Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  Back at the house Burke and Hare convinced Jamie to drink some whisky, but he would only take a few sips saying he didn’t like the taste. However, before long he was sleeping happily on the spare bed and the two men attempted their usual method of killing by suffocation, but Jamie proved to be too strong for them and fought back. They eventually managed to overpower the hapless boy and that night Dr Knox handed over another £10 for the latest body.

  Needless to say, several of Knox’s students recognised the popular boy and started to ask questions. Luckily for Burke and Hare, Dr Knox was not prepared to lose his supply of bodies and denied that the body was that of Jamie. He ordered them to carry on with the dissection immediately, and he made sure they focused on the recognisable deformed foot first to destroy any identifiable evidence.

  THE FINAL JOB

  The Burke and Hare ‘body business’ was abruptly cut short when they took the life of a recent arrival to Edinburgh, Mary Docherty. Burke started chatting to Mary in the local tavern and invited the woman to come back to his house. That evening Mary spent a pleasant few hours with Burke and mistress Helen McDougal, Hare and his wife Margaret and another couple, James and Ann Gray, who had been staying at the lodging house. After several drinks, Burke convinced Mary to stay the night at the lodging house and the Grays left after Burke promised to pay for alternative lodging so that Mary could use their room. The Grays seemed quite happy with this arrangement and promised to return for breakfast the following morning.

  When the Grays returned the next day they were curious why Mary Docherty was not at the breakfast table and started to ask questions. Helen told them she had asked the lady to leave because she had started to become too familiar with Burke. After breakfast, Ann Gray went to the bedroom to get some socks she had left behind and was taken aback when Burke yelled at her to stay away from the bed.

  Later on that same day the Grays were left alone in the house and Ann, curious about why Burke wouldn’t allow her near the bed, went to have a closer look. When they found the body of Mary Docherty lying there, they both ran from the house straight into the arms of Helen. When they questioned her about the body, Helen panicked and begged them to remain silent, promising them the sum of £10 a week for their loyalty. However, the couple were outraged at her suggestion and went to fetch a policeman.

  Aware that they were about to be tumbled, Helen and Margaret ran off to warn their respective partners, so that the body could be removed. By the time the police arrived that night there was nothing to be found. When the police questioned the neighbours, they told them that they had seen Burke and Hare leaving the house that afternoon carrying a large tea chest.

  The police decided to interview Burke and Helen separately and, although they corroborated each other’s stories, they slipped up on the time that they said Mary left the house. Burke said she had left at seven o’clock in the morning, while Helen claimed that it was seven in the evening, leaving a twelve-hour discrepancy.

  Following an anonymous tip-off Mary Docherty’s body was traced to the classrooms of Dr Knox and James Gray positively identified her as being the woman they had seen in the Hare household. The police brought the Hares in for questioning and it wasn’t long before the whole sorry story started to unravel.

  It is believed that Burke and Hare were responsible for the deaths of between twelve and thirty people, but at the end of the day Burke was the only one to be prosecuted and then only for the murder of Mary Docherty. William and Margaret turned king’s evidence against Burke, which in turn sent their colleague to the gallows.

  Burke was hanged on January 28, 1829, in front of a large, expectant crowd chanting, ‘Burke him, Burke him!’ His mistress, Helen McDougall, escaped punishment when the charges against her were not proven.

  Ironically, no charges were ever brought against Dr Knox, who had so willingly bought the bodies from Burke and Hare. It is alleged that William Hare died a penniless pauper in London in 1859, no doubt haunted by his past. It has also been said that Helen McDougal turned up in the village of Redding, Stirlingshire, but disappeared a few days later. It is alleged that she was burnt to death in a house that mysteriously caught fire in New South Wales.

  One strange twist to this macabre story is that Burke’s body went the same way as his victims – it was donated to a medical school for dissection!

  The Papin Sisters

  In 1933 France was horrified to learn of the brutal double murder that had taken place in the respectable town of Le Mans. Two wealthy women, a mother and daughter, had not simply been killed by their housemaids, but their bodies had been viciously mutilated as well.

  The two maids were Christine and Lea Papin, two sisters and their unprovoked crime took place on February 2, 1933. The case attracted a huge amount of public and media interest due to the brutality of the attack. In fact the media had a field day, calling the sisters such names as the Monsters of Le Mans, the Lambs Who Became Wolves and the Raging Sheep. Suddenly the name Papin was known all over France and what made the case even more strange was the reserved demeanour of the two girls throughout the whole scenario.

  Because of the odd nature of the circumstances, the case of the Papin sisters attracted many writers, film-makers and artists, including Jean Genet, Claude Chabrol, and Ruth Rendell, who in their various works discussed the reasons why the murders might have occurred. Moreover, in France, the murders coincided with the rise of existentialist thought as a popular philosophy of the time. Existentialism emphasised the difficulty of understanding motives within human behaviour, pointing to the inequalities in French society, and bourgeois society as a whole, that may – some speculated – have led to this outburst of violence. Thus it was that two obscure maids, who normally would not have attracted the least amount of attention during their lifetimes, came to occupy an important position in French and European literature and the arts during the twentieth century.

  Rape at an early age

  Christine Papin was born on March 8, 1905. Her younger sister Lea was born on September 15, 1911. Little is known about the girls’ early life, except that their father was an alcoholic who treated his family brutally, raping at least one of the girls at an early age. In addition, the girls were forced to leave school early, their education interrupted because of their poverty, and had to go into service as maids.

  By the time they were aged twenty-eight and twenty-one, they were working for a solicitor, his wife and his daughter in the town of Le Mans. They were hard-workers, and there was little for their employers to complain about. They spent most of their time attending to household duties, and in their free time, they always went everywhere together. They frequently attended church, and were known in the area as sober, prim young women who kept themselves very much to themselves.

  Relations in their employers’ household were not exactly warm, but there was not a great deal of ill feeling either. The employers were rather lacking in cordiality towards their servants, and the mistress in particular was rather haughty. The maids responded by being rather taciturn and keeping their distance as much as possible. Occasionally, the mistress of the house lost her temper and scolded the maids, but this was hardly unusual behaviour at the time. There was certainly no sign of any major problem that could have explained the terrible bloodbath that was about to occur.

  Beaten to a pulp

  On February 2, 1933, the mistress of the house returned, with her daughter, to find that there had been a power cut. She established that it was the servants who had caused it, by making a mistake of some kind in the kitchen. As usual, the mistress began to complain, when suddenly, the sisters turned on her. One of them grabbed the mistress, and one of them grabbed her daughter, and as though possessed, the sisters proceeded to tear the womens’ eyes out from their sockets with the greatest ferocity. Never in the history of crime had such a frenzied attack been recorded.

  Next, the servants seized hammers and beat their mistress and her daughter to a pulp, finishing off by carving u
p their bodies with a kitchen knife. In a bizarre ritual, they transferred the blood of one body to the other, opening up gaping wounds and pouring blood in, especially around the genital area. Later, Christine said she had done this to discover ‘the mystery of life’. By now the faces of the victims were so badly beaten that they were unrecognisable, and their bodies were covered in stab wounds and bleeding profusely. But instead of trying to hide their crimes, the sisters simply left the bodies lying on the carpet downstairs, and without clearing up at all, they went upstairs to bed. Before they retired they washed themselves carefully, taking off their bloodstained clothing and removing all traces of blood from their hands. They then got into the same bed together, naked, and huddled together there until they were found. According to the police, who were shocked to find they had made no attempt to hide their crime or cover their tracks, they did not attempt to resist arrest and were immediately taken into custody.

  Fits and hallucinations

  Naturally enough, considering the spectacular nature of the crime, the French press and public were agog when the case came to trial in September 1933. The sisters gave evidence, but could give no motive for their crimes. They had no grievances to bring against their employers and could not explain why they had suddenly engaged in this brutal attack. In addition, neither of them gave any indication of being insane. They were quiet and decorous, and appeared to understand what was being said to them. Their main objective during the trial appeared to be to ensure that they each took equal blame for the crimes, and they were very keen that they should be sentenced together. They were both convicted of the murders and, eventually, the jury decided that Christine, the elder sister, should be sentenced to death as the instigator of the crimes.

  When the pair were sent to prison – Christine to await her death by hanging – they were separated, and it was then that Christine began to show signs of extreme mental illness. She experienced fits and hallucinations, trying to tear out her own eyes and injuring herself in the process. She was restrained by a straitjacket, and after her ordeal, slumped into a fit of depression before beginning to speak deliriously about what had occurred, but in a way that made no sense at all.

  The mystery remains

  In the end, because of her delirious condition, Christine Papin was not hanged but instead was sent to a mental hospital in Rennes, where she died only a few years later, in 1937. Her sister Lea remained in prison until 1941, when she was released. She then went to live in Nantes, and her mother came to live with her there. She was thought to have died in 1982 but film-maker Claud Ventura found out, so he claimed, that she was in fact living in a hospice. By now she was paralysed by a stroke and left unable to speak. In his documentary on the case, En Quete des Soeurs Papin (In Search of the Papin Sisters), Ventura produced photographs to show that the old woman he found in the hospice was the same person as the young Lea who had committed the murders. However, because of a lack of documentation, it remains unclear whether she really was the Lea Papin who had brutally committed the killings all those years ago.

  The celebrated case of the Papin Sisters became a subject for many playwrights, film-makers and writers during the twentieth century. The play Les Bonnes (The Maids) by Jean Genet emphasises the sisters’ cruel treatment by their mistress and their unhappiness in the household. As ever, Genet’s aim in his work was to show the French bourgeoisie at their most despicable, and to make the point that French society was rotten to the core. Other works of art, such as the play My Sister in this House by Wendy Kesselman, the film La Ceremonie by Claud Chabrol, and the novel A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell, take different positions, and it is clear that the strangeness of the event, and the mystery of the sisters’ motivation leave the case open to many different readings. In addition, commentators such as the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have discussed the fact that these were ‘women on women’ killings, exploring the bizarre relationship between the two sisters that led them to kill their mistress and her daughter.

  Thus, instead of having lived out their lives in obscurity as two quiet, unassuming, churchgoing maids in a small French town, the Papin sisters have become emblematic of a complex web of relations between women and society, explored by French intellectuals and others over more than a century of analysis and discussion. Today, their crime remains as mysterious as it was when they committed it in 1933, because although we know the circumstances of what happened, we still remain largely ignorant about why Christine and Lea Papin suddenly decided to murder their mistress and her daughter in such a hideously brutal, violent way; and, moreover, why they took no steps to cover up their crime but simply declared, ‘En voila du propre’ (That’s a clean job of it), and went to bed, where they were later found naked in each other’s arms, waiting for retribution to descend, as it did, in the shape of trial by jury, incarceration, illness and, finally, death.

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

  The case of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, known as the Moors murderers, was one of the most shocking in British crime history and has remained in the public memory ever since. This is partly because, many years after the murders were committed, there was a great deal of controversy over whether Myra Hindley should be allowed to leave prison. Even though there were many murderers with a worse record than hers, the way in which Hindley and her lover Ian Brady treated their child victims so horrified the general public that there was a tremendous feeling of animosity towards her. There was also a high-profile campaign by an English aristocrat, Lord Longford, to release Hindley, which again attracted a great deal of attention. However, because of the public’s attitude towards her, there were fears for her safety once she was let out into normal society, and as a result Hindley was never released. Eventually, she died in prison.

  Number one hate figure

  Britain has had serial killers who have killed more victims than Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, but none have attracted so much loathing from the public. None have become so clearly the embodiment of evil as this pair of murderers who brutally tortured and killed at least five child victims in the early 1960s. What shocked the public most of all was the role of Hindley. For up to that time, only men had been known to carry out serial sex murders of children in this way. That a young woman should have been involved, as Myra Hindley was, and that the couple would have used tapes of the cruel torture of their victims to enhance their lovemaking, as emerged at their trial, seemed so utterly perverse that for many years, Hindley became Britain’s number one hate figure. It was perhaps unfair, but understandable, that she should have been reviled even more than the main perpetrator of the crimes, Ian Brady.

  There is no doubt that it was Brady who instigated the plan to murder the children, and that he was an extremely violent, aggressive and disturbed individual. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 2, 1938. Circumstances did not bode well for the mother and child. Brady’s mother, Peggy Stewart, was unmarried at the time and she found herself unable to support her child, so she gave her baby, aged four months, over to the care of John and Mary Sloane, a couple with four children of their own. Inevitably, this arrangement did not offer the baby a great deal of love and attention. Peggy continued to visit her son for a while, though not revealing that she was actually his mother, but then the visits stopped. She married again and moved to Manchester in the north of England, with her new husband, Patrick Brady. By this time her son was twelve years old.

  The lovers meet

  Ian Brady was an intelligent child, but had great emotional difficulties as a result of his family problems and had few friends at school. He was a loner, and not easy to get along with. In his teens, despite having passed the entrance examination to a good school, Shawlands Academy, he began to show signs of disturbed behaviour. He became fascinated by Nazi Germany and by Adolf Hitler in particular. He also took to truanting, missing school frequently. In addition, he began to commit petty burglaries around the area in which he lived. By the age of sixteen, he
had been arrested by the police three times and pressure was on to send him to Borstal (reform school). He was only saved from this fate when he agreed to leave his home in Glasgow and go to live with his natural mother, Peggy, and her husband in Manchester. His first months there did not seem to be too troubled. When he arrived there, in late 1954, he took his stepfather’s name and worked as a market porter, but before long he took to crime again and was jailed for theft. While in prison, he studied bookkeeping and, on his release, he worked as a labourer. However, by this time it became clear that he was now committed to pursuing a life of crime. In the meantime, he got a job as a bookkeeper with a company called Millwards Merchandising. All went well until the following year when a new secretary began work there: Myra Hindley.

  Hindley had been born in Manchester on July 23, 1942, the oldest child of Nellie and Bob Hindley. During the war years, while Bob was in the army, the family lived with Myra’s grandmother, Ellen Maybury. Later, when Bob and Nellie had trouble coping in the postwar years, Myra went back to live with her grandmother, who was devoted to her. Throughout her school years Myra was seen as a bright, though not overambitious, child, with a love of swimming. In her teens, she was a popular babysitter.

  She left school at sixteen and took a job as a clerk in an engineering firm. Soon afterwards, she got engaged to a local boy, Ronnie Sinclair. However, she broke the engagement off, having apparently decided that she wanted more excitement in life. Ominously enough, that desire was granted when she met Ian Brady.