At 6 a.m. on of 1 October 1888, a carpenter employed by the firm J. Grover & Sons was working on the foundations of a new building in Whitehall. Frederick Windborn walked down the ramp into the basement and passed through the 30ft-long vault to a recess where he kept his tools. Groping in the darkness, he felt something strange, which on inspection with a lighted match appeared to be a neatly wrapped parcel measuring roughly 2ft by 2.5ft. If he also noticed the maggots crawling about the place, his curiosity was not aroused sufficiently to investigate. It was only on the following day, after chatting about it with a colleague on his lunch break, that it was decided to take a closer look. It was not, as Windborn had thought, a lump of old bacon, but the decomposed body of a woman enclosed in a piece of black petticoat and tied up with string. The head, arms and legs were missing, and the spine had been sawn through above the pelvis. The Times described it as a ‘horrible spectacle’ but went on to say that the victim appeared to be ‘a remarkably fine young woman’. All the circumstances pointed to murder. But why leave the body on a busy construction site? Although there were no guards at night, the area was surrounded by an 8ft-tall hoarding and was closed to the public. Was the reason connected to the building itself? This new edifice was to become known as New Scotland Yard, the home of the Metropolitan Police.
The decision to move from the old headquarters at No.4 Whitehall Place had been taken in 1885 when it became clear that more space was needed. They chose a site which encompassed 70,000 sq. ft of land on the Victoria Embankment; it had been sold by the Metropolitan Board of Works for the building of a National Opera House. Work had begun to designs by the architect Norman Shaw, but when that scheme ran into trouble the police raised a £200,000 loan to take over the project and asked Shaw to adapt his plans. The result was a striking building of red brick dressed with 2,500 tons of white Portland stone hewn by the convicts at Dartmoor. The circular turrets at the corners and thick square chimneys on the roof gave it the appearance of a castle crossed with a Victorian mansion. When it finally opened in 1890, the legend of ‘The Whitehall Mystery’ only added to its Gothic stylings.
Other workers at the site testified that they had not seen the parcel on 28/29 September, yet the presence of maggots indicated that it had lain there for weeks. The medical evidence suggested that death could have taken place earlier that month, but a piece of newspaper used to wrap the body was dated 24 August 1888. Detectives searched the vaults for further body parts on 3 October. They found nothing, but they were lucky to escape with their lives when a 4-ton steam crane at the site toppled from its 150ft-high platform through the first floor to the very spot where the remains had been discovered the previous day. As one newspaper reported:
The detectives in the vault, hearing the crashing overhead and loud cries of warning, rushed out into the open, just in time to see the engine bury itself in the ground upon which but an instant before they had been standing. The heavy machinery fell within 2ft of a constable who did not manage to escape so quickly, and then the boiler burst with a loud report, flooding the surrounding ground with hot water.
Further pieces of the puzzle emerged when the torso was matched to a right arm found three weeks earlier. On 11 September, shortly before 1 p.m., a group of labourers came across a pale object wrapped in string on the north shore of the Thames near the railway bridge off Grosvenor Road and Ebury Bridge Road. The police were called and the arm was passed on to Dr Thomas Bond, who would later play a part in the Whitechapel murder investigation. He concluded it had been removed after death and had belonged to a Caucasian woman of around twenty years of age.
On 6 October it was reported that a woman’s leg had been found in Guildford, but two days later this was discounted as belonging to a bear. A more startling discovery was made on 17 October when a news agency journalist visited the building site with a dog. If the police detectives from A Division had made a thorough examination of the scene, it was shown to be inadequate in spectacular fashion when the Russian terrier indicated a 7ft-wide recess on the opposite side from the location of the torso. Digging into the ground by candlelight, they found first a left leg and then, a few inches deeper, the left arm. Dr Bond believed the leg had been there for weeks, perhaps six, and had been cut from the body after death. As to how the woman died, he was unable to offer up an explanation. The jury returned a verdict of found dead rather than wilful murder, preferring to leave the mystery to the police. As The Times reported:
The jury had before them the surmise that no one would so mutilate a body except for the purpose of concealing an identity, which once established might lead to the detection of a terrible murder. The body, it was clear, was a woman above twenty-five years of age, who had not died of a disease … but beyond that fact they could not go except by supposition.
The dismemberment of the Whitehall victim suggested some knowledge of anatomy, while the finding of the separate parts at different locations and times suggested a deliberate attempt to conceal a crime. The killer’s methods were similar to those used in another case the previous year, in Rainham, Essex. On 11 May 1887, a lighter-man spotted part of a human torso floating in the water. The head, arms, upper chest and legs were missing. By 1 July, the police had recovered eleven separate body parts from stretches of the Thames in Temple and Battersea, and in the Regent’s Park Canal near St Pancras. As in the Whitehall case, the head was never recovered. When pieced together they formed a dark-haired Caucasian woman aged between twenty-five and forty and around 5ft 3in tall. There was no obvious cause of death and the inquest jury returned a verdict of found dead.
Links have been drawn from both cases to the ‘Thames Mysteries’ of September 1873 and June 1874. In the first case, parts of a woman’s body were recovered at Battersea, Nine Elms and Woolwich. While the head was again missing, the face and scalp washed up on the shore at Limehouse. In the second case, a headless body with one leg and no arms was recovered from the riverbank at Putney. And the headless torsos did not stop at Whitehall. In June 1889, a riverside labourer pulled in a female torso wrapped in an apron at Horsleydown in Southwark. Other parts – but not the head – were found in the river at Battersea, Nine Elms and Limehouse. A section of the torso was left in Battersea Park and the right thigh was spotted in the garden of the Shelley estate, which may have been the killer’s deliberate nod to Frankenstein’s monster, or entirely coincidental. Unlike the other mysteries, the victim in this case was identified as Elizabeth Jackson, a suspected prostitute whose family were living in Chelsea. Three months later another torso, complete with both arms, was found by a police officer under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, off Backchurch Lane in Whitechapel. The head and legs were never recovered. While the murder was at first feared to be the work of the Ripper, it had more similarities with the Thames cases due to the severing of the head and legs by knife and saw. In 1894, Chief Constable Sir Melville MacNaghten grouped together the Pinchin Street discovery with Rainham, Whitehall and Elizabeth Jackson.84
It was not unusual to find a dead body floating in the Thames in the 1880s. In 1888 there were several reports of ‘mysterious deaths’ connected to the river. In May a five-year-old boy was found drowned off the Shadwell Basin. He had last been seen going for a walk with his mother, but they never returned. The mother was never traced. In August, a number of witnesses saw twenty-four-year-old Alfred Cooper dive off London Bridge for a 10s bet. He never surfaced and the jury returned a verdict of accidental death.85
Statistics for 1882 show 544 corpses were recovered from the Thames and open verdicts were returned in 277 of those cases. Without obvious signs of injury, it was difficult to reach a firm conclusion about the cause of death and many of the deceased were never identified. The discovery of a severed arm might suggest a ‘revolting murder’ or ‘a grim joke by some medical student’. In 1888, The Times noted that:
… a remarkable feature in the case of the discovery of the mutilated body at Whitehall is the number of missing women brought to the notice of the authorities by persons making inquiries respecting the remains. It is thus shown that very many women leave their friends without communicating with them and pass out of sight of those nearest to them.
It also reported that there were ‘an average number of mysterious disappearances of women’ that year. In 1887, there were 18,004 reported missing persons, of whom 9,203 were restored to their friends and eighty-five were suicides. That left a total of 8,716 people unaccounted for in London. Often the job of tracking them down was left to private detectives, who widely advertised in books, magazines and newspapers of the day.86
There were also many other reports of women being dismembered and their body parts being dumped around the capital in the nineteenth century. The head of Hannah Brown was found at the Regent’s Canal near Edgware Road in 1836, and the torso and legs of Julia Martha Thomas were recovered from a box washed up on the shore at Barnes in 1879 (the skull remained missing until it was dug up in Richmond in 2010). A woman’s head was found in a mews off Tottenham Court Road in 1884. However, the victims were not just women – in 1857 a carpetbag full of male body parts was found at Waterloo Bridge. He was never identified.
But if there was a second serial killer in operation in London in 1888, their crimes were completely overshadowed by events in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The discovery of the torso at the new police building was relegated to twelfth in The Times contents page on 3 October, first place going to ‘The East End Murders’ and the identifications of the victims Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. In between, there were reports on the Paris theatres, the Church Congress and the new German Emperor Wilhelm II. There were few similarities between the Ripper murders and the Whitehall mystery, but that did not stop the newspapers suggesting a connection. The speculation was enough to prompt somebody to send a letter to the Central News Agency on 5 October:
Dear Friend, In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit for ever. Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped. Will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke well well Jack’s a very practical joker ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat. Yours truly Jack the Ripper.
If there was a ‘Thames Torso’ murderer killing women, cutting them up and disposing of the parts separately, it is possible that they claimed a second victim in 1888. On the morning of 28 September, a boy walking past the Blind School on Lambeth Road in Southwark noticed a parcel on the grass behind the railings. It contained the decomposed arm of a woman. No other body parts appear to have been recovered and while it was initially thought to belong to the torso at Whitehall, the finding of both arms for that woman suggested this third limb belonged to yet another victim. Or it may have been an impudent act of body disposal rather than a murderr. Likewise, the placing of a woman’s torso, arm and leg in the vaults of New Scotland Yard may just have been a morbid joke at the expense of the police. ‘It seems a strange fatality that the site of the future home of the Metropolitan Police should have been tainted with undiscovered crime,’ wrote the authors of an 1889 book on the history of the force. ‘Let us hope that this is not a bad augury.’87