by Trow, M. J.
Sergeant Lansdowne had clearly been following up another lead. Was it possible that this was some sort of medical school prank, that a cadaver available for legitimate dissection under the terms of the Anatomy Act could have ended up in the river as some sort of hideous joke? Since the medical schools were all closed until 1 October and no London hospital reported a body missing, this seemed unlikely. The Lancet leapt to the defence of medical students:
The public has, happily, in the course of thirty years, learnt to dissociate the medical student from the Burker5 who may now be fairly said to be extinct. But, as recent events seem to show, there is still a tendency to make the student the scapegoat of any horrid murder or frightful mutilations. This is to be regretted for more reasons than one but chiefly because it interferes with the course of justice by leading it off the proper track.6
When the inquest turned its attention to a possible identification of the dead woman, the spotlight fell on Mrs Cailey. Mary Christian was the wife of Benjamin Fisher Christian and they took in lodgers at their house at 15 South Street, Battersea Fields. Since he is described as a traveller, it is likely that it was Mrs Christian who effectively ran the lodging house. Mary Ann Cailey had arrived with a Mr Beer at the beginning of August, from Dorsetshire, saying she needed rooms until ‘her affairs were settled’. She claimed to be 33, but Mrs Christian had her doubts, putting her nearer to 40. The lodger needed to deal with a solicitor named Thompson of Lincoln’s Inn in connection with her finances. Mrs Christian assumed this to be property or inheritance or both. Mary Cailey was currently the Christians’ only lodger so had a room to herself. She was tall, a little under 5ft 9ins, and stout. Mrs Christian had last seen her on Thursday 2 September, when Mary Cailey left about ten in the morning, saying she was getting her things out of pledge and to receive money from her solicitor.
It was clear to Mrs Christian, who seems to have been sensibly nosy, that Mary Cailey was not all she seemed. She kept late hours and when Mrs Christian felt obliged to mention this, she merely laughed. About a week before she left she had been attacked by four men near Victoria Bridge. They had knocked her to the ground and hit her, probably with fists, on her temple just under the hair line. What struck the landlady as odd is that the lodger did not mention the attack on the night she claimed it happened, but a few days later. When Mrs Christian asked Mary Cailey where she went all day and until so late an hour, she claimed she went to see an old lady in Paulton’s Square, Chelsea. There was no mention of Lincoln’s Inn, the solicitor, or Mr Beer, who left as soon as Mrs Cailey was ensconced at the Christians’.
Mary Christian’s description of the lodger’s clothes, though very detailed, was almost pointless in that the Thames torso had been naked and no clothes were forthcoming. Her hair was thin and black however and Mary Christian had the dreadful job of examining the corpse. She could not be certain: ‘I fully believe that is the face of Mrs Cayley, but I should not like to swear to it.’ Doctors Kempster and Hayden both said that the bruise described by Mrs Christian could not possibly be the one visible on the temple of the corpse. At that point, coroner Carter gave his conclusion that a murder had been committed and suggested the government might like to offer a reward to further the case. The jury duly returned ‘Wilful murder by person or persons unknown’, although Kempster was sure that the dismemberment at least was carried out by one person alone.
It must have been soon after the inquest formally closed that Abel Beer visited the workhouse mortuary and told the police that the corpse was that of his sister, Mary Ann Cailey – he even remembered the scald mark on the stomach she had suffered as a child. For some reason, detectives working the case doubted it; perhaps they had seen ghouls like Abel Beer before and he apparently was beginning to have second thoughts too.
The Times editorial on 16 September, though accurate in other respects, got it hopelessly wrong on the dismemberment. This was done ‘evidently without the guidance of even the most rudimentary knowledge of anatomy; for bones had been sawn through with considerable labour when the same kind of dismemberment might have been accomplished easily by means of the knife alone …’ The paper retracted this later. Whoever dismembered the torso victims – all of them – was very adept at joint disarticulation and did it well. The Times speculated that the actual murder took place on Thursday 4 September and summed up the ongoing problem for anyone involved in working – or researching (!) – the torso killings:
The facts point to a murder of a character more than usually atrocious; but the remains have not hitherto been identified and there is absolutely nothing to guide suspicion to the place where the murder was perpetrated. Not a particle of the dead woman’s clothing has been found; and although it is conjectured that a barge may have been the scene of the tragedy, it is at least equally possible that it occurred at some distance from the river and that the pieces were carried thither after the commission of the crime.7
Four days later the police produced the elusive Mrs Cailey. Various newspaper descriptions had brought her out of the woodwork and had also alerted her siblings. Mary Ann was the daughter of William and Mary Beer of Uplyme, Dorset, and they had not heard of her for three years. One brother thought the body in the mortuary was his sister, a second brother was certain, so was her sister and a friend confirmed it. All the more bizarre then that Inspector Sayer’s men found Mary Anne very much alive in the West End late on Wednesday and took her immediately to the mortuary when ‘she was confronted with her own portrait’.
Her story was that she had ‘been to Scotland with a gentleman’ and had been so horrified by mention of the Thames murder that she refused to read or hear about it. She was reunited with Mrs Christian and this must have been a doubly interesting meeting as she owed the woman several weeks’ rent. There is little doubt that Mary Ann Cailey was a prostitute. Her staying out late, her unverified links with a square in Chelsea, her sudden ‘flit’ to Scotland and the rough treatment she received at the hands of the men near Victoria Bridge, all lead in that direction. Mrs Christian’s seems to have been a respectable house and Mary Ann Cailey should have counted herself lucky on two counts – one, that the police did not charge her with wasting their time and, two, that she did not, after all, meet the torso killer.
Police enquiries of course continued. Leads were followed wherever they led. Missing women were located where possible; ‘domestic’ rows were checked. One man eventually found in Brighton had deserted his wife and left her on the charge of the parish. This was an indictable offence, but she was not dead and he was not the torso killer.
Hayden and Kempster had carried out a bizarre piece of reconstruction. They had not only sewn the body together again, but had pulled the skin of the face over a butcher’s block and taken a photograph of the result. ‘The features are so characteristic,’ said The Times on 20 September, ‘and pronounced that any one who knew the woman could hardly fail to recognize her.’ This seems unlikely. The photograph does not appear to have survived, but bearing in mind the nose and lips had been cut and it had been in the water for several hours at least, identification must have been almost impossible. A knife had clearly been used to remove the skin from the tissue underneath and this had left a ‘buttonholed’ effect. The Lancet believed that this was accidental and not an attempt to render the face unrecognizable. The police were keeping the photograph to themselves and only those with a genuine reason for viewing it would be allowed to see it – the dealers in horror were never far away.
The police were clearly desperately short of clues. Earlier Thames tragedies had usually produced a plethora of solutions from members of the public. This one did not. In the case of the Waterloo tragedy, the murder of prostitute Eliza Grimwood on 26 May 1838, her remains, badly mutilated and with an attempt at decapitation, were found in a carpet bag which could be traced. In the Great Coram Street murder at Christmas 1872 the victim was Harriet Buswell aka Clara Barton, a 27-year-old prostitute, and her quarrel with a German client overheard. ‘In
this case,’ said The Times, as a sort of built-in obituary for the whole torso series, ‘there are only pieces of flesh.’ On 20 September the everghoulish Illustrated Police News showed the graphic finding of the face. The central image shows a Thames Division galley with a suitably horrified inspector watching a constable lift the face from the water. This of course did not happen; the face had washed up on shore. Such tinkering with the facts is typical of the Illustrated Police News house style. To the left, the caption reads, ‘Finding the First Portion – Battersea’ and shows wherries drawn up on the foreshore, a derrick in the background and a train picturesquely steaming over the railway bridge. The image to the right is captioned ‘Finding the Second Portion – Putney’ and a bystander is leaning over a bridge parapet watching the police galley at work below.
On the same day, various papers carried the information that a £200 reward had been put up by the government and a virtual free pardon was guaranteed to any accomplice not actually guilty of murder.
By 25 September, interest was waning. ‘People still come to see the remains,’ The Times reported, ‘and tales, some of them very strange in their mystery and some strange by reason of their stupidity, are brought to the notice of the detectives.’ Rumours were flying by now of two lunatics who had escaped from Broadmoor. William Bisgrave had absconded on 13 July and John Walker on 7 August. Both had been seen in the London area and their descriptions were circulated. We shall meet these two again in a later chapter.
The Times waxed lyrical on the case: ‘There will be no lack of persons ready to throw blame upon the police and to mention that it is their duty to discover the murderer. It is worth while to point out that policemen, even if they are styled detectives, are only endowed with ordinary senses.’ This was not, The Times pointed out, an ordinary murder and
it is not pleasant to reflect that, in our high civilization, any one, however poor or friendless, can thus be made away with; but it is inevitable that the art of detection should remain somewhat in the wake of crime and that the best efforts of the police should be sometimes baffled by the union of vulpine cunning with unscrupulous brutality.’8
And no further progress had been made by June the following year. Evidence for what had happened to the body found in the Thames at Putney in June 1874 is almost nonexistent. My original intention was to devote a full chapter to this killing, but the meagre details do not merit it.
Gladstone’s Liberals lost the election in January as Benjamin Disraeli labelled the outgoing Cabinet ‘a range of exhausted volcanoes’. Irish lawyer Isaac Butt was leading the first of the ‘filibustering’ campaigns for Irish Home Rule in the Commons. Well-to-do society was fascinated by the fraud carried out by Arthur Orton, a Wapping butcher, who claimed to be the long-lost heir to the vast Tichborne estate. In August, the ten-hour day became a reality for thousands of factory workers, but none of this would account for news of a dismembered corpse found in the Thames being forced off the front pages.
All we do know is that the News of the World for 14 June carried the story that a headless body without arms, but with one leg remaining, was taken from the Putney riverbank to Fulham Union Workhouse. At the subsequent inquest, Dr E C Barnes, the police surgeon, stated that he believed the body had been divided at the spinal column and that a covering of lime had been used to aid decomposition. Once again, although today we would have no doubt that a murder had been committed, the letter of the law demanded that an open verdict be delivered; an unknown fate for an unknown woman.
Chapter 10
The Girl with the Rose Tattoo:
Tottenham Court Road, 23 October 1884
It was ten years before the torso killer struck again.
Or was it? We now know that serial killers go through cycles in their killing behaviour and there is no standard or rational time-scale for this. Jack the Ripper killed five women in the space of less than ten weeks in 1888. Steven Wright, the ‘Suffolk Strangler’ murdered the same number in a little over six weeks. We would expect, then, something of an outbreak of torso murders in 1873 or 1874, but they did not happen. How can we explain this ten-year gap?
Dr Joel Norris, one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers, has identified seven phases in which such a murderer operates. The aura phase is the one in which the killer withdraws into a private world of perverted fantasy. He cannot focus, becomes slipshod in his everyday work. If he is employed, he will make mistakes. If he has a social life, he will reduce it, become less gregarious, move away from the herd. The pressure grows in his brain to kill and he moves on to the trawling phase. Steven Wright, the Suffolk Strangler; Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer; Joel Rifkin, the Long Island Murderer; Jack the Ripper and, I believe, the torso killer, all targeted prostitutes because they were lust murderers and because prostitutes were easy prey. Ted Bundy fits this pattern too, as does Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
The killer selects his victim. Perhaps she has the kind of hair he likes – most of Bundy’s targets had long, straight dark hair. Perhaps she is the right size – all of Rifkin’s victims were under 5ft 3ins. Perhaps it is their dress or the particular place in which they are standing. Something drives the serial murderer on. Into the wooing phase.
Grabbing a woman from a public place is hazardous. There might be an eyewitness to such an abduction. And the victim might fight back. One of the reasons that child-killer Robert Black was caught is that he wrongly estimated the age of his last target. She may have looked 12 but in fact she was 16, struggled loudly when he tried to bundle her into his van and got away, able to give a full – and for Black, fatal – description to the police. The wooing phase involves calm and reassurance, even for a short time. Ted Bundy used the ploy of a broken arm and asked girls for help opening his car door. Ridgeway and Rifkin both appeared to be punters, interested in nothing more than sex.
Wooing quickly turns to capture. The victim is thrown into a car or pickup truck, shoved down an alleyway, silenced by strangulation or a fist. The murder itself is carried out by whatever means the killer is most comfortable with – a slash to the throat; strangulation with or without ligature; a single shot to the head. This is the climax – the all-consuming point which the earlier phases have been building towards. For sexually sadistic killers, this may or may not result in orgasm. Peter Kürten, the Monster of Dusseldorf responsible for dozens of sex crimes against women and children in 1920s Germany admitted that it was the flowing of blood, not sex itself, that excited him.
The totem phase is one in which the killer seeks to relive the thrill of the murder. He will take a trophy of some kind – jewellery, underwear, body parts – which he can use to remind him of the event. Some lust-murderers – Ted Bundy, John Christie – were necrophiliacs; they enjoyed sex with the cadavers they had created.
The final phase is that of acute depression. The murderer can become suicidal, but actual suicides are rare and usually take place only once the killer is caught. The Gloucester murderer Fred West and Dr Harold Shipman, perhaps the most prolific killer of all time, both ended their lives awaiting trial in prison. For most serial killers, the phase passes and the whole cycle begins again.
The problem arises over time-scale. For every burst of frenetic slaughter à la Steven Wright or Jack the Ripper, there are many examples of an altogether slower kill-rate, with months or years between murders. The unidentified murderer known as ‘Il Mostro’, the Monster of Florence, for example, had a gap of six years between his first and second murders and seven between that and his third. So it is possible that the torso killer was merely biding his time between the summer of 1874 and the October of ten years later. On the other hand, of course, he could have moved away for a time and come back, or he could have been imprisoned on unrelated charges. Or he could have been in a mental institution.
By 1884 of course, the world had turned. Oxford University passed a resolution allowing women to sit examinations and women were able to compete at Wimbledon for the first time.
Beatrice Webb founded, with her husband Sidney, the Fabian Society, dedicated to introduce socialist reforms by gradual, peaceful means. In the male-dominated world, Alfred Tennyson, the poet laureate, was made a Lord; Hiram Maxim, the American engineer, invented a machine-gun that fired rapid rounds without reloading. In London, the Circle Line of the Underground was completed and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was set up. There was pressure, in the national scene, to further the extension of the franchise. The international picture was dominated by the potential crisis in the Sudan, where General Charles Gordon had been sent to evacuate Europeans from Khartoum. These last two events alone prove that ‘’orrible murder’ had yet to steal the headlines – that would be the legacy of Jack the Ripper to the nation. In 1884 the potential martyrdom of Gordon and Gladstone’s third reform bill meant that ‘the discovery of human remains’ was relegated to a single half column in The Times.
The latest discovery was made almost a mile as the crow flies from the river. The nearest point was the Victoria Embankment just below Waterloo Bridge, but the find itself was made in Alfred Mews off Tottenham Court Road.
‘Yesterday,’ said The Times of 24 October, ‘considerable excitement was caused in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road by the discovery of human remains, supposed to be those of a woman, under circumstances suggesting foul play.’1 On that Friday morning, a carman named Rawlinson and a road-sweeper named Threader were involved in clearing rubbish by emptying dustbins in Alfred Mews, a narrow cul-de-sac almost opposite Goodge Street Underground station. Clearly neither man looked carefully at their cart’s contents because it was not until they reached King’s Cross railway station, belonging to the Great Northern Railway Company, that they realized what they had. They assumed at first that the body parts were those of a dog or cat. Railway workers sorting the rubbish later that day recognized that at their feet lay a human skull with flesh still clinging to it but no hair and some sort of lime attached. Rawlinson called the police.