Today we tell a tale suitable for Halloween: the story of the murdering body-snatcher who was hanged for his crimes and who left the legacy of his name.

On Halloween night of 1828, a Scottish landlord named William Hare and his lodger William Burke made a mistake that proved their undoing. For some time, the two men had been stealing corpses from graves and selling them (illegally) to a local surgeon for dissection. Then they turned to murder, luring wayfarers to Hare's lodging house, getting them drunk, and then smothering them (or, in the case of feistier victims, strangling them).

Hare and Burke's mistake was this: instead of continuing to kill unknown travelers, on the last night of October they selected an elderly local woman to be their victim. Her disappearance was noticed and the killers were caught. Burke was executed before a crowd of 30,000, many of whom chanted "Burke him!"

So began the use of burke, the verb meaning "to kill by suffocation or strangling." That sense is no longer in common use, but before it died off, it gave rise to the extended sense "to suppress quietly or indirectly." Nowadays, burke also means "to set aside without consideration or decision."

Appropriately, William Burke's own body was itself dissected at a medical school. Ironically, his crime inspired the liberalization of dissection laws, allowing anatomists to legally obtain corpses more easily.

The grisly murders of Burke and Hare inspired two authors: Robert Louis Stevenson and his story "The Body Snatchers" and Dylan Thomas and his screenplay "The Doctor and The Devils". Both became movies. tjoeb};>