page_title: Burke and Hare murders
section_title: Events of November 1827 to November 1828
hierarchical_section_title: Burke and Hare murders / Events of November 1827 to November 1828
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Paterson
context_page_description: The Burke and Hare murders were a series of 16 killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures.
  Edinburgh was a leading European centre of anatomical study in the early 19th century, in a time when the demand for cadavers led to a shortfall in legal supply. Scottish law required that corpses used for medical research should only come from those who had died in prison, suicide victims, or from foundlings and orphans. The shortage of corpses led to an increase in body snatching by what were known as "resurrection men". Measures to ensure graves were left undisturbed—such as the use of mortsafes—exacerbated the shortage. When a lodger in Hare's house died, Hare turned to his friend Burke for advice and they decided to sell the body to Knox. They received what was, for them, the generous sum of £7 10s. A little over two months later, when Hare was concerned that a lodger suffering from fever would deter others from staying in the house, he and Burke murdered her and sold the body to Knox.
context_section_description: On 29 November 1827 Donald, a lodger in Hare's house, died of dropsy shortly before receiving a quarterly army pension while owing £4 of back rent. After Hare bemoaned his financial loss to Burke, the pair decided to sell Donald's body to one of the local anatomists. A carpenter provided a coffin for a burial which was to be paid for by the local parish. After he left, the pair opened the coffin, removed the body—which they hid under the bed—filled the coffin with bark from a local tanners and resealed it. After dark, on the day the coffin was removed for burial, they took the corpse to Edinburgh University, where they looked for a purchaser. According to Burke's later testimony, they asked for directions to Professor Monro, but a student sent them to Knox's premises in Surgeon's Square. Although the men dealt with juniors when discussing the possibility of selling the body, it was Knox who arrived to fix the price at £7 10s. Hare received £4 5s while Burke took the balance of £3 5s; Hare's larger share was to cover his loss from Donald's unpaid rent. According to Burke's official confession, as he and Hare left the university, one of Knox's assistants told them that the anatomists "would be glad to see them again when they had another to dispose of".
  There is no agreement as to the order in which the murders took place. Burke made two confessions but gave different sequences for the murders in each statement. The first was an official one, given on 3 January 1829 to the sheriff-substitute, the procurator fiscal and the assistant sheriff-clerk. The second was in the form of an interview with the Edinburgh Courant that was published on 7 February 1829. These in turn differed from the order given in Hare's statement, although the pair were agreed on many of the points of the murders. Contemporary reports also differ from the confessions of the two men. More recent sources, including the accounts written by Brian Bailey, Lisa Rosner and Owen Dudley Edwards, either follow one of the historic versions or present their own order of events.
  Most of the sources agree that the first murder in January or February 1828 was either that of a miller named Joseph lodging in Hare's house, or Abigail Simpson, a salt seller. The historian Lisa Rosner considers Joseph the more likely; a pillow was used to smother the victim, while later ones were suffocated by a hand over the nose and mouth. The novelist Sir Walter Scott, who took a keen interest in the case, also thought the miller was the more likely first victim, and highlighted that "there was an additional motive to reconcile them to the deed", as Joseph was suffering from a fever and had become delirious. Hare and his wife were concerned that having a potentially infectious lodger would be bad for business. Hare again turned to Burke and, after providing their victim with whisky, Hare suffocated Joseph while Burke lay across the upper torso to restrict movement. They again took the corpse to Knox, who this time paid £10. Rosner considers the method of murder to be ingenious: Burke's weight on the victim stifled movement—and thus the ability to make noise—while it also prevented the chest from expanding should any air get past Hare's suffocating grip. In Rosner's opinion, the method would have been "practically undetectable until the era of modern forensics".
  The order of the two victims next after Joseph is also unclear; Rosner puts the sequence as Abigail Simpson followed by an English male lodger from Cheshire, while Bailey and Dudley Edwards each have the order as the English male lodger followed by Simpson. The unnamed Englishman was a travelling seller of matches and tinder who fell ill with jaundice at Hare's lodging house. As with Joseph, Hare was concerned with the effect this illness might have on his business, and he and Burke employed the same modus operandi they had with the miller: Hare suffocating their victim while Burke lay over the body to stop movement and noise. Simpson was a pensioner who lived in the nearby village of Gilmerton and visited Edinburgh to supplement
caption: Mary Paterson, killed by Burke while she was intoxicated
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