Lewis Hutchinson was born in Scotland around 1733, trained in medicine, and by the 1760s owned Edinburgh Castle, a fortified great house he had built in the Pedro district of St Ann parish in the Jamaican interior, on the road between the north coast and the island's centre.
He shot travellers who passed. The house had loopholes cut for muskets and stood on the only practical road through that stretch of country, and men going to and from the coast stopped there for water and did not leave. He took their possessions and disposed of the bodies in a sinkhole nearby. Local accounts, and the trial, put the figure at more than forty, though what was proved was very much less. He was called the Mad Master of Edinburgh Castle, after the house.
He was known locally for years and nothing was done, in a colony where the interior was barely policed and where a white landowner shooting people on his own property was a matter the authorities were slow about.
He was arrested after a soldier sent to investigate was shot. He tried to escape by ship and was taken. He was tried and hanged at Spanish Town on March 16, 1773, and left money for a monument to himself with an inscription about his persecution. It was never erected. The ruins of Edinburgh Castle still stand.