West Port Murders / Or an Authentic Account of the Atrocious Murders Committed by Burke and His Associates; Containing a Full Account of All the Extraordinary Circumstances Connected With Them. Also, a Report of the Trial of Burke and M'Dougal. With a Description of the Execution of Burke, His Confessions, and Memoirs of His Accomplices, Including the Proceedings Against Hare, &c.

by Anonymous

MURDER OF MARY PATERSON.

The first murder which was charged against Burke, although it is surmised that several had been committed before that time, is that of the girl Paterson, who was about eighteen or twenty years of age. It appears that this girl, with one of her associates, Janet Brown, had been lodged in the Canongate Police Office on Tuesday night, the 8th of April. They were kept till six o’clock next morning, when they went to the house of one Swanston, to procure spirits. Here they were met, for the first time, by Burke, who asked them to drink. He afterwards prevailed on them to go with him to breakfast, and gave them two bottles of spirits to carry along with them. They accompanied him to Constantine Burke’s house, in the Canongate. This man was a scavenger, and went out at his usual hour to his work. After they had been in the house for some time, Burke and his wife began to quarrel and to fight, which seems to have been the usual preliminary to mischief. In the midst of this uproar, Hare, who had been sent for, and who was a principal agent in this scene of villany, entered, and in the mean time Janet Brown, agitated seemingly, and alarmed by the appearance of violence, wished to leave the house, and to take her companion along with her. By this time it was about ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, and Paterson was asleep in one of the beds, totally unconscious of her approaching fate. The other girl went out, and was absent about twenty minutes. When she returned she asked for Paterson, and was told that she had left the house. By this time she was murdered. She came back in the afternoon in search of her, and received the same answer. Burke had availed himself of the short interval of twenty minutes, during which her companion Janet Brown was absent, to execute his horrid purpose when she was asleep, by stopping her breath; and that very afternoon, between five and six o’clock, her body was taken to the dissecting room and disposed of for L.8. The appearance of this body, which was quite fresh, which had not even begun to grow stiff, and of which the face was settled and pleasant, without any expression of pain, awakened suspicions, and Burke was strictly questioned as to where he procured it. He easily framed some plausible excuse, that he had purchased it from the house where she died, which silenced all further suspicion.

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