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I'm your host Genevieve Manion and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me there's just something especially intriguing, creepy and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends and welcome to this, my 34th episode. I hope that you had a life altering week. I hope that you bathed in the blood of that full blood moon lunar eclipse on Friday. Lots of folks taking out the trash. I love this energy. Lots of things that do not serve us coming to an end. Real get the hell out of my life so I can make way for all the greatness to come energy. I hope that you got nice and fresh this week. I got pretty sparkly myself. Oh and a quick note to those of you getting a little upset over my comparing your leaders to raccoons. I appreciate that. A listener told me that I shouldn't be comparing these fascists to raccoons because raccoons are lucky lovely little creatures. They're not fascists at all. And to that I say thank you. You are correct. Just wanted to clear that up. Okay, A little Haunted Housekeeping thank you for rating the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Thank you for your supportive and lovely comments in general. And thank you everyone who played my little Moonlight Sonata game on Instagram this week. I had a theory that most people see a moon over dark water when they hear the first move was wrong. Some people do see that, but also see visions of death and childhood in Tom Cruise and some of you saw some really goth atmospheres and reading about them was like reading some dark poetry. It was very fun. I'll be posting images from today's show on Instagram and Blue sky, so find me there. You can also email me@myvictorianightmaremail.com and you can listen to the show ad free by joining my Patreon. You will find the link on my website and okay, I mentioned a couple of episodes back that I was getting to the point where I will be needing an assistant soon. I'm not quite there yet, but a number of really sweet people reached out and said that they were interested. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that role will look like. It will probably be along the lines of topic and article Research One of the toughest things about research for this show is I gotta tick not one but three boxes. Is it Victorian? Is it spooky? And can I talk about it for at least 35 minutes? Hitting all three of these criteria is actually harder than you may think. Like, there are plenty of interesting things that happened in the Victorian era, but I'm not here for interesting. I don't care about interesting. I want interesting and spooky. I waft into the Georgian and Edwardian eras. In fact, today we'll be dancing along the edge of the Georgian era. But those other two requirements do not have any wiggle room. It's gotta be spooky and I need enough rabbit holes to be able to talk about it for at least 35 minutes or more. So I'll try to come up with a clear description for what I'm looking for. But being able to tick these boxes and research is the main requirement. I'm also really not great at asking for help, so I gotta fight a few demons before rolling this out, but I'm planning to win that fight over the next two to three weeks. Today's episode in regard to those three requirements was a gold mine. The most depressing thing is when I think I've got a great topic and it is Victorian and it is spooky, but there's just not enough there. So it's really deflating. And it happens a lot. Like, folks are always asking about the Winchester Mystery House and the first time I got that request I was like, okay, awesome, I'll check that out. And as I've mentioned on other episodes, it's just all lies. Nothing that you've heard about that place is true. So it's like a nothing burger. But today's topic was actually a very pleasant surprise. I'm talking about body snatchers today. Resurrectionists. And at first I was like, how much can I actually talk about guys who dug up dead bodies to sell to surgeons? I guess I'll just crack open some resources here and oh my God, I can talk about these guys all day. Oh my God, there's so much wild information about these guys. It is endless. So today I will be deep digging into the wild world of the late 18th century and 19th century body snatcher. My main references for Today are an AnatomyPubs online library.wiley.com article by Janet Philp, a Civil warmed.org article by Katie Richard, and a Wikipedia article on Burke and Hare. These and all of the references can be found in the show Notes. Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. Secure VPN keeps your online activity private. AI powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly and with award winning antivirus you get top tier hacker protection. Plus you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply. Between the 1300s and 1800s, there was a lot of tension between developing medical sciences, legal systems, and spiritual leaders. It's fair to say that the 1800s was where this tension came to its peak, and I will discuss the number of ways the Victorians arrived at that peak in a bit. But first, a little haunted Ancient history. It's not particularly haunting, I'm just being a silly goose. Anatomical science goes as far back as 300 BC to Greece, where early medical men were beginning to establish medical practices and ethics. Between the Renaissance to. Well, today it wasn't super cool or legal to simply cut into any body that you came across, no matter how you came across it. And laws for who was allowed to be dissected ranged from region to region, and the situations in which they could be dissected also varied greatly. For example, in the early 1800s in Scotland, those who died by suicide, prisoners who died in prison, executed criminals and orphans who died were all legally eligible for dissection in medical schools, although this was not true in London, only executed criminals were legally dissectible there. Same for the United States back in the 14th century. In Italy, only executed criminals could be dissected as well. But these dissections were open to the public and any old schmo could come by. They were generally performed for students. But then again, the general public was more than welcome to join. In the 1500s, interest in surgical science was really beginning to pick up steam. Experienced surgeons were a much needed, well paid asset, so interest in the profession was booming. But Henry VIII established that only four bodies, also of only executed criminals, could be made available for teaching in London a year. Smaller towns would have even less bodies allowed. Barbers, by the way, didn't just cut hair in this time. They did bloodletting, dental extractions, and even minor surgeries at the time. And they were considered in the same wheelhouse as surgeons who performed amputations, for example. That was not the barber specialty. They were all about hair, blood, teeth, and they could probably lance a ward off you for a reasonable fee. Ever wonder what that red, white and blue spinning pole you see outside of barbershops is about? I'll get back to the history of body snatching in a second, I promise. From the middle ages through the 1700s, barbers had a pole with a brass vessel bowl type situation at the top, which would hold leeches, and the bottom had a bowl that would receive bloodletting blood. Patients would grip this pole during the procedure to stimulate blood flow, and barbers would simply place this bloodletting pole outside their shops to let folks know that they were open for business. Gross. That is amazing. I've read that the red stripes represent bloodied bandages that barbers would clean and then put out to dry on this poll, but that does not appear accurate, or at least there's a more clear explanation. In Henry VIII's time, a law was passed that barbers needed to use a red and white pole to do their bloodletting to distinguish themselves from the surgeons who were to use only a red pole. The blue stripe didn't really appear until Americans set up shop, and it's believed that it may simply be a play on the American flag's colors. But I digress. For those aspiring surgeons in the 1400s in Italy, for example, who wanted to perform non public, more private dissections without like any old plebe gawking over their shoulder while they worked, it would have to be done in the privacy of homes, not medical schools or even clinics. Because anyone found to be doing this, no matter where they were, could potentially find themselves executed and handed over for public plebe dissection themselves. Luckily for these aspiring surgeons in this era who did not want to be caught carting cadavers home from the local cemetery, the profession of body snatcher Quickly materialized someone willing to risk extreme punishment for digging up a body and delivering it right to your very door, discreetly, for a reasonable fee. Between 60, 16, 88 and 1700, there was very much an understanding in the United Kingdom and around the world that surgical science needed to be developed and the need for cadavers was essential. But rather than passing laws to allow other kinds of bodies to be used for dissection, laws were being passed to create more executable offenses. This was referring, referred to as the Bloody Code. The number of crimes that you could be executed for in England in 1688 was 50. By 1700, it was over 220. In 1752, the Murder act was passed in the British government that officially established, among a few other deterrents to the horrid crime of murder, all but bodies of executed murderers would be handed over to medical schools for dissection. Up until then, again, executed people could be dissected, but it was now a precedent that all bodies of the executed would be turned over to medical schools. Most European nations at this time considered executed criminals fair game for dissection, but not just because they were criminals. It was a very common belief that their souls were damned, so they could not be in need of their bodies intact, for when, say, Christ returns and the dead rise from their graves to inherit the earth. Dissecting bodies was considered to many an abomination, a desecration that ran diametrically opposed to funerary customs and practices, practices established to ensure the dead may rise again. I discussed many of these traditions in the Victorian Cult of Death episode Episode two. People died at home surrounded by family. They were encouraged to confess and free themselves from secrets and sins before they passed on. And careful steps would be taken to prevent the soul from getting stuck inside the home. The goal was to keep the soul and the body until the funeral, when religious rituals would ensure that the soul passed on to the spirit world properly. Victorians would, for example, cover all of the mirrors after a family member died because it was believed that the soul of their deceased loved one could get trapped in the reflection. I also heard a more specific belief that mirrors were covered to prevent the deceased love spirit from seeing their reflection and becoming too attached to the realm of the living, making it harder for them to make their way back to the body and pass on after the funeral. Although they believed the soul did pass on to the spirit world after death, they still believed that the soul stayed tethered to the body. Not necessarily that the soul remained in the corpse after burial, but There was a direct line between the soul of the dead and the body. And when you cut into the body after death, you cut the tether between the body and the soul. So this is what the development of medical science was trying to dance around at the time. Lawmakers in Victorian England did not want to go up against religious doctrine by enshrining into law that other non sinners could be legally dissected. But they were more than happy to turn a blind eye to the practice of allowing members of the community to deliver bodies to surgeons, no questions asked. This is why so many common sense laws to prevent body snatching were simply never considered until years down the line, they'd make the crimes of stealing sheep, cattle and horses eligible for the death penalty to produce more bodies for the surgeons before going up against the church. Those crimes I just mentioned were all literally punishable by death in London in the early 1800s, by the way, by the late 1700s, there were 300 medical students in Edinburgh and London. And by the 1820s, there were over 400 in Edinburgh and almost a thousand in London. And despite the Murder act and increasing numbers of egregiously unjustly executed people, there simply were not nearly enough bodies to supply the medical schools. It was not uncommon in this time for fights to break out at the gallows between relatives, friends and body snatchers eager to sell the bodies to surgical schools. It was not illegal to buy or sell a dead body by any means in this time. Dead bodies belonged to no one, so that was all there was to it. The higher the quality of bodies a school offered to their students, the more attractive those schools became to those paying students. And folks realized that they could be making a much easier buck finding their own supply than duke it out with families at the gallows. By 1800, the very dangerous profession of resurrectionist was a booming trade. And people sure hated these guys and the surgeons. Not just because their trade robbed the innocent of their abilities to abide with Jesus Christ after Judgment Day. Not just because the people whose graves were targeted were mostly poor, which was considered an excellent extra abomination, but because careful, deep, sincere respect for the dead was woven into the very fabric of Victorian culture. Their society as a whole, from Europe to Australia to Canada to the United States and beyond, was in many ways defined by their respect, admiration and at times, fetishization of the day dead. And here are these sons of bazookas making a living off of dissection. The repugnance was top tier for these guys. In fact, a riot broke out in 1788, on April 16th, it's my birthday. In New York City, after a medical student jokingly waved the arm of a cadaver at a group of children outside a hospital. One of the kids whose mother had just died, confronted him, and allegedly the surgeon joked that the body was his mother. News of this spread quickly, and a mob stormed the hospital. They found bodies left out, partially dissected, a horror show. All of the physicians had to run for their lives. Baltimore's very first recorded riot was in 1807. The community discovered that surgeons at a hospital had been accepting their deceased neighbors from body snatchers. So they burned the whole hospital to the ground. The University of Maryland had secret passageways built to more easily smuggle the bodies in and out. As mentioned, it was primarily the poor whose graves were targeted by these men. Those who were often buried in mass graves due to the cholera epidemic. Folks were also contending with yellow fever, tuberculosis, dysentery, and even if they did have enough money for their own private grave, they were often buried in easily opened pine coffins, not buried too deep in the United States. The bodies of slaves were, however, simply handed over by the slave owners to surgeons. And the bodies of freed slaves were also commonly disinterred and sold. The grave robbers knew that black families couldn't as easily protest the desecration of their loved ones bodies as even poor white folks, so they felt a bit safer going after them. Even though I don't believe cutting into bodies prevents anyone from having any afterlife experience one way or another, it makes me sick to think that for those who did believe this, the families of men and women who lived as slaves, whose entire lives were stolen from them, had to live with the thought that their loved ones wouldn't even receive freedom in death. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season, and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Not all surgeons were okay with accepting stolen bodies. The anatomist who discovered the circular Tory system, William Harvey, he found the practice of grave robbing so hideous that he resorted to only dissecting family members. There were other anatomists who found the practice so Awful that they suggested other means of legally acquiring bodies, like those people who died in debt. Surely if you still owed money to the state after death, the state should consider consider your body and soul valuable currency, as you would be greatly benefiting society. It's kind of wild to read these things again with no belief that the state of your body after death has anything to do with your experience in the great beyond. And still dry heave at the mental gymnastics these folks were using to determine who didn't matter in society. Which is what this is all really about. Who did and did not matter and why. Speaking of people who also were considered to not matter in society, let's talk about the kinds of folks who took on this profession. This wasn't a common profession because it was easy or just because it paid well. This was a profession you took on because there was little else that you could do to support yourself or your family. If you found yourself desperately in need of cash and you needed it fast, body snatching was a quick way to get some money this very night if you so needed it. And guess what? I don't mean to sound so excited after reading that very depressing paragraph, but I am. Because guess who I ran into while researching the men who worked as body snatchers? Old Cunny Rigabelle. Remember that guy from episode 10? I read probably one of my favorite articles in the Illustrated Police News about that guy. Really short article. It was called. A Body Snatcher Sells His Own Body and Dies. I was just about certain that they'd made that entire story up and just plopped it at the bottom of the page because it's just too insane. And I couldn't find anything else else on the guy at the time. But guys, I found him. The man did indeed walk the earth. William Cunningham was a resident of Cincinnati in the early to mid-1800s who had a number of other nicknames. The Ghoul and Old Dead Man. Known to be completely fearless. One night he was body snatching with a bunch of guys and got caught red handed. And all his buddies scattered, but not Old Cunny. And he was like, hey, you got me, but you guys want a drink? And they were like, who wouldn't want to share a pint with Old Cunny? So they went down the local bar, William bought a couple of rounds, he gave a bottle of Black Eye himself and he promised that he wouldn't go back and dig that guy's body up. And you know what he did? He left and went directly back to the cemetery to dig up that man's body, and off he went into the night. He was said to be so good at the trade that he alone provided entire schools with all of the fresh cadavers they could ever want. He admitted to dressing his cadavers in fresh clothing and propping them up in his wagon to not attract suspicion, and even said he held conversations with them all along the way day. He also admitted to giving cadavers with smallpox to medical students who he didn't think respected him enough. Now, I could not find any evidence for what was mentioned in that article. This was what is not probably that he robbed graves for the doctors from any feeling of disrespect for corpses since some time before his own death, he sold his own body to the physicians in consideration of $50 to him in hand paid, end quote. I couldn't find any evidence for that, but my mind was blown. I never thought I'd see that guy again in my life. Pleasant surprise. Now, William wasn't by any means the only prolific body snatcher in the trade. There were professionals in every state, town, every city. I mentioned the Maryland university's clever secret tunnel system that they would use to accept bodies from resurrectionists. But they actually didn't have to rely on private contractors. They had one on their payroll. A man named Frank, whose last name has been lost to time. This was likely on purpose. The school's arrangement with this man was clearly dubious and something that they no doubt kept little paper trails of. He was originally the school's janitor. He was so adept at body snatching that the school quickly found itself with a surplus. So they started selling bodies to other schools. In a letter to a colleague in Maine, a professor at the Maryland university gloated that their school had the best body snatcher in the trade. And And a better man never lifted a spade. To ship bodies, you run into two distinct challenges. One is that you don't want to be caught doing it. And the other is bodies, especially in warm weather, don't last very long. So to solve both of these problems, the university used whiskey barrels with whiskey in them to preserve the bodies. For three whiskey cadavers, the university was charging other schools $50. It's funny, because that's about how much two glasses of Michter's rye will run you in midtown today. So what do you think they did with all that whiskey after delivery? I was not able to substantiate the claims that students would drink it or that they would sell it to local pubs and stores. This doesn't mean that they didn't. I just couldn't find the original sources that said this. I read in a few sources that this was the origin of the term rot gut whiskey, although I was able to find that term rotgut appearing much earlier in the 1600s. And it appears that that term was also just generally used for terrible, poorly made whiskey. Less to do with what it was marinated in so much as what it would do to your own guts. What do you say we take a hard left away from this information and take a little walk down this dirt road here to an establishment that looks similar to the lodging houses that we saw in Whitechapel. Although the one just ahead is a little smaller than the one the ones that we saw there intended for just a small amount of nightly guests. Wait a minute. Hey. Hey. Jimmy, is that you? That's. That's Jimmy from the seance in episode 32. Around 12 minutes in. Buddy, you remember my friend? Yes, hello. What are you doing in Scotland in like 53 years before the Jack the Ripper seance happened? Oh, I started to podcast, and a little like you, I'm rooting round in different timelines to make it more interesting. Oh yeah? What's the podcast about? True crime. Oh, are you here about the Burke and Hare murders? No, a little known one. I'm here to find Maggie Dixon. She was sentenced to death for concealing a pregnancy and killing a newborn child. It's a real heartbreaking story. Well, you're a real good guy, Jimmy. And I'm sure you are gonna do a real sensitive job of that. Well, thank you very much for saying so. I can't wait to hear it when it's done. We won't keep you. We gotta go see something terrible over here. I gotta go see something terrible over there. Have a great night. Jimmy. Lovely to see you. Oh, safe travels. Oh, wasn't that lovely? I love running into friends. Okay, come. Come with me. Just up this way. This house here belongs to a man named John Broggan, cousin of a man named William Burke. It's October 31, 18, 28, 9:00 in the evening, and the home is lit by gas lamps and candles inside. Come over here to the window, but do not stand too close. We really do not want the people inside to see. There are about six people, two men and three women, having quite a party. They're dancing and singing and drinking. Looks like a pretty great time. Spoke too soon. Definitely looks like a bad time. One of the guys just spilled a drink on the other guy and it appears yes, knuckle sandwiches were just added to the menu. They're making things very uncomfortable for the ladies inside. Whoa. Whiskey glasses through the windows. Oh my God. Are you okay? Schetti on you okay, good. Let's step a little further away from the windows for a bit. They will probably be at it for a while. We will come back later to see how things develop. But for now, I want to tell you how those ill gotten cadavers we've been talking about fought back. The poor weren't just easier prey for the resurrectionists because their coffins were easier to open. They weren't buried as deep. They were often buried in mass graves. Families didn't have the means to fight back, unlike the poor. The well to do really made it a challenge, and sometimes a deadly one. A few ways that cadavers were protected from body snatchers were, for example, the mort safe. This was an iron cage placed entirely around a coffin, sometimes incorporating a heavy stone or concrete top. That was a real buzzkill for someone who spent all that time digging just to smack into that. Although often the cage would just be placed above the ground and set deep into the earth as a temporary structure. Placed just long enough for a body to become decomposed, too decomposed to sell. The fresher the body, the more appealing they were to the doctors. So this helped with that. You could rent one of these for your family members at some cemeteries if you didn't have the money to purchase a permanent one. Most were intended to be temporary, but some folks who didn't want any monkey business whatsoever had permanent ones installed. You can still see some of them in cemeteries in Scotland. I put pictures of those on the Instagram and blue sky. It's funny, in episode two, I discuss safety coffins, which were different. Those were designed to prevent someone from being buried alive with systems of bells, flags, windows, etc. If you were buried alive in one of these things, you were really in trouble, I'd say. But by no means was this the only safeguard against the body snatchers. Of course, family members would pay watchmen to watch the graves, but these guys could easily be paid off. Families could pay gravediggers more money to dig an extra few feet. There's this scene in a series called Taboo. I've mentioned it before, where at a funeral, a woman is asked if she wants to pay the diggers of her father's grave a little extra so that they dig a little deeper. And she's like, no, I hate my father. They could take him. London anatomist Sir Astley Cooper had himself buried in a stone sarcophagus inside multiple coffins, like a Russian nesting doll. I mentioned in episode 24 about how H.H. holmes had his entire coffin encased in concrete. He was a psychopathic murderer who also body snatched. In his early years as black and African American cemeteries were often targets of body snatching. There was a late 1820s edition of Freedom's Journal. This was an African American newspaper that suggested families layer straw in their loved ones graves between the earth to make it harder to dig through. At the very least it would make it take longer. And these folks liked to work fast. Now you'd think think a large stone or slab of concrete over the grave would make a good deterrent. But you know what they say, you build a smarter trap, you get a smarter rat. These guys would just dig at the head of the coffin beside the stone, dig straight down. Once they got to the head of the coffin, they'd just pop that off, tie a rope around the neck of the body and drag it out. Then they would just fill the hole when they were finished and a hole they went. So if you were concerned that your sarcophagus, iron cage or pounds of straw wasn't enough to keep you safe, maybe you'd just use a gun. You could have a gun situated at the foot of your grave that was operated by trip wires which were hard to see in the dark. But these, even in the dark, could easily be avoided. So perhaps you would prefer a coffin torpedo. Torpedo. Initial patents included shotguns that were buried, aimed upward and triggered by the opening of a coffin lid. But you still may miss them. This is where more heavy explosives came in handy. The coffin torpedo, patented by Thomas N. Howell, included essentially a landmine, like an explosive shell that was tripped by the disturbance of wiring. I found an article in the Stark County Democrat, Ohio newspaper from Thursday, January 30, 1881, of a coffin torpedo that blew a guy to pieces and maimed another. The headline is A torpedo blows them up and it reads, a report reaches here that on Monday night three body snatchers while attempting to rob a grave near Gann, this county, met with a fatal accident. The story goes that while excavating the grave, the Picts came in contact with a torpedo which exploded, killing one of the ghouls named Dipper and mangling the leg of another whose name could not be learned. The third party was occupying a sleigh as a lookout and after the accident succeeded in getting his disabled companion to the sleigh and driving off end Quote. Was this a common occurrence? It doesn't appear so. At least not common enough that it was reported often. But I found an advertisement for a coffin torpedo that reads, sleep well, sweet angel. Let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat. Is that supposed to rhyme? You know, I really took for granted the idea that when my time comes, it's somebody else's problem. These poor people were really genuinely terrified about what could become of them and death. I don't care at all what happens to me. And they can do just about whatever is the least amount of hassle. Really. I love that quote from it's always Sunny in Philadelphia where Danny DeVito is like, when I die, just throw me in the trash. Same. Although I do want to be an organ donor if they will accept them. I got great thumbs. Anybody needs a good thumb? Really good boobs. I do hope that those go to a good home when I'm done with them. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Okay, let's make our way back to that party. The guys will likely have tired themselves out by now. Now. And yes, they're sitting down. They're talking. Everyone else has gone to bed. Walk with me around the side of the house. Here. Yes, there's one of the ladies. She's asleep in bed. The room is still lit with a single candle by the bedside. The two men are stumbling through the door into her room. Don't look. I'll explain what's happening. One of them is laying on top of her. The other is lifting a pillow from the side of the bed and placing it over her face. She isn't struggling. There was just a tiny whimper. We won't stay, but very soon this woman will be dead. They will put her body in a pile of straw at the foot of the bed, but they're too drunk to make a delivery tonight. Her name was Margaret Docherty, and their names are William Burke and William Hare. The two most famous body snatchers in history. Although what you just witnessed was their means of procuring bodies to sell to surgeons. They didn't bother taking trips to the cemetery. They found it easier to make cadavers than find them. William Burke and William Hare murdered 16 people in Scotland over a period of about 10 months in 1828 and sold their bodies to an anatomist named Robert Knox. One night a man died of dropping in the lodging house where Hare was landlord. He owed Hare £4 back rent. After complaining that this man who just died owed him $4 to his buddy Burke. They decided that he could probably get his money back and even turn a profit if they simply sold the body to a medical school. They found a Professor Knox who was more than happy to take this fresh corpse off their hands and paid them seven pounds for it. They were told, essentially, y'all come back here by the anatomist. The order of murders that Burke and Hare committed are very much up for debate as the sequences of events in their confessions contradicted each other at times. But they quickly hatched a plan to use the lodging house as their murder house. Their movie was suffocation. A person would come to stay at the house and they would get their victims drunk and suffocate them to death by Burke, laying on top of their semi conscious bodies to keep them still, while Hare would use bedding to suffocate them. Those women that we saw earlier at the party that were missing while poor Margaret was being killed, they were these guys wives who aided and abetted their killing. One victim was given so much liquor by Burke's wife Helen, that she fell asleep and hair simply covered her mouth with a stiff mattress cover. She was dead by nightfall. He and Burke delivered her that night to Knox. There were two women, Mary Patterson and Janet Brown, who Burke brought back to the house for drinks one night. But his wife got jealous and accused him of having an affair fair with one of them. Janet left, but Burke and Hare murdered Mary in her sleep. Helen kept the woman's skirt and petticoats. Janet returned looking for her friend, but she had already been delivered to Knox. She was told that she left for Glasgow with a traveling salesman. Her body was still warm when they delivered it to Knox, who was delighted with it. He stored her in whiskey for three months before dissecting her. Burke and Hare would murder their victims, place them in a tea chest and deliver them to Knox. They would then receive eight to ten pounds for each body, depending on their freshness. They murdered men, women, a mentally disabled man, a child, the grandson of one of their victims. They murdered his grandmother in one room and when they were finished, they found the boy by the fire, carried him into the room where his murdered grandmother was and smothered him there beside her. It was the death of Margaret Docherty that would be their last. She was killed in the lodging house of Hare's cousin. But Hare had a lodging house of his own. The night of her murder there were two other people who were staying in his cousin's house. They asked them to stay at the the other house that night because they had family staying. It was really that they just intended to kill Margaret. The two lodgers agreed but came back the next day and one of them became suspicious when she wasn't allowed into the room. She had left a pair of stockings there and came back to retrieve them. It isn't clear from the confessions of Burke and Hare, but for some reason these lodgers were left alone in the house for a while and they discovered Margaret's body in the straw. They ran for the police, but actually ran into Helen and accused her family of killing this woman. Helen tried to bribe them with a weekly payment of £10 but they refused and ran. By the time the police came to the house, Burke had already removed the body. But the police found her blood stained clothing under the bed. Burke, Hare, their wives and the cousins who owned the lodging house were all arrested. Knox, the surgeon who accepted all of these murdered people was found to be deficient in principle and heart. But he was not found guilty or even charged with any crime. Hare ratted everybody out. After being given immunity, Hare's wife, even though she clearly at the very least knew about the murders, was not prosecuted. But Burke and his wife were tried for the murders of Mary Patterson, a man named James Wilson and Margaret Docherty. The jury in the trial could find only that Burke was guilty of the murders. So Helen was released and only Burke was sentenced to death. An angry mob met her in the street outside when she was released and she was taken to a police building for protection, she climbed out the back window of the station and escaped into the night. She came back the next day to see if she could see her husband. Ballsy move. She was refused and there are no clear accounts of what happened to her after this. Hare's wife Margaret was also recognized a few days later and attacked by a mob. She was escorted to Belfast on a ship, but that's the last any account was made of her. Hare was kept in custody for his own protection, but when he wanted to leave, he wore a disguise. Little Groucho Marx moustache. It didn't work. He was recognized and had to be rescued by the cops. They threw him in a carriage and people were throwing rocks at the door and the windows. The cops dropped him off at the English border and he was told to essentially get the hell out. And after that, no one knows what happened to the guy. Burke was hanged on the morning of January 28, 1829, in front of a crowd that was said to be as large as 25,000, and his corpse was publicly dissected. A minor riot ensued when students rushed the crowd to get closer to see the dissection, and at the conclusion of the dissection, Professor Munro dipped his quill pen into Burke's blood and wrote, this is written with the blood of Wm. Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh. The blood was taken from his head. End quote. While Slayer played in the background. Okay, tough episode. That was a lot. So here is something to make you feel feel a little better. Society, as we know, evolved over time in regard to the procurement of bodies for science, to the point where many people happily dedicate their bodies to science. In fact, this began as early as the late 1800s. The inhumanity of body snatching and the nobility of dedicating your body to the greater good began with a growing number of Americans. Doctors, nurses, academics, some dying of diseases, who hoped that the doctors would use their bodies to study and hopefully cure those diseases in others. During World War II, perceptions began to shift about how we can use our bodies to help others on a national scale. Developing a sense of pride in donating a part of yourself to help others. In the 60s, Unitarian advocate Ernst Morgan published a book called A Manual of Simple Burial, which promoted memorial services that didn't require a body, simply a celebration of life, and he included a directory of medical schools to donate your body to in the book. There was a sense of nobility and respectability developing in this time of how to rethink death, as well as a heroism in the idea of donating your body. Yes, bodies are still needed, and there is a worldwide shortage. But technology has revolutionized anatomy teaching in ways that limit the need for as many cadavers as were needed in the past, where many American and European surgical students were despised for the disrespect that they showed to the dead in the Victorian era. Now contemporary students honor what many refer to as their first patients. May we too, honor all those who have given their bodies willfully and those who have given unwillfully for the lives that they've given to others. If you would like to dedicate your body to science, visit sciencecare.com if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more. Please rate, review, subscribe and leave me comments on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Be kind to yourselves and I will see you in your nightmares.