A hulk of a man is doing his usual bench pressing routine in the afternoon.
400 pounds (181kg), he thinks, not too bad.
He wipes the sweat from his face while looking up at a TV monitor that’s playing a bare-knuckle
boxing match he’s seen eight times already.
A couple of hours ago he got a call from the “Adam’s Family”; not the bunch of spooks
from TV but one of the most vicious and powerful criminal organizations in the UK.
They have a job for him.
With that in mind, he goes into his garage and takes stock of his tools.
Chainsaw, present; ax, present, meat cleaver, present; knives, all there and recently sharpened.
He flexes his bicep and gives it a reassuring grab with his hand, all the time wondering
where he’ll hide the human remains this time.
It doesn’t really matter, he thinks while grinning and shaking his head, the cops are
useless.
His name is Stephen Marshall, a man that will become known as the Jigsaw Killer.
Make no mistake, this man was terrifying.
He was violent to the nth degree.
He dismembered bodies without so much as breaking a sweat.
He left pieces of people all over the south of England, a hideous trail of bread crumbs
for the police to follow.
He was an excellent butcher, too, expertly removing flesh from faces, adroitly cutting
people into little pieces.
When pathologists looked at his work they said it must have been done by someone who’d
worked in their profession.
Like the infamous Jack the Ripper, he knew his way around a human body.
But who was Marshall, and who finally put his macabre jigsaw together?
We don’t know too much about his childhood, so we can’t hypothesize about what might
have happened during his younger years to make him the monster he became.
We do, however, know how he strayed to the dark side.
In the 90s when he was in his early twenties he got into bodybuilding.
He was what the Brits sometimes call a “hard man”, and that led to him getting jobs as
a bouncer.
In the English underworld, being a formidable bouncer might lead to gang connections.
If you are particularly good at breaking noses and not shying away from a man with a weapon
in his hand, it’s possible you could get hired by a criminal gang as a bit of muscle.
That was back in the 90s anyway, the world of British bouncing isn’t so wild these
days.
That’s exactly what happened to Marshall though.
He started doing jobs for the Adam’s crime family, an outfit said to be behind scores
of murders and who racked up millions of pounds.
This family was heavily involved in drug trafficking, extortion, hijacking, and of course the odd
murder.
The problem with killing people is getting rid of the bodies, and that’s certainly
not something criminal millionaires want to do.
It’s not just dirty work, but it can be difficult to do it right.
And it’s not as easy as you might think, not if you want to leave no trace.
That’s why the Adam’s family hired Mr. Marshall.
Body disposal was just a part-time gig for Marshall, though.
Besides working on doors at nightclubs, he also ran a gym at one point in his life that
was apparently very popular with other underworld figures.
Other jobs he had were having his own car-valeting company, and later, working as a kitchen salesman.
It’s said he routinely spent thousands of pounds on drugs and prostitutes throughout
his life, so we’re guessing when he took the salesman job he’d already failed at
his other ventures.
This is a good segue for us to introduce a man named Jeffrey Howe, someone who would
become one of Marshall’s jigsaws.
Howe wasn’t like Marshall in the least, not having any connections to the underworld.
He was rather unhealthy and obese, so not a man you’d instantly think was a gym rat.
The two met because Howe was also a kitchen salesman.
At first, they got along well.
It’s said they were drinking buddies that became the best of friends, although we doubt
Howe knew about his friend’s aptitude for butchering corpses.
In fact, Howe was described by the people that knew him as a kind of Santa Claus character.
He always had a smile on his face and was said by his brother to have a “heart of
gold.”
He was so kind in fact that when Marshall didn’t have a place to stay in 2008, he
said you can stay at my place, for free.
Marshall was quick to take up the offer but then asked if his 21-year old prostitute girlfriend,
Sarah Bush, could stay, too.
Howe obliged.
Ok, so it’s 2008 and the two men plus the young woman are living together.
Howe is 49 and Marshall is 38.
They all liked to drink heavily and occasionally consume illegal substances.
One of those men had a history of violence and was described as “highly volatile.”
What could possibly go wrong…
Well, the couple were a pair of parasites if ever there was one, and Howe being Howe
was impressionable, somewhat lonely after a couple of failed marriages, so he wanted
to help.
He also quite liked the fact that he lived with a friendly and very attractive woman,
as well as a hard man who offered friendship and protection.
When you went to the pub with Marshall, you didn’t get into trouble.
Howe enjoyed this feeling of invulnerability.
But the pair were rinsing him, to use a British expression, meaning taking him for all he
had.
They just asked for more and more, until Howe became somewhat bothered by this.
It might at one point have occurred to him that he was being used.
He even told a friend this.
Meanwhile, he had no idea that by forging his signature the selfish couple was able
to claim housing benefits on a place they pretended to be renting.
At the same time, the couple was aware that the spring of cash they’d been tapping for
six months might dry up.
What to do?
March 9, 2009.
The couple has decided they won’t wait for the cash to dry up and will take what they
want.
They’ll have the apartment, thank you very much, and they’ll take the credit cards
and whatever else Howe owns.
Marshall has already told his partner that getting rid of the body won’t be a problem.
He’s an expert and has done it many times before, he tells her.
He’s going to create a jigsaw, one that will become a confounding case for the cops.
While Howe slept that night, the couple sneaked into his bedroom.
Bush put a pillow over his head to prevent any screams from waking up the neighbors and
Marshall stabbed Howe twice in the neck.
They waited until he bled out, and that was that; job complete.
Now there was a missing man.
When people that were friends with Howe went to the apartment, the couple told them that
he was renting the place out to them and they hadn’t seen him in a while.
They told others that Howe had packed his things and taken off someplace, which didn’t
seem too unusual given that Howe had been a chef in Italy in his past.
The couple pretty much emptied Howe’s bank account and they forged checks in his name.
They sold just about everything of value he owned, including a nice Saab car that they
put on eBay.
They basically lived a life of booze and drugs on tap while eating where they wanted.
Ok, but what about the body of a man that was to say the least on the large side?
Well, Marshall spent 12 hours working on that body, hence the commendable workmanship that
the pathologists would later comment on.
He used the whole gamut of his tools, his chainsaw for the larger cuts, his meat cleaver
for the medium cuts, and a hacksaw and knife for the fiddly bits.
He likely used a knife when he removed the flesh from Howe’s face.
Once the body was dismembered into manageable pieces, Marshall set about leaving bits at
various places in some of the most picturesque spots in the south of England.
You could say his actions were defiling nature, but what did he care, he’d done this before
and had gotten away with it.
Still, Marshall may have been a dab hand at dismemberment, but his hiding skills it seems
were below par.
On March 22, just a couple of weeks after the murder, someone came upon a blue bag ditched
in a hedgerow near a farm in the county of Hertfordshire.
Inside the bag was a left leg with the foot still attached.
The farmer who found it said, “It was all wrapped up in plastic.
I didn’t open the plastic but it was then I realized it was either a joint of meat or
something a lot worse.”
It was soon discovered that whoever that leg belonged to hadn’t been dead long.
It was also assumed that it belonged to someone Asian or Caucasian.
This was just one piece of the jigsaw, and for cops, not much more meaningful than getting
a piece of Adam’s leg in a jigsaw of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.”
They were a long way from seeing the full picture.
Then on March 29 cops were called out to see another piece of the puzzle.
This was a forearm without the hand.
It was actually found in the same county as the last piece, although in a different village.
It was soon understood that this body part belonged to the same person as the leg.
It hadn’t even been buried and was just lying in some grass, so it seemed to the police
that someone might be playing a game with them.
Just two days later, cops were alerted to a grizzlier find.
This was a head with the flesh shorn off.
The eyes, tongue, ears, as well as the neck, had also been removed.
The killer hadn’t tried very hard to hide it since a farmer found it in a cattle pen,
although it was discovered in a different county from the previous two pieces.
Then on April 7, the fourth part of the puzzle was found.
This was a right leg that was recovered from a layby on a busy road in yet another county
in the south of England.
The guy that found it had been driving for a pest control firm and had decided to stop
his van to take a break.
The police were almost certain the body parts were all from the same person.
Going to the public for help solving the case, they announced that the man had two front
teeth missing and that whoever it was had had a fungal infection in one of his toenails.
As for that jigsaw of the Creation of Adam, the cops now had bits of Adam, bits of God,
lots of cloud, but they were still missing the main pieces.
On April 11, they hit the big time.
A hiker had been out walking in one of the nicest areas of England’s green and pleasant
land and had come across a suitcase.
Inside it was Howe’s torso and the other missing body parts.
The only bits of his body missing now were the hands, but hey, isn’t there always a
darned missing piece in every jigsaw.
They were never found, although Marshall later said he’d ditched them in woodland in the
county of Essex.
The cops still didn’t know who the dead man was, but at least they had a picture to
look at.
They said he was overweight, had a problem with eczema, and had bleached skin pigmentation
on both of his legs.
At the time, though, they didn’t tell the public the body wasn’t all in one piece.
They thought that might worry folks a bit too much.
On April 21, Howe’s mother called the cops and reported a missing person.
This wasn’t because she thought her son had been killed, only that she was concerned.
Still, when the police heard her description of Howe things added up.
They went around to his apartment and busted in since there wasn’t anyone home.
They didn’t find any evidence of the murder and dismemberment that had taken place there,
but they found Howe’s passport.
Marshall and his girlfriend later told the cops that Howe was alive and had just taken
off someplace, but after the police got Howe’s dental records the game was pretty much up.
This is what the cop who arrested them said, “Marshall was very, very nervous, jittery,
his leg was shaking.
Sarah Bush was uncomfortable, and at that point, I knew that Jeffrey Howe was going
to be our victim.”
Once forensics got to work, traces of Howe’s blood were found all over the apartment.
T-shirt fibers found on duct tape that was used to wrap one of the body parts also matched
a t-shirt of Marshall’s.
If that wasn’t enough, CCTV showed Marshall’s car traveling to all the spots where the body
parts were found.
The game was certainly up now, although at first, the couple denied the murder.
Marshall pleaded guilty to perverting the cause of justice by lying about Howe being
alive and well, and he also admitted to cutting up the body, but he denied the murder.
Bush denied everything but said she was only with Marshall because she was scared to leave
him.
Then witnesses came forward who said they’d heard Marshall brag about his dismemberment
skills.
It was also revealed that Howe had told someone that Marshall had threatened to kill him if
he didn’t leave the apartment.
At the time, Howe thought Marshall was just kidding.
Marshall then shocked everyone when he did an about-turn.
He changed his plea to guilty and then even owned up to cutting up bodies on four occasions
for the notorious Adam’s family.
Such an admission meant he would have to watch his back for the rest of the 36 years he spent
in prison.
Such a powerful family could make sure someone died between prison walls.
Maybe the only reason he’s alive today is that he never said whose bodies he’d disposed
of.
That, or he’s kept away from the prison general population.
Bush tried to say that she had only acted out of fear of Marshall, although the judge
didn’t buy it.
He said to her, “You were well aware of what Stephen Marshall had done.
You took advantage of Mr. Howe in life and then after his death you used his money.”
Still, she was given a lenient sentence and was out in just under four years.
Marshall is in prison now and could get out in 2046, but that will be up to the parole
board.
If you want to hear more about British killers watch, “The Most Evil Serial Killer Couple
of All Time - Fred and Rose.”
Or, watch this, “Most Evil Prisoner Kept in Glass Box.”