Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And of all the possible get rich
Speaker 1: quick schemes you could involve yourself in, I'm betting you
Speaker 1: would stop short of serial killing. Yes, even if it
Speaker 1: meant you'd be aiding the advancement of science. But that's
Speaker 1: not the case for everybody. Take William Burke and William Hair, too,
Speaker 1: Irish immigrants who ran a boarding house in Edinburgh, Scotland,
Speaker 1: and killed at least fifteen people during a ten month
Speaker 1: period across eighteen seven and eighty eight. And we're not
Speaker 1: trying to aggrandize serial murders here, but they made a
Speaker 1: small fortune doing it. Burke and Hair had no criminal
Speaker 1: records before they got into the murdering business. Burke was
Speaker 1: a cobbler and Hair a laborer who owned a lodging
Speaker 1: house with his wife. When a boarder who owed the
Speaker 1: Hair's a good deal of background died one day in
Speaker 1: November eight seven, Hair complained to his friend Burke. The
Speaker 1: two decided that the best way to recoup Hair's financial
Speaker 1: loss was to sell the man's corpse to an anatomy
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Edinburgh. Anatomy research was a
Speaker 1: booming business in Edinburgh in the early eighteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: though many human dissections were conducted every day in the city,
Speaker 1: human remains were hard to come by. Grave robbing was
Speaker 1: frowned upon, but anatomists were only technically allowed to study
Speaker 1: the bodies of deceased prisoners, suicide victims, orphans and abandoned children.
Speaker 1: So Edinburgh's underbelly was crawling with body snatchers. Since the
Speaker 1: demand was high for cadavers and the supply relatively low,
Speaker 1: many anatomists used the services of so called resurrection men
Speaker 1: to fill their human corps requirements. Resurrection men were folks
Speaker 1: who made a business of body snatching or clandestinely removing
Speaker 1: a body from a burial site. There was no law
Speaker 1: against digging up a dead body and selling it, since
Speaker 1: the dead didn't officially belong to anyone. Oh what an
Speaker 1: innocent time, but the general public was perhaps understandably dismayed
Speaker 1: by this practice. In addition to the living's emotional attachment,
Speaker 1: who loved one's remains. At the time, many Christians were
Speaker 1: concerned that the dissection of bodies after death would prevent
Speaker 1: the deceased from rising during the final judgment. However, anatomists
Speaker 1: desperate for cadavers were willing to pay good money for
Speaker 1: bodies and sometimes in terrible condition, without asking questions about
Speaker 1: where those bodies came from. A doctor and anatomist named
Speaker 1: Robert Knox was a popular lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Speaker 1: When Burke and Hair came to him with that first
Speaker 1: cadaver from the boarding house, Knox paid them seven pounds
Speaker 1: ten for the body. In today's money that's almost seven
Speaker 1: fifty pounds or over nine fifty American dollars, and was
Speaker 1: almost double with the dead man owed Hair in Backgront.
Speaker 1: The body was pretty fresh, which pleased Knox, and he
Speaker 1: was even more pleased a few months later with the
Speaker 1: body of Burke and Hair's first murder victim. She was
Speaker 1: a lodger who fell ill with fever in the boarding house.
Speaker 1: Perhaps worried that her illness would mean bad business for
Speaker 1: the boarding house, or perhaps looking to make a quick
Speaker 1: book the two men suffocated her. Knox paid them ten
Speaker 1: pounds that's thirteen dollars for that cadaver, worth over a
Speaker 1: thousand pounds or hundred dollars today. Over the course of
Speaker 1: the next year, Knox bought a total of sixteen bodies
Speaker 1: from the pair, mostly women. Most of their victims were killed,
Speaker 1: likely with the knowledge of the murderer's wives, by applying
Speaker 1: them with whiskey and then suffocating them. Burke and Hair
Speaker 1: preyed on people who were poor and alone or disabled.
Speaker 1: During the eventual trial, the three victims named in the
Speaker 1: indictment were a mentally disabled young man, a young woman
Speaker 1: reputed to be a prostitute, and their final victim, the
Speaker 1: one who got them caught, a middle aged Irish woman
Speaker 1: named Margaret Dougherty, reportedly in Edinburgh's searching for her missing son.
Speaker 1: Burke and Hair were discovered by a couple staying in
Speaker 1: Hair's boarding house. They saw the two men drinking with
Speaker 1: the woman in the evening, and the next morning she
Speaker 1: had disappeared. They found her body packed in straw under
Speaker 1: a bed, ready to be taken to Knox. After the
Speaker 1: couple alerted the police, the authorities rated Knox's cadavers and
Speaker 1: found the woman's body among them. In the trial, Hair
Speaker 1: testified against Burke, and he and his wife were released.
Speaker 1: Burke's wife was also released, but was executed. Knox was
Speaker 1: exonerated of all charges because Burke testified that Knox didn't
Speaker 1: know about the providence of the bodies he was buying.
Speaker 1: The case was extremely high profile, and, along with other
Speaker 1: murder cases, including copycat crimes, it led to the passing
Speaker 1: of the Anatomy Act of eighteen thirty two. This controversial
Speaker 1: legislation opened up anatomists options. Any donated body could not
Speaker 1: be dissected, but with dissections still considered a sort of desecration,
Speaker 1: the only people who considered such a donation tended to
Speaker 1: be those in poverty. The Act therefore shifted dissection from
Speaker 1: being a sort of secondary punishment for criminals after execution
Speaker 1: to being a sort of punishment for not having the
Speaker 1: family or funds to provide for yourself after death, and
Speaker 1: led to riots at the Cambridge Medical School. Though attitudes
Speaker 1: and laws have changed since then, the issue of the ownership,
Speaker 1: transfer and treatment of the dead is definitely still under discussion.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Jesselyin Shields and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: grave topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: M