The Edinburgh Reporter June 2022

20 BOOKS
Deadly deeds
Serial killers for Science
The to-ings and fro-ings of murderous
duo Burke and Hare are laid bare
in Jan Bondeson’s book Murder
Houses of Edinburgh
Much has been written about
those fiends of the Old Town,
Burke and Hare, Edinburgh’s
most celebrated serial killers,
who murdered a number of
people for the purpose of
selling their bodies for
dissection at the anatomy school of Dr Robert Knox.
William Burke was born in 1792 in Urney, County
Tyrone, as one of two sons to middle-class parents. In
1818, he deserted his wife and family, moving to
Scotland, where he became a navvy helping to
construct the Union Canal, settling down near Falkirk
with his common-law wife Helen M’Dougal. After
moving to Edinburgh, he became a hawker selling old
clothes to impoverished people, before trying his luck
as a cobbler. About the mystery man William Hare,
little is known except he was an illiterate Irish lad who
turned up in Edinburgh in the mid-1820s, living in a
small lodging-house off Tanner’s Close, West Port, run
by a man named Logue. When this individual died,
Hare moved in with Logue’s Irish-born wife Margaret.
In 1827 Burke and Hare both worked as agricultural
labourers in Penicuik; they became friends and it has
been suggested that Burke and Helen M’Dougal
moved into the Tanner’s Close lodging-house as well,
drinking and carousing, and leading a riotous life.
WORTH MORE DEAD
In late November 1827, an old army veteran named
Donald died at Hare’s lodging-house, owing £4 worth
of back rent. Thinking that the old man would be
worth more dead than he had been alive, Burke and
Hare sold his body to the celebrated Edinburgh
anatomist Robert Knox, at his anatomy school in
Surgeon’s Square, for £7 10s. This princely sum paid
up, without any awkward questions asked, for the
cadaver of the old soldier, set the two ruffians thinking.
What if they murdered various down-and-out
characters in the slums of Edinburgh, in a way that
made it difficult to tell that they had been deliberately
done to death, and then sold the corpses to Knox?
There is reason to believe that their first victim was a
miller named Joseph who lodged in Hare’s house.
After he had been sedated with some liberal tots of
whisky, Burke pinned him down by laying across his
upper torso, as Hare suffocated him to death with a
pillow. In total they claimed sixteen victims, all killed
in the same manner, among them the young prostitute
Mary Paterson, and the invalid lad James Wilson, and
a street character known as Daft Jamie. Their final
victim was an Irishwoman named Margaret Docherty,
whose body was discovered by some other lodgers
who called in the police. Burke and Hare made haste
Portraits of serial killers
William Hare and William
Burke circa 1850
to sell the cadaver to Dr Knox, but the public-spirited
lodger identified the body in his dissection-room and
the two ruffians were arrested.
At the trial of William Burke, which opened on
Christmas Eve 1828 before the High Court of
Justiciary in Parliament House, the slimy Hare turned
King’s evidence, blaming Burke for everything. Burke
was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to be
hanged and publicly dissected. Awaiting execution,
Burke made a partial confession, putting much of the
blame on Hare. He was hanged on 28 January 1829 in
front of an enormous crowd and publicly dissected by
Professor Munro a few days later. His mounted
skeleton stands at the Anatomical Museum of the
University of Edinburgh, whereas Surgeon’s Hall has
his death mask and a book bound in his skin. Helen
M’Dougal made a swift escape from Edinburgh,
pursued by an angry mob. Although Daft Jamie’s
Awaiting execution, Burke made
a partial confession, putting
much of the blame on Hare
family urged that Hare should also be prosecuted, this
was not possible according to the legislation of the
time. Hare also left Edinburgh in a hurry, probably for
his native Ireland, although no historian has been able
to track him down. A cutting from the Newry
Commercial Telegraph of March 31 1829 claims that
Hare turned up at a public house in Scarva, County of
Armagh, with his wife and child, but he was
recognised by the mob and run out of town.
TALL TALES
According to an article in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
of December 22 1861, the Canadian correspondent of
The Scotsman had heard a story that Hare had died in
that country. The Weekly Scotsman of August 26 1916
prefers a more sanguinary tale: Hare got employment
at a lime kiln, but the other workers found out about
his true identity and threw him into the lime so that he
was blinded; he ended his days as a blind beggar in
London’s Oxford Street. In an article marking the
centenary of the murders, the Nottingham Evening
Post of November 26 1927 prefers the version that
Hare ended up as a blind beggar selling matches in
London’s Burlington Arcade for forty years.
There has been a good deal of gibbering, from
various ill-informed ‘internet monkeys’, that Burke and
Hare lived on the southern side of what is today the
West Port in Edinburgh’s Old Town, but a map in the
1884 book The History of Burke and Hare by George
MacGregor, and perusal of the 1852 Ordnance Survey