At eight o'clock on the evening of Thursday, February 5, 1829, a man in a heavy coat, his hat pulled low, walked out of the Calton Jail in Edinburgh under the name of Mr. Black. A jailer went with him as far as Newington, where he climbed onto the southbound mail coach for Dumfries. He had spent two months in custody, most of it for his own protection. He had not been tried for anything, and under the terms the Crown had given him he never would be. William Hare had helped kill sixteen people in the city in less than a year, and nine days earlier the man he had given evidence against had been hanged in front of a crowd of more than twenty-five thousand.
He was an Irishman from Ulster, like Burke, probably from County Armagh, County Londonderry or near Newry, and the record cannot settle his age. When he was arrested he gave it as twenty-one; other accounts put his birth anywhere between 1792 and 1804. He may have worked the land in Ireland before crossing over, and he spent seven years as a laborer on the Union Canal before moving to Edinburgh in the mid-1820s to work as a coalman's assistant. He lodged in Tanner's Close in the West Port, one of the poorest quarters of the Old Town, in the house of a man named Logue and his wife, Margaret Laird. When Logue died in 1826 Hare took up with Margaret, who became known as Margaret Hare, and the lodging house with her. In 1827, working the harvest at Penicuik, he met Burke and his partner, Helen McDougal, and when they came back to Edinburgh they moved into Tanner's Close as lodgers.
The trade began with a death nobody caused. On November 29, 1827 an old army pensioner named Donald died of dropsy in the house, shortly before his quarterly pension was due and owing four pounds in rent. Hare resented the loss. With Burke he took the body out of its coffin, filled the coffin with tanner's bark, and sold the corpse to the private anatomy school run by Dr. Robert Knox in Surgeons' Square for seven pounds ten shillings. Scottish law allowed dissection only of executed criminals, suicides and foundlings, and the schools could never get enough bodies legally, so Knox's assistants paid for whatever arrived fresh and asked nothing.
Donald's sale showed the two men a market, and the next body was made to order. Another lodger, known only as Joseph the miller, fell ill with a fever, and Hare worried that sickness in the house would drive custom away. They gave Joseph whisky and smothered him with a pillow, and Knox paid ten pounds. Whether Joseph or the salt seller Abigail Simpson died first, in January or February 1828, is argued over; Walter Scott, who followed the case closely, thought it was the miller. After that the method barely changed: drink, then one man lying across the victim's chest while the other closed the nose and mouth with his hand. It left no wound and very little sign, which is why the word burking entered the language and why, when the time came, the Crown had almost nothing to prove murder with.
The victims were people the city did not look for. Abigail Simpson was an elderly pensioner from Gilmerton who walked into Edinburgh to sell salt; she was given drink at the house and killed there in February 1828. An English lodger from Cheshire who sold matches died next, and an old woman who fell asleep drunk had her head wrapped in a mattress cover and was dead by morning. Mary Paterson, about eighteen, was taken from a tavern with her friend Janet Brown in April; Brown left, Paterson did not, and one of Knox's students thought he recognized her on the table. Effie, a cinder-gatherer who was known in the streets, followed. So did an old woman from Glasgow and her grandson, a boy described as deaf and unable to speak, killed on the same visit and sold as a pair; a drunken woman Burke took from the custody of a police officer on the pretense of seeing her home; Mrs. Ostler, a washerwoman; Ann McDougal, a young relative of Helen McDougal's from Falkirk; and Mary Haldane, a former lodger who asked to sleep in the stable, followed days later by her daughter Peggy when she came asking where her mother had gone. Knox's school paid ten pounds a body in winter and eight in summer.
James Wilson was the one who should have stopped it. Known across Edinburgh as Daft Jamie, he was eighteen, lame, and a familiar figure in the streets. Hare brought him to the house in October 1828. He did not care for whisky, was nowhere near as drunk as the others, and fought both men before they overcame him. Students recognized him when the body arrived; Knox denied it was Jamie, and accounts differ on what was done next, one saying the head and feet were removed before dissection and another that the dissection began, unusually, with the face. Either way, the body that could have identified the killers was destroyed.
The last murder was committed at Hallowe'en. Margaret Docherty, a middle-aged Irishwoman, was drawn in by Burke on October 31, 1828, with talk of a shared name and home country, and killed at the house where Burke and McDougal now lodged, after Burke had paid two other lodgers, James and Ann Gray, to sleep at Hare's for the night. The Grays came back the next day, were kept away from a bed where they had left their things, and found her body under the straw. McDougal offered them ten pounds a week to say nothing. They went to the police anyway. By the time officers arrived the body had gone to Knox's rooms, where it was found, and Burke and Hare were arrested on November 1 and told contradictory stories about her. The case was in the Edinburgh papers by November 6, and Janet Brown came forward and identified clothing in the house as Mary Paterson's.
The Crown had a body and very little else. A medical examination of Docherty concluded she had probably been suffocated but could not prove it. Most of the other victims had long since been dissected. The Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae, decided that without one of the four prisoners giving evidence he could not convict anyone, and the offer went to Hare. Accounts date his immunity to December 1, 1828. What he admitted in return is itself disputed. Some accounts have him giving details of all sixteen deaths, others say he described the Docherty killing and confessed to no murder of his own. His evidence put the killing on Burke, whom he named as the one who did it; Burke's own confessions, made in the condemned cell, put Hare beside him at almost every death and credited him with at least one killing done alone.
At the trial, which opened on December 24, 1828 and ran through the night into Christmas morning, Burke and McDougal faced the Docherty murder, with Burke also indicted for the deaths of Mary Paterson and James Wilson. Hare and his wife gave evidence for the Crown. The jury convicted Burke and returned not proven for McDougal. Burke was hanged in the Lawnmarket on January 28, 1829, and his body was dissected. Knox was never charged. A committee of inquiry reported in 1829 that it had seen no evidence he or his assistants knew murder had been done to supply his rooms. He never spoke publicly about the men, left Edinburgh in 1842, and died in London in 1862. Burke's body was dissected in public by Professor Alexander Monro on February 1, and his skeleton is still held by the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh. The case fed directly into the Anatomy Act of 1832, which opened a legal supply of bodies to the schools.
The anger that had nowhere else to go turned on Hare. Janet Wilson, Daft Jamie's mother, with his sister and a public subscription behind them, brought a private prosecution against him for her son's murder. On January 16, 1829 the High Court of Justiciary rejected it by four votes to two, holding that the Crown's undertaking protected him from prosecution by anyone. His wife had been freed on January 19. She went to Glasgow to find a passage home, was recognized and attacked by a mob while she waited, and was taken under police escort onto a ship for Belfast; nothing reliable is known of her after that. Hare, released days after the court's ruling, told a fellow prisoner named Lindsay only that he would probably go back to Ireland too.
The mail coach did not get him far. At one stop a fellow passenger, Erskine Douglas Sandford, a junior counsel who had acted for the Wilson family, recognized him and told the rest of the coach who he was. By the time it reached Dumfries the news was ahead of him, and a crowd gathered at the inn where he was to spend the night. Police sent a decoy coach to draw it off while Hare climbed out of a back window into a carriage bound for the town jail. The crowd followed, threw stones at the doors and windows and smashed the street lamps, and order came back only when a hundred special constables arrived. In the small hours a sheriff officer and a militia guard took him out of town, set him down on the Annan Road and told him to make for the English border. One account records a sighting on the road near Carlisle on February 7, 1829; others say there was no reliable sighting of him at all after the Annan Road.
Everything after that is story. He was said to have been recognized by fellow workmen, thrown into a lime pit and blinded, and to have ended his life as a blind beggar in London; others sent him to Ireland, to America, to Canada or Australia. Death years of 1858 and 1859 are given without any record behind them. None of it has been traced to a document. The only certainty is the legal one: a man who took part in sixteen murders walked away under the protection of the Crown, and no court in Scotland ever tried him for any of them.