by Trow, M. J.
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Copyright © M J Trow 2011
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Contents
Foreword by Professor Laurence Alison
Acknowledgements
Map
1. Messing about on the River
2. The River of Death
3. ‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887
4. Jack
5. The Whitehall Mystery: Scotland Yard, September 1888
6. The Frankenstein Connection: Horsleydown, June 1889
7. The Women of Moab and Midian
8. The Pinchin Street Torso: Whitechapel, 10 September 1889
9. ‘Dealers in Horror’: Battersea, 5 September 1873 and Putney, June 1874
10. The Girl with the Rose Tattoo: Tottenham Court Road, 23 October 1884
11. Men Behaving Madly
12. Other Times, Other Crimes
13. The Habitual Homicide
14. The Cat’s Meat Man
Notes
Bibliography
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, 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 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.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone too numerous to mention who has been generous with their time and expertise in the writing of this book, but especially Rupert Harding and his team; Professor Laurence Alison of Liverpool University; Eloise Campbell for her excellent photography and company; Neil Paterson of the Historic Collection, Metropolitan Police; the staff of the Guildhall Library; the staff of Colindale Newspaper Library; and as always my wife Carol, for her medical insight and for being the only woman in the world who doesn’t mind typing out tales of dismemberment!
Chapter 1
Messing about on the River
TWENTY bridges from Tower to Kew –
(Twenty Bridges or twenty-two)
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young, and the Thames was old
And this is the tale that the River told: –1
On 21 June 1888, only weeks before a series of appalling murders began in Whitechapel, the failed actor and writer Jerome Clapp Jerome married the recently divorced Georgina ‘Ettie’ Morris. The couple spent their honeymoon in a little boat moored on the Thames. The result of this, in the following year, was Jerome’s only literary success Three Men in a Boat, an affectionate and occasionally riotous look at young friends messing about on the river.
Two years earlier, Charles Dickens,2 son of the great novelist, produced his unconventional handbook, the Dictionary of the Thames, which charts the same ancient waterway and in the same spirit of leisure and laughter. The Thames of Jerome and Dickens, always set in the river’s largely non-industrial reaches above London Bridge, is one of endless sunshine, punts, pleasure steamers and cream teas. The dress is swirling parasols and bustles, straw boaters and striped blazers.
Let us take a trip downstream with these men. Let us do it on 11 May 1887.
Jerome’s oarsmen started at Kingston and worked upstream, past trailing willows and open fields, the sort of countryside that would be captured years later by Kenneth Grahame in his Wind in the Willows. We will take the opposite direction, downstream to the Port of London, then the busiest docks in the world. The Oarsman’s and Angler’s Map of the River Thames, published in 1893 forms a snapshot of the life of the late Victorian river. The whole thing is 9 inches wide and nearly 9 feet long, charting the twists and turns of the Thames with the principal road and rail links that lay on both banks.
At Kingston, in a nod to history, the map refers to the stone near the marketplace where Saxon kings were crowned. Recommended hotels were the Griffin and the Sun. R J Tuck and A Burgoine ran the principal boatyards, with all manner of skiffs, punts and larger craft for hire. The town’s population was about 17,000 and, although it was linked via the London and South Western Railway to the metropolis itself, was still serviced by the Guildford Coach, the horse-drawn attractions of which were enjoying something of a revival at the time. For a meagre 17s 6d, a nostalgic passenger could travel the ‘Old Times’ route via Richmond, Barnes, Hampton Court, Weybridge and Chertsey, ‘thus taking in all the best views of the river’.3
Kingston housed the East Surrey Territorial Regiment and a number of Volunteer units. It had a High Steward, mayor, eight aldermen and twenty-four councillors. Dickens waxes lyrical for two pages over the town’s history, from the Celtic chieftain Cassivelaunus, through the Saxon witanegemot (council) of King Egbert, through to the second Civil War in 1648 when Lord Francis Villiers was killed there in a skirmish.
The place was growing in 1887, largely as a dormitory town for London. Parks had recently been laid out, and the grammar school rebuilt. The thriving banks in the town were the London & County and Shrubsole & Co, a faint reminder that the financial capital of the world was only twenty miles away. Kingston had its own rowing clubs, of course, and the amateur regatta, held in July, was enthusiastically attended. Regattas were, rather like the music hall, great levellers. Even if the majority of oarsmen were upper and middle class, the families who ate their packed lunches and cheered from the banks were just as often the hoi polloi from the working-class areas of the town.
The Thames flowed north above Kingston where the first wooden bridge was built to link the town with Hampton Wick in 1219. The water here was known in pre-industrial times for its purity.
Rudyard Kipling assumed4 that Teddington was Tide End Town, because here the tidal and non-tidal rivers meet. It was probably named after a local Saxon ruler, Tudda and in 1887 had a population of 6,500. Here was the first lock on the river. Today’s statistics give us an average flow at Teddington of 1,145 million gallons a day (2,000 cubic feet a second). The current flows at anything between half a mile and two and three-quarter miles an hour. In calculating the dispersal of dead bodies, this is important. The Teddington lock was the largest on the Thames, with smaller variants – the coffin, launch and barge locks – alongside. Travellers on the river liked lock-keepers. Like the landlords of hostelries on both banks, they exuded bonhomie, despite the fact that by the 1880s they must have already been kept very busy. In the preindustrial river scene, the rector of St Mary’s church here in the 1670s was the mystic Thomas Traherne. Fascinated by the river’s reflections, he wrote:
By walking Men’s reversed Feet
I chanced another World to meet;
Tho it did not to View exceed
A Phantom, ’tis a World indeed,
Where Skies beneath us shine,
And Earth by Art divine
Another face presents below,
Where People’s feet against Ours go.5
As the river bends with Twickenham on the north bank, the traveller reaches Twickenham Ait or Eel Pie Island. The various Aits or Eyots along the Thames were used as bridging places earlier in history. The most famous of them was Runnymede, where King John was forced to put his seal to Magna Carta, a list of sixty-three gripes from his barons which today we see as the first faltering steps towards democracy.6 By 1887, Eel Pie Island was already in decline. It had been, fifteen years earlier, the place to be for river-trippers where hundreds of ‘Arrys and ‘Arriets would arrive by pleasure steamer to munch their way through eels. Trade Union and Benevolent Clubs especially enjoyed these outings. The river itself was shallow here and dredging a constant operation in the 1880s.
For anglers, Twickenham and Richmond were ideal in the ebb tide which lasted for about ten hours. Barbell, dace and gudgeon were in abundance, although this was one of the areas where altercations were not unknown between fishermen and boat owners, each group seeing the river as there for their particular hobby only. Tuicam hom is first mentioned in a charter of 704 and eight centuries later there was a ferry between the town and Richmond. Historically, famous names lived along the banks – the philosopher Francis Bacon; musician Godfrey Kneller; the poets John Donne and Alexander Pope; the artist J M W Turner and the magistrate/novelist Henry Fielding. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens described the area as ‘lonely and placid’.
The river bends again at Richmond, 15½ miles from London. From here, in 1887, it was less than half an hour by train to Waterloo, which accounts in part for its popularity with day trippers. The name was given to it by Henry VII, Earl of Richmond in Yorkshire as he had been before 1485, but there was already a royal residence
at nearby Sheen where the first three Edwards had lived. The freshness of the air here saw a vast building programme from the Georgian period ‘from the mansion to the cottage’7 and the views from the Great Park were stunning. The library owned 3,000 books and there was a busy Reading Room at the Quadrant. The ‘hideous red brick’8 church was the burial place of the actor Edmund Keane and, to all intents and purposes, Richmond by 1887 was merely a London suburb. The police station, headquarters of the Metropolitan force’s V Division, stood in George Street.
Opposite industrial Isleworth and Brentford, as the river straightened, stood the observatory and gardens at Kew. The Aits here were used to harvest osiers, the willow branches woven into eel-nets where a royal palace stood on the Isleworth bank in the reign of Henry III. In the 1880s the town was renowned for its market gardens, flour mills and cement works. Education was flourishing, with a Green School for girls endowed by the late Duchess of Northumberland and a Blue School which was (at least nominally) coeducational. The most famous inn was the London Apprentice and this area (and no doubt the pub too!) was the domain of the Met’s T Division.
John Gay could find little to recommend Brentford in his day:
Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.9
It had cleaned up its act by the 1880s but it could not disguise its commercial untidiness. Whole fleets of barges operated on the River Brent, linking with the cargo and freight of the Great Western Railway and the result was a little foretaste of the hell that lay below London Bridge.
Against this backdrop, the gardens of Kew looked like a bit of heaven. The village itself was almost buried in urban development and Dickens, like most of the writers on the Thames, looks back with nostalgia to the quiet idylls of ‘only twenty years ago’.10 It was the gardens that drew residents and visitors alike: ‘Here are to be seen … the most beautiful tropical palms, plants, ferns, ferntrees and cacti … Attached to the gardens is a valuable museum of useful