Bloody Valentine

by Douglas Skelton

  Matters were further complicated by another murder – that of a Mrs Smalley in Morecambe. Police had been interviewing a number of people in connection with the case, including someone who worked for Dr Ruxton. Again Ruxton complained to the police about this and said that some people were saying he had killed the woman. He said that someone would put a dead baby on his doorstep and say he had killed it next. He was told that the police could do nothing about the press or local rumours – and then he was asked for a photograph of his wife. He provided one and gave them permission to release it to the press.

  With that in hand, the scientific detectives were about to make investigative history.

  With two possible victims now named, the forensic team beavered away in Edinburgh to match up what they had deduced from the bodies with known facts. Body No 1 was estimated to be twenty years of age – the same age as Mary Jane Rogerson. By measuring the length of bones they had and using a specially prepared formula, they believed the height of the person to have been between four feet ten inches and five feet – Mary was five feet tall. Mary had suffered badly from tonsillitis – the scientists had discovered evidence in the remains consistent with tonsillitis. Mary had four vaccination marks on her left arm – so did Body No 1. They took a cast of the body’s left foot – it fitted one of Mary’s shoes. Mary’s hair was light brown – so were the samples from Body No 1. But there were further clues the killer had tried to cover up – although all he did, in the end, was draw attention to them. Mary was known to have had an operation on a septic right thumb and this had left a small scar – the killer had stripped the flesh on Body No 1’s right thumb away. Mary had livid birthmarks on her right arm around the elbow – the killer had cut away the flesh from the right arm around the elbow.

  Body No 2 had an estimated age of between thirty-five and forty-five – when she disappeared, Isabella Ruxton was just under thirty-five. Body No 2, which was more or less complete, measured five feet three inches – Isabella was just over five feet five inches. The missing woman’s hair was mid brown – so was the hair found on the body. A cast of Body No 2’s left foot fitted one of Isabella’s shoes. But, again, it was what had been removed from the remains that spoke volumes. Isabella had very distinctive fingernails – they were curved, brittle and regularly manicured – and the fingertips of Body No 2 had been sliced off. She was described as having thick ankles with calves the same thickness all the way up to her knees – the flesh had been removed from both legs. Isabella had what were described as ‘humped’ toes – toes that are bent downwards, probably as a result of wearing shoes that were too small – and the toes of the single foot recovered from Body No 2 had been removed. Isabella had suffered from a bunion on her right toe – skin and tissue had been removed from the foot right down to the bone. The bridge of her nose had been uneven; the nose, along with other facial features, had been removed – but doctors said the bone and cartilage were arched.

  Thanks to the maggots that had infested the remains, they were even able to establish a rough time of death. Dr Alexander Mearns of the Institute of Hygiene at the University of Glasgow studied the life cycle of the larvae found on the corpses and established that the bodies had been lying in the ravine since shortly after the last time Mary and Isabella were last seen alive. His work was groundbreaking in its day but it was not the only piece of pioneering forensic detection connected to the case. Armed with photographs of both women, the scientists set about using the skulls, now totally denuded of the remaining putrefying flesh, to help, once and for all, establish their identities.

  The studio portrait of Isabella, provided by Ruxton, was blown up to life size. Skull No 2 was also photographed from a variety of angles in an attempt to match the position of the face in the portrait. The skull shots were then superimposed on to the portrait shot – and they fitted. A similar exercise was conducted on Skull No 1 although the photographs supplied of Mary Rogerson were not of such good quality. However, the overlay of the skull shot did appear to match. This was the first time such a technique had been employed in a murder case. The process could not, by itself, prove Bodies Nos 1 and 2 were Mary and Isabella but, when considered along with the long list of similar characteristics, it did go a long way to establishing the victims’ identities.

  Now all police needed to do was bring their killer to justice.

  As time went on, Buck Ruxton grew twitchy. He knew his name had been put in the frame for the murders – he had commented on it to a number of people, including police officers – but, instead of laying low and hoping the dust would settle, he continually complained to police officers about interference in his affairs. He also tried to convince some potential witnesses that he was innocent, even going so far as asking some of them to say what they knew to be false. For instance, he asked Mrs Oxley to say that she had come round to the house on the Sunday after his wife disappeared whereas, in fact, he had called at her house early that morning to specifically tell her not to come. He asked another to say that he had been at her house on 19 September, when the truth was he had been nowhere near it on that day.

  When he became aware that he was under suspicion, Ruxton began compiling a document, headed ‘My Movements’, detailing the period between 14 and 30 September. On Saturday 12 October, he was interviewed by officers from Scotland and Lancaster and asked if he could account for his movements in that period. He replied, ‘I shall be only too pleased to tell you all that I can,’ and promptly produced his makeshift journal. He made a statement, which he signed, and remained in police custody while other questions were put to him. At 7.20, the following morning he was arrested and formally charged with the murder of Mary Rogerson. It was a few weeks later, while still being held on remand, that he was charged with the murder of Isabella Ruxton.

  In the meantime, police were able to go through the house at 2 Dalton Square with a scientific fine-tooth comb. Professor John Glaister came down from Glasgow to oversee the operation and his team found bloodstains on floors, doors and walls as well as blood traces and tiny particles of flesh in the bath and drains. A segment of a cotton bed sheet found around one of the bundles in Scotland was compared with a sheet on a bed and was found not only to have come from the same loom but the same warp on that loom.

  Glasgow policeman Detective Lieutenant Hammond also visited the Lancaster house in the days following Ruxton’s arrest. Investigators were determined to leave no stone unturned in their attempts to prove the identities of the two bodies. Fingerprints had been taken from the left hand of Body No 1 and they were found to match prints in the house. The detective also discovered what he thought were two prints of Mary’s right thumb in the house but, because the actual thumb had not been recovered at that time, it was impossible to compare them. However, on 4 November, the thumb was found – although it was in a greatly putrefied state. The epidermis – the outer skin – had completely rotted away, leaving only a portion of the dermis or underlying skin. However, it is on the dermis that the loops and ridges that make up an individual’s fingerprints are to be found. The detective doggedly laboured until he had managed to obtain a dermal print from the decayed thumb – and they matched the two prints he had spotted in the house. Both John Glaister and Sydney Smith later said this was the first time in the UK that such dermal prints were used to identify a murder victim.

  The trial began at Manchester Assizes on 2 March 1936. For complex legal reasons, Ruxton was, by now, only facing the charge of murdering Isabella. He was defended by Norman Birkett who would later sit on the bench during the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials. Over 100 witnesses were called, two hundred exhibits were employed and the accused himself fired off over 100 notes to his counsel during the case. Thanks to the Scottish forensic team and some solid detective work, the prosecution case was a strong one. The bloody carpets, the stained suit, the witnesses to Ruxton’s jealous outbursts, the changing stories, the physical evidence linking the bodies in the ravine to the house in Dalton Square, all proved to b
e too powerful for the experienced barrister to combat – although he made a game attempt.

  In the end, the only thing he could do, in terms of defending his client, was to put Ruxton on the stand – and that proved to be something of a poisoned chalice. At first, Ruxton was nervous and more than once appeared on the verge of tears but, as the examination progressed, he seemed to warm to his role. He admitted he and his wife argued but that afterwards their relationship was ‘more than intimate’. He denied ever saying he would kill her if she were unfaithful, saying that the thought of it ‘made his blood wild’. He claimed he did not kill his wife or the maid. ‘It is a deliberate fantastic story,’ he said. ‘You might just as well say the sun was rising in the west and setting in the east.’

  He said his wife had returned from Blackpool that Saturday night and had gone to bed. The following morning she announced she was going to Edinburgh a day earlier than planned and that Mary was going with her. The two women, he said, left at between 9.15 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. – and he never saw them again. The blood found in the house was his not theirs. He had cut himself trying to open the tin of fruit for the children’s breakfast. The blood had streamed from his hands as he went up the stairs to the bathroom to clean it. The blood on the suit he gave to Mr Hampshire was the accumulation of months of dealing with wounds in the course of his work.

  However, under cross-examination by the prosecution, Ruxton’s carefully controlled poise began to crumble. He could not answer difficult questions. He became emotional. His temper began to fray. At one point he erupted with, ‘This is a court to give men justice not to put a man on the gallows for nothing.’

  Ruxton gave his evidence over two days. It has been observed that if the case had ended on the first day of his testimony, the jury may well have given him the benefit of doubt and acquitted him. But his demeanour and anger on the second day worked against him. Norman Birkett gave an impassioned plea on his client’s behalf. ‘Suspicion is not enough,’ he said, ‘doubt is not enough, the accusing finger is not enough, the imaginative reconstructions of my learned friend are not enough.’ But they were enough. At the end of the eleven-day trial, the jury took only an hour to find Buck Ruxton guilty of murdering his wife. Before the judge, Mr Justice Singleton, passed sentence, Ruxton was asked if he had anything to say and, naturally, the garrulous doctor declined to pass up the opportunity to hear his own voice. He raised his hand to the bench in a Roman salute and then said, ‘I want to thank everybody for the patience and fairness of my trial. I should like to hear whatever his Lordship has to say about it.’ The judge fixed the black cap on his head and sentenced him to death.

  On the night before his execution, as he sat in his cell in Manchester’s Strange ways Prison, Ruxton scribbled a note to Norman Birkett. He thanked the barrister for everything he had done, telling him he had left him ‘a trivial token’ in his will. This turned out to be a set of silver knives and forks, which Mr Birkett did not accept. Ruxton’s note continued, ‘I am leaving three bonnie little mites behind. If you can, please do be good to them. They are intelligent and good-looking.’ He hoped his son would become a doctor like his father and that his daughters would become nurses. The kindly and fair-minded Norman Birkett ensured the three Ruxton orphans were well taken care of afterwards.

  The note to Birkett was not the only one Ruxton wrote. There was another letter, written earlier, that was infinitely more dramatic. It had been composed on the day after his arrest in Lancaster and handed, in a sealed envelope, to a News of the World reporter who visited him. ‘Take great care of this,’ said the doctor. ‘They have charged me with murder and I, in turn, charge you to place this envelope in safety and security. On no account must it be opened until my death, if to die I am. If I am acquitted – and I think I must be acquitted – you will give it back to me.’

  Despite the horrific nature of his crimes, 6,000 people signed a petition for a reprieve. The plea was refused and Ruxton received the news in the condemned cell with what was described as a ‘fatalistic calm’. Home Office rules insisted that the executioner be in the prison by 4 p.m. on the day before a hanging so Thomas Pierrepoint, part of a family firm of hangmen, had to stay overnight in Strangeways Prison. This meant that he did not have to force his way through the anti-capital-punishment demonstrations taking place outside the prison. The demonstrations resulted in one noted campaigner being arrested. Mrs Van Der Elst found herself in the middle of a hostile crowd when she arrived on Tuesday 12 May 1936 to protest at the punishment being meted out to Buck Ruxton within the prison walls. She was met with jeers from the people as she told them that the doctor should not be hanged. Police finally charged her with breach of the peace and driving her motor car in a manner likely to threaten life and limb.

  At 9 a.m., the crowd hushed as they waited for the prison bell to toll – that would be the signal that Tom Pierrepoint had done his job. But the bell did not toll. Instead, a notice was pinned to the prison gates to say that Ruxton had gone to his doom.

  On the same day, the sealed envelope he had given to the reporter was handed to the News of the World editor and subsequently published. It read, ‘I killed Mrs Ruxton in a fit of temper because I thought she had been with a man. I was mad at the time. Mary Rogerson was present at the time. I had to kill her.’ The letter, short and far from sweet, was signed ‘B. Ruxton’.

  Unsubstantiated rumours hinted that he received £3,000 for the confession and that the money went towards paying his defence costs.

  So, what happened on that Saturday night after Isabella returned home from Blackpool? No one can say for certain but, by piecing together scientific evidence and adding a little guesswork, we can come up with a likely scenario.

  Whether or not he had planned finally to kill his wife we cannot say but we do know that Ruxton had the full day to build up a jealous rage. When Isabella returned that night they would have argued. As his anger turned to violence, Ruxton attacked her and strangled her – this was borne out by the medical evidence of a fractured hyoid bone in the throat of Body No 2, a swollen tongue and congestion of the brain and the condition of the lungs. The later removal of certain body parts, like the nose, the eyes and the lips, could have been an attempt to disguise the cause of death.

  However, young Mary Rogerson witnessed Ruxton’s act of madness and he had to silence her forever. There was evidence of blunt force trauma on the skull and he may then also have cut her throat. This could have taken place on the stairway or landing and would have accounted for the heavy blood staining on the walls and carpets.

  Having murdered two women, the doctor then used his medical knowledge to dispose of the bodies and, as we have seen, to remove identifying features. The bodies were manhandled into the bath and there he cut them up, limb from limb, piece by piece. The blood loss here would have been considerable and would have left heavy staining on the bath. He might also have cut his own hand by accident at this time. It would have taken about eight hours to complete but, once his bloody work was done, he kept the body parts in the two locked bedrooms until he was able to dispose of them. Had Mrs Hampshire managed to get into either of these rooms then she would have been in for a very nasty surprise.

  And, all the while, his three children were sleeping in their own rooms, oblivious to the horrors that were taking place beyond their bedroom doors. In the end, it was local children who best summed up the events of that grim September night with a piece of doggerel:

  Red stains on the carpet, red stains on the knife,

  For Dr Buck Ruxton has murdered his wife.

  The maidservant saw it and threatened to tell,

  So Dr Buck Ruxton he’s killed her as well.

  There is a strange story of a visit made by Ruxton to a fortune teller who told him the number thirteen would play a distinctive role in his life – and it certainly did. He was arrested on 13 October, committed for trial on 13 December, sentenced to death on 13 March and his prison number was 8410 – which adds up to thirteen. />
  8

  DEATH ON THE ROAD

  James Robertson

  At first it looked like a hit and run.

  Taxi driver John Kennedy found the woman at just after midnight on 28 July 1950 lying on Glasgow’s Prospecthill Road. He had just crested the brow of the steep hill that runs down towards the junction with Aikenhead Road on the city’s south side when his headlights picked out the body. ‘I thought perhaps she was drunk,’ he said later, ‘then I saw that her face was matted with blood.’

  As he stooped over the woman, a Glasgow Corporation maintenance truck pulled up and the driver Samuel Murray and his pal David Ashe climbed out to help. They were part of a team repairing tram lines and had passed the same spot just ten minutes before and had noticed a dark coloured car sitting there with its lights off. Mr Ashe had said that, at the time, he thought he’d seen a woman lying on the road beside the car but Mr Murray was certain he had been mistaken. Clearly, though, there had been no mistake.

  The alarm was raised and a police car was directed to the scene of what was still thought to be an accident. Constable William Kevan studied the area under the glare of various sets of headlights and torches. He was an experienced traffic cop and had attended many an accident. It did not take him long to realise that something did not add up here.

  She had once been a good-looking woman but now her body was battered and smashed. Her dark-red hair was matted with blood and blood was splattered all over her light-coloured coat. Her shattered dental plate was on the ground and her shoes lay some distance away. She was on her back with her arms slightly outstretched and one leg bent over the other. It was obvious she had been run over by a car. There were tyre marks around and on the body but, curiously, there was no other sign of the vehicle. We know now, from the plethora of forensic science documentaries and dramas, that it is virtually impossible for someone to enter or leave the scene of a crime without leaving or taking something that links them to it. Fingerprints are, of course, the most well-known things to be left behind but footprints, saliva, semen, hair, blood, traces of fabric can all be of help to police investigators. And, of course, now with DNA testing, the discovery of even a small amount of skin can be the equivalent of leaving behind your name and address.