The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes

Chapter Ten: Day in Court

Chapter 10 Day in Court William Burke The cadaver was a male subject, thirty-six years old, not very tall, but muscular and well built. In life, it had belonged to William Burke, laborer and shoemaker, “whose hands,” according to West Port Murders, “were more deeply dyed in innocent blood than those of any other homicide recorded in the calendar of crimes.” Arrested, with Helen M’Dougal, William Hare, and Margaret Laird or Hare, he was tried, with M’Dougal, for the murder of Margaret Docherty or Campbell on December 24, 1828. The case was covered in exhaustive detail in newspapers and broadsides, in West Port Murders, and in Trial of William Burke and Helen M’Dougal. For the Scots loved their trials, and they were justly proud of their legal system, among the most equitable and humane at that time. Burke and M’Dougal were represented, free of charge, by the best legal counsel. They were tried under judges who protected the rights of the accused and before juries who demanded the strongest possible evidence before convicting on a capital case. During their day in court—literally a day, for the trial ran continuously for twenty-four hours—they therefore derived more direct benefit from eminent men than they had met with in their entire lives. The Scottish legal system saved M’Dougal’s life, though it did nothing to guarantee her future. It convicted Burke and executed him on Wednesday, January 28, 1829. In the end, it was neither the police nor the medical men who were Day in Court 213 responsible for putting a stop to the series of murders, but the lodger, Ann Gray, filled with that investigative spirit apparently so prevalent in Edinburgh neighborhoods. She had come from Maddistone, near Falkirk, where she had known Helen M’Dougal, who had lived with her father as if his wife. That made her a kind of stepdaughter, and so she and her husband, James, were very pleased to renew the acquaintance in October 1828, shortly after their arrival in Edinburgh from Aberdeen. James Gray had been born in the Grassmarket, where his father had kept a public house. Though listed as a laborer in court records, he had been trained as a jeweler and had worked in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. When business failed, he had joined the army and served for a number of years, probably in Ireland. He had returned to Edinburgh to look for work, and ran into Burke on the High Street. Burke sought out the Grays’ company, inviting them “to remain at his house.” Helen M’Dougal even accompanied Ann Gray to pay the ninepence owed their former landlord. At the time, Gray imputed this friendliness “to his wife being a town’s-woman of Burke’s wife, and Helen Dougal”—as he insisted was her correct name, rather than “M’Dougal”—“having had two children by Gray’s wife’s father.” Later, he told interviewers, he had “every reason to think that Burke had an intention of making Gray and his wife victims also.” That seems plausible, from the pains Burke and M’Dougal took to ensure that the Grays lodged with them; by this point we have no reason to trust their unsolicited friendliness. Perhaps, as an outraged journalist later assumed, their success at purveying their former victims had emboldened them still further. Perhaps “a year’s impunity had produced the effect of making them consider themselves as engaged in a species of profession which had indeed, like illicit distillation, or any contraband traffic, to be concealed from the authorities, but which, except for this annoying accompaniment, was pursued with nearly as little compunction as any other profession would have been.” Perhaps Burke thought his good character with the police—bolstered, according to James Gray, by treating the local watchman to a bottle of whiskey every night when he came off duty—would keep him safe from all suspicion. Or perhaps by this time Burke and M’Dougal, William and Margaret Hare were beyond asking themselves any questions, and simply, horrifyingly, thought of anyone who came within their grasp as a potential cadaver. If the Grays had been their original targets, Burke and Hare had no difficulty in turning their attention to Margaret Docherty when she ap- 214 Chapter 10 peared in Rymer’s shop on October 31, 1828. And as it turned out, their...