by Trow, M. J.
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 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’.
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. 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 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 Doc
k 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 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.
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 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 st
ruck again, the most infamous serial killer of them all made his entrance.
Chapter 4
Jack
Ann Rule wrote, in her excellent book on the Green River killer:
It was 1988, and the centennial anniversary of the most infamous serial killer of them all. Jack the Ripper had stalked unfortunate ladies of the night in London exactly a hundred years before … Old Jack was a piker compared to the GRK’s toll; he had claimed less than half a dozen victims, but his fame had magnified exponentially over the years because he was never caught.1
And in the only full book written to date on the Thames torso killings, author R Michael Gordon writes:
The Whitehall Torso Murder would soon become lost in the shadow of Jack the Ripper. And this vitally important point explains why so little work has been done on the torso killings. It may even partially explain why the world’s first serial killer literally got away with murder.2
To understand how this happened, we have to evaluate the Whitechapel murders and the impact that the man who was Jack the Ripper had on London at the time and the world ever since. I have written two books on the Ripper, a drop in the constant deluge of research that has gone on since 1888, the year of the majority of Jack’s killings. Since that ‘Autumn of Terror’ there have been thousands of books, both fact and fiction, movies, articles, television documentaries, video games, even an opera. There is an excellent website – Jack the Ripper Casebook – which provides chat-rooms, regular updates and the most minute discussions about the crimes and times of the Whitechapel murderer. Ripperologists all over the world have their own pet theories, are usually quick to rubbish anyone else’s, often claim they are bored by endless speculation, yet keep coming back for more. The Thames torso killer lost himself in this obsession and eludes us still.