At length the time for “doing it” arrives. Burke and Hare got up a sham fight, to produce a noise of brawling and quarrelling, common enough in their horrid abode; and when this has been continued long enough as they think, Burke suddenly springs like a hungry tiger on his victim, whom one of his accomplices had, as if by accident, thrown down,--flings the whole weight of his body upon her breast,--grapples her by the throat,--and strangles her outright. Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour elapse while this murderous operation is going on, and ere it is completed; during the whole of which time Hare, by his own confession in the witness-box, sat upon the front of the bed, a cool spectator of the murder, without raising a cry or stretching out a hand to help the unhappy wretch thus hurried into eternity by his associate fiend Burke. As to the women (Helen M‘Dougal, Burke’s helpmate, and the wife of the miscreant Hare) they seem to have retreated into a passage closed in by an outer door, “when they saw him (Burke) on the top of her” (Docherty), and to have remained there while he was perpetrating the murder; without, however, uttering a single sound or doing a single act, calculated to interrupt the murderer in his work of blood, or to procure assistance to the dying victim. These she-devils were familiar with the work of death; and one of them, the wife of Hare, confessed it in the witness-box. She had seen, she said, such “tricks” before. No language can add to the impression which these facts are calculated to produce. The succeeding events, however, are not less picturesquely horrifying. The murder was committed at eleven o’clock, and in an hour after, or at twelve, Burke fetches Paterson, the assistant or servant of a teacher of Anatomy in Edinburgh, to whom he was in the habit of selling the bodies of his victims, to the spot--the murdered body being by this time stuffed under the bed and covered with straw; and, pointing to that truly dreadful place, tells him that he has got a subject for him there, which will be ready for him in the morning. The demons then appear to have recreated themselves with fresh dozes of liquor; and about four or five in the morning, the two women already mentioned, with a fellow of the name of Broggan who had joined the party, after the deed was done,--laid down in the bed, beneath which the murdered body of Docherty, not yet cold in death, had been crammed, and went to sleep, some of them at least, as coolly as if nothing of the kind had occurred. When daylight returned, the tea-box, so often mentioned in the course of the trial, was procured, and the slaughtered body crammed into it, and sent off by the porter M‘Culloch, to Surgeons’ Square; after which Burke and his accomplice Hare set off for Newington to obtain the whole or part of the price of the subject they had procured by murder, and actually got _five pounds_, being one-half of the price agreed upon.[1]