The Human Crocodile
'Trust me, I'm a doctor!'
'Not with that comb over I wouldn't !'
On Friday 28th July 1865, the last ever
public execution to take place in Scotland was performed on Glasgow Green.
Around one hundred thousand spectators were present to see Edward William
Pritchard, an English doctor, dangle at the end of a hangman’s noose. Pritchard
blamed a ‘terrible madness’ for his actions yet it was clear that the murders
had been carefully planned.
Pritchard was born
in Hamsphire in 1825, the son of a captain in the Royal Navy, became a naval
surgeon who served on HMS Victory and in 1846 a member of the Royal College of
Surgeons. He and his wife had three daughters and two
sons before they moved to Glasgow in 1860. Pritchard had left his
previous job in Filey in Yorkshire, followed by questions of debt and
impropriety towards female patients. There, he had been described as ‘fluent,
plausible, amorous, politely impudent and singularly untruthful’.
In 1860, having
moved to Glasgow, his applications to join the Faculty of Physicians and
Surgeons of Glasgow were rejected – perhaps because of doubt regarding his
qualifications – it turns out his diploma had been bought from the University of Erlangen in
Germany. One of his many detractors
commented ,"He spoke the truth only by accident.” For example, it seems he
used to claim to be a personal friend of great Italian liberator Garibaldi and
carried a walking cane with the inscription: 'Presented by Gen. Garibaldi to
Edward William Pritchard' as some kind of proof. He also gave lectures on his
travels, describing how he hunted “the Nubian lion on the prairies of North
America," which is a great feat of accuracy if you think about it
geographically. Once he moved to Glasgow he had the strange habit of ‘walking
down the street, handing postcards which contained his own picture to people he
thought worthy’.
But in 1863, a servant girl died when fire broke out at the Pritchard
home in Berkley Terrace which lies round the corner from Madeline Smith’s house.
The procurator fiscal held an enquiry;
why did a young healthy girl stay in bed reading while her bedroom went on
fire? The answer they failed to come up with was that she was dead already. Pritchard
received the insurance money and used it, and a loan from his mother-in-law to move
the family to a large house in Sauchiehall Street. The mother-in-law was a
terrible judge of character and really admired her son-in-law.
The vacancy for a housemaid was filled by a 15 year old from
Islay named Mary McLeod. Pritchard immediately
started an affair with her, later terminating her pregnancy and promising to
marry her should his wife die before him.
The unfortunate wife.
Dr Paterson did not speak out re his suspicions, later testifying at Pritchard’s trial that he had no doubt that Mrs Pritchard was being poisoned by her husband but that medical etiquette meant that it was impossible for him to do anything about it. Instead there was an anonymous letter sent to the procurator fiscal asking for some attention to be brought to the case.
Edward Pritchard was devastated by the loss of his
wife. While through in Edinburgh preparing for the funeral, he pleaded for the
coffin lid to be removed one last time and with a display of fervent feeling, he
tearfully kissed the lips of his beloved Mary Jane. It was an act that later gained
him the name ‘the Human Crocodile,’ for his crocodile tears.
On his return to
Glasgow Queen Street, he was met by a detective superintendent and accused of
her murder.
The hearing took
place over five days and it took the jury less than an hour to declare
Pritchard guilty. The Taylors were still supportive of Pritchard until Mrs
Taylor’s body was exhumed and post-mortem showed large quantities of antimony
in both bodies. Records proved that Pritchard had bought large quantities of
poison over the previous few months - more antimony than the rest of the
doctors in Glasgow combined. His motive was clear – his obsession with the
servant girl. One paper reported: "No one who
saw the intelligent, thoughtful and mild-looking individual seated in the dock
on the first morning, could be prepared for anything like the consummate
villainy and diabolic cruelty which each day brought to light ... the whole
murderous plot." His fondness for young ladies - especially household serving maids – earned
him his other nickname; The Poisoning Philanderer.
His only defence
was to try and shift the blame to the servant girl, Mary McLeod – a claim which
he later withdrew. That did not stop him from calling two of his children to
the witness stand, aged fifteen and eleven, to tell the court how much their
father had loved their mother. Pritchard cried as the
children stood in the witness box.
But it was the evidence of his affair with young Mary that ripped
his credibility to shreds (not to mention the poison in the dead bodies). It
was the beginning of the end for the devilish doctor and despite protestations
of innocence, his appointment with death was just weeks away. He was convicted
of the murders of both women, he was dispatched to the gallows.
He made several confessions, eventually
saying: ‘The sentence is just, I am guilty of the deaths of my mother-in-law
and wife. I can assign no motive beyond terrible madness. I alone – not Mary
McLeod – poisoned my wife.’ Huge crowds gathered
outside the court as he was taken away and Pritchard theatrically bowed to
them.
Edward William
Pritchard was hanged at 8am on 28th July 1865, his body buried in
the South Prison’s Murderer’s Graveyard where plots are only identified by the initials of the dead. Many years later, during
building work for the High Court, workmen found a pair of shoes under a stone
marked 'EWP'. These were Pritchard's patent leather shoes, perfectly preserved,
which he had worn to the scaffold. One of the workmen took the shoes and sold
them in a nearby pub.
Caro GB 30th August 2013
