In search of Burke and Hare

uch has been written about those fiends of the Old Town, Burke and Hare, Edinburgh’s most celebrated serial killers, who murdered a number of people for the purpose of selling their bodies for dissection at the anatomy school of Dr Robert Knox. William Burke was born in 1792 in Urney, County Tyrone, one of two sons of middle-class parents. In 1818, he deserted his wife and family, moving to Scotland, where he became a navvy helping to construct the Union Canal, settling down near Falkirk with his common-law wife Helen M’Dougal. Moving to Edinburgh, he became a hawker selling old clothes to impoverished people, before trying his luck as a cobbler. About the mystery man William Hare, little is known except he was an illiterate Irish lad who turned up in Edinburgh in the mid-1820s,