Burke and Hare Read online

  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.

  In Burke’s Courant confession, the nameless Englishman was the second of their victims and he, too, fell seriously ill in Hare’s house. These two old derelicts could be disposed of in relative secrecy. Only Burke and Hare themselves, and possibly their women, would have known anything about it. Abigail Simpson was the unfortunate target, we may sure
ly assume, of two furtive and skulking devils emboldened by the smoothness of their previous transactions with Knox and his men, as well as the implied encouragement to bring as many bodies as they could, and their greed for more easy money.

  Burke remarked in his Courant confession that he and Hare ‘often said to one another that no person could find them out, no one being present at the murders but themselves two; and that they might be as well hanged for a sheep as a lamb’. They certainly took a huge step of mind-boggling recklessness or stupidity with their next victim, who fell into their hands (as mentioned in both of Burke’s statements) in April.

  Early one morning, generally believed to have been Wednesday, 9 April, Burke was drinking rum and bitters in William Swanston’s shop in the Canongate when two young prostitutes came in. They were Janet Brown and Mary Paterson, aka Mitchell, both in their late teens and well known on the city streets. Mary, in particular, was a good-looking girl who had turned to prostitution in desperation, having been orphaned in childhood. She had curling-papers in her hair. Both girls had spent the previous night in the Canongate watch-house, having been arrested for a disturbance of the peace. On their release at six o’clock, they had gone, for some unexplained reason, to their former lodging at the house of a Mrs Lawrie, although they were now lodging with a Mrs Isabella Burnet or Worthington in Leith Wynd. No doubt both landladies were brothel-keepers.

  Burke approached the girls in Swanston’s and bought them drinks, then invited them to his lodgings for breakfast. Mary, the more bold and impulsive of the two, took little persuading and after a time Burke overcame Janet’s reluctance with flattery and extravagant promises. The three left Swanston’s shop with two bottles of whisky. But instead of walking them to Tanner’s Close, Burke took them to his brother Constantine’s place in nearby Gibb’s Close off the Canongate, telling them he was lodging there. He was no doubt anxious to avoid being seen by anyone who might recognise the girls, either in the streets or in Hare’s place.

  A bed hung with tattered curtains and a truckle-bed were among the scant furnishings of a single room reached via a dark passage and a narrow staircase. Con Burke and his wife were still in bed, but Mrs Burke got up and prepared breakfast for the visitors, and they washed down their eggs, bread and smoked haddock with tea and whisky. By the time Con Burke left for work, Mary Paterson was almost senseless. Janet, however, was still wide awake, and Burke persuaded her to go out with him for a breath of air. He took her to a nearby tavern where he plied her with pies and beer, then took her back to Gibb’s Close. They were just sitting down at the table to consume more whisky when the curtains round the bed flew open and the livid features of Nelly McDougal appeared.

  Nelly had called in while Burke was out, to find the young and attractive Paterson slumped across the table and Burke out, as Elizabeth Burke must have told her, with another girl. A furious row ensued, with Nelly shrieking abuse at Janet Brown and threatening violence. Elizabeth Burke left hurriedly, though not before explaining to Janet, somewhat needlessly perhaps, that the screaming woman was Mr Burke’s wife. Janet said she had not known that Burke was a married man. Nelly’s wrath then turned on her husband, and Burke threw a glass tumbler at her, cutting her forehead above one eye. He pushed her out of the room and locked the door. Nelly had accused Janet of seducing her husband, but Burke was the seducer, with lust in his loins taking temporary priority over murder in his mind. Janet, however, was not to be coaxed into bed by Burke’s Irish charm, and insisted on leaving. This was doubtless because of Nelly McDougal’s fearsome presence on the other side of the door. Burke escorted Janet safely past his wife into the street, and she went back to Mrs Lawrie’s house.

  Elizabeth Burke, meanwhile, had gone to fetch the Hares. When they arrived, Burke and Hare manoeuvred their three female relatives into waiting outside the room. Then they laid the stupefied Mary Paterson onto one of the beds and had no trouble in snuffing out her short, sad life.

  Burke went at once to Surgeons’ Square to arrange another delivery. While he was gone, Janet Brown turned up again. She had a servant girl with her, sent urgently by Mrs Lawrie to help Janet bring Mary Paterson back. But Janet, half drunk herself, had taken twenty minutes to find the place again, having to ask directions from neighbours and the spirit-dealer Swanston. Nelly McDougal’s rage at Brown had not subsided, and Maggie Laird had been told the tale, for she flew at Janet and had to be restrained by her husband. Hare told Janet that Burke had gone out for a walk with Mary. Janet accepted Hare’s offer of a drink while she waited for them to come back, and sent the girl back to tell Mrs Lawrie that she would not be long.

  We can only guess how close to death Janet Brown was during those few minutes. She was drinking whisky in the company of Hare and three possible accomplices – his wife, McDougal and Eliza Burke – with her friend Mary lying dead a few feet away, hidden by the bed-curtains, and Burke due back at any moment to pack up Mary’s corpse and get it to Dr Knox. But Mrs Lawrie sent the maidservant back for Janet and the two girls then left together. Nelly and Maggie went home to Tanner’s Close, and when Burke came back, he and Hare stuffed Mary Paterson’s doubled-up corpse into a tea-chest.

  However much Burke’s sister-in-law may have known or suspected about these goings-on, it is clear that Burke was not keen to leave the tea-chest there until dark, when Con would be home from work. So Burke and Hare carried the box straight to Surgeons’ Square in broad daylight. When they got to High School Yards, some schoolboys followed them, chanting ‘They’re carrying a corpse!’ Burke and Hare were admitted to Dr Knox’s rooms by ‘Mr Ferguson and a tall lad’ and paid, according to Burke’s Courant confession, £8.

  There are several contradictory statements about what happened at 10 Surgeons’ Square that afternoon, but it is certain that someone immediately recognised the dead girl. Burke’s prison statement makes it sound as if it was the ‘tall lad’, who ‘seemed to have known the woman by sight’, and he and Fergusson asked where they had got the body. Burke told them that he had bought it from an old woman at the back of the Canongate.

  In the Courant confession, Burke said, ‘One of the students said she was like a girl he had seen in the Canongate as one pea is like to another.’ At the end of this dictated statement Burke added in his own hand, ‘Mr. fergeson was the only man that ever mentioned any thing about the bodies He inquired where we got that yong woman paterson.’

  There are, however, other versions of this transaction. Knox’s biographer, his former pupil Henry Lonsdale, says that:

  A pupil of Knox’s, who had been in her company only a few nights previously . . . eagerly and sympathisingly sought for an explanation of her sudden death, Burke on his next visit was confronted with his questioner in the presence of two gentlemen, and declared that he bought the corpse from an old hag in the Canongate, and that Paterson had killed herself with drink.1

  As the corpse smelt strongly of whisky, this explanation was accepted. We have already noted that heavy consumption of whisky played a vital role in the murders committed by Burke and Hare. Their victims, as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe wrote:

  . . . were enticed to their tragical end by the present of spirituous liquors, which rendered them passive in the clutches of their butchers. It is too certain, that the use of whisky, in this town at least, is prevalent beyond example – and that the older parts of the city, even in mid-day, exhibit scenes that rival Hogarth’s Gin Lane, or the beastly orgies of the ancient Scandinavian savages.2

  A further witness to these exchanges was David Paterson, who was not related to Mary, but was a young man employed by Dr Knox. He declared later that he came into the room to find Miller in conversation with Burke and Hare, and ‘a female subject stretched upon the floor. The beautiful symmetry and freshness of the body attracted my attention.’ Shortly afterwards, Paterson heard Fergusson say that ‘he was acquainted with the deceased, and named her as Mary Mitchell . . .’3 A few days later Paterson asked Burke, who had called on another errand, �
�where he had procured the last subject’, and Burke replied that he had ‘purchased it from the friends of the deceased’, whereupon Paterson asked where her relatives lived. Burke paused, looking suspiciously at Paterson, before retorting, ‘If I am to be catechised by you, where and how I get subjects, I will inform the doctor of it, and if he allows you to do so, I will bring no more to him, mind that.’4

  Burke and Hare were paid, according to Paterson, £10 for this body, and he was almost certainly right. Why would these useful suppliers be offered, and accept, a lower price than normal for such a fine specimen – especially one so fresh, which was in Knox’s premises within four hours of the murder, according to Burke, and still warm? The only explanation, if Burke’s memory was correct, is that Mary Paterson was one of their first victims, sold before a tariff had become well established whereby the suppliers got £10 in winter and £8 in summer. This was because there was always a greater demand for subjects during the autumn and winter months. Most teachers of anatomy and surgery held their lecture courses then. In the days before refrigeration, bodies could not be preserved for long enough in the summer for them to remain useful for the necessary period of time, and the stench would have been intolerable on hot summer days. In winter, corpses were stored in cold cellars and the dissection rooms were decidedly chilly.