The Thames Torso Murders
On the morning of September 5, 1873, a policeman rowing down the River Thames made a grisly discovery: in some mud next to the Battersea waterworks, he saw some human remains. Or, to be more precise, he found the left quarter of a woman’s torso. What’s more, just a few hundred meters away, a fellow officer found the right side of a woman’s torso floating in the Thames. Then, the next day, a face and a scalp – not attached to a full head – were found, followed by a thigh, then part of an arm and also a shoulder. The Thames Torso Murders sensation had started.
Dr Kempster, the police surgeon at the time, had an ingenious, albeit horrific, way of trying to solve the mystery. He made a mechanical frame on which he placed the body parts, including the head. Then, members of the public were invited to see if they could identify the victim, believed to be a woman aged around 40. Though many people came to have a look – testament to both the morbid curiosity of the time and also to the sheer number of women who would go missing in Victorian London – nobody could provide a name. But Dr Kempster did conclude that the body had been cut up by someone who knew how to wield a scalpel.
Five years later, the dismembered remains of a second woman were found in various locations across central London. Again, the police were baffled, though they once again noted that the perpetrator was somebody with medical knowledge. In 1889, a third body turned up in pieces. For more than two weeks, body parts began turning up across Battersea. This time, the examiners concluded that the victim was young and heavily pregnant. This was enough information to find an identify. The victim was named as Elizabeth Jackson, an alleged prostitute from Chelsea, directly across the river from Battersea. And the murderer? Nobody knows.
After a fourth cut-up body was found in September 1899, the media speculation went into overdrive. Some suspected Jack the Ripper and the “Torso Killer” were one and the same person. However, given the different methods used, the police and the press largely concluded that two killers were busy in London. In more recent years, historians have claimed that the killer might have been active in Paris, too, as cut-up female bodies started turning up in the French capital around the same time. To this day, however, no one has been conclusively identified as the Torso Killer and his hideous crimes have long been overshadowed by those of the Ripper.