Today is Thursday, January 28, 2021.

On this day in 1829, the infamous killer and body snatcher William Burke was executed in a public hanging.

Over a span of a year, Burke and his partner William Hare

murdered at least 16 people and sold their bodies to an anatomy professor for medical

research.

Welcome to Today in True Crime, a Spotify original from Parcast.

Today we're covering the hanging of William Burke. Let's go back to the morning of January 28, 1829,

to a crowded square in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The mood was square in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The mood was jubilant as teeming crowds packed in Edinburgh's lawn market. The Newcastle Current reported that,

Never, we believe, was such an assemblage scene.

The crowd assembled, which could not be short of 30,000 souls,

rent the air with shouts of exultation when the monster appeared on the scaffold.

The monster in question did not have fangs or claws, but was an unassuming-looking man in his late 30s, and for the moment he was

one of the most infamous people in Scotland. William Burke had emigrated from Northern

Ireland to work as a manual laborer on the Union Canal. Shortly after arriving in Edinburgh,

he met and befriended William Hare, a fellow Irishman

who ran a boarding house in Tanner's Close.

Their friendship spelled disaster for many of Edinburgh's poorer residents.

The trouble began in November of 1827, when one of Hare's tenants suddenly died of edema.

Hare was frustrated that the man had died still owing rent, and with Burke's help, he hatched a plan to recoup the funds.

At the time, Edinburgh was home to several leading experts in the field of anatomy.

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