The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes

Introduction: The Burke and Hare Murders

Introduction The Burke and Hare Murders Though neither was native to the city and both are long gone, William Burke and William Hare remain two of Edinburgh ’s most famous residents. Over a twelve-month period they killed sixteen people—three men, twelve women, and one child—in a murder spree which ended only with their arrest in November 1828. The motive was profit, for Edinburgh was a major center of medical education, and lecturers would pay high prices for “subjects,” that is, cadavers for dissection . The means was a form of suffocation. Assisted by Hare’s wife, Margaret , and Burke’s companion, Helen M’Dougal, the two men enticed their victims to drink to insensibility, then lay on top of them, compressing the chest while holding the mouth and nostrils closed: “burking,” it came to be called. The crimes were made possible in part by general conditions of the early nineteenth-century city, with its large mobile population and small police force.There were additional contributing circumstances: Margaret Hare ran a lodging house for transients in the busy immigrant district known as the West Port, and Dr. Robert Knox, the up-and-coming anatomist to whom the killers sold the cadavers, asked no questions. “Murder is no novel crime,” wrote one contemporary journalist, “it has been done in the olden time as well as now; but murder perpetrated in such a manner, upon such a system with such an object or intent, and accompanied by such accessory circumstances, was never, we believe, heard of before.” Its “deep tragical interest” made it “picturesquely horrifying,” and it has retained its hold on the popular imagination ever since. Burke and Hare are 2 Introduction famous among true-crime aficionados, forensic experts, and devotees of horror stories. They have been depicted in literature, on stage, and in film. And whenever questions are raised about the lucrative medical transplant industry, or the illicit harvesting of body parts, we are sure to hear the story of Burke and Hare. These were the first serial killings to capture media attention, sixty years before Jack the Ripper. The early nineteenth century was marked by an enormous expansion in the popular press, and news of horrific murders sold sensationally. Edinburgh newspapers eagerly followed the story, providing daily and even twice-daily reports and commentary. These reports were reprinted and embellished in the periodical press from London, Manchester, and Dublin to New York, Boston, and the Ohio frontier. Fulllength versions followed as soon as publishers could set the type. First off the press was Thomas Ireland’s West Port Murders, a series of twenty-fourpage pamphlets later combined in a single volume. It promised “An Authentic and Faithful History of the atrocious murders committed by burke and his associates; Containing every authentic particular, and a full Disclosure of all the extraordinary circumstances connected with them . . . Illustrated by Portraits drawn from Life, and other highly interesting Copperplate Engravings of Plans, Views, &c.” Ireland had not quite completed his print run when the publisher and bookseller Robert Buchanan issued his more upmarket book, Trial of William Burke and Helen M’Dougal. Advertised as the only “authentic edition” of the trial, it featured sworn testimony from the murderers’ neighbors and associates as well as a corrected version of the proceedings. Buchanan published two other sets of documents relating to the murders over the next few months, reprinting local newspaper articles and pamphlets not available elsewhere. An avid reading public scooped them up, binding them together with lurid illustrations , broadsheets, and caricatures. The murders became part of the lore of Edinburgh, a story steeped in the distinctive geography of the city, with its tall gray tenements “dispersed over a very irregular surface of ground,” wrote Thomas Shepherd in his 1831 collection of engravings, Modern Athens, “and placed partly in valleys, and partly on the tops and sloping sides of hills.” He compared the High Street, lying on the highest sloping ridge, to “the backbone of a herring,” with Edinburgh Castle at its head on the west end, and Holyrood Palace on its tail to the east. The ribs were formed by “the numerous The Burke and Hare Murders 3 narrow lanes,” called wynds or closes, running steeply down the hillside, and the Hares’ house in Tanner’s Close, southwest of the High Street, became notorious as the scene of most of the murders. Scottish writers have always been drawn...