num_pages: 224
description: He was a respected cabinetmaker and councillor by day  but Deacon William Brodie changed into a sinister thieving monster when darkness fell on the old city of Edinburgh. Cleverly employing his respectable reputation to access the richest members of society before stealing from them as a masked burglar he used the resulting illicit money to fund yet another life  with five children and two mistresses. But Brodie  whose chilling story inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to create the classic tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde about a century later  came fatally unstuck when an accomplice informed on him. Then neither his ill-gotten gains nor his plans to cheat the hangman could save him. Rick Wilson traces the increasingly desperate double life of Brodie from his first taste of crime through to his public disgrace and execution  hanging on the very gallows he allegedly conceived himself.
language: None
title: The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde: The Lives and Crimes of Deacon Brodie
publisher: The History Press