Burke and Hare (6 page)

Perhaps the best reason for accepting Burke’s version of events is the detailed description he gave of their first sale and their encouraging reception in Surgeons’ Square. It has the ring of truth about it. The man who diverted them from Monro to Knox must have been one of Knox’s own students, and was as eager as the doctor’s agents that night – Fergusson, Miller and Jones – that there should be an ample supply of subjects available.

Possibly Donald’s debt to Hare had mounted up because Hare had sold him an old shirt, and Maggie Laird had provided him with food and drink while he was ill. We shall never know, but there are no overwhelming reasons to doubt that Burke’s story was true in substance if not in detail. What seems much more likely is that it was Burke, rather than Hare, who was the author of the plot. This would account for Burke’s generous share of the money they received. If it was Burke who had suggested to Hare that they could sell the body, and that he, Burke, would take the lead in doing so (he being clearly the superior in matters of public relations), Hare would presumably have been more than satisfied to recover the money he was owed and have five shillings profit out of the deal.

At any rate, by the time the sale was completed, a seed had been planted in the minds of the pair, which apparently lay dormant through the winter months but was to germinate early in the spring of 1828 and grow with mind-boggling vigour in the course of that year.

NOTES

¹
Daniel Defoe,
A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, (London, Penguin edn., 1971), p. 577.

²
‘Report on the state of the Irish poor in Great Britain, 1836’, quoted in H.C. Darby (ed.),
A New Historical Geography of England after 1600
, (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 172.

³
Quoted in Kellow Chesney,
The Victorian Underworld
, (London, Penguin Books), 1982, p. 69.

⁴
M. Dorothy George,
London Life in the Eighteenth Century
, (London, Penguin Books, 1985), p. 129.

⁵
Quoted in Sir Llewellyn Woodward,
The Age of Reform 1815–70
, (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 601.

⁶
Letter to Maria Edgeworth in Grierson, pp. 126–27.

⁷
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
, March 1829.

⁸
Owen Dudley Edwards,
Burke & Hare
(Edinburgh, Polygon Books, 1980), p. 289.

⁹
Ibid, p. 37.

¹⁰
Robert Buchanan et al,
Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh on Wednesday, December 24, 1828
(Edinburgh, 1829), p. xiv.

¹¹
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
, March 1829.

¹²
Ibid.

¹³
Robert Buchanan et al,
Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal
pp. xiii–xiv.

¹⁴
Burke’s official confession in prison, 3 January 1829; my italics.

¹⁵
Henry Lonsdale,
A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist
, (London, Macmillan, 1870), p. 103.

3. CONTRACT

T
here were body-snatchers who were not technically grave-robbers or ‘resurrection men’. Two London operators, Cornelius Bryant and Israel Chapman, became specialists, for instance, in doing deals with undertakers or masters of workhouses to obtain bodies before they were buried, and they even stole bodies from houses before funerals could take place. A man named Joliffe, living at Bethnal Green, attempted to bring a charge in 1826 against two men who, he said, had stolen the body of his wife, who had died only that night, while he was asleep in the next room. But the magistrate ruled that the men had not broken any law unless they had also taken away an article of clothing or some other property – which, of course, they had not.

There was no question, however, of Burke and Hare having stolen old Donald’s body, or his shirt, since they were already in Hare’s possession. As far as we know, neither Burke nor Hare had committed any serious criminal act at this point. They had used sleight of hand to turn a situation to their own advantage. It was dishonest, but not felonious.

The two men must have spent the winter months brooding over the ease with which they had made £7 10 shillings. As Burke mended shoes, Hare collected his rents and they spent their profits on drink they could hardly dismiss from their minds that fatal invitation to call at 10 Surgeons’ Square again when they had another body to dispose of. They must have been tempted at some point to join the body-snatching fraternity, but hesitated partly, perhaps, through cowardice, and partly because of the dawning realisation that there was an easier way of obtaining dead bodies, circumventing the risky business of nocturnal digging in guarded or booby-trapped kirkyards.

At some date in the winter of 1828, probably early February, it seems that another lodger of Hare’s named Joseph, who had been a miller, fell ill and became delirious. Hare and his wife were anxious that the fever should not deter other lodgers. If rumour got abroad that an infectious disease such as cholera or typhus was present in Hare’s house, it would ruin his business. Burke and Hare were suddenly presented with motive and opportunity. We do not know how old Joseph was, but it is probable that he was getting on in years and was unlikely to recover from the illness. Burke remarked in one of his statements that Joseph had been quite well off at one time and was related by marriage to someone of status in the Carron Ironworks. If he was now lodging alone in Hare’s house for threepence a night, it is perhaps a reasonable assumption that by this time he was an elderly widower with no close relations. After weighing up the risks for a while, no doubt, Burke and Hare made up their minds to ease the poor fellow on his way to oblivion. After making him practically unconscious with whisky, one of them pressed a pillow over Joseph’s face while the other lay across his body to prevent him from thrashing about and making a noise.

The job was quickly done and the two men lost no time, when it was dark enough, in carrying the body to Surgeons’ Square, where they were greeted at No. 10 by Dr Knox’s students and asked to lay out the corpse for inspection as before. This time they were paid £10 and no questions were asked: money for a dram! The pair may even have been persuaded that they were performing a public service. One English resurrectionist put up a spirited defence when brought before a magistrate, complaining that the police would be better engaged in looking after thieves and house-breakers than apprehending respectable men who lived by supplying the faculty with subjects for dissection.

At any rate, whatever Burke and Hare may have done before, they had now committed murder and been well paid for it. There is no reason to suppose that they had ever heard of Torrence and Waldie. They needed no precedent to make them aware of the opportunities offered to men of cunning by the present state of the law. Burke said in his prison confession that he had not ‘the smallest suspicion of any other person in this, or in any other country, except Hare and himself, being concerned in killing persons and offering their bodies for dissection; and he never knew or heard of such a thing having been done before’. But now they had crossed the Rubicon and there was no going back. They appeared to have got away with murder and they did not waste much time in trying their luck again.

A man of about forty from Cheshire, whose name they did not know, came to Hare’s house for a few nights. Burke referred to him merely as an Englishman, saying that he was tall and dark and had been selling spunks (matches or tinder) in Edinburgh. He fell ill with jaundice and, like old Joseph, presented a threat to Hare’s lodging-house business. Burke and Hare were unable to resist the temptation of furthering the cause of medical science by selling his corpse to Dr Knox for a further £10. This was like manna from heaven for the Irishmen. The local body-snatchers had all the risk and trouble of excavating graves by night; sometimes having to bribe undertakers and watchmen; sometimes having to transport corpses over considerable distances from remote churchyards, always with the risk of discovery; sometimes being shot at. Burke and Hare had hit upon a way of circumventing all these inconveniences. But they could not expect Hare’s lodgers to keep falling ill. Impatient for more easy money, and emboldened by their previous experiences and the encouragement of the doctor and his assistants, they took a greater risk next time.

Abigail Simpson, who lived at Gilmerton, a few miles south-east of Edinburgh, was an old woman whose former employer allowed her a weekly pension of eighteen pence and a can of kitchen fee (dripping). She regularly walked into Edinburgh to collect it and generally hung around selling salt and camstane (kaolin or pipe-clay used by women to whiten their doorsteps, etc.) to supplement her meagre income. On 11 February 1828 (according to Burke’s confessions) she came to Tanner’s Close with Hare, and began drinking with him until she was so drunk that she could not go home. She told Hare that she had a daughter, and Hare merrily said that he was a single man and would marry the daughter and take care of them both. Next morning she was ill, but still drank more despite vomiting. She was lying on her back in bed, dressed in ‘a drab mantle, a white-grounded cotton shawl and small blue spots on it’, insensible from all the ale and whisky she had consumed. Hare suggested to Burke (or so Burke said) that they should smother her and sell her body to the doctors. Drinking heavily with their intended victims was to become a fixed routine in their method. Alcohol served a dual purpose – it made the victims weak and relatively insensible and gave the killers Dutch courage.

Burke laid himself across the old woman to prevent her from struggling, while Hare clapped his hands over her mouth and nostrils. When she was dead, the two men undressed her and put the body in a chest. Hare said he would throw the clothes into the canal. Then they informed Dr Knox’s assistants that they had another subject. Mr Miller sent a porter to meet them during the evening at a rendezvous below the Castle Rock. Burke and Hare carried the chest to this spot and then accompanied the porter who carried it to Knox’s premises. The corpse was cold and stiff when Dr Knox came in to look at it while they were there. ‘Dr Knox approved of its being so fresh,’ Burke said later, ‘but did not ask any questions.’ They were paid £10.

Burke’s account of this murder raises several interesting questions. Burke made two confessions after his conviction for murder. One was made in Calton Jail on 3 January 1829 in the presence of the Sheriff, the Procurator-Fiscal and the Sheriff’s Clerk. The other was made to some person unknown, later in the month, and published in the Edinburgh
Evening Courant
after Burke’s execution. In both of them, Burke said that the murder of Abigail Simpson was the first he and Hare committed, and in the
Courant
confession he was specific about the date and time – the morning of 12 February 1828. He said that he ‘did not know the days nor the months the different murders were committed, nor all their names’, but added that all the murders were committed between 12 February and 1 November 1828. He did mention certain months and seasons in the course of his two confessions, but why did he recall the earlier date with such certainty? The twelfth of February that year was a Tuesday. Was it some anniversary – his birthday, perhaps – that made it stick in his mind? In dealing with the subsequent murders, his memory was less precise in terms of dates and less consistent in terms of the order of victims, and in spite of his two statements, made nearly three weeks apart, there are strong reasons for doubting that Abigail Simpson was the first victim of the fiendish partners. On 1 December 1828, Hare also gave information to the Sheriff. His statement has been lost, but among those who saw it was Sir Walter Scott, who noted that, while Hare’s confession agreed with Burke’s as to the number and description of the victims, they differed in the order in which the murders were committed. Hare, apparently, said that Joseph the miller was the first victim, and this seems much more likely for several reasons.

The order of the whole series of murders cannot be established with certainty. We do not have Hare’s testimony and Burke’s confessions are contradictory. But there are some clues in the wording of the confessions and the prices Burke said they got which make the order in which I give them seem more probable, I think, than the sequences given by other writers on the subject, such as William Roughead and Hugh Douglas.

In selling the body of Donald, the old army pensioner, the two inexperienced men had approached the matter with natural nervousness and caution and, according to Burke’s confessions, did not try anything like it again for more than two months. It seems highly unlikely that they would take the risk of luring an old woman who was known on the streets of Edinburgh into Hare’s house and killing her. Someone might see them together, and they were not so familiar with Dr Knox and his men at that stage that they could be confident that medical men would not ask any questions about the unburied corpse of a drunken woman. There would be much less likelihood of suspicion if they took another of Hare’s old lodgers who was dying of some disease and whom no one would miss. This would also help to explain the cessation of activity during the winter months after selling Donald’s body. Burke and Hare did not immediately summon up the courage to set out on a murder spree by taking victims off the streets. They spent the winter quietly waiting for another opportunity to present itself in Hare’s lodging house.

It is difficult to overstate the brutality of their method of execution. Most of their victims, even though drunk, must have been conscious that they were being murdered for several moments, but were rendered incapable of any physical resistance. The most basic human instinct of clinging to life was suppressed, and they must have been seized by panic as their lungs seemed likely to burst in the struggle for air.