Body of last Scot hanged for murder may be exhumed THE remains of the last man to be hanged for murder in Scotland may have to be exhumed from his unmarked grave when Aberdeen's Victorian Craiginches Prison closes its doors for the last time later this year. Henry John Burnett was only 21 when he was executed at Craiginches at 8am on 15 August, 1963, after being convicted of the murder of his lover's sailor husband, Thomas Guyan. Burnett murdered the merchant seaman by blasting him in the face with a shotgun. He was the only inmate of Craiginches to die on the gallows inside the prison and the last man to be executed in Scotland before Parliament abolished the death penalty. Both Craiginches and Peterhead prisons are due to be replaced by the new £140 million "super jail" HMP Grampian which is being built at the site of Peterhead Prison. It will house 500 male and female prisoners, as well as young offenders, in the same complex. And the body of Burnett is set to be exhumed and reburied at another site once the future redevelopment of the Craiginches site has been decided. A Scottish Prison Service spokesman said: "Aberdeen Prison will have to close over the winter at some point and, beyond that, the Scottish Prison Service will have to look at the plans for the future of the site. Depending on what happens with the prison, consideration will have to be given about what is going to happen the body. We are aware there is a grave within the grounds of the prison, and we will ensure the appropriate consideration is given to the removal of the remains as part of the decommissioning of the site. We will seek consultation with the local authority as part of the process, as well as ensuring that relevant legislation is complied with. The spokesman said: "There is no active discussion about what we are going to do, but there is realisation that, at some point down the line, it is something we will have to do in terms of exhuming the body." It is understood the SPS will have to seek the approval of the Sheriff Court to exhume the body. The spokesman added: "As far as we are aware, the grave of Henry John Burnett is the only grave known to be inside Craiginches. There was only one execution at Craiginches and at that time the practice was that they (executed prisoners) were simply buried in unmarked graves within the grounds of the prison. There is an awareness of where it (the grave) is. Burnett had met Thomas Guyan's wife, Margaret Guyan, when both were working as fish filleters at John R. Stephen Fish Curers in Aberdeen. She later went to live with him at his home in Skene Terrace. Obsessively jealous, Burnett kept Margaret locked in the house they shared and on one of the rare occasions she was allowed out alone she met her estranged husband and agreed to go back to him. When Margaret refused to return to him, Burnett then stole a double barrelled shotgun from his brother's house and killed Thomas Guyan on 31 May, 1963, at his home in Jackson Terrace . In his address to the jury, the solicitor-general spoke of the "sordid background of a sailor's wife being unfaithful to her husband when he was at sea" and of "the lover with whom she consorted being unable to bear seeing his mistress's favours being given elsewhere." Unusually, the family of the condemned man and the family of his victim both appealed for clemency. But the letters he wrote to his lover Margaret from his prison cell helped to convince Michael Noble, the Scottish Secretary, not to grant his reprieve on grounds of mental instability. Six days before his execution, Burnett wrote: "Well, my darling, you will be wondering why I did not kill you up in Skene Terrace. Well, it was because I loved you. I could easily have done it if I had wanted to, but what they were saying in court was a heap of rubbish about me being insane even at the time. I knew exactly what I was doing ...  The late Councillor Bob Middleton, the leader of the Labour Group on the former Grampian Regional Council, was one of he official witnesses at the hanging in his role as a magistrate and baillie on Aberdeen Corporation. Years later he recalled: "I saw the noose put round his neck, and then he simply dropped from sight ... vanished. There was no sound.