Hare was brought to court and questioned later that day, but refused to give any answers. He would not say if he was concerned in killing James Wilson, nor confirm where he was born, say where he intended to go if released from prison, or reply on any other matter, except that he admitted he could not write. But a fellow-prisoner named Lindsay said that Hare had told him that when he was liberated he would go back to Ireland. John Fisher, the chief warder at Calton jail, confirmed this. Hare then volunteered the information that he could not stay in Edinburgh as he had no home and no money, so he must go elsewhere to find work. He might remain in Scotland, or go to England or Ireland. The Sheriff therefore sent him back to prison until he could find £500. But there was no chance of him doing so, and the Wilsons withdrew the warrant after three days, resigning themselves to the inevitable. On 5 February 1829, Hare was freed from Calton jail at eight o’clock in the evening.
He was taken by hackney carriage in the company of Fisher, the turnkey, to meet the south-bound mail coach at Newington, a district he was not unfamiliar with. Hare, wearing a hat and well wrapped up in an old camlet coat against both cold and recognition, climbed up to an outside seat of the coach, and as it moved off, the considerate Fisher called out, ‘Goodbye, Mr Black; I wish you well home.’
The first stage of the journey was completed at Noblehouse, a village twenty miles south of Edinburgh, where the passengers were set down at an inn for supper. There, according to the Dumfries Courier, Hare was recognised by one of the passengers who had been travelling inside the coach; none other than Mr Douglas Sandford, in fact, who had been junior counsel for the Wilsons!7 When the freezing Hare attempted to take an inside place for the next stage of the journey, Sandford ordered the guard to remove him and, to justify his action, revealed to his fellow-passengers the true identity of ‘Mr Black’. When the coach reached Dumfries, news that Hare was on it travelled like wildfire and a large crowd gathered outside the King’s Arms in the High Street. Soon the local police had something close to a riot on their hands, and Hare only escaped the fury of the mob by making it to the town jail. The crowd grew to an alarming 800-strong mob, and 100 special constables were hurriedly sworn in and armed with batons, while frenzied rioters hammered at the prison doors and smashed windows and lamps.
Hare was smuggled out in the early hours of the following morning and, escorted for some distance by local militia and one of the Sheriff’s officers, he was left to his own devices on the road to Annan. He must have crossed the border into England and was reported to have been seen twice in the vicinity of Carlisle in the next few days. That is the last we know of Hare’s fate or whereabouts.
Meanwhile, Burke’s confessions appeared in the press, inflaming the public mind even more against the one who had got away. Wild speculation and rumour soon filled the vacuum left by the absence of fact. A broadsheet published by J. Johnstone & Co gave an account, ‘copied’, it said, ‘from a Dublin Paper’, of the lynching of Hare by a mob in Londonderry. Another, published by Neil & Co, purported to give an account of Hare’s execution ‘at New York in June, from an American Paper’.
J.B. Atlay, however, asserted that Hare ‘certainly survived his confederate for over forty years’.8 He produced no evidence for this statement other than the Victorian tale that a blind beggar who used to sit at a corner of London’s Oxford Street was Hare. He had been disabled, it was said, by a workman who discovered who he was and blinded him with quicklime. ‘His story was on the lips of every nursemaid, and he was pointed out to awestruck children as William Hare, one of the actors in the West Port murders.’9 There is no good reason to believe that this really was Hare. It seems extremely unlikely, for his presence in London would not have been tolerated, and no one would have given him alms, when his vile career in Edinburgh had become known and led to copycat crimes in the capital, to say nothing of the widespread fear of ‘burking’ and urgent legislation to remove any incentive for similar crimes in the future.
It is more likely that Hare somehow made his way back to Ireland, probably from Liverpool, and ended his days there in obscurity with an assumed name, although it is only fair to mention that Lonsdale, writing in 1870, stated that Hare and his wife ‘returned to their native country (Ireland), and were no more heard of except in the pages of fiction till a few months ago, when Hare was reported as being seen in London’.10
Now that we have followed the careers and fates of the homicidal quartet as far as we can, is it possible to apportion guilt with any confidence? To deal with the women first, was Burke telling the truth when he said they might have thought he and Hare were body-snatchers but had no suspicion of murder? This was his story in the ‘official’ confession, but he changed his tune somewhat in the Courant confession, eager to implicate both Hare and his wife. Although he repeated that ‘Helen McDougal and Hare’s wife were not present when those murders were committed’, he said that it was Hare’s wife who lured Daft Jamie into her house and, after signalling to Burke by stamping his foot in Rymer’s shop, locked Jamie inside the room with Burke and Hare. It was also Hare’s wife who urged Burke to murder Helen McDougal, if that story was true; and Hare’s wife who often helped him and Hare to pack the murdered bodies into boxes. There cannot be a shadow of a doubt that Margaret Laird (or Hare) knew, at least at a later stage, what was going on and – willingly or otherwise – aided and abetted her husband and Burke in their crimes. Asked during the trial what she supposed had happened to Mrs Docherty when she (Hare) had come in from the passage and not seen the old woman, she replied, ‘I had a supposition that she had been murdered. I have seen such tricks before.’ The first sentence might have been part of the line she and Hare had agreed to take at the trial. The second sounds like a slip of the tongue, but no one in court pursued the point. This was presumably because she could not give evidence against her husband and there had been some prior agreement between the lawyers not to delve into any murders other than those in the indictment, in order not to inflame the volatile public even more. What astute advocate would have let pass her remark that she had ‘seen such tricks before’, without insisting on knowing what she meant by that?
Burke said that he ‘had a good character with the police; or if they had known that there were four murderers living in one house they would have visited them oftener’. These are the words of a condemned Irishman retaining his macabre sense of humour, about ten days before his execution, with whoever interviewed him in prison and took down the Courant confession. It cannot, of course, be taken as evidence of Helen McDougal’s guilt as an accessory.
However, one murder which points to guilt on McDougal’s part is that of her distant relation, Ann McDougal. She was, according to Burke, a cousin of Nelly’s ‘first husband’, and came to Edinburgh to visit Burke and Nelly, presumably at Nelly’s invitation. She was murdered in Broggan’s house when she had been in Edinburgh for a few days, and her corpse was in the house, where Nelly lived, for a few hours, packed in a trunk which Broggan saw, apparently open with a body in it. Now, if we give Nelly the benefit of the doubt and assume she was out all that time and saw neither the body nor the trunk, there is still the question of what she supposed had become of her friend and distant relation. Would she have believed Burke if he had told her that Ann had suddenly gone home to Falkirk without a parting word to Nelly? Maybe; but of all the murders, this is the one which most calls into question McDougal’s ignorance of what was going on quite early in the proceedings.
The most powerful piece of evidence against Helen McDougal was the allegation by Mr and Mrs Gray that she had offered them money to keep quiet and not go to the police when the corpse of Mrs Docherty was found at the foot of her bed. Even if she had believed that Burke was acting within the law on previous occasions, she must have known that he was acting illegally this time, and therefore was an accessory during and after the fact. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, even if she had been entirely unaware of any murder before that of Mrs Docherty, she had tu
mbled to the truth by the night of Hallowe’en.
McDougal’s attempted bribery of the Grays points to her guilty knowledge in more ways than one. How could she and Burke, even with the willing participation of Hare and his wife, possibly have afforded to pay the Grays hush-money of £10 a week? Clearly, if the Grays had accepted this offer, it would not have been long before they ended up on Knox’s dissecting-table. It appears likely that McDougal made her ludicrous offer with this in mind. But she denied that she had offered any money to the Grays, and the other evidence against her was either based on the unreliable testimony of the Hares or was purely circumstantial, and consistent with a belief that Burke and Hare were body-snatchers.
Of course, if the Hares’ evidence in the witness box had been believed, and McDougal indeed saw Burke on top of Mrs Docherty before running out of the room, that would have been conclusive. She cannot have thought the drunken Burke was about to rape the woman – she must have known that he was going to kill her. But the jury was right in deciding that the case against her as an accessory to murder had not been proven. In an English court, in these circumstances, a woman who was possibly innocent would quite probably have been sent to the gallows. We cannot say with certainty that she was not in on the whole series of murders right from the start, but she is entitled to the benefit of the doubt in our minds, as well as the jury’s.
As to the actual perpetrators of the sixteen murders, it was widely believed at the time that the worst of the two fiends had got away with it. There was nothing to choose between them in moral terms, but it is worth keeping in mind that Burke was the one with such brains as the two possessed between them. He was the only one of the four who was literate, he had the wider experience, and he had the nous to be the chief motivator of a criminal partnership. It is difficult to believe that anyone with an ounce of sense would have followed Hare in a risky enterprise, although it may well have been Hare, who had lived in the squalid back streets of Edinburgh longer than Burke, who first thought of the idea of selling a body to the doctors. Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate, was probably right in regarding Burke as the principal party in the affair. In which case, the man whom Lord Cockburn later called ‘respectable’ was the evil monster, and the one Professor Wilson called ‘evil’ was the cowardly dupe.
What if Rae had offered Burke immunity from prosecution instead of Hare? Since Nelly McDougal was not Burke’s wife, the Lord Advocate could have had three defendants in the dock instead of two, and might have got two of them convicted, as Maggie Hare’s guilt would probably have appeared rather less doubtful to the jury than McDougal’s, and Burke would most probably have been more talkative in the dock than Hare was. Rae may have genuinely believed that Burke, as the more educated man, was the prime mover in the partnership, and that he should be the one to pay the supreme penalty; but he must also have been influenced in his choice by the probability that Hare would be the easier to frighten and coerce into turning King’s Evidence.
Was there any way in which Hare might have been brought to justice as well as Burke? It was infinitely more desirable for the two men to be tried for murder than Burke and McDougal, for even if McDougal had been found guilty she was only an accessory and not a killer herself, as was also true of Maggie Hare. The only body in the case was that of Mrs Docherty, but the case of Mary Paterson was at least suspected before Hare made his statement and had been granted immunity from prosecution. Janet Brown (or ‘Jess’ as she was called in the ‘Echo’s’ letter) had gone to the police with her story when she heard of the arrest of Burke and Hare and their womenfolk. Perhaps more protracted and diligent enquiry after the discovery of Mrs Docherty’s corpse might have led to a chink in the armour of silence that surrounded Knox and his students. Several people, according to David Paterson, had made sketches of Mary Paterson’s corpse. If one of these had come to light it might have been accepted as sufficient evidence to subpoena Knox and his assistants to testify to the delivery of her body by ‘John’ and ‘William’ to 10 Surgeons’ Square.
There would have been no proof that she had been murdered, but the fact that she had been in the company of Burke and Hare alive and well, and been delivered dead, on the same day, combined with the evidence about Mrs Docherty, should have been enough to persuade a jury of the guilt of both men. And if evidence had been given about the delivery of Daft Jamie as well – another young and relatively healthy person, some of whose property had been found in the possession of Burke and Hare, including the brass snuff-box and spoon – that would surely have proved conclusive, even by the admirable standards of cautious Scottish juries reluctant to take chances with the death penalty.
Another question arises about Jamie Wilson’s corpse. If the order I have suggested for the murders is correct, and Burke and Hare got £8 for the body of Mrs Ostler and £10 for that of Ann McDougal, that would suggest that Mrs Ostler was murdered in September (Burke said it was ‘September or October’), and Ann McDougal early in October. Knox advertised his new season’s course of lectures in Practical Anatomy and Operative Surgery as commencing on 6 October, so we may take it that he paid winter rates for his subjects from about that date. So if Ann McDougal’s corpse was the first that Burke and Hare sold to him after the summer recess, Jamie Wilson must have been murdered well into October, possibly halfway through the month.
Now, how long would Knox normally store a corpse before dissecting it? It could not be long, even in a cold cellar, in the days before refrigeration. But the body of Mary Paterson was apparently kept in spirits for three months before it was dissected. If the allegation was untrue that Jamie’s corpse was mutilated and dissected at once to prevent recognition, it might well have been still whole in Knox’s cellar when news reached him of the arrest of Burke and Hare, perhaps a fortnight, or at most three weeks, after he had bought Jamie’s corpse from them.
If this were the case, what would Knox have done in such circumstances? He would either have destroyed the evidence at once, not wanting another recognisable corpse to be found on his premises; or he might have assumed with his customary arrogance that he could sweep aside any questions the police might put to him. But there appears to be a possibility, at least, that Jamie’s corpse was intact on Knox’s premises at the time of the arrest, and it could have been seized and subjected to a post-mortem examination which might have revealed more signs of a violent death than was the case with Mrs Docherty.
But thorough investigation of all the circumstances was not one of the hallmarks of this infamous case. Sir William Rae, of course, could not risk bringing four people to the dock and failing to get any of them convicted. He acted on the balance of probabilities, and the result was that the despicable Hare got away with multiple murder.
NOTES
1 Lonsdale, p. 74.
2 Grierson, p. 108.
3 ‘Shearing’ meant reaping; i.e. the annual harvest when townsfolk traditionally went for a working holiday in the open air.
4 Robert Buchanan et al, Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal, p. xiv.
5 Glasgow Chronicle, 10 February 1829.
6 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 14 February 1829.
7 Dumfries Courier, 10 February 1829.
8 Atlay, p. 42.
9 Ibid.
10 Lonsdale, pp. 75-76(n).
* * *
10. ECHO
* * *
During the weeks since Christmas, while Burke was in the condemned cell awaiting execution and Hare was in prison waiting for legal arguments to end in his release, one other allegedly culpable associate of the foursome had kept what some regarded as a dignified silence.
Dr Knox was commonly perceived as a sinister ringmaster who got Burke and Hare dancing to his tune. Some believed he had actively encouraged sixteen murders, and most of those who would not go that far held him guilty of turning a blind eye, like Nelson, to a clear signal he chose not to see.
Near the end of January, a sixpenny pamphlet was published, entitled Letter to the L
ord Advocate, disclosing the accomplices, secrets, and other facts relative to the Late Murders; with a correct account of the manner in which the Anatomical Schools are supplied with subjects. Its author hid behind the pseudonym ‘The Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, but it has been attributed ever since to David Paterson, Knox’s doorkeeper. This document has consistently been dismissed as the spiteful reaction of a man who had been sacked and was taking revenge on his employer, while at the same time clearing himself of any blame in the affair. No one in more than 100 years seems to have seriously questioned whether Paterson was really the author of this pamphlet. It is my belief not only that the pamphlet was not written by Paterson, but that it is more important than has been realised. The chief object of the Letter, it appears to me, was not to exonerate Paterson, but to urge the Lord Advocate to prosecute Hare as well as Burke and to bring Knox to justice for his part in the affair. What was meant, otherwise, by the title-page quote, ‘What? Shall wealth screen thee from justice?’ The pamphlet was written and printed in a very short time, before all hope of prosecuting Hare had gone, and by someone with prior knowledge of Burke’s confessions, since they were referred to in the text. But he can only have seen the few leaked (and inaccurate) details of the Courant confession, for in neither of his confessions did Burke say, as the ‘Echo’ believed, that ‘the first subject ever they sold to Dr K – was a female that died in Hare’s house’. This at least proves that the author of the Letter was not the person who somehow gained access to Burke in prison and obtained the complete account.
Paterson lived with his mother and fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, at 26 West Port. He described himself as ‘keeper of the museum belonging to Dr Knox’, and was referred to in court, during Burke’s trial, as a ‘medical person’ by one lawyer and a ‘surgeon’ by another. But after Paterson’s appearance in court and some damaging correspondence with the newspapers, Knox’s senior students, keen to defend their mentor when he would do nothing to defend himself, denounced Paterson as a ‘doorkeeper’, a menial servant who had no responsibilities other than answering the door and keeping the premises clean, and was ‘hired by the week at seven shillings’.
Burke and Hare Page 15
