Dr. Edward William Pritchard poisoned his wife, Mary Jane, and her mother, Jane Taylor, in their home on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow in the first months of 1865. He was their physician as well as husband and son-in-law. He prepared or carried up much of his wife's food, told visiting doctors that she had gastric fever, and signed both death certificates himself. Chemical analysis after his arrest found antimony in both bodies, and in July 1865 a jury at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh found him guilty of both murders. Three weeks later he was hanged in front of a crowd on Glasgow Green, in what is generally described as the last public execution in the city.
The case drew attention across Britain at the time, and its fullest record is the volume edited by the Edinburgh lawyer William Roughead for the Notable Scottish Trials series in 1906, which reprints the trial, Pritchard's confessions, the death register entries and contemporary press reports. Much of what follows comes from that book. Three things set the case apart: a man who craved public admiration and built a reputation on invented stories; a teenage servant whom he exploited and whom his defense later tried to blame; and a second doctor who suspected poisoning, refused to sign a death certificate, and kept his suspicion to himself while the wife was still alive.
Pritchard was born at Southsea, Hampshire, on December 6, 1825. His father, John White Pritchard, was a captain in the Royal Navy, and several relatives served at sea; one brother, Francis Bowen Pritchard, was a naval surgeon, and another, Charles Augustus Pritchard, was secretary to the naval commander-in-chief at Plymouth. In September 1840 he was apprenticed to two surgeons in Portsmouth, Edward John and Charles Henry Scott.
What came next is uncertain. A medical directory entry, probably supplied by Pritchard himself, said he had studied at King's College in London from 1843, but the college denied it, according to Roughead. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons on May 29, 1846, after asking to sit the examination earlier than the rules then allowed. He passed the Navy Board examination and joined HMS Victory as an assistant surgeon on November 2, 1846. Over the next four years he served in the Collingwood, the Calypso, the Asia and the Hecate, with voyages to the Pacific, the northern seas and the Mediterranean. The University of Edinburgh holds a notebook he kept as assistant surgeon of the Calypso during an 1848 visit to Pitcairn Island; he later lectured on the subject.
While the Hecate was at Portsmouth he met Mary Jane Taylor at a ball. She was the only daughter of Michael Taylor, an Edinburgh silk merchant, and was staying with her mother's brother, a retired naval surgeon named David Cowan. Her family approved the match, and they married in the autumn of 1850 (a Grange Association history of the family grave gives the date as September 17, 1850, in London). Mary Jane had been born on December 28, 1825, at Duddingston, near Edinburgh. For a time the couple lived apart, he at sea and she at her father's house in Edinburgh.
Mary Jane's relatives found him an opening in general practice at Hunmanby, in Yorkshire, and in March 1851 he resigned from the Navy and set up house there. He opened a branch practice in the nearby resort town of Filey and became medical officer for a district of the Bridlington Union. He published local guidebooks, among them a guide to Filey in 1856, and wrote for medical journals.
His time there did not end well. After his trial the Sheffield Telegraph wrote that he had left Hunmanby and Filey with a poor reputation, describing him as fluent, plausible, amorous and habitually untruthful, a man who used his membership of the Freemasons to advertise himself and who left Yorkshire in debt. Roughead adds that other local papers said much the same of the roughly six years he spent in the county.
In 1857 he bought a Doctor of Medicine degree, awarded in absentia, from the University of Erlangen in Germany, and on April 1, 1858, he became a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries of London. He then sold his practice, and in the autumn of 1859 he left England as medical attendant to a gentleman traveling to Egypt and the Holy Land, while his wife returned to her parents in Edinburgh.
When he came back in June 1860, the family decided he should start again in Glasgow. They took a house at 11 Berkeley Terrace. Glasgow's doctors quickly came to distrust him. The claims he made about his past, Roughead writes, were plainly untrue, and he could not find a Fellow willing to propose him for the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, nor get into the city's medical societies. In October 1860 he applied for the vacant chair of surgery at the Andersonian University, citing his experience "in almost every part of the world," with testimonials whose authenticity was doubted. The post went to another man.
He turned instead to winning the public. He joined the Glasgow Athenaeum, became one of its directors and an examiner in physiology, and gave popular lectures, mostly about his travels. One line preserved from a lecture had him plucking eaglets from their nests in the deserts of Arabia and hunting the Nubian lion on the prairies of North America. Listeners noticed that his accounts of the Fiji Islands were never the same twice. He spoke of a close friendship with Giuseppe Garibaldi and showed friends a walking stick inscribed as a gift from the general; one acquaintance recognized it as a stick he had seen Pritchard carry before it had any inscription. Roughead judged the friendship invented.
He became a Freemason in 1861, joining Lodge St. Mark on March 18 and becoming its Master the next year, and he entered several higher Masonic orders in Glasgow and Edinburgh that December. He had his photograph printed in large numbers and sold copies to stationers below cost, and he handed them out to casual acquaintances; he gave one to the stranger he traveled with on the evening of his arrest. He also applied to join the Glasgow Photographic Association, whose membership book, now in the Mitchell Library, later had his name struck through and "Gone?" written above it.
Contemporary descriptions show a tall, well-built man with a long, carefully trimmed beard, a bald crown partly covered by a lock of light brown hair, and an elaborately polite manner. He built up a fair practice. Roughead also records that it was publicly known that Pritchard used his position to make improper advances to women patients, and that one such case led to a prosecution that was dropped only because of the misfortunes of the woman's husband.
In the early hours of Tuesday, May 5, 1863, a policeman on his beat saw the glow of fire in the attic window of 11 Berkeley Terrace and rang the bell. According to the Glasgow Herald's report the next day, Pritchard answered the door, saying his two sons had woken him a few minutes earlier. He said he had gone up to the servants' room, called the maid's name and been driven back by smoke. The fire brigade put out the flames. In the attic bedroom they found the body of the servant, Elizabeth McGirn, in her bed. The paper suggested that she had fallen asleep reading with the gas jet lit beside her bed, and that the smoke had suffocated her before she could move. Her fellow servant was away from home with Mrs. Pritchard at the time.
Her name is spelled McGirn in the 1863 newspaper report and in a Mitchell Library account; the National Records of Scotland, in an article drawing on the statutory registers, gives it as Elizabeth McGrain, aged 25, and says her death was recorded as suffocation. Little else about her life appears in the sources.
The authorities questioned Pritchard and a post-mortem examination was carried out, but no further action was taken. He then claimed under his fire insurance for jewelry that he said had been destroyed, though no trace of it was found in the debris; when the company resisted, he accepted a fraction of the claim. After his conviction, writers looked again at the fire. One contemporary writer, quoted by Roughead, argued that a young woman a few feet from the door would surely have tried to escape or shown some sign of distress, and that the stillness in which she was found suggested she was already dead or drugged before the fire started. The Spectator, writing in July 1865, treated the girl's death as another of his crimes. Roughead himself concluded that without direct proof it would be unjust to add this death to Pritchard's record. He was never charged, and this account treats the death as suspected only.
At Whitsunday (the May term day) of 1863 the family moved to 22 Royal Crescent, and a new servant took the dead maid's place, a girl engaged as housemaid and nurse to the children. Roughead gives her age as 15; in the witness box in July 1865 she said she would be 17 that October and had been "under fifteen" when she started. That summer, while Mrs. Pritchard was away at the coast, Pritchard began sexually exploiting her. He later admitted this in writing, and she confirmed at the trial that the abuse went on until shortly before Mrs. Pritchard's death. She testified that Mrs. Pritchard had once found her husband kissing her, that she became pregnant in 1864 and miscarried, which Pritchard admitted he had brought about, and that he had told her he would marry her if his wife died first.
She was a child in his employment and under his roof, and the sources treat her as his victim. Pritchard's later conduct toward her made her position worse: she was arrested after his arrest, his defense suggested she was the poisoner, and his first confession accused her. She is not named here, in keeping with this site's practice for victims of sexual abuse. Nothing in the record suggests she had any part in the killings, and Pritchard himself finally declared that she had none.
At Whitsunday 1864 Pritchard moved his family to a house he had bought in Clarence Place, then a section of Sauchiehall Street, a few doors west of Mains Street; in his letters he gave the address as 131 Sauchiehall Street. The price was 2,000 pounds. He borrowed 1,600 on the property, and his mother-in-law provided 500 pounds. Her letters show she meant it as a loan secured on the house; she urged her daughter to see the money well spent and wished her son-in-law success. No security was given until after her death, when her trustees asked for it. From about this time he began overdrawing his accounts at the Clydesdale Bank and the City of Glasgow Bank, and in November 1864 he took in two medical students, Thomas Connell and Richard King, as paying pupils and boarders.
The household that autumn was Pritchard, his wife, four of their five children, the cook Catherine Lattimer and the young housemaid. The eldest child, a daughter, had been raised by her grandparents in Edinburgh.
Mary Jane Pritchard was 38 or 39 in 1865 (her coffin plate and death register entry gave 39; the Grange Association's birth date makes her 39 only from December 1864, so the two agree). She was a mother of five who had spent much of her marriage moving between her husband's postings and practices and her parents' home in Edinburgh. Witnesses at the trial described an affectionate family, and her husband's letters to her relatives were full of concern for her. She told her dressmaker in March 1865 that it was strange she was always well in Edinburgh and ill at home.
Jane Taylor, born Jane Cowan, was the wife of Michael Taylor, a silk and lace merchant who lived at Lauder Road in the Grange district of Edinburgh. Roughead describes her as a strong and healthy woman for her 70 years; the inscription recorded by the Grange Association gives her age at death as 73. She suffered from neuralgic headaches and had come to rely on Battley's Sedative Solution, an opium preparation, of which she had built up a tolerance. When she heard her daughter was ill she traveled to Glasgow to nurse her, shared her bedroom and, for the fortnight she was there, prepared much of her food herself.
Mrs. Pritchard fell ill in October 1864 with sickness and vomiting, which she put down to a chill. Pharmacy records later showed that in November her husband bought an ounce of tartarised antimony and an ounce of tincture of aconite, and on December 8 an ounce of Fleming's Tincture of Aconite, about six times the strength of the ordinary tincture. In late November she went to her family in Edinburgh, recovered, and came home on December 22 for Christmas. About two weeks later the vomiting returned, worse than before and usually after meals. From then on she rarely came downstairs; her husband took or sent up her food.
On February 1, 1865, she had a violent attack with severe cramps. Pritchard asked Dr. James Moffat Cowan, a retired Edinburgh physician and a cousin of his wife, to come and see her. Cowan visited on February 7, found her better than he expected and suggested a mustard poultice, champagne and ice. The same day Pritchard bought more antimony and aconite. After Cowan left on the 8th she had another attack, and at her own request Dr. William Gairdner was called. Gairdner, puzzled and thinking from her excitement that she might be intoxicated, stopped all stimulants and prescribed a simple diet. Pritchard told him she had catalepsy. Neither visiting doctor saw signs of fever.
Gairdner was not satisfied. On February 9 he wrote to her brother, Dr. Michael Taylor of Penrith, recommending that she be moved to his house. Pritchard said he agreed in principle but that she was not fit to travel. She never went.
On Cowan's advice Jane Taylor came from Edinburgh on Friday, February 10. The day before, Pritchard bought his fourth ounce of aconite in under three months. On February 13 Mrs. Pritchard asked for tapioca. A packet was fetched from the grocer, left for a time on the hall table, cooked by the cook and carried upstairs. Mrs. Taylor ate some and was sick at once, remarking that she must have caught her daughter's complaint. Antimony was later found in the rest of that packet. It was not proved that Pritchard was in the house that day. On February 16 Catherine Lattimer left service and Mary Patterson became cook; on February 18 Pritchard bought another ounce of Fleming's Tincture.
On the evening of Friday, February 24, Mrs. Taylor had tea with the family, wrote letters, sent the housemaid out for sausages for supper, and went up to her daughter's room. Minutes later the bell rang violently. The servants found her in a chair, very ill and trying to be sick; she soon lost consciousness. Pritchard sent the student Connell for Dr. James Paterson, a local practitioner who had never been in the house.
Pritchard met Paterson in the hall and told him the old lady had fallen from her chair in a fit while writing, and that she was "in the habit of taking a drop," a claim Roughead calls a deliberate lie. Upstairs, Paterson found Mrs. Taylor dying on her daughter's bed and judged at once that she was under the influence of some powerful narcotic. Pritchard then told him about the Battley's solution and suggested she had taken "a good swig at it." Sitting up in the same bed was Mrs. Pritchard, whom Paterson saw for the first time; he was struck by her distress and formed the belief that she was suffering from the effects of antimony. He said nothing to her and asked her husband nothing, and he left. Called again near one o'clock, he declined to come, thinking the case hopeless.
Jane Taylor died at about 1 a.m. on Saturday, February 25, 1865, a fortnight after she arrived. While the cook and a washerwoman, Jessie Nabb, were laying out the body, they found the Battley's bottle in her pocket. Pritchard came in, asked for it, exclaimed at how much she had taken since Tuesday, told them to say nothing because talk would harm a man in his position, and took it away. When it was analyzed after his arrest, the bottle held antimony and, in Professor Penny's estimate, aconite amounting to about 7 percent of the contents.
On March 1 Pritchard met Paterson in the street and asked him to look in on his wife the next day while he took his mother-in-law's body to Edinburgh for burial; she was buried in the Grange Cemetery on March 2. Paterson's visit confirmed his opinion, but again he told no one. On March 3 Michael Taylor called on him, sent by Pritchard for a death certificate. Paterson refused, giving no reason beyond professional etiquette. On March 4 he wrote to the registrar, James Struthers, who had sent him a form to complete, that he had seen the patient only for a few minutes before death, that she seemed to be under some narcotic, that Pritchard had been present throughout and could certify the cause, and that the death was "sudden, unexpected, and to me mysterious." According to Paterson, the registrar never passed the letter on and later destroyed it. Pritchard certified the death himself: paralysis for twelve hours, with apoplexy for one hour as the secondary cause, an order of events that Roughead was told no competent doctor would give. On March 5 Pritchard called on Paterson to say his wife was much improved.
After her mother's death Mrs. Pritchard's food was again taken or sent to her by her husband. On March 13 he bought what proved to be his last half ounce of Fleming's Tincture of Aconite. That evening he sent cheese up for her supper. She asked the housemaid to taste it, and the girl felt a burning in her throat. The next morning the cook ate a little of the leftover cheese and became violently ill. (When the cheese was analyzed after the arrest, no antimony was found in it.) On March 15 Pritchard asked the cook to make egg-flip for his wife; after hearing him go into the dining room and then his consulting room, the cook saw him drop two lumps of sugar into it. She tasted the mixture, found it foul, and was ill through the night. Mrs. Pritchard drank a glass and was sick at once.
At midday on Friday, March 17, the sickroom bell rang three times. The cook saw Pritchard at the door of his consulting room and, a little later, giving his wife something to drink from a porter glass. At five o'clock Mrs. Pritchard had severe cramps and became delirious, speaking to her dead mother as if she were in the room. Paterson was called at eight and was shocked at how much she had changed since March 2. She told him she had been vomiting; Pritchard said she was raving and had not slept for days. Pritchard told Paterson he kept no drugs in the house, so Paterson dictated a prescription for a sleeping draught and left.
Pritchard went to bed beside his wife, with the housemaid on a sofa in the room. At about one in the morning he sent the girl down for a mustard poultice. When the servants came back, Mary Jane Pritchard was dead. It was March 18, 1865. Pritchard insisted she had only fainted, called on her to come back to him, and then went out to post letters. One, to his bank about an overdraft of 131 pounds, asked the bank to wait until after his wife's funeral. On Monday, March 20, he registered her death as gastric fever lasting two months.
That Monday Pritchard took his wife's body to her father's house in Edinburgh for burial beside her mother. There he had the coffin opened in front of the family and kissed her. While he was away, an anonymous letter reached the procurator fiscal in Glasgow, the local public prosecutor. It was widely believed to have come from Paterson, but he denied writing it. Inquiries followed at once, a warrant was obtained, and when Pritchard stepped off the train at Queen Street station that evening he was arrested by Superintendent Alexander M'Call on suspicion of causing his wife's death.
Police searched the house and took bottles from the consulting room and the clothes and bed linen from the sickroom. Pritchard appeared before the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Sir Archibald Alison, on March 22 and made a statement (a "declaration") denying the charge. After Jessie Nabb told investigators about Pritchard's relationship with the teenage servant, the girl was arrested as a possible party to her mistress's death; after a long examination before the sheriff she was released. The books of two Sauchiehall Street suppliers, Murdoch Brothers and the Glasgow Apothecaries' Company, showed his recent purchases of antimony, aconite and other poisons in amounts no ordinary practice would explain.
At first both families believed in his innocence, and public opinion in Glasgow leaned his way.
On March 21 Douglas Maclagan, professor of medical jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh, and Henry Duncan Littlejohn examined Mary Jane Pritchard's body at her father's house in Lauder Road. They found nothing that could account for her death and kept the organs for analysis. As soon as he returned from the examination, Maclagan ran a trial test on her urine and found clear evidence of antimony. With his assistant, Arthur Gamgee, he went on to find it in the contents of her intestines, in a water-soluble form that he concluded could only be tartar emetic, the common medicinal form. He found no vegetable poisons. She was buried in the Grange Cemetery on March 22.
The result reached Glasgow on March 28 and turned public feeling against Pritchard. He was committed for trial for his wife's murder, and a warrant was issued to exhume Jane Taylor. Her body was raised on March 30. The post-mortem again showed no natural cause of death, and analysis again found antimony. On April 21 Pritchard made a second declaration before the sheriff and was committed for trial on the second charge.
Frederick Penny, professor of chemistry at the Andersonian University in Glasgow, analyzed organs from both women and the items taken from the house. His reports, dated May 9, 17 and 19, 1865, found antimony in every organ he tested, most of it in the intestines; tartarised antimony in the leftover tapioca, at a rate of about 4.6 grains to the pound; antimony and aconite in the Battley's bottle; and loose tartar emetic, aconite and other poisons among Pritchard's own supplies. He tested the Battley's mixture on rabbits to show the effect of the aconite. Vegetable poisons such as aconite and opium, the doctors explained in court, rarely survive in a body to be detected, so the case for them in Mrs. Taylor's death rested on her symptoms and the contents of her bottle.
Pritchard used an old Scottish statute of 1701 to force a speedy trial, and on May 31 the indictment was served. It charged him with murdering Jane Taylor between February 10 and 25, 1865, with tartarised antimony, aconite and opium given in tapioca, porter or beer, and her Battley's solution; and with murdering his wife between December 22, 1864, and March 18, 1865, with tartarised antimony and aconite given in egg-flip, cheese, porter or beer, and wine. On June 26 he was moved from Glasgow's North Prison to the Calton Jail in Edinburgh.
The trial opened on Monday, July 3, 1865, before the Lord Justice-Clerk, John Inglis, with Lord Ardmillan and Lord Jerviswoode. The Lord Advocate, James Moncreiff, had been called to London on parliamentary business, so the prosecution was led by the Solicitor-General, George Young, with the advocates-depute Adam Gifford and James Arthur Crichton. Pritchard was defended by Andrew Rutherfurd Clark, William Watson and David Brand. Dressed in deep mourning, he pleaded not guilty in a firm voice, with his brother Charles beside him in the dock. Special rules controlled admission to the crowded court, as they had at the trial of Madeleine Smith eight years before.
The defense first asked for the two charges to be tried separately; the court refused. Over three days the Crown called its witnesses: the cooks Catherine Lattimer and Mary Patterson, the teenage housemaid, the washerwoman Jessie Nabb, the two students, the dressmaker, Doctors Gairdner, Paterson and Cowan, Michael Taylor, the registrar, the police, the pharmacists, and the analysts Maclagan, Gamgee, Littlejohn and Penny. The housemaid's evidence about what her employer had done to her, given reluctantly, was the turning point in the courtroom; reporters noticed the change in Pritchard's face as she spoke. The court ruled that the Crown could not ask her whether Pritchard had given her anything to cause her miscarriage, because no such charge had been given notice in the indictment.
Paterson's evidence caused the most argument. He told the court that when he saw Mrs. Pritchard on February 24 and March 2 he had been convinced that someone was poisoning her with antimony, but had thought it consistent with professional practice to keep the opinion to himself. Under cross-examination he said he had written to the registrar about Mrs. Taylor's death.
On the fourth day the defense called Mrs. Pritchard's brother, Dr. Michael Taylor, several other witnesses, and two of Pritchard's children, a girl of 14 and a boy of 11, to describe the affection between their father, mother and grandmother. Pritchard wept. The defense called no medical witness to dispute the Crown's doctors and no witness to his character.
The Solicitor-General told the jury that Mrs. Taylor had not died of apoplexy any more than her daughter had died of gastric fever: she had died of poison, opium, aconite and antimony. He argued that the poisoner had to be either Pritchard or the housemaid. Rutherfurd Clark, for the defense, argued that Mrs. Taylor might have taken an overdose of her own opium, weakened as she was, and pointed the jury toward the servant girl as the one with opportunity; Roughead notes that this line drew criticism but followed from how the Crown had framed the case. The prosecution's weak point was motive. The only financial interest it could show was a life interest in two thirds of a sum of 2,500 pounds, and the suggestion that Pritchard wanted to be free to marry the servant was also unconvincing. Roughead concluded that the real motive for killing his wife was never discovered, and suggested that Mrs. Taylor was removed because she stood in the way or had begun to suspect.
On Friday, July 7, Inglis charged the jury. He told them it was impossible to doubt that Mrs. Pritchard died of antimony, and that Mrs. Taylor died of antimony, alone or with aconite and opium. He also passed judgment on Paterson's silence. He said he cared nothing for professional etiquette, that every right-minded person owed a higher duty to his neighbor to prevent the destruction of human life, and that in that duty Paterson had failed; he added that this did not make Paterson an unreliable witness.
The jury retired at a quarter past one and returned in under an hour (fifty-five minutes, according to the trial report). Their foreman, George Sim, announced that they unanimously found the prisoner guilty of both charges as libelled. Pritchard clasped his hands and briefly needed support. Inglis told him the evidence left no reasonable doubt and urged him to use his remaining time to make his peace with God, then put on the black cap and sentenced him to be held in the prison of Glasgow on bread and water and hanged there on July 28, between eight and ten in the morning, his body to be buried within the prison precincts. Pritchard bowed to the bench and the jury and was taken back to the Calton Jail, then on July 8 to Glasgow, leaving the train at Cowlairs to avoid the crowd waiting at Queen Street.
No petition for a reprieve was raised on his behalf.
Before the trial Pritchard had told his solicitor they would return to Glasgow together. After it he lay for a day in a stupor. Over the next three weeks he wrote three confessions, each different.
The first, made to the Rev. R. S. Oldham of St. Mary's Episcopal Church, his own congregation, said he had killed his wife with an overdose of chloroform, and that the housemaid had been present and knew her mistress was being poisoned. The authorities believed the part about the girl was false and withheld it. The second, signed on July 11, 1865, before Oldham and two prison witnesses, described how he had begun abusing the girl in the summer of 1863 and the miscarriage he caused; said Mrs. Taylor had caught them together; maintained that Mrs. Taylor had died of an accidental overdose of her opium and that he had put the aconite in her bottle after her death to make it look like misadventure; and admitted killing his wife with chloroform.
The third, dated July 19, 1865, and made before the Rev. J. Watson Reid, withdrew the second. In it Pritchard declared that the sentence was just, that he was guilty of the deaths of both Mrs. Taylor and his wife, that he could give no motive beyond what he called a "terrible madness" and drink, and that he alone, not the servant girl, had poisoned his wife "in the way brought out in the evidence" at his trial. He thanked the judges, jury, police and prison staff by name. Only the last two were given to the press, and Pritchard asked that the final one not be published until after his execution.
On Thursday, July 27, Pritchard was moved from the North Prison in Duke Street to the South Prison, which faced Glasgow Green near the foot of the Saltmarket. He wrote a farewell to his brother-in-law, Michael Taylor, saying he would meet his wife and her mother again "in happier circumstances," and a long letter to his eldest daughter, who had visited him often. He had wanted to address the crowd from the scaffold but agreed, at the urging of his ministers, not to.
The scaffold, in use for about fifty years, was wheeled out from a shed in Clyde Street at two in the morning of Friday, July 28, 1865. The fairground booths of the Glasgow Fair had been cleared from the Green the night before, and four rows of barriers were set up. Crowds gathered through the night and filled Jail Square, now Jocelyn Square, and much of the Green; the Evening Times has recorded that rooms overlooking the scaffold were let for three guineas each. Roughead gives the figure, as reported, of 100,000 onlookers.
At eight o'clock the magistrates sat in the old courtroom of the prison. Pritchard was brought in, pinioned and dressed in the mourning suit he had worn at his arrest and trial. Asked if he had anything to say, he answered, "I acknowledge the justice of the sentence." He walked to the scaffold, where William Calcraft, the executioner, fitted the cap and rope, and at ten minutes past eight he was hanged. The Edinburgh Evening Courant reported that there was no screen and that he did not die at once. The body hung until a quarter to nine. A cast of his head was taken for the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, and at one o'clock he was buried in the prison yard, beside a man executed the year before. His grave was marked only by the letter P scratched on a stone.
Roughead described Pritchard's hanging as the last public execution in Glasgow, and the city's records, newspapers and libraries have repeated that description; the Evening Times notes that public hangings at the square ended in 1865 and that the last execution in the city, in 1960, took place inside Barlinnie prison. Some modern accounts, including a 2016 National Records of Scotland article and a University of Edinburgh catalog entry, go further and call it the last public execution in Scotland. Roughead was more careful, writing "in Glasgow, if not in Scotland." That wider claim was not confirmed in the sources checked for this account.
Paterson's silence became the subject of a long argument in the press after the trial. He answered the judge in a long letter to the Glasgow Herald, arguing that his letter to the registrar had been meant to protect Mrs. Pritchard and expose the poisoner, that it should have led to a post-mortem on Mrs. Taylor and probably saved the wife's life, and that the blame lay with the registrar who had destroyed it. He also asked what would have happened had he accused a fellow doctor to his face on mere suspicion. Roughead, writing forty years later, left readers to judge but noted that Paterson's sense of etiquette had at least not stopped him from telling the whole story in court.
The two women lie in the Taylor family grave in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh with Michael Taylor, who died in 1867; the headstone gives only their names, dates and ages. The National Records of Scotland has noted that the original register entries for both deaths were never altered, so Pritchard's false causes of death remain on the record, while later entries in the Register of Corrected Entries record that both women were poisoned. Nothing is recorded in the sources consulted about the later lives of the Pritchard children or of the housemaid.
Roughead's edition, published in 1906, remains the standard account. It lists a number of pamphlets and reports published in 1865, including a full report reprinted from The Scotsman, and compares Pritchard at length with William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner hanged in 1856.
Proven at trial and final: the murders of Jane Taylor and Mary Jane Pritchard, by the unanimous verdict of July 7, 1865. Pritchard confessed to both before his execution, after two earlier confessions that denied killing Mrs. Taylor and blamed or implicated the teenage servant; he withdrew both of those.
Suspected, never charged: the death of Elizabeth McGirn in the fire of May 5, 1863. The authorities questioned him and took no action; the suspicion rests on the circumstances and his insurance claim. He did not mention this death in any confession.
Not proven and withdrawn: any part played by the teenage servant. She was arrested and released, the defense suggested she was the poisoner, and Pritchard's first confession accused her, but his final confession said he alone poisoned his wife.
Uncertain: the motive. The Crown's financial motive was slight, and Roughead concluded that the real reason was never found. The Spectator argued at the time that money was the motive.
Uncertain: who wrote the anonymous letter to the procurator fiscal. Popular opinion named Paterson, who denied it.
Details that vary between sources: the servant's name (McGirn in the 1863 Glasgow Herald report and the Mitchell Library; McGrain, aged 25, in the National Records of Scotland article); the teenage servant's age when she entered service (15 according to Roughead, under 15 by her own evidence); Jane Taylor's age (70 according to Roughead, 73 on the family grave); Mary Jane Pritchard's age (39 on the coffin plate and register, 38 in the Grange Association listing); how long the jury was out (an hour, or fifty-five minutes); which prison the scaffold stood in front of (the South Prison, according to the 1865 Courant report reprinted by Roughead; the North Prison, according to the 2016 National Records of Scotland article); the size of the crowd (reported as 100,000, never counted); and whether this was the last public execution in Scotland as well as in Glasgow.
December 6, 1825: Edward William Pritchard is born at Southsea, Hampshire.
December 28, 1825: Mary Jane Taylor is born at Duddingston, near Edinburgh.
September 1840: apprenticed to surgeons in Portsmouth.
May 29, 1846: admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
November 2, 1846: joins HMS Victory as an assistant surgeon; later serves in the Collingwood, Calypso, Asia and Hecate.
1848: visits Pitcairn Island with HMS Calypso.
Autumn 1850: marries Mary Jane Taylor.
March 1851: leaves the Navy; begins practice at Hunmanby, Yorkshire, with a branch at Filey.
1857: buys an M.D. from the University of Erlangen in absentia.
April 1, 1858: licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries.
Autumn 1859: travels to Egypt and the Holy Land as a traveling physician.
June 1860: returns and settles at 11 Berkeley Terrace, Glasgow.
October 1860: applies unsuccessfully for the chair of surgery at the Andersonian University.
1861: becomes a Freemason.
May 5, 1863: fire at Berkeley Terrace; the servant Elizabeth McGirn dies. No charge follows.
Whitsunday 1863: moves to 22 Royal Crescent; a teenage housemaid enters service. That summer he begins sexually exploiting her.
Whitsunday 1864: moves to Clarence Place, Sauchiehall Street.
1864: the servant becomes pregnant and miscarries; Pritchard later admits causing it.
October 1864: Mary Jane Pritchard falls ill.
November and December 1864: Pritchard buys antimony and aconite.
December 22, 1864: Mrs. Pritchard returns from Edinburgh; her illness returns about two weeks later.
February 1, 1865: her first violent attack.
February 7 to 9, 1865: Dr. Cowan and Dr. Gairdner see her; Gairdner writes to her brother.
February 10, 1865: Jane Taylor arrives to nurse her daughter.
February 13, 1865: the tapioca incident.
February 24 to 25, 1865: Jane Taylor collapses and dies; Dr. Paterson suspects poisoning.
March 2, 1865: Mrs. Taylor buried in the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh.
March 4, 1865: Paterson refuses to certify Mrs. Taylor's death.
March 13 to 15, 1865: the cheese and egg-flip incidents.
March 18, 1865: Mary Jane Pritchard dies at about 1 a.m.
March 20, 1865: Pritchard registers her death as gastric fever; an anonymous letter reaches the procurator fiscal; he is arrested at Queen Street station.
March 21, 1865: post-mortem by Maclagan and Littlejohn.
March 22, 1865: first declaration before the sheriff; Mrs. Pritchard buried in Edinburgh.
March 28, 1865: analysis confirms antimony.
March 30, 1865: Jane Taylor's body exhumed; antimony found.
April 21, 1865: second declaration; committed for trial on both charges.
May 31, 1865: indictment served.
July 3 to 7, 1865: trial at the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh.
July 7, 1865: unanimous guilty verdict on both charges; sentenced to death.
July 11, 1865: second confession (admits killing his wife, denies killing Mrs. Taylor).
July 19, 1865: final confession to both murders; clears the servant.
July 28, 1865: hanged in public on Glasgow Green; buried in the prison grounds.
1906: William Roughead publishes Trial of Dr. Pritchard.