Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Edinburgh Body Snatchers: Murder at Halloween

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Take the Cautionary Tales listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCHGGZ3 In 1827, Edinburgh, Scotland was a world centre for anatomical study, but there was a shortage of cadavers for medical students to dissect. Two men, William Burke and William Hare, spotted a grim business opportunity. They began sourcing bodies - by any means possible... In this episode of Cautionary Tales - recorded live at the Podcast Show in London - true crime meets economics. Tim Harford's hair-raising story explores a question: what makes some markets acceptable, and others repugnant? For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Hello dear listeners, it is Tim Harford here with an exciting idea up my sleeve. I want to know if you'd be interested in joining a cautionary club with additional member only content. And with that in mind, the Cautionary Tales team and I have put together a survey. We'd like to find out exactly what kind of content you're keen to get your hands on. Would you like a cautionary newsletter? Perhaps some extra conversations, like my last one with Adam Grant? Or maybe you have another idea for us all together? The link is in the episode description and it will take you just a few short minutes

to answer. So please do take a moment to fill it out and let us know your thoughts. We are really keen to hear from you. Thank you. Hello. I have a frighteningly good episode of Co-Optionary Tales for you this Halloween. It was recorded in front of a live audience at the podcast show in London and I shared the stage with actors and our sound supremo Pascal Wise, who not only created grisly sound effects by hand, but played the trombone too. I hope you enjoy this nightmarish marriage of true crime and economics. October 31st, Halloween, in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828.

A short, middle-aged woman walks into a bar where a man sits drinking. She asks the barkeeper, Can you help me? I've come to Edinburgh to see my son, he's working here. But when I went to the last address he gave me, the landlady said he left three days ago. I don't know where he is and he doesn't know I'm here. I've no money and no place to stay. The man who's drinking at the bar looks up. Wait a minute, you're from Ireland. I can tell by your accent.

Yes, I'm from Donegal. My name's Maggi Doherty. No way, I'm a Doherty too and I'm'm family and Donnygall, sure we must be related. Let me buy you a wee drink. What an amazing coincidence. Hey, Maggi, you must stay the night with me and my wife. The man takes Maggi Doherty back to a room in a shared house, sixteen feet by seven. In the room is a wooden bed, with straw for a mattress and a pile of straw to the side. He gives her a drink and some food and another drink. Then he says,

Ragnarf, I need to pop out now. I'll be back. Maggi Dottie goes in search of someone to talk to. She pokes her head around the door of the neighbouring room, introduces herself to the woman there and tells her sad story. You know, I really should be looking for my son. I'll go out searching now. Leave it till tomorrow, says the neighbour. Halloween's a busy night.

You don't know the city and obviously had a lot to drink. You may not easily find your way back here. Oh, you're right. I'll just wait till Mr. Doherty gets in. Mr. Doherty? Says the neighbour. Mr. Doherty? My relative. Your neighbour, he lives in that room there. He's not called Doherty, says the neighbour. He's called Burke. The two women look at each other, confused.

Does Maggi start to sense that something is wrong? Perhaps not. She is very drunk. Mr Doherty, or rather Mr. Burke, comes back. He's with a friend and both their wives. The four of them take Maciej Doherty back to Burke's room. Then they shove Maciej Doherty down to the bed. Burke pins her down, while the other man clamps his hands over her nose and mouth. She can't move. She can't call for help.

She can't breathe. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Quaushnoy Tales, live in London. APPLAUSE November 1827, a year before Maggi Dottie's fateful Halloween, William Hare has a problem. Hare runs a cramped and cruddy boarding house in a slum part of Edinburgh's Old Town where the buildings are packed tightly together and the smells from the nearby tanneries compete with those from sewage hurled from windows into the street. One of Hare's lodgers has just died and the dead man

seems to have no relatives or friends to take the body away. Hare tells the local authority and they say we'll get it and bury it in a pauper's grave. But a full day passes and nobody comes. That body's taking up space, I could be renting out! Hare complains to his friend William Burke. Burke and Hare have both heard rumors that it's possible to sell human bodies to medical schools. Could they sell Hare's dead lodger? Neither has any idea how to go about it. So they make their way to another more prosperous part of Edinburgh, where the medical schools have their quarters.

They ask around, but nervously, they assume that what they're doing must be against the law. Are you a student? We've heard that medical schools are sometimes in need of, er... human bodies? You'll want to see Dr Knox. Number 10, Surgeon Square. Burke and Hare make their way to Surgeon Square and find number 10. One of the doctor's assistants opens the door. The doctor's not here now. Ah, you have a subject. Bring it after dark.

Back at Hare's boarding house, someone from the local authority has been round with a coffin and put the body in it. Soon a porter will come to take the coffin away. Burke and Hare have no time to lose if they want to get some cash for their dead lodger. They gently pry up the nails on the coffin lid, haul the body out and stuff it in a sack. And when the porter comes, he's bound to notice if the coffin's empty. They'd better put something heavy in it. They go to a nearby tannery where piles of bark are crushed for the tannin used to make leather hides. Burke and Hare take a load of the bark, they tip it into the coffin, nail down the lid again. Then they wait for dark to fall.

The two friends heave the sack with the lodger's body through the streets of Edinburgh, back to the doctor's place. Come on in then. You're new, I take it. Well, up the stairs and lay the subject out on that table there for the doctor's place. Come on in then. You're new, I take it. Well, up the stairs and lay the subject out on that table there for the doctor. Oh, and you'll have to take the night shirt off it. Burke and Hare take the night shirt off the body. Into the room comes Dr Knox, a striking figure in his mid-thirties, prematurely bald with just one eye.

Smallpox took the other and always flamboyantly dressed with his gold chains and embroidered waistcoat. Dr. Knox glances at the naked body, nods his head and says, let's see seven pounds and ten shillings. Seven pounds and ten shillings. Seven pounds and ten shillings? That's about what you'd earn for three months of hard manual labour. Burke and Hare can hardly believe their luck. The assistant gives them the money and escorts them back to the door. Is nobody going to ask them where they got the body? Or who it was?

Or what gives them the right to sell it? Apparently not. Can it really be that easy? Apparently so. We'll be glad to see you again when you have another body to dispose of. Burke and Hare had assumed that what they were doing must be illegal. It was not. The law said a dead person's possessions pass on to the next of kin. That's why Dr Knox's assistant insisted on the night shirt being taken off the body. Legally that night shirt must belong to someone,

even if it wasn't clear who. Dr. Knox could get in trouble if he bought it. But the body itself was a different matter. When a person died, their next of kin didn't own the body. In the eyes of the law, a human body was not a thing that could be owned at all, and if it couldn't be owned, then logically speaking, it couldn't be stolen. Burke and Hare had broken no law by taking the lodger's body. Dr Knox had broken no law in buying it.

Lecturers like Dr Knox needed bodies to teach their students. For years the law had given medical schools the bodies of criminals who had been hanged. Indeed knowing you would be publicly dissected was seen as part of the punishment. But more and more people were training as doctors. And nowhere near enough criminals were being sentenced to death. By the 1820s a black market had sprung up to meet the demand for bodies. Some like Hare's Lodger were taken straight from their death beds to the medical school. But most were supplied by grave robbers or resurrectionists.

They'd sneak into graveyards in the dead of night and dig up her recently buried corpse. As nobody owned those bodies, it wasn't stealing, as long as they took the clothes off the body and put them back in the coffin. There was one law the resurrectionists were breaking. It was illegal to violate a sepulcher. But the punishments weren't severe and prosecutions were rare. The authorities mostly looked the other way. No one wanted to put the medical schools out of business. Still, perhaps there was a better way. Some people floated ideas to create a legal supply of cadavers, as the author

Lisa Rosner describes in her book on Birkenhair. One proposal was to let universities have the bodies of people who died in poor houses. These people had relied on handouts from the public purse, the argument went. Surely we could dissect them when they died, instead of spending yet more on a pauper's burial. Great idea, said the radical politician Henry Hunt. How about we start with the people who've benefited most from public money during their lives? Now I would recommend, no listen, listen, I would recommend in the first place that the bodies of all our kings be dissected instead of expending seven or eight, seven or eight

hundred thousand pounds of the public money for their internment. Next, I would dissect all our hereditary legislators. Hunts' objections struck a chord with the public. Poor people couldn't afford to get treated by doctors, so why should their bodies be the ones doctors trained on? But what were the alternatives? Another more imaginative proposal came from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Create a fully legalised, regulated market. Let living people sell to medical schools the right to use their body after they die. It wouldn't be wise, they added, for such a market to let relatives sell bodies after death.

That might create a legally sanctioned incentive for murder. But of course, there already was a legally murky market, and the incentive for murder that it created was all too clear. A few weeks have passed since Burke and Hare received their £7.10 shillings and they sensed the possibility of another payday because another of William Hare's lodgers has fallen gravely ill. An old man with no known relatives. He's delirious with fever, too weak to speak. He is going to die, isn't he? Hopefully soon. What's taking him so long? Is there any way he might be encouraged to hurry up?

Burke presses a pillow onto the man's face, while hair pins him down to stop him struggling. It doesn't take long. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. Welcome gentlemen, take your seats. Today we will consider the causes and treatment of lateral curvature of the human spine. Dr Robert Knox ran the most popular medical school in Edinburgh. In the winter of 1827, he had 247 students, almost twice as many as his nearest competitor. That's partly because Knox was such a brilliant teacher. As one writer put it, In gifts of speech, he was unequalled. his harmonious voice, his clearness, his logical precision, the enormous amount of information which flowed without effort from his lips.

Knox was also snooty, even cruel, when he described his rivals. He mocked them, when they didn't have enough cadavers to teach with and had to use illustrations instead. Gentlemen, would you pay to study at their school of pictorial anatomy? That's the other reason Knox's school was so successful. He ensured his students had a steady supply of corpses. Knox would assign six students to each body. They'd rotate around, taking turns to practice with a scalpel, forceps or saw, peeling back the skin and fat to examine the muscles and ligaments on the limbs. Cutting through the ribs to explore the lungs and the heart, trying out specific

surgeries such as extracting bladder stones. As another eminent surgeon put it, It is only when we have acquired dexterity on the dead subject that we can be justified in interfering with the living. Students knew they could rely on Dr Knox to give them that chance to acquire dexterity. And grave robbers knew that when they brought a body to Knox, he wouldn't haggle too hard or fob you off with a credit note. He'd give you a fair price and prompt payment in cash. By April 1828, William Burke and William Hare were becoming regulars at Dr Knox's place

on Surgeon's Square, after the old man had brought the doctor an old woman, and a middle-aged man who clearly had jaundice and could plausibly have died from that. They knew the routine now. They'd bring the body naked in a tea chest. They'd follow the doctor's assistant up the stairs, lay the body out on the dissection table for the doctor to examine. But the latest body was quite unlike the others they'd brought so far. This naked corpse was that of a young girl, maybe 18 years old. Young and beautiful.

The doctor's assistant took one look at her and... I know that girl. She's called Mary. She lives in Cannon Gate. I saw her a couple of weeks ago and she looked in perfect health. The body was cool, but not yet stiff. Clearly the girl had not been dead for more than a few hours. Where did you get that body?

Burke and Hare must have felt the panic rising in their chests. Up to now, they'd actually been pretty smart. They'd killed people who nobody would notice were missing, who were old or obviously diseased. But perhaps they'd been smart only by accident. Because now they'd gotten murdered a healthy young woman whose face was known around town. Standing in front of the doctor and his assistant. They must suddenly have realised how reckless that was. Burke tried to think on his feet. Um, we, um, we bought it. Yeah, that's, we bought the body, uh, from an old woman,

uh, on the, on the cannon gate. Doctor Knox looked at them. Perhaps he believed them. Perhaps he didn't. Either way. Hmm. Well, that's fine, gentlemen. Shall we say £8? In the 1990s, the economist Alvin Roth became fascinated by kidneys. When a person has kidney failure their life can sometimes be saved by a transplant. But that requires not only a donor, but a donor whose kidney matches in terms of blood type and tissue type. It's possible for a living

person to donate a kidney. We have two and most of the time we can function just as well with only one. Sometimes a family member will offer to donate a kidney to save their loved one's life but often, frustratingly, the would-be donor isn't a match. Sometimes a patient will get lucky, a total stranger will make the offer motivated by pure altruism. But there's one thing a patient can't do, pay someone to give them a kidney. Thinking as an economist, Roth wondered, why not?

You have a sick, wealthy person who needs a kidney. You have a poor, healthy person who's willing to lose a kidney for the right price. Two consenting adults who want to engage in a transaction that will benefit them both. Why should we stop them? And yet we do stop them. Selling kidneys is against the law in almost every country in the world. Roth is curious. What exactly is it we object to about a legally sanctioned market in kidneys? Perhaps we're concerned that sellers wouldn't fully understand the risks, but could regulate the market to make sure consent was informed.

Maybe we worry that people might be coerced into selling their kidney, but we already have safeguards to ensure that family members who come forward are not under duress. Or maybe the concern is about where it could lead. Legalised kidney sales and before you know it, you might have mortgage lenders requiring your kidney as extra collateral. Again says Roth, you could write laws to guard against that. But even if you imagine laws and regulations that are completely watertight, Roth found people still don't want it to be legal for others to sell their kidneys, even if they can't articulate exactly why. Roth realised he'd stumbled on an idea that didn't have a name in the economic literature.

In 2007, he published a paper that gave it a name. Repugnant Markets. These are markets we ban because we just don't like the idea of there being a market. Makes us go yuck. Roth pointed to other markets that people find repugnant. In many countries, sex is like donating a kidney. It's fine to do it for love, but against the law to do it for money. Often though, when we ban a repugnant market, we force it underground. There's a global trade in kidneys. And banning prostitution doesn't tend to

stop it happening. Societies must then decide how hard to actually try to stamp the market out. Sometimes the answer is not very hard at all. Paying for sex in many places is technically illegal, but tacitly tolerated. The same could be said of that more literally underground activity, robbing graves for bodies in 1820s Edinburgh. Nobody wanted to mount a serious crackdown on violating sepulchres. But nor was there any appetite for setting up the kind of legalised market in Cadavers suggested by the Royal College of Physicians. The thought was far too repugnant. Faced with a hard choice, the authorities tried to ignore it. But Burke and Hare were about to make it impossible

to look the other way. On the streets of Edinburgh's Old Town, one of the best known characters was a teenage boy whom the locals called Daft Jamie. He spent his days wandering barefoot, singing, gabbling nonsense and telling jokes and riddles. Sometimes other boys made fun of him and Jamie got tearful. But he'd never fight them because only bad boys fight. People liked Daft Jamie. They gave him little gifts of money, food or clothes. One day William Hare's wife came across Jamie looking for his mother.

Come with me, she said. Back at the boarding house, she left Jamie with Hare and a bottle of whiskey and went to fetch Burke. She ushered Burke into the room and locked the door. At Surgeon's Square, Dr Knox's assistant recognised the body at once. I know who that is. That's Daft Jamie. No, no, no. I'm sure you must be mistaken. It can't possibly be anyone you know. Still, let's prepare this one for the students quickly now, shall we? By the time people started to notice that no one had seen Daft Jamie for a while, the

evidence of the murder had been cut up into tiny pieces and disposed of. Burke and Hare had got away with it again. They must have thought they could get away with anything. Then, on Halloween in 182828 they made one mistake too many. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. Like many young couples in Edinburgh's crowded old town, Anne and James Gray couldn't afford to rent a whole room, so they sublet space in a room from someone else, William Burke and his wife. The Grays and their infant son had been lodging with the Burks for just a couple of weeks when, on Halloween, William Burke came home with a guest he'd met at

a bar, Madge Doherty. Burke said to Anne, Right, I want you to stay here for the night. I need your bed for my, erm, wee relative here, Maggi. Where are we supposed to go? Oh, don't worry. My friend here's got a wee lodging house. You can sleep out tonight. Anne and James weren't happy, but they left. When they returned in the morning, there was no sign of Maggi,

and Burke seemed strangely flustered. Have a drink. Burke poured them glasses of whiskey, and then he started pouring whiskey all over the pile of straw in the corner of the room. What are you doing that for? You'll make the whole room stink of whiskey. I just want to empty the whiskey bottle so that I can, that I can go out and get some more.

Very odd. Was there, perhaps, some other smell Burke was anxious to disguise? The greys kept their clothes near that pile of straw and crossed the room to get her infant son a clean pair of stockings. Get away from there! Burke's behavior was getting stranger and stranger. For the rest of the day either Burke or his wife sat close to the pile of straw, eyeing the grays suspiciously. Anne later told the police.

I thought there was something that was not right. At last, just before darkfall, Anne got her chance to investigate. Anne later told the police. I thought there was something that was not right. At last, just before darkfall, Anne got her chance to investigate. Burke had left the house to run some kind of errand. Then Burke's wife stepped out for a moment too. The first thing I got on lifting up the straw was the woman's right arm. Anne and her husband lifted more of the straw to reveal the head with blood around the mouth. They both recognized the woman

they'd met briefly the night before, Maggi Doherty. Anne and James Grey pack up their belongings, grab their infant son, make for the door. On their way out of the house they meet Burke's wife coming back in. What the hell's going on? There's a corpse in the room! Burke's wife falls to her knees. Don't tell anyone, she begs. We'll give you money. God forbid! The Grays push past Burke's wife and go to a police station to tell their story. By the time a policeman arrives at Burke's room, the body's

gone, but there's blood on the straw. And the neighbours say they've just seen Burke and another man taking out a heavy-looking tea chest. If that was a body, thinks the policeman, where might they have taken it? The policeman knocks on the door at 10 Surgeons Square. Yes, indeed. I've just taken delivery of a cadaver in a tea chest. You'd like to see it, of course. Come on in. As the economist Alvin Roth discovered, people find it easy to discuss the potential costs of legalising a market they find repugnant, such as a market in kidneys. It's harder to get them to think about the costs of keeping that market banned.

But those costs are real. The people who'd be willing to sell a kidney have to do without the money they could have earned. Of course, we hate to think of people selling a kidney only because they're poor and desperate, but banning kidney sales doesn't make the poverty and desperation go away. Then there are the people who'd like to buy a kidney, but can't. They end up spending countless hours tied to a dialysis machine. If they're lucky, if they're unlucky, they end up dead.

Still, that widespread feeling of repugnance isn't something you can just wish away. Roth asked himself, is there a way to create a mechanism that works like a market, so it gets more kidneys to more patients, but that doesn't trigger a repugnance response. Roth helped to design kidney exchanges. Imagine that you and I both need a kidney, and both our partners are willing to donate. My partner's kidney isn't a match for me, but it is for you. And your partner's kidney isn't a match for you, but it is for me. So we swap donors. Roth's exchanges take this simple swap and make it work on a bigger scale.

They can link dozens of donors in one chain. It's like a market for kidneys, but instead of paying with money, you pay with a willing donor. Nobody finds it repugnant. Roth won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in designing new kinds of markets. Perhaps if Alvin Roth had been around in 1820s Edinburgh, he could have found some equally clever way to get more cadavers to more medical schools. Something like the idea of the Royal College of Physicians to reward the living in exchange for their body after death. The absence of such a mechanism had costs no idea how Maggi Dochti ended up dead. Sure, none at all. They were all drinking and singing and dancing, he says, with William Hare and both their wives, and then they suddenly noticed Maggi wasn't there anymore.

Sure, she must have crawled into the pile of straw and, you know, died? A likely story. But could the public prosecutor prove beyond reasonable doubt that Burke and Hare and their wives were guilty of murder? Forensic science was less advanced than today. The doctors said the state of Maggi Roti's corpse was consistent with her having been forcibly suffocated. They couldn't say for certain that she didn't choke to death on her own vomit.

In Scottish law, it was notoriously hard to get a jury to convict for murder. Other legal systems offer a jury just two possible verdicts – guilty or not guilty. Scottish law adds a third possibility. Not proven. It means we think you probably did it, but we're not quite sure enough to send you to the gallows. The only way to guarantee at least one conviction, the prosecutor reluctantly decided, was to cut a deal with one of the accused. Testify and we'll let you off. William Hare jumped at the chance to turn King's evidence.

Under Scottish law, a man couldn't testify against his wife. So Hare's wife was off the hook too. With immunity from prosecution, Hare confessed to the murder of Maggi Doherty and Daphne Jamie and young Mary and that sick old man in the lodging house and the old woman and the jaundiced man and that old grandma and a 12 year old grandchild and and 16 murders in all. The police were astonished but in 15 of those cases the evidence had long ago been dissected away. Only Maggi Doherty's body remained. And so it was for the murder of Maggi Doherty that Burke and his wife stood trial. Burke's wife, the jury found?

Not proven. Burke, though? Guilty. The judge left no doubt about what he thought. In the whole history of civilized society, there never has been exhibited such a system of barbarous and savage iniquity or anything at all corresponding in atrocity to this cold, hypocritical, calculating and bloody murder. One of the most monstrous delineations of human depravity. William Burke was sentenced to hang.

Burke and Hare's murders focused the minds of politicians. They had to remove the incentive for robbing graves and committing murder. They passed the Anatomy Act, which gave medical schools the right to take bodies from workhouses, prisons or hospitals if no one had claimed them within 48 hours of death. Campaigning politicians continued to object. The law was commandeering the bodies of the poor, they said, to train doctors whose services only the rich could afford. But was there a better alternative? If Alvin Roth had been around in the 1820s to think that question through, what might he have suggested? Roth gives us a clue in his paper Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets.

He quotes an editorial from the Lancet in 1824, four years before the Edinburgh murders, which argued for ending the historical practice of giving medical schools the bodies of hanged murderers. It only keeps up the prejudice against dissection, they wrote. That would have been a good start in overcoming repugnance, says Roth. Instead of seeing dissection as punishment, you try to reframe it as an altruistic contribution to advancing medical knowledge.

Many people see it that way today when they leave their bodies to science. The present-day University of Edinburgh, for instance, assures potential donors that Were it not for such acts of selflessness, it would be impossible to maintain Scotland's high educational reputation in the medical professions, and for this we are extremely grateful. and for this we are extremely grateful. Back in 1828, William Burke was sentenced to hang and be dissected. No clever attempt at reframing there, thousands of people queued to see Burke's naked body on the dissection table. In museums in Edinburgh, you can still see his skeleton and a pocketbook made from his

skin. In the university's archives is a letter written in Burke's blood. But what about William Hare and the wives? People in Edinburgh were outraged they'd got off scot-free. All were chased out of town by angry mobs. A mob gathered too outside the home of Dr Knox. They hung his effigy from a tree. Why hadn't he asked more questions about the bodies? He could have stopped the murders at an earlier stage. Knox was unrepentant.

He carried on his lectures as usual, talking over the shouts of protestors outside his lecture room. Ignore them, he told his students. The assailants of our peace may be big in menace, but they are too cowardly an act to confront such a phalanx body of gentlemen as I see before me." Dr Knox eventually moved to London, where his notoriety posed less of a nuisance. When he died, aged 71, he left clear instructions about what should happen to his body.

instructions about what should happen to his body. Knox had always insisted on the importance of cadavers to train up doctors. So did he make his own final selfless contribution to advancing medical science? He did not. Lay me to rest in the churchyard, where the wild flowers bloom, and the sun might shine on the green sod above my grave. This live edition of Cautionary Tales was written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. Tonight you heard the voice talents of Ed Gohan and Stella Harford.

Our sound designer, composer and live trombonist was Pascal Wise. Additional sound design from Tom Berry. Sarah Nix edited the script. Thanks to Ryan Dilley. The show was produced by Alice Fiennes with Marilyn Ross. Thanks to Avril Tucker, the teams at TEG Live Europe, The Podcast Show and Aztec. Horseshoe Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review. If you want to hear the show ad free, sign up on the show page of Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Hello dear listeners, it is Tim Harford here with an exciting idea up my sleeve. I want

to know if you'd be interested in joining a cautionary club with additional member-only content. And with that in mind, the Cautionary Tales team and I have put together a survey. We'd like to find out exactly what kind of content you're keen to get your hands on. Would you like a cautionary newsletter? Perhaps some extra conversations like my last one with Adam Grant? Or maybe you have another idea for us all together? The link is in the episode description and it will take you just a few short minutes to answer. So please do take a moment to fill it out and let us know your thoughts. We are really keen to hear from you. Thank you.