A skeleton is on display at the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, and it carries a name. It belongs to William Burke, who was executed in Edinburgh on January 28, 1829, for the murder of Margery Campbell or Docherty. The sentence read out by the High Court of Justiciary directed that his body be "publicly dissected and anatomized." Professor Alexander Monro carried that out at the University, and the skeleton is still there. Nobody bequeathed Burke to science and no dealer sold him. A court put him in the museum.
Most serial-case material reaches the public by other routes. A pair of gloves and an apron come out of a police collection. A cell door is given to a town museum. A board of chemical tests is kept by a national museum because of what it shows about science in a courtroom. An archive builds an exhibition from a trial file, a gallery shows a film of a trial that was meant to be seen only in a courtroom, and a city buys a bronze relief of a man it executed. Each of these acts is defended in terms of education, record or art. Each has also drawn objections from relatives, from courts or from the public.
The reason a medical school wanted Burke’s body at all is set out by the National Library of Scotland. Dissection was essential to teaching, the only legal supply was the bodies of executed criminals, and the schools therefore leaned on "resurrection men" who took the newly dead from churchyards. Families answered with guarded cemeteries and iron cages called mortsafes. Burke insisted that neither he nor Hare had ever taken a body that way, and the Dictionary of Irish Biography agrees that no evidence says otherwise. The same reference work credits the case with helping to bring about the Anatomy Act of 1832, "An Act for regulating Schools of Anatomy."
The University of Edinburgh’s museum pages treat the object plainly. Burke’s skeleton is displayed, and the museum also holds two casts of his face, one taken shortly before his execution and one after his death. The museum’s account of the case, however, shows how the telling of a case can shift on a label. It says Hare was "allowed to flee," a phrase that compresses a decision of the full High Court. Some modern summaries go further and say Hare was acquitted. He was not. He was never put on trial, and the difference matters to anyone reading a label in a case that stands in a medical school.
Haigh’s afterlife in display cases began before the execution. Gordon Lowe, in his account of the case, writes that on the day before it Haigh sat for a life mask so that Madame Tussauds could make a wax figure of him, in clothes he had chosen himself.
The physical objects went elsewhere. The Metropolitan Police Crime Museum at Scotland Yard, known as the Black Museum, took the material associated with the case. In June 2015 the Associated Press reported that the Museum of London would show items from that collection, among them the leather gloves and apron Haigh wore.
A smaller institution holds a smaller piece. Haigh first appeared before magistrates at Horsham, in Sussex, and between hearings he was held in a cell at the town’s police station. The Sussex Express reported that the door of that cell is now in Horsham Museum, along with a comb he used in the prison hospital at Lewes.
Barker’s evidence board survived, and the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian, keeps it in its medicine and science collections. From June 28, 2024, to July 5, 2025, it was on view in the exhibition "Forensic Science on Trial" in the museum’s Albert H. Small Documents Gallery. The Smithsonian’s announcement listed the chemical tests from Sherman’s 1872 trial among the objects and described her as suspected of poisoning three of her husbands and eight of her children. The museum’s curator, Kristen Frederick-Frost, told Smithsonian Magazine that Barker "threw everything and the kitchen sink at the Sherman evidence." In a 2025 interview on the museum’s blog she said he ran up to seven different analyses on each sample and that every one detected the poison, where a single test would have identified it.
Barker had a reason. In 1871 Elizabeth Wharton, a wealthy Baltimore widow, was tried for poisoning General W. Scott Ketchum and was acquitted after her defense brought in leading medical experts who challenged the tests used against her as outdated. Barker later acknowledged, Smithsonian Magazine says, that the Wharton case was why he multiplied his tests in the Sherman case.
How the board was hung is itself a statement. In the exhibition the Sherman board was placed beside a sexual assault evidence kit in a panel on misogyny in forensic science, the curator said in 2025. A nineteenth-century poisoning case was thus offered as an example of science working, and then set alongside a modern object to ask who science had served and who it had failed. The case count shifts with the speaker. The Smithsonian’s announcement speaks of three husbands and eight children, the museum’s later interview of eleven people suspected, Connecticut History of a total that may reach ten, and the court, of one death.
The case it sets out is one of a large gap between what a court decided and what the archive believes. The assize court of Ille-et-Vilaine convicted Jégado on December 14, 1851, on 18 counts: three murders by poisoning, four attempted murders and eleven thefts. She was executed at Rennes on February 26, 1852. Yet the archives record the court’s own estimate that 37 people had been poisoned, 23 of them fatally, across some eighteen years in presbyteries and private households. Most of those deaths were never tried, since they had occurred more than ten years before her arrest and lay beyond the limitation period that French law then set. A printed account of 1852, catalogued in the French Execution Ballads database at the University of Melbourne, gives the figures as 37 persons and 25 deaths, so even the contemporary arithmetic varies.
The exhibition is candid about what the trial file does not settle. The archives note that the investigating judge put his questions to her in a leading form, phrased as negatives that invited agreement, and that none of the items seized in the first searches contained poison. They also record how fast the case traveled. Her arrest papers gave her name as "Jigadeau." When officials made inquiries in Morbihan, word spread that a servant named Hélène had been arrested at Rennes, and the court at Pontivy warned the chief prosecutor of local talk linking a servant of that name to old, unexplained deaths. Bretons, the archives write, followed every step of the case. The tourist office of Pontivy Communauté, for its part, lists a point of interest under her name, so that the archive’s cautious file and a visitor’s itinerary now describe the same woman.
Several Melbourne institutions hold her case. State Library Victoria keeps portraits of Needle and two of her children, together with letters from 1894. The Public Record Office Victoria holds her prison and court files. The Old Treasury Building, the Melbourne museum, featured her in its exhibition "Wayward Women?" and its account is the source of many of the dates now repeated about her life.
The arguments are legal and moral rather than curatorial. Needle’s counsel urged that spells of unconsciousness left her unable to be held responsible. The doctors called would not commit themselves to a diagnosis, and Justice Hodges would not wait for them. "The law cannot wait while philosophers, physicians and scientists settle metaphysical problems," he said, in words the museum quotes. The Attorney-General, Isaac Isaacs, declined to recommend action on a plea to the Governor. A 2019 book by Samantha Battams, covered by InDaily of Adelaide, argues that the trial was prejudiced by public opinion and press coverage beforehand and by evidence that would not be admitted today, and the InDaily piece adds that the jury was composed of men only, women not serving on juries in Victoria until the 1920s. A museum can display a life like hers as a woman’s history. A court of the period had already disposed of her as a case.
What Cleveland did with the unnamed is the curatorial part of the story. Police made plaster death masks of the victims' faces and put them on display, a Cleveland 19 report recalled in 2018, in the hope that someone would recognize them. The mask of the man later called the Tattooed Man was shown, with a chart of his tattoos, at the Great Lakes Exposition, the lakefront fair that drew more than eleven million visitors over the summers of 1936 and 1937. CBS News reported in 2024, citing the Cleveland Police Museum, that more than 100,000 people saw the display and that none identified him. His mask and those of other victims are now shown at the Cleveland Police Museum, whose website also hosts the historian James Jessen Badal’s account of the series. The Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University keeps a collection of photographs from the case.
The sequel is also a matter of record. In August 2024 the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office and the DNA Doe Project began genetic genealogy work to name unidentified victims. The medical examiner calls them "Kingsbury Run John Doe" and a number, and the numbering, the DNA Doe Project says in its case pages, does not always match the numbering used in news reports. As of the project’s case pages, updated in October 2025 and June 2026, two victims were still undergoing testing.
The Police Museum of the Czech Republic in Prague has kept the case in view. Radek Galaš, the museum’s director, told Seznam Zprávy in 2026 that Pilčík told stories so convincingly that people believed he had survived the Titanic, and that a twelve-year-old girl who was to have been guided across with her family had survived weeks of captivity and was in no condition to give a statement. "What she lived through must have been something utterly dreadful," he said. Radio Prague International, reporting on the museum’s collection, described the belongings of the people who had paid him, among them clothes and identity cards, and the museum’s staff told the radio that letters in the girl’s hand had been meant to win the trust of further clients.
The most telling story comes from the gallery floor. Seznam Zprávy reported that years ago an elderly woman stood for a long time in front of the exhibit on the case and told a museum employee that she was the girl who had been held in 1951. She left without giving her contact details and did not return. The same article reported that the investigation file has not survived, which leaves the exhibit, and the stories told about it, as the case’s public form.
The case also reached television. The series "Thirty Cases of Major Zeman" included an episode, "Bestie," based on it, and on May 21, 2026, the ÚSTR, Czech Television and the Police Museum held the second evening of a discussion series on the programme at the museum itself, the Interior Ministry’s magazine Policista reported. A research institute, a broadcaster and a police museum thus met in one room to discuss a television version of a case in which the suspect never faced a court.
After the execution, according to the Ärzte Zeitung, his head went to the University of Göttingen. It was kept at the anthropological institute and, for decades, at the forensic medicine institute, where scientists of the period studied such specimens to test whether criminals could be identified by facial features or the structure of the brain. It was last shown in public in the early 1960s. When the forensic medicine department moved, it was lost for years in a clinic basement. In 1991, for Hanover’s 750th anniversary, the city asked to borrow it for a laser show. Klaus-Steffen Saternus, who headed the Göttingen institute, refused that request and every similar one. In January 2015 the Göttinger Tageblatt reported, and the University Medical Center Göttingen confirmed, that the head had been quietly cremated in 2014. A spokesman, Stefan Weller, said the urn had been placed in an anonymous cemetery field the previous March, after calls for a dignified interment. The university had spoken with the Protestant church and tried without success to find relatives.
Hanover has argued about display of another kind. In 1992 the Sprengel Museum bought a bronze cast of Alfred Hrdlicka’s 1966 relief of Haarmann, and relatives of the victims protested what they called a monument to the mass murderer, the taz reported. Dirk Götting, scientific director of the Lower Saxony Police Museum, has warned that figures from the past can take on a harmless image with time, citing a musical, a graphic novel, guided city tours and a figure on an Advent calendar. His own museum, in Nienburg, shows a replica of the Weimar-era police cell in which Haarmann was held, and an axe said to have been his. A forensic examination showed no traces on the axe, and its origin is doubtful, a caveat the museum makes about its own exhibit. A police exhibition in Berlin in 1926 had shown his attic room only two years after his arrest.
The Lower Saxony State Archive holds the case files that survive. Demand is so high that they can now be viewed only in digital form, and the trial files of the prosecution and the Landgericht are not among them. Together with the city’s centenary page of 2024, the archive’s December 2024 feature is where the victims are named in full, a record the relief and the replica cell were never designed to offer.
The trial was a performance as well as a proceeding. RTBF calls it the first major criminal trial since 1914, one that a public tired of wartime spy stories was hungry to follow. Actu-Juridique reports heavy press coverage and the presence of the singer Maurice Chevalier and the actress Mistinguett at the trial. The historians Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu and Amélie Chabrier, discussing the case for RetroNews, the newspaper archive of the French national library, describe a trial followed in the press for about a month in which newspapers built a character and a name for Landru as much as they reported facts. He was provocative in the dock, they say, and used humor that pleased the courtroom.
The case has been collected in other forms since. Criminocorpus hosts notices on two popular songs of the day, a complainte of 1920 titled "Landru et ses femmes" and one of 1921 whose title praises him as "ce grand calomnié," that much-slandered man. It holds a serial from the magazine Police Magazine of 1931, "La vie amoureuse de Landru," and a set of period documents from the Philippe Zoummeroff collection. William Bolitho gave him a chapter in Murder for Profit in 1926. Orson Welles wanted to direct Charlie Chaplin in a black comedy based on Landru, according to the Criterion Collection. Chaplin would not be directed by anyone else and bought the idea for 5,000 dollars, the American Film Institute catalog says. He made Monsieur Verdoux, released in 1947, with Welles credited for the idea. Criterion adds that Chaplin had been in Paris during the 1921 trial.
The historian Richard Tomlinson, who began researching the case in the early 1980s, told Connexion he has no doubt Landru killed the ten women and the young man, but that how, where and what became of their bodies is still unknown. He thinks the real total may be dozens, and he argues that a hatred of women links the swindles to the killings. Tomlinson said that pre-trial police documents, made public years later at an exhibition in Paris, supported his reading. The assize court records for Seine-et-Oise from 1811 to 1940 are held by the Archives départementales des Yvelines, and Actu-Juridique reported in January 2025 that the Landru file is open for consultation as part of a digitization project. In October 2024 a play based on the trial, "Landru, je n’ai rien à vous dire" by Louis Barraud, was staged at the Paris Court of Appeal, so the case went back to a courtroom, this time as theater.
The case entered the museum world through a camera. The British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to respond to the war in Afghanistan, spent two weeks in the country in 2002 and were given permission to attend the Supreme Court in Kabul and film a trial. It was Shah’s. Tate describes the footage as showing a crowded, shabby courtroom with armed guards, proceedings in Afghan languages and only basic explanation. The Imperial War Museum’s catalogue says the artists felt the people in the case and the line of witnesses stood for the struggle of the Afghan people to come to terms with the previous 23 years. They edited the footage into a 12-minute film, "Zardad’s Dog," completed in 2003, and it was first shown at the Imperial War Museum in the exhibition "The House of Osama bin Laden," from April 10 to May 26, 2003. The artists were nominated for the 2004 Turner Prize for the work.
Then the law intervened. The film’s title alludes to an allegation, recorded in the Imperial War Museum’s catalogue entry and in Tate’s press release, that Zardad kept Shah as a "human dog" and used him against captives. These are allegations, and Shah was never charged with those acts. Zardad himself had fled Afghanistan and reached Britain in 1998 on a false passport, claiming asylum. He was arrested and charged with conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages in Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, and his trial in London was under way when the Turner Prize exhibition was due to open at Tate Britain. In October 2004, a few days before opening, Tate and the artists were advised that showing the film during that trial could amount to contempt of court. It was withdrawn. After Zardad was convicted in July 2005 and sentenced to 20 years, Tate showed the film in the Lightbox space at Tate Britain from October 3 to November 3, 2005. The Imperial War Museum holds it in its art collection.
The film raises a second argument that its subject cannot answer. Amnesty International said that Shah’s trial had denied him a lawyer and the chance to question witnesses. He was executed in secret, and the government made the fact public only a week later, after Amnesty disclosed it. What Tate presented as the first capital trial since the fall of the Taliban was, by the account of the human rights body that learned of the execution, a proceeding in which the defendant could not properly defend himself.
The arguments are rarely about the objects. They concern who is entitled to decide what an object means, and several of the accounts quoted record a point at which the meaning shifted. A court’s decision to free Hare became "allowed to flee" on a label and "acquitted" in some summaries. A conviction of Jégado on three murders now sits beside an archive’s estimate of 37 poisoned. A relief bought as art was called by victims' relatives a monument. A trial filmed in Kabul was withdrawn in London for fear of contempt and shown a year later. Where an exhibit states its own doubt, as the Nienburg museum does about an axe, the visitor is told what kind of object he is looking at.
Of the ten cases, one is displayed in the body, and that was the court’s order. The rest show what was made of the case afterward: wax, plaster, bronze, film, a board of tests, a cell door, a file.
• January 28, 1829: William Burke is executed in Edinburgh; his body is publicly dissected and his skeleton passes to the University.
• 1832: The Anatomy Act regulates schools of anatomy in Britain.
• February 26, 1852: Hélène Jégado is executed at Rennes after conviction on December 14, 1851.
• 1872: Lydia Sherman is convicted at New Haven; on January 11, 1873, she is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• October 22, 1894: Martha Needle is executed at Melbourne Gaol, after conviction in September.
• November 30, 1921: Henri Désiré Landru is convicted at Versailles; he is executed on February 25, 1922.
• December 19, 1924: Fritz Haarmann is convicted at Hanover; he is executed on April 15, 1925.
• 1926: A police exhibition in Berlin shows Haarmann’s attic room.
• 1936 and 1937: The Great Lakes Exposition shows a death mask from the Cleveland series.
• July 19, 1949: John George Haigh is convicted at Lewes Assizes; he is executed on August 10, 1949.
• September 1951: Hubert Pilčík is arrested near Pilsen and dies in custody before trial.
• 1991: The Göttingen forensic institute refuses to lend Haarmann’s head for a laser show.
• 1992: The Sprengel Museum buys a bronze cast of Hrdlicka’s relief of Haarmann; victims' relatives protest.
• 2002 to 2003: Langlands and Bell film a trial in Kabul; the film is shown at the Imperial War Museum from April 10 to May 26, 2003.
• April 20, 2004: Abdullah Shah is executed in Kabul.
• October 2004: Tate withdraws "Zardad’s Dog" from the Turner Prize exhibition on legal advice.
• October 3 to November 3, 2005: Tate shows the film at Tate Britain after Zardad’s conviction.
• 2014: Haarmann’s head is cremated; the Göttinger Tageblatt reports it in January 2015.
• June 2015: The Museum of London shows items from the Crime Museum, among them gloves and an apron associated with Haigh.
• 2019: The Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine open the Jégado exhibition.
• June 28, 2024, to July 5, 2025: The Smithsonian shows the Sherman evidence board in "Forensic Science on Trial."
• August 2024: Genetic genealogy work begins on the unidentified Cleveland victims.
• May 21, 2026: The Police Museum of the Czech Republic holds an evening on the "Bestie" episode of "Thirty Cases of Major Zeman."