The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (2 page)

As early as two years prior to the death of Ferencz Báthory, rumours and complaints about Elizabeth’s various activities had begun to find their way to the court in Vienna, from which the Habsburgs ruled Hungary. Initially, these appear to have been brushed aside; but as the years passed – and Elizabeth began to abuse the daughters of the lower gentry – her conduct could be ignored no longer.

In March 1610 an inquiry was established. Evidence was so damning that negotiations were soon entered into with others in the Báthory family, including Elizabeth’s surviving son. It was decided that in order to avoid scandal and the disgrace of a noble and influential name, Elizabeth would receive no punishment. Rather she would be placed under house arrest and spend the remainder of her life at the castle.

On the morning of 29 December 1610, a group of men under the guidance of the Palatine of Hungary, George Thurzó, entered the castle. They discovered one girl recently deceased, two others who were mortally wounded, and a number of others who had been locked up. However, these were far from the most horrific sights. Elizabeth had disposed of her victims without care. Frequently, they were simply shoved under beds – if the stench became too great, servants were instructed to remove the bodies and leave them in the surrounding fields. Both whole corpses and body parts were found throughout the castle.

On 7 January 1611, four maids, considered Elizabeth’s collaborators, were put on trial. Of these only one escaped execution. While the noble lady was sent to live out the rest of her days in a tower room, two of her maids had their fingers cut off and were thrown on a pyre; another servant was beheaded.

In rendering their verdict, a panel of 21 judges considered the testimonies that had been collected over the preceding ten months. It was claimed that Elizabeth had tortured and killed her victims not only at the castle, but on her other properties and during trips to Vienna. More often than not, the claims against Elizabeth were based on hearsay. Her crimes, though, were many. She would push needles under the finger and toe nails of her maids and place red-hot coins and keys on their hands, faces or genitalia. In winter, she would throw young girls into the snow and pour cold water over them, allowing her victims to freeze. Some girls would simply be left to starve to death. She was also said to take great delight in biting the flesh off faces and other parts of the body – always while her victim was still alive.

Exactly how many girls suffered death at the hands of Elizabeth is unknown. One witness mentioned a book written by Elizabeth, which was claimed to have contained the names of more than 650 of her victims. Although the book has not survived and the figure is not mentioned by any other witness, the death toll of 650 has remained, becoming an integral part of Elizabeth Báthory’s legend. However, her collaborators put the number at less than 50, while others working in the castle gave estimates of between 100 and 200 girls.

After learning the extent and nature of Elizabeth’s crimes, Mattias II, emperor of Hungary, encouraged Thurzó to put her on trial. Though reluctant to break the agreement with the Báthory family, he began to collect more evidence. It has been suggested that what Thurzó was actually doing was playing for time. If so, his ploy worked. Elizabeth lived under house arrest for less than four years. She was found by a servant, dead in her tower room on the evening of 21 August 1614.

Imagined atrocities

As if Elizabeth Báthory’s crimes weren’t sufficiently repulsive, over time her story has been embellished by the addition of imagined atrocities. The most prevalent of these fabrications is the idea that the countess had virgins murdered in order to bathe in their blood. In doing so, the story goes, Elizabeth believed she could retain her youth and beauty. Although the source of this story has been lost to history, the first recorded account was written by a Jesuit scholar, László Turóczi, in his 1729
Tragica Historia.
In the three centuries since, this invented atrocity has been pointed to as the ultimate in female vanity.

BURKE AND HARE

On 28 January 1829, the body of an executed prisoner, William Burke, was brought to the University of Edinburgh. It was studied and dissected under the eyes of medical students, professors and interested members of the public. The prisoner’s skeleton was removed, cleaned and readied for display in the university’s medical school. His skin was put to use in the crafting of a variety of items, including the binding of a small book that remains to this day on display in the Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. It was a fitting end to one of the most notorious murderers in Scottish history.

Born in 1792, within the parish of Urney, County Tyrone, Ireland, Burke had spent seven years in the militia, had married and fathered two children. In about 1817, he emigrated to Scotland. Though he would claim that he wrote to his wife frequently – letters that were unanswered – it is likely that he abandoned the family. In Scotland, Burke led something of a transient existence, working as a baker, a cobbler and a labourer. While working on the Union Canal, he met a woman who called herself Helen McDougal. This was not her legal name; years earlier she had separated from her husband, and had taken up with a sawyer whose name she had adopted. Together they had two children, who Helen summarily abandoned when she and Burke ran off on a journey that would eventually lead them to Edinburgh.

William Hare, too, had come to Scotland from Ireland. Like Burke, he had laboured on the Union Canal, where he befriended a man named Logue. In 1822, after the project was completed, Hare found work loading and unloading canal boats. He became a tenant in Logue’s squalid seven-bed Edinburgh lodging house, but the stay was short-lived. The two friends had a falling-out, likely precipitated by the interest Hare was taking in Logue’s wife, Margaret. When Logue died, in 1826, Hare returned to the house and, after a brief competition with a rival lodger, was soon living as the common-law husband of the widow.

By 1827, William Burke and Helen McDougal had established themselves as regular tenants in the lodging house run by William Hare and Margaret Logue. Though it would be incorrect to describe the two couples as friends, they were united by common interests – whisky and money – both of which, it seemed, they were forever lacking. This would change in November 1827, when a tenant known as Old Donald, an army pensioner, died of ‘a dropsy’ [bodily distemper] owing £4 rent. Annoyed by the debt, Hare enlisted Burke’s help in stealing the body from its coffin, and replaced it with an equal weight of tanner’s bark. A man familiar with the less respectable side of Edinburgh, Hare knew that Old Donald’s body would be of some value to the city’s schools of medicine. After dark, they recovered the body from its hiding place and carried it in a sack to an anatomy school at No. 10 Surgeons’ Square. There it was received by three assistants of Dr Robert Knox, one of the foremost professors of anatomy in Scotland. For their troubles, Burke and Hare received £7 10s, nearly three pounds below market value. Still, it was a significant sum, and the pair were elated to have made such a gain with so little effort.

Not long after, another tenant, a miller named Joseph, developed a high fever and became delirious. Fearing news of Joseph’s illness would affect business, Hare grew concerned, but it wasn’t long before he’d turned the situation to his advantage. He summoned Burke to Joseph’s bedside. There the pair determined that the miller was most certainly going to die of fever. They plied Joseph with drink, after which Burke suffocated the man with his pillow. That evening, they took the body to Dr Knox’s lecture rooms.

The winter passed, and with it the £10 Burke and Hare had been given for the body of Joseph the miller. By February 1828, the pair were again looking to supplement their incomes through the good graces of Dr Knox. However, despite Edinburgh’s dire problems with sanitation, and the miserable winter weather, all appeared healthy at the lodging house. The pair looked outside their door, figuring that no one was likely to miss those who considered the street their home. Their next victim was Abigail Simpson, an impoverished and elderly former employee of Sir John Hope, who had travelled by foot to Edinburgh in order to collect her pension – 18 pence and a can of broth. She was on her way back home when she met Hare, who invited her to the lodging house for a small drink. It is probable that Burke and Hare intended to kill Abigail that evening, but became too drunk to carry out the plan. She, too, was drunk, and ended up staying the night. Upon awakening the next morning she began a new round of drinking. Burke and Hare took pains to remain sober, and when Abigail fell asleep they smothered her.

That evening, the occasion of their third visit to No. 10 Surgeons’ Square, the pair met Dr Knox for the first time. The professor was pleased with the corpse and authorized a payment of £10. As would become the routine, the profit was split three ways: £4 went to Burke, £5 went to Hare, and £1 was given to Margaret Logue as the owner of the lodging house that was proving so useful.

Over the next six months, Dr Knox would see a lot of Burke and Hare, as the pair murdered with greater frequency. They charitably put an end to the life of a tenant suffering from poor health. They suffocated an old woman Margaret had encountered in the street and had brought back to the lodging house. In April, Burke brought two teenaged prostitutes to his brother’s modest home, one of whom he and Hare killed after the other had left the house. Afterwards, the two men dared to carry the body in a sack through the Edinburgh afternoon.

A group of schoolboys followed them, chanting, ‘They’re carrying a corpse!’ But Burke and Hare were not apprehended.

It seems that for the first time in their lives, Burke and Hare had money – and yet it wasn’t enough. They drank more, and spent freely. This new-found wealth did not go unnoticed by their neighbours, to whom Burke, Hare and their common-law wives offered a variety of explanations, including Helen’s rather improbable tale that her man served as a gigolo for a wealthy woman in the New Town.

The close call they had experienced in transporting the prostitute’s corpse to Dr Knox did nothing to slow down the murderers. Indeed, it might be said that the pair had been emboldened by the experience. One morning, shortly after murdering a beggar-woman named Effie, whom Burke had known through his work as a cobbler, he encountered two policemen escorting a drunken woman they’d found in a stairwell. Boldly, he approached the two men and offered to take the woman to her lodgings. The offer was accepted and before the day was through, her corpse was lying in Dr Knox’s lecture hall.

The next two victims were an elderly woman and her deaf grandson, after which Burke took a holiday, spending midsummer with Helen’s relatives. Upon his return, he became suspicious that his partner had continued the lucrative business without him. An inquiry at Dr Knox’s school revealed that Hare had indeed sold the body of a woman in his absence. Although Burke and Helen left the lodging house in anger, it wasn’t long before the men resumed their trade.

The next victim was a Mrs Ostler, whom Burke lured into the lodging house during the celebration of a neighbour’s newborn child. Mrs Ostler’s murder was soon followed by that of Helen’s cousin, Ann McDougal, whom Burke had met earlier that summer and had invited to visit the couple in Edinburgh. Next, Hare picked up an elderly prostitute named Mary Haldane. She was summarily murdered, followed by Peggy, her daughter, who had confronted Hare as to her mother’s whereabouts.

The decision to murder Mary Haldane was yet another indication of the brazen attitude the two men had developed. Past victims had been loners, most often people whose disappearance would have gone unnoticed, but Mary Haldane had been a well-known character. Her sudden departure from the streets of Edinburgh was the subject of some talk. The fact that her daughter was also missing added greatly to the mystery.

Burke and Hare’s next victim, a mentally handicapped young man named Jamie Wilson – Daft Jamie – was not only well-known, but well-loved. When his corpse was brought in to Dr Knox’s lecture room, several students recognized it as Jamie. For his part, the professor denied that it was Daft Jamie laid out on the table, yet went to work immediately in dissecting the body laid out before him.

By Hallowe’en, 1828, Burke and Hare’s luck had all but run out, but they would still manage one final murder. The victim was an Irish woman, Mary Docherty, whom Burke invited to the lodging house by claiming some family connection. Her body was discovered the next evening by Ann Gray, one of Margaret’s tenants. As Gray and her husband ran for the police, Burke and Hare disposed of the body through their usual method. They delivered the corpse to Dr Knox’s premises, where it was discovered the next day by the authorities.

Avoiding the noose

Burke, Hare, Helen and Margaret were all arrested. As the evidence was thought to be thin, Hare was offered immunity from prosecution so long as he testified against his business partner. His testimony led to Burke’s death sentence. Helen, his common-law wife, was released – her complicity in the murders could not be proven. Returning to her home, she was almost lynched by an angry mob. She is thought to have fled first to England, then to Australia. Margaret, too, escaped the noose and was rumoured to have settled in Ireland.

In February 1829, Hare was released. There are various stories concerning his fate – that he became a blind beggar on the streets of London, or that he was thrown into a lime pit – but nothing is certain.

Dr Knox remained silent about his dealings with Burke and Hare. For several years, he continued his teaching, seemingly unaffected by public suspicion. Gradually, however, the consequences of his association with Burke and Hare became apparent. His student numbers dwindled, he was twice rejected by the University of Edinburgh and a brief stint at the Argyle Square Medical School proved not to be a success. He relocated to nearby Glasgow, then London, where he obtained a secure position with the Cancer Hospital.