The Business Partnership of Torrance and Waldie

Engraving of 18th century Edinburgh

William Burke and William Hare created for themselves a prominent place in the annals of infamy with their assembly-line practice of committing murder in order to sell cadavers to an Edinburgh medical school during 1827-28.  A much more obscure, but equally ghastly predecessor to this line of homicide-for-profit took place in that same city a few decades earlier.  It deserves notice as the first known case of what would eventually be termed “anatomy murder.”

In November 1751, two nurses named Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie sought a suitable subject for some local apprentice surgeons.  Their first plan focused on a dead child they had attended.  They hoped to substitute some heavy object in the coffin, and make off with the body.  This scheme being foiled, they then turned their attention to another young patient of Torrence’s, a boy of eight or nine named John Dallas.  The boy was not expected to live, and would be, in the opinion of his kindly nurse, “a good subject for the doctors.”

Young Dallas, however, inconsiderately refused to die, and even showed dangerous signs of possible recuperation.  The two ladies, determined not to be cheated of a corpse a second time, resolved to take matters into their own hands.

On December 3, Janet Dallas, the boy’s mother, called on Torrance.  The nurse invited her to the local pub.  While they were gone, Waldie went to the Dallas home and kidnapped the boy, hiding him in her own flat.  Torrance soon joined her there, and they forced ale “which would scarce go over” on the weak and sickly John.  He died a few minutes later.

Once the boy went from patient to profitable merchandise, it was time to make a deal.  The apprentices, after examining the body, offered Torrance and Waldie two shillings.  The nurses were indignant, exclaiming “that they had been at more expenses about it than that sum.”  When the students offered to throw in “tenpence to buy a dram,” the ladies were mollified, and the bargain struck.  When Torrance agreed to carry the body herself to their rooms, she even got a bonus of sixpence.

Young John’s parents initiated a frantic search for their missing child, and four days later his body was found “in a place of the town little frequented,” and bearing clear marks of having been dissected.  (When the apprentices heard that the boy was feared to have been murdered, they panicked and dumped the corpse.)

The parents, rather gruesomely, were arrested first, followed by Torrance and Waldie.  The apprentices gave their story, whereupon the Dallases were freed and the nurses put on trial, a proceeding which took place on February 3, 1752.

The best their counsel could say in their favor was a protest that they faced the death penalty for two of the charges.  Their argument was that, although the murder itself was a capital offense, the kidnapping was a lesser crime, and the sale of the body not illegal at all.  The prosecution retorted that those charges were still relevant to the case.  Although stealing the child while alive, and selling him when dead, would not merit the supreme penalty, the killing in-between most certainly did.

The two nurses were swiftly convicted.  Torrance then tried to “plead her belly” (i.e., claim that she was pregnant, as the law could not execute a woman in that condition.)  She was examined by four midwives, who reported that she was not expecting a child.  Helen Torrance and Jean Waldie paid for their crime at the end of a rope on March 18. It is recorded that “Both acknowledged their sins, and mentioned uncleanness and drunkenness in particular.”

Their bodies were dissected at the medical college.