Jessie King was a laundress who grew up poor in Glasgow and later moved to Edinburgh. In 1887 and 1888, living with an older man named Thomas Pearson, she took in babies whose unmarried mothers paid a single fee to have them adopted. The babies disappeared. In October 1888 boys playing in a back green in Stockbridge found the body of one of them, and police found another in the coal closet of the house where King lived.
King confessed. Pearson gave evidence for the Crown and was never charged. On February 18, 1889, a jury at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh took about six minutes to convict her of murdering two infants, Alexander Gunn and Violet Duncan Tomlinson. A third charge was withdrawn. She was hanged at Calton Jail on March 11, 1889, at the age of 27, and was the last woman executed in Edinburgh. The question of how much Pearson knew, and whether a young woman with few resources carried the whole blame for a trade they ran together, was raised by her supporters in 1889 and is still argued by historians.
She was born Jessie Kean on March 27, 1861, at Black's Land in Kelvinhaugh, in the Anderston district of Glasgow, according to the Edinburgh Evening News of March 11, 1889, and the birth register entry identified by the Broughton Spurtle. Her father, James Kean, was a cotton yarn warper. Her mother, Grace, had married him in Glasgow in August 1854. Jessie had two brothers, Peter and John.
Her mother died when Jessie was 18 months old. Her father died in June 1879, when she was 18. About three years later she went to Bonhill, by Alexandria, and worked in the mills at Renton. She then spent 18 months in a Magdalene Asylum, one of the institutions run for women judged to be "fallen," and there she learned laundry work. She lodged in the south side of Glasgow for about two years and worked for a year or so in a laundry at Gourock.
The surname she used, and that the court used, was King. After her conviction the Edinburgh Evening News began calling her Kean. The Spurtle editor, writing in 2020, argued that the switch was probably deliberate: in the anti-Irish climate of the time, the name signaled the family's Irish and Catholic origins to readers.
In Edinburgh she worked as an ironer at a laundry in Causewayside. Her co-workers, the Evening News reported after her death, found her cold and reserved but good at the work. She lodged at 21 Gifford Park with Thomas Pearson, a laborer, who was then living with another woman; that woman left after growing jealous of the attention Pearson paid the young lodger. King then lodged with an elderly couple in Sciennes for about 16 months, until May 1887. Pearson visited her there and was introduced as her uncle. In the neighborhood he was known as "the piper" because he played the bagpipes.
Pearson was much older than she was. The Edinburgh Evening News, in a 2023 feature, put the gap at about 30 years and described King as uneducated, penniless and heavily pregnant when she met him. Morag Allan Campbell, a doctoral researcher in modern history at the University of St Andrews who studies Victorian attitudes to mothers, infanticide and child murder, wrote in 2016 that he was about twice her age and a heavy drinker, and that he paid her the kind of attention she craved.
On May 25, 1887, King gave birth to a daughter at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh. The birth was registered under the name Grace King, with the mother's address given as 21 Gifford Park and no father named. About four months later the child was recorded as vaccinated. After that there is no further record of her. The Spurtle editor suggests she was named after King's own mother.
King gave different people different accounts. She said Grace had died in infancy, but would not say where she was buried. She said a lady had adopted her. She said the child had died suddenly and been taken to a doctor. One friend who questioned the story let the matter drop and remembered it only after King's arrest. No charge was ever brought over Grace.
What King and Pearson did next had a name: baby farming. A mother, usually unmarried, paid a stranger a fee to take her baby and bring it up as an adoption. The Edinburgh Evening News, looking back in 2023, described the practice in Victorian Edinburgh as one in which children, often born outside marriage, were taken in for a fee and then killed, and wrote that it was not uncommon. The mothers in this case were a wire worker and a domestic servant. The Spurtle editor noted that the crime had two parts, killing children in her care and doing it again and again to be paid to take in another, and that Edinburgh people at the time suspected many respectable families quietly tolerated such arrangements, because a child born outside marriage threatened a family's reputation and money.
Joanne Pearman, in a 2017 University of Kent law doctoral thesis on baby farmers and social control in Victorian Britain, studies the King trial as one of four baby-farmer murder trials. She treats it as a later case, coming a generation after the trials of Charlotte Winsor and a woman named Waters, that confirmed the public picture of the baby farmer as a child murderer.
From May to November 1887 King and Pearson lived at 24 Dalkeith Road. Neighbors saw King with a little boy, whom she described at different times as her brother's child, a neighbor's son and an adopted child. He was Walter Anderson Campbell, about five months old. His mother, Elizabeth Campbell, was a wire worker from Prestonpans who had died soon after his birth. The couple took him under the name Stewart and were paid 5 pounds to adopt him.
He lived with them for two or three months and disappeared in early November 1887. King told people he had gone to an aunt, and then to his father. Police later believed he had been buried under the floor and searched, but found nothing. The Crown charged King with his murder, but the charge was withdrawn during the trial. She was never convicted of any crime against him.
The couple then moved across the city to Baker's Land in Canonmills and from there to Ann's Court, a small court behind the old mills at Canonmills, in a house the indictment described as occupied by Pearson. They now called themselves Mr and Mrs Macpherson. The Spurtle editor notes that Pearson is an anglicized form of Macpherson.
On April 4, 1888, King took in Alexander Gunn, a boy of nearly 12 months, the son of Catherine Whyte of Huntly Street, Canonmills. His mother paid 3 pounds. In her own later account, King said Pearson at first objected to having the child and then agreed to a short stay. By May the couple could not support him. She said she tried several children's homes, including Miss Stirling's Home, and that they refused him because he was illegitimate.
In her declaration King said that one Monday, after she had been drinking heavily and while Pearson was out, she killed Alexander. She told Pearson she had placed the boy in Miss Stirling's Home. She kept his body hidden, and when the couple moved to Stockbridge she took it with her, wrapped in Pearson's waterproof coat. When Pearson asked about the coat, she said, she told him it had been spoiled by mold and thrown away.
Alexander's age and the fact of his mother's payment are almost all the surviving record says about him. He was a year old, his mother lived in Canonmills, and he had been in King's care from April until the end of May.
By the autumn of 1888 the couple were lodging at 2 Cheyne Street, Stockbridge, in a house belonging to a Mr and Mrs Banks. In September King took in Violet Duncan Tomlinson, a baby of about six weeks, the daughter of Alice Maria Jane Stewart Tomlinson, a domestic servant living at Coates Place, Edinburgh. King gave her name as Mrs Banks and received 2 pounds. According to her declaration, Pearson did not know about this adoption.
King said she gave the baby whisky to keep her quiet, that the baby's breathing failed, and that she then made sure the child died. She put the body in the coal closet of the house. The court later convicted her of murdering Violet by suffocation.
A few weeks later, on October 14, 1888, King gave birth to a son at the Royal Maternity Hospital. He was registered as Thomas Pearson King, with no father named and her address given as 2 Cheyne Street. She described herself as a laundress.
About two weeks before her declaration, by her own account, King took Alexander's body out of the house and left it on a piece of ground at Cheyne Street. The next day boys playing in the back green found the bundle and kicked it about as a football before realizing what was inside. The Edinburgh Evening News reported the find on October 27, 1888.
Rumor moved quickly through Stockbridge. Mr and Mrs Banks had noticed that their lodgers kept the coal closet locked, and they went to the police. Two detectives, James Clark and David Simpson, searched the house and found Violet's body on a shelf in the closet. A piece of black cloth in the closet matched the cloth found with Alexander's body.
King confessed when first questioned and repeated the admission at the police office. Both she and Pearson were arrested, charged with murder and held in Calton Prison.
King made three formal declarations before the sheriff in November 1888, and all three were later read to the jury.
On November 5, 1888, before Sheriff Rutherfurd, she declined to say anything about the charges. On November 6 she gave the detailed account summarized above, admitting that she had killed Alexander Gunn and Violet Tomlinson and saying Pearson knew nothing about either death. On November 28, shown a letter written from Dalkeith Road, she declined to say anything about the Campbell charge.
Because she had cleared him, Pearson was released in early November and became a witness for the prosecution.
The trial had been set for January 7, 1889, but was postponed because a witness was ill. It opened on February 18, 1889, before the Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Kingsburgh, in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. The public galleries were full, and a crowd that could not get in waited in Parliament Square.
The Crown was represented by the Solicitor-General, Mr Darling, with Mr Graham Murray and Mr D. Robertson, advocate-depute. King was defended by Mr Fitzroy Bell, instructed by James Young, W.S., one of that year's poor's agents. She had pleaded not guilty.
The indictment had three charges. The first accused her of strangling Alexander Gunn in April or May 1888 at Ann's Court, Canonmills, in a house occupied by Thomas Pearson, laborer. The second accused her of suffocating Violet Duncan Tomlinson in September 1888 at Cheyne Street, Stockbridge. The third accused her of strangling or otherwise killing Walter Anderson Campbell in October or November 1887 at Dalkeith Road. The depute-clerk, Mr Veitch, read her declarations to the jury.
Pearson gave evidence against her. Dr Joseph Bell, who had taught Arthur Conan Doyle at university and is said to have inspired Sherlock Holmes, gave medical evidence. The Evening News described King as looking miserable and taking little interest in the proceedings.
During the trial the Crown withdrew the Campbell charge. The trial lasted about four and a half hours. The jury was out for about six minutes and found her guilty of the murders of Alexander Gunn and Violet Tomlinson. Lord Kingsburgh sentenced her to death.
She had sat through the day stolid and apparently indifferent. When the sentence was read she sobbed and moaned, and she had to be helped down the steps from the dock. Her cries could still be heard in the courtroom after the trap door closed behind her. The Spurtle's notes on the report say the death sentence both surprised and distressed her.
For about two weeks nobody moved to save her. Public anger at what the trial had revealed was strong. On February 21 the Evening News printed letters signed "Compassion" and "Humanity," urging Christian women to petition for a reprieve and pointing out that a man had recently received only ten years for a brutal murder in the same city.
The campaign was led by Canon James Donlevy, the priest in charge of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Broughton Street, and J. Tod Thyne of Stockbridge, who put considerable time and effort into looking for anything that might cast her conduct in a better light. By March 7 a petition from Stockbridge residents with more than 1,600 signatures had gone to London. The final total was put at more than 2,000, and two of the jurors signed it. T. R. Buchanan supported the appeal, an Edinburgh man wrote to the Earl of Hopetoun asking him to approach the Secretary for Scotland, the Marquis of Lothian, and the city's members of Parliament were asked to help. Archbishop Smith visited her on March 6.
The petitioners made several arguments. They said she had confessed only after being told she would probably get 18 months. They said she had suffered from melancholia in Glasgow and from hysteria at the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, and that she was of weak intellect. They said she had acted under Pearson's influence. Dr Andrew Stuart sent statements about her mental condition.
The Evening News answered the first point by reporting that she had confessed to the police before she saw any agent or friend. It also reported that jurors believed the case had been proved even without the confession, because the pattern of one child taken in, killed and then replaced by another showed a trade in babies.
In response to the petitions, two medical men, Sir Douglas Maclagan and Sir Arthur Mitchell, were asked to report on whether she was sane. The answer came in a letter dated March 9, 1889, from R. W. Cochran-Patrick, the Under Secretary, written from the Office of the Secretary for Scotland at Whitehall and addressed to Thyne. After what it called the most minute inquiry, the letter said, Lord Lothian could not advise the Queen to commute the sentence. A newspaper editorial published the day after the execution, reprinted by the Spurtle, said medical opinion had found her sane and responsible.
In prison King was watched day and night by relays of female warders, as she had been even before the trial. She tried three times to kill herself, and the warders stopped her each time. She was generally moody and withdrawn.
The Evening News reported that she had attended Protestant mission services at Causewayside. In prison she began to say she was a Roman Catholic, and Canon Donlevy visited her every day. Two of her former employers came to see her on the Saturday before the execution, and she told them she was ready to meet God.
Her son Thomas had been placed with the Inspector of Poor for the City Parish, and there were plans to move him to the Barony Parish in Glasgow after her death. On March 8, 1889, before the prison governor and two witnesses, King signed a will naming Canon Donlevy, or whoever succeeded him at the cathedral, as the boy's guardian. She wrote that she wanted her child brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. Donlevy, applying for custody, said the boy's upbringing was the thing she cared about most after her own salvation.
On her last night she went to bed at eleven and slept from about half past twelve, waking several times. At five she rose and dressed in her own clothes. Donlevy had stayed in the prison overnight; at six he gave her communion, assisted by another priest from the cathedral, and she heard Mass in the prison chapel with two Franciscan nuns. At about a quarter past seven she ate breakfast and seemed composed.
By half past seven the magistrates and officials had gathered: Bailies Russell and Steel, Dr Littlejohn and his son, Dr Henry Harvey Littlejohn, the chief constable, Mr Morham, the prison doctor, Dr Hay, and the prison chaplain, the Rev. Mr Fleming. The executioner was James Berry, who worked as a hangman across the United Kingdom from 1884 to 1892. King shook hands with each of the weeping female warders at her cell door and, through Donlevy, thanked the junior doctor. With the priest reading the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus and King giving the responses, she walked the dozen yards to the scaffold room on his arm. She was hanged at about eight o'clock, holding a small black cross. Reporters were not admitted, and the account the Evening News printed came from those who were present.
Outside, about 1,500 people gathered near the prison. Many climbed Calton Hill, which the talk of the night before had named the best vantage point, and nearly 1,000 crowded along Waterloo Place in the last minutes. They could see nothing of the execution itself, only people crossing the prison yard. At two minutes past eight a black flag went up over the prison, and the crowd began to break up.
James Berry later said he had never seen anyone face the scaffold with such courage. She was buried with Catholic rites inside the prison walls. King was the last woman executed in Edinburgh.
The surviving record says little about the children as people. Walter Anderson Campbell was about five months old, and his mother had died soon after he was born. Alexander Gunn was about a year old, and his mother, Catherine Whyte, lived in Canonmills. Violet Duncan Tomlinson was about six weeks old, the daughter of a domestic servant. Their mothers had paid what they could, in a society that gave unmarried women few other choices.
Pearson walked out of Calton Prison in November 1888 and was never charged with anything. The Spurtle found the death of a man of his name, recorded as 60 years old, at 77 Drygate in Glasgow on March 2, 1890, apparently from a head injury and fractured skull. That death record names him as the widower of Janet Baillie and the son of a gardener, James Pearson. The Spurtle presented the identification as possible rather than proved, and noted that some Edinburgh tour guides speculate without evidence that he was murdered.
King's son grew up in the care arranged for him at her death. The Spurtle, with help from a genealogist, traced him to the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Private Thomas Pearson King, regimental number 9446, was killed in action in Belgium on October 26, 1914.
Within weeks of the execution, on March 27, 1889, Robert Anderson moved a motion at the Lord Provost's Committee of Edinburgh Corporation asking the city council to petition the government for laws to protect young children, citing what had come out at the King trial. The committee told the Town Clerk to draft a memorial seeking new legislation or amendments covering unprotected illegitimate children. The Chief Constable of Edinburgh later gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee in 1890, evidence that Pearman links to the King case. Parliament passed the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act in 1889 and the Infant Life Protection Act in 1897.
The case was also turned into entertainment almost at once. In July 1889 the Grand Historical Galleries waxwork museum on South Bridge advertised a life-like model of Jessie King in its criminal chamber.
William Roughead gave an eyewitness account of her trial in his book In Queer Street (1932). Demolition of Calton Jail began in 1930, and St Andrew's House, a Scottish Government building, replaced it. King lies with nine other executed prisoners beneath part of its west car park, among them Eugene Chantrelle (1878) and the Gorebridge poachers Robert Vickers and William Innes (1884). The condemned cell door was later found in the Beehive Inn in the Grassmarket. The cell area where she spent her last days was opened to the public for the first time on Doors Open Day in 2007.
Her story has become part of Edinburgh's ghost and history tours. Chloe Bramwell, writing in the University of Edinburgh history magazine Retrospect in 2022, described hearing the story on a tour and argued that tourism had turned a poor woman living in terrible conditions into a tidy tale of villainy.
Proven at trial and final: the murders of Alexander Gunn and Violet Duncan Tomlinson in 1888. A jury convicted her of both, on her own declarations and on evidence that included Pearson's testimony and the discovery of both children's bodies.
Charged but not proven: the death of Walter Anderson Campbell in 1887. The Crown withdrew the charge during the trial, his body was never found and there is no conviction.
Never charged: the fate of King's daughter Grace, and any link to the infant found in a box at Abbeyhill station. After King's arrest, neighbors told police that a dented bonnet box she had owned looked exactly like the box in which that child was found. The Evening News said no further evidence came forward and no charge was brought. Neither is counted here as a victim.
Pearson's role is the main open question, and it was raised in 1889, not only by later writers.
The case against him. He lived with King throughout, the first murder took place in a house the indictment described as occupied by him, the couple used false names together, and the first child's body was wrapped in his coat. The Edinburgh Evening News, in 2023, reported that Violet's body was found in a place out of King's reach, a point the Spurtle also notes from claims made at the time. King's confessor, Canon Donlevy, asked the Secretary for Scotland to reconsider on the ground that Pearson's drinking, temper and cruelty had shaped what she did. The 1889 petitioners said she had acted under his influence. Campbell wrote in 2016 that he was the manipulative force behind the scheme and that she was young, poorly educated, dependent on him and possibly not of sound mind.
The case as the Crown and court saw it. King herself, in every account, insisted Pearson knew nothing; her declaration says she lied to him about where Alexander had gone and about the coat, and took Violet without his knowledge. Two senior physicians examined her, and the Secretary for Scotland, after their report, refused a reprieve; a press editorial after the execution said medical opinion found her sane and responsible. The jurors were reported to believe the evidence proved the case even without her confession.
The confession. Her supporters said she confessed because she was told she would probably get only 18 months. The Evening News reported that she had already confessed to the police before seeing anyone. The Edinburgh Evening News wrote in 2023 that she later tried to withdraw the confession and was not allowed to.
How she was judged. Several modern writers, including Campbell, Bramwell and the Spurtle editor, have argued that the trial and press coverage dwelt on her status as an unmarried "fallen woman," and that this shaped how she was seen. Bramwell suggests her unmarried status may have influenced the jury.
Details that vary between sources: the petition total (more than 1,600 in the Evening News of March 7, 1889; more than 2,000 in its later report; more than 1,700 in The Scotsman in 2023); how long the jury was out (about six minutes in the 1889 report, "within minutes" in later accounts); the Dalkeith Road house number (21 in the letter shown to her, 24 in the declaration and the press); and Pearson's first name (Thomas in the 1889 reports; one 2007 Scotsman article calls him Michael). Some modern summaries say she was convicted of three killings; the 1889 record shows two convictions and one withdrawn charge.
March 27, 1861: Jessie Kean is born at Black's Land, Kelvinhaugh, Anderston, Glasgow.
At 18 months old: her mother dies.
June 1879: her father dies.
About three years later: mill work at Renton; then 18 months in a Magdalene Asylum, where she learns laundry work; then laundry work in Glasgow and Gourock.
Later: moves to Edinburgh; works as an ironer at Causewayside; lodges at 21 Gifford Park with Thomas Pearson, then in Sciennes.
May 25, 1887: her daughter Grace is born at the Royal Maternity Hospital; the child is later recorded as vaccinated and then disappears.
May to November 1887: King and Pearson live at 24 Dalkeith Road and take in Walter Anderson Campbell for 5 pounds; he disappears in early November.
April 4, 1888: at Ann's Court, Canonmills, King takes in Alexander Gunn for 3 pounds.
April or May 1888: Alexander Gunn is killed.
September 1888: at Cheyne Street, Stockbridge, King takes in Violet Duncan Tomlinson for 2 pounds; Violet is killed.
October 14, 1888: King's son, Thomas Pearson King, is born.
October 1888: boys find Alexander's body in the back green at Cheyne Street; the Evening News reports it on October 27; detectives find Violet's body in the house; King and Pearson are arrested.
November 5, 6 and 28, 1888: King's three declarations; Pearson is released as a Crown witness.
January 7, 1889: trial postponed.
February 18, 1889: trial at the High Court of Justiciary; Campbell charge withdrawn; guilty of two murders; sentenced to death.
March 6, 1889: Archbishop Smith visits her.
March 7, 1889: a petition of more than 1,600 signatures has gone to London.
March 8, 1889: King signs her will.
March 9, 1889: the Secretary for Scotland refuses to recommend a reprieve.
March 11, 1889: King is hanged at Calton Jail.
March 27, 1889: the Lord Provost's Committee moves to seek child protection laws.
July 1889: a waxwork of King goes on show on South Bridge.
March 2, 1890: a Thomas Pearson dies in Glasgow.
October 26, 1914: Private Thomas Pearson King is killed in action in Belgium.
1930: demolition of Calton Jail begins; St Andrew's House later replaces it.
1932: William Roughead's In Queer Street is published.
2007: the condemned cell area is opened on Doors Open Day.