Body Brokers Page 9

  One day, a man named William Burke checked into the lodging house accompanied by his wife, a woman named Helen M’Dougal.

  An industrious man who had a weakness for drink, Burke earned his money hawking old clothes and skins while he and his woman moved from lodging house to lodging house. Hare took a liking to his new lodger and let Burke set up shop in a small side room. There, Burke began mending old shoes that he’d found on the street, which he later resold. Burke and Hare became friends and drinking partners, often tipping back spirits late into the night.

  Their sinister enterprise began innocently enough. One of Hare’s lodgers, a lonely old man named Desmond, had fallen ill with dropsy. His body swelled. His face and stomach grew bloated, and he died—still owing four pounds in rent.

  William Hare discovered the corpse. He might be forgiven for seeing the death of his lodger primarily as a case of lost income for himself. Bitter at this turn of events, Hare and William Burke decided to drag the old lodger’s corpse over to a hospital and recoup the debt. The two men bundled up the lodger’s body and lugged it through the streets to Surgeon’s Square, the headquarters of Dr. Knox, who was then a well-known surgeon and teacher of anatomy. Dr. Knox rewarded Hare and Burke handsomely for the old man’s corpse, paying them a little more than seven pounds in cash.

  Before they left, Dr. Knox encouraged the men to bring him other corpses. They realized then just how much more a man was worth dead than alive.

  But rather than go to the trouble of digging up corpses in the overcrowded, stinking cemeteries of Edinburgh, Burke and Hare opted for a more convenient approach: murder. They certainly didn’t have to go far to find a victim—there were plenty of potential corpses right there at the lodging house.

  Burke and Hare’s first victim was a miller named Joseph. Like Desmond, Joseph had become ill while living at the lodging house. Though weak, he still eagerly accepted when Hare invited him in for a friendly chat and a few generous glasses of stout.

  Knowing that a violent method of murder would be detected by the doctors, Burke and Hare waited until Joseph grew sleepy, then lowered a pillow over his nose and mouth and smothered him to death. When they were sure he was dead, they stripped Joseph of his clothes, packed up his naked body, and hauled it over to the offices of Dr. Knox, where it was received without any compunction. This time they earned ten pounds.

  And so it went for one whole year. During that time, Burke and Hare asphyxiated sixteen people—many of them old women—and sold all sixteen bodies to Dr. Knox. The doctor seems never to have raised the obvious question: How did Burke and Hare happen to know so many people who had suddenly died?

  Their killing spree would almost certainly have continued—but, like many men in their position, the two friends got carried away by their success and grew careless. Alerted by Burke’s suspicious behavior, one of Hare’s female lodgers did some exploring in Burke’s bedroom and discovered a corpse hidden in the corner under some straw.

  The woman told her husband about the corpse, and her husband confronted Mrs. Burke. As he later recalled, “I asked what it was that she had in the house; and she said, ‘What was it?’ And I said, ‘I suppose you know very well what it is.’”

  Mrs. Burke fell on her knees and begged him not to tell anyone about the body upstairs. But he would have none of it and promptly informed the police.

  When word of the murders got out, all of Edinburgh was in an uproar. There were rumors that Dr. Knox had ordered Burke and Hare to kill their victims. How else, people whispered, could two such ignorant men devise such a foolproof method? Word spread that they had killed as many as thirty-two people, that Knox was in on all of the crimes, and that he’d helped conceal the identities of the corpses. If he wasn’t guilty, why hadn’t he questioned the steady stream of bodies that Burke and Hare delivered when it was clear that none of the bodies had ever been interred?

  There was no evidence that Knox knew about the murders, and he was never prosecuted, but an investigative panel later reprimanded him for not making inquiries about the origin of the corpses. Testifying as a witness for the prosecution, Hare managed to get immunity. Thanks to his testimony, William Burke was found guilty. After a sensational trial, he was hanged in front of nearly 25,000 jeering spectators. His body was then turned over to anatomy students for dissection.

  In 1832, partly as a result of the Burke and Hare murders, the British government passed the Anatomy Act, which was intended to put an end to the cadaver trade in England once and for all. The new law provided surgeons with the “unclaimed” bodies of the poor and friendless for dissection.

  Meanwhile, across the ocean in America, resurrectionists—or “ghouls” as they were known in the press—were doing a thriving business. While less well known today than its counterpart in England, the American body-snatching business grew into a large and complex enterprise that lasted well into the twentieth century.*3 In 1921, the diener at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine was still buying bodies from a ghoul.

  Until the late eighteenth century, there were few skilled doctors and even fewer surgeons in America. Doctors who tended to the sick in Colonial times were often little more than interested laymen who did the best that they could, prescribing remedies of dubious value like bloodletting and vomiting. In the absence of proper medical schools, the distinction between a trained physician and a quack was vague at best.

  Ambitious medical students who could afford the journey visited London and studied under famous professors like John and William Hunter. As they returned from their travels and disseminated what they had learned, an interest in anatomy started to take hold in America—in particular in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. According to Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies, between 1810 and 1860, the number of medical schools in the United States increased from just five to sixty-five.

  Courses in human dissection had a profound effect on the way in which doctors analyzed the ailments of their patients. For example, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, a surgeon in Kentucky, knew enough from dissecting a corpse to recognize that one of his patients, who claimed to be pregnant, was carrying not a child but an ovarian tumor. Realizing that this woman was in mortal danger, McDowell operated on her at his kitchen table and removed a twenty-two-pound tumor. Within a month, the woman had fully recovered.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, all over the country, surgeons and their students were engaged in anatomy courses at medical schools, for which no corpse was spared. These schools, however, bore little resemblance to the medical schools of today. Many of them offered little more than cadavers and a lone instructor, and they were haphazardly run, driven more by commercial values than educational ones. Some were hosted by enterprising surgeons or simply by entrepreneurs who set up the corpses in their basements or attics and allowed aspiring surgeons to dissect them.

  Because their main focus was anatomical dissection, the schools were particularly dependent on the availability of corpses and, therefore, on ghouls. Like England, America had no willed-body programs. To dismember a corpse on a table in a room full of strangers was a foreign and barbaric concept, and a punishment in the eyes of the public at the time. Worse, in most states, hanged criminals weren’t available for dissection either. If medical schools wanted a steady source of corpses, they had to find someone who was willing to do the very dirty work of supplying them.

  In the early days of body snatching in America, ghouls limited their activities to local graveyards, since they traveled by horse and wagon and had to have enough time to bring the corpses back to the medical schools before sunrise. Later, the advent of railroads allowed them to travel farther afield to collect corpses.

  Train travel made it possible for them to ship large batches of corpses from state to state, any time of the day or night. In the process, they developed a spiderweb of shipping hubs, informants, and anatomist clients, which in many cases extended hundreds of miles. Small companies popped up to negotiate these shipmen
ts, finding reliable suppliers, buying the corpses, packing them up, and getting them to out-of-state clients.

  The brokers and ghouls devised clever ways of disguising and preserving their “goods” for the journey. One method was to “pickle” the corpses in brine—likely a combination of salt and vinegar—and to pack them in wooden casks.

  To procure corpses, the ghouls used a method similar to the one used by their counterparts in England. Like the Borough Gang, they traveled in groups. Typically, they carried with them a spade, a keyhole saw, and a piece of rope. In 1878, the New York Times featured this description from a Kentucky grave robber, who had described it to a local reporter from the Courier Journal:

  On arriving at the grave, the spade is first called into use. One-half of the grave is marked off, and the dirt from the upper half of the coffin is thrown out. This work can be performed by a professional in about eight minutes. At this point, the saw comes into use. The saw is started into one edge of the coffin, and soon, with a noise resembling sobs and groans, has cut through the upper board, and often through the shroud and flesh of the subject! The further work of opening the coffin is easily performed. The manipulator of the saw raises his body with a hand on either side of the grave, a foot above the coffin’s lid, and, loosening his hold upon either side, precipitates his whole weight upon the lid, which gives way with a crash.

  Some body snatchers preferred a more delicate approach; rather than saw through the coffin lid and risk damaging the flesh of their prize, they drilled a line of holes across the top of the coffin. On occasion, a coffin would be fitted with a glass lid, which was easier to break than wood and made the body snatcher’s job simpler. In any case, the ghoul removed the lid and lowered a rope down to his assistant. The rope, which had a slipknot or a metal hook at the end, was thrown around the head of the corpse and word was given to the man up above to “hoist away.”

  This method of retrieval did not always proceed smoothly. “I remember once that the whole head of a woman whose neck we tied the rope around came off in our grasp,” the resurrectionist told the Courier Journal reporter. Once the corpse was out of the grave, the men would “double up the body ‘nose and knee like’ and dump it in a sack, put it in a wagon, and come to town.”

  Clues to a good corpse could be had for a fee. It was customary in some parts of the country for the undertaker to leave a piece of coal at the site of a particularly auspicious grave. The undertaker, in turn, received a portion of the body snatcher’s profits. Other informants included the minister, who, having led the funeral service, was familiar with the burial site, the caretaker of the cemetery, and the grave digger.

  The ghouls’ victims were almost always poor men, since male cadavers had better musculature. They were also often black. Partly, this was a matter of convenience. It was customary in some cities to bury poor people and African Americans next to each other, or in neighboring cemeteries. The poor were often interred naked, without coffins, sometimes in mass graves, which made them very easy to steal.

  Mostly, though, the reason was simply prejudice. According to the book Bones in the Basement: Post-Mortem Racism in Nineteenth Century Medical Training, in 1831, the Medical College of South Carolina “advertised in a circular that it obtained ‘subjects . . . for every purpose’ from the African American population rather than the white population of Charleston so that they could carry out ‘proper dissections . . . without offending any individuals.’”*4

  More than forty years after England put an end to body snatching, the body business was thriving in America. In 1878, according to Michael Sappol’s research, at least twelve body snatchings made the newspapers, and there were likely many more that were never reported. Citizens lived in terror that their bodies or the bodies of their loved ones would be stolen. They hired watchmen to safeguard the coffins, buried their family members in “mortsafes,” which were metal cages that enclosed the coffins, and invested in all kinds of other creative gizmos marketed by opportunistic undertakers.

  One gadget popular in Indiana was the “grave torpedo.” The torpedo consisted of a simple spring attached to an iron cup containing explosive powder. If a body snatcher disturbed the dirt over a coffin, his movements would activate the spring, an explosion would result, and the dirt would be thrown up in the ghoul’s face. How successful this was in deterring the body snatchers is unclear.

  The protests of the public did little to curb the body trade. As long as there was demand for specimens, there were ghouls skulking in the cemeteries. When states made it a crime to steal bodies, the price of corpses rose, but the surgeons and medical students continued to buy from the ghouls. They claimed to have no choice. One anatomist in Michigan complained that he needed as many as ninety to a hundred bodies every year. “In order to meet this enormous demand, I have labored early and late and have tested every honorable method,” he said, but in the end he fell back on “other means.”

  No corpse was safe from the ghouls. In May 1878, congressman John Scott Harrison died suddenly in North Bend, Ohio. News of the congressman’s death attracted a lot of attention. He was a wealthy man, the son of a former U.S. president, which made him a near celebrity in that era, and consequently his corpse was the subject of keen interest. Surgeons would have been eager to study his brain, to examine his heart and its ventricles, to cut through his skin down to the bone, to dissect his arteries and veins.

  Knowing this, and fearing that grave robbers would steal his body, Harrison’s sons weren’t about to take any chances. In addition to a coffin, they ordered a special cement vault for their father’s body. The vault was to be covered up with a heavy stone and then the whole thing filled with rocks and logs. With a man so important, they couldn’t be too cautious. They even arranged for a watchman to come and check on the grave every hour for a week after the funeral.

  On the appointed day, after all of the security measures were in place, Harrison’s friends and family gathered around his grave by the Ohio River to say good-bye. The ceremony proceeded smoothly until suddenly one of the mourners spotted a suspicious sign at a nearby plot. The dirt around the grave of a young boy had been disturbed—a telltale sign of a grave robbing. Sure enough, when they went to investigate the plot, the mourners turned up nothing but worms. It was just as they had feared: The boy’s body had been stolen.

  Outraged that anyone could be so brazen and unfeeling as to steal the body of a small child, and fearing that the same criminals might get to Harrison, the group wasted no time in organizing a search party. Led by Benjamin Harrison, the congressman’s son, they headed straight for Cincinnati, which was then home to several medical schools. The police joined them, and by the next day they had obtained a search warrant for the Medical College of Ohio.

  Finding no trace of the boy at the school, they were about to leave when one of them noticed a rope on a pulley leading down through a trapdoor in the floor. Curious, they decided to see what was on the other end. As they pulled on the rope, a naked male figure rose up slowly through the floor. The man’s head had been wrapped in cloth. He was too large to be a boy, that was certain, but the mourners were intrigued. When they removed the cloth, much to their horror, there staring back at them was the pale face of Congressman Harrison.

  Sure enough, when they went to investigate, they discovered that Harrison’s grave had been dug into during the night and the glass cover of his coffin broken in pieces. The watchman, whom they had paid to keep the robbers away, had no explanation.

  The police promptly arrested the medical school diener and charged him with concealing a stolen body. During their inquiries, they learned that the Miami Medical College, another Cincinnati medical school, was being used as a shipping hub by a local grave robber.

  Dr. Henri Le Caron, who went by the alias Dr. Charles O. Morton, was a handsome and daring doctor who had worked his way through Detroit Medical College moonlighting as a ghoul. He had since become the head of a gang of body snatchers and was in the business of f
urnishing corpses from Ohio to the University of Michigan by way of the Miami Medical College. Once he had enough specimens for a shipment, he loaded them into barrels labeled “pickles” and sent them on to Michigan. When the Ohio police learned about his scheme, they rushed to Ann Arbor. Sure enough, there in the pickling vat of the morgue, where the corpses were preserved, was the body of the small boy who had been laid to rest next to Congressman Harrison.

  In a letter to the Cincinnati Times, the Dean of the Faculty at the Ohio Medical College, Dr. Robert Bartholow, denied any knowledge of the Harrison theft. “A very great misconception seems to exist as regards the part taken by the Faculty and their assistants, in procuring the material for dissection,” he wrote. “The men engaged in the business of procuring subjects are, of course, unknown to the Faculty. They bring the material to the college, receive the stipulated price, and disappear as mysteriously as they come.”

  Incensed, Benjamin Harrison wrote his own letter to the citizens of Cincinnati, which was published in the New York Times. “He charges the distinguished men who compose the Faculty of the Ohio College,” the Times reported, “with shielding the guilty party from justice. The bodies brought to the college, he says, are purchased and paid for by an officer of the college. The body snatcher stands before him, and takes from his hand the fee for his hellish work. He is not an occasional visitant. He is often there, and it is silly to say he is unknown. ‘Who did it, gentlemen of the Faculty? Who . . . hung him by the neck in the pit?’”

  A grand jury later indicted Dr. Morton and J. Q. Marshall, the diener, but predictably no professor at either medical school was ever charged. Medical school faculties consistently escaped prosecution. But cases like the “Harrison Horror” eventually forced states to address the problem of grave robbing once and for all. The issue of how to obtain a sufficient quantity of corpses for dissection had been debated for years all over the country, but it wasn’t always satisfactorily resolved.