Original subtitles

SOUND OF OARS

The London Thames, winding silently through the capital.

Though calm today, in Victorian times, it was buzzing with trade,

building and activity,

but it also had a sinister side.

Built in the 1880s as part of Tower Bridge,

this is known...

..as Dead Man's Hole.

Traditionally, this is where dead bodies

would be fished out of the river...

..brought up these steps and then taken through

to the mortuary over there for identification.

Sometimes they were accidental drownings,

sometimes suicides,

but just occasionally, they were also victims of murder.

And there's one story about bodies in the Thames

that ever since I first heard it,

has always haunted me...

..and captured my imagination.

This is the extraordinary,

forgotten story of a Victorian serial killer.

He may have killed as many as five women

in 19th century London.

Cold and calculating,

he taunted the police and shocked the newspapers.

But he wasn't Jack the Ripper.

This is a murderer you've probably never heard of.

The killer's hallmark was to dismember

the bodies of his victims

and to scatter the body parts up and down the river.

Given the name the Thames Torso Murderer,

he was never caught.

But ever since I heard about this case,

I just can't shake these questions.

Who were the women, and who killed them?

A body has been found in the streets of Whitechapel.

Now, I'm hunting that murderer down, and I'm not doing it alone.

I'm consulting professionals

from the fields of pathology and psychology,

and independent researchers

who have their own theories on the case.

And I've hand-picked a team of writers

and historians to help me navigate Victorian London.

They've scoured the surviving police case files

and original records about the victims and their deaths.

We're checking leads that were followed

and discovering ones that were missed.

Together, we'll build a picture of the women who were killed

and will finally unmask

one of the 19th century's most brutal serial killers.

1887, London,

the most populated city in the world and growing fast.

People are flocking here

in the hope of well-paid work in new urban industries.

But as the city swells, living standards fall,

homelessness rises, poverty grows, and crime is rife.

For many, it's a risky place to be and for some, truly dangerous.

Whereabouts are we heading?

Well, this is a Victorian map,

but I think that you'll know Rainham Ferry.

Yes, absolutely.

And I want to go to Hempelmann's Fish Manure Works.

OK. About 40 minutes from here.

But for the first case, I need to leave the city and head east.

I've come 15 miles out of central London,

downriver to what, in 1887, would have been

the peaceful farming village of Rainham.

Just here on the bank, was Hempelmann's Blood Fish Manure plant

producing fertiliser for the market gardens around here.

And this is where the case really begins.

Here's a newspaper account of the horrible discovery at Rainham.

A lighterman called Edward Hughes was at work.

And it says here that at 11.30 in the morning,

Edward was by the jetty.

The tide was flowing out to sea, and he saw what appeared to be

a bag which the tide was carrying along.

It was about 33 feet from his barge.

Now, Edward goes to retrieve this parcel,

and he manages to fish it out and get it onto the land.

He discovers that it contains the lower torso of a woman's body.

Here's a reconstruction of the scene in a newspaper.

Because this is the Illustrated Police News,

which is a really trashy paper, they sensationalised the image.

But just think, for poor Edward Hughes,

what a distressing thing to find.

But the gruesome discoveries at Rainham were only just the start.

On the 5th of June, here at Temple Pier,

right in the heart of the city, 16 miles upstream from Rainham,

a woman's thigh wrapped in fabric is found floating in the water.

A few days later, up here at Battersea Park,

on the foreshore was found another parcel

wrapped up in canvas this time, and tied with string,

and inside it was the upper part of a woman's torso.

Three weeks later, in the north of the city,

some boys are fishing in Regent's Canal,

right here by St Pancras Lock.

They noticed something unusual.

It's a right arm.

Later the same day, further up the canal by Regent's Park,

someone finds two severed legs.

The police begin to drag the canal,

and the next day a left arm is pulled out of the water.

Finally, on the 16th of July,

so that's more than two months after the torso is found at Rainham,

a labourer spots a left thigh floating in the water

between two barges here at Camden Lock.

A total of eight body parts

have now been found all over London, in the Thames, in the canal.

And when they're pieced together,

they make the almost complete corpse of a young woman.

The only parts missing are the shoulders and the head.

As public horror mounts, the police begin to investigate,

but with no head to identify her, no obvious cause of death,

and not even a crime scene to go on, they quickly draw a blank.

Now, can I do any better?

In the early 1900s,

Sherlock Holmes creator, Arthur Conan Doyle

met up with other amateur sleuths

to investigate infamous and unsolved cases,

especially murders.

They called themselves the Crimes Club.

So, to help me uncover the Thames Torso Murderer,

I've brought together my own crack team.

Rose Wallis, a social historian with an expertise

in 19th century crime and criminal justice.

Nadifa Mohamed, a novelist with a passion for history

and bringing the past to life.

And Kate Lister,

a historian of sexual behaviour and women's rights.

They've been combing through original documents

to see if immersing ourselves in the fabric

of 19th century London can help us find out more

about the victims and ultimately solve this crime.

I want to know who did this

and how they did it - we don't know the cause of death -

and why they did it.

That intrigues me.

Reading the details of how the body parts were found across London

and into Essex is incredibly disturbing.

I mean, it's extraordinary how kind of disparate,

how spread apart everything is,

that there are these pieces of a person.

Even 100 years later, it's still...it's really shocking.

Turning their body into a jigsaw puzzle.

Our first question is, who was she?

Are there any leads in the papers?

There was one promising lead.

A Miss Cross.

She is about 28 years old and she has gone missing in January.

Nobody has seen her.

She is described in the reports as being of weak intellect,

having a speech impediment.

She is described as being very trusting,

that she did have a habit of going missing from time to time.

Do you think she's what we might describe

as somebody with learning difficulties?

That probably is how we would describe her today.

We certainly wouldn't say of weak intellect.

So we've got a woman, late 20s,

who's been missing for several months.

- Yes. - Do we know anything more about this woman?

We do.

We can track her through the family address

that's reported in the newspapers.

So that means we can go into

the wonderful census records and we can find them.

In 1871, the Cross family are living in Guildford in Surrey.

Big family, one of which is Emmeline.

Oh. So the missing woman is called Emmeline?

- Yeah. - Wow.

Which also helps us because we can work out

that this family were originally from Norfolk.

Oh...

The experience of the Cross family is, I think,

quite representative of a lot of people

moving from agricultural areas that were hit

by what we call the great agricultural depression

in the 1870s, having to then move elsewhere, to urban areas,

particularly from Norfolk to the south-east,

to try and find new opportunities in this kind of ten-year period.

So, we've got a woman in her late 20s who's gone missing.

Her family are concerned for her.

She's somebody who perhaps is a bit at risk in an urban environment.

Somebody who grew up in the country, is very trusting.

This is promising.

While the club pursues this lead on a possible victim,

I'm on the trail of the murderer.

The one thing that seems a clue to me is the fact

that all the body parts were placed into London's waterways.

So, I want to talk to someone with first-hand experience

of the river as a crime scene,

a former member of the Metropolitan Police Marine Unit.

So, Rob, I want to show you my map

with all of the locations marked of where the body parts were found.

Despite where they ended up, do you think they could have

been placed at the same time in central London

and then flowed west downstream?

Normally, in my experience, any object in a river

will normally turn up downriver from where it went in.

But for me, what stretches the imagination

is to drop three body parts into the water in central London

and then for one to turn up in Rainham, which is a long way away.

Much more likely that we've got an individual

putting the parts in at separate spots along the bank of the river, you'd think?

- That would be my thoughts. - Mmm.

What about these ones up here that are in the canal?

Because I think that does connect to the river, doesn't it?

- The Regent's Canal? - It does.

Could they have been sort of washed up somehow?

Um...well, no. The canal system is completely separate.

To get onto the canal system, you have to go through a river lock,

and then you've got to navigate several locks on the inside.

There's very little current on the canals.

There's nothing to move...

- So these were definitely put in at that spot. - That would be my guess.

Mmm. Interesting.

There's clearly a sort of release strategy here,

and if I've understood you correctly, Rob,

if the murderer has an HQ then, it's likely to be upstream

from Rainham because stuff generally goes down.

Really, the heart of London is our hot spot.

Yeah, I think so, I think so.

That would fit with just about everything we have.

Um...and it fits quite nicely.

We've now got a theory

that the killer's working out of central London.

But shockingly, by the following year,

he's not the only murderer in the capital on the loose.

The body has been found in the streets of Whitechapel...

Police are asking for any witnesses to...

In August 1888,

Jack the Ripper kills for the first time,

cutting the throat of Mary Ann Nichols in the city's East End,

followed days later by Annie Chapman.

But as terror spreads through the streets of London,

the Torso Killer makes his next move.

Oh, yes. These steps going down to the water are,

I'm pretty sure, the steps just here on my map.

On the 11th of September, 1888,

a porter called Frederick Moore

spots something in the mud of the foreshore.

He goes to get it.

It's a woman's arm.

It's been tied around the upper part with a piece of string.

For almost a month,

the origin of the severed arm remains a mystery.

But then, the police get word that a woman's torso

has been found with the arms missing.

There's a crucial difference, though.

The torso isn't in the river,

but it is very close, on the Embankment.

But it's found wrapped up in a black skirt

and placed in the vaults of this building,

which in 1888 is still under construction.

It's a building site. But there's something else.

This isn't just going to be any old office block.

It's the brand-new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police.

We have another body, and this time

part of it's been found in the river, but part of it on land

and in the basement of the new police headquarters.

The plot is thickening. Things are developing.

I think the killer is coming out of the shadows a little bit.

- Gaining in confidence. - Mmm.

This is really, really weird.

Terrifying as well.

This is a second body.

Before we get into that,

did you make any headway with the first victim from Rainham?

Could she be the missing Miss Cross?

Well, obviously her DNA is of no use to us here,

and it's very difficult to make an identification of her.

But her family said she had two distinctive birthmarks.

She had one on her breast,

which wasn't found, and she had one on her wrist.

The wrist was found.

- The wrist was found. - Yes? - No birthmark. - Oh.

It's not her.

- Huh. Frustrating. - Mmm.

I'm glad she's not in eight pieces though, as far as we know.

What about this latest body, the Whitehall torso?

I know you've been looking into who the victim might have been.

- Have you found any leads on her? - Yes, I have.

A family in Chelsea

who were missing their 17-year-old daughter, Lilly Vass.

Lilly Vass.

She was a servant working in Wandsworth Common.

A sensible girl, apparently,

who'd been in service most of her teenage years,

and the only associate that her mother is aware of

is this girl in Notting Hill who is a pen pal of Lilly's.

She reports her missing

after this body is found in Whitehall,

and the parents are invited to come and look at the body parts.

Oh.

And poor Mrs Vass can't bring herself to go into the room

where the body parts are, so all she can do is look at the skirt

that some of the remains were found in.

It's a black satin skirt which she doesn't have any memory

of Lilly having, and so that reassures her that this isn't Lilly.

But she doesn't return home either.

So what happened to Lilly, then?

Thankfully, two years later, there is a sign of her in the records.

- There is? - Yeah.

So Lilly is alive.

Married to a man called Joseph Hale.

And he's a wheelwright from Notting Hill.

And I don't know if you remember,

but in Notting Hill was Lilly's pen pal, the servant girl.

And I'm now wondering if it wasn't a servant girl, but it was Joseph.

Who she would end up married to.

And maybe - this is another kind of conjecture -

maybe that was the reason she went missing.

Because her mother didn't approve of this relationship?

- Possibly. - That would make sense.

- Well, good for Lilly. - Good for Lilly.

But we still don't know who this body belongs to.

And it belongs to somebody, it's someone's daughter.

Exactly. It's just so easy to disappear in London at this point.

And not to leave very much of a trail at all.

That blows my mind that they couldn't identify...

That nobody came forward

to say it could be this person...

It's really frustrating, isn't it?

The killer is in charge.

The murderer may have obscured his victims' identities,

but I'm hoping there were clues to their lives he couldn't erase.

So, I've asked a modern forensic pathologist

to review the postmortem reports from the coroner's inquests

for the Rainham and Whitehall victims, and see what she can add.

So, Marie, what does the Victorian doctors

who looked at these bodies in the first instance work out?

They made a thorough examination

and they found no evidence of any significant trauma,

no evidence of stab wounds, no breaks.

So we can't account for the death from the parts that we have.

But the commonality is that the heads are missing.

And that would suggest to me

that that's where the cause of death lies.

This killer has not made things easy.

What did the doctors work out about the identity of the victims?

With the Rainham body, we had the pelvis with the pelvic organs.

The uterus was still present, so we were dealing with a female.

We then tried to age the person.

Now, they could look at the bones themselves

and look where bones fuse,

and from that then they could infer how old somebody is.

All the bones were fused,

which meant they thought that the person was over 25.

What was the profile they came up with for the body in Whitehall?

They thought it was probably somebody between about 25 to 30,

and they described her as being well-nourished.

Mmm. Somebody with a good diet?

So somebody who's not living on the streets,

living in the workhouse, something like that?

That's the assumption you could make.

So, in the case of the Rainham body parts,

do they tell you anything about her social class?

They did notice indentations on the lower legs...

- Yes. - ..which they said were garter marks.

Mm-hm.

And that appears to be how the lower classes

wore their stockings, with the garters low on the legs.

Higher class, they wore their garters higher up the legs.

That seems to be their assessment.

So we're dealing with somebody of a lower class.

Were they male, these doctors?

Of course they were male.

Do you think they really knew about women's underwear?

Well, now, that's a completely different story.

But I think they did a fantastic job.

- Really? Hmm. - Definitely. - Yeah.

They got all of the information they possibly could out of what they had.

- Yes, yeah. - And there is nothing else that I could tell them

that they didn't find. Marvellous.

We've talked about what we can learn about the victims -

what can we learn about the killer from this information?

There are some similarities in how the bodies have been dismembered.

Now, dismemberment just means taking the body apart,

dividing it into pieces.

But it's been very cleverly done.

If we look at the Rainham body,

the arms have been removed -

and they've been removed through the joint.

So, it wasn't anybody taking tentative cuts, or trying to

work out and jagged, you know - sort of working their way through.

It was somebody with some confidence.

Somebody who knew what they were doing?

Somebody who knew their way around a body who could remove a limb,

and do it quite efficiently.

It comes into the realms then of,

who would have that kind of knowledge?

Somebody with medical knowledge would. A surgeon would.

Butchers.

- From cutting up animals? - Animals!

This isn't just somebody randomly doing this.

- They've got some key bits of knowledge. - Mm.

More devilry.

I've learnt that the police surgeons really combed the bodies of

the victims for clues that might be written there,

to tell us who they were.

It's interesting that they are interested in it,

- at least, right? - Yeah.

- And they are pulling every detail they possibly can. - Yeah.

So, at Rainham, they look at the sacking,

they look at the twine.

- The knots. - Exactly, the knots.

What can be deduced from the knots?

Well, I think the thing with the knots is,

there are different types of knots, and that if it's -

and again, by the water, is it a knot that indicates...

- A sailor. - ..a sailor's knot? Or is it kind of a slip knot?

Unfortunately, it's just a kind of fairly ordinary knot.

It does lead me to think, are there other physical clues

that we should look into?

There was this skirt that was wrapped around the torso.

What do you think?

Absolutely, that's brought up at the inquest.

They've traced it back to a Bradford manufacturer.

- Really? - Yeah. - This is proper police work.

THEY CHUCKLE

It really is.

Erm, and it was acknowledged that it was made of "common material",

that "there was one flounce" -

the decorative frill round the bottom - "six inches wide",

and that "the material could probably be bought

"at six and a half pence per yard".

What kind of level of fashion is that, do we think?

Expensive? Cheap?

This is where it gets, I think, a bit ambiguous,

because it's black fabric,

but then, it is patterned, as well, so it's a bit fancier.

Erm, satin is perhaps a higher end-fabric.

Most poorer people were wearing second-hand clothes,

- third-hand clothes even, weren't they? - Yeah. - Yeah.

It's hard to pin down, but they are paying attention to it.

LUCY SIGHS

Quite impressed by the levels of investigation the police are doing.

Mm. But it's a really interesting period that we're looking at,

in terms of policing, particularly perhaps in London.

I mean, London's always been the kind of focus of concerns

about crime and disorder -

that's why we see the foundation of the Metropolitan Police,

our first professional police force, in the city in 1829.

But they were very much a kind of preventative force.

But in 1842, they set up the first detective branch,

and this was plainclothes police officers.

They'd go undercover, they can investigate clues,

they talked to witnesses.

But then, in 1878,

they established the Criminal Investigation Department -

- CID... - Wow! - ..as we know it.

And this is a great image of H Division,

which is the Whitechapel CID.

- There are some amazing moustaches in that photo. - Yeah.

Was it part of the job description to have a moustache?

THEY CHUCKLE

By the time we get to 1883,

there's, like, 800 CID officers.

And these have local divisions, like the Whitechapel one,

spread out all over the place.

What does it show? A rise in crime?

A rise in concerns about crime? Or both?

I think probably both.

The 1880s are a really tense and fraught time,

particularly in London.

And there are those concerns about increasing crime,

about public disorder.

So, there's a much kind of bigger presence of the detective branch.

These local detective offices were run from a riverside command centre,

just next to Big Ben, in the very heart of London -

which brings me back to our second torso.

There's something about the Whitehall murder

that's still really bothering me.

It's the fact that the body was left in the headquarters of the police.

And it was extremely hard to access,

as an article in The Times made clear.

You go down "some underground steps"...

..and then, a ramp down to the lower level,

which is "a vast place of arches",

which is very dark.

And then, you can take "a dangerous way to another recess",

that's totally dark, and then, there's a piece of board.

And it was under the board,

"within this space, that the parcel containing the body was found".

And it goes on here, "The devious ways which have to be taken to

"reach this secret spot,

"and the fact that this is the most secret spot on the site"

have led people to think that it must have been a workman

who put the body there,

cos nobody else would have known the way.

The police investigated,

but they couldn't link any of the workmen to the crime.

The newspapers speculated that maybe

"entrance was obtained from the Thames Embankment",

because there was this side entrance there

where the supplies came in by boat.

Now, that is a connection to the other body parts

which were all found in the Thames.

This is leading me to wonder,

why on earth would you put the body in a place where

only a closed circle of suspects had access,

the people who knew this very complicated labyrinth

of a building site?

And that's even before we get on to the connection with the police.

Why on earth would you take that risk?

To try and understand the killer's thinking,

I'm meeting someone who regularly works with the police

to help them understand criminal behaviour.

Investigative Psychologist, Professor Sam Lundrigan.

Sam, so, this torso has been discovered in the basement

- of the new police headquarters. - Mm-hm.

Why would a killer put a body in such a risky, weird place?

It's really striking, isn't it? It immediately stands out.

And I think, for this offender, the locations where he is

disposing of his victims' bodies, or body parts, is integral

to understanding why he's offending

and what he's trying to achieve.

What about the disposal of the body parts along the river

- and the canal, then, in the earlier case? - Yeah.

Do you think that that had any meaning, beyond just

getting rid of the body?

What we know, from my research,

is that where offenders decide to dispose of bodies will have

meaning to them, in terms of the world they operate in.

He has some connection, I would imagine,

with the Regent's Canal area, from that initial...

And obviously, the Thames.

He's got a familiarity with those areas of London,

and the waterways in particular.

I think it's one of the most important stages in this

offender's murderous activity, is that final resting place.

Because he knows they will be eventually found.

And so, I think, for him, it's really important that

the placement and the posing of the body parts

is bringing some sort of reward.

The posing of the body parts,

- do you mean like, kind of, almost displaying them? - I do.

- With the gaze of the finder in mind? - Absolutely.

I think he's thinking about that ultimate public display...

- That is dark! - ..and the discovery. It is.

I think we're dealing with a very, very dark individual.

Can you read into the Whitehall case something about the killer's

thoughts towards the police?

Possibly taunting them by putting the body parts

in the police basement?

It absolutely could be.

Of course, we don't know.

Erm, but psychologically, it makes sense to me.

You're making me think about this picture in

the Illustrated Police News,

depicting the finding of the body in a new way then.

- Hmm. - Do you think that the person who did the crime would want

to know that this picture existed?

I do. I do.

I know many examples where serial killers have followed

the media coverage like this,

because that brings a reward.

They're looking for some validation or notoriety,

if you like, through their acts.

- That is so creepy. - Mm.

Do you see there's a kind of development from the first killing

to the second?

- The first, the body parts are all over the place. - Yeah.

The second, the body part is placed in the police headquarters.

While he's remaining actually quite remarkably consistent,

because the core behaviours that make up his signature -

the dismemberment, the lack of frenzy, the lack of mutilation -

that stays the same.

But what he's starting to do is branch out

and use different environments.

So, you've gone so far as to say this person likes to be in control,

- is probably familiar with the waterways of London. - Yeah.

What do you take away from these two cases?

I think that we're dealing with an incredibly dangerous individual.

He's becoming more audacious.

He's almost saying, "Yeah, game on.

"Catch me if you can."

Given the pathology shown here,

the calculation, the experience, how methodical he is,

I would already be calling this individual a serial killer.

This person will kill again.

I think we are at the early stages

of an unfolding criminal career.

We've got a killer who's taunting the police, it seems,

playing a game of cat-and-mouse.

On the one hand, he's ever so cautious and methodical.

But on the other hand, he's taking these crazy risks.

It seems that, the more I learn about this killer,

the more complicated he becomes.

What I've learned from Sam is just so dark,

you won't believe it.

She thinks that the placing of the torso in the vaults

was something that the killer did very deliberately,

and that he maybe imagined the feelings of the people

who came across it.

That feels like a sort of step up in levels of darkness

- and weirdness, doesn't it? - It really does.

If he was, to some extent, taunting or teasing the police,

then, how did they respond?

So, we've got to remember when this is happening,

it's October 1888.

Four women have already been brutally murdered in Whitechapel,

and that's been attributed to Jack the Ripper.

And now, another Thames Torso mystery,

and the body, you know, right under their noses.

And they're - I mean, they're being taunted in the press.

- Look at the character there, laughing. - Yeah.

And it gets worse for the police, because they found the torso

in this vault under what will be Scotland Yard,

but they think there's nothing else down there,

until a journalist, Mr Waring, comes with his little dog, Smoker,

and they find more body parts...

..under the nose of the police.

- They missed it. - They missed it.

A journalist?

- Smoker the dog? - Yes.

What is he, a kind of canine detective?

- Apparently, yes. That's exactly what the press call him. - Ha!

- "Smoker the Dog Detective!" - There we are, in a bowler hat.

Oh, look at him in his actual outfit!

Is this real, then? What does he do?

So, I don't know why Mr Waring thought it was acceptable to

bring his dog to the place where the body had been found,

but he does.

And he gives him a scent and sets him loose in the vault,

- and they find a leg. - No! - A woman's leg.

The police had missed it?

They actually trialled sort of sniffer dogs,

potentially with the idea of using them in Whitechapel.

But there's a sort of moral outrage of,

- "how could you possibly set bloodhounds..." - Loose.

"..on Englishmen," you know?

"It's a breach of our civil liberty."

When they had been used quite freely in the Caribbean

to hunt people who escaped from plantations.

Yeah, it's that distinction between, you know,

these things may be considered appropriate in colonial context,

- but... - But not in England! - Not in London.

Not in London, the home of liberty!

Even when the police are being ridiculed and criticised

very heavily for not catching Jack the Ripper, or indeed,

- the Thames Torso killer... - No.

..they aren't trying every method at their disposal

- because of these really entrenched ideas. - Mm.

The Victorian police are making no progress.

So far, not a single arrest has been made

for either the Rainham or the Whitehall killings.

With no clue about where the murders had taken place,

who the victims had been,

with no known cause of death,

and possibly with the killer taunting them, as well,

the police are stuck.

They just need more information.

And seven-and-a-half months later, they get it.

On the 4th of June, between 8 and 9 in the morning,

some boys are bathing here at Albert Bridge.

It's not something that's allowed today.

And they spot a parcel being nudged along the foreshore

by the tide.

A 15-year-old called Isaac Brett

goes to get this parcel out of the water.

And he takes it up the steps to the road,

where it's unwrapped to reveal...

..a woman's leg.

It's been cut off between the hip and the knee.

Later that day, four miles downriver,

a workman called John Reagan is hanging around just here

at St George's Steps, Horsleydown.

Tower Bridge is under construction,

and he's hoping to pick up a day's work as a labourer.

And he sees something floating in the water.

When he gets it out,

he realises it's the lower half of a woman's body.

Soon, more remains of the victim are found in the river.

And, on land, too, here in Battersea Park,

and even across the water in Chelsea.

A total of ten body parts are discovered.

Some of them are wrapped in pieces of a woman's

black-and-grey checked coat.

It's an Ulster coat, one of those ones with a little cape attached.

And, just like in the Rainham and Whitehall cases,

no head is ever recovered.

And there's something even more horrifying.

It turns out that the victim had been

around seven months pregnant.

Looking at the map of all the murders,

especially this latest one,

you can see that many of the body parts were found in West London,

in Battersea, Chelsea, and Pimlico,

and often around the river.

This stretch of the river

had recently undergone enormous change.

In the preceding decades,

ambitious Victorian engineers had reclaimed the marshy land

along the river banks, creating new embankments,

with public gardens and fancy promenades.

But by the 1880s, these new public spaces

also attracted London's destitute and vulnerable.

I'm increasingly convinced these locations hold a clue

about these crimes.

And I'm meeting Murder Club member Kate Lister

to test out a theory on her.

- Here's our torso, Kate, on the land. - Yeah.

And then, the thing that's nagging at me

is this other body part over here,

the part of the leg that was also on the land.

On the other side of the river.

That's different to all the other body parts,

- which are in the water, on the foreshore. - Yeah.

So, here's my theory, Kate,

which is that the killer had a boat.

They could have come up the river through, around this part,

and parked up at the Battersea Park Pier that's marked on the map.

- Yes. - Come ashore, dumps the torso,

zips across the water,

- perhaps to that little staircase over there? - Yeah.

And drops the thigh that was over on that side.

That makes much more sense than attempting to carry

body parts all around London.

- Although the body parts were found on the land... - Yeah.

..it could be that the important thing here is the river.

And do you know what, Kate?

There's something else about this house here,

- where that body part was found, that's really weird. - OK.

I think we should go and take a look.

Now, this is where I wanted to bring you.

Things have changed quite a lot,

but in 1889, that was a house, that was its garden,

and it was in that garden that the leg was found.

Why come to the other side of the river,

scramble up the Embankment,

and throw a leg over there? Why?

- Here's my theory, Kate. - OK.

It's a bit far-fetched, but bear with me.

It's because of whose garden it was.

This house was built for a man called Percy Shelley,

who was the son of Mary Shelley...

- OK. - ..who was the author of...

- Frankenstein. - ..Frankenstein.

In which a monster is made out of body parts.

What do you think about that?

Do you think he knew that?

Do you think he knew that this was their house?

It was called Shelley House, so the connection was quite obvious.

That would be the only reason, wouldn't it, would be

to come up here and throw a leg, is for the shock factor,

there's no other reason for doing it at all.

We do suspect that the killer puts body parts

in places of significance.

Yeah. Like in the police building that was under construction.

Exactly so.

And do you know what, standing here, as well, looking at the other side -

see how easy it would be to get across by boat?

But just when everything is starting to point towards the river,

in 1889, the Victorian police make a major breakthrough...

..and it's linked to the clothing the victim's body parts

were wrapped in.

Several local women come forward to say they think that

they've recognised the checked coat.

They think it belongs to a friend of theirs,

24-year-old Elizabeth Jackson.

Elizabeth Jackson's sister, Mary, also comes to the police

to tell them that her sister has a little scar

just here on the wrist.

It was an accident with a vase when she'd been 12.

The body is re-examined, and the scar is found -

confirming that this must be Elizabeth Jackson...

..or, as her friends call her, Lizzie.

It's easy to think of her as just a crime victim,

but these little details kind of bring her alive.

And just think about her sister

and her friends wanting to know what's happened to her.

Elizabeth's remains were taken 30 miles south-west of London

to Brookwood Cemetery,

then the largest graveyard in the world.

It was built in the 1850s because

the swelling capital had run out of space to bury its dead.

I've come today to see for myself

where Elizabeth was finally laid to rest.

So, here we have Elizabeth Jackson.

- 2nd of July burial... - Mm-hm. - ..1889.

- Age - 24. - Yes.

It is a pauper burial, indicated by "third class",

which you had no memorial or marker.

But she does have her own individual grave.

And do we know where that is?

- Not exactly, but we do know areas in the cemetery... - Mm.

..where pauper burials were.

So, we found Elizabeth.

But there's also something else.

We think we've found the Whitehall murder victim.

- No! Really? - Yes. Yes.

Ah, here we are.

108525.

There was another murder in Whitehall...

That says...

..so, "The remains from Whitehall".

- The Whitehall murder, the Whitehall mystery. - Yeah.

And it does fit in with the dates of death

and the time of investigation.

That's amazing.

It's lovely to know that somebody's still thinking about these women

- after all these years. - Yeah. I agree.

Yes. They shouldn't be forgotten.

Poor Elizabeth had a pauper's burial.

It's possible that her family weren't even there.

I hope that she'd be glad that somebody's come

looking for her now.

Someone who's on her side, as well.

She deserves to have her story told.

I'm very curious to know more about who she might have been.

So, Elizabeth Jackson,

the only identified known victim of this killer.

Rose and I have been doing some digging and,

because we have a name,

- we can start to put a life back together. - Mm.

Born in Chelsea, 1865.

She is the daughter of Roman Catholic Irish immigrants.

Her mum, Catherine, and her dad, John, who was a stonemason.

If we jump forward to the 1871 Census,

we get a little bit more background on who this family was...

Now on Oakham Street, right?

- Yeah. - OK. - Oakham Street.

So, love this map.

This is part of Charles Booth's Map of Poverty in London.

He mapped all the different areas to understand the nature of

the communities, their affluence - or lack thereof, at this point.

And we can find Oakham Street just here,

and the blue indicates sort of the poorer parts of society.

Whereas then, the red up here is kind of the greater affluence.

It looks like they're in this little island of poverty

in this sea of wealth which, for a girl of her background,

I guess would give the pick of domestic service jobs.

It's like you're reading my mind, Nadifa.

We find Lizzie Jackson, aged 16 - so it's ten years after 1871,

and she is indeed in domestic service.

So, Lizzie Jackson is there.

"General servant."

So, how does she end up as a body in the river?

Well we think that she continues to work in domestic service,

and then, something happens that sees her whole

life circumstances really shift.

And we find her, in 1888,

in the local workhouse.

- Oh! - So... - The workhouse!

..it's the first of three records.

Scarily, the last record we have of her at the workhouse

- is on the 12th of May, 1889. - Mm-hm.

- So, this is just... - Weeks before she's murdered. - Yeah.

There's something really wrong here.

People didn't go to the workhouse

unless it was an absolute desperate state.

Not only was it a horrible experience,

- but there was so much shame and stigma attached to it. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - And she's not going home.

- Why not? - What would cause a Roman Catholic girl from an Irish family

to go to the workhouse, instead of not?

- She's pregnant, out of wedlock, isn't she? - Yes.

- Oh. - That does seem to be what's happened here. - Yeah.

And, thanks to the fact that we know who she is,

we do have a reasonably comprehensive account of

her last few weeks from her friends.

Mrs Margaret Minter, who was the wife of a labourer -

and working in a laundry, she knew Lizzie,

and she talks about how shabbily-dressed she was,

and how dishevelled she looks.

And her mum described how she tried to avoid her in the street.

She avoids her mother?

Yeah, the mother describes her as trying to run away,

- to hide her state. - Oh, that's so sad.

It's really sad, isn't it?

How do we think Lizzie might have been supporting herself?

In the inquest, it comes out people talk about her in terms of that

she was leading a loose life,

that she was well-known to the police,

that she was well-known to the lodging houses.

There's some suggestion that she was selling sex.

But this is such a dangerous position for her,

and we even know that she was sleeping rough

- at this point, as well. - Oh! Where? - Yeah. Where?

She was sleeping on the Chelsea Embankment at night,

which does place her right in our murderer's line of sight.

And across the river from Battersea.

Mrs Minter says that Jackson slept outside.

You can see how vulnerable that would make her.

She's 24. She's pregnant,

possibly with alcohol problems, sleeping rough.

She really didn't want her parents to know that she was pregnant,

- did she? - No.

And it does keep getting worse. It keeps deteriorating.

One of the last people to see Elizabeth alive was

the rather fabulously-named woman Ginger Nell,

who is identified in the press as "an unfortunate".

- Unfortunate! - That's significant,

because that's the Victorian euphemism for

a woman who sells sex.

And apparently, Ginger Nell was trying to look after Elizabeth,

and she warned her specifically about a "dangerous class of boatmen

"who infest the locality, who took advantage of unfortunates".

- Ooh, that's very chilling. - Mm, it is.

And we know that Elizabeth was sleeping rough

- on the banks of the river. - Yes, we do.

It's the river again.

The river again.

But in 1889, the investigation takes a dramatic turn,

when new information comes to light,

giving the Victorian detectives their first prime suspect.

And he's no stranger prowling the river bank,

but someone much closer to home.

Police discover that before her death,

Elizabeth had been living with a man, Jack Fairclough,

believed to be the father of her unborn child.

A troubling picture of this Jack Fairclough starts to emerge.

According to this report,

"Their life was a most unhappy one.

"Their quarrelling was incessant.

"At times, she was unnaturally used..."

That means violence.

"..and on one occasion, was badly wounded in the arm

"by a knife thrust from him."

And, really worryingly, since Elizabeth's body was found,

no-one has seen him.

He's disappeared.

Finding Jack Fairclough becomes the police's top priority.

They circulate this sketch of him all over the country.

He's a wanted man.

The hunt is on for Fairclough.

The Murder Club have done a deep dive into his background,

and I've shared their findings with our investigative psychologist.

I want to see if Sam thinks he could really be our man.

We know now, and it was the same then,

that most female victims of homicide

are killed by somebody that they know.

And that will typically be some sort of romantic partner.

So, on that basis alone, it would be worth looking at Jack.

But then, if we delve a little bit more into actually who he was,

as an individual, we can see some indications that actually,

this may be a man who is capable of murder.

We know that age 18, he was arrested for a crime against a person -

that was robbery of a watch,

but he was never convicted for that offence.

But it starts to give us a little bit of an indication of

the individual we're dealing with,

and the type of lifestyle he led,

and perhaps the way he dealt with people in his life,

how he got what he wanted.

And if you add to that, that he was also...

..led a very transient lifestyle, he was actually quite mobile.

And we know already, we've established that the person

responsible for these crimes is quite mobile,

in that he's using multiple disposal locations.

He led a rather chaotic lifestyle.

And that is evidenced in his military records where we know,

not once, but twice, he deserted from the military.

- He ran away from the Army? - He ran away.

There's a number of references in statements from individuals

who knew them both as a couple, that suggests that they had quite

a dysfunctional relationship,

and that it was not unusual for him to use violence.

So, again, it's sort of starting to build up this picture,

not necessarily that points directly that he killed Elizabeth,

but that he is potentially a man who is comfortable using violence

to get what he wants.

He sounds like a bad 'un.

What do you think? Do you think he could have been the killer?

Put it this way - if I was advising the police,

I would want them to find this man as quickly as possible.

Shortly after Fairclough's image is released,

an eagle-eyed policeman spots a man matching his description.

Fairclough's in a lodging house in the Devon village

of Ottery St Mary.

The local constabulary wires Scotland Yard,

using a private telegraph system

connecting police stations across the country.

The inspector in charge speeds down to Devon.

And the next morning, he brings Fairclough

back to London for interrogation.

When Fairclough is questioned, he tells the police that,

at the time Elizabeth Jackson was killed,

he was outside London,

travelling around the country, looking for work.

He says that he's been up to Huntingdon,

and down as far as to near Exmouth,

right down here.

And that is where the police caught up with him.

Two police officers are sent to follow his route,

to check out his alibi.

And here is their report.

"The police have travelled through many counties making enquiries,

"and have spent a great amount of time upon the case, but..."

Goodness!

"..it was shown beyond all doubt

"that he was miles away from London,

"both for ten days before and ten days after the first remains

"were discovered in the Thames."

I can hardly believe it.

But that seems pretty conclusive.

Unless the police have made some gigantic mistake,

Fairclough was nowhere near London when the killing happens...

..which means that Fairclough cannot be the killer.

With no arrest made,

the Thames Torso Murderer remains at large.

Then, on the 10th of September, 1889,

three months after Elizabeth Jackson's body was found,

yet another dismembered corpse is discovered.

But this time, the victim's headless torso

isn't found in the Thames,

or even on the banks of the river.

It's found here in East London, in Whitechapel -

the very heart of the territory of Jack the Ripper.

Found less than two months after

the Ripper's most recent suspected murder,

the discovery sends shock waves

through the terrified streets of London.

And it begs a horrifying question.

Could it be that the Thames Torso Murders have been the work

of Jack the Ripper all along?

That smacks of there being a sexual connotation to this.

There's such moral panic, and such fear.

His crimes scream power and control.

"I am the man who committed all these murders.

"My name is..."