Recent disclosures that a human body could sell for some 1 ˝ million dollars, if it were “organ complete” and free of disease, has inspired a number of professional and amateur thieves to become body snatchers, but the practice is actually an old one, thriving centuries ago.
The most infamous of body snatchers, and among the most unwise, was William Burke (1792-1829), an Irish laborer who emigrated to Scotland in 1817. There he eventually opened a used clothing store in Edinburgh and, far more importantly, rented a room from William Hare, a fellow Irishman and owner of a boardinghouse catering to vagrants and elderly pensioners. This was the era of the body snatchers or resurrectionists, those moonlighting grave-robbers who supplied anatomists with bodies for dissection. Body snatchers were subject to heavy fines and deportation, but if they left the corpse’s clothing behind, they could not be convicted of robbery or any serious offense. Cadavers were much in demand at the time, no questions asked, for only the relatively few bodies of men executed for murder were then legally available for the dissection table and anatomy was first coming into its own as a science.
It was in 1827 that Burke and his partner embarked upon their career. One of Hare’s lodgers – an old man named Donald – had died owing him four pounds, and the landlord convinced Burke that they had stumbled upon an easy source of income. Ripping the cover off the coffin in which parish authorities had sealed Donald, the pair hid his body in a bed and filled the coffin with tanner’s bark, resealing it and later selling the cadaver for seven pounds ten shillings to Dr. Robert Knox, who ran an anatomy school in Surgeon’s Square. Burke and Hare soon expanded their operation. Another boarder lingered too long at death’s door and they helped him through, smothering the man with a pillow and selling his body to Knox for ten pounds. Hare and his wife, and Burke and his mistress, Helen McDougal, proceeded to dispatch from fourteen to twenty-eight more unfortunates in similar fashion, receiving up to fourteen pounds for each body. They were careful to smother their victims, leaving no marks of violence, so that t would appear that they were merely graverobbers. Whenever the boardinghouse supply ran low, they lured victims there, usually choosing old hags, drunks and prostitutes, whom they often plied with drink. If a candidate offered too much resistance for a pillow, Burke would pin him down while Hare smothered him, holding his hands over the victim’s nose and mouth.
But the murderers got careless. First, they killed Mary Paterson, a voluptuous eighteen-year-old, so free with her body that it was quickly recognized by Knox’s young medical students, who even preserved it before dissection as a perfect example of female pulchritude. Then they did in “Daft Jamie” Wilson, a familiar, good-natured imbecile who made his living running errands on the streets of Edinburgh. Finally, the suspicions of neighbors aroused, police caught them with the body of a missing woman named Mary Dougherty. Hare turned State’s evidence at the ensuing trial, which began on Christmas Eve, he and his wife freed, and Helen McDougal discharged for lack of evidence. Burke for some reason foolishly refused to give state’s evidence. He was convicted and hanged a month later on January 28, 1829, before a crowd of some thirty thousand. A word the murderer contributed to the language was heard as he stood on the scaffold in the Grassmarket, spectators exhorting the executioner with cries of “Burke him, Burke him!” (i.e., don’t hang but smother or strangle him to death). The crowd wanted to burke Hare, too, despite his immunity, but the real brains behind the operation escaped then and is believed to have died of natural causes many years later in England where he lived under an assumed name. Throughout the trial Hare’s wife had sat in court holding their baby in an attempt to win sympathy, even though the child suffered from whooping cough. Burke, who signed a post-trial confession admitting to some sixteen murders, was himself dissected at Edinburgh University Medical School following his hanging, his remains viewed by tens of thousands, and for all anyone knows his skeleton might still be propped up in some corner of some classroom there. As for Dr. Knox, the crowd turned against him after the execution, threatening to destroy his school, and only police protection saved his life. Despite his protestations of innocence, he was ostracized and eventually forced to leave town.
William Burke was not the first person to murder for cadavers, or even to murder for this motive by suffocation; two female nurses, Helen Torrence and Jean Valdig, had been hanged for this crime in 1752. But with all the publicity Burke’s name came to literally signify the act and figuratively to mean “stifle or hush up” in any manner, the usage perhaps strengthened later by the Fenian murder of Thomas Henry Burke, undersecretary for Ireland. It is a little ironic that Burke’s name, in the form of to burke, burke, and burking, should be so remembered, for Hare probably did more of the actual suffocating, his confederate’s greater strength needed to hold their victims down. Burke and Hare are thought to be the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatchers. As a result of their Hare “anatomy murders,” existing dissection laws were modified, making it easier for anatomists to obtain bodies without resorting to illegal means. Until recently, anyway.