Transcription
Flowing from the Cotswold Hills to the North Sea, the Thames is the longest river that flows solely through England. These 215 miles of rolling waters have given life to millions of Britons throughout its existence and indeed bore witness to innumerable momentous events. In fact, when an American congressman once dared to compare the Thames unfavourably to the 2320 miles long Mississippi, MP John Burns replied, “The Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history.”
Parts of that history, however, are darker than any murky waters. Today we revisit one such moment in time as we explore the Thames Torso Murders.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 11th of May 1887, Edward Hughes was working as a lighterman at Victoria Docks near Rainham. Lightermen used barges known as lighters to ferry goods to and from ships. It was whilst doing this work that Hughes noticed something floating in the water. At the time, the Thames was used as a dumping ground by half of London, so finding something strange floating in the water wasn't unusual. Still, Edward took the bundle ashore and examined it more closely. It was a canvas sack with a heavy object inside. Intrigued and perhaps hoping he had found some valuable lost cargo, he opened the sack. To his horror, inside lay a human torso. It was apparent that the remains had been in the water for some time.
Authorities were soon at the scene, and while officers searched for other body parts, the torso was taken to a shed next to the Phoenix Hotel, as Rainham had no mortuary at the time. An inquest into the death of the unknown woman opened in the hotel on Saturday, May the 14th. Coroner C.C. Lewis and his witness Dr. Edward Galloway explained the postmortem findings. Dr. Galloway believed the body had been dead for over two weeks, though he had no way of telling how she had died. There were no bruises or other injuries on the torso save for the cuts that had severed the limbs and the head. The woman's legs and thighs had been removed with what appeared to be a very sharp saw. The torso ended at the last two bones of the lumbar vertebrae. The killer had further mutilated the body by using a keen-edged knife.
According to Dr. Galloway, whoever committed this horrific crime was an expert. As he explained to the jury, “Not only has the cutting up been performed in an exceedingly skillful manner, but the operation had been carried out on that part of the spine, offering the least resistance to separating. And that would only be done by a person having a very intimate knowledge of anatomy.” He believed the victim was in her late twenties, approximately 5 foot 3 to 5 foot 4 inches, with possibly brown hair. Though there was no solid evidence to support these theories. Despite there seemingly being medical knowledge behind the dismemberment, Dr. Galloway dismissed thoughts that the remains belonged to a medical school, as disposing of bodies in such a way was illegal. Though the suspicion that the killer was a doctor or surgeon remained.
The police had an arduous task on their hands. They had no idea how far down the river the remains may have drifted before being discovered, and with little to point to the victim's identity, they decided the only line of inquiry was to ask people who had a female missing from their family to come forward. Several missing persons reports were compared to the victim's details, but no match was found. On June the third, because the cause of death could not be determined, the inquest jury delivered a verdict of simply ‘found dead.’
However, more body parts began to pop up two days later, along the River Thames. A thigh, again wrapped in sacking, was discovered near the Temple Pier, halfway between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridges. Shortly after, another bundle of sacking was found floating further upstream by Battersea Park Pier along Chelsea Reach. Police theorised that these remains had been dropped into the water from a nearby bridge, possibly Blackfriars. The investigation had a setback when a coroner, S.F. Langham, allowed the recently discovered thigh to be buried. It was decided that all the other remains would be preserved in alcohol. Eventually, all the body parts would be found, save for the head. The legs would be the final parts to be located. Strangely enough, they weren't found in the River Thames, but some miles away here in the Regent's Canal.
It was clear to investigators that the body parts were not placed in the River Thames simultaneously, but at different times, as the remains showed differing levels of water damage. However, police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond and his assistant, Dr. Charles Hebbert, theorised that the killer may not have had medical knowledge. Instead, they believed they were a butcher or hunter, as they would have more experience cutting up carcasses. Still, the authorities had no clue about the victim's identity, and requests for information about missing women proved fruitless. Before long, the investigation into the Rainham torso case hit a brick wall. At this point, the police could only hope the murder of the young woman was an isolated case and the killer would not strike again.
Unfortunately, that hope was soon lost when the authorities realised the city was terrorised by not just one, but two serial killers.
Now, as previously stated, the Thames is a river filled with history. Someone who is no stranger to uncovering its sometimes macabre stories is Mudlark Nicola White. Nicola searches the river's muddy shores for historical items and discarded objects.
“I drifted into mudlarking, to tell you the truth. I moved to London from Cornwall in about 1998 and I found myself on the foreshore, which was a bit like a replacement beach. And as I was walking along, I started to find little bits of pottery and glass. And then one day I found my first coin. I think it was like a George the Sixth, nothing too old. But it was the idea that somebody had lost that 100 years ago or so and that I was the first person to hold it in my hand since that person. My favorite kinds of finds are things that I can link back to a person or a place because it just means you can connect with history in a very personal way. For example, I found a brass luggage tag, which I was able to link back to a soldier from World War One who was seriously injured in the war. He was operated on. He came home, married, his landlady died, and then I found his grave in a pauper's grave in Greenwich.”
“But some of my more, let's say, macabre finds. I have found a couple of human jawbones. Now, when you find human remains, you obviously have to notify the police because they want to make sure that they're not recent murder victims. And these jawbones, they were actually forensically analyzed by the police and they dated them to around about the 1700s. And because of where I found them in southeast London, my imagination runs riot, of course, whenever I find something like this. I'm imagining it could have come from a prisoner on perhaps a prison hulk that was moored alongside the River Thames near Deptford. I know that from reading about them, these men who were imprisoned on these hulks were often, unfortunately, if they died, just thrown overboard or buried in unmarked graves very close to the edge of the river.”
“There's a fragment of pottery here, which I found, which comes from Lambeth Workhouse. I've got quite a lot of pottery from different workhouses. It's always been interesting to me that they have their own crockery with their names on it. But Lambeth Workhouse was apparently where Mary Nichols spent a lot of time, at least eight years or so, before she was murdered by Jack the Ripper, so I've read. She was an inmate at Lambeth Workhouse. That's heavy. Yeah, it is, isn't it? So, as always, when I hold something in my hand like that and I found it, the first thing I do is research it. And then I come up with a story like the poor Mary Nichols story. And I think, gosh, you know, is it possible that she could have eaten off of this plate or served it to somebody?”
“The Thames has been referred to as liquid history, as you know, by Burns, the MP. But I like to think of it as a giant liquid storybook full of stories of people and places and yes, stories that need to be told.”
If you'd like to hear more of the stories behind Nicola’s finds, you can find links to her YouTube channel and social media pages in the description box below. It's also important to note that to mudlark on the Thames, you require a foreshore permit.
It's no surprise that many of the items that you find on the foreshore date back to the Victorian era. For it was during that period that London swelled and became one of the largest cities in the world. During this period, more body parts were discovered in several locations in the centre of the city.
Between September the 11th and October the 1st, 1888, when a woman's right arm and shoulder were found on an embankment near Pimlico, the authorities initially thought it was simply a bad prank by medical students. Several weeks later, however, a carpenter working on converting an old opera house into Scotland Yard, home of the Metropolitan Police, found a strange parcel near where he hid his tools on site. When this parcel was opened, it contained a maggot-infested torso of a woman. It began to seem like the killer was purposely taunting the police.
With the permission of the authorities, reporter Jasper Waring used a Spitsbergen dog on October the 17th to look for the missing parts of the victim. He found a leg that was buried near the construction site. This discovery embarrassed the police, who had thoroughly searched the area with bloodhounds days earlier. Medical professionals examined the body parts and concluded the victim was of large stature and well-nourished and was approximately 24 years old and five foot nine inches tall. It seemed that the killer had used a ligature on the woman's right arm to prevent blood draining from the cut end. Once more, the cause of death could not be determined, but the clean, precise cuts again indicated the killer had some medical knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, the newspapers quickly began to speculate whether Jack the Ripper was behind the torso murders. But the Metropolitan Police said there was no connection. Furthermore, the serial killer himself allegedly wrote to the Central News Agency on October the fifth and denied having anything to do with the Thames torso murders. “Dear Friend, In the name of God, hear me. I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman, I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die, and their blood shall mingle with the dust.” It has since been speculated that the letter may have been written by a reporter to boost newspaper sales.
Little progress was made in the case after the discovery of the second assumed victim of the torso killer. The inquiry was once again closed with the verdict ‘found dead.’ Months passed, with no further discoveries, and it seemed as if the killer had vanished. But sadly, this was not to be the case.
Unlike with the previous victims, however, detectives would discover something they had failed to thus far: the victim's name. Three young boys were playing in the Thames near Horselydown on the morning of Tuesday, June the fourth, 1889, when they spotted something floating in the murky water and began throwing stones at it. When they took what appeared to be an apron on to shore, they discovered a part of a woman's body. The same day, a parcel containing a thigh was found by a teenager half a mile away under Albert Bridge. When Sergeant William Briggs examined the parcel, he noticed something interesting. The remains had been wrapped in part of a lady's overcoat that was embroidered with the name ‘L.E. Fisher’. Finally, the authorities had something that could be used to aid in the identification of the victim.
Over the following days, more body parts were discovered in several locations. Whoever the killer was, it was terrifyingly clear they didn't dismember their victims and dispose of the parts to conceal what they had done. They wanted the pieces to be found to taunt and terrify both the public and the police. One of the pieces, the victim's right thigh, was even tossed over the wall of the Shelley estate, owned by Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Had the murderer been inspired by the 1818 novel?
Just like in the case of the two previous victims, the body of the third woman had been cut with some skill, and the discussion as to whether this was a surgeon's or butcher's hand began once more. This victim had been dead approximately 48 hours before the discoveries, but again, the doctors couldn't say how she had died. To add to the tragedy, the woman had been about eight months pregnant at the time of her death.
Although the police failed to locate an L.E. Fisher, this victim got their name back when a woman named Katherine Jackson came forward identifying the body as that of her daughter, 24-year-old Elizabeth Jackson. Despite the state of decomposition, Katherine was able to tell the body parts belonged to Elizabeth because of the scars on her left forearm. The young woman had left her home in Chelsea in November 1888 and was last seen by her sister Annie, living and working on the streets. The identification of one of the victims was the first and only major breakthrough in the case, though knowing Elizabeth's name didn't bring the police any closer to finding out who had killed her.
Back in the 1800s, fingerprinting was still in its infancy, and DNA evidence finding was a long way off. Without any other useful evidence, the search for a suspect was like finding a needle in a haystack, and just a few months later, the killer would strike again.
On the morning of September the 10th, 1889, PC William Pennant stumbled upon a woman's headless and legless torso under the railway arch at Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. This time, the victim's arms were still attached. There was also extensive bruising on her back, hip, and arm, indicating she had been badly beaten prior to her death. According to medical professionals, the victim had been killed about a day before the discovery of the torso. The police surgeon, George Bagster Phillips, noted that the cut surfaces at the hips were dry and black while the neck was moist and red, and it was determined the woman had died of blood loss.
To this point, the precision of the wounds the torso killer inflicted had helped separate his victims from the mangled remains of those of the Ripper. However, the abdomen of this latest gruesome discovery had been mutilated. Could this murder have been committed by Whitechapel's most notorious criminal? Phillips, who had examined the bodies of the Ripper victims, didn't think so. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson also believed these remains were part of the Thames torso murders and not one of Jack's.
For the torso murders, the authorities' most significant challenge was the lack of witnesses and potential suspects. They just didn't know where to look, where to even begin. And before long, the case grew cold. Meanwhile, the Ripper murders dominated the front pages and people's minds. Despite their gruesomeness, the Thames torso murders were pushed to the background. Unlike in the Ripper case, not a single person has been named as a person of interest or a suspect in the torso killings. Other than Jack himself.
Over the years, it has been speculated whether all four victims were connected and whether they were killed by the same person. Some even believe that several murders that occurred years prior may also be connected to the case. And while many experts have discounted any connection between the torso and Ripper killings based on the modus operandi, the debate continues more than 135 years after the first body was found. The torso murders will likely remain a mystery forever.
Thank you for watching. And a special thanks to our members and our patrons who help to make it possible for us to get on location and film. A special thanks to Nicola. I found it fascinating her explaining what mudlarking is and telling us her stories of her personal finds up and down the shores of the Thames. Right then. Take care, and I'll see you next time with another story to make you say, “Well, I Never.”