The Lady and Her Monsters (24 page)

On the day before Burke's hanging, the skies opened up and a great deluge washed over the city. But the weather didn't seem to matter, because thousands gathered in Lawnmarket to view the preparations for the ordeal. They laughed as the scaffold went up, and reports detail how the crowd's chatter mingled with “the din of the workmen and clinging of the hammers.” As the day ended and what natural light there had been during the day diminished to nighttime, the workers lit torches around the area, giving the place a more “lurid glare.”

Under normal circumstances, the workmen who raised the scaffold would have done anything to get someone else to take this job, but for the Burke hanging, they fought to perform the honor. When they had the scaffold up, some left the area, intent on returning the next day, but others joined the crowds who had laid claim to empty spaces in dark corners and beneath balconies, wrapped in thin blankets that offered little warmth, determined to be there to watch Burke hang. By morning their space would be reduced by more than half by the rest of the population who would join them.

More than twenty thousand people crowded in Lawnmarket to view the execution on the next day. Numerous constables and law enforcement officers had been hired to watch and patrol the area in case of rioting, but they were not needed. Everyone in the crowd agreed with William Burke's fate, so fights did not break out. If anything, there was an air of gaiety in the area that struck some onlookers as out of place. The erratic voices grew to a fever pitch as Burke was brought onto the scaffold and a noose tightened around his neck. They began to chant, “Burke him, Burke him, Burke him . . .”

The execution of William Burke. Burke, along with his associate, William Hare, murdered the poor and indigent who crowded the streets of Edinburgh. They supplied bodies to the various anatomist schools in the area for dissections.

The
Newgate Calendar
reported on the crowd's eagerness to do away with the murderer but also wrote about Burke's state of mind: “On Wednesday the 28th . . . Burke underwent the last penalty . . . Seats commanding a view of the gallows were let at a large price . . . he was assailed by the hideous yells of public execration. The concluding moments of his existence must have caused him the most acute suffering, for, stung to madness by the horrible shrieks . . . he appeared anxious to hurry the execution . . . as if desirous to escape from that life . . . A short, but apparently severe struggle succeeded.”

In detailing the day's events,
The Scotsman
instead chose to depict the audience and its reaction, which bordered on either hilarity or hysterics:

The struggle was neither long nor apparently severe; but at every convulsive motion, a loud buzz arose from the multitude, which was several times repeated even after the last agonies of humanity were past. During the time of the wretched man's suspension, not a single indication of pity was observable among the vast crowd—on the contrary, every countenance wore the lively aspect of a gala day, while puns and jokes on the occasion were freely bandied about, and produced bursts of laughter and merriment, which were not confined to the juvenile spectators alone—Burke Hare too! Wash blood from the land! One cheer more! And similar exclamations were repeated in different directions, until the culprit was cut down, about nine o'clock, when one general and tremendous buzz closed the awful exhibition—and then the multitude immediately thereafter began to disperse.

After the execution, the crowd struggled for the lurid relics of the hangman, trying to get their hands on anything affiliated with Burke, such as pieces of his clothing or remnants from the noose.

Dissection quickly followed at the University of Edinburgh Medical College, at the hands of Dr. Alexander Monro. Every precaution was taken to allow only a limited number of people into the anatomy theater, but the judge's sentence had called for a public dissection, so even nonstudents and non–medical men participated. Months later, a pamphlet titled
The West Port Murders
was published anonymously. The unknown writer said he had been present at the hanging and dissection and felt he had to give it a thorough account. “Every countenance bore an expression of gladness that revenge was so near, and the whole multitude appeared more as if they were waiting to witness some splendid procession or agreeable exhibition.” He went on: “At the dissection the quantity of blood that gushed out was enormous, and by the time the lecture was finished, which was not till three o'clock, the area of the class-room had the appearance of a butcher's slaughter-house, from its flowing down and being trodden upon.”

Burke's remains were on display for hours to allow people to view them. Thousands streamed by the now-mangled corpse, including several females, which everyone in the auditorium thought peculiar. During the dissection, the skin Dr. Monro had removed from the corpse was stolen. Weeks later, the markets began to sell belts, wallets, and book covers all said to have been made from the tanned skin of William Burke. They fetched a very high price. The structure and mold of his skull was later studied by phrenologists, who believed they could divine an individual's personality, artistic sensibilities, and even murderous inclinations from their bone structure. Unfortunately, Burke's skull turned out to be within the normal range, debunking the phrenologists' theories.

Following Helen M'Dougal's release, she made the terrible mistake of returning to her house, where she was viciously attacked by an angry mob and nearly killed. She was fortunate that her house was located near a police station, and they offered her some protection. She was rumored to have traveled to Australia, where she remained until her death in the late 1860s. William and Margaret Hare returned to Ireland, where it was reported Hare was pushed by some coworkers into a pool of quicklime, which caused him to go blind. He spent the rest of his days as a beggar.

Although Burke and Hare did not implicate Robert Knox, nor was he formally charged for any of the crimes, his reputation suffered. Students stopped attending his lectures, positions disappeared, and appointments he wished for never came to be. He moved to London, where he worked at a cancer institution and eventually died in 1862.

The aftermath of the Burke and Hare episode had a strange effect not only on the laws that were passed afterward, but on the literature that was published. The trial was followed by a rise in crime-driven novels that derived from factual accounts. Even nursery rhymes took a turn for the macabre. A particularly naughty one provided children the chance to skip rope while they chanted the whole event in eight simple lines:

Up the close and down the stair

In the house with Burke and Hare.

Burke's the Butcher, Hare's the Thief,

Knox, the boy who buys the beef.

Burke and Hare,

Fell down the stair,

With a body in a box,

Going to Dr. Knox.

But more important, in August 1832, what became known as Mr. Warburton's Anatomy Bill passed through Parliament and became affectionately known as the Anatomy Act. In essence, it would drive the resurrectionists out of business.

From 1829, the year news broke out about the Burke and Hare crimes, until the act passed, the bill went through several revisions, but somehow it was always blocked during the very last stages. What helped it, sadly, was an episode in London that was similar to the Burke and Hare crimes, when it was learned that another gang, which included two killers, Bishop and Williams, nicknamed the London Burkers, had also been murdering individuals in order to sell their bodies to the anatomists. A particular gruesome case was that of an Italian boy, which brought London to its knees.

The London Burkers—John Bishop
(left),
Thomas Williams
(center),
James May
(right)
—were convicted in 1831 for murdering men, women, and children in London, then selling their bodies to medical schools for dissections. Their nefarious deeds came to light when suspicions were cast on the smothered body of a young immigrant boy they were trying to sell, in what became known as the “Italian Boy” case.

On November 5, 1831, Bishop and Williams were arrested when they tried to sell the body of a young boy to the porter at King's College. Suspicious of the body's condition, the porter called on the school's surgeon and anatomist, who performed a detailed examination of the body. The boy was said to have suffered great trauma, including a blow to the head and the removal of all of his teeth, and he also appeared not to have been buried at all. The two men were frequenters of the Fortune of War pub, the notorious haunt of body snatchers in London, where a waiter had noticed one of the two felons washing a collection of human teeth with a pitcher of water. They were arrested and put on trial. Found guilty, they were hanged at Newgate on December 5, 1831, in front of a crowd of nearly thirty thousand.

These two cases pointed to something painfully obvious: not only the dead had trouble resting in peace; the living could not either. The struggle for anatomical material had reached such levels that murder was now a way for some individuals to find viable subjects. Not even two weeks after the Bishop and Williams trial, Henry Warburton introduced the Anatomy Act again. This time the bill passed on May 11, 1832, stating in part that “whereas in order further to supply human bodies for such purposes . . . grievous crimes have been committed, lately murder, for the single object of selling for such purposes the bodies of the persons so murdered: And whereas, therefore, it is highly exponent to give protection, under certain regulations, to the study and practices of anatomy, and to prevent, as far as may be, such great and grievous crimes and murder as aforesaid.”

The Anatomy Act appointed three people to inspect all the places and laboratories—private as well as institutionally funded—where anatomizations took place; those inspectors could enter the premises at any time and without any notice. This would allow them to determine if anatomists were adhering to the new regulations. The act also gave the right to allow a dissection to take place to those who possessed the body legally, unless the deceased had said otherwise and those in charge were aware of those wishes. Corpses could not be removed from their place of death for at least forty-eight hours, and even then, someone in authority had to allow this to occur. The act also made it legal for any “member or fellow of any college of physicians or surgeons” to examine the body of anyone who had died and whose body they had received. They would not be “liable to any prosecution, penalty, forfeiture, or punishment for receiving or having in his possession for anatomical examination, or for the provision of this act.” In addition, the anatomists were also responsible for burying the remains of the corpses in consecrated ground.

Not everyone was impressed with the new laws. Thomas Wakley, the founder and editor of the medical journal
The Lancet,
declared in an editorial: “Burke and Hare . . . it is said, are the real authors of the measure, and that which would never have been sanctioned by the deliberate wisdom of Parliament, is about to be exhorted from its fears . . . It required no extraordinary Sagacity to foresee that the worst consequences must inevitably result from the system of traffic between resurrectionists and anatomists, which the executive government has so long suffered to exist. Government is already in a great degree, responsible for the crime which it has fostered by its negligence, and even encouraged by a system of forebearance.”

With the bill in place, anatomists and medical men could now find fitting subjects themselves, in death houses, in hospitals, and directly from family members. They would not be punished for carrying on such experiments, however peculiar. As part of the deal, they only had to make certain to find a decent place to bury the bodies after they were done with them. Given these new laws, the resurrectionists were no longer needed. The era of the gentlemen in black was forever over. Or so it seemed.