PAST CRIMESdespised, but whose wealth had mightily impressed her father. Soon after the
marriage, her husband died, apparently from poison, and Mary was convicted
of his murder. She was burned alive at the stake, even though the judges
themselves felt sympathy for her.
Some of the convicted were habitual criminals–Anne Harris, at twenty
years old, already twice widowed by the hangman, was so notorious a
shoplifter that she had been branded so many times there was nowhere left on
her face for further brands, and so she was hanged. Sixteenyear old Roderick
Audrey had worked up a successful scam with a trained sparrow. If caught
climbing through an open window to steal, he claimed he was merely chasing
his pet bird. He was imprisoned in Newgate no less than twenty times in his
brief career before going to the gallows.
There are also accounts of people hanged for crimes they did not commit–
including William Shaw, convicted of killing his daughter, who was later found
to have committed suicide, and Captain John Massey executed for piracy
although he had simply been captured by pirates and forced to accompany
them until he could inform on them to the authorities. There were female gang
leaders, abortionists, heretics, traitors, homosexuals, highway robbers, a female
polygamist, smugglers, mutineers, rapists and resurrection men.
The 1752 Murder Act had stated that criminal corpses were to be
anatomised, but there was still a shortage. The resurrection men stole dead
bodies for sale to the medical colleges for purposes of dissection, and part of
the official sentence for many was that, after hanging, they would be
dissected. Not all hangings were efficient, however. William Duell was
executed in 1740 for killing a woman during a robbery and was hanged at
Tyburn. His body was taken to Surgeon’s Hall to be‘anatomised’. An assistant
was washing the body when it was noticed that it was breathing; Duell soon
revived, was returned to Newgate prison, and subsequently had his sentence
commuted to transportation.
The case of Mr Duell was not unique, and indeed posed a problem for
surgeons. People in comas, or suffering from hypothermia, could appear dead,
and the medical science of the day had few methods to confirm death.
Surgeons had to use a variety of methods to make sure their subject had
actually expired. Once they cut into the body, they were in fact killing the
patient, in contravention of the Hippocratic Oath. Most surgeons believed that
dissection of criminals was in the public good, but some also made a lot of
money out of the process. Hanged convicts at York were often dissected by
William Hey from the Leeds Infirmary. His dissections were threeday public
events in front of very large crowds. He charged three pence per person on the