Burke and Hare

Both christened William and immigrants from Ireland, Burke and Hare separately became navvies on the Union Canal before ending up in Edinburgh in search of work and their fortune. They met in 1826 when Burke and his long-time "companion", Helen McDougal, moved into Mrs Log's Boarding House in Tanner's Close, where Hare was already resident. After the death of Mr Log, Hare took up with the merry widow Log, and the four who would perpetrate some of the worst murders in Edinburgh's folklore were together.

In November of 1827, "Old Donald", a long time resident of the guesthouse, died owing £3 in rent unpaid. At this time, it was illegal to use bodies for medical purposes in the country, but many were still required for training and research, and so the occupation of the "body snatchers", or "Resurrectionists" came to be, where graves would regularly be robbed of their freshly buried contents and sold to doctors for about £10. Burke and Hare are often referred to as "the grave robbers", but this they were not, for none of their victims ever made it as far as the graveyard before they took them.

Knowing that Old Donald's body was worth more than the rent he owed, they arranged to replace the corpse in the coffin with bark, and carted the poor cadaver off for sale to Dr Knox, of Surgeon's Square, for £7, 10 shillings, a good deal more than he owed. The ladies then suggested that the two should take up the Resurrectionist game, but Burke had other things in mind. He had no interest in the dirty, sly work of grave digging, when he could just get to the bodies earlier. So it was that when another tenant took ill in the lodgings, failing to pay rent and also to scare off other guests, Burke talked Hare into assisting while he suffocated the last dregs of life out of the poor fellow and placed him in the tea chest for transportation to Dr Knox, where £10 was procured for the fresh corpse. The body snatchers had become murderers.

Now, though, there was a conscious decision to be made. There were no more dead or dying making themselves readily available to the pair, which meant that if they were going to carry on in this game, they were going to have to start drumming up their own business. So it was that Abigail Simpson became their first real prey in February of 1828. The old woman was lured to their lodgings, gotten blind drunk and then suffocated to death in their now familiar manner, whereafter £10 was procured from Dr Knox for her corpse. Next they went for a younger victim, Mary Haldane, an experienced prostitute, whose body was worth even more than the previous-best £10.

Seeing that the better the bodies were, the more they were worth, Burke and Hare became arrogant and indiscriminate in their murders. In April 1828, young prostitute Mary Paterson was murdered. But the murder was bungled and her friend, Janet Brown, allowed to escape the scene prior to the act. Mary, though, was not so lucky and soon found her way to Dr Knox's table. However, her body was absolutely perfect and renowned throughout the underworld, so much so that one of Knox's students even recognised her, but Knox saw only a flawless subject, and even had an artist record her lifeless body before she was dissected.

What followed was a horrific reign of terror upon the streets of Edinburgh, while the pair, led by Burke's ego, murdered their way through the Edinburgh underworld, taking the daughter of Mary Haldane to join her mother, an old Irish woman and her deaf mute grandson in one swoop, and Burke even killing a horse that refused to carry some of their macabre cargo to the doctor's for them. It seemed that blood agreed with the pair.

A row happened between the two when Hare took it upon himself to kill and sell an old woman while Burke was on holiday, which resulted in Burke and McDougal moving out of the lodgings. But the murderous partnership was to continue. The pair killed Helen's cousin Ann on a visit from Falkirk and they were back at it again, killing unknown numbers of victims before they started to make mistakes too big to be missed.

The murder of Daft Jamie, a well-known local idiot, was one, but the worst was that of Mrs Doherty. Being so arrogant as to keep her body in a room where guests who had seen her the night before came in and found her, the couple went straight to the police, against Helen's vehement pleas for mercy.

Their trial took place on 24 December 1828, but only Burke and McDougal were tried, as Hare and Log turned state's evidence in return for a pardon of their own parts in the crimes. Burke was sentenced to death, while McDougal's verdict was the peculiarly Scottish "not proven". On 28 January 1829 Burke was hanged before the amassed Edinburgh Mob, who demanded the same of Hare, thus causing him to flee the city forever, until he died destitute in a cellar in London, having been blinded in a previous narrow escape from death in a limekiln when his identity had been uncovered. And that was the end of Edinburgh's most famous murderers, Burke and Hare.

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