Burke, William, a notorious murderer, native of Ireland; executed in 1828 for wholesale murders of people in Edinburgh by suffocation, after intoxicating them with drink, whose bodies he sold for dissection to an Edinburgh anatomist of the name of Knox, whom the citizens mobbed; he had an accomplice as bad as himself, who, becoming informer, got off.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Burke, Robert O'Hara * Burkitt, William