William Burke was born at Urney in County Tyrone in 1792 and came to Scotland as a labourer on the Union Canal, settling in Edinburgh's West Port with Helen McDougal. He met William Hare, who with his partner Margaret Laird kept a lodging house in Tanner's Close.
It began with a death rather than a killing. In November 1827 an old army pensioner named Donald died in the lodging house owing rent, and Burke and Hare filled his coffin with bark and sold the body to Dr Robert Knox's anatomy school in Surgeons' Square for seven pounds ten shillings. Edinburgh was then the leading centre of anatomical teaching in Europe and the legal supply of cadavers, limited to executed criminals, met a fraction of the demand. Knox asked no questions and paid promptly.
Over the following ten months they killed sixteen people. They took in or lured lodgers, travellers, prostitutes and the destitute, made them drunk, and suffocated them by compressing the chest and covering the nose and mouth, a method that left no marks and that entered the language as burking. Among them were a woman named Mary Paterson, and Daft Jamie, a well-known and mentally disabled young man about the town whose body was recognised on the dissecting table.
They were caught on November 1, 1828 when lodgers found the body of Margaret Docherty under a bed. The evidence was thin, and the Lord Advocate offered Hare immunity to testify. He took it.
Burke was convicted on Christmas Day 1828 and hanged before a crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand on January 28, 1829. His body was then publicly dissected by Professor Alexander Monro, and members of the public were admitted to file past. His skeleton is still held by the Anatomical Museum at Edinburgh, and a pocketbook bound in his skin survives.
The case produced the Anatomy Act of 1832, which legalised the supply of unclaimed bodies to medical schools and ended the trade.