The Jigsaw Murders Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 28 - The Jigsaw Murders
MICHAEL PARK: It is 14th September 1935.
Doctor Buck Ruxton, a GP in Lancaster in a country called England… I don’t know. Never heard of it myself... turned up on the doorstep of patients and family friends the Hampshires.
The Doctor asked them to help him prepare his home and practice for decorators who were set to be starting the very next day.
When the group arrived at the house they found it in shambles. Carpeting had been pulled up from the stairs and straw was strewn around. There was a stained suit lying on top of sections of rolled up carpet.
And in the garden someone had been burning towels.
This is Scotland, a podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
Two weeks have passed. Susan Johnson has stopped her car overlooking the incredible Devil’s Beef Tub just outside Moffat.
The beef tub is a hollow formed by the meeting of four hills and dives foot feet into the earth at the source of the River Annan. It’s long been a spot full of romance and intrigue.
The Border Reivers used to use it to hide stolen cattle. Their enemies called them devils… hence the name. In the 1600s a covenanter fleeing from mounted dragoons tried to escape by scaling the impossibly steep sides of the hill.
He was shot on the spot.
And on this day, in September 1935 Susan Johnson took a walk in the mid-morning cold from that small spot in the landscape which contains so much history, and pokes her head over the parapet of a bridge, looking down into the trickling water.
Something wasn’t right.
A package, wrapped in fabric - something that looked to be children’s clothing, and tied up with string had become stuck on a boulder as it tumbled through the water under the bridge.
The water was tearing at the package, lapping into it and tugging at its coverings. With every pass of the stream more and more of the content emerged. It was a human arm.
In little more than a few hours the local constabulary fished out more than 30 of these packages, all containing expertly dismembered pieces of the human anatomy.
To be more precise, the expertly dismembered pieces of two humans. All wrapped in bedsheets, pillowcases, kids clothing and some newspapers, the latest dated September 15th 1935.
REPORT: "Of the four bundles recovered during the initial search, the first was wrapped in a blouse and contained two upper arms and four pieces of flesh; the second bundle comprised two thigh bones, two legs from which most flesh had been stripped, and nine pieces of flesh, all wrapped in a pillow-case; the third was a piece of cotton sheeting containing seventeen portions of flesh; the fourth parcel, also wrapped in cotton sheeting, consisted of a human trunk, two legs with the feet tied with the hem of a cotton sheet and some wisps of straw and cotton wool. In addition, other packages opened to reveal two heads, one of which was wrapped in a child's rompers; a quantity of cotton wool and sections from the Daily Herald of 6 August 1935; two forearms with hands attached but minus the top joints of the fingers and thumbs; and several pieces of skin and flesh. One part was wrapped in the Sunday Graphic dated 15 September."
MICHAEL PARK: With every effort taken to mutilate and destroy and evidence of the victim’s identities, Professor John Glaister Junior took the bodies to the University of Edinburgh.
There they were autopsied and thankfully for the investigators, another package had been found just before transport which contained a hand where the fingerprints hadn’t been completely destroyed.
In addition to fingerprinting the scientists were able to use an early form of forensic entomology to establish an approximate date of death based on the age of maggots living in the corpses of the unfortunate women.
By far the most brutal discovery was that the women had been exsanguinated - drained of their blood - and had their viscera removed during what they estimated to have been an eight hour dismemberment.
It is the middle of the night on September 15th and Doctor Buck Ruxton has just murdered his wife in a fit of jealous rage. She had been having an affair and the self-pitying, impotent rage of the doctor had finally overcome him.
He strangled her, beat her and stabbed her. No-one is quite sure of the order or even how much of it she was alive for but the struggle woke their live-in maid Mary Jane Rogerson and the doctor was in no mood to leave witnesses.
He murdered her too.
He used every bit of knowledge and cunning he had in him to mutilate the bodies in an effort to trick investigators but his mistakes were much simpler and eventually led to him being caught.
He wrapped the body parts in newspapers that had put out special souvenir editions only available in the Lancashire area, then he threw the packages into a stream thinking it was a river because of heavy rain.
By the time the rain died off there was nowhere for the parts to wash away, so they became entangled on boulders and tree stumps and were simply too heavy to wash away.
Had he dumped them in the River Annan just yards away, there was a chance they’d never have been found as they washed out into the Solway Firth.
Ruxton, who had reported to police that had his wife had deserted him again, had told the parents of his maid that his wife had smuggled her off to have an illegal abortion.
They initially went along with it but later filed a missing person’s report.
All this led them to Ruxton’s door. He refused to entertain the notion and produced a meticulous account of his movements that he presented in the form of a little book.
Unfortunately for him he wasn’t able to account for the fact that someone driving his car had knocked over a cyclist on the road between Dumfries and Lancaster.
He certainly wasn’t able to explain away the incredible amount of blood that investigators found traces of in his house.
And then, the kicker. Using x-rays forensic anthropologists took images of the skulls of one of the women and used a studio portrait of Isabella Ruxton to reconstruct the shape and structures of the face, proving pretty much beyond doubt that the bodies thrown into the ravine on a murky morning in September 1935 were that of Isabella and Mary Jane.
Buck Ruxton was bang to rights. He was found guilty and hanged, one of the first murderers to be caught using entomology, forensic anthropology and fingerprinting techniques.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
Additional voices for this episode were by Chris Moriarty.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by the human substitution cipher, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work by heading over to mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does amazing illustrations for our episodes. You can check out more of her work by going to tidlin - T I D L I N .com
Scotland is supported by Chris Lingwood and listeners like you on Patreon. Get involved and chuck us a couple of bucks at: patreon.com/scotlandhistorypodcast
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.