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INSIDE
HISTORY
C R I M E A N D T H E U N D E R W O R L D
THE
TRIALS
OF
LIZZIE
BORDEN
* Stand and deliver: Dick Turpin * the real peaky blinders * h.h Holmes * ANgels in The House*
*Bootlegging and prohibition * Al Capone * burke and hare * The evolution of the Crime investigation *
*Peine Forte Et DURe * The Morellos * How to get away with murder in the middle ages *

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Avampato
Christa
Stephen Carver
Dr
Nell Darby
Dr
Rebecca Frost
Dr
James
Mallory
Kevern
Nick
Ruggiero
Anthony
O'Shaughnessy
Patrick
Smith
Conal
Walsh
Robert
Elliott Watson
Dr
John Woolf
Dr
is no escaping the fact that crime has always been a
There
of history. Wherever there is an opportunity then there
part
always those who aim to benefit from it. For this issue of
are
HISTORY, we have aimed to enter the criminal
INSIDE
Rebecca Frost investigates the evolution of the myth
Dr
the notorious H.H Holmes. How many did he actually
behind
and how much of what he did (or even, did not do) was
kill
work of his own imagination? Was he responsible for
the
to create his own sensationalism the stories written
helping
him?
about
media, since the early days of the printing press, has
The
been keen to report on murders. Lizzie Borden's case
always
no different. Yet, her particular case raises a number of
was
Despite being found innocent of the murders of her
issues.
and stepmother, Borden faced many trials following
father
acquittal. From her own community, to media frenzy and
her
criminals have never needed the media to help them
Some
become part of the public imagination. Over time they can
to
glamorous based on the work of fictional writers
become
to tell a story. Dick Turpin is one such case. The image
eager
Turpin is often portrayed as the gentleman highwayman,
of
by the wealthy and adored by women. The real Turpin
feared
a completely different story as Dr Stephen Carver will
is
reveal.
has unfortunately become a form of entertainment
Crime
many television channels dedicated air time to
with
and movies about famous criminals. There is
documentaries
course an issue with this. How much do we really know
of
these people? How can tell the fact from the fiction? As
about
our job is not glamourise the deeds of these
historians
but to pursue the truth with the evidence at hand.
individuals
only hope that we have managed to do just that.
I
us as we take you from the Middle Ages right up to the
Join
Century on this journey of historical crime and the
20th
A NOTE
BY THE
EDITOR
"DON'T HAVE NIGHTMARES...
SLEEP WELL"
Nick Ross. BBC Crimewatch Presenter
underworld throughout time.
of course, the perception of history.
E D I T O R
Nick Kevern
C O N T R I B U T O R S
Underworld. As Nick Ross from Crimewatch used to say:
"Don't have nightmares...sleep well."
@inside__history insidehistorymag @InsideHistoryMag

to get away with murder in the
How
Ages
Middle
Turpin: The Not-So Dandy
Dick
Highwayman
man: The Evolution of the mth
Self-made
H.H Holmes
of
the St Valentine's Day Massacre
How
the Jazz Age
killed
changing world of Crime
The
Investigations
10
18
22
30
36
40
I N S I D E H I S T O R Y
07
30
I S S U E 0 2 / C R I M E A N D T H E U N D E R W O R L D
C O N T E N T S
07
12
26
48
48
53
26
22
Crushing the Confession
Burke and Hare: Dealers in Death
Angels in the House
The trials of Lizzie Borden
The Morellos: Families at War
The REAL Peaky Blinders
12
18
Prohibition in New York City
44

40

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HOW TO GET AWAY
WITH MURDER IN
THE MIDDLE AGES
WORDS BY CONAL SMITH

Watch any film or TV series set in the middle ages, or
a middle ages-esque environment such as Westeros,
and you are likely to come across barbarism. Heads
are chopped off and men are hanged for anything,
including the smallest of crimes. While there may be
some exaggeration, go back to the middle ages and
almost all serious crime was certainly punished in this
way. Murder, serious theft and burglary of goods over
12 pence(!) were capital offences for anyone over the
age of 10. Here, however, are a few ways that a crafty
criminal could try to avoid the noose.
Although in some cases it was possible to claim
sanctuary indefinitely, it was more common that a
criminal would need to make a choice within 40 days.
Either they must opt to go into permanent exile,
receiving safe passage as they left the country, or
they had to present themselves to a court. Presenting
one’s self to a court meant facing the full force of the
King’s justice, and so the option of fleeing England to
start a new life overseas could be a route to avoiding
this.
Plead benefit of the Clergy
If you were a member of the clergy (priest, monk or
nun), you escaped the King’s justice automatically.
Instead of being tried in the King’s courts, you would
be tried by your fellow churchmen in a Church court.
Here punishments tended to focus more on penance
than punishment. Though standing in the village
square in nothing but your small clothes sounds far
from pleasant, it certainly sounds preferable to
hanging. Surely this was only open to real members
of the clergy though?
Wrong. ANYONE could claim benefit of the clergy.
The ‘proof’ if one can call it that was merely the ability
to read a passage in latin. Still think that sounds
tough as you had to learn Latin? Wrong again. There
was a set passage, which became known as the ‘neck
verse’ that was used to test this. Hence, even if you
could not speak latin, you could learn psalm 51 by
heart and then simply recount it when the bible was
placed in front of you to test whether you were
indeed clergy. While you might not completely get
away with murder, being liable for a Church
punishment, a simple bit of preparation was a
surefire way to avoid execution for murder. This route
even went on far beyond the middle ages, not being
finally abolished until 1823!
Sanctuary
Even if you had not put in the requisite preparation
to plead benefit of the clergy, the Church still
provided a clear route to avoiding the death penalty.
There was a legal ability to claim sanctuary in a holy
place, until its abolition in 1624. If a criminal was able
to reach a Church or Cathedral, their pursuers were
not able to enter a holy place and arrest them,
something which could be seen a desecrating a holy
site.
8 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
There was a legal
ability to claim
sanctuary in a holy
place, until its
abolition in 1624.

Victory taken
as clear proof
of innocence
Trial by Combat
A far riskier route, but one which could see you
serving no punishment whatsoever, was dependent
on presenting yourself to the authorities. Once
arrested, if there was some element of doubt over
your guilt you could request trial by combat rather
than the more common trial by jury. This system was
in place from the Norman Conquest and meant that,
so long as your accuser was not someone deemed
unable to fight (through age, sex or disablity), you
could challenge them to single combat. In a 60 foot
square arena, the two of you would engage in a fight,
either to the death or until one of the participants
yielded, with a victory taken as clear proof of
innocence; for the authorities this also had the
benefit of sometimes avoiding the need to employ a
hangman!
The three possibilities hitherto described are some of
the purely medieval routes of escape available to you,
but there were also some routes that continue to be
employed far beyond the period and even in some
cases up to this day.
In the first instance of course there is the simple
route of fleeing as far and as fast as possible. While
there were medieval methods to catch a fugitive,
such as the hue and cry, the reach of these attempts
were geographically very restricted. Secondly, one
could admit guilt, but then try and obtain a royal
pardon. For those who could afford it this could
sometimes be bought. However, more common in
the Later Middle Ages are the many violent criminals,
including murderers, who received a royal pardon in
return for military service overseas. If a guarantee of
hardship and risk of violent death did not appeal, the
modern mafia staple of witness intimidation would
also have been available to you dependent on wealth
and influence, particularly given the lack of forensic
evidence to ensure a conviction without sworn
testimony.
So there you have it, if you committed a murder in
the middle ages there may have been no way of
guaranteeing escaping the long arm of the law.
However, there were plenty of options to choose
from in an attempt to avoid swinging for your crimes.
Conal Smith is part of the
editorial team at the
VersusHistory Podcast
WORDS BY NICK KEVERN
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 9

CRUSHING THE
CONFESSION
WORDS BY PATRICK O'SHAUGHNESSY
IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA

O'Shaughnessy is the Head of History at a
Patrick
international school in the Middle East.
prestigious
is a Co-Editor of the Versus History Podcast and
He
writes on various subjects related to History.
regularly
is currently writing a book which focuses on
Patrick
causes and events of the American Revolution.
the
If your English ancestors stood trial for a crime in a
court of law before 1772, the sentence - if convicted -
could be extremely severe. For instance, when the
Gunpowder Plotters were convicted of ‘high treason’
against King James I in January 1606, they were
publically hung, drawn and quartered before of a
hostile and highly unsympathetic crowd in London.
The potential punishments for those convicted of a
crime during both the Tudor and Stuart eras (1485-
1714) could include - but were not limited to - being
beheaded, death by hanging and being put in the
stocks, depending on the severity of the crime that
one was found guilty of committing. Capital
punishment was constant during this time of great
political, social and cultural flux. Following the demise
of the Stuart dynasty in 1714, the punishment dished
out to offenders during the reigns of the first three
Georgian monarchs who reigned between 1714-1820,
could still involve the death penalty. By 1800, the
application of the death penalty was extended to
cover over 200 different crimes, including theft.
Transportation of convicted felons was also used until
1867, during the reign of Queen Victoria. As Historian
E.P Thompson argued, ‘The commercial expansion,
the enclosure movement, the early years of the
Industrial Revolution - all took place within the
shadow of the gallows.’ It is clear, therefore, that the
huge societal shifts which were taking place in
Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries did not
axiomatically lead to changes or reform in the
criminal justice system.
The application of capital punishment and the
banishment of convicted criminals to distant colonial
outposts is generally well known and documented.
However, a lesser-known, but perhaps equally
barbaric feature of the criminal justice system until
1772 was an inherent part of the prosecution stage,
rather than the punishment decreed as part of the
sentence. If prosecuted in a court of law for a capital
offence (e.g: murder or treason) during the reign of
King George III (1760-1820) or a monarch preceding
him, your English ancestors would have been faced
with a simple choice. To plead ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ of
the stated crime in a court of law. Right? Actually, it’s
wrong!
The choice of plea facing the accused at the start of a
trial was not a simple binary between ‘innocent’ on
the one hand and ‘guilty’ on the other. There was a
THIRD option. This is where things get slightly
complex but very interesting. We can safely assume
that a plea of ‘guilty’ in a trial for a capital offence
would have meant almost certain conviction, death
and the subsequent forfeiture of all land and property
owed to the Crown. A plea of ‘innocent’ would have
either resulted in the previous outcome or if one was
lucky, an acquittal (although this was unlikely in
treason cases as these were often a fait accompli).
The third option would have appealed to those with
significant estates and wealth. To avoid the seizure of
all property and estates by the Crown, the accused
could refuse to enter a plea at the start of the trial
when requested to do so. This could result in what
was known as ‘peine forte et dure’. In English, this
meant ‘hard and forceful punishment’. When this
eventuality occurred, the courtroom proceedings
were suspended, as a plea was necessary to proceed.
The defendant was subsequently subjected to a
process of crushing by increasingly heavier rocks,
hence the ‘hard and forceful punishment’ element.
The process was designed to elicit a plea - either
‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ from the defendant - which
would then result in the process of crushing being
terminated and the courtroom trial being resumed.
However, the process of ‘peine forte et dure’ did not
often result in a plea being entered, as one may think,
despite the obvious excruciating and slow death that
would result. The reason for this is to do with the
forfeiture of wealth, assets and titles to the Crown
that a ‘guilty’ verdict in a court of law would entail.
Indeed, if the accused were to perish during the
‘crushing’ process, they would technically die as an
‘innocent’ person. Therefore, the ‘next of kin’ could
inherit the wealth of the deceased, rather than it
being seized for the Crown.
During the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in the
British Colony of Massachusetts, an elderly individual
named Giles Corey, who was born in Northampton in
1611 and emigrated to the American colonies in his
younger years, refused to enter a plea to the court in
his trial for alleged witchcraft. Corey was subjected to
the brutal process of peine forte et dure and was
subsequently crushed to death. Legend has it that
Corey endured the entire crushing process in silence.
Whether or not this is true, Corey died an innocent
man in the eyes of the court and could, therefore,
bequeath an inheritance to his immediate family. The
awful spectre of this elderly colonist being crushed to
death may well have been one of the causal factors
behind the eventual conclusion of the Witch Trials in
Salem, along with the growing accusations of
witchcraft aimed at women at the apex of the social
hierarchy. Whatever the truth, the history of peine
forte et dure demands attention as a more brutal part
of Britain’s legal and judicial history.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 11

DICK TURPIN:
THE NOT SO
DANDY
WORDS BY DR STEPHEN CARVER
HIGHWAYMAN

In popular history, the name ‘Dick Turpin’ evokes a
character at once handsome, brave and funny, his cry
of ‘Stand and deliver!’ once causing many a lady
traveller’s heart to flutter. Not as famous as he was in
the seventies, perhaps, when he had his own TV
show, but he remains a real Jack Sparrow, with a set
of adventures ingrained in the national psyche, most
notably his famous ride from London to York in a
night on the equally legendary Black Bess. Like a
Georgian Jesse James, the ‘gentleman highwayman’
is the outlaw king and a symbol of rebellious
Englishness. The reality was, of course, much less
glamorous.
The best original biographical source is a chapbook
entitled The Genuine HISTORY of the LIFE of
RICHARD TURPIN, The noted Highwayman, Who was
Executed at York for Horse-stealing, under the Name
of John Palmer, on Saturday April, 7, 1739 as told by
Richard Bayes and recorded by one J. Cole in
conversation at the Green Man in Epping Forest. Not
that such ‘histories’ are exactly accurate, but this one
was at least based on contemporary witness
testimony and an account of the trial is also
appended.
According to Bayes and Cole, Turpin was born in
Hempstead in 1705. He was taught to read and write
by a tutor called James Smith, then apprenticed to a
butcher in Whitechapel. There he married a local girl
called Elizabeth Palmer, or Millington, depending on
which chapbook you believe. The couple set up in
business in Sutton, but the meat trade was no longer
guilded and unregulated competition was fierce.
Turpin took to stealing livestock until he was spotted,
and a warrant drawn up. Evading capture, he next
briefly tried his hand at smuggling before falling in
with a band of deer poachers known as ‘Gregory’s
Gang’ after its leaders, the brothers Samuel, Jeremiah
and Jaspar Gregory. The gang soon diversified into
housebreaking around Essex, Middlesex Surrey and
Kent, stealing horses, sexually assaulting
maidservants and demanding valuables with
menaces. As a contemporary newspaper reported:
"On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five
rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at
Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened
to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them
where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing
for some time, they threatened to lay her across the
fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would
not do."
Beatings, rapes, scaldings and severe burns were
favourite forms of persuasion, until, pursued by
dragoons with a £100 reward on each of their heads,
several of the gang was cornered at a pub in
Westminster. The youngest, a teenager called John
Wheeler, turned King’s evidence and his compatriots
were hanged in chains. Descriptions of the remaining
outlaws were quickly circulated, including: ‘Richard
Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh colour’d Man,
very much mark’d with the Small Pox, about 26 Years
of Age, about Five Feet Nine Inches high, lived some
Time ago at White-chappel and did lately Lodge
somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a
Blew Grey Coat and a natural Wig’.
"Beatings, rapes, scaldings
and severe burns were
favourite forms of
persuasion, until, pursued
by dragoons with a £100
reward on each of their
heads, several of the gang
was cornered at a pub in
Westminister"
On the run, Turpin held up a well-dressed gentleman
who turned out to be the highwayman, Tom King.
They rode together for three years, living in a cave in
Epping Forest until their hideout was discovered by a
bounty-hunting servant who Turpin murdered. On
the run again, Turpin stole a horse near the Green
Man, at which point Richard Bayes became directly
involved in his own story, tracking Turpin and King to
the Red Lyon in Whitechapel. Turpin took a shot at
Bayes, hitting King instead and escaping in the
confusion. King lived for another week, during which
he cursed Turpin for a coward and gave up all their
secrets. Bayes found the cave, but Turpin was long
gone.
Becoming ‘John Palmer’, Turpin relocated to
Yorkshire as a ‘horse trader’, although he was really
stealing them from neighbouring counties.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD/ 13

The closest we get to ‘Black Bess’ is a black mare
owned by a man called Thomas Creasy that Turpin
stole in York during this period. Returning home
drunk from a shooting party one day, Turpin shot a
cockerel belonging to his landlord for a lark. His
neighbour, a Mr. Hall, witnessed the event and
declared, ‘You have done wrong, Mr Palmer in
shooting your landlord’s cock’, to which Turpin
replied that if he stood still while he reloaded, he
would put a bullet in him too. Hall told their landlord
and Turpin was arrested. Being new to the area,
Turpin could not provide any character witnesses,
and although he claimed to be a butcher from Long
Sutton, something about his vague backstory did not
ring true with the examining magistrate. He was
detained while more enquiries were made in
Lincolnshire, revealing that ‘John Palmer’ was a
suspected horse thief. He was transferred to a cell at
York Castle while further investigations were
conducted.
his corpse being borne through the streets like a
martyred saint, before it was buried in lime to render
it useless for surgical dissection. He supposedly lies in
the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate,
although the headstone that now graces the spot
was not there when an aspiring young novelist from
Manchester called William Harrison Ainsworth looked
for it in 1833.
By then, Dick Turpin had been largely forgotten. As
the eighteenth century progressed, turnpikes,
traceable banknotes, and expanding cities had
encroached into the traditional hunting grounds of
highwaymen and in 1805 Richard Ford’s newly
founded Bow Street Horse Patrol finally wiped them
out. For Ainsworth’s generation, highwaymen
belonged to a vanished world, and were therefore
ripe for romantic resurrection.
The highwayman Dick Turpin, on horseback, sees a phantom riding next to him. Lithograph by
W. Clerk, ca. 1839. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
Because Georgian prisoners had to pay for board and
lodgings, Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex
asking for money, but when the letter arrived
postage was owed which the recipient refused the
pay. It was returned to the post office at Saffron
Walden, where Turpin’s former tutor was now the
postmaster. Smith recognised the handwriting and
informed the authorities. Turpin was indicted for
stealing the black mare, and then identified in court
by his old teacher.
Turpin was hanged at Micklegate Bar in York on
Saturday, April 7, 1739. He was thirty-three years old.
Contemporary accounts agree that he died bravely
and with style, having bought a new frock coat and
shoes for the occasion. As Georgian hangings had a
short drop, he took about five minutes to strangle
under his own body weight. Bayes and Cole describe
Turpin was hanged at
Micklegate Bar in
York on Saturday,
April 7, 1739.
14 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD

Richard Turpin shooting a man near his cave in Epping Forrest. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Ainsworth is the real reason we have the version of
Dick Turpin we do in popular history. Turpin was the
hero of his boyhood, and he and his brother grew up
listening to their father, a prominent lawyer, spin
fireside yarns of ‘Dauntless Dick’ which the boys
would then embellish and enact in the family’s
overgrown back garden. He therefore wrote the
highwayman into his breakthrough novel Rookwood
in 1834. This tidy little gothic romance was an
overnight sensation, making its author a literary
celebrity and inspiring a national craze for Georgian
outlaws. As far as Ainsworth’s massive audience was
concerned, Turpin was the hero of Rookwood, to the
extent that the section entitled ‘The Ride to York’ was
often published separately, cementing the entirely
fictional event to the original’s biography. Ainsworth
based the episode on another apocryphal story in
which Turpin supposedly rode so quickly from a
robbery at Dunham Massey to Hough Green that he
was able to establish an alibi. The original ‘Ride to
Jack Sheppard in Bentley’s Miscellany, which ran
concurrently with Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The original
Jack Sheppard was another unremarkable Georgian
thief who achieved some notoriety in his own day by
escaping from Newgate. Jack Sheppard was another
bestseller but this time the critics turned on
Ainsworth, triggering a moral panic about the
supposedly pernicious effects of ‘Newgate novels’ on
young working-class males. When the valet François
Courvoisier murdered his master, Lord William
Russell, allegedly after reading Jack Sheppard, the
charge against Ainsworth seemed incontrovertible
and his status as a good Victorian and a serious
literary novelist never recovered. This is why we know
a lot more about Dick Turpin than we do him.
But that, as they say,
is another story…
The highwayman Dick Turpin, on horseback, arrives at a tree from which two bodies have been
hanged. Lithograph by W. Clerk, ca. 1839.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
York’ comes from a legend about the seventeenthcentury
highwayman John Nevison, or ‘Swift Nick’,
which goes back to an account by Daniel Defoe in A
tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain written in
1727.
Dr Stephen Carver is the
Author of THE AUTHOR WHO
The sincerest form of flattery followed, as Turpin was
rehabilitated as a national treasure, inspiring a run of
highwayman plays, novels and penny dreadfuls that
flourished well into the 1860s. After being a footnote
in eighteenth century history, Turpin’s fame was
assured by his nineteenth century fictional
doppelgänger. Almost everything we think we know
about Dick Turpin in national myth comes from the
pages of Ainsworth’s book.
AND WORK OF W.H.
LIFE
published by
AINSWORTH
& Sword books.
Pen
£25.00
RRP:
@drstephencarver
OUTSOLD DICKENS: THE
After an unsuccessful follow-up novel, Ainsworth
returned to the Newgate Calendars in 1839, serialising
16 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD

FULL PAGE AD.indd 1 19/08/2019 11:40

BURKE
DEALERS IN
DEATH
WORDS
BY
ROBERT WALSH
HARE

The crimes of William Burke and William Hare are
part of Scotland’s history, living on in popular culture
even today. The subject of films, books and
documentaries, their legacy has long outlived them
and their victims. They also inspired works by Robert
Louis Stevenson and Dylan Thomas. A feature film,
not the first, was made as recently as 2010. Even Sir
Walter Scott (author of Ivanhoe) had an opinion:
“A wretch who is not worth a farthing when alive,
becomes a valuable article when knock’d on the head
and carried to an anatomist.”
In Edinburgh’s West Port district they murdered
sixteen people between November 1828 and
November 1829, selling their corpses to distinguished
surgeon and anatomist Robert Knox. Knox’s full
culpability will always be debated, Burke and Hare’s is
undoubted.
Surgeons always needed cadavers. Bodies of
executed convicts, their principal source, were simply
too few even when dissection formed part of the
death sentence and executions were common. Burke
and Hare briefly solved that problem. Body-snatchers,
grave-robbers and ‘resurrection men’ (resurgam
homo to be exact) found a solution not on the
ground, but under it. Burke and Hare, however, went
even further. In 1995 book Murdering to Dissect:
Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy
Literature, historian David Marshall remarks:
“Burke and Hare took grave-robbing to its logical
conclusion: instead of digging up the dead, they
accepted lucrative incentives to destroy the living.”
Edinburgh Medical School was and remains a highlyrespected
institution, but it had its dark side. Knox
was only one of several surgeons who bought
cadavers without asking where they came from.
Often lacking any other source, Knox and his
colleagues had little choice.
Edinburgh folk of the time were often staunchly
religious and, if not religious, certainly superstitious.
Their belief that a person’s body should remain
interred until the Resurrection made them hate and
fear body-snatchers. The body-snatchers in turn had
a lucrative racket where Edinburgh’s highest society
did brisk business with its lowest.
The fresher the cadaver, the more men like Knox
were prepared to pay and in cash. More could be
learned from fresh cadavers than decomposing ones.
In a society where life was often cheap, death could
be lucrative. A fresh body could fetch twenty guineas.
Families of hanged felons often claimed the body for
burial and sold it to surgeons instead.
The result was an epidemic of grave-robbing. Several
graveyards built watch-towers and employed guards.
Some families, knowing body-snatchers preferred
fresh bodies, rented huge stones. Placed over a new
grave, they prevented it being plundered. Others
used ‘mortsafes,’ iron cages rendering coffins
impregnable.
" The fresher the cadaver,
the more men like Knox
were prepared to pay and
in cash."
Based in a dingy boarding house in Tanner’s Close,
the pair’s first sale wasn’t their first murder. Lodger
‘Old Donald’ had died owing four pounds in rent, a
considerable sum for the time. A late-night visit to
Surgeon’s Square netted seven pounds and ten
shillings, around one thousand pounds today. It was
their first of many encounters with Knox.
‘Old Donald’ had proved worth more dead than alive
but, like their customers, Burke and Hare had a
supply problem. Natural death wasn’t reliable but
serial murder was, especially of people who were
readily missed. With poverty endemic in 1820’s
Edinburgh there were plenty of vagrants, tramps,
drifters and prostitutes. Having already sold the
naturally-deceased their stock-in-trade was entirely
unnatural thereafter.
Victims were lured to Tanner’s Close, plied liberally
with alcohol and suddenly ‘burked.’ ‘Burking,’ a term
used today, smothered the victim’s nose and mouth
until they suffocated. Working together, one
restrained the victim while the other suffocated
them. The victims died quickly with no visible signs of
violence to arouse suspicion, not that their customers
were especially fussy. It also provided fresh,
undamaged cadavers sold at higher prices.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 19

Knowing they could hang for their first murder ( a
miller named Joseph in January 1829) Burke and Hare
had no qualms about fifteen more, selling their
victims to Knox at considerable profit. Their wives also
participated, helping lure victims to Tanner’s Close.
One after another their victims vanished. The more
they killed the more brazen they became, even
murdering a respectable, middle-class victim and
one of McDougal’s relatives. Their last victim was
Margaret Docherty on October 28 1829. The
interference of fellow lodgers Ann and James Gray
ended their killing spree.
The Grays became suspicious when Burke wouldn’t
allow anyone into his room. Sneaking in while Burke
was distracted they discovered Docherty’s body,
informing police even after McDougal offered them
£10 a month as a bribe. By the time police arrived
Docherty had already been sold, but Burke and his
wife told conflicting stories. Both were detained and
Hanged on 28 January 1830 Burke’s skeleton remains
on display at, ironically, Edinburgh Medical School.
Perhaps as many as 40,000 people attended his
execution with soldiers on hand to prevent disorder.
Hare and his wife vanished into obscurity as did
Burke’s widow. The disgraced Knox left Edinburgh,
dying in London in 1862.
Shortly after Burke’s dissection, MP Henry
Warburton’s Anatomy Bill failed to get through
Parliament. In 1832 his second attempt succeeded
after John Bishop and Thomas Williams were hanged
for a similar crime. Warburton’s 1832 Anatomy Act
granted anatomists unclaimed bodies from
workhouses and hospitals, also ending dissection of
executed convicts. Bishop and Williams had attracted
similar notoriety and a grim nickname; The London
Burkers.
William Burke murdering Margery Campbell - the last of the Burke and Hare murders
Credit: WikiMedia
Docherty’s body was discovered at Knox’s dissecting
room the next day. She was identified by the Grays as
the missing woman. Hare and his wife were also
arrested.
The trial was a public sensation and Burke might
have won had Hare not turned King’s Evidence to
cheat the hangman. In return, Hare was released.
Tried on Christmas Eve, 1829 and convicted on
Christmas Day, Burke was condemned to hang.
Passing sentence, Lord Justice-Clerk David Boyle
added an ironic stipulation:
Walsh is the
Robert
of MURDERS,
Author
AND
MYSTERIES
IN NEW
MISDEMEANORS
published by America
YORK
Time
Through
£18.99
RRP:
“Your body should be publicly dissected and
anatomised. And I trust, that if it is ever customary
to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in
order that posterity may keep in remembrance your
atrocious crimes.”
@ScribeCrime
20 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD

The execution of William Burke . Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

ANGELS IN THE
HOUSE:THE NOT SO
ANGELIC VICTORIAN
HOUSEWIVES
WORDS BY
DR JOHN WOOLF

Angels in the House: subservient and submissive,
demure and deferential. The ideal Victorian woman
lived safely ensconced in the heavenly homestead: a
refuge from the rambunctious world outside. Snug in
domesticity she cared for home, husband and child.
She was morally superior, passive and ‘passionless’;
her beauty reflected in ‘domestic pictures’ that
portrayed her as angelic, supportive and subservient
to the husband who, in all things, she willingly and
lovingly deferred…That anyway was the theory—a
pervasive form of patriarchy that permeated
Victorian society and culture. But of course the reality
was more complex. And in the underworld of crime
and corruption women played their part…
Cue the Forty Thieves later known as the Forty
Elephants: a syndicate of working-class women who
stole, blackmailed and extorted their way to notoriety.
Operating from the 18th and into the 20th century, it
was around 1890 that the gang fell under the
five years for her crimes.
Mary’s successor at the helm of the Forty Thieves was
Alice Diamond. Born inside the workhouse, Alice rose
through the criminal ranks to lead the gang with
military precision. She expanded their operation
beyond London; the motley crew (known for their
bewitching looks) travelled the country stealing and
plundering and hiding their loot up their skirts and
knickers.
All the while other women continued to subvert the
stereotype of the Angel in the House. Female
offenders were mainly responsible for minor crimes
such as theft and public disorder. There was a high
rate of female re-offending. Many were forced into
crime through abuse, poverty and destitution; sexual
exploitation was rife. And while women made up only
a small proportion of convicted offenders, their role in
crime was disproportionately discussed. In the press,
leadership of Mary Crane AKA Mary Carr, Polly Carr,
Polly Pickpocket, Handsome Polly and Queen of the
Forty Thieves. In Scoundrels and Scallywags, and
Some Honest Men (1929), Detective Tom Divall wrote:
‘She had rather small features and a luxurious crop of
auburn hair, but she was the most unfeeling criminal
that ever lived. She participated in child stealing,
enticing men into filthy and foul places, and in fact in
everything too horrible to mention. She had been an
artists’ model, and if she had stuck to that business
she might have done well and lived in luxury’.
Instead she wound up behind bars. Charged with
theft on numerous occasions, an 1896 conviction saw
her sentenced to three years penal servitude for
kidnapping a child. After her release Mary resumed
fencing stolen goods and in 1900 received another
the female criminal was depicted as the antithesis to
the Angel in the House: cold, calculating,
promiscuous and monstrous; in medical and legal
circles, she was morally corrupt and mentally
deficient.
Some women began writing about crime, taking aim
at the supposedly safe domestic sphere. Mary
Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational novel Lady Audley’s
Secret (1862) placed crime at the heart of the hearth,
provoking the worrying question: what if the Angel in
the House was secretly a Domestic Devil?
Such a concern captured the Victorian imagination.
And with poison in abundance—arsenic being
particularly ubiquitous in the first half of the century
— the potential for a domestic goddess turned
demonic murderess remained in the realm of
possibility.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWOLD / 23

John Woolf is the author of
Dr
FRY’S VICTORIAN
STEPHEN
and THE WONDERS:
SECRETS
THE CURTAIN ON THE
LIFTING
SHOW, CIRCUS AND
FREAK
AGE
VICTORIAN
Amelia Dyer (below) the
‘Baby Farmer’ poisoned,
starved and strangled
infants in her care—
killing around 400 in a
thirty-year period.
Were there not numerous cases that proved the
point? The twenty-two-year-old servant Eliza
Flemming executed for poisoning her master and his
family in 1815; Sarah Chesham executed for poisoning
her husband in 1851 And in 1873 Mary Ann Cotton
was sentenced to death for the destruction she
wrought with arsenic.
Previously a Sunday-school teacher and nurse, Mary
Cotton murdered a total of twenty-one people
between 1865 and 1872, making her far more prolific
than Jack the Ripper. She hid behind the image of
the Angel in the House to mercilessly murder three of
her four husbands, eleven of her thirteen children,
plus her lovers and her mother. Mary moved across
the north of England collecting the insurance after
the slaughter of her nearest and dearest. And on 24th
March 1873 she drew her last breath at the gallows in
Durham County Gaol: ‘She clasped her hands close to
her breast, murmured in an earnest tone, “Lord, have
mercy on my soul”, and in a moment the bolt was
drawn’.
Mary Cotton murdered a total of
twenty-one people between 1865
and 1872, making her far more
prolific than Jack the Ripper.
Cotton was by no means the only female serial killer.
Amelia Dyer the ‘Baby Farmer’ poisoned, starved and
strangled infants in her care—killing around 400 in a
thirty-year period. She too met her fate at the gallows
on 10 June 1896. Her last words: ‘I have nothing to
say’.
Dyer joined the pantheon of female murderers
executed for their crimes. And she emphatically
disrupted the Victorian notion of the Angel in the
House. It was always just a theory, and one which was
neither universal nor constant, but this maleconstructed
ideology captured a supposed ideal. It
was, however, bloodily subverted by the female
murderers and criminals who dispensed with the
Angel in the House and, in so doing, provoked fear
and loathing throughout Victorian society.
@drjohnwoolf
24 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD