During his speech, Jessie King's composure cracked and her groans echoed round the courtroom. Her hysteria grew while his lecture about her future deliverance was being made and, when he finally announced the death sentence, she screamed and fainted in the dock. Two police officers carried her bodily to the cells below the courtroom from where she was transported to the condemned cell of Calton Jail.
She was to be the first woman to hang in Scotland since 1862, when Mary Reid, or Timney, had been convicted for beating her neighbour to death (see p. 144). However, there were many in the city who believed she should be spared. Attempts were made to have the sentence commuted to life, with 2,000 residents of Stockbridge even submitting a petition stating she was ‘a weak-minded person and ought not be to held entirely responsible for her actions’. The petition was sent to the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Marquis of Lothian, along with medical reports regarding the state of her mind. But the Marquis was not in a forgiving mood. As there was no doubt over her guilt, he said, the law must take its course. He went on to say that as the offence ‘was a very heinous one, there would probably be little sorrow among the community at large over her future’.
There were newspaper reports that King tried to cheat the hangman although this was later denied by her priest. A long pin was found in her cell at one time, which she claimed was for picking her teeth, but officials believed she had a more lethal function in mind. Later, a length of rope was found. No one knew how she came into possession of these items but there was little doubt that she planned to do herself some mischief. At some stage, she had also either given birth to another child, which would perhaps have been Pearson's, or she had taken charge of another adoptee. A letter from the governor to the procurator fiscal and dated 18 January 1889 reads:
I beg to inform you that Jessie King, an untried prisoner confined here on a warrant at your instance, attempted to commit suicide last night by strangulation.
I am of the opinion that she means to take her own life and that of her child [my italics] but every precaution will be taken to prevent this. In the meantime the child has, on the recommendation of the surgeon, been removed from her.
It seems that, on this occasion, she had taken a length of tape from the child's pinafore and wrapped it round her own neck several times. In a note to the governor, the prison doctor, Henry Hay, said he had ensured King was
most carefully attended night and day as she seemed to be labouring under mental excitement and evidently means to commit suicide. From what she has said to the other two prisoners associated with her, I consider it unsafe to allow her child to be in the cell with her.
Edinburgh's Lord Provost was technically responsible for organising the execution but he delegated the job to Baillies McDonald and Steel. McDonald, though, wanted nothing to do with the killing of a woman, whether she deserved it or not, and respectfully asked to be relieved of the onerous duty. It then fell to a Baillie Russell who had no such qualms.
The actual scaffold was built in a corridor running between the male and female sections of the jail. The days of executions being public spectacles were long gone and the scene of Jessie King's final minutes would be hidden from non-official eyes.
The executioner was Yorkshireman James Berry, a former policeman and shoe salesman from Bradford, whose deeply held religious convictions did not prevent him from dropping a number of murderers in England and Scotland. His first such commission had actually come from the City of Edinburgh five years earlier when he had executed two miners turned poachers, William Innes and Robert Vickers, who had been convicted of murdering two gamekeepers. The success of that double hanging had brought him work in England, his first execution south of the Border having been that of a woman in Lincoln. Mary Lefley had poisoned her husband with arsenic disguised in a rice pudding. But the convicted woman had not gone quietly into the long night and her screams had distressed Berry so much that, forever after, he was loath to hang a female. His record was also marred by a few botched executions – including one where the accused's head was snapped from its neck by the drop – and the pressure of his job brought on a nervous breakdown in 1888.
However, he arrived in Edinburgh on Friday 8 March 1889 to take up temporary lodgings in the jail while he made his calculations. He ascertained her weight as 7 st. 2 lb and calculated that the job would require a 6 ft 6 in. drop if his favoured Italian hemp rope was to be used.
Jessie King had clearly been listening to the judge's advice for, throughout her last night, she ‘paid great attention to the ministrations of her spiritual advisers’ – in her case Canon Donlevy and two Franciscan nuns. She went to bed at 11 p.m. but did not fall asleep until around 12.30 a.m. and she was awake again by 5 a.m. on the Monday morning, the day of her execution. An hour later, Canon Donlevy was leading a mass in the prison chapel and administering the sacrament to the penitent woman.
After a breakfast of bread and butter, boiled eggs and tea, she was left to prepare herself for what was to come. Meanwhile, the proprieties of legal murder were being observed in another part of the prison. At around 7 a.m., a large knot of men – including doctors, police officers, the prison chaplain and various prison and court officials, as well as journalists – strode through the corridors to the office of the prison matron. At a few minutes before 8 a.m., the prison governor made the following request:
Baillies Russell and Steel, magistrates of the City of Edinburgh, would you have the goodness to proceed to the prisoner's cell and identify her with the warrant in order that she may be handed over to you for execution as required by law?
Then, because a job isn't over until the paperwork is done, he added, ‘And, perhaps, on your return, you will be good enough to sign the receipt.’
The receipt in question read:
HM Prison, Edinburgh, 11th March 1889 – Received by the governor of HM Prison, Edinburgh, the person of convict Jessie King, with a view to the carrying out of the sentence of death which was passed in High Court of Justiciary, held in Edinburgh on the 18th February 1889, as per the extract conviction exhibited here.
Jessie King walked with Canon Donlevy and prison officials from the condemned cell into the execution area. By now, she had calmly accepted her fate. She thanked the prison staff for the kindness they had shown her and bade goodbye to a number of female officers. As she walked, the priest murmured the litany and she made the correct responses. There was no gallows platform as such so there were no steps for her to climb to the noose. Berry preferred to slip the hood over the head of his subjects before they reached the trapdoor, as he believed the sight of the dangling rope was unsettling. Jessie stood quietly as he covered her face and pinioned her arms and legs. Then she was led to the trapdoor where the looped rope hung from a nine-foot gibbet and beam. The accused woman said, ‘Into thy hands, oh Lord, I commend my spirit. Lord Jesus, receive my soul. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.’
At three minutes past eight, Berry released the trapdoor and Jessie King's body jerked into the darkness below. The satisfied hangman said that she never moved after the drop. He also opined that she was the bravest woman he ‘had ever had under [him]’.
When the reporters were admitted to the chamber, they found Berry staring into the gaping trap. Given his distaste for hanging women, he appeared more relaxed than he was probably feeling. A pale Canon Donlevy stood nearby, tightly clutching his crucifix. King's body swung gently, the creaking of the rope unnaturally loud. The law demanded that the body hang there for a period of one hour before it could be taken down and buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls.
Outside those walls, between 1,500 and 2,000 people waited for news of the execution. They had been gathering since the sun began to glimmer. Their breath was visible in the frosty March air and the women and girls clutched their shawls to their heads to try to keep out the cold. They stood on the North Bridge, on Regent Road and around Nelson's Column on Calton Hill, their eyes trained on the prison towers. They were f
rom every stratum of society, the clean and the tidy rubbing shoulders with the unkempt and the unwashed who had streamed from Canongate and Cowgate to their chosen vantage points. Barrow boys and street vendors suspended trade to stand on their boxes and carts to gain a better view of the flagpole from which the black flag of death would be flown. They waited patiently, with no sign of the carnival atmosphere that would have attended so many hangings in the past, as the chilly air echoed only occasionally to the tolling of the prison bell. A church clock chimed the eighth hour and, a few short minutes later, a murmur grew among them as the black flag fluttered up the mast. The crowd looked at the signal for a few moments then began to disperse as silently as it had gathered – the gentleman with the washer woman, the shopkeeper with the street sweeper, the rich man, the poor man, the beggar man and the thief, all heading back to the town houses and the wynds and the closes that made up the city.
They left knowing that Jessie King, the baby-killer, had ‘passed to her account’. They did not know that she would be the last woman to be hanged in Edinburgh.
PLATFORM PARTIES
Scottish courts were never as keen on sentencing women to death as their English counterparts. But, as we have already seen, of course, that did not mean they would not do so.
In the Middle Ages, Scots barons were granted the power of pit and gallows by the king and, because proper records were either never kept or no longer exist, it is difficult to say how many women were drowned, strangled, burned or hanged at the fancy of the laird or his often corrupt bailiffs.
Hanging was not the science it later became. Each district had its dule, or hanging, tree and offenders were made to stand on a cart – the rope thrown over a branch, the noose around the neck – before the cart was driven away, leaving them to die a slow, agonising death. Sometimes men would simply haul them up on a rope looped around their necks, holding them there until they died.
Executions became public carnivals, with street vendors hawking their wares and, as in the case of William Burke, decent vantage points being rented out to the upper classes who had no great desire to rub shoulders with the great unwashed.
It was not only serious crimes like murder for which men and women could be executed. In Inveraray in 1752, Anne Campbell was hanged for the theft of £50 while, at her side, was eighty-year-old Sarah Graham who had made off with £900 in IOUs. Jean Craig was another thief and she met her doom in Aberdeen, in 1784, while housebreaker Elspeth Reid should have dangled on the same day but received a respite due to her pregnancy. However, six months later she kept her date with the hangman. Jean Scott was a Glasgow thief and housebreaker executed in 1784. Elizabeth Paul was another Glaswegian who had been banished from the city for theft and then flogged through the streets when she showed her face again. She should have ‘taken a telling’ for, in 1786 she was hanged for stealing four pieces of cloth. In 1817, Irishwoman Margaret Crossan was found guilty of wilful fire-raising during which twelve cows, a bull and three calves died. She was hanged in Ayr, along with two men found guilty of robbery and theft, in the town's only triple execution.
Although Scottish courts were never as keen on executing women as their English counterparts, they still managed to make mistakes. One woman who may have been innocent but who met her doom on the scaffold was Margaret Tyndall, or Shuttleworth, in 1821. She had been found guilty of murdering her vintner husband by beating him to death with a poker. No motive was provided for the crime and the evidence was sparse – apart from the fact that the accused was alone in the house with the deceased at the time of the murder and all the doors and windows were locked. She had, however, been dead drunk that night and had been put to bed by a servant, who later went out to attend, fittingly, a wake.
Despite denying her guilt continually, Margaret Shuttleworth was hanged on 7 December and her body given over for dissection. However, some years later, a tramp, charged with another murder, confessed to killing Mr Shuttleworth. He had placed the bloody poker beside the woman as she lay in a drunken stupor and then escaped from the house by climbing up the wide chimney.
Obviously, not every woman executed in Scotland was innocent or even guilty of a comparatively trivial crime. Agnes Dougal was described as an ‘atrocious woman who lived a very lewd and violent life’. She was the mother of four children – all illegitimate – whose downfall came when a suitor said that he would only marry her if her eight-year-old daughter, Joanna Finlay, was out of the picture. During a walk along the River Clyde, just as they passed the then village of Anderston, Dougal attacked the girl and cut her throat so deeply that she almost severed the head from the body. She was hanged in November 1767.
Seven years later, Margaret Adams and her sister, Agnes, broke into the shop of their neighbour, Janet Mcintyre, in Glasgow's Argyle Street and murdered her. They were heard, though, and found hiding under the bed. Margaret was hanged in Edinburgh in 1774 but Agnes was reprieved.
In Paisley in 1793, Agnes White murdered her five-year-old child by feeding it milk laced with oil of vitriol. She was hanged in Glasgow.
In 1823, Mary McKinnon, who managed an Edinburgh brothel, was hanged for stabbing a solicitor's clerk. It was estimated that 20,000 people turned out to witness her death on the Lawnmarket.
In Arbroath, jealous Margaret Wishart poisoned her blind sister in order to win the affections of their handsome lodger. She was hanged in Forfar in 1827, pleading her innocence.
After an argument, Euphemia Lawson and her husband, Hugh McMillan, attacked a neighbour and threw sulphuric acid over him. Although he subsequently died, they were brought to court on charges of attempted murder. The man was acquitted but the woman was sentenced to death. She was hanged in Edinburgh on 23 January 1828.
In October 1830, Catherine Humphrey became the first woman to hang in Aberdeen in forty-five years. She and her husband had not been getting along. She had often threatened to do him harm and her husband predicted she would die ‘facing Marischal Street’, a reference to the site of the gallows at the time. She was convicted for poisoning him with oil of vitriol.
In 1838, Carluke woman Mrs Jaffray saw to it that the wearing of Rob Roy tartan went out of fashion by wearing a shawl bearing the red and black plaid to the gallows. She had been found guilty of poisoning two lodgers with arsenic.
In 1850, Mary Lennox died on the rope in Glasgow after poisoning her sister-in-law at Strathaven. She fainted on the scaffold and had to be held up from either side as the hangman drew the bolt that opened the trapdoor.
Probably one of the most interesting platform parties took place in Glasgow in August 1853. Hans McFarlane and Helen Blackwood had been found guilty of murdering ship's carpenter Alexander Boyd by throwing him from the window of a building. With echoes of John and Catherine Stuart and their liking for ‘Dr’ laudanum (see p. 97), they first made him insensible with whisky, mixed this time with snuff, then robbed him. While in Duke Street Prison, McFarlane asked for permission to marry his lover, Blackwood. Permission was refused but they were determined to be man and wife. As they stood on the scaffold near to Glasgow's South Prison on the site of the present-day High Court, McFarlane announced to the woman – and the 40,000-strong crowd there to see them hang – ‘Helen Blackwood, before God and in the presence of these witnesses I take you to be my wife. Do you consent?’
The woman replied, ‘I do.’
McFarlane then said, ‘Then before these witnesses I declare you to be what you have always been to me, a true and faithful wife, and you die an honest woman.’
The minister officiating at the hanging then said, ‘Amen’, the bolt was drawn and the newly married pair fell to their deaths.
Condemned people often hoped for a last-minute reprieve, searching the crowds for a man bearing a letter from the authorities that would commute their sentence to life imprisonment or transportation. Such was the case of Mary Reid, or Timney, who, in 1862, was found guilty of murdering her neighbour, Ann Hannah, by battering her to death in Carsphairn in what is
now Dumfries and Galloway. The mother of four insisted she had struck out in self-defence but efforts to have the death sentence reduced failed. However, just as the trap was to be sprung, a man appeared with a letter for the prison governor. The woman's spirits rose as he opened it, believing that this was the long-hoped-for reprieve, but they were cruelly shattered again when it was revealed to be merely a request from a London news agency for a speedy report of the execution. With a cry of, ‘Oh, my four weans,’ Mary Timney was judicially murdered.
Jessie McLachlan was luckier for her sentence was commuted to life in prison. She had been convicted of murdering domestic servant Jessie McPherson in Glasgow, in 1862, but the evidence against her was far from watertight. It was – and still is – strongly believed that the brutal killer was actually eighty-seven-year-old James Fleming, the father of the victim's employer. Under pressure, her execution was first postponed then cancelled altogether. When told of the commutation, she replied, ‘Then I am to be kept in jail all my days?’
She was not kept in jail all her days, being released from Perth Prison in 1877. She remained in Scotland until her husband's death in 1880, then moved to America where she died in 1899. Seven years earlier, another woman, Isabella McGregor, claimed on her death bed that she had, in fact, murdered Miss McPherson but no corroborative evidence was produced.
By this time, the death penalty, with regard to women at least, was nearing the end of its rope although it remained on the statute books until finally being abolished in 1969. After the execution of baby-farmer Jessie King in 1889, it would be almost thirty-five years before a woman faced the noose again in Scotland. Her name was Susan Newell and she would be the first woman to hang in Glasgow since Helen Blackwood took part in her bizarre wedding ceremony facing Glasgow Green.
Deadlier Than the Male Page 14
