Burke & Hare Part 1

When twenty-seven-year-old James Bullock was shot and killed in St. Louis in the winter of 1958, investigators immediately focused their attention on Bullock’s wife, Edna, who was the beneficiary of her husband’s large life insurance policy. Witnesses recalled seeing the victim b ...  Show more

In April 1834, a massive fire broke out at the mansion of Delphine LaLaurie on Royal Street in New Orleans French Quarter. LaLaurie was known to have kept several slaves as servants in the home, but when bystanders attempted to enter the house to rescue those trapped inside, they ...  Show more

The Burke and Hare case was a scandalous episode in 19th-century Edinburgh where William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants, resorted to murder to supply fresh corpses to medical schools. Operating in the early 1820s, they targeted vulnerable individuals, including trav ...  Show more

In 19th-century Edinburgh, two men on the hunt for money found a lucrative industry: grave robbing. But the infamous Burke and Hare didn’t want to dig up corpses. Instead, they delivered death to the gullible, and brought the bodies to one high-paying professor. Learn more about ...  Show more

When a tenant at their boarding house died in 1827, William Burke and William Hare found a way to make some extra money: selling bodies to a medical school. But to keep it up, they’d need a fresh supply of dead bodies — and those were hard to come by. Naturally, at least. Learn m ...  Show more