Original subtitles

[Music]

Well, here we are on the lawn market in

Edinburgh. And as you can see, this is a

very busy thoroughare. Tourists coming

and going, loads of traffic. But if

you'd been here on the morning of the

28th of January, 1829, things would have

been ever so slightly different. But not

the crowds. On that morning, about

25,000 people had assembled right here

to witness an execution. Some of the

more well-healed members of Edinburgh

Society had actually bought out some

spaces in the window so that they could

look down and get a better view. Who

were they here to see? Well, a notorious

killer. This person's killings had made

the headlines here in Edinburgh, in

Scotland, across the UK, and across the

world. His name was William Burke.

Together with William Hair, Burke was

one half of Scotland's infamous

murdering duo. Burke and Hair stalked

the old streets and dark courtyards of

the capital after dark, spreading

terror. Join me, Anthony Delaney, and

me, Maddie Pelling, for a history hit

after dark special that takes us from

Edinburgh's high society to its darkest

corners.

You might think that you know the story

of Burkenhair, the 19th century's

infamous grave robbers. But they never

robbed a grave.

[Music]

Instead, they murdered at least 16

people before selling them to the

anatomist table. This is the true story

of their crimes.

But it's also a history of medicine, of

women, of poverty and the marginalized,

and what life was really like on the

streets of one of Britain's most

important and busiest cities.

This is the real story of a notorious

killing spree that drew in Edinburgh's

highest and lowest

and implicated the city establishment in

the butchery. These were murders that

changed history.

[Music]

Edinburgh in the 1820s was a sthing city

drawing in people from across Scotland

and beyond, including two men whose

names would become a byword for the

darkest murders. William Burke and

William Hair came from the north of

Ireland. And like many other Irish

people who came before them, they came

to work on the Union Canal. Thousands of

Irish immigrants like Burke and Hair

found work as navies, manual laborers,

propelling the industrial revolution

with engineering projects on a new

scale.

And when they socialized in Edinburgh,

they came to places like the white art

in behind me. And they lived close by

too, just across the way on Tanner's

Close. And it was there that hair ran a

lodging house with Margaret Leair. And

Burke, having left a wife and two

children behind him in Ireland, set up

home with Helen McDougall.

Burke and his common law wife McDougall

rented a room in Hair's lodging house as

they got set up in the city, and the two

men struck up a friendship.

Overcrowded lodging houses in the city's

Westport were filled with newcomers in

the 1820s. These crumbling tenementss

offered only a temporary roof for the

city's poorest residents, charging just

a few pennies for a bed. Yet for those

arriving in Edinburgh in search of work,

these ramshackle buildings were a vital

lifeline.

Burke and Hair were one step up the

social hierarchy of Edinburgh's old

town, clustered around and beneath the

foroding castle. But this tightpacked,

poverty-stricken Alri Ricky was a world

away from the smart new town emerging

just to the north.

Edinburgh in 1828 was a city of two

halves. In the old town, it was made up

of a warren of medieval streets, people

living in poverty, cheap by jou. But

here in the new town, it was a different

story altogether. Here was a Palladian

architectural triumph built on values of

rationality, enlightenment, and funded

by a growing wealthy population.

The new town, carefully constructed to

emphasize symmetry and proportion, was

built in stages from the 1760s.

By the turn of the century, Edinburgh

was becoming increasingly stratified.

The wealthy migrated to the spacious,

orderly streets of the new town, while

the poorer residents of the city

remained cramped in the old.

To explore the evolving landscape of the

city, I'm meeting social historian

Esther Meyers. Edinburgh is a very old

city and it originally is a medieval

town sort of built around the castle. So

it's really quite compact and and and

and very narrow streets. People

literally living on top of one another

and that's what we can see here. And

that's what you can see here. Yes. In

the later 18th century, a new town is

built that is much more spacious, much

more grand, uh much more open, literally

easier to breathe in. And it is that

divide that is going to be in a way I

suppose um symptomatic for the the

divide between poor and and and rich. So

Edinburgh is fascinating because of

course it's a capital city. So there's a

university, it is the center, it's a

religious center of course because the

kirk the church of Scotland has its home

here. There there's a medical

establishment. There is a a financial

establishment. So you have a sort of an

elites. What you see happening at the

start of of of our period is that that

is starting to change as more and more

people come into the city attracted by

the opportunity or possibly pushed out

by the lack of opportunity at home. Um

and and that's when things start to get

really difficult and that is this rise

in poverty and the and and the the

population growth. It's difficult to be

poor. You're at constant risk of

disease. Sanitation is terrible.

People's diets are terrible. um they are

at the behest of of of landlords who can

kick them out at any moment. It's pretty

grim.

So we have people rushing to this city

that's full of potential opportunity and

wealth to be had. But where are they

coming from? So there are people coming

from outside of from Scotland. Um and

then there are people coming from

elsewhere. So the most numerous groups

really come from other places in

Scotland. But of course another group

are Irish migrants who are starting to

in reasonable numbers attracted by the

opportunity that is provided by cities

like Edinburgh. As a low-grade landlord,

William Hair was trading on this tide of

povertystricken Irish and Scots pouring

into Edinburgh. But he and Burke were

ambitious men who wanted more. And there

was an emerging trade that could provide

just that.

Edinburgh's worldrenowned medical

establishment was on the lookout for

bodies. It needed them to stay at the

forefront of scientific advancement, but

there was a serious shortage of legally

available bodies in the city. So, a

clandestine economy of the dead

flourished.

An opportunity to profit from this grim

trade in bodies soon fell into Burke and

Hair's lap.

Now, it just so happened that a death

occurred at Tanner's Close. This was a

man called Old Donald who was a tenant

at William Hair's lodging house. But

hair was not too pleased about this

death. Not for any humane reasons, but

because old Donald owed him money. So he

approached his friend William Burke to

find out what they could do to recoup

this loss. So together, maybe here in

one of these taverns, they came up with

a plan. And that plan was to take old

Donald's remains to Dr. Robert Knox.

Soon they had more money in their

pockets than they had had in months.

On that cold December night in 1827,

Burke and Hair made their way down from

Dr. for Robert Knox's place in Surgeon

Square towards the cowgate and grass

market. Their pockets jingling with the

spoils of their grim trade.

They felt safe in their newfound

business. After all, old Donald was

friendless. He wouldn't be missed.

Anatomy theaters like this were filled

to the brim with ambitious medical

students flocking to Edinburgh from all

over the world to study the human body

in one of the greatest centers for

medical education. The chair of anatomy

at the University of Edinburgh was a

hereditary position passed down through

generations of the Monroe family

dynasty. By the 1820s, Alexander Monroe

Tersus was said to make his lectures on

the human body as dull as he was

himself. So students looked elsewhere to

private anatomy teachers.

One of the most flamboyant was renowned

anatomy teacher Dr. Robert Knox. Working

out of number 10 Surgeon Square, Knox

played an infamous role in the story of

Burke and Hair. to explore the

peculiarities of anatomy teaching in the

period. I'm meeting Cat Irving.

So Dr. Robert Knox was the superstar

anatomy teacher in Edinburgh in his day.

So Robert Knox was operating out of 10

surgeons square. If you went to one of

his classes, well, you would be

dissecting a cadaavver yourself. This

was known as the Paris manner of

dissection. And this was the idea that

rather than just standing in a a lecture

theater watching a teacher dissect that

you did it yourself. Everyone was

enthusiastic about his teaching, they

came away really really knowing what

they were doing inside the human body.

It's incredible to think of this fame

and status that he had gained for

himself in this community amongst the

medical students, the medical

professionals. But one thing strikes me

about these independent, shall we say,

anatomists that are linked to the school

but not part of the school. We're going

to need a huge supply of bodies. So

where is the where's the legitimate

supply coming from? First of all, the

legitimate supply at this time is coming

from executed criminals. the private

anatomy schools, they're not entitled to

any of that legitimate supply, you know,

and the legitimate supply wasn't enough

for the medical schools at the time. So,

they're definitely having to get more

underhand methods of body supply. We're

talking about the body snatchers. We're

talking about bribing people in

hospitals, undertakers, things like

that. That's how they're getting their

bodies. And there's a wonderful advert

that you can see for one of Robert

Knox's classes where he says,

"Arangements have been made as usual to

get an adequate supply of bodies." In a

school like Knox, how many bodies are we

talking that would need to pass through,

let's say, on a yearly basis? We've read

reports of there being as many as 90

cadaavvers needed for one year of Robert

Knox's classes. And he's paying a lot of

money. It's very, very worthwhile. I

mean, we know that Robert Knox would pay

seven, eight pounds for a body, which

was a lot of money back then. You know,

if you consider, you know, what we think

of his minimum wage being about half a

crown. This is phenomenal. This is a

significant amount of money for people

who were otherwise, you know, on the

edge of poverty.

Burke and Hair recognized the growing

demand for bodies for the anatomist's

lab. Their opportunistic streak soon

took a darker twist. Rather than just

deal in the recently dead, why not speed

up the journey to the afterlife? That

way, they didn't have to wait to earn

some hard cash.

Following old Donald's demise, attention

turned to another tenant at Har's

lodging house. This time, a man named

Joseph, who was a miller, and Joseph

hadn't been well for some time. It was

relatively inevitable that he was going

to die. But rather than let nature take

its course, hair decided he would hasten

Joseph's demise. And so he turned to

Burke for help. How would they get rid

of Joseph the Miller? Well, they

plighted him with whiskey one night, and

Burke cast himself across his torso

while hair took a pillow, put it over

his face, and smothered Joseph in his

bed. Now, this was meticulously planned.

It might seem quite rudimentary, but

actually what it meant was that for

someone like an anatomist who might be

using this body, there was no trace of

murder.

Burke and Hair had discovered their

routine method of killing. A quick

silent technique which left no trace.

The practice was so notorious that the

term burking was born, forever linking

their names to death by suffocation.

Burkenhair trundled Joseph's body

straight to 10 Surgeon Square in a tea

chest and collected their earnings from

Dr. Knox.

There were other shadowy figures moving

bodies around Edinburgh's dark streets

and underground passages. A clandestine

economy of bodies had emerged to meet

the city's growing demand for

cadaavvers.

Burke and Hair may never have robbed a

grave, but around them resurrectionists

or body snatchers who dug up freshly

buried bodies revealed how vulnerable

the city's poorest were both in life and

in death.

Even the very notion of a body being

dissected was seen by many people as a

violation of that body. um regardless of

the fact it might be advancing medical

science, you know, you needed a

Christian burial to afford you a chance

of resurrection and you know a place in

heaven. And so anything that impeded

that whether it be stealing a body from

the grave or uh cutting up a body on the

dissection table would be seen as a

pardon. And that's why essentially

dissection becomes a punishment. And

this spectacular contraption here is

known as a mort safe.

And the idea behind this was it would be

sunk into the ground over a recently

buried grave to deter the grave robbers.

These mort safes, funnily enough, were

were rentable after a period of 6 months

or so where the body has decomposed and

is therefore unusable. that could be

lifted up with a special equipment

called a mort safe tackle and moved on

to the next again grave. But this

wouldn't necessarily be the norm. This

would only be for a family who could

afford something like this. If you

didn't have much money at all, you may

simply throw a layer of deep straw over

a grave, which would be harder to dig

through. The other alternatives were

there were communal watchtowers or or

watch houses built within graveyards.

And so someone would be employed to

guard over the graveyard at night. And

if you were very wealthy, then of course

you could go all out and do the whole

crypt which would be impregnable. And of

course the tragedy in this economy that

grows up is that it's the bodies of the

poorest who are easiest to access in the

graveyards. and they're the people who

more often than not end up on the

anatomist slab.

[Music]

What I find so fascinating about all of

this is that 19th century Edinburgh is

built on hierarchy. Everywhere there are

tenement buildings with the poorest at

the bottom and the richest at the top.

And you would have thought that when

people died and they were put into the

earth below ground level that that would

be the great leveler that everyone in

there would be equal. But that's not

what we find here. Instead, we see

people's social class, the social

standing they had in life following them

into the graveyard.

Burke and Hair took advantage of this

unequal society, returning to the area

of the city where they knew they would

find its most vulnerable residents.

The murder of Joseph the Miller had

marked a chilling turning point. From

there, Burke and Hair quickly escalated

their killings. No longer waiting for

fate, they began to seek out victims.

Each one seeming more vulnerable than

the last.

It was here in Edinburgh's grass market

that the Irish immigrant community

settled. This was a place where rich and

poor lived cheap by jou. There was

stinking poverty and enormous wealth.

And it would be here in amongst the

vulnerable and the rich that Burkenhair

made their hunting ground.

This area of Edinburgh was a magnet for

all types of traders.

Abigail Simpson found herself on

Tanner's Close in February 1828

trying to increase her meager pension by

selling salt. From the moment she met

William Hair, her hours were numbered.

She was pied with alcohol and bked like

the other victims.

[Music]

Their next target was a 40-year-old male

lodger from Cheshire, a man whose name

slipped Burke's memory. He sold matches

and tinder and was lodging at hairs for

just a few nights. But the man from

Cheshure was smothered and suffocated,

stripped of his clothes and bundled into

the tea chest bound for Dr. Nox.

On the crowded streets of the old town,

18-year-old Mary Patterson was trying to

ek out a living.

We don't know a huge amount about Mary's

story. What we do know comes from

centuries of speculation and rumor.

There is a story that a medical student

later coming into contact with her body

recognized her as a local sex worker.

There's no evidence that this was true,

but what we do know is that in April

1828, she just left the Magdalene

Hospital, a charitable institution in

the city bent on reforming so-called

fallen women.

The Magdalene Asylum, located discreetly

off the cannon gate, had been set up to

bring women perceived to have fallen

into immorality back into acceptable

society.

[Music]

When Mary left the Magdalene, she surely

hoped for a fresh start. Together with

her friend Janet, she went out drinking

to celebrate. But it would not be long

before the pair ran in to William Burke.

He pied them with drinks one after

another. And it's here that the details

become foggy. Mary, at some point in the

night, became unconscious. All we know

is that when Janet returned to find her

friend, Mary had disappeared.

After Mary's murder, the pair acted

swiftly. Their next 11 victims included

nine women and two men. They were a

cinder gatherer, a washerw woman, a

woman referred to only as the drunk

woman, and a grandmother with her

12-year-old grandson, poor and itinerant

people who they thought no one would

miss if they disappeared into

Edinburgh's shadows.

Burke and Hair's confidence grew as they

received their payment for body after

body. They thought they had the perfect

crime, a discreet buyer, Dr. Nox, and no

one paying attention on the supply side.

But with their next victim, Hubris, got

the better of them. James Wilson was a

familiar figure on these streets, often

seen begging and sometimes wandering

barefoot around the grass market.

James Wilson, known locally as Daft

Jaime, was a vulnerable young man. He

lived in the city with his mother and

sister, often in dire poverty, sometimes

living on the streets. He was popular

with the locals despite his lowly

status, and when they could, they

offered him coin and food.

At this stage, Margaret Hair takes a

sinister leading role in the story. In

early October of 1828,

she came across Jaime wandering the

streets looking for his mother. With the

pretense of being a good Samaritan, she

reassured him that she knew where his

mother was and invited him back to the

lodging house to wait for her. William

Hair was waiting. Burke was summoned and

together Burke and Hair convinced Jaime

to have some whiskey. He was soon dozing

on a spare bed. They suffocated him.

Jaime struggled, but the men joined

together and eventually overpowered him.

That night, they collected another £10

for his body.

When Burke and Hair kill Jaime, they

unknowingly create a problem for

themselves because Jaime is so

recognized across the city.

Jaime's appearance on the anatomist lab

caused quite a stir that October day. He

was immediately recognized by some

students. Nox ordered the hurried

dissection of his body, removing Jaime's

head and feet in an attempt to disguise

the cadaavver.

The killing of Daft Jaime exposed the

cracks in Burkenhair's grim enterprise,

and suspicions were closing in fast.

Their relationship had deteriorated too

after a disagreement over hair selling a

body while Burke was away in Fulkerk.

But before the authorities could catch

up to them, there would be one final

victim.

I've come to meet Anthony to unpick the

moment on Halloween night in 1828

when the Burke and Hair murder spree

would begin to unravel.

It's been an interesting experience. So,

I've been out on Edinburgh streets

walking some of the same streets that

these victims we know went down and

occupying that space. It is weird and

it's it's so interesting to to step into

Edinburgh in that moment to imagine this

early 19th century city. A lot of the

people who were killed by Burkenhair of

course were living on the streets as

vagrants and that it's so tragic what

happened to them and they were human

beings and I've been trying to sort of

hold on to that and hold on to who they

were as people in life as much as who

they were in death when of course in the

case of this particular story they then

become nothing more than kadaavvers to

be cut up on the slab. I talked about

the sense of belonging to this story

almost which feels uncomfortable even

saying that but it continues because

we're getting to the apex of it now and

it involves another Irish person but

this time an Irish woman called Margaret

Dockerty. This feels really

heart-rending actually because she comes

to Edinburgh in search of her son who

immigrated to work on the same kind of

jobs that Burkenhair originally came

here for. She came, she was looking for

her son. She couldn't find him. And

somewhere in that dynamic, she crosses

paths, unfortunately for her with

William Burke. I guess her vulnerability

comes from her aloneeness. And at the

same time, there's this grit. I I admire

her because I can't find my son. I

haven't heard from him. I am going to

Edinburgh. And of course, she's not

going to find her son or that

opportunity when she gets here. Nobody's

going to miss her if she suddenly goes

missing from Edinburgh Street. So they

try and ply her with alcohol. Eventually

they bring her into their seemingly warm

social circle. She will have gone. These

are Irish people. I can trust them and

they will take care of me to settle in.

And plus they have a lodging house. So

eventually it gets to this idea that she

will stay with Burke and McDougall, but

they have there's an inconvenience. They

have a a couple staying with them, the

Grains. And so they say, "Listen, we

have somebody else. We need we need your

bed. H it's a family member. They try

and dress it up like that. So again,

they are using the Irishness. Let me get

this straight. There's a couple already

in the lodging house paying for their

roots. Now they're told that they have

to vacate because there's a family

member coming. Is that not going to

raise some kind of flag? And it was in

this setting where they essentially had

coerced and trapped or Margaret Doerty

that they killed her. And the next day

the grays come back. Initially Burke was

hesitant to let them into their room and

they do persist. And when they get in

there they discover the body of Margaret

Docty amongst some straw. So hold on.

They've they've just put the body under

some straw. I mean that that doesn't

speak to great masterminds of

criminality. That's a pretty basic way

to hide the body. It doesn't sound like

they've gone to that much effort. Yeah.

I mean think about it. He's kicked two

people out in order to facilitate this

murder. He's leaving all kinds of loose

ends and then and he's letting those

same two people back into the crime

scene hours later. Yeah. Because the

granny's are slightly the heroes of this

piece actually and they they get

overlooked because it's such an

incidental part but it's a vital part

and it's also such a welcome humane part

of this story. They come back to Burk's

lodging house. Their belongings are in

there and those belongings are probably

the most valuable things they have in

the world apart from each other. They

understandably are outraged by this and

it's the first time in this story and

I'm so glad we encounter it that a bit

of humanity comes back into it. They're

like no we we we have to report this. We

will be reporting this. Um they offer

them money not to. I think like £10 a

week or something like quite a lot of

money you know although we know that

often they sell bodies for around about

£10 to no right. So that's one body a

week to pay off the grays and and keep

their necks from the noose. It's

probably a price worth paying for

Burkenhair. Well, not for the grays,

which is incredible. I'm so glad that

there is this element of the story. The

only ones with a moral compass, the only

ones. And they do report it in the

interim. However, Margaret Dockert's

body has been taken to Robert Knox and

and follows the same fate that so many

others do. But when the police

investigate this from the Gray's report,

they find Margaret Doertrates

bloodstained clothes under the bed in

the Gray's room.

An arrest petition was issued on the 3rd

of November 1828.

From information received and

circumstances discovered, it appears

that the said William Burke, Helen

McDougall, who lives with him, William

Hair, a laborer, and Margaret Leairard,

his wife, are guilty actors, part of the

crime of murdering Maisy or Maggie

McGonal.

The warrant was written in a rush and

didn't even name poor Margaret Dockati

with care. The person least considered

in all the legal flourish is the victim.

The trial began at 10:00 a.m. on

Christmas Eve 1828.

By the time of the trial, the media

frenzy was insatiable. Newspapers and

broadsides, an early form of tabloid,

teamed with sensational details as the

full horror of the crimes emerged.

Nothing like this case had ever been

seen in Edinburgh before. To examine the

trial and the media storm around it, I'm

meeting historian and expert on the

Burkenhair case, Owen Dudley Edwards.

[Music]

We have some of the the texts in front

of us. And you can see here from some of

the the headlines, we've got one here,

extraordinary occurrence. There's real

hyperbole in how the murders are being

talked about, how the pending trial is

being discussed. Do you think that's a

crucial part of the Burke and Hair

story? Is that one of the reasons why we

remember them? When the Burke had been

arrested and hair had been arrested,

fear began to stop. First of all, there

was the media fictions which percolated

in various ways. People are buying crazy

fictional stories, pamphlets about this

back, conspiracy stories. When the

triumph itself took place, the

government was under attack. And what

was disclose of the trial, some of it

with very questionable evidence, the

manufacturer by the government, this

widespread sense that people are being

murdered for the advancement of the

upper classes and their well-being

is hits all the way down to the prime

minister who is at this point the Duke

of Wellington. And the last thing he

wants to do is to see anything like

potential of a revolution happening

here. In 1819, there have been real

fears of a revolution in Scotland, which

had been fairly brutally repressed. So

they really want to make sure there can

be no revolution happening. Before the

trial, there had been a sensational turn

of events. That meant only William Burke

and his partner Helen McDougall were in

the dock.

Sir William Ray, the Lord advocate, had

offered her immunity from prosecution if

he turned the king's evidence and

provided the details of the murders of

Dockati and the other victims. This

final rupture between Burke and Hair

would prove to be fatal.

Let's talk about that extraordinary

moment then when Hair does turn King's

evidence and he turns against Burke. Why

do you think he does that? Oh, quite

simply that the government was

tremendously anxious to get convictions

because suddenly the trial breaks open.

The reality is beginning to emerge and

constantly there's the fear of there

would be this attack upon the city

establishment. the professor of anatomy

in Edinburgh wrote uh to the Lord

advocate asking that action be taken

because very distinguished persons might

be regarded as involved doctors

receiving bodies that they didn't know

nearly enough about or wouldn't say much

about. They do need to have miscreants

who have to be able to get there must be

scapegoats. there must be victims and

therefore the government attorneys to

hair and his wife maneuver them into

saying okay we'll testify against him as

hair could not be brought to testify

against his wife Burke and his partner

McDougall stood alone on charges for the

murder of Mary Patterson James Wilson

and Margaret Dockati

under pressure her confessed to 16

murders incredibly the authorities had

to let him off to honor the king's

evidence agreement.

Burke also made several chaotic

confessions in the run-up to the trial,

mixing up the order of deaths in each,

unable to remember the sequence of

events. Finally, in the presence of a

priest, he recounted his crimes as

accurately as he could remember,

detailing the grim circumstances in

which each death occurred.

hair has perjured himself by what he

said at the trial about the murder of

Dockerty. He did not sit by while I did

it. As he says, he was on the body

assisting me with all his might while I

held the nostrils and mouth with one

hand and choked her under the throat

with the other. We sometimes used a

pillow, but did not in this case.

In Burke's statements to the press, he

explicitly distanced Dr. Robert Knox,

notably absent at the trial, from the

murders. Dr. Knox neither taught or

encouraged him to murder any person.

It's so fascinating that this this case

has so much reach that it's appearing in

the papers of politicians and the

anxieties of politicians as well. At

this moment, we've had this scientific

advancement that's continuing with

juggernaut speed into the modern age.

And yet the cost of it still feels very

backward. It feels very dark. Do you see

this as a landmark case in terms of

where it sits in medical history, in

social history of the 19th century? Very

much. The Scottish Enlightenment of

which we're all so proud was at its

height in medicine and it continued

beyond this time. So Scottish Mets led

the world very much for the next 60

years after Burkenhair. And the big

danger of the enlightenment was the

inhumity the scientists as it were who

see humanity as useful corpses.

At 8:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, the jury

retired to consider its verdict in the

trial of William Burke and Helen

McDougall. They returned 50 minutes

later. They delivered a guilty verdict

against Burke for the murder of Dockati,

but the same charge against McDougall

was found not proven. As he passed the

death sentence against Burke, Lord

Justice Clark remarked, "In order that

posterity may keep in remembrance your

atrocious crimes, William Burke, you

will be taken forth to the common place

of execution in the lawn market of

Edinburgh, and there be hanged by the

neck by the hands of the common

executioner upon a jibet until you be

dead, and your body thereafter to be

delivered to Dr. Alexander Monroe,

professor of anatomy in the University

of Edinburgh to be by him publicly

dissected and anatomized.

Burke and Hair's actions shook Edinburgh

society to its core for their brutality,

but also because they revealed the

vulnerabilities of the poor so long

ignored.

Very early on the cold morning of

January 28th, 1829, the crowds began to

gather at Edinburgh's lawn market in

front of St. Giles Cathedral.

Perhaps curiously, we have an eyewitness

account from the time that says that on

the morning of the execution, before

everybody had assembled, about 100

Irishmen came here to form a guard

around the gallows. They did this

because they wanted to stop the crowd

from claiming Burke's body. and then

tearing it to pieces. What they hadn't

factored in, I suppose, is the fame and

the notoriety attached to this case and

the amount of people that were going to

be here on that day. Their attempts were

essentially futile.

[Music]

While a small number of his countrymen

sought to preserve Burke's dignity, even

as he faced justice, the majority of the

crowd were horrified by the grim details

revealed during the trial. In his final

moments, Burke stood before an outraged

city, facing its full fury.

It is very special and haunting to be on

the very cobbles where this history

unfolded, I have to say. And it does

help you to imagine some of the feelings

and the drama that was unfolding that

day. But the archive can fill in some of

those really important details. And

luckily for us, we have an eyewitness

account which will guide us on our way.

At every struggle the wretch made when

suspended, a most rapturous shout was

raised by the multitude. When the body

was cut down at 3/4 past 8, the most

frightful yell we ever heard was raised

by the indignant populace, who

manifested their most eager desire to

get the monster's carcass within their

clutches and gratify their revenge by

tearing it to pieces.

After Burke's body fell limp, rioting

erupted in the streets. The city wanted

more, so his body was smuggled across

Edinburgh.

Now, if this looks like any modern

university building, that's because it

is. These are the law buildings at the

University of Edinburgh. But beneath me

is a set of steps that is truly a key to

the past. It's these steps through which

Burke's body was transported from the

gallows into the medical school here at

the University of Edinburgh. And it was

transported through a series of secret

tunnels because officials in the city

were worried that the crowd would snatch

his putty and use it for their own

devices.

After it had been smuggled through the

city, Burke's body arrived at the

university for dissection, ready to be

cut up on the slab, just like his own

victims.

I've come to Surgeons Hall Museum to

explore a display of Macau memorabilia,

including William Burke's life mask and

a strange pocket book. My guide again is

Cat Irving.

We are standing right now in front of a

very particular item and that is a

pocketbook that has been covered in

Burke's skin. Why did they choose to

bind a pocketbook with his skin? Well,

on the back it mentions his hanging, but

there are no pages inside it. The pages

are all gone. And this is something that

would have been quite common at the

time. Well, not common. It happened

occasionally that the skin of criminals

would be used for something like this as

an extra form of punishment. It was

considered to be a dehumanizing thing.

So, let's talk a little bit about the

cult of Burken Hair and the fascination

that grows up around them. I'd be so

interested to know from you who works

with these artifacts so intimately,

why does that happen? I think there's

definitely something to do with the fact

that because people had this idea in

their head that they had to be buried

intact in order to, you know, have this

eternal life that that meant that body

snatching seemed so horrific to them. It

it, you know, it wasn't just disturbing

the grave. It wasn't just a little bit

unpleasant. This was something that was

going to affect the hereafter.

And then you have William Burke and

William Hair come along and that's not

just eternal life. this is possibly

ending your life now, you know. So the

horror of this for people on the street

would have been absolutely, you know,

terrible. I do think that they become so

embroiled almost in sort of comedy

aspect of the horrible history of

Edinburgh that we don't tend to really

focus on how unpleasant, how awful their

crimes were. And I do think that's a

shame that we should really be thinking

about the people who lost their lives

because of what these two men did.

I'm on a little bit of a mission with

this film to include another name in the

Birken Hair title, shall we say, and

that's Robert Knox.

Can you talk to us about him, the part

that you think he played? Well, I mean,

Robert Knox was key to this museum. This

museum opened to the public in this

building in 1832. And the first

conservator of this museum was Robert

Knox, but he was also very important to

Burkenhair. You know, he was the person

that bought the bodies. It seems very

likely that he would have some inkling

of what was going on. But he escaped

legal justice in that sense. You know,

he was never prosecuted. Uh Burke

actually signed a confession when he was

in prison saying that Nox had nothing to

do with what was going on. You know,

that he had no knowledge of what him and

William Hair were up to. There is that

kind of evasion of any kind of legal

responsibility for what was going on,

but the public certainly felt that he

was guilty.

Burkenhair remain infamous in the

history of Edinburgh. They're synonymous

with this place. But we tell their

stories again and again. And on stage,

in TV and film, they live lives beyond

those that they really had here. We

fictionalize versions of them. And in

fact, we've had stories about them since

the media first started reporting on

Burke's trial. We make up stories about

them. They haunt our shadows, our

nightmares. And they even appear in the

nursery rhymes of children.

Up the close and doing the stare. Button

Ben with Burke and Hair. Burks the

butcher. Here is the thief. Knocks the

boy that buys the beef.

Burke and hair very quickly took their

place in the imaginary chamber of

horrors. They were nightmarish figures

who exposed the terrifying thought that

medical research could mean the death of

the poor so the rich could survive

as well as the legendary and

fictionalized versions of the Burkenhair

story. I want to return to remember the

real lives of the victims.

They were targeted because they were

isolated and it was assumed they might

slip through the cracks and into the

shadows of a city without anyone

noticing. But where we can piece

together more of their lives, we find

the loved ones they left behind.

Mary Patterson had been accompanied by

her lifelong friend Janet Brown when she

tragically crossed Burke and Hair's

murderous path.

[Music]

When Janet returned to look for Mary,

little did she know that she was just

meters from the body at Burks. For

weeks, she searched for her friend, but

to no avail. Meanwhile, Mary's body had

passed into the possession of Dr. Nox.

He was so enamored with her beauty that

he preserved her in whiskey,

objectifying her and even inviting local

artists to sketch her body.

While Mary's body was studied and

admired from the slab, Janet would walk

through Edinburgh's old town, searching

desperately for her friend.

[Music]

By the time Janet found out the truth

about her friend Mary, the trial was

already well underway. It was in the

salacious reporting around the case that

she found out the details of the fate of

her friend. She would have been

horrified to realize that she was too

late to give evidence against William

Berg. Imagine how she must have felt

looking up at him from the crowd on the

day of his execution.

Another victim, James Wilson, was more

than the caricaturured version portrayed

in the contemporary press. The

widespread image of dafted Jaime was a

lonesome and pitiable figure. But James

also had family fighting his case.

After turning King's evidence, hair

thought that he had got off scot-free.

But there would be one final stumbling

block. A private case was now being

brought against him with a fiery

prosecutor working on behalf of Jaime's

mother and sister to bring him to

justice.

The lawyer George Monroe was determined

to pursue the case. On the 16th of

January 1829, he delivered a petition

protesting against hair's immunity and

imminent release from prison. The high

court gave it lengthy consideration, but

turned it down. Hair would walk free.

But what this shows us is that

Burkenhair's victims were never alone.

They may have been vulnerable, part of

the lowest rungs of Edinburgh society,

but they were part of families. They

were part of networks of friends and

they were more than the caricaturures

that defined them. They were human

beings with their own fears and

aspirations and really they deserved

more than the fate that they got at the

hands of the most infamous murderers in

Edinburgh.

In the aftermath of the trial and

Burke's public dissection, the people of

Edinburgh were left hungry for justice.

And now the mob directed their anger

upwards to those establishment figures

they saw as responsible.

Remember we said that Dr. Robert Knox's

involvement in the case had been

overlooked. He had escaped justice, but

he soon became a target for public fury.

The Edinburgh crowds were not satisfied

with the hanging of William Burke. They

believed there was another man who was

also guilty of these horrendous crimes

and that man was Dr. Robert Knox.

[Music]

In order to get justice, they made an

effigy of Dr. Knox and they dressed him

in gentlemanly garb to show his status,

then hanged the effigy in order to burn

it. The burning failed, so they ripped

it from limb to limb. Still not

satisfied, they made their way here to

Newington Place to the home of Dr. for

Robert Knox. In a contemporary

broadside, there was an account of the

riot. The effigy was described. The

figure was pretty well decked out in a

suit of good clothes, and the face and

head bore a tolerable resemblance to the

person intended to be represented. On

the back was a label bearing the words

Noox, the associate of the infamous

hair. To the public at this time, it was

Knox and Hair, not just Burke and Hair,

who were guilty of these heinous crimes.

But the infamous doctor still received

protection from the authorities.

Now, it looks very different than it

would have looked in Nox's day, but this

is the spot where he lived. And the

baying crowd came here demanding he come

outside and face justice. They trampled

on his lawn. They broke his windows, but

Knox was nowhere to be seen. And the

reason for this is he had already been

warned by Captain Stewart of the

Edinburgh Police Force that the crowd

was after him. Stuart had gone in Knox's

back door, dressed him in a cloak, given

him a saber and a pistol, and the two

men escaped out the back.

The mob had turned its fury on the man

they deemed responsible, the man who had

deliberately avoided questioning the

source of the fresh bodies. Yet, the

establishment rallied around Dr. Knox,

and a committee of inquiry cleared him

of complicity.

But though he continued to work, his

peers gradually excluded him from

university life. He eventually left

Edinburgh in 1842 to lecture across

Britain and Europe.

The shock wave created by the Burk and

Hair murders reached as far as

Parliament in London. The thorny debate

over legitimate sources of bodies for

medical research had long been pushed

down the agenda in Westminster.

But the horrifying events of that year

brought the question back to the four.

Even more urgently, there were copycats.

The London burkers had started to murder

for money as well. So these crimes

fueled the appetite for new legislation.

The 1832 Anatomy Act gave surgeons and

their students legal access to unclaimed

bodies from workhouses, hospitals, and

prisons.

Helen McDougall and Margaret Hair, the

men's partners in crime, were released

after the trial. They both faced the

anger of the mob before fleeing

Edinburgh. But there remains an

unanswered question in this case. What

happened to William Hair himself? There

are a few different ideas. We know that

he was moved from Edinburgh. He was

given money and a new name to live

under. But the last sighting of William

Hair was in Carlilele about 2 miles

outside the town. After that, he

disappears from the record. Some say he

went to Ireland, some say he went and

worked in London, others that he was

killed by a mob. Either way, that

mystery is one of the reasons why this

case endures in the popular imagination

and why we'll never get enough of the

case of Knox Burke and Hair.

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