Murderous Body Snatchers: Burke and Hare and the Bishop Gang
So, as long as they stuck to these rules, the worst any convicted a resurrection man could expect was a fine or a short spell in prison-a mere occupational hazard to any career criminal. However, by the 1820s, greed or desperation prompted some Body Snatchers to abandon the rules. When the supply of naturally deceased fresh cadavers dried up, some decided to create their own. These resurrection men turned to murder as a way of meeting the demand for corpses from anatomists and so continued turning a profit.
The most notorious of these body snatchers turned murderers were William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were Irish laborers who migrated to Scotland for work. They met and became friends when they were living in the west Port region of Edinburgh. The pair turned to body snatching after one of Hare’s neighbors died, and the couple seized on the chance to sell the body.
However, they quickly graduated to murder. The pair would lure their victims into Hare’s lodging house and get them drunk. Once their victims passed out, the couple suffocated them using their own particular method which became known as ‘Burking”. Burking involved lying on the victim’s chest and covering their mouths and noses until they ceased to breath.
The authorities arrested Burke and Hare when a neighbor discovered a body under Burke’s bed. The authorities eventually found that the pair had murdered at least 17 people between 1827 and 1829. They had then sold their corpses to Dr. Robert Knox, a lecturer of anatomy in Edinburgh’s surgeons Square. Hare who turned King’s evidence helpfully supplied the full facts of the case. As a result, he escaped justice. Burke, however, shouldered all the guilt for the crimes. He was sentenced to hand on January 28, 1829. With supreme irony, he was also condemned to be dissected after his death. As for Dr. Knox, he escaped scot-free as there was no evidence to suggest that he knew he had received deliberately murdered corpses.
The case of Burke and Hare was not an isolated one. In London, a man called John Bishop ran a notorious resurrection gang for 12 years before he was discovered. The band, which besides Bishops consisted of James May, Thomas Williams, and Michael Shields, body-snatched around 1,000 corpses that they sold to anatomist at London’s medical institutions. However, they too eventually turned to murder. Amongst their victims were an Italian boy, Carlo Ferrari, three homeless people, and a woman, Frances Pigburn and her child
May, Williams, and Bishop were eventually arrested and brought to justice in 1831 when they attempted to sell the body of a fourteen-year-old cattle drover to King’s College. After getting the boy drunk, they tied a rope around his ankles and lowered him head first into a well where he drowned. All three men were found guilty. May escaped the gallows and was transported. However, 30,000 Londoners turned up to watch Williams and Bishop hang.