tr.v. burked, burk·ing, burkes To suppress or extinguish quietly; stifle: burked the investigation by failing to reappoint the commission.
Article on the origin of the word burking (burkeing)
Another of Hare’s lodgers, Joseph the Miller, fell ill not many days later. Joseph owed no money to Hare and was not as seriously ill as Donald had been, but Hare and Burke discussed the situation and decided, with no medical expertise whatsoever, that Joseph was going to die, and was in pain, and they decided to put him out of his misery.The two, showing great sympathy for Joseph’s discomfort, gave the sick man glasses of whisky until Joseph fell unconscious. Then one of the men held Joseph’s nose and mouth shut while the other spread himself across the victim’s prone body, pining the arms and preventing any struggle.
Joseph never regained consciousness and was soon on Knox’s doorstep. Inadvertently, Burke and Hare had stumbled onto a foolproof method of murder with Joseph: it appeared that the victim had died from illness or drunkenness and there were no incriminating marks. They would repeat the process frequently over the next 11 months.
If you could take a time-machine trip back to late-1880s Baltimore, you might hear the above ballad sung while strolling the city's cobblestone streets. The macabre ditty recounts a brutal murder that was Baltimore's--if not the country's--only case of "burking."The American Heritage Dictionary offers three definitions for the verb "burke," including "to suppress or extinguish quietly" and "to avoid; disregard." But it's the final definition that's relevant here: "To execute by suffocation so as to leave the body intact and suitable for dissection." We owe the term to one William Burke, an Irish-born grave robber who tired of digging up corpses--and started producing them instead. He's thought to have killed 32 people in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1820s, plying victims with liquor and then suffocating them. The warm corpses were trucked down to the local dissection room and turned into cold cash. (Anatomical study was a burgeoning field then and test subjects were bought on a cash-on-the-coffin basis.)
Baltimore's burkers were less subtle men, substituting bludgeoning and stabbing for strangulation, but their motivation was the same as that of their forebear. In 1886 they killed Emily Brown and sold her corpse to the University of Maryland School of Medicine for $15. [snip]
The cold-blooded, cash-driven crime shocked the city ("Burking in Baltimore" blared a front-page headline in The Sun on Dec. 13, 1886). Every Baltimorean who went missing was assumed to have been burked. H.L. Mencken was a child at the time and recalls the burking hysteria in his autobiography Happy Days--writing (joshingly) that the University of Maryland med school "swarmed with medical students who never had enough cadavers to supply their hellish orgies." Mencken reports that the more fearful of his west-side neighbors wouldn't even walk past the school for fear of being yanked in and opened up. In actuality the Brown murder helped speed the enactment of laws that put the kibosh on the cash-for-cadavers trade. [snip]