‘Come back, my dear Mary Jane, don’t leave your dear Edward.’
DR EDWARD PRITCHARD was apparently a ‘Walter Mitty’ character, who not only lived in a world of boastful fantasy but was mentally unstable, lecherous and fundamentally dishonest. He was the son of a Royal Navy captain, brother of a naval surgeon and nephew of two admirals. From an early age it was clear he would follow in his father’s footsteps and those of his seafaring naval family. Born in Southsea, Hampshire in 1825, at 14 he began to train as a naval surgeon, going Surgeons and commissioned at 21 as an assistant naval surgeon aboard HMS Hecate, where he served for five years.
In appearance, Pritchard was almost completely bald, with heavy sideburns and a full but neatly trimmed sand-coloured beard. He was tall, handsome, with aquiline features and bright, intelligent eyes. Certainly, he was aware of the favourable impression he made on the opposite sex.
While stationed in Portsmouth he married a Scottish girl, Mary Jane Taylor, daughter of a retired Edinburgh silk merchant, by whom he would father five children. Tiring of Portsmouth, in March 1851 the family moved to Hunmanby, a small community near Filey in Yorkshire. Here, Pritchard established a practice, eventually becoming medical officer for the whole district, centred on Bridlington. Pritchard enjoyed publicity and wrote articles for local newspapers and published a couple of books on the attractions of the neighbourhood. However, he was a notorious spendthrift who quickly gained a reputation as untrustworthy and a relentless womaniser.
In Yorkshire Dr Pritchard’s unctuous, incorrigible, lying and philandering character soon made his position untenable as his practice shrank and he began to neglect it. Pritchard began to seek an escape from his professional failure. Aspiring to what would, on paper, seem impressive qualifications he bought a Doctor of Medicine degree from the German University of Erlangen, in absentia, in 1857. A year later he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in London.
A freemason, Pritchard used his membership of that organisation to advance himself wherever possible. Nevertheless, he became so unpopular in Yorkshire that he felt obliged to sell his practice in 1858, leaving a mountain of unpaid debts behind and becoming for a year the private physician to a gentleman, travelling, according to Pritchard, all over Europe in the process while his dutiful wife stayed with her children at their grandparents’ home in Edinburgh.
Upon returning to England, Pritchard felt the necessity to vainly brag to all he met of his adventures, many of which seemed obviously to be mere figments of the doctor’s imagination. He claimed to have ‘plucked the eaglets from their eyries in the deserts of Arabia and hunted the Nubian lion in the prairies of North America’ and to have risked death on the ‘cannibal-infested islands’ of Fiji. Profoundly self-absorbed, Pritchard bizarrely began to offer photographs of himself to all and sundry, including total strangers. He also claimed to be a ‘personal friend’ of Italian nationalist hero Garibaldi, whom he had never met, going so far as to carry a walking-stick engraved, ‘from his friend General Garibaldi’. Applying for eminent surgery professorships, the references Pritchard used were blatant fabrications, as he claimed familiarity with distinguished members of his profession who had never even heard of him. As a result of such brazen antics, no such appointment was offered.
In 1859, Dr Pritchard moved further north, this time to Glasgow where he would be close to his wife’s family and seek their financial assistance to establish his practice afresh. Such proximity to his in-laws did not inhibit Pritchard’s amorous adventures and he had numerous affairs. His professional reputation suffered as he continued to exaggerate his importance to anyone who would listen. Scottish doctors of the time were proud of their well-earned and highly regarded status throughout the world of medicine and an English braggart of dubious talent and repute would hardly be welcomed with open arms. The Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons refused him membership. Unperturbed, he became a director of the Glasgow Athenaeum Club and set up a practice that grew steadily and provided him with ample opportunity to proposition his female patients. On one occasion Dr Pritchard only narrowly avoided prosecution, having made advances to the wrong woman. Alas, if his behaviour had remained merely unsavoury, two (possibly three) lives would not have been taken.
On the night of 4 May 1863 a fire broke out in the Pritchard’s home at 11 Berkeley Terrace. Elizabeth McGirn, a young servant girl, died in the conflagration. Horribly burned, her arms completely consumed to the elbows, a postmortem suggested she had been unconscious in her bed and died soon after the fire started, presumably from smoke inhalation. Mrs Pritchard and her other maid were not at home. Dr Pritchard was and when a policeman knocked on his door at 3.00am on the morning of 5 May to report the glare of firelight from an attic window he answered the door fully dressed. The doctor explained that he had just been woken by the smell of smoke and was about to call out the Fire Brigade. His insurers were suspicious, particularly when Pritchard claimed for the loss of some expensive jewellery, not a trace of which was found after the blaze. A fraudulent claim was declared. Eventually, the insurers paid out in part after a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. Pritchard did not dispute it, perhaps not wanting to draw attention to the falsity of his claim. This did not stop damage to Dr Pritchard’s reputation. Rumour abounded that the dead girl had been drugged prior to death or would otherwise have been alerted by the fire. The blaze had been conveniently restricted to her room and although the authorities believed the dead girl had fallen asleep reading and the fire had commenced when the curtains caught alight from the gas jet, many had their doubts.
The inquest into the death of Miss McGirn left Dr Pritchard in the clear. It was never explained why, if the girl died reading a book as the doctor claimed, no trace of one was found at the scene or how the girl could have been overcome by smoke before she could raise the alarm. The gossip of the day suggested she was pregnant and blackmailing her employer. A hypothesis of this kind can now only be conjecture. Following his later, murderous career it is not implausible that Elizabeth McGirn was murdered and Pritchard simply got away with it.
A year after the Berkeley Terrace fire, the Pritchard’s moved first to 22 Royal Crescent and, a few months later, in 1864, to a new home at 131 (now re-numbered as 249) Sauchiehall Street, adjacent to Clarence Place. The house was bought partly with money from Mrs Pritchard’s parents, who paid the full £400 deposit, leaving Pritchard to pay up the £1600 mortgage. Despite his in-laws generosity Dr Pritchard remained ‘up to his eyes’ in debt. As he was not a gambler and by now had a lucrative practice and was known to be less than generous, the reason for this remained a mystery.
In the summer of 1864, Mrs Pritchard happened one day upon her husband kissing 15-year-old servant girl Mary MacLeod in one of the bedrooms. Miss MacLeod offered to leave the household but her mistress would have none of it, declaring her husband to be a ‘nasty, dirty man’. The doctor had seduced Miss MacLeod while her mistress was staying at her parents’ home during the summer of 1863. The relationship lasted some 18 months, during which she became pregnant and Dr Pritchard subsequently performed an abortion. Later she would swear Pritchard promised to marry her once his spouse passed away. Relations became strained between husband and wife following the discovery of his ‘romance’ and Mrs Pritchard fell ill in November that year.
Previously in excellent health, 38-year-old Mary Pritchard never had a serious illness in her life. Now she felt continuously nauseous, suffered headaches, aches, pains, was depressed and frequently bedridden. Life became even more impossible due to some pupil-apprentices of Pritchard living in their home, making the successful running of the household more arduous for Pritchard’s wife.
Despite the dutiful attendance of Dr Pritchard, his wife preferred to recuperate at her parents’ home in Edinburgh, a move originally resisted by her husband who believed his household ‘unable to cope’ without her. Mary Pritchard appeared to make a full recovery in Scotland’s capital city. Unfortunately, upon returning to Glasgow on 22 December to spend Christmas with her family, having gained weight and ‘eaten her parents out of house and home’, she fell ill once more. Vomiting every time she ate or drank, Mrs Pritchard herself remarked how strange it was that she was ‘always well in Edinburgh, always sick at home’.
On 24 November 1864 Dr Edward Pritchard had purchased an ounce of Fleming’s tincture of aconite and in the following three months purchased five more. Aconite, more commonly known as wolfsbane or monkshood, is a plant extract used to treat arthritis, fever, inflammation, neuralgia and skin disease. While the pulp of the plant above ground is effective and non-toxic when diluted, its root is extremely poisonous with only a teaspoon enough to cause cardiac arrest and respiratory collapse. Eight days earlier, Dr Pritchard began to stock up on tartar emetic, containing antimony potassium tartrate. Purchasing an ounce, some 435.5 grains, Pritchard now had enough for more than 200 times the dose required as an emetic.
On 6 February, a retired doctor and cousin of Mrs Pritchard received a letter at his home in Edinburgh from Dr Pritchard expressing anxiety at his wife’s deteriorating health. The following day, Dr JM Cowan visited Glasgow and prescribed a mustard poultice for her stomach, together with some champagne and ice to relieve her exhaustion. That night, Mrs Pritchard had a severe attack of cramp and demanded the attentions of another physician, Dr Gairdner.
Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University, Dr William Tennant Gairdner, was asked to examine the patient, as was Mrs Pritchard’s own brother, Dr Michael Taylor, who hurried from his practice at Penrith to attend to his sister. Both were highly suspicious as to the cause of the symptoms, were unhappy at the treatment she received from Dr Cowan and wanted Mrs Pritchard removed from the house. She was too ill unfortunately and so 70-year-old Mrs Taylor, urged to do so by Dr Cowan, arrived to nurse her daughter.
Mrs Taylor found her daughter confined to bed and suffering from incessant vomiting and cramp. Assuming command of the household, Mrs Taylor shared her daughter’s bed and prepared her daughter’s meals. The cook, Catherine Lattimer, was dismissed by Dr Prichard a couple of days later supposedly on the grounds of ‘old age’ and Mary Patterson, a younger woman, engaged as her replacement.
On 16 February Mrs Taylor ate some tapioca, later found to contain antimony, and became violently sick, believing she had ‘caught’ the same illness as her daughter. On 24 February Mrs Taylor, who had previously been in excellent health, retired at 9.00pm. Half-an-hour later she rang a bell for Mary MacLeod to bring hot water to make her vomit as she felt desperately ill. When the maid returned she was asked by Mrs Pritchard to fetch her husband. When he entered the room, Mrs Taylor had obviously had some kind of seizure and was gripped by what her son-in-law later called ‘catalepsy,’ a theory Pritchard had already propounded with regard to his wife. This was apparently on account of muscular cramp that affected her entire body spasmodically. Dr Gairdner had already rejected Pritchard’s catalepsy theory with regard to Mrs Pritchard, believing she would recover if simply given plenty of rest.
Another physician, Dr James Paterson, Professor of Midwifery at Glasgow and a near neighbour, was asked to assist with the treatment of Mrs Taylor. Dr Paterson was convinced that the woman was under the influence of a narcotic, probably opium. Dr Pritchard stated that he thought both alcohol and opium to be the cause. No trace of alcohol was noted by Dr Paterson, who was pedantic, cautious and who rejected the suggestion of Pritchard that his mother-in-law was an incorrigible drunkard. Mrs Pritchard was still sharing the same bed as her mother and, fully conscious, witnessed her mother’s sudden, shocking demise.
Dr Paterson informed Pritchard that Mrs Taylor was dying. He also took a quick look at Mary Pritchard and thought her very weak. The Englishman seemed incredulous. After Dr Paterson made Mrs Taylor and her daughter as comfortable as possible given the circumstances, he headed home around midnight.
Mrs Taylor passed away at 1.00am on the morning of 25 February 1865. As Mary Patterson and a charwoman by the name of Mrs Nabb laid out the body, in the pocket of Mrs Taylor’s dress a bottle of the opium-based ‘Battley’s Sedative Solution’ was found. Dr Pritchard expressed shock at such a discovery he deceitfully claimed had been intimated to him by Miss MacLeod.
Dr Paterson was asked to sign the death certificate. He refused, suspecting that the narcotics involved in Mrs Taylor’s death were not self-inflicted. He wrote to the District Registrar on the 2 March that the death was ‘sudden, unexpected and mysterious’. His motivation, later stated in court, was that he ‘wished to save Mrs Pritchard’s life, guard my professional reputation and detect the poisoner’. The District Registrar took no notice of Dr Paterson’s letter and inexplicably destroyed it. Dr Pritchard, diagnosing ‘apoplexy’ as the cause of death, wrote the death certificate himself. He then proceeded to finish murdering his wife.
With Mrs Taylor deceased, Dr Pritchard took sole command of everything his wife ate or drank. On 13 March he gave Mary MacLeod a piece of cheese for Mrs Pritchard’s supper. Perhaps suspecting at last that she was being poisoned, Mrs Pritchard offered a little to her maid who found it ‘hot like pepper’, burning her throat and inducing thirst. The cook tried some the following day, with the result that she not only burned her throat but suffered from cramp and had to take herself to bed for five hours. Such symptoms were consistent with those one would expect of someone suffering from acute antimony poisoning.
There was to be no respite for Mrs Pritchard. On 15 March Pritchard sent a jug of camomile tea to his wife. Drinking it, she threw up immediately. Between 10.00 and 11.00pm that night, he took her egg-flip (raw egg, sugar and whisky), to which he added some extra ‘sugar’. Tasting it, the cook found it horrible, bitter and burning and vomited until 4.00am. Unperturbed by Mary Patterson’s response, Dr Pritchard took the egg-flip to his wife who suffered a similar reaction.
Valiantly, Mrs Pritchard had survived some four months of her mystery illness. Her system could hold out no longer. At 7.45pm Dr Pritchard called Dr Paterson who was struck by Mrs Pritchard’s wasted, sunken-eyed appearance. She told Dr Paterson that had been vomiting for days, a comment her husband passed off as ‘ravings’. After explaining that his wife had not slept for five nights, Dr Pritchard was asked by his colleague to prepare a sleeping draught of chlorodyne and morphia, only to reply that he kept no drugs in the house other than chloroform and Battley’s Solution. At this, Dr Paterson left. At 1.00am Mary MacLeod and the cook were summoned by Pritchard to apply a mustard poultice to his wife. Mary Patterson refused, on the grounds that her mistress was already dead. The tormented Mary Pritchard had finally passed away earlier that morning of Saturday, 18 March 1865. Pritchard cried out,‘Come back, my dear Mary Jane, don’t leave your dear Edward.’ That same day he wrote some letters and informed the cook on returning from posting them that the ghost of his late wife had ‘kissed him on the cheek’ and ‘bade him look after the children’. He again wrote the death certificate and this time certified the cause of death as ‘gastric fever’.
It seemed obvious that the two deaths in Dr Pritchard’s home had resulted from poisoning, especially when the household cook and housemaid both fell ill after eating food prepared for the late Mrs Pritchard. Hastily, the widowed doctor took his wife’s body to Edinburgh for burial where a macabre incident took place. Mrs Pritchard’s appalled relatives witnessed him, as the coffin was leaving for the railway station, opening the lid, kissing Mary repeatedly on the lips and expressing his boundless, heartfelt love. His ‘beloved’ was buried on Wednesday 22 March.
Returning to Glasgow, Dr Pritchard was arrested by a police force alerted to the possibility of murder through receipt of an anonymous letter received by Mr William Hart, Procurator-Fiscal of Lanarkshire. The letter was damning. Signed Amor Justitae (lover of justice), it directly accused Dr Pritchard of the double murder of Mrs Taylor and her daughter. Dr Paterson was assumed to be the author but he flatly denied all knowledge of it.
The corpses of Mrs Pritchard and her mother were exhumed and autopsied by doctors Andrew MacLagan and Henry Littlejohn. As the cause of death could not be ascertained by their appearance alone, the organs of both women were sent for chemical analysis. The body of Mrs Pritchard was laced with antimony. The stomach of Mrs Pritchard itself contained no poison, implying that the deadly agents were slowly administered over a period of time. Mrs Taylor’s body showed evidence not only of antimony but also aconite and opium, all three of which were subsequently found in the bottle of Battley’s Solution she imbibed on the night of her death.
Dr Pritchard expressed shock at his arrest and later, somewhat ungallantly, tried to place the blame on his recent amour, the young Mary MacLeod. Mary was also arrested but released shortly after, having agreed to testify against her employer and former lover.
Pritchard went on trial in Edinburgh on 3 July 1865, before the High Court of Justiciary, having expressed his innocence with enough charm, guile and sadness at his wife’s demise to encourage many to believe he was genuinely innocent. Even her relatives were fooled. The trial was to prove them wrong.
In his evidence, Dr Paterson showed himself very hostile to the accused, greatly assisting the formidable prosecution team of Solicitor-General Mr George (later Lord) Young, assisted by Messrs James Arthur Crichton and Adam (later Lord) Gifford. Although he proved of great assistance to the Crown, Dr Paterson’s own reputation was utterly destroyed in the process.
The defence team, Messrs David Brand, Andrew (later Lord) Rutherfurd-Clark and William (later Lord) Watson tried in vain to deflect the guilt onto Miss MacLeod. They also attempted to have the deaths of Mrs Pritchard and Mrs Taylor heard independently, believing that two acquittals would be easier to achieve than one, given their belief that not enough evidence was available to secure separate convictions. Putting all the evidence together it might be a lot easier for a jury to see the whole story and secure the conviction of their client. It was. The judges ruled that each death was intertwined with the other and, over five days, the prosecution team won their case. The vicious and cold-blooded way in which Pritchard had slain his victims provided some juicy headlines, although the trial itself was almost a procession of damning evidence.
Throughout the trial and following the publication of the autopsy results, the press were baying for Pritchard’s blood. Portraying him as a ‘handsome, dashing, cool and unconcerned’ monster ensured the courtroom was full to bursting on every day of the trial. The evidence of Mary MacLeod proved the most salacious for the press, covering as it did her seduction, pregnancy and abortion. As she spoke a look of malice transformed the previously complacent and unworried occupant of the dock. Drs MacLagan, Littlejohn and a plethora of medical witnesses dealt a fatal blow to the defence by explaining the agony of each victim’s death, in the case of Mrs Pritchard through antimony poisoning and in the instance of her mother, antimony, aconite and, from the Battley’s Solution, a trace of opium. The Pritchard team could barely respond, unable, as they were to find a single medical expert to refute the evidence of the prosecution witnesses.
Dr Paterson hammered a nail into not only Pritchard’s coffin, but also his own public and professional standing. Under oath, he rather haughtily declared himself convinced that Mrs Pritchard was being poisoned by antimony when he had called on her. Despite this conviction, to the astonishment of the court, Paterson declined to visit her again. She was ‘not his patient’ and it was ‘not his duty’ to do so, he obdurately and pompously stated. Rutherfurd-Clark pressed on, to be again told that Dr Paterson did not consider himself ‘under obligation’ to save the life of a woman being poisoned to death in a cruel and agonising manner. The court was aghast that his warped sense of ethics had allowed him knowingly to let an innocent woman die. With absolute conviction, Paterson blustered that his ‘conscience was clear’. He then cast doubt on his own professional competence by obstinately insisting that opium, not antimony and aconite, had caused the death of Mrs Taylor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Eventually forced to concede that all three drugs had contributed to her death, Paterson left the stand with his reputation in tatters. Refusing to accept that his neglect and obdurate, arrogant behaviour had contributed to this state of affairs, after Pritchard was executed Dr Paterson wrote a lengthy letter, published in the Glasgow Herald, in which he tried to explain that his conduct was deliberately misunderstood by the Edinburgh legal establishment at the trial merely because he was a Glaswegian and thus considered inferior to his Edinburgh betters. Having dug himself into a hole, Dr Paterson had just kept digging.
Desperate to sway the jury, Rutherfurd-Clark stooped to call two of the Pritchard children to the stand to say how much their parents adored each other, how kind their father was and how much they loved him. Endearing as 14-year-old Jane Frances and her 11-year-old brother Charles Edward were, it smacked of barrel-scraping in the absence of anything concrete to exculpate his client and reverberated badly with the jury. At this point the defence, as she was the only other possible culprit, accused Mary MacLeod. The girl was still only 16 and no one believed her capable of such horrendous crimes.
When it came to making his final statement of the trial, the Solicitor-General did not have much difficulty in focusing the jury. The evidence made clear that the victims had not died of gastric fever, apoplexy, accidentally or by suicide. Murder by poison was certain and not disputed even by defence counsel. The culprit(s) could not include the children or the cook as the former had not always been there and Mary Patterson had replaced Catherine Lattimer, the original family cook, only on 16 February. Mrs Pritchard’s murder, said Mr Young, was one ‘in which you almost detect a doctor’s finger’. It was carried out slowly, deliberately, painfully, with the sole intention of undermining the victim’s constitution. One day she would be fine and then for a couple of days deteriorate. Only Mary MacLeod and Dr Pritchard were ever-present. Was it not ludicrous to suggest a servant girl had the skill to carry out such a misdeed before her medically trained employer? Only Pritchard could have carried out this foul endeavour and the cruel slaying of Mrs Taylor.
Addressing the jury, Rutherfurd-Clark began by looking at his client and stating that, were his client guilty, ‘he would be the foulest man who ever lived’, having cold-bloodedly murdered the loving woman who bore his children and the mother-in-law who ‘idolised’ him. Pritchard was not such a man. Laying it on thickly, Rutherfurd-Clark continued, ‘The mind of a man can barely conceive of a wretch so devoid of human feeling in perpetrating such crimes’. He did his client no favour, as it was clear to all that Pritchard had method and means, even if motive was obscure. After all, no food or drink had passed her lips without his direct intervention.
In summing up, the Lord Justice-Clerk went over the testimony of each witness step-by-step, meticulously detailing every shred of evidence while also taking the opportunity to denounce Dr Paterson’s ‘lack of consideration for the rule of life’ in favour of a misguided sense of professional etiquette. In concluding, he hinted strongly to the jury that the prosecution had proved its case, hinting that even if Miss MacLeod had contributed to the deaths of Mrs Taylor and Mrs Pritchard, the jury could have ‘very little doubt’ that Pritchard had provided and prepared the poison.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, it took only an hour’s deliberation for the 15 Scottish jurors to find Dr Pritchard guilty. The judges, the Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Glencorse, Lord Ardmillan and Lord Jerviswoode provided an experienced and formidable array of judges. Their chair, Lord Glencorse sentenced Pritchard to be hanged on the morning of 28 July, prior to which he was to be fed only on bread and water.
Dr Pritchard at first thought a reprieve possible, giving off the air of a loving husband misjudged and facing martyrdom. Seemingly devoted to his bible he anticipated a rising tide of public anger at his sentence only to find not a single person willing to lift a finger to save the egocentric and deluded murderer.
Perhaps to redeem his soul, Pritchard admitted in prison that he did indeed carry out the murders of Mrs Taylor and his wife. Malevolently, he also initially tried to implicate Miss MacLeod. Eventually, he recanted and admitted he alone carried out the deeds for which he was convicted. And what were his motives? A delegation of notaries including three clergymen, three policemen and his executioner, Calcraft, visited Pritchard at dawn on his day of execution to ascertain them. They left disappointed. So we can only speculate.
Dr Pritchard was unpopular, a sociopath and undoubtedly psychotic. Perhaps with his wife out of the way he could begin a new life with someone else. Curiously, one area that was not pressed home by the prosecution was the financial circumstances of the accused. At the time, money was considered the prime motivation, even though Pritchard, in debt to be sure, was not being pressed to repay and could probably have looked forward to continue milking the Taylor family for the foreseeable future, had Mrs Taylor lived. Perhaps he did not realise he was better off than he thought. He had insurance policies that the two banks he had overdrafts with would have accepted as security. Certainly, greed appears in retrospect to have been less significant than thought at the time, as Pritchard would not have gained from his wife or mother-in-law’s deaths financially. His real motivation was possibly malice, otherwise why draw out the poisoning of his victims in such a cruel and painful way? Yet he appeared to hold no hatred for them that could possibly justify, even in his own convoluted mind, the agonising and callous treatment meted out. Perhaps he murdered to satisfy some malignant sadistic impulse or merely killed for the thrill of ‘getting away with it’.
Emboldened by what appears to have been the murder of the unfortunate Elizabeth McGirn, he may have wanted to carry out a slaying that would seem, to him at least, even more ‘daring’. He never did provide a reasonable explanation and took his secret to the grave with him. Perhaps he himself did not know.
Trying to appear contrite while remaining centre stage, Pritchard with his last words offered his thanks to over 40 people by name. These ranged from family and friends to the judges at his trial, although his defence team were noticeably omitted. Taken to the scaffold, Pritchard met his death with a quiet dignity that stilled the jeering mob. Vexed at being denied the right to address the crowd, Pritchard was hanged in Jail Square near Hutcheson Bridge at Glasgow Green just after 8.00am. Such was the excitement generated by the case that members of the public gathered a full 24 hours before the sentence was to be carried out. A record gathering of over 100,000 attended, and cheered, the execution of Dr Edward William Pritchard. His body was buried in the precincts of the prison in Jail Square.
In 1910 Pritchard was, in a manner of speaking, resurrected. The justiciary buildings in Jail Square were demolished. In the process the body of Pritchard was exhumed. The skeleton and skull were examined and two years later formed the basis of an article by Dr George Edington published in the Glasgow Medical Journal. The skull and bones were well preserved as were the clothes and a pair of elastic-sided boots Dr Pritchard wore at his execution. Eventually, their curiosity sated, the authorities quietly re-buried the remains. This time, one hoped, permanently.