In the fun-loving spirit of Halloween...more gruesome stories from My favorite city, Edinburgh. Like I said for the other ones, these are all true, which as far as I'm concerned makes them better than the guy-with-a-meat-hook stories.

This one happened over the years of 1827 and 1828 and it's known as the Burke and Hare Murders. For those of you that don't know, the University of Edinburgh has almost always been one of the top 5 universities in Europe, and it has often been in the top 10 in the world. At the time, Edinburgh university was THE place to go to study medicine. Students who would be doctors flooded to the school.

This made a problem for the school, however. They had a very limited number of cadavers for he students to dissect. Brilliant young doctors were pulling their hair out because they had no means of studying human physiology and illnesses hands-on. Other students who “just got lucky” and wound up with a cadaver were speeding past them on the road of knowledge, while they had to rely on diagrams and lectures.

So, as usual, the inventive Scottish came up with a solution. A new type of job came into being. The Resurrectionist. A resurrectionist was a person who would hear news of a recently deceased body. They would follow the funeral party to the grave, then wait until nightfall and dig up the corpse. Then they would sell the body to one of the mass of students in the city. Seems like a great solution, except the whole thing was highly illegal. If you were caught digging up a corpse or buying one you were in huge trouble. I don't think I need to describe how foul jails were at that time. So the whole thing had to be done in the shadows.

Burke and Hare were two good-for-nothing resurrectionists who would rather spend their time drinking and fooling around than actually looking for real jobs. Although Burke was married, he had a mistress in Edinburgh named Helen MacDougal. He moved into a boarding house that was owned by Hare's girlfriend, Margret Laird. For a while they worked on and off, but one night something happened.

An old army pensioner died in the boarding house. He had really pissed the four of them off, because not only did his dying of a cough keep them up all night but he never paid Margret Laird the 4 pounds he owed in boarding fees. So they had an idea. It was easier to sell a body without having to dig it up, so Burke and Hare brought it to a man they knew named Dr. Robert Knox who gave them 7 pounds for the corpse. Not only had they got the money that they were owed, but they were 3 pounds richer on the deal.

It wasn't long before they had the idea to actually make the corpses. Joseph the Miller was another sick tenant Laird had. Both Laird and MacDougal pretended to flirt and care for Joseph, all the while pouring whiskey into him. When Joseph was good and drunk, Burke and Hare pounced, one holding him down and the other sitting on the man's chest so he couldn't breathe. It worked like a charm. They had another corpse, and another 7 pounds from Dr. Knox.

But, running out of sick tenants, they stared to look elsewhere. An old woman, Abigail Simpson, was out late and so Burke and Hare invited her to stay at the boarding house and rest there instead of going home in the dark and dangerous streets. Kindly, they used the same sort of technique to subdue and murder her. This time Knox gave them 15 pounds because the body was so fresh.

Next, the two men brought home a pair of prostitutes: Mary Paterson and Janet Brown. Apparently, Brown was coming on to Burke so strongly that a it pissed off Helen MacDougal and they had a fight. Brown stormed out but Paterson stayed. They killed her the same way as the others. Later, Brown came back looking for her friend and she was told that Paterson had “gone off” with Burke. It was noted that the next day when some of the students unwrapped the cadaver they had purchased, they recognized the prostitute Mary Paterson because some of them had been with her in the past.

The next victim was a woman who was a beggar. Just about all information about her is lost to history, except that some people called her “Effie” and that Burke and Hare got 10 pounds for her corpse.

Shortly after that, Burke saw a woman who was having a fight with police in the street. The police were about to take her in when Burke stepped up and claimed that he knew her and that he would take care of her. The police let the woman go and her corpse turned up being sold at the University within hours of the incident. It's not clear who the woman was, and she may never be identified properly.

The following string of murders were all done in the same way as before. Each victim as pathetic as the rest. There was an elderly woman who didn't put up much of a fight. Next, a deaf beggar boy who was caught unaware. Burke brought one of his friends in next, a man by the name of Ostler who had apparently annoyed Burke somehow. Helen MacDougal was apparently also annoyed by one of her relatives, Ann MacDougal, and decided to kill her off for good measure. Next was another prostitute, this one who was much older, named Mary Haldane. When Mary Haldane's daughter Peggy came looking for her murdered mother, they invited Peggy in and killed her as well.

But Mary and Peggy turned out to be the start of mistakes. It seems that while Burke and Hare were deliberately preying on the weak and feeble, they had neglected that not all of them might be unnoticed. Mary Haldane was apparently very well known in her neighborhood. That made their next victim an even bigger mistake. A lame and retarded boy known only as “Daft Jamie” seemed like the perfect victim, but he was very well known. It seems that Knox had suspected what Burke and Hare were up to, because he made sure that when Jamie's body was presented to the students the hands and feet had been cut off and Knox had already dissected the face. The ploy didn't work, and several students recognized Jamie anyway.

Their last victim was a woman named Marjory Campbell Docherty. Unfortunately when Burke and Hare found her Laird had taken in a pair of boarders named James and Ann Gray. They had to wait for the Grays to leave before they could murder Docherty, and during that time the Grays grew suspicious. At one point, the Grays went out for a bit and instead of the usual get-the-victim-too-drunk-to-move, Burke and Hare pounced right away and the neighbors heard a struggle. After Ann Gray came back she got into a fight with Burke. Burke wouldn't let her near a bed where she knew she had left some of her things. For some reason, Burke had to go out later and when he did the Grays investigated the bed. Marjory's body was still underneath it. Burke and Hare hadn't had the chance to sell it yet.

The police were notified, and like all citizens the people reveled in the scandal and entertainment of the trial. Hare opted for an immunity plea and testified against Burke. Burke, of course, got death and Hare fled to Carlisle in England. Margret Laird and Helen MacDougal both avoided sentencing, but were nearly lynched by mobs of angry citizens. Helen retreated to Australia, and Margret escaped to Ireland. Nothing could be proved about Knox, and although he avoided sentencing students now avoided his classes and University heads refused to reassign him.

Ironically, after Burke was hanged, he was dissected by the University's Medical College. They made a death mask before dissecting him, and then tanned his skin and made objects from the leather once they were done. Burke's mask, skin, and skeleton are still on display to this day in the college museum.

The trio of “gentlemen” who were primarily involved even have a children's rhyme of their own now, to commemorate them forever:

“Burke is the Butcher,
Hare is the Thief,
and Knox is the boy that buys the beef.”

Sleep well, everyone. And stay away from whiskey and loose women.