Burke and Hare murders

The Burke and Hare murders (occasionally referred to as the West Port murders) were perpetrated in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1827-1828 by William Burke and William Hare who sold the corpses of their 17 victims to the Edinburgh Medical College for dissection. Their principal customer was doctor Robert Knox.

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Historical background

Main article: History of anatomy in the 19th century

Before 1832, there was insufficient legitimate supply of cadavers for the study and teaching of anatomy in British medical schools. As medical science began to flourish in the early 19th century, demand rose sharply, but at the same time the only legal supply of cadavers - the bodies of executed criminals - was falling due to a sharp reduction in the execution rate in the early 19th century, when compared to the 18th century. This situation attracted criminal elements who were willing to obtain specimens by any means. The activities of body-snatchers (also called resurrectionists) gave rise to particular public fear and revulsion.

Spree

By 1827, Burke and his mistress, Helen MacDougal, were regular tenants at Hare's lodging house in Edinburgh. It is not known whether the two knew each other from an earlier common employment on the Union Canal. According to Hare's later testimony, the first body they sold was that of a dead tenant, an old army pensioner who owed Hare £4 rent. In November, they stole the body from its coffin and sold it to the Edinburgh Medical College for £7, their first meeting with Professor Robert Knox, a leading Edinburgh anatomist.

Their next victim was a sick tenant Joseph the Miller whom they plied with whisky and suffocated. When there were no other sickly tenants, they decided to lure a victim from the street. In February 1828 they invited pensioner Abigail Simpson to spend the night before her return to home. They engineered her intoxication and smothered her. Because the corpse was so fresh, they were paid £15.

After another murdered tenant, Margaret Hare invited a woman to the inn, plied her with drink and then sent for her husband. Next Burke brought in two prostitutes, Mary Patterson and Janet Brown but Brown left when an argument broke out between MacDougal and Burke. When she returned, she was told that Patterson had left with Burke. Next morning some of the medical students recognized the dead prostitute, possibly because they had used her services.

The next victim was an acquaintance of Burke, a beggar woman called Effie. They were paid £10 for her body. Then Burke "saved" a woman from police claiming that he knew her and delivered her to the medical school just hours later.

The next two victims were an old woman and a deaf boy. Burke and Hare argued over the boy but then Burke broke his back and sold both bodies for £8 each. The next two victims were Burke's acquaintance Mrs Ostler and MacDougal's relative Ann MacDougal.

Then Hare met elderly prostitute Mary Haldane. When her daughter Peggy inquired about her whereabouts, she ended up accompanying her mother on the medical school cutting table. However, this disappearance was noticed since Mary Haldane had been a well-known figure in the neighbourhood.

Their next victim was an even better-known person, a retarded young man with a limp called Daft Jamie(18). The boy resisted and the pair had to kill him together. His mother began to ask for her boy. When Dr Knox uncovered the body the next morning, several students recognized Jamie. His head and feet were cut off after Knox had shown his students the body. Knox denied that he was Jamie but apparently began to dissect his face first.

The last victim was Mary Docherty. Burke lured her into the lodging house by claiming that his mother was also a Docherty but he had to wait because of James and Ann Gray who were lodging with them. The Grays left for the night and neighbours heard the noise of a struggle.

Detection

The next day, Ann Gray became suspicious when Burke would not let her approach a bed where she had left her stockings. When the Grays were left alone in the house in the early evening, they checked the bed and found Docherty's body under it. On their way to alert the police, they ran into MacDougal who tried to bribe them with an offer of £10 a week. They refused.

MacDougal and Margaret Hare alerted their spouses and Burke and Hare took the body out of the house before the police arrived. However, under questioning, Burke claimed that Docherty had left at 7:00 am then MacDougal claimed that she had left in the evening. The police arrested them. An anonymous tip-off led them to Knox's classroom where they found Docherty's body. James Gray identified it. MacDougal and Margaret Hare were arrested soon after. The murder spree had lasted eleven months.

When an Edinburgh paper wrote about the disappearances on November 6, Janet Brown heard about it and went to the police. She identified Mary Paterson's clothing.

The evidence against the pair was not overwhelming so Lord Advocate Sir William Rae offered Hare immunity from prosecution if he confessed and agreed to testify against Burke. Hare's testimony led to Burke's death sentence in December 1828. Ironically following his hanging, he was to share the fate of his victims - dissected for the benefit of medical students. Helen MacDougal was released, since her complicity to the murders was not proven. Robert Knox was not prosecuted despite a public uproar.

Helen MacDougal returned to her house but was almost lynched by an angry mob. She fled to England but her reputation preceded her. She was rumoured to have left for Australia where she died around 1868. Margaret Hare also escaped lynching and reputedly returned to Ireland. Nothing more is known about her.

Hare was released in February 1829 and many popular tales tell of him as a blind beggar on the streets of London having been mobbed and thrown in a lime pit. However, none of these reports were ever confirmed. The last known sighting of him was in the English town of Carlisle.

Robert Knox kept silent about his dealings with Burke and Hare but his popularity among students decreased. His applications for other positions in the Edinburgh Medical School were rejected. He moved to the Cancer Hospital in London and died in 1862.

Skin from Burke's body was used to make the leather binding of a small book. This book can now be seen in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. His skeleton hangs in the anatomy library of Edinburgh University's Medical School.

Political consequences

The murders highlighted the crisis in medical education and led to the subsequent passing of the Anatomy Act 1832, which expanded the legal supply of medical cadavers to eliminate the incentive for such behaviour. About the law, the Lancet editorial stated:

Burke and Hare ... it is said, are the real authors of the measure, and that which would never have been sanctioned by the deliberate wisdom of parliament, is about to be extorted from its fears ... It would have been well if this fear had been manifested and acted upon before sixteen human beings had fallen victims to the supineness of the Government and the Legislature. It required no extraordinary sagacity to foresee, that the worst consequences must inevitably result from the system of traffic between resurrectionists and anatomists, which the executive government has so long suffered to exist. Government is already in a great degree, responsible for the crime which it has fostered by its negligence, and even encouraged by a system of forbearance. (Lancet editorial, 1828-9 (1), pp 818-21, 28.3.1829)

In popular culture

The murders have entered the timeless culture of children’s folklore. Threats of visits from Burke and Hare are used by some parents to discipline unruly children (sf. Boogyman), and the pair are even prominently featured in a couple of sing-song rhymes that accompany children’s jump rope and hopscotch games:

Up the close and down the stair,

But and ben with Burke and Hare.

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the boy who buys the beef.

(Source: The Know-it-all, by A.J. Jacobs, 2004, ISBN 0743250605 - pages 36-37.)

A close in Edinburgh's old town is a narrow alleyway, usually arched over by the houses fronting on to the High Street or Canongate. The term is also used for the passageway leading from the front door of a tenement past the stair.

Rudyard Kipling has a joke about the two ghouls in his novel Kim. At one point Hurree Chunder the Babu discourses on the virtues of education, and recommends "the eminent authors, Burke and Hare." Alan Sandison, in his annotated edition of Kim, explains that "the reference is, of course, to Edmund Burke, writer and statesman, and Augustus Hare, a writer of books of travel. But there is, in their unusual conjunction, a deliberate confusion with the two Edinburgh mass-murderers..." (See pages 163 and 302 of the Sandison edition of Kim).

The story of the murders was filmed in 1948 as a motion picture with working title Crimes of Burke & Hare. However, the British Board of Film Censors deemed its historical topic too disturbing and insisted that references to Burke and Hare be excised. The film was redubbed with alternative dialogue and characters, and was released as The Greed of William Hart. The original script is apparent to anyone skilled in lipreading. A less coy treatment of the topic was made in the 1971 film Burke and Hare starring Derren Nesbitt. The 1960 film The Flesh and The Fiends also used the real names, with Peter Cushing as Knox and Donald Pleasence as Hare. Burke and Hare also made an appearance in the Hammer Horror film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. In 1985, Freddie Francis directed a film version of the events entitled The Doctor and the Devils. Another film based on the murders is in pre-production, based on a script by Edinburgh novelist, Irvine Welsh. Provisionally titled The Meat Trade, the film is scheduled to feature Robert Carlyle and Colin Firth under the direction of Antonia Bird and will be shot on location, in Edinburgh, beginning in April of 2007.

The Edinburgh based, Australian Rules Football club, the Body Snatchers is named for the antics of Burke and Hare.

See also

• Dr. Robert Knox
• Dr. Thomas Sewall
• London Burkers

Bibliography

• Adams, N. (2002) Scottish Bodysnatchers ISBN 1-899874-40-2
• Bailey, B. (2002) Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls ISBN 1-84018-575-9
• Douglas, H. (1973) Burke and Hare ISBN 0-7091-3777-X
• Edwards, O.D. (1993) Burke and Hare ISBN 1-873644-25-6
• MacDonald, H.P. (2005) Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection ISBN 0-522-85157-6
• Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt and Allen Simpson (1994). "The Westport Murders and the Mineature Coffins from Arthur's Seat". Book of the Old Edinburgh Club 3: ns 63-81.
• Richardson, R. (2001) Death, Dissection and the Destitute ISBN 0-226-71240-0
• Roughead, W. (1966). Classic Crimes 1: Katharine Nairn, Deacon Brodie, The West Port Murders, Madeleine Smith, Constance Kent and The Sandyford Mystery. London: Panther.