Arm of Eve E-Book

Sarah Bax Horton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 472

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Jack the Ripper is often called the world's most notorious unidentified killer, but he was not the first modern serial killer on the streets of London. Before him was another murderer who hunted from the River Thames – one arguably more sadistic and mercurial. The Thames Torso Killer has always lurked in the Ripper's shadow, despite the fact he murdered and dismembered at least four people over two years. He started to kill in 1887, over a year before the Ripper, and his last murder was in 1889, almost ten months after the death of Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper's last victim. In Arm of Eve, Sarah Bax Horton conducts her own investigation and uses modern criminal profiling to come up with her own suspect – a known criminal who knew the Thames like the back of his hand.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Sarah Bax Horton, 2024

The right of Sarah Bax Horton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 749 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

This book is dedicated to Detective Inspector John Regan of the Metropolitan Police Thames Division, also known as the river police

Contents

Introduction

  1   The first murder: Rainham, May 1887

  2   The Whitehall murder, September 1888

  3   The Battersea murder, Monday, 3 June 1889

  4   A suspect called ‘Lancashire Jack’

  5   The Pinchin Street murder, Whitechapel, where a woman’s torso was discovered at 5.25 a.m. on Tuesday, 10 September 1889

  6   Profiling the Thames Torso Killer

  7   The non-fatal attack on Jessie Miller, Monday, 1 July 1889

  8   The non-fatal attack on Elizabeth Sarah Warburton, Wednesday, 23 October 1889

  9   The Salamanca Place murder, Vauxhall, where a woman’s dismembered body was discovered on Sunday, 8 June 1902

10   A parallel case: the murder of Julia Martha Thomas in 1879, and a reconstruction of the Salamanca Place murder

11   Why not Jack the Ripper?

12   A final analysis of the Torso Killer

Conclusion and true crime reconstructions of the Thames Torso Murders

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Map

Select bibliography

Notes

Introduction

The Thames Torso Killer should, by rights, take precedence over Jack the Ripper as the world’s first unidentified modern serial killer. He started to kill in early 1887, over a year before the Ripper, and his last murder was in autumn 1889, almost ten months after that of the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Jane Kelly. The Torso Killer murdered and dismembered at least four women, in addition to the unborn child of the only victim who was identified. The police surgeons of the day pieced together the headless remains and provided best-guess descriptions of each woman, while Metropolitan Police officers worked through lists of missing persons. Despite their best endeavours, all but one went nameless to their graves. This book is named Arm of Eve after a sketch by Albrecht Dürer of Eve’s idealised left arm, its hand curled around the forbidden apple, representing the universal woman.

The Metropolitan Police Whitechapel Murders files cover the deaths of eleven women between 1888 and 1891. Those women were similar to each other in their destitution and dependence on street-hawking and soliciting. At least five were casual sex workers killed by Jack the Ripper: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. A sixth, Martha Tabram, was probably the Ripper’s first kill. Emma Smith, who died twenty-four hours after being attacked, said she was assaulted by a gang of men. Scotland Yard assessed Rose Mylett’s demise to be an accident. The murders of street walkers Alice Kinsey, or McKenzie, and Frances Coles also remained unsolved. Some commentators add Kinsey to the canon of women killed by Jack the Ripper, as her abdominal injuries were similar to the type of posthumous mutilations which he inflicted for his own gratification.

One of the last murders on those files was that of an unidentified woman referred to as the Pinchin Street trunk, whose dismembered torso was discovered under an East End railway arch. Like the other cases, it has long been considered a possible Ripper crime. But the Pinchin Street victim was killed by the Thames Torso Killer. The police of the day classified it as such, attributing it to a second serial killer active at the same time who was believed to have committed four murders. While the Ripper killed between August and November 1888, the Torso Killer started his attacks in April 1887 and probably stopped after the Pinchin Street murder in September 1889.

Extraordinarily, the Torso Killer operated at the same place and time as the Ripper, with whom he shared notable similarities. Like the Ripper, this killer picked his victims through chance sightings of women who fitted his ideal victim type. Mostly dark-haired and busty, they were of a similar age to his wife, and happened to be alone when he spotted them. A few of them, low on funds, might have occasionally sold their bodies for sex. Unlike the Ripper, who did not sexually assault his victims, the Torso Killer was a rapist turned killer; his approach based on the classic rapist’s mantra: isolate – inebriate – penetrate. His frustration with women manifested itself through violence, gaining control through brute force. It is clear from their injuries that his victims put up a vigorous defence. He was brutal, physical, under-educated, clever enough to develop a repeatable crime, but not so intelligent to grasp that his methods created a pattern that could be deciphered.

Unlike his notorious counterpart, the Torso Killer did not simply abandon his victims’ bodies. He cut them up and deposited the pieces at locations around Central London; not only in the River Thames and Regent’s Canal, but also in Battersea Park, a private garden, under a railway arch and, notably, in the foundations of New Scotland Yard. Mutilation and dismemberment are two distinct ‘signatures’ of murder. The Ripper’s primary objective was to open his victims’ abdomens and remove their organs. In extreme cases, he cut their faces and other body parts. The Torso Killer dismembered his victims’ bodies, both for gratification and disposal. This difference alone is sufficiently significant to indicate not one, but two serial killers, as defined by the police of the day.

The four murders typically attributed to the Torso Killer occurred in close sequence and are named after locations where body parts were found: Rainham in May 1887; Whitehall in September 1888, at the first peak of the Ripper scare; Battersea and Pinchin Street in 1889. The police surgeons of the day used scientific techniques to deduce the age, height and defining characteristics of each woman, while Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and divisional police officers appealed for information from the public to make a match. Only the ‘Battersea’ victim was ever identified, a pregnant 24-year-old from Chelsea named Elizabeth Jackson, demonstrating that the historical names were misnomers. They do not represent the locations where each woman was accosted or killed, frustrating the police investigation. As in any murder series, each subsequent case reveals something new about its perpetrator and confirms something consistent in his operational method.

The Metropolitan Police District covered a 15-mile radius of Charing Cross and was divided into four districts, sub-divided into divisions. Police from up to a dozen divisions investigated the Torso cases, reflecting the diverse locations where body parts were found. Ripper veterans from Whitechapel’s H Division worked on the Pinchin Street murder, as did divisional police surgeons led by early forensic expert Mr Thomas Bond and his assistant at Westminster Hospital, Doctor Charles Hebbert. Bond was the real powerhouse of the duo, being ‘probably the expert of his day, esteemed by his colleagues, often brought in when other medical evidence was in dispute’.1 Both men were also involved in the Ripper post-mortems, notably that of Mary Jane Kelly, after which Bond produced the world’s first profile of a serial killer.

The senior police officers involved in the Torso investigations also had Ripper experience. They included Metropolitan Police Commissioners Sir Charles Warren and his successor James Monro, CID Chiefs Robert Anderson and Melville ‘Mac’ Macnaghten, Chief Constable Colonel Bolton Monsell, H Division Superintendent Thomas Arnold, Chief Inspectors Henry Moore and John West, Detective Inspectors Donald Swanson, Frederick Abberline and John Shore, and Inspectors Charles Pinhorn and Edmund Reid. The author’s great-great-grandfather Harry Garrett was an H Division sergeant based at Leman Street police station, and was previously a constable in Greenwich’s R Division. Like his seniors, he worked in some capacity on the Ripper murders, as did Detective Sergeant Frank Froest, who was directly involved in the Pinchin Street Torso case owing to its East End location.

Several more police surgeons and officials were involved in both the Thames Torso and the Whitechapel Murders investigations. Doctor George Bagster Phillips, a stalwart of the Ripper case, was called out alongside his assistant Doctor Percy Clark, as was Doctor Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police surgeon who had conducted the post-mortem examination of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes. And one of the coroners was, again, Wynne Edwin Baxter.

The officers of Thames Division, the river police, were instrumental in bringing my proposed perpetrator of the Thames Torso Murders to an approximation of justice. The river police force numbered 200 men, with a chief inspector, seven inspectors, forty sub-inspectors, five detectives and 147 constables. Policemen patrolled the Thames in six-hour shifts, using twenty rowing boats and two steam launches.2 Their headquarters was at Wapping, in a building still in use today, although in this instance their police station at Waterloo Bridge was the scene of the action.

In ensuring the conviction of this perpetrator, Detective Inspector John Regan drew on his considerable local knowledge of the river’s smugglers, thieves and miscreants. Described in police records as precisely 5ft 6⅜ inches tall, with blue eyes and greying hair, Regan was born just north of the river in St George-in-the-East. A year older than my police ancestor Harry Garrett, he was his contemporary and, in 1891, his near-neighbour on Stepney’s Oxford Street, today’s Stepney Way.

A key document for any researcher into the Thames Torso Murders is a report in two parts written by Doctor Charles Hebbert with input from his senior colleague Bond. The report was compiled from lecture notes for students of forensic science, and was prefaced as being for their future guidance, should they be required to report the results of a post-mortem examination to the authorities:

When a medical man is called upon by the coroner or the police to examine such cases, he often is at a loss to know how much or how little to report, so in the following pages I have indicated the usual procedure, hoping that they may interest some students of forensic medicine, and perhaps aid them in framing a report if ever they are requested to make one.3

In it, Hebbert demonstrated how the post-mortem examination of a murder victim could assist in identifying the body, where possible state the cause of death, and deduce characteristics about the victim and perpetrator to direct the police investigation.

The Hebbert report definitively unites the four crimes committed in the period 1887–89:

The mode of dismemberment and mutilation was in all similar, and showed very considerable skill in execution, and it is a fair presumption from the facts, that the same man committed all the four murders.4

It makes two vitally important points: ‘the golden rule, as quoted by [forensic scientist Alfred Swaine] Taylor, is “that a medical man, when he sees a dead body, should notice everything”’5 and chillingly, that:

the cases taken as a whole are valuable as illustrating the difficulties we labour under in describing a person from such imperfect data, and as showing how a skilful, determined individual can murder and dispose of four bodies without detection.6

In the author’s hypothesis, although the killer evaded being charged with multiple murders, he was convicted of a serious lesser offence, putting him out of action for several years.

This series of crimes appears impossible to solve. The Torso Murders present several difficulties which at first sight seem intractable: where the perpetrator operated; how and where he accosted his victims if they were strangers; if not, how he knew them; where he killed them and secreted their body parts before disposal; even where he dumped their remains, as the tide took them far from that spot. Perhaps owing to the case’s impenetrability, the few writers who have written book-length examinations of the Thames Torso Killer have relied heavily on Ripper suspects in their theories about his identity. In the author’s analysis, the Torso and Ripper series are distinctly separate. In 2020, I made the startling discovery that, in the closing days of 1889, the Torso Murders might have been partly avenged by the river police. A search against my own profile of the killer uncovered a man with a criminal record, which documented his prosecution and subsequent custodial sentence for just one of his crimes.

My prime suspect is James Crick, a waterman and lighterman based at Horsleydown7 on the south bank of the River Thames adjacent to today’s Tower Bridge. Watermen rowed skiffs or wherries to transport passengers, or ships’ crews, along or across the river. They were licensed to carry a specific number of passengers depending on the size of their skiff, and a later chapter cites the limit of eight. Lightermen transported goods using a range of craft including the London lighter, also known as a Thames or dumb barge as it was not powered by sail or engine. Heavily reliant on the tides, it was manoeuvrable by a single man with a pair of large oars, or by a man and a boy, and if ‘above 50 tons burden’ by ‘at least two competent men’.8 Whilst lighting was a year-round trade, driven by traffic to and from the docks, watermen mainly plied their passenger trade in the fair-weather months between April and October.

James Crick fits the type of criminal profile that was applied to Jack the Ripper, of having an absent father, a dominant mother, and being a risk-taker whose frustration and aggression were often targeted against women. Like Hyam Hyams, named by the author as Jack the Ripper in One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper, the first victim of his violence was his wife. Later charged with rape and attempted murder in two separate incidents, Crick was convicted of a single charge of rape and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. After his early release from jail, a further murder suggested a possible match to the series, as a sackful of human remains was discovered in June 1902 at Vauxhall’s Salamanca Place. James Crick could have been the Torso Killer, and his victim type, method of violent assault and mobility on water fit that criminal profile. Unlike Jack the Ripper, there are no eyewitness accounts that link the killer to his victims, no link between his lodgings or relatives’ premises and the murder locations, and no distinctive physical or psychological characteristics that serve to identify him.

The Torso Killer was an opportunist, roving across much of Central London to solicit his victims. Like Jack the Ripper, he picked out a series of women who were solitary and vulnerable. She could have been anyone who fitted those criteria, whom he found attractive. He felt confident that he could intimidate each one into doing what he wanted, and that any offered resistance would be futile. Aged between 20 and 40, she was the sort of woman who was willing to have a laugh and a drink, and take up his chance offer of a free ride.

1

The first murder: Rainham, May 1887

You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’

The Queen’s Golden Jubilee took place in the glorious year of 1887, when every borough offered its own tribute to their monarch in the form of a statue, municipal improvement or personal gift. A year when, after fifteen years in the force, my police ancestor Harry Garrett was made acting sergeant at Lee Green police station in South East London, swiftly followed by his well-earned promotion to sergeant. But before the summer celebrations, on Wednesday, 11 May, a boatman fished a sackful of human remains from the River Thames at Rainham in Essex.

Accounts of what became known as ‘The Rainham Mystery’ begin at the same time and place: the morning of Wednesday, 11 May 1887, when the River Thames’s equivalent of a delivery driver, Essex lighterman Edward Hughes, spotted a bundle on the foreshore at Rainham Ferry. He jumped out of his craft, walked over and picked it up, looking for something of value. Even a corpse attracted a finder’s fee of 5 shillings paid by the local parish. The bundle gaped open to reveal a part of a human torso comprising a woman’s pelvis below the third lumbar vertebra. Named after the first place where a body part was washed up, Rainham marked the start of a series of murders sharing the same method of killing, dismemberment and disposal, and committed by the same hand.

The investigation united officers from the Essex Constabulary, the river police of Thames Division, and Scotland Yard, which was represented by Superintendent John Shore and Detective Inspector Arthur Hare. An officer of nearly thirty years’ experience, Shore would later work on the Ripper investigation, to which Hare was also connected as a personal friend of one its leading officers, Inspector Frederick Abberline. Hare and Abberline were initiated into the same Freemason’s Lodge, Zetland, on the same day in 1889.1 A high-flyer, Hare would retire in 1906 as a CID superintendent.2

The Rainham murder instantly presents two red herrings, as its stated time and place were both misapprehensions. The investigating police deduced that the body part had been washed by the tide 15 miles downstream from London, where the murder had occurred several weeks previously. On being alerted to Hughes’s find, the police immediately launched a search for the remaining body parts, starting with a small bight close to the spot where the bundle was discovered, as flotsam usually gathered there, in addition to other creeks and bays. Despite significant effort, they found nothing.

On Saturday, 14 May at Rainham’s Phoenix Hotel, 54-year-old Charles Carne Lewis, the highly experienced Coroner for South Essex, opened the inquest into the death of an unknown woman. The jury viewed the body part in an adjoining shed, where it ‘presented a very horrible appearance, there being only a portion of the body, and that in an advanced state of decomposition’.3

The first witness was Hughes, aged 24, a licensed lighterman who transported goods to and from the docks along the River Thames. A pen-and-ink drawing in the Illustrated Police News shows the fresh-faced Hughes staring in shock at what was an inaccurate depiction of a full-length, headless and armless torso.4 As the murders continued over the next eighteen months, equally gruesome sights would be depicted in the press, their sensationalism generating sales.

Hughes testified in detail about finding the remains:

At about 11.30 on Wednesday morning [11 May] he was on his barge at Rainham Ferry; the barge was lying alongside the jetty at Mr. Hempleman’s factory; the tide was flowing; he saw what appeared to be a bag, which the tide was washing up; the bag was about 30 feet from his barge; he went to it and brought it ashore; as he was picking the bag up it partially came undone, and he saw it contained part of the body of a woman; he told a man who was coming up into Rainham to inform the police; he left the body on the shore in charge of another lighterman [George Crook];5 he did not see any papers or any linen in the bag; he saw nothing but the body of the woman.6

Hempleman’s was a chemical and manure manufacturer employing eighty men. Described in the press as a ‘blood and bone factory on the marshes’,7 it was a suitably grisly location for that discovery. In a possible conflict of interest, its wealthy owner, Frederick Seband Hempleman, was the jury foreman.

Constable Stock, who was stationed at Rainham, took up the story:

[At] about 12.30 on Wednesday morning he received information which induced him to proceed to Rainham Ferry; on the shore near Mr. Hempleman’s factory he found a piece of sacking, tied up with cord; it was partially undone, and he could see it was part of the body of a woman; it was at once taken to a shed at the Ferry public-house, and then removed to the Phoenix Hotel; Dr. Calloway [sic] saw it the next day … 8

Stock gave the following replies to questions from the coroner. He confirmed that there was no linen or paper in the bag, no letters or mark of any kind on the sacking, and nothing peculiar in the cord with which the sack was tied.9 He added, ‘The knot was an ordinary one which anyone could tie, and had no distinctive character about it, such as a sailor’s knot [presumed to be a bowline or hitch knot] or a slip knot.’10 Both of the latter types of knot were more complex than the standard overhand knot.

The next witness was general practitioner and surgeon Doctor Edward Callaway, aged 51, who was based at Barking. Doctor Callaway provided the results of his post-mortem examination of the remains:

On the 12th … he was shown part of the body of a female, which consisted of the last two bones and a half of the lumbar vertebrae above the trunk, which had been sawn through completely straight by a fine sharp saw. The integuments [skin and related structures] surrounding the vertebrae were cut by a very sharp instrument, which had also passed through the abdominal wall.

There was neither head nor legs, and the thighs had been taken clean out of the socket of the pelvis, the muscles of the thigh being cut obliquely from the inside to the outside. These were also clean cut, and must have been done by a sharp instrument. There was no jaggedness in any of the cuts, which had evidently been done by some one expert in the use of the knife.

He could not detect any particular mark of violence to the body, which had been dead probably about a fortnight. The viscera [intestines] in the body had been removed, the pelvis was empty, and there was neither bladder, womb nor rectum.

And in response to a set of questions from the coroner:

Although death had taken place fourteen days [previously], still the body might not have been in the water for so long a period. He should judge that the age of the deceased would be from 27 to 29, and the body was in a very well nourished condition. There were no evidences of maternity. It would be contrary to the Anatomical Act to part with the body from a hospital …

The Anatomy Act of 1832 regulated the anatomical examination of donated bodies, and ensured that they were ‘decently interred’11 within eight weeks of receipt. Callaway continued:

It look[ed] as though some one were attempting to get rid of the body piecemeal. He was quite sure, however, that a very skilful person had cut up the body, the part of the spine offering least obstacles to severance having been selected for the operation. The way in which the thighs had been cut proved conclusively that the person who operated was thoroughly acquainted with anatomy.12

The doctor added in response to further questioning that, in his opinion, the body was cut up for the purpose of lessening its bulk for disposal. There were no marks or moles on the remains that could lead to the victim’s identification.13 Although not stated in court, the most likely explanation for removing the body’s organs was to render it less buoyant in the water, otherwise it would ‘float, often, because of intestinal putrefactive gases, belly upwards’.14

The final witness of the day was Superintendent John Dobson, of the Essex County Constabulary. At his retirement six years later, he was described as one of the sharpest officers in the force.15

He saw the body on Wednesday in a shed at Rainham Ferry, and on Thursday, he examined the body in company with Dr. Calloway [sic], and then proceeded to Scotland Yard, and saw Superintendent Shore, who stated that there was no information in the office of any woman being missing. Notices of the finding of the body were immediately telegraphed all over the metropolitan district, with instructions to look out for the missing portions of the body …

Superintendent Shore stated that the hospitals were very careful and particular, and … this was [not] part of a dissected body.16

The coroner adjourned the hearing until 3 June, to allow the police to search for the missing body parts ‘if they had been got rid of in the same way’.17 Through the press, the particulars would be ventilated, and watermen, who ferried passengers along the Thames, and other river workers would be on the lookout. He added that it was quite possible that this was another Wainwright case.

Lewis was referring to a notorious case of 1874, in which brush maker Henry Wainwright shot his lover Harriet Lane and buried her body in a shallow grave under the floorboards of his warehouse in Whitechapel Road. A year later, when he went bankrupt and needed to vacate the premises, he disinterred the corpse, and dismembered it for disposal. He persuaded one of his workers to join him in carrying the two heavy parcels, wrapped in black American canvas, to a street corner, where he hailed a cab. His companion, suspicious of their putrefying contents, alerted the police, and Wainwright was arrested shortly after his arrival at Southwark.18 Wainwright’s motive for dismemberment was purely practical, to enable him to move the decomposed body parts to another place of concealment without arousing suspicion.

On Friday, 3 June, when the Rainham inquest resumed, Doctor Callaway was recalled to state the cause of death as far as he could:

From a close inspection of the body, there was nothing whatever which would give any indication as to the manner in which the deceased came by her death, or the cause of such death. All he could say was that the body had been dismembered very shortly after death … 19

Superintendent Dobson was also recalled, and testified that a Mrs Cross of Albany Terrace, Richmond Upon Thames, had written to him giving information about her daughter, who had disappeared from home on 20 January. Richmond was in South-West London, 25 miles away from Rainham. A description of Miss Cross circulated by the police read: ‘Age 28, height 5ft 8in, complexion dark, pencilled eyebrows, short curly black hair, and exceedingly handsome face.’20 The water was muddied by the fact that she regularly went missing, as Dobson explained to the court:

The young woman was of weak intellect, and in the habit of absenting herself from home for a few days, when she would wander to the side of the river and get upon any barges, boats, or yachts which might happen to be moored alongside the towing path. [She] had never been heard of, although the police had made every endeavour to discover her whereabouts.21

The police interest in Miss Cross demonstrates their awareness that the Rainham victim could have been picked up anywhere in the Metropolitan area, transported alive or dead on a boat, put into the Thames at any spot, and her body taken by the tide to its discovery location. River workers were interviewed regarding Cross’s disappearance. A proportion of bargemen and lightermen, who transported cargoes on the Thames in different vessels, were also watermen, the riverine equivalent of taxi drivers. Watermen often worked as lightermen over winter, when poor weather deterred their passengers. The Watermen’s Company licensed all watermen and lightermen on the River Thames and, it was claimed, did not cancel the licences of men convicted of felonies, mainly theft from cargoes.

A case of gang rape and robbery dating from the autumn of 1886, the year before the Rainham murder, suggested that a minority of river workers could pose a danger to women. Its victim was a 23-year-old inmate of Chelsea Workhouse, Sarah Ann King, who was described as having an unspecified intellectual disability. One September morning, she was found wandering the streets by a local police constable and returned to the workhouse. The medical superintendent Doctor Moore, having heard her account and examined her, concluded that she ‘had been subjected to a very gross outrage’.22

King claimed to have been accosted by a man on Chelsea Embankment, and taken by him on a rowing boat onto a barge on the Thames, where she was held overnight and raped by five men. The main suspect allegedly threatened to kill her. He also took payment from the rest of the men for having sexual intercourse with King, and stole 17 shillings from her pocket.23 Three of them were tried for rape at the Central Criminal Court, colloquially known as the Old Bailey, and acquitted. No evidence was offered upon other charges of robbery with violence, and another charge of rape on an unspecified victim four days after the attack on King.24 It is possible that King’s intellectual disability disadvantaged her, and at an earlier police court hearing of the case, her evidence was described as ‘highly unreliable, contradictory, and improbable’.25 She was certified for admission to Caterham Lunatic Asylum before her case came to court.26 None of the identifiable suspects had any later criminal charges brought against them.

At the Rainham hearing, Superintendent Dobson also reported the disappearance of a Mrs Carter, of Vauxhall, in August 1886, who had not been heard of since, ‘notwithstanding diligent enquiries’.27 Those two names were the nearest the police came to any identification of the victim. Both women had gone missing considerably earlier than the date of the murder. The coroner summed up, saying that he saw no benefit in any further adjournment, and that although the deceased had no doubt been the victim of foul play, ‘nothing leading to a clue to the incriminated parties had been discovered’.28 He advised the jury to return an open verdict, which they did.

Only two days after the verdict was returned, several more body parts surfaced. Their various discoveries again raised questions about the timing and location of the murder, and the additional problem of whether they were disposed of at the same time or on staggered dates. On Sunday, 5 June, close to Temple Pier in central London, pierman John Morris retrieved a floating right human thigh including the patella (kneecap), wrapped in coarse canvas and tied with cord. It was examined by Doctor George Hamerton, police surgeon for Holborn’s E Division.29 The Coroner for the City of London, Samuel Langham, refused to conduct an inquest on the lone thigh, because it was not ‘a vital part’,30 and it was buried at the City of London Cemetery at Ilford.31

On the same day, the victim’s lower thorax and upper abdomen were discovered as a single piece on the south bank of the Thames near Battersea Pier. That finding triggered a meeting on 11 June between the Battersea district coroner Braxton Hicks, Doctors Callaway and Kempster, the police surgeons for Rainham and Battersea respectively, who had both examined the body part, and officers Shore and Ayre of Scotland Yard. Previously, Doctor Callaway had confirmed that the remains fitted with the lower abdomen and pelvis found at Rainham and that the piece of sacking was exactly similar to that used to wrap the Rainham and Temple Pier bundles. It was decided not to hold an inquest at once, but to preserve the Battersea remains in a glass jar filled with spirits of wine, and await further developments.32

Over the next three weeks, body parts continued to emerge north of the river at St Pancras Lock and the Regent’s Canal. The canal ran for 8.6 miles between Paddington in West London and the Limehouse Basin in the east, where it joined the River Thames. The police had the canal dredged for approximately 2 miles, from the Midland Railway Goods Station at St Pancras as far as Primrose Hill.33 Doctor Callaway and Inspector Hare examined the pieces of limbs at St Pancras Mortuary and confirmed that they belonged to the same body.34

Another meeting was held, this time of the four coroners in whose districts the various body parts had been found: Samuel Langham (City of London); Charles Carne Lewis (South Essex); Athelstan Braxton Hicks (Battersea); and Doctor George Danford Thomas (Central Middlesex). It was agreed that Danford Thomas would hold a single inquest at the Crowndale Hall in Camden Town. A qualified doctor and lawyer, he was ‘a man of very unostentatious and retiring disposition’.35 Shortly before his death in August 1910, Danford Thomas conducted the first hearing of the inquest into the discovery of human remains at the notorious American Doctor Crippen’s house in Holloway, North London.36 Hawley Harvey Crippen murdered his wife Cora in January of that year. Chief Inspector Walter Dew, who had served on the Jack the Ripper investigation as a young constable, was alerted by ship’s telegram to Crippen’s escape and effected his extraordinary arrest during an Atlantic crossing to Canada.37 Dew’s CID chain of command included further personalities from the Ripper investigation, Assistant Commissioner Macnaghten and Frank Froest, by then promoted to superintendent.38

Mirroring the first inquest, the second had two hearings, this time with an adjournment of nearly four weeks between them. On the afternoon of Monday, 11 July, Danford Thomas opened the inquest into the discovery in the Regent’s Canal of two arms and two lower legs with feet. The left lower leg also had the left kneecap attached. He introduced the case by stating that other portions of the body of a female had been found in different parts of the metropolis, and that an inquest, with an open verdict on the cause of death, had been held on the portion of the trunk found at Rainham Ferry.

Danford Thomas went on to observe:

All these parts were believed to belong to the same corpse. The head had not yet been picked up, and all the internal organs were missing. There was no proof of identity thus far.

It was imagined that a body must have been dissected by some skilled person, and it was suggested that some medical students might have become possessed of a body, and scattered its mutilated parts about as a grim joke. On the other hand, it was possible that a murder had been committed. The police were still pursuing their investigations into the case.39

The four men who had made discoveries within his district testified about the dates and locations of their finds, which had all occurred in or near waterways in North London. Frank Hurle, keeper of the St Pancras locks, testified that he had discovered the right arm in the waters of the Regent’s Canal near the coal dock of the Midland Railway. James Berry testified that he found the other arm inside the coal dock. George Monkford and Charles Rodwell stated they found two legs on the same day in the waters of the Regent’s Canal between the St Mark’s and Gloucester bridges.40 The press reported that both legs were wrapped in canvas and tied with cord. The feet were described as ‘small and well formed’ and a further distinguishing feature was mentioned, but not in court: ‘in the front of both legs are evidences of some kind of congestion, such as varicose veins …’41

Inspector Hare testified about the discovery of other parts of the body: on 11 May, the lower part of the trunk at Rainham; on 5 June, the right thigh on the north bank of the River Thames opposite Waterloo Pier (meaning Temple Pier); and on 8 June, part of the thorax at Battersea.42 Doctor Callaway confirmed that he had examined all of the body parts, with the following results:

The portion of the trunk found at Rainham Ferry … belonged to a female who he thought was about 27 or 28 years old. When he saw it first he thought it had then been in the water a fortnight. The internal contents [organs] were missing. The spine had been sawn through. The thighs had been cleverly dissected out of the joints [by a skilled person] …

The right thigh, found in the Thames, corresponded with the trunk. The thorax, too, found at Battersea, corresponded with the trunk. The collarbones and breast[s] were absent. The sacking in which all the remains were wrapped corresponded, save that in which the thigh was placed, which was of a slightly coarser texture.43

In response to questions from the coroner, Callaway confirmed that he thought the deceased had died at the beginning of May, or end of April. As far as he could possibly gather, the arms and legs also corresponded with the torso, although the left thigh was missing. There was nothing to guide him as to the cause of death. He finished by stating, ‘It is my conviction that the body has been thus cut up in order the more readily to get rid of it – to dispose of its parts.’44 The coroner commented that it was a very grave matter indeed. As Home Secretary Henry Matthews had ordered a further surgical examination of the remains to be made, he adjourned the proceedings.45

On the afternoon of Saturday, 6 August, Danford Thomas resumed the inquest, stating that, since the last sitting, the left thigh had been found. The first witness, William Cope, a labourer, testified about his discovery:

On Saturday July 16th, whilst he was at work at the Camden Town locks, he noticed in the waters of the Regent’s Canal, between two barges, a piece of flesh, which on getting out he found was a left thigh. He called a police-constable, who took it away.46

The next witness was Detective Inspector Arthur Hare. He reported that since the adjournment, every inquiry had been made, but without finding any clue about the victim’s identity. Mr Thomas Bond then took the stand. An anatomical lecturer at Westminster Hospital, and experienced police surgeon, he would become the leading medical expert on the Torso Murders. At the behest of Assistant Commissioner James Monro, Bond provided his expert opinion on this unusual case.47

Bond testified as follows:

He had examined the different parts, and he found that the whole of them corresponded, and were certainly parts of the same body. He searched the body, but could not find any marks likely to lead to identification.

From a measurement of the different parts he was of opinion that the female was 5 ft. 2 [inches] to 5 ft. 4 [inches] in height. He concluded that the age of the woman was from 25 to 35 years. The body was that of a well-nourished, stout woman, and she had dark hair.

The different parts had been divided by some persons having a knowledge of anatomy. He was certain that the body had not been divided for dissecting purposes. The parts had been in the water for about three months, and he had no doubt that they were put in at the same time. There was no evidence as to how the deceased came by her death.48

His final statement commented on the actions of the killer or killers to prevent the body from being identified:

The head and shoulders were absent, and, in his opinion, would never be found. In the first place, the perpetration of the crime, if crime it was, would make this unrecognisable; and, in the second place, if thrown into the water, the weight of the bones would keep the skull at the bottom of the water.49

Bond’s statement that the head and shoulders were missing makes it clear that the torso was cut into three parts. The word ‘shoulders’ referred to the upper thorax and collarbones. It was not possible to discern whether the head and neck had been separated from the collarbones and shoulders.

Bond’s description of the victim’s hair was based on her black pubic hair. To estimate the victim’s height, Bond’s colleague Hebbert dismissed as unreliable the ‘figure carré des ancients’, a method which measured a square around a man with outstretched arms and legs, as seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Instead, he took an average of three measurements. The first placed the top of the pubes at the centre of the body; the others followed ‘the ancient Egyptian canon’ that the length of the middle finger as measured down from the root of the thumb-nail at right angles to the axis of the middle finger when the hand was laid flat on a table was 1/19th of the height; and that the forearm from the tip of the olecranon (elbow) to the end of the middle finger was 5/19ths of the height.50 Based on ‘a number of observations’, Hebbert considered the latter to be ‘the only measurement which gives anything like an accurate result’.51

The coroner summed up briefly before the jury returned the verdict, ‘That the remains found were those of a woman between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age; but there was not sufficient evidence to show by what means the said woman came by her death.’52 The police investigation continued with little to work on. The press speculated that the body was not that of Miss Cross, the woman who disappeared in January from Richmond Upon Thames, as ‘her feet were abnormally large’ compared to the ‘remarkably small’ feet of the victim.53

Another article quoted an unnamed woman with a missing sister in the continued efforts to identify the body:

For some time during last year her sister had been keeping company with a young doctor, and she knew that the latter had seduced her. Both parties lived in South London, but last year the doctor obtained possession of a practice in a northern suburb, and went to live there, being followed shortly afterwards by the young woman, who insisted much against his will in living with him.

They led the neighbours to believe that she was his housekeeper, but she suddenly disappeared about two months ago, and has not since been heard of. Her age and general description answers that of the body found in the Thames, and inquiries are being made with the view of ascertaining whether the young woman is still alive.54

In the lack of any further information or discoveries, the investigation petered out. What is left are the conclusions of the Hebbert report, with the following stated objectives when examining the eight parts of the Rainham victim:

In the inquiry we had to determine the following points: whether they were human and belonged to the same body, the race, age, sex, height, complexion, and condition of life, and, if possible, the cause of death, and the skill or ignorance of the operator.55

Hebbert analysed the victim’s ‘condition of life’ meaning her likely occupation, marital status, childbearing status and social class. He also made detailed observations about the perpetrator’s method of cutting up her body:

The skin of the hands and feet was too much decomposed to show whether she had led a life of hard manual work. There was no mark made by a wedding ring. The uterus was that of a virgin, but the vulva was too decomposed to give indication with regard to old or recent injury. … There were circular slightly depressed marks, about half an inch deep, just below the knees. … The mark round the leg showed that garters were worn below the knee, a custom, I believe, more common among the lower than the upper classes, who either wear garters above the knee or suspenders. She had recently menstruated.

The cuts on the surfaces of the vertebrae were such as would be made by a saw, and the long sweeping incisions through the skin showed that a very sharp knife had been used. The disarticulations were neatly and cleanly done, in each case the joint being exactly opened. The absence of ecchymosis [bruising] showed that all the cuts were made after death.

It was obvious, from the direction and manner of the cuts, that no ordinary surgical or dissecting-room operation had been carried out. Although no special knowledge of anatomy was shown, the cuts indicated a practical skill in amputating limbs at joints, and making clean sweeping skin cuts. It may be argued that such skill would be gained by a hunter or a butcher, as either of these are in the habit of rapidly and skilfully separating limbs, and of cutting up a trunk into several parts.

I do not think that any surgeon or anatomist could have done the work so well, as they are not constantly operating, while a butcher is almost daily cutting up carcases [sic]. Moreover, the limbs were separated in almost precisely the way a butcher or hunter would adopt, i.e. making a series of cuts round the flexure of the joint, and then by a strong twist wrenching out the head from the joint and cutting the capsule.

The condition of the skin showed that each part had been lying and decomposing in water, and that several months had elapsed since the date of death.

The summary was that the remains were those of an adult female of Caucasian origin and dark complexion, from twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and about 5 ft. 3 in. high, that she had not borne a child, and in fact, from the small size of the os uteri [mouth of the uterus] was unlikely to conceive; that the body had been mutilated after death by some person who, though not necessarily a skilled anatomist, yet had some knowledge of joints, and the readiest mode of separating limbs, and by inference a butcher or hunter; that decomposition had taken place in water, and some months elapsed since death.56

Hebbert and Bond were consistent in their analysis that no medical professional or student was involved in this case. The perpetrator’s knife skills came from a trade or side-line similar to that of a butcher or hunter. Although he was less clear about the date of death, at an inquest hearing Doctor Callaway was specific that the Rainham torso had been in the water for approximately a fortnight before 11 May. A press article quoting an interview with Callaway provided further information and reduced that fortnight to nearer a week: ‘there is tolerably good circumstantial evidence that the murder was committed on May 1, or, at any rate, not later than the second of that month’.57

According to the published tide tables, on Monday, 2 May 1887, high water at London Bridge was at 8.20 a.m. and 9 p.m. On the following day, it was one hour and twenty-two minutes later.58 Alternatively, if the time lapse of a fortnight were correct, the tides were more favourable on Wednesday, 27 April 1887, when high water at London Bridge was at 4.13 a.m. and 4.31 p.m. Sunrise was at 4.42 a.m and sunset at 7.13 p.m.59 An article dated 23 April reported a spring tide, meaning an exceptionally high water level: ‘the evening tides have been at their worse for [rowing] practice, the water at that time having been nearly out of the river’.60

With a very high tide occurring at 4.13 a.m., the perpetrator could have killed on the previous night and put the body parts into the tidal Thames at a central location such as London Bridge before his working day began. A strong ebb tide, with unusually high and fast-flowing waters, would take the remains eastwards past the sinuous U-bend of the Thames to the other side of the Isle of Dogs, at Rainham. A flood tide would take them westwards to Battersea. In the tideless Regent’s Canal, the body parts would hardly move, directly placing the killer at the spots where they were found. In late April and early May, the weather was consistently cold, slowing down the decomposition of the remains. The relative darkness of a new moon afforded him additional protection.

Dismemberment was an extreme option for the killer to take, requiring skills, time, effort and implements. In the Thames Torso Murders, it always occurred after death and was not the cause of death. Criminology classifies the act of dismemberment as either offensive, in which it is the perpetrator’s main objective, or defensive, with its motive being to render the victim unrecognisable and destroy evidence relating to, for example, fatal injuries. If its purpose was to prevent police from identifying his victim, she might be connected to him as his wife or partner. Alternatively, she might have been an acquaintance or stranger accosted by chance yet seen socialising with him. The body was stripped of all clothing and footwear, representing items with an intrinsic financial value if sold or pawned.

The killer’s method of dismemberment revealed semi-proficient knife skills and the type of tools available to him. His approach was not wholly methodical, as the right patella was attached to the right thigh, whereas the left patella was attached to the left lower leg and foot. The rough sacking, canvas and cord he used to tie up the remains revealed the materials he had to hand every day for his trade. Canvas sacks were breathable, used for foodstuffs that tended to ‘sweat’, releasing moisture into the air. He arguably left the expression of his criminal fantasy, or distinctive ‘signature’, in extensive dismemberment and any superfluous mutilations of his victims’ bodies. His acts of dismemberment were therefore both defensive, to conceal the body and identity of his victims, and offensive, meaning sexually motivated.

The first murder in a series is likely to be committed close to the killer’s home, in circumstances where he feels comfortable. In his immaturity, he may make discernible mistakes before he learns from experience to cover his traces and conceal his techniques. And in this particular case, the Torso Killer did make mistakes, although none of sufficient magnitude to betray himself. By leaving body parts in multiple locations, and possibly even on different dates, he exposed his mobility on water and his links to specific geographical locations on the industrial Regent’s Canal. The next murder increased the probability that its perpetrator worked on the river.

2

The Whitehall murder, September 1888

Man is not truly one, but truly two … the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin.

From The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

On Tuesday, 11 September 1888, a year and half after the Rainham murder, a woman’s severed arm was found on the Thames foreshore at Pimlico in Westminster, Central London. The exact location of that discovery was the riverside of Ward’s Deal Wharf, a wholesale timber business at 113 Grosvenor Road, and its date was hugely significant to the police and the anxious public. The second of the ‘canonical five’ Ripper killings, the murder and evisceration of Annie Chapman in a Spitalfields backyard, had taken place only three days earlier.

As in the Rainham case, the authorities waited for more body parts to be found, issuing instructions to the police and river workers to search along the Thames. On Friday, 28 September, a boy walking along Lambeth Road saw ‘a curiously-shaped paper parcel’ in the garden of the Blind Asylum.1 Being enterprising enough to fish it out between the railings, assisted by a passing bricklayer and the local shoeblack, its contents were found to be ‘the arm of a woman which had been cut from the body. It was decomposed, and had been laid in lime. The fingers were clutched.’2 What became known as the ‘Lambeth arm’ was taken to Kennington Lane police station.

In the early hours of Sunday, 30 September, the Ripper killed two women in separate attacks in Whitechapel and the City of London. Elisabeth Stride had her throat cut, while Catherine Eddowes’s face and body were subject to significant posthumous mutilations including the cropping of the tip of her nose and part of one ear.

The capital’s police forces were already stretched to their limits when, on the following Tuesday, 2 October, a woman’s torso was discovered in a dark corner of New Scotland’s Yard’s vaulted basement. It was 2 miles north-east of the discovery of the first arm, on the Victoria Embankment, where over a hundred labourers were working at a prime location near the Houses of Parliament. Nobody knew whether this was an act of deliberate audacity, defiling the new headquarters that the police were already calling ‘our Palace’,3 or simply one of convenient disposal among the rubble and rubbish of a building site.

Hebbert reported:

The trunk is that of a female, the breasts being present. It comprises the thorax and upper part of the abdomen, the head having been separated at the sixth cervical vertebra, and the pelvis and lower part of the abdomen at the fourth lumbar vertebra.4

Whereas Bond and Hebbert fitted the right arm found on the riverbank to the torso and declared it a match, the second was quickly discounted from the investigation. It is lost to history whether the Lambeth arm was the left or right limb, how much of it was intact, and whether it was in fact female. The press reported that medical students had removed it from a dissected corpse, and placed it where it was found as a hoax.5

Even at the height of the Ripper scare, the press reported that the murders were not undertaken by the same man. It was at a critical point when Jack the Ripper had killed at least four victims, and the Torso Killer two, with the coincidence of timings intensifying the capital’s shock and distress:

Although there is no reason whatever for connecting the murder, whose victim was discovered in the buildings at the Whitehall end of the Embankment, with the terrible series of assassinations that have appalled the metropolis, there can be no doubt that it has added to the existing excitement and dismay. The fact, too, that mutilation, although not of the same character, has been practised, and that the head and limbs of the victim have been cut off, adds to the resemblance.

There is, however, no similarity in the circumstances under which the crime must have been committed. The victim in the present [Whitehall] case was not felled and murdered upon the spot where the remains were discovered; indeed, it may be at once accepted as a fact that she met her death inside a house. The ghastly process of dismemberment and packing up must have taken a considerable time, and could not have been carried on in the open air, where there was a risk of discovery …

Never was the air more full of horrors than it is at present; it would almost seem that we had an epidemic of murder among us.6

On the afternoon of Monday, 8 October, the Coroner for the City and Liberty of Westminster, John Troutbeck, opened the inquest into the death of an unknown woman at the Sessions House on Broad Sanctuary. Troutbeck was described by his contemporaries as a man who ‘well knew his own mind, and in the conduct of his court was very careful to preserve his authority’.7 On the same afternoon, the funeral of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes was held at the City of London Cemetery at Ilford. It was a busy day for Londoners, as thousands of people lined the route of the funeral procession from the City eastwards, while in Westminster large crowds manifesting ‘the greatest interest’ gathered in Westminster outside the Millbank Street mortuary and the Sessions House.8

Before the inquest hearing began, the jury were sworn in at the mortuary, where they viewed the body parts ‘through a window, for fear of contagion. It was on a table propped up, and the arm recently found was placed in the socket. The body was a dark brown colour.’9