In the autumn and winter of 1888, the archetypal serial killer was stalking the dingy back streets of London's East End, leaving a succession of dead prostitutes and an everlasting mystery in his wake. Jack the Ripper's motives and identity remain unknown but his nickname lives on through the years and it has spawned a mini-industry of books, TV programmes and films.
In Scotland during the same period, another serial killer was operating but there is little mystery over her motives and none at all over her identity. She operated in Edinburgh but, unlike Burke and Hare, she did not haunt the mean streets of the Old Town looking for her victims. They were handed to her willingly and she was even paid to take them. Those victims were the unwanted children of working mothers. They were often born and taken away in secret because their mothers feared losing their jobs, having their lives interrupted and being stigmatised by society. They called her a ‘baby farmer’ but she was nothing less than a child-killer.
The woman went to her death worrying over her own soul and its salvation, prayers dripping from her lips like tears of self-pity. But what of her little victims? Three deaths were lodged at her door but it is widely believed that others had gone unnoticed and unmourned. They had come into the world with nothing and left the world with even less – no mother, no father, no one to grieve for them, no one to remember them. Who, then, prayed for the lost ones? For the babies who had been conceived in passion and disposed of in haste, to be hidden from a society that would not accept them? Who prayed for them?
Walter Anderson Campbell was born on 20 March 1887 in Prestonpans, East Lothian. He was illegitimate and his mother, Elizabeth Campbell, claimed that the father was a Leith postman named David Ferguson Finlay. However, within days of the baby's birth, Elizabeth herself was dead and the boy was left in the care of her sister, Janet Anderson, who approached the father and offered to adopt the child if she was given money. Finlay refused although he did provide financial support for three months while he advertised the boy in newspapers for adoption. This was a common practice and, at the time, completely legal.
A Mrs Stewart replied and Finlay called at her rooms at 24 Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh, to meet both her and her father. The woman explained that her own child had died soon after childbirth and she was desperate for another so Finlay agreed to let them have his son and gave them £5. Mrs Stewart and her father then travelled to Prestonpans to collect the child from Janet Anderson.
No one knows what happened to Walter after that. Neighbours in Dalkeith Road believed that the couple, whom Finlay had thought were father and daughter, were actually uncle and niece. And their name was not Stewart but Pearson. Over a year later, one local tenant confirmed that a little boy had arrived in the flat in August 1887 but that three months later he was gone. The boy had been noticeably ill, said the neighbour, but the woman she knew as Pearson said he was her sister's child and had been sent home. Soon after that the Pearsons moved from Dalkeith Road.
No trace of little Walter was ever found. He had, without doubt, fallen victim to the scandal of baby farming in which women, often midwives, took unwanted children off the parents’ hands in return for a fee. Usually the woman would ‘farm out’ the child for adoption, either selling the baby on or paying someone else to take it. Sometimes the child found its way to a kind and loving family. Baby Walter, though, was not so fortunate. At some point during his stay in Dalkeith Road, he was killed and his murderer escaped detection for a further year.
But her name was not Stewart or Pearson. It was Jessie King. And the killing would not stop with that little boy.
Jessie King was born in the Anderston area of Glasgow in 1861. For a time, she worked in the city's mills but did not find the work to her taste. So she left the city of her birth and travelled east to the nation's capital, where she found employment in Causewayside as a laundry worker. However, by 1887 she was homeless and pregnant. Around this time, fifty-nine-year-old labourer Thomas Pearson agreed to take her in, ‘Out of pity,’ he said. He may not have been the father of the child but he agreed to put a roof over her head as long as she took care of the place and made him comfortable. ‘Making him comfortable’ would almost certainly come to mean providing him with sexual favours.
The child died soon after birth but King was desperate to be a mother. It was soon after this that they saw David Finlay's advertisement and they replied. King got what she wanted – and made some cash in the process – but her maternal instincts did not last long for, according to Pearson, he came home from work one day to find the lad gone. King told him she was tired of him and had put him in a home. She also said she wanted to return to work and the presence of the child was proving inconvenient.
But these were lies. She had killed the boy. How she did it is unknown. What she did with the body is unknown. Exactly how many children went through King's hands is unknown. In the end, she faced charges regarding only three – and then it was only because she had been sloppy in disposing of one poor waif's body.
A young boy, named Alexander Brown, unwittingly set in motion the forces that uncovered the scandal. In early October 1888, the eleven-year-old was playing with friends in Cheyne Street in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh when he came across a parcel wrapped in a piece of oilskin coat lying beside the door of a back green. One of his friends gave the bundle a severe kick and, when it burst open, young Alexander saw the remains of a dead baby boy.
The boys ran to a nearby street and found Constable George Stewart. He accompanied them back to Cheyne Street where he gingerly lifted the grisly little bundle. Such news, even in a city hardened by many outrages over the decades, was difficult to contain. As the police officer carried the corpse through the streets, a host of women clustered around him, many weeping over the fate of the poor wee bairn. But one woman stood out. Constable Stewart spotted her at the door of number 10 Cheyne Street. Of all the women, she was the only one who appeared uninterested and unmoved by the tragedy.
The news reached the ears of local landlord James Banks and his wife Jane. They recalled a tenant, a Mrs Pearson, who had one day turned up with a baby – that time it had been female – claiming that she had been given £25 to take the little girl off the hands of an unmarried mother. Lately, though, the child was nowhere to be seen and, when asked about this, Mrs Pearson told the landlord that she had managed to find someone who would take the child for £18.
Mr and Mrs Banks felt the tenant's conduct to be sufficiently suspicious that they passed it on to the police. Subsequently, Detective Officers James Clark and David Simpson were sent to interview the so-called Mrs Pearson, living at 10 Cheyne Street. Because the dead child was male and the baby seen by Mr Banks had been female, the two police officers perhaps looked on this as a mere formality. However, if there is one rule in detection it is that nothing should be overlooked. Their visit would eventually ensnare a baby-killer.
They asked the woman about the child she had shown Mr Banks and she admitted immediately that she'd had such an infant in her care. The baby's name was Violet Tomlinson, she said, and she still had her authentic birth certificate in her possession. The documentation showed the child had been born in August.
The detectives asked her, ‘Where did you get the child from?’
‘From her mother,’ was her reply. ‘Her name is Alice Tomlinson and she got herself in the family way and gave birth in Edinburgh's maternity hospital. After a week, she let it be known that she wanted someone to adopt the child.’
‘And you volunteered?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘She gave me £2 to take the child and a further £25 for her keep.’
‘Where is the baby now?’ the detectives continued.
‘With my sister,’ she answered. ‘Her husband's the piper to the Duke of Montrose, you know. Alice Tomlinson's mother knows all about it.’
Officer Clark diligently visited the elder Tomlinson woman and asked her about the transaction. Although everything Mrs Pearson had said was confirmed, he remained uneasy
. There was something not quite right about her story, something just slightly off. She looked respectable enough, she sounded convincing, but he could not shake off the feeling in his gut that she was hiding something. So he went back to the house in Cheyne Street and asked if he could search the place, particularly a cupboard that, for some reason, had caught his interest. Mrs Pearson tried to stop him but the policeman was not to be dissuaded – in fact, her resistance only made him all the more suspicious. Finally, the woman agreed, her body slumping as she muttered, ‘Get a cab and take me to the police office. It's there. I did it!’
These words and what he found in the cupboard proved the policeman was right to be insistent. There were two shelves in the cupboard and, on the bottom one, he found the body of a baby girl, perhaps around six weeks old, wrapped in canvas. He also found a fragment of oilskin, similar to the one that had acted as the first dead baby's shroud, and a canister of chloride of lime, used to mask the stench of putrefaction. It was also commonly held that lime would speed up the decomposition process but, in actual fact, it acted more as a preservative.
Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Chief Police Surgeon Dr Henry Littlejohn, one of the pioneers of forensic medicine, performed the post-mortem on the little boy found in Cheyne Street. His son, Harvey – who would also become something of a legend in his chosen profession – assisted him. The body weighed in at 11 lb 4 oz and was 29 ins in length. After removing the oilskin, they found that the body had been wrapped in cotton so tightly that it had caused the flesh to mummify and had halted any real decomposition although, when unwrapped, the skin was covered in patches of white mould. The cotton was carefully peeled away from the head to reveal strong discolouration of the face. The cause of that was all too obvious – an apron string tied so tightly around the neck that it bit deeply into the skin.
At first, it was difficult to ascertain the gender of the child because the sexual organs had melded together during the mummification process but, after several hours of soaking in warm water, they were able to determine that the child was male and around one year of age. They estimated he had been killed six months before.
Dr Littlejohn also examined the female child found by Officer Clark. She was 23 ins in length and weighed in at 8 lb 1 oz. Although she had not been dead for as long as the first child, decomposition was at an advanced stage – when the body was opened he found a considerable number of maggots and flies feasting on the flesh. Like the first body, there was a ligature, this time a piece of cloth, wrapped around the neck twice and pulled so tightly that it had cut a deep furrow in the flesh. However, Dr Littlejohn believed the cause of death to be suffocation, perhaps by a hand placed over the mouth or after the child had choked on a quantity of whisky it had been given.
He was assisted in this second autopsy by a man who became the inspiration for the greatest of all fictional detectives – Sherlock Holmes. Dr Joseph Bell was Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University and taught the young medical student Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes’ celebrated creator. There was, however, little need for Dr Bell's acute deductive mind in this case, for Mrs Pearson – or, rather, Jessie King – was making a full confession. She did so, she said later, because she believed that, by revealing all, she would escape the gallows.
The dead boy's name was Alexander Gunn and Jessie King had taken him for adoption from his mother Catherine Whyte of Edinburgh's Canonmills area, receiving £3 for taking the baby off her hands. Alexander was one of twins born to the domestic servant on 1 May 1887 in the home of a Mrs Mitchell. The mother had given the boys to a nurse, a Mrs McKay, to look after but soon realised she could not afford to support them so had agreed to put them up for adoption. The twin boys had been split up, with one, named Robert, going to a Mrs Henderson while Alexander had gone to Jessie King, this time using the name MacPherson. Catherine Whyte had tried many times to see her child and had failed but Mrs McKay had told her he was doing well.
Soon afterwards, Catherine Whyte married but she did not tell her new husband about having given birth to twins. When the scandal blew up, she proved unwilling to discuss the matter with the authorities for fear that her husband and new friends would hear. According to a medical report, the matter ‘acted on her nervous system’ and brought on a breakdown that led to her being admitted to hospital.
Thomas Pearson was, at first, unhappy with the arrangement as he felt that they were hard pressed enough to take care of themselves. However, when he heard that Jessie had been given some money to keep the boy, he relented and said the child could stay for a few weeks. As time went on, he became quite fond of the lad, whom they called Cluny. They told anyone who asked that the child belonged to her sister who was ill.
By May 1888, King found she could not cope with the child and tried to have him taken by a children's home. However, the management, with all the sanctimony that Victorian family values could muster, refused to consider illegitimate youngsters and King was sent away. Finally, in a drunken rage, she strangled the boy with her apron string. She could not support the child, she said, and it was the best thing in the long run. When Pearson asked where the boy was, however, she told him that she'd managed to place him in a home. But when Pearson said, once or twice, that they should go and visit the boy, she fobbed him off with excuses.
The body was wrapped in part of an oilskin coat belonging to Pearson – to keep in the smell, she later said – and placed in a locked box. When Pearson asked what had happened to the coat, she told him that she had thrown it out because it was covered in green mould. The next day she took the body out of the box and stored it in a cupboard. At that time she and Pearson were living in Ann's Court, Canonmills, and three days after killing the boy, she removed the corpse again and carried it to Stockbridge where she hid it in the basement of a house. It lay there for four months until the beginning of October, when she retrieved it for the last time and dumped it in Cheyne Street.
Telling people she had given the child out for nursing, Jessie King carried on as if nothing had happened. A local girl who had actually looked after little Alexander for a period was told that the boy had been taken away by his father. The girl, thirteen-year-old Janet Binnie, recalled being told by King that the child actually belonged to ‘her man's sister’, who had died of cancer of the womb. King had told young Janet that she had never liked the dead woman and was none too fond of her child either and Janet admitted that she often saw King slapping the infant.
Whether out of love or as a matter of fact, King exonerated Thomas Pearson from any involvement in the murders. According to her, Pearson had not even known that the Tomlinson baby was in the house. The mother had paid King £2 to care for her and, on the afternoon she brought the baby home, she had given the child whisky to quieten her. However, the brew proved too strong and the baby choked. She did not want Pearson to know the little one was there, so she placed her hand over her mouth to stifle the crying. In so doing, she silenced little Violet forever. She put the body in the cupboard and, as she had to go out, stuffed a cloth into her mouth in case she revived.
Pearson, though, was identified as the Mr Stewart who had posed as Jessie's father when little Walter Campbell was brought for adoption. From the moment of his arrest at Lawson's Nursery in Ferry Road, where he was employed as a gardener, Pearson insisted he was an innocent man. He told police – and later the High Court – that Jessie said Walter Campbell had been put in a home because she was tired of him. She also told him Alexander Gunn had been placed with Miss Stirling's Home – which often sent orphans abroad – because she could not cope with him. Pearson had wanted to visit him at the home but Jessie told him they could only call at certain times. And he claimed he had not been aware little Violet had ever been in the house.
He did admit using the name MacPherson on occasion and passing himself off as Jessie's uncle. He confirmed that Jessie sometimes used the name Stewart and that he went along with it because he was her friend.
Although no real d
efence was raised during her trial in February 1889, King's counsel attempted to paint Pearson as the real mastermind behind the baby-farming scandal. It was alleged that he was the one who influenced her into committing these dreadful acts. However, her own declaration, given in the presence of a lawyer, had absolved Pearson from any knowledge of the murders and had confirmed that she had acted on her own. At any rate, Pearson was given immunity from prosecution as long as he told the truth on the stand.
The judge described the case as being ‘as sad and as piteous a picture of society life as ever came before a Court of Justice’. Unsurprisingly, the jury did not take long to reach their verdict. The fifteen men were out for a total of just three minutes. She had originally been charged with three counts of murder – Alexander Gunn, Violet Tomlinson and Walter Campbell. However, with no body and very little evidence of foul play, the third charge was dropped. But she was found unanimously guilty of the first two killings.
Jessie King appeared calm as she stood to hear the sentence but the muscles at the side of her mouth were jerking and twitching furiously. The Lord Justice Clerk stared down at her from the bench and said:
Jessie King, no one who has listened to the evidence at this trial can fail to be satisfied that the jury could have come to any other conclusion than that arrived at in your case.
Your days are now numbered.
Remember, the sentence of this court and the penalty of law after that sentence relate to this world and this world only. I entreat you to be persuaded not to harden your heart against the influence of the world to come. All that you have done can be blotted out for the world to come if you will but repent and turn from your sins. I beseech you to attend to the ministrations you will receive; and as you confessed your crimes in your declaration to Man, so you will confess to God also. You will be sure of forgiveness.
Having thus addressed her spiritual needs, the judge turned to her corporeal future. ‘Now it is my sad duty to pronounce the penalty of the law; and I and all who hear me, will join in the prayer that you will be led to true repentance and so to salvation.’ He then placed the black cap on his head and informed her she would be hanged on Monday 11 March 1889 in Calton Jail.
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