The Law Killers by Alexander McGregor Page A

to his fate. Later, after a breakfast of tea, toast and poached eggs, he smoked and told the officers who sat with him that he had been grateful for their decent treatment of him.
    The minister, Gough, arrived at 7.15 a.m. and the pair spent half an hour in quiet conversation before the execution procession of prison governor, two Dundee bailies, two other ministers and six wardens assembled at the door of the cell. Bury was anxious to go to his maker smartly dressed and had discarded his prison outfit in favour of his own dark trousers, twill shooting coat and shirt with a white linen collar and fashionable blue tie.
    The meticulously attired little man with less than an hour left to live would not have believed what was happening outside. In Bell Street and Lochee Road, beside the city-centre prison, the crowds had been assembling from daylight. As 8 a.m. approached, over 5,000 people had gathered, though there would be nothing for them to see since a rough shed had been erected round the scaffold within the prison to prevent the coming spectacle from becoming a peep-show (much to the distress of some would-be entrepreneurs who had hoped to sell vantage points in a high building in Lochee Road).
    When Bury came face to face with his executioner, James Berry, the pair shook hands and Bury was asked if he had anything that he wanted to say. He replied that he wanted to thank all the prison staff for their kindness during his incarceration, then, in something of an understatement, he remarked to Berry, ‘You have a very disagreeable task to perform.’ The hangman replied that it had to be done, but he would ensure that it would be carried out in the least painful way possible. Then he removed Bury’s best tie and slipped a white hood over his head to prevent him from getting a sight of the scaffold. During his twelve-yard walk from the condemned cell to the noose, Bury was said to have been the most calm and relaxed person present. His only outward sign that anything unusual was happening to him came when his arms were pinioned to his sides, at which he clenched both fists.
    Then, at 8 a.m. precisely, the trapdoor shot open and, with Gough’s prayers ringing in his ears, the brutal wife-killer who could seem so mild mannered plunged six feet and six inches to his death. He died instantaneously, his neck snapping and his head falling limp onto his left shoulder.
    At that exact moment the clock on the Old Steeple clock a few hundred yards away chimed the hour and the huge crowd fell silent. People only began to stir again when a black flag was run up the prison flagpole, signalling that the execution had taken place. For the following fifteen minutes the prison bell tolled. It was never to be heard in the same manner again, for William Henry Bury, who had first set foot in Dundee only three months earlier, was the last man to hang in Dundee. His remains still lie within the precincts of the new police headquarters that occupy the site, his grave marked with a small stone simply engraved ‘W. H. B.’
    Could the apparently timid little man who so calmly went to the gallows really have been the same monster who stalked the back streets of London’s East End and outwitted Scotland Yard’s finest detectives? Might the London Ripper more accurately have been known not as Jack but as Bill?
    The passage of so much time means it is unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure and there are now many more suspects than there were mutilated victims of Jack the Ripper. But William Bury comes high on the list of some Ripperologists – the amateur sleuths around the world who have written millions of words advancing their own particular theory about the maniac who terrorised a city and went on to become a legendary figure, even more fascinating now than he was more than a century ago.
    Bury may merely have been what Inspector Abbeline of Scotland Yard dismissed him as: a violent drunkard who married a poorly educated woman for her