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Trial
The trial began at 10:00 am on Christmas Eve 1828 before the
High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh's Parliament House. The case was heard by
the Lord Justice-Clerk, David Boyle, supported by the Lords Meadowbank,
Pitmilly and Mackenzie. The court was full shortly after the doors were opened
at 9:00 am, and a large crowd gathered outside Parliament House; 300 constables
were on duty to prevent disturbances, while infantry and cavalry were on
standby as a further precaution.
McDougal and Burke
The Hares
The case ran through the day and night to the following
morning; Rosner notes that even a formal postponement of the case for dinner
could have raised questions about the validity of the trial. When the charges
were read out, the two defence counsels objected to Burke and McDougal being
tried together. James Moncreiff, Burke's defence lawyer, protested that his
client was charged "with three
unconnected murders, committed each at a different time, and at a different
place" in a trial with another defendant "that is not even
alleged to have had any concern with two of the offences of which he is
accused". Several hours were spent on legal arguments about the objection.
The judge decided that to ensure a fair trial, the indictment should be split
into separate charges for the three murders. He gave Rae the choice as to which
should be heard first; Rae opted for the murder of Docherty, given they had the
corpse and the strongest evidence.
In the early afternoon Burke and McDougal pleaded not guilty
to the murder of Docherty. The first witnesses were then called from a list of
55 that included Hare and Knox; not all the witnesses on the list were called
and Knox, with three of his assistants, avoided being questioned in court. One
of Knox's assistants, David Paterson—who had been the main person Burke and
Hare had dealt with at Knox's surgery—was called and confirmed the pair had
supplied the doctor with several corpses.
In the early evening Hare took the stand to give evidence.
Under cross-examination about the murder of Docherty, Hare claimed Burke had
been the sole murderer and McDougal had twice been involved by bringing
Docherty back to the house after she had run out; Hare stated that he had
assisted Burke in the delivery of the body to Knox. Although he was asked about
other murders, he was not obliged to answer the questions, as the charge
related only to the death of Docherty. After Hare's questioning, his wife
entered the witness box, carrying their baby daughter who had developed
whooping cough. Margaret used the child's coughing fits as a way to give
herself thinking time for some of the questions, and told the court that she
had a very poor memory and could not remember many of the events.
The final prosecution witnesses were the two doctors, Black
and Christison; both said they suspected foul play, but that there was no
forensic evidence to support the suggestion of murder. There were no witnesses
called for the defence, although the pre-trial declarations by Burke and
McDougal were read out in their place. The prosecution summed up their case,
after which, at 3:00 am, Burke's defence lawyer began his final statement,
which lasted for two hours; McDougal's defence lawyer began his address to the
jury on his client's behalf at 5:00 am. Boyle then gave his summing up,
directing the jury to accept the arguments of the prosecution. The jury retired
to consider its verdict at 8:30 am on Christmas Day and returned fifty minutes
later. It delivered a guilty verdict against Burke for the murder of Docherty;
the same charge against McDougal they found not proven. As he passed the death
sentence against Burke, Boyle told him:
Your body should be
publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to
preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep
in remembrance your atrocious crimes.
Aftermath, including
execution and dissection
McDougal was released at the end of the trial and returned
home. The following day she went to buy whisky and was confronted by a mob that
was angry at the not proven verdict. She was taken to a police building in
nearby Fountainbridge for her own protection, but after the mob laid siege to
it she escaped through a back window to the main police station off Edinburgh's
High Street. She tried to see Burke, but permission was refused; she left Edinburgh
the next day, and there are no clear accounts of her later life. On 3 January
1829, on the advice of both Catholic priests and Presbyterian clergy, Burke
made another confession. This was more detailed than the official one provided
prior to his trial; he placed much of the blame for the murders on Hare.
On 16 January 1829 a petition on behalf of James Wilson's
mother and sister, protesting against Hare's immunity and intended release from
prison, was given lengthy consideration by the High Court of Justiciary and rejected
by a vote of 4 to 2. Margaret was released on 19 January and travelled to
Glasgow to find a passage back to Ireland. While waiting for a ship she was
recognised and attacked by a mob. She was given shelter in a police station
before being given a police escort onto a Belfast-bound vessel; no clear
accounts exist of what became of her after she landed in Ireland.
Burke's preserved
skeleton
Burke was hanged on the morning of 28 January 1829 in front
of a crowd possibly as large as 25,000; views from windows in the tenements
overlooking the scaffold were hired at prices ranging from 5s to 20s. On 1
February Burke's corpse was publicly dissected by Professor Monro in the
anatomy theatre of the university's Old College. Police had to be called when
large numbers of students gathered demanding access to the lecture for which a
limited number of tickets had been issued. A minor riot ensued; calm was
restored only after one of the university professors negotiated with the crowd
that they would be allowed to pass through the theatre in batches of fifty,
after the dissection. During the procedure, which lasted for two hours, Monro
dipped his quill pen into Burke's blood and wrote, "This is written with the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at
Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head".
Burke's skeleton was given to the Anatomical Museum of the
Edinburgh Medical School where, as at 2022, it remains. His death mask and a
book said to be bound with his tanned skin can be seen at Surgeons' Hall
Museum.
Hare was released on 5 February 1829—his extended stay in
custody had been undertaken for his own protection—and was assisted in leaving
Edinburgh in disguise by the mailcoach to Dumfries. At one of its stops he was
recognised by a fellow passenger, Erskine Douglas Sandford, a junior counsel
who had represented Wilson's family; Sandford informed his fellow passengers of
Hare's identity. On arrival in Dumfries the news of Hare's presence spread and
a large crowd gathered at the hostelry where he was due to stay the night.
Police arrived and arranged for a decoy coach to draw off the crowd while Hare
escaped through a back window and into a carriage which took him to the town's
prison for safekeeping. A crowd surrounded the building; stones were thrown at
the door and windows and street lamps were smashed before 100 special
constables arrived to restore order. In the small hours of the morning,
escorted by a sheriff officer and militia guard, Hare was taken out of town,
set down on the Annan Road and instructed to make his way to the English
border. There were no subsequent reliable sightings of him and his eventual
fate is unknown.
Caricature of Knox,
harvesting corpses
Knox refused to make any public statements about his
dealings with Burke and Hare. The common thought in Edinburgh was that he was
culpable in the events; he was lampooned in caricature and, in February 1829, a
crowd gathered outside his house and burned an effigy of him. A committee of
inquiry cleared him of complicity and reported that they had "seen no evidence that Dr Knox or his
assistants knew that murder was committed in procuring any of the subjects
brought to his rooms". He resigned from his position as curator of the
College of Surgeons' museum, and was gradually excluded from university life by
his peers. He left Edinburgh in 1842 and lectured in Britain and mainland
Europe. While working in London he fell afoul of the regulations of the Royal
College of Surgeons and was debarred from lecturing; he was removed from the
roll of fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1848. From 1856 he worked
as a pathological anatomist at the Brompton Cancer Hospital and had a medical
practice in Hackney until his death in 1862.
Legacy
Legislation
The question of the supply of cadavers for scientific
research had been promoted by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham before the
crimes of Burke and Hare took place. A parliamentary select committee had
drafted a "Bill for preventing the unlawful
disinterment of human bodies, and for regulating Schools of Anatomy"
in mid-1828—six months before the murders were detected. This was rejected in
1829 by the House of Lords.
The murders committed by Burke and Hare raised public
awareness of the need for bodies for medical purposes, and of the trade that
doctors had conducted with grave robbers and murderers. The East London murder
of a 14-year-old boy and the subsequent attempt to sell the corpse to the
medical school at King's College London led to an investigation of the London
Burkers, who had recently turned from grave robbing to murder to obtain
corpses; two men were hanged in December 1831 for the crime. A bill was quickly
introduced into Parliament, and gained royal assent nine months later to become
the Anatomy Act 1832. This Act authorized dissection on bodies from workhouses
unclaimed after 48 hours, and ended the practice of anatomizing as part of the
death sentence for murder.
In media portrayals
and popular culture
The events of the West Port murders have made appearances in
fiction. They are referred to in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 short story "The Body Snatcher" and Marcel
Schwob told their story in the last chapter of Imaginary Lives (1896), while
the Edinburgh-based author Elizabeth Byrd used the events in her novels Rest
Without Peace (1974) and The Search for Maggie Hare (1976). The murders have
also been portrayed on stage and screen, usually in heavily fictionalized form.
David Paterson, Knox's assistant, contacted Walter Scott to
ask the novelist if he would be interested in writing an account of the
murders, but he declined, despite Scott's long-standing interest in the events.
Scott later wrote:
Our Irish importation
have made a great discovery of Oeconomicks, namely, that a wretch who is not
worth a farthing while alive, becomes a valuable article when knockd on the
head & carried to an anatomist; and acting on this principle, have cleard
the streets of some of those miserable offcasts of society, whom nobody missd
because nobody wishd to see them again.
Notes
Gilliland observes
that although there is no evidence that the couple had been formally married,
they were considered as such under Scottish law.
It has been suggested
that, but for this chance encounter, the public opprobrium which later fell on
Knox might have attached to Monro.
£7 10s in 1827
equates to approximately equivalent to £683 in 2021, according to calculations
based on Consumer Price Index measure of inflation.
The original copy of
Hare's confession—given on 1 December and accepted as the basis of his turning
king's evidence—was subsequently lost, although the details were widely reported
in the press of the time.
The modern sources
that provide a chronological list of the murders are:
Brian Bailey, Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls; Bailey
also tabulates the order from the two Burke confessions, three contemporary
publications and his own;
Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders;
Owen Dudley Edwards, Burke and Hare.
Rosner reflects that
the pair were unlikely to change their modus operandi for the second murder,
particularly for a less effective method of smothering a victim.
£10 in 1828 equates
to approximately £875 in 2016.
The two women were
described in contemporary accounts as prostitutes, but there is no evidence
that this was true.
Some contemporary
accounts state that Burke murdered the boy by putting him over his knee and
breaking his back; both Rosner and Bailey consider this highly unlikely, and
the latter describes it as "a piece
of sensational embroidery".
Margaret Docherty's
name is also given as Margery, Mary or Madgy with the alternative surname
Campbell.
It was a Saturday and
the dissecting rooms were closed, so the tea-chest containing the body was left
in the cellar; Knox gave the men £5 and told them he would examine it on
Monday, when he would pay them the balance.
During their careers
both Newbigging and Christison were Presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons
of Edinburgh; Christison also became the president of the British Medical
Association and one of the personal physicians to Queen Victoria.
The original meaning
changed over time in general use as a word for any suppression or cover-up.
One of the spectators
present was Marie Tussaud, also known as Madame Tussaud, who made several
sketches during the case. She had a wax model of Burke on display in Liverpool
within a fortnight of his execution.
Burke and McDougal
even had their evening meal of soup and bread at 6:00 pm, while they were still
in the dock; the case continued while they ate.
On hearing the not
proven verdict Burke turned to McDougal and said, "Nelly, you are out of the scrape".
Some accounts of the
escape state that she was disguised as a man for her escape from
Fountainbridge, which Rosner considers "picturesque
though unlikely".
One contemporary
source, A. Wood's 1829 work West Port Murders, considers the number of
attendees "more nearly to forty
thousand souls than to thirty-five thousand".
Several tales of
Hare's fate exist. These include that he worked at a lime pit until he was
recognised, upon which point his fellow-workers threw him into the pit, which
turned him blind; he may have turned to begging on Oxford Street, London. Other
possibilities are that he went to Ireland or America and lived for 40 years
after the murders.
Rosner gives the date
as 10 February; Bailey gives 11; Taylor gives 12.
In order to change
public opinion on the matter, Bentham donated his body to be publicly dissected
and his corpse to be preserved as an "auto-icon";
it has been on display in University College London since 1850.
On stage:
The Anatomist (1930) by James Bridie.
The Doctor and the Devils by Dylan Thomas.
On radio:
"The
Anatomist" (1937) by Bridie; based on his own play.
On film:
The Body Snatcher (1945), based on Stevenson's story.
The Flesh and the Fiends (1960).
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) depicted Burke and Hare in
the late Victorian era as employees of Dr. Jekyll.
Burke & Hare (1971)
The Doctor and the Devils (1985), based on Thomas's play.
Burke & Hare (2010).
On television:
"The Anatomist"
(1939) by Bridie.
"The
Anatomist" (1956) an episode of the ITV Play of the Week series.
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