Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page iii
The Thames Torso Murders M J Trow
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page iii
The Thames Torso Murders M J Trow
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page vii
Foreword by Professor Laurence Alison
I occasionally get asked to contribute to so called ‘cold case reviews’ – cases that, for various complex reasons, have remained unsolved and without a conviction for many years. Not infrequently the impetus has come from advances in DNA or other ‘hard science’ forensic methods. A diligent and conscientious Senior Investigating Officer can make great strides and resolve and successfully convict in cases that are sometimes over two decades old. Psychologists, profilers, or behavioural investigative advisers are occasionally asked to advise on narrowing suspect searches, ‘building’ search matrices or suspect lists, or provide input with regards to the use of the media, leaflet drops or where to prioritize an area for buccal swabbing. As such, the ‘softer science’ advisers are there to assist (broadly) in the decision making of the SIO and in regards as to where he or she should put his or her resources. There are several recent cases that have been extremely successful ‘revisits’ to cold case reviews and recently I wrote a book about the Rachel Nickell murder, the murder of a young woman, solved some eighteen years later by diligent modern methods of policing. However, it is exceptional to be asked for consultation on cases in the 1880s! In such cases, it was not even possible to establish fingerprint evidence and scientists were only just able to distinguish whether blood was human or animal. I had the pleasure of working with Mei on his Jack the Ripper documentary for Atlantic Productions in which he proposed a mortician’s assistant, Robert Mann, as a plausible suspect. I frequently am asked to comment on new ‘Jack’ suspects and must confess I have an interest in those murders partly because of their unusual and psychologically disturbing features and partly because of the atmosphere of Victorian London that surrounds them. Having lived in London myself for many years the history of that city and the narratives around crime,
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page viii
viii The Thames Torso Murders police and policing that surround it hold a peculiar fascination. Normally I reject making a contribution to TV documentaries but in Mei’s case it was rather different. It was very gratifying working with a historian and crime writer who wasn’t rabidly promoting and promulgating the notion that his/her pet suspect was the definitive answer to the Jack mystery. Instead, Mei, diligently worked through the socio-historical context, and in the spirit of Occam’s razor ‘deleted’ out (quite rationally and systematically) all the ridiculous suspects (Queen’s surgeons, painters, etc.) and provided a plausible and, moreover, psychologically coherent suspect. I must confess there are several aspects to Mann that do not fit with sexually sadistic murderers and there is no compelling circumstantial evidence or reason to believe that Robert Mann must be Jack but Mei acknowledged that point and was happy to discuss these issues and acknowledge that nothing was black and white, cut and dried. Psychologists work with probabilities and not certainties (as do profilers) and as such definitive answers do not sit well with them. So Mei was a breath of fresh air. He is interested in motive, research, empirical approaches, statistical mechanisms, geoprofiling, crime scene analysis and methods of working that are outside of his direct area of expertise. What he does so cleverly is critically evaluate those areas and successfully weave them into his own, considerable knowledge of the relevant social historical issues. The same is true for this book. He was willing to listen, but sometimes reject my musings and incorporate them (not uncritically I may add) in this bizarre series of so-called torso murders. I must confess it was not a series of crimes that I had heard about and, of course, as he notes, they were superseded by the Ripper murders in terms of press coverage and notoriety. Unlike the Jack murders though there is something disturbingly clinical and cold about them and what I found most fascinating was what was not present. No apparent motive (sexual, financial or retributive), a lack of anger, a lack of sadism. No obvious gain and no real knowledge of why these victims were selected. It was hard to establish what the offender was ‘getting out of ’ this grisly, high-risk series of offences. The removal of body parts, the disposal of them at various locations and the consistent non occurrence of the heads are all (mercifully) unusual features – as unusually rare as the acts of sexual sadism in the Ripper cases but in many ways far harder to understand (at least psychologically). My view was that a central psychological signature was the instances of display of body parts. Signatures are commonly considered those psychological features that are irrelevant to the commission of the crime but are psychologically relevant aspects. Thus, binding a victim may be functional in so far that it disables and controls them but an act of piquerism or dressing victims
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page ix
Preface ix
in a particular way. I will leave the reader of course to follow through Mei’s compelling account of this series of offences and allow the reader to develop their own interpretations (as I am sure is Mei’s intent) prior to his own particular views; suffice it to say I would encourage the reader to examine what is absent in terms of the behaviour and what this may tell us about the offender. Finally, a word about the significance of socio-historical context. Psychologists rarely if ever consider such matters. Why would they? They deal with the here and now. But what is so important and instructive about working with a historian is seeing how the psychological function of any given behaviour can vary so considerably. Take for example the act of beheading. To the ‘civilized’ contemporary Western mind this is an act of utter barbarism, cowardice and brutality. However, it once was a method of execution reserved for royalty and seen as a quick, some might argue honourable death. We know that our ‘torso’ murderer beheaded his victims. This is a difficult act to inflict on a victim (both technically and because of the revulsion) and, certainly, forensically, will have made this investigation especially difficult for the police. The strength of Mei’s work lies in the integration of psychology, forensics, functionality and the socio-historical context surrounding this behaviour and I’d struggle to think of another author that would be able to make such a sensible series of possible interpretations of this complex, horrific case.
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page xii
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 25
Chapter 3
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887
It was a little after dawn on Wednesday 11 May 1887 that lighterman Edward Hughes saw something floating in the water. In common with thousands of men along the Thames, his job was to transfer goods aboard the flat-bottomed barges called lighters, from ship to shore. In the May of 1887, Hughes was working in the Victoria Dock that ran from Bugsby’s Reach where the Greenwich Marshes jutted north and made the river bend to Albert Docks lying alongside. That morning, Hughes was on his barge lying alongside the jetty at Hempleman’s Factory. The ebb tide was flowing fast by then and he hauled the floating bundle up on deck. Any experienced lighterman would not have found this odd. As we have seen, half London used the Thames as a dumping ground and it was not that unusual to find ‘floaters’ in the water. Writing a few years later, R Austin Freeman travelled through dockland in a steamer and noticed a rowing boat with three uniformed men in it. Suddenly, the man in the stern stands up and all three stare fixedly at what appears to be a submerged basket floating down in mid-stream … As they reach it the coxswain takes a length of thin rope and seizes the floating object and for an instant a human head appears above the surface. Then the boat starts off again and we see that the line has been made fast to the derelict, now towed astern and rolling over and over at the end of the cord with a horrid semblance to life. We realize that the mysterious boat belongs to the Thames police and that presently another poster bearing the words ‘Found Dead’ will appear among the collection of bills which decorate the door of the riverside mortuary.1 Rainham appears as a small village in Domesday in 1087 and by the time of its ‘mystery’ in 1887 had a population of 1,669. The church of St Helen and St Giles was the only building standing from its medieval past. The wharf had
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 26
26 The Thames Torso Murders been developed since the 1720s to carry farm produce upriver to London and a new one, with a retaining flood wall, had been built in 1872. The marshes here are only 5 feet above sea level, a situation made even wetter by the existence of the Ingrebourne Tributary at the western end of the parish. Frederick Hempleman & Co was one of several manufacturers clustered around the ferry area that produced artificial manure. Hughes took the bundle ashore. It was a coarse canvas sack and in it was the pallid, waterlogged torso of a female. The arms, legs and head had gone and a section of both breasts had been hacked away. Horrified, Hughes sent a colleague for a policeman. He found Constable Stock of the Essex constabulary and they carried the remains to the ferry building. Unusually thorough for a provincial ‘copper’, Stock noted that the cord around the sack had been wound round several times and he got a message through to his superior, Inspector Allen. A number of officers were detailed to search the area, knocking on doors, wading about in the shallow water, checking anywhere where other body parts could have lodged. It was fairly obvious to the authorities that Rainham itself was a red herring. For all the press dubbed the finding of the woman’s remains the ‘Rainham Mystery’, the true source of that mystery probably lay much further upstream. But the law said that all corpses found in an area were that area’s responsibility and, as Rainham had no mortuary or coroner’s court, the torso was placed in a shed next to the Phoenix Hotel in readiness for the inquest which would open in the hotel on Saturday 14 May. The coroner was C C Lewis, covering the South Essex district and once the jury were sworn, he explained the circumstances surrounding the finding of the torso. His first witness was Dr Edward Galloway, the police surgeon from nearby Barking (the Met’s R Division), who had carried out a post-mortem on the remains. In accordance with the medical practice of the time, he reported on what he saw and made various extrapolations later. The legs and thighs had been removed with a perfectly straight cut made with a very sharp saw, leaving the last two bones of the lumbar vertebrae, the tendons and muscle tissue around this having been cut by a keen-edged knife. The same blade had passed through and separated the abdominal wall. The upper portion of the breasts, the head, arms and legs had all been removed, the lower limbs taken cleanly out of their pelvic sockets by means of cutting obliquely from the inside to the out. All cuts were clean, with no signs of jadedness and the work, in Galloway’s opinion, was that of an expert. The fact that there was no sign of external violence – no extraneous cuts or bruising – meant that it was impossible to say exactly how the victim died. Galloway believed that the body had been dead for about two weeks. That took the likely date of the murder, which this clearly was, to the beginning of
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 27
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887 27
May. He estimated the victim’s probable height as 5ft 3ins or 5ft 4ins, making her infuriatingly average and estimated that her hair was brown (although without pubic or armpit hair, this had to be conjecture). He believed her to have been in her late twenties, but she could have been as old as 35. He told the court: The general appearances led me to believe that the body had never been used as a hospital subject and it would be quite contrary to the Anatomical Act2 for a body to be parted with without the knowledge of the hospital authorities.3 Pressed by the coroner, Galloway reluctantly admitted that he believed whoever had dismembered the corpse had ‘a thorough knowledge of surgery’. His reasoning was sound enough: not only has the cutting-up been performed in an exceedingly skilful manner, but the operation had been carried out on that part of the spine offering the least resistance to separating and that would only be done by a person having a very intimate knowledge of anatomy. What Galloway was doing, of course, and he must have been aware of this, was pointing the finger at a doctor, more specifically a surgeon and it was this, as much as the gruesomeness of the remains, that led to the press coverage. It was not yet front-page news simply because it appeared to be an isolated case. The rest of this first day saw the testimony of Edward Hughes and his colleagues who reported their finding of the corpse. At that point, to give the police more time for their investigations, Lewis adjourned proceedings. The problem, for the Thames River Police, the Essex constabulary and R Division was that the body could have floated from anywhere upstream, even, quite possibly, west of London. One obvious line of enquiry was to ask anyone with a female missing from their family to come forward. A North London man reported his wife missing. A Mrs Carter had disappeared from her address in Vauxhall Street, Lambeth, and Mrs Cross of Albany Terrace told police that her ‘daughter of weak intelligence and fond of going on the barges on the river’4 had also disappeared. None of these proved to be the halfbody at Rainham. When the inquest reopened on Friday 3 June, Inspector Allen gave testimony as did Superintendent Dobson of Brentwood. Neither the police nor Galloway, recalled, could give a definite cause of death. Without it, the jury had no choice but to deliver the wholly inadequate verdict of ‘found dead’.
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 28
28 The Thames Torso Murders Two days later, the horror returned. As the Essex Times reported it on 8 June: On Sunday morning [5 June] great excitement was caused on the Victoria embankment on its being made known that a portion of the mutilated remains of a female had been picked up near the Temple Pier. The pier lay halfway between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridges along a very different part of the river from Rainham with its marshes, new road layout and burgeoning chemical works. At the landward end of the pier stood the elegant chambers of the Temple Law Courts, where future Ripper suspect M J Druitt had his office. The huge, imposing facade of Somerset House and King’s College lay to the west and the Temple gardens, heavy with spring blossom, to the east. The pier itself was very busy, as a focal point for passengers taking pleasure steamers up and down the river. Whoever saw the ‘large parcel’ first reported it to the pierman, J Morris, at ten o’clock. Morris fished it out of the water just below the pier and discovered that it was a human thigh, wrapped in sacking and tied with cord. Later that day, another piece of sacking was found floating in the Thames, this time further upstream and on the south bank by Battersea Park pier along Chelsea Reach. Once again, a busy part of the river. Once again, a body part wrapped in coarse canvas. The current here is odd, with the eddies described in Chapter 1 potentially slowing the progress of anything floating. While researching this stretch I noticed however that a piece of wood, some four feet long and perhaps five inches wide was travelling downstream past the pier site in a direct line and at some speed. The River Police, who knew these currents better than anyone, conjectured that this latest find was dumped into the river off one of the bridges upstream but close by. Logically, that made it Albert or Battersea, half a mile and three-quarters of a mile away respectively, near the point at which the Wandle enters the Thames. This latest bundle was the ‘upper portion of a human body’. The first medical man to inspect the Temple Stairs find was Dr Hamerton, assistant police surgeon. He noted that the thigh had been taken cleanly out of the socket of the pelvis. The first thought from the River Police was that this was a new murder, with no connection to Rainham, but once Dr Galloway could investigate, he was of the opinion that the parts came from the same body. Once again, Galloway affirmed the apparent surgical skill required to remove the thigh and made a fascinating observation: ‘These body parts have been removed with skill, not simply torn off to hide a murder.’5 What was certain to police and doctors was that the finds were not all placed upstream simultaneously and allowed to float downstream at the river’s whim.
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 29
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887 29
The Temple and Battersea finds had not been in the water that long (the skin was not wrinkled or waterlogged) and that meant that someone was placing random body parts in the river at different times and at different places. River of death the Thames may have been, but these finds were bizarre and unprecedented. On the afternoon of Saturday 11 June a high-level conference was held at Battersea. Galloway was there, along with a colleague, another divisional police surgeon Dr Kempster and the area’s coroner A Braxton Hicks. Two officers of Scotland Yard were also present – Arthur Hare and Superintendent John Shore. The seriousness of the situation was made evident by Shore’s seniority – he was deputy to the Chief Constable, Adolphus (‘Dolly’) Williamson. Braxton Hicks was the son of a famous obstetrician and had been in post as coroner for the South West District of London for only two years at this point. Four years later, he would preside over the inquest into Matilda Clover, one of the victims of the Lambeth poisoner, Dr Neill Cream. Another coroner, S F Langham, who would preside a year later at the inquest on Ripper victim Katherine Eddowes, had already muddied the waters of this murder by allowing the thigh section found at Temple Stairs to be placed in a pauper’s pine coffin and sent for burial at Ilford Cemetery. With any bizarre murder, especially when the culprit is never found, there is the temptation to point the finger of conspiracy. Langham presumably had nothing to hide and could no doubt plead lack of staff and resources, but his decision was at best a dereliction of duty and sums up the general attitude about the Torso murders. An inquest on a single body part would be pointless and a waste of time. The result: the killer of at least eight women walked free. It may be that Langham was given a suitable dressing down in private, because the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, ordered an exhumation of the torso at Rainham, which had been buried in the local churchyard. The Ilford thigh was dug up too. Braxton Hicks ordered the preservation of the parts in spirits of wine, the conventional preservation technique of the day and the parts sealed hermetically in case other parts should turn up. They did, days later. The Times reported that a ‘parcel containing a portion of the remains of a human body was picked up near the spot where part of a woman’s body was discovered some time since’. Unfortunately, the reporter did not record whether this was Rainham or Battersea, but the likelihood is that it was off Waterloo Pier, close to the bridge and upstream from Temple Stairs. The final act of the Rainham tragedy was played out exactly a week later, when labourer William Gate saw a bundle floating in the waters of Regent’s Canal, near the St Pancras Lock. This was a slight departure for the Torso killer. So far the Rainham body parts had all been found in the Thames itself, but the canal was an artificial waterway that ran into it and some distance from
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 30
30 The Thames Torso Murders the river itself. The canal was 9 miles long and had been designed by the architect John Nash. It began in Paddington’s Little Venice and flowed to the Regent’s Canal Dock at Limehouse, just upriver from the West India Dock and below Shadwell. The canal itself, although popular today as a leisure area, was built too late to be commercially successful. By the 1820s when it was complete, the transport revolution was about to switch to railways. Gate found a sack containing two human legs and reported the find at the nearest police station. The limbs had been in the water for some time (there is of course no tidal movement in a canal) and the wrinkling of the skin suggested an older woman. When Dr Galloway assembled the various parts, however, he could add yet more to the Rainham torso. On Tuesday 19 July he spoke to various reporters and The Times of the 21st was able to confirm that ‘the entire body excepting the head and upper part of the chest, are now in the possession of the police authorities’.6 Galloway was quoted at length. The thigh found in the Thames corresponded with the trunk. The chest also corresponded exactly with the trunk and had been sawn through. The collarbone and the breasts had been taken off. I have formed the opinion that the trunk had been in the water about a fortnight and that the death of the woman took place in May. I have seen the remains found at St Pancras [Regent’s Canal] and I am of the opinion that they belonged to the same body. The canvas in which the parts were wrapped was also the same, except for the thigh. The police continued to ask for reports of missing persons to be verified by families and friends, but nothing positive came of that. On 13 August, the Rainham drama came to a close. Dr G Danford Thomas was one of the great London coroners of his day. As coroner for Central Middlesex some of the most infamous cases came before him as a matter of routine. Now he presided over the Rainham Mystery at Crowndale Hall in Camden Town. Inevitably, as the man most concerned with the post-mortem work, Dr Galloway was there, but so too was Dr Thomas Bond, A Division’s police surgeon who fifteen months later would feature prominently in the Ripper investigation. Bond had wide experience. He graduated from King’s College Hospital in 1864 and served with the Prussian army as it swept to victory over the Austrians in the war of 1866. He had been police surgeon to A Division for twenty years by the time of the Rainham case, as well as assistant chief surgeon at Westminster Hospital. He had been brought in by the Assistant Commissioner
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 31
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887 31
of the CID, James Munro, probably as a second opinion for the less experienced Galloway. Bond told the inquest that the Rainham victim was a young woman between 25 and 40, between 5ft 2ins and 5ft 4ins in height and she had never given birth. ‘The different parts had been divided by some persons having a knowledge of anatomy.’ Galloway’s testimony seemed to have shifted a little by mid-August: ‘The body had been divided by someone who knew the structure of the human frame, but not necessarily a skilled anatomist.’7 What we have here is a sense of squirming in the spotlight and a certain professional unease. It was to dog the Ripper case a year later too. If the Torso killer had sufficient anatomical skill, the likelihood was that he was a surgeon, or at least a physician. The medical profession is notorious for closing ranks when one of their own falls under suspicion.8 ‘The removal [of the head]’, Bond wrote later, ‘was not for the study of anatomy, but was done for the purpose of covering up a murder.’9
The thick black lines represent the cuts made to dissect the body. The shaded areas are the parts that were never found.
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 32
32 The Thames Torso Murders Inspector Hare told the inquest that, despite extensive enquiries all over London, no further progress had been made since the original finding of the Rainham torso. In short, the police had drawn a blank. Once again, the only possible conclusion was ‘found dead’. Clearly a murder had been committed, but there were no marks on the body to indicate how. Without the remotest chance of identification, it was not possible either to know why. Most bizarrely of all, no one, either among the police or the press seems to have thought of making links with the macabre events of fourteen years earlier … On 1 July, Bond was officially called in to examine the eleven separate body parts of the Rainham corpse. He was assisted by Dr Charles Hebbert although it is likely that he merely took notes rather than performed any kind of autopsy himself. Interestingly, the report begins with the sex organs and because this was a medical article written by a doctor for doctors, it is highly technical. The ovaries were small and the rugae (internal ridges) of the vagina prominent, indicating that this was a woman who had never given birth. The pubic hair was black, and an incision had been made in the vaginal wall’s cartilage. There was no sign of bruising near any of the incisions on the body, proving that dismemberment was done quickly and soon after death. Allowing for the water’s action on the body parts, Bond believed the skin to be fair. The arms had been removed by oblique cuts downwards and outwards from the tip of the shoulder and the humeri (upper arm bones) had been cleanly disarticulated. Despite the fact that water-logging had led to some of the skin peeling away – it was especially thick and white on the palms of the hands – it was possible to tell that there was no ring indentation on either hand. The corpse was probably unmarried. Similar disarticulation had occurred on the thighs, the right patella attached but separated from the lower leg at the knee joint. The left thigh (found in Regent’s Canal) showed more signs of decomposition, the head of the femur riddled with water-worm holes. The lower legs were well shaped and muscular, the feet small and undeformed. Presumably, Bond and Hebbert noted this because, among the poor especially, cheap ill-fitting footwear led to frequent deformities. There were circular depressed marks, almost half an inch deep below both knees. Because of water action, the skin on the thighs was peeling off and the toe nails and phalanges (small bones) had gone. What did the dismembered body tell the doctors? The Rainham corpse was clearly female and, because of the state of the bones, over 25 years old. The skin implied Caucasian origin, but the hair and complexion were dark. Hebbert wrote at length on the various methods for estimating height and, whichever way it was done, the dead woman had been about 5ft 3ins tall, which made her
Thames Torso Murders_Layout 1 31/01/2011 16:15 Page 33
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887 33
depressingly average for the time from the point of view of the police officers trying to identify her. There was a glimmer of hope – and certainly a narrowing of the field – in Bond’s/Hebbert’s discussion of the victim’s condition of life. Decomposition of the hands meant that it was impossible to say whether she had been used to hard manual work. The uterus implied virgin, but the vagina was too badly decomposed to make this certain. It was possible that the small uterus meant that conception was unlikely. She had recently menstruated and the tell-tale grooves below the knees showed ‘that garters were worn … a custom, I believe, more common among the lower orders than the upper classes, who either wear garters above the knee or suspenders’.10 It was in their discussion of the method of dismemberment that Bond and Hebbert become most interesting. In keeping with similar judgements made by medical men on the Ripper victims who would litter the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields the following year, they were anxious to distance doctors from such appalling barbarity. A saw and a very sharp knife were used, which were clearly the tools of a surgeon’s trade, but Hebbert’s argument is rather weak: I do not think that any surgeon or anatomist could have done the work as well, as they are not constantly operating, while a butcher is almost daily cutting up carcases.11 It may be argued that such skill would be gained by a hunter, as either are in the habit of rapidly and skilfully separating limbs and of cutting up a trunk into several parts.12 Hebbert reasoned that the method of disarticulation used, cutting round the flexure of the joint and then twisting to cut the sinews, fits with either profession very neatly. In terms of the date of the murder the doctors were less helpful. Decomposition had set in to the extent that ‘some months’ had elapsed since death, perhaps raising doubt on Galloway’s likely May murder. And there, in the absence of any further information, the matter was quietly shelved. Before the Thames torso murderer struck again, the most infamous serial killer of them all made his entrance.