Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  They began to match the body parts, assigning them to individuals they named simply as Body 1 and Body 2. They suspected that the dismemberer had surgical or anatomical experience and they believed that the reason for the removal of some of the parts was to destroy something of interest that could have identified the bodies. And while they were aware that the purpose of the mutilation was to conceal sex and identity, they were still working on the premise that they had an older male and a younger female. Two tanks of embalming fluid were constructed, one for each body, and the assigned parts were placed in the fluid to halt further decomposition.

  On 30 September, the newspapers carried reports of the grisly discovery at Moffat but the story still described the victims as a man and a woman. Ruxton must have felt mightily relieved. It was, though, those same newspapers that were to give the police the break they needed.

  One of the newspapers used to wrap some of the remains was a copy of the Sunday Graphic, dated 15 September 1935 and carrying the serial number 1067. This provided the earliest possible date for the dumping of the bodies. Moreover, the newspaper was not only local to the Lancaster area but its circulation could be narrowed down even further: it was a limited “slip edition” distributed in small numbers only around Lancaster and Morecambe.

  Their research into this newspaper brought the police down from Glasgow to Lancaster and Morecambe. There were no couples missing from round here, either, who fitted the description of the bodies, but there were two missing women. That must have been one of those real lightbulb moments—especially when the police learned that the husband of one of the women was a GP with a surgical background. They had been led down a blind alley for the first twelve days of the investigation: a classic illustration of why it is so important that the information given to the police in the early stages of a case is accurate.

  The celebrated academics readily admitted that they could be wrong. Another vital lesson: not allowing our egos to take the investigation any further than necessary down that blind alley. By Sunday 13 October, Dr Ruxton had been charged with Mary’s murder. Some of the items of clothing wrapped around the body parts had been recognized by her family.

  Then came the first piece of brand-new forensic science. Whereas Bella’s fingertips had been cut off and were never recovered, Mary’s were intact. The outer layer of epidermis on the hands of Body 1 was “degloved”—a condition known as “washerwoman hands”—from having been in the water for so long. However, her deeper, dermal fingerprints were visible. The fingerprint expert was able to retrieve the dermal prints from the corpse and compare them with epidermal fingerprints found in Mary’s room at 2 Dalton Square, and indeed all around the house in areas that she helped to clean, including on glassware.

  The dermal print, although finer and less clear-cut, has a similar ridge detail to the outer, epidermal print, and is just as valid for identification purposes. This was the first time that dermal fingerprinting played a role in a UK case and the first time such evidence would be admitted into court.

  Rubber casts were taken of the hands and feet of Body 1, which fitted perfectly into Mary’s gloves and shoes, but not Bella’s. The skin removed from Mary’s leg, which had held the birthmark, constituted negative evidence, speaking to the attempt to prevent identification rather than proving identity itself. If something is done to disfigure a specific part of a body, then it raises the question of what was there that someone was trying to hide.

  Ruxton was charged with Mary’s murder first because the evidence associated with her identity—sex, age, height, clothing, fingerprints, the absence of evidence in a critical area and the fit of her gloves and shoes to the hands and feet—was consistent with Body 1, described as a woman between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five with multiple blunt-force trauma injuries to the head. Body 2 was a female between the age of thirty-five and forty-five with five stab wounds to the chest and a fractured hyoid bone. Since Ruxton had been much more thorough in removing her identifying features, proving that this was Bella was going to be much more difficult.

  The scientists turned their attention to photographs of the two women. The pictures in existence of Mary were not of good quality but there was an excellent image of Bella, wearing a diamond tiara. They decided to attempt to superimpose a photograph of a skull on to a photograph of a face, something that had never been tried before. This was the birth of the technique we were still using sixty years later when we assisted with the identification of two of the victims of the Monster of Terrazzo, as recounted in Chapter 2.

  It was an inspired idea and an incredible feat of patience and perseverance on the part of the photographer. While it is true that the superimposition on to Mary’s photograph was not convincing, in Bella’s case it was a triumph, and the result remains an iconic forensic image to this day.

  On 5 November, Ruxton was charged with the murder of his common-law wife. The Crown needed to secure sufficient evidence to get to the position of “beyond reasonable doubt,” and it seems they felt they probably had enough, despite the fact that there were no witnesses to the assault, no murder weapon had ever been found and no confession was forthcoming. The case was almost entirely circumstantial, and therefore heavily reliant on some very new, untried and untested forensic techniques that prosecutors, police and scientists could only hope would be deemed admissible in court.

  At trial, the Crown dropped the murder charge for Mary and the case went ahead based only on the evidence relating to Bella. This happens in court cases when a decision has to be made on the best strategy to be adopted to secure a conviction. Mary’s family were understandably distraught that Ruxton would not face justice for taking the life of their daughter.

  He entered a plea of not guilty and the Crown prepared eleven witnesses and 209 exhibits for the trial, which started on Monday 2 March 1936 at Manchester Court. Even though the primary investigating police force and the experts were Scottish, and the remains had been found in Scotland, the trial was held in England because that was where the offences had been committed. The case should have been heard at Lancaster Castle, but was moved to Manchester owing to concerns that there could be no fair trial in a small community where the accused was such a prominent figure.

  It lasted eleven days, one of the longest murder trials on record in the English courts. The forensic evidence was admitted and, together with witness evidence from around the time of the murders and their aftermath, it constituted the majority of the testimony given. The final day, Friday 13 March, was certainly an unlucky one for Dr Ruxton. Having retired at 4 p.m., the jury returned just over an hour later with a unanimous guilty verdict and Mr Justice Sir John Singleton passed the death sentence. Buck Ruxton was to be taken from the court to Strangeways prison, where he would be hanged by the neck until dead.

  Of course, Ruxton appealed, and his case was chaired by the lord chief justice, later Baron Hewart of Bury, on 27 April, but it was not upheld. Clemency was sought by the people of Lancaster with a petition of over 10,000 signatures, but this, too, was denied, and on 12 May 1936 the sentence was carried out. Ruxton was just thirty-six years old and left three orphaned children aged six, four and two. All sorts of distasteful things occur in the wake of cases as notorious as this one. Although the bodies of Bella and Mary were eventually buried, their skulls were retained by Edinburgh university. Charlatans offered messages from beyond the grave. Bawdy ditties were sung or recited in bars and playgrounds. The area where the bodies had been found became known locally as Ruxton’s Dump. As for the house at Dalton Square, much of it had been dismantled for testing by the scientists, including the bath where the two women had been bled and dismembered. This ended up being used for many years as a horse trough by the Lancashire Mounted Police division in Hutton.

  Would we go to the same lengths nowadays as the police and scientists of the 1930s? I would certainly hope so. Our predecessors left no stone unturned. As well as the careful preservation of evidence and the application of the remarkable
innovations of superimposition and dermal fingerprinting, the case featured a Glasgow entomologist, Dr Alexander Mearns, who was brought on board to analyse pupae found on the remains to further narrow down the likely time of death—another technique that was in its infancy. This investigation had everything, and I would urge anyone interested in the full story to read Tom Wood’s excellent book Ruxton: The First Modern Murder.

  Today, of course, we would DNA sample the body parts to assign them to the correct individual and we would take matching DNA samples from Mary’s parents and from Bella’s children and her sisters. But we lose our core skills at our peril: we have no idea when we might need to call upon them. The latest techniques are not always able to give us answers.

  We have become over-reliant on DNA and our testing methods are now so sensitive that we are starting to experience some challenges in the courtroom on the question of possible contamination. There are still things we don’t know forensically about how DNA behaves. How it transfers on to different materials, for example, or for how long it stays there. We don’t know how easy or difficult it is for it to be transferred from one surface to another and we have difficulty deconvoluting a mixed profile sample.

  DNA evidence might be enough to prove identity but it may not be sufficient on its own to prove guilt or innocence in a court of law. So it is important to ensure that it is supported by as much corroborating evidence as possible. And when a case comes along where DNA cannot help we must rely on the scientific skill and knowledge of our various disciplines and the mutual acknowledgement that, when investigators and scientists work together as a team, we can achieve great things.

  If we can reach a swift solution then of course we will, and sometimes the obvious answer will be the right one. The cases that stay in our minds, though, are not the easy ones but those that have been the hardest and required the most thought. What we always remember is that every body part we see belongs to a person who lived. Someone who had a mother, father, perhaps siblings or children, and friends and colleagues who cared about them.

  As this journey through the human body has shown, the job of the forensic anthropologist is not to create a life story but to try to find and understand the story that has already been written large in its bones, muscles, skin, tendons, and in the very fibre of its being. We must be the bridge between whatever horrific, tragic or simply sad incident has brought about the end of a life and the handing back of the body in which it was lived to the people who will lay their loved one, and their story, to rest.

  What it is not is rocket science, and although it may at times be portrayed as glamorous, it really isn’t. It is a hard job that challenges you physically, intellectually and emotionally, but it is an honour and a privilege to play what is sometimes a very small part in the investigation process and to know that what you have done has made a difference to someone somewhere.

  Before long, it will be my turn to pass the baton into the very capable hands of the generations coming up behind me who are better suited to the physically gruelling aspects of the job. I never pictured myself in the role of professional grandmother, but somehow it has sneaked up on me when I wasn’t looking. When I saw myself on television recently in an interview I recorded with the criminologist David Wilson, I recognized, of course, many things that I already knew about myself. But by detaching the woman on the screen from “me,” and viewing her as a different person, I think I can detect a lot more about her.

  I see my mother and my father in me facially, but not in the way I talk. I don’t have either their mannerisms or their accents. Like my father, I am capable of telling a story without necessarily answering the question I am being asked. My brain still runs faster than my mouth, and I can see myself thinking two steps ahead of what I am saying. I can tell when I am uncomfortable, from my body language and the tone of my voice, and when I am relaxed and feel myself to be on solid ground. I have two smiles and one of them does not reach my eyes. These are all characteristics I can recognize as part of who I am, but which no forensic anthropologist looking at my bones or my body when I am dead would ever be able to discern.

  So we need to be realistic about what a stranger can tell from our bodies and just how valuable or otherwise that information may be in the identification of our mortal remains. I would hope that from whatever might be left of me a good forensic anthropologist would be able to determine that I was female, my age when I died, my height (5 ft 6 ins, or 1.67 m) and my red hair, if it is still red by then. If it isn’t, they can always find that colouring in my genetic make-up, which would also tell them about my skin tone and whether or not I had freckles (I do). I would hope they could establish that my ancestry is Caucasian. A classic Celt.

  They will see that I have no tattoos, no congenital abnormalities (of which I am aware), no deformities (though these may yet come), no modifications and as yet, please God, no amputations or major injuries. I have several scars from accidents, like the one under the ring on my right finger where I sliced it open with the lid of a tin of corned beef as a teenager. There is only one surgical scar to date, from an operation to reverse the gynaecological sterilization I had opted for. My pelvis might show signs of the three beautiful babies I brought into the world. My teeth would scream that I am a Scot with more fillings than teeth, and some have been extracted. I have no tonsils. I have the early stages of arthritis in my neck, back, hips and big toes. I broke my right collar bone years ago when I fell off my motorbike in the ice.

  I have no surgical devices of any sort implanted in me. I have never been shot or stabbed. I have never taken any form of illegal substance (to my knowledge, at least) and toxicology would confirm that I am on no regular medication. All things considered, it is actually a pretty boring, run-of-the-mill body, so I can only apologize to the person who could have to sift through these bones looking for something, anything, that might be of interest.

  I have said before that when I die I would like my body to be dissected in the anatomy department in Dundee university. I want to be embalmed using the Thiel method my department pioneered in the UK. The very ordinariness of my remains will make me an excellent silent teacher. I would prefer my students to be scientists, please, rather than medics or dentists. Science students learn about anatomy in much more detail, because their curriculum devotes more time to the subject. When they have finished with me, I would like all my bones to be brought together and boiled down to get rid of all the fat inside, and then to be rearticulated as a teaching skeleton so that I can hang in the dissecting room I helped to design and continue to teach for the rest of my death.

  I see it as such a waste to go up in smoke or to be buried uselessly in the soil. And what could be more fitting, for an anatomist and forensic anthropologist, than to want to be an articulated skeleton when she grows up?

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements are tricky things to write when there are so many people to thank. The production of a book is a genuine team effort and the writer is just one member of the cast. I hope it goes without saying that my husband and my beautiful daughters are top of the list. They have tolerated my reclusive retreating into my attic for hours, days and weeks at a time. They have thrown in food and gallons of tea from the door and endured frequent bouts of outwardly directed frustration and doubt. Without them, I have no purpose.

  Then there is my second family, who have looked after me so well for a number of years and for whom I struggle to find words that express how much I adore them. To the lovely and marvellously bonkers Susanna Wadeson and the unflappable and smooth-talking Michael Alcock—that tea and cake with you both in the Wellcome cafeteria has so much to answer for. How you persuaded me to do this I will never know, but thank you.

  To Caroline North McIlvanney, who wonderfully labelled herself as my “éminence grise.” You are never in the shadows, lovely lady, but are writ large across every page and for that I remain in awe of your talents and am eternally grateful.

  Steph Duncan stepp
ed into the story for a while and although it was a cameo appearance, it was fun. Thank you for keeping an expert hand on the tiller and steering us in the right direction.

  And then there is a third family. Creative and accomplished people I may only have met once or twice, but who work away in the background, doing what they do so magnificently to make this all happen: Kate Samano, Sharika Teelwah, Katrina Whone, Cat Hillerton, Tabitha Pelly, Emma Burton and all of the Transworld team. I am also indebted to the indomitable legend that is Patsy Irwin for her continued sound guidance and the incredibly talented Richard Shailer for his artistic brilliance. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

  I want to pay a heartfelt tribute to one other very small group: the anatomists and the forensic anthropologists who have taught me so much and with whom I have shared so many adventures over the years.

  My early teachers of anatomy are gone now but they instilled a passion that has granted me a fulfilling career. My belated thanks are due to Professor John Clegg and Professor Michael Day for the faith they showed in me.

  To Professor Louise Scheuer and Professor Roger Soames: we have had some amazing times together and I have learned so much from you, even if I didn’t always listen. Soz!

  Finally, to my wingman. The forensic anthropologist who has a special place in my heart and with whom I have shared many experiences so ridiculous that we could never, ever publish them. Everyone should be lucky enough to have a Lucina Hackman in their life and I am grateful that I have been blessed to know and work with the original. Friend, colleague and partner in crime.

  Index

  abortions, 162, 285

  accessory bones, 44

  acetabulum, 182

  acromion process, 177–178