William Burke and William Hare, Ulster-born immigrants, embark on a grim scheme to pass off cheese mould as a patent medicine. When their fraud is exposed, they flee to an inn run by Hare’s wife, Lucky. There, one of her lodgers has already died, and she urges them to remove the body. A quick stop for a drink introduces them to a murkier opportunity: Fergus, a local enforcer for the ruthless Danny McTavish, relays that Dr Knox is paying well for cadavers, especially as demand grows. Seizing the chance, Burke and Hare decide to sell the corpse to Knox, and in a moment of desperate improvisation they break the spine to cram the body into a barrel for the smuggle through the city.
The deal with Knox is struck after a tense negotiation, and the mortgaged body yields a handsome sum for each new dissection. Buoyed by money and bravado, Burke and Hare turn to grave-robbing in earnest, hoping to stock Knox’s dissection table. Their plan hits a grim snag when they exhume an already long-dead corpse and are chased from the cemetery by militia men, Burke even being shot in the rear during the pursuit. Back at the inn, Lucky is intoxicated and almost unconsolable, yet she reveals she knows what they’ve been up to. Regardless, she surprises them by proposing a partnership: she will take a “tax” of a pound per corpse as a home-front share of the gains, easing the tension with a sly, pragmatic endorsement.
Trouble escalates when Burke is kidnapped by McTavish and Fergus, who have also seized Hare. McTavish demands half the Knox money and threatens to kill them if their haul doesn’t cover his cut. The men are dumped on the road and forced to plot murder after murder to recover what they’ve lost, tightening the grip of fear and greed around them. Suspicion swirls through Edinburgh as missing-person posters proliferate and Captain Tom McLintock of the militia begins to connect the dots. Burke’s nerves fray while Hare retreats into plans to pivot the operation toward a legitimate funeral-parlor business.
McTavish captures Hare again and extorts the remainder of the money, prompting a dangerous twist when McTavish reappears as Knox’s next dissection cadaver. Captain McLintock recognizes the figure and links him to Knox’s growing collection of anatomical photographs—photos that include people reported missing. Knox’s confession about his arrangement with Burke and Hare seals the moral collapse of the scheme. McLintock arrests Burke and Ginny Hawkins, along with Hare and Lucky, in a chilling confrontation that takes place even as the couples are engaged in intimate moments.
In prison, Burke shows remorse, but Hare urges silence, arguing that confession would doom all of them, including the women. The authorities, keen to shield Edinburgh’s medical schools and their vast funding, pressure the case into a quiet resolution, even bribing McLintock with a promotion. Knox’s anatomical photographs are destroyed, erasing a damning record, as McLintock delivers a grim ultimatum: any confession from one prisoner will free the others. Burke chooses to confess so that Ginny may go free, delivering his final line, “I did it for love,” before his execution. The narrative closes with a note on the fates of each character and a final glimpse of Burke’s actual skeleton housed in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
