The Westport Murders were a series of 16 murders committed between November 1827 and 31 October 1828 in the area around West Port Street in Edinburgh by Irish immigrants William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare sold the corpses of their victims as dissection material to the renowned Scottish surgeon, anatomist, and zoologist Robert Knox (1791–1862), a leading lecturer at Barclay’s private anatomical courses, which were popular with students at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. The criminals’ accomplices included Burke’s common-law wife Helen McDougal and Hare’s common-law wife Margaret. The method of murder used by Burke and Hare—suffocation by squeezing the victim’s chest—has received its own name in English, burking, from burke — to kill, to strangle; in a figurative sense – to hush up a case, to deal with it quietly and unnoticed (named after William Burke, the main perpetrator of the murders).
Murders
According to Hare’s evidence at the trial, the first body they sold to Knox was that of a lodger who had died of natural causes on 27 November 1827, an elderly ex-soldier named Donald, who owed Hare and Laird £4 in rent. Having stolen the body before burial and stuffed the coffin with bark, Burke and Hare took it to Edinburgh University to find a buyer (originally intended to be Professor Monroe, an anatomy lecturer). According to Burke’s evidence, a university student directed them to Barclay’s Institution in Serjon’s Square, where they agreed on a price with Robert Knox’s assistants Jones, Miller and Ferguson, and sold the body for dissection for £7 10s. The victim of the first deliberate murder committed by Burke and Hare in December 1827 was an ailing lodger of the Hares, a miller named Joseph, in some sources – Joseph Miller, whom the criminals strangled with a pillow, having previously fed him to his fill and given him whiskey to drink – according to Burke and Hare’s statement at the trial, solely for the purpose of “easing the suffering of the dying man”.
On February 11, 1828, Burke and Hare invited Abigail Simpson, an elderly resident of Gilmerton, who had come to Edinburgh for a pension, to spend the night in their furnished rooms. Acting in a proven way, the accomplices gave Simpson alcohol to drink and strangled her (according to another version, Margaret herself invited Simpson into the house, offered her whiskey and, having waited until she was drunk, called her husband). They were paid 10 pounds sterling for Simpson’s body. In the same month, an “English peddler” was killed, whose name remained unknown.
The house of William Burke and Helen McDougal. View from the yard.
On the morning of April 9, 1828, Burke, having met two eighteen-year-old prostitutes, Mary Patterson Mitchell and Janet Brown, in one of the Canongate taverns, invited them to his place for breakfast; both, after some hesitation, accepted the invitation. Having brought the girls to his brother’s house, Burke generously plied them both with alcohol, after which Patterson fell asleep right at the table. Trying to get Brown drunk, Burke took her to a pub, then brought her back to the house, where Mary was still asleep, drunk, sitting at the table. Suddenly, Helen burst into the room, showering Burke and Janet with abuse; a fight ensued, during which Burke pushed his partner out the door. Brown, not wanting to be present at the scandal, chose to leave, but promised to return for Patterson after Helen (who continued to scold from behind the door) had gone home. On the way home, Janet stopped by Mrs. Laurie, the landlady of a tenement house who had once rented a room to her and Mary. Having heard Janet’s story about the events that had happened to her and Mary that morning, Laurie, worried about Patterson, told Janet to immediately return to Hare and take the girl from him. When Janet came for her friend, she was told that Mary had left with Burke and would return later, after which Janet began to wait for Mary at the entrance to the house. A few hours later, Mrs. Laurie, worried about Janet’s own fate, sent a servant for her. Yielding to his persuasion and never waiting for Mary to return, Janet left. By this time, her friend was already on Knox’s dissecting table. Later, a rumour spread in Edinburgh that one of Knox’s students had identified the dead Patterson right during a lecture.
William Burke
In May 1828, Burke’s acquaintance, a beggar named Effie, was killed by murderers, for whose body Burke and Hare received £10. Presumably, in the summer of the same year, five more unknown people were killed, including an old beggar woman and her blind grandson. Having strangled the old woman (according to other sources, by poisoning her with an excessive dose of painkillers), Hare broke the boy’s back over his knee. The bodies of the old woman and the boy were sold to Knox for £8 each.
Around June 1828, a quarrel broke out between the accomplices, probably caused by the fact that Hare, taking advantage of Burke’s departure from Edinburgh, independently obtained several corpses and refused to share the proceeds with Burke. As a result of the quarrel, Burke and McDougal moved out of the furnished rooms, renting their own apartment building in the same district. However, the “anatomical murders”, which had long been the only source of income for Burke and Hare, did not stop: in the same month, a laundress named Mrs. Osler, an acquaintance of Burke, and McDougal’s cousin, Ann McDougal, were killed. At the same time, Burke “rescued” an unnamed drunk woman detained on the street from the police station, telling the constables that he knew her well; just a few hours later, the victim’s body was delivered to the medical school. Then, an impoverished elderly prostitute, Elizabeth Haldane, was killed, having climbed into Hare’s stable for the night, and a few months later – her daughter Peggy Haldane.
Burke and Hare’s next victim was a well-known mentally retarded lame youth in the West Port area – eighteen-year-old James Wilson, nicknamed Crazy Jamie, who was killed in early October 1828. Wilson desperately resisted – Burke and Hare had to strangle him together. When Dr. Knox, starting another anatomy class the next morning, pulled the shroud off the body, several students recognized Crazy Jamie. During the lecture, Wilson’s head and feet were cut off. Knox denied that the body belonged to Wilson, but he began dissecting the corpse’s face.
The last victim was Marjorie Campbell Docherty, killed on Halloween night – from October 31 to November 1, 1828. The previous morning, Burke, as usual, went to the pub and noticed the Irish accent of an elderly woman asking for alms from the owners of the establishment. After offering the woman a glass of liquor, Burke discovered that her name was Mary Docherty from Inishowen, and then claimed that his mother had the same surname and was from the same area. Having assured Docherty that he and she were undoubtedly related, he easily lured her into his house, but was unable to immediately kill his victim due to the presence of lodgers – married couple James and Anne Gray. That evening, Burke and McDougal, who had arranged a copious libation with Docherty on the occasion of Halloween, persuaded the Gray couple to spend the night in the Hares’ furnished rooms. Another lodger of the Burkes, renting a room on the floor above and returning home around midnight, heard the sounds of a struggle from behind the door of the Grays’ flat and a woman screaming: “Murder! Call the police, there is a murder here!” The lodger ran out into the street and spent some time there in vain searching for the constable, then re-entered the house, went up the stairs and listened to what was happening outside the door. Not hearing anything suspicious, the lodger decided that the incident was over and went to bed.
William Hare
Exposure. Court. Execution
Returning home the next morning, the Grays found Docherty missing. When questioned about the fate of the previous night’s guest, McDougal said that she had thrown her out because she had behaved “too friendly” with Burke. Anne Gray became suspicious when Burke refused to let her near the bed where she had left her stockings. The following evening, when the Grays were alone, they looked under the bed and found Docherty’s body there. On their way to the police station, the Grays encountered McDougal, who unsuccessfully tried to offer them ten pounds a week to keep quiet about what she had seen.
Before the police arrived, Burke and Hare managed to remove the body from the house, but during questioning, Burke stated that Docherty had left the apartment at seven o’clock in the morning, while according to McDougal, she had left in the evening. Both Burke and McDougal were immediately taken into custody. An anonymous informant led police to Knox’s lecture room, where Docherty’s body was found in a tea chest and identified by James Gray. Hare and his wife were arrested shortly afterwards. On 6 November 1828, Janet Brown, having read in a newspaper about the murders that Burke and Hare were accused of in connection with the disappearances of residents of the Westport area, went to the police station and identified the clothes seized from Laird as those of her friend Mary Patterson. However, the evidence against Burke and Hare collected during the investigation was considered insufficient, and the Lord Advocate Sir William Ray offered Hare immunity from prosecution on condition that he repented his actions and agreed to testify against Burke.
Based on the evidence given by Hare, William Burke was sentenced to death by hanging on 24 December 1828, followed by a public dissection. The sentence was carried out on the morning of January 28, 1829. The execution, which took place on Lawnmarket Street (according to other sources, at the beginning of High Street in front of St. Giles Cathedral), was watched by between 25,000 and 40,000 people. After the execution, Burke’s body was put on public display at the Edinburgh Medical College; several medical students, seizing a convenient moment, cut off pieces of skin from the corpse for subsequent sale and as souvenirs. Professor Alexander Monro, who carried out the dissection of the body according to the sentence, dipped a pen in Burke’s blood and wrote in a specially prepared book:
“Written in the blood of W-m Burke, who was hanged in Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head.”
The book, covered with Burke’s tanned skin, his death mask and skeleton are exhibited in the anatomical museum of the medical school of the University of Edinburgh.
Helen MacDougal was released due to the impossibility of proving her complicity in the murders. A separate suit brought by James Wilson’s mother against Hare was dismissed because of the immunity from prosecution granted to him as a “royal witness.” Knox, who escaped any formal charges (in his confession, Burke swore that he had no knowledge of the origin of the corpses he had dissected), was publicly vilified as the actual instigator of the murders committed by Burke and Hare.