My guest this week is Suzanne Huntington, co editor of Ripperologist Magazine and author of the recently published book “The Thames Torso Murders: Fact or Fiction?” She not only talks about the “Canonical Four” Thames Torso murders and the possible killer (or killers), but she also takes a wider look at Victorian era dismemberment cases in and around London, the challenge of separating fact from long repeated myth, and the ways these crimes have been linked (rightly or wrongly) to the Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper. It is a fascinating deep dive into one of the most unsettling murder series of the late 19th century.
The author’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/p/The-Thames-Torso-Murders-Fact-or-Fiction-61565822546574/
The author’s US Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Suzanne-Huntington/author/B0GHT5B8TK
The author’s UK Amazon page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Suzanne-Huntington/author/B0GHT5B8TK
Transcript:
Erik: Welcome all to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik, so I am sure you remember it. It wasn’t all that long ago last fall that I interviewed Sarah Bax Horton about the Thames Torso Murders. Another book has recently been published on the subject, and it was not known to me until Tom Wescott, Jack the Ripper expert, and, and my interview with him, by the way, years and years ago, is one of the top five most listened to interviews I’ve ever conducted.
It was he who suggested that my guest and I speak together and, and I’m very excited to, to revisit this endlessly fascinating series of murders with another very reputable expert in the area of Victorian-era true crime. So off we go, and I hope you enjoy the listen.
It is so great to have Suzanne Huntington on the show with me today. She is a British author, historian, and researcher, and part-time librarian. And I just wanna say for the record, I love librarians, one of the most important professions ever to exist, and, and she’s here to chat with me about her new book.
It is called The Thames Torso Murders: Fact or Fiction? Welcome to the show.
Suzanne: Hello.
Erik: So you are a very well-established figure in the Ripperology community. And I do wanna mention off, off the bat to my audience that you are the co-managing editor of Ripperologist Magazine. So you definitely know your way around the subject.
Suzanne: I, uh, yes. Well, hopefully. I wouldn’t say I’m one of the experts in, in Ripperology. Um, I’d say my, my knowledge on Ripperology as a whole is average to slightly better than average. But, um, yeah, I do a lot, I tend to do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff rather than the formal research, you know, the nitty-gritty of, of Ripperology.
So I, I make the look pretty, yeah. So, yeah, the, the Thames Torso murders, again, the subject of your new book, they, they do go hand in hand with the Whitechapel murders, right? I mean, regardless of whether they’re connected in, in any way by a, a shared killer, it’s the fact that they happen in the same general time and place.
Suzanne: Yes, uh, uh, definitely. I mean, they’re sort of, it’s sort of intellectually and emotionally, they’re sort of inextricably linked. And that’s largely, I think, down to the fact that you’ve got what I term the, the big four torso cases, um, which happened in 1887, 1888, and two in 1889. So those happened, you know, around the, the sort of Ripper scare that, you know, predominantly occurred in, uh, 1888.
So yes. Um, but I think with the, the Thames torso cases are very much an add-on to Ripper, and they’re sort of a second once removed to Ripper. And by doing this book, what I’ve attempted to do is to jettison all the baggage that’s around the, uh, the subject matter and the confusion around whether it’s linked to Jack the Ripper or not, and how many cases actually constitute the so-called Thames torso murders.
And just to make it provide a bit of clarity for everybody as to what we’re actually referring to. So hopefully by the end of the reading the book, they’ll have got a very, uh, painful arm because it’s a big heavy book. But they will have also got much, a much better understanding of what it means by the phrase, the Thames Torso murders.
Erik: Right. That they even have a connection in the sense that the Ripper murders are called the Canonical Five, and the Thames Torso murders are referred to by some as the Canonical Four.
Suzanne: Right. That’s my, that’s one of my little bugbears, that is. Um, I, I, yes, that’s true. From my point of view, and this is a, a purely personal observation, I think that when we talk about Jack the Ripper, we, and we talk about the Canonical Five, I think that’s one of the, the most, it, it, it holds the subject back so much. And I think it’s the same with the torso cases. When we talk about the Canonical Four, I think it’s more sort of like a, you know, a soundbite buzz-phraseology. Use Canonical Five, therefore, with the torsos, let’s use the Canonical Four. It’s not quite straightforward as that. I think that if you start talking about with Jack the Ripper that there were five cases, and you’ve got the traditional narrative, you know, that goes from Mary Ann Nichols, uh, over to, uh, Mary Jane Kelly, I think that makes people very blinkered and it closes people’s minds to other possibilities.
I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong that there are five cases in Ripperology. I’m just saying that we should, as researchers, readers, authors, be open to the idea that there may be more than five, or indeed less than five. It’s, you know, that there is an argument to be said that, um, not all of them are by the same, uh, perpetrator.
Much to the torso cases, seven books, my actual specific cover may be of books, but not actually really dedicated to the torsos. And I think that if you see it as those four cases, that the, in 1887, Whitehall in 1888, then you’ve got Elizabeth Jackson in ’89, and then what’s referred to as the Pinchin Street torso, uh, that’s in, uh, September 1889, that again makes you very blinkered. And if you look at the, the, the books that are on the subject, none of them agree on how many murders actually constitute—
Or none of them agree on how many murders the actual perpetrator did. So Canonical Five, Canonical Four is, I’m not keen on the phraseology. I think I use it in the book. I just find that it, it makes things very, very inward-looking. That’s the only phrase I can think of at, at this moment in time. But, um, you need to be open with looking, particularly in something like a dismemberment case because of that, effectively a method of disposal.
So does it mean that, you know, there were other serial killers around and they had to get rid of bodies by dismemberment? Or does it mean that the, the fact that the bodies were being dismembered, does that, is that part of the, the killer’s or killers’ part of their MO? So what I actually did with the, the torso cases is I looked, I, I thought I’d strip it right back to basics.
And I know that you’ve had Tom Wescott on, uh, the podcast before and is, was a huge influence on me, uh, with his Bank Holiday Murders book. Um, because Tom recognized the fact that we’d got so far down the line with Jack the Ripper, that inaccurate information was being repeated and repeated and it was becoming fact.
So he decided, let’s take a fresh look at this. Let’s strip it right back, you know, to its bare bones and let’s see what we can learn. And that’s exactly what I did with the torso cases. So I set myself a, um, time, uh, span of 1850 to, uh, 1913, which obviously would, um, so I had to look, nearly look at all the newspaper cuttings to see what we could find.
And I actually found out that there was only 38 cases of dismemberment in the UK, because the UK would’ve included Southern Ireland as well. At that time there was actually only 38 cases that actually occurred in a 63-year period. So dismemberment is incredibly rare, uh, and it still is rare. It’s only marginally gone up now.
And so people’s perception of dismemberment being a popular method of disposal for a murderer is, I think, skewed because it’s so horrific, because you’ve got dismemberment, and that’s a deeply unpleasant way to, to get rid of a body. It creates headlines. And the headlines, when you’re seeing headlines, it, it distorts how many cases there actually are in reality.
So when I found the 38 cases, I then broke those down to male and female, um, outside London, inside London, solved and unsolved. Reviewed all of that. And then eventually I came to 12 cases of female dismemberment, which occurred in London from 1873.
And then that’s what made part of the book. My first section is on how we get 12 cases. We then have a second section, which is each individual chapter is looking in depth at what we can learn from each of the cases, the 12 cases. And then my final section is any conclusions that we may or may not be able to reach.
Erik: Okay. Interesting. So, so yeah, when you talk about 1850 to 1913, mm-hmm, one of the ideas, right, was to cover potentially the life of a serial killer, right? A period of time in which a single serial killer might have operated, because there was, there was no consensus of opinion, uh, amongst—
I myself would, um, be somewhat—
Suzanne: Statement. And this mission statement was, and I’ll quote it: to determine by unbiased means and my own research, if the incidences of dismemberment that occurred in late Victorian England were related. So effectively keep in my options open. Let’s see what the evidence actually brings us to. Is there anything that we can make a conclusion on that we can be reasonably confident that this and this happened, but probably not this and this?
So. I, I’m a, I mean, you haven’t experienced me yet, but I’m a terrible waffler. I’ll go off on any tangent that you fancy. I’ll read something that I’m, look, I’m researching something on Ancestry, and then two hours later I’ll pop my head up and realize I’ve gone down this massive rabbit hole and it got absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the original point of actually going on Ancestry.
So I needed, uh, I needed for myself to, to keep myself in check. And so by doing it this mission statement, every time I, I ran the risk of it becoming irrelevant, of putting information in there that, that had no, ultimately no bearing on the actual case, then I could stop myself and bring myself back, and that, that was my—
That was my barriers. That, that they were my borders to keep on the straight and narrow, as it were, um, and, uh, keep focused on what my actual aim of the book was.
Erik: Right, right. It’s interesting. You, you write in your book that London’s urban expansion during this period created volumes of rediscovered human limbs.
Suzanne: Oh yeah.
Erik: But, but you can’t assume that a discarded limb meant murder, right?
Suzanne: Right. And that, that was one of the biggest problems, one of the reasons why it took two years to establish that there was 38 cases to look at. Because, I mean, obviously London’s been around for what? I’ve no idea off the top of my head. Say, say two thousand years, whatever, whatever the situation may be.
Throughout that time, it’s been razed to the ground. It’s had, uh, rioting, um, it’s had plagues, diseases, um, it’s had fires, uh, you name it, it’s happened to London. And it’s got progressively more and more crowded, I think. What are we on now? We’re about, it’s about 9 million in the Greater London area. And, and interestingly, London doesn’t get, actually, geographically very much bigger during this period. It gets more condensed and more crowded in the areas that we’re looking at in the urban areas. So by definition, your graveyards are gonna be very overcrowded.
Municipal cemeteries that are being built, the dead, that are just outside of the capital. And this is because you’ve got some, some of the statistics in the graveyards are just jaw-dropping, you know, sort of quarter of a million people in, in, in graveyard, and they’re just being buried on top of one another and on top of one another.
And that obviously had to stop. You got it, had to stop for public health reasons. And you’ve also got, combined with that, the industrialization, the urbanization that occurred in the—
To get through. Then walls and churchyards and graveyards were being shaved off around the edges and what have you. And of course there’s gonna be bodies in there. And you get numerous, numerous incidences of dustmen—dustman meaning people who do the trash, in, in Americanization of it. Um, and the dustmen are taking away these bits, you know, bits of, of churchyards and what have you, and they’re finding bones now.
A lot of the soil, the topsoil, um, as we call it now, it was known as, uh, mould then, a lot of the, the topsoil was then being used in these nice pleasant terrace front gardens and back gardens in, in the suburbs, in the out part of London. And so people are finding skulls, they’re finding—
Slums and they’re finding bones in cellars, in the bottom of cellars when they dig up footings. And it’s a wash. Literally. London is awash with human remains. And it’s interesting because, to a certain extent, that is still the case. Whenever there is a new building being built in, in London, an archaeologist has to, uh, survey the site first to see if there’s anything of importance there.
And they had the, the latest, uh, railway, underground railway that they do, which is, uh, Crossrail. And I think they found something like 3,000 proper burials whilst they were excavating to do the, the Crossrail, uh, project. And you still get, I mean, I follow on, on Facebook groups, and it was about two years ago people are always posting, you know, is this, what’s this? What do you think this is? And what have you.
In fact one person just completely on a tangent once found a hand grenade, which did make me laugh because he actually thought it was more important to actually post that on Facebook than he did to actually get the, the police and the bomb squad involved. But that’s beside the point. Um, and, um, it, it, about two years ago, I think there was three, three separate people found different bits of, of human body in the Thames. So it, it’s still now happening on a, a relatively frequent basis.
And so it’s very easy when, certainly in, in the late Victorian period, it’s very easy to think, oh, that’s a murder, or that, you know, that that’s somebody who’s tried to, you know, do away with somebody and bury the body. Well, actually, it’s far more likely that that body is a couple of hundred years old than it’s an actual murder victim because of the, the history of the capital itself.
Erik: Yeah. That, that makes sense. I, I can see how challenging it would be to sort through all of that evidence and, and whittle it all down to, to 38 cases.
Suzanne: I mean, gonna say on, on that subject, I mean, in the capital’s waterways at that time, so we’re talking about the Thames, canal, river, and the various little creeks, eight bodies a week coming out of the water. I mean, if that was happening now that’s, that’s horrendous statistic. You know, more, one a day. People were drowning, being potentially murdered, or they’d end in the canals and rivers by accident. So this is the sort of thing that, that, that we’re dealing with here.
And it’s very difficult to sort the wood from the chaff, uh, when it comes to actually ascertaining what actually constitutes a dismemberment case.
Erik: Right. And, and along those lines, in order to understand the Thames torso murders, you really have to understand the nature of the river itself. And there are all sorts of, of factors involved, of course, uh, pollution, river traffic, the ebb and, and flood tides. And you even talk about the idea of floatability and how a parcel would move along the river’s currents.
Suzanne: I, I did make up the word floatability and put it in – (laughing)
Erik: (laughing) I never would’ve guessed. It sounded perfectly reasonable as a word to me.
Suzanne: But you have obviously, if you were looking at it from a, a modern-day perspective and you were an investigator looking at a dismembered body where body parts have been found in a body of water, everything we’ve got now, the basic would be looking at is the statics. Was there anything else around the part when found? Because one of the issues there is with, um, the River Thames is that it goes from being fresh water to brackish water to full seawater as it gets further down towards the estuary.
You’d be taking into consideration the size of the body part and looking at whether that body part was likely to float or whether that body part was likely to sink. And you’d also be looking at the base of, of the water that you’re talking about. So are we talking about mud? Are we talking about clay? I mean, London is notorious, they call it the London clay.
And you’d be, have to take a whole load of factors into consideration before you could even start to estimate where that body part may or may not have been actually placed into the water. And then, of course, just to complicate matters even further is, is the unknown aspect of it, is that we can’t assume that the body parts were put into the water by, you know, being dropped off a bridge or, you know, dropped off at the embankments.
It’s possible that they were on a, a boat and a boat was going up and down the river and they were dropping body parts off there. So there’s an awful lot of factors that you have to take into consideration. And one of, I mean, I was on a massive learning curve with, with all of this. One of the things I didn’t realize was that, um, I, I contacted the RNLI, which is the lifeboat people, um, and they’re based on Tower Bridge.
And I asked them, if you had a body and it was in the water, would it go downstream, upstream? What would happen to it? And they said, all depends on when it was dropped in the water and what time of year it was and the flow of the tide. So I’d always presumed that just as off the top as an example, if a body part was placed in the river in Battersea, then it would be found either in Battersea or further downstream.
But that’s not necessarily the case. It can be quite plausibly found upstream depending on a whole variety of factors. And so if you don’t know when a body part was actually placed in the water, then it’s very difficult to give an accurate, a fully accurate, I should say, fully accurate estimate of where the body part was placed in.
And you’ve got, as well, other factors. You’ve got certainly at that time, there are some wonderful pictures on the internet for everybody, anybody ever wants to have a look at them, of just how busy the River Thames was. I mean, I think it was the, the busiest port in, in the world at that, that point, and I might be wrong, but it’s certainly one of the busiest.
There was, there was hundreds, possibly even thousands of different-sized boats that were on, on the wharfage in the center moving up and down. There was also the, the, the lightermen boats, where the barges, they were carrying, uh, cargo from the larger boats to the wharves. All of this is gonna have an impact on the flow of the river.
We also, at that point, didn’t have the Thames flood barrier, uh, which nowadays largely, hopefully, fingers crossed, prevents London from being flooded. At that point, it was being, in certain areas of London, it was being regularly flooded. Um, and so the, the, the difference in tidal measure was huge. I think at one point, I think it went up to about 24 feet, which is huge.
And you’ve got different tidal levels depending on which time of year. It’s because it’s all based around the moon. Don’t ask me to understand it. I just know it as a, as a statement of Wikipedia fact.
Erik: Sure.
Suzanne: Um, and, and you’ve also got, um, the added, uh, issue of the River Thames is a very twisty, windy river. And the, the difference in high tide and low tide at different parts of the river, half an hour, three quarters of an hour. So you looking at one body at Hammersmith and—
Say that’s a significant distance, that’s probably 20, 25 miles. And so the, the tidal time will be completely different. So it’s a very long-winded way of saying it’s very difficult to actually pin the tail on the donkey to brave a man and say categorically this body part was dropped from this bridge or this body part entered the water at X, Y, or Z.
Because if there’s so many factors that we have to take into consideration and the factors that we just can’t calculate.
Erik: Yeah, that makes sense. So the first case that you really comprehensively cover in your book is the Battersea Mystery. This is one I don’t think we, we’ve, we’ve talked about on the show before. I might be wrong, but I, I, I, off the top of my head, I don’t remember it. And, and that investigation begins on the morning of September 5th, 1873.
Could you walk us through it and, and explain why it’s important in the context of the, the Thames Torso Murders as a whole?
Suzanne: Okay. So Battersea ’73 occurred, right, you say, uh, from September 1873. And this was one of the big stories of 1873. In fact, I think there’s only really another, uh, case, a claimant case called the Tichborne Claimant. Um, that’s really any bigger news than that.
And 14 body parts were found. And they were all found in the River Thames, uh, from Hammersmith to Woolwich, um, which is about, as I say, 21, 22 miles by boat. And it was an almost complete body, uh, when it was put back together. Um, some of the torso is missing. I think the lower left leg was missing, and an upper arm, and there was no head, but there was, and this is really rather grotesque, the head had been scalped. And so they retrieved half of the hair and half of the face.
Now, um, a young medical man called Dr. Thomas Bond, starting out on his journey, um, if anybody’s familiar with Ripperology, they will know Dr. Thomas Bond because he was involved in, um, providing the Metropolitan Police—
Very, it’s one of his cases. Uh, and so interesting from point of view that Thomas Bond first at the whip, as it were. We know that she died shortly before she was deposited, uh, in the river. And it was, uh, noticeable because she wasn’t actually disarticulated. It was, uh, parts of her arms and her legs were actually sawn through. So it would, in theory, that would demonstrate that the person who, well, murdered her and or disposed of her, because of course they could be separate, anatomical knowledge on that because they just thought, well, just saw it through.
And this, so this happened at the sort of back end of 1873. And it’s also interesting because of, we’ve actually got a, a write-up in The Lancet at that time, uh, which is, it’s almost a sort of medical autopsy report. Not quite, uh, but it’s, it’s an interesting early, uh, example of pathology and it suggests that there, it was strong evidence that she was bludgeoned and then had her throat slit.
Now, in an attempt to identify her, Thomas Bond got a, a barber’s block, not a butcher’s block, because a lot of people misunderstand that. And that’s one of the things that I had to clarify. A barber’s block, which is effectively a wooden mannequin head, and stretched this grotesque half-scalp and half-face over the barber’s block.
And then the general public, who thought that, you know, they’ve got missing relatives and missing friends, go and have a look and see if they recognize this person. They didn’t, uh, strangely enough, because if, I can’t imagine what on earth this poor lady must’ve looked like. And the one thing it did show was that her skin was coarse.
So that in itself would demonstrate theoretically that she was exposed to weather, she was an outdoors person. That perhaps, this is pure speculation on my part, perhaps she was something to do with prostitution that inhabited that area at that time.
And with that, when we move on, the next case, jumping a little bit, but move the next case, which happened the following year, which is also generally known as the Battersea Mystery, which is confusing because it’s just become known as this. But actually it didn’t actually happen in Battersea. It actually happened in Putney, uh, which is about a mile and a half, two miles away from Battersea.
And that was, uh, one body part, heavily decomposed. So very different from the ’73 case. And that receives basically the odd bit and piece of newspaper coverage, the odd paragraph here and there. And so you’ve gone from almost like the sublime to the ridiculous. You’ve gone from one of the biggest stories in 1873 to footnote in history in 1874.
You’d thought that given what happened with, you know, Jack, how the momentum grew in 1888, you would think in theory that there would’ve been more concern, but there wasn’t. It was completely the opposite. Nobody was interested. So that’s actually the, the shortest chapter in the book because there’s very, very little out there that we can actually gain from it.
So yeah, so that’s, that was an interesting start to the, to the book because we’ve gone from, right, let’s have a look at these 12 cases to a case where we’ve got loads of information through to, um, a case that’s probably about eight or nine pages long.
Do you want, would you like me to go onto some other cases?
Erik: That, that would be super, yeah.
Suzanne: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So what, all the time that we’re looking at these cases, we’re trying to determine if there is any similarities between them. And when we look at ’73 with all the information there and then ’74, there just simply isn’t enough information there with the ’74 case for us to be able to say this is a standalone case, this is linked to, to Battersea ’73. There’s just not enough information. That’s, there’s just no way you could possibly assess that.
So you have to sort of like move on to the next case. Park that for now, and then move on to the next case and the next one and the next one and then just see if anything, you know, springs to mind.
And also in 1874, the Blackfriars Mystery, where one body part was found—it’s an entire body, but it was missing the right leg and possibly the right arm. Now this is actually, I think, quite an interesting case, not because it’s linked to anything, ’cause I think it’s highly unlikely it’s linked to anything, any of the other cases. But it, it’s interesting because if, when they were doing a dredging operation by Blackfriars Bridge, and when they were doing this dredging, the, the actual dredger bucket picked up the, the body.
And when the medical men had a look at this lady, she got corpse wax, grave wax, or the correct terminology is adipocere, which I hate saying because I always wanna mispronounce it. And that effectively means that there was a wax-like substance over her body that was hard to the touch and it preserved her body.
Is that it can preserve a body and body parts for centuries. I think in, I think I actually mention it in the book, there’s an incident, I think it was in France, and they found a, a child’s body, I think was in France, and this child died in the 13th century and they could still examine brain tissue from the 13th century because of this grave wax, this adipocere.
Erik: Wow.
Suzanne: Yeah, I know. Yeah. It’s amazing, isn’t it? But from our point of view, that makes it extremely problematic because of, she could have been in the water for a couple of months, she could have been in the water for several centuries. There’s just no way of knowing.
She was, she was found with her left hand above her head. And I speculate, and it’s not, not me being a genius, it was mentioned at the time as well, that it seems likely that when she died, she was resting on her left side with a, a hand above her head. And it was the activity of the dredger that caused the actual dismemberment.
In other words, that the, the scoop from the dredger bucket tried to take a, a bite, for want of a better expression, uh, and ended up grabbing her leg and possibly her, her, her right arm and tore them off. So when it went, when the dredge went back in again and then picked up the next bit down, which would’ve been her body, that is, is probably how she, that’s how she ended up losing her leg probably, or—
It’s another example, it’s another avenue that we have to be aware of that you’ve got this, uh, situation where we can’t work out, uh, how old she was. We dunno how she died. There was no significant wounds on the body. But that doesn’t actually mean to say she wasn’t murdered. Equally, she could have fallen in the river, she could have been committing suicide. We just dunno how she, she ended up there.
So that’s another one, like the, the, the previous case, where it’s possible, it’s possible that she could be linked to another case. But is it probable? And based on the evidence that we’ve got at, at the moment, I’d say no. Um, I think it’s another standalone case.
Erik: Interesting.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. When I was doing the, the research for the book, I actually find the smaller cases, the non-Canonical Four cases, I actually find them as interesting, if not more interesting than the, uh, the Canonical Four because you learn so much about the different methods and the different aspects that you have to take into consideration in order to make some form of, of an assessment on these cases.
So if we, we then move on to 1884. So there’s a 10-year gap before we have the next unsolved case, uh, or cases I should say. And that’s the Tottenham Court Road case and the Mornington Crescent case, which, um, occurred, both occurred in the latter part of 1884.
Now this is, if I did a sequel to the book, I would do it on this particular chapter because of it, it really does need some serious, serious investigation on this. Not because I think that it’s linked to any of the other cases, but because I think it’s an, it’s a really, really interesting, uh, subject matter all on its own, and it’s effectively, it’s a mishmash of cases.
So I, I knew about the, the two cases, the Mornington Crescent, Tottenham Court Road, when I, I did the research, but as I started to delve in it a bit deeper, I actually realized that there wasn’t actually two cases in this area, which is sort of the Bloomsbury, Marylebone area of London, not to sort of Camden Town area, um, that there was actually six cases, possibly even seven cases, which occurred in that time that were found in 1884.
Now that’s a quite obviously significant number and alarm bells should be going off, you know, sirens and what have you. What is going on here? And that’s where you have to look at a wider context of the area that we’re actually looking at.
So what we know about the 1884 cases is that the Tottenham Court Road case, um, it seems, uh, the lady was put into four parcels. She was discarded in the rubbish. She was found in a, I think her skull was found in the rubbish. Um, what we know about the Tottenham Court Road case is that she actually had undergone what they euphemistically refer to as an illegal operation shortly before she died. So she’d had an illegal abortion, termination.
And when we know that information with the Tottenham Court Road case, you actually start to look at the whole area and you realize that there was actually 13 medical institutions, at least in that area at the time. There was various doctors’ practices. We have, uh, student medical schools, we have obviously all different types of doctors and surgeons.
And some of the, uh, cases that we find here, um, are literally a, a foot or they’re an arm. And in some of the cases we don’t even know what gender they are. So you have to question, and this is my sort of wider theory, you have to question whether it’s possible that students, for want of a better expression, took them home with them to study.
In Dyott Street, which is in Bloomsbury, they found several body parts stuffed underneath, um, a discarded safe, and it had been covered in lime. Now, the way that they, they looked at it, uh, the, the, uh, medical men looked at, at these, um, body parts, there was evidence to suggest that the, they’d been subjected to some form of anatomical study.
So the Tottenham Court Road area, the Bloomsbury, Marylebone area, I think that there’s an awful lot of stuff gonna crawl out the woodwork with regards to abortion rings. And I give a, a big part of that chapter about a separate one in the area and doctors performing stuff that they shouldn’t be performing and people with basically no medical knowledge at all performing these operations.
So there’s an, a medical theme going through all of this, whether it be to do with the abortion rings or whether it’s to do with anatomy students. I, as I say, I think it’s a fascinating subject, but is there any evidence to suggest anything was linked to any of the other cases? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think you can say that.
So once you’ve got those cases out of the way, you’re then onto the Canonical Four. Um, and then, and then we’re looking at the case that’s known as the Rainham Mystery, which is the 1887. Now there’s seven body parts there and the body parts ranged from an, uh, body parts found in Battersea right the way across to Rainham, which is outside of the London area.
And so that’s about, around about 25 miles, 26 miles between the, the two extremes in the River Thames. But there’s also body parts found in the Regent’s Canal. Um, the Regent’s Canal links passenger and goods railway stations in the northern part of London. So you’ve got the likes of Euston, King’s Cross, and St. Pancras, and some absolutely huge goods yards.
And the cargo was transported off the railways onto the Regent’s Canal, and it was moved down if it needed to go overseas. Parts of the, when we’re looking at the next three cases, which it’s no secret that I’ve said, uh, in the conclusions that they are potentially linked, one of the reasons I think they’re potentially linked is because they have got some, they’ve got something to do with the wharves, the transportation, the, the barge, the cargo, the, the, the workmen, the laborers.
To me it’s, there’s something to do with that. And when you look at, at, at Rainham, the fact that the first body part was found there, you’re thinking, oh, that’s quite a significant distance from, from London. And I think that is interesting because where the actual body part was found, it was found near a small creek on the Thames and around that area, there were some, for want of a better expression, dirty industries.
And these, uh, dirty industries were things like, uh, fish fertilizers, you know, uh, what else was there, you know, rubbish dumping, rubbish, uh, processing. And you also go, when you go further inland, you go towards brick-making and the brickfields. Uh, and there’s a, there’s a, there’s a big link between the dust that was being—
To the making. The first body, there’s actually three body parts found, uh, but the first body part, an arm, timber, and then you find the other body parts are found, uh, in the basement area of the under-construction new Scotland Yard. Now, the new Scotland Yard is right, if anybody’s ever been past the building, it’s right by the Houses of Parliament, uh, is literally across the road from the river.
So it’s not, you know, like inland. It’s, it’s literally 50 yards away from the water. So again, you’ve got two more examples, well three more examples, of there being some sort of link to the waterways. And the fact that New Scotland Yard was under construction at that time, an awful lot of the larger pieces of material that were being used in the construction were being transported by boat.
So I think you are, you’ve got a further example geographically and infrastructurally, if that’s such a word, to suggest that somebody to do with the river was, was, was involved with this.
Now when we talk about the fact that the torso, and I think it was a lower leg, that were found in this under-construction basement of New Scotland Yard, there’s an awful lot of, uh, discussion, particularly on the forum, on JTR Forum and Casebook, as to whether it’s significant that these body parts were found in what would become the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police.
Now, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion either way on that. Whether it was a conscious effort on the part of the perpetrator to, for want of a better expression, stick two fingers up at the authorities—look what I can do—that may well be the case. Equally, it could be just a laborer or a workman who’s found a convenient place to store a body part. I, I dunno, and I can argue it either way.
So you’ve got that with Whitehall. And then if you move on to Elizabeth Jackson, so this occurred in June, July 1889. You have more body parts, 14. Uh, I think it’s about 14 body parts, and those, again, are spread quite far and wide along the River Thames from Wandsworth Bridge up to the western side of the, of Woolwich, all in the River Thames, except for two body parts, which one was found in Battersea Park and one was flung over the railings of a house, uh, Shelley House, uh, on the Chelsea Embankment.
But again, both of those body parts that were found on land are only literally a stone’s throw away from the River Thames. And the difference between Elizabeth Jackson, A, we identified her, and B, she was actually seven months pregnant when she died. She was effectively destitute. Uh, she was living in a rather notorious road called Turk’s Row, which was in Chelsea, and she was just about as destitute as anybody could be.
Um, she didn’t want to go into the workhouse because she, um, her mom and her dad were in the workhouse, and she felt shame over the, well, certainly witnesses have said that she felt shame over the fact that she was pregnant and unmarried. Uh, her partner, John Faircloth, he, he did a runner, uh, and gone off elsewhere and she was in all probability having to prostitute herself in the area around Turk’s Row, which, um, had a large population of soldiers because we go near towards the Chelsea Barracks down towards the river, uh, in, in Battersea, which is practically next door.
So I think that looking at the evidence that’s available, I think it’s most probable that Elizabeth Jackson was either picked up by a punter, for want of a better vulgar phrase, or she was attacked in some way in Battersea Park because a lot of her, her clothing was found by the body part in Battersea Park. And I think that’s what happened. And then the disposal of the rest of her body was done on the river.
Now again, because of these factors that we’ve got of working out exactly where a body part would end up, did somebody go along the river discarding body parts, or were they all dumped at the same location and some, due to how heavy they were, went further than others? We can’t say, you know, it’s, it’s too much of a stretch, a stretch to actually put a, a serious argument one way or another with regards to that.
But again, going back to the other two cases, there is a similarity in the way that the, the body parts have been dismembered. There is a similarity in geography. There’s a similarity in, uh, the amount of, uh, body parts, how the body was cut up. We’re looking at body parts that were cut up, um, using a knife and a saw and were disjointed. That was the case for all three of them.
The Thames and water was, uh, being used. A couple of the Elizabeth body parts and, uh, all three bodies appear to have been dissected almost straight after death.
Now, that differs from the 1873 Battersea case because the 1873 Battersea case, ignoring the fact that there’s a 14-year gap between the, the murders, which you have to question, the plausibility of a dismemberment killer leaving a 14-year gap. And I know that we have serial killers that do leave gaps, and I know that it’s possible that, that that serial killer could have been in jail.
So I take that, you know, on board. But for me the key difference between the 1873 Battersea case and those other three cases that I’ve just mentioned is that the Battersea case was cut up in a very, very different manner. And when you are just sawing through, you know, a femur or a tibia or what have you, and that’s the way that you are dismembering somebody, that’s a completely different approach to adequately dismembering somebody using a knife and a saw.
So that’s what are the two, two main reasons why I don’t think that the 1873 case is linked to Rainham, Whitehall, and Elizabeth Jackson. But ultimately if somebody turned around to me and said, I don’t think that any of the cases are linked, I’d go, yeah, well that’s, that’s a decent enough viewpoint because we don’t have any inquest reports. Um, all we’ve got is newspaper, um, accounts of them.
And as we know, newspaper accounts can vary wildly from the truth and vary wildly between your different accounts of the, the same court hearing. The names as well, the dates, the locations, the addresses, all of those can be different. So the difficulty with a case, looking at a case that’s, you know, 140 years old, 150 years old, is that we just don’t have the information to hand.
We were, half of it is speculation. Half of it is looking at probability versus possibility, and I do overuse these phrases, and I apologize to anybody who listens to me because I do. For me, in my head, looking at the plausibility, the probability of something happening, and looking at the possibility of something happening is two very different things.
And I think that it’s probable, but not certain probable, that Rainham, Whitehall, and Elizabeth Jackson were linked. But I think it’s possible, and I, I’m pushing myself with possible, that the 1873 Battersea is linked to them because the evidence just doesn’t support my view so— I dislike to use the phrase because I think it anonymizes the, the lady, the victim. So I do try and use the phrases human being.
And so the Pinchin Street torso is a case that happened just outside of, of Whitechapel in, uh, an area of St. George in the East, a street called Backchurch Lane. And the Pinchin Street torso was found under an archway, under a viaduct, and it was a body minus the legs and the head. And historically it’s been viewed by a lot of researchers and authors that the Pinchin Street torso was linked to Whitehall and Elizabeth Jackson, and I don’t think that the evidence there to say that’s the case.
I think it’s more likely to be a standalone case. And it was possibly as a result of domestic violence or some form of meeting, uh, in the, the dead of night, uh, between, uh, two people for money. The Pinchin Street case is, in my opinion, very different in the way that it’s been, that the person has been cut up and you don’t see any evidence of any hesitation in the way that the, the other three cases are dismembered. Somebody who’s done it has done it in a confident way.
You do see evidence of hesitation, and that’s because the legs were removed quite soon after death. But the head was only removed shortly before the body was discarded in the archway. So much so that there was little flecks of blood that came out the neck wound. And they, the estimates of, of death is, it varies depending on who, who you, you read about it, but it’s, you’re talking round about 48 hours. Uh, the body was just starting to properly decompose.
We know that because a tentative slit from her torso down to her genital area, and this was starting to push apart from the gases that were accumulating, uh, in her intestines. So Pinchin Street, you’ve got no, no link with, with the water. Well, not that we know of anyway. I mean, I suppose you could argue that somebody put a, a boat, put the missing body parts into the water, but we’ve got no evidence of that. We have to assume that it was land-based.
There was only four body parts. So the, the, the full torso was left completely intact. It also would appear that only a knife was used as opposed to a knife and a saw. And then we have this hesitation in the way that the legs and head is cut off.
Reasons, sorry, I should say this as well, that when the medical men examined her body, they found that she was covered in bruises, and these were severe bruising, bruising. They looked like she’d been stamped on or kicked heavily on her back and also on her arms, on her forearms, there was actually bruises where somebody had gripped their thumb and their, their fingers around her. So there was obviously some form of violent altercation that occurred before she died, shortly before she died.
So to me, all of this with Pinchin Street doesn’t particularly fit in with the Whitehall cases either, even though it’s only a distance away from Whitehall. So it, it’s, it’s regarded as a crossover case between the, the torso cases and, uh, the Whitechapel cases. And I think there’s a reason for that, and that’s why, because it doesn’t fit into either category properly. And I think the reason for that is because it’s a standalone case. That’s just my opinion.
Erik: That, that’s a good point. You, you write that the differences between the Whitechapel cases in general and, and the Thames torso cases in general are that the Whitechapel victims were left out in the open and, and there’s evidence of the victims being posed but not dismembered.
Suzanne: Yeah. And I think the majority of people, I think, are in agreement. I know there’s, there’s some people who, who don’t necessarily agree with me. That’s fine, again, but I just don’t see.
You look at the fact of Whitehall, uh, occurring in the middle of the autumn of summer, autumn of 1888, how you would have the Ripper murders where, you know, people are being disemboweled, they’re being left for shock value, then the killer wanting to make an impact on the people who discover the bodies and to shock the authorities and the press and everybody. And then you suddenly go from that to dismembering a body in the hope that she won’t be found, and there’s only three body parts that are found, and then go back and increase to doing your, your Ripper mutilations and your slashing.
I just, I just don’t see how. And also in one location. That’s a factor. Nothing to do with the waterways. All land-based, all, all within a, a confined area. You know, it’s all walkable and what have you. I just don’t see it. I, I can’t think of a, another example of another serial killer that acts like that.
And that’s not to say that it hasn’t happened in the past and, uh, that it’s not possible here. I can’t 100 percent confirm it either way. But I can say, once again, on the balance of probabilities, that I just don’t see it. I think Jack the Ripper is something completely separate. Completely separate. Uh, so that’s just my opinion.
Erik: Right, right. Some authors and researchers use the attempt by the Ripper to decapitate as a demonstration that the two series are linked though. Right?
Suzanne: Mm-hmm. So if we’re talking about Annie Chapman now, I’ve had many a discussion, the description that’s given about how, uh, the, the wounds around Annie Chapman’s neck and neck, I think contrary to some of my other Ripperologist, uh, colleagues, I think an attempt was made. A tentative attempt was made to decapitate Chapman.
But if you look at the rest of Annie Chapman, there’s not, not really anything else that we can say that is similar to a torso murder. There isn’t any water. There isn’t any other dismemberment. He’s, he’s gone for, he may have gone for a decapitation, given it up as a bad job because just can’t do it.
One of my pet peeves when I, I read, uh, stuff is when people say that she had her throat cut so badly that she was nearly decapitated. And you, once you’ve read that once I’ve said this, you’ll not be able to unread it now because that phraseology, or, or paraphrase, is used in so many different books, websites, forums, you know, newspaper articles, magazines. And it’s actually, it’s a, a shock-tactic terminology because it actually takes quite a lot to decapitate somebody, but it doesn’t take that much to put nicks in the vertebrae.
So if you’re actually cutting somebody’s throat, there’s a big difference between cutting somebody’s throat from ear to ear and then inadvertently nicking the bones of the vertebrae in the neck and somebody actually physically trying to decapitate somebody. Very different. So with Annie Chapman, obviously you have got a situation where he’s had, I think he’s had a, a, a tentative go, a speculative go, at decapitating her, realized that it’s a lot harder than what he actually first thought it was gonna be like.
And then he’s moved on to more interesting things, i.e. the removal and slashing of the pelvic and the abdominal areas, and the removing of her – I just remembered the removing of her large intestine and putting it around as a vile, perverse decoration around the side of her body.
Erik: Yeah, that, that’s really interesting too, the comparison you draw between Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Jackson, especially when it comes to the, the treatment of their uterine—
Suzanne: Yeah. So, um, so first of all with Annie Chapman, you’ve got an attempt to remove her uterus, um, which I think he gets half of it. What you’ve got with Elizabeth Jackson is something different. Very. I know it’s, there’s, there’s some people who disagree with me quite strongly on this, but this is purely my opinion, uh, and the way that I view what has happened with regards to the two different cases.
When you look at Elizabeth Jackson, because she was seven months pregnant, obviously she’s got a, for want of a better expression, a baby bump. And when, um, her body was found, they, they found out, they noticed that the fetus had actually been removed from the uterus. But the placenta, the uterus, and the ovaries were still left in situ.
Now there’s more than one person who’s got a bit hot under the collar over this terminology that I’ve used of in situ. And what I mean by in situ, and I do clarify this in the book, is that the uterus and the ovaries and the placenta were still attached to the pelvic wall, and they were part of this much bigger piece of, uh, flesh, which is unfortunately, I can’t think of any other phrase to say, baby bump.
And that would, that also included the kidneys, the spleen, the liver, part of the stomach, and part of the bladder. So yes, she’s had her uterus removed, but it’s not specifically her uterus. Unlike Annie Chapman, where it’s specific, what the perpetrator for Elizabeth Jackson has done is they removed that entire area and left the uterus and ovaries in place along with the kidney, spleen, liver, et cetera.
So I view that as being fundamentally very different. Whatever was going on in that perpetrator’s head to do with Elizabeth Jackson, I have got no idea when it comes to the fact of the, the baby. Um, because that is really quite disturbing because the baby was actually, I think it’s about a four- or a six-inch cut, and the baby was actually physically removed out of the uterus.
Now, what was going on in this person’s head? I, I’ve got absolutely no idea. It could be that that was a kink, you know, very strange one. Alternatively, it could be that once they cut this part of the body out, that they realized that that area was too big to actually maneuver. So they then effectively sounded, I apologize, it comes across as sounding flippant. It’s certainly not meant to sound flippant, but you need to reduce the size of the body part, and the easiest way to do that is to take the fetus out.
It could be either. We’ve got no way of knowing what was going on. All I can say is, is that I don’t see a similarity with the way that the uterus has been used, uh, in the case of Elizabeth Jackson to the way that the uterus was used in the case of Annie Chapman.
Erik: So, so based on, on your years of research, what kind of profile would you build for the person responsible, assuming, of course, the Thames Torso murders were the work of a serial killer?
Suzanne: So I think that this person was most probably male, in fact, almost certainly male. I think that the person was working class and I think the person was employed. And I think the person was employed in some sort of industry linked to the waterways. So that leaves a very wide spectrum of roles that might be included because you might have be specifically relating to the working class, possibly, or probably. I dunno. I would say probably have some form of association with prostitution. That’s not to say that the ladies who were killed were prostitutes, but I would suspect that there is a misogynistic love-hate relationship when it comes to women.
But age-wise, this to me smacks of somebody in their bit more mature, sort of, sort of mid-twenties maybe through to even up to about 40. I don’t think any older. I don’t really think any younger. Knew the area with some form of butchery skills, not necessarily because that terminology can be taken out of context. Do demonstrate some confidence with regards—
I don’t think necessarily that they were a butcher, but I certainly think that they’ve had some experience of cutting meat or, or witnessing meat being cut up. But other than that, I dunno.
Erik: Right. So, so yeah, I, I’d love to ask you, um, you, you do propose a couple of potential suspects at the end of your book. My listeners are, are familiar with, uh, James Crick, because he is the main focus of Sarah Bax Horton’s book. And you do find James Crick to be perfectly reasonable as a suspect yourself.
Suzanne: I think, yeah. I, I, I, I don’t really have a, a massive issue with, with James Crick. I know that, I mean, um, the, the name James Crick was, I think it was first raised, going back to the early noughties on, I think it was on Casebook. Um, and I know there are some other people who did bits and bobs of research around him.
And he’s, he’s an interesting character, is James. He’s, he’s not a nice man. He’s a deeply, deeply unpleasant man. And the fact that he certainly raped one lady and attempted to kill her and attempted to kill another lady, although he was actually let off, there’s no way that those are the only two crimes that James Crick has been involved in. No way. That’s somebody who knows what they’re doing.
And it’s interesting as well, when you look at, at the, the accounts of, of the rape that happened in, when was it, 1889? It’s interesting because there’s other, there’s other people mentioned, and it seems to be some sort of little mini organized gang, which again, needs some further investigation.
But if you, you know, if you think about it from a logical point of view, if you’ve got somebody who knows the waterways of, of London and is raping women, attempting to murder them, um, he’s admitted that he has, uh, murdered other women. Whether that’s true or not is a different issue. That’s not something you can discount easily.
There is a strong circumstantial case for James Crick. And I also think it’s very interesting that when he’s sent down for the rape, he’s sent down for 15 years, and that’s practically unheard of in that era. For a, for a rape to get to trial is highly unusual, and B, for the perpetrator to be found guilty, very rare.
And if they are found guilty, nine times out of 10, they’re given a year, two years max, and that is maximum. So for somebody to be given 15 years’ hard labor is highly unusual, and that to me suggests that the authorities behind the scenes wanted this man off the streets.
So he’s not an, as I say, he’s not a nice person. He’s a deeply unpleasant man. Whether he murdered the people on the Thames, I think that it would take a bit more, or quite significantly more evidence for me to be fully convinced. But he’s certainly a person of interest.
The other person that I put forward, not necessarily saying him, but as an avenue for further investigation, is the, uh, bricklayer foreman, uh, from the Whitehall Mystery in 1888. And he was, uh, part of, uh, the witnesses that, that, uh, happened.
Now, the problem we’ve got with, with this is that I can’t find anything because his name—and he’s named, called Thomas, and also called Charles—and surname is Cheney. And Cheney in different spellings of those pronunciations. So to try and actually find him is extremely difficult.
In fact, I drew a blank. So I ended up, uh, contacting a lady called, uh, Debra, who people, if you’re into Ripperology, will know she’s what, who I regard as being probably the best researcher that Ripperology has. Uh, and she, uh, went away. She came back and she said, have a look at this man. This is really interesting.
And she found a bricklayer, Charles Cheney, who’d been born in New Milton in Hampshire and then became a bricklayer. It’s possible that it could be this man who is the foreman bricklayer at Whitehall. But what makes it very interesting is that because he’s a bricklayer, New Milton was where John Chappell owned a large brickworks, and John Chappell was the person who owned the place where the Pimlico arm was found in the Whitehall case.
And that, to my knowledge, is the only potential link that we’ve got in all of the cases that link the new Scotland Yard with where the arm was found. And that I think is potentially quite significant.
That’s not to say that Charles, if it is his name, is the Thames torso murderer, but it is an interesting avenue to go down because certainly his nephew was a, a bricklayer there. And then we have obviously the links with, in the Rainham case where you’ve got the brickyards at Rainham. And I think that is definitely somewhere that I, in fact, I’m, I’m just about to start having a look at it properly myself now just to see where it leads. It might lead nowhere, it might. Who knows. But yeah, that’s another area that I think is worth exploring.
Erik: Right. You go into a lot of depth in, in your book about anatomy, right? And what it would take to do something as horrific as, as what happened to these women. Women. And that’s a really central part of your book, trying to figure out what kind of skill level someone would need to carry out these murders.
Suzanne: Uh, yes. So, and anatomy, now I have to go on a massive learning curve when it came to stuff like this. So to do with anatomy, because when you look at, um, the four cases from ’87 to, um, ’89, we have a gentleman called, uh, Charles Hebbert. Dr. Thomas Bond, who remember from the 1873 case, is effectively his assistant.
And he and Charles Hebbert write four accounts for the medical, in a medical journal called the Westminster Hospital Reports. And when you read these reports, it’s dry reading. It’s dry as— And I ended up having to do a glossary of terms in the back of the book, not just for the people who are reading it, but for myself as well because a large parts of it, unless you actually understand what the word specifically means, it’s complete gobbledygook.
So from, um, an anatomical point of view, as I say, I was on this huge learning curve and then we, we, how the bodies were dismembered.
Now it’s problematic when we look at placing too much emphasis on the minutiae of dismemberment. You know, somebody cut off the head at the sixth cervical vertebrae and somebody cut it off at the seventh cervical vertebrae. When somebody’s doing something quickly, is it reasonable to assume that they’re not too concerned about which specific vertebrae they’re cutting through yet? In my opinion, I don’t think that’s particularly relevant. But how they dismember is relevant.
And when you look, when you look at The Lancet account in the 1873 case with regards to the reports, uh, of the inquest interactions with the, the medical witnesses in the 1887 to ’89 cases, there’s almost a defensiveness on the part of the, the medical men. They’re, they’re almost tripping over themselves in certain circumstances, not all of them, but in certain circumstances, to make it very clear that whoever did this was not a medical man, they were not a doctor, they were not a surgeon, you know, they were not gonna, uh, be casting aspersions on their hallowed, uh, profession.
And when you actually start to look at the different anatomical aspects of it, you start to understand what they’re, they’re talking about. When you, I’ve, I’ve got some truly vile anatomy books on my shelf so I could actually understand all of this. And medical men amputated or dismembered anatomical specimens to dehumanize a, a body in a very different way to how a butcher would.
And so somebody who is a butcher isn’t, you know, particularly bothered that they’ve missed off the so-and-so muscle, or the cartilage, or the what have you. What they’re aiming for is fast, it’s sweeps, it’s confidence of, right, let’s, we’ve got this carcass, we’re gonna be cutting around this arm, we’re gonna move it on, right, and then there’s the next one, and then there’s the next one, and then there’s the next one.
Or a surgeon, obviously, is gonna be taking a lot more care over it, and they’re also gonna be doing things much slower and uses—
And transfixion means that they open up the joints in a very specific manner to ensure that if somebody’s being, having their arm amputated or their leg amputated, that they basically don’t kill them. So they, there are flaps of skin and it’s done in a curved manner. And it, um, I’ll use the, I’m gonna ironically hesitate to use the word hesitation, but there’s far more hesitation on the part of a medical man than of somebody with butchery skills.
And so with the cases that I think are linked, there isn’t really any evidence, in my opinion, of medical knowledge per se, but there is evidence of butchery knowledge. And that, of course, if you’re gonna do the narrative of a, a, a waterman or a, um, a laborer, you know, in a wharf or a dock, that’s a big spanner in the works because I can’t think there would’ve been too many butchers in the construction site on, on New Scotland Yard.
Uh, so we have to take that on board. It’s possible that this person was a butcher, but I personally think that this person had acquired butchery skills. I don’t think he was a butcher at the time. He may have previously been a butcher.
One of the reasons that I say this is that my father, God rest his soul, um, was a qualified butcher and slaughterman. And I know how to cut a chicken up. I know how to cut a lamb. I know, well, I’ve never done it, but I know how to potentially put a carcass because he’s just shown me this, this, and this. So I know where roughly that it’s jointed, and, and that’s it.
And so I would be reasonably confident to actually do that. But if I, God forbid, murdered somebody, and then they start looking at the evidence that’s presented in front of them and they look at the victim and they see that whoever’s done it has been, has made a reasonable job of the subject matter, are they going to reach a conclusion that the perpetrator, the person, is a butcher? Is somebody skilled in butchering?
Well, if you look for me, you’re never gonna, it’s never gonna crop up on anything because I have no formal training, but I do know roughly what to do. Yes. It could be that somebody was a butcher. Equally, it could be somebody who’d acquired butchery skills during a part of their life previously.
Erik: Ah, interesting. Wow. Well, well this has been so great and I appreciate you, you spending some time going over this with us. I know that this is a, a labor of love for you. So, so again, congratulations on the book. And I know you haven’t quite set up a website yet, but you do have a, a Facebook page dedicated to the subject, right? And, and I would imagine it’s pretty active.
Suzanne: Uh, it’s, to be honest with you, it’s interesting on Facebook. I just tend to get likes. I don’t really get huge amounts of interaction because the subject matter not that well known. Um, you, you get far more interaction and debate actually when it comes to the two forum sites, which is, you know, JTR Forums, uh, and Casebook.org.
But by all means, if you wanna contact me, the easiest way to contact me is, uh, through Facebook. Um, I have a, an author site there, or on Amazon. I’ve also got an author page on that.
Erik: Super. Well, well, thank you again for being a guest on this show.
Suzanne: You’re very welcome. I’m actually gonna have some tea now.
Erik: Sounds lovely. Well, well, again, I, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Suzanne: You are welcome.
Erik: Again, I have been speaking to Suzanne Huntington. She’s the author of the new book, The Thames Torso Murders: Fact or Fiction? This has been another episode of the Most Notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I’m Erik Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.
