Burke and Hare (7 page)

In Burke’s
Courant
confession, the nameless Englishman was the second of their victims and he, too, fell seriously ill in Hare’s house. These two old derelicts could be disposed of in relative secrecy. Only Burke and Hare themselves, and possibly their women, would have known anything about it. Abigail Simpson was the unfortunate target, we may surely assume, of two furtive and skulking devils emboldened by the smoothness of their previous transactions with Knox and his men, as well as the implied encouragement to bring as many bodies as they could, and their greed for more easy money.

Burke remarked in his
Courant
confession that he and Hare ‘often said to one another that no person could find them out, no one being present at the murders but themselves two; and that they might be as well hanged for a sheep as a lamb’. They certainly took a huge step of mind-boggling recklessness or stupidity with their next victim, who fell into their hands (as mentioned in
both
of Burke’s statements) in April.

Early one morning, generally believed to have been Wednesday, 9 April, Burke was drinking rum and bitters in William Swanston’s shop in the Canongate when two young prostitutes came in. They were Janet Brown and Mary Paterson, aka Mitchell, both in their late teens and well known on the city streets. Mary, in particular, was a good-looking girl who had turned to prostitution in desperation, having been orphaned in childhood. She had curling-papers in her hair. Both girls had spent the previous night in the Canongate watch-house, having been arrested for a disturbance of the peace. On their release at six o’clock, they had gone, for some unexplained reason, to their former lodging at the house of a Mrs Lawrie, although they were now lodging with a Mrs Isabella Burnet or Worthington in Leith Wynd. No doubt both landladies were brothel-keepers.

Burke approached the girls in Swanston’s and bought them drinks, then invited them to his lodgings for breakfast. Mary, the more bold and impulsive of the two, took little persuading and after a time Burke overcame Janet’s reluctance with flattery and extravagant promises. The three left Swanston’s shop with two bottles of whisky. But instead of walking them to Tanner’s Close, Burke took them to his brother Constantine’s place in nearby Gibb’s Close off the Canongate, telling them he was lodging there. He was no doubt anxious to avoid being seen by anyone who might recognise the girls, either in the streets or in Hare’s place.

A bed hung with tattered curtains and a truckle-bed were among the scant furnishings of a single room reached via a dark passage and a narrow staircase. Con Burke and his wife were still in bed, but Mrs Burke got up and prepared breakfast for the visitors, and they washed down their eggs, bread and smoked haddock with tea and whisky. By the time Con Burke left for work, Mary Paterson was almost senseless. Janet, however, was still wide awake, and Burke persuaded her to go out with him for a breath of air. He took her to a nearby tavern where he plied her with pies and beer, then took her back to Gibb’s Close. They were just sitting down at the table to consume more whisky when the curtains round the bed flew open and the livid features of Nelly McDougal appeared.

Nelly had called in while Burke was out, to find the young and attractive Paterson slumped across the table and Burke out, as Elizabeth Burke must have told her, with another girl. A furious row ensued, with Nelly shrieking abuse at Janet Brown and threatening violence. Elizabeth Burke left hurriedly, though not before explaining to Janet, somewhat needlessly perhaps, that the screaming woman was Mr Burke’s wife. Janet said she had not known that Burke was a married man. Nelly’s wrath then turned on her husband, and Burke threw a glass tumbler at her, cutting her forehead above one eye. He pushed her out of the room and locked the door. Nelly had accused Janet of seducing her husband, but Burke was the seducer, with lust in his loins taking temporary priority over murder in his mind. Janet, however, was not to be coaxed into bed by Burke’s Irish charm, and insisted on leaving. This was doubtless because of Nelly McDougal’s fearsome presence on the other side of the door. Burke escorted Janet safely past his wife into the street, and she went back to Mrs Lawrie’s house.

Elizabeth Burke, meanwhile, had gone to fetch the Hares. When they arrived, Burke and Hare manoeuvred their three female relatives into waiting outside the room. Then they laid the stupefied Mary Paterson onto one of the beds and had no trouble in snuffing out her short, sad life.

Burke went at once to Surgeons’ Square to arrange another delivery. While he was gone, Janet Brown turned up again. She had a servant girl with her, sent urgently by Mrs Lawrie to help Janet bring Mary Paterson back. But Janet, half drunk herself, had taken twenty minutes to find the place again, having to ask directions from neighbours and the spirit-dealer Swanston. Nelly McDougal’s rage at Brown had not subsided, and Maggie Laird had been told the tale, for she flew at Janet and had to be restrained by her husband. Hare told Janet that Burke had gone out for a walk with Mary. Janet accepted Hare’s offer of a drink while she waited for them to come back, and sent the girl back to tell Mrs Lawrie that she would not be long.

We can only guess how close to death Janet Brown was during those few minutes. She was drinking whisky in the company of Hare and three possible accomplices – his wife, McDougal and Eliza Burke – with her friend Mary lying dead a few feet away, hidden by the bed-curtains, and Burke due back at any moment to pack up Mary’s corpse and get it to Dr Knox. But Mrs Lawrie sent the maidservant back for Janet and the two girls then left together. Nelly and Maggie went home to Tanner’s Close, and when Burke came back, he and Hare stuffed Mary Paterson’s doubled-up corpse into a tea-chest.

However much Burke’s sister-in-law may have known or suspected about these goings-on, it is clear that Burke was not keen to leave the tea-chest there until dark, when Con would be home from work. So Burke and Hare carried the box straight to Surgeons’ Square in broad daylight. When they got to High School Yards, some schoolboys followed them, chanting ‘They’re carrying a corpse!’ Burke and Hare were admitted to Dr Knox’s rooms by ‘Mr Ferguson and a tall lad’ and paid, according to Burke’s
Courant
confession, £8.

There are several contradictory statements about what happened at 10 Surgeons’ Square that afternoon, but it is certain that someone immediately recognised the dead girl. Burke’s prison statement makes it sound as if it was the ‘tall lad’, who ‘seemed to have known the woman by sight’, and he and Fergusson asked where they had got the body. Burke told them that he had bought it from an old woman at the back of the Canongate.

In the
Courant
confession, Burke said, ‘One of the students said she was like a girl he had seen in the Canongate as one pea is like to another.’ At the end of this dictated statement Burke added in his own hand, ‘Mr. fergeson was the only man that ever mentioned any thing about the bodies He inquired where we got that yong woman paterson.’

There are, however, other versions of this transaction. Knox’s biographer, his former pupil Henry Lonsdale, says that:

As the corpse smelt strongly of whisky, this explanation was accepted. We have already noted that heavy consumption of whisky played a vital role in the murders committed by Burke and Hare. Their victims, as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe wrote:

A further witness to these exchanges was David Paterson, who was not related to Mary, but was a young man employed by Dr Knox. He declared later that he came into the room to find Miller in conversation with Burke and Hare, and ‘a female subject stretched upon the floor. The beautiful symmetry and freshness of the body attracted my attention.’ Shortly afterwards, Paterson heard Fergusson say that ‘he was acquainted with the deceased, and named her as Mary Mitchell . . .’
³
A few days later Paterson asked Burke, who had called on another errand, ‘where he had procured the last subject’, and Burke replied that he had ‘purchased it from the friends of the deceased’, whereupon Paterson asked where her relatives lived. Burke paused, looking suspiciously at Paterson, before retorting, ‘If I am to be catechised by you, where and how I get subjects, I will inform the doctor of it, and if he allows you to do so, I will bring no more to him, mind that.’
⁴

Burke and Hare were paid, according to Paterson, £10 for this body, and he was almost certainly right. Why would these useful suppliers be offered, and accept, a lower price than normal for such a fine specimen – especially one so fresh, which was in Knox’s premises within four hours of the murder, according to Burke, and still warm? The only explanation, if Burke’s memory was correct, is that Mary Paterson was one of their first victims, sold before a tariff had become well established whereby the suppliers got £10 in winter and £8 in summer. This was because there was always a greater demand for subjects during the autumn and winter months. Most teachers of anatomy and surgery held their lecture courses then. In the days before refrigeration, bodies could not be preserved for long enough in the summer for them to remain useful for the necessary period of time, and the stench would have been intolerable on hot summer days. In winter, corpses were stored in cold cellars and the dissection rooms were decidedly chilly.

April was too early for summer rates to be in force, and Burke and Hare evidently got £10 for other corpses delivered
after
Paterson’s. Of the £10 they received for the majority of their victims, split fifty-fifty in theory, Hare actually took £6, one pound of Burke’s share being appropriated by Maggie Laird ostensibly as a kind of tax on his use of her premises.

In the ‘official’ confession Burke said that the body was disposed of ‘five or six hours after the girl was killed, and it was cold, but not very stiff, but he does not recollect of any remarks being made about the body being warm’. In the
Courant
confession, however, made nearly three weeks later, he recalled that Mary Paterson ‘had twopence halfpenny, which she held fast in her hand’. If rigor mortis had not yet set in, this tight grip on her coins would indicate a cadaveric spasm occurring at the moment of death under severe nervous tension. The students asked Burke to cut off the girl’s hair, which still had her curling-papers in it. One of them handed him a pair of scissors, and ‘she was warm when Burke cut the hair off her head’.

Whether warm or cold, limp or stiff, it is certainly clear that Mary Paterson’s corpse made a dramatic impression, for one reason or another, on all who saw it, including Knox himself. One or more of them recognised the girl as someone they had seen around Edinburgh or were more familiar with, and all of them were impressed by the beauty of the naked but lifeless figure. Knox, Burke said, ‘brought a Mr –, a painter, to look at her, she was so handsome a figure, and well shaped in body and limbs’. He added that ‘she was not dissected at that time, for she was three months in whisky before she was dissected’. Who would have told Burke this? It surely can only have been Paterson. Knox’s biographer wrote that the body of Mary Paterson ‘could not fail to attract attention by its voluptuous form and beauty; students crowded around the table on which she lay, and artists came to study a model worthy of Phidias and the best Greek art’. Knox, he added, ‘wishing for the best illustration of female form and muscular development for his lectures, had Paterson’s body put in spirit for a time, so that when he came to treat of the myological division of his course, a further and daily publicity was given to Paterson’s remains . . .’
⁵

Davie Paterson, the janitor, also stated that it was the common opinion among Knox’s students and assistants that it was a finely proportioned body, ‘so much so, indeed, that many of the students took sketches of it . . .’
⁶
Necrophilia, it seems, superseded medical science for a time on Dr Knox’s premises. There is a surviving pencil drawing by J. Oliphant which certainly appears to endorse opinions of Paterson’s shapely form, but there is a touch of the macabre in the fact that this ‘pin-up’ was drawn from a corpse.

Meanwhile, Janet Brown and the two solicitous madams, Lawrie and Worthington, continued to enquire about Paterson’s whereabouts. Janet Brown asked Constantine Burke about her friend when she met him in the street one day. ‘How the hell can I tell about you sort of folk?’ he said. ‘You are here today and away tomorrow.’ He added that he could not answer for everything that took place in his house while he was out at work.

Burke and Hare had, by this time, resumed normal business. The two fiends took to lurking in the dark and dingy streets and wynds of the Old Town like predatory animals ready to pounce on and devour the weakest and most vulnerable prey. Destitute, feeble and homeless creatures who depended on the kindness of strangers for a drink and a roof over their heads for a night fell easily into their foul ambushes. Their next victim, probably, was a destitute old woman who came to Hare’s place looking for a night’s lodging. Burke thought it was in May. He did not know the woman’s name. She was drinking heavily and soon became quite drunk. Burke declared to the Sheriff in his official confession that he suffocated her himself while Hare was out, and that evening they disposed of the body, in the customary manner, for £10. But in his
Courant
confession, Burke told a different story. According to this version, the drunken woman fell asleep after being lured into the house by Hare’s wife, and ‘when Hare came home to his dinner, he put part of the bed-tick on her mouth and nose, and when he came home at night she was dead’. Burke was mending shoes at the time, he said. They took her clothes off and put the body into a tea-chest for delivery to Dr Knox. When he told this story, Burke had had nearly three weeks sitting in the condemned cell to think about it, and he had every reason to implicate Hare as deeply as possible in the whole series of murders.