The Anatomy Murders

Up the close and down the stair, Up and down with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the man who buys the beef. —anonymous children's song On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder. Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press. The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a living laborer.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Publisher Description

Inspired by three true-life SoCal homicide cases, "Anatomy of a Killer" becomes a labyrinth of shocking crime stories beginning with the disappearance of an Afghanistan Army veteran and the murder of his fiance. This is followed by the cold-case tale of an LAPD lady-cop who brutally murders her lover's wife. The trilogy is completed when a leading movie actor is bludgeoned to death by a pair of hustler-brothers in his Hollywood Hills mansion. Compelling...intriguing...a rich police procedural where no one of left unscathed in these sinister tales of greed and corruption...

A series of bizarre disappearances filled the citizens of early nineteenth-century Scotland with terror. When the perpetrators were finally apprehended in 1828, their motive roiled the nation: William Burke and William Hare had murdered for profit. The cadavers supplied a ready payout, courtesy of Dr. Robert Knox, who was desperate for anatomical subjects. Nearly two hundred years later, these scandalous murders continue to fire imagination in Scotland and beyond. From the start, the sensational events provoked artists and writers. While Sir Walter Scott resisted public comment, his correspondence gives his trenchant private opinion and shows him working busily behind the scenes and against the doctor. Many more mined the news outright. Serial novelist David Pae exploited the disturbance to lobby for religious belief in an increasingly secular world. A subsequent generation resurrected the grisly drama as fodder for the Victorian gothic-the murders figure prominently in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" and, more obliquely, in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The twentieth century saw the specters of Burke and Hare emerge in James Bridie's play The Anatomist, Hollywood horror films, television programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Frankensteinian retellings from Alasdair Gray. In this century, the story has been picked up by Smallville and Doctor Who. Recent allusions and reenactments range from the somber-in popular detective fiction by Ian Rankin-to the dark, camp comedy of Fringe Festival performances and the slapstick of John Landis's Burke and Hare. Featuring over thirty images and canvassing a wide range of media-from contemporary newspaper accounts and private correspondence to Japanese comic books and videogames-The Doctor Dissected analyzes the afterlife of this national trauma and considers its singular place in Scottish history.

A professional behavioral witness to more than a hundred capital trials explores the making of a murderer. CSI shows us where a crime is committed. Forensic detectives show us how. But what really goes on in the mind of killer? What is it in each potential victim that sparks in them the urge to take a life? What are the reasons behind a quick thrill kill, or slow torture? Between choosing someone they know, or a stranger? As they stand before a jury, after reams of graphic evidence, the question is no longer whether or not they committed the unthinkable. The question posed to Wanda Draper, expert in behavioral science and child development, and key witness in more than a hundred high-profile trials, is why? The answer is all that stands between a sentence of life in prison or death row. In this unique true-crime investigation, Draper shares some of the darkest cases of her career. She sheds light on the personal circumstances and critical life events that perverted childhoods and brought convicted murderers to trial. She reveals how the past casts a grave shadow over one’s future. And in doing so, explores one irrefutable fact: killers aren’t born, they’re made.

The second historical suspense novel in Imogen Robertson’s critically acclaimed Westerman and Crowther mystery series London, 1781. Harriet Westerman anxiously awaits news of her husband, a ship’s captain who has been gravely injured in the king’s naval battles with France. As London’s streets seethe with rumor, a body is dragged from the murky waters of the Thames. Having gained a measure of fame as amateur detectives for unraveling the mysteries of Thornleigh Hall, the indomitable Mrs. Westerman and her reclusive sidekick, anatomist Gabriel Crowther, are once again called on to investigate. In this intricate novel, Harriet and Crowther will discover that this is no ordinary drowning—the victim is part of a plot to betray England’s most precious secrets.

From the author of the #1 bestseller Senatorial Privilege comes this shocking, true story of the crimes, investigation, and trial of Antone Costa, the Cape Cod killer. The eventual discovery of the four horribly mutilated bodies buried in a secret place in the woods that the grisly serial killer called "his garden", and the subsequent trial seized the attention of the nation and will keep readers riveted as well.

When two worlds collidethe illegal transportation of tons of Mexican cartel marijuana to inner city gang members in a Midwestern citys 2hood3three bodies end up burning, caught in a web of greed as a major international drug deal goes very bad.