For more than three decades, Madame Tussaud toured England, Scotland, and Ireland, winning nationwide acclaim. Over the years, her enterprise morphed into a family business, with both her sons dedicating their lives to the wax museum. In 1829, Madame Tussaud and Sons scored one of their biggest hits of the ’20s with controversial effigies of Burke and Hare, Edinburgh-based murderers who sold their victims' cadavers to anatomists for dissection.
Above: Burke and Hare's method of tag-team strangulation gave rise to the slang term, "burking." This 1829 political cartoon by William Heath shows two politicians, Sir Robert Peele and the Duke of Wellington "burking" Old Miss Constitution. At the time of this image's creation, Peele and Wellington had recently changed positions on the controversial Catholic Relief Act, resolving to support it. Heath clearly viewed their change of heart as a betrayal of the British constitution.
SHOW NOTES
This 1773 etching by William Austin depicts a night watchman catching a resurrectionist in the act of purloining a cadaver. While fleeing, the criminal drops a hamper with the stolen corpse inside.
This 1820 print published by S. & J. Fuller shows a fashionable assembly room, a favored venue of balls and other recreational events. While touring the provinces, Tussaud preferred to rent out assembly rooms for the display of waxworks. These settings particularly appealed to members of the local middle-classes.
1839 watercolor of an anatomical lecture at the School of Anatomy on Great Windmill Street, London. This image gives a sense of what anatomical lectures would have looked like at Edinburgh University and the Royal College of Surgeons, where Doctor Robert Knox researched and taught.
Engraving of Edinburgh Castle, taken from Thomas Shepard's 1831 collection of engravings, Modern Athens. Edinburgh Castle stands on one end of the Royal Mile, at the highest point in the city.
The Grass Market of Edinburgh, taken from Thomas Shepard's 1831 collection of engravings, Modern Athens. Madgy Docherty died on All Hallow's Eve, the day before Edinburgh's annual livestock fair. During the festive livestock fair, the Grass Market filled with farmers selling horses, sheep, and cattle. Burke and Hare would have passed through this square on a regular basis as well.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
---Berridge, Kate. Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax. New York; London; Toronto; Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2006.
---Chapman, Pauline. Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Two Hundred Years of Crime. London: Constable, 1984.
---Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
---Pilbeam, Pamela. Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks. London; New York: Humbledon and London, 2003.
---Rosner, Lisa. The Anatomy Murders. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
---Tussaud, John Theodore. The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1890.
TRANSCRIPT
Lightning bolts lit up the cloudy night sky as Andrew Ewart patrolled the graveyard. The cemetery stood in the parish of Libberton, southeast of Edinburgh. It was December 4, 1827, and Ewart and his fellow watchmen had worked an uneventful shift thus far, splitting a bottle of whiskey to pass the time. A winter’s wind nipped at Ewart as he trudged through the darkness, his firearm in hand, scanning the grave sites for signs of an intruder. Just a week or so earlier, a trespasser had crept into this very churchyard and dug up a dead body.
At this time in Scotland (and, indeed, across Britain), corpses were hot commodities. Doctors dissected human cadavers to deepen their knowledge of anatomy and physiology, enabling significant advances in medicine. Yet physicians had limited access to fresh specimens and were often forced to obtain them by illicit means. Until the early 1800s, anatomists raided churchyards, smuggling cadavers from newly dug graves to operating tables, usually aided and abetted by their students. By the late 1820s, however, the business of body snatching had taken a treacherous turn. Paid security guards and volunteers alike safeguarded the dead, and many of these sentinels were more than prepared to use lethal force. Rather than risk their own necks, doctors paid a new breed of professionals to do their graverobbing for them. The men who committed these midnight thefts were known as resurrectionists. These regrettable yet necessary functionaries remained an invaluable source of cadavers until 1832. That year, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which opened legal pathways allowing medical schools to procure their so-called “subjects.”
It was one of these resurrectionists who had looted the tombs of Libberton Parish, and Andrew Ewart was tasked with preventing a repeat. He was rounding the corner of the little stone church when he saw the silhouette of a man, skulking among the gravestones—another resurrectionist, Ewart suspected. He ordered the intruder out of the churchyard and threatened to open fire. Three times he shouted, and three times the shadow ignored his commands. Finally, Ewart raised his gun, took aim, and fired. Just as he was pulling the trigger, however, the stranger cried out, “Andrew, you’ll no[t] shoot me!” No sooner had the plea crossed his lips than the bullet struck him in the arm, dropping him to the ground. Ewart rushed over and realized, to his horror, that he knew the fallen man. He was no resurrectionist—he was another watchman named Henry Pennycook. Bored and buzzed on more than a dram or two of whiskey, Pennycook was trying to sneak up on Ewart so he could scare the living daylights out of him. The practical joker for the prank with his life. He languished in the hospital for four agonizing days, finally expiring on December 8.
Ewart, meanwhile, was charged with murder and taken to court. The defense argued that he had done no wrong in shooting at a man he believed to be a resurrectionist. The prosecution countered that it was illegal to shoot and kill Pennycook, period, even if he had been trying to purloin a cadaver. As far as Scottish law was concerned, graverobbing was not grounds for deadly force. That may have been true, Ewart’s attorney responded, but “the people of Scotland had hitherto been allowed to believe that it was lawful to protect the graves of their departed friends in this manner.” These arguments left the jury conflicted. While they unanimously found Ewart guilty, they also urged the judge to show mercy. As Ewart awaited sentencing, he faced a grimly ironic possibility. The law permitted anatomists to dissect the bodies of convicted murderers. If the judge ignored the jury’s call for leniency and condemned him to the gallows, Ewart would wind up beneath the scalpel after trying to prevent the body of another from meeting the same fate. Happily for Ewart, the judge heeded the jurymen. His sentence was commuted to a single year’s imprisonment. He might have served even less time if he had killed an actual resurrectionist.
The trade in ill-gotten cadavers led to one of Madame Tussaud’s greatest hits of the 1820s. By that time, she had crisscrossed the British Isles as a traveling entertainer and amazed innumerable patrons along the way. Today, we’ll hear how she roughed it on the road for more than two decades, how she transformed her enterprise into a family business, and how the infamous crimes of William Burke and William Hare scandalized the nation and generated a windfall at Madame Tussaud’s. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to episode 6 of Queen of Crime . . .
Burke and Hare at Meet Madame Tussaud and Sons
On the Road
Last episode, we left Tussaud in Ireland, in 1808. Six years earlier, she had traveled from Paris to London, parting ways with her good-for-nothing husband, François, and her younger son, Francis, then two years old. She passed the intervening half dozen years in the British capital, Scotland, and Ireland, accompanied by her older son, Joseph, nicknamed Nini. In 1804, while exhibiting in Dublin, Marie rejected François’s pleas for her to come home. As she informed him in a letter, she considered the continued success of her business as well as the welfare of her children more important than returning to him—the nineteenth-century equivalent of breaking up with your husband by text.
Rejecting the role of dutiful wife, Tussaud embraced the lifestyle of itinerant show-woman. She toured with her wax exhibit over the next three decades or so and stopped in dozens of English cities— Manchester, Newcastle, Bath, Brighton, Birmingham, Rochester, Northampton, and Derby, visiting these and many other locations more than once. She also made return visits to Scottish cities like Edinburgh and Irish hubs like Dublin.
In the early nineteenth century, traveling showmen—stilt-walkers, knife-swallowers, organ-grinders and the like—planned their itineraries around a predictable calendar of local events such as fairs, markets, races, and more. These occasions pulled in residents from neighboring areas, boosting the number of potential customers. Tussaud made her travel plans in a similar fashion, careful to program stops in conjunction with, say, annual saint’s day festivities. Each visit lasted anywhere from a week to several months. When business slowed, Tussaud sped off to the next destination. But if customers kept coming longer than anticipated, she stayed put, willing to postpone prearranged engagements elsewhere if necessary.
When it came time to box up the models and hit the dusty trail, Marie and Joseph traveled by stagecoach. In an age before steam-powered locomotion, these horse-drawn carriages operated much like trains would later, keeping to preplanned schedules and stopping at various stations, or “stages,” along a predetermined route. A fresh team of four to a half-dozen horses waited at each stage, ready to replace the worn-down beasts that had brought the travelers thus far. While Marie and Joseph rode from province to province, a caravan of freight wagons transported their precious cargo, shielded from the elements by canvas tarpaulins, a service offered by private couriers who charged by the weight.
The going was tough and even dangerous. Setting aside the toil of loading and unloading cumbersome crates over and over again, many roads remained in poor condition, making for bumpy rides. Needless to say, nineteenth-century public transportation was not yet equipped with climate control. Marie and Joseph would have sweat bullets in the sweltering heat of summer and shivered in the freezing temperatures of winter. They also would have kept on alert for brigands. Because of the threat of highway robbery, a “shotgun messenger,” armed with a coach gun, sat beside the coachman at the head of the carriage. In fact, this precaution gave rise to the phrase of “riding shotgun.” That Tussaud met the demands of this taxing and treacherous way of life throughout her forties, fifties, and sixties speaks to her inexhaustible stamina and unbreakable will. These attributes accounted in no small part for her nationwide success.
Making a Name Across the Nation
As the Tussauds cut across the United Kingdom and back again, word spread of her amazingly lifelike waxworks. In 1818, newspapers reported a humorous case of mistaken identity in Rochester. A young woman commented out loud on the sculptures while perusing the exhibition. At one point, she came to a halt before a uniformed officer. She assumed he was famous like everybody else else represented in the collection, but she failed to recognize him. “Pray who are you?” she asked the lifelike figure. To her astonishment, the “sculpture” bowed and answered her question: “My name, madam, is Captain [so-and-so] of the [such-and-such] Regiment, and very much at your service.” At once amused and embarrassed, the woman replied, “I beg your pardon, captain, for my mistake, and must confess that in the involuntary compliment I paid to the exhibition I cut a rather sorry figure myself.”
The best story of all involves the wax modeler herself. A well-to-do woman came in one day, whereupon Tussaud offered her a catalogue. The customer declined but changed her mind while touring the exhibition. Spotting Tussaud in the middle of the room, she walked on over and asked if she could purchase a catalogue. According to a Lincoln newspaper, “Receiving no answer [she] turned away highly chagrined at the supposed rudeness of M.T.” It soon became apparent that she had not spoken to Tussaud but rather to a wax model of Tussaud. Mortified, “she now readily excused [the proprietor’s] want of politeness.”
Tussaud understood that novelty was just as important as talent. She updated her collection on a regular basis, encouraging patrons to come back again if she visited a city for a second or third time. To give an example, the very same week of King George IV’s coronation in 1821, she unveiled a tableau of the lavish ceremony in Liverpool. This exhibit wowed the public and became a highlight of the touring years.
“Much Genteel Company”
Tussaud was establishing a reputation as not just England’s premier wax modeler but as a wax modeler for the middle-classes.
Without fail, Tussaud targeted the haves and have-mores when she rolled into town, communicating with them through the local press. A combination of paid publicity and newspaper coverage suggests that Tussaud succeeded in luring her desired clientele. “No improper persons will be admitted,” she warned in a summer 1823 edition of the Bristol Mercury. Two years later, in 1825, a Chelmsford periodical reported that “much genteel company” had patronized the exhibition. At other times, though rarely, she offered special discounts to the under-classes, implying their general absence from her establishment. An 1830 piece of publicity from Portsmouth made this announcement: “Madame Tussaud and Sons have made arrangements to admit THE WORKING CLASS during the time the exhibition remains for half price, from a quarter before nine till ten in the evening.”
Tussaud further courted the middle-classes by booking venues where they felt at home. Many itinerant artists plied their trade at fairgrounds, but Tussaud steered clear of tents and booths and the rowdy crowds they attracted. Multiple locations suited her needs, but she preferred the gentility of assembly rooms. Kate Berridge describes these as “parade grounds of polite society, a forum for elegant recreation.” Assembly rooms were designed in part as a venue for balls and thus afforded ample space for dancers and musicians. Waltzes and quadrilles—the latter a French import, in which four couples danced in a square formation, twirling, linking, and unlinking their arms—rose to prominence throughout Tussaud’s traveling years.
Thanks to the square footage and acoustics of assembly rooms, Tussaud was able to add a new attraction to her exhibition, an in-house orchestra, which added to the overall air of refinement. First mentioned in 1819, the band was small and consisted primarily of piano and strings. One of its members spuriously claimed to be the son of Louis XVI, who against all odds had survived imprisonment. Drawing from a repertoire of popular songs, the orchestra lent acoustic stimulation to the visual pleasures of the wax collection. Later in the century, Tussaud’s published daily programs of the orchestra’s offerings.
Madame Tussaud and Sons
Phillipe Curtius primed Tussaud for a career in show business when she was a child, and Marie did the same for Joseph from boyhood. Young Master Tussaud’s peripatetic childhood and adolescence would have prevented him from settling into a schoolroom routine. The closest he could have come to sustained formal education would have been attendance at “hedge schools,” ad hoc institutions usually sponsored by philanthropic clergymen. Despite a lack of schooling and limited interaction with homegrown Britons of his own age, Joseph acquired English early on, making him an invaluable asset to his mother, who never attained as firm a grasp on the language. In addition to his command of English, Joseph possessed an effervescent personality. Marie soon had him greeting customers and giving guided tours, sharing insider tidbits about the waxworks. In a tender show of maternal affection, she temporarily displayed a model of Joseph near the entrance, inviting customers to compare the youth and his likeness. When he turned sixteen in 1814, Joseph had attained such a prominent position in the business that advertisements honored him with the title of “J. Tussaud Proprietor.”
Like his mother, Joseph was artistically inclined, and he made use of several talents to enrich the family coffers. He drew silhouette portraits of patrons and sold them at one shilling and sixpence. Silhouette portraits were made with the assistance of a magic lantern, the same device that powered Paul Philipstahl’s phantasmagoria. The subject sat stock-still and sideways in front of a sheet of glass, lit by the magic lantern. The portraitist then placed a sheet of paper over the far side of the glass—that is, the side opposite the magic lantern. The bright beam of light from that device cast a shadowy silhouette on the glass, which Joseph in turn could trace on the paper, filling in the contours with black ink later. Musically gifted, too, Joseph also joined the the in-house orchestra as a pianist.
While Joseph was tracing silhouettes and striking chords across the United Kingdom, Marie’s younger son, Francis, was struggling to find his way in Paris. Like his older brother, he was blessed with artistic gifts. He could play the harp by the time he hit twenty, and since the harp is not an instrument you can just pick up and start playing without instruction, it seems probable that he received music lessons throughout his early years. Yet we have no evidence that Francis ever envisioned a career as a musician. Instead, we are told by John Theodore Tussaud, Marie’s great-grandson, he aspired to train as an architect.
Unfortunately for Francis, his father shoved him down a different career path, compelling him to apprentice in the less creative profession of grocer. However, François wrested him out of that apprenticeship as soon as he learned how much it would cost, instead putting him to work with a carpenter who specialized in in billiard tables.
Francis wanted more out of life than building billiard tables, needful and noble as that line of work is. By 1821 or 1822, life in Paris seemed unlivable, and he contemplated whether to join Marie and Joseph on the road. He would not have packed his belongings and set out for the British Isles without careful consideration. Francis came of age with recurring complaints about how well his mother and brother were faring across the English Channel and how they were keeping all their earnings to themselves. The idea of teaming up with them carried the allure of financial prosperity. At the same time, Francis may have worried about meshing with this mother-son operation. They were family, sure, but twenty years had passed since Marie and Joseph had bid adieu to Paris. He hardly knew either of them—nor they him—since he was just two at the time of their departure. Moreover, there was no indication of their ever coming back to the French capital. It must have seemed possible that if Francis committed himself to the family business, he would never set foot in his birthplace again. Despite any concerns he may have harbored, the time had come for Francis to leave home. Unlike Madame Tussaud and Joseph, he would find himself back in Paris in a matter of weeks.
After his ship pulled into Dover, Francis set out for the British capital, where he hoped to ascertain his mother and brother’s whereabouts. Francis had not a penny to his name and thus no alternative but to make the roughly eighty-mile trek to London on foot. He subsisted on a couple of biscuits, stashed in a raggedy military knapsack and slept under haystacks for warmth at night. His progress came to an abrupt halt when police mistook him for a military deserter—presumably on account of his soldier’s rucksack—and placed him under arrest. During interrogation, it fast become evident that Francis was not a British soldier. It’s hard to salute, snap to attention, or obey any orders on command when you scarcely know a word of English. Making their apologies, the authorities sent the flustered Frenchman on his way. The worst was yet to come. When at last Francis traipsed into London, he received heartrending news: both Marie and Joseph had drowned in a shipwreck, swallowed by the sea along with their prized waxworks. Gutted by the revelation and with little hope of obtaining work in this strange land, he turned right around and made the mournful voyage back to Paris. We’ll hear the truth about this supposed shipwreck after a quick break.
Marie and Joseph were not quite as dead as rumor suggested. They had suffered shipwreck, but mother and son both survived to tell the tale. In the summer of 1821, Tussaud alerted the public that she would be leaving England due to “a particular engagement in Dublin.” As Kate Berridge notes in her biography, the newly crowned King George IV was visiting Ireland at the time, and Tussaud may have reasoned that His Majesty’s presence there would encourage Dubliners to check out her collection, especially the crowd-pleasing coronation tableau. On August 8 or 9, 1821, the Earl of Moira, a ship thought to be carrying Marie and Joseph, was charting a course from Liverpool to Dublin when it ran aground in Liverpool Bay. Wave after wave buffeted the vessel as it stood, marooned and gradually sinking into a sandbar, sweeping dozens of passengers off the deck, including the ship’s drunk and criminally incompetent captain. The death toll is unknown, but the swell is thought to have claimed roughly half of the 100 onboard. Only one of six crew members survived. The private memoirs of a well-to-do family seemingly tie Marie and Joseph to this maritime tragedy. The story goes that members of the ffarington household were at dinner in their stately residence outside Preston, Lancashire, when unannounced visitors arrived on their doorstep. The memoir reads, “Mrs. ffarington’s curiosity was aroused and she went to the door herself, where she found the butler was being addressed in voluble French by a party of people outside. She brought them in and found them to be a little company of foreigners who had suffered a shipwreck on their way to Dublin. The leader of the party was Madame Tussaud.” Soaking wet and stained with mud, the refugees needed shelter, and the matriarch welcomed them into her home. They stayed for several days as they recovered.
Sometime afterward, Marie discovered that Francis had come looking for her and Joseph in London and wrote to him in Paris. Due to snarls in the post, however, it took months for the letter to reach him. When it did, he made his way back to England, this time with more desirable results. After a full two decades apart, he reunited with Marie and Joseph in Liverpool. Regrettably, no details of this meeting have come down to us, but it marked the birth of Madame Tussaud and Sons.
Hard-and-fast facts are nonexistent while rumors abound as to the family dynamic. Whispered and no doubt warped over the years, the received narrative is one of sibling rivalry, with Francis jealous of his mother’s affection for Joseph. After all, her beloved Nini had never left her side in all her years of touring. Added to Francis’s jealousy were feelings of insecurity since he worried about his ability to rise to her expectations. Whatever tensions may have surfaced between Francis, Joseph, and even Marie, the new arrival threw himself into the wax exhibition just as his brother had, lending his musical capabilities to the orchestra. While Joseph hammered out melodies on the keyboard, Francis plucked away at his harp. They divided the duties of a band leader, and the group performed under the mysterious name of “Messers Tussaud and the Fishers.”
Before long, new branches sprouted on the family tree. In 1822, Joseph married Elizabeth Babbington, who bore him three children, the first of them a son. Francis took his vows with Rebecca Smallpage a few years later. The couple celebrated the birth of their first child, also a son, in 1831. In a show of mutual brotherly love, Joseph named his firstborn Francis while Francis christened his baby boy Joseph. If the family lore about their tenuous relationship is true, the good will may have extended little farther than the children’s birth certificates. By around 1840, at which time the Tussaud clan had settled in London, Grandma Marie had twelve grandchildren in total. Each and every one of her progeny would take an active role in the business, and at least one direct descendant was still involved as late as 1967.
In 1828, Tussaud would claim to make memorable use of her family helpers when the nation learned of the heinous offenses committed by two Irishmen living in Edinburgh, William Burke and William Hare.
When Burke Met Hare
Born circa 1792, William Burke hailed from Urney, County Tyrone, Ireland. We know virtually nothing about his upbringing, although he appears to have attended school long enough to read and write in English—his first language was Irish Gaelic. By the time he reached adulthood, he was five-foot-five, with brown hair and blue eyes. You would never think him depraved in the slightest. On the contrary, those who knew him considered him charming, possessed of the Irishman’s “natural vivacity,” according to Henry Cockburn, “not at all ferocious in his general manner, sober, correct in all his other habits, and kind to his relations.”
After serving in the military, Burke left Ireland as a migrant laborer, eventually landing in Edinburgh. Each year, thousands of Irish people took this course, sailing to Scotland from one of several major ports, often to help farmers harvest their crops. In his 1831 collection of engravings, Modern Athens, Thomas Shepard captures the Edinburgh that Burke inhabited. In the medieval Old Town, where Burke would reside, tenements were spread across “a very irregular surface of ground, and placed partly in valleys, and partly on the tops and sloping sides of hills.” Usually referred to as the Royal Mile, the High Road led from the imposing Edinburgh Castle, perched on the highest point in the west of the city, down to the breathtaking Holyrood Palace, a royal residence in the east. Shepard likened this bustling thoroughfare to “the backbone of a herring” while the “numerous narrow lanes” that split off from it resembled the ribs of this metaphorical fish. At the time of the murders, Burke lived in West Port, a long street that served as the primary entry point from western Scotland into Edinburgh. All manner of shops lined West Port—there was even a circulating library—while so-called “closes,” closed-in alleyways and courtyards, led to tenements behind.
Upon arrival in Edinburgh, Burke procured employment as a “navy,” short for “navigator.” In this role, he aided in the construction of roads and canals that linked the localities of Lowland Scotland. In 1818, work began on the Union Canal, which would leave the city of Edinburgh and connect with the existing Fourth and Clyde canal. Digging a canal before the advent of dynamite was onerous, and it became even more so when the team came to a stretch that would pass by Callender House, an estate outside Edinburgh. The owner of Calender House refused to allow the waterway to flow within sight of his grounds. As a result, the canal was diverted through Prospect Hill, a limestone outcropping. The laborers hacked out a tunnel that was 690 feet long and twelve feet deep. First, they loosened the stone by detonating gunpowder and then they broke it asunder with pickaxes and shovels. The work was grueling—not to mention perilous—but it paid between two and three shillings a day.
At around this time, Burke made the acquaintance of Helen M’Dougal, brown-haired and blue-eyed just like him and in her early twenties. The two fell in love and lived together as man and wife without officially tying the knot—Burke was already married to a woman in Ireland. Between 1822-26, the couple traveled around while Burke found work in various professions. Like many migrant laborers, he attained proficiency in a number of trades, making ends meet at various times as a weaver, baker, and cobbler.
He was making shoes for a living when he met William Hare. We know little about Burke and even less about Hare. At the time of his arrest, he gave his age as twenty-one, placing his year of birth around 1807. Much like Burke, he emigrated from Ireland to Edinburgh, probably as an itinerant laborer. Five-foot-four-and-three-quarters-of-an-inch tall, he had brown hair and hazelnut eyes. Unlike Burke, he was described as having “a ferocious and tyrannical disposition, much inclined to quarrel, and very obstreperous when in liquor.” Hare appears to have worked as a “bagman.” In this capacity, a contemporary noted, he would, “provided with a strong coarse sack . . . follow the coal carts and carry the coals into the homes of the inhabitants.”
By the mid-1820s, Hare had taken a room at a well-reputed boardinghouse, a freestanding building in Tanner’s Close. Christopher North, editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, toured the premises in 1829 and described the exterior as looking “like a minister’s house.” The established filled and emptied with the arrival and departure of itinerant workers, many of them Irish. The boardinghouse was owned by James and Margaret Logue. When James passed away, Margaret took over, and soon thereafter, she married Hare.
Sometime around October 1827, Margaret Hare bumped into a fellow she knew from around town, William Burke. In the course of conversation, he mentioned his intention to head out west and make a living as a cobbler. Margaret suggested that he and his companion, Helen M’Dougal, stick around in Edinburgh. She and her husband, William, had an apartment for rent Tanner’s Close. Rent was affordable, and there would be no shortage of customers in West Port, so he and M’Dougal moved in.
Fast Cash in Edinburgh, 1827
It was sometime in November 1827, when William Hare knocked on a door in the lodging house. He wanted to speak with an old pensioner named Donald, who owed £4 in rent. Receiving no answer, Hare opened up and stepped inside to discover his lodger dead, killed by dropsy, an overabundance of fluid in the tissues. Harsh as it sounds, the surprise corpse was a burden to Hare. He would not see a penny of the overdue rent and to make matters worse, this dead body wasn’t going to dispose of itself. Hare duly arranged to have it buried at the parish’s expense. Twenty-four hours later, however, nobody had come to attend to the cadaver, now decomposing. Increasingly impatient, Hare contemplated a more profitable means of removing the stinking biohazard and turned to his older, more experienced lodger, William Burke, for advice. Edinburgh anatomists were ever in need of fresh “subjects,” as they called them, and Hare proposed selling Donald’s cadaver to the doctors. “It would be impossible to do it,” Burke replied. The carpenter “would be coming in with the coffin immediately.” Burke had a point. The carpenter did arrive in short order, whereupon he lifted the corpse into the casket and nailed the lid shut. Yet neither Burke nor Hare anticipated what happened next. The carpenter just . . . left. Without the coffin. Acting fast, Hare unfastened the lid with a crowbar, removed the old pensioner, and slid his body underneath one of the beds, aided by Burke. The two nicked some tanner’s bark from the back of the building, which they packed in the coffin and covered with a sheet. Finally, they reaffixed the lid and had the casket interred, untenanted.
Burke and Hare made every effort to avoid detection, doubtless afraid they were breaking the law. In actual fact, selling Donald’s corpse was not illegal. As Lisa Rosner notes in her excellent book, The Anatomy Murders, Hare’s sole obligation to the parish was to dispose of the body, which did not necessarily equate to securing a proper burial. Neither Scottish nor English law treated corpses as property, so it was not as though Burke and Hare were trafficking in stolen goods. If, on the other hand, Burke and Hare had disturbed a grave to obtain the corpse, they would have committed the same illegal act as the resurrectionists, “violation of sepulchers,” an offense punishable by fines and imprisonment. Burke and Hare went on to sell plenty of bodies, but they never once violated a sepulcher to do so.
Burke and Hare had a precious commodity on their hands, but they required a buyer. The quest for one brought them to Number 10 Surgeon Square, the dissecting rooms of Dr. Robert Knox. Dr. Knox was a rising star in the enormously competitive field of anatomy. By the 1820s, Edinburgh University ranked among the foremost institutions of medical instruction in the English-speaking world, attracting upwards of five hundred aspiring physicians each year. In addition to attending anatomical lectures at the university, students increasingly frequented private dissection classes given by Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons. These lessons suited both teachers and pupils. Fellows boosted their income by charging fees for lessons while students gained deeper knowledge of human anatomy, which gave them an edge as they entered the profession. Knox, like virtually every Royal College anatomist, had his eye on a professorship at Edinburgh University. Attaining the post was next to impossible—the Munro family had enjoyed a veritable monopoly on it for a century. Yet that would not stop him—or anyone else—trying. If he wished to become Prof. Knox, he needed to train more students, make more discoveries, and publish more papers than anybody else. All three pursuits demanded a steady supply of human cadavers. Knox had made impressive strides toward that goal in little time. He had graduated from Edinburgh University, passing his final exams on the first attempt—no mean feat, since this test required him to discourse on the viscera of the thorax and the pathology of ulcers, among other topics, entirely in Latin. In April 1824, he received permission and financial support to found a Museum of Comparative Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, where he soon assumed a leadership position. In 1826, Knox began offering private anatomical lessons as a Fellow. Success like his could only breed envy, and many of his competitors might have taken pleasure in dissecting him.
When Burke and Hare produced Donald’s cadaver, Knox made an offer of £7, 10s, asking no questions as to where it had come from. For all he knew, the two strangers could have retrieved the corpse lawfully from a workhouse, infirmary, or other institution where the deceased had died a natural death. Or they could have illegally raided a churchyard illegally for it. At any rate, Burke and Hare agreed to the transaction. As one of Knox’s assistants handed over their payment, he added that his employer would be happy to buy from them again in the future. Assuring the good doctors they would bear that in mind, the Irishmen left. Hare took £4, 5s—he felt himself entitled to the lion’s share since Donald was his lodger—while Burke pocketed the remaining £3, 5s. It’s easy to imagine that whiskey flowed like a waterfall as Burke and Hare celebrated the transmutation of a stray cadaver into fast cash. We’ll hear about further visits to the offices of Dr. Knox after a quick break.
The Death of Mardgy Docherty
It was All Hallows Eve, 1828. A smallish woman named Madgy Docherty made her way to West Port. Older than forty but younger than fifty, she wore a striped, red short-coat. Spirits were high, as they always were on Halloween, for Edinburgh’s annual livestock market would take place tomorrow. Farmers selling horses, sheep, and cattle would cluster together in Cowgate and Grass Market, two major thoroughfares, while the rest of the city teemed with vendors of agricultural implements. Madgy Docherty liked to talk, and as she revealed to anyone who would listen, she had come to the Scottish capital to seek out her son, Michael, a migrant worker who had traveled to Edinburgh two months earlier to help with the harvest. She had missed him by three days at his previous place of residence and now had no idea where he had gone. She made up her mind to leave the city.
Before hitting the road, she ducked into a grocery to pick up provisions. Like many working-class Irish traveling in and out of town, Docherty was counting on the generosity of strangers. Asking for charity inside the market, she introduced herself as Mrs. Docherty to a fellow Irishman, a shoemaker by trade, who did a double take. Would you believe it? He was also a Docherty. Her kinsman offered to put her up for a fortnight, during which time she could scout around for her son. As an added advantage, Madgy would be free to take part in the city’s Halloween revels. She thanked him for his kindness and accompanied him to the tenement where he lived. There, she met Nelly, Mr. Docherty’s wife, who cooked her breakfast and helped wash her laundry. The couple made their home in a small apartment, sixteen by seven feet, with well-plastered walls, a wooden floor, and a fireplace. The Docherties rented out a bed to lodgers now and again, and they happened to have two living with them when Madgy arrived: James and Ann Gray. The shoemaker avoided any mention of his family connection to Madgy in front of the Grays, and there’s little doubt why. They knew that their landlord and his wife weren’t named Docherty at all. They were William Burke and Helen M’Dougal. (The two had moved out of the Hares’ boardinghouse and into a new tenement.)
As the day wore on, Burke’s behavior bewildered Ann Gray. He ordered both her and her husband to leave for the evening on the grounds that the two of them quarreled too much. Ann protested—she and her spouse had not argued at all. Burke put his foot down. He had already arranged for them to stay at William and Margaret Hare’s boardinghouse that night. It was crystal-clear to Ann that Burke wanted her and James out of the house, but she had little reason to suspect ill intentions. The Grays were Scottish, and Ann conjectured that her Irish-born hosts preferred not to spend the holiday with Scots. “I thought it was Halloween night,” she testified later, “[and] they did not wish me among them.”
Later that night, the Hares came over, and the party started in earnest. Burke and M’Dougal’s neighbor, Ann Conway, heard much of the ruckus as she tried to fall asleep, no doubt annoyed by the noise since she needed to rise at 3:00 a.m. to make breakfast for her husband, who was due at work at 4:30. Docherty sang while Margaret Hare and Helen McDougal danced. Sometime before 11 p.m. however, Burke and Hare exchanged harsh words. At about the same time, a woman was heard to call out, “Murder!” Then came the sound of somebody getting strangled. The woman screamed again, this time calling out for the police. Hugh Alston, a grocer who lived directly overhead, heard the commotion and heeded the cry for help, rushing outside to locate a constable. There was not a single policeman in sight. Either they were preoccupied policing the Halloween revels or maybe they were participating in the festivities themselves. By the time Alston returned to his room, the screaming had stopped. The next day, Burke explained to other residents that Hare had throttled him, causing Docherty to cry out, “Murder.” “It was just a bit of drink like,” Burke reassured them.
Nobody doubted his version of events. He and M’Dougal lived in one of West Port’s most respectable tenements, but there was nothing unusual about a Halloween party getting rowdy. When the Grays came back from the boardinghouse, however, Ann could not shake an uneasy feeling. Docherty had vanished without a trace. As she smoked her pipe over breakfast, Burke forbade Ann to go near her bed, even though her belongings were stored there. When she tried to fetch a stocking from near the straw pallet that served as a mattress, Burke swore at her, “Keep out there.” Whenever he stepped out of the apartment, moreover, he made sure that M’Dougal was lying on the bed and even stationed an eleven-year-old neighbor on a chair at the foot of it.
That evening, Burke, M’Dougal, and the boy chanced to be out of the room at the same time, leaving the Grays alone in the apartment. Ann leapt toward the bed at the first opportunity. When she bent over to lift the straw, her fingers found the arm of a woman. The color drained from Ann’s face as her eyes turned to James. Together, the two of them shifted the bed and discovered the naked body of Madgy Docherty underneath. When James gently lifted the head by the hair, he and his wife noticed blood “about her mouth and on the one side of her head.”
The Grays wanted out of this apartment—and fast. They gathered their possessions and raced out the door only to stop in their tracks in the passageway. Helen M’Dougal was headed right toward them. James demanded to know what was going on, at which point M’Dougal fell to her knees and implored them not to go to police. She could give them a few shillings until Monday, she blubbered, after which she promised the astounding amount of £10 per week. M’Dougal had underestimated the Grays’ moral character. “God forbid that I should be worth money for dead people!” Ann spat back at her. They hightailed it out the front door only to cross paths with Margaret Hare. “What are you making a noise about?” she barked. The Grays made no secret of why they were making noise. Margaret replied coolly that she could clear this up over a round of drinks, but the Grays were in no mood for either Scotch whiskey or Irish hogwash. They brushed past her and made a beeline for the Fountainbridge police station.
A short while later, a patrolman was dispatched to Burke and M’Dougal’s residence. They did not find a body waiting for them, but the floor was specked with blood, and they turned up the red striped gown that Docherty had worn on All Hallows Eve. Many a missing cadaver found its way to the doctors, they knew, so the following day, two police officers visited the dissecting rooms of Dr. Robert Knox. An assistant of his produced a heavy tea chest that had been delivered the previous day, and sure enough they discovered Madgy Docherty inside. This was grounds for a murder investigation. Soon, police had four suspects in custody—William and Margaret Hare, along with William Burke and Helen M’Dougal.
A Perfect Murder—and a Perfect Getaway
No sooner had the authorities opened their investigation than they doubted whether murder charges would stand up in court. Scottish law dictated that juries hear homicide trials, and Scottish juries had a reputation for rigor. Edinburgh advocate Sir William Rae noted that he “had reason to know how scrupulous a Scottish jury uniformly is, in finding a verdict of guilty, where a capital punishment is to follow.” In the case of Madgy Docherty, police had a dead body on their hands—that was indisputable—but that dead body bore no trace of foul play. Three trained investigators—one police surgeon, plus two forensic experts—examined the corpse and could find no evidence of homicide. They suspected that Docherty had died of suffocation, but for all they knew, she could have choked on her own vomit. Police kept the four prisoners under lock and key throughout the month of November and questioned them extensively. Helen M’Dougal hardly uttered a syllable, whereas Burke and Hare claimed to know nothing of how the “little old woman” met her demise. December neared, and still not a shred of new evidence had surfaced. If the state brought charges against these prisoners, a defense attorney of even middling abilities would have little trouble securing an acquittal.
When individuals are believed to have conspired to commit a crime, investigators may offer immunity to one or more parties in exchange for their testimony. Police began to weigh their options. Neither of the women made an ideal informant. Helen M’Dougal wasn’t talking, and Margaret Hare could not be compelled to testify against her husband. Thus, police officials zeroed in on the men. Burke was thirty-six years old, Hare just twenty-one. Investigators judged Hare to be less experienced and thus more impressionable. A deal was proposed: if Hare agreed to testify against Burke and M’Dougal, the Crown would extend complete immunity to both him and his wife. If Hare had been versed in the law in general and the prosecution of alleged murderers in particular, he may well have turned down the offer. Police had next to nothing, and the time was fast approaching when they would either have to press charges or release the prisoners. But in an age before detective fiction—the Victorian version of police procedurals like CSI—ordinary people like Hare were clueless about the inner-working of the justice system. Seeing cooperation as the surest way to evade the hangman, he sang like a canary on Karaoke Tuesday.
On December 1, 1828, Hare unraveled the mystery of Mady Docherty’s death. Between 11 p.m. and midnight, Burke and Hare came to blows, at which point a heavily intoxicated Docherty intervened. Amid this scuffle, she was pushed—or perhaps fell—onto the bed, where she lay, prostrate. Burke then positioned himself on top of her chest, compressing her lungs and making it impossible for her diaphragm to expand. Meanwhile, Hare covered her nose and mouth with both hands, preventing inhalation. Too drunk to defend herself, Docherty suffocated without much struggle. Once she had expired, Burke and Hare stripped off her clothing and hid the body under the bed.
On its own, the cruelty of Docherty’s murder would have appalled the public. But her tragic end was just the beginning of Hare’s revelations. Over the past twelve months, he and Burke had murdered no fewer than sixteen people, including Docherty—twelve women, three men, and one child. They dispatched most of their victims in the Hares’ boardinghouse rather than at Burke and M’Dougal’s apartment, where Docherty was killed. In the main, Burke and Hare preyed on seasonal workers, newcomers to Edinburgh whom nobody would miss if they vanished without warning. (That said, they had claimed the lives of at least two familiar faces in town: Jamie Wilson, nicknamed Daft Jamie, and a young woman called Mary Peterson.) Rosner characterizes the murderous duo’s typical victim as follows: “Healthy, not too strong, intermittently employed, tending to travel for work, willing to drink to insensibility.” As this last trait suggests, Burke and Hare plied their unsuspecting guests with alcohol until they lost consciousness. Then, they strangled most of them exactly as they did Docherty—a practice that gave rise to a new slang term, “burking.” These peddlers of cadavers had devised the perfect M.O.—“burking” left no discernable traces of foul play, at least by the standards of contemporary forensics. At the time, some observers even suggested that they had sought advice from an anatomist while devising their tag-team strangulation, but they had not. As soon as they had their victim’s body boxed up, they paid a visit to Dr. Knox, who always took their offering, never asked questions, and appears not to have suspected homicide. (Knox’s involvement in the West Port spree irreparably tarnished his professional reputation.)
As became evident, Burke and Hare killed for gain. There’s no evidence that they derived gratification—sexual or otherwise—from murder. But what kind of profit are we talking about? A single transaction at Number 10 Surgeon Square could yield £10. This was far from chump change. A migrant laborer would have to work three harvests to earn that amount; “to put it another way,” Rosner notes, “it was three years’ worth of hard agricultural labour.” £10 equals 200 shillings. Assuming that Burke had brought in two shillings per day while helping to carve that limestone tunnel into Prospect Hill, he and Hare had just netted what he would have earned in one hundred days of arm-numbing toil. At the same time, £10 was hardly a jackpot. The commerce in corpses would never enable the Hares, Burke, and M’Dougal to climb their way out of the ranks of the working poor and into the middle class. They would never be able to afford, say, a three-story townhouse in Edinburgh’s elegant New Town, planned and constructed in the eighteenth century. At the end of the day, £10 was just enough to buy them greater comfort. The two couples could splurge on more expensive food, liquor, clothing, and accessories. They may have even used disposable income to bribe the occasional neighbor who asked one question too many. To the general public, the fact that Burke and Hare had killed for a sum as low as £10 added another element of horror to their crimes.
As Burke later testified, his partner in crime suffered no pangs of conscience “and could sleep well at night.” By way of contrast, Burke downed ever larger quantities of whiskey to drown his remorse. After each murder, he begged God’s forgiveness many times over and slept with a bottle of whiskey at his bedside. If he awoke, he swallowed as much as half of it to knock himself out.
Burke and Hare murdered Madgy Docherty on All Hallows Eve, and strangely enough, the ensuing trial also took place on a holiday. Burke and M’Dougal appeared before the High Court of Justiciary on Christmas Eve of 1828, with William and Margaret Hare acting as chief witnesses against them. (Margaret, remember, was also granted immunity.) The trial stretched into the morning of Christmas Day, and ended with separate verdicts for each defendant. The jury found Burke guilty while acquitting M’Dougal. Burke would suffer the punishment that cemetery watchman Andrew Ewart narrowly dodged: execution followed by dissection. While awaiting execution, Burke gave a full confession to all sixteen homicides, and his statement remains the most authoritative account of the offenses.
After the jury had issued its verdict, the remaining conspirators disappeared into oblivion. Hounded by a mob almost as soon as she stepped outside of the jailhouse, Helen M’Dougal left Edinburgh within days of the trial, after which time she evaporates from the historical record. Margaret Hare was released on January 19 and likewise skipped town, booking passage to Ireland, where she lived out her days in merciful obscurity. Burke went to the gallows on January 28, where he was hanged before an audience of some 25,000 spectators. Hare remained in police custody until February 5 for his own safety. Concerned that he would fall victim to mob violence, police arranged his surreptitious exit from Edinburgh—Hare wore a disguise while traveling by mail coach. He eventually crossed the English border and was never reliably sighted again.
The Missing Murderer
Madame Tussaud and Sons were exhibiting in Preston when the jury condemned Burke to death. On January 16, 1829, Tussaud announced her triumphant return to Liverpool—she had shown off her handiwork there twice before already—and planned a stay of several months. Acutely attuned to the sensation generated by the West Port murders, she unveiled a likeness of Burke in February, “as he appeared at trial.” She based her model on a cast of the murderer’s face created by an Edinburgh artist. An advertisement in the Albion beckons potential customers with promises of 100% accuracy, assuring readers that “she has spared no pains to preserve, in the Countenance, that Satanic smile for which he was so conspicuous.” In this case, Tussaud was happy to reveal that she had worked from the output of another artist. In the future, however, she would claim to have attended homicide trials to sketch portraits of the accused, ensuring the fidelity of her handiwork.
Though certain that customers would flock to the exhibition to view Burke in wax, Tussaud also feared blowback. By treating the monster’s likeness as entertainment, she could appear to trivialize his crimes or even to glorify him. With time, moreover, the Burke and Hare ballyhoo would inspire mischief among local pranksters, mischief with which the mannerly Tussaud would not wish to associate herself. In early March, newspapers reported that young men in Liverpool were ambushing boys, gagging them with bandages, and threatening to sell their cadavers to anatomists just like Burke and Hare. Then, they would run off, cackling, leaving their victim scared out of his wits. In an early advertisement, Tussaud concedes that “the introduction of such a character to her exhibition may be considered improper by some.” Yet she defends her decision by informing readers that “it is done merely in compliance with the public curiosity.” “Don’t get mad at me because I’m giving you what you want,” she almost seems to say.
Despite adopting this defensive stance, Tussaud still met with criticism. At least one journalist called her out with caustic irony for catering to public curiosity about serial killers. “The announcement is in admirable consonance with the purpose of the exhibition,” the critic begins. In a direct parody of the aforesaid advertisement, he continues, “First the honor Madame assumes to herself in publishing HER completion of a figure of Burke, then the hope that her handiwork will meet with friendly approbation; the fear, delicately inferred, of the displeasure of some, with the great sacrifice made to public curiosity all conspire to render the announcement a perfect bijou…If there be a desire of catching that huge, goggle-eyed monster, public curiosity, it is only necessary to bait the hook with the skull of a murderer, and mark how the creature gulps it!”
But others voiced a complaint that Tussaud had not predicted. The problem was less about what she had displayed than what she had not. Her sculpture of Burke was an unqualified success, but where was one of Hare? The Irishmen committed their murders together, after all, so the display came across as incomplete. If I had to guess, Tussaud limited herself to Burke in the beginning because it was he—not Hare—who went to court for his crimes and then to the gallows. Yet that mattered little in the court of public opinion. Hare may have been guiltless in the eyes of the law, but Britons still viewed him as equally culpable of the West Port spree, and it’s hard to fault them for that.
Never wishing to disappoint, Tussaud remedied the dilemma of the missing murderer. According to publicity, she dispatched either Joseph or Francis to Edinburgh to make sketches of Hare. In March, she hyped the arrival of “THE INFAMOUS, THE DIABOLICAL HARE / The Associate of the Monster Burke.” The same handbill relates, “she sent her Son to Edinburgh to procure a good likeness of him . . . the likeness of Hare was taken a short time previous to his leaving Edinburgh and the countenance is fully indicative of his character.” By now we know to doubt almost every single syllable out of Tussaud’s mouth, and this contention should certainly give us pause. Hare escaped Edinburgh in early February and apparently crossed the English border soon thereafter. If the effigy of Hare debuted in March, it seems likely that Tussaud made plans to create it in mid-to-late February at the earliest, by which time Hare would have been long gone from Edinburgh. Whatever the case, the terrible twosome pulled even larger crowds to her promenade each evening. They were truly a sight to be seen—that is, if you could get close enough to see them. A reporter for the Liverpool Mercury was struck by size size of the crush: “although the mind sickens at the idea of such a monster [as Hare], yet curiosity to see his resemblance is such that, it is difficult at times to approach the place where the figures of him and Burke are placed, so great is the desire to see them.” While likenesses of other murders came and went in the space of year at Madame Tussaud’s, those of Burke and Hare remained on display well into the twentieth century, making them among the longest-lasting inductees to the Chamber of Horrors.
Next episode, we follow Tussaud to London where she finally settles down and opens what historian Pamela Pilbeam calls “the most successful tourist destination” in the British capital. We’ll also hear about the eccentric cult leader who committed a murder and led an insurrection in the provinces.
Comments