When Scotland Yard Took On Resurrectionists

They worked by flickering lamplight, prowling from one grave to the next, digging and heaving, leaving in their wake a trail of rot and desecration. Come morning, the cemetery gates opened to reveal, scattered among the lopsided tombstones, “coffins with their once-living and moving tenants exposed in all the horrors—the revolting horrors—of decomposition and putrefaction.” Four other coffins, hauled from the earth, lay “emptied of all their contents, save the clothes of the deceased.” And so it was on a November night in 1830, the Resurrection Men plied their morbid trade in a Cambridgeshire cemetery.

Body snatching, the plundering of graves for fresh corpses, was prevalent and profitable in nineteenth-century Britain. Against this macabre backdrop, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Its dark exploration of death and the morality of scientific experiment touched on topics very much in the public consciousness at the time. “To examine the causes of life,” Dr Frankenstein writes, “we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.” To find the raw material necessary for his grim experiments, Frankenstein confesses to having “dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave.”

As in the novel, originally published in 1818, the advancement of medical studies and a flourishing desire to understand human anatomy fueled the real-life and gruesome crime of grave robbing. Ten medical schools opened in and around London between 1824 and 1834. A report at the time from the Select Committee on Anatomy “suggested that there were around 800 students at medical schools in London, of whom 500 practiced dissection.” Meeting this demand required an annual supply of “450–500 corpses.” Cadavers proved a hot commodity.

The bodies of those hanged for murder traditionally provided fodder for medical studies—a result of the Murder Act of 1751, which stipulated such corpses “be conveyed . . . to the hall of the Surgeons Company . . . [and] shall be dissected and anatomized by said surgeon.” But in the 1800s, as the number of executions decreased and the number of medical students increased, supply could not meet demand.

“The absolute necessity of having a good supply for the use of students, so as to prevent them going off to rival schools,” notes one contemporary history, “caused the teachers to offer large prices, and thus made it worthwhile for men to devote themselves entirely to obtaining bodies for this purpose.”

Enter the Resurrectionists, so named because they “resurrected” the dead. Often thieves by trade, they represented “the most desperate and abandoned class of the community.” They worked in gangs and stalked graveyards at night in search of recently filled graves and fresh product. Some dug up the coffin, while others went about it with a bit more—for lack of a better word—finesse. They’d dig down to the casket, pry it open with a crowbar, tie a rope around the neck or secure it beneath the armpits, and haul the corpse from its place of eternal slumber. It was, decried one paper, a “dreadful crime by which the tables of the dissecting-rooms have been so wastefully covered with subjects.” Dreadful it might have been, but it proved lucrative. A fresh body might fetch as much as 16 guineas (roughly £2,200 or $2,800 today).

To prevent such abominations, churchyards and cemeteries employed night watchmen and built “high walls topped with broken glass or iron spikes.” It was not uncommon for the bereaved to stand sentry, night after night, at the graves of their recently deceased loved ones until certain the body had turned to rot. One innovative gentleman with a mind for engineering pitched his idea to the press. Reported The Northampton Mercury on 27 February 1830:

“Preservation of the Dead.—A country mechanic, for the preservation of the bodies of deceased persons from the hands of resurrectionists, says, ‘I can fit a 6lb grenade, to which is attached a single spring and percussion cap, to the inside of a coffin, in such a manner to preserve it free of moisture, and keep it effective for three months; during which period, should the resurrectionist attempt the removal of either the corpse or the coffin, instant death would in all probability be the result.’ Resurrectionists beware!”

Some went beyond robbing graves. Sixteen people died at the hands of the infamous William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh over a ten-month period in 1828. Smothering and suffocation—what became known as “burking”—was their preferred method of killing, as it left no signs of violence. A local anatomist, ignorant of where the bodies came from, purchased them for his lectures. Upon the duo’s capture in October, Hare turned Crown’s evidence and escaped the gallows. Burke swung on 28 January 1829. Anatomy Professor Alexander Monro at the University of Edinburgh publicly dissected Burke’s body four days later.

The bell of the dissecting room at London’s recently established King’s College in the Strand rang at 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, 5 November 1831. William Hill, the room’s porter, answered the door to Jonathan Bishop and James May. He knew both men, as he had purchased corpses from them in the past. May asked Hill if he was in need of any dissecting material.

“Not particularly,” Hill replied—but, out of curiosity, asked, “What have you got?”

“A male subject,” May said, his voice slurred with drink. The body was that of a fourteen-year-old boy they’d be willing to part with for twelve guineas.

Hill balked at the price. He said the school had no present need for cadavers, but he would check with the demonstrator of anatomy to be sure. He invited May and Bishop inside, out of the wet November gloom, and fetched Richard Partridge. Like Hill, Partridge refused to pay the asking price but countered with nine guineas.

“I’ll be damned if it should go under ten guineas,” May spat and staggered outside.

“Never mind him,” Bishop said, “he’s drunk. It shall come in for nine guineas.”

Bishop and May wandered off into the grey afternoon and returned between two and three o’clock. They brought with them two colleagues—Thomas Williams and Michael Shields—and a large hamper. Hill invited them in. Bishop and May lugged the hamper into an adjoining room and opened it to reveal a body wrapped in canvas. May, in his drunken stupor, “turned the body very carelessly out of the sack.”

The body, both men said, was “a good one.” Hill noticed it looked “particularly fresh” and wondered aloud what took the life of one so young. Bishop and May shrugged. “It appeared different from a body that had laid in a coffin,” Hill later said. “The left arm was turned up towards the head, and the fingers of the hand were firmly clenched.” A cut on the dead boy’s forehead aroused Hill’s suspicions, but Bishop said it had just occurred when the body fell from its wrapping. Hill, not sure what to make of things, summoned Partridge to have a look.

Partridge, accompanied by some of his students, entered the room and examined the delivery. “The eyes seemed very fresh, and the lips were full of blood,” Partridge recalled. “The chest looked as if blood had recently been wiped from it.” Partridge excused himself and his colleagues under the guise of collecting the funds to complete the transaction. One of the students couldn’t help but notice the body “corresponded with the description of a boy said to be missing, given in handbills posted up about the streets.”

Partridge returned and told Bishop and May he only had a £50 note and some change—but, if they were willing to wait, he’d break the larger bill.

“Give me what money you have,” Bishop suggested, “and I shall call on Monday for the remainder.”

May offered to take the £50 and get it changed somewhere. “Oh no,” Partridge said, smiling, and left the room. He returned fifteen minutes later with an inspector and several constables from F (Covent Garden) Division, who took the four men into custody. May, emboldened by liquor, struck one officer several times before being subdued. The constables dragged the men—and the hamper with the body stashed back inside—to the Covent Garden station, where a battered May crawled in on all fours “with his smock frock over his head.” The division’s senior officer, Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas, ordered the four prisoners placed in a room together.

“What do you have to say?” Thomas asked May. “You’re being charged with having come into possession of the subject in an improper manner.”

May scoffed. “I have nothing to do with it. The subject is that gentleman’s,” he said, jabbing a finger in Bishop’s direction. “I merely accompanied him to get the money for it.”

Thomas asked Bishop whose body it was.

“The body is mine,” Bishop said, “and if you want to know how I got it, you may find it out if you can.”

Thomas asked Bishop what he did for a living. “I am a bloody body snatcher.”

Thomas left the men and went to the back of the station house to view the corpse. Two constables lifted the dead boy from the hamper, gently removed his body from the sack and laid him on a table. “It struck me as the body of a person who had recently died,” Thomas said. “I perceived that the teeth had been extracted from it.”

Beyond that, it had no tales to tell.

A heavy police guard conveyed the prisoners to Bow Street Magisterial Court that evening. “From the appearances on the body of the deceased and the fact that two of the prisoners are well known body-snatchers, the rumor almost instantly spread that the unfortunate boy was ‘burked’ by the prisoners,” reported The Times. “The crowds which surrounded the office and pressed forward to hear the examination were far greater than we ever remember to have seen on any former occasion.”

The morbidly curious packed the room to capacity. Thomas, sworn in, stood at the bar and said he was charging the four men in custody with “the murder of a boy aged about fourteen years whose name I am unable to state.” Although he had no evidence at present, he said, representatives from King’s College would attest to the prisoners trying to sell the body. Thomas told the court that Bishop, since his arrest, had made a statement saying he had acquired the body from Guy’s College.

“I sent a message to Guy’s Hospital with a request as to know whether a boy answering the description of the deceased had died there lately,” Thomas explained. “I received for answer a slip of paper stating that since the 28th three persons had died there, that one was a woman and the other two were males aged 33 and 37. Bishop’s statement as to where he obtained the body cannot be true.”

Asked if they had anything to say in their defense, Bishop said nothing. May, “dressed in a countryman’s frock and who appeared perfectly careless during the examination,” played ignorant. “It is not my subject,” he said, “and I know nothing about it.” Williams and Shields both asserted their innocence.

The magistrate ordered the prisoners be remanded into custody and asked that an autopsy be performed “to come to a positive conclusion as to the cause of death.”

“The prisoners were then removed to the cells at the back of the office,” wrote one reporter, “and as they passed from the bar, they were groaned and hissed at by some persons in the office.”

Dr. George Beaman, a local surgeon, performed a cursory examination of the body that night at the station. The boy, in Beaman’s estimation, appeared to have been dead no more than thirty-six hours. “The face appeared swollen,” he noted, “the tongue swollen, the eyes prominent and bloodshot, and the tongue was protruding between the lips.” He observed a wound, about an inch long, above the left eyebrow. Blood still oozed from the cut, but the forehead showed no sign of fracture. “The teeth had been all extracted,” he observed, “the gums bruised, and portions of the jawbone had been broken and removed with the teeth.”

The next morning, Saturday, 6 November, a sad and desperate procession filed past the child. Thomas had already received eight requests to view the deceased from parents of missing boys “aged thirteen to fourteen.” “The parents could in no way account for their absence,” he said, “and they all appeared in the greatest distress of mind. One of the boys so lost was deaf and dumb.”

Not one of the distraught parents claimed the mystery boy as their own. An Italian couple, however, claimed they recognized him but didn’t know his name. A street musician named Joseph Paragalli and his wife said they had known the boy in passing for the last two years. He was Italian and often wandered the streets carrying a cage suspended from his neck with two white mice in it. They last saw him strolling down Oxford Street at quarter past noon on Tuesday, 1 November.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.

That evening, Beaman—in the company of Richard Partridge and King’s College anatomy professor Herbert Mayo—performed the post-mortem. The body showed “not the slightest marks of violence” to the throat or chest. Examining the upper part of the skull, however, Beaman detected blood right beneath the scalp indicative of “violence or accident.” He turned the body over and peeled away the skin from the lower part of the head to just beneath the shoulders, revealing “three to four ounces” of coagulated blood “amongst the muscles there.” The spine was not fractured but, removing a vertebral arch to examine the spinal marrow, Beaman found “a quantity of coagulated blood . . . within the spinal canal, pressing upon the marrow.”

The heart had no blood in it; an indication of sudden death. The stomach contained the partially digested contents of a meal, which reeked of rum. “Digestion was going on at the time of death,” Beaman said. “I should think that death occurred about three hours after the meal.” He wiped his bloody hands on the front of his leather apron. “From the whole of my observations on the body,” he said, “I ascribe the death to a blow given on the back of the neck.”

On the morning of Tuesday, 8 November, Superintendent Thomas responded to a summons from a dentist named Thomas Mills, who had a practice at 39, Bridge House Place. Mills had read about the dead boy in the newspaper—particularly the details regarding the missing teeth. He produced a small cloth pouch and emptied it onto a table. Thomas looked down and saw a scattering of teeth. Mills said that on Friday, 4 November, a man walked into his practice and offered to sell twelve human teeth, “six for each jaw,” for a guinea. Mills examined the teeth, noticed one was chipped and questioned whether they all came from the same mouth.

“Upon my soul to God,” the man replied, “they all belonged to one head and not long since.”

The man explained the teeth had come from the fresh body of a boy fourteen or fifteen years old, who hadn’t been buried. Mills offered twelve shillings for the set. The man accepted the offer and left.

“On examining them afterwards,” Mills said, “I found that some part of the flesh of the gums was so firmly attached to them that I imagined they had been violently taken from the head. I found great difficulty in detaching it from them.”

With most likely the dead boy’s teeth in his possession, Thomas headed back to the station house. The coroner’s inquest was scheduled to begin that afternoon at the Unicorn pub in Henrietta Street.

“The room in which the inquest took place,” remarked one spectator, “was crowded almost to suffocation.” Three days of medical testimony and a recitation of the facts by Thomas failed to shed any light on the boy’s identity and how he suffered such a fate. The four accused certainly did nothing to elucidate the matter. Bishop strayed from his previous statements and said he had not acquired the body from Guy’s Hospital, but had actually pilfered it from a grave. “The reason I don’t like to say the grave I took it out of,” he said, “is because the watchmen about the grounds entrusted me—and, being men of family, I don’t wish to deceive them.”

Unmoved, the jury returned a verdict against all four of “wilful murder against some person or persons unknown” and urged Scotland Yard to conduct “a strict inquiry into the case.”

Excerpted from Scotland Yard: A History of the London Police Force’s Most Infamous Murder Cases by Simon Read. Published by Pegasus Crime, September 2024. Pick up your copy here.