The discipline of forensic anthropology was pushed forward dramatically in the 1930s with a crime in the UK called the “Jigsaw Murders”. The title here is gruesomely fitting.
In September 1935 in Lancaster, England, the charismatic wife of a popular medical doctor — named Isabella Ruxton — and her housemaid, Mary Rogerson, had gone missing. Isabella’s spouse, Dr Buck Ruxton, claimed to be extremely worried about his wife. But at the same time, he told Mary’s parents that their daughter had gotten pregnant and that Isabella was off assisting her to get an abortion.
Towards the end of the month, far to the north in Scotland in a ravine next to the town of Moffat, body parts wrapped in newspaper started washing up.
It took some time for investigators to connect Buck Ruxton with the dismembered bodies — they had been so chopped up that their gender was difficult to establish. But ultimately a bevy of experts, including anatomist James Couper Brash, assembled a case.
There were a number of firsts in the trial that eventually took place: the scientific team re-assembled the bodies as best they could and were able to super-impose photographs of Isabella onto the skull, demonstrating that the proportions were the same. Dr Buck Ruxton had used his surgical knowledge to chop up and disfigure the corpses with a view to obscuring their identification. In fact, he was too good at this because it was clear that only someone who knew anatomy well could have done such a job. He destroyed the epidermal layer of the fingers — but the inner layer of skin still bore witness to the identity of the victim, and this was the first time fingerprints were used to establish victim identity.
Ultimately it came out that Dr Ruxton had murdered his wife — he was insanely jealous and accused her of having an affair. He might have killed Mary because she was a witness. He dragged both bodies to his bathtub, drained the corpses, and dismembered them like so many jigsaw puzzle pieces.
In 1936, Ruxton was hanged for the murders, leaving his three small children which he had had with Isabella to be orphans.
Sources: Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind, Sue Black. Image: Universal History Archive/Getty Images. The Irish Times, “‘Jigsaw murders’: the gruesome case of a jealous GP,” Dean Ruxton, Thurs Aug 18, 2016
