with the Doctors—A Bargain Struck—Sale of Donald’s Body.

The beginning of the connection of the persons whose career, up till 1827, we have endeavoured to describe in the preceding chapter, with the resurrectionist movement, may be said to have been to a certain extent accidental.

In Hare’s house in Tanner’s Close there resided for some time an old pensioner named Donald. About Christmas, 1827, he died, owing his landlord about £4, but as a set off against this his quarter’s pension was about due, though, of course, it was more likely this would go to some relative who might be unwilling to pay the debt to Hare. The funeral arrangements were made, and everything was in readiness for consigning the remains of the old veteran to their kindred dust, when it occurred to Hare that by selling the body to the doctors he might be able to save himself from making a bad debt through the inconvenient death of his lodger before the pension was due. Burke, in his confession, stated that Hare made the proposition to him, promising a share of the proceeds. After some hesitation Burke agreed to the scheme; the coffin, which had been “screwed down,” was opened, and tanners’ bark substituted for the body, which was concealed in the bed. Thereafter the coffin and its contents were carefully buried. In the evening the two men visited Surgeon’s Square, Hare remaining near at hand, while Burke went towards the door of Dr. Knox’s class-rooms. He was noticed by one of the students; and the following strange conversation, founded on the record of it by Leighton, took place between them:—

“Were you looking for any one?” the student said, as he peered into the dour-looking face of the stranger, where perhaps there had never even once been seen a blush.

“Umph! Are you Dr. Knox?”

“No; but I am one of his students,” was the reply of the young man, who was now nearly pretty well satisfied as to the intention of the stranger whom he had accosted.

“And sure,” observed the latter, “I’m not far wrong thin, afther all.”

“And I may suit your purpose as well, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” answered the strange man; “perhaps you may, sir.”

“Well,” said our friend, the young student, “don’t be at all afraid to speak out. Tell me your business, although I have myself an idea as to what it may be. Have you got ‘The Thing?’”

“Doun’t know, sir, what you mean.”

“Ah! not an old hand at the trade, I perceive. You were never here before, perhaps?”

“No,” said the stranger.

“And don’t know what to say?”

“No,” said the stranger. And the bashful man again turned his gloomy downcast optics to the ground, and appeared also as if he didn’t very well know or to be able to make up his mind as to what he should do with those hands of his, which were not made for kid gloves—perhaps for skin of another kind rather.

And shouldn’t this hardened and callous-hearted student have been sorry for a man in such confusion? But he wasn’t; nay, he evidently had no sympathy whatever with his refinement.

“Why, man, don’t you speak out?” he said somewhat impatiently.

“There’s somebody coming through the Square there,” was the reply, as the man looked furtively to a side.

“Come in here, then,” said the student, as he pulled the man into a large room where there were already three other young men, who also acted as assistants of Dr. Knox. And there now they were, in the midst of a great number of coarse tables, with one in the middle, whereon were deposited—each having its portion—masses or lumps of some matter which could not be seen by reason of all of them being covered with pieces of cloth—once white, but now dirty gray, as if they had been soiled with clammy hands for weeks or months....

“Sure, and I’m among the dead,” said the man, ... “and I have something ov that kind to——”

“Sell,” added an assistant sharply, as, in his scientific ardour, he anticipated the merchant.

“Yes.”...

“And what do you give for wun?” he answered, as he sidled up to the ear of the young anatomist who had been speaking to him.

“Sometimes as high as £10.”...

“And wouldn’t you give a pound more for a fresh one?” said he, with that intoxication of hope which sometimes makes a beggar play with a new-born fortune.

“Sometimes more and sometimes less,” replied the other; “but ‘the thing’ must always be seen.”

“And by my sowl it is a good thing, and worth the money any how.”

“Where is it?”

“At home.”

“Then if you will bring it here about ten it will be examined, and you will get your money; and since you are a beginner, I may tell you, you had better bring it in a box.”

“And have we not a tea-chest all ready, which howlds it nate, and will not my friend help me to bring it?”

“Well, mind the hour, and be upon your guard that no one sees you.”

The young students who had this conversation with Burke were two men who afterwards became famous in their profession—Sir William Ferguson, F.R.S., the author of a System of Practical Surgery; and Thos. Wharton Jones, one of the most eminent physiologists of the country. So that the training they obtained in these troublous times has proved highly beneficial to medical science, and through it to humanity.

But to continue the story of the disposal of old Donald’s body. Having come to this agreement with the students, Burke joined his companion, and went home. They put the body into a sack, and carried it to Surgeons’ Square. When they arrived there they were in doubt as to what they should do with it. They laid it down at the door of a cellar, and then went to the room, where they saw the students again. By their instructions they carried the corpse into the room, took it out of the sack, and placed it on a dissecting table. A shirt which was on the body they removed at the request of the students, and Dr. Knox, having examined it, proposed they should get £7 10s. The money was paid by Jones, Hare receiving £4 5s., and Burke £3 5s., the paymaster saying he would be glad to see them again when they had any other body to dispose of. This is Burke’s account of the transaction, as made in his confession on the 3rd January, 1829, and it substantially agrees with the fuller account given by Leighton.

This was the first transaction these two men had with the doctors, and it is curious to notice how an incident of so little moment in itself should be to them the first step in a long and terrible course of crime—long in the sense that, considering its nature, they should have for such a length of time kept out of the reach of the law, or, indeed, of any suspicion of being anything worse than pitiful creatures of resurrectionists, who were willing to rob graves of their mouldering contents for a few paltry pounds. That step, however, was enough.

CHAPTER VII.

New Prospects—Description of Hare’s House—The Murder of Abigail Simpson, the Old Woman from Gilmerton—The Two Sick Men.

The success of their first transaction with the doctors developed new feelings in the hearts of Burke and Hare, and their two female companions. Their minds, unconsciously, had been undergoing a degrading process, and the action they had taken with regard to the old pensioners body opened up the way to them into a more complete state of moral turpitude. They thought they saw in this new traffic, if they could by any means obtain possession of the remains of their fellow-creatures, an easier method of attaining a comfortable livelihood than any they had yet tried, even though it should involve the committal of murder; for they seemed fatally blind to the consequences which it was certain such a course as they contemplated would in all probability bring to them. Their argument, it may be assumed, was that if they got bodies to sell, no matter how, they would be able to throw off suspicion; and instead of doing what others then did, go to the churchyards and plunder them of their ghastly contents, they took for their motto the significant question Burke put to the student when he was negotiating for the sale of Donald’s body—“Wouldn’t you give a pound more for a fresh wun?” It was perhaps the case that they did not make up any definite plan of operations for the future; but it is beyond doubt that the outline of the plan they ultimately adopted was suggested by the conversation in Knox’s rooms, while the details, in respect of the individual members, may have been worked out as occasion presented—each act leading on to the next until the last foul crime was committed.

Before beginning the horrid record, it will be well to give a description of the scene of the enactment of most of the crimes—Log’s lodging-house, in Tanner’s Close:—

“The entry from the street,” says Leighton, “begins with a descent of a few steps, and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you came—for the house, which was razed for shame, is no longer to be seen—to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye, have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, ‘Beds to let,’ as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to come out alive, distinguished it still more. The outer apartment was large, occupied all round by these structures called beds, composed of knocked-up fir stumps, and covered with a few gray sheets and brown blankets, among which the squalid wanderer sought rest, and the profligate snored out his debauch under the weight of nightmare. Another room opening from this was also comparatively large, and furnished much in the same manner. In place of any concealment being practised, so far impossible, indeed, in the case of a public lodging-house, the door stood generally open, and, as we have said, the windows were overlooked by the passengers up and down; but as the spider’s net is spread open while his small keep is a secret hole, so here there was a small apartment, or rather closet, the window of which looked upon a pig-stye and a dead-wall, and into which, as we know, were introduced those unhappy beings destined to death. The very character of the house, the continued scene of roused passions, saved it from that observation which is directed towards temporary tumults, so that no surprise could have been excited by cries of suffering issuing from such a place, even if they could have been heard from the interior den; and that was still more impossible, from the extraordinary mode of extinguishing life adopted by the wary and yet unwary colleagues. In this inner apartment Burke used to work when he did work, which, always seldom, soon came to be rare, and eventually relinquished for other wages.”

In this place Donald the pensioner died, and here it was that the most terrible series of modern tragedies was committed. The plan having been agreed upon by the two confederates—it is doubtful if the two women had anything to do with its formation—Hare began by prowling about the streets to see if he could fall in with any person who would make a likely subject upon whom they could practice. For a time he was unsuccessful, but at length an opportunity arrived. This was, according to Burke’s confession of the 3rd January, 1829, early in the spring of 1828, and, according to the one published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, on the 11th February. Leighton, however, says it was one afternoon in December 1827, though he gives no other reason for differing from Burke, though in this instance the criminal does not speak generally, but with absolute definiteness. Whichever month it was, the fact is certain that one afternoon Hare met an old woman the worse of drink in the Grassmarket. This was Abigail Simpson, belonging to Gilmerton, a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh, who had come into the city to obtain the pension granted her by a gentleman in the New Town—Sir John Hope, it has been suggested—who gave her one-and-sixpence a week, and a can of kitchen-fee. Her call had been made, and some of the money she had apparently spent in drink, for she was under the influence of it when she met Hare. He thought she looked a fitting subject. She was old and weakly, and the little strength of mind and body left her by her potations could surely be overcome very easily if she were once in a suitable place for the commission of his shocking design. Hare spoke to her, professing that he had seen her before; and she, garrulous and doted, readily entered into conversation with him. Speedily they became fast friends, and he easily persuaded her to accompany him to his house, where they would have a “dram” together in honour of their happy meeting. Once in the house, Mrs. Simpson was treated with overflowing kindness. She was introduced to Burke as an old friend, and the whisky was placed before her. She and the others partook of the liquor, though it is probable that her entertainers were more circumspect than she was in her libations. Highly pleased with her reception she told all about herself and her affairs, and of how she had a fine young daughter at home, who was both good and beautiful. Hare said he was a bachelor, and he spoke to the old woman of marrying her daughter, so that they would have all the money among them. When the supply of drink was finished, Mrs. Hare bought the can of kitchen-fee from Mrs. Simpson for one-and-sixpence, and this money was also expended in the purchase of more whisky for the use of the company. The fun became fast and furious. The old woman crooned some of the songs of her youth, and Burke, who, as it has already been seen, was himself something of a musician, contributed his share to the harmony of the evening. It was proposed that Mrs. Simpson should not go home that night, and to this she readily assented, for, as the Courant confession of Burke puts it, “she was so drunk she could not go home.” This was their chance, but somehow or other it was not taken advantage of—perhaps it was because they were not, “old hands at the trade,” and they lacked sufficient courage at the time to carry out their evil intentions against the old woman; just as likely they were too much intoxicated themselves to commit the crime; possibly they were joined by other lodgers, before whom they could not act. Be that as it may, the poor victim lay the last night of her life in a state of thorough intoxication. When morning came, she was sick and vomiting, and cried to be taken home to her daughter. Her entertainers expressed the utmost sympathy for her condition, and in their brutal “kindness” they gave her some porter and whisky, which quickly made her again helplessly drunk. The time had now arrived. The house was quiet, and the courage of the two men was sufficient for the deed they contemplated. Hare placed his hand over her mouth and nose to stop her breathing, and Burke laid himself across her body in order to prevent her making any disturbance. Resistance there was really none. The woman was beyond resistance, and any noise she might have been able to make was stiffled by the method adopted to compass her death. In a few minutes she was dead, and the men lifted the body out of the bed, undressed it, and bundled it up in a chest. Hare took away the clothing, among which was a drab mantle, and a white-grounded cotton shawl with blue spots, with the intention of putting it in the canal. One of the men afterwards informed Dr. Knox’s students that they had another subject to give them, and it was agreed that a porter from Surgeon’s Square should meet them at the back of the Castle in the evening. Burke and Hare carried the chest, with its ghastly contents, to the meeting place, and thence the porter assisted them with it to the rooms. “Dr. Knox,” says Burke, “came in when they were there; the body was cold and stiff. Dr. Knox approved of its being so fresh, but did not ask any questions.” The price paid the murderers for the corpse of old Abigail Simpson, of Gilmerton, was ten pounds.

The work of wholesale murder was now fairly begun, and the conspirators had gained confidence by the success of their first effort. There were no qualms of conscience—if there were they were speedily drowned in drink—strong enough to stop them in the course upon which they had so rapidly entered. The fear of discovery had passed away when they saw how easily and quietly they could work, and the desire for more victims became—shall we charitably say?—a mania.

The next unfortunate who fell into their foul clutches was a miller known to Burke simply as “Joseph.” The man was related by marriage to one of the partners of the Carron Iron Company, then the principal ironfounding firm in Scotland, and at one time had himself been in possession of a decent competency. He had, however, lost his money, and was so reduced that he had to reside in Hare’s house in Tanner’s Close. Joseph, while lodging there, became very ill, and the report went forth that the malady by which he was attacked was an infectious fever. Hare and his wife were alarmed lest the rumour should damage the reputation of their house, and keep lodgers away. It was accordingly agreed that Joseph should be put out of the way as quickly as possible, and that by the remedy they had applied so successfully in the case of Mrs. Simpson. Burke laid a small pillow over the sick man’s mouth, and Hare lay across the body to keep down his arms and legs. Death ensued as a matter of course, and the body was sold in Surgeon’s Square for ten pounds. It does certainly seem strange that such a set of circumstances should lead up to the murder of the miller, and having in view the line of conduct these two men had now adopted, it is more than probable that the report of Joseph lying ill of fever was circulated by them to avert suspicion at his disappearance, and render his death from apparently natural causes more probable.

Another case very similar to this one, but in all likelihood distinct from it, is mentioned in one of the confessions of Burke, which, though not to be depended upon absolutely, must be assumed to be accurate in their main features. In the Courant confession the condemned man mentions the murder of an Englishman as having followed that of Mrs. Simpson; though in the document prepared by the Sheriff-Clerk the case of Joseph the miller is given in its place. The victim in this other instance was a native of Cheshire, also a lodger in Hare’s house, who was ill with jaundice at the time the tragedy with Abigail Simpson was being enacted. He was a very tall man, about forty years of age, and found a livelihood by selling “spunks,” or matches, on the streets of Edinburgh. His death was caused by the efficient plan now adopted by Burke and Hare, who obtained the customary ten pounds from Dr. Knox for the body, and no questions asked.

As indicative, however, of the untrustworthiness of these confessions, it is interesting to notice at this point that while in the document published in the Courant, and attested as correct by Burke’s own signature, the murder of the Englishman is placed in point of time after that of Simpson; yet, in the official confession, emitted fully a fortnight earlier, the commission of the crime is stated to have occurred in May, and as the fourth on the terrible list. It is nevertheless to be feared that although there may be some doubt as to the exact dates when some of the murders were committed, Burke did not make full confession of the various acts of wanton sacrifice of human life in which he had been engaged, perhaps, unfortunately, because they were so numerous, and were done in such a short space of time, that his memory could not carry every individual case and its proper details.

CHAPTER VIII.

Qualms of Conscience—The Murder of Mary Paterson and Escape of Janet Brown—Preservation of the Fallen Beauty.

It is remarkable that at so early a period in their career of crime Burke and Hare should have shown so much boldness as they exhibited in the murder of Mary Paterson, a young woman unfortunately too well known on the streets of Edinburgh; and it is equally remarkable how, considering the whole circumstances, they were able to carry out the crime and dispose of the body without detection.

There is little reason to doubt that Burke was in the first instance a man of finer nature than Hare, though their guilt in the end was at least equal. Hare, it seems, could play his part in the slaughter of a fellow-mortal without any qualms of conscience, and he slept as quietly the night after he had provided a “subject” for the doctors, as if his soul were unstained with guilt. Burke, however, was a man of a different temperament, and though reckless he could not altogether banish the moral teachings of his church from his mind. “Thou shalt do no murder,” rung in his ears, but under the benumbing influences of drink the command was forgotten and broken, and then followed the fearful looking for judgment. He could not sleep without a bottle of whisky by his bed-side, and he had always on the table a two-penny candle, burning all the night. When he wakened, sometimes in fright, he would take a draught at the bottle, often to the extent of half of its contents at a time, and that induced sleep, or, rather, stupor.

In one of these “waukrife” fits, Burke, early on the morning of Friday, the 9th April, 1828, left the house, and made towards a public house in the neighbourhood of the Canongate, kept by a man named Swanston. While he sat drinking rum and bitters with the landlord, two young women, of apparently doubtful character, entered the house, and ordered a gill of whisky, which they immediately set about to consume. These were Mary Paterson or Mitchell and Janet Brown, both residing with a Mrs. Worthington in Leith Street. They had been apprehended the previous evening for some offence against the law, probably for being drunk and quarrelsome, and lodged in the Canongate Police Station. Between four and five o’clock in the morning they were liberated, and went to a house in the vicinity, where they had formerly lodged, occupied by a Mrs. Laurie, who endeavoured to persuade them to remain with her. She was unsuccessful, and they left for Swanston’s public house, where they met with Burke.

The women and Burke, it is said, were strangers to each other, but he, whose conscience had been again quieted by the liquor he had imbibed, thought he saw in them two fine subjects for the doctors. In his most winning manner he went up and spoke to them, asked them to have a drink with him, and ordered a round of rum and bitters. They were not at all averse to the treat, so they sat down and consumed three gills at the expense of their smooth-spoken entertainer. At last Burke had ingratiated himself so much with the girls that he proposed they should accompany him to his lodgings, near by, and partake of breakfast with him. His story was that he was a pensioner, and to Brown, who had some objection to going with him, he said he could keep her comfortably for life if she and her companion, who was quite willing, would go with him. He talked them round, until they agreed to accompany him. Purchasing two bottles of whisky he gave one to each of them, and the trio then set off for Constantine Burke’s house in Gibb’s Close, off the Canongate. This Constantine Burke, his brother, was a married man, with several of a family, and was a scavenger in the employment of the Edinburgh Police establishment. It was never known whether he and his wife had any complicity in the murders, but it was shrewdly suspected at the time that they were at least aware of them, especially of the one that was committed in their house.

When Burke and his two companions arrived at the house they found that the brother and his wife were newly out of bed, but had not as yet got time to kindle the fire. The house, on that account, looked rather gloomy for the reception of guests, and Burke upbraided his sister-in-law—or landlady as he wished her to appear—for her carelessness. The fire was, however, speedily lighted, and a cheerful glow was shed through the apartment, which even then was nothing very fine. The entrance to it was up a narrow wooden trap-stair, and along a dark passage. The door was only fastened by a latch. The place itself was but meagrely furnished, the most prominent articles it contained being a truckle bed, and another with tattered patch-work curtains; while on the walls were nailed, by way of adornment, some tawdry prints. The fire, however, improved its appearance somewhat, and Mrs. Constantine Burke and her brother-in-law set about the preparation of breakfast. Soon there was on the table a plentiful supply of food, consisting of tea, bread and butter, eggs, and haddocks,—altogether a feast which could not have been anticipated by the look of the apartment itself or of its accustomed occupants. The company sat down, and the conversation became general and altogether friendly, so that, what with the drink they had imbibed, and the warmth of their reception, the girls began to feel quite happy. Constantine Burke left to attend to his daily employment; and when the breakfast dishes were cleared off the table the two bottles of whisky were produced, and the debauch, begun at so early an hour, was renewed. Burke and Mary Paterson drank recklessly, the former to keep up his courage for the murder he contemplated, and the latter simply because she liked the liquor; but Brown was more temperate, though she did not altogether abstain. Mary at length succumbed to the potency of the whisky, and she lay back asleep in her chair. Burke now saw that at least one of his proposed victims was safe, and his suggestion to Brown that they should go out and have a walk was agreed to quite readily. It is difficult at first sight to surmise what can have been his object in making this movement, but it may find an explanation in the fact that soon the couple were seated in a public house with pies and porter before them. The mixture of drinks made Brown more stupid, and after a while she accompanied the man back to the house in Gibb’s Close, in a very drunken condition, but still retaining some little knowledge of what she was doing. Again the whisky was produced. While they sat drinking, Helen M‘Dougal, who had entered the house while they were out, and who had hidden herself behind the bed-curtains, broke in upon their conversation. The sister-in-law whispered to Brown that this was Burke’s wife, and M‘Dougal fiercely attacked the girls, accusing them of attempting to corrupt her husband. Brown explained that neither she nor her own helpless companion knew Burke was married. M‘Dougal having heard this explanation apologised to Brown and pressed her to resume her seat, and she then turned with the fury of a tigress upon her husband, breaking the dishes on the table. Burke threw a glass which, striking her on the forehead, caused an ugly gash which bled profusely. Mrs. Constantine Burke rushed out of the house, and went, it has been assumed, for Hare, and soon afterwards Burke succeeded in turning his M‘Dougal out, locking the door after her. Mary Paterson slept through all the hubbub, while Brown stood aside in terror. Burke endeavoured to induce the latter to sit down again, and she, though willing enough, was put in so much fear by the noise made by M‘Dougal in the passage leading to the house that she felt the sooner she was at home it would be the better for herself. Finding he could not persuade her to stay, Burke conducted her past his paramour, and then returned to the house, where Mary Paterson still lay unconscious. Hare arrived soon afterwards; the two men combined to try their fatal skill on the intoxicated girl; and in a few minutes her soul had fled from her poor frail body. The women were conveniently outside, and when they came in the corpse was lying on the bed covered up. They asked no questions, for they probably knew as well as if they had witnessed it, what had been going on. Having completed their work the men left the house.

In the meantime, Janet Brown had made her way as best she could to the house of Mrs. Laurie, which she and Paterson had visited immediately before meeting with Burke. She told, as coherently as possible, the story of what had happened to herself and her companion during the day, and Mrs. Laurie, judging that the company in which they had been was somewhat rough, sent her servant along with Janet to bring Mary away. Muddled with the drink she had taken, the girl found the greatest difficulty in returning to the house she had so recently left. At last she applied for information to Swanston, the publican, who informed her that Burke was a married man, and that she would probably find him in his brother’s house in Gibb’s Close. Thither she went, and after mistaking the door she succeeded in getting the place she wanted. Mrs. Hare was sitting inside, and whenever she saw Brown she jumped towards her as if to strike her, but thinking better of it, she held back. The girl asked where Mary Paterson had gone, and they replied that she was out with Burke. The unlikeliness of the story did not seem to suggest itself to her, though if she had been in any other than a semi-intoxicated condition she would have remembered that when she left the house Mary was totally incapable of walking on account of the drink she had taken. On the invitation of Hare and his wife and M‘Dougal, she again, for the third time, sat down at the table to partake of more whisky. Mrs. Laurie’s servant, seeing the state of matters, left Brown and returned to her mistress.

Hare now calculated on a second victim, and he plied Brown with more liquor, while M‘Dougal, to keep up the appearance, poured forth invective against her husband for going away with Paterson, who, poor girl, lay dead on the bed beside them. While this was going on, and the girl was fast becoming a fit subject for the murdering arts of Hare, the servant had informed Mrs. Laurie of how matters looked in Gibb’s Close, and she, rather alarmed, sent the girl back to bring Janet Brown away. In this she succeeded, and Hare, considering his object frustrated, left the house shortly after her. Later in the afternoon Brown, partially sobered, returned again—how like the moth careering recklessly round the candle that works its destruction!—and again inquired for Mary. The answer she received this time was that Burke and her friend had never returned. Brown went out to search for her, and with the aid of Mrs. Worthington, with whom she resided, she found that Mary Paterson had not gone with Burke. They called again at Constantine Burke’s house for an explanation, and the inmates there, seeing that their former story had been proven untrue, said the girl had gone away with a packman to Glasgow. This was not at all satisfactory, but what could they do? If they had called in the police and searched the house they would speedily have unravelled the mystery, but they were, unfortunately for themselves, of a class whose relationship with the authorities was not of the most pleasant description, and who, therefore, sought to have as little to do with them as possible.

About four hours after Mary Paterson’s death her murderers had her body in Dr. Knox’s dissecting room, and had received eight pounds for their forenoon’s work. This expedition, in itself, was rather foolhardy, for while the corpse was cold it was not very rigid, and presented the appearance of recent death; and it was all the more so on account of the fact that Burke and Hare were supposed to be resurrectionists of the old type, who robbed graves of their contents. Ferguson, the student already mentioned, and one of his companions, thought they knew the girl, and one of them said she was as like a girl he had seen in the Canongate only a few hours before as one pea was to another. But more than that, the girl’s hair was in curl papers, so that all the external appearances were that the body was fresh, and had not been buried. They asked Burke where he had obtained the body, and his reply was that he had purchased it from an old woman residing at the back of the Canongate. One of the students gave him a pair of scissors, and he cut off her fine flowing tresses, and these he would probably sell to a hairdresser to be made up for the use of some proud dame.

But this was not all. Mary Paterson, in life, was an exceedingly good-looking girl,—indeed, her fine personal appearance had to a certain extent contributed to her ruin. Her handsome figure and well-shaped limbs so attracted the attention of Dr. Knox, that he preserved the body for three months in spirits, and invited a painter, whose name is suppressed in Burke’s confession, to his rooms to see it. Her friends, however, knew nothing of this, and they searched everywhere, but without success. For some months Janet Brown asked Constantine Burke, every time she saw him, if he had ever heard anything of Mary Paterson since she went away with the tramp to Glasgow, but he replied to her only with a growl, and there the matter rested for eight months, until the great conspiracy against human life was brought to light. And surely Mary Paterson, notwithstanding all her faults, was worthy of a better fate. Beautiful and well educated, she had lost in youth the guiding care of a mother. Her beauty was a snare to her, and her perverse will, though accompanied but not modified by a kind heart, greatly tended to accomplish her downfall.

CHAPTER IX.

Unknown Victims—The Two Old Women—Effy the Cinder Raker—“A Good Character with the Police”—Burke and Hare Separate—The Murder of Mrs. Hostler.

In view of what has already been said as to the serious discrepancies in the confessions given to the world by Burke, and considering also that many of the persons murdered, even according to these confessions, were never sought after by their friends, if they had any, the impossibility of taking the crimes in their chronological order will be at once evident. We therefore propose, in the present chapter, to bring together as many details as can be gathered respecting these unknown victims, reserving, in the meantime, an account of those more prominent instances which came within public ken either through the medium of the trial, or by subsequent inquiry.

One forenoon Mrs. Hare, in the course of her peregrinations, found herself in the company of an old woman whom she persuaded to go with her to her house. There the whisky was, as usual, produced, and a mid-day carouse indulged in by the two women; but Mrs. Hare, it may be presumed, would drink very sparingly. At this time Hare was at work unloading the canal boats at Port-Hopetoun, and Burke was busy mending shoes in his cellar. That this was so may be taken as indicating that in point of time this was one of the earliest adventures of the terrible quartette, for latterly, when they were in receipt of a large and, as they made it, a steady income from the doctors, the men threw aside all honest work, and devoted themselves to their murderous employment. However, at this period, they were sometimes engaged in the creditable affairs of life. When Hare came home for dinner his wife had her unknown acquaintance in bed, in a helplessly drunken state, although she had had some trouble before she got that length. Three times had Mrs. Hare put the old woman to bed, but she would not sleep, and every time she plied her with more drink until at length she attained her purpose. Hare, seeing the woman in this condition, carefully placed a part of the bed-tick over her mouth and nose, and went out to resume his work. When he returned in the evening the woman was dead, having been suffocated by the bedding he had placed over her. Burke, if his own statement is to be credited, had nothing to do with this cool and deliberate murder, but if not an accessory to the fact he was certainly one after it, for he assisted Hare to undress the body, place it in a tea-chest, and convey it that night to Dr. Knox’s rooms, where they received and divided the usual fee. The name of this woman was not known, even to Burke, and all that he could tell of her was the manner of her death, and that she had some time previously lodged in Hare’s house for one night.

As a set-off against the crime just mentioned, there is one in which Burke acknowledged that he alone was engaged. This was the murder of an old woman in May, 1828. She came into the house as a lodger, and of her own accord she took drink until she became insensible. Hare was not in the house at the time, and Burke, by the usual method of suffocation, produced her death. No time was lost in conveying the body to Surgeon’s Square.

In the murder of an old cinder woman, however, both the men were engaged. During the course of her work of searching for small articles of inconsiderable value among the contents of ashpits and cinder heaps, and about the coach-houses, this woman, familiarly known as Effy, came across small pieces of leather which she was in the habit of selling to Burke, who used them for mending the shoes entrusted him for repair. One day he took her into Hare’s stable, which he used as a workshop, and gave her drink, possibly on the pretence of finishing some business transaction between them; it may have been in part payment of scraps of leather he had received from her, for a murder never seems to have been committed except when the funds were at a low ebb, and at the rate at which the confederates were carousing and indulging in finery, that was very frequent. Hare joined his companion in the work of making the woman incapable, and she was soon so overcome by the liquor she had consumed, that she lay down to sleep on a quantity of straw in the corner. Their time for action had again arrived, and they carefully placed a cloth over her so as to stop her breathing. “She was then,” proceeds the confession, “carried to Dr. Knox’s, Surgeon Square, and sold for £10.” This is always the end of the matter, and for a few paltry pounds these persons were willing to take the life of a fellow creature.

But in spite of all his loose way of living, and, as we have seen, somewhat drunken habits, Burke had a good character with the police, and on one occasion made them the means of furnishing him with a victim. A “good character with the police” in the locality in which he lived would be of some consideration. It was then inhabited, and still is, by the lowest classes of the community, and the criminal element would be prominent. Burke, so far as is known, had always been able to keep clear of the minions of the law, and in this respect his character would seem to them to be of a better type than those who engaged in a less shocking, if more open, form of crime. They would look upon him as a poor workman, a little foolish, perhaps, but still, as the place went, comparatively respectable; yet, as they found out latterly, he was the most wicked criminal in the city, with, perhaps, the exception of his accomplice Hare. It seems strange that he should have been able to manage the police in such a way as to make them serve his vile purposes, but it must be remembered that he was a man possessed of considerable assurance and not a little of that winning tongue proverbially belonging to his race. However, this was the way the incident came about.

Early one morning, when probably on the outlook for some poor unfortunate whom he could drug with whisky and put to death, he came across Andrew Williamson, a policeman, assisted by his neighbour, dragging a drunken woman to the watch-house in the West Port. They had found her seated on a stair, but thought she would be safer and more comfortable in a police cell. And so she would have been if they had carried out their intention. Burke saw in her a victim who had herself half done the work he contemplated, so he went to the constables, and said:—“Let the woman go to her lodgings.” The men were willing to do so, but they did not know where she lived. Burke proffered his services to take her home, and they, presuming he knew something about her, gladly gave him the charge of their loathsome burden. The murderer did not look upon her in that light—she was to him a valuable prize, loathsome though she might be as a drunken, debauched woman. He took her to Hare’s house. There is hardly any need to say what was done with her. That she fell into Burke’s hands in such a condition indicates her end. That night she was murdered by Burke and Hare in “the same way as they did the others,” and for her body they received ten pounds from Dr. Knox.

But the last of these, what may be called, isolated cases, took place in the house of John Broggan, whither Burke and his wife removed in Midsummer, 1828. Why this change of residence took place has never been satisfactorily explained. Some have supposed that the parties quarrelled, and there is undoubted evidence of a dispute between Burke and Hare about the time of the removal, but, certainly, if the separation of residence was due to such an event, they do not seem to have kept up the ill-feeling long, for they were soon together at work at their shocking trade. Others, again, have thought it more probable that the change was due to a desire to extend the business in which they were now engaged, or to avert any suspicions that may have been raised by the frequent disappearance of people seen to enter Log’s Lodging House. Either of these suppositions is feasible, but, as will be shown later on, a dispute as to the division of the money received from Dr. Knox in payment for a body was the primary cause of the separation; though, after the difference between them was settled, the change may have been found very convenient. Broggan’s house was situated only a short distance from the abode of the Hares, and into it Burke and M‘Dougal first went in the capacity of lodgers, but it was afterwards rented by them.

In the month of September, or, perhaps, October, after this removal had taken place, a widow woman of the name of Hostler, was washing for some days in Broggan’s house. This woman’s husband, a street porter, had died but a short time previously, and she was forced to seek for employment at washing and dressing, and, during the harvesting season, in the fields. The Broggans had engaged her to wash their clothes, and after a full day’s work she went back the day after to finish up. When this was done Burke pressed her to take a drop whisky along with him. They soon were in a happy state, and the sound of merriment was heard by the neighbours, who, however, paid little attention to the matter, very possibly because Mrs. Broggan had but a little before been confined, and their idea was that the “blythmeat” and the “dram” incident to such an occasion, were going round. Burke, in his second confession, said Broggan and his wife were not in the house at the time, but the fact already mentioned rather tells against the latter’s absence. Whoever were present seemed to be enjoying themselves. Mrs. Hostler drank heartily, and as the liquor warmed her blood and raised her spirits, she sang her favourite song, “Home, Sweet Home.” Burke, notwithstanding all the black sin on his soul, and the evil purpose in his mind, sang too, and the mirth to the outsiders seemed real and legitimate. But the drink she had imbibed made the woman sleepy, and at last she was forced to lie down on the bed. Hare by this time had joined his accomplice, and they speedily smothered the poor woman. She did not die without a severe struggle. In her hand at the time of death she had ninepence-halfpenny, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the murderers were able to open the tightly-grasped hand to take away the money. The body was packed into a box, and placed in a coal-house in the passage until an opportunity occurred for taking it to Surgeon’s Square. That evening the corpse of Mrs. Hostler lay in Dr. Knox’s rooms, and Burke and Hare were richer by eight pounds, though they had to answer for another murder.

CHAPTER X.

Old Mary Haldane—The End of her Debauch—Peggy Haldane in Search of her Mother—Mother and Daughter United in Death.

But returning to the cases about which more is known than those spoken of in the last chapter, or which possessed features that have given them a greater hold on the public mind, the first to call for notice are the murders of an old woman named Haldane, and her daughter Margaret, which took place before Burke changed his residence.

Old Mary Haldane, it seems, was called “Mistress” merely out of courtesy, for she had no claim to the title. A woman of some considerable personal charms in her youth, she had given way to the deceiver, and at last found herself on the streets, a drunken, worthless vagrant. She had three daughters, one of whom married a tinsmith named Clark, carrying on business in the High Street of Edinburgh; the second, at the time of her mother’s death, was serving a term of fourteen years’ transportation for some offence; while the third was simply following the unfortunate example of one who should have sheltered her from evil influences. Old Mary was well-known to Burke and Hare and their wives, having at one time been a denizen of Log’s lodging-house. According to Burke’s own admission this was how the murder was committed:—“She was a lodger of Hare’s. She went into Hare’s stable; the door was left open, and she being drunk, and falling asleep among some straw, Hare and Burke murdered her the same way as they did the others, and kept the body all night in the stable, and took her to Dr. Knox’s next day. She had but one tooth in her mouth, and that was a very large one in front.” This account, however, hardly agrees with what was brought out by subsequent inquiries. Burke, it would appear, had long thought of her as a proper subject for his murdering craft, and one day, when he felt that something further would have to be done to renew their exhausted exchequer, he went out to look for Mary. She had left Hare’s lodgings, and was then away on a drunken debauch. His search was unfruitful at the time, but two days later he saw her standing at the close leading to the house in which she then resided. She was then in the condition of the man who said he was “sober and sorry for it,” for she readily agreed to accept the dram Burke offered her if she went along with him. Mary was well-known in the district, and the gamins regarded her as a butt for their little practical jokes and coarse fun. They ran after her as she passed along the Grassmarket towards the West Port, all the more so as she was in the company of a well-dressed man, because Burke’s personal appearance and habit had been improved by the large sums of money he was every now and then receiving from Dr. Knox for his ghastly merchandise. Many persons noticed the strangely assorted couple, and although they wondered a little at the time to see them going along the street in so friendly a manner, they soon forgot all about it, until the disclosures of the trial brought the incident back to their recollections. As Burke and Mrs. Haldane were on their way along, they met Hare walking in the opposite direction. Hare, if he were not previously aware of his colleague’s object, now quickly divined it, and stood to speak with them. Mary agreed to accompany her old landlord to his house in Tanner’s Close; and Burke, having chased away the children who were tormenting the poor woman, left them to transact some other business. He was not, however, long behind them in arriving at Hare’s house, where the two women—M‘Dougal and Mrs. Hare—had provided whisky for the good of the company. The bottle was passed round, and Mrs. Haldane partook greedily of its contents, so greedily, indeed, that in a marvellously short time she was helplessly intoxicated. Then followed the usual process of “burking,” and Mary Haldane, unfortunate in life, was equally unfortunate in her death. Of course the women had retired from the apartment before the last scene was enacted. Probably they did not care to see the end, for it was inconvenient if they should be called upon as witnesses, though they must have known what was being done, as they certainly contributed largely to bring about the commission of the deed. This was but a part of the method, and in this, as in other respects, it was carefully carried out. What Dr. Knox or his assistants gave them for Mary Haldane’s body is not known, but it has been suspected that, providing a regular and good supply, the conspirators were now receiving twelve or fourteen pounds for every “subject” they took to Surgeon’s Square.

But this was not the end of the Haldane tragedy—there was yet another victim from that already unfortunate family. Mention has been made of the daughter Margaret, who was only too closely following in the footsteps of her wayward mother. Notwithstanding the terrible career of these two unfortunates, there seems to have been as strong a bond of affection between them as should always exist between a daughter and a mother. Margaret, or Peggy, Haldane soon missed her mother, and after the lapse of a day or two set out to look for her. It was nothing new for the old woman to be away for a short time, but on this occasion the absence was more prolonged than usual. She went about asking every one she knew if they had seen Mary Haldane, and her “begrutten face” and tawdry finery drew sympathy from many to whom that feeling was an almost total stranger. Many gave her what help they could to trace her missing mother, but for a time they were without a clue, until David Rymer, a grocer in Portsburgh, mentioned to a neighbour that he had seen Mary Haldane in the company of Hare on the way to his house. The girl felt that her search was now at an end, and so it was, for she would soon be beside her lost parent. At Hare’s house she called in the full expectation of finding her mother, perhaps it might be in the midst of a debauch, but that was nothing out of the way, and surely she would get her home with her. On entering the house Peggy met Mrs. Hare and Helen M‘Dougal, who, to her surprise, denied that Mary Haldane had recently been with them, and who, in the fear of discovery, endeavoured to strengthen their repudiation by abusing the old woman and her daughter. Hare, in an adjoining apartment, heard what was going on, and set to work to deceive the girl in a much more astute manner. Blank denial could only send her back to those who had helped her to trace her mother to his house, suspicion might be raised, and inquiry, he saw, could only result in complete discovery. He therefore came out of his den, and, silencing the clamorous tongues of his two female associates, he assured Peggy that he could give her the explanation of her mother’s disappearance. In his heart he knew no one could throw more light than he on the matter, but it was his purpose rather to darken than illuminate the inquiring mind of the poor searcher. He invited her into the adjoining room to taste the inevitable “dram”—drink and die. She was not averse to a drop of whisky, and she sat down at the table where her mother but a few days before had indulged in her last debauch, aye, and where many before had done the same. Burke had noticed Peggy enter the house, and he followed soon after her. It was wonderful how readily these two men closed round their victims. He sat down at the table with Hare and the girl, and the former began his explanation. He admitted, of course, that he had seen old Mary, for there was a policy in that, but he added that she left him to go on a visit to some friends she had at Mid-Calder, a few miles to the west of Edinburgh. It must have appeared a little strange to Peggy that her mother should have gone visiting among her family friends without letting her daughter know of her intention, but then Mary’s ways were somewhat erratic; and the hope that a walk to Mid-Calder would discover her mother, combined with the benumbing effects of the whisky she was drinking, quieted her anxieties. The potation wrought speedily, and the young woman passed from the talkative and merry state of drunkenness to the dull and stupid, until, at last, she was ready for the sacrifice. She was so drunk, says Burke, that he did not think she was sensible of her death, as she made no resistance whatever.

Burke’s confession regarding Peggy Haldane’s murder has been proven by inquiry to be inaccurate in some details; but there is no reason to doubt his account of the manner of it. He says it was committed in Broggan’s house. That was not the case, for the crime occurred in Log’s lodging house, of which Hare was then the landlord. He said, “Hare had no hand in it,” and that “this was the only murder that Burke committed by himself, but what Hare was connected with;” but this statement is contradicted by another of Burke’s own confessions; and, further, we have seen that if Hare took no active part in the murder itself, he was at least accessory to it. However, as to the manner there need be little doubt:—“She was laid with her face downwards, and he (Burke) pressed her down, and she was soon suffocated.” What a dreadful death! Yet no more dreadful than that met by all the victims of the soul-hardened conspirators. The body was put into a tea chest, and taken to the rooms of Dr. Knox. Mary and Peggy Haldane were again under the same roof: they were again together, but in Death! Burke acknowledged that he received eight pounds for this victim, but, as he said, he did not always keep mind of what he got for a subject, though he had no doubt Dr. Knox’s books would show. These books, however, never saw the light of day.

CHAPTER XI.

A Narrow Escape—The Old Irishwoman and her Grandson—Their Murder—Hare’s Horse rising in Judgment.

Still the wholesale slaughter of weak human beings went on. The murderers never sought a strong, able man upon whom to try their fatal skill; they always chose the old and the silly in body or in mind, those who could be plied with drink.

Burke, one day in June, 1828, was wandering about the streets of Edinburgh looking for another “subject.” In the High Street he came across a frail old man whose physical condition bespoke him an easy victim, and whose bleared eyes and drink-sodden face showed he would quickly respond to the fatal bribe of a glass or two of whisky. The two men were just becoming fast friends, and were about to adjourn to the den in Log’s lodging house, when an old woman, leading a blind boy of about twelve years of age, came up to them. She asked if they could direct her to certain friends for whom she was seeking. Burke then discovered her to be an Irishwoman, who had walked all the way from Glasgow, sleeping at nights by the roadside or in farm-yards, and whose simple question showed that she was entirely strange to Edinburgh. This was a better opportunity, he thought, and he parted with the old man to make friends with the newcomers. He soon found out from the woman’s own statement who she was, and for whom she was in search; and on the strength of a common nativity he undertook to befriend her, professing that he knew where her friends resided and that he would take her to them. The boy, it seemed, was her grandson, and he was deaf and dumb; Burke even thought he was weak in his mind. So he took them to Hare’s house at the West Port, feeling certain that he had obtained a prize, if not two of them. He knew that being strangers there would be less chance of an inquiry after them, should they disappear, than if they had been denizens of Edinburgh, though experience had shown him that even the best-known figures in the district could drop out of sight without any serious search being made for them. Again the bottle was set on the table, and the old Irish woman was invited to take a drop until her friends should come in, for it was told her that they resided there. It is the old, sickening story. The whisky operated quickly on the wearied brain, the woman lay down on the bed, and at the dead hour of the night she was murdered by the human ghouls. How truly can Poe’s lines be applied to them:—

“They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls.”

The dreadful work completed, they stripped the body, and laid it on the bed, covering it with the bed-tick and bed-clothes. All this time, unconscious of the tragedy going on in the little room, the poor boy was in the one adjoining in the charge of the women, who were, in their peculiar way, looking to his comfort. He was becoming anxious at his grandmother’s prolonged absence from him, even though she was in the same house, and he gave such expression to his anxiety as his dumbness would permit. The men wondered what they should do with him. It would be imprudent, they thought, to slay him also and take his body with that of his grandmother to Surgeon’s Square. Yet what could they do with him? They might wander him in the city, and there would be little fear that he would be able to tell how or where his grandmother had disappeared, for he was deaf and dumb and “weak in his mind.” On this point, however, they could not agree, and they parted, Hare to get something to put the body into, and Burke to consider the whole bearings of the important matter under discussion. Burke, in his second confession, says, “They took the boy in their arms, and carried him to the room, and murdered him in the same manner, and laid him alongside of his grandmother.” Leighton, however, obtained some further information, and in the light of it the tragedy becomes even more horrible:—“The night passed,” he says, “the boy having, by some means, been made to understand that his protectress was in bed unwell; but the mutterings of the mute might have indicated that he had fears which, perhaps, he could not comprehend. The morning found the resolution of the prior night unshaken; and in that same back-room where the grandmother lay, Burke took the boy on his knee, and, as he expressed it, broke his back. No wonder that he described this scene as the one that lay most heavily upon his heart, and said that he was haunted by the recollection of the piteous expression of the wistful eyes, as the victim looked in his face.”

The bodies of the old Irishwoman and her poor grandson lay side by side on the bed for an hour, until their murderers could get something into which they could be packed. The tea-chest so often used had gone astray, or been used up, so it was no longer available, but they obtained an old herring-barrel, which “was perfectly dry; there was no brine in it.” Into this receptacle the two bodies were crushed, and it was carried into Hare’s stable, where it remained until the next day. This cargo for the doctors required much more careful handling than any that had yet taken to Surgeon’s Square, and Hare’s horse and cart—which he had used in his hawking journeys throughout the country—were pressed into the service. But an extraordinary occurrence took place, nearly ending in discovery. The barrel was carefully put into the cart, and the old hack owned by Hare started for Dr. Knox’s rooms with its loathsome burden. At the Meal-Market, however, it took a “dour” fit, and move it would not. A large crowd had gathered round the stubborn animal, and assisted the drivers to lash and beat it, but all to no effect. Burke thought the horse had risen up in judgment upon them, and he trembled for exposure—conscious guilt made a coward of him. Fortunately for them no one made any inquiry as to the contents of the barrel, for attention was directed mainly to the horse, and the murderers were safe. They engaged a porter with a “hurley-barrow,” and the barrel was transferred to his care. The man had less scruples than the horse, and dragged his vehicle after him to Surgeon’s Square. Hare accompanied him, and Burke went on in advance, fearful lest some other awkwardness should occur, and the stubbornness of the horse had made him doubtful if they would manage safely through the transaction. Arrived at Dr. Knox’s rooms, Burke lifted the barrel and carried it inside. Another drawback took place in the unpacking of the bodies. They had been put into the barrel when they were in a comparatively pliable state, but now they were cold and stiff, having been doubled up in it for nearly a whole day. The students gave a helping-hand in the work, and when it was accomplished and the bodies laid out, sixteen pounds were paid down to Burke and Hare. But was it not strange that no questions should have been asked? or that no suspicions of foul play should have been raised? The horse, it turned out, was fairly used up. Hare had it shot in a neighbouring tan-yard, and it was then found that the poor animal had two large dried-up sores on his back, which had been stuffed with cotton, and covered over with a piece of another horse’s skin. No wonder, then, that the brute refused to go further.

CHAPTER XII.

Jealousy—An Undeveloped Plot—Hare Cheats Burke, and they Separate—The Foul Work Continued—Murder of Ann M‘Dougal.

While all this was going on, these four persons, bound together, as they were, by the joint commission of terrible crimes, had their little disagreements among themselves. The women were jealous of each other, and there is every reason to believe that each man was suspicious that his neighbour, in the case of discovery, would turn informer, as the result afterwards proved. To those around them they all appeared to be in a most prosperous condition. The women dressed themselves in a style that was considered highly superior in the locality in which they lived; the men also were better clad than members of the same class usually were; and their mode of living—the extent of their drinking, too—showed that somehow or other they had plenty of money in their possession. These things attracted the attention of the neighbours, but if they had any suspicion that matters were not altogether right, they did not give expression to it. Under all this outward appearance of comfort and well-doing there was a canker. The women, as already said, were jealous, the men were suspicious, and these feelings joined to produce the plan for another tragedy in their own little circle, which was prevented either by the intervention of an accident, or by the fact that Burke had still a little kindliness left in his blood-stained heart. Hare and his wife could not trust Helen M‘Dougal to keep their secret, because, as Burke himself expressed it, “she was a Scotch woman.” It is difficult to reconcile this statement with another made by Burke, that the women did not know what was going on when the murders were being committed. Besides, as we have seen, the women helped towards assisting the poor victims into a state in which they could be easily operated upon, and though they may not have been active participants in the taking away of life, or witnesses of the last struggle between the men and the creatures whom they so quickly ushered into eternity, there can be no reasonable doubt that they were aware of the dreadful adventure in which they were all to a greater or less extent engaged. Had the women been ignorant of all this there would have been no need—it would, indeed, have been impossible—for the one to urge that the other should be put out of the way, on the principle that “dead men and women tell no tales.” However, notwithstanding these minor discrepancies in Burke’s confessions, we have his own definite statement that Mrs. Hare urged him to murder Helen M‘Dougal. The plan suggested was that he should go with her to the country for a few weeks, and that he should write to Hare telling him that his wife was dead and buried. No more of the plan is given, but it is to be presumed that the murder would actually take place in the little back room which had been the scene of so many tragedies—the little human shambles in Hare’s house—and that the body should be sold like the rest to Dr. Knox and his fellows. This plan, as has been indicated, was not carried out. Burke says he would not agree to it. That may have been, but it is rather strange that about this time Helen M‘Dougal and he should go to Maddiston, near Falkirk, to visit some of her friends there.

The time at which this visit to Maddiston was made was when the villagers made a procession round a stone in that neighbourhood—Burke thought it was the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. This would fix the date as the 24th of June, 1828. They were away for some time, but whether through scruples of conscience, on the part of Burke, or because no fitting opportunity of putting her out of the way occurred, Helen M‘Dougal returned to Edinburgh with him. Arrived there they found a very different state of matters than had existed when they went away. Before, Hare and his wife were sadly in want of money, some of their goods having been laid in pawn; but now they were in the possession of plenty of money, and were spending it freely. There must be some reason for this change, and a suspicion was raised in Burke’s mind that Hare had taken advantage of his absence to do a little business on his own account, without making him any allowance from the proceeds. The agreement among them, according to Burke, was that if ten pounds were obtained for a body, six went to Hare, and four to Burke, the latter having to pay Mrs. Hare one pound of his share, for the use of the house, if the murder took place there. This arrangement was in itself scarcely equitable to Burke, assuming it to be correct, and it was therefore all the harder on him when he found that his colleague was attempting to rob him of his due. He consequently taxed Hare with endeavouring to cheat him, but this was indignantly denied. Not satisfied, however, Burke paid a visit to Dr. Knox’s rooms, and was there informed that during his absence Hare had brought a subject and had been paid for it. Returning to the house he upbraided his partner, charging him with unfairness and breach of honour. Hare still denied the accusation, and from high words they got to blows. They fought long and fiercely, so that the neighbours, attracted by the noise, gathered round the door to witness what was going on; but neither of the combatants allowed a word to escape them as to the cause of the quarrel between them. At last they were exhausted—possibly Hare was worsted, for Burke, without mentioning the fight, stated in his Courant confession that “Hare then confessed what he had done.” He does not say whether or not he received any portion of the proceeds from the sale of the body of the victim murdered during his absence.

[Larger Image]

Interior of Burke’s House.
(For Explanatory Key See [Page XII].)

It was probably owing to this quarrel that Burke and Helen M‘Dougal removed from Hare’s house in Tanner’s Close to that of John Broggan, whose wife was a cousin of Burke. This house was not far from their old lodgings, being but two closes eastward in Portsburgh. Grindlay’s Close was between it and Tanner’s Close, and it was entered from a back court to which admission could be gained from the street either by an unnamed passage, or by Weaver’s Close, still further east. Leighton was able to gain a detailed description of this place, and it is well worth quoting:—“In a land to the eastward of that occupied by Hare, in Tanner’s Close, you reached it after descending a common stair and turning to the right, where a dark passage conducted to several rooms, at the end and at right angles with which passage there was an entrance leading solely to Burke’s room, and which could be closed by a door so as to make it altogether secluded from the main entry. The room was a very small place, more like a cellar than the dwelling of a human being. A crazy chair stood by the fire-place, old shoes and implements of shoemaking lay scattered on the floor; a cupboard against the wall held a few plates and bowls, and two beds, coarse wooden frames, without posts or curtains, were filled with old straw and rugs.” It was in this house that Mrs. Hostler, as already described, was murdered, and it was in this house that the last of the long series of tragedies was to be enacted. The criminals were gradually approaching their doom, but they had become reckless and bold. They had been so successful in the past, that they hoped to be equally so in the future, forgetful that the mills of God grind slow, but sure.

We have seen that while Burke, according to his own declaration, had murdered Peggy Haldane in this house off Weaver’s Close, unaided by his old accomplice (though both these details are doubtful), yet they were united in the suffocation of Mrs. Hostler. They really could not work separately—they were so bound together by the crimes they had committed that an ordinary quarrel, though it should have at first made them live in different houses, could hardly disjoin their interests. This could only have been done by one of them informing on the other. But they were again united in their horrid labours.

In the course of the autumn there arrived in Edinburgh to visit Helen M‘Dougal a cousin of her former husband. This was a young married woman named Ann M‘Dougal, who probably came from the district around Falkirk. There is no doubt she would be received in the most friendly manner, which she would heartily reciprocate, for it is more than probable that her visit was consequent upon an invitation given her by Helen M‘Dougal and Burke when they were in Stirlingshire during the summer. But may not that invitation, given in all apparent kindness, have been simply a snare to draw the poor woman from her home so that she might be a more convenient, victim in Edinburgh? may Burke not have given it so that he might make Ann M‘Dougal a sacrifice instead of his paramour, as had been suggested to him by Mrs. Hare? But whether this was a premeditated plan, or whether the young woman came to Edinburgh on a genuine invitation or of her own accord, is quite immaterial. It is at least certain that once she was in the house of her relatives her fate, so far as they were concerned, was sealed. After she had been coming and going for a few days, Hare and Burke plied her with whisky until she was in an incapably drunken condition, and had to be put to bed. Burke then told Hare that he would have the most to do to her, as he did not like to begin first on her, she being a distant relative. What an amount of feeling this displays! It would have been interesting to have known how Burke argued with himself in coming to this decision. However, relative or not, he was not at all averse to allow Hare to kill her when she was supposed to be under his protection, and what was more, he was willing to help Hare once a beginning had been made; he was even anxious to share the price her body would bring at the dissecting-rooms. Hare then set about his portion of the work. He held the woman’s mouth and nose to stop the breathing, and Burke threw himself across the body, holding down her arms and legs. Of course life could not long continue under these conditions, and Ann M‘Dougal lay murdered in the house of a friend, and by the heart and hand of a friend—“a distant friend,” as Burke put it to his accomplice. The murder was committed in the afternoon. It is surely a remarkable thing that if Helen M‘Dougal knew nothing of the work in which her reputed husband and Hare were engaged, she should have allowed her relative to be murdered; or that if this was the first she learned of it, she should have been so ready to let the matter rest. But of course she was cognisant of it all along. Burke was at no regular employment, and yet the money was to hand in larger quantities than they could ever have expected from the cobbling of shoes.

The two men next set about making arrangements for the transfer of the body to Surgeon’s Square. They saw Paterson, Dr. Knox’s porter, who gave them a fine trunk to put it in. When this was done Broggan, who had been out at his work, came home, and made inquiries about the trunk standing on the floor-head, for he knew that neither he nor his lodgers possessed an article like it. Burke then gave him two or three drams, “as there was always plenty of whisky going at these times,” to keep him quiet. He went out again, Burke and Hare carried the trunk and its contents to Surgeon’s Square, receiving ten pounds for it. On their return they each gave Broggan thirty shillings, and he left Edinburgh a few days afterwards for Glasgow, it was thought. This money payment brings out the duplicity of Hare in a remarkable manner, and shows that the cunning by which he afterwards saved himself from the scaffold was no new development. Broggan, it would seem, had practically discovered that there was something wrong. The murderers saw that it would be necessary to give him “hush-money,” and to endeavour to get him to leave the city. But Hare was cautioner for Broggan’s rent, which amounted to three pounds, so that if the man left the city there was every probability that the payment of the rent would fall on him. He therefore proposed to Burke that they should each give thirty shillings to enable Broggan to pay the rent, and to this Burke readily agreed, as he was glad to see the man out of the way. Broggan, however, spoiled this plot by going away with the money, and, as Burke said in his second confession, “the rent is not paid yet.” But Burke was victimised all the same, as he was afterwards at the trial, by his more astute colleague who should have accompanied him to the gallows.

The relatives of Ann M‘Dougal made inquiries about her, but they could find no trace; though it is recorded that on seeking her at the house of Burke’s brother, in the Canongate, Helen M‘Dougal, under the influence of drink, no doubt, told them they need not trouble themselves about her, as she was murdered and sold long before. They did not seem to have taken much notice of the remark, or if they did they must have concluded that the disappearance of Ann was due to the workings of the band of resurrectionists, to whose existence the people of Edinburgh were gradually being awakened by the numerous and frequent disappearances. But suspicion had not yet alighted on Burke and his associates.

CHAPTER XIII.

James Wilson, “Daft Jamie”—Some Anecdotes concerning him—Daft Jamie and Boby Awl.

Perhaps none of the murders committed by Burke and Hare caused so much popular regret as that of James Wilson, known as “Daft Jamie.” He was one of those wandering naturals known to everybody, and being a lad who, while deficient in intellect, was kind at heart, he was a universal favourite, only the very small and the very impudent boys troubling him. Here is a quotation from a small publication issued shortly after the mystery of his death was cleared up, which gives us some knowledge of his manners:—“He was a quiet, harmless being, and gave no person the smallest offence whatever; he was such a simpleton that he would not fight to defend himself, though he were ever so ill-used, even by the smallest boy. Little boys, about the age of five and six, have frequently been observed by the citizens of Edinburgh going before him holding up their fists, squaring, and saying they would fight him; Jamie would have stood up like a knotless thread, and said, with tears in his eyes, that he would not fight, for it was only bad boys who fought; the boys would then give him a blow, and Jamie would have run off, saying, ‘That wiz nae sair, man, ye canna catch me.’ Then about a thousan’ gets (young brats of children), hardly out o’ the egg-shell, would have taken flight after him, bauling out, ‘Jamie, Jamie, Daft Jamie.’ Sometimes he would have stopped and turned round to them, banging his brow, squinting his eyes, shooting out his lips (which was a sign of his being angry), saying, ‘What way dae ye ca’ me daft?’ ‘Ye ir,’ the little gets would have bauled out. ‘I’m no, though,’ said Jamie, ‘as sure’s death; devil tak me, I’m no daft at a’.’ ‘Ye ir, ye ir’, the gets would have bauled out. He then would have held up his large fist, which was like a Dorby’s (mason’s) mell, saying, ‘If ye say I’m daft, I’ll knock ye doun.’ He would then have whirled round on his heel and ran off again, acting the race-horse.”

Such was Daft Jamie Wilson. He was born on the 27th November, 1809, in Edinburgh. His father died when he was about twelve years of age; and his mother being a hawker, he was left, during her absence, pretty much to his own devices. He generally wandered about the streets, getting a meal here and a few pence there, eking out a livelihood by the good-will of the people, who as a rule were very kind to him. Many stories are told of him, and a few are well worth repeating.

One afternoon in the summer of 1820, Jamie set off with a number of boys in search of birds’ nests. He stayed so long that his mother became alarmed, and went out to look for him. During her absence Jamie arrived at the house, ravenous with hunger, and he was so impatient that he could not wait until his mother returned, so he broke open the door. Once in, he sought every corner of the house for food. In a moveable wooden cupboard he found a loaf, and when reaching up to lay hold of it he overbalanced himself, bringing cupboard and its contents to the floor. The dishes were all broken, and a great amount of damage was done. When the mother came in and saw what Jamie had been about, she was so angry that she attacked him with a long leather strap, and gave him such a beating that he left the house, and would not reside in it afterwards. He preferred to sleep on stairs, or behind walls, except when some one offered him accommodation for the night.

Jamie, like other people, had his likes and dislikes. He was very fond of some of the students attending the University, and to them he would talk readily, even offering them a pinch out of his “sneeshing mill.” This article was a curiosity, and along with it he carried a brass snuff-spoon in which were seven holes, the middle hole being Sunday, and the others round it the days of the week. He was of a statistical turn of mind, and could tell how many lamps there were in the city, how many days in the year, and such like. Many little conundrums he considered his own particular property, and he was highly offended if any one anticipated him in their answer. He liked best when they replied, “I gie it up,” and left him to supply the solution himself. What a pleasure it gave Daft Jamie to be asked—“In what month of the year do the ladies talk least?” for he could say—“The month o’ February, because there wiz least days in it.” When he was asked—“Why is a jailer like a musician?” he replied, “Because he maun tak’ care o’ his key;” and the question, “What is the cleanest meat a dirty cook can make ready?” gave him the opportunity of saying, “A hen’s egg is cleanest, for she canna get her fingers in’t, t’ tak’ a slake o’t.”

“I can tell ye a’ a guess,” Jamie would have said to a crowd of idlers who might have gathered round him, “I can tell ye a’ a guess, that nae body kens, nor nae body can guess’t.” “What is’t, Jamie?” would be the eager question, and highly pleased, the poor fellow would repeat, what most of his audience had often heard before:—

“Tho’ I black an’ dirty am,
An black, as black can be;
There’s many a lady that will come,
An’ by the haun tak me.”

“Now,” he would continue, “no nane o’ ye guess canna that.” “Ah no, Jamie,” some one would reply, “we canna guess that fickly ane, wha learned ye a’ thae fickly guesses?” “It wiz my half step-mither,” he usually answered, “for she’s a canty body, for she’s aye as canty as a kitten when we’re a’ sittin’ beside her round the fire-side, she tells us heaps o’ funny stories, but I dinna mind them a’.” “Ah! I ken your guess, Jamie,” some tantalising bystander would remark, “its a tea kettle.” Jamie was fairly discomfited, and he would run away crying, “Becuz ye ken, becuz somebody telt ye.”

Half-witted and all as he was, Jamie was wonderfully ready at repartee. A gentleman once said to him—“Jamie, I hear you have got siller in the bank; why do ye keep it there?” “Because I’m keepin it,” replied Jamie, “till I be an aul’ man; for maybe I’ll hae sair legs, and no can gang about t’ get ony thing frae my nineteen friends.” Another person asked him, “Why do the ladies in general not carry Bibles to church?” “Because,” said Jamie, “they are ashamed o’ themsel’s, for they canna fin’ out the text.” “That is very true,” said an old schoolmaster, “for I observed twa governesses sitting in a front seat in a church that I was in last Sabbath, and the text was in Ecclesiastes, and neither of them could find it out.” Jamie was in the habit of frequenting the house of an old lady in George Street, Edinburgh, where the flunkey and the cook were very good to him. The man often shaved him, and on one occasion, when the flunkey was about to lather his customer he remarked:—“I dinna think I’ll shave ye ony mair, Jamie, unless ye gie Peggy a kiss.” “But maybe mem wad be angry,” said Jamie. “No, no,” said the flunkey, “she’ll no be angry, for hoo can she ken? She’ll no see.” Laughingly, Jamie turned round to Peggy, and made to kiss her, but she stopped him and said, “A twell a wat no, Jamie, ye’ll no kiss me wi’ that lang beard, it wid jag a’ my lips.” With this repulse Jamie resumed his seat, and when the shaving process was finished he looked at himself in the glass. Peggy now claimed her kiss, but Jamie clapped his hands over his mouth, and replied, “Ye’re no a bonny lass, ye’re no bonny eneuch for me, and since ye was proud, I’ll be saucy, I’m a dandy now.” “Weel, then,” said Peggy, “let me see how the dandies walk,” and Jamie walked through the kitchen with as proud a gait as that of a Highland pipe-major. On another occasion, when Jamie was a little touched with the whisky he had imbibed, he met a woman whose eye had been blackened in some brawl. “Oh! fy, fy, Jamie, it is a great shame to see you, or ony such as you, tak’ drink,” was her greeting. “A weel,” answered Jamie, “what I hae in me, you, nor nane like ye, can tak’ out; an’ what way hae ye got that blue eye? Hae ye faun on the tub, nae, when ye was washin’?” The woman explained that she got it by coming against “the sneck of the door last night.” “Ou aye,” said Jamie, “ye ken ye maun tell the best story ye can, but I ken ye hae been fou when ye got it, an’ by yer impudent tongue t’ yer gudeman, he had ta’en ye through the heckle pins; I saw ye yesterday whare ye sid nae ha’e been.” This was enough for his reprover, and she left him.

An instance of Jamie’s carefulness has already been given in the reply he gave to the gentleman who asked him why he put his “siller” in the bank, but two others bearing on the same point have also been preserved. He was on very friendly terms with the porters on Adam’s Square stance, and one of them asked him why he did not wear an article of dress which had been given him by one of his friends. “It was owre guid for me to wear,” replied Jamie, “for when I hae guid claes the fouk dinna gie me onything.” Once a gentleman accosted him in George Street with the remark, “Come along with me, Jamie, and I will give you an old coat.” “I thank ye, I thank ye,” said Jamie, “but I’ve got plenty o’ auld yins at hame.” The gentleman passed on, but he was not far away when Jamie ran up to him and said, “Is it a guid ane?” The reply was favourable, and Jamie accompanied his friend to his house, where he was given a coat, a hat, and a pair of shoes. Jamie never wore a hat or shoes, and although the day was very cold and dirty, he could not be persuaded to don the articles given him by the gentleman, and he explained that he did not want to wear them in “sic hard times.”

Like many of his poor brethren in misfortune, Jamie was a regular attender at church, and he was never known to be absent from a sermon in Mr. Aikman’s chapel. He was very fond of the singing, and lilted away in his own peculiar fashion. An attempt was made to induce him to go to the Gaelic Chapel, next door to Mr. Aikman’s, but he said he “wad gang to nae body’s kirk but his ain.” He had a preference for Sundays, as on that day he was in the habit of visiting a kind friend who gave him “meat and kail.” Jamie’s fondness for singing, such as it was, supplied a coachman in Hunter’s Square with an opportunity of playing a practical joke on him. The man asked him to sing King David’s anthem, and he would give him his coach and horses, and make him provost. Jamie said the people would hear him, but the facetious Jehu said he would shut him in the coach. Having been snugly ensconced in the vehicle, Jamie began the singing, and roared so loudly that the whole neighbourhood was alarmed. Among those attracted to the spot was Robert Kirkwood, another halfwit, a great friend of Jamie, familiarly known as Boby Awl. Boby saw his companion through the window of the coach, and cried out, “Eh! it’s Daft Jamie, I ken him, I see him.” Jamie came out, and shook hands with Boby, who asked, “Did ye get a ride, Jamie?” “Ay,” said Jamie, “but no far.” The coachman then induced the pair to dance on the street, but the crowd became so great that a policeman had to put a stop to the performance.

Jamie and Boby were fast friends, and no one could get them to fight, though frequent attempts were made to do so. They seemed to have a fellow-feeling for each other, and each of them firmly believed that his companion, and not himself, was “daft.” In the Grassmarket, on one occasion, they joined together to purchase a dram. On their meeting, Jamie accosted his friend with, “It’s a cauld day, Boby.” “Aye is’t, Jamie,” was the reply; “wadna we be the better of a dram? Hae ye ony siller, man?—I hae tippence.” “An’ I hae fourpence,” said Jamie. “That’ll get a hale mutchkin,” answered Boby; and the pair adjourned to a public-house, where their liquor was served over the counter. Boby, on the pretence that Jamie should go to the door to witness a dog-fight that he said was going on when they came in, got his companion out of the way, and drank up the whole of the whisky himself. When Jamie came back he said he saw no dog-fight, but when he noticed the empty measure he said to Boby, “What’s cum o’ the whisky?—ha’e ye drunk it a’, ye daft beast, and left me nane?” “Ou aye,” said the delinquent; “ye see I was dry, and couldna wait.” When Jamie was afterwards asked why he did not revenge himself on Boby for this piece of treachery, he answered, “Ou, what could ye say to puir Boby? He’s daft, ye ken.” Once, and only once, did these two lads come to blows, and it was then through the mischievous workings of an Edinburgh cadie, or errand-boy. They were together in the slaughter-house, when Wag Fell, the cadie, gave Boby a putrified sheep’s head. He then induced him to turn his attention to something else, and slipped the head to Jamie, with the remark that he was to run away home and boil it. Jamie started on his mission, but he was not far gone when Boby, who had been told by Fell that Jamie had stolen his sheep’s head, made up to him, crying, “Daft Jamie, gie’s my heid.” They both claimed it, and in the struggle Boby struck Jamie so violently on the nose that it bled profusely. Jamie, however, did not retaliate, though he retained possession of his “heid.”

It is a strange fact that these two lads both met with a violent end. Boby Awl was killed by the kick of a donkey, and his body was disposed of in Dr. Monro’s dissecting-room. The circumstances of Jamie’s death, as being connected more directly with the narrative of this book, had better be told in another chapter.

CHAPTER XIV.

Daft Jamie Trapped into Hares House—The Murder—The Body Recognised on the Dissecting Table—Popular Feeling.

The murder of so well-known a character as James Wilson, by Burke and Hare, can only be regarded, from their point of view, as an act of the most egregious folly, and, like that of Mary Paterson, it courted discovery. So long as they confined their attention to tramps and others who were strangers in the city, or to persons regarding whom there was no probability of much inquiry being made, they were comparatively safe; but now they were treading on absolutely dangerous ground. It may have been, as Burke asserted in his confession, that so far as he could remember he had never seen Daft Jamie before he met him in Hare’s house. But that is in no wise probable. During his residence of many years in Edinburgh he must frequently have come across the poor half-witted lad, who was known by sight to almost every resident of the city, especially as the Grassmarket was a favourite haunt of both of them. But though Burke might plead ignorance, some of his accomplices could not, for it was owing to their very acquaintance with Jamie that he fell into their hands. That they should have made such a supreme error is something more than remarkable.

On a day late in September, or early in October, 1828, Daft Jamie was wandering about the Grassmarket, asking all he knew if they had seen his mother. What set him upon this tack it would be difficult to say. His mother, perhaps, had been away from home, and the poor lad had taken a sudden longing to see her; or perhaps it was simply one of those strange vagaries that poor mortals like Jamie occasionally take. During his search he was met by Mrs. Hare, who asked him what he was about. “My mother,” he replied, “hae ye seen her ony gait?” Mrs. Hare was ready with her answer, for she had quickly formed a plan. Yes, she had seen his mother, and if Jamie went with her he would find her in her house in Tanner’s Close. Jamie, in all innocence—and what could he suspect?—followed the woman to Log’s lodgings, where Hare was himself sitting idle. Of course the visitor was welcomed in the most kindly fashion, asked to sit down until his mother should appear, and to keep him from wearying he was invited to partake of the contents of the whisky bottle. Jamie was chary about this, for although he was fond of an occasional dram he had a great fear of “gettin’ fou.” At last he was induced to taste, and he sat down on the edge of the bed with a cup containing some liquor in his hand. In the meantime, Mrs. Hare went down to Mr. Rymer’s shop near at hand, to purchase some provisions. She there found Burke standing at the counter talking to the shopkeeper, and, taking advantage of the opportunity, she asked her old lodger to treat her to a dram. This he did, and while she was drinking it off she pressed his foot. Burke understood the signal—as he said himself, “he knew immediately what he was wanted for, and he went after her.” When he arrived at the house, Mrs. Hare told him he had come too late, for the drink was all done, but that defect was soon remedied by another supply being brought in. Jamie was again offered more whisky, and was prevailed upon to take it. Then they managed to get him into the little room where so many tragedies had been enacted. The drink began to take Jamie’s weakly brain, and he lay down on the bed in a half-dazed state. Hare crept beside him, and the two men watched his every movement to see when it would be safe for them to attempt to carry out their diabolical design. Mrs. Hare, meanwhile, had been acting with her usual caution. She knew it was not for her to stay in the house when “business” was being transacted, so she went out, carefully locking the door behind her, and placing the key in an opening below the door. The two men were eagerly watching their victim in the back-room, but they felt that this case would not be as easy as most of the others in which they had been engaged. Jamie was young and physically strong, and he had not taken enough of their liquor to render him absolutely helpless, even in the hands of two robust, desperate men. Burke at last was tired of waiting, and he furiously threw himself on the prostrate body of the sleeping lad. Jamie was no sooner touched than the natural instinct of self-preservation made him endeavour to defend himself. He closed with his assailant, and after a furious effort threw him off. He was now standing on the floor ready for another onslaught. Burke’s blood was up, and he renewed the attack, but Jamie was likely to be more than a match for him. Hare, in the meantime, was standing aside, idly watching the contest, and it was only when Burke threatened to “put a knife in him” that he roused himself and threw his strength in the scale against the man who was fighting for his life. Jamie had nearly overcome Burke when Hare entered the lists and tripped him up. The poor lad fell heavily on the floor, and before he had time to recover himself the two men were upon him—Hare, as usual, holding his mouth and nose, and Burke lying over his body keeping down his legs and arms. Still Jamie struggled, but to no advantage. His murderers had him too securely beneath them, and gradually his strength waned, until at last the tragedy was completed. Burke and Hare, when they saw the end coming, watched him anxiously, for even yet they were afraid their prey might escape them. But they had done their work too thoroughly. They had not, however, come off unhurt. It was reported at the time of the trial that during the struggle Jamie bit Burke so severely on the leg that, if the laws of the country had not promised to hang him by the neck, he would likely have died from the cancered wounds received in the conflict. This was found not to be the case, but there is no doubt that the two murderers received several painful bruises from the dying man.

When it was certain that Daft Jamie was dead, Hare searched his pockets, and found in them the snuff-box and spoon that were about as well known as the simpleton himself. To Burke he gave the spoon, retaining the box himself. A box was libelled among the productions at the trial, but Burke in his confession says that the one in the possession of the authorities was not Daft Jamie’s, which had been thrown away, but was his own. Before it was taken to Surgeon’s Square the body was stripped of its clothing, and here another fatal blunder was made. In all the other murders the clothes of the victims were destroyed to prevent detection, but in this case Burke gave Daft Jamie’s clothes to his brother Constantine’s children, who were then going about almost naked, and it is said that a baker who had given the murdered lad the pair of trousers he wore at the time of his death, recognised them on one of Burke’s nephews. When stripped, the body was put into Hare’s chest, and in the course of the afternoon it was conveyed to Dr. Knox’s rooms, when the sum of ten pounds was obtained for it. No questions seem to have been asked as to how Burke and Hare became possessed of the body of Daft Jamie, though there can be little doubt that the students recognised it. The public then wondered at the matter, and it may be wondered at still. In a popular work, published at the time, there was this very pertinent sentence:—“Certainly, those scientific individuals who attend the class in which he was dissected, must be very hardened men, when they saw Jamie lying on the dissecting-table for anatomy; for they could not but know, when they saw him, that he had been murdered; and not only that, the report of his being amissing went through the whole town on the following day; there could not be any one of them but must know him by sight.” That some of them did know him by sight is certain, for shortly after he was missed the statement was commonly circulated that one of Dr. Knox’s students had affirmed that he saw Jamie on the dissecting-table. Mrs. Wilson and her friends went here and there looking for the poor lad, but no trace could they find of him, and there seemed to be a tendency to treat the statement of the body having been seen on a table in the rooms in Surgeon’s Square as a mere idle rumour, arising out of the uneasiness and suspicion which the quiet and unknown operations of Burke and Hare were causing among the inhabitants of the country in general and Edinburgh in particular. A sense of insecurity had gone abroad, and it was not dispelled until the final clearing up in the trial of Burke and Helen M‘Dougal.

The mysterious fate of Daft Jamie, as we have said, took a most remarkable hold on the public mind. It was the talk all over the country, and when the mystery was solved the murder of the poor natural bulked larger than all the other crimes put together. The hawkers and pedlars, and patterers of the time carried about with them all over the country coarsely-printed chap books containing accounts of the crimes of the greatest murderers of the age, or biographies of Daft Jamie, to which in some cases were added the efforts of sympathising poetasters. The poetry as a rule was execrable, but the feeling displayed in them was but a reflex of the public mind. One aspiring genius spoke of

“The ruffian dogs—the hellish pair—
The villain Burke—the meagre Hare,”—

while another composed the following acrostic:—

“Join with me, friends, whilst I bewail
A while the subject of this tale;
Many a mind has often been
Engaged with Jamie’s awkward mien;
Such pranks will ne’er again be seen.
We may bewail, but ’tis in vain,
It will not bring him back again:
Lost he is now—this thought imparts
Sad comfort to our wounded hearts;
Oh! may such crimes nowhere remain,
Nor ever more our nation stain.”

CHAPTER XV.

The End Approaches—Proposed Extension of Business—Mrs. Docherty claimed as Burke’s Relative—The Lodgers Dismissed—The Murder of Mrs. Docherty.

But the end was near. This wholesale slaughter of human beings in the metropolis of a civilised country was almost finished. The only marvel was that it had lasted so long.

The work had been conducted with so much impunity, however, that the prime movers in this dreadful conspiracy against human life had made arrangements for the extension of their operations. They found a ready market for their goods, and when they took a body to Surgeon’s Square they were always encouraged to bring more. Their efforts in the cause of science were thus appreciated by the scientists themselves, and it matters little whether these scientists were aware of the diabolical means their favourite merchants used to obtain possession of the bodies they brought for their use. To rob a churchyard of its ghastly contents was as much a crime, though it was certainly not so serious, against the laws of the country and the public sense of morality, as the murder of a fellow-creature for his mortal remains. And then Burke and Hare found their work comparatively easy, and very remunerative, though perhaps a little risky. It was much easier than the cobbling of boots and shoes, or travelling about the country as a pedlar. They enjoyed themselves looking for victims, and the process of getting one into a fit state for “disposal” was quite suited to their tastes. When it came to the point—when the person to whom so much attention was paid was stupid and helpless—there was, as a rule, little to be done. Burke described the method very simply in his Courant confession:—“When they kept the mouth and the nose shut a very few minutes, they [the victims] could make no resistance, but would convulse and make a rumbling noise in their bellies for some time; after they ceased crying and making resistance, they [the murderers] left them to die by themselves; but their bodies would often move afterwards, and for some time they would have long breathings before life went away.” And every one can re-echo the sentiment of the remark by Burke, made almost in presence of that death he had so often invoked on others:—“It was God’s providence that put a stop to their murdering career, or he did not know how far they might have gone with it, even to attack people on the streets.” All these circumstances, then, added to the freedom from suspicion which Burke and Hare hitherto enjoyed, render it not at all surprising that these desperate men should have laid their plans for an extension of their business. Burke and another man, with whom they had arranged, were to go to Glasgow or Ireland, and “try the same there,” forwarding the subjects to Hare in Edinburgh, who was to dispose of them to Dr. Knox. The “other man” was popularly believed to be David Paterson, Dr. Knox’s porter, and he was openly charged in the public prints of the time with being in complicity with Burke and Hare, although he strenuously denied it. But more of that at the proper time. The contract with Dr. Knox, also, was highly satisfactory. They were to receive ten pounds in winter and eight pounds in summer for as many subjects as they could supply. This scheme, however, was not carried into effect, for the end came suddenly.

The last of the West Port tragedies was the murder of Mary Campbell or Docherty, an old Irishwoman who had come to Edinburgh to look for her son. On the morning of the 31st October—the Friday of the Sacrament week—Burke was in Rymer’s grocery store near his own close-mouth, talking to the shop-boy while he sipped a tumbler of liquor. As he was doing this an old woman entered the shop, and asked for assistance. Burke, ever on the outlook, saw the poor beggar was in every way suitable for his purpose—she was an old and frail stranger who would never be missed because she was not known, and her very frailty would make her a sure and easy victim. He soon got into conversation with her, asked her name, and what part of Ireland she came from. She answered him readily, and he, having thus got the cue, said she must be some relation of his mother, whose name was also Docherty, and out of what appeared to be pure friendliness—out of a feeling of patriotism or kinship—he invited her to his house to partake of breakfast with him. The poor woman was thus offered what she most needed, and delighted to find she had met a friend, she accompanied him to the house once occupied by Broggan, but which, since that person had left the city, had been tenanted by Burke and Helen M‘Dougal. Mrs. Docherty was made welcome by M‘Dougal, who seemed to understand everything. Burke set the breakfast, but the stranger would not touch it until noon, as it was Friday. Leaving Helen M‘Dougal to look to the comfort of their guest, Burke went in search of Hare, whom he found in Rymer’s public house. They had a gill of whisky together, and Burke then told his colleague that he had at home “a good shot to take to the doctors.” Hare, of course, was ready to participate in the work, and went with his colleague. By the time they arrived at the house they found that M‘Dougal and the old woman had, after their breakfast, set about cleaning up the room, and had everything as neat and tidy as the ill-furnished, tumble-down structure could well be. Burke again visited Rymer’s for some provisions, and preparations were made for a night’s junketting, to be followed by the usual tragedy.

But there was a serious difficulty in the way, and that must be got rid of before anything further was done. At that time there were lodging with Burke an old soldier named James Gray and his wife. The man was a native of the Grassmarket, who, after an attempt to learn his trade as a jeweller, had enlisted in the Elgin Fencibles, transferring afterwards to the 72nd Regiment, and who had returned with his wife to Edinburgh after an absence of about seventeen years. He met Burke in the High Street about a fortnight before the affair with Mrs. Docherty, and had lodged with him for nearly a week. The difficulty, therefore, was to get this couple out of the house without creating suspicion, for they could not be trusted. Burke explained to them that he had discovered the old woman was a relation of his mother, and certainly the animated conversation carried on in Irish by him and the woman seemed to confirm the statement that some relationship, however distant, existed between them. Of course it would not do for Mrs. Docherty to seek accommodation anywhere else than in her relation’s house, and it would be a matter of obligement if Mr. and Mrs. Gray would find quarters in some other place for a night or two. Gray and his wife readily acquiesced in the suggestion, and Burke went out to look after lodgings for them. These were easily obtained in Hare’s house, and the unwelcome couple, towards evening, left for their new abode. Thus far the arrangements had worked admirably, and now that the way was clear the tragedy could begin at once.

In the evening Mrs. Hare joined the company, and the fun began. The whisky circulated rapidly, Burke indulged his musical tastes by singing his favourite songs, and the old woman crooned over some of the Irish ballads she had learned in her youth. Dancing, too, was engaged in; and once or twice visits were paid to the house of a neighbour, where the revelry was continued, and where Docherty hurt her foot when endeavouring to emulate the sprightliness of her more youthful companions. As the night wore on they kept more to their own house. The neighbours, between ten and eleven o’clock, heard a great disturbance proceeding from Burke’s dwelling, and some of them, though used to the sounds of drunken riot from that quarter, had the curiosity to look through the keyhole of the door to see what was going on. One of them, a woman, saw—or thought she saw—Helen M‘Dougal holding a bottle to the mouth of Docherty, pouring the whisky down her throat. After a while the disturbance ceased, but not for long. About eleven o’clock Hare quarrelled with Burke, and the dispute could only be settled by an appeal to blows. Whether this was a real quarrel or not it would be difficult to say, for, though Burke himself declared “it was a real scuffle,” it has been pointed out as a suspicious circumstance that this “quarrel” is in a sense the counterpart of the one that took place between Burke and M‘Dougal immediately before the murder of Mary Paterson. While the two men were fighting, Mrs. Docherty, tipsy though she was, tried to interfere. She rose from the stool on which she had been sitting by the fireside, and asked Burke to sit down, as she did not wish to see him abused. The fight, however, still continued, and Hare, whether by design or not, knocked the old woman over a stool. She fell heavily, and, owing to the amount of drink she had taken, was unable to rise. Whenever this had been done the fighting ceased, Mrs. Hare and Helen M‘Dougal slipped out of the house, and Burke and Hare set to work on the prostrate, helpless woman. It was after the old method, but a fatal mistake was made. One of them grasped her violently by the throat, leaving the mark of the undue pressure. Soon the woman was dead. Burke undressed the body, doubled it up, and laid it among a quantity of straw beside the bed. The women then returned to the room, and Burke went to see Paterson, Dr. Knox’s porter, brought him to the house, and, pointing to the place where the body lay, told him that there was a subject which would be ready for him in the morning. When Paterson left, the four human fiends resumed their debauch, and for the last time together they spent a riotous night. The murder was committed between eleven and twelve o’clock on Hallowe’en night; and they brought in the month of November with heavy drinking. About midnight they were joined in their cups by a young fellow named Broggan, a son of the man to whom the house had once belonged, and who, as we have seen, was bought off when the first murder—that of M‘Dougal’s cousin, was committed in it. At last, when the morning was far advanced, they were all overcome by sleep, and the party lay down to rest, with the body of the murdered woman beside them.

CHAPTER XVI.

An Ill Excuse—Strange Behaviour—Discovery—The Threat—Unavailing Arguments—The Last Bargain.

About nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, the 1st of November, Burke went round at Hare’s house to see about his lodgers, who had been forced to change their quarters for the night. He was anxious to know how they had rested, and having offered Gray a “dram of spirits,” he invited the family along to his own home to have breakfast. This they were not loath to do, as there was no prospect of them readily obtaining their food in their temporary lodgings. When they entered Burke’s house they found there Mrs. Law and Mrs. Connoway, two neighbours, Broggan, and Helen M‘Dougal. They naturally missed the woman for whom they had been shifted, and Mrs. Gray asked M‘Dougal where the “little old woman” had gone. The reply was that Mrs. Docherty had grown very impudent to Burke, perhaps through having taken too much liquor, and they had found it necessary to put her out. Breakfast was served without further ado, and then Mrs. Gray set about the dressing of her child. Burke was behaving in a very curious manner, for he had the whisky bottle in his hand, and was throwing some of the contents under the bed, on the bed, and up to the roof of the apartment, at times put a little on his breast, and occasionally took a sip internally. His explanation of this remarkable proceeding was that he wished the bottle “toom,” that he might again have it filled. Mrs. Gray, it would seem, was taking a smoke, and had a pipe in her mouth when she was looking for her child’s stocking. In the course of her search she went to the corner of the room where the body of Docherty was lying covered with straw, but Burke called to her to keep out of there; and when she made to go beneath the bed to get some potatoes he asked her what she was doing there with a lighted pipe. He offered to look after them himself, but Mrs. Gray dispensed with his help, and collected the potatoes without having disturbed anything. All these circumstances created a suspicion in the woman’s mind that something was wrong; but later in the day that surmise was strengthened by Burke, when about to go out, telling Broggan to sit on a chair which was near the straw, until he returned. Broggan either did not know of the mystery underneath the straw, or did not care, for Burke was not long away until he went out also. M‘Dougal left the house too, and Mrs. Gray had then an opportunity of clearing up the suspicions she had formed. The straw in the corner had appeared to be the great object of attention, and she went direct there. She lifted the straw, and the first thing she caught hold of was the arm of a dead woman. Gray himself went over, and there they saw the naked body of the old Irishwoman who had been brought into the house by Burke the day before. The man lifted the head by the hair, and saw there was blood about the mouth and the ears. The horrified couple hastily threw the straw over the corpse, and collected what property they had in the house in order to leave it immediately. Gray went out first, leaving his wife to complete their packing arrangements. On the stair he met Helen M‘Dougal, and asked her what that was she had in the house. The woman made a feeble pretence at ignorance, but when Gray said to her, “I suppose you know very well what it is,” she dropped on her knees, and implored him not to say anything of what she had seen, and offered him five or six shillings to put him over till Monday. She urged that the woman’s death had been caused by her having taken an overdose of drink—alcoholic poisoning is now the respectable name for it—and tried to make the man believe that the incident was such as might occur in anybody’s house. Finding this line of explanation thrown away upon him, she tried another which she seemed to think more powerful. In her intense anxiety for concealment, she told him there never would be a week after that but what he might be worth ten pounds. It seemed to suggest itself to her that Gray, by such promises, might be induced to join their murdering gang. He, however, replied that his conscience would not allow him to remain silent. Just as M‘Dougal left Gray to enter the house, Mrs. Gray came out, and the two women met. Mrs. Gray turned back, and asked M‘Dougal about the body among the straw; but the reply was similar to that given to Gray himself. The unfortunate creature offered the same inducements, but all to no effect, as Mrs. Gray exclaimed with unction—“God forbid that I should be worth money with dead people!” M‘Dougal, seeing the end was near, cried out, “My God, I cannot help it!” to which Mrs. Gray replied, “You surely can help it, or you would not stay in the house.” The husband and wife then left the place together, followed by M‘Dougal, and when in the street they were met by Mrs. Hare, who asked them what they were making a noise about, and told them to go into the house and settle their disputes there. The two women invited Gray and his wife into a neighbouring public house, and there, over a round of liquor, they plied them with arguments and entreaties to keep silence as to what they had seen, and the benefit would be ultimately theirs. But all to no purpose. Gray was obdurate, and his wife supported him in his intention to inform the authorities of what they had reason to believe was a foul murder. Finding they were simply wasting their time, Mrs. Hare and M‘Dougal, in a state of great anxiety, hurriedly left the place, as if to prepare for flight; and Gray made his way to the police office to lodge the information.

In the meantime, Burke and Hare were busy making arrangements for the removal of the body to Dr. Knox’s premises. They applied at the rooms in Surgeon’s Square for a box in which to put it for safe conveyance, but they could not be supplied with one; and later on, between five and six o’clock in the evening, Burke purchased an empty tea-chest in Rymer’s shop. He had engaged John M‘Culloch, a street porter, to call at the house for a box, and before this man arrived the two colleagues had wrapped the body of Docherty in a sheet, placed it in the box among some straw, and roped down the lid. Whether they knew of the discovery by Gray, and his subsequent threat, is uncertain: that they did not is probable from the manner in which they went about the work of removing the corpse. When everything was ready, M‘Culloch was called in, and told to carry it to the place to which they would take him. As the porter was raising the box on to his back he saw some long hair hanging out of a crevice in the lid, and, having probably been in the service of resurrectionists before, he endeavoured to press it inside. This done, he went on his way with his burden, the two men who employed him walking by his side. Mrs. Hare and Helen M‘Dougal, apparently beside themselves with excitement, had been near all the time, and followed some distance behind. It was now well on in the evening, and after the box and its contents were placed in the cellar at Surgeon’s Square, Burke, Hare, and M‘Culloch, accompanied by Paterson, “the keeper of Knox’s museum,” and still followed by the women, walked to Newington, where Paterson received from the doctor five pounds in part payment for the body. In a public-house in the vicinity the division was made. Knox’s man handed M‘Culloch five shillings for his services as porter, and Burke and Hare each received two pounds seven shillings and sixpence; but on Monday, it was understood, when the doctor would have had time to examine the body, they were to receive other five pounds, making ten pounds in all.

The end had now come; the murdering career of these terrible beings was closed. They seemed to feel that it could last no longer; their whole manner of working on that Saturday indicated impending discovery, and helped towards it.

CHAPTER XVII.

The Arrest of Burke and M‘Dougal—Discovery of the Body—Hare and his Wife Apprehended—Public Intimation of the Tragedy—Burke and M‘Dougal give their Version of the Transaction.

Gray, according to his threat, went to the Police Office to give information of what he had seen. When he arrived there no one was present who could act upon his statement. After waiting some time he saw Sergeant-Major John Fisher, who entered the place about seven o’clock, and to this officer he described all he had witnessed and what he suspected. Fisher inclined to the opinion that his informant wished rather to do his old landlord an ill-turn than to benefit the public, but, notwithstanding, he, along with a constable named Finlay, accompanied Gray to Burke’s house in the West Port. What took place there can best be told in Fisher’s own words:—“I asked Burke what had become of his lodgers, and he replied that there was one of them—pointing to Gray—and that he had turned him and his wife out for bad conduct. I then asked what had become of the little woman who had been there the day before, and he said she left the house about seven o’clock that morning. He said William Hare saw her go away, and added, in an insolent tone, that any number more saw her away. I then looked round to see if there were any marks in the bed, and I saw marks of blood on a number of things there. I asked Mrs. Burke [Helen M‘Dougal] how they came there, and she replied that a woman had lain in there about a fortnight before, and the bed had not been washed since. As for the old woman, she added that she knew her very well, they all lived in the Pleasance, and that she had seen her that very night in the Vennel, when she had apologised for her bad conduct on that previous night. I asked her then, what time the woman had left the house, and she said, seven o’clock at night. When I found them to vary, I thought the best way was to take them to the Police Office.” Fisher, while he considered it his duty to apprehend Burke and M‘Dougal, in view of the contradiction as to the time when the woman left the house, and also of the fact that the bed-clothes were spattered with blood, seems still to have had the idea that the whole matter had arisen out of personal spite between Gray and Burke, and that the former wished to injure the latter. However, he took the wisest and the safest course by apprehending the two persons he found in the house. Later in the evening, the officer, accompanied by his superintendent and Dr. Black, the police surgeon, again visited Burke’s den in Portsburgh, and made a thorough search through it. They saw a quantity of blood among the straw under the bed, and on the bed they found a striped bed-gown which had apparently belonged to the murdered woman.

This was all very well for one night, and certainly the case had, to the official mind, assumed a more serious aspect than one having only a foundation on mere personal ill-will. Next morning, Sabbath, the 2nd November, Fisher went to the premises of Dr. Knox in Surgeon’s Square, and having obtained the key of the cellar from Paterson he entered, and found there a box containing the body of a woman. Gray was immediately sent for, and he at once recognised the corpse as that of the old woman he had seen in Burke’s house. The authorities then thought it was time they had Hare and his wife in custody, and they were immediately arrested. This was done about eight o’clock on the Sunday morning. They were then both in bed. When Mrs. Hare was informed that Captain Stewart wished to speak to her husband about the body that had been found in Burke’s house, she laughingly said that the captain and police had surely very little to do now to look after a drunken spree like this. Hare answered her that he was at Burke’s house the day before, and had had a dram or two with him, and possibly the police might be inclined to attach blame to them; but as he had no fear of anything Captain Stewart could do to him, they had better rise and see what he had to say. This conversation between Hare and his wife seemed to be intended to “blind” the police, who were within hearing, but it did not save them from apprehension. They were taken to the Police Office, and lodged in separate cells.

The news of the tragedy and the apprehensions was quickly mooted abroad, and the public mind was agitated by the rumours that were afloat. But little satisfaction was gained from the following brief and guarded paragraph which appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant of Monday, 3rd November, two days after the murder:—

“Extraordinary Occurrence.—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 she afterwards went out of town in search of work. She took up her lodging on Friday in the house of a man named Burt or Burke, in the West Port. It appears that there had been 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 anything, or raise any alarm; but, in the evening, circumstances transpired which led to the belief that all was not right, for by this time the body had been removed out of the house, and it was suspected it had been sold to a public lecturer. Information was conveyed to the police, and the whole parties were 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 circumstances, not only gave it up, but offered every information in his power. The body is now in the Police Office, and will be examined by medical gentlemen in the course of this day. There were some very strong and singular circumstances connected with the case, which have given rise to the suspicions.”

This information, though substantially correct, was too meagre to satisfy the public craving, and the most extraordinary rumours were afloat as to the discoveries that had been made by the police. Meanwhile, the authorities were busy making inquiries into the case, and in the first instance they had Docherty’s body examined by Drs. Black and Christison, and Mr. Newbigging. The result of these examinations conclusively pointed to the fact that the woman must have suffered a violent death by suffocation, and the case for the Crown was strengthened by this testimony. On the 3rd of November, the day of the first public announcement of the “extraordinary occurrence,” Burke and M‘Dougal emitted declarations before Sheriff Tait. Burke’s account of the affair was that on the morning of the previous Friday he rose about seven o’clock, and immediately began his work by mending a pair of shoes. Gray and his wife were up before him, and M‘Dougal rose about nine o’clock. After he had gone out for a few minutes for tobacco, all the four of them breakfasted together about ten o’clock. Burke resumed his employment, Gray left the house, and the women began to wash and dress, and tidy up the apartment. In the evening he told Gray that he and his wife must look out for other lodgings, as he could not afford to support them longer, they having not even paid for the provisions they used. He recommended them to Hare’s house, and accompanied them there. About six o’clock he was standing at the mouth of the entry leading to his dwelling, when a man whom he never saw before, and whose name he did not know, came up and asked if he could get a pair of shoes mended. This man was dressed in a greatcoat, the cape of which was turned up about his face. Burke offered to perform the work, and the stranger went with him into the house. While he was busy mending the shoes the man walked about, remarked on the quietness of the place, and said he had a box which he wished could be left there for a short time. Burke consented to give it accommodation, and the stranger went out, returning shortly with a box, which he placed upon the floor near the foot of the bed. Burke was then sitting with his back to the bed. He heard his customer unroping the box, and then make a sound as if he were covering something with straw. The shoes were soon mended, Burke received a sixpence for his work, and the stranger went away. Burke immediately rose to see what was in the box, but finding it was empty he looked among the straw beneath the bed, where he saw a corpse, though whether it was that of a man or a woman he could not say. The man called later on, and Burke remonstrated with him for bringing such an article into his house. The stranger promised to take the body away in a little, but this he did not do until six o’clock on the following (Saturday) evening. This was Burke’s account of what transpired on the Friday, the day when the murder was actually committed. In itself it was a stupidly told story, and one having not a single feature of truth in it to give it the slightest support from outside testimony. But his record of the Saturday was even more blundering. He admitted that about ten o’clock on the Saturday, while he was in Rymer’s shop, an old woman came in to beg. He discovered by her dialect that she came from Ireland, and after questioning her he found that she belonged to Inesomen, in the north of Ireland, and that her name was Docherty. As his mother bore the same name, and came from the same place, he concluded that the woman might perhaps be a distant relation, and he invited her to breakfast. After sitting by the fireside smoking till about three o’clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Docherty went out, saying she would go to the New Town to beg some provisions for herself. When he was alone in the house about six o’clock, the man who visited him the previous evening, and who, on special inquiry by the sheriff, he now declared to be William Hare, came for the purpose of removing the body. Hare was accompanied by John M‘Culloch, a street porter. These two carried the body away in the box, as they said, to dispose of it to any person in Surgeon’s Square who would take it. After the body was delivered, Paterson, Dr. Knox’s curator, paid “the man” some pounds, and gave two pounds ten shillings to Burke “for the trouble he had in keeping the body.” The woman Docherty never returned to the house, and he did not know what had become of her. Some of the neighbours had told him, when he returned after being paid the storage money, that a policeman had been searching his house for a body, and he, having gone out to look for the policeman, met Fisher and Finlay in the passage. As for the body found in Dr. Knox’s rooms, and which he had seen the day before, he thought it was the one which was below his bed, but it had no likeness to Mary Docherty, who was not so tall. Then the blood on the pillow-slip he accounted for by saying that it was occasioned by his having struck M‘Dougal on the nose with it, as Mr. and Mrs. Gray could testify. Such an inconsistent story was of itself enough to condemn Burke, to say nothing of the identification of the man he had never seen before, and whose name he did not know, as William Hare.

Helen M‘Dougal, in her declaration, emitted on the same day, was equally wide of the truth, though she did not make such a stupid mistake as to mix up the transactions of Friday and Saturday. According to her, Mary Docherty entered their house about ten o’clock on the Friday morning, just as they were about to begin their breakfast, and asked to be allowed to light her pipe at the fire. This privilege was accorded her, after which she was asked to take some breakfast along with them. In the course of a conversation, Burke arrived at the conclusion that the old woman was a relative of his mother, and on the strength of this he went out for whisky and gave them a glass all round, “it being the custom of Irish people to observe Hallowe’en in that manner.” About two o’clock Docherty left to go to St. Mary’s Wynd to inquire for her son, and she never returned. The rest of the day and night was spent in drinking with Hare and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Gray. On the Saturday evening she quarrelled with Mrs. Gray about having stolen her gown, and the Grays had apparently vented their spleen by raising a story and bringing the police down upon them. For her part she knew nothing about a body being in the house, and certainly the body shown her in the Police Office was not that of the old woman, as Docherty had dark hair, and the body of the dead woman had gray hair. Such, in brief, was her account of the events of the two days, and the only point on which her declaration could be said to agree with that of Burke was as to the cause of the bloodstains on the bedclothes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Public Excitement at the West Port Murder—The Newspapers—Doubts as to the Disappearance of Daft Jamie and Mary Paterson—The Resurrectionists still at Work.

Of course the public knew nothing of what the authorities were doing or had discovered, the examination of the prisoners before the sheriff being, as is still the custom in Scotland, strictly private. The newspapers, as we have seen, did little to satisfy the natural curiosity of the people, but that was due probably to the fact that the police, finding themselves on the eve of making a great discovery, chose rather to keep silent, and deny the press information, than run the risk of having their movements made known to parties whom it might be better should not be aware of them. The Edinburgh Evening Courant, of 6th November, had, however, a very circumstantial account of the murder of Mrs. Docherty, but it was hid away among items of little importance. It was as follows:—

“Extraordinary Occurrence.—Further Particulars.—We have used every endeavour to collect the facts connected with this singular story. The medical gentlemen who examined the body have not reported, so far as we have heard, that death was occasioned by violence. There are several contusions on the body, particularly one on the upper lip, which was swollen and cut, a severe one on the back, one on the scapula, and one or two on the limbs; none of these, however, are of a nature sufficient to cause immediate death. The parties in custody, two men and two women (their wives), and a young lad, give a very contradictory account of the manner in which the old woman lost her life. One of the men, not Burke, states that it was the lad who struck her in the passage, and killed her. Burke, however, acknowledges being a party to the disposing of the corpse. The lad’s account of the story is different from that of the others. He says he was in Burke’s house about seven o’clock on Friday evening, when the old woman was represented to him as a fortune-teller, who for threepence would give him some glimpse into futurity, and with this sum she was to pay for her lodgings; but not having the money, his fortune was not told, and he went away. The parties at this time were seemingly sober. He went to the house about two o’clock on Saturday morning, when he found Burke, his wife, and two other persons, in the house, seemingly the worse of liquor. He sent for sixpence worth of whisky, which was drunk; and soon after the whole party fell asleep. The old woman was not present, but the lad thought nothing of that, believing she had left the house. At a later hour in the morning a neighbour came in, who had been in the house on the previous evening, and asked, what had become of the fortune-teller? To this Burke’s wife replied, that the old woman had been behaving improperly, and she (Mrs. Burke) had kicked her down stairs. Another neighbour saw the old woman joining in the mirth, as late as eleven o’clock on the Friday night. The above are the outlines of the statements that have reached us; we must, however, admit that, from the secret manner in which the investigations are conducted, it is impossible to obtain accurate information. A great number of rumours have gone abroad of individuals having of late disappeared in an unaccountable manner, but one of them, however, a sort of half-witted lad, called ‘Daft Jamie,’ was seen on Monday, not far from Lasswade, with a basket, selling small-wares.”

This notice makes one or two interesting discoveries, notably what professes to be the drift of Hare’s declaration, and that of the young man, Broggan, who had also been arrested on a charge of complicity in the murder. Another point is the manner in which Mrs. Docherty was presented to Broggan, and some of the neighbours. But if the newspapers did not devote much space to the “extraordinary occurrence,” it was a topic which moved the very heart of the people, and was on everybody’s tongue. The journals were too busy discussing the siege of Silistria, the proceedings of politicians in London, or the state of Ireland; but the inhabitants of Edinburgh, and, indeed, of broad Scotland, thought and talked of little else but Burke and Hare and the resurrectionists. Before the time fixed for the trial the newspapers discovered they had made a mistake, and at last gave some degree of satisfaction to their readers by supplying a full report of the case. It is somewhat amusing, however, to find the Glasgow Courier of 27th December, with this apologetic notice:—“In the absence of any political news of importance we have devoted a considerable portion of our paper of to-day in giving a full report of the trial, before the High Court of Justiciary, of Burke and his wife for murder.”

The public were strongly of opinion that to the machinations of Burke and Hare could be traced the disappearance of Daft Jamie and Mary Paterson, the latter especially, as she had been seen in Burke’s company. The authorities, also, pursued their inquiries in the same direction. On the 10th of November the two men and their wives were committed by the Sheriff to stand their trial for the murder of Docherty, but Broggan was liberated, his innocence being apparent. The doubt as to the disappearance of Daft Jamie was deepened by a statement in an Edinburgh newspaper that he had been seen in the Grassmarket after the apprehension of the accused parties. This was repeated by several other prints, and the public mind remained in suspense, though there was a suspicion, amounting almost to a certainty, that Jamie had been the victim of foul play. At last the Observer and the Weekly Chronicle, who had been the most strenuous advocates of the safety of the lad, were forced to admit that he was amissing. Possibly the rumour that he had been identified in the dissecting-room by some of the students had something to do with the change. The Observer announced that it had been “credibly informed that this poor pauper,” Daft Jamie, had really disappeared in a mysterious manner, and that circumstances of a suspicious nature had transpired. The Chronicle was more elaborate in its explanation, stating that there were two Daft Jamies, but that there was no doubt one of them had been made away with.

While all this was going on there were other events connected with the resurrectionist movement coming to the front. One of these was a terrible contest which took place in a churchyard near Dublin. A woman of the name of Ryan died, and was decently interred. Her relatives were afraid that her remains would not be allowed to lie in the grave, as the body-snatchers were then busy with the Irish burying-places. They therefore joined to keep a watch for a time over her tomb. One night, between eight and nine o’clock, two of the men were left sentry at the grave, while the others went into a cabin in the vicinity, erected for the use of watchers. These latter were not long seated when a knock was heard at the door, and when it was opened they saw nearly a dozen armed men, who declared their mission to be body-lifting, but who, with all courtesy, stated that if the watchers would kindly point out where the body in which they were specially interested lay, it would be passed over. The watchers, however, intimated that, they would resist the uplifting of any body. A desperate contest then took place, but the resurrectionists were at last driven off. About two o’clock in the morning they returned, but again they were defeated, it was thought, with loss of life, for more than one of them was seen to fall.

It would be difficult to say whether it was this incident, or the general plundering of Scotch churchyards, that led the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle at this time to devote a leader to the question of the importation of corpses for anatomical purposes to Scotland from Ireland. This journal very soberly discussed the resurrectionist system, “its advantages and the indispensability of it in the present state of the law.” The writer seriously objected to the “noodles of functionaries on the banks of the Clyde,” interfering with subjects when they were in transitu, and pointed out that “for every Irish subject they seize they insure the rifling of some Scotch grave.” Very fine sentiment—the resurrectionist system was good enough in Ireland, but immediately it touched Scotland it was evil.

Two cases—one of them not without a touch of grim humour—came to light in Edinburgh at this time, and furnished material for additional commentary on the West Port tragedy. A resurrectionist, wishing to raise the wind, waited on an Edinburgh lecturer, and stated that he had a “subject” to dispose of, but he required two pounds ten shillings to meet some immediate demands. The money was given him, and in a short time a box was sent to the lecturer’s rooms. To the infinite surprise of the gentleman and his assistants, the trunk was found to be filled with rubbish. Such tricks, it was said, were often played on anatomists; but for all that, four individuals were apprehended in connection with this fraud, and were sentenced by the police magistrate each to imprisonment for two months. The other case illustrates the extraordinary boldness of the resurrectionists, even at a time when the popular feeling was strong against the miscreants apprehended for the murder of Docherty. A mulatto of the name of Masareen, who kept a public house in the Grassmarket, died on the autumn of 1828, and a month or so later his wife became unwell and was taken to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where she died in the end of November. On the day of her death her body was claimed by two men who represented themselves as her relatives. It was given them, and they took it away ostensibly for interment. Next morning her real relations appeared, and the greatest consternation was caused by the discovery that the Infirmary authorities had been duped by some very clever rogues. A search was made, and after some trouble the body was found in a dissecting room. It was taken back to the Infirmary, and was decently buried on the 1st of December.