by Trow, M. J.
Chapter 9
‘Dealers in Horror’: Battersea, 5 September 1873, and Putney, June 1874
The torso killings did not begin with Rainham in 1887, although they did end with Pinchin Street two years later. To find the start of this particular trail of terror, we have to go back fourteen years.
1873 was a year for deaths. In December, the first of the ‘London peculiars’, the thick fogs that enveloped the capital with sulphurous gloom, struck, killing an estimated 1,150 people in three days. On 1 May in the native village of Chitambo in what is Zambia today, the explorer and missionary David Livingstone was found dead in his hut, kneeling as if in prayer. A week later, in Avignon, France, the political campaigner and philosopher John Stuart Mill died of tuberculosis. His autobiography, published later in the year, heaped praise on his late wife, Harriet: ‘A real majestic intellect, not to say moral nature like yours, I can only look up to and admire.’
Not everybody was as eulogistic on womankind. At Durham, on 24 March, a dozen pressmen, a couple of medical students and a ghoul named Crooks who specialized in attending hangings, stood in the execution shed at the gaol to say a sorrowless farewell to the mass poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton. The hangmen were William Calcraft and Robert Evans, neither of them particularly efficient at their task and Mary Ann did not go quietly. According to her biographer, she was
swinging round, her chest heaving and her clasped hands jumping up and down. Then she began to twist about and to sway from side to side … Her body, unlike her mind, was loathe to give up life; it waged its desperate, frightful, hopeless fight. Shocked, hurt, in pain, it writhed, threw itself, jerked, the jumping hands frustrated by the pinioned arms from easing the agony of the cap and the rope, strangling mercilessly, inefficiently.1
And in September, another woman died. We still have no idea who she was.
With a rich irony, The Times featured a series on the Thames and its Embankment, a proud look at the extraordinary achievements of Joseph Bazalgette and the difference his engineering feat had made to London’s inhabitants. But right next to it, in the edition of 8 September, was a whole column and a half headed ‘Suspected Murder’. Three days earlier a Thames Police galley rowing routinely near Battersea saw an object floating in the river. It turned out to be the left quarter of a female torso. On 7 September two more portions were found, the right thigh floating off Woolwich and the right shoulder, with part of the arm attached, off Greenwich. The police noticed and subsequent medical reports confirmed that the arm was smeared in tar which probably occurred as the limb bobbed downstream, colliding with mooring ropes and other debris. The Times commented that the Woolwich find was the only one to be located below the various canals and each piece was found on an ebb tide, lower and lower down the river.
The consensus of opinion was that the body parts had entered the Thames not far from the point where the Wandle enters it and had been washed downstream. This is an important fixing point as we shall see. The Wandle runs north to meet the Thames just west of Wandsworth Bridge, so the assumption was made that the body parts were placed in the river from the south shore and not from a bridge.
The Times reported that death was caused by a blow to the right temple which crushed the skull, except that the skull was missing and that the first body part at any rate had been dumped in the river within hours of death. This meant that the first torso murder along the Thames had possibly taken place on Friday 5 September. ‘Such’, said the reporter, ‘are the bare outlines of this evidently atrocious crime.’ The Lancet, the medical journal founded by Thomas Wakley fifty years earlier, postulated that the body was drained of blood via a section of the carotid artery in the neck, since there were no clots elsewhere in the body’s veins.
The inquest which followed shed more light. Constable Richard Frame of Thames Division had been on duty the previous Friday, rowing up to Chelsea Bridge from Somerset House. At half past six the galley was at low water opposite the Battersea Waterworks. The body part was lying on the foreshore, three or four feet from the water’s edge. Frame’s colleague checked and discovered that it was a ‘portion of a woman’s body, being the left breast entire’. The find was taken to the police station ship Royalist moored on the Thames Embankment. This vessel remained in use until 1898 and was known by Thames Division as ‘The Abode of Bliss’ (‘Daddy’ Bliss was the inspector in charge who lived on board with six constables). From there, the torso section passed to Battersea police station where it was examined by Dr Kempster, the divisional police surgeon.
On that same day, South-Western Railway Company policeman Henry Locke was on duty at the company’s premises at Brunswick Wharf, Nine Elms. The trees themselves had long gone and this stretch of the river was heavily industrialized. The body part found here was nearly two miles downstream of the torso, a little upstream from Vauxhall Bridge. At half past ten Locke saw something floating in the water and, believing it to be a dead sheep, threw stones at it (!). He asked a bargee nearby to fish it out and discovered that it was the right breast of a woman. Locke passed it to a Met officer.
That officer was Constable 349W Henry Turner who took the torso part to Inspector Starkey of the Thames Police. Since the item had been found in the river, it naturally came within his jurisdiction. From there, it was passed to Dr Kempster.
Any crowd of people on the foreshore merited investigation and John Parker of the Thames Division saw just such a group at a quarter to seven the next morning, Sunday 7 September. This was Duke’s Shore at Limehouse and Parker was passing in his galley. To the immediate east lay the huge West India Docks behind their granite walls and on the mud of the water’s edge lay what was perhaps the most ghastly of all the torso killer’s handiwork. It was ‘the head of a woman with the bone out. It was the face and scalp of the head and had the ears, eyelashes but no eyes, the nose partly cut off, and the upper lip partly cut through, as was the cheek.’ It appeared to have drifted down with the tide and although The Times report of Parker’s evidence is confused, it seems that the face was shown to Inspector Marler of the Thames Division at Wapping police station before being taken to Scotland Yard.
At this point in the inquest proceedings held on the afternoon of 8 September in the boardroom of the Clapham and Wandsworth Union Workhouse, the coroner, W Carter, had had enough. He rounded on the police present, including Superintendent Butt of W Division and the Yard men Inspector Sayer and Sergeant Lansdowne, complaining that the face had been handled by too many people, as had the other body parts.
Inspector Marler probably did not have a pleasant time in the witness box. He was part of the overlong evidence chain himself and had also taken possession of what he believed to be the dead woman’s lungs, which turned out to be those of a sheep. He was the first to notice a wound to the right temple.
Dr William Henry Kempster of Bridge Road, Battersea, was surgeon to V Division. He talked the coroner’s court through his inspection of the various body parts and without the benefit of a second opinion, as we have with Dr Hebbert’s analysis of the 1880s torsos, we have to hope that Kempster got it right. The right thorax, he said, was of a woman of about 40 years old, who was ‘very stout’. Only part of the diaphragm remained of the internal organs and the breast had been separated between the second and third cervical vertebrae. There was also a higher cut where an attempt had been made to separate the body diagonally. A knife and a very fine saw had been used to remove the arm socket neatly from the trunk – exactly the same tools used in the later dismemberment cases. The retraction of the muscles led Kempster to believe that the cutting had been carried out very soon after death.
Four hours later he received the other side of the torso and they fitted exactly. This was more useful forensically. There was a coloured wart or mole near the right nipple, another mole on the neck and there was an old scar near the breastbone which was probably caused by a burn and probably done in childhood.
The next day Kempster took possession of the ‘integuments of the h
ead’. The chin was missing and so was half the mouth. The doctor believed that the scalp had been cut and the face pulled off the skull within thirty-six hours of Kempster first seeing it. The cut was clean, but had removed the nose and split the mouth. The hair and eyebrows were dark and the skin olive. ‘There was a little moustache – the feminine moustache, as we call it’, Kempster told the horrified jury. The hair on the head was ‘very dark, very thin and somewhat short’. It may be that this was a piece of sloppy reporting by The Times because later editions gave the hair as long. In the meantime it led to speculation that the woman was a recently released convict, still sporting her prison haircut. Presumably there was enough of the nose left for Kempster to speculate that it was round, fat and short. The ears were too and had some time been pierced for earrings. The dead woman had been pregnant at some time and the extensive bruising on the right temple, three or four inches in diameter, was delivered in life. He did not speculate that this was the likely cause of death. There were three cuts to the head – one, obviously, to remove scalp and face, the others probably the result of an attack from a blunt instrument.
At this point Carter adjourned proceedings to give the police time to continue their enquiries. One obvious line of investigation was missing persons and a steady stream of people visited the remains at the Wandsworth and Clapham Workhouse mortuary to attempt to identify the body. This was a revolting experience, causing several of them to faint and gave rise to the real fear that ‘dealers in horrors’ were simply coming forward in ghoulish fascination. Ever since the Ratcliffe Highway murders2 in 1811 – and probably earlier – the public had held a remarkable fascination for bloody killing. Portions of the Red Barn where Maria Marten had been buried in 1828 were physically ripped up and taken away as souvenirs. The skin of her killer, William Corder, was made into a cover for a prayer-book. Freak shows up and down the country exhibited tableaux of grisly murder and in the year of the first torso murder, the wax effigy of poisoner Mary Ann Cotton was shown at Madame Tussaud’s premises in Baker Street. The exhibition catalogue read: ‘The child she rocked on her knee today was poisoned tomorrow. Most of her murders were committed for petty gains; and she killed off husbands and children with the unconcern of a farm-girl killing poultry.’3
One visitor to the mortuary who appeared to be genuine was a man from Bermondsey convinced that the dead woman was his daughter. Since she had had smallpox and no such scarring could be found on the Thames corpse, this seemed unlikely, but the stricken old man refused to be shaken in his certainty. Mr Hayden, the workhouse medical officer quizzed him further. The 60-year-old man, not named by The Times, lived in Britannia Place, Hoxton, and his 39-year-old married daughter had been missing for three weeks. His son-in-law had gone ‘into the country’ to bury his mother and his daughter ‘went away in drink’. She had borne a child fifteen years ago. Kempster was of the opinion from the state of the breasts that the woman had indeed suckled a child at some time. The pair had lived in the City Road, so if it was her, she was a long way from home.
The thick black lines represent the cuts made to dissect the body. The shaded areas are the parts that were never found.
If morbid curiosity had led the old man to travel this distance, he had all the horrors he could have desired. He was taken to the dead-house where the severed breasts were taken from a shell [coffin] and put together and the ghastly face having the scarred nose with the scalp, thinly covered with hair, was taken from a jar of spirits and laid before him.
But he could not remember any mole or wart, nor could he recall a burn wound to the chest. His daughter had a mole on her cheek, but that part of the cheek was missing.
The whole thing was inconclusive, but what emerges from The Times account is that the police considered seriously at this stage that the crime might have been committed on a barge and were particularly interested in the canals that led to Limehouse where the face was found. How much of this was the result of clues of which we now know nothing and how much of it was the natural xenophobia of the river is difficult to say. Bargees were often gypsies and assumed to be involved in all sorts of crime.
But there were more body parts to come. On 11 September a dock labourer named Gerrard found a foot floating in the river off Hammersmith Docks. This of course was important in that Hammersmith is some way up river from the earlier finds. Did the tide carry the foot upstream or was it placed there later as part of a continuing process? The Times now doubted the Wandle estuary as the dump point of the previous body parts. The police believed that the various sections were ‘dropped’ at high tide, about two o’clock on the previous Friday morning. The Thames Division, with their long experience of tides and currents, were of the view that three of the eleven body parts ended up ‘below bridge’. The earliest found portions were carried from the Middlesex to the Surrey shore, one ending up on the mud, the other carrying on the stream further down. A piece as light as a foot would easily get caught in a ‘lay-by’ and be carried upstream again by the next incoming tide.
A full count of the eleven parts found by 11 September meant that what were still missing were: the skull, both hands, both legs, the left shoulder joint and the internal organs. What was curious was the absence of clothing; the Thames torso was totally naked. The dredgers of whom Charles Dickens senior wrote regularly sold clothing from corpses in the Thames, but no one had yet come forward to offer any of these to the police.
In the meantime, as was inevitable with a crime as repellent as this, the police were inundated with false alarms. On 10 September intestines taken aboard the Royalist proved to belong to two sheep – the bargemen were blamed for that too. Another set of enquiries also involved bargemen. On the day before the likely murder date, a bargee and his wife were heard quarrelling. This was a typical ‘domestic’ of the type the police met with regularly, but barges, by definition, were on the move all the time. This one was traced by detectives to Higham, near Rochester, and one plainclothesman kept watch throughout the night. When the barge moved off to Crawford and then Gravesend, he followed, only to be confronted – and abused – by the woman whose ‘disappearance’ he had been investigating.
The Times of 12 September reported that the old man who was convinced that the victim was his daughter had been overjoyed to find her very much alive in the Waterloo Road.
An altogether more likely lead involved a Mrs Cailey, who until recently had lodged in Battersea, only yards from the river. Analysis of the newspaper accounts of the time allow us to piece together this one line of enquiry and it is a reminder of how painstaking police investigation was and how time-consuming.4 On 12 September, a week after the murder, an informant of South Street, Battersea Fields, reported to Inspector Hewlitt of the local division that her lodger had been missing since 2 September. She had been abandoned by her husband and assaulted by four men on Victoria Bridge in the days before her disappearance. She kept late hours and was continually boasting of being about to come into a large inheritance. The case of Mrs Cailey was explained at the resumption of the inquest on the fifteenth.
Carter again presided and Inspectors Sayer and Brady were there from the Yard. The first witness called was Richard Stratford ‘a seeker of what I can find’ who lived at East Greenwich. He was dredging on 8 September at Blackwall Point on the Kent side of the river when he found the tar-smeared thigh portion which he took to Greenwich police station. On the same day, Thomas Evans, waterman and lighterman of Nelson Street, Woolwich, found another thigh in the water near Woolwich Dockyard wall. He turned it over several times with his boat hook before taking it to Woolwich police station.
The next day, William Bennett, a platelayer from Plumstead, Essex, who worked at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, saw something on the bank. He was laying down a light-gauge railway at the time and broke off to investigate. This was the pelvis, although Bennett assumed it was a thigh. Coroner Carter intervened to ask Bennett to point to his own thigh and the platelayer pointed to his ‘lower side’ (pres
umably hip). Later that day, John Prince, waterman and lighterman of Manor Street, Chelsea, was in midstream at the Albert Bridge works, ready to ‘pick up anything’ which might fall from the works, such as timber, and he saw a handless arm. He noticed two bruises just above the wrist before he handed the limb in to Battersea police station.
On the same day William Prince (John’s brother), apprentice to a waterman, was in his boat off Wandsworth Distillery about a quarter of an hour after high tide when he noticed a leg floating by and he thought it looked as if it had been ‘pressed down’ as though by weights.
The second arm was found on Wednesday by carman Edward Patterson of the Parade, Lambeth. He was on a barge (he does not explain why) at White Hart Docks, near Vauxhall, when he saw the bruised limb. He fished it out, wrapped it in straw and took it to Kennington Lane police station. It was the next day that Joseph Gerrard, waterman and lighterman of Queen’s Street, Hammersmith, found the right foot floating near his barge.
Throughout these tense days, of course, the Thames Division galleys were on particular alert and it came as no surprise when Inspector Edmund Walker found a badly decomposed leg off Eastern’s Wharf, Commercial Road, Lambeth. The coroner and jury then had the grisly task of viewing the assembled body parts.
Dr Kempster now had more of the body to report on and was able to say that the existence of one ovary and a portion of uterus with the pelvis proved that the victim had never given birth but she may at one time have miscarried. There were old scars on one arm and on one thigh, near the knee. The peculiar blistering on some of the skin surfaces he put down to the sun’s rays on the exposed area bobbing above the river surface. Some of the bruising described by various finders was in fact decomposition. He believed there had been two very violent blows to the head, delivered in rapid succession, which would have resulted in immediate loss of consciousness and probably death. There was no sign of any stab wound and it was just feasible that the separation of body parts could have begun while the victim was still alive. Dr Edmund Hayden MRCS concurred with Kempster’s findings, agreeing that the body was probably cut up while still warm.