Corpse and Robbers

You probably think you know the neighbours pretty well. You pop round for the odd cup of coffee and they make you feel very comfortable, and you do the same for them when the shoe is on the other foot. And that’s how it should be.

Be careful though, because things might not always be what they seem. Especially if those living next door have a thing about shovels and like working in the dark. In that case it might be worth having a closer look at their nocturnal habits.

Ben Johnson wrote a story about two charming characters called William Burke and William Hare. They were originally from Northern Ireland but they moved to Scotland separately, to find work in the 1800’s. I don’t know if they knew each other while they were living in Ireland but they ended up living on the same street in Edinburgh and soon became friends.

The two men were heavy drinkers and their lives were chaotic. They earned their living as resurrectionists which was a very fancy title to describe guys who basically worked as grave robbers. Their job was to exhume recently buried bodies and bring them to various medical schools, where they would be dissected and studied by students of anatomy. They were paid for each corpse they delivered.

Strictly speaking, medical and anatomical schools were the only institutions that were legally allowed to dissect bodies, or cadavers, and they could only operate on the bodies of criminals who died having been executed.

In the 1600’s and 1700’s, execution was commonly used to dispose of criminals so there were plenty of bodies. As the years went by though, executions became less popular and that created a problem for Burke and Hare.

Medical schools paid well for cadavers so there was good money to be made. To compensate for the lack of earnings, they started robbing bodies from the graves of ordinary citizens, but they ran into difficulties here too.

Because grave robbing was becoming so common, relatives took it in turn to stand watch over the recently dug graves of their dearly departed, especially for the first few days after the burial. The early days after death were critical because medical schools wouldn’t accept bodies that were decomposing.

Burke and Hare were far from finished though. They took things to a new level when they ran short of bodies by creating their own supply line. They started killing people with the sole intention of providing remains for medical research to make a profit.

By this time, Hare was living with a widow and they were running a boarding house. In 1827 one of Hare’s tenants, an elderly army pensioner, died of natural causes while still owing £4.00 in rent. To cover the man’s outstanding debt, the pair took his body and sold it to the medical school at Edinburgh University.

There they met Professor Robert Knox, a popular anatomy lecturer, who paid them seven pounds and ten shillings for the body which was a considerable amount of money. Lead weights went into the coffin for burial instead.

Encouraged by how easy it was to turn a profit, the pair struck again in early 1828 when another tenant became ill. They got fed up with waiting for him to die, so they decided to help him on his way. They fed him with whisky and then suffocated him by covering his mouth and nose while they held him down. The technique they used was suffocation by leaning on the chest and that became known as “Burking.”

When they ran out of tenants, they decided to entice victims to the lodging house, preying on Edinburgh’s poorest communities who were less likely to be missed or recognised. In total Burke and Hare are said to have murdered at least 16 people for between seven to ten pounds apiece, although the real total could well be a lot higher.

Burke and Hare soon became greedy and nobody was safe. An elderly grandmother was killed with an overdose of painkillers and Hare murdered her blind young grandson by breaking the boy’s back across his knee.

The police eventually got involved and following an investigation, William Burke was convicted and hanged in front of a crowd of over 25,000 in 1829 and, fittingly perhaps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science.

Hare cut a deal and gave evidence against Burke and so avoided the hangman’s noose. He was released in February 1829 and fled across the border into England. No one knows what happened to him, but it was rumoured that he was thrown into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the streets of London.

You could be excused for thinking that this kind of behaviour was consigned to the history books and that you and your loved ones could rest in peace for all eternity without having to worry about having your bones dug up and sold to the highest bidder. Not so.

In 1998, Anthony Noel Kelly, an English aristocrat was jailed for nine months in the UK for what a judge termed the revolting theft of human remains from the Royal College of Surgeons. Kelly was the nephew of the Duke of Norfolk and he was convicted of using body parts to make sculptures and according to the judge, he had affronted every reasonable concept of decent behaviour.

His partner in crime was a former undertaker’s assistant and embalmer who worked at the college and he smuggled the parts out of the institution during the dead of night. The pair were both found guilty of smuggling human anatomical specimens between 1991 and 1994. Not so long ago.

There might still be others.