Disposal of a body requires both method and resourcefulness. The chief purpose is concealment or, at least, to delay discovery of the crime with the idea that no body equals no crime, which, as many murderers have discovered, is not necessarily the case.
Burial may seem an obvious choice but the perpetrator immediately encounters the first challenge. Moving the body of an adult, when it is literally a dead weight, is not an easy task for one person without assistance. A burial also requires a degree of secrecy and is usually carried out during the hours of darkness. Then there is the inconvenient product of burial which is the soil excavated from the grave. Disturbed soil is a dead giveaway for search parties.
To overcome the difficulties of moving and transporting a corpse, murderers readily incline towards dismemberment. Reducing the body to small components allows parts to be parcelled up for easier disposal – at least, that is the theory. In practice, there is the revelation that the process is, to a very high degree, messy. For a start, the average human body contains at least six and a half litres of blood. Once this major body fluid is released, it gets everywhere – it drips, splashes, stains and leaves trails.
For this problem, and where dismemberment is part of a preconceived plan, the murderer may have noted the availability of a bath in which to place the body or have had the foresight to acquire some plastic sheeting. Choice of tools for dismemberment may involve visits to hardware stores to buy knives, saws, axes and other implements of the slicing and dicing trade. Some operators, such as Simone Weber in 1985, have recourse to an electric saw, which provides speedy lopping of the limbs but tends to increase the mess factor. For the medical practitioner turned murderer, there is the option of risking identification by demonstrating skill at disarticulation. In 1928 Dr Frank Westlake’s dismemberment of his victim betrayed his medical background.
The object of dismemberment is to render the victim’s body to manageable proportions. Using her particular technique, Mme Weber, filled seventeen plastic bags with human remains. The astute murderer will target his victim’s head for severance and separate disposal, hence the high proportion of headless torsos that turn up lacking the most obvious means of identification.
Once the body has been reduced to a number of basic components, the resultant parts may be individually wrapped for disposal. Unless carefully thought out in advance, this usually means the murderer grabs whatever clothing, bedsheets, blankets or sacks that may be at hand to make a bundle or parcel. Newspaper has proved to be a popular material for this purpose, even though this may well offer clues as to the place and date of the crime. Dr Ruxton wrapped parts of one of his victims in a special edition of a Sunday newspaper, which conveniently provided investigators with vital co-ordinates of his crimes.
Having rendered the victim’s remains into a number of conveniently-sized bundles or parcels, the murderer still faces the problem of disposal. The chronicles of crime amply demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which murderers are prepared to go to accomplish this task. In 1851 William Sheward dumped parcels of body parts in and around the city of Norwich and James Greenacre made several trips on foot and by omnibus with a similar mission in London in 1836.
Transportation by car and casual disposal in a stream close to the roadside was the method favoured by Dr Ruxton in 1935. While Donald Hume, a decade later, took to the skies in a light aircraft to drop his airmail parcels over the Essex mudflats. Others have used car transport and rail services to deliver unwanted body parts to distant places using suitcases and trunks.
Trunk murderers occupy a special place in the pantheon of odious criminals. Prominent among this band of luggage specialists was Winnie Ruth Judd, who in 1931, accompanied the dismembered remains of her two victims packed in trunks on a train journey from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Trunk murderers, and those who delay too long in deciding on their disposal option, face the inevitable consequences of decomposition and its accompanying stench.
A popular disposal method is to dump parcels of remains in water. This offers the temporary satisfaction of putting grisly remains out of sight and out of mind, but water has the uncanny knack of delivering up the dead, as Donald Hume discovered. In 1927 James McKay dumped his murdered mother’s body parts in the River Clyde but they came back to haunt him.
Even destruction by fire or acid is not foolproof and, as many killers have discovered, the human frame is remarkably resilient. Teeth, in particular, possess amazing powers of indestructibility. John Perry in 1990 went to great lengths to destroy his wife’s remains, including her skull, but there were enough teeth left to provide identification.
What to do with the head of the victim is a problem that has taxed the ingenuity of many murderers. Fred Thorn went to the trouble of encasing his victim’s head in plaster of Paris while Dr Herman Schmitz kept his trophy in a jar of preservative.
Heads and skulls have exerted a special fascination for murderers when dealing with their victims and also for the enforcers of law and order when dealing with murderers. Ned Kelly’s skull became the object of controversy when it was stolen in 1990. The Australian authorities were so concerned about the possible desecration of the body after Thomas Griffin was executed in 1868, that his head was removed before burial. The ploy did not succeed and the head ended up as a trophy.
The tragic fate of Fanny Adams in 1867 and the two fingers shown to the authorities in Vienna in 1926 by Dr Herman Schmitz are among the infamous references to body parts.
Sweet Fanny Adams
“Sweet Fanny Adams” was the name given by British sailors in the Royal Navy to canned meat that formed part of their rations. This was a coarse reference to a young girl who had been murdered in a field in Hampshire on a warm summer’s day in 1867.
Eight-year-old Fanny Adams, together with her sister and a friend, left their homes in Alton to play in the nearby fields. Their favourite spot was Flood Meadow, which bordered the River Wey and was shallow enough for paddling.
At about 5.00 p.m. on 24 August, Fanny’s two companions returned to their homes without her. They explained that they had seen William Baker who worked as clerk to a local solicitor and he spoke to them. He offered Fanny a halfpenny to go with him and he had given money to the other girls who, left to their own devices, continued playing by the river until it was time to go home.
Fanny’s mother and a neighbour immediately set out to look for the eight-year-old. Early in their search, they encountered William Baker. They asked him about Fanny and, while he admitted giving money to her friends, said he knew nothing about her. Reassured by their conversation, Mrs Adams returned home, assuming her daughter had gone off to play on her own and would soon return.
When Fanny had not returned home by 7.00 p.m. a proper search was organized and her body was soon discovered in a hop field. The child had been brutally attacked and mutilated. Her head was severed from the body, the eyes and one ear were missing and the abdomen disembowelled. The remains were strewn about on the ground.
As the last person known to have seen the dead girl, William Baker immediately came under suspicion. The twenty-nine-year-old clerk was only saved from a violent end at the hands of Fanny’s father by the intervention of the police. Baker was arrested and two small knives, one of which was bloodstained, were found in his possession. There were also traces of blood on his clothes.
A search of Baker’s desk at the office where he worked produced the most incriminating evidence. His diary entry for the day of the murder read, “Killed a young girl – it was fine and hot.”
Baker, the subject of great public hostility, was tried for murder at Winchester. He was an articulate man and tried to talk his way to innocence by saying the knives found on him were too small for mutilation and that the children had lied about him. In his defence, it was stated that a failed love affair had left him depressed and suicidal and he was stressed by overwork. None of this impressed the jury who found him guilty and were not inclined to mercy. William Baker was executed before a crowd of five thousand at Winchester on Christmas Eve 1867. Poor Fanny’s memorial lay in the sailors’ reference to the contents of their canned food.
Pre-Nuptials
Briton James Greenacre had contracted several profitable marriages and was planning his fourth wedding, to Hannah Brown, on Christmas Day 1836. On Christmas Eve, they met at his house in Camberwell, London, to discuss their plans. His tactic was to call off the wedding because he believed Hannah had been using his name to obtain credit while, contrary to his expectations, she had no money of her own. Hannah was not seen alive again, although parts of her began appearing in different places.
On 28 December, a package was found on the Edgware Road lying in a pool of frozen blood. When the sacking was pulled open, a female trunk emerged with the arms intact but legs and head missing. Just over a week later a head was
retrieved from the Regent’s Canal at Stepney. This second find matched the torso found earlier. Two months later, a large bundle was found in a ditch at Camberwell. This contained the legs belonging to the other body parts already recovered.
It would be another three weeks before the dismembered body, now re-assembled, would be identified. A man whose sister had been missing for three months identified the remains as Hannah Brown. It was known that she had last been seen in the company of James Greenacre, the man she intended to marry.
Greenacre was preparing for flight with a female companion, Sarah Gale, heading for America. Some of their trunks were already on board their passenger ship. These were taken for examination and the contents included cloth identical to the wrapping used on some of the body parts. Greenacre was arrested along with his lady friend, whom he attempted to absolve from any involvement in the crime.
His explanation was that Hannah had tipped up her chair and fallen badly, damaging her head. He later changed his story, saying that he was so incensed by Hannah’s false statements regarding her property that he hit her with a wooden roller and killed her. Following his confession, he gave a detailed account of how he disposed of her dismembered corpse. He thought to disarm any suspicion by dumping his parcels in broad daylight, believing this would appear less furtive than operating at night.
Having been tried and convicted of murder, Greenacre spent his time leading up to execution writing an autobiography. He portrayed himself as an industrious and respectable individual who had been elected to the office of overseer of his parish. His calculation was made evident when he attempted to engineer another marriage after murdering Hannah by advertising for a partner with money. Greenacre ended his life on the scaffold and the woman he planned to take with him to America was sentenced to transportation.
Trophy Cabinet
An Irish immigrant to Australia became Chief Constable at Brisbane and was drawn into crime by the lure of gold. After his execution for murder, the authorities went to great lengths to prevent his head being taken as a trophy. That they failed said a great deal about the lawlessness of the 1860s.
Thomas Griffin took advantage of a free passage offered to former soldiers to start a new life in Australia in 1856. With his new wife he set up a boarding house in Melbourne but, wanting some more excitement in his life, he joined the police and rapidly rose through the ranks.
By 1867, at the height of the gold rush, he was Gold Commissioner at Rockhampton. His job was to buy the precious metal from the miners. On 27 October, he set out with an armed escort to carry notes and coins worth £4,000 across the Mackenzie River to Claremont. Troopers John Power and Patrick Cahill guarded the ten canvas bags containing the money.
When they reached the river crossing on their 200-mile journey, Griffin decided to return to Rockhampton, leaving the two troopers to continue without him. Soon after he arrived back at Rockhampton he called at the police office asking if it was true that the gold escort had been killed. Indeed, the dramatic news had just been received that Power and Cahill had been found dead in the bush and the money gone.
Griffin was very forthright in his theories about what had happened. In response to reports that the troopers had been poisoned, he said it was a false report, “. . . they are shot, you’ll see if they aren’t.” A small group of men, including a doctor, decided to visit the scene. Griffin volunteered to drive the trap but handled it so dangerously that the doctor asked him to step down before they were all killed.
Once they reached the scene of the crime, it became clear that the troopers had been shot, bearing out Griffin’s prophecy. The suspicion that had settled on him intensified as a result of a round of drinks he had bought at a tavern in Rockhampton, paid for with a one pound note. The note was part of the
consignment that had been stolen and, unbeknown to Griffin, its number recorded.
Griffin was arrested on suspicion of murder and, despite the circumstantial nature of the evidence, was found guilty at his trial in Rockhampton. While in the condemned cell he tried to persuade his jailors to help him escape and made references to the whereabouts of the stolen money. No deals were done and he faced the hangman with the words, “Go on. I am ready.”
In an extraordinary sequel to Griffin’s career, first as law enforcer and then as law breaker, there were fears that an attempt would be made to remove his head from his corpse. To prevent this, the authorities arranged that another body would be buried on top of his in the same grave. Despite this precaution, his head was removed and the skull displayed as a grisly trophy in the surgery of the doctor who had complained about his driving.
Par Avion