This time it happened in Valencia. The case became known after a complaint from a City Council for a funeral that did not take place. On January 29, the National Police announced the dismantling of a criminal organization that allegedly stole corpses and then sold them to medical schools, at a rate of 1,200 euros per piece.
This organization not only trafficked from a funeral home the stolen bodies of vulnerable, uprooted people with no known relatives in hospitals and residences, but, after dissection and dismemberment in anatomy classes, they smuggled the remains returned from university faculties. in the coffins of other deceased persons destined for cremation that were in the care of their relatives. A business as round as it was mean, since the medical schools paid the costs of transporting and cremating the remains that they returned to the funeral home that supplied human bodies.
Needless to say, there are strict protocols in Spain to prevent such grotesque cases of illegal trafficking of corpses from occurring. Even so, given that death has long since taken a secondary place, if not absent, in the concerns of the living, as was seen in nursing homes during the first months of the pandemic, it would surely be necessary to pay more attention to this matter. What’s more, tomb looting is another criminal activity that is increasing in cemeteries across half of Spain.
It is still too early to know if the perpetrators of this case were inspired by a story by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled The Body Snatcher, which the brilliant Scottish author based on some well-known real events that occurred in Edinburgh at the beginning of the 19th century and which, years They would later be described in detail by William Roughhead (1870-1952), a lawyer and criminologist, also from Edinburgh.
Be that as it may, the truth is that the similarities between what has just been uncovered in Valencia and the crimes committed two centuries ago in the capital of Scotland make your hair stand on end. Of course, the story of the heartless thieves that Roughhead tells, a certain William Burke and his accomplice named Hare, ends badly, or well, depending on how you look at it.
Arrested, tried and sentenced to die by asphyxiation in public – the method Burke used to murder his defenseless victims – the ‘performance’ (the term used by Roughhead) was attended by no less than 25,000 spectators, many of whom passed by. all the cold and rainy night before in the elements, in order to get a good position. Sir Walter Scott, the famous author of Ivanhoe, witnessed the execution from the balcony of a building overlooking the square where the scaffold had been set up.
The next day, Burke’s body was taken to the Medical School, where Dr. Monro proceeded to dissect it before a select audience, as the judge had sentenced. The doors were then opened wide to allow some 30,000 curious onlookers to file through the operating room. But the show was not over yet. What was left of Burke was flayed, the hide tanned, and finally put into a barrel of brine; The skeleton was taken to the university’s Anatomical Museum. Roughhead’s grandfather bought for a shilling a piece of Burke’s tanned hide, which he kept in an old wooden snuff box inherited by his criminalist grandson.
As for the accomplice Hare, since his testimony had been fundamental in the investigation against Burke, the judge released him, a decision that provoked a wave of public indignation and several popular attempts to put him on trial for his part in the crimes, amen from a failed lynching from which he narrowly escaped and disappeared from the map.
It remains to be seen how what happened in Valencia will end.
