The hanging of William Brodie, or Mr Hyde

On October 1, 1788, William Brodie was hanged at the Edinburgh Tolbooth for robbing the Excise Office in Canongate.

Brodie came from a properous Edinburgh family but, having got into gambling and loose women, financed his bad habits by burglary. His daring and style, and the insouciant way he went to his execution, made him a criminal celebrity, and he's generally believed to have been the model for Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Brodie [The Times reported] now under sentence of death in Edinburgh, was about twelve years back in possession of a large estate in houses in that city, besides £10,000 left him by his father. The pernicious spirit of gaming quickly dissiipated his patrimony, and finally held him up an awful lesson to the giddy and thoughtless, however exalted.

The Times printed a typically graphic account of his execution. When Brodie and his accomplice, Smith, climbed on to the scaffold, the ropes were found to be too short and they were kept hanging around, as it were, while a new one was found.

Brodie, whose audacity has been wonderfully testified, ridiculed the whole proceedings; and no callous-hearted person, unconcerned in the awful event, could have laughed more cordially on the occasion. He turned the cause of delay into an object of mirth to all those around him.

A couple of days later, the paper devoted almost a page to an obituary, which mused over Brodie's fatally flawed personality

His crimes appeared to be rather the result of infatuation than depravity; and he seemed to be more attracted by the dexterity of pilfering, than the profit arising from it. To excel in the performance of some paltry legerdemain, or slight of hand tricks, to be able to converse in the cant or flash language of thieves, or to chaunt with spirit a song from the Beggar's Opera, was to him the highest ambition. Those who knew him best agree that his disposition was friendly and generous and that he had infintely more of the dupe than the knave in his composition.

There was also, of course, a moral lesson for the reader:

The fate of this unfortunate man .... points out the difficulty of eluding, by the most artful means, the steady and persevering hand of justice; it shows that when guilt is once brought home, th rank of the individual rather aggravates than lessens the crime; and that the laws are distributed with an equal and impartial hand to all.