It’s not an exaggeration to say that William Burke is one Scotland’s most notorious convicted criminals.
Executed exactly 193 years ago today, Burke, along with his partner William Hare, was branded a cold and calculated graverobber, known for digging up and selling corpses to Dr Robert Knox for dissection in his medical lectures at Edinburgh University.
But few know that the pair never actually plundered coffins. Instead, the gruesome twosome bypassed the dirty work of graverobbing, turning instead to murder - slaughtering at least 16 people in a 10-month killing spree at the lodging house run by Hare and his wife.
Their preferred method of murder was piling their victims with alcohol before smothering them to death.
Burke and Hares’ names remain side by side in the history books as Scotland’s most ghoulish double act, yet even fewer still remember that the Irishmen never faced a criminal trial together.
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It was in fact Burke and his Scottish mistress Helen McDougal who were charged with the crimes.
A jury delivered a guilty verdict to Burke on Christmas Eve, 193 years ago, after deliberating for just one hour and a half.
Charges against MacDougal, his common law wife, were found not proven and she was saved from the hangman's noose.
On hearing the news in court, Burke turned to MacDougal, threw his arms around her neck and said: "Thank God, you are safe."
Burke was hanged a month later, on this day in 1829, with his body exhibited before being flayed and dissected. A crowd of 25,000 is reputed to have witnessed Burke’s last moments as Sir Walter Scott watched the execution from his window nearby.
Burke’s body was then transported to Edinburgh University where it was publicly dissected by Knox’s great rival, Professor Alexander Monro. Today Burke's skeleton is still kept under lock and key at Edinburgh University.
Hare, meanwhile, escaped the gallows after he and his wife gave evidence against his partner-in-crime. Hare was the Crown’s star witness and the Irishman got off Scot-free. He was last seen leaving Edinburgh on a coach bound for Carlisle shortly after the trial.
The fate of Stirling-born Helen MacDougal is also shrouded in mystery.
We know that she tried to visit her lover Burke ahead of his execution but was turned away at the gate of the Calton Hill gaol. Still, Burke was told of her presence, and duly sent out his last remaining coins and pocketwatch to his beloved Nelly.
It was soon decided it was no longer safe for her to remain in Edinburgh, where locals believed she complicit in the gruesome West Port murders, despite the not proven verdict.
Historians last place her in Glasgow but no one has ever been able to confirm exactly what happened to the famed serial killer's wife.
A local paper published in Glasgow at the time claims she faced a fate just as brutal as her husband's victims.
The broadsheet, currently held by the National Library of Scotland, wrote that she was “attacked furiously” and killed by an angry mob days after arriving in Glasgow.
They ran the story under the sensational headline 'An Account of the Horrid and Barbarous Murder of Helen M'Dougal' on April 29th, 1829, and detailed how a gang of thugs 'seized her by the hair of the head and strangled her.
The text, published in Glasgow by D Glen, reads: “It appears that Helen McDougall, wife of the miscreant Burke, after her liberation from Edinburgh, took her way to Glasgow where she remained for a number of days till the suspicion of the persons whom she lodged with, caused her repeatedly to shift.
“After which she bent her way to the Readon (Redding), where her parents reside and holds a respectable situation, and where she remained for some time, but being greatly annoyed one night her parents were under the necessity of conveying her out of the back window in the middle of the night, and leave her to spent the remainder of her wretched life in the best way she could.”
The paper goes on to say that McDougall, then presumed around 33-years-old, “was attacked by a great number of individuals, most of them females who attacked her furiously, seized her by the hair of the head and strangled her, one of the woman dispatched her by putting her foot on her breast, and crushed her.”
How accurate this report is remains up for debate, as does the extent to which McDougall was aware of her husband’s murderous ways.
While we may never known what happened to her beyond her journey to Glasgow, but what we do know is that her and Burke remained faithful to each other until the end.
Before Lord Advocate Rae cut his deal with the Hares, he tried to get McDougall to testify against Burke. In his words, she “positively refused” to give up her serial killer husband and likely paid the ultimate price for her silence.
