Sawney Bean and his wife were roughians with no education and no morals. They discovered they could make a living by ambushing people and then dragging their bodies back to the cave to be stripped, robbed of their belongings and then cut up like animals to be hung on hooks and preserved as ‘meat.’
     The Beans spawned fourteen children, who quickly learned the family ‘business.’ There were more and more tales of people ‘disappearing’ in the area, and occasionally, strange bits of flesh or body parts or bones would be found washed up in the rivers. The Beans often had to dump some of the ‘meat,’ because regardless of their preserving techniques, some of it would always rot and have to be disposed of.
     This was a total puzzle to the magistrate. They realized something had happened to the people to whom those body parts belonged, but it never occurred to anyone that someone would be killing people and using them as meat.
     It is probable that at times, someone had seen children playing near the cave, or found something suspicious, but the Beans were skilled at killing and erasing any evidence that no one ever found them. They most likely killed anyone who ventured too close to their lair.

     As it is with almost any criminal though, they finally made their first and last mistake.
     After 25 years of the most hideous and unthinkable crimes, they had pounced upon a young couple riding home from the fair one day and killed the woman. The man was horrified and put up a good fight. The shock of seeing them so quickly strip and disembowel his wife gave him the strength to ward them off.
     More people returning from the fair happened upon them and rushed to his rescue. The Beans were predictable cowards when things were not in their favor. They fled to their cave to hide.

     The group took the rescued man to the Magistrate of Glasgow to relate his story. This was the breakthrough so long awaited. Now, there was an explanation for all the disappearances over the previous 25 years, and they might be close to capturing the culprits who caused them.
     The crime was considered so serious that King James VI himself went to Aryshire with four hundred men to help in the search.
     Still, just as many other times before, the searchers nearly missed the cave, and would have again if the hounds with them hadn’t smelled the scent of death and yanked at their chains in an effort to pull the men through the watery cave.

     After a long time of winding through the dank, forbidding tunnels, they finally reached the place where the Beans stashed their victim’s clothing and treasures. Not far from there, was a place where the bones were stacked, and not much farther, they reached a putrid, horrifying sight which proved once and for all, their worst suspicions of cannibalism were true.

     They fought back their nausea and finally came upon the Bean family, whereby they fought them and dragged them outside.

     The crimes were so unspeakable that normal justice was cast aside. All twenty seven men and twenty one women of which all but the original parents being born of incest, were marched by the King and his entourage to Edinburgh and condemned in a haphazard trial.
     The general consensus was that the Beans had lived outside the mores of decent society- had broken every law known to God or Man, and as such, should be dispensed with forthwith.
     The men had their limbs cut off while they were still alive, and they were allowed to bleed to death. The women fared no better. They were burned at the stake.

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