William Burke and the Edinburgh murders

It is twenty past eight on the morning of the second of November 1828, in a back-room above a stable on Tanner's Close, off the West Port, Edinburgh, with a fog off the Forth coming up the close from the Grassmarket and the candle on the table at the head of the bed half burnt. He is thirty-six years old. He is William Burke, born at Urney parish, County Tyrone, of Cork-emigrant parentage, formerly an officer's servant in the Donegal militia, formerly a labourer on the Union Canal at Linlithgow, presently a lodging-house keeper of a kind in West Port, in his twelfth month of an arrangement with his neighbour William Hare and the resurrection trade.

On the bed at the back of the room, under a heap of dirty straw and three sacks of flour, is the body of a Irishwoman called Margaret Docherty (some sources have her as Margaret Campbell), who came in at the front door yesterday morning asking for hospitality from a fellow countrywoman and who, by midnight, was dead. The body has been there about ten hours. The arrangement with Hare is that they will move it to Surgeons' Square in the late afternoon when the foot-traffic on the West Port has thinned.

James and Ann Gray, a labourer and his wife who have been lodging in the front parlour of the house this week, came into the back-room ten minutes ago looking for stockings that Mrs Gray had left somewhere. James Gray pulled back the straw to look on the bed. He has, by his own deposition, found the body. He has, by his own deposition, gone out of the room and downstairs and at this moment is on West Port walking to the Edinburgh police office at the head of the High Street.

Burke is sitting on a stool against the wall on the far side of the room, looking at the place where the straw has been disturbed, with no expression on his face that the back of the chair has registered.

He thinks: Gray is gone. Gray will be in Old Stamp Office Close in twenty minutes.

He thinks: the body is in the room. There is no version of the next twenty-four hours in which the body is not on the dissecting-table at Surgeons' Square or in the hands of a sheriff officer.

He thinks: Hare will turn king's evidence. Hare will turn king's evidence within the day. Hare has a wife and a child and the Hare household has six sources of income to mine for, and one of them is sitting in the room behind me. Hare will give me up to keep his neck.

He thinks: the gallows takes a man in seven minutes. There is no part of this room or of the next room or of any room I have ever been in in this country that has prepared me for what is about to happen.

He sits on the stool. The constable from the Stamp Office Close arrives at half past nine and asks if he can come into the back-room. Burke says he can. The constable looks at the bed. The constable says: William Burke, in the name of the King, you are detained.

Hare turned king's evidence within the week. Burke was tried at the High Court of Justiciary on the twenty-fourth of December 1828 on a single count, the murder of Mary Docherty, before Lord President Hope, Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle and Lords Pitmilly, Meadowbank and Mackenzie. The trial took twenty-four hours through the day and night, including the jury's deliberation. The verdict was unanimous. Burke was sentenced to be hanged on the twenty-eighth of January 1829 at the Lawnmarket and his body to be publicly dissected at the University. The hanging drew a crowd of twenty-five thousand to the Lawnmarket, the largest assembly in Edinburgh's recorded history. Burke spoke briefly from the scaffold, asked forgiveness for the doctor of Surgeons' Square Robert Knox (whom he expressly absolved of complicity), and was hanged. The crowd, by every contemporary report, watched in silence and went home in silence; the city was, on the evening of the twenty-eighth of January 1829, by the later memoir of Henry Cockburn, the quietest I have ever seen it.

The body went to the Anatomy Theatre of the University on the morning of the twenty-ninth, was publicly dissected by Professor Alexander Monro III, and the skeleton was articulated and put into the medical museum, where it remains. The story spread through every printed song and broadside of the next half-century. The verb to burke, meaning to murder by suffocation while leaving no marks, entered the OED in 1850. Robert Knox was not prosecuted but was driven out of the medical practice of Edinburgh and ended his career as a freelance anatomy lecturer in London; he died in 1862, by every measure of his profession a ruined man. William Hare, who had walked free under the king's evidence agreement, disappeared south of the border within a year and is presumed to have lived out his life under a different name; the tradition that he was blinded in lime in a Lancashire factory accident is unverified by any contemporary record. The lodging-house in Tanner's Close was demolished in 1902. The skeleton is in the Anatomical Museum at Old Surgeons' Hall on Nicolson Street. The death-mask, taken on the morning after the hanging, is on the wall beside it. Both are open to the public on Wednesdays. The skeleton has been the subject of a debate, every twenty years for two centuries, on whether it should be returned to consecrated ground. It has not been.