Scottish Heroes & Villains

Burke & Hare (page 1 of 2)

The year is 1836 and five young boys are roaming Arthurs Seat in Holyrood park, Edinburgh - hunting for rabbits, what they find defies belief and brings back to the public's attention one of the most gruesome periods of our capital's history.

Buried in a small cave they find 17 miniature coffins - each coffin is only 4 inches long and each contains a small carved wooden doll - made with some expertise. Many theories exists as to what these dolls represented but the one that captured the imagination was their co-incidental link to the 17 victims of William Burke & William Hare; The BODY SNATCHERS.

The story of Burke & Hare is fascinating in itself for many reasons, though motivated by greed on the part of the perpetrators, the purpose of the murders and the resulting bodies created a scandal that both shocked the polite society of Edinburgh but at the same time contributed to the city's standing as a place of intellectual advancement in the development of modern medicine.

We go back to the early 1800s - great advances take place in science and medicine is no exception - however research into anatomy is made difficult as the supply of fresh cadavers on which to experiment are hard to come by. Generally only those executed for murder were given up for dissection and with such a voracious demand from the university there just were not enough murderers to go round, ironically an opportunity arose then for two of the best.

Enter William Burke & William Hare, two Irish immigrants from Ulster who had come to Scotland to work on the Union Canal. The pair probably met when Burke moved to a lodging house in Edinburgh's West Port area run by Hare and his partner; Margaret Laird. Burke & Hare could never have been considered of high morals and indeed the area around the West Port was rife with criminals, prostitutes and life’s detritus in all shapes & sizes. However they did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to become Edinburgh's most notorious serial killers - their path to hell was a little less obvious...

The downfall of Burke & Hare began with a simple problem - what to do with a dead tenant who owed you money? In 1827 an elderly lodger of Hare's called Donald had died of natural causes in the night - he had no known family and owed Hare £4.49 in rent. Burke listened to Hare curse his bad luck - then a solution came to them. Poor Donald may have been considered worthless in life but maybe not so in death - the anatomists! And so their new career began; on the day of Donald's funeral they filled his coffin with bark and in the dead of night - wheeled the body to Surgeon's Square where Professor Knox paid them seven pounds and ten shillings and asked few questions regarding how they had come about the corpse. suddenly from four pounds down they were three pounds ten shillings up, not a bad night's work!

burke & hare

The scheme had one drawback though - if they had to sit and wait for the next tenant to pop his clogs they could be in for a wait - even in such a god forsaken place as the West Port! As they eagerly eyed their tenants the next victim presented himself; Joseph Miller was already sick, why not help him on his way a little? no harm in that surely? So one night they plied him with whisky and suffocated the poor man. Since they had now exhausted the supply of sick tenants in the boarding house it was time to look elsewhere. In February 1828 Abigail Simpson, an elderly lady was lured into the lodging house and dispatched in the same style, a smothering technique designed not to harm the corpse which grimly became known as 'Burking'.

Poor Abigail was hardly cold by the time she reached Knox's back door, This was reflected in Burke & Hare's payment for this cadaver when the Anatomist paid them fifteen pounds as she was so 'fresh'.

Over the next year they grizzly trade was carried out from their seedy boarding house

The victims of Burke & Hare were mostly those on the lower rungs of life’s social ladder, those who would not be missed but even in a city the size of Edinburgh not everyone at this level was a complete unknown; The pair had their first close escape when Burke brought back two prostitutes, Mary Patterson and Janet Brown. Brown left after an argument but Patterson was not so lucky. As her body was uncovered on the dissecting table the next morning a collective gasp was heard among the students. Many students had known Mary...intimately!

Several more victims followed in her footsteps; local characters such as Effie a local beggar along with more of Edinburgh's elderly, poor infirm and immoral including a mother and daughter, Mary Haldane and her daughter Peggy who had been dispatched after arriving at the boarding house looking for her mother. But Mary was to give them yet another scare and arise more suspicion when she was also recognised on the slab.

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