Severed heads, bloodless bodies and maggots – inside grisly case that gave birth to CSI

On a September morning a young woman glanced over the parapet of a bridge in the small town of Moffat, Scotland. She saw a bundle of fabric, which had a severed arm sticking out of it.

Police searched the area and kept discovering body parts – two human heads, thigh bones, legs, chunks of flesh, a single torso and a pelvis. The bloody remains had been wrapped in bedsheets, a pillow-case, children’s clothing and several newspapers.

In the history of British crime, such sickening discoveries are sadly not unheard of, but what made this 1935 case special was it came to signify the real birth of forensic science.

As the various body parts were examined in Moffat Mortuary – putting them together gave the case its name, the Jigsaw Murders – it soon became clear the killer had gone to great lengths to conceal the identity of his female victims.

The eyes, ears, skin, lips, and several teeth had been removed from both heads to prevent drawings being made of the victims, or identification from dental records. Chunks of flesh had been cut off body parts where scars of old operations or vaccinations marks may have been. The fingertips had been removed from the one set of hands which had been found.

But the two pathologists made one important conclusion – the grisly butchery had been done with a surgeon’s blade.

The next puzzle was finding out when the murders had been committed. For the first in the history of crime scene investigation, maggots taken from the putrefying remains were used to calculate how long the bodies had lain there.

From the skulls it was worked out one of the victims was that of a woman probably between 35 and 45, and that the second body probably aged between 20 and 21. One had been strangled and then stabbed repeatedly, while the other bludgeoned with an unknown instrument.

The experts also estimated the mutilation of the two bodies, which had been drained of blood, would have taken about eight hours to complete. One of the papers the body parts had been wrapped in came from the Lancaster area. But who had committed the crime?

In Lancaster, well-respected Doctor Buck Ruxton was acting somewhat suspiciously.

Read the full story in Daily Star