Burke and Hare

by Bailey, Brian

  The lecture began at one o’clock. Burke’s cranium was sawn off and his brain exposed. According to the author of the contemporary West Port Murders, ‘the amount of blood that gushed out was enormous, and by the time the lecture was finished, which was not till three o’clock, the area of the class-room had the appearance of a butcher’s slaughter-house, from its flowing down and being trodden upon’.14 While Monro was delivering his lecture, students who had failed to get in were clamouring at the door, and police had to be called, but the officers were outnumbered by unruly students and a noisy affray broke out in which windows were broken and the police had to use their batons. Several men on both sides were injured. Order was only restored when Professor Christison negotiated an agreement whereby medical students were to be allowed into the lecture room, fifty at a time, to view the remains after Monro had finished with them.

  Next day, the general public was also permitted to file past the corpse, which had by then been restored to a less gruesome condition, although the shaved head showed continuous stitching where the skull had been replaced, with signs of blood still on it. The procession began at ten o’clock in the morning, and by dusk it was estimated that 25,000 people had passed through. Seven women were among these spectators. The fact that women had been among the crowd watching the execution had drawn some comment in Edinburgh, but the news that seven members of the gentle sex had viewed the butchered corpse caused considerable shock.

  Scott noted:

  The corpse of the Murderer Burke is now lying in state at the College, in the anatomical class, and all the world flock to see him. Who is he that says we are not ill to please in our objects of curiosity. The strange means by which the wretch made money are scarce more disgusting than the eager curiosity with which the publick have licked up all the carrion details of this business.15

  But then, until the mid-twentieth century, British justice had an infallible instinct for increasing morbid curiosity and depravity by making the punishment even more gruesome and horrific than the original crime.

  When all the gawping was over, the flesh was stripped from the bones and the skeleton was preserved as an exhibit in the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh University, where it remains to this day, a mark of celebrity, like a marble statue in a public square or a wax effigy in Madame Tussaud’s. But whereas they are mere likenesses of their subjects created by art, this is the subject, accorded the honour of perpetual visible corporality which neither saints nor emperors aspire to. Burke’s ghost must have smiled with satisfaction.

  Sensational pamphlets and broadsheets flooded the streets. One ‘reported’ the last words of Mrs Docherty as she was being suffocated, ‘God abandoned! and thou, hideous carrion, your time is at hand – the wrath of Heaven, even now, is ready to fall on your heads. I – I – shall be the last.’ Another imaginative piece of journalism gave Burke’s last dying speech. It was on the streets of Newcastle before news of the execution could possibly have arrived there.

  Phrenologists claimed to have measured the heads of Burke and Hare to find consistencies in the external variations in shape which could be identified as characteristic lesions of the brain in murderers. The leader of these pseudo-scientists was George Combe, a solicitor, who was among those who had been allowed to see Burke’s corpse before Monro lectured on it. He had recently published Essays on Phrenology and founded The Phrenological Journal. Thomas Stone, President of the Royal Medical Society, poured scorn on this theory, which he described as a hypothesis ‘which has been decidedly rejected by the most enlightened men in Europe, and which, from its earliest existence, has appealed rather to the credulity of the vulgar, than to the judgment of men of science’.16

  In due course, the ‘official’ and Courant confessions were published simultaneously, in spite of a further temporary injunction against the Courant version, granted to the afore-mentioned solicitor Smith, who claimed that the so-called ‘Courant confession’ had been intended by Burke for him, but had been given to the editor of the Courant by a turnkey named Wilson. On 27 January, the day before his execution, Burke had signed a paper authorising the demand of this confession from the Courant and its delivery to the Sheriff’s Office. He referred to this document as the one ‘which I signed for – Ewart’, and said that although it was correct ‘so far as I had time to examine it’, the declaration made before the Sheriff was ‘the only full statement that can be relied on’.

  It seems clear that Burke was being pestered in the condemned cell by lawyers acting for various interested parties, some anxious to prevent premature publication of the full details, and the Courant eager to capitalise on what it saw as a major ‘scoop’. Neither Smith nor the paper wanted their scoop to be upstaged by release of the ‘official’ confession, so they promptly came to some agreement, and both confessions were printed in the press on 7 February.

  And so at last the full story of the Burke and Hare crimes was revealed to the public, and although the extent of the murders was established only on the basis of the criminals’ own statements, there was no compelling reason to believe that they were lying or hiding the truth. Sixteen is the number of murders attributed to Burke and Hare ever since, although doubts remained for many years afterwards, even among those involved in bringing the pair to justice.

  Lord Cockburn, whose memoirs were published twenty-seven years after the trial, recalled that ‘it was nearly certain that, within a year or two, Burke and Hare had murdered about sixteen people, for the sale of their bodies to anatomists; and after his conviction Burke confessed this’.17 Popular rumour naturally tended to put the figure much higher, but without the benefit of the slightest evidence. A Glasgow printer named Muir published a broadsheet purporting to be Hare’s confession to murdering, with his accomplices, ‘between 30 and 40 individuals in the City of Edinburgh’. But idle speculation and misinformation surrounded the whole affair. An anonymous American lawyer got the story so wildly wrong that he described the execution of both Burke and Helen McDougal on 22 January.18

  Sir Robert Christison’s characteristically cautious impression was quite different. In his autobiography, published after his death in 1882, he wrote that there was ‘reason to suppose that this atrocious trade had been carried on during the whole winter of 1827-28. Burke, indeed, was said to have admitted after conviction, that sixteen victims had been murdered by his copartnery. But villains of his rare stamp are apt to indulge in the strange vainglory of exaggerating their actual wickedness.’19

  Owen Dudley Edwards repeatedly ascribes seventeen murders to the pair. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, however, we may take it that Burke and Hare between them killed sixteen people in the course of nine months – an average of one every seventeen days.

  NOTES

  1 Caledonian Mercury, 1 January 1829.

  2 Letter of 4 January 1829, Grierson, p. 89.

  3 Glasgow Herald, 10 June 1814.

  4 Tanner’s Close and the slum area around it were demolished in 1902.

  5 Grierson, p. 102.

  6 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, (Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1856), p. 458.

  7 Atlay, p. 42(n).

  8 ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, Letter to the Lord Advocate.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Quoted in Roughead, p. 64.

  11 Ibid, p. 65.

  12 Grierson, p. 131.

  13 Sir Walter Scott, Journal, (Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1950 edn), p. 583.

  14 Ireland, West Port Murders, p. 254.

  15 Scott, Journal, p. 585.

  16 Thomas Stone, Observations on the Phrenologial Development of Burke, Hare, and Other Atrocious Murderers, (Edinburgh, 1829).

  17 Cockburn, p. 456.

  18 Quoted in George Ryley Scott, The History of Capital Punishment, (London, Torchstream Books, 1950), pp. 49-50.

  19 Robert Christison, The Life of Sir Robert Christison, Bart, (2 vols, Edinburgh, Wm Blackwood & Sons, 1885), Vol I, p. 308.

  * * *

  9. H
ARE

  * * *

  The Hares remained in prison all this time. They had been locked up for their own safety at first, but when it became clear that William Hare was soon to be released, as no further action was to be taken against him by the Crown, Daft Jamie’s mother and sister, both named Janet Wilson, petitioned the Sheriff to have Hare detained in prison so that he could not cheat justice by fleeing to Ireland. It was their intention to bring a private prosecution for the murder of Jamie.

  Press and public were at one in their fury that Hare seemed likely to get off scot-free. Many believed that the malevolent Hare was the worst of the evil pair. The general opinion was that Hare was not only the original instigator of the homicidal partnership, but also the one with most blood on his hands in the actual killing of their victims. Hare, ‘the vilest of the two monsters’, according to Lonsdale, ‘suggested a fresh stroke of business, namely, to inveigle the old and infirm into his den and “do for them”.1 This slimy character, it was commonly maintained, had led Burke on throughout this grisly catalogue of crime, and had ended by treacherously sending his partner to the gallows, to save his own neck. He had not shown the slightest sign of remorse for his actions and, in fact, had given some appearance of being quite pleased at getting himself off the hook at Burke’s expense.

  Nevertheless, the Lord Advocate’s position was clear, however much he and everyone else might regret it. If it had not been for Hare’s testimony, Burke, as well as Nelly, would almost certainly have won a Not Proven verdict. Rae had used Hare to bring Burke to justice, and had guaranteed him immunity from prosecution if he testified against his erstwhile partner. If he now went back on his word, it would bring discredit on himself and the honour of his country.

  We have already noticed Professor John Wilson’s impressions of Hare in prison, and Sir Walter Scott was of a like mind as regards Hare:

  This Hare is a most hideous wretch so much that I was induced to remark him from having observed his extremely odious countenance once or twice in the Street where in general I am no observer of faces but his is one which there is no passing without starting & I recognized him easily by the prints.2

  Another character-sketch of him was provided by the afore-mentioned James Maclean, who told Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe that Hare was a man of ‘ferocious and tyrannical disposition, much inclined to quarrel, and very obstreperous when in liquor’. Maclean, a fellow-hawker as well as a fellow-Irishman, related how, during the summer of 1828, he was returning from the shearing3 at Carnwath with Hare, Burke and others when they all went into a public house at Balerno, near Currie, for some refreshment:

  The reckoning being clubbed, Hare snatched up the money from the table, and put it into his pocket; when Burke, fearing lest a disturbance should take place in the house, paid the whole amount. After they left the inn McLean observed to Hare it was a scaly trick to lift the money with an intention to affront them. On this Hare knocked the feet from under McLean, and when prostrate on the ground, gave him a tremendous kick on the face. His shoes being pointed with iron plates, commonly called caulkers, he wounded McLean severely, laying open his upper lip.4

  When speculation was rife about the possible number of the pair’s victims, Maclean himself was thought likely to be one of them, as he had gone missing. But he had been paying a visit to Glasgow and returned to Edinburgh in due course.

  When a public subscription was announced to raise the costs of a private prosecution for the killing of the popular Jamie, the Edinburgh public, urged on by the Caledonian Mercury, responded at once, and by 16 January Mrs and Miss Wilson were able to retain Mr Francis Jeffrey as counsel and petition the Sheriff for Hare to be charged with the murder of James Wilson.

  Three days later, while this new development was being considered by the law authorities, Margaret Laird was released, as the Crown could not proceed against her and she was not named in the private action against her husband. As she made her way back to the Old Town with her child in her arms, she was inevitably recognised, and a mob gathered to follow and pelt her with stones and mud. She, like McDougal earlier, had to be rescued by police and locked up again for her own safety. A few days later she was freed again, and after apparently wandering about the country in tatters, ended up a fortnight later in Glasgow, where she was again given refuge from the mob in a prison cell.

  She occasionally burst into tears while deploring her unhappy situation, which she ascribed to Hare’s utter profligacy, and said all she wished was to get across the channel, and end her days in some remote spot in her own country in retirement and penitence.5

  She remained in Glasgow for some time, nevertheless, trying to get aboard vessels bound for Ireland. Lucky at last, she was eventually assisted by the authorities in securing a passage on board the Fingail from Greenock to Belfast on 12 February.6 Hearsay identified her with a woman called Mrs Hare, employed as a nursemaid in Paris thirty years later, but we may pass a verdict of Not Proven on this highly improbable story.

  Hare, meanwhile, was taken into close confinement again and an examination of witnesses began. Burke, in the condemned cell at this time, might have hoped for a stay of execution if he was to provide evidence against Hare. On 20 January, Hare’s legal representatives applied for the warrant to be withdrawn and for their client to be released. The Sheriff refused this on the grounds that there was nothing in a guarantee by the public prosecutor to prevent private proceedings. Hare’s lawyers then took the case to the High Court, presenting a lengthy Bill of Advocation, Suspension and Liberation, in which they argued for Hare’s immediate release. He had made a full disclosure of the murders, including James Wilson’s, under assurance from the Lord Advocate of his personal protection, and he had given evidence at the trial under assurance from the judges that he would not be punished for any of the murders listed in the indictment.

  The Wilsons were advised of this bill and their counsel was heard in reply to it. Hare was released from close confinement so that he could communicate freely with his advisers. The High Court then passed the bill to the Lord Advocate so that he could present his arguments on the matter. It was by now 26 January, and Burke was to be hanged in less than forty-eight hours.

  The High Court of Justiciary, with the Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Boyle, presiding, considered the submissions of all sides at great length. The Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae, told their lordships that in giving Hare immunity from prosecution he had intended to cover any case that might arise. His assurance was unqualified, and calculated to obtain Hare’s cooperation by banishing from his mind any danger of future trial or punishment. Sir William considered that this freedom from prosecution, guaranteed in the public interest, included prosecution at the instance of any private party. He believed that he was now legally prevented from prosecuting Hare, and to do so would be dishonourable and unworthy of his office.

  Mr Sandford, for the Wilsons, argued that Hare was not protected against private prosecution for Jamie’s murder because such protection was given only in respect of the crime on which he gave evidence. During the trial, Hare was clearly warned that he need not answer any question relating to any other murder but Mrs Docherty’s, because he could not claim the court’s protection on other matters. Hare had refused to answer the one question put to him about the death of James Wilson.

  Hare’s representatives referred to ‘Janet Wilson, alleged sister, and Janet Wilson, alleged mother of the said James Wilson, alias Daft Jamie; but who, the petitioner is informed, and has reason to believe, do not truly possess these characters, and have produced no evidence thereof.’ Duncan McNeill argued that the Public Prosecutor alone had the right to punish criminals on the public’s behalf, and relinquished the right to bring Hare to trial in order to obtain the conviction of Burke. Hare had kept his part of the bargain, and if the Crown was now to renege on its agreement, Hare would not have a fair trial, the ends of justice would not be served, and the public would lose faith in the absolute integrity of the law. This last point
was perhaps of doubtful veracity. The public had little interest in the niceties of the law. It simply wanted Hare hanged.

  The debate was too complicated for the judges to arrive at a quick decision, and they gave themselves a week in which to reach their final conclusions. It is significant, however, that there was no suggestion that the execution of Burke should be postponed.

  On 2 February, their lordships met again to deliver their judgement. Lord Boyle was supported by Lords Gillies, Pitmilly, Mackenzie, Meadowbank and Alloway. By a majority of four to two, the High Court of Justiciary ruled that Hare could not be prosecuted for the murder of James Wilson. They quashed the action of the Wilsons and ordered that Hare should be set free. The kernel of their decision was that, as Lord Mackenzie put it, ‘the protection of a socius criminis, obtained by his appearance as a witness, in a prosecution by the Lord Advocate, operates also against the private prosecutor’. Otherwise, it would be possible in theory for Mrs Docherty’s relations to prosecute Hare for a murder he had admitted, and he could be convicted without trial or jury on a charge on which he had been guaranteed immunity.

  Hare was not out of the wood – or the prison cell – yet, however. The Wilson women immediately responded to the High Court judgement by notifying the Sheriff that they intended to bring a civil action against Hare for an ‘assythment’ of £500. This meant that they would sue him for damages, and they pleaded for him to be detained to prevent him from fleeing the country and avoiding this indemnity.