The Old Tolbooth stood for over 400 years just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and housed all manner of torture, torment, and even public execution. One of these deaths was that of a man whose bizarre and duplicitous life would become the inspiration for one of fiction’s most well-known horror stories, and whose hanging was the most well-attended in Scotland’s history. The man was Deacon William Brodie, but you may know him as “the real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
SHOW SOURCES & SUPPLEMENTALS
“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
The Trial of Deacon Brodie, edited by William Roughead, 1906
An Account of the Trial of William Brodie, and George Smith, before the High Court of Justiciary, on Wednesday the 27th, and Thursday the 28th days of August, 1788; for breaking into, and robbing, the General Excise Office of Scotland, on the 5th day of March last, William Creech, 1788