When it was certain that Daft Jamie was dead, Hare searched his pockets, and found in them the snuff-box and spoon that were about as well known as the simpleton himself. To Burke he gave the spoon, retaining the box himself. A box was libelled among the productions at the trial, but Burke in his confession says that the one in the possession of the authorities was not Daft Jamie’s, which had been thrown away, but was his own. Before it was taken to Surgeon’s Square the body was stripped of its clothing, and here another fatal blunder was made. In all the other murders the clothes of the victims were destroyed to prevent detection, but in this case Burke gave Daft Jamie’s clothes to his brother Constantine’s children, who were then going about almost naked, and it is said that a baker who had given the murdered lad the pair of trousers he wore at the time of his death, recognised them on one of Burke’s nephews. When stripped, the body was put into Hare’s chest, and in the course of the afternoon it was conveyed to Dr. Knox’s rooms, when the sum of ten pounds was obtained for it. No questions seem to have been asked as to how Burke and Hare became possessed of the body of Daft Jamie, though there can be little doubt that the students recognised it. The public then wondered at the matter, and it may be wondered at still. In a popular work, published at the time, there was this very pertinent sentence:—“Certainly, those scientific individuals who attend the class in which he was dissected, must be very hardened men, when they saw Jamie lying on the dissecting-table for anatomy; for they could not but know, when they saw him, that he had been murdered; and not only that, the report of his being amissing went through the whole town on the following day; there could not be any one of them but must know him by sight.” That some of them did know him by sight is certain, for shortly after he was missed the statement was commonly circulated that one of Dr. Knox’s students had affirmed that he saw Jamie on the dissecting-table. Mrs. Wilson and her friends went here and there looking for the poor lad, but no trace could they find of him, and there seemed to be a tendency to treat the statement of the body having been seen on a table in the rooms in Surgeon’s Square as a mere idle rumour, arising out of the uneasiness and suspicion which the quiet and unknown operations of Burke and Hare were causing among the inhabitants of the country in general and Edinburgh in particular. A sense of insecurity had gone abroad, and it was not dispelled until the final clearing up in the trial of Burke and Helen M‘Dougal.
The mysterious fate of Daft Jamie, as we have said, took a most remarkable hold on the public mind. It was the talk all over the country, and when the mystery was solved the murder of the poor natural bulked larger than all the other crimes put together. The hawkers and pedlars, and patterers of the time carried about with them all over the country coarsely-printed chap books containing accounts of the crimes of the greatest murderers of the age, or biographies of Daft Jamie, to which in some cases were added the efforts of sympathising poetasters. The poetry as a rule was execrable, but the feeling displayed in them was but a reflex of the public mind. One aspiring genius spoke of
“The ruffian dogs—the hellish pair—
The villain Burke—the meagre Hare,”—
while another composed the following acrostic:—
“Join with me, friends, whilst I bewail
A while the subject of this tale;
Many a mind has often been
Engaged with Jamie’s awkward mien;
Such pranks will ne’er again be seen.
We may bewail, but ’tis in vain,
It will not bring him back again:
Lost he is now—this thought imparts
Sad comfort to our wounded hearts;
Oh! may such crimes nowhere remain,
Nor ever more our nation stain.”
CHAPTER XV.
The End Approaches—Proposed Extension of Business—Mrs. Docherty claimed as Burke’s Relative—The Lodgers Dismissed—The Murder of Mrs. Docherty.
But the end was near. This wholesale slaughter of human beings in the metropolis of a civilised country was almost finished. The only marvel was that it had lasted so long.