Helen Torrance and Jean Waldie were executed this day, for stealing a child, eight or nine years of age, and selling its body to the surgeons for dissection. Alive on Tuesday, when carried off, and dead on Friday, with an incision in the belly, but sewn up again.
–Tolbooth’s log for March 18, 1751/2*
This date in 1752 marks a milestone in the mutation of the Enlightenment’s piercing medical gaze into the beginnings of a macabre and sordid niche industry that kept doctors well-supplied with cadavers into which to gaze.
The March 18 hanging in Edinburgh of Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie appears to be the first known execution for an anatomy murder.
In the bad old days when dissection subjects were so hard to come by that medical students were known to snatch fresh bodies from the grave like Dr. Frankenstein, the Scots Magazine reported that the two women “frequently promised two or three surgeon-apprentices to procure them a subject” in exchange for a small fee. That fee really was quite small: two shillings, and a few extra pence they haggled for, not at all a favorable rate to sell one’s soul and maybe little more than enough to cover their costs.
Torrence and Waldie were supposed to obtain the subject while sitting on a ceremonial death watch with a dead child, but having no such deceased moppet to hand and really needing a couple of shillings, the ladies went the far more perilous route of snatching a real live eight-year-old while his parents were away. They plied little John Dallas with ale and suffocated his breath away, and Torrence even schlepped the cadaver to the apprentice surgeons in her own apron for an added tip.
The prisoners’ hair-splitting defense, a masterpiece of legal black comedy, was that they could only be shown guilty of kidnapping a living child and then selling a dead child — and neither of these acts constituted a capital crime. Considering the deep-rooted public loathing of resurrectionists’ grave-raiding, the court readily made free to infer from the juxtaposition of these circumstances the hated women’s culpability for John Dallas’s demise.
* 1752 was the last year that England maintained the old Julian calendar, and with it, the recognition of New Year’s Day on Lady Day (March 25) rather than January 1, so the documents of the time make this execution March 18, 1751. The change to the Gregorian calendar took place that summer.
On this day..
- 1871: Generals Lecomte and Thomas, at the birth of the Paris Commune
- 1696: Charnock, King, and Keyes, frustrated of regicide
- 1915: Wenseslao Moguel, "El Fusilado", survives the firing squad
- 1563: Jean de Poltrot, assassin of the Duke of Guise
- 2015: Nine more in Pakistan
- 1905: An unknown spy in the Russo-Japanese War
- 1825: Peggy Facto, Plattsburgh infanticide
- 2010: Paul Warner Powell, jurisprudentially confused
- 1647: Mary Martin, infanticide
- 1314: Jacques de Molay, last Templar Grand Master
- 1789: Catherine Murphy, Britain's last burning at the stake
- 1741: Jenny Diver, a Bobby Darin lyric?
Do you know if their bodies were buried or dissected after hanging? I’m desperate to find out
There’s a really good documentary on YouTube where some forensic anthropologists investigate the case of a mummified child who was probably, at minimum, stolen from his grave, and perhaps actually murdered by the “resurrectionists.” Indications were that the boy, who was about eight or so, was in reasonably good health when he died and, as he was not malnourished, he probably wasn’t poor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ot59Shbe2Y