This is the Town of Ramsgate public house, situated in the district of Wapping, east London.
To the rear of this 16th century building is a set of stone steps known
as the Wapping Old Stairs, which lead down to the north shore of the River
Thames. At around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday February 20th, 1966 fifteen-year-old
Diane Hamilton was in the kitchen of the Town of Ramsgate tavern. Her father Harry
Hamilton was the landlord. As she washed her hands in the sink and looked out of
the window across the Thames, she was distracted by a man, thin in stature,
opening the gate to the steps. She watched as he descended them towards the
river, which was now at low tide. He was dressed in a light grey shabby suit and
stood at the shore expectantly. Diane Hamilton was surprised to see a stranger
here at 4:30 p.m. on a Sunday. She knew all of the regular boat men in the area,
but didn't recognize this person. She thought no more of it though, and went
about her business. Little more than one hour later a boatman on the Thames found
a fleshy mass resting on the sodden ground, close to the foot of the steps.
On closer inspection he recognised it as the upper section of a female torso.
The head and arms, including the shoulders, had been severed off cleanly. The immediate
theory was that the woman had been involved in a boating accident and was
cut to pieces by the boat's propeller. After this was eventually ruled out it
dawned on London's police force that this could be the seventh victim of Jack
the Stripper. If you're familiar with my channel, you may remember that back in
June of 2018 I covered the Hammersmith Nudes Murders case. Six known victims
were claimed between 1964 and 1965 by a killer who was never apprehended.
The final known victim, Bridget O'Hara, was found in February of 1965. The state of
the body in this case did not match those in the Nudes Murders, but Chief
Superintendent John Du Rose, who had headed the Nudes Murders investigation,
surmised that it could have been the same killer, and the act of cutting off
the head and arms may have been to delay or prevent identification of the body.
On Wednesday February 23rd 1966, John Du Rose joined detective Superintendent
Jack Mannings at a post-mortem which took place at the Poplar mortuary in
East London. The 10 inch section of chest belonged to a woman, said to be
between 30 and 40 years of age, with dark hair, a 40-42 inch bust and a 34 inch
waist. She was estimated to be five foot six and
she had given birth to at least one child. This section was cut from the base
of the neck to just above the navel with a very sharp blade and surgical
precision. According to the pathologist, the woman did not die of natural causes
before dismemberment. She had certainly been murdered. There was no clothing
found, the body part had been in the water for no longer than four hours, and
death had occurred within 48 hours of it being found. Because the head and arms
had been expertly severed, Scotland Yard were almost certainly looking for
someone with a knowledge of precision cutting, like a surgeon or butcher.
It was eventually decided that the victim was unlikely to be the seventh
victim of Jack the Stripper, as there was ultimately nothing to link her to the
other victims, other than the fact she was found in the Thames. the M.O.s were
just too different. John Du Rose had a little more to do with
the investigation, and detective Superintendent James Graney was left
with the unenviable task of identifying a section of corpse with no means of
identification and catching a killer with no current leads. It was also
impossible to say whether the torso had been dropped into the river at the point
it was found, or if it had been discarded elsewhere upstream. On Monday February
21st the investigation was made public when the story hit the papers. BBC Radio
broadcast details of the find that evening, and made an appeal to the public
for help. Within an hour of the broadcast five women were reported missing to
Scotland Yard. These women haven't been seen for days, but concerns for their
safety were not aroused until the broadcast was made. A further five were
reported missing in the following 24 hours, and the February 24th issue of the
Police Gazette requested information on any women from around the country who
had gone missing in the last few weeks, because of course, there was no guarantee
that the victim was a Londoner. On February 22nd at dawn, 300 police and
frogmen made a sweep of both sides of the Thames from Westminster Bridge to
the Estuary, then extended their search west as far as Teddington in the hope of
finding more body parts. On the same day, the section of torso was taken to the
London Hospital for a more detailed examination by pathologists
Dr. Hugh Johnson and Dr. Eric Cameron.
a vague impression of printed lettering was found on the skin. It was now thought
that the part may have been left to rest on a cardboard box, or wrapped in
newspaper before being discarded. The faint impressions of the letters Y and E
were made out on the front of the body. When the body part was taken to a
Cardiff laboratory for further examination using infrared light, the
letters K E and Y were recognised. They were found to have come from The
Observer newspaper dated February 13th, and had been part of the headline
'Separation from mother can make monkey neurotic'. In earnest, the police made
visits to every house in Wapping to which The Observer was delivered, but no
suspects were found. On Friday March 4th, two weeks after the grim discovery
at Wapping, another section of torso was seen floating in the Thames at Greenhithe,
close to the Nautical College. It's worth mentioning that other reports say
it was found in North Fleet, which is two miles east of Greenhithe. Either way the
body was discovered by workmen on the shore, who noticed it floating between
two barges. This section had been cut and sawn in the same way as the previous
section, and it ran from the navel to the upper thigh. Its location was
approximately 20 miles downstream from where the first section was found.
Later, at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, pathologists confirmed that the two
sections came from the same body. 100 more police officers and ten
dogs were now drafted into searching the Wapping area where the original section
was found. House to house inquiries were also made for miles outside a Wapping
and all empty and abandoned buildings were searched.
London's old bomb sites and wasteland were also investigated to no avail.
Scotland Yard believed at this point that the killer was keeping the sections
of body and discarding of them a piece at a time. 100 more police made a
further search of the shore where the second find was made, but no clues were
found. Then, on Monday March the 7th, at a dock in Raynham, a workmen stumbled
across a section of thigh, about ten inches long.
Pathologists examining the first two finds again concluded that it belonged
to the same person. The following day March the 8th, the river revealed a
small cut-off of human flesh which was found at Grays, eight mile southeast of
Raynham. But this was just a preview of what the Grays region of the river was
hiding. Four days later, on Saturday March the 12th, as police from Kent and Essex
joined forces with London's Murder Squad, detective Superintendent James
Graney received a call from a labourer who had been working on a construction
site at the same foreshore at Grays. The unnamed man had found another body part.
This was a narrower section of torso which included part of the neck and
shoulders. James Graney went to the site and arranged for it to be transported by
car to the London Hospital for analysis, where again it was confirmed to belong
to the same woman. Police presence at the north foreshore of the Thames' east side
was dying down as March 17th approached. Had they stuck around a bit longer, they
may have been the ones to find the putrid, water-logged human leg floating
around a dock in Dagenham, but again it was the dock's workmen who made the grim find.
At first, due to the amount of time it had been in the water, it was hard to
distinguish whether it was human or part of an animal, but inspection found it not
only belonged to a human, but the same human.
The only match that was made public was on Friday March 18th
when police at Wapping received an anonymous tip-off regarding 31-year-old
Brenda Harris. Mrs. Harris left her home near Reading after a family argument,
which was three weeks before the first torso find. Her mother showed police a
letter postmarked Blackheath London that she said her family had received from
Brenda in late February. It said that she was safe and well, but her younger
brother Jeffery was certain that the letter was not written by Brenda. He said
that he knew her handwriting well and it didn't match the letter.
Clealy concerned Brenda's family jumped to the conclusion that she was the woman in question.
Her brother said:
Brenda's husband Allen's response depended on what newspaper you read.
The Newcastle Evening Chronicle was among those who quoted him as simply saying:
But the Evening Express cleared up any confusion, correctly quoting him as saying:
He was referring to Mothers' Day, which was on
March the 20th. However there were a couple of glaring
differences between Brenda Harris and the unidentified woman. Brenda was small
in stature, whereas the section of torso was described by police as belonging to,
quote, "a beefy and well-built woman", thought to be much taller than Mrs.
Harris. Secondly, Mrs. Harris had undergone three cesarean births. At the
time this was thought by the family to be important, but there was no mention by
police of the mystery woman having any signs of such scarring. By April 12th,
however, it was reported that Mrs. Brenda Harris had returned home, safe and well.
A schoolboy who approached police at the riverside, told them that he'd seen,
quote, "a man about seven feet high" get out of his car and throw a large package
into the Thames at the Victoria Embankment. This sparked a frogmen search
of the area, but no further clues were found. After receiving an anonymous call
on March the 7th, Scotland Yard headed to Epping Forest.
They received word that a human head had been found in a lido there.
After frogmen searched the lido, no head was found, and it was strongly believed
that the report was bogus. On Saturday March the 5th, an abandoned dinghy which
appeared to be forcibly jammed beneath a jetty, only 20 yards away from where the
second piece of torso was found, was first thought to be a credible lead.
The blue-and-white craft, which was the kind not usually seen in the Thames, had a
sunset motif on the rear. It was later found to have no link to the case.
There was also a report that on Sunday Febuary the 19th, the day before the first
find, a red mini car pulled up beside the Westminster Embankment, and the occupants,
a group of men, were seen throwing a heavy looking tied up object into the river.
This tip-off was of particular interest because nine men, who all lived alone,
were reported missing from their homes in the Wapping area during the
investigation. Only one of them was found and questioned on March the 6th. He was later
released after it was decided that he had no involvement in the case and had
no information to give. A curious case arose on Wednesday March 2nd when an
unnamed man from, quote, "the north of England" made a phone call to his local
police station stating that he knew the woman and could identify her. The man's
name and exact location was withheld, but it was later found that a woman matching
the description of the torso woman went missing from Liverpool in February of '66.
This may sound like a tedious link, as people go missing all the time up and
down the country, but could the mystery man from the "north
of England" have been referring to the Liverpool woman? Furthermore, did he know
for certain that she was the Thames woman, and was he in fact the killer?
No more information was revealed. I'm afraid to say, my friends, that this is where the
case of the Torso in the Thames goes cold. The last words I could find on the
story were from issues of the Birmingham Post and Daily Mirror, both dated May the
11th 1966. They tell of the inquest which was held in St. Pancras on May the 10th.
At the inquest it was explained that of the 250 women James Graney had
investigated, 17 were possible matches, but with no way of narrowing the list
down any further, an open verdict was recorded by coroner Ian Milne.
It's also acknowledged that the dead woman may not have been reported missing
in the first place, meaning that the 17 remaining women were completely
speculative candidates anyway. The cause of death was not determined, and there
were no clues, other than the expert method used to dismember the body and
the newspaper ink found on the skin. But neither of those things drew the police
any closer to their killer. The most likely candidate was the mystery thin
man in the shabby gray suit, witnessed by fifteen-year-old Diane Hamilton on the
day of the first discovery. But he walked away that day, never to be heard
from again. James Graney made his final plea to the
public in May of 1966:
A human skull found in the Thames at Greenhithe, Kent on July 23rd 1966 was
initially thought to belong to the torso murder victim, especially as it was found
so close to where the second portion of torso was found almost five months before.
But after examination, it was revealed
that the skull had been there for at least three years. I could find no
further information on the skull's identity.
Although this particular story ends here, other similar incidents have occurred over the years. In fact the
River Thames holds a number of dark tales involving the discovery of human
torso. 70 years before the 1966 case there was the famous Thames Torso
Murders, in which the torsos and other body parts from four victims were found
floating or washed up. This case spanned from 1887 to 1889. Only one victim was
identified. The killer or killers were never brought to justice.
The case was well overshadowed by Jack the Ripper's killing spree, and some even
believed, despite the clear differences in method, that Jack the Ripper himself
may have been responsible. The case is covered at length by author MJ Trow in
his 2011 book, The Thames Torso Murders.
On October 5th 1974, the torso of criminal Billy Moseley was washed up on
the shore of the Thames. Other parts of his body washed up over the next 10 days
in what turned out to be a gangland killing. At around the same time, the body
of Micky Cornwall was found in Woodland near Hatfield, 30 miles north of Central
London. The two murders were linked and four people were charged for their roles
in the killings. It was to be one of the most controversial miscarriages of
justice ever seen in Britain. The case was covered in the 1992 Channel 4
documentary The Torso Murders, but as the story carried on well into the late '90s
it was only told in part.
You may already be familiar with the story of 'Adam', the name given to the
unknown African boy whose torso was found floating in the River Thames on
September 21st 2001. It's generally believed that he'd been the victim of a
ritualistic sacrifice. If you've never heard of it and want to learn more, take
a look at Channel 4's documentary Torso in the Thames - Adam's Story.