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FILE 126 · VOL XX · The Dead Are Still Working
He Murdered 16 People and Sold Their Bodies to Doctors. His Skeleton Is Still on Display.
They hanged him, cut him open and put him in a case. They forgot to ask if he was finished.
Based on: The West Port Murders
Intake record
| Recovered from | Back room of an antiquarian bookshop, Edinburgh Old Town |
|---|---|
| Contents | A pocketbook bound in leather that is not from a cow, an 1829 dissection ticket, a medical student's diary, a museum night guard's resignation letter |
| Finder | Fiona McLeish, bookshop owner |
| Status | The murders and the display are documented. The pocketbook's last entry is dated this year. |
Recovered file
In the early 1800s, Edinburgh was one of the best places in the world to study medicine. Hundreds of students came every year to learn anatomy. To learn anatomy, they needed to cut open human bodies. [1]
There were not enough.
By law, the only bodies doctors could legally dissect were those of executed criminals. There were not nearly enough executions to supply every class. So a black market grew. Grave robbers, called resurrection men, dug up fresh corpses at night and sold them to anatomy teachers, no questions asked. [1]
Families guarded new graves. They built iron cages over them, called mortsafes. They paid watchmen. [1]
Two men in Edinburgh found an easier way.
In November 1827, a lodger died of illness in a cheap boarding house in the West Port district of Edinburgh, owing rent. The landlord and his friend, an Irish laborer named William Burke, sold the body to an anatomy school for seven pounds and ten shillings. It was more money than a laborer made in months. [2]
Then they began to make more bodies. [2]
Over the next eleven months, they murdered sixteen people. Poor lodgers. Travelers. Sick people. People nobody would miss. They got them drunk and smothered them, a method that left almost no marks, so the bodies looked fresh and natural. They sold each body to the same anatomy lecturer, who did not ask where they came from. [2]
They were caught at the end of October 1828, when two lodgers found a woman's body hidden in straw at the foot of a bed. Burke's partner turned King's evidence, which means he testified against Burke in exchange for not being prosecuted. He was never tried. [2]
Burke was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, and then to be publicly dissected. It was the same fate as the people he had sold. [2]
He was hanged on January 28, 1829, in front of a crowd that may have reached twenty-five thousand people. A few days later, his body was dissected in a lecture hall at the University of Edinburgh. So many people wanted to see it that there was nearly a riot. Afterward, thousands filed past his opened body. [2]
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 126 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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