The Saga of Irish Entrepreneur Killers for Medical Science

Wikipedia Commons, used with permission

Source: Wikipedia Commons with permission

William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants to Scotland with no previous criminal records, became unlikely serial killers in the late 1920s when greed got the best of them—and so did the medical community of that era.

The grisly saga began when the pair targeted vulnerable victims and killed them by strangulation, using a method they perfected that left no telltale traces and little evidence of a murder. It was all to help stock corpses at a nearby medical school for anatomy classes at the Royal Medical Society’s Hall. The instructor, Dr. Robert Knox, paid handily for bodies in good condition.

Inspired by their success, the pair repeated it again and again, robbing newly buried coffins and selling the cadavers to Knox. The price was upped to ten pounds for each body in good condition.

All told, Burke and Hare killed 17 victims in Edinburgh, Scotland between 1827 and 1829 in what became known as the West Port Murders. Burke, with accomplice Hare, ran the body-snatching operation in the then-grim West Port district of Edinburgh. They ended up being two of Scotland's most gruesome immigrants.

They did not set out to kill. From Ireland, they moved to Ulster, Scotland, and worked on the Union Canal. They lodged with Maggie Laird and Nell MacDougal, a pair of prostitutes. Maggie, who ran the boarding house, became romantically involved with Hare. When an older pensioner boarding with them died of natural causes in November 1827, the pair jumped at the opportunity.

Burke and Hare hit on the idea of selling the boarder’s remains to a local anatomy school that desperately needed bodies for dissection. They took the corpse to Knox, a popular instructor who worked out of a private anatomy classroom in the Royal Medical Society's Hall in Surgeon's Square at the Edinburgh Medical School. Knox paid seven pounds and ten shillings for the corpse.

Then, early in 1828, another of the lodgers, Joseph, came down with a fever, so Burke put a "small pillow and laid it across Joseph's mouth, and Hare lay across the body to keep down the arms and legs." Later termed "burking," they would employ the technique in all their murders to follow.

The corpse trade thrived in the 19th century, and medical schools required cadavers for anatomy classes. But the demand always outstripped the supply. Schools invariably accepted bodies with no questions asked. Burke and Hare set themselves up as procurers of those human bodies to satisfy the demand of Edinburgh's medical schools.

Originally, the two set about digging up, in the dead of night, the graves of the recently departed, stealing the bodies and then selling them for cash to the doctor. But digging up bodies was too much work for the pair. So they started murdering people in Edinburgh's old town and selling the bodies.

Most of the corpses were of drunken down-and-outs who Burke and Hare suffocated when their victims fell into alcoholic stupors.

Their greed, however, got the better of them when they started killing and disposing of people whose disappearances were noticed by police. Also, students began recognizing the corpses and became suspicious. Both men, along with their female companions, were arrested. The evidence against the men was circumstantial, despite local cries for justice. Then a deal was struck. Hare agreed to give evidence against Burke in exchange for immunity against prosecution. And Maggie Laird turned King's Evidence and testified against Burke and Nell MacDougal. Nell received a not-proven verdict, but Burke was found guilty.

William Burke’s trial began at 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve 1828. The jury, following brief deliberations, found him guilty of murder. On January 28, 1829, William Burke went to the gallows and was hanged at Edinburgh in front of a large crowd.

A rhyme soon circulated around the streets of Edinburgh. It read, in part:

"Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef."
—19th century Edinburgh rhyme

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist, so named after Canadian psychologist Robert Hare (no relation to William Hare), is a tool used to identify a person’s psychopathic tendencies similar to Burke and Hare’s. Originally designed to assess people accused of crimes, it is a 20-item inventory of personality traits assessed primarily via an interview. Subjects receive scores for each trait that depend on how well each one applies to them. Traits include lack of remorse, lack of empathy, inability to accept responsibility for actions, impulsivity, and pathological tendency toward lying.

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In a twist of irony, Burke’s body was given to a local medical school for dissection. A free man, Hare left Edinburgh shortly after the execution of his partner. He died penniless in London in 1859. Knox, the physician who so willingly purchased most of Burke and Hare's bodies, was never prosecuted.

In 1827, before anyone knew about Burke and Hare, a Scotland Parliamentary committee convened to investigate the way in which medical schools obtained corpses. The Edinburgh murders became linked with Parliament's deliberations, and the legislation became known as the Anatomy Act of 1832.