Dr. Edward Pritchard insisted that his wife’s coffin lid be opened so he could kiss her goodbye one last time. As he leaned over his beloved, he cried. What could have been seen as a loving gesture of a grieving man came to be known as something much more sinister. According to legend, crocodiles cry while eating their prey. And you see, Dr. Edward Pritchard wasn’t just crying over his departed wife’s body, he was shedding crocodile tears over his murder victim.
This week we’re telling you the story of Dr. Edward Pritchard, “The Human Crocodile”, the third case from Glasgow’s Square Mile of Murder.
Edward William Pritchard was born on December 6, 1825 in Southsea Hampshire, making him the first of our Square Milers to actually be English. He was born into a Naval family, his father was a captain in the Royal Navy and he had several relatives who had served as well. As such, he was expected to follow in his family’s footsteps and become a Navy man. At age 15 he began working as an apprentice to a surgeon in Portsmouth and then reportedly attended King’s College London to study medicine in 1843. However, King’s College denied ever having an Edward Pritchard in attendance. His supposed qualifications were reported to the Medical Directory by Pritchard himself. Here we see a pattern of lies begin to emerge.
He was admitted to the Court of Examiners of the College of Surgeons on May 29th, 1845 and was appointed an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy. He served at sea on several ships including HMS Victory, HMS Collingwood, HMS Calypso, HMS Asia, and HMS Hecate. When the HMS Hecate was docked in Portsmouth in 1850, he met Miss Mary Jane Taylor at an Officers ball. Mary Jane Taylor was from Edinburgh and was staying with her uncle, a retired naval surgeon. The uncle immediately approved of Pritchard, as did Mary Jane’s mother and father, and the two were married in autumn 1850.
Pritchard couldn’t afford to “buy himself out” of the navy and continued to serve on the HMS Hecate while Mary Jane stayed with her parents in Edinburgh. The elder Taylors decided their son-in-law should really be residing on dry land, and set up a doctor’s practice for him in Hunmanby in Yorkshire. Pritchard and Mary Jane settled there in 1851 and started their family. They had 5 children by 1860, two boys and three girls.
In Hunmanby, Dr. Pritchard earned himself quite the reputation. He was described (after his trial) by the Sheffield Telegraph as, “fluent, plausible, amorous, politely impudent, and singularly untruthful.” They went on to say that, “His veracity became so notorious that, in his attempts to deceive others, he succeeded only in deceiving himself.” He became well known for having affairs with his female patients, and generally lying about nearly everything, but his dalliances and deceit didn’t reduce Mr. and Mrs. Taylor’s opinion of him.
He became an MD by way of purchasing a diploma in absentia from the University of Erlangen in 1857, and in 1858 became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries of London. With his newly acquired credentials, he sold his practice in Hunmanby for £400 which would be about £49,000 today, and joined his wife in Edinburgh. Mary Jane had been staying with her parents because she hadn’t been feeling well. Soon after Mr. Taylor suggested that Dr. Pritchard should set up shop in Glasgow, after all the city was booming. So he and the family moved to Berkeley Street in Glasgow.
But wouldn’t you know it, the fine medical professionals in Glasgow were suspicious of Dr. Pritchard and nobody in town would recommend him for the faculty of Physicians and Surgeons and several other medical societies in the city. He applied to be the Chair of Surgery at the Andersonian College in 1860 but was turned down because many people who saw his “glowing testimonies from well-known English doctors” thought that these recommendations were probably forgeries.
Even though his professional life was struggling Pritchard was heavily involved in Glasgow’s social life. He was a member of the Glasgow Athenaeum and was even made a director. He was appointed as an examiner in physiology for the Society of Arts and gave countless lectures about his experiences in various parts of the world, though he never managed to get the details quite right. In one of his lectures he bragged that he had hunted “the Nubian lion in the prairies of North America.” And just for the record, there ain’t no Nubian lions in North America.
And just as he had in Yorkshire he spent plenty of time associating with women we weren’t his wife. Including his young servant, Mary McLeod. And in fact, Mary McLeod wasn’t a woman at all, she was only 15 years old. But we’ll get back to Mary in a bit, just keep her in the back of your mind.
Before Mary there was Elizabeth McGirn. And Elizabeth McGirn was, more than likely, The Human Crocodile’s first victim. The Pritchard family were living at number 11 Berkeley Terrace on Berkeley Street on May 6, 1863 when a horrible fire broke out. At 3am, police officers stationed nearby noticed flames in the attic window and rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a fully dressed Dr. Pritchard, who told the officers he had been woken just a few minutes earlier when his sons alerted him to the smoke filling the house. After talking to the boys, Pritchard rushed up to the attic where the servants’ quarters were. He called out for Elizabeth, but received no reply. He told the officers that he had tried to enter the attic, but it was so full of smoke and flames he was unable to get inside.
The news of the fire was quickly relayed to the Anderston Police Office and then to the Central Engine Station who sent firefighters to put out the flames. When they entered the attic flat, they found Elizabeth McGirn’s charred body in her bed. Newspaper accounts at the time reported that McGirn had the habit of reading in bed and perhaps she had fallen asleep before the gas jet had set her bed-hangings alight. They suggested she could have suffocated from the smoke, because, if she hadn’t suffocated surely she would have made some effort to escape the inferno.
But there were some serious inconsistencies with Pritchard’s account of the fire. Why did he answer the door fully dressed if he had only heard his sons’ calls minutes before the police rang the doorbell? Why was the family’s other servant and Mrs. Pritchard conveniently out of the house that night? And why hadn’t Elizabeth McGirn tried to escape?
After the fire, there were rumblings around town that McGirn may have been pregnant, pointing the finger at Pritchard. And indeed, after his trial, many presumed that the only way Elizabeth McGirn would fail to escape the fire was if she had been dead or otherwise incapicated before the fire started. Police briefly investigated, but nothing ever came of it, and Pritchard remained a free man. He also was all too eager to claim insurance money on the house and listed several expensive pieces of jewelry on his claim. But no evidence of the jewels was ever found, and the insurance company refused to pay as much as he was asking for and Pritchard eventually settled for a relatively small sum.
He was known to saunter along the city’s streets, particularly Sauchiehall Street, and would hand out picture postcards of himself to people who passed him by. And let’s just stop for a moment here to discuss Ole Eddie’s looks. They weren’t great. And they certainly weren’t the kind of looks you’d want to see on a picture postcard handed to you on the street. He was tall and thin, but stood hunched over. He was balding, but had perfect the art of the comb-over (if such a thing can really be perfected.) And he had a massive bushy beard, but no mustache. Not exactly a looker.
After the fire at Berkeley Street (which is just behind Glasgow’s Mitchell Library) the Pritchard family moved to 22 Royal Crescent which is very near our last Square Mile Murder location, Sandyford Place. And eventually the family bought an expensive home at 131 Sauchiehall Street. They purchased the house in 1864 for £2000 which would be worth about £256,022 today. But the good Doctor didn’t actually contribute any of his own money towards the property purchase. Instead his mother-in-law, Mrs. Taylor gave him £500 and the rest was borrowed from a bank. If you couldn’t already tell, Mrs. Taylor just loved Edward. She couldn’t have thought more highly of the man.
But boy should she have been paying more attention. Pritchard’s medical practice was finally making money, but he somehow managed to spend it all and was overdrawn at two different banks. And his struggles extended into his marriage. His wife found him kissing young Mary McLeod and the two began to fight. But that wasn’t all, Mary McLeod was pregnant. Being a “doctor” Pritchard induced a miscarriage to solve that inconvience. Pritchard told Mary that if his wife died before he did, he would marry young Mary. What a sweet proposal!
This all went down in the second half of 1864 and in October 1864, Mary Jane Pritchard became very ill. She had constant attacks of sickness, and her Doctorly husband said he thought she had… gastric fever. Oh no I sense another bingo card opportunity! On November 16th, Dr. Pritchard bought an ounce of tartarised antimony.
Now tartarised antimony is a poisonous and very deadly compound that when ingested or inhaled has similar symptoms to arsenic poisoning. And an ounce is a lot of antimony. And on November 24th, Pritchard doubled down and purchased an ounce of tincture of aconite, also super duper poisonous. And oh by the way, he bought these poisons from Murdochs and Currie’s on Sauchiehall Street, the two shops where Madeleine Smith had purchased her arsenic seven years earlier.
Mrs. Pritchard went to stay with her parents in Edinburgh on November 26th and stayed until Christmas. And wouldn’t you know it, while she was there, her health greatly improved. According to a letter sent to Dr. Pritchard from their daughter Fanny, Mrs. Pritchard had gained weight and had more than her regular appetite back and was enjoying going out in Edinburgh. Two days after he received this joyous letter, on December 8th, Pritchard bought another ounce of tincture of aconite. And this time he bought Fleming’s Tincture of Aconite which is six times stronger than the kind he purchased previously.
The family had a happy Christmas but Mrs. Pritchard’s mysterious illness returned one week into 1865. Her condition was always worse after meals, and she was so ill that she rarely had the energy to eat with the rest of her family. Her doting husband would instead bring food and drinks up to her room. On February 1st she had a “serious attack” and she was found by the family’s cook, Catherine Lattimer, in her bedroom with intense stomach cramps. The next day Dr. Pritchard wrote to his wife’s cousin, Dr. James Cowan of Edinburgh, and asked his fellow doctor to come through to Glasgow to check on Mrs. Pritchard.
When Dr. Cowan arrived, he thought that the patient looked pretty okay actually, but prescribed a mustard poultice and small quantities of champagne and ice. Which like, what a prescription. So Dr. Pritchard went out and bought some champagne. And also another ounce of antimony and another tincture of aconite.
The following day Dr. Cowan suggested that Mrs. Pritchard’s mother should come over from Edinburgh and take care of her daughter for a while. Mrs. Pritchard agreed, and Dr. Cowan planned to fetch Mrs. Taylor from Edinburgh. But before she arrived, Mary Jane Pritchard had another violent attack. Catherine Lattimer heard Mrs. Pritchard screaming in pain upstairs. When she went into the room she found Mrs. Pritchard in bed with her husband standing beside her. Mrs. Pritchard said she had taken chloroform and she was very agitated. She demanded to see another doctor, all while Dr. Pritchard tried to soothe her. Mary McLeod also heard Mrs. Pritchard’s cries and she sent for Dr. Gairdner, who was a Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University.
When the doctor arrived Dr. Pritchard told him that his wife had already been prescribed champagne and chloroform. And so, when Dr. Gairdner saw Mrs. Pritchard, he declared immediately that she was drunk. But also that she was clearly having some kind of spasms and was quite obviously very upset. She kept crying out and was shouting at her husband things like, “Don’t cry. If you cry, you are a hypocrite. You are all hypocrites!” Dr. Gairdner told Dr. Pritchard to stop giving her chloroform (and presumably booze) and that he would be back to check on her later in the day. He in fact told Dr. Pritchard to not give her any medicine at all.
But, you know, the good doctor didn’t say anything about aconite, so the bad doctor went and bought another ounce that very day, between Dr. Gairdner’s visits. On his second visit to the house Gairdner noted that Mrs. Pritchard looked better, though she was still having spasms in her hands. He prescribed no more medication and a diet of bread, milk, and the occasional boiled egg.
The next day Mrs. Taylor arrived from Edinburgh. She quickly had the house in order and spent most of her time by her daughter’s bedside. She sent young Mary McLeod to buy a bottle of Battley’s Sedative Solution, which was a very respectable medication used in high society, even though it was actually opium. So she sent Mary out to get a bottle of opium. The 1800s were wild. You see, Mrs. Taylor had been taking Battley’s for headaches and had become, shall we say, fond of the stuff. She had even built up quite a tolerance and a bottle that once would have lasted her two or three months, now only held over for two or three weeks.
On Monday February 13th, Mary Jane wanted some tapioca, so one of her sons, Kenny, went to get some. He brought it back to the house and set it on a table right outside Dr. Pritchard’s consulting room, which wouldn’t you know, had a locked cabinet that held enough poisonous substances to drop the entire city of Glasgow. The tapioca sat there for about 30 minutes before Catherine Lattimer whipped some up in the kitchen. But by the time the tapioca reached Mary Jane, she had changed her mind and didn’t want it anymore. So her dear old mum ate it instead.
And could you believe that immediately after finishing the tapioca, Mrs. Taylor became violently ill. She thought she may have picked up the same mysterious ailment as her daughter. If only she knew just how right she was!
On February 18th, Dr. Pritchard bought yet another ounce of the extra strong Fleming’s Tincture of Aconite. At this point, the cook Catherine Lattimer had left the family’s employ (a note in Dr. Pritchard’s diary noted that she had left his service and his reason was that she was “too old.”) But Lattimer still popped round to the house now and then to check on the family, Mrs. Pritchard, and to take the children out for walks. When she came by on February 24th, she met Mrs. Taylor and thought that the woman was looking very ill. But she chalked this up to the stress of caring for her daughter.
Mrs. Taylor, for her part, spent the day much like every other day and had dinner with the family at around 7pm. At 9pm she went upstairs to be with her daughter. Soon after that the bell for Mrs. Pritchard’s room sounded in the kitchen. Mary McLeod went upstairs and found Mrs. Taylor trying to vomit. Mary brought up water and told Dr. Pritchard about his mother-in-law’s illness, but he said he was with a patient and would be up later.
Upon entering the room again, Mary found Mrs. Taylor sitting unconscious in a chair with her head drooping onto her chest. Dr. Pritchard finally came upstairs and went to see Mrs. Taylor. The new cook, Mary Patterson was right behind him and waited outside the door. Through the closed door she heard Mrs. Pritchard say, “Mother, dear mother, can you not speak to me?” The doctor opened the door and sent one of his students (who I guess were there? It’s a bit unclear) to go get Dr. Paterson who lived just a few metres down Sauchiehall Street. When Mary Patterson entered the room she found Mrs. Taylor not on the chair where Mary had found her, but placed fully dressed into Mrs. Pritchard’s bed. She checked Mrs. Taylor’s forehead and noticed it was getting cold.
Mrs. Pritchard was distraught. She asked her husband, “Edward, can you do nothing yourself?” His reply? “No, what can I do for a dead woman? Can I recall life?”
Dr James Paterson arrived, having been told that Mrs. Taylor was suffering from a case of apoplexy, which was kind of a catch all term used to refer to any sudden death with a sudden loss of consciousness. Dr. Pritchard told Dr. Paterson that his mother-in-law had been writing a letter when she had suddenly taken ill. She had fallen off her chair and then been carried upstairs to Mrs. Pritchard’s bedroom. He even added that she and Mrs. Pritchard had been drinking beer with dinner and were both sick afterward.
When Dr. Paterson saw Mrs. Taylor, she was unconscious. Upon examination he came to the conclusion that she was under the influence of opium or another powerful narcotic and was indeed dying. He managed to find a weak pulse, but stuck to his diagnosis of “dying.”
Downstairs, Dr. Pritchard told Paterson about Mrs. Taylor’s fondness for Battley’s Sedative Solution, to explain away her rapid decline. He also described his wife’s illness as gastric fever. Dr. Paterson felt that he could do nothing else for the family and went home at 11pm. Mary McLeod called on him again at 1am, but he refused to see Mrs. Taylor again unless Dr. Pritchard requested his presence himself. He never did.
Mary Patterson stood guard at the bedroom door all night, and in the early hours of the morning, Dr. Pritchard opened the door and said that Mrs. Taylor was gone. He asked Mary Patterson to ready a spare bedroom downstairs for Mrs. Pritchard. His wife refused to leave her mother’s side, insisting that she wasn’t quite dead yet. He eventually managed to convince her to leave, and once she was settled downstairs, Mary Patterson and the family washerwoman Mrs. Nabb tended to Mrs. Taylor’s body. As they undressed her they found a half empty bottle of Battley’s. When Dr. Pritchard saw the bottle, he made a great show of crying, “Good heavens, has she taken this much since Tuesday?!”
Dr. Pritchard made note in his diary of the events of February 24th and 25th, noting that Mrs. Taylor had been seized by vertigo and rigors, quickly becoming comatose and that at 1am on the 25th, she had passed away “calmly and peacefully.” It’s more than likely these diary entries were written in case somebody happened to want to investigate this mysterious death.
Later that morning Mr. Taylor came through to Glasgow hearing the news of his wife’s death. He called on Dr. Paterson and asked for her death certificate. Dr. Paterson was surprised that Dr. Pritchard hadn’t told the widower that death certificates were never handed out to family, but sent directly to the registrar. On the next Wednesday Paterson ran into Dr. Pritchard on Sauchiehall Street, and Dr. Croc asked if he would look in on his wife while he attended Mrs. Taylor’s funeral in Edinburgh. Paterson agreed, and when he visited her he found her to be very ill. He asked her lots of questions about both her and her mother’s ailments and prescribed some soothing drinks, easy to digest food, and some sort of powder.
Dr. Pritchard didn’t just attend Mrs. Taylor’s funeral. He also attended the reading of her will, and learned that she had left two thirds of her £2500 estate to her daughter, Mrs. Pritchard. That would be about £316,000 today.
Soon after seeing Mrs. Pritchard, Dr. Paterson received a form from the registrar asking for the cause of Mrs. Taylor’s death. He sent it back blank, but attached a note that he said “explained the circumstances” or her death. The registrar for his part, decided to destroy the note. Not one to leave things hanging for too long, Dr. Pritchard decided to fill out the death certificate all by himself. He listed Mrs. Taylor’s primary cause of death as, “Paralysis, duration twelve hours.” And her secondary cause was, “Apoplexy, duration one hour.” He didn’t seem to realise that apoplexy should always come before paralysis, not after.
Life went on in the Pritchard household. Dr. Pritchard saw Dr. Paterson in early March and brought the happy news that his wife was feeling much better. He was so happy about her recovery that he decided to buy a brooch on March 7th…for Mary McLeod.
On March 13th he purchased a meagre half ounce of Fleming’s Tincture of Aconite (the extra strong one.) That evening he sent Mary McLeod upstairs with some cheese for his wife’s dinner. Mrs. Pritchard asked Mary to taste the cheese and Mary noted a burning sensation in her throat after eating it. Mary Patterson also ate a bit of cheese the next morning and had to spend the rest of the day in bed.
On Friday, March 17th Mary Patterson heard Mrs. Pritchard’s bell ring urgently twice. She knew that Mary McLeod was home and it was the young girl’s job to answer bells so she ignored it. But it rang again so Mary Patterson decided to check things out. She wasn’t sure which bell had rung so she checked at Dr. Pritchard’s consulting room first. But the door, despite being partially open, seemed to be blocked by something on the inside and wouldn’t budge. She carried on upstairs. Immediately after that the consulting room door opened and out came Dr. Pritchard. Right behind him was Mary McLeod.
Mrs. Pritchard had apparently rang her bell because she was feeling lonely. So her doting husband fixed her a drink. How sweet. At around 5pm the bell rang again. Mary McLeod went up and found Mrs. Pritchard outside of the bedroom on the landing, pointing at the floor and crying, “There is my poor mother dead again!” Mary helped the raving woman back to bed, and at around 8pm Dr. Pritchard went to fetch Dr. Paterson.
When he arrived, Dr. Paterson once again found Mrs. Pritchard looking downright horrible. He prescribed a simple sleeping solution of ipecacuanha wine, five to ten drops of chlorodyne, and an ounce of cinnamon water. Dr. Pritchard needed the prescription repeated which surprised Paterson, who assumed a fellow doctor would have all the ingredients on hand. Pritchard said he didn’t keep any medicines in the house except chloroform and Battley’s. And you know the cabinet full of poison in the very room they were standing in. He must have forgotten about that.
After Paterson left, Dr. Pritchard went upstairs and got into bed with his wife. Mary McLeod slept on the sofa in the bedroom in case of emergency. At 1am Mrs. Pritchard woke and moaned, “Edward, don’t sleep. I feel very faint.” Dr. Croc had Mary McLeod get a mustard poultice, made by Mary Patterson downstairs. The poultice didn’t make Mrs. Pritchard feel any better so he asked young Mary to fetch another one. Downstairs Mary Patterson heard the bell ring and went up to the bedroom. Inside she saw the second mustard poultice on the bed next to a very dead Mrs. Pritchard.
Dr. Pritchard told Mary Patterson to apply the poultice to his wife, and her reply? “There’s no use putting mustard on a dead body.”
He asked, “Is she dead?” And her reply, just as priceless as the last was, “Doctor, you should know that better than I!”
He insisted his wife had merely fainted and asked Mary McLeod to get some hot water. Mary Patterson again pointed out the futility of heating up a dead body. At which point Dr. Pritchard burst into tears and cried out, “Come back, come back, my darling Mary Jane. Do not leave your dear Edward!” The man knew how to put on a show.
He collected himself and went downstairs to write some letters. As you do when your wife dies. One letter he wrote was to the Clydesdale Bank. It was a response to a notice saying his account was overdrawn by over £131 (a cool £16,500 today).
He wrote:
I am fully aware of the overdraft, and nothing short of the heavy affliction I have been visited with since the year commenced – in the loss of my mother, and this day of my wife, after long and severe illness – would have made me break my promise. If you will kindly tell Mr Readman, to whom I am well known, that immediately I can attend to business I will see him on the matter, please ask him if he can wait till after my dear wife’s funeral on Thursday.
He also took some time to write in his diary. On the page for March 18th, 1865 he wrote:
Died here at 1 a.m. Mary Jane, my own beloved wife, aged 38 years – no torment surrounded her bedside – but, like a calm, peaceful lamb of God – passed Minnie away. May God and Jesus, Holy Gh., one in three – welcome Minnie. Prayer on prayer till mine be o’er, everlasting love. Save us, Lord, for they dear Son.
On Monday March 20th he wrote up a death certificate which said Mrs. Pritchard had died from gastric fever, duration two months and arranged for Mrs. Pritchard’s body to be taken to Edinburgh.
That same day the Procurator-Fiscal in Glasgow received an anonymous letter dated “Glasgow, 18th March, 1865.” The letter read:
Sir,
Dr. Pritchard’s mother in law died suddenly three weeks ago in his house on Sauchiehall Street Glasgow under circumstances at least very suspicious.
His wife died to-day, also suddenly and under circumstances equally suspicious.
We think it right to bring your attention to the above as the proper form to take action in the matter and see justice done.
Many thought the letter may have been written by Dr. Paterson, who denied it. But there were few others connected to the case who had suspected foul play. Whoever tipped off authorities certainly saw justice done, because the Procurator-Fiscal told the police and the police started investigating immediately.
Edward Pritchard was none the wiser to the investigation and continued to flit about town, telling all sorts of lies about his wife’s death including that she had died even though he had three different doctors examine her. Which in his words caused “a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.” So this is what led him to his wife’s open coffin in Edinburgh, where he kissed her lips and cried “with great feeling” his crocodile tears. He left his father-in-law’s house and took the train back to Glasgow.
When he got off the train at Queen Street Station, Superintendent McCall was waiting for him on the platform. Dr. Edward Pritchard was arrested right there on suspicion of having caused the death of his wife. Upon hearing the news, most people thought it was crazy. Even his wife’s relatives said he surely had nothing to do with her unfortunate death. His friends visited him in prison where he was said to be calm. He also made a declaration asserting his complete innocence.
And poor young Mary McLeod was also arrested, on suspicion of having been involved in the whole thing. Thankfully she was released soon after. On March 28th, Mrs Pritchard’s body was examined and found to be full of poisonous antimony. This led to the decision to exhume Mrs. Taylor, whose body also contained high amounts of antimony. After this discovery, Dr. Pritchard was asked to make a second statement. And again he declared his innocence.
Edward Pritchard was tried before three judges in Edinburgh, just as Madeleine Smith had been. In fact, one of the judges, The Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Inglis, was the judge who pleaded to the jury to find Miss Smith not guilty at her trial. The lead counsel for the crown prosecution was Mr. Adam Gifford, who had also represented the crown during Jessie McLachlan’s trial. And just to round out the old gang, Mr. Rutherfurd Clark, Jessie McLachlan’s defense attorney, acted as Pritchard’s lead defense counsel.
The trial began on July 3rd and lasted for five days. A contemporary newspaper account wrote of Pritchard at the trial:
His naturally handsome countenance, and a certain plausibility of manner which characterised him, favourably impressed spectators. This was strikingly illustrated by his bearing in court, particularly in the earlier stages of the trial. None who saw the intelligent, thoughtful, and mild-looking individual seated in the dock on the first morning of the eventful trial, could be prepared for anything like the refined and consummate villainy and diabolic cruelty which each day brought to light, until, when the whole murderous plot was laid bare, the assembled auditors saw before them a perfect fiend in human shape.
Pritchard’s demeanour only changed after Mary McLeod reluctantly confessed to their “relationship” (AKA his victimisation of a teenage girl). His mild expression began to give way to something altogether more villainous during her testimony. The Crown had a pretty airtight case, the only thing they couldn’t prove conclusively was how the poison had been administered to Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Taylor. The circumstantial and medical evidence largely spoke for itself. And the best the defense could do was to try to blame Mary McLeod for the murders.
Dr. Paterson testified at the trial and got some serious scolding about not alerting someone of his suspicions that Mrs. Pritchard was being poisoned. He insisted that “medical etiquette” made it impossible for him to make his suspicions known. Lord Inglis further condemned this during his summation saying:
Dr. Paterson said…That he was under the decided impression when he saw Mrs. Pritchard, that somebody was practising upon her with poison. He thought it consistent with his professional duty… to keep that opinion to himself…There is a rule of life and a consideration that is far higher than these– and that is, the duty that every right-minded man owes to his neighbour, to prevent the destruction of human life in this world, and in that duty I cannot but say Dr. Paterson failed.
The jury deliberated for only an hour. When they came back the foreman announced they had unanimously found the prisoner guilty of both charges. Lord Inglis sentenced Dr. Edward Pritchard to death. He was taken back to prison in Glasgow and spent the twenty-one days between his sentencing and execution becoming excessively religious. He met with his own Episcopalian minister as well as ministers from other denominations. To his own minister he offered his first “confession” and said that he had murdered his wife with an overdose of chloroform and that Mary McLeod had also been there and had known all about it. Everyone found this confession to be bullshit.
He made a second confession on July 11th that detailed the origins of his relationship with Mary McLeod. He wrote that he believed his wife knew of their “affair”. He also said that Mrs. Taylor caught him and Mary together in the consulting room the day before she died. But that she definitely, certainly died of an overdose of Battley’s Solution of Opium. And that the aconite that had been found in her Battley’s bottle had been placed there, by the good doc, after her death, on purpose. He did this to make sure that anyone investigating the death would find that her death was simply caused by misadventure, nothing more. Obviously.
He also once again confessed to giving his wife chloroform, but at her own request. You see, she was so sleep deprived after her mother’s death. But during the administration he succumbed to his inner demons and knowingly gave his wife an overdose of chloroform, with Mary McLeod in the room of course. He said he had been living “in a state of madness” since his connection with Mary McLeod and that he repented for his crimes.
The same day Dr. James Paterson had a long letter published in The Glasgow Herald after suffering from criticism after the trial. In the newspaper he said that the fault lay with the registrar who had destroyed his letter. He said the letter had read:
I am surprised that I am called on to certify the cause of death in this case. I only saw the person for a few minutes, a very short period before her death. She seemed to be under some narcotic, but Dr Pritchard, who was present from the first moment of the illness until death occurred, and which happened in his own house, may certify the cause. The death was certainly sudden, unexpected, and to me mysterious.
In the rest of his letter to the Herald, Paterson insisted that sending this letter to the registrar had been an attempt to scare Pritchard off of poisoning his wife. And he also pointed out that several other doctors had failed to notice Mrs. Pritchard was being slowly poisoned.
Dr. Pritchard didn’t care at all about Paterson’s assertions, he was busy drafting a third confession in his cell, this one a week before he was set to hang. This time he admitted to both murders but said he had been driven to kill due to an onset of “terrible madness” and the ingestion of “ardent spirits”, or ya know, whisky.
All his confessions did him little good because his execution went ahead on July 18th, 1865. The night before a crowd began to gather at Jail Square and by half-past 7 between 80,000 and 100,000 had gathered. The deadly procession arrived at around 8 am and Edward William Pritchard, the Human Crocodile, was “launched into eternity” (as put by the Edinburgh Courant) at ten past eight in the morning.
Dr. Edward Pritchard was the last person to be publicly executed in Scotland. Even though his involvement with Elizabeth McGirn’s fiery death was never proven, she is generally considered to be his first victim. And with three victims, that makes Dr. Edward Pritchard a serial killer, over 20 years before Jack the Ripper terrorised London and embodied the term.
FURTHER READING:
Square Mile of Murder by Jack House
Our Records: The Glasgow Poisoner
How the Human Crocodile met the Glasgow hangman for the last public execution
Scotland’s Murder Mysteries – Dr. Edward Pritchard
Paregoric (Battley’s Sedative Solution)
Poultices: the moist cure-all that came to a sticky end
RELATED EPISODES:
10: The Square Mile of Murder Poisoner
20: Square Mile Murder at Sandyford Place
23: Black Widow Mary Ann Cotton
June 2020 Bonus Episode: Amelia Dyer & Victorian Baby Farming
