Burke and Hare (10 page)

The new season was underway by the time Ann McDougal came to Edinburgh on a short visit. She was a young married woman, a cousin of Nelly’s former partner. She had come to see Nelly, probably at her invitation, following the visit to Falkirk. She stayed in Edinburgh for a few days, but then Hare came round to Broggan’s, and he and Burke began dosing her with whisky until she became drunk and fell asleep during the afternoon. Burke claimed he felt some delicacy about being the first to lay hands on her, she being a friend. So Hare stopped her breath while Burke held her down. They undressed the body and put it in a ‘fine trunk’ provided for the purpose by Davie Paterson, Knox’s assistant, he having been notified that ‘John’ and ‘William’ had another ‘thing’ for sale.

When Broggan came home from work, he saw the trunk and began asking questions about it, but Burke and Hare gave him some whisky and each of them gave him one pound ten shillings to pay the rent he owed. He then quietened down. They gave him the money, Burke said, ‘that he might not come against them for the murder of Ann McDougal, that he saw in the trunk, that was murdered in his house’. Does this mean that Burke and Hare were either so drunk themselves, or so stupidly complacent by this time, that they left the trunk open with a corpse in it for anyone to see?

As soon as it was convenient, at any rate, Burke and Hare carried the trunk to Surgeons’ Square and were paid £10 for Ann McDougal’s corpse. Shortly afterwards, John Broggan and his wife absconded with the rent money, leaving Burke and Nelly responsible for both the flat and young John Broggan. Soon afterwards, Burke and Hare chanced upon another young victim.

James Wilson was a mentally subnormal young man, well known to people in the streets of Edinburgh as ‘Daft Jamie’. Eighteen years old, his father had died when he was twelve. Jamie had left home after a thrashing from his mother when he had accidentally toppled a cupboard full of her household crockery. He still saw his mother regularly and she washed his clothes, but he would not return to live in the house. He slept in doorways except when someone took pity and offered him a bed for the night. He wandered about the streets with bare feet, which were deformed, causing him to limp, and was partly paralysed on his right side. Although tall and said to be strong for his age and condition, he would tearfully refuse to fight when younger boys mocked and goaded him, saying that it was only bad boys who fought. He would not wear the shoes and better clothes that well-wishers occasionally offered him to protect him from the elements, on the grounds that if people thought he was sufficiently dressed, they would no longer give him anything. Among his few possessions were a brass snuff-box and a copper spoon with seven holes, which Jamie called the days of the week, identifying the large one in the middle as Sunday. One of his favourite pastimes was asking riddles, but he would get upset when those to whom he posed them knew or could guess the answers. ‘What month do ladies talk least?’ he would ask, and delight in giving his baffled companion the answer, ‘February, because there are fewer days in it.’ Or, ‘Why is a jailer like a musician?’ ‘Because he maun tak’ care o’ his key.’

Jamie’s best friend was Robert Kirkwood, known as ‘Bobby’. Once Bobby tricked Jamie out of a dram of whisky, and when others asked Jamie what he was going to do about it, he replied, ‘What could ye say to puir Bobby? He’s daft, ye ken.’

One morning in October, William Burke was having an early drink in Rymer’s shop when he saw Maggie Laird in the street taking Jamie Wilson towards her house. A few minutes later she came into Rymer’s, bought a pennyworth of butter, and asked Burke for a dram. While she was drinking it, she stamped lightly on Burke’s foot. This is the first positive evidence of Maggie Laird’s complicity in the murders. He, understanding the signal, followed her back to Tanner’s Close. Hare was there with Jamie and had given him whisky. When Burke arrived, the two men lured Jamie into the small room which had formerly been Burke’s, sat him on the bed and pressed him to have more whisky. Jamie was reluctant to drink more, and was ‘very anxious making inquiries for his mother, and was told she would be there immediately’. Maggie Laird left the room and locked the door, leaving the three men inside, and slipped the key under the door. She had, Burke said, ‘led poor Jamie in as a dumb lamb to the slaughter . . .’

After a time Jamie lay down on the bed, although he was not drunk. Hare, according to Burke’s story, reclined behind or beside him with his head resting on one hand, watching. Burke was close by. Suddenly Hare, growing impatient, ‘threw his body on the top of Jamie, pressed his hand on his mouth, and held his nose with the other’. Jamie, however, was weak in his mind, not in his body, and he put up a fierce fight, struggling so desperately that he and Hare fell off the bed. Hare did not let go, and Burke then got himself across Jamie’s arms and legs, and the two fiends gripped tight until Jamie ceased to struggle and his body went limp. He was soon dead. ‘He never got up nor cried any,’ Burke said. It was not yet noon. They stripped the body naked, Hare going through the pockets and finding the snuff-box and spoon. He kept the box himself and gave the spoon to Burke. They put Jamie’s corpse into a chest which Hare kept clothes in, and carried it that afternoon to Surgeons’ Square, where they received £10.

There is an alternative version of these events, however, which the Edinburgh
Weekly Chronicle
printed after the trial, claiming that it was based ‘upon the foul authority of Hare’. According to this, it was Burke who took Jamie to Hare’s house after meeting him in the Grassmarket, where Jamie was looking for his mother. After being induced to drink ‘a quantity of spirits’, Jamie fell asleep on the floor and Burke then leapt on him and tried to strangle him, but had to howl for Hare’s assistance when Jamie fought manfully. Burke threatened to stick a knife into Jamie if Hare did not help him. Hare then lent a hand by holding Jamie down.

This version seems much less likely than Burke’s account, since neither man would have wanted to leave signs of violence on the body, and they had shown plenty of patience before in waiting for their victims to be in a suitable condition for their tried and tested method. But on the other hand, the act of murdering a well-known figure like Daft Jamie indicates a startling recklessness which might mean that, by this time, Burke and Hare thought they could get away with anything and were ready to throw all sane precautions to the winds. Subsequent events lend some substance to this probability.

Burke and Hare normally took care to destroy their victims’ clothing, but this time Burke took Jamie’s clothes and gave them to his brother Constantine’s children, who were ‘almost naked, and when he untied the bundle they were like to quarrel about them’. Burke on this occasion refused to pay Maggie Laird the usual pound out of his share of the proceeds. After all, he was no longer a tenant there. But Maggie was so put out that she refused to speak to Burke for three weeks.

When news of Jamie’s death broke later on, many sentimental ballads and broadsheets appeared on the streets, with excruciatingly bad verses about Daft Jamie. None of the brutal acts of murder of Burke and Hare caused more widespread horror than their premeditated killing of this happy innocent:

Meanwhile, at 10 Surgeons’ Square on the morning after the murder, the corpse of what David Paterson described as a ‘stout young man’ was unpacked and immediately recognised as Daft Jamie by several of Knox’s students. According to Paterson, Knox denied that the corpse was that of Jamie, but, later, when word got around that Jamie had been missed from his customary haunts, Knox ordered dissection of the corpse at once, before other corpses that had been there longer. William Fergusson promptly severed Jamie’s head and feet.

Was Paterson telling the truth when he made these damaging allegations? By the time he made them, he had allegedly been sacked by Knox, and it is commonly believed that he wanted to avenge himself on his former employer. Nevertheless, it seems rather unlikely that he would have invented this account of the disposal of Jamie’s corpse. Jamie was stated in the trial indictment to have been living, at the time, in the house of James Downie, a porter, at Stevenlaw’s Close in the High Street. It is hardly surprising that Paterson and others recognised him. William Fergusson lived with his brother John in Charles Street, and Alexander Miller had lodgings in Clerk Street, both in the Old Town. Almost everybody in central Edinburgh must have been familiar with the appearance of this innocent youth, a figure of fun to the insensitive and an object of compassion to others. It is quite probable that Robert Knox, who lived on a different social level, did not know him, but what was he to do when he realised that he had on his slab the unburied corpse of a well-known character who had only recently been seen alive and well? Burke and Hare had by now, between them, sold to Dr Knox sixteen ‘subjects’ (fifteen of which they had murdered) in the course of a little over ten months. They must have been regarded at Surgeons’ Square as very useful contacts, and whatever dawning apprehensions may have crossed the minds of Knox or his students, such regular and reliable suppliers were not to be discouraged by awkward questions or any hesitation in paying the agreed price.

So far from Christopher North’s monotonous ‘auld wives’ tale, their victims had now included Mary Paterson and Jamie Wilson, both teenagers, and the deaf mute child of twelve. If their evil progress had not soon been terminated, it is difficult to believe that they would not soon have begun to prey on children, easily kidnapped off the streets and more easily put to death.

Paterson, meanwhile, now out of a job, was rumoured to be planning to move west in partnership with Burke, to procure more bodies and dispatch them to Hare, who would sell them as usual to Knox. This story seems, at first sight, wildly improbable, partly because Burke had good reason not to trust Hare with money, and partly because Hare was the last man on earth to be left in charge of public relations with educated men. But in any case, before any such plan could be put into operation, events took a different turn.

NOTES

¹
Hugh Douglas,
Burke and Hare
, (London, Robert Hale, 1973), p. 136.

²
Ibid.

³
‘Silly’ was used in the sense of ‘innocent’, not ‘imbecilic’.

⁴
A Laconic Narrative of the Life and Death of James Wilson, known by the name of Daft Jamie
, W. Smith, 1829.

6. CLIMAX

O
n the morning of Hallowe’en, Friday, 31 October, regarded in Scotland especially as the most perilous night of the year, when devils and other malevolent beings were abroad, Burke went to Rymer’s for his usual early dram. While he was drinking, a poor woman came in begging for charity. Burke recognised her Irish accent and asked where she was from. She told him Inishowen in Donegal, and that her name was Mary Docherty. Well, what a coincidence! Burke, buying her a dram, told her that his mother’s name was Docherty, so it was, and that
she
had come from Inishowen. They must be related! The woman told him that she had come from Glasgow to look for her son. She had no money, and had had no breakfast that morning. The ever-solicitous Burke persuaded her to come home with him and have some porridge and another wee dram.

We have two rather contrasting impressions of Burke’s ‘house’ at about this time. One is Christopher North’s description:

The other description is in Thomas Ireland’s contemporary account of
The West Port Murders: