Burke and Hare Read online

  Henry Lonsdale explained the circumstances in which the anatomists of Edinburgh frequently procured subjects for their classes:

  It is needful to revert to the mode of procuring ‘subjects’ from lodging-houses, to show the grounds for believing, as all Knox’s men did, that Burke and Hare trafficked in the dead of unclaimed strangers. If the artisan or tramp, the sma’ pedlar, the gaberlunzie, and other waifs and strays, decrepid and aged, classed as unknown vagabonds, died in a lodging-house where ten or more persons slept, the removal of the corpse became an urgent necessity . . . Those who knew the Old Town of Edinburgh, its wretched ‘wynds’, its hovels, or rather styes, its whisky shops and dens of iniquity, could have no difficulty in comprehending the frequency of casualties amid such a frightfully debased population. Life was everywhere surrounded by the contingencies of death. The filth and horrors of Paris, as described by Eugène Sue, had their counterpart in the Cowgate, Canongate, and Grassmarket. Housed in the sunless and fetid alleys, or the worse tainted cul de sacs or ‘closes’, sheltering by dilapidated gables and sheds for cattle, or half smothered amid burrowed ruins and cellarage tenanted with rats and vermin, men, women, and children huddled together in brutal fashion. Of what consideration was life to mortals in the veriest rags and tatters, in the midst of stench, and feeding on the garbage of the gutters, or the poison of the dram-shops? Was death not rather a consummation devoutly to be wished? Human beings so lost to shame and natural feeling would have sold the corpse of their neighbours, and as readily that of their nearest relative, for a few bottles of whisky . . . Now, all bodies obtained in this way were, of course, but recently dead; the same remark was applicable, but not so forcibly, to some exhumed bodies removed immediately after the regular interment.14

  Soon after Burke and Hare had delivered the corpse of Mrs Haldane to Knox’s premises, an old cinder woman, whose name, Burke thought, was Effie, came to Hare’s house. She sometimes sold small pieces of leather to Burke for his cobbling, offcuts she had obtained from a local coach-works. Burke took her into Hare’s stable and plied her with whisky until she was drunk and fell asleep in the straw. Then he and Hare suffocated her and sold her body to Dr Knox for £10.

  One day Burke encountered a constable, Andrew Williamson, and another man, dragging a drunken woman, who had been found ‘sitting on a stair’, to the West Port watch-house. Burke intervened on the woman’s behalf and offered to take her off their hands and escort her to her lodgings – an offer, it seems, that the policeman was pleased to accept. Burke was asked in prison by the Courant representative if the policeman knew him when he gave the woman into Burke’s charge. Burke replied that he had a good character with the police; ‘or if they had known that there were four murderers living in one house they would have visited them oftener (my italics). The woman, needless to say, was taken not to her lodgings but to Burke’s, and soon appeared on Knox’s dissecting table. Burke said in his Courant confession that they got £10 for her, so this murder took place when Knox’s winter rates were still being paid, before June.

  The unimposing entrance to Hare’s lodging-house was becoming more like the ominous portal of Dante’s Inferno, as if the sign ‘Beds to let’ had the dread inscription in small print underneath, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ The next ill-fated entrants were an old woman and her grandson from Glasgow. Burke dated these murders to ‘about midsummer’. The boy, who was around twelve years old, was a deaf mute. Burke and Hare murdered the woman ‘at the dead hour of night’, while she slept, having consumed much whisky as usual. They stripped off her clothing and covered her with the bedclothes, then fetched the child, who was sitting with Nelly and Maggie at the fire in the kitchen, into the same room, and killed him too, laying him beside his grandmother.

  It is worth bearing in mind that some of these so-called ‘old women’ or ‘drunk auld wives’ were maybe not so old as we might imagine. Destitute and ill cared-for folk might appear old, but the grandmother of a twelve-year-old boy, for instance, could be well under fifty herself, and if she was capable of walking from Glasgow to Edinburgh, as one version of the story suggests, she was hardly on her last legs.

  There is a story, often repeated, that Burke, instead of suffocating the boy, put him across his knee and broke his back. It originates from The Court of Cacus by Alexander Leighton, who, writing more than thirty years after the events, heard various tales at second- or third-hand which may have been enhanced, if not actually invented, by the author’s fertile imagination. It seems highly unlikely that Burke and Hare would depart from their tried and trusted method so far as to kill anyone in a violent manner which would require explanation when seen by medical men, and we can safely dismiss this tale as a piece of sensational embroidery.

  After leaving the two corpses where they were for an hour, the two men stuffed them into a herring-barrel, which they carried into the stable. In the morning, they lifted the barrel onto Hare’s cart, hitched Hare’s old horse to it, and set off for Surgeons’ Square. They had progressed no farther than the Meal Market, however, a mere few yards from Tanner’s Close, before the nag came to a halt and refused to budge, despite the blows and curses of its owner. This commotion soon drew a small crowd of spectators, so Burke quickly found a porter with a hurley (a two-wheeled barrow) and employed him to wheel the herring-barrel the rest of the way. Hare accompanied the porter while Burke went on ahead to prepare for the barrel’s reception. The students he met there had some difficulty in extracting the two pallid corpses from the barrel, as they were ‘so stiff and cold’. (This indicates that rigor mortis had set in and it must have been during the afternoon when the delivery was made.) Burke and Hare were paid at the agreed summer rate of £8 for each of the bodies. They went home and Hare shot the horse in the tanner’s yard. The wretched animal had two large holes in its shoulder which had been stuffed with cotton by the animal’s previous owner and covered over with a piece of skin to hide the wounds when he sold the horse to Hare.

  On 24 June (Burke rather curiously remembered that it was the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn), Burke and Nelly left Edinburgh for a few days to visit Nelly’s father near Falkirk. They left Hare in want of funds; he had pawned his clothes. But when Burke and Nelly came back, Hare had ‘plenty of money’. Burke asked him if he had been doing any business. At first Hare denied it, but Burke did not believe him and ‘went to Dr Knox, who told him that Hare had brought a subject’. It turned out that Hare had taken home a woman he had found drunk in the street, murdered her, and sold the corpse to Knox for £8, but was reluctant to share the proceeds.

  The solid partnership was developing a few cracks. Burke alleged that Maggie Laird had, at some point, tried to persuade him to murder Nelly McDougal, on the grounds that she was ‘a Scotch woman’ and could not be trusted. The idea was that Burke and Nelly should go to the country for a few weeks and Burke, having done the deed, would then write to tell Hare that Nelly had died and been buried. This was in order to be able to show the letter to the neighbours and allay suspicion. But Burke would have none of it. We cannot be certain that this suggestion was made prior to the visit to Falkirk, but it seems very likely and, added to Hare’s secretive bit of private enterprise while they were absent, it was enough to make Burke and Nelly move to other lodgings.

  Only two streets away from Tanner’s Close lived a cousin of Burke’s, who was married to John Broggan, a carter. Broggan and his wife, who was pregnant, rented a basement room behind a shop in a five-storey tenement. There was some waste ground behind it, and Broggan’s apartment could be reached via a narrow passage from the West Port or down some steps from the waste ground. The ‘house’, as such places were commonly called in Edinburgh at the time, adjoined one occupied by a Mrs Ann Connoway and her husband John, and the passage to Broggan’s entrance separated the Connoways from another house occupied by a Mrs Janet Law and her husband Robert, who worked at one of the local tanneries. Burke and Nelly moved in with the Broggans, and Burke soon took
his revenge for Hare’s deceit. The separate dens of Burke and Hare were about to become twin abodes of evil.

  NOTES

  1 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1829.

  2 Lonsdale, p. 44.

  3 John Struthers, Historical Sketch of the Edinburgh Anatomical School, (Edinburgh, Maclachlen and Stewart, 1867), p. 92.

  4 Lonsdale, p. 125.

  5 Ibid, p. 126.

  6 Alexander Leighton, The Court of Cacus, (Edinburgh, Houlston & Wright, 1861), pp. 20–21 (n).

  7 Lonsdale, p. 334.

  8 Struthers, p. 82.

  9 Lonsdale, p. 269.

  10 Struthers, p. 41.

  11 Dictionary of National Biography

  12 Owen was also, like his master, subject to jealousy and intolerance. Charles Darwin was among the victims of his hostility.

  13 Lonsdale, p. 162.

  14 Ibid, pp. 99–101.

  * * *

  5. JAMIE

  * * *

  Margaret Haidane was a daughter of the elderly prostitute Mary Haldane whom Burke and Hare had murdered in Hare’s stable. According to Burke’s official confession, Margaret came to Broggan’s house, but he could not remember why. Burke killed her himself. He laid her face down on the bed and ‘pressed her down, and she was soon suffocated’. She was easily disposed of, as she had got so drunk that Burke thought she ‘was not sensible of her death, as she made no resistance whatever’. He committed the murder in the morning, took the body to Knox’s premises in a tea-chest during the afternoon and got £8 for it. Hare was not present, and ‘neither Broggan nor his son knew the least thing about that or any other case of the same kind’. But Burke’s mention of Margaret Haldane presents us with a slight puzzle, for in the Courant confession Burke said that it was Peggy Haldane he had killed.

  We might easily assume, since ‘Peggy’ is a common diminutive of ‘Margaret’, that they were one and the same person. But in the early nineteenth century, ‘Peggy’ was a popular name in its own right. Furthermore, Burke declared that Margaret’s sister was married to a tinsmith in the High Street, named Clark. And in the Courant confession, he said that Mrs Haldane, ‘who had a daughter transported last summer from the Calton jail for fourteen years’, also had another daughter ‘married to – in the High Street’. But the woman that Burke said he had killed was, according to his story, a lodger of Hare’s, and she and her mother were ‘both of idle habits, and much given to drinking’. If we can safely assume, then, that the one Burke admitted to killing in Broggan’s house was neither Clark’s wife nor the one transported, Mrs Haldane must have had three daughters, not two.

  Is it possible that Burke confused the names of Margaret and Peggy because he had murdered them both? If so, we must revise the number of murders generally attributed to Burke and Hare. Alexander Leighton gathered information many years afterwards that led him to assert that Mrs Haldane did indeed have three daughters, but that the one murdered was done to death in Tanner’s Close, when she came there searching for her mother. According to this version, she had been told by David Rymer, a grocer and publican in West Port, that her mother had been seen going into Hare’s house. But is Burke likely to have confessed (twice) to carrying out a murder by himself in Broggan’s house if it were not true? If there is any truth in the hearsay that Leighton picked up, it would seem to confirm that two of Mrs Haldane’s daughters were murdered as well as herself. And if Burke had ‘forgotten’ why one of them turned up at Broggan’s, it was probably because he was reluctant to admit that he had taken her there for sexual intercourse while Broggan and his family, not to mention Nelly, were out.

  Roughead and Douglas both place the murder of Margaret Haldane immediately after that of her mother, because Burke mentioned them together in his Courant confession. Douglas said it ‘seems unlikely that these two murders would be separated in time . . .’1 But, on the contrary, it does seem very likely that they were. Burke’s statements make it clear that, having moved out of Hare’s premises, he killed the daughter himself to get his own back on Hare. The two Haldanes are not placed together in the ‘official’ confession, which Burke later said was the only one that could be relied on. Hugh Douglas considered that the order of the murders ‘hardly seems relevant to us today’.2 But consideration of the unfortunate people who came into fatal contact with Burke and Hare is the only recognition that they lived and died, and served humanity, albeit unwillingly, in death. Unlike the soldiers who have died in battle, they do not have permanent memorials in their honour, but although the manner of their deaths was appalling and far from heroic, they too served their country in a noble purpose. An attempt to determine the circumstances of their deaths is the least we can do for them. (See table at the end of this chapter.)

  Despite the strained relations between the two murderers and their women, the partnership was too successful to be dissolved. Burke and Hare realised that they could work better as a team than as separate individuals, and soon resumed normal business.

  Mrs Ostler was a washer-woman who came to Broggan’s house to wash some clothes. Hare was there with Burke, and they got the woman drunk and suffocated her in their well-practised modus operandi. She had ninepence-halfpenny in her hand, which she grasped so firmly that they had difficulty prising it out when she was dead. ‘Mrs Broggan,’ Burke said, ‘was out at the time.’ They put the body in a box which they then concealed in a coal-house in the passage until the afternoon, when they took it to Surgeons’ Square and got £8. Burke said that this murder took place in September or October. The earlier month seems more likely, for by October, one supposes, Dr Knox’s winter rates should have been in force. ‘Arrangements have been made,’ said the announcement of his new season of lectures, ‘to secure as usual an ample supply of Anatomical Subjects.’

  The new season was underway by the time Ann McDougal came to Edinburgh on a short visit. She was a young married woman, a cousin of Nelly’s former partner. She had come to see Nelly, probably at her invitation, following the visit to Falkirk. She stayed in Edinburgh for a few days, but then Hare came round to Broggan’s, and he and Burke began dosing her with whisky until she became drunk and fell asleep during the afternoon. Burke claimed he felt some delicacy about being the first to lay hands on her, she being a friend. So Hare stopped her breath while Burke held her down. They undressed the body and put it in a ‘fine trunk’ provided for the purpose by Davie Paterson, Knox’s assistant, he having been notified that ‘John’ and ‘William’ had another ‘thing’ for sale.

  When Broggan came home from work, he saw the trunk and began asking questions about it, but Burke and Hare gave him some whisky and each of them gave him one pound ten shillings to pay the rent he owed. He then quietened down. They gave him the money, Burke said, ‘that he might not come against them for the murder of Ann McDougal, that he saw in the trunk, that was murdered in his house’. Does this mean that Burke and Hare were either so drunk themselves, or so stupidly complacent by this time, that they left the trunk open with a corpse in it for anyone to see?

  As soon as it was convenient, at any rate, Burke and Hare carried the trunk to Surgeons’ Square and were paid £10 for Ann McDougal’s corpse. Shortly afterwards, John Broggan and his wife absconded with the rent money, leaving Burke and Nelly responsible for both the flat and young John Broggan. Soon afterwards, Burke and Hare chanced upon another young victim.

  James Wilson was a mentally subnormal young man, well known to people in the streets of Edinburgh as ‘Daft Jamie’. Eighteen years old, his father had died when he was twelve. Jamie had left home after a thrashing from his mother when he had accidentally toppled a cupboard full of her household crockery. He still saw his mother regularly and she washed his clothes, but he would not return to live in the house. He slept in doorways except when someone took pity and offered him a bed for the night. He wandered about the streets with bare feet, which were deformed, causing him to limp, and was partly paralysed on his right side. Although tall and said to be strong
for his age and condition, he would tearfully refuse to fight when younger boys mocked and goaded him, saying that it was only bad boys who fought. He would not wear the shoes and better clothes that well-wishers occasionally offered him to protect him from the elements, on the grounds that if people thought he was sufficiently dressed, they would no longer give him anything. Among his few possessions were a brass snuff-box and a copper spoon with seven holes, which Jamie called the days of the week, identifying the large one in the middle as Sunday. One of his favourite pastimes was asking riddles, but he would get upset when those to whom he posed them knew or could guess the answers. ‘What month do ladies talk least?’ he would ask, and delight in giving his baffled companion the answer, ‘February, because there are fewer days in it.’ Or, ‘Why is a jailer like a musician?’ ‘Because he maun tak’ care o’ his key.’

  Jamie’s best friend was Robert Kirkwood, known as ‘Bobby’. Once Bobby tricked Jamie out of a dram of whisky, and when others asked Jamie what he was going to do about it, he replied, ‘What could ye say to puir Bobby? He’s daft, ye ken.’

  One morning in October, William Burke was having an early drink in Rymer’s shop when he saw Maggie Laird in the street taking Jamie Wilson towards her house. A few minutes later she came into Rymer’s, bought a pennyworth of butter, and asked Burke for a dram. While she was drinking it, she stamped lightly on Burke’s foot. This is the first positive evidence of Maggie Laird’s complicity in the murders. He, understanding the signal, followed her back to Tanner’s Close. Hare was there with Jamie and had given him whisky. When Burke arrived, the two men lured Jamie into the small room which had formerly been Burke’s, sat him on the bed and pressed him to have more whisky. Jamie was reluctant to drink more, and was ‘very anxious making inquiries for his mother, and was told she would be there immediately’. Maggie Laird left the room and locked the door, leaving the three men inside, and slipped the key under the door. She had, Burke said, ‘led poor Jamie in as a dumb lamb to the slaughter . . .’