ARTICLE: Burke vs. Hare

When one flipped on the other to save his own skin.

You have probably heard of their names, but you probably only have a vague idea that they were bodysnatchers in ye olden times before cars were a thing.

Except that they weren’t. They didn’t steal dead bodies, not once that we know of. They created them.

Both men were from Northern Ireland, but they came from very different backgrounds. William Burke was born into relative comfort, and was doing all right for himself until he abandoned his wife and family in his early 20s and made for Scotland. There he shacked up with ‘Nelly’ McDougal, and he eventually became a successful enough cobbler in Edinburgh. Apparently he was hard-working and sang and danced for his customers, when he wasn’t roaming about with a bible under his arm.

Nobody knows exactly when William Hare was born, but he was born poor. He arrived in Edinburgh before Burke, having worked on the Union Canal like his future colleague. By 1827, he had got together with his now-dead landlord’s widow. She was apparently terrifying. The two couples met, moved into the same boarding house in Edinburgh when they returned to the city, and apparently proceeded to torment their neighbours with their drunken, loud behaviour.

And then the f**kery really started.

Dr. Robert Knox was not pretty look at. Having been disfigured by smallpox as a child, despite only having sight in one eye, he had served as a physician at the Battle of Waterloo, and become a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. Here, twice as day by 1827, he lectured on anatomy. He promised to dissect fresh specimens to educate future medical professionals, and he was none too shabby at it. There was a constant need for fresh bodies.

And so Edinburgh was in the midst of a grave-robbing epidemic, but people were going to extreme lengths to protect their recently departed loved ones. Everything from security guards, to mortsafes, to big blocks of stone on top of the grave until the body was no longer any use. Once they had decomposed past a certain point, surgeons couldn’t work with them.

A Mortsafe in Greyfriar’s kirkyard (Wikipedia)

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Events are fuzzy, but in about a year from 1827-1828, in an unknown sequence, Burke and Hare went from flogging the body of a dead lodger to recoup the rent he owed, to offing people at a rate of knots. They would come to contradict themselves and each other in the end, but in short, they murdered 16 people, fuelled by the prospect of money and apparently alcohol.

The one they nailed Burke for was the last: the killing of Margaret Docherty. (also known as Margaret Campbell) By the time his trial started on Christmas Eve, 1828, the pair were famous. The reason they didn’t nail Hare? He turned King’s evidence, and this is some of what what he said to condemn his friend:

Hare in the dock. A mask taken from life confirms that he was an odd looking bloke. As for his wife, she looks every bit as belligerent as described. So does the kid, but apparently it was suffering badly from whooping cough at the time and so we’ll give her a pass.

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‘WILLIAM HARE, Sworn in the usual manner by LORD MEADOWBANK.

It is… my duty to inform you, that whatever share you might have had in that transaction, if you now speak the truth, you can never afterwards be questioned in a Court of justice; but you are required, by the solemn oath you have now taken, to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and if you deviate from the truth, or prevaricate in the slightest degree, you may be quite assured that it will not pass without detection...’

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