| 词汇 | burke |
| 词源 | burke. The best-known of eponymous murderers and among the most unwise, William Burke (1792–1829) was an Irish laborer who emigrated to Scotland in 1817. There he eventually opened a used-clothing store in Edinburgh and, far more important, rented a room from William Hare, a fel- low Irishman and owner of a boardinghouse catering to va- grants and elderly pensioners. It was in 1827 that Burke and Hare embarked upon their career. One of Hare’s lodgers—an old man named Donald—had died owing him four pounds, and the landlord convinced Burke that they had stumbled upon an easy source of income. Ripping the cover off the cof- fin in which parish authorities had sealed Donald, the pair hid his body in a bed and filled the coffin with tanner’s bark, resealing it and later selling the cadaver for seven pounds 10 shillings to Dr. Robert Knox, who ran an anatomy school in Surgeon’s Square. Burke and Hare soon expanded their operation. Another boarder lingered too long at death’s door and they helped him through, smothering the man with a pillow and selling his body to Knox for 10 pounds. Hare and his wife, and Burke and his mistress, Helen McDougal, proceeded to dispatch from 14 to 28 more unfortunates in similar fashion, receiving up to 14 pounds for each body. They were careful to smother their victims, leaving no marks of violence, so that it would appear that they were merely grave robbers. Whenever the boardinghouse supply ran low, they lured victims there, usu- ally choosing old hags, drunks, and prostitutes, whom they often plied with drink. If a candidate offered too much resis- tance to being smothered by a pillow, Burke would pin him down while Hare smothered him, holding his hands over the victim’s nose and mouth. But the murderers eventually got careless. First they killed Mary Peterson, a voluptuous 18-year-old, so free with her body that it was quickly recognized by Knox’s young medical students, who even preserved it before dissec- tion as a perfect example of female pulchritude. Then they did in “Daft Jamie” Wilson, a familiar, good-natured imbecile who made his living running errands on the streets of Edinburgh. Finally, the suspicions of neighbors aroused, police caught them with the body of a missing woman named Mary Dough- erty. Hare turned state’s evidence at the ensuing trial, which be- gan on Christmas Eve; he and his wife were freed, and Helen McDougal was discharged for lack of evidence. Burke for some reason foolishly refused to give state’s evidence. He was con- victed and hanged a month later on January 28, 1829, before a crowd of some 30,000. The word the murderer contributed to the language was even heard as he stood on the scaffold in the Grassmarket, spectators exhorting the executioner with cries of “Burke him, Burke him!” (i.e., don’t hang him but smother or strangle him to death). The crowd wanted to burke Hare, the real brains be- hind the operation, despite his immunity, but he escaped them and is believed to have died of natural causes many years later in England, where he lived under an assumed name. |
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