William Hare was born in Ireland around 1792 or 1804, the record is not settled, and came to Scotland as a canal labourer. By 1827 he and Margaret Laird kept a lodging house in Tanner's Close in Edinburgh's West Port, where he met William Burke.
Between November 1827 and October 1828 the two men killed sixteen people and sold the bodies to Dr Robert Knox's anatomy school. The method, suffocation by compressing the chest and closing the airway, left no evidence, which is precisely why the prosecution had a problem.
When they were arrested in November 1828 the Crown case was weak. Only Margaret Docherty's death could be evidenced at all, and the Lord Advocate concluded he could not convict either man without one of them turning. He offered Hare immunity from prosecution in exchange for a full confession and evidence against Burke, and Hare accepted and gave it.
Burke was hanged on January 28, 1829. Hare was released in February and had to be smuggled out of Edinburgh because of the crowds. There was a substantial public and legal argument at the time about whether the immunity had been proper, and a private prosecution attempted by the mother of one victim failed on the ground that the Crown's undertaking barred it.
After that the record stops. He was reported to have been recognised and thrown into a lime pit at Carlisle and blinded, to have died a beggar in London, to have gone to Ireland or America. None of it is established. He is one of very few people in this archive to have killed at that scale and simply disappeared with the state's permission.