THE ANATOMY MURDERS OF BURKE AND HARE (1828)

LOCATION: Edinburgh

PERPETRATORS: William Burke and William Hare

MOTIVATION: Murder

BACKGROUND: Ober the course of a ten-month period, from February to November 1828, William Burke and William Hare murdered 16 people in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a case that would become known as the Anatomy Murders.

Up until 1832, when the law was changed, partly in response to the Barke and Hare murders, there were few ways for doctors to obtain human bodies for the purpose of medical research. At the same time, a rapid rise in the population of Britain was occurring, which meant that more doctors were needed and medical schools were expanding.

Resurrectionists were certainly at work in Edinburgh during the 1820's and it was not unusual for the relatives of a recently deceased person to mount vigil over their grave to prevent the body being stolen.

On November 29, 1827, an elderly tenant with no known relatives died of natural causes in the lodging house run but Hare and one way for Hare to recoup the money was to sell the body to the medical school.

The next opportunity to make easy money presented itself to Burke and Hare the following February when another of Hare's lodgers fell ill, when the man began to recover, Burke and Hare took matter into their own hands, plying him with whiskey until he became unconscious, at which point one of them smothered him with a pillow while the other lay across his chest.

Once they had crossed the line into murder, they began to kill regularly, mostly targeting people who had come to stay in the lodging house or those they met elsewhere.

The murderers went with the porter so that they could collect the money they were owed from Knox´s assistants. Over the course of the spring and summer, they sold a succession of bodies to Knox in this way, with no questions being asked.

In October they murdered 18-year-old James Wilson, who suffered from some form of mental disability and was a well-known character on the streets.

The murder of James Wilson should have raised suspicions about Burke and Hare, but it was actually their next murder, the sixteenth, that finally led to their arrest.

The trial began on Christmas Eve  and considered the Docherty case first, with both William and Margaret Hare taking the stand to testify against Burke and MacDougal. Burke was sentenced to death and on January 28, 1829, he was hanged at a public execution in Edinburgh, the other three defendants were released from custody and forced to leave the city.

OUTCOME: A law passed in 1832, which allowed medical school to acquire bodies for anatomical research by legal means.