by Trow, M. J.
Did the police investigate the premises of Harrison Barber? We do not know because details of the minutiae of the investigation have not survived; but it seems likely that they did. What would they have found? The kind of knives and saws which could have been the murder weapons, but there was no way of proving that. Sacks and string of the type in which the body parts were wrapped but which were so anonymous they could be found all over the country. The body parts of horses waiting for disposal. A lot of animal blood which could not be differentiated from human and would have been washed away continually as the working day progressed. And a lot of horse slaughterers and cat’s meat men who had seen nothing, heard nothing and simply, but for very different reasons, could not help.
And if one of these men was the man who had worn the unidentifiable uniform who had prophesied the finding of the torso near Pinchin Street to Mr Arnold the news vendor, how were the police supposed to recognize him?
There are more questions than answers in the Thames torso case. Laurence Alison finds it odd, as do I, that most of the victims remained anonymous. Remember, however the loss of life aboard the Princess Alice when 160 corpses remained unclaimed. Could they all have been solitary individuals with no family and no friends? If the torso victims were all prostitutes, especially if they worked out of a brothel, or were kept by some dubious gentleman leading a double existence, it was clearly in someone’s best interests not to identify the deceased.
Time and time again, we come back to the heads. Why go to the lengths, in 1873, of removing the skull and not the face? Is the deliberate dumping of body parts a message to someone? After all, the killer could have destroyed the bodies totally in his workplace, grinding the bones to powder. Is the killer taunting the public and the police, saying, ‘Look how clever I am. I can leave these ghastly objects where I like and you can’t catch me.’ This is certainly the tone of many of the Ripper letters and if none of these is genuine, the ‘spirit’ of the message might well have been shared by the torso killer.
Or is the cat’s meat man simply carrying out a job for someone? Is he, in fact, that most beloved stalwart of the modern thriller, a hitman, carrying out contracts, which may have been the clue to the Cleveland torsos of the Kingsbury Run. Or is all that in the realms of fiction?
Whoever he was, the torso murderer was a new breed of killer and the police were at a loss to know where to start. I have traced the man as far as I can and that is much nearer than anyone else has got. But he has, nevertheless, got away with murder, then and for all time.
Like most of the women he killed, he has no name and no face.
As R Michael Gordon was putting the finishing touches to his book on the torso murders in 2002, a series of prostitute killings was being investigated by police in London. One of the victims was Zoe Parker, who had a red rose tattoo on her arm. As I write this final paragraph of my book, police have arrested a man calling himself the ‘Crossbow Cannibal’ believed to be responsible for the murder of several prostitutes in Bradford’s red light district. The eighty-one body parts of one of them, Susan Blamires, have been found floating in the River Aire …
We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And more of your children will be dead tomorrow.
Notes
Chapter 1: Messing About on the River
1. Rudyard Kipling, The River’s Tale.
2. Where I refer to him, it will be by surname only to avoid confusion.
3. Charles Dickens, Dictionary of the Thames (1887), p. 45.
4. In The River’s Tale that begins this chapter.
5. Thomas Traherne, Shadows in the Water, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Thames, Sacred River (London, Vintage, 2008), p. 353.
6. Because of the alteration of the Thames’s course since 1215, Runnymede is now part of the bank and is no longer an island.
7. Dickens, Dictionary, p. 216.
8. Ibid.
9. John Gay, Epistle to the Earl of Burlington (1712), quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 434.
10. Dickens, Dictionary, p. 118.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 435.
13. Dickens, Dictionary, p. 26.
14. Ibid., p. 26.
15. Samuel Pepys, Diary, quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 438.
16. Technically, it is the bell inside the clock tower and not the tower itself that has this name.
17. Quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 438.
18. Quoted ibid., pp. 294–5.
19. Quoted ibid., p. 17.
20. Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass (1616).
21. Quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 203.
22. Virginia Woolf, The Docks of London, quoted in Chris Ellmers and Alex Warner, London’s Lost Riverscape, introduction by Gavin Stamp (London, Guikd Publishing, 1988).
23. Such a plan was actually in existence during the 1660s when Britain was at war with the Dutch three times. The writer Aphra Benn was a government agent for Charles II at the time and passed vital information from the Low Countries to London.
24. Legal quays were set up officially during the reign of Elizabeth I with a monopoly on taxed goods. The sufferance quays, by contrast, were originally only on the south bank of the river and were necessary because of the increasing congestion of river traffic. They were essentially temporary in nature.
25. Quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 442.
26. Quoted in Dickens, Dictionary, p. 88.
Chapter 2: River of Death
1. Quoted in Ackroyd, Thames, p. 157.
2. Dio Cassius, Historiae, quoted in John Peddie, Conquest: The Roman Invasion of Britain (Stroud, Sutton, 1987), p. 84.
3. Dio Cassius, Epitome 62, quoted in M J Trow and Taliesin Trow, Boudicca, the Warrior Queen (Stroud, Sutton, 2003), p. 176.
4. Ackroyd, Thames, p. 370.
5. Quoted ibid., p. 380.
6. Quoted ibid., pp. 388–9. All details on this accident from Ackroyd.
7. Tr. Swanton, Anglo Saxon Chronicle Peterborough (E) text (London, Phoenix, 2000), p. 138.
8. Admiral John Byng was shot on the deck of his own flagship for failing to face the enemy during the Seven Years’ War. Recognized then and now as a gross miscarriage of justice, it was not seen that way by the cynical François Voltaire who claimed that the English ‘shot an Admiral now and again to encourage the others’.
9. M J Trow and Taliesin Trow Who Killed Kit Marlowe? (Stroud, Sutton, 2001).
10. Thomas Hood, The Bridge of Sighs (1844). It was the favourite poem of murderers Charlie Peace and Henry Wainwright.
11. Ackroyd, Thames, p. 374.
12. Quoted ibid., p. 376.
13. Henry Mayhew, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dicken’s London (London, Headline, 1987), p. 121.
14. Both these phrases are taken from the full title of Colquhoun’s treatise.
15. For an excellent survey of the chaotic and overlapping duties of these medieval forces, see T A Critchley and P D James, The Maul and the Pear Tree (London, Sphere, 1987).
16. Molly Lefebure, Murder on the Home Front (London, Grafton, 1990), p. 25.
Chapter 3: Found Dead
1. R Austin Freeman London Below Bridge from George R Sims, Living London (London, Cassell & Co., 1903), p. 256.
2. The Anatomy Act was passed in 1831 as a direct result of the murders by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh. It provided far more bodies legally for the purposes of medical study.
3. The Times (16 May 1887).
4. Ibid.
5. Quoted in R Michael Gordon, The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian London (Durham, NC, McFarland & Co., 2002), p. 40.
6. The Times (21 July 1887).
7. Quoted in Gordon, Thames Torso Murders, p. 44.
8. And the numbers of murderous doctors historically are very high – Pritchard, Palmer, Bodkin Adams, Ruxton, Shipman, etc.
9. Gordon, Thames Torso Murders, p. 44.
10. Charles A Hebbert, An Exercise in Forensic Medicine (1888). There was always a slight proble
m for an exclusively male police force (and quite possibly doctors too) in telling one female garment from another. When Molly Lefebure was secretary to one of the most famous pathologists, Dr Keith Simpson, during the Second World War, she found it amusing to have to explain to officers cataloguing crime scenes of female victims what bits of underwear were called.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
Chapter 4: Jack
1. Ann Rule, Green River, Running Red, New York, Pocket Star Books, 2004, p. 447.
2. Gordon, Thames Torso Murders, p. 73.
3. See Chapter 8.
4. In Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer I identified the Whitechapel murderer as Robert Mann, the mortuary assistant attached to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. To avoid confusion and not to veer too far off the point of this book, I simply refer to the killer as Jack the Ripper, preserving his anonymity yet again!
5. For reasons why the mutilations on Alice McKenzie seem different, see my Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer.
6. R Michael Gordon does not mention the Battersea, Putney nor Tottenham Court Road murders at all.
Chapter 5: The Whitehall Mystery
1. Hebbert, Exercise in Forensic Medicine.
2. Quoted in Gordon, Thames Torso Murders, p. 67.
3. Quoted ibid., p. 68.
4. Quoted ibid., p. 71.
5. See Chapter 4.
6. Lees diary for those dates, quoted in Stewart P Evans and Keith Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (Stroud, Sutton), 2001, p. 143.
7. Illustrated Police News (20 Oct. 1888).
8. The Times.
Chapter 6: The Frankenstein Connection
1. Dickens, Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames (1887), pp. 25–6.
2. Hebbert, Exercise in Forensic Medicine, pp. 151–7.
3. Weekly Herald (June 1889).
Chapter 7: The Women of Moab and Midian
1. George R Sims, London At Dead of Night from Living London (1902), vol. 3, p. 355.
2. Letter to Central News Agency, 5 Oct. 1888, quoted in Evans and Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, p. 223.
3. The generic slang term for a prostitute, probably from motte, French for a hill, referring to the genital area.
4. Quoted in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, Jack the Ripper A–Z (London, Headline, 1991), p. 10.
5. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, Salvation Army Publications 1890), p. 51.
6. Quoted in Graham Ovenden and Peter Mendes, Victorian Erotic Photography, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1973, p. 87.
7. Quoted in Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, London, Pelican, 1971.
8. Black Sarah.
9. Quoted ibid., p. 351.
10. Ibid., p. 323.
Chapter 8: The Pinchin Street Torso
1. Israel Lipski poisoned Miriam Angel in June 1887 and was hanged at Newgate for the murder in August of the same year.
2. Hebbert, Exercise in Forensic Medicine.
3. James Monro to J S Sanders, 11 Sept. 1889. HO File 144/221/A49031K.
Chapter 9: Dealers in Horror
1. Arthur Appleton, Mary Ann Cotton: Her Story and Trial, London, Michael Joseph, 1973, pp. 131–2.
2. In 1811, two families living along the Highway were bludgeoned to death in two separate incidents within weeks of each other. A sailor named Williams was charged with the murders but was found dead in police custody before he came to trial.
3. Quoted in Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors (London, Grafton, 1986), p. 95.
4. It was never certain whether the Thames Mystery corpse was that of a prostitute but it seems highly likely. In later cases involving prostitutes both in Britain and the United States, the police were often accused of not working hard enough to solve the murders because of the victims’ lifestyles. This does not appear to have happened in the torso cases of the 1870s and 1880s.
5. The term means anatomist, one who, before the Anatomy Act of 1831 obtained corpses by illegally exhuming bodies for dissection in the medical schools. William Burke, the unlucky half of the murderous duo Burke and Hare, went a stage further and murdered victims which were then sold to the nearest hospital. He was hanged in Edinburgh in 1829.
6. The Lancet (1873).
7. The Times (16 Sept. 1873).
8. Ibid.
Chapter 10: The Girl with the Rose Tattoo
1. The Times (24 Oct. 1884).
2. As I write (March 2010) the Met are investigating the suspicious death of a young man found in Bedford Square’s garden near a shed used by gardeners. The Homicide and Serious Crime Command, descendants of the men who hunted the torso killer, believed they knew the man’s identity. Scores of office workers must have walked straight past the body on their way to work.
3. Fritz Haarmann was a predatory homosexual who picked up young men near his local railway station in 1920s Germany and dismembered the bodies, selling their flesh in his market stall around the corner.
4. Chief Inspector Walter Dew’s description of him in I Caught Crippen (1935).
5. Clerkenwell Press (Saturday, 25 Oct. 1884).
Chapter 11: Men Behaving Madly
1. Although Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, murdered black and white girls indiscriminately.
2. Sir Charles Warren to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, 19 Sept. 1888, quoted in Stewart P Evans and Donald Rumbelow, Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates (Stroud, Sutton, 2006), p. 86.
3. Ibid.
4. Joseph Merrick was exhibited in various freak shows in London before he was ‘rescued’ by Dr Frederick Treves of the London Hospital. Merrick suffered from the extremely rare condition of neurofibromatosis Type 1, possibly linked with another, undiagnosed condition.
5. Begg, Fido and Skinner, Jack the Ripper A–Z, p 152.
6. He would have been right 300 years earlier!
7. In The Secret of Prisoner 1167, London, Robinson, 1997.
8. Quoted in The Trial of Neill Cream, p. 9.
9. W T Shore, Introduction to Trial of Thomas Neill Cream (London, William Hoyle & Co., 1923), p. 40.
10. Pall Mall Gazette (1903).
Chapter 12: Other Times, Other Crimes
1. Clifford Elmer, Synopsis of the Edgware Road Tragedy, Fairbairn’s Edition of the Trial of Greenacre and Gale for the Horrible Murder and Mutilation of Hannah Brown. Catalogue entry, 2010.
2. Quoted in Joan Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton, Barn Owl Books, 1990), p. 29.
3. Donald Hume killed Stanley Setty in a fight and dismembered his body which he then took up in parts in a light aircraft he had hired for the purpose. The parts themselves were located scattered over the Essex marshes and a brilliant piece of forensic science led to the killer’s door.
4. Bukhtyar Rustomji anglicized his name to Buck Ruxton when he moved to England. He killed his wife and the family maid in December 1935 and dismembered their bodies before dumping them in a tributary of the River Arran near Moffat, Edinburgh.
5. Quoted in James Badal, In the Wake of the Butcher (Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 2001), p. 168.
6. Quoted ibid., p. 169.
7. Quoted ibid., p. 170.
8. By an odd coincidence, serial killer of prostitutes John Christie had worked here fifteen years earlier.
9. John du Rose, Murder was my Business (London, W H Allen, 1971; Granada Edition, 1973), p. 120.
10. Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs elaborated on this theme, as Dr Hannibal Lecter gives his insights into Buffalo Bill.
11. Quoted in Rule, Green River, Running Red, p. 261.
12. Quoted ibid., p. 405.
13. Quoted ibid., p. 529.
14. Quoted ibid., p 587.
Chapter 13: Criminal Man
1. Quoted in Evans and Rumbelow, Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates, p. 240.
2. Having an abnormal obsession with sex. The female equivalent is nymphomania.
3. Quoted i
n David Wilson, A History of British Serial Killing, London, Sphere, 2009, p. 13.
Chapter 14: The Cat’s Meat Man
1. Laurence Alison and Marie Eyre, Killer in the Shadows, London, Pennant Books, 2009.
2. Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed, Atlantic Productions for the Discovery Channel, 2009.
3. David Whitelaw, Corpus Delicti (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1936), p. 65.
4. The case of armed robbery and murder by the Stratton brothers, in Deptford.
5. The official guesstimate is at least 215.
6. The Lancet (1873).
7. All the Ripper letters are quoted from Evans and Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell.
8. I personally believe there is a possibility (no more) that the ‘Sor’ letter sent with half a kidney to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee is genuine.
9. Brian Innes, Profile of a Criminal Mind (Kettering, Index, 2004), pp. 74–5.
10. Alison and Eyre, Killer in the Shadows, p. 227.
11. W J Gordon, The Horse World of London (1893), ch. 15.
Bibliography
ACKROYD, Peter (introd.) Dickens’ London, London, Pilot Productions, 1987
—— Thames: Sacred River, London, Vintage, 2008
ARNOLD, Catherine, Necropolis: London and its Dead, London, Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster), 2006
BADAL, James, In the Wake of the Butcher, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 2001
BEGG, Paul, FIDO, Martin, and SKINNER, Keith, The Jack the Ripper A–Z, London, Headline, 1991
BUDWORTH, Geoffrey, The River Beat, London, Historical Publications 1997
CHAPMAN, Pauline, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, London, Grafton Books, 1986
DICKENS, Charles, Dickens’s Dictionary of London (first published 1888), Mortenhampstead, Old House Books, 1993
—— Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames (first published 1887), Mortenhampstead, Old House Books, 1993