True Crime Campfire - Unburied: Serial Killers Burke and Hare

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

In the 1820s, the city of Edinburgh was shaken to its core by a series of callous murders. Behind the killings was a story of death, greed, and willful blindness that provided the coldest possible answer to the question, “What is a human life worth?” Join us for the story of Scotland's most infamous serial killers. Sources:Alanna Knight, Burke & Hare: Scotland’s Serial KillersR. Michael Gordon, The Infamous Burke and HareFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In the 1820s, the city of Edinburgh was shaken to its core by a series of callous murders. Behind the killings was a story of death, greed, and willful blindings. that provided the coldest possible answer to the question, what is a human life worth?

This is Unburied, the crimes of Burke and Hair. So, campers, for this one, we're in my husband's home country. Edinburgh, Scotland, January 28, 1829. It was barely light at 8 a.m., the dawning sun obscured by clouds that poured cold rain down onto the cobblestone streets. But despite the nasty weather, a huge crowd had already gathered around the scaffold erected on the lawn market. Around 25,000 people packed tight up against the cordon of barriers and cops. Enterprising locals rented out their window views of the execution to come, and some daredebals, or I think we might ought to call them idiots, had clambered up onto the roofs of the tall buildings

all around, in dim light and in the middle of a rainstorm. People were that excited about watching William Burke die. When a group of police officers and magistrates led Burke out from the lockup on nearby Liberton Wind, the crowd went nuts. Burk him, they yelled, William Burke, having already made the leap from killer to adjective. And the crowd's rage wasn't just for Burke. Bring out hair, they shouted. Hang hair! And also, hang knocks! He's a noxious morsel.

Ooh, that's a good one. I'm using this. that. In just a few minutes, the hangman had the noose around Burke's neck. At this time in Britain, the condemned prisoner would signal to the hangman when they were ready for the drop, as long as they didn't take too long, and Burke waited just a few moments. He dropped and swiftly died and was left hanging from the scaffold for an hour. The idea behind public executions being that they were deterrence rather than entertainments, which I guess is why people brought picnic lunches. Right. When Burke was cut down to be put in his coffin, the crowd surged forward, and the police had to struggle to keep him from tearing the body apart.

Instead, hungry for souvenirs, the looky-lose had to content themselves with hacking off pieces of the hangman's rope or shaving little slivers of wood off the coffin. Burke's execution was a phenomenon, and his crimes had shocked the whole nation. They weren't his crimes alone, though. He famously worked with a partner. You hardly ever hear of just Burke. You always hear Burke and hair. Other than probably being born in Newry, we know basically nothing about William Hare's early life in Ireland, but I'm guessing it wasn't a rock and good time. John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy

at Edinburgh University, met both Burke and Hare while they were in jail, and described Hare as illiterate and uncouth, a tall, thin, quarrelsome, violent, and amoral character with scars from old wounds about his head and brow. He was the most brutal man I've ever seen. leering miscreant inspired, not fear, for the aspect was scarcely ferocious, but disgust in abhorrence. So utterly loathsome was the whole look of the reptile. Damn, dude, don't sugarcoat how you feel, right? That quote, by the way, as well as being a great example of a time when true crime writers felt no need to hold back, is from Atlanta Knight's book, Burk and Hare, Scotland's serial killers, one of our main sources for the story.

The charmer that was William Hare came to Scotland as a young man to construction work on the Union Canal, which connected Edinburgh with Glasgow. There were huge public works projects all across Britain in the 19th century, and a lot of the hard work in building them was performed by Irish laborers, which was one of the reasons why most big cities, including Edinburgh, were home to big Irish communities. And there weren't just more Irish people, there was more of everybody. Improved agriculture, healthcare, and sanitation set Britain up for a population boom all throughout the 19th century, and all of a sudden there were more people than the old cities could handle. They had to split up houses into flats,

where each little bitty room had four or more beds crammed in there. Low-income workers rented beds, not rooms, and if you were alone, you'd more often than not end up sleeping in a room full of strangers. If you were short on cash, you might even have to share your bed. No, thank you. I cannot even imagine. That sounds so awful. When Hare's job on the Union Canal ended in 1822, he mostly hired himself out as a farm worker in Pennycook and stayed at one of these cheap lodging houses run by a fellow Irishman by the name of Logue. The house was in a place called Tanner's Clothes, which backed onto tanneries and added some extra funk to the air of Edinburgh, which was already famous for its odor.

That's what every great city wants, right? Come to Edinburgh. You have to smell it to believe it. Yeah, it wasn't the Four Seasons, but William Hare did find something he liked there. his landlord's wife, Maggie Laird. Reporters at the time described hair and Maggie developing a friendship, but I'm sure their readers knew what they meant. It was the kind of friendship that led to Logue kicking hair the hell out of his lodging house. He was banging her. Yeah, we got that.

The 1800s were a bit more subtle than podcasters. But not long after that, in 1826, Logue died and hair swooped right back in, married Maggie, and took over Loke's place as the new landlord. This was definitely a step up from breaking his back in a field all day. As a landlord, he hardly had to do any work. I mean, job standards haven't changed in the last 200 or so years since. I swear to God, every apartment I live in has, like, painted over outlets and shit.

It's insane. And for him, the money, it wasn't spectacular or anything, more of a trickle than a steady stream, but it was enough to allow Hair to pursue his one true passion in life. Drinking. He wasn't alone in that, obviously. Actually, world history makes a lot more sense if you just assume that everybody was either hammered drunk or hung over for like 600 years. Which is true.

I mean, you couldn't trust the water, right? So beer was safer. And it had the added benefit of making everything funny. Exactly. Anyway, William and Maggie both drunk off their asses and screaming at each other in public was a common sight in Westport, because, you know, they like to keep it classy. When he needed a few extra coins, Harrow would drive a little car around the street selling fish.

Campers, would you buy mystery fish off the street from this man? You know, I would not, but maybe people back then enjoyed getting tapeworms. Maybe they appreciated the company. I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but they were all drunk. So I don't think they were inhibited by a drunk man on a car, howling, smelly, sea life teeming with parasites. I mean, okay, think of, think of, like, the best pizza you've ever eaten. It was at 2 a.m. in a dirty fucking, like, diner. Like, you were hammered. We all know it. Absolutely true. There were probably parasites in that pizza.

Soon, the smallest room in Harris lodging house, a closet he converted to a bedroom, would be occupied by a guy Hare met doing farm work, William Burke. Burke was born into a respectable working family in Ireland in 1792, received basic education, was in the army for a while, and married and had two children. So far, so good. But in 1818, at 26, Burke suddenly abandoned his family and ran away to Scotland to work on the Union Canal. He shacked up almost immediately with a woman named Helen McDougal who had abandoned her husband and two kids too. It was a match made an asshole heaven. And soon she was Burke's common-law wife, which I think just means they lived together in sin?

Burke found work where he could, including in the fields beside William Hare, and eventually learned some cobbling skills, though he kind of sucked at it. No, no elves helping him in the night. He made a living repairing ruined shoes and boots and selling them to poor people throughout the city. Burke and Hare became fast friends, although they were kind of a weird match. Hair was the kind of gremlin you can see coming a mile off. He just radiated grim and sinister. Not so much. He came off as a normal guy. Yeah, I love this description. This is how author John Wilson described Burke. A neat little man of about five feet five, well-proportioned, no mass of muscle anywhere about his limbs or frame, but vigorously necked.

Vigorously necked. Oh my God, I'm totally going to start calling on one of our cats that because he is. He's vigorously necked. A very active but not a powerful man and intended by nature for a dancing master. Nothing repulsive about him, to ordinary observers at least, and certainly not deficient in intelligence. I want that on my headstone. Jesus Jones. Wilson, and this probably won't surprise you, given the times we're talking about, was less than generous regarding Haren Burke's Lady Loves. Poor, miserable, bony, skinny, scranky, wizened jades both without the most distant approach to good-lookingness. Peevish, sulky, savage, and cruel, and evidently familiar from earliest life with all the woe, and wretchedness of guilt and pollution. God.

Don't hold back, man. I love how all these 1800s writers are basically just like the ye-oldy version of Katie and me. Some high-level roasting going on here. Although this is how cat show judges talk about blue ribbon winners. Like, they talk about the weirdest shit about the cat with the most love. Oh, he's vigorously necked with no muscle. A little peevish and scranky as well.

Like, oh, my God, that's a... It's like the ugliest cat you've ever seen, and they're just delighted. I really wish I'd come up with Skranky. We're going to have to file that one away. Scrinky is so good. It's so invocative. Like, you know exactly what it means. It's a little classier than skanky, you know?

Yeah. Scranky. Oh, man. According to Wilson, Maggie Hare was the smart one and had most of the she devil, whereas Helen Burke was of a dour and sullen disposition, morosely jealous and gloomily wicked. No, I lied. That's what I want in my headstone, gloomily wicked. That is perfection. Not long after the Berks moved in, in late 1827, one of Hare's other tenants died of dropsy, which is what we call edema today. I love all those old disease names. Like, oh, she had the vapors. She had dropsy. He expired from a bad case of the staggers.

I think that one's for sheep, actually, but it's a real word. This poor dude was an elderly retired soldier named Donald, and Hare was just furious that he'd had the audacity to die because the old guy owed him four pounds in rent and was just about to get his quarterly pension, which would have covered the debt. Four pounds, by the way, would be approximately 400 pounds today, and this was way too much money for William Hare to let slip through his grimy little fingers. Now, to understand what happened next, we're going to have to take a little detour to talk about dead bodies.

Despite improvements to health care and sanitation, people in the 1820s still died at a rate that would shock us today, especially children, sadly. Funerals and mourning were common parts of life, and grief wasn't made any easier by the real possibility that the next time you visited your deer departed in the graveyard, you might find that their grave had been dug up and their body snatched. This was the golden age of grave robbing. If you had the money, one shilling per night,

you could protect the recently deceased with a mort safe, an incredibly heavy cage of iron and stone that enclosed the coffin for several weeks, which is just metal as hell, ain't it? It's like a thing that they'd rig up to keep vampires contained or zombies or something's rat. If you couldn't afford that

and most people couldn't, then you just had to stay up all night at the graveside to make sure it wasn't disturbed, often with a pistol or sword if you had one. This exhausting vigil would be kept up until the corpse had enough time to, you know, decay beyond the point where it would be useful to the dissectionists.

Because while grave robbing has been around almost as long as graves have, the 1820s version was mostly about the pursuit of knowledge. This was a time of big advancements in all the sciences, including medicine, and to get a good understanding of how living humans work, you're probably going to need to cut open some dead ones, especially if you want to be a surgeon. At the University of Edinburgh, to qualify as a surgeon, you had to have performed at least three dissections. And I think that makes sense, because you don't want the guy operating on you to open you up and say, what the

fuck is that thing? Oh, God, it moves. Poke it, see, it moves. You don't want that. And you just know there's some long-suffering nurse next to him going, yo, that is the heart, dude. Absolutely. There were a whole bunch of new medical schools and students, and there just weren't enough bodies available because the laws at the time meant that only executed criminals could be dissected. That's so weird and gross.

Students would crowd around the dissecting table, scrabbling for a share of the body. Now, medical students were almost all from well-off families, and their professors usually made good money. from their own practices. So the laws of supply and demand created a dark new economy, where under the cover of night, naked corpses were delivered to Surgeon Square in Edinburgh, no questions asked, in exchange for about 10 pounds each depending on the condition of the body. Most people were outraged by grave robbing. The church, capital C, taught that dissection would prevent

people from being able to rise on judgment day, which they assumed was just around the corner. But the authorities mostly looked the other way for two reasons. One, the dissections were necessary for the advancement of medical science, and two, the people performing them were mostly from wealthy families. Real good one-two punch there, right? Yeah, I know. There were rules, though. They were prepared to look the other way when a corpse was removed, but not what it was

buried with. Stealing clothes, jewelry, or anything else from a grave would bring down the hammer, which is why the bodies were delivered naked to Surgeon Square. Sometimes medical students would rob graves themselves, and you could always tell because they sucked at it and would leave a big, messy pile of dirt and clothes. You know, because they've never worked a day in their lives. Exactly. Rich dandies. I have a man who tells me how to button my pants.

I don't know how to do this. Oh, Archibald. There's brown things on my hands. What is this mysterious? The professionals were neater, filling in the whole. after they were done and often relaying the turf. The less people were outraged, the easier it was for them to get work. These professionals were known as Resurrection Men. The most famous one in Edinburgh was Andrew Merrileys, known as Mary Andrew, who 19th century writer Andrew Layton described as

of gigantic height than in Gaunt with a long pale face in the jaws of an ogre. Again, with a roasting or a particularly bored main goon. This fine specimen had three accomplices. Spoon, stoop, Maudiwarp, and occasionally a fake minister called Praying Howard, who would perform funerals for the poor and take note of a likely target for digging up. I'm sorry, this cannot be real. Spoon, stoop, and Mouty Warp and Praying Howard? Am I in a fever dream right now? More evidence of everybody being six beers deep all the time. It really is. You could just see these guys sitting around being like, oh, spoon, we should open a bar together, man, a real tavern. We'd be good at it.

But then they get in a huge fight over whether to call it spoons or mouty warps and the whole thing falls apart. Obviously, Mouty Wharps is the answer. Obviously, right? I think so too. Whenever possible, Mary Andrew and his band like to skip the whole grave robbing part of the business, which was a lot of hard work. If they heard that some poor bastard with no friends or family was sick or close to death, they'd hurry or around and see if they could get the unfortunate soul to reveal some personal details. Then, after they died, the gang would come back and use that info to pretend to be grieving

family members, ready to load the body into a coffin and cart it to its place of burial. As, yeah, as soon as they were out of sight, they'd crack open the coffins, shuck off the corpse's shroud, and take it up to Surgeon Square. So William Hare, faced with a fresh body of a man who owed him four pounds, realized he had a way to make his money back and then some. But he didn't think he could do it alone. As we know, from other stories we've covered, dead weight is really hard to move around. So he brought in his friend Burke, talked about how much whiskey they could get with 10 pounds and nice clothes they could buy for their wives.

Burke didn't need much convincing. The local parish arranged for the old soldier's burial and put him in a coffin in Harris' boarding house until then. This was common back then, which is just so weird to me. Once everybody else had left a house, Heron Burke forced him. the coffin open and hid the body in a spare bed, then filled the coffin with tree bark. And as this box full of wood was solemnly buried in the churchyard, Burke and Hare ran over to the old College of Edinburgh University to try and find a buyer for their corpse. After some awkward questioning of students, they ended up in the office of Dr. Robert Knox

at Surgeon Square, where three medical students told them, come back at night with the body. So after dark, Burke and Hare shoved the body of the old soldier into a set. and carrying him between them walked the mile to Surgeon Square through the old streets, dimly lit by the oil street lamps, which is just such a creepy image to me. This was about 50 years before Jack the Ripper, by the way, so similar vibes. It's like a Victorian weekend at Bernice. Yeah. The same three med students met them at the door and had them carry the body upstairs to a lecture hall.

Building was dark and empty now. In the hall, Burke and Hare tumbled the body out onto the dissecting table, and the students were like, what the hell? Because Burke and Hare complete nobs at the corpse selling game hadn't known to take off Old Donald's clothes. This could get them all in deep shit, which is just such a weird legal situation where being in possession of an entire ass human body is fine, but the outfit it was wearing could land you in jail. So the students had them undress the body. Then Dr. Knox himself happened by and took a look at the corpse and offered Burke and Hare

seven pounds and ten shillings for Old Donald. Dr. Knox, like everybody else in the story was a character. He'd contracted smallpox as a child which scarred his face and caused one eyeball to atrophy, leaving an empty socket. His students, with all the sensitivity of young folks throughout history, called him old cyclops. But Knox didn't let it get him down. In fact, he was a bit of a dandy. His biographer, Henry Lonsdale, who was also one of his students at one point, described him like this. With spotless linen, frill and lace, and jewelry redolent of a Duchess's boudoir, standing in a classroom amid osseous forms, cadavers, and decaying moralities, he was a sight to behold and one assuredly never to be forgotten.

Diem. Dr. Knox had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. He was built like a brick wall and had a voice like maple syrup. Apparently, he was an incredibly charismatic speaker. He was also a brilliant surgeon and teacher and was absolutely determined that his students would never be short on bodies to dissect. He was able and willing to outbid his rival. to accomplish it, something Burke and Hare were oblivious to, because they, of course, accepted his first

low-ball offer. This was probably why the student who showed them out made a point of telling them to come back if they happened to cross any more dead bodies. The students moved the body down to a cold cellar. Dr. Knox would dissect it in front of his class the next day. And it's worth pointing out that as morbid and goth as all this was, so far it was all completely normal for the time. Similar scenes were played out at med schools all over the country every day. Students need to bodies and this was how they got him. The money Burke and Hare got from Dr. Knox was one hell of a windfall for them. But three months later, in February 1828, it was gone, most of it on cheap whiskey. Fortunately for their pockets, though, another one of Hare's tenants, an old retired

Miller named Joseph, got sick with a bad fever. He had no family that they knew of, and Burke and Hare were super excited for him to die so they could sell his body to Dr. Knox, but Joseph just kept clinging to life, the nerve. So they thought, well, maybe we could just hurry things along a little bit. Whether their chosen method of murder was something they worked out for themselves or something they learned someplace else, we don't know. But they stuck with it for the rest of their criminal careers. They got Joseph drunk on whiskey, which given how sick he was, soon made him pass out. We don't know who did what next. They tended to mix things up. But we know that one lay fully across Joseph to keep him from struggling, and the other forced a pillow over his face and smothered him.

After dark, they stripped the old man naked, shoved him in a sack, and carried him to Surgeon's square, where the same three students met them, approved the condition of the body, and paid them without asking a single question about where the body had come from. Burke and Hare had gotten away with murder, and profited from it. Hare took on another lodger, an Englishman who sold matches and tender on the streets of Edinburgh. When he fell ill with jaundas, Burke and Hare didn't hesitate. Whiskey, pillow, sack, money in their pockets.

It was all so easy. The easiest money the two of them had ever made in their lives. There was no chance of them stopping, but relying on Hare's tenants getting sick wasn't going to provide the steady supply they needed, so they took to hunting the streets for vulnerable and lonely targets. The first was an elderly lady called Abigail, who sold salt and pipe clay on the streets

to supplement her tiny pension. Playing a Good Samaritan, Burke invited her to come in out of the cold and have a drink. He and Hare got her so drunk she couldn't walk home, and the next morning gave her even more whiskey to help with her hangover. She soon passed out. Burke lay across her and hair, refining his technique, forewent the pillow, and held one hand over her mouth while holding her nose shut with the other. When she was dead, they undressed her and put her body into a tea chest,

then went to Surgeon Square to tell Dr. Knox's students they had another body. After dark, a porter met Burke and Hare in the shadows under Castle. Rock, and the three of them took the body to Dr. Knox. The doctor told Burke and Hare he was happy they'd brought him such a fresh body and paid them 10 pounds. Neither he nor any of his students asked any questions. Abigail was the third body they'd received from Burke and Hair in three weeks, all of them fresh. They should have had questions. These men were about as far from being stupid as you can get, but I guess the pervasive culture of no questions asked was a hard thing to break. And we had the same thing here.

Like if you guys have ever studied H.H. Holmes, the murder castle guy. He did the same thing. I mean, he didn't do it for the money. He did it because he was a psychopath and a serial killer. But when he killed people, he would sell their skeletons to men's schools. Yeah, that was, yeah, that was his whole, that was his whole trick. And people were like, oh, dope. Thanks, dude.

You found another one? You're so lucky. One after the other after the other. Nobody asked any questions. Yeah, it's, you know, upsetting. No easy victims presented themselves to Burke or hair over the next month, though, and they were getting desperate and willing to take some risks. On the morning of April 12th, Burke was drinking rum in the bar when two young women came in.

He knew them both, Janet Brown and Mary Patterson, both in their late teens, both sex workers, and both currently pissed off at spending the night before in jail. Burke bought them rum and bidders and badmouthed the local cops with them, then offered to give them breakfast at his place. Mary was all for it, but Janet, who I think had more street smarts, was wary. but the other two talked her into it, and after Burke bought a couple bottles of whiskey, the three of them left. Instead of Hare's boarding house, though, they went to the one room flat where Burke's brother lived, which was closer. Burke wanted to avoid being seen on the street

with the two young women. The flat was a small room with a bed separated by a curtain. Burke's sister-in-law, Elizabeth, made them all breakfast, which they washed down with a whole lot of whiskey. Soon enough, the two whiskey bottles were nearly empty and Mary was passed out on the table. To Burke's frustration, though, Janet could apparently drink anybody under the table, and she was showing no signs of passing out. He took her to a tavern to give her some pies and beer in the hopes of making her sleepy, then they headed back to finish off the whiskey. They did not come back to a peaceful scene.

Burke's wife Helen had come looking for him and found Mary, a very attractive young lady, asleep on the bed. Elizabeth told her Burke had brought Mary over and was currently out with another girl, so Helen was in a full-on rage screaming at Burke and Janet. Elizabeth left and went looking for hair, which I think tells you she knew perfectly well what her brother-in-law was really up to. Meanwhile, the screaming argument escalated into a brawl, which ended with Burke shoving his wife out of the flat and locking the door.

Janet started freaking out loudly, so Burke opened the door and held his wife back so Janet could run away, which, again, this is like pre-Gavin De Becker trusting your instincts. And like, holy shit. She was like having none of it. Yeah, absolutely. But she knew something was off, you know, and this probably just confirmed it. Yeah, absolutely. Elizabeth soon came back with both the hairs, William and his wife Maggie,

and the three women waited outside the flat while Burke and Harris smothered, poor Mary Patterson to death. There's no doubt all of them knew what was happening. I guess she was able to calm Burke's wife down by saying something like, oh, no, sis, don't worry. He's not cheating on you. He's just killing another innocent woman for money. And Helen's like, oh, okay, that's much better carry on. It's just horrible. While Burke went up to Surgeon Square to arrange delivery of the body, Janet, still woozy from all the drinks, came back.

The madam of the brothel where she and Mary worked had sent her to go get Mary and bring her home. With Mary's murdered body lying on the bed behind the curtain just a few feet away, Hare told Janet that Mary and Burke had gone out for a walk and they'd be back soon. They should have some whiskey while they waited. So they drank, with hair being a little. as charming as he ever got, and Helen Burke and Maggie hair glaring daggers at Janet. This was only going to end one way. When Janet passed out drunk, she'd joined Mary, dead on the bed.

Luckily for her, though, her madam finally sent a servant to pick her up and bring her home. She was almost certainly just minutes away from being murdered, which is just incredibly creepy. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for her to find out what happened to her friend and realized that she came just within an inch of being dissected by a bunch of med students. good God. And it was her tolerance for alcohol that saved her. I mean, that's wild. Which sad. It probably meant she was an alcoholic, but it saved her life then.

Yeah. Burke and Hares stuffed Mary's body into a tea chest. Burke didn't want his brother to come home from work and find it there, so they had to risk carrying the body to Surgeon Square in the daylight. As they passed the high school of Edinburgh, a bunch of school boys were heading to school, and a couple of them

started pointing and yelling, they're carrying a corpse, they're carrying a corpse. They weren't serious. Like, It was just dark humor because of the size of the box, but Burke and Hair must just shit bricks for a second there, which I think is delightful. Now, Edinburgh was a fair-sized city by the standards of the day, about 130,000 people, but that was still small enough that it wasn't weird to run into somebody you knew. Mary Patterson, like we said, was a gorgeous young woman. People noticed her when they saw her on the street. And as Burke and Hair tipped Mary's naked body

onto the floor, one of Knox's students recognized her. For the very first time, someone asked Burke and Hare where they'd gotten hold of a body. Burke said he'd bought it from an old woman who'd told him Mary had drunk herself to death. And this flimsy story was apparently enough. Burke and Hare were paid eight pounds for Mary's body. And then Dr. Knox came in and buckle up for this because it is upsetting.

Knox was so impressed by Mary's figure that he made arrangements for a painter to come in and take a look at her. His students and assistants went on and on amongst themselves about how great her body was and a lot of them made sketches of her, which has got to be one of the more moments that we have come across so far. Let's all just be glad they didn't have an actual

camera. After his students posed Mary's body, oh, it just gets worse. Dr. Knox's artist, John Oliphant, made a sketch of her that survives to this day. I have seen it. It is creepy. It's obviously sexual. It focuses on her bare butt. Like just Jesus Jones, guys, please get some help. I know you've all been dead for 200 years, but get some help. Wherever you are, get some help. and I think it's fair to say that the murder of Mary Patterson was a turning point in this case. Burke and Hare took a risk and got away with it, and Dr. Knox and his students showed a willingness to accept absolutely any story about a body's origins. Before Mary, Burke and Hare had brought them old, poor people, the kind of people who often did end up dead on the streets.

But Mary was a young, healthy woman, full of life. She was still warm when they brought her in. Like we said earlier, these students were not stupid people, and Dr. Knox certainly wasn't. They might have kept their mouths shut, but I can't imagine they had no suspicions at all about what Burke and here were doing. They just didn't care because it benefited them. Gross. Mary's friend Janet had looking for her, along with their madam. Burke's brother, Constantine, told Janet that Mary had run off to Glasgow with a man, but no one who knew Mary believed that. She was literate and close with her friends. There was no chance she'd move and not send

letters. But the problem was, Burke had chosen a victim whose friends wanted nothing to do with the cops and who probably wouldn't have gotten any help from them, even if they had tried. They just kept looking for Mary by themselves. Burke and Hare had gotten away with murder again, and they didn't slow down. And they killed a lot of people. Two elderly women, both short-term lodgers and Hare's boarding house, were smothered and sold. The latter of these, Mary Haldane, had a daughter Peggy who came to Westport looking for her mother. Burke offered her some consoling whiskey, then killed her too. Another elderly lady was next, Effie, who from time to time had sold Burke pieces of leather

that he used in cobbling. He invited her for a drink in the stable, and when she'd passed out, he went and got hair and they smothered her. One night soon after, Burke passed a policeman who was escorting a drunk old woman to the Westport lockup. Burke professed shock at seeing the elderly so poorly treated and offered to take the lady home. The cop, relieved to dodge some work, let Burke take the woman away with him. She was dead before morning. Oh great. Way to serve and protect, asshole. By this point, I think it's fair to say that Burke and Hare were killing for two reasons. Obviously, it started because of the money, but I think it's pretty clear that they got a taste for it, and after a while it was about the thrill just as much as the money. Murder was the

center of their lives. Burke prowled the streets every day for potential victims. He happened on an old Irish woman and her disabled grandson. They'd come to Edinburgh looking for relatives but gotten lost. Burke, always hospitable, said he knew where her relatives were, but she should come have a drink and relax a little first. Soon, when she was drunk enough, Burke summoned hair and they took the old woman back to Burke's room and killed her. But now they had a problem, the 12-year-old boy. The boy was non-verbalt. verbal, so for a while they thought about just dropping him somewhere on Edinburgh's streets and letting him fend for himself. But they worried that he'd still be able to lead the police back to them. So the solution was obvious and became more obvious as the poor boy got scared and started

crying. So they killed him too, which just breaks my heart. This might be the worst one. In his jailhouse confession, Burke would claim he put the boy over his knee and broke his back, but that confession is really not reliable. It's very contradictory, often overly dramatic, so they most likely just smothered the boy like everybody else. They wanted to sell his body, after all, and even at Surgeon Square, a 12-year-old with a broken back might be pushing it.

In June, William and Helen Burke went to Falkirk for a while, supposedly to visit Helen's family, but there might have been a more sinister intent behind the trip. Maggie Hare hated Helen, and had made it clear to both Burke and Hare that Helen should be, quote, converted to merchandise. Oh, my God. The plan was for Burke to kill her in Falkirk,

then send letters back to Hare saying Helen had died of natural causes. If anybody asked questions, Hair would show them the letters. But Burke ultimately wouldn't go along with the plan, and he and Helen got back to Edinburgh to find Hair suspiciously flush with cash. Their deal was that they'd split the profits from the bodies 50-50 no matter what, but Hare had killed a woman and sold her body on his own. and not one penny of the cash had come to Burke. They got into a fist fight over the money,

and the Burke's moved to a new flat two streets over. But Burke and Hare soon realized that the body-selling thing worked a lot better with two people, and they kissed and made up. Aw. A friend of Helen's visiting from Falkirk was next, then an elderly cleaning woman who shared Burke's new lodging. All she had in the world was nine and a half pence,

and they practically had to break her fingers to get it out of her dead hand. She was Burke and Hare's 14th victim Next would be an 18-year-old street kid called James Wilson known as Daft Jamie, although whether that was because he was eccentric or because he had some kind of mental illness or disability, I don't know. He'd suffered from some form of paralysis on the right side of his body, so he walked with a limp. He was a sweet-natured kid, well-known and really well-liked on the streets

where he slept on staircases and in doorways. In the daytime, he walked the streets barefoot and in rags. Now, all of these were choices to some extent. He slept rough because he'd fallen out with his mom and didn't want to move back in with her, even though he still went home to eat and have his mom do his laundry, which I think is hilarious and kind of cute. Plenty of charitable folks had offered Jamie's shoes and new clothes and stuff, but he refused because he was a smart kid, and people would be more likely to give him stuff if he looked like an urchin. Don't sound daft to me, you know?

Damn, I want to hire this guy as a strategist. One day, Burke was having his usual early morning rum when he saw Maggie Hare leading Jamie, into the Hare's boarding house across the street. A little while after, Maggie came in and bought some butter and a dram of whiskey, and while she drank, she lightly stepped on Burke's foot, a signal that there was work for him to do. He followed her back to Hare's place, where Hare was already playing Jamie with whiskey. He and Burke took Jamie to the tiny back room where Burke used to stay and tried to get him to drink more, but Jamie wasn't willing and started getting agitated and calling for his mom.

He was sleepy, though, and lay down on the bed. Their normal procedure was to get their victims too drunk to struggle, but Jamie wasn't playing along. Hare was suddenly impatient and threw himself across Jamie's body, forcing his hands over the boy's mouth and nose. Jamie, who was a strong kid, struggled. Burke also threw himself onto Jamie to help pin him down, taking a painful shot to the nuts for his troubles. It was very painful due to what newspapers of the time called Burke's embarrassing wound, meaning he had testicular cancer, which almost certainly would have killed him eventually. And I'm not going to say I'm glad that somebody had cancer, obviously, but I will say this.

It doesn't break my heart that Jamie was able to cause a little shit stain an exceptional amount of pain. I hope it hurt like absolute shit. It didn't help, though. Burke and Hare were two grown men, and by this time well practiced at murder. Jamie was soon dead. But Burke and Hare, having gotten away with so much, were getting sloppy. They went through Jamie's pockets and found a small. snuff box, which hair kept, and a copper spoon which went to Burke. They usually burned their

victim's clothes, but Burke gave Jamie's to his brother for his own children, and yep, this is exactly what happens. They start to get cocky after a while. We've seen it a million times. After dark, they took Jamie's body to Surgeon Square where several of Knox's students recognized him, Jamie being a well-known site on the city streets. That didn't stop them paying Burke and hair for the body, though. Of course not. I freaking hate these guys. A Surgeon Square Porter would later claim that as soon as Dr. Knox learned that an outcry was rising about Jamie's disappearance, he had his students cut off the boy's head and feet so the body couldn't be identified. But this kid only made those claims after Knox had fired him, so it could

be that he just had an axe to grind. We're not sure if that's true or not. On October 31st, Halloween, Burke was hitting the rum in his favorite grog shop when he heard a familiar accent. An Irish woman called Mary Doherty was begging for charity. Burke saw an opportunity and turned on the charm, buying Mary Dockerdie a drink and learning her name and that she was from Ineshawen in Donagall. I'm so sorry if I said that wrong. Inishawen, that's what it looks like. That was my mother's name, Burke declared, and her an Inishawen woman too. We must be related. Mary, relieved to have found somebody nice and possibly even a cousin, told more of her story. She'd come from Glasgow to look for her son, but had gotten stuck in

Edinburgh and was now poor and hungry. She hadn't eaten all day. Burke immediately offered to take her home and make her some porridge, and they'd have some more whiskey, of course. After settling Mary in with the house's other tenants, including a couple named Gray, Burke went out to fetch hair and some more whiskey. Burke's neighbors heard laughter and singing all night, the sounds of a Halloween party. Then suddenly there were different sounds. Burke and Hare shouting, the scuffling sounds of a struggle. By itself, that wasn't unusual for a party in Edinburgh, but a grocer coming home between 11 p.m. in midnight, heard a woman's voice shout from Burke's house.

Murder, for God's sake, someone get the police. And the grocer did try and find a cop, but couldn't. When he came back a few minutes later, everything was quiet, so we assume there was nothing to worry about. I can totally see this still happening today, but just think about the logic here. You hear somebody shout that they're being murdered. When you come back a few minutes later, there's no more noise.

What's the most likely reason for that? people will do amazing mental gymnastics just to avoid getting involved they had murdered mary of course and temporarily hidden her body in the pile of straw at the end of burke's bed the next morning a neighbor asked helen burke about the commotion the previous night helen got furious and said mary docherty had made advances on her william so helen had kicked the damn bitches backside out the door can we talk just for a second about what a peach this woman is good god all these people are just as awful Like, they're just awful, all of them.

Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Gray, other tenants of Burke's boarding house, had breakfast with the Burke's. Mrs. Gray, smoking a pipe, wanted to look through the straw at the bottom of the Burke's bed to try and find her child's missing stocking. But Burke waved her off, saying she could burn the whole place down with her pipe. His warning was so harsh that it made Mrs. Gray a little suspish. So a little later, after Burke had gone to Surgeon Square to make arrangements for the body, she went to look through the straw to see what Burke was so desperate to hide.

hide. She found an arm first. Then, as she brushed the straw aside in panic, the naked body of Mary Dockney, who she'd met the night before. The body's face was bloody. The horrified Grays immediately packed up all their stuff and ran out the front door, but on their way out, they ran into Helen Burke. When Helen asked why they were in such a hurry, Mrs. Gray said, There's a bloody corpse in there. The jig was most definitely up. Helen dropped to her knees and begged the Grays to keep their mouths shut. When that didn't work, she offered them 10 pounds a week, but the Grays stuck to their principals and marched out, and after talking together, they went to the police. Meanwhile, Burke and Hare had packed Mary Docherty into a tea chest and transported her

to Surgeon Square, where a porter stored her in the cellar. Then Burke and Hare were shown to Dr. Knox's house, where he paid them five pounds with the promise of more once he had time to inspect the body. While this was going on, James Gray was reporting to police sergeant John Fisher. and the cops soon headed to Burke's flat. They got there not long after Burke and, of course, found no body in the straw. Sergeant Fisher asked Burke what had happened to Mary Doherty. Burke said she'd left about seven in the morning, and that William Hare would be able to confirm that. But poking her on the flat, Fisher found bloodstains on the bed. Helen tried to play it off, said a previous tenant had had her period there. He asked her when

Mary Dockertie had left and Helen said 7 p.m. the previous night. But Burke had said 7 a.m. That was enough for Fisher to take them both to the police office to be interviewed. Acting on information received, we don't know from who, the police, along with the police surgeon, Dr. Black, went to Surgeon Square and opened up the tea chest still kept in the cellar. Mary Dockertie's body, doubled up and with blood around her mouth, was inside it. The police sent for Mr. Gray, who identified her.

The police surgeon concluded that Mary had probably died by violence, but he couldn't be 100% certain. It can be hard to figure out a definite cause of death today, so imagine how hard it was, like, in the early 1800s. The staff and students at Surgeon Square told them who had helped Burke deliver the body. And the next morning, they put the ye-oldy habeas gravis on William and Mary Hare.

The two couples, Burke's and hares, were separated into four cells to be interrogated individually. All four of them denied ever having seen or heard of Mary Doherty, although Burke's story quickly morphed into a family, little tale of a dark man in a great coat with a cape across his face. Actually, now that he thought about it, it might have been William Hare, who hid a body in the straw in Burke's room while Burke was working on the man's damaged shoes. A weird story, and not helped by Helen Burke, whose much less dramatic story was that Mary Docherty had come in on Friday to light her pipe

at the fire, had been offered a hospitable glass of whiskey, and left at 2 p.m. The greys were just claiming to have seen a body out of spite, like you do. The post-mortem examination of Mary Docherty provided some evidence of death by smothering, but not enough to be certain. The way Burke and Hare killed most of their victims left very little evidence on the body, at least by the standards of 19th century forensics,

and they still use the word Burke to describe smothering of that particular type. I've heard that on true crime shows. They call it burking. But regardless, the prosecutor decided to charge both Burke's and both hairs with murder. Edinburgh had a thriving newspaper culture, and the papers stoked the public outrage about Mary Docherty's murder with sensational stories that were only occasionally

sort of kind of close to the truth. The public expected justice to be done. The authorities strongly suspected that Burke and Hare had been involved in other murders, but they had no witnesses, and thanks to the efficiency of Dr. Knox's surgical school, no bodies either. They had the body of a woman who their own doctors

were unwilling to definitively say had died of violence. They had some shaky witness testimony. There was a clear financial motive, but a month after the burke's and hares had been arrested, the Lord Advocate worried that the crown was going to have a hard time getting a guilty verdict. Finding Burke to be the much more intelligent of the pair, and so assuming that he was probably in charge, the Lord Advocate decided to offer Hare immunity from prosecution

if he would testify against William and Helen Burke. That just absolutely chaps my ass to this. I know it was like 200 years ago, but ugh, it makes me mad. Hair couldn't testify against his wife Maggie, so Maggie would also go free. oh my god and of course hair accepted to deal immediately i mean this guy would throw you under the bus so fast you'd have to lay there waiting at the bus stop for ten minutes till it got there with burke and hare the big story and all the papers janet brown now had a pretty good idea what had happened to her friend mary patterson and she went to the police a shopkeeper had once given jamie wilson a pair of trousers now he saw burke's nephew wearing the same pair and he too came forward evidence trickled in and william berth was charged with the murders of Mary Patterson, James Wilson, and Mary Docherty. Helen Burke was charged with the murder of Mary Docherty.

Huge crowds gathered for the first trial for Mary Docherty's death, with only a lucky few managing to get into the courtroom to see, including, by the way, a woman named Madame Tussaud, who wanted to get a good look at William Burke for her waxworks museum, where he'd end up in her chamber of horrors, isn't that wild? The law moved quicker back then. The trial started early on December 24, 1828, and after 23 hours, in the early hours of Christmas Day, the jury was sent to deliberate. Fifty minutes later, they came back.

William Burke was found guilty of Mary Doherty's murder, and the verdict against Helen was not proven. A Scottish oddity that has the same legal force as not guilty, Burke grabbed hold of Helen's hand. Nellie, you're out of the scrape, he said. He wasn't out of the scrape, though. The sentence for murder was death by hanging. All the judge had to decide was whether, after death, Burke's body should be hung in chains as a deterrent. They called it gibbiting, or given over for dissection.

There was really only one choice. Burke would be dissected, just like his victims had been. Helen Burke was very nearly hanged by vigilantes as soon as she ventured out in public. The police had to beat back a crowd to save her life. Eventually, they smuggled her out of a police station disguised as a man. After brief stays in Falkirk and Newcastle, being recognized and driven out of both places, she dropped off the map. In early January, Burke made a jailhouse confession, and it was only then that the full extent

of his and hair's crimes came to light. Newspapers published the confession, and the public was outraged with Hayer's plea deal and with Robert Knox's unpunished involvement in the whole thing. Burke exonerated Knox in his confession, but he was still angry. at the doctor. He still owed Burke five pounds for Mary Docherty. Feel like I'd let it go at that point, but that's me. After his hanging, a massive crowd of students packed into the dissection theater to watch a doctor work on William Burke's body. There weren't enough places for everyone who wanted to watch, and the police had to push back furious students who couldn't get in.

The lecture concerned the human brain and involved the doctor sawing off the top of Burke's skull. The next day, the body with a shaved and neatly stitched head was put on public display, and tens of thousands of people filed past for a look. Burke's skeleton is still on display at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, complete with the doctor's neatly sawed line all the way around his skull. Maggie Hare went home to Tanner's clothes when she was released, but a mob quickly gathered and threw rocks and mudded her. The police rescued her and kept her in a cell overnight for her own safety.

She moved to Glasgow, but people recognized her, and the cops had to swoop in again to save her. By now, she was loudly cursing William Hare to anybody who would listen. All she wanted was to get back to Ireland. The police smuggled her onto a ship bound for Belfast and obscurity. The crown stuck to their deal with hair. He was released without charge on February 5, 1829, and taken by Sergeant Fisher to a mail coach with a hat pulled down over his eyes. As he took an outside seat on the coach, Fisher called out, Safe Journey Home, Mr. Black.

But one of the other passengers recognized Mr. Black, and when the coach stopped at the inn, the news spread ahead of it. At Dumfries, a mob of 800 people were waiting for him. 100 special constables with batons saved Harris' life and kept him safe in town jail. In the early hours of the following morning, the police took hair down the few miles of road to the English border and had him walk across and out of their jurisdiction. After that, Hair pretty much vanished.

In much later Victorian times, there was a story that a blind beggar on Oxford Street in London was William Hare, blinded by workmen who discovered his identity. But that kind of feels like an urban legend to me. Yeah, me too. Dr. Knox tried to carry on as normal, but that just wasn't going to fly. The Edinburgh Public assigned a good part of the blame for the murders

to Knox's willingness to look the other way. A mob marched down the streets with an effigy of Dr. Knox, which they hung from a tree outside his house. They couldn't get it to catch fire, so they hacked it to pieces instead, like some kind of grisly pinata. But that was fun to watch. Knox fled through his back door with a sword and pistol from his army days. He was socially and professionally ostracized, and soon he couldn't attract enough students to support a full class. He wouldn't work solidly again until 1854 when he was 63, when he finally took a job at the London Cancer Hospital. where he worked till he died eight years later.

So, yeah. Humans may still suck in a whole rich plethora of ways, but at least we don't do this shit anymore. Hopefully. Or the public hangings. But then again, they didn't have TikTok back then. True. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week.

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