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while still owing £4.00 in rent. To cover the man’s outstanding debt, the pair took
his body and sold it to the medical school at Edinburgh University.

There they met Professor Robert Knox, a popular anatomy lecturer, who paid them
seven pounds and ten shillings for the body which was a considerable amount of
money. Lead weights went into the coffin for burial instead.

Encouraged by how easy it was to turn a profit, the pair struck again in early 1828
when another tenant became ill. They got fed up with waiting for him to die, so they
decided to help him on his way. They fed him with whisky and then suffocated him
by covering his mouth and nose while they held him down. The technique they used
was suffocation by leaning on the chest and that became known as “Burking.”

When they ran out of tenants, they decided to entice victims to the lodging house,
preying on Edinburgh’s poorest communities who were less likely to be missed or
recognised. In total Burke and Hare are said to have murdered at least 16 people
for between seven to ten pounds apiece, although the real total could well be a lot
higher.

Burke and Hare soon became greedy and nobody was safe. An elderly grandmother
was killed with an overdose of painkillers and Hare murdered her blind young grand-
son by breaking the boy’s back across his knee.
The police eventually got involved and following an investigation, William Burke was
convicted and hanged in front of a crowd of over 25,000 in 1829 and, fittingly per-
haps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science.

Hare cut a deal and gave evidence against Burke and so avoided the hangman’s
noose. He was released in February 1829 and fled across the border into England.
No one knows what happened to him, but it was rumoured that he was thrown
into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the
streets of London.

You could be excused for thinking that this kind of behaviour was consigned to the
history books and that you and your loved ones could rest in peace for all eternity
without having to worry about having your bones dug up and sold to the highest
bidder. Not so.
In 1998, Anthony Noel Kelly, an English aristocrat was jailed for nine months in the
UK for what a judge termed the revolting theft of human remains from the Royal
College of Surgeons. Kelly was the nephew of the Duke of Norfolk and he was con-
victed of using body parts to make sculptures and according to the judge, he had
affronted every reasonable concept of decent behaviour.

His partner in crime was a former undertaker’s assistant and embalmer who worked
at the college and he smuggled the parts out of the institution during the dead of
night. The pair were both found guilty of smuggling human anatomical specimens
between 1991 and 1994. Not so long ago.
There might still be others.