William Burke was hanged in Edinburgh on January 28, 1829, for the murder of an elderly Irishwoman, Margery Campbell or Docherty. That was the only killing a jury heard. In statements he made in prison after his conviction, Burke said that in 1828 he and another Irish laborer, William Hare, had suffocated sixteen people, most of them poor and old, and sold the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox, who ran a private school of anatomy in Edinburgh. Hare escaped trial by giving evidence for the Crown under a promise from the Lord Advocate. Burke's own body was dissected in public under the terms of his sentence, and his skeleton is still held by the University of Edinburgh.
The case gave English a verb, "to burke," meaning to smother or strangle. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, it also helped bring about the Anatomy Act of 1832, which regulated how the medical schools obtained bodies.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography, in an entry by the historian James Quinn, says Burke was born in about 1793, probably at Urney, near Strabane in County Tyrone, the son of Neil Burke, a laborer. The family was Catholic and Irish-speaking. Burke had some schooling and worked for a time as a servant to a Presbyterian minister. He tried baking and weaving, then served in the Donegal Militia from about 1809 to 1815 as a private, an officer's servant and a bandsman; he was a skilled flute player. In the confession printed by the Edinburgh Evening Courant, Burke gave his age as thirty-six and his birthplace as the parish of "Orrey," County Tyrone, and said he had served seven years, mostly as an officer's servant.
A memoir printed in Edinburgh in 1829, in the book West Port Murders, adds that he worked with his father until he was eighteen, spent a year as a servant to a local gentleman who then died, and joined the militia at nineteen as a substitute. The same memoir says his brother was a non-commissioned officer in the regiment.
Burke married a woman from Ballina, County Mayo; she had no part in the later events. The Dictionary of Irish Biography says they had two children; the 1829 memoir says seven, of whom all but one boy had died. After the militia was disbanded he moved his family close to his father-in-law's small farm. The memoir says he demanded a formal lease of his share, his father-in-law refused, and the quarrel ended with Burke leaving. In 1818, the Dictionary of Irish Biography says, he crossed to Scotland and worked as a laborer on the Union Canal at Maddiston. There he began living with a Scottish woman, H.M., who, according to the 1829 accounts, lived with him as his wife and used his name. When the canal work ended in August 1822 he spent two years laboring near Peebles, then moved to Edinburgh and earned a living mending shoes.
Late in 1826, according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Burke and H.M. moved to the West Port of Edinburgh. William Hare, an illiterate Catholic laborer from Newry or Derry, had also come over to work on the canal, around 1819 or 1820. After the canal was finished he took casual work, including at Port Hopetoun. In 1826 he married a widow, M.H., whose late husband had kept a lodging house in Tanner's Close, off the West Port, and he lived on what the house brought in.
In his official confession of January 3, 1829, Burke said he first saw Hare at the Hallow Fair of 1827. He and H.M. met M.H., whom he already knew, in the street. Over a drink he mentioned that he meant to go west to look for work as a cobbler, and M.H. said there was a small room in their house that would suit him, so he could follow his trade in Edinburgh. He moved in. Hare's house, Burke said in the Courant confession, had eight beds for lodgers at threepence a night, and two or three people often shared a bed.
Among the lodgers was an old army pensioner known as Donald. Burke's official confession says Donald fell ill and died about Christmas 1827, shortly before his quarterly pension was due, owing Hare £4. The Dictionary of Irish Biography dates the death to November 29, 1827, and the National Library of Scotland to November 27. A day or two after the death, Burke said, Hare proposed selling the body to the doctors and giving Burke a share. After the parish coffin had been nailed shut, the two men opened it, took the body out, filled the coffin with tanner's bark and closed it again; the coffin was buried in the West Church yard.
That evening, Burke said, they went to the yard of the College and asked a young man who looked like a student whether any of Dr. Monro's men were about. The young man sent them instead to Dr. Knox at No. 10 Surgeons' Square. Knox's assistants told them to come back after dark. The body was carried there in a sack, Knox came in and looked at it, and the assistants paid £7 10s. Burke said Hare took £4 5s. and he took £3 5s. Burke said, and the Dictionary of Irish Biography agrees, that the assistants made it plain they would be glad to see the two men again. In the Courant confession Burke said that the high price was what made them try murder.
The University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum describes Knox as a freelance anatomy teacher who ran private classes in Surgeons' Square in competition with the University's own classes. The National Library of Scotland explains why bodies were scarce: dissection was essential to medical teaching, the only legal supply was the bodies of executed criminals, and the schools relied on "resurrection men" who dug up fresh burials, which families tried to stop with guarded graveyards and iron cages called mortsafes. Burke insisted that neither he nor Hare had ever taken a body from a grave. The Dictionary of Irish Biography agrees that there is no evidence they did.
Everything known about most of the deaths comes from Burke's two confessions, made after he had been sentenced. Hare also confessed, on December 1, 1828, but the Dictionary of Irish Biography says that statement has since disappeared. Burke said in the Courant confession that he did not know the days or months of the different killings, nor all the names, because they were usually drunk at the time and took little notice. He said Knox's records of payment would show the dates. The two confessions do not give the killings in the same order. The Courant version, which Burke dictated and corrected by hand, gives the fuller order and dates; the official statement differs at points.
Abigail Simpson lived at Gilmerton, outside Edinburgh, where she had a daughter, and earned a little selling salt and camstone. The Courant confession says she was drawn into Hare's house on the afternoon of February 11, 1828, given drink, and kept overnight because she was too drunk to go home. She was killed the next forenoon, February 12. Burke said she had claimed to be a pensioner of "Sir John Hay." Her body was taken to Surgeons' Square, and Knox's school paid £10. Hare took her clothes, saying he would throw them in the canal. In the official confession Burke described the same killing, of a woman from Gilmerton, as the first, and said Knox remarked that the body was very fresh but asked no questions.
An Englishman from Cheshire, a lodger at Hare's who had made a living as a street seller, was ill with jaundice. Burke described him as very tall, about forty, with black hair and whiskers going gray. His name was never known. He was killed in his bed and sold for £10. An old woman who lodged one night at Hare's, also never named, was killed next; the Courant confession says M.H. brought her in from the street while Hare was working at the canal boats.
Mary Paterson, whom the indictment called Mary Paterson or Mitchell, was a young woman, "eighteen or twenty years of age" according to West Port Murders. She and a companion, Janet Brown, had spent the night of April 8 in the Canongate police office and were let out at six the next morning. Burke met them that morning, bought them drinks and took them to a house in Gibb's Close in the Canongate. The indictment charged him with her murder there in April 1828. Burke said the body went to Surgeons' Square within hours. In the Courant confession he said that when he and the porter carried it through the streets in daylight, a crowd of boys from the High School Yards followed them, calling out that they were carrying a corpse. He also said one of Knox's students thought he recognized her.
About June 1828, Burke said, an old woman came from Glasgow to Hare's with her grandson, a boy he described as about twelve and unable to speak. Both were killed in the night. Their bodies were sent to Knox in a herring barrel on Hare's cart; when Hare's horse refused to pull it past the Meal Market, they hired a porter with a handcart. Burke said they were paid £16 for the two.
Joseph, a miller by trade who had once had money and had a connection by marriage to the Carron ironworks, was lying ill at Hare's. Burke said in his official statement that Hare and his wife feared talk of fever in the house would drive lodgers away, and the two men agreed he should be killed. His body was sold for £10.
While Burke and H.M. were away visiting her family near Falkirk, Hare brought a drunk woman in from the street and killed her alone, selling her body for £8. Burke said he found out only because Hare had money when he came back; when Hare denied doing any business, Burke went to Knox's rooms and was told Hare had brought in a body.
A woman called Effy, who gathered cinders and scraps and sold pieces of leather to Burke for his cobbling, was killed in Hare's stable. Another woman was handed to Burke by two police officers who were taking her, drunk, to the West Port watch-house; Burke offered to see her to her lodgings and took her to Hare's. In the Courant confession he said he was on good terms with the police, and that the police would have called more often had they known what was happening in the house. Each body, he said, brought £10.
After Whitsunday 1828, according to West Port Murders, Burke and H.M. moved into the house of a relative of Burke's by marriage, whose family later left Edinburgh, and the killing continued there. Burke stated plainly that the people of that household knew nothing of it.
Mrs. Haldane, a stout elderly lodger, fell asleep drunk in Hare's stable and was killed there. Her daughter, Margaret, called Peggy, was killed some time later in the house where Burke now lived. Burke said he killed Peggy Haldane alone, and that Hare had no part in it. Mrs. Ostler, the widow of a porter, did washing for households in the district and had been washing in the same house; West Port Murders describes her as a hard-working washerwoman well known in the neighborhood. Burke said she was given drink, killed in the house and sold for £8. Ann M'Dougal, a young married woman who was a cousin of H.M.'s former husband, came to visit and was killed there too. Burke said that because she was a distant connection he asked Hare to begin, and then helped him, and that Knox's people supplied a trunk for the body.
James Wilson was known in the Old Town as Daft Jamie. The Dictionary of Irish Biography describes him as a young man of nineteen with a learning disability. He went about the streets bareheaded and barefoot. According to the Courant confession, M.H. brought him into Hare's house from the street one morning in October 1828 while Burke was having a drink in a grocer's shop nearby. Burke said she came into the shop, asked him for a dram and stamped on his foot, and he understood what she wanted and followed. Wilson kept asking for his mother and was told she would be there soon.
Burke said Hare began the attack and that Wilson, who was sober, fought hard; it took both men to kill him, before noon. Hare took a brass snuffbox and a copper spoon from Wilson's pocket, kept the box and gave Burke the spoon. The body was sold to Knox that afternoon for £10. Burke also said that M.H. received £1 of his share for the use of her house for every person killed there, and that when he did not pay her for Wilson she refused to speak to him for three weeks. At the time of the killings, he said, a £10 body was split £6 to Hare and £4 to him.
Wilson's death, unlike most, was charged in the indictment. Wilson's mother, Janet Wilson, later tried to bring Hare to trial for it.
The last person killed was an elderly Irishwoman whom the indictment called Margery or Mary M'Gonegal, or Duffie, or Campbell, or Docherty. A lodging-house keeper in the Pleasance, Mary Stewart, testified that the woman, who called herself Madgy Campbell or Duffie, had come from Glasgow and left her house between seven and eight on the morning of Friday, October 31, 1828, to look for her son. A shop boy at a grocer's in the West Port testified that Burke met her in the shop that morning. In one of his declarations to the sheriff, Burke said she had told him her name was Mary Docherty and that she came from Ireland, and that he invited her home for breakfast on the strength of a possible family connection.
That night was Halloween. The Courant confession says Burke and Hare killed her in Burke's house; seven shillings found in her pocket were split between them. A lodger couple, James and Ann Gray, had been sent to spend the night at Hare's. Neighbors heard drinking and dancing, then sounds of a quarrel. One neighbor, Hugh Alston, testified that between eleven and midnight he heard a woman cry "murder" close to Burke's door. Around midnight Burke called at the door of David Paterson, the keeper of Knox's museum, and brought him to the house, where he told him in a low voice that he had "procured something for the Doctor," pointing to the straw at the head of the bed.
On the Saturday the Grays came back. Ann Gray asked after the old woman and later found the body hidden near the bed. A broadside account of the trial reports her evidence that H.M. offered her money to keep quiet. The Grays went to the police. By then the body had been packed into a tea chest and carried by a porter to Surgeons' Square, where Paterson received it and £5 was paid, half the price, with the rest due once Knox had seen it.
John Fisher, a criminal officer of the Edinburgh police, testified that when he questioned Burke and H.M. at their house their accounts did not agree, and he took them both to the Police Office. That night he returned with the police superintendent and Dr. Alexander Black, the police surgeon, and found fresh blood in the straw under the bed and a striped bed-gown. The next morning he went with Paterson to Knox's premises in Surgeons' Square, where a box in the cellar was opened and the body found. James Gray was sent for to identify it. The body was examined by Dr. Black, Dr. Robert Christison, the professor of medical jurisprudence at the University, and Dr. Newbigging.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography says Burke and H.M. were arrested on November 1 and the Hares the next day. The National Library of Scotland gives November 3, 1828, as the date all four were detained and, after the medical examination, charged with murder.
Burke's declarations of November 3 and 10 to the sheriff-substitute, George Tait, were read to the jury. In them he told a story about a stranger in a greatcoat who had asked him to mend his shoes and left a box in the house, and said the old woman had breakfasted with them and left at about three in the afternoon to beg in the New Town, and that he knew nothing of what became of her.
The Hares said Burke was to blame. The medical evidence was uncertain, and there were no witnesses to the killing itself. According to the National Library of Scotland, the Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae, chose Hare to turn King's evidence in return for immunity, and M.H. could not be made to testify against her husband. Under that arrangement both Hares appeared as Crown witnesses.
The indictment, brought in the name of Sir William Rae as Lord Advocate, charged Burke with three murders: Mary Paterson or Mitchell, in Gibb's Close in the Canongate in April 1828; James Wilson, in Tanner's Close in October 1828; and Margery Campbell or Docherty, in Burke's house on October 31, 1828. The third charge named H.M. as well. The stated purpose in each case was to sell the body for dissection. The Crown listed 55 witnesses, among them William Hare and his wife, Knox's museum keeper and the doctors.
Burke and H.M. were brought to the bar of the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh about twenty minutes before ten on the morning of Wednesday, December 24, 1828. The court was the Lord Justice-Clerk, David Boyle, with Lords Pitmilly, Meadowbank and Mackenzie. The Lord Advocate led for the Crown. Defense counsel included the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, who addressed the jury for Burke, Patrick Robertson, and Henry Cockburn, who addressed the jury for H.M. A broadside report says the prisoners were brought to court by coach before dawn, police guarded the doors, and only ticket holders were let in.
The defense objected that the indictment joined three unconnected murders and two prisoners, which would prejudice the jury. The court held that the indictment was competent but, at the prisoners' request, allowed the charges to be tried separately and left the choice to the Lord Advocate. He chose the third charge, the death of Margery Campbell or Docherty, the one charge that included both prisoners. The other two charges were never tried.
The Crown called neighbors, the Grays, the porter who had carried the box, Knox's museum keeper, the police officer Fisher, the two Hares and the doctors. Hare's evidence was central. He was examined as a socius criminis, an accomplice called as a witness. He described Burke killing the woman while, he said, he sat by. Cockburn tried to ask him whether he had ever been concerned in any other murder. After argument from the bench and the bar, the court ruled that the question could be put, but the Lord Justice-Clerk said Hare was not bound to answer it, and he declined. Burke later said in the Courant confession that Hare had lied under oath and had not been sitting on a chair, as he claimed, but had taken part in the killing.
The medical evidence did not settle the question. Dr. Black said he believed the woman had died a violent death, probably by suffocation, but that suffocation was hard to prove from the body and he could not be certain. Dr. Christison found no natural disease that could have caused death and described bruising that, he said, could not have been made after death. Under further questioning, the report records the view that the appearances of the body justified suspicion of violence but, on their own, no more than a probability, so that the rest of the evidence had to be weighed with them. The Dean of Faculty used this in his closing speech for Burke, arguing that the medical witnesses had established suspicion and no more.
The trial ran through the night. The Lord Justice-Clerk charged the jury, telling them to give the prisoners the benefit of any reasonable doubt and not to be swayed by prejudice or public clamor. The jury retired and came back about fifty minutes later, at about half past eight in the morning. It found Burke guilty of the third charge in the indictment. It found the charge against H.M. not proven. The University of Edinburgh gives the date of the verdict as December 25, 1828.
Lord Meadowbank, proposing sentence, said the trial was without precedent and had lasted almost twenty-four hours, and spoke of a "most sanguinary and atrocious system" that the evidence had revealed. The Lord Justice-Clerk then sentenced Burke to be held in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh until January 28, 1829, and on that day to suffer death on a gibbet by the hands of the common executioner. He added that Burke's body should be "publicly dissected and anatomized," as the law then allowed in murder cases, and urged him to call at once on the ministers of religion.
The Lord Justice-Clerk told H.M. that the jury had found the charge against her not proven, and that this was not the same as finding her not guilty. He said she knew in her own conscience whether she had taken part, and hoped she would change her way of life. The court then dismissed her from the bar. Under Scots law a "not proven" verdict ends the prosecution, but it is not a finding of innocence. West Port Murders reports that she was released from the lock-up, where she had been held for her own protection, and went back to her old lodging. When she went out for whisky the next evening, a crowd recognized her and the police had to protect her. The National Library of Scotland says she left Edinburgh soon after, and the Dictionary of Irish Biography says she was believed to have gone to England. Nothing reliable is known of her after that.
Burke was held in the jail on Calton Hill. West Port Murders says that when he was told an account of his life might be of public use, he said he would say nothing until he had consulted his priest, and that he considered Hare the more guilty of the two. So many visitors crowded his cell to question him that he wrote to the Lord Provost asking to be spared them.
On January 3, 1829, Burke gave his official confession to the sheriff-substitute, George Tait, with the procurator fiscal, Archibald Scott, and an assistant sheriff clerk present. It was read back to him and confirmed on January 22, with a Catholic priest, the Reverend William Reid, also present. On that day he added that he knew of no other such killings by anyone but himself and Hare, that he had never been involved in any similar act before, and that rumors to the contrary were false. He said that the only knives in his house were a table knife, a small knife he used for shoemaking and a pocketknife, none of which had been used on anyone. In the statement of January 3 he said that suffocation had occurred to Hare with the first killing and that they had kept to it because it left no marks; that nobody had suggested it to them; and that none of the bodies had been offered to anyone except Knox's assistants, who, apart from the museum keeper, never learned where the two men lived.
The second confession, which Burke dictated and corrected, was printed by the Edinburgh Evening Courant; the Dictionary of Irish Biography dates it January 21, 1829. It gave the victims in a different order and in more detail, put the total at sixteen, and said nine had died in Hare's house, four in the house where Burke later lived, two in Hare's stable and one in the Canongate. In it Burke said that H.M. and M.H. were not present at the killings, and that he and Hare had talked of repeating the scheme in Glasgow or Ireland, sending the bodies back to Hare to sell. He said Providence had put a stop to the killings and that he did not know how far they would otherwise have gone. He said that M.H. had once urged that H.M. be killed as well because, being Scottish, she could not be trusted, and that he refused. He said he could not sleep without a bottle of whisky and a candle by his bed.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography says that in his confessions Burke tried to clear everyone under suspicion except Hare, and that he cleared Knox. In both statements he said that he and Hare always told Knox's men a story about having bought the bodies from relatives, and that Knox himself asked no questions.
On the Tuesday before the execution Burke was moved by coach from the Calton jail to the lock-up house next to the place of execution. A broadside sold that week reports that Catholic clergy and the Reverend Mr. Marshall visited him that evening, and that he slept for several hours.
The Scotsman's report of the hanging, published the same day, January 28, 1829, and reprinted by the paper in 2018, says he had taken comfort in the Catholic faith of his family, had been kept in heavy irons, and had borne it calmly. The procession left the lock-up shortly after eight in the morning. The scaffold stood at the common place of execution at the head of Libberton's Wynd. Burke, in black, knelt and prayed with the two priests and was described as firm and composed. The crowd shouted against him for several minutes when he appeared, and as the executioner prepared the rope people called out "Burke him." When the cap was drawn over his face they called for Hare. The Dictionary of Irish Biography gives the time of the drop as 8:15 a.m. and the crowd as about 20,000. Sir Walter Scott watched from a window, according to the National Library of Scotland. The body was cut down at about nine.
The National Library of Scotland notes that a ballad sold after the hanging recorded the crowd's cry, and that this is probably the first appearance in print of "burke" as a verb meaning to murder by suffocation or strangling.
Early on the Thursday morning the body was taken from the lock-up to the College and placed in the rooms of Alexander Monro, the professor of anatomy and Knox's rival. At one o'clock Monro gave the public dissection the court had ordered, as a lecture, to a large audience. Medical students who could not get in pushed at the doors of the anatomy theatre; the police used batons, and several officers were hurt before Christison arranged for the students to be let in about fifty at a time. On the Friday the public was admitted to view the body.
Burke's skeleton was kept by the University. It is on display in the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum, and the museum also holds two casts of his face, one taken shortly before his execution and one after his death.
After the trial Hare and M.H. were sent back to jail. The Supplement to the trial report, published in 1829, says the Crown held them in the hope of learning more or finding a fresh charge, without breaking the promise of protection, and failed. On January 19 it was decided the Crown would release them. M.H. was let out.
The public, and the press, were not satisfied. Janet Wilson, the mother of James Wilson, and her daughter of the same name brought a private prosecution against Hare for Wilson's murder. On January 16, 1829, they petitioned the sheriff, who issued a warrant and held Hare in close confinement while evidence was taken. Hare's counsel, Duncan M'Neill, asked for his release; the sheriff refused on January 21, with Mr. Jeffrey as counsel for the Wilsons. Hare then took the matter to the High Court of Justiciary by a bill of advocation, suspension and liberation, arguing that he had disclosed everything he knew about the killings, including Wilson's, on the Crown's assurance of protection, and could not be tried.
The full court heard written arguments, and the Lord Advocate made submissions. Lords Gillies, Pitmilly, Meadowbank, Mackenzie and Alloway and the Lord Justice-Clerk each gave an opinion, and at least one judge disagreed with the majority. The court then granted Hare's bill, found that he could not be tried for the crime named in the warrant, suspended the warrant, ordered his release and stopped the inquiry; the evidence already taken was sealed. The judgment was signed by David Boyle. The Dictionary of Irish Biography dates the decision to February 2, 1829, and says it came at the Lord Advocate's urging. The same day the Wilsons asked the sheriff to keep Hare in jail as a man about to flee, so that he would have to give security against a civil claim for compensation, which they put at £500.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography says Hare was released on February 5, was nearly lynched by a crowd in Dumfries, and was seen near Carlisle on February 7, 1829. Later reported sightings were never confirmed. The same entry says that many observers, Sir Walter Scott among them, thought Burke had been made a scapegoat, and that the crowd at the hanging had called for Hare to hang beside him. A story that he was thrown into a lime pit and blinded, mentioned by the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, is reported only as a story; the University says it is not known what became of him.
M.H., who was arrested and never charged, was attacked by crowds after her release. The Dictionary of Irish Biography says she was escorted to Greenock in February 1829 and sailed for Belfast. It adds that none of Burke's three associates appears in the records after February 1829.
Robert Knox was never charged, and he was not called to give evidence at the trial. The National Library of Scotland calls him one of the most skilled anatomists in Britain and says he was negligent in failing to ask where the bodies came from. His reputation suffered badly. On February 12, 1829, a crowd hung an effigy of him outside his home. He was caricatured more than Burke and Hare themselves, went on lecturing for a time, and was gradually shut out of academic life. A rhyme quoted by the Dictionary of Irish Biography and the University of Edinburgh, named Burke the butcher, Hare the thief and Knox the man who bought the meat.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography says the case helped bring about the Anatomy Act of 1832. The Act, "for regulating Schools of Anatomy," took effect on August 1, 1832. It required teachers of anatomy to be licensed, set up inspectors who kept returns of every body received, and allowed a person in lawful possession of a body to give it for anatomical examination unless the dead person or a near relative objected, with the body to be buried decently afterward. Its section 16 ended the power of courts to order the dissection of a murderer's body, the sentence that had been passed on Burke.
Proven by verdict: the murder of Margery Campbell or Docherty by Burke, on October 31, 1828. That is Burke's only conviction.
Charged but never tried: the murders of Mary Paterson and James Wilson. The court allowed the charges to be separated and the Crown proceeded only on the third.
Confessed by Burke but never tried: sixteen killings in all, including Docherty's. Burke's statements are the only source for most of them, for the identities and numbers of the victims, for which killings Hare took part in, and for the roles he gave M.H. and H.M. Hare's own confession has been lost. Hare was never tried for any killing; what he did is known from Burke's statements and his own evidence as a Crown witness, and from the Dictionary of Irish Biography's summary. Burke's two confessions differ on the order of the killings, and he said himself that he did not know the dates.
H.M. was tried and the charge against her found not proven. She was dismissed from the bar and is not guilty in law of any killing. M.H. was never charged.
Details that vary: the date of the first sale (about Christmas 1827 in Burke's official statement; November 29 in the Dictionary of Irish Biography; November 27 in the National Library of Scotland); the date of the arrests (November 1 and 2, or November 3); Burke's year of birth (about 1793, or 1792); the number of his children in Ireland (two, or seven of whom one survived); and the number of charges in the indictment (three in the printed trial report and the 1828 broadside; the Dictionary of Irish Biography says two). Some modern summaries say Hare was "acquitted"; he was never tried. The University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum says Hare was "allowed to flee," which simplifies a decision of the full High Court. The reputation of Burke and Hare as grave robbers rests on no evidence, according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and Burke denied it.
About 1793 (or 1792): William Burke born, probably at Urney, near Strabane, County Tyrone.
About 1809 to 1815: serves in the Donegal Militia.
1818: leaves his wife and children in Ireland and goes to Scotland to work on the Union Canal.
August 1822: canal work ends; two years laboring near Peebles, then Edinburgh, as a cobbler.
Late 1826: moves to the West Port with H.M.
1827 (Hallow Fair): meets Hare; moves into Hare's lodging house in Tanner's Close.
Late November or about Christmas 1827: the lodger Donald dies; his body is sold to Knox's school for £7 10s.
February 12, 1828: Abigail Simpson killed (Courant confession).
April 1828: Mary Paterson killed in Gibb's Close, Canongate, after she and a companion left the Canongate police office on the morning of April 9.
About June 1828: an old woman and her grandson killed.
After Whitsunday 1828: Burke and H.M. move to a relative's house; killings continue there.
October 1828: James Wilson (Daft Jamie) killed.
October 31, 1828: Margery Campbell or Docherty killed in Burke's house.
Saturday, November 1, 1828: the Grays find the body and go to the police; Burke and H.M. are taken to the Police Office.
Sunday, November 2, 1828: the body is found in a box at Knox's rooms and identified at the Police Office.
November 1 to 3, 1828: Burke, H.M., Hare and M.H. taken into custody.
November 3 and 10, 1828: Burke's first and second declarations.
December 1, 1828: Hare's confession (now lost).
December 24, 1828: trial opens in the High Court of Justiciary.
December 25, 1828: Burke found guilty of the Docherty murder; the charge against H.M. found not proven; Burke sentenced to death and dissection.
January 3, 1829: Burke's official confession to the sheriff-substitute.
January 16, 1829: Janet Wilson and Janet Wilson junior begin a private prosecution against Hare for James Wilson's murder.
January 21, 1829: Courant confession dated (Dictionary of Irish Biography); the sheriff refuses Hare's release.
January 22, 1829: Burke confirms his official confession.
January 28, 1829: Burke hanged in the Lawnmarket.
The Thursday after the hanging: public dissection by Professor Monro; disorder at the College.
February 2, 1829: High Court orders Hare's release and ends the private prosecution.
February 5, 1829: Hare released; seen near Carlisle on February 7.
February 12, 1829: a crowd hangs an effigy of Knox.
August 1, 1832: Anatomy Act takes effect; the courts' power to order dissection of murderers ends.
As of October 2026: Burke's skeleton is on display in the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum.