This episode contains distressing themes and descriptions of violence. This podcast is intended for a mature audience. Listener caution is advised.

The death of a woman in Edinburgh was traced back to two men named Burke and Hare.

In 1828, anatomists were only just beginning to understand the inner workings of the human body,

so they were unable to definitively say how Margaret Docherty had died.

In order to secure a conviction, the authorities granted immunity to one of the men,

but they didn't know just how many victims there had been.

Welcome to Season 11, Episode 2 of They Walk Among Us,

a podcast dedicated to UK True Crime.

Please listen to Season 11, episode 1 for part 1 of this two-part case.

After William Burke and his common-law wife, Helen McDougall, were charged with the murders

of Margaret Docherty, Jamie Wilson and Mary Patterson.

The press revealed that Burke had routinely supplied bodies to the dissecting rooms in Surgeon

Square. A reporter for the Edinburgh Chronicle remarked, how these were procured is another question.

The idea that someone would kill another human being to

sell their body to be dissected was beyond comprehension. The case shocked polite society

and attracted global attention. An article in a Liverpool newspaper read,

It is whispered that there have been more, but we ask in what

quarter of the world can such unfeeling and deliberate barbarity be surpassed? Let Edinburgh

talk no more about civilising and evangelising distant nations until she civilise and

evangelise all her own citizens. The murderers in the present case are,

in all probability, phrenologists, who have been formed with the bump of destructiveness,

with overwhelming development in their skulls, were consequently obliged to follow out their inclinations

...