by Sue Black
Tailpiece
“You don’t know that you’ll ever have to talk about the skeleton in your closet”
Mark McGwire
Baseball Player
The American epidemiologist Nancy Krieger summed up better than I ever could the relationship between our bodies, ourselves and our world when she wrote of how the stories that our bodies narrate cannot be divorced from the conditions of our existence. They often match our own and other people’s stated accounts—but not always. Our bodies tell the stories that others cannot, or will not, tell because they are unable, forbidden or have chosen not to do so. Since All That Remains was first published in 2018, a remarkable number of people have written to me to tell me about their own bodies: about what has gone wrong with them over the years, the weird and wonderful anatomical variations to which they attest and what their remains might look like after they have breathed their last. Together these stories form an incredibly rich tapestry of the sheer range of human anatomy that exists in our species and are testament to just how unreserved we can be about sharing them.
Written in Bone focuses on the body section by section because that is how a forensic anthropologist works. We have no way of knowing what part or parts of a body might be presented to us for identification or in what state of preservation or fragmentation. As all of the cases in this book illustrate, our job is to squeeze every single piece of information out of whatever parts we do have in our pursuit of the answers to questions about identity, life and death.
The case that to all intents and purposes gave birth to the field in which I ply my trade is one that for me exemplifies the role of the forensic anthropologist and how it fits into the judicial process. It should be an essential text for every forensic pathologist, anatomist, police officer, lawyer and judge as well as for every forensic anthropologist. This is a case that links Lancaster, where I currently live and work, with my homeland of Scotland. It shows police working alongside anatomists and features some groundbreaking detective and forensic skills that paved the way for my generation of scientists and investigators. It also underlines the need for us to be open-minded and receptive to all possibilities, and to be constantly refining our techniques and seeking new ways of reaching for the truth.
It is a story that gives an insight, too, into the lengths to which we must sometimes go in order to establish what happened to one of our fellow human beings and reminds us that at the end of every murder investigation lies the need for truth and justice. It demonstrates why we must know exactly what we can expect any body part found in isolation to be capable of revealing. It is perhaps an interesting exercise for us all to undertake. What could you find in your body that would help me to identify who you were and what life had thrown at you? Start at your head and work down to your toes, just as we have in this book, and you will be amazed at how many little things can be noted that, in combination, might create a likeness of you and your life that your family and friends would recognize.
At the centre of this case was Bukhtyar Rustomji Ratanji Hakim, who was born into a wealthy, middle-class French–Indian family in 1899. After qualifying in medicine and surgery he worked at a Bombay hospital and later for the Indian Medical Service. Seeking to widen his horizons, in 1926 he moved to London. He had big ambitions, but in a city full of aspiring medics, he found himself a rather uninspiring small fish in a very big pond. He relocated to Edinburgh, another highly respected seat of medicine and surgery, where he studied to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, but failed the examinations on three separate occasions.
Feeling that his Indian name was holding him back, he changed it by deed poll to one he thought sounded much more British. And so it was as the debonair Dr Buck Ruxton that he met Isabella Kerr, the manageress of an Edinburgh restaurant. Bella, who was separated from her husband after a disastrous and short-lived marriage, saw this suave, exotic medic as her route to a better life.
Bella became pregnant, and to avoid a scandal they decamped to London, where they presented themselves as a married couple and she gave birth to their daughter. Ruxton once again found the capital a hard place in which to succeed. He finally decided that perhaps surgery was not for him, and that he might have a better chance of earning a reasonable living if he set up as a GP in an area where he would have less competition.
So, in 1930, the little family of three moved to Lancaster. This poor northern city, where there were not enough doctors to serve the population, was the perfect place for a new general practice to flourish. Property was cheap and Ruxton took out a loan to buy a Georgian townhouse at 2 Dalton Square, where he and Bella set up home and he opened his surgery.
Before long the practice was thriving. Ruxton was a popular GP and highly regarded by his patients. In particular he had an excellent reputation for his gynaecological skills at a time when mortality among pregnant women and infants was high. In this pre-NHS era, when all medicine and consulting had to be paid for, he was known to waive fees for his poorer patients who could not afford them.
With Buck’s dapper appearance, medical expertise and kindly ways, and Bella’s charm and social skills, the couple were quickly accepted by the local smart set. In five years they had added another two children to their family and on the surface life seemed good. Their house was comfortably furnished and they each had their own car, quite a status symbol in the 1930s. They had several domestics who cooked and cleaned for the family and a live-in maid, Mary Rogerson, who hailed from the nearby coastal town of Morecambe.
But beneath the glittering fairy story, all was not well between the couple. Bella was ambitious and headstrong. Not content to play the doctor’s wife, she was set on having her own business and her own money. Buck wanted control, she wanted freedom and the outcomes of their often loud arguments were plain for all to see. Bella sported bruises around her neck and told the police, who were summoned on several occasions, that her husband was violent. She left him more than once, taking the children with her, because of his behaviour but always returned. The attitude then to domestic violence was that a man was the master of his family and however he chose to run his household, and manage his wife, was his business and nobody else’s.
Everything about Bella’s personality that had first beguiled Ruxton now became a source of fear and bitterness. He resented her independence and the money she spent on herself. Although no great beauty, Bella had a charisma that attracted other, younger men, and Buxton was insanely jealous. He became convinced that she had a lover and that she was going to leave him for good.
It all came to a head over the weekend of 14 September 1935. Bella had arranged a trip to Blackpool that Saturday night to visit two of her sisters who were living there and to see the world-famous illuminations. Ruxton was not happy about it. In the interests of a quiet life, rather than staying overnight as she had planned, she decided to drive back to Lancaster the same evening. But the fact that she did not arrive home until after 1 a.m. was confirmation, in his eyes, that she had been seeing another man.
As she entered the house in the early hours of the morning of Sunday 15 September, it is likely that Ruxton was waiting for her. He may have strangled her, as he had a history of this type of assault, or perhaps he lashed out with the poker. We will never know, because there were no witnesses. Whatever the sequence of events, Bella died. Maybe Mary Rogerson, the maid, hearing the commotion, came out on to the landing and met the same fate. However it happened, she, too, lost her life that morning. The amount of blood discovered subsequently on the stairs suggested that either one or both women may have been stabbed.
Did Ruxton set out to murder his common-law wife and their maid? Probably not, but they were dead none the less, and now he had to decide how to deal with it. Should he face the music and risk his career and reputation by owning up? Should he just pack his bags and run away? Or should he try to cover it up? He settled on the last option. He was undoubtedly an intelligent man but, inclined to arrogance, he had an over-inflate
d view of his own intelligence and may well have been a little contemptuous of the capabilities of the police. He would have to concoct a plausible story but, more pressingly, he would have to find a way of disposing of two bodies that were leaking blood and fluids all over his landing carpet.
Dismemberment must have seemed the logical solution to him. He had the necessary anatomical knowledge, he had studied forensic medicine and he had the surgical means. It is not enough, however, to have the expertise to cut up the bodies. You also have to be organized, to have an idea of where you are going to dump the parts and how you are going to handle the mess. Ruxton would need to dispose of the remains, clean up the house and come up with a cover story, all the while running his surgery and looking after the three children who were asleep in the house, minus the help of the maid.
He dragged the bodies across the landing into the bathroom, the preferred site for most dismemberments as it comes equipped with a body-shaped and appropriately sized vessel and a plumbing system to wash all the fluids away. He would have known he’d have to bleed the bodies, as he could not afford to leave a trail of blood through the house, and that he’d have to do it quickly, before the blood began to congeal and the task became more difficult. He would have to disfigure them to obscure their identities, aware that, in time, decomposition would do the rest of the job for him.
With the right equipment and the right skills, dismemberment does not actually take that long. He started with Bella, his common-law wife. Heaving her into the bath, he removed her clothes, skinned her torso and removed her breasts. He excised her larynx because he knew that the prominence of the Adam’s apple was an indication of the difference between a man and a woman. He also removed her internal and external genitalia. He cut off her lips, ears, eyes, scalp and hair. He then removed her head. He sliced away her cheeks, pulled out her front teeth and all the others that had fillings or dental work which might identify her. He dismembered her whole pelvis and stripped her lower limbs of flesh because she had quite distinctive thick ankles. He removed the ends of her fingers, to prevent fingerprint comparison. He severed her major joints with skill and precision. He encountered only one significant setback: while getting rid of the evidence of a bunion on her right foot, his knife slipped and he cut his hand badly. This was going to slow him down and hinder him from doing such a thorough job on Mary.
By this point he was probably quite exhausted. His initial adrenaline rush would have hit the crash part of the cycle, he was wounded and his instruments would by now have been blunt and slippery. Although he removed many of the facial features that could have identified Mary, along with the skin from her thighs, to obliterate a birthmark, her hands and her feet he left alone. To what extent he dismembered her torso we do not know, as it was never found.
He made an excellent job of obscuring the identities of his victims. Perhaps too good a job, because in the process he left clues to his own. His clean disjointing of Mary’s shoulder and hip was a clear indication that the person who had done this had an understanding of anatomy and possessed the necessary surgical skills. And the specific parts of the body he removed pointed to a high degree of knowledge of what was important to contemporary forensic identification.
Having dismembered the bodies, Ruxton locked the bathroom door, cleaned the landing carpet, and perhaps the walls, as best he could and changed his clothes, which would have been soaked in blood. Later that morning, he had breakfast with his children, visited his cleaning lady to say that she would not be required until the next day and dropped the children off with friends so that he could continue unobserved with the task awaiting him at home.
He wrapped the large body pieces in a mixture of old clothing and newspapers. He now had a big pile of body parcels, plus some clothing, identifiable excised body parts and remnants of tissue which he wanted to dispose of separately. He bought petrol and, over the course of several nights, he burned these in an old barrel in his back garden.
He invented a variety of stories to explain the absence of Bella and Mary, including the one he initially told Mary’s parents—that she was pregnant and Bella had taken her away to procure an abortion for her. As abortions were illegal he hoped this would deter them from contacting the police. He managed to keep most people at bay for long enough to think through what he was going to do with all the parcels. There were comments from staff and patients about the condition of the house—the odd smell, and the disappearance of carpets—and on his dishevelled and exhausted appearance. He told some he was preparing the place for redecoration, others that Bella had left him again, attributing his state of disarray to stress and worry. His bandaged hand, he said, he had jammed in a door. But to be a really good liar, you have to be a consistent liar.
Ruxton realized he could not use his own vehicle to dispose of the bodies. He was too well known in the area. So he hired an unostentatious car, with a big boot, from a local company, and decided to drive north and dump the remains in Scotland, no doubt rationalizing that the police force across the border was unlikely to be in communication with their English counterparts. Having lived in Edinburgh, he knew the road well.
Early on Tuesday 17 September, taking his young son with him in the hired car, he drove towards the town of Moffat in the borders, a journey of over a hundred miles. With today’s motorways and faster cars it can be done in just under two hours, but of course in 1935 it was a much longer expedition. A couple of miles north of Moffat in Dumfriesshire, he stopped on an old stone bridge across the Gardenholme Linn stream. There had been heavy rain and the burn was in full spate. He threw the contents of the boot over the parapet into the fast-flowing water.
At 12:25 p.m., a cyclist reported to the police that he had been knocked off his bike in Kendal by a speeding southbound motorist. He had taken a note of the registration number of the car, which was telephoned through to the next police station along the road, in Milnthorpe. A police officer was waiting there for Ruxton as he drove through, and stopped the car. The matter was recorded as a minor incident, since nobody was hurt, and Ruxton was allowed to continue on his way, having explained, ever the caring doctor, that the reason he had been driving so fast was that he had patients waiting to see him in Lancaster. But this was a huge mistake on Ruxton’s part and he would have known it. His presence, and that of his hire car, in Cumbria, on the route back from the borders, had now been officially recorded, timed and dated.
Two days later he made the round trip again with the remainder of his cargo. This time he was more cautious and presumably disposed of the rest of the body parts, unseen, at various points in the Annan river and its tributaries.
By 25 September, Mary Rogerson’s family had grown so concerned about her absence that they informed the police. Ruxton, her employer, was questioned and spun the constabulary one of his pre-prepared yarns.
On Sunday 29 September, fourteen days after Bella and Mary were murdered, a young woman out for a stroll near Moffat looked over the bridge into the Gardenholme Linn burn, as you do, and thought she saw a raised arm and a hand sticking out of the water. The local menfolk were fetched to take a closer look and found a bundle, caught against a boulder, containing a human head and upper limb. Police officers from the Dumfriesshire Constabulary were summoned and arrived swiftly on their bicycles.
A search of the burn, the surrounding streams and ravines and the Annan river brought forth dozens of body parts, including a second head. Some of them were wrapped in fabric or clothing and some in wet newspaper. These were the days, of course, before crime scene investigators, before DNA, before forensic photography or generators to light a scene through the night. The police officers were quick, thorough and efficient. They recovered everything they could find and made copious notes, paying admirable attention to detail. The body parts were taken to the mort house at the corner of the cemetery in Moffat, there to await the scrutiny of the doctors.
An inventory was taken the next day, in much the same way as we would do it now. So far t
hey had two arms, two upper arm bones, two thigh bones, two leg bones, an upper trunk, the lower part of two legs, including feet, a pelvis, two disfigured heads and, in total, nearly seventy assorted pieces of human remains. The fabric and newspaper in which they had all been wrapped was removed, cleaned and carefully dried.
It was clear that these were not natural deaths and that the body parts belonged to a minimum of two people. It was also very apparent that the dismemberment had been performed with expertise. The police wondered if it may have been carried out by a doctor, or whether the whole thing might be a hoax, perhaps perpetrated by medical students dumping body parts from a dissecting room. What was not clear was whether the victims were local or whether the remains had been brought to Moffat from elsewhere. At this stage, then as now, establishing the possible identity of the two bodies was paramount if the killer was to be found and their story revealed.
It was obvious from the inventory that there were body parts still missing, and although a further search using dogs turned up a few more bits, what they had by no means comprised two complete bodies. An early assessment suggested that the victims might be an older man and a younger woman. This misdirection meant that nobody was looking for two missing women. There were no comparable people missing locally and so the investigation had to be widened. Easier to go north than south, especially as the remains had been found in Scotland, not England, and so the Glasgow police became involved, as did the anatomists and forensic doctors from the ancient universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The principal anatomist was James Brash, a professor at Edinburgh university, and the two other academics were Sydney Smith, professor of forensic medicine at Edinburgh university, and John Glaister, professor of forensic medicine at Glasgow university. All three were esteemed academics with global reputations and, ironically, they would have been revered by Dr Ruxton. Professors Brash and Smith had probably taught him when he was studying for his surgeon’s examinations.