For many miles on the road inland from St. Ann's Bay, the only inhabited place a traveler could stop was Edinburgh Castle, a stone great house in the Jamaican interior. Travelers rested there, and some of them never went on. The master of the house, a Scotsman named Lewis Hutchinson, shot lone passers-by, cut up their bodies, and threw the remains into a sinkhole, or by some accounts into a cotton tree, for animals to eat. The sinkhole came to be called Hutchinson's Hole. When his house was searched after his arrest, the searchers found about forty-three watches and a great quantity of clothing. How many people he killed is not known.
He was born in Scotland in 1733 and is believed to have studied medicine there, and in Jamaica he was called the Mad Doctor, or the Mad Master, of Edinburgh Castle. He came to the island in the 1760s to run the estate, which he was said to have acquired legally, though his neighbors accused him of building up his cattle by stealing their strays. Much of what was told about him later cannot be tested: that he drank his victims' blood, that he invited guests to be entertained before he killed them. What is recorded is that his reputation kept people away from him, that the enslaved people on the estate told of terrible treatment, and that for years nobody moved against him.
It ended when an English soldier, John Callendar, tried to take him and Hutchinson shot him. Hutchinson fled south to Old Harbour and boarded a ship, and the Royal Navy under Admiral Rodney caught him before he could get away.
At his trial the testimony of enslaved witnesses showed he had not acted alone. Two planters, James Walker and Roger Maddix, were sentenced to death for taking part in the murders of a farmer, William Lickley, and a schoolmaster, Timothy Cronin. Three women, Maddix's wife Dorcas, Susanna Cole and Elizabeth Thomas, were said to have watched Cronin strangled while he was pinned in the stocks; Cronin's watch and seal were found in Elizabeth Thomas's possession, and she was acquitted. Hutchinson was convicted and hanged in the square at Spanish Town in 1773. The trial records survive in the public records of Britain and Jamaica, and the ruins of Edinburgh Castle still stand.