by Trow, M. J.
Extraordinarily, Assistant Commissioner ‘Big John’ du Rose who spearheaded what became known as the Nudes or Jack the Stripper murders, believed for a time that Hannah Tailford might have been a suicide. In the 1960s about a hundred bodies were fished out of the Thames each year and it was not unknown for suicides to strip and push a gag into their mouths to make breathing impossible or to prevent calling out for help. If that were the case, where were Hannah’s clothes? Did she walk naked through London without attracting attention? It did not help that one of the foremost pathologists of his generation, Dr Donald Teare, could only find bruising on the jaw which could have been the result of a fall. With the official weight of evidence so undecided, coroner Gavin Thurston could only direct the inquest jury to deliver an open verdict.
Two months later, Irene Lockwood’s body was found on the river’s foreshore at Duke’s Meadows, Chiswick, not far from the pier. This was only a few hundred yards upstream from the Hannah Tailford dump site. Irene, aka Sandra Russell, had lived in Denbigh Road, Ealing. Like Hannah, she had a flat to entertain clients – the rent was £12 10s a week. Like Elizabeth Jackson eighty years earlier, Irene was pregnant. Like the anonymous Bedford Square victim of 1884, she had a tattoo; hers read ‘John in Memory’.
Irene, from Lincolnshire, was involved in the ‘blue film’ industry that provided cheap super 8 movies for home consumption or were shown in Soho ‘theatres’. A friend of hers in the same racket, Vicki Pender, had been murdered the previous year, proving, if proof were needed, what a dangerous game these girls played. Vicki aka Veronica Walsh had been battered and strangled to death by a client who was subsequently jailed for life.
Superintendent Frank Davies now led the enquiry, as clearly there was a pattern emerging here. Vicki Pender was a one-off, but Davies now had two dead prostitutes found in similar attitudes along the river bank and within yards of each other in space and two months in terms of time. In the middle of all this, Kenneth Archibald confessed to Irene’s murder, saying he had killed the woman and pushed her body into the river. He signed a confession twice before retracting it and a whole pantomime was played out as Archibald was tried and acquitted in a court of law. He admitted later that he had been ‘on a bender’ with friends and that it was alcohol that made him spin the murder yarn. Astonishingly, so many of the points he made fitted reality that the police believed him.
The river pattern was broken by the next murder, rather as the London Squares killing broke the torso pattern in 1884. Helen Barthelemy, from Talbot Road, Willesden, was found sixteen days after Irene Lockwood, in a driveway behind houses at Swincombe Avenue, Brentford, about a mile from the Thames. She was naked, the dark ring round her waist proof that her panties had been removed after death and four of her teeth were missing, one lodged in her throat. Helen had been educated in a convent in Scotland and had literally run away to join a circus. She worked as a waitress and stripper along Blackpool’s Golden Mile for a time and she used the aliases Teddie, Thompson and Paul. Her forearm bore the tattoo ‘Loving You’.
Helen operated in the Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush areas, newly filled with a growing West Indian population, and kerb-crawlers and cars in those streets were checked. This was light years away from CCTV on every corner and pleas by the police for the girls to be extra-vigilant and to cooperate largely fell on deaf ears.
It was not until 14 July that Jack the Stripper struck again. Scottish-born Mary Fleming of Lancaster Gardens, Ealing, was found dead, sitting upright near a garage door in Berrymead Road, Chiswick. She was naked and her clothes were never found. Neither was the denture which had been torn out of her mouth. The body was found at 5am by a chauffeur, George Head, on his way to the garage complex to pick up his car. Painters working through the night on a rush job had seen a car or small van reversing in the cul-de-sac in Lancaster Gardens two hours earlier. They also saw its driver, but the angle was not clear and, aware that he was being watched, he drove off.
Forensics now came to the aid of the police. The latest victims had minute traces of car-body paint sprayed on their skin and the search was on for premises near the dump sites. Manpower was increased on the case, but no real headway was made before the next killing. Margaret McGowan, a Notting Hill prostitute, was already something of a celebrity before her body was found, partly decomposed, in a rubbish dump in a car park at Hornton Street, Kensington. One of her teeth was missing and she had tattoos on one arm, including ‘Helen, Mum and Dad’. Under the name of Frances Brown, Margaret had given evidence in the vice trial of Dr Stephen Ward, the osteopath linked to call-girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, whose association with War Minister John Profumo helped to bring down Harold Macmillan’s government.
Margaret was living in Shepherd’s Bush and had given birth to three illegitimate children. Together with Kim Taylor, she had been soliciting in Portobello Road on the night she vanished. Kim was able to give police a description of the man who had picked Margaret up, but no one, understandably, came forward.
The Stripper’s next – and final – victim was Bridget O’Hara, known as Bridie. She paid £3 10s a week for her flat in Agate Road, Hammersmith, and was last seen alive at the Shepherd’s Bush Hotel on the night of 11 January 1965. The next person to see her, other than her killer, was Ernest Beauchamp, who came upon what he first took to be a shop mannequin lying largely hidden under shrubs on the Heron Trading Estate8 on 16 February. She had not been there all that time, the pathologist believed, but had been kept somewhere indoors before being dumped. The Irish girl was naked, with the name ‘Mick’ tattooed on her arm. She had died, as had all the others, from asphyxiation and her front teeth had been knocked out. There were once again paint-spray particles on the skin.
It is useful to compare police tactics in the Stripper case with those of eighty years earlier. Policewomen dressed up as prostitutes with tiny tape recorders hidden in gloves and scarves to lure clients. Even the police had no real idea of the enormous range of perversions that call girls were asked to provide. Sadomasochism was paramount and the detectives leading the case were particularly interested in anyone with a penchant for fellatio, which might explain the missing teeth in so many victims. Kerb-crawlers were interviewed, sometimes at home on flimsy excuses like minor road accidents so that wives should not become suspicious and marriages fall apart. Focusing on paint-spray workshops, squads of uniformed men and women combed the twenty-four square mile area north of the Thames. Such was the press coverage of the Stripper murders that a total of 500 policemen, uniformed and plainclothes, worked on the case.
The Heron Estate became the focus of police activity and one paint-spray shop in particular had been the temporary resting place of Bridie O’Hara. Seven thousand people worked on the estate and there was open access to it to any number of outsiders. The rapid rebuilding which has characterized London since the end of the Second World War meant that buildings were demolished during the Stripper’s spree, destroying perhaps valuable evidence.
Unlike the hunters of the Thames torso killer, the police had mass communication at their disposal. Not only did newspapers give the case a huge coverage by comparison with that of the 1870s and 1880s, but the police held twice-daily press conferences that were broadcast on radio and television. It was as though John Du Rose’s men were talking directly to the man they were after.
In what may well be the most disappointing end to a murder investigation in the history of true crime, du Rose wrote in his autobiography in 1971 that the psychological pressure brought to bear by the police drove the prime suspect to suicide.
We had done all we possibly could but faced with his death no positive evidence was available to prove or disprove our belief that he was in fact the man we had been seeking. Because he was never arrested or stood trial, he must be considered innocent and will therefore never be named.9
Subsequent theories pointed to the apparent suicide of night-club owner and former boxing champion Freddie Mills who was found bla
sted by a rifle bullet in his car outside his own club, the Nite Spot, in Charing Cross Road, on the night of 25 July 1965. A recent book claims that Mills was Jack the Stripper and that the missing teeth were the result of his boxer’s right hook. The evidence is flimsy, but probably no more outrageous than Home Office Pathologist Keith Simpson’s claim that Mills’s wound may well have been self-inflicted. Since the only wound was a bullet’s entry in the inner angle of the right eye and the weapon was a .22 rifle, this must have been one of the most awkward and unlikely suicides on record. I have no doubt that Mills was murdered. I also have no doubt that he was not Jack the Stripper. Another killer of women along the river had got away with murder.
Gary Ridgeway would not get away, but the killer of women along the Green River in Washington State enjoyed a twenty-year run before he was caught. Just as the Thames torso killer operated in a criminal nightmare world dominated by Jack the Ripper, so Ridgeway’s hunting ground was very similar to that of serial killer Ted Bundy. At one point in fact, while Bundy was on Death Row for his crimes, he offered to help police in their enquiries into the Green River case on the dubious grounds that he understood how the man’s twisted mind worked.10
Unlike the Thames, the Green River runs through wild, open countryside for much of its sixty-five-mile length, through the state of Washington. It is popular with anglers and kayakers and some of its stretches are dangerous, with fast-flowing currents and rapids. In July 1982 the first victim of the Green River killer was found. She was 16-year-old Wendy Coffield and her naked body was fished out of the water by detective Dave Reichart, who would spend half his working career trying to find out who killed her. Although only the first three victims were found beneath the water’s surface, an estimated fifty more would appear over the next twenty years, hidden mostly in the thick scrub woodland that forms the river’s hinterland.
Most of the killer’s victims were prostitutes, picked up along the Pac HiWay, known locally as the SeaTac Strip. The area’s ribbon development provided everything for the passing motorist on his or her way to Seattle or Tacoma and that included drugs and prostitution.
The first three bodies elicited various clues. Their clothes had gone, but dental records, not kept in the 1870s and 1880s, could prove useful. The water had removed all traces of semen, but two of the three had triangular shaped stones stuffed into their vaginas in what seemed to be symbolic rape. All three women were identified and there had been no attempt at dismemberment.
The 1980s saw something of an upsurge in the serial killer in the United States. That was essentially the first full decade in which the term was used of a murderer who kills again and again, choosing similar targets and using a similar, but constantly developing MO. Ted Bundy began his murderous spree in the Seattle area in 1974, killing seven women in seven months. With his cool arrogance and exceptional cunning, he lured pretty, dark-haired teenagers into his VW before raping and murdering them. So assured was he, he even gave his real name – Ted – and continued to kill in three more states before he was finally arrested. He confessed to twenty-eight murders and often returned to the corpses to have sex with them. Two other necrophiliacs whose folie à deux led to the death penalty, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis O’Toole exaggerated the number of young girls they killed, but they were certainly seriously deranged sociopaths whose total killings have been notched up at anything between three and sixty-nine (the notoriously vague Lucas claimed nearly three hundred!). The Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono egged each other on to commit murders across California in the 1970s and Bianchi’s attempt to fool psychiatrists into believing he was suffering from multiple personality disorder failed.
Against high-profile monsters like these, Gary Ridgeway comes across as ‘normal’, even humdrum. And it was this very ordinariness that allowed him to notch up over fifty murders. His battered pickup truck was spotted several times along the Pac HiWay. He was known to be a kerb-crawler. The police talked to him more than once. But each time, Gary Ridgeway walked away, as slippery as mercury, to kill again.
His list of victims makes depressing reading. Wide publicity, the advancing technology of media and the anxiety of distraught relatives meant that most of the Green River killer’s targets were identified. Some, however, despite forensic techniques to reconstruct faces that Doctors Kemper, Hebbert and Bond could only dream about, remain mere numbers. Many were runaways, nice kids who fell out with moms and dads and stepmoms and stepdads, whose grades began to fall at school, who wanted independence and the good life. Such women were as notoriously vulnerable in Washington State in the 1980s as their counterparts were in London a century earlier. The only difference was that they tended to be younger.
The enquiries made by the Green River Task Force, a beleaguered team faced with dwindling funds and waning public interest as time went on, revealed a huge variety of sexual oddities among ordinary people. One travelling salesman returned home with variously coloured samples of pubic hair. A husband took a macabre delight in cutting up the centrefolds of porn mags and rearranging the dismembered heads, arms and legs.
And the killer seemed to be taunting the police. At one point he staged a carefully constructed murder scene, as when Carol Christensen was discovered fully clothed with false clues nearby. At other times, the bodies were almost literally thrown away. And again, others were systematically hidden in dense undergrowth. They were black and white, making a nonsense of the usual serial killer’s pattern of intra-racial murder only.
Time and again the police had to break the worst news to frantic parents. The reactions varied, but the quiet dignity and extraordinary courage of these parents is best summed up by the mother of 16-year-old Kimi-Kai Pitsor last seen getting into an old pickup truck in downtown Seattle. She was only identifiable through dental records. ‘She’s not hurting now,’ her mother said. ‘She’s not cold. She’s not hungry. She’s no longer in any kind of pain.’11
Forensic technology was coming to the aid of the police during the long years of the Green River Killer’s reign of terror. Ted Bundy had been nailed by bite marks he left on one of his victims and in 1985 Colin Pitchfork became the first murderer to be caught by matching his DNA with semen found on the underwear of his teenaged victims. Criminal profiling had not only established the term ‘serial killer’, but a great deal was known about the mindset of such people – how they operate and what drives them to kill. When Gary Ridgeway was finally caught he exhibited all three of the ‘triad’ symptoms in childhood which marks a high percentage of multiple murderers. He was obsessed with lighting fires, carried out torture on animals and was still wetting the bed at 13. Profiler John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico got the killer’s age range right (mid-twenties to early thirties) and said prophetically: ‘These homicides reflect rage and anger … He will not stop killing until he is caught.’12
But Gary Ridgeway did not fit the usual pattern. In fact, a deep study of him since his arrest has helped establish new norms of behaviour for serial killers. In 1984 he passed a polygraph test when interviewed over the murders. He was regularly employed, painting trucks for the Kenworth Company for twenty years. He did not come from a broken home and had several lasting relationships, most recently with an unsuspecting wife whose presence almost certainly slowed down his killing rate. His workmates even joked about the fact that Gary Ridgeway’s initials were the same as the killer’s sobriquet and for a while he was ‘Green River Gary’.
On 16 November 2001 Gary Ridgeway was arrested on a routine charge of loitering for prostitution. The girl was a policewoman and for the Green River Killer it was the end of the line. Weeks, then months of interviews, DNA testing, arraignments and the whole palaver of bringing a twenty-year killing spree to an end, followed. When he appeared before the flashing cameras of the media for the first time, he was, in Ann Rule’s words, ‘medium height, medium build, totally average-looking, a man who scarcely resembled what they believed him to b
e – the most infamous and prolific serial killer ever known in America’.13 He told police flatly and without emotion how he had killed various women, strangling them usually from behind. ‘Some went easily,’ he said, ‘and some fought hard. But they all died.’14
‘Adam’ was seen floating past the Tower of London on the afternoon of Friday 21 September 2001. A passerby on Tower Bridge saw a bright orange object bobbing on the water’s surface and he realized they were shorts wrapped around the body of a black boy. Once the police had been alerted, Thames Division’s marine search unit went into action and recovered the corpse. There was huge and almost immediate media coverage and in the absence of a name, the police called the boy ‘Adam’.
The subsequent post-mortem revealed that Adam was between 4 and 7 years old. His head, both arms and both legs had been removed, but there were no obvious signs of sexual assault and the body did not seem malnourished which would have been the case in the event of neglect. His stomach contents contained British food but pollen traces in his lungs was from African trees. More sinister was the fact that the stomach also contained a mixture which the Met knew was used in African ritual magic. Bone analysis proved that Adam came from the Yoruba Plateau area in Nigeria. The pollen implied that he had been in England only a few days.
Met officers travelled to Yoruba, working with the Nigerian police who had their own missing children file and trawled villages and primary schools in the forlorn hope of locating Adam’s parents. They drew a blank.
Ten months after Adam’s body was found, a Nigerian woman turned up in London from Germany with an extraordinary claim that she had fled Yoruba where a cult was involved with the ritual murder of children. Orange shorts like the pair Adam was wearing were found at her flat and one of her associates, Kingsley Ojo, had several ritual items in his apartments, but no DNA links with Adam. He was sent to jail for four years in 2004 for child trafficking. Like the victims of the torso killer, Adam was never identified. With all the scientific advances available to the police and all the worldwide media coverage of the case, the little boy in the Thames essentially remains unknown and his killer has got away with murder.
