1831: The Burking Murder: Elizabeth Ross Smothers an Elderly Woman to Sell Her Corpse
In August 1831, Elizabeth Ross suffocated 84-year-old Caroline Walsh at lodgings in Goodman’s Yard, Minories, London. Walsh had been lured to move in with Ross and her partner Edward Cook. Ross held her hand over the elderly woman’s mouth for half an hour as she lay on the bed, killing her to sell the body to medical institutions, a practice known as burking.
The case emerged during a period of intense demand for cadavers in British medical schools, driven by the expansion of anatomical education following the Napoleonic Wars. Just three years earlier, the infamous Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh had shocked the country, and the London Burkers, John Bishop and Thomas Williams, had committed a similar anatomy murder the same year as Ross.
