by Trow, M. J.
More than that, we know that the torso killer was what profilers today call an organized killer. The FBI’s explanation of such a man is as follows. He is likely to be of ‘average or above average intelligence’. This is not a mere wheeler of carts; he sells his wares and handles money. He will be ‘socially competent’; if he wants to make a living at all he has to be able to engage people in conversation, to gain their trust. He will be dealing with maidservants and walking the same streets as the prostitutes he targeted. He would have been on equal terms with Elizabeth Jackson. He is ‘likely to be a skilled worker’. All the doctors who examined the body parts are agreed on this. The dismemberment was slick and highly proficient as would be the case in a man who cut up horses for a living. It is the next three categories which remain unanswerable. ‘High in order of birth’, ‘father’s employment stable’, ‘inconsistent childhood discipline’ is unknown because we have no name. ‘Controlled mood during crime.’ We cannot be sure of this, partly because the doctors at the time could not find an actual cause of death. It is likely that the 1873 victim died as a result of a blow to the head and if this method worked well, then the torso killer would have continued to use it. It may well explain why the heads were usually missing. Horse slaughterers killed their animals with a single, powerful axe blow to the head. It may also explain the apparent lack of frenzy in the murders. If that frenzy was directed at the head, for whatever reason, then all the torso killer’s angst would have been vented on that; the actual dismemberment was done coolly when the frenzy had passed and for other reasons.
Some of the forensic experts working on the Cleveland torso case believed that there were signs of life in the Kingsbury Run victims after dismemberment began, but there is no sense of that here. However frenzied the attack to the head may have been and whatever sexual assault the cat’s meat man carried out on his victims before or after death, there is no sign of any of that in the body parts themselves. ‘Alcohol use associated with crime.’ Again, we do not know. Somehow the cat’s meat man lured his victims to his slaughterhouse, won them over, perhaps with alcohol, before he went to work – and not in the way they expected. Dr Neill Cream, as we have seen, went so far as to write invitations to some of his victims and was usually careful enough to destroy the letters afterwards. ‘Sexually competent.’ Once more, we are in the dark. Many serial killers have some sort of sexual dysfunction and the frustration and anger this causes leads them to blame and hurt what they conceive to be the source of the problem – women. Rapists are not interested in sex per se; they crave power and control over their victims. On the other hand, some serial murderers have more or less conventional sex lives – Gary Ridgeway for example or Joel Rifkin, both of whom visited prostitutes for regular sessions before they killed them. Did the cat’s meat man have sex with seven-months-pregnant Elizabeth Jackson? We can only assume that that is what she thought he was going to do. ‘Living with partner’ is again, an unknown. ‘Mobility’; the cat’s meat man was free to roam in theory all over London, selling his wares. ‘Interest in news media reports of crime’; this is a difficult area, but I believe it likely. We must always, in the nineteenth century, consider the problem of literacy; could our killer read? I do not believe he wrote silly, taunting letters to the police about Jack the Ripper, but I do believe he cashed in on police activity twice, rather as modern killers sometimes ‘help’ the police with their enquiries to keep close to events. Soham murderer Ian Huntley, for example, joined the search for two missing schoolgirls in the area in 2002, knowing full well where their bodies were because he had dumped them there. Otherwise, the torso killer’s dump site in the foundations of Scotland Yard and Pinchin Street are the most bizarre coincidences. Norman Shaw’s opera house was widely reported in the press as being converted for police headquarters use. Pinchin Street was only hundreds of yards from the murder scene of Ripper victim Liz Stride in Berner Street; it was in the heart of Jack’s territory – what better way to cause the total confusion which has extended right down to R Michael Gordon’s analysis of 2001?
The last characteristic of the organized serial killer is that after the crime has been committed the murderer might change occupation or leave the area. Is this why we have the strange shift to the Tottenham Court Road? All the other body parts were found in the river, on the foreshore or at least in water (the legs of the 1873 victim in Regent’s Canal). Even the Pinchin Street torso is less than a quarter of a mile from the river. But Alfred Mews, Bedford Square, Fitzroy Square – these are land-locked areas and a relatively long way away. Had the horse slaughterer changed direction? And had he returned, with a vengeance, by 1887?
We cannot answer the question whether our killer lived with a partner. It was the convention of the time for men, whether heterosexual or not, to marry or at least live with a woman. In the case of Gary Ridgeway, his final marriage did not end his Green River killing spree, but it certainly slowed it down. Does this explain the ten-year gap between the Putney murder in 1874 and the gruesome finds of the rose tattoo in Bloomsbury? Did the killer’s wife die or leave him and is that why he came back to his old haunts?
So we have, in the cat’s meat man, an organized killer. The crime committed by such a person, writes Brian Innes,
Is premeditated, not committed on the spur of the moment. The planning forms part of the offender’s fantasies, which have probably been dwelled on for years before they find violent expression. The victims are mostly strangers, of a particular type that the offender has in mind and that he has been hunting for. Since the crime has been planned, the offender will have figured out ways to approach the victim, win over their confidence and so gain control over them … [such killers] show an intelligent ability to adapt to a changing situation … and they learn as they progress; from crime to crime, they ‘improve’ on what they do.9
But there were hundreds of cat’s meat men in London. Is there any way of narrowing the field? Ripperologists will be familiar with Mrs Harriet Hardyman, a woman of medium height ‘with a curiously rounded chin’ according to one newspaper report, who was a witness at the inquest on Annie Chapman. She lived with her 16-year-old son on the ground floor front of 29 Hanbury Street and, in the early hours of 8 September 1888, Annie and her killer walked past her window and down the passageway next to Harriet’s apartment. The room at the back was used to cook the cat’s meat, but it is not clear whether the Hardymans sold the produce from their door or whether young Hardyman had a cart. In the 1891 census, Mrs Hardyman called herself, rather grandly, a ‘purveyor of horseflesh’.
A trawl through all the horse-slaughterers, butchers and sellers of horseflesh in London (‘cat’s meat man’ was only ever the colloquial term for such occupations) takes months of research and inevitably focuses on Smithfield and the East End where they tended to proliferate. But there is one tool of modern psychology which reduces the search and that is geoprofiling. A more useful term for this process is murder-mapping, a systematic study of where the murders occur. Of course our job is complicated by the fact that we do not have any actual murder sites. We know that the Whitechapel murderer killed in certain streets forming a pattern within a stone’s throw of each other because his victims’ bodies were found there. All we have in the case of the torso killer is dump sites, which are not the same thing at all.
Perhaps the best known geoprofiler in Britain today is Dr David Canter, who always asks himself two basic questions in relation to murder sites: where is the likely home or base of the killer and how far is he prepared to travel in search of his prey? The Ripper killed in a tight ‘circle of comfort’ in an area he knew like the back of his hand, the neighbouring parishes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. A modern serial killer like child-murderer Robert Black was unusual in that he drove in his white van, committing crimes between Oxford and Edinburgh and dumping his victims’ bodies far from where he abducted them. Professor Laurence Alison wrote:
Today’s geoprofilers would break down the sub-tasks the offender
needed to accomplish in order to escape and examine the exit points from the scene of each attack. They would systematically consider the most likely route home, including temporal (time) and topographical (detailed lay of the land) patterns that may influence the choice the offender makes in targeting crime scenes.10
With the torso killer, the problem is a little different because I believe he killed his victims in the same place. The risk element came with his ‘wooing phase’. He must have had the social skills to persuade them to go with him in the first place. We do not know what premises any of the women lived in. There is a suggestion that Elizabeth Jackson lived in a common lodging house in or near Turk’s Row, but that is not proven and anyway such places would not tolerate open prostitution. If the victims worked out of a brothel, then they certainly had an available bed, but the torso killer was not interested in that; he would have invited them back to his. A far greater risk was involved when he got rid of body parts, wheeling them around London. Much of this was probably achieved in the early hours, before the river was too busy, although such was the lifestyle of the street-traders, that there was never a truly quiet time.
Geoprofiling has shown that a serial murderer’s first kill will take place nearest to his home, the place he feels safest. Later kills will radiate out as he gets bolder, more experienced and also, perhaps, there is a need to avoid places where he might have been seen previously. Looking at the map of the dump sites, even allowing for the tidal action of the river, there is undeniably a focus on Battersea. Of the twenty-five body parts found along the river, eight of them turned up between Battersea and Victoria Bridges. If we widen our search slightly, the figure is fourteen – over half the total. Geoprofiling is an imprecise science – some say it is actually an art – but it does give us a pattern. Let us remind ourselves of the view of the police at the time of the first murder, back in 1873. They believed that the body parts had been deposited in the river somewhere near the point where the Wandle tributary runs into it. Is there anything relevant to the cat’s meat man in this area? Draw a line southeast from the Wandle estuary. Just over half a mile away, lies Garratt Lane. ‘In Garratt Lane, Wandsworth,’ wrote W J Gordon in 1893, ‘is the largest horse-slaughtering yard in London.’11
Despite the positive article about life for London’s horses written in G R Sims’s Living London in 1903, many of them ended up broken by fatigue and bad treatment – Anna Sewell highlighted their plight in Black Beauty. Some 26,000 horses a year died at the hands of Harrison Barber Ltd, of Garratt Lane. In 1873, when the torso killings began, the slaughterhouse was owned by M Wallis, who by 1886 had gone into partnership with a Mr Milestone. The following year the company had been bought up by a social climber, John Harrison, who was the official horse slaughterer to Her Majesty and did regular trade with the Dukes of Teck and Edinburgh, as well as the Household Cavalry and Royal Horse Artillery. Harrison’s original premises were along York Road in North London and these he retained, adding by 1887 other companies’ premises in: Queen Victoria Street; Brandon Road, King’s Cross; Westcott Street in the Borough; Green Street, SE; Parliament Street, Bethnal Green and Coventry Street in the East End. Intriguingly, he also owned the abattoirs at 19, 21 and 23 Winthrop Street around the corner from the murder site of the Ripper’s first ‘canonical’ victim, Polly Nichols. These premises had belonged to a Mr Barber who now became Harrison’s partner in what by 1889 was something of a monopoly.
William Gordon wrote:
No horse that enters [Harrison’s] yard must come out again alive, or as a horse. The moment it enters those gates it must be disfigured by having its mane cut off so close to the skin as to spoil its value and though it may be put in a ‘pound’ on the premises, which might better be called a condemned cell or moribundary, it must not remain there for more than three days.
Gordon describes Harrison’s yards as having stood there for over a hundred years, ‘by the banks of the winding Wandle’. It was ‘practically odourless’ with a field in front of the building and a firework factory next door. Mr Milestone himself showed Gordon the killing process; it was all over in two seconds: ‘Maneless he stands; a shade is put over his eyes; a swing of the axe, and with just one tremor, he falls heavy and dead on the flags of a spacious kitchen.’ In a little over half an hour, the hide was added to a nearby pile, hoofs in a second heap, bones dumped for boiling into oil and flesh ‘is cooking for cat’s meat’.
Slash, slash go the knives and the hide is peeled off about as easily as a tablecloth and so clean and uninjured is the body that it looks like the muscle model we see in the books and in the plaster casts at the corn-chandlers.
The rest of the process was almost mass-production. The bones were pulped into a huge ‘digester’ and the oil produced was pressed out between sheets of paper, white cakes for the candle makers. Surplus oil was used for lubrication and leather-dressing. Other bones were crushed ready to be sent to manure merchants, in rows ‘like flour-sacks at a miller’s’. Still others were ground to powder and mixed with sulphuric acid to make fertilizer. The skin and hoofs were sent to the glue-makers and button makers, the shoes recycled if they were in good enough condition or melted down by farriers and rehammered into shape. Tails and manes ended up in sofas or as fishing lines. Hides became whip-lashes, carriage roofs and even the leather inserts on cavalry troopers’ overalls. The problem of smell was minimized by a complex ventilation system of pipes passing over a furnace, so that by the 1890s, the noisome stench associated with the ‘stink’ industries was, at least, reduced.
The horse meat was boiled in coppers ‘with just the central tint of redness and rawness that suits the harmless, necessary cat’. Tripe was available for the ‘palate of the less fastidious dog’. The work of slaughter went on endlessly – ‘Go to any of their depots between five and six o’clock in the morning and you will find a long string of the pony traps and hand-carts, barrows and perambulators’ of the cat’s meat men. The meat was often placed on skewers of wood and William Gordon estimated that 182½ tons of deal a year was used by Harrison Barber Ltd. ‘Here is another item,’ he said prophetically of the ‘greens’ of the next century, ‘for the forest conservation people.’
And the Garratt Lane branch had cold storage. Two hundred and fifty carcases could be stored there: ‘A door is opened and shut … a shiver of cold runs through us as a match is struck and a candle lighted … around us are piles of meat, all hard as stone and glittering with ice crystals …’ William Gordon was describing an abattoir. He was also, unknowingly, describing a murder scene.
Let us consider the known facts again against the background of a slaughterer/cat’s meat man employed by Messrs Wallis later Harrison Barber along Garratt Lane. He stalks prostitutes on either side of the river, which is half a mile away from the slaughterhouse. We certainly know that this was the patch worked by Elizabeth Jackson. He is experiencing the traumatic phases of the serial killer. He selects a woman, on what basis we do not know. Perhaps she is short, dark-haired, a little on the plump side. Perhaps he takes her for a drink in one of the many waterside pubs they both know so well. He invites her back to his. But it is not his home, it is a large building overlooking open fields. He assures her they will not be disturbed. Perhaps he has a wife at home or children. Or nosy neighbours who will disapprove. He has probably already handed over the cash, done the necessary deal. He has his own key because he is a trusted, perhaps relatively senior, employee and lets them both in. Does she strip? Do they have sex? It is impossible to say. Impossible to say, too, how long it is before the axe comes crunching down on her head. There were one or two blows on the temple of the 1873 victim. ‘It was all over in two seconds’ for the horses; perhaps it was the same for her. She falls ‘heavy and dead on the flags of a spacious kitchen’.
What happens next depends on the exact type of killer he is. He does not mutilate, unlike Jack. He seems to have no fixation with a woman’s genitals or internal organs. But it is possible he has sex with her a
s she lies there. He cannot afford to wait too long. The place is lit with the candles made from the animals who usually die here. It will not be long before his colleagues arrive for the day’s work so he goes to work with speed and confidence. If the police and medical men were right about the projected times of death, at least two of them are highly likely to have been committed on a Sunday, the day the slaughterhouse was closed. ‘Slash, slash’ goes the knife to disarticulate flesh and sinew. He uses the fine saw for the rest of the work, dumping the portions into the anonymous flour sacks to hand or wrapping them in other bags, bound with equally anonymous string. On one occasion, we know, he used a copy of the Echo that someone had left lying around. On another, he used Venetian blind cord. On two occasions, and we do not know why, he used the victims’ clothes – the chemise of the Pinchin Street woman and the dress, drawers and Ulster of Elizabeth Jackson. How he chose the number of pieces into which he cut the body we do not know. Nor do we know what he does with the head.
Does he, like Voison, fill the skull with molten lead and sink it in the Thames? Does he, like Jeffrey Dahmer, find an isolated corner of the cold store where he can keep them, reliving the thrill of the murder experience? Perhaps he has the coolness to wait until the other deliverymen arrive or perhaps he goes out first, ahead of them, the bodies drained of blood and the blood washed away down the channels in the kitchen floor. We know from the testimony of Constable Pennett that he dumped the torso under the arch in Pinchin Street between five and five thirty. And in the mist curling along the river, he rumbles his cart, chooses his moment and drops his ghastly cargo – ‘chunk by chunk by chunk’.
There are no employee lists of Messrs Wallis in the 1870s nor of Messrs Harrison and Barber in the 1880s. So our killer is untraceable, exactly as he hoped he would be. And one of the premises bought up by Harrison in 1887, the year of the Rainham Mystery, is that of Henry A Currell, slaughtermen of Brandon Road, King’s Cross. Brandon Road that is fifteen minutes walk from Alfred Mews. Did the torso killer take flight after his butchery in 1874 and find a similar day job in Brandon Road? And did the Harrison buy-up in 1887 mean that he found himself redeployed once again to his old haunts in Battersea?
