THE CASE of Jessie King was one that shocked Victorian Edinburgh. Here was a woman who had, it seemed, callously murdered at least two infants that had been put in her care. In an era when life was cheap, the murder of children was nonetheless something that produced a horrified reaction from the public.
In many ways the Jessie King case was a tragic by-product of an era where a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock was subjected to almost complete social exclusion. The solutions to this quandary were grim. Mothers risked their lives undergoing a
mateur abortions. Newborn children were abandoned, given to the authorities to bring up as unwanted bastards or passed on to "baby farmers" to raise.
It was as such a baby farmer that King came to be put in charge of several children. One of these was a boy named Alexander Gunn, whose mother gave King a fee to care for her infant. Alexander was taken to the Canonmills lodgings that King shared with her partner Michael Pearson. The baby appeared to be looked after satisfactorily but then suddenly disappeared.
Attempts to trace young Alexander were thwarted as King and Pearson had both now moved a short distance away to the Stockbridge area of the city where they were taking care of a girl. Again the baby appeared to be well-cared for, but, after a period, she too mysteriously disappeared.
Questions over what might have become of these infants were soon answered when some boys playing in Stockbridge discovered the corpse of a male infant. When the police investigated, they discovered that the boy had been strangled. Soon the matter of Jessie King's "missing" child was raised. Was the corpse that child?
When questioned, King insisted the baby she had been seen with was in the care of her sister. When authorities began to search the house she broke down and led them to a cellar where they discovered the corpse of another child – that of the girl who had been put in King's charge. The dead boy who was found earlier would turn out to be baby Alexander.
The facts of the case were clear. King had taken charge of at least two children who had then been killed. A third child was also reported missing but since no body was ever found, King was not charged in connection to its disappearance. The mothers of these children had been told varying stories as to what had become of their offspring, but the fate of the young were now in no doubt.
King admitted to strangling Alexander in a state of "drunken melancholy" and described how she had given the girl whisky as a sleeping aid, but claimed she had "overdone it". Tried before Lord Kingsburgh, the woman was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death – an order to be carried out on 11 March 1889.
Today, King would have been assessed by psychiatrists to determine whether she was "mad or bad". In the 19th century, a "medical commission" was asked to "report as to her sanity". The commission felt that she was sane, although, according to a contemporary report from The Scotsman, it was clearly a matter of concern at the time of the murder as to whether "her own mind was not capable of forming a conception of the difference between right and wrong."
Jessie King was hanged at Edinburgh's Calton Jail in the shadow of Calton Hill. (The jail is now largely demolished, replaced by St. Andrew's House, although some of the walls and original buildings remain.) She was the last woman hanged in Edinburgh.
Reporters were banned from witnessing the execution but permitted to view the body and interview prison staff. King was described as "calm in the extreme" before her death and the hangman - whom The Scotsman's reporter candidly described as an "unwashed looking figure" - thought that "in all his life he never saw a woman meet her death so bravely".
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