Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Who Was the Victorian Thames Torso Murderer? With Lucy Worsley About this episode For over a century, a series of gruesome murders have gone unsolved. Until now?
The Thames Torso Killer terrified Victorian Londoners by dismembering their victims and scattering their body parts along the River Thames. Kate is joined by Lucy Worsley in this episode to discuss their investigation into the Thames Torso Killer for 'Lucy Worsley's Victorian Murder Club'. They discuss how the killer evaded discovery, and how their crimes were presented by the press.
Watch Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club on BBC Two to see Kate, Lucy and a host of other experts including Sarah Bax Horton, Samantha Lundrigan and Marie Cassidy. All episodes from the series now available on BBC iPlayer.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
0:53 Speaker 02 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.
0:57 Speaker 03 If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
1:01 Speaker 01 In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.
1:11 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Leister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets.
1:19 Kate Lister? Because let's face it, warning you that a show called Betwixt Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society is going to contain sex scandal in society, seems a little bit bonkers to my way of thinking, so we may as well have a giggle with it. But I'm actually being a bit serious today. I've got my serious face on. This is seriously an adult podcast, spoken by serious adults to other serious adults about adulty, serious things, covering a range of serious adult subjects. You should be a serious adult as well. Right, no, serious face back on. We're actually covering murder today. Murder and mayhem in Victorian London, and you just might not want to listen to that one today, in which case scroll back and find something more suitable. And we will see you next time. Right, for the rest of you morbid little goblins, let's crack on.
2:09 Kate Lister? When the sun is out in 19th century London, the Thames glitters its snaking path through the city. But get a little bit closer and you'll realise it is anything but sparkly clean. This is a working waterway. Boats of all sizes are carrying their wares to port and dumping their waste into the river. And they aren't the only ones dumping waste here. Industrial, domestic, bodily, you name it. All of London's effluence is here. With the shouts of workmen echoing across the water and human waste floating downstream, the river has none of the tranquility expected for a final resting place. And yet, in the late 19th century, it was just that for so many.
2:51 Kate Lister? In 1882, for example, 544 bodies were found in the Thames. And those were just the ones that they found. And in the 1870s and 1880s, an even stranger set of discoveries was being made. Body parts, unidentifiable torsos being spread across the banks of the River Thames. It is a case that has gone unsolved... until now.
3:42 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. In 1888, the city of London was gripped by the spectre of a serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. But he wasn't the only murderer in town. As incredible as it sounds, at the same time that the serial killer called Jack the Ripper was stalking London, there was another one on the loose. With at least four victims, only one who has ever been identified, this killer is known as the Thames Torso Killer. Today, I'm with the one and only Lucy Wurzy, who I joined on the new BBC documentary series, Lucy Wurzy's Victorian Murder Club. And we may have finally solved this set of very gruesome crimes.
4:26 Kate Lister? And now, we're allowed to talk about it as well. So let's go.
4:36 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Lucy Worsley. How are you doing?
4:43 Speaker 04 I am thrilled to be here and to be hanging out with you again. We've had a murderous time over the last year together, haven't we?
4:49 Kate Lister? Oh, what a strange way to forge a friendship. How did you meet?
4:55 Speaker 04 We were in a murder club together.
4:57 Kate Lister? We were in a murder club. It was so interesting looking at that particular series of murders in London. But for anybody who hasn't seen the documentary on BBC, can you just tell us a little bit, like a quick overview, the Thames Torso Murders? What was that case?
5:14 Speaker 04 Yes, this new series, which is on the BBC too at the moment in the UK, is called Victorian Murder Club. And the idea is that the club, including Kate and others, tried to solve a murder. And the murder that we, I think that we solved it. I mean, the evidence won't stand up in a court of law, but I'm totally convinced that we've, we've got the guy. The murderer we were after was called the Thames Torso Murder. And his technique was, oh, this is horrible, I do warn you, was to dismember the bodies of his victims and to leave them scattered in and around the River Thames, hence the name.
5:57 Speaker 04 And this was all happening in the 1880s. And the reason you probably haven't heard of this guy is because it was at exactly the same time as Jack the Ripper.
6:07 Kate Lister? That's so mad.
6:08 Speaker 04 He sucks all the oxygen out of serial killing in London in the 1880s.
6:13 Kate Lister? There were two serial killers in the same area at the same time, both targeting women.
6:21 Speaker 04 Yes. Now, some people think that Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Murderer were one and the same person.
6:28 Kate Lister? Yeah.
6:28 Speaker 04 And part of the thinking there is that would be so wild to have two of them in the same city at the same time. But... Actually, back in the eighteen eighties, the police quite quickly decided that they were two separate people because the techniques were very different. Jack the Ripper's attacks were frenzied and out of control and horrific in that sort of fiery way. But the Thames Torso murderer was, I hate to use the word clever, but I think it's appropriate. His approach was much more cold and Methodical. Calculated, methodical. And there was lots of pre-planning here because it actually makes very good murderous
7:11 Speaker 04 practice to dismember a body like this and to put the pieces in the river. Because the river becomes your accomplice. The river degrades the evidence and makes it much harder for the authorities to find out where the crime was done, how it was done. We don't even know the means of killing and who did it where, when. All of those things get really hard to untangle.
7:33 Kate Lister? The victims of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, I suppose, they get a lot of attention as well because we know who they were. We have names, we have histories, and thanks to Hallie, we have even more fleshed out history. The person doing these murders and the people he was targeting, we know very, very little about them. It's literally just body parts showing up.
7:55 Speaker 04 Well, that's the genius of this particular murderous approach. It makes it very hard to find out the identities of the victims. But there's something in common between the murderer known as Jack the Ripper and the murderer known as the Thames Torso murderer. And this helps to explain why they were both operating on the same streets at the same time. And this is something I learnt during the course of our investigation from our psychological expert. And she told me, and this was a revelation to me, that when people are living in communities where there's overcrowding and there are high levels of poverty and there's a sense of transience, people coming and going, that enables serial killers to flourish, if you
8:39 Speaker 04 like, because they tend to prey upon people who Will not be missed. And that's, that's really heartbreaking. People who are vulnerable on the fringes of society and who won't be, won't be noticed if they're gone.
8:52 Kate Lister? I hate the fact that these murderers get cool nicknames, but that's, that's sort of what we're left with. But there was one victim of the Thames Torso murderer, who we do know their identity, and that was Elizabeth Jackson.
9:03 Speaker 04 Yes. Now, this is where the Thames Torso murderer made a mistake. Because in this particular case, many of her body parts were found, some were found down by Tower Bridge, which is significant in our story, and others were found up in the Battersea direction, including the torso itself was found just away from the river in the park at Battersea, where we went and we lurked in the bushes together, didn't we?
9:30 Kate Lister? We did.
9:30 Speaker 04 And some of her body parts were found wrapped in a checked piece of material. It was, it was quite distinctive. And some of this lady Elizabeth's friends read in the newspaper that the body parts had been wrapped in this material and they thought, hang on, we recognise that. That's a coat that Elizabeth Jackson, our friend who's gone missing, had. It was an ulster coat, which is the sort of little cape that goes around the shoulders, the sort that Sherlock Holmes sometimes wears. So it was Elizabeth's coat that enabled her to be identified.
10:04 Kate Lister? And Elizabeth's story is it's, it's really sad, but it's kind of, it's the same story that you hear being told so many times with a lot of women in this area at this time. So what do we know about her? She was very young. She was homeless at the time, is that right?
10:23 Speaker 04 Elizabeth had had a sort of sad story of descent down, down the social hierarchy, I suppose, as it existed in the 1880s. She was born in Chelsea in 1845. I know that you know, but I wonder if our listeners know about the Bouv poverty maps. There were these wonderful sort of sociological maps of Victorian London, where you can argue with this technique that this sociological researcher coloured all of the different streets in different colours to show the relative affluence of the people who were living on them. And although she lived in a well-to-do part of town, Chelsea, Elizabeth lived on a bad street. A street where people didn't have a lot of money.
11:05 Speaker 04 She got a job as a domestic servant and life was going pretty well for her, but she lost the job. And that was probably because she got pregnant.
11:15 Kate Lister? Hmm.
11:16 Speaker 04 And at this point, you think, why, why did she not go back to her family to get help? But they were Roman Catholic. So we can deduce that perhaps it was shame that prevented her from doing that. She turned up in the workhouse, which was a very shaming thing in itself to do. And she spent some amount of time living with a man, who's one of the suspects in the case, actually. He was an itinerant stone mason. They travelled about the country a bit together. There was talk in this relationship of him using violence against her. He used her unnaturally, that's the word that was used. And there were unpaid debts, but then towards the very end of her life, Elizabeth was now quite pregnant.
12:00 Speaker 04 And she was sleeping rough down by the river in Chelsea on the emoment. Now, if you walk along the river in London today, you'll be walking on this big, grand, substantial Victorian embankment that was put there to channel the river and to keep it moving more swiftly. And this, in the daytime, was a place of leisure and promenading, and people would go along in their carriages and with their parasols. But at night, it became a place for rough sleepers. And if you remember, I think you uncovered this bit, didn't you? Elizabeth had a friend called Ginger Nell.
12:36 Kate Lister? I remember Ginger Nell.
12:37 Speaker 04 Nell said to Elizabeth, don't go down there by the river, there are bad men on the boats. That was all too prophetic.
12:43 Kate Lister? It was. And what did she mean by those bad men on the boats? Who were the men on the boats? Because that cropped up in quite a bit of the evidence that we're looking at of like, what was, not the culture of the river, but like, there's a few warnings that it's not safe for women to go down there and associate with the men on the boats.
13:04 Speaker 04 Well, if you walk by the river in London today, there is, there is life on it. You see the tourists' boats going up and down, you see the police boats going up and down sometimes. But one thing that I really loved about this project is, well, I live in central London, I live by the river. And it's like I saw my own river with new eyes, because I began to realise just how much of a community was on the river in the 19th century. It was a highway, it was bustling, there were loads of people travelling up and down, day and night. And some important river workers were the watermen. Who would take you from one side to the other. Now, they were building bridges throughout the nineteenth century. They were building them like bilio at the time of our case.
13:48 Speaker 04 Tower Bridge is half constructed, but it's not finished yet. So in the meantime, watermen would take you from side to side and then barge men, their job or lighter men is a more technical term. A lighter is a sort of long, low, flat barge and that would transport goods up and down the Thames.
14:09 Kate Lister? And that was where Elizabeth was last seen? Was it that she was sleeping down in this area, rough?
14:15 Speaker 04 That's the last we hear about her until she she turns up as a victim of crime, yes.
14:21 Kate Lister? Where was she discovered? Where were her body parts discovered?
14:25 Speaker 04 Well, in this particular case, they were all over. Many of the parts were in the Battersea area and in Chelsea, but one part of her abdomen was found down near Tower Bridge. And I suspect actually that the people who've researched this case in the past have thought, hang on, this is this is a West London thing. But we'll probably come on to this. The fact that one of the body parts was found right near Tower Bridge, which is at the eastern end of the city of London, I think is highly significant.
14:56 Kate Lister? I do too, because when I'm not asking it just to be graphic and sensationalist, but the actual process of dismembering a body, of cutting up a body and then attempting to dispose of it is it takes a lot of effort and a lot of work. And this person, whoever it is, is managing to put body parts either side of the river, up and down the river. It seems to be very central to this. It's like, there's a lot of effort and a lot of labour that has gone into this. Does it seem to you to be somebody that is just being haphazard? Or do you think that this is quite a deliberate? Act.
15:32 Speaker 04 Well, when I went along to talk about this with Mary, our amazing pathologist, our forensic scientist, who has cut up ever so many bodies herself. She told me that to to cut up a body without electricity is hard work.
15:46 Kate Lister? Hmm.
15:47 Speaker 04 It takes hours. So that has led people, all of us, to think, well, he must have had a place where he couldn't be disturbed, a place of privacy, a kind of a base, if you like. And that's one of the few clues that might lead towards his identity.
16:06 Kate Lister? And if you're killing somebody on the river, why wouldn't you just throw them into the river whole? Like the the act of dismembering somebody for hours, there must have been method to that. There must have been reasons to do that.
16:19 Speaker 04 Well, if I were going to commit a murder.
16:22 Kate Lister? You never would, but if you were.
16:24 Speaker 04 I I exactly, I would want to get rid of the head because the head is is a really important way of identifying the victim. And if you identify the victim, that can lead you to the murderer, as in the case of Elizabeth Jackson. It leading us towards the men who are lurking on the boats on the river. And once you've taken the head off, and I imagine throwing that into the river, the head is heavy, it's going to sink to the bottom. And that's going to be a really good way of disposing of it. And then there's the other body parts are also going to be degraded by being in the water. It's not going to be clear exactly where you put them in because they're going to be moved by the tide.
17:06 Speaker 04 But there's also something even more dark and horrible about all of this. It's quite clear, I think, from talking to Sam, our psychologist, that the killer did think about the discovery of the body parts in some of the cases. Some of them were positioned in a place where the killer could imagine the sensations of the people who would be coming across them and minding them too. That's part of what Sam calls his satisfaction.
17:33 Kate Lister? Because Elizabeth isn't the only victim, is she? There have been others.
17:39 Speaker 04 Well, you say that. Um, yes, yes, yes. So there were two victims before Elizabeth and then a fourth one either. But here, I'd just like to say a word of praise and thanks to another member of the Murder Club team. Because I think that this case was cracked ultimately by a contemporary researcher called Sarah Bax Horton. Sarah Bax Horton has written several true crime books, but the one she wrote about this case is a cracker.
18:08 Kate Lister? That's really good.
18:08 Speaker 04 And I, I think that there were more victims than the four, because I'll tell you the act of genius that Sarah did. Like us, she'd been thinking, the river is central here. And she had also, as Sam, our psychologist, had been doing, been profiling this killer as somebody who probably had a history of violence against women. This is really common in the cases of men who kill women, that there are crimes short of murder in their background. So what she did, and this is something, I've been thinking about this. This is something the Victorian police couldn't have done in the eighteen eighties. The technology wasn't available to them. What she did was search the British newspaper index online, something that's available to all of us, but she thought of this and she did it.
18:53 Speaker 04 And she searched it using two filters. One was the River Thames. And the other was violence against women, but not murder, not murder, other forms of violence against women. And who should come out but a man who'd been accused of domestic violence? And then a rape, and then another rape and attempted murder. And in the last of these cases, the woman he tried to rape and to kill survived. A passing police boat heard her screaming. He was arrested. She appeared in court. And this is Sarah Warburton. I love the fact that Sarah Bax Horton has uncovered the testimony of this woman, Sarah Warburton, from the eighteen eighties.
19:35 Speaker 04 Because Sarah Warburton says, in court, this man who raped me, he said, if you make a noise, I will settle you. Like the other women that have been found in the Thames, which I think is a confession. And her testimony in court had him put away. He was put away and the murders stopped. And he was a waterman. That had been his job. His name was James Crick. I hesitate to name him because I think he would have enjoyed that, but that was his name. And he operated in his skiff, his rowing skiff, to take people across the river from the steps at Tower Bridge, which is where part of Elizabeth Jackson was found.
20:13 Kate Lister? Somebody who has one of these boats would have the privacy to murder and dismember somebody, wouldn't they? So that, and it gives him the means and the opportunity to do it.
20:24 Speaker 04 It gives him the means of transport. It gives him the private place to do the dismemberment. And his, a heartbreaking factor about all of this is that Rosina and Jessie, the first two victims, short and murder, weren't believed. I mean, these, these cases were investigated, but they didn't result in convictions for him. And in the first of those cases, his wife, Rosina, said, he's often out at night. I don't know where he is. It's a mystery to me. I think I do know where he was and what he was doing.
21:00 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Lucy after this short break.
21:13 Speaker 05 What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?
21:24 Speaker 05 I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership.
21:47 Speaker 05 Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.
22:11 Kate Lister? There's so many modern parallels in some of these stories because some of the testimony of the women that escaped him is they'd been drinking at the time and they got on their barge with him to, you know, like have a good time, I guess. And then it's, and you get this real sense from reading through the testimony and the police witnesses, there is a real like, well, what did you think was going to happen then, you silly girl?
22:34 Speaker 04 Hmm. He definitely played upon the trust that these women would have felt, that he was able to build up their trust so that they got into his car. And in, I said car, that's because I'm thinking of Sarah Everard here. There are so many strange parallels between
22:54 Kate Lister? Yeah, there are.
22:55 Speaker 04 The case of Sarah Everard and the Thames Dorset killer. And I was just reading the, the report of the inquiry that's been done into her death, where she got into the car of a man she trusted that turned out to be her killer. In the case of James Crick, he was obviously able to present himself as somebody who wouldn't do you any harm. In fact, as the final, to my mind, victim who wasn't killed, Sarah Warburton, the one who put him away, as she got into the boat, another woman said to her, you'll be perfectly safe with him. He's fine. So he obviously had that ability to manipulate people into thinking they were safe when they weren't.
23:29 Kate Lister? And thank God for Sarah Warburton. But one of the reasons that she was able to put him away is because there were witnesses to what he was doing. Is he, he was attacking her on the boat and there were people that heard and saw what was happening.
23:42 Speaker 04 Exactly. So, yeah, yeah. Again, I'm thinking how brilliant Sarah Bax Horton has been to discover all of this because she has uncovered such an amazing, kind of exciting denouement to this mystery, really. When he took Sarah Warburton into his rowing skiff, he rode her to a steamboat. That was moored underneath the half-finished tower bridge. And this was in the dead of night. And he used that boat to assault her. But Sarah Woberson, this is where his luck turned, was a to get an iron boat and to have bashing with it and to run onto the deck screaming. And at this point, a passing police boat with a chap called Inspector Charles Ford in
24:27 Speaker 04 charge was coming up the river and they heard the screams. So they came to investigate and the police boat rode after James Craig, who tried to escape in his skiff here. And he was a champion rower. He'd won competitions for rowing. He was really strong, but the police got him. And when the case came to court, there was not only the testimony of Sarah, the victim, but there was also the testimony of the passing police officer. So when you think about what was the performance of the Victorian police like in this case? Something they did really well. I mean, our forensic science expert was really quite impressed by the way that they'd carried out the autopsies on the victims in order to learn as much as they could about the
25:11 Speaker 04 crime from the clues left on the bodies. And obviously Inspector Charles Ford was key to putting her away, although I think part of the key to that was the fact that he was male and a police officer as opposed to female and not a police officer. And the ways in which they didn't do so well or and failed were they didn't draw this connection between the pattern of crime that Sarah Backs Horton has now been able to do. Admittedly, that would have been harder for them because they didn't have the access to data that we had. And what they didn't do is successfully prosecute him for the earlier and lesser crimes that he did along his path towards becoming.
25:56 Speaker 04 A serial killer. I should just caveat this. I mean, no way will this stand up in a course of law, but I'm convinced this all to me hangs together. It does make sense. And I perhaps have jumped the Kool-Aid, but I really think that's 130 years later, we know who did it.
26:15 Kate Lister? I think of all the suspects, he's the most believable, that you believe it. He was in the area, he had the means, he has a history of violence against women, he's assaulting women of the same demographic as the victims. According to the victim that escaped, he's referring to other women that he's murdered. Like, it all fits. Obviously, we'll never know for sure. But one of the things that I found was the most remarkable, and that I hadn't realised before we started looking at this case, was how many autopsies are carried out in pubs in the 19th century?
26:43 Speaker 04 No.
26:43 Kate Lister? I had, I had no idea that that was a thing that they did. I just assumed that all found bodies would be taken to a mortuary somewhere, but they weren't.
26:54 Speaker 04 Well, one of the things that was happening in Victorian London was the creation of mortuaries. And parishers began to feel that they weren't a proper parish unless they had-
27:01 Kate Lister? We should stop doing it in a pub, basically.
27:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. That that's the way justice was done in the 18th century. It was kind of community-based. Coroners would call their inquests in a convenient local space, whether that be a pub or a hall or whatever. And everything gets professionalised throughout the 19th century. And in fact, in the 1880s, there was now the Criminal Investigation Division, that existed. And this was both a weapon that could be used against the murderer. They had excellent sort of telegram networks connecting all the different departments across London. And these are the plainclothes police. They could make inquiries. It was their job to actively go out and research cases, as opposed to just try and keep them
27:48 Speaker 04 from being committed in the first place. That was more the job of the constables, keeping law and order on the streets. But this new professionalisation of the police kind of played into the crime because one of the Thames torsos was placed by the murderer in such a weird place. In the vaults, the underground vaults of a building site and the building that was then in construction, it was going to be the new headquarters for the Metropolitan Police, it was the New Scotland Yard. So it's very easy to speculate that this was the murderer taunting the police. And like many other people in Victorian society, he was a bit nervous that they might try and catch him. But a lot of people were a bit
28:28 Speaker 04 suspicious of this idea of having a professional police force, because would it trample upon the liberties of Englishmen? Would it impose some kind of French-type martial law? They weren't entirely welcomed with open arms.
28:42 Kate Lister? Was that the second body that turned up, the one where he had placed a torso in what would have been, basically it was the police station that was being built, and it was in a vault, wasn't it? So that, like, again, the effort to do that, to carry a torso up from the riverbank onto a building site and in the middle of the night and not be seen by anybody and place it there and vanish. I don't want to say it's impressive because it's a horrible thing to do, but like, that's wild.
29:08 Speaker 04 It is wild, and there's been a very carefully calibrated calculation of risk, I think, to be able to get away with that. But it's obviously something that he took meaning from, because he did it again. In the fourth torso, so this is the one after poor Elizabeth Jackson, the fourth torso was placed very deliberately and very precisely between the regular beat of local police constable. It was placed underneath the railway arches in Pinchon Street, which is in Whitechapel. And this is all within a mile of the very recent murders committed by Jack the Ripper. So was he taunting the police in the case
29:52 Speaker 04 of the Whitehall torso? Was he taunting the Ripper in the case of the fourth torso, the one placed in Whitechapel? It certainly seems possible.
30:01 Kate Lister? It does seem possible. And that kind of led us to think of like, is this competition between serial killers? Because like, obviously, Jack the Ripper, those murders were getting so much attention, so much oxygen from the press. Did the Thames Torso Killer, who's been murdering women for a good few years by this point, feel jealous of that and want to, like, place a body in the Whitechapel area? It seems impossible that whoever did this would have been unaware of those killings in Whitechapel, because they were everywhere at the time.
30:35 Speaker 04 Yes, completely. I'm just hearing the voice of some psychologist in my head.
30:38 Kate Lister? Getting carried away.
30:39 Speaker 04 Hang on, hang on, it's all very speculative. But it it just seems obvious, doesn't it? On the face of it, that there's some kind of relationship being presumably forged in the mind of the torso killer when when he does place his body so clearly on the patch of Jack the Ripper. And I think when you mentioned the press attention, that was possibly a key part of this. Because something that criminals like is to read about themselves in the paper sometimes. And I already said that it seems to him important to be able to imagine the discovery of the body parts and the shock and the concern and the dismay that that must have caused for the people who were doing it.
31:23 Speaker 04 And then to be able to read about that in the paper would perhaps even have magnified that sensation. So perhaps he watched the coverage of the Ripper murders and thought, I want a bit of that too. And there was more newspaper coverage of that fourth torso than there had been of the other three.
31:42 Kate Lister? And he placed one in the garden of Mary Shelley's son Percy Shelley, right?
31:49 Speaker 04 Yes, this is this is a really wild twist in in the case. And I don't know if anyone's going to be convinced by this, but it's interesting to speculate. In the case of poor Elizabeth Jackson, one of the body parts, I think it was her thigh, was placed in the garden of a house on the north bank of the Thames in Chelsea. And the house was known as the Shelley House. It was the house lived in by the son of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Now, did he just toss it in there accidentally? We we know that sometimes he attaches significance to the placing of the body parts. Was he saying, this is this is a Frankenstein thing to do? Here's a body part for you to create a monster out of. Who knows? Who knows?
32:33 Speaker 04 But it's quite, it's quite spooky to think about, isn't it?
32:38 Kate Lister? Spooky. And again, when you when you've got the map, and I think you do this in the documentary, and like you you show where these body parts are. Are turning up, you get a sense of the effort that went into this because this person is crossing the river with various body parts, then they've got to haul it up the embankment and then they've got to lob it over a garden wall. That it's all, whether or not they knew the association with Frankenstein, this is a very deliberate act that that isn't just like a frenzied killer that they want to get out of there as quickly as possible.
33:08 Speaker 04 I suppose the only explanation can be that the person felt compelled to do this, that it gave them some sort of not pleasure, but some kind of satisfaction is this quite useful word, I think, to to describe it, that the Samoan psychologist kept kept using when we were talking about it. And that is, it's just very, very different to the way that Jack the Ripper seemed to be sort of out of control in the moment of the attack. This is all about the pre-planning. I'm an uptight, well-organized pre-planner myself. I would definitely verge in this direction if I were to become a criminal.
33:42 Kate Lister? Well, you heard it here first, folks.
33:49 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Lucy after this short break.
34:02 Speaker 05 What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?
34:14 Speaker 05 I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.
35:00 Kate Lister? Something else that we looked at was the newspaper reporting and it's really difficult to look at it. And I think even today, newspaper reporting around women's murder, and especially violence against sex workers, which Elizabeth Jackson, there was some discussion that that was what she was doing to make ends meet at the time, is it's very sensational, it's very lurid. What did you think about the newspaper reports of the time into these killings?
35:26 Speaker 04 That's a whole kind of separate investigation is needed into the nature and the veracity of the reporting. I mean, you cannot, and a lot of people have made this mistake, take what you reason in any newspapers to be the absolute truth. Because there's always layers, there's always layers of meaning and assumption and sort of cultural background there. In the case of these particular murders, the newspaper that really stands out is the Illustrated Police News. And it always stands out because of their crazy pictures. They were like sort of National Enquirer of the 1880s. They would illustrate their front page with drawings that were not made on the spot. You absolutely can't believe them in terms of detail. But what they do do,
36:11 Speaker 04 these pictures, is give you an insight into the imaginations of Victorian readers. Readers wanted this stuff. They really wanted to think that these murders had a level of titillation to them, which is absolutely abhorrent to us. When the first torso was discovered, it was actually at a place called Rainham in Essex, which is downriver from central London. And the picture that in the paper that shows the discovery, shows her with the whole top part of her body exposed. And you can see her nipples. Are we allowed to say nipples on this podcast?
36:48 Kate Lister? You are, please, please say nipples.
36:50 Speaker 04 Thank you. And nipples were not found. That was not the part of the torso that was found in that particular case. But they just wanted some nipples.
36:58 Kate Lister? It's very lurid, it's very sensational, and it's...
37:02 Kate Lister? It's very effacing to the actual victims, about whom we know next to nothing, because Elizabeth Jackson is the only one we've ever been able to name, isn't she? We've no idea who the others were.
37:11 Speaker 04 You say that, but I've come to think of there being seven victims in this case. The four who were killed, but also Rosina, his wife.
37:19 Kate Lister? Yes, yes.
37:20 Speaker 04 And Jessie, his first rape victim that we know about, and then Sarah, the second. And this is the kind of fabulous thing about crime for historians. Crime for historians really pays because it's when a crime happens that sometimes things get recorded from the lives of people that otherwise we wouldn't know anything about.
37:42 Kate Lister? Yeah.
37:42 Speaker 04 So we can look through this case into the lives of Rosina and also Jessie, who worked as a folder in the book trade. So it was her job to fold the pages of the books before they were sewn together. And then Sarah Warburton, the one who put him away, her job was to sew the furry bits onto Victorian capes and other posh garments.
38:04 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah.
38:05 Speaker 04 So these women were working away, not earning a lot of money. In the case of Jessie and Sarah, both vulnerable from having parted from their husbands. And in the case of Jessie, the rape victim who wasn't believed, I really think of her as his victim because at the age of just 43, she was by then described as an unfortunate. This word that's a kind of a Victorian euphemism for somebody who perhaps is selling sex. And she died at 43 by falling underneath an omnibus, probably drunk, she'd had a drinking problem. So I certainly feel in my heart that he killed her too.
38:47 Kate Lister? I think so. I think so. And what happened to James Crick? Do we have anything to round off his story? Hopefully he just died horribly in jail.
38:54 Speaker 04 He was put away, but then he was dispo.
38:59 Speaker 04 Calls everybody to kind of nod in grim familiarity. He was released to good behaviour.
39:05 Kate Lister? Of course he was.
39:05 Speaker 04 He was. And then he went back to his job on the river.
39:08 Kate Lister? Yep. And that, any more crimes reported after that that we know of?
39:13 Speaker 04 Well, you have opened up the whole business of the fifth torso that was found on the river. This is in a whole new century. This is in nineteen O two, so twelve years after the discovery of the last of the other ones. But some people think that this was the same murderer back in business. There were some quite significant differences. In this case, again, the victim was unknown. Again, the body had been dismembered, but in this case, it had been found all in one place. So all the body parts were found together, possibly because the killer had been disturbed before he'd had the chance to distribute them as he'd planned to do.
39:55 Speaker 04 But there was also a major, major difference, which is that, and this is very gruesome, that the body parts had been boiled. So there wasn't any flesh on them in this particular case, which, again, speaking to people who see much more export about this than I do, it'd be very odd for a killer to change their method as dramatically as that. But the body parts were found near the river and James Crick was at liberty at the time.
40:21 Kate Lister? He was. Lucy, you have been marvelous to talk to. I knew that you would be. Give us the title of the documentary again, so people can go and, and watch it and give us their own thoughts on this fascinating series of murders.
40:36 Speaker 04 Oh, you're full of delicious charm and flattery, Case. It all goes the other way as well. This show that Case and I had a lot of fun and also learnt a lot from working on is called Victorian Murder Club with me, Lucy Worsley, and it's on BBC Two at the moment. And if you really want to binge, you can watch the whole thing on iPlayer. Go and do it now.
40:58 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. Will you, I don't want more murders to happen, but will you come back again and tell us about other, other ghastly crimes?
41:07 Speaker 04 Only too happy.
41:08 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. You've been fabulous.
41:13 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Lucy for joining me. And if you like what you heard, get therapy, that's what I would say to that. But if you like the podcast in general, then don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. You can watch Lucy Worsley's Victorian Murder Club on Mondays at nine PM on BBC Two, with all the episodes now available on the BBC iPlayer. Coming up, we are continuing our series on just how filthy people were in the past. If you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
42:04 Speaker 01 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
42:20 Speaker 02 It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.
42:24 Speaker 03 If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
42:28 Speaker 01 In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.
Previous How Filthy Were the Egyptians? Next How Filthy Were Medieval People? Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated