Episode 447: Burke & Hare Part 1

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Hey Weirdos, I'm Alayna and I'm Ash.

And this is morbid.

It's morbid. Hey guys, hey, what's up, what's up fellas? what's up fellas? and....

Fellers, floras, faunas and foxes. Oh, okay, getting cute with the spring equinox, I see the spring of it all.

What is it, Ostara? I just learned about something like that. Yeah, something like that.

Something like that, it's witchy, yeah, it's like welcoming spring, and I feel like we're all kind of feeling this way.

Usually, I'm.

I never want to hang on to winter, but I'm never super eager to get out of it. I'm usually just like, Okay, spring is coming, like, Cool, that's how I feel.

This year, but this year, I was like, get me the fuck out of winter, this has been a fucking terrible winter. It's well, we had a lot of family stuff going on.

We had.

Sicknesses, sicknesses. Yeah, like....

It's just been a shit winter, too much going on, yeah, lots of loss.

Lots of loss up in the air. Sadness. Yeah, just....

It's been shit, a lot of stress, so much stress. Like you guys were all feeling it in our voices. I think, because we got so many which, like, we can't say it enough.

Thank you, we really appreciate that. You guys give a shit because the amount of messages we've gotten that are like, you guys, okay, well, it's so crazy. Like, clearly we've been going at this for a while with you guys. Because, like, you know, you can hear the change in our voice. Even when we don't think we're showing it, we think we're putting on the show like the show must go on.

Get rid of whatever's going on behind the scenes. I feel that sentiment so hard. The show must go on, the show must go on. It's true because....

It has to, and you never want to, like, we never want to let you down when shit happens. We are here to entertain you. You know what I mean, to inform you of things, you know.

So it's like, we're very much in that mindset of the show must go on. But to know that, like you said, you guys always know, even when we think we're hiding it, it's crazy. That tells us, like, how close we are to this community are, we just like a little familiar and we just appreciate you.

It's like, really nice, it's nice, but I also it was like a slap because I was like, Oh shit. So it's leaking out a little bit. But the good news is like, where spring is here? We're feeling a lot more, we feel like we are in a good place like, schedule wise. Like, you know how we went, we kind of changed it to the OG way of things.

It's feeling good well. And astrologically, things are changing a bit right now, and like planets are moving into different signs and houses that, like, things are a little more stable. That's what we need. Except I think Aquarius is moving into Pluto next week and that's going to bring, like, some kind of major transformation.

The last time that Aquarius was, I think it's Aquarius entering Pluto is what it is, and the last time it happened was in the 1700s. Oh, damn, isn't that nuts? And it's a time of, like, what's the word?

The war, revolution, a time of the war, it's the time of like revolution. Oh, wow.

Yeah, crazy, so that could be like, great or really bad. Well, I think like, revolution, like revolution.

Or it could be really bad. It's going to probably coincide with, like, all the alien shit that's happening right now. I'm not even joking your butt, I mean, I'm not even joking your butt, I'm not even.

I'm not even shitting your dick. No way you're not. I can tell, yeah, but you know what?

We're in a good place. It's spring, aliens aside, happy Spring. it's spring. I'm feeling good.

I got some good cases coming up that I'm feeling excited to tell you guys about. Just because, like, you know, I love an old timey like weird history case. You do. I got it. I got a good one here that I'm really excited about, and it's I just burped a little.

I'm sorry, that's okay. That's what happened in the microphone. You know, sometimes you just you can't, you can't make a stop. It just erupted.

Can't stop, won't stop, you know, I'm so sorry. But I'm going to be doing Burke and Hare today and it's going to be a two-parter, so it's going to be this week.

I'm going to be doing Burke and Hare. Damn girl, you're on a two-parter like crusade. Yeah, you know, I love a multi-part.

Yeah, I'm glad I like, when you do that, I love some really, really intense, long cases.

But it gives me a little more time to wrap mine up. There you go, so it works out and I just think it's good. You know, you get a whole week of one really intense, long case.

I like it, I'm excited about it. This one's a wild one, and it also takes place in Edinburgh for at least part of it.

And this is a wild one because we're going to do, I'm going to do this case. And then we're going to talk about maybe next week or whenever. We're going to talk about those these little mini coffins that were found way later, and we're going to get into detail, don't worry, but there's a theory that it's connected to this case, which is a nice like continuation, okay?

So you have to look forward to a lot of Burke and Hare in the recent in the coming days. Okie, Dokie. So, throughout the first three decades of the 19th century, doctors and med schools all across Europe. They really struggled to find enough bodies that they could use because this is the time when they were using bodies like corpses for anatomical teaching in medical theatres. It's surprising that they were having a hard time finding bodies back in that time because they didn't want to get like plague bodies or anything like that.

You know, like you didn't, you wanted like, fresh, yeah, fresh bodies that were not sick, presumably, you know, if you could get them where there's no trauma and stuff, it would.

Be like, I mean, those would be good too for certain things, but yeah.

Now they basically this demand for fresh bodies and how it was becoming so hard to find them. This led to the rise of what was called resurrection. Men. Oh, that doesn't sound good, cool band name you call it.

This is kind of a tongue in cheek name that was given to grave robbers. Yeah, who medical students turn to a lot for fresh corpses, isn't that crazy?

Thinking of like, just like, like hoity-toity people in the medical field like Mahaha, I don't know. Yeah, well, it is because they're looking. They're basically overlooking the crime of grave robbing and the ethics surrounding that. Just for the pursuit of medical advancement, like, really.

I guess, but you kind of have to, you know at the time, you don't have to. At the time, that's what was going on.

It was very frequent resurrection. Men were a real thing. That's a weird thing. And in Edinburgh, Scotland, Dr. Robert Knox was a very highly respected surgeon.

And he found what he believed to be a very reliable pipeline of fresh bodies, and he found, and it was really hard to find that. You would find this resurrection, man. Maybe you could get a couple out of them, but you were going to have to look around for it. It was not easy. This guy, however, was like, I found a good, steady stream of bodies to use.

He had a serial killer. Well, he was working alongside William Burke and William Hare, the two Williams Burke and Hare. Oh, no, it's like, Tom and Tom, Yeah, exactly, that's not good.

Did anyone see that mid-season trailer? The mid-season trailer, though? Avada Kedavra Just in case you don't know what we're talking about. Oh my God, the end of it when he says, What can I do for you?

What did he say? Could I get you anything? I think? or no? She says, Do you want anything? Do you want anything? and she says, I want you to die.

She says, For you to die, like, Whoa, yeah, but that's for another day. But once we get to the just wait, once we get to those reunions and those episodes come and we'll talk more about it.

For real, but yeah, so this Dr. Robert Knox. He was absolutely comfortable with the fact that William Burke and William Hare were providing him a steady stream of bodies to use in his medical teachings. And throughout 1828, Burke and Hare supplied Knox with nearly 20 corpses. They got a very decent profit out of that.

I bet they did, but were Burke and Hare just resurrection men? No, I don't think so. They just really good at their jobs, no?

Just always finding fresh bodies. Nothing is like, ever like. If it's too good to be true, it's not true, exactly so.

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Western world kind of strayed away from the original. Thinking that, you know, a dead body was the most, it's hard to explain in Victorian times and whatnot, death and bodies were treated a certain way. There was a lot of respect, it was a big to-do.

It was a big to-do. Like a lot of ethics surrounding a dead body, a lot of importance placed on the body, the body itself was a real like beacon of ethics and all that kind of stuff. Sure, this, you know, in the late 18th, early 19th century. That's when they began to stray away from that a bit, and it was more like, a body's a body.

It kind of did. It was like a more enlightened era, where advances in medical science were kind of reshaping this thought process. A lot. Because people didn't think that anybody was still lurking around in their body, right? It became more of a clinical situation, you know, like medical theaters became more of a thing, people were watching these dissections.

It was just it really flipped the whole thing on its ear. And in the early 19th century, England, trainee doctors, so medical students and those hoping to become surgeons, were required to dissect at least three corpses before moving forward in their training. That's, I like that now. That's a similar thing. You're required to do gross anatomy, you're required to do that.

So it stuck around. And as these trainees needed more and more hands-on experience, the availability of bodies for dissection kind of became entangled a bit with the medical school's student fees. But it's simply the more bodies a school had access to. The more hands-on training they could offer, and the more hands-on training they could offer, the more they could charge in student fees makes sense.

So this what once was like, we need to do this training, that's important so they can become good. Doctors suddenly became entangled with money, and then it becomes something totally different. Money is the root of all evil it truly is.

So, of course, for the purposes of training exercises, like we were saying, only recently deceased bodies would really suffice here. That's where that issue came from, that we were just talking about. So this created a demand that was far outweighing the supply at the time. And the only legal supply of bodies for the purpose of dissection were those who had actually been executed at the gallows. Oh, okay, yeah.

That makes sense, which at the time was only about 50 people per year. That's good, that's good, but not for this.

It's not giving you a great supply of people. But, like at the time, executions themselves were heavily attended by spectators, the dissections were also heavily attended social events. They often took on kind of like a carnival atmosphere. Yeah, there was a lot of showmanship involved, a lot of theater.

It's like the.

I think you did a whole episode on that way. Early on in the podcast, we were talking about how executions came, executions, yeah.

Yeah, and that's definitely what happened with dissections in medical theaters. When it was like a new carnival to go to is probably how they saw it. It was a new macabre thing that was happening before your very eyes. And at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example, early 19th century instructor Professor Giovanni Aldini. He was known to perform tricks in the form of, like, basically, macabre experiments on corpses.

Don't love. He would make disembodied heads open their eyes with, like electrical shock. Oh no, he would have like a dead hand clutch things. He had a little too much fun with it.

Yeah, he would use galvanic experimentation, and this involves using electrical sparks, like static electricity to demonstrate that it could cause different muscles to twitch and even move. A dissected specimen. It's interesting and it's fascinating that you can do that, it's just a matter of should you do that, exactly?

That's the thing you can do that, yes, which should you also, you saying. Galvanic took me to a place of failing every science course I've ever taken.

There you go. I did look into galvanism a little bit, cause I was like, I'd never heard of that. So I. I'd heard, like, a little bit about making things move with electricity. But a little side note about galvanism, it's really fascinating. In 1751, England passed the Murder Act, and this act allowed the bodies of recently executed murderers to be used for medical experimentation.

So that's how they were able to get the bodies from the gallows. This way, the demand for corpses for medical colleges would be aided. And also, the Murderer prize was suggested to also subjected, excuse me, to having his body dissected, which at that time was still considered a desecration. And just another form of posthumous punishment. Or whatever they had done. So this is important in a second, so just remember that putting it in my pocket.

But in 1780, and that Italian professor Luigi Galvani was the one who suddenly found, or, excuse me, it wasn't that professor, it was a relation to that other. Sure, he was the one who suddenly found that he could use jolts of electricity to make the muscles of deceased and dissected frogs at the time twitch around and look like they were alive. I love frogs. Once he discovered this, others quickly started using this method of experimentation on other animals as well.

Dead animals, yes. Galvani's nephew, a physicist named Giovanni Aldini, who we just talked about, actually used the body of an ox to do this. He took the ox's head off and used electricity to make its tongue move around. I just like, don't think you have to.

I just like, don't want to, I don't want to go to that show. Yeah, I'm all set, it's a little weird, but yeah, it's a little weird. And once word got out about this, though, people began to attend the demonstrations. Where people, where they would like, electrify cows, pigs, other animal heads as like a show.

The human species, species, the human species. So in November 1818, a Scottish chemist, Andrew Ury, I believe it is took shit to another level. Oh, no.

He had not only conducted these experiments, but he did so on recently executed murders because of the Murder Act. And he did it for the reason of believing he could use electricity not just to reanimate particular muscles in a corpse, he believed that he could bring an entire corpse back to life. Oh, Dr. Frankenstein, here we go.

On this November evening in 1818, Ury did a truly theatrical demonstration in front of a theater of onlookers. On a 35-year-old murderer named Matthew Clydesdale, he had murdered his fellow coal miner, who was an 80-year-old man. Jesus Christ, what that guy.

And he had used a pickaxe. Oh my God, so you're going to try to bring this man back to life, that's the thing. So he was in an anatomical theater full of people watching. And he managed for over an hour to use electrical current directed through rods at different nerve points to make it look like the dead murderer was breathing, like his chest went up and down.

And they made his hand point at people in the crowd. Wow, they needed a hobby, a different hobby. I should say they needed something.

I was going to say this was their hobby, unfortunately, they needed Bravo.

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Uh, so he actually wrote about these experiments and the demonstration, and some of the entries that were found in his like journals. And on Atlas Obscura, I found some of those entries. And one of them says Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action, rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghastly smiles. E.W. united, their hideous expression in the murderer's face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a fuseli or a keen, an actor and a painter.

At this period, several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted same. And he said he thought the experiment was important, but not really fruitful. Because even if he had managed to revive this man from the dead, he was bringing back a murderer, exactly.

So, either way, interesting. And since this was something happening at the time and in medical colleges, it seemed like an interesting side quest for me to take. I just had to. So back to the resurrection man of this time in the early 19th century. Skilled tradespeople could, kind of they could expect to make in their trades, like regular trades. They could make between five and 10 shillings for a 72 hour, grueling work week. Yay.

By contrast, selling a fresh cadaver could net you as many as 20 guineas, which is around 420 shillings. Oh, shit, that's from the medical training schools. Under the circumstances, the imbalance between supply and demand created an economic opportunity. That, while it's pretty ghoulish and a little hideous, it would be hard for a lot of people of the time to pass up, yeah.

And if you put people hard up in really bad situations, they're a little desperate at this point, makes sense. So that's at least what you have to think of when you think of a perspective at the time. I'm not saying I would do it, I'm just saying I'm not in those dire straits that they were in, right?

Now, also in England, the penalty for unlawful disinterment was a small fine, or up to six months in jail. Wow, so certainly horrified the public. Grave robbing, but grave robbing in general wasn't really taken that seriously by the authorities either. Because that's not that big of a penalty, penalty for it.

Yeah, so, in fact, while procuring, fresh bodies was typically left to grave robbers and resurrection men, and sometimes to a lesser extent. Students would actually go out and find them themselves. It was like a hazing ritual. Yeah, literally. It was not entirely unheard of for a professor to help in the process.

He was getting desperate. Especially if they hope to obtain a special prize, so there's that now. It was the promise of good money that caused normal people to head out to cemeteries and collect these bodies.

They would use grappling hooks and wood spades because these were less noisy than like metal tools. That would get them caught in the act and these resurrection men, they would also be called exhumators. I believe it's how you say it, yeah, that makes sense, or lifters, that's also what they were called.

They could put in like very little effort with the right tools, and they earned more than they would earn in a week's time in one night. Damn, yeah, now. In Edinburgh, several safeguards were actually installed in cemeteries across the city to make sure this wasn't happening. Because it was such a big problem. Yeah.

They had huge watchtowers, they had mort safes which were large. You can look them up online. They're large iron cages that sat over a grave site to prevent body snatching. Oh, I think you might've seen photos of them.

At the obituary show, they, yes, they showed a morgue safe, which if you haven't gotten your tickets to the Obituary U.S Tour, you should do that. Because it's fucking hilarious and you learn a lot. Yeah, but these protective measures, they definitely limited more the procurement of cadavers, which was making things harder and making the medical colleges in Edinburgh get cadavers from London, Liverpool or Ireland.

They were costing more money in that situation and probably the reward went up because it was a harder thing to do. Exactly, Yeah, so the harder it is to procure something, people find nefarious ways to get it.

I love the way that you just said nefarious. I know I don't know why I said it like that you were in Scotland in that moment, but I don't know why I was like, nefarious.

Nefarious? Yeah, oh, what was I going to say? I don't know. Keep going.

And that's where the problem lies. It's like, if something's harder to get, people are going to find nefarious ways to get it. Oh, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, it's not the catch, it's the chase.

Exactly so, with the dissection of dead human bodies serving both a scientific and entertainment function at the time. And the value of the recently dead now shooting up there at a premium. It was a matter of time before the criminal and pretty unscrupulous people turned to not only digging these bodies up, but turned to other ways to get bodies. That's exactly we're going to turn to murder to meet demand. Oh, no.

And at the time, none were going to be as prolific, or, dare I say, efficient at doing this than Edinburgh's. Burke and Hare. Oh no, so let's talk about Burke and Hare. Both Burke and Hare had a tendency to exaggerate their lives, both of them, their origin stories, their achievements.

It's giving Henry, Lee, Lucas, and.

And Otis Toole, Otis Toole, yeah. So at this point, it's difficult to really discern fact from fiction, and there's some things....

I know because they're just liars, they lie out of their face into your face, so it's just not good. But there are definitely some facts that we know are true, okay?

William Burke was born in Liam de Burka in 1792 in County Tyrone, Ireland. He was the son of Neil Burke, who was a laborer. And while many in late 18th century Ireland were very poor and made a meager living performing manual labor, William Burke's upbringing seems to be a little more fortunate than those around him. He received a fair education. It's described as okay.

He can read and write, and he found work as a servant to a Presbyterian minister. But it didn't take long for him to get a little tired of that work, and he moved on. So from there, he tried his hand at being a weaver, a baker, a shoemaker, a candlestick maker. I was waiting for that.

And then he turned to the Donegal militia in 1809, where he served as a personal attendant to one of the senior officers. I was going to say, that sounds intense, it is. And it was during this time that the militia with the militia that William Burke married Margaret Coleman, who was a young woman from the town of Ballina.

Well, that's a pretty town name, right? Ballina? He, that's actually it's the chicken's name in return to Oz Ballina.

I believe it's Ballina. Look at you. yeah, look at you. Quoting horror films, go watch Return to Oz.

I love that, that's a horror film, I love it, it is, it really is.

But he went to live with Margaret Coleman after the militia was disbanded in 1816.

And he found employment with a quote country gentleman, and continued living with his wife and her family. That was an until they lived together with the family, until an ongoing argument with her father made it a little unlivable. That'll do it. The main point of their contention was Burke's obsession with leasing his father-in-law's land.

But his father-in-law refused to transfer the lease of his land into Burke's name, so Burke was just pissed and just straight up abandoned the family. In 1817 because he couldn't lease land that wasn't even his. Yeah, he was like, Fuck you guys.

And he just went to Scotland, he never returned to Ireland, and he never saw his wife again. Holy, I was going to say they were married, right?

Well, that goes to show you exactly who this man is, who we're working with. His father-in-law wouldn't transfer the lease of his land into his name. And he was like, Well, I'm out. He's like, I don't know her, I don't know her.

No way rolls up the window. So, while there are some surviving documents to verify William Burke's origins, we can't say the same for William Harris. His life before and after. This whole story is a little mysterious, but some of it's questionable.

We can find bits and pieces of it. But by most accounts, he was born in Ireland in the early 1790s. According to George McGregor, who is the author of a history surrounding this case and the Resurrectionist times and movement, Harris was, quote, brought up without any education.

And rapidly slipped into a vagabonding kind of life. His temper was brutal and ferocious, and when he was in liquor, he was perfectly unbearable. Oh, no. Like his later pal Burke, William Hare left Ireland for Scotland in late 1817 or maybe early 1818, and he found work as a lumper at the docks in Hopetown.

What's that basically? Lumpers unloaded the shipments, which is called lumpers, which is hilarious. But it was 1818, during his early days of working at the canal, that William Burke met Helen MacDougall. She was a widower at a very young age, and Macdougall had two children to support. So she took up with Burke in Madison. And the couple lived, for all intents and purposes, as a married couple.

I was going to say, they just couldn't get married because he already had a wife back home, can't get married. Although they would remain together for the decade leading up to Burke's eventual death, it seems they never really had a loving or nice relationship. They both were heavy drinkers, they fought constantly. Their arrangement seemed like it was tolerable and acceptable to both of them, but it wasn't like a lovely situation.

Out of convenience, yeah, which is unfortunate for everybody, especially the kids, yeah. And due to economic instability, Burke and MacDougall moved around a lot and eventually made their way to Edinburgh in 1827..

There, they took up residence in a boarding house in Portsburg, where Burke had planned to set up a cobbler shop. The home was actually owned by Ding Ding ding, William Hare. I knew it and Margaret Laird. Oh, I wish it was Lair.

Lair, Lair and Hare, Lair and Hare.

Lair and William Burke had met Margaret Laird a few months before, actually, so he knew her. That's how they got the room at the boarding house, and Laird had convinced Burke and MacDougall to move into the boarding house. She had inherited from her previous husband, who had died I think two years earlier, everybody dying, it's that time, you know?

Yeah, it's a good old time. Like many accommodations in Edinburgh's Westport at the time, the boarding house was not great, yeah.

It was known as Tanner's Close.

There were two poor immigrants who'd come to the city looking for work, so they were not treated well. That makes sense. So this house was not well-maintained. It was what historians have since described as dirty, low and wretched. Awesome.

The rooms of these boarding houses were filled with a ton of beds, as many beds as you could get. Windows were at street level, so they looked directly in, so there was no privacy. But there was one smaller room at the back of this boarding house that had only one window looking out over a pigsty. So, you know, we're moving on up. And this is actually the particular setting where a lot of the crimes of Burke and Hare would eventually unfold.

Looking out over a pigsty Oh God, that's awful. Yeah, it's giving. Willie Picton Yeah, it's not great.

So it would be easy, and probably reasonable, to assume that body snatching for profit was the work of lazy men hoping to get rich on a very short night of work. Yeah, but like we said before, that's not necessarily true. In the case of Burke and Hare, both were very hard workers, like that is one thing you can say about them.

That's what it sounds like. They actually continued to work their respective trades. Burke was a cobbler, and Hare was a boatman. Or a salesman had to keep up with appearances after they were selling bodies.

And, in fact, looking at the year where their spree began. Author of Burke and Hare, Burke and Hare the book, Owen Dudley. Edwards describes them as quote. Excellent examples of immigrant enterprise whose ultimate business diligently answered the needs of the host culture. Basically, despite the horrific acts and very ghoulish nature of the business that they were entering. Burke and Hare saw a need for cadavers and were able to meet the need through ingenuity, making them a good representation of work ethic. At first keywords.

At first, at first, but then because, remember, we are talking about a time where people are desperate. We're talking about a time where people are living in fucking terrible conditions, especially immigrants.

Yeah, we are talking about people just desperate to get enough food on the table for their family or feed their kids. Keep a roof over the kid's house. Those are the people that would turn to this for quick money. Burke and Hare in the beginning were doing just that, yeah.

But then they turned to murder. And that's not okay. I'm not saying the grave robbing is okay. I'm saying that desperation is a part of this story, totally in the beginning.

Right, this is where it ends, yeah.

Desperation, meager living conditions, all this stuff, that's where we. There's always a line, We're drawing a line right here, so nobody say that.

I'm saying that it's fine that you murder people for medical schools. I'm saying that right now. No, don't say that. This is where it ends. Not okay.

So again, this is before shit got really real, uh-oh. So Burke, Hare and their women, Laird and McDougal, were all trying to make at least a slightly honest living again. They were working at. Burke was a cobbler, Hare was a boatman, Laird was a landlady, and McDougal was selling Burke's shoes.

So they were all working together, they were all working an honest living. But around November 29th, 1827, things turned nefarious. And then imagine saying that you had a pair of Burke's shoes, yeah.

I bet sales went down. That'd be wild now this evening. One of Laird's tenants, who was an aged pensioner, that's how he's described. Named Donald, he died in the house, and he died of natural causes. Oh, okay.

He actually did, okay, okay, this is one where he actually did. Some sources say he died of dropsy, which is edema.

And that was honestly.

So this was often the case for pensioners and transients. At the time, Donald was on living credit, which means he had an arrangement with Laird that he would pay for his living. The roof over his head when his pension came.

Okay, he would receive that quarterly, but unfortunately, Donald had died before receiving his next pension, so Laird and Hare had also loaned him money at one point. So they are like the runners of this boarding house, obviously.

They'd loaned him money, they were letting him live on this, like, you pay me when your pension comes, so now he's gone. They're not getting the pension, they're not getting their money back.

So he actually owed them a fairly large sum of money, which is not like a bad thing. They loaned him the money. Yeah, everything was fine, it was on the up and up.

They were now expected to forfeit that. But in his confession later given after his arrest, Burke explained that Hare had informed the authorities of the man's death. As you should. And he was hoping that, if nothing else, they would just take the body out and the parish would pay for the burial. Because he was like, not only am I not getting paid for the living expenses, I'm not getting the money back that we loaned him. And now I'm expected to bury this guy.

Oh, he would have been expected to pay for the burial, so he was like, I'm not doing that. So he called the authorities being like, you just got to take him out of here. And again. The parish would hopefully pay for it.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. well, you were holding something back intentionally.

Yeah, yeah, well yeah.

It's hysteria, it's so physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely?

Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.

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So they waited because they were like, Sure, we'll come pick him up, and they waited for the coffin to come. And Hare continued to be really pissed and bummed about the lost income and expenses that he wasn't going to get back. And this is when Burke suggested, Why don't we just sell the body to the surgeon for the purposes of dissection? Because he's got no one around, he's got no family.

Well, that's really sad. We can't pay for him, he owes us money anyways. Again, I'm not saying this me, I'm saying this is what they were thinking.

Right, right, so they're thinking, you know? And although the practice was illegal and very seriously discouraged from social speaking, a lot of people were doing it. Burke had extensive experience with medical practitioners from his days in the militia. And he knew that they were often willing to pay a pretty good sum for a recently deceased body that didn't have signs of trauma. So he's looking to get his money back. So they talked a little bit about it and it was decided that they were going to sell Donald's body and recoup Hare's losses.

But they are how he saw it, didn't they already call the people to come pick him up? Well, so this is what ended up happening. Because when I read that, too, I was like, What did you tell those people that came? Yeah, exactly.

They were just coming to drop off the coffin, they hadn't even arranged yet for the parish to bury him. okay, but these authorities were coming to bring the coffin, yeah.

So they figured they could recoup Hare's losses, get this whole thing taken care of, get him out of the house, get a new person in there, there you go. And they said Burke was the one that was going to do the negotiating for the price. And two days later, when the coffin was delivered, Burke and Hare stood by.

They watched as the delivery men loaded the body into the coffin, nailed it shut, then they left. And it was going to be picked up by whoever was going to transfer it to the cemetery. But as soon as those people were out of sight, Burke and Hare pried open the lid, removed the body. They hid it in a nearby bed, and they stuffed things in the casket that would make it heavier, mimic the weight of a human being.

Oh my God, exactly. I think. They used Tanner's bark that they collected from the backyard, then they resealed it, and then they had it picked up to be interred at the West Churchyard. Shit.

So it was a filled casket of something else that was interred. Oh my God. So, with the first part of the plan a success in their eyes, Burke and Hare next set about finding a buyer for Donald's body. So they first stopped at the surgical college, and they asked a student where they could find Dr. Monroe, who they assumed they would want to see for selling a body.

He was like, the head guy, right? So the student gave them directions to Monroe's home. But through a series of really weird mistakes and coincidences, they instead found themselves at another doctor's home.

This doctor was Dr. Robert Knox, who was? I don't know if you remember him from the beginning. That's who we talked about, right? I thought you said his name.

He was from the top of the episode. He was a private anatomy teacher who had the most students and used the most bodies in the city. Okay, so they just happened to come across this guy when they were looking for another doctor, right?

And they've come across the doctor who needs the most bodies that they can get. I see so whether or not things would have been different if they had come to Monroe's door or some other teacher that had some more scruples. There you go, we don't know, right?

Maybe, honestly, I think most doctors at the time would have taken this body. They were desperate just because of the way shit was, but who knows, things could have been different. We'll never know.

If they were turned away and they couldn't find anything, they didn't get paid for it. I think they would have ended up murdering people for some other reason later down the line. Because I don't think these are good men. So I think it would have gone down that road differently, but I think it could have been a different story. But whatever, Knox was desperate for bodies, so he was thrilled by this offer.

Yeah, so he gave the men 10 shillings for Donald's corpse. This one transaction was the thing that set into motion the awful chain of events that was going to happen after this. The deaths of at least 16 people 16 in one of the worst crime sprees in Scottish history. Wow.

So until this point, Birkenhaer's only crime, and this is what I was talking about before. If they committed one at all, in the eyes of the time, was unlawful disinterment. Okay, because they hadn't killed him, right?

He had died. Yeah, yeah. However, they hadn't actually exhumed the man's body, they only sold his corpse.

So it's unclear whether there was even a crime here at all because they didn't disinterment, because technically nobody had really done this yet. He was never buried, yeah.

Yeah, unlawful disinterment was digging up a body grave, robbing, right? This man was never buried. Because nobody thought they would have to make another law of like, Hey, if you know someone that can't.

You also can't, yeah, so there's like a loopy hole here that I think they were banking on. But technically, I wonder if they could have been charged with disinterment. Because he was in the coffin and they took him out of his coffin, and that's what I wondered.

Yeah, I wondered if maybe, who knows? I didn't find what the specific language of the crime would be sure. But I wonder. That's a very good point because I wonder if them prying open that coffin would have counted, even though he was only in there for a moment. You're disinterring him.

You are, yeah, you know, like, technically, so, I guess that would be like how a jury would see it, yeah.

So it's like, you can't. You can look at this as like, all right, they haven't murdered anyone yet. But then you also look at it and go, well, maybe he did commit a crime here. Yeah, he disturbed a body, definitely committed an ethical crime, but like a technical crime.

Like a crime, crime, yeah. But either way, what would be looked at at the time as a pretty petty crime that they had just committed? Yes, like somebody died naturally in their home.

They owed these people a debt that they didn't pay. They were put in a coffin. These people just took them out of the coffin and sold them for that debt. Yeah, at the time, that would be like, Wow, that was fucked up.

But like, that's really all that would happen. So that being such, in the eyes of the time, a petty crime, makes it really surprising how brutal and quick they escalated from that. So they probably, like, you were just saying, like, you were like, Oh, I don't know, I wouldn't have done it anyway. I think you're right.

Because it's like, you don't just go from that to this, what they end up doing, oh no, it's just it's one thing to sell. The body of a man who dies by natural causes again, fucked up, saddling you with the death and saddling you with getting rid of the body at the time.

It's quite another thing to systematically seek out a particular type of victim and murder them purely to be paid, right? That is a very different series of crime. Yeah, that's, you're kind of like a hit man at that point.

Yeah, and I think that's why it's so shocking the crimes of Birkenhair, because it is such a like. They went so quickly into just really brutality.

And to sell a body outside of proper channels while in poor taste is again entirely understandable, given the impoverished circumstances of Scotland's immigrant working class at the time. But that next step would never be murder. For most of these people, like most of these people, that would be the end of it. You're going to have trouble sleeping at night with what you did, but you didn't murder anybody. But that's why, that's why this also doesn't make sense.

I'm like, there's got to be more in here that we don't know about. And people do think there are more murders that we don't know about. From them really, that maybe aren't even tied to this medical industry, that like, because it really, there's not a lot of sense here for this jump.

Well, and I wonder, too, if there's murders that they couldn't have used the bodies because they had to be more pristine. Exactly. I wonder. There's got to be more in there, right? According to identifying the first victim of Burke and Hare, there is a little bit of a discrepancy with their confessions. But you just work with what you have because this was a long time ago.

According to Burke, the first victim of their scheme was Abigail Simpson. She was a minor hawker, which is like a like, they would hawk things, you know what I mean, like, sell things. Oh, oh, oh, I see.

Like, did you say throw? yeah, like hawk-a-loogie, just hawking things. But she was a minor hawker from the nearby village of Gilmerton, who stopped at the boarding house for an evening. In Hare's confession, he identifies the first victim as a man named Joseph.

So Joseph was a miller who was also staying at the boarding house at the time and was very ill with a fever.

It's so they both died, so it's like, whether they were first or not. Well, and they probably killed so many people that that's why there's a discrepancy.

Well, I'm going to make a confession here because Hare's confession was the most consistent and unchanging. While Burke's would kind of jump around a little bit, it's generally believed that Hare's version of events is probably the most accurate. It also makes more sense that they went from the first crime of somebody dying naturally and them just selling the body to maybe killing someone who was ill already and dying. Yeah, it does make more sense if we want to make any sense out of it, but either way it's fucked. But I'm just trying.

Yeah, now. It was in late January or early February 1828, just a month or two after having sold the body of pensioner Donald. That Joseph the Miller became very ill with a fever that made him stay in bed, he couldn't get out of bed, he was unable to speak. He was, like, delusional and fearful of having a man so very close to death in their home, Laird.

So the other owner of the boarding house.

Get rid of this man as soon as possible. What a piece of shit, yeah. And she had no idea how to go about doing it. She wasn't saying, like, let's kill him.

She was just like, we got to get him out of here because I don't want him to die in my boarding house, which is my God. That is the like mentality and brutality and callousness of the time. No, it's true, it's good, I keep saying, it's giving. It reminds me a lot of the Jack the Ripper story.

When you hear like, You can't die in my boarding house, you know like it wasn't even. It's foreign to us. But at the time that was, it was desperation, there was such a lack of empathy there was.

And it was it was a lack of empathy that was beaten into people like this. It wasn't a lack of empathy that there was a bunch of sociopaths running around. Yeah, exactly. It was like, no, this was like beaten into people who just were treated like fucking scum. Twas, as Harry would say, a sign of the times.

It truly was a sign of the times. Yes, but sensing so this, so this was happening, Laird is a little like, Oh, what do we do here? Yeah. Sensing another opportunity to make a quick buck, Burke and Hare began discussing the best ways to get rid of this man.

Wolf. Ultimately, they decided they should suffocate him. Oh yes. Scottish historian Sir Walter Scott suggested that, rather than a giant like crazy Olympic leap from opportunistic body snatcher to cold-blooded killer, this killing might be that. Like I said, that like line in between, yeah, the gray area.

That sent them into that whole thing, like the really dark area. Because they would frame it as a mercy killing right and an act to protect the reputation of Hare and Laird's boarding house. Because you don't want people dying in your boarding house, right? People are going to hear about it.

And that's how they framed it, and that's how they were kind of taking it as that. Like little transition period between being a totally just shitty grave robber and being a fucking evil, cold-blooded killer. So whatever the case, it was here that Burke's preferred method of killing was established. He placed his hand over Joseph's mouth and nose, and he instructed Hare to lay across the man's chest to prevent flailing and to make it harder for him to breathe.

And that's how they would do it, like hand over, mouth and nose, the other one would lay on the chest. So it was a very brutal way of killing someone, very scary and terrifying and awful for the person that was being killed, yeah.

Now, before the evolution of modern forensics, this murder method, which would become known later as birking. Oh, I don't like that at all. Yeah, it was very ideal for what they needed to do because it wasn't leaving anything right.

And there was again, without the modern forensics we have, that somebody could tell when somebody is suffocated, right, right? You couldn't tell. Back then. One hand over the nose and mouth, or sometimes they would force the jaw shut. It was very difficult, if not impossible, for the victim to draw any breath that way.

And then the weight of the second man on the victim's chest prevented the diaphragm and lungs from expanding. So it was very fast, it was effective for what they were trying to do. And there were no visible signs of how it would affect the price that Knox was going to offer. Is there petechial hemorrhaging when you get suffocated? Yeah.

But they just didn't know what that was back then, they didn't know what that was. Oh, okay, that was not a very common thing that they would be like, Oh, you suffocated this person. This technique was used in the murder of Abigail Simpson very shortly after this, or what we believe was shortly after this.

According to Burke's confession, Abigail Simpson had arrived at the boarding house on February 5th, and Quote was decoyed in by Hare and his wife. The three spent the evening drinking, and after several drinks, Simpson began talking about how difficult it had been to support her daughter as a single mother. Oh God, that's what makes this even worse to me is like, she literally brought that forth to you.

Well, and like, you spent hours drinking with her and got to know her, yeah, and then did whatever you did and got to know that. She was talking about how hard her life was, how she had a child, she was raising that child by herself.

Like, you're an asshole, No, you're just going to, like, orphan, a baby, yeah. So at some point, Hare told Abigail that he was a single man and suggested that he would marry her and provide financial support. Yeah, right.

Which convinced her to stay the night, at least the next day. Abigail was violently ill and was vomiting from drinking the night before. So Hare gave her quote some porter and whiskey. Which caused her to become so intoxicated that she passed out in the bed in the back room. Do you think that they were doing anything to her drinks beforehand? I could see that for sure, but there's no indication of it.

Like, no, like, you know, official indication, but I could see that happening, for sure, yeah. But she passed out on that bed in the back room, the one that overlooks the Pigsty, and once she'd passed out. Burke entered the room. And then he laid across her legs and feet, while Hare covered her nose and mouth with his hand until she suffocated.

So scary when the sun had gone down and it was darker outside. They carried her body to Knox's dissecting room, where he paid them 10 shillings for the body. And remember, Knox isn't asking where they're getting these bodies from. See, that's the problem, because it's you're turning a blind eye. Yeah, like, sure are.

The blindest of eyes. And there's a point which I believe we're probably going to get to in part two, where there's one that you're like, you turned a real blind eye on that one. Oh God, yeah. So the pair's third victim, which Burke mentioned in his confession, he called him simply an Englishman, a nader of Cheshire.

So not even a name, just an Englishman. He was killed under circumstances that were pretty similar to Joseph the Miller. So the man was described as being 40 years old and he used to sell spunks in Edinburgh. He's got spunk.

What we could see is that spunks are like some kind of like a woody Tinder. Okay, I don't know why it's called spunks. But at the time that he met Burke and Hare, he was unemployed. And he'd come to the boarding house. And when he had come to the boarding house, he appeared to be ill.

He was suffering from jaundice, they believe. Um, just like the others. The man was taken to the private back room near the pigsty. He was smothered and then the body was removed once it got dark that night, taken to, Knox, paid him out 10 shillings and didn't ask any questions. Now, if there was any kind of emotional conflict over the murders of these three the first three victims? Neither Burke nor Hare seems to have indicated any kind of, like, you know, emotional turmoil, guilt, any kind of remorse.

So they probably would have murdered, even if it weren't for the money. They seemed like they were totally, they just went about their lives, nothing was affecting them. They didn't seem off to people around them. Like, you know how you'll hear that sometimes, like, I don't know, he seemed off.

Like, no, he didn't. None of them seemed off.

But around these schemes, meaning the two women in the boarding house, specifically Laird, they didn't seem like they were really asking questions either. Oh, I don't like that at all, yeah. And what would happen was Burke would explain to Dr. Knox that the men had come across these bodies. Either through a relative or some kind of close, you know, relative, a personal friend or some kind of acquaintance.

And there's always close to them, but not close to them far enough away. Where it wasn't weird, yeah, it was always like that arm's length, like, I know this person, who knows this person? But and obviously, that's a very flimsy explanation.

Like, he, like, Knox, is like, Oh yeah, you got another one, and they're like, Oh yeah, like my cousin's brother's friend, you know, he died, and why not? He said. It was fine, and Knox is just like, Okay, like, I don't need to ask anything else. I was like, maybe ask like two questions at least.

But wildly, in at least one of the murders, Abigail Simpson Margaret Laird is implicated in that crime. She was drinking with them, she knew what was going on, She was in the house when it happened, like she was at the very least to an active participant in luring Abigail into the house.

That's what I was going to ask. I had a feeling at some point she was going to be involved in this all.

And author of The Anatomy Murders The book, another book about this case which will like?

Lisa Rosner. She said the earnings for each body were split three ways, with Hare getting six, Burke getting four and Laird getting one. So she was an active participant, weird and and active in the sense of like she got one shilling because she was luring. Or getting them drunk and turning a blind eye, not actively, like physically, murdering someone.

But she was an accessory, yeah.

So Burke and McDougal, Who is Burke's lady? Yep, she's the other piece of this four person puzzle. Burke maintained until his death that McDougal knew nothing of these murders. Well, you don't really hear much about her other than nope. He married her.

But that's why she was never really, she wasn't included in the split either. Like that was split three ways, it wasn't split four exactly. And she would have been in it if she was part of it and she wasn't.

So interesting, that's interesting. Or did Hare get more because and like, like she, she was cut into his, he got the most?

Like, his six shillings were part of her earnings, her earnings, right? It absolutely could have been the case. Cause it's like, how cause Hare's coming home with all this money and you're not wondering where it's coming from.

Well, that's the thing. I don't think she had a physical part in it, I don't even think she had really the physical part that Laird did. But she had to know something was awry. Like, he's getting money somewhere, like you said, exactly.

She's gotta be asking, Where's this coming from? And who knows, maybe he again. These people are good liars, like he could have said anything. Oh, I did some extra work at the boarding house.

These guys are shitbags, so it's like, you know, you're with a shitbag. You know? He's not getting money via wholesome means like, come on, I'm sure you don't know that this is what's going on, but then at the same time, you're in the boarding house.

You're not seeing anything, I don't know. Yeah, maybe she just kept quiet. But he maintained Burke was very clear till his death, said she knew nothing about it, did not participate in.

It had nothing to do with it. Damn or hare, right? yeah.

Sorry, Hare, but for the most part, Burke and Hare chose their victims. Like most serial killers choose their victims. They were typically transients.

So it was like one of those things and honestly, marginalized people they would pick, so it was like the less dead. Fewer social connections, connections, people that weren't going to be, in their opinion, missed, right? There are, however, a few exceptions to this method that they went with.

Their fourth victim, Mary Patterson, was definitely going to be missed. She was known by a lot of people in town by face and name, her landlady, Mary Quote was quote much given to drink and had even been jailed for at least 10 days the previous year for being drunk disorderly and creating a crowd. Which meant she was also known to police. Which is another reason to not pick this person. See, now, this is where I wonder if they were escalating and they wanted some more excitement out of it.

That's the thing. Like this wasn't just financially profitable, but they wanted a little more so. In the evening of April 8th, Mary went out to a public house with her friend and roommate Janet Brown. The two of them ran into William Burke.

So he was apparently liking the two ladies, and he ordered a bottle of whiskey and invited them to join him at his table. Because he's really good guys. Yeah, totally. During the trial, Janet Brown, the friend, said that Burke's advances made her uncomfortable and she was actually very reluctant to join him. But Mary was, quote, always a forward, fearless disposition and had no reservations, so they stayed there.

They drank with him all night. The following morning, Burke took both women to the nearby home of his brother, Constantine. There they had a big breakfast, they drank two more bottles of whiskey. And after that, Mary passed out and she was moved to a small bed, while Burke and Hare went out to get more food and more alcohol.

Okay. Several hours later, the scene was discovered by Helen McDougal. She was pissed to find Burke hanging out with two women, who he was clearly like, wooing, yeah, and so they began arguing the couple.

Okay, and during this it got violent, and during this whole thing. Burke hit her hard enough to open a huge gash on her forehead. Oh my god, yeah, like pieces of absolute shit.

And Janet Brown, the friend of Mary, would later tell the court that she was quote much alarmed by their proceedings and tried to wake her friend Mary. So they could get the hell out of there. But Burke ushered her out the door before she could wake up her friend, What the fuck? So, even though he wouldn't let her go wake her friend, she was like, Okay, well, I'm going to come back and I'm going to get her later, yeah.

I'm going to get her, and she said, Return within a half an hour to get her. Well, Brown is gone, Janet Brown. She's out of the house, and McDougal is sitting in the adjacent room. Remember, McDougal supposedly doesn't know anything about this.

She's turning a blind eye, okay? And Burke and Hare decided to employ their usual method of suffocation, and they killed Mary Patterson. So when Janet Brown came back a half an hour later, to remember, this isn't even the boarding house, this is Constantine's house.

Right, this is the brother. She comes back a little while later and she's told that Mary had gone out to town with Burke and it was unknown when they would return. Okay, so she was like, Um, I don't know about that.

So she came back to the house again several hours later, but this time she was told that Mary and Burke had never returned. What, okay? So Janet Brown was like, Um, I'm going to come back again. So she returned back later and even reported Mary's disappearance to the police. But because of her status and having a reputation of being heavy drinkers and, you know, other unsavory in the time behaviors. The report wasn't taken seriously at all and it was never investigated.

Good, so they just didn't investigate it. We're like, Well, that's probably fine, that's really shitty now. Four or five hours after killing Mary Patterson, the two men loaded her body into a large tea crate and they carried it over to Knox's dissection room.

When they got there with the body, one of Knox's assistants recognized Mary from town and asked about how they'd come into possession of her body. Right to which Burke replied that he'd purchased it from an old woman at the back of Canongate. So the student at Dr. Knox's school were like, What the fuck?

But they were also so taken with Mary's beauty, they said that she was, quote, so handsome, a figure and well-shaped, and body and limbs. That the professor called in a local painter to create a portrait of her. Instead of inquiring further as to how this man, these two men are saying they bought this woman's body from a woman behind somewhere, they're like, Yeah, that probably checks out. She's so hot, though. We should get a painter in here and we should get a fucking portrait taken of her.

Like, Wow, what? And what's crazy is? Before he painted her, the painter asked Burke to cut off the woman's hair to, like, cut off some of the hair. Gave him a pair of scissors to do it. And before leaving, Knox gave Burke eight shillings and allowed him to keep the two and a half shillings that were found clutched in Mary's hand when she arrived. I have to go at this point in time.

Yep, I actually have to leave, yep. So the murder of Mary Patterson was definitely a large departure from Burke and Hare's pattern, yeah.

Not only was the woman known to tons of people in town, and they actually, she was recognized immediately. But other, unlike other victims, he'd been seen socializing with her at a public house for hours. Yeah, like, even gone so far as to seduce her and go back to his brother's house with her. Like, that's a lot of like, brazen shit, a lot of eyes on you.

And the surprisingly limited details of the murder that basically were only provided by Burke's confession. It suggests that Burke kind of felt differently about this killing than he did to others. Because the way he described this one was different, the amount of time he spent with the victim was different. People are like, what the fuck happened there? Like, that's a weird departure. And the, you know, the weird intimacy that was shared between Burke and Patterson put the scheme, and both of their freedom, at risk, to be honest.

Like, Burke really put them in a really bad position here. One might call it a pickle, a very big pickle. They again. They had been seen multiple places, by multiple people, countless people, and she was well known.

She was well known, people know her by name and face, and the last place she's seen alive is at Constantine Burke's home, right like Burke's own brother.

That does how that doesn't. The fact that they weren't arrested really can only be explained by really bad policing and a complete disinterest in the safety and welfare of the lower social classes. Here. Totally, cause even her friend knows the last two people she was seen with, and they're like, Yeah, sorry.

And we're telling the authorities, Sorry, yeah.

Like, that sucks to suck, I guess, like, what the fuck? So, given the inconsistencies in their confessions and the namelessness of most of their victims. It's pretty impossible to create like, a really accurate chronology chronological order of the murders committed between April and October 1828. Instead, you can, you can like, group them together to kind of form a an approximate picture, I would say of when the really big things happened. Burke's friendliness with Mary Patterson had caused a number of minor problems for the pair. Who, whether they knew it or not, made the decision to return to the more convenient and less familiar victims.

I don't know if that was a conscious effort. Like they were like, we can't do that again, or they just did it. Because they were like, well, that was a headache and just like, didn't think about it. But either way, they went back to the beginning, where it was like people, they didn't think. We're going to be missed very well now. The first of these victims, unfortunately, was Elizabeth Haldane, who showed up at Hare's boarding house sometime in early spring of 1828..

He knew nothing more about her than her name, but he described her as, quote, a stout old woman. She had but one tooth in her mouth, and that was a very large one in the front, that's how he described her. That's fucked now. Burke found the woman sleeping off drink in a pile of straw in the stable.

That's so sad. And retrieved more alcohol to give to her once she was sufficiently drunk and very unstable and unable to take care of herself. They suffocated her with the usual manner and left her in the barn until the following day, and that's when they took her body to Knox. A few months later, Elizabeth Haldane's daughter, Margaret, was also murdered by Burke.

What? And was murdered by Burke alone? And did they? Did he know that there was a connection there? So that's the thing we're not really sure.

So she was briefly staying at the boarding house. And this murder is one that you can read a lot about, and it gets distorted a lot through a lot of fictional accounts of the murder. Um, a lot of them portray her as like this daughter searching for her mother. And then the woman's killers get the jump on her before she can find them out. Like this, really like, intensified, you know, detective noir kind of thing.

Yes, in reality, Burke described Margaret as someone quote of idle habits and much given to drinking. And it's really likely that they met at a public house or just somewhere else. Okay, he enticed her back to the boarding house with drink.

And she passed out, laid Burke, laid her face down on the bed and pressed her face into the bed until she suffocated. Jesus. And it really does seem like purely coincidence that she had been killed by the same killers who killed her mother. That is so beyond bizarre it really is.

And tragic, it's so sad now. Around the same time of Margaret Haldane's murder, Burke had gone into town looking for another victim. And that's there that he made friends with a frail, elderly man who he believed was the perfect fit for the next victim. But just as Burke was about to invite the man back to the boarding house, he spotted what he would describe to police as quote an old woman and a dumb boy. Her grandson from Glasgow.

Oh, through conversation, he learned that the woman and child were Irish and had walked from Glasgow to Edinburgh. They were looking for shelter along the road, like during the night, and the woman was not from this area and was completely unfamiliar with Edinburgh. She's lost, and so this made them ideal victims to him, because no one Edinburgh doesn't know her either.

Exactly so the elderly man with who Burke was talking, he just kind of abandoned that whole thing. He was like, Well, you were going to be next, which I can't imagine that, man.

Yeah, but he invited the woman and boy back to the lodging house now, by most accounts, the woman had been traveling to Edinburgh to visit friends. And was told by Burke that her friends resided at the boarding house of his friend. William Burke, or, excuse me, William Hare. Once they'd reached the boarding house and they settled in, Burke brought out the bottle of liquor, which immediately they got drunk. The woman retired to bed for the evening.

And according to George McGregor, the author, the two killers snuck into the room quote at the dead hour of the night. And she was murdered by the human ghouls, while Burke and Hare were murdering the old woman. Her grandson was in an adjoining room with Laird and MacDougall, who were attempting to soothe his agitation over his grandmother's absence. MacDougall was there. Unsure of what to do, the men decided they needed to get rid of him as well.

So they suffocated him as well and loaded both bodies into an old herring barrel. And then Burke was quick to note that the barrel was, quote, perfectly dry. There was no brine in it, just in case you were worried about that, so that was a briny barrel.

I would have been pissed, I mean, I'm pissed either way, like, hello. But so that implicates MacDougall now, too. So goodbye, and then he's sitting there, going. She has nothing to do with it.

She didn't know anything.

So I think, Hey, what happened to that little boy that I was fucking calming down while you murdered his grandma in the next room? Exactly like this is just horrific, yep.

That's how I feel now. Later that morning, the two men tried to transport the barrel to Knox's dissection room by horse and cart, but after a few miles, the horse refused to go any further. Because the horse was like, you guys are assholes and I'm not doing this, yeah, the horse was like, I'm not being implicated in this.

So I guess they got a porter's cart from a nearby shop and pushed it the rest of the way they got to Knox's. Burke carried the barrel the remaining distance to the dissection room. The students struggled to get the bodies out of the barrel because they were so stiff and cold. And as a result, Knox paid them a slightly reduced rate of 16 shillings now, according to Burke, the pair shot the horse on their return to the boarding house because it wouldn't walk any further.

I did not need to know that. So they're like, the worst kind of people, soulless women, children, elderly animals. They don't give a fuck.

There's no, there's no line with them. And shortly after the murder of this woman and her grandson, Burke and Hare murdered a cinder gatherer that Burke thought maybe went by the name Effie. Maybe possibly.

Who knows? During the spring and summer months, most laborers left the city to work in the farms and fields that surround the city. And this kind of limited Burke and Hare's victim pool during that time, because the laborers so. According to Lisa Rosner, the author, Effie was a hawker who would occasionally sell odds and ends door to door, and she was actually known to Burke.

Like, Burke knew her, and because she had sold like bits of leather to him, I think for use as like in his cobbling business. That's crazy. And despite being known to both the killers and many people in town as well. The pair enticed Effie into the barn with alcohol, and they said you can rest in the barn as well. And when she fell asleep, they quote, laid a cloth over her and suffocated her, as they did the others.

And then they transported her to Knox's dissection room, where they were paid 10 shillings for the body. Oh my God. And that is where we're going to end for part one of Burke and Hare.

Good, when we return, we are going to talk about the final murders. Things are going to go awry for the two of them. We're going to talk about how they were caught and we're going to talk about what happened to them.

I'm excited to talk about what happens to them, like and when they get caught and sentenced to prison, because I'm like, you need to be caught at this point. And again, like, thinking about, like, um, at the very least two people, but most likely a group of people that are willing to do this kind of shit. And to the most vulnerable people, too, the most vulnerable people. And like, two just yucky, scary, terrible couples. Oh, it always freaks me out when couples, yeah.

I don't like it. This is. This is quite a tale and a real sign of the times, for real. But that is part one of Burke and Hare. Well, thanks for listening to that guy. Yeah, hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it. Weird, but not this weird, because that's too weird.

No, it's not that time anymore, guys, don't go Gray Robin, it's not that time.

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