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Chapter 3 Burking Invented Joseph the Miller, Abigail Simpson Who was the first murder victim? According to Burke, it was Abigail Simpson, from the nearby village of Gilmerton, who came to lodge in Hare’s house. She sold salt and camstone, a kind of limestone popular for whitening windowsills and stairs. After drinking for much of the night with Hare, she lay, insensible, “on her back in the bed,” and Hare “then said that they would try and smother her in order to dispose of her body to the doctors.” According to Hare, the first murder was Joseph, a miller, also one of his lodgers, who was “very ill, lying in bed, and could not speak sometimes.” Hare and his wife were “uneasy” that rumors of “fever in the house” would keep away other lodgers; moreover, Joseph was apparently close to death, and so Burke and Hare “agreed that they should suffocate him for the same purpose.” Sir Walter Scott, who took an active interest in murder cases as both lawyer and novelist, was inclined toward Hare’s version of events. “For there was an additional motive to reconcile them to the deed in the miller’s case,” he noted, “the fear that the apprehension entertained through the fever would discredit the house, and the consideration that there was, as they might think, less crime in killing a man who was to die at any rate. . . . It is a step in the history of the crime.” To the psychology of the murders we may add considerations of method. In Joseph’s case, Burke “got a small pillow and laid it across Joseph ’s mouth, and Hare lay across the body to keep down the arms and 54 Chapter 3 legs.” It seems likely that they soon decided that it was dangerous to use a pillow. We do not know whether it was a feather pillow, that favorite device of later detective stories, or whether Burke and Hare were concerned that it might provide a chain of evidence that could link them to the corpse. But there was little reason for Burke to carry pillows around the lodging house—that was surely Margaret Hare’s responsibility—and if other lodgers drew a connection between Burke’s pillow toting and a subsequent dead body, it would cause far more “uneasiness” than any fever. So it seems likely that Joseph was killed first, with the aid of the pillow, but that afterward the two men employed the method Burke described in Abigail Simpson’s death: “Hare clapped his hand on her mouth and nose,” and Burke “laid himself across her body, in order to prevent her making any disturbance.” This was the method that, a year later, would become known as “burking ,” after its most famous practitioner. It was an ingenious method, practically undetectable until the era of modern forensics. Burke’s weight on the victim’s rib cage prevented the diaphragm and lungs from expanding, while Hare’s covering the nose and mouth prevented even the slightest air flow into the lungs. As the Caledonian Mercury explained to its readers , clearly relishing the anatomical detail, “At every inspiration, the ribs of the chest or thorax are dilated by muscular action to an extent of about one-fifth larger than immediately after expiration and, in cases of a full or strong inspiration, to nearly one-third. A partial vacuum is thus produced, and the atmospheric air rushes in by the trachea to fill the cavity in the diaphragm, the recipient of the air inspired, and to oxygeneate the blood.” Without that vacuum produced by the expansion of the diaphragm and rib cage, air could not be drawn into the body. “In murder upon scientific principles, therefore,” the Caledonian Mercury went on, “the first point is to compress the ribs of the thorax, so as to prevent this dilatation; and if the compression be powerful, it will of itself be sufficient to destroy life in a few minutes, without the application of pressure to the throat at all, and without leaving on the body any external marks of violence.” Nor need the compression be long continued, “for independently of the necessity of respiration to the support of life, the blood, for want of oxygen, instantly becomes poisoned, and this of itself would occasion immediate death.” Burke’s account confirms this, for, he said, once they had “kept the mouth and nose shut a very few minutes,” while compressing the chest, the...

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