26

‘I could forgive extravagance or anything else but infidelity – never’

Lancaster, 1935

When brother and sister Susan and Alfred Johnston stopped to admire the scenery at Gardenholm Linn near Moffat in Dumfriesshire on 29 September 1935, they were surprised to spot what appeared to be a newspaper-wrapped parcel lying near a fast-flowing stream. When the parcel was opened and found to contain an arm, the police began an intensive search of the eighty-foot-deep ravine and soon discovered several more packages, each containing human remains.

Over the next few days, the police and members of the public continued to find packets of flesh wrapped either in newspaper, bed sheets or garments. It was first thought that there could be as many as five dismembered bodies scattered in the ravine but when the gruesome contents of the parcels were painstakingly pieced together at the mortuary in Moffat, it was determined that there were in fact only two bodies – those of an elderly man and a much younger woman, although also found among the remains was a single, large eye, described as a ‘Cyclops eye’. The two corpses were badly mutilated and eyes, ears, noses, lips, most of the fingers, fingernails and other possible identifying features had been removed.

On 1 October, the Chief Constable of Dumfriesshire issued a statement to the press. He confirmed that the body parts had been examined by Professor John Glaister of Glasgow University and Mr John Millar of Edinburgh University, who had established that they were the remains of a man and a woman, thought to have died around ten days earlier. The man was described as ‘probably elderly’, well-nourished, muscular and about 5ft 8in tall. Little more than decayed stumps remained of his teeth and it was believed that he may have worn at least one false tooth. The unidentified woman was roughly six inches shorter and stockily built, with ‘well kept’ feet and hands, dark brown hair and prominent buck teeth. The chief constable confirmed that the police forces of Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire were co-operating in a fingertip search of the ravine, during which it was intended to drain pools and hack down undergrowth, in the hope of locating the still missing trunk, feet and right upper arm of the male corpse and the woman’s right forearm and hand.

However, on 10 October, the police issued amended descriptions of the bodies, now stating that they were the remains of a man aged around sixty and a woman aged approximately twenty-five and, only two days later, they announced that the remains were actually those of two women, who they referred to as ‘Body 1’ and ‘Body 2’. ‘Body 1’ was a plump, well-developed woman, aged twenty to twenty-five, who would have been less than 5ft tall in life. Although it was not possible to determine the cause of the young woman’s death, she had bruising on her face and arms and had received at least two blows on her head from a blunt instrument that would have been sufficient to render her unconscious but would have been unlikely to prove fatal. ‘Body 2’ was described as well-developed and large chested, around 5ft tall and between thirty-five and forty years old. Since the hyoid bone in her neck was broken, it was believed that the woman had been manually strangled and the bodies had been dissected with a degree of dexterity, suggesting that the person responsible for cutting them up had both medical knowledge and surgical skill.

Unable to identify the two deceased women, the police turned their attention to the newspapers in which many of the body parts were wrapped, finding that one was what was known as a ‘slip edition’, covering the crowning of the Morecambe Carnival Queen. Only 3,700 copies had been printed and these had been distributed exclusively in Lancashire. Enquiries in that area revealed that a Mr and Mrs Rogerson from Morecambe had reported their daughter Mary missing on 9 October.

Mary Jane Rogerson was twenty years old and worked as a nursemaid in the household of a Parsee doctor, Bukhtyar Rustomji Rantanji Hakim. Having come from India to Edinburgh to study for further qualifications, Hakim, who had already attained the rank of captain in the Indian Medical Service, adopted the name Gabriel Hakim and, after deciding to settle in England, eventually changed his name by deed poll to Dr Buck Ruxton.

While studying, Ruxton befriended the manageress of an Edinburgh café. Isabella Van Ess (or Van Est) was married, but lived apart from her Dutch husband and quickly became infatuated with the dashing Indian doctor and, when he left Edinburgh for London in 1928, she followed him shortly afterwards. Isabella obtained a divorce in October of that year and the couple’s first daughter was born in 1929.

In 1930, Ruxton purchased a medical practice in Lancaster and he and Isabella set up home with their daughter at Dalton Square, engaging Mary Jane Rogerson to act as a nursemaid a year later. Apart from a six-month gap in her employment in 1932, Mary remained with the family for the births of another daughter and a son and by 1935 was the only live-in domestic servant, although several cleaning ladies were employed to assist her with the domestic duties.

Mary remained strongly attached to her parents, who lived in Morecambe and she would invariably visit her father James and stepmother Jessie on her days off. Mary’s last visit to her home was on 12 September, which was her half-day. After taking tea with her family, Mary enjoyed an afternoon out with them in Morecambe, leaving to return to Lancaster at about six o’clock in the evening. Three days later, Dr Ruxton visited Mary’s home to inform her parents that Mary had gone on holiday to Edinburgh with Mrs Ruxton. Mr and Mrs Rogerson were out at the time of the doctor’s visit but he spoke to their lodger, William Risby, who passed on the message when the Rogersons returned home.

Although Mary normally telephoned her parents regularly, Dr Ruxton’s message allayed the Rogersons’ concerns as the days passed and they heard nothing from their daughter. However, Ruxton again arrived at the Rogersons’ home unexpectedly on 25 September and informed Jessie that he did not know Mary’s whereabouts. He told Mary’s worried parents that their daughter had been associating with a laundry boy and was pregnant and that Mrs Ruxton had taken the girl away, ‘to see if they can do anything about it.’ Ruxton revealed that he had no idea where his wife and servant were but assured Mary’s family that he was trying his best to find out.

When there was still no word from Mary by the following week, the Rogersons visited Ruxton at his practice and were told that Mrs Ruxton may have run away from home and taken Mary with her. ‘Mary has been deceiving me, in conjunction with my wife,’ Ruxton explained, adding, ‘I sometimes feel I could choke them both.’ When Mr and Mrs Rogerson challenged the doctor, he quickly backpedalled, reassuring them that he was so frantically worried about Isabella that sometimes he didn’t know what he was saying and adding that, of course, he would never choke Mary. Over the following few days, the Rogersons contacted Ruxton several more times in an effort to find their daughter until on 9 October, the day after Mary’s twentieth birthday had passed with no contact with her family, they called in to the police station at Lancaster and officially reported her missing.

The following morning, a police officer happened to be at Lancaster Station at 4 a.m. and saw Dr Ruxton getting off the Edinburgh train. Inspector Clark offered Ruxton a lift home and as the two chatted during the drive, Ruxton explained that he had been to Edinburgh to look for his wife. Clark asked if he had been successful, to which Ruxton replied that he had visited his wife’s sister and learned that she had no knowledge of Isabella’s whereabouts.

Ruxton then began to tell Clark that he suspected that Isabella was having an affair with Lancaster solicitor Robert J. Edmondson. Ruxton related that on 7 September, Isabella had asked to borrow the car for a trip to Edinburgh. According to Ruxton, he grew suspicious and hired a car and, having followed his wife, he tracked her to the Adelphi Hotel in Edinburgh, where she allegedly booked in under the name of ‘Mrs Buxton’, spending the night in a double room with Edmondson.

The evening after his conversation with Clark, Ruxton went to the police station and asked them to make ‘discreet inquiries’ into the whereabouts of his wife, who he said had left him on 15 September, taking Mary Rogerson with her. Although Ruxton told Chief Constable Vann that he was perfectly willing to answer any questions, he specifically asked the police to publish a statement denying that his wife and nursemaid’s disappearance was in any way connected with the discovery of two bodies in Moffat, claiming that rumours to the contrary were adversely affecting his medical practice.

It was no secret that the relationship between Buck and Isabella was a volatile one and that Dr Ruxton was exceedingly jealous of his wife, frequently accusing her of infidelity. Maids Charlotte Smith, Vera Skelton and Eliza Hunter all left the couple’s employ on account of the constant violent quarrels between them and in April 1934 and again in May 1935 Isabella made formal complaints to the police against her husband. On both occasions, Detective Sergeant Stainton described Ruxton’s reaction as extreme. He sobbed, waved his arms in the air, foamed at the mouth and behaved like a madman, telling the police that his wife was meeting other men and threatening to kill Isabella and her supposed lover.

By the beginning of September 1935, the focus of Ruxton’s obsession was Robert Edmondson, the unmarried son of friends of the Ruxton family. On 6 September 1935, Isabella called at the Edmondson family home for a visit and it was arranged that Mr and Mrs Edmondson and their son and daughter would accompany Isabella on a trip to Edinburgh the next day. The party set off in two cars, Isabella driving her husband’s Hillman Minx with the two Edmondson women and Robert following with his father in Robert’s Austin. On arriving at Edinburgh, they took four rooms at the Adelphi Hotel, one occupied by Mr and Mrs Edmondson and the remaining three occupied by Robert, his sister and Isabella. What none of the party realised was that they had been followed from Lancaster by Ruxton.

On 14 September, Isabella again borrowed her husband’s car this time driving to Blackpool and meeting her sisters, Mrs Nelson and Mrs Madden, who had travelled from Edinburgh to see the famous illuminations. The three women spent the evening together, with Isabella leaving at about 11.30 p.m., arriving home just after midnight. In their mother’s absence, Mary Rogerson cared for the Ruxton children, who were having a tea party with two friends. The mother of the Jackson children collected them at 7.30 p.m., at which time Mary was ‘alive, well and happy.’

Cleaning lady Mrs Oxley was expected at the Ruxtons’ home on the morning of 15 September but at 6.30 a.m. Dr Ruxton arrived at her house, telling her not to bother coming in to work that day. Less than three hours later, a woman tried to deliver newspapers to the house in Dalton Square and was surprised when, after a long delay, Ruxton himself answered the door instead of the cleaning lady or the maid. Miss Roberts described Ruxton as looking very agitated as he explained that his wife and maid were away in Scotland. At ten o’clock, a woman delivering milk to the house noticed that Ruxton had a bandaged hand, which he claimed to have cut while opening a tin of peaches and, half an hour later, one of the ‘slip’ newspapers was delivered to Ruxton’s door. By mid-morning, Ruxton had visited two garages and purchased eight gallons of petrol, four in his car’s fuel tank and the remainder in tins.

At 11 a.m., a woman arrived at Ruxton’s house with her young son, expecting the boy to have a pre-arranged minor operation. Ruxton answered the door and apologised profusely to Mrs Whiteside, claiming that his wife was in Scotland and he was unable to operate without her assistance. ‘There is just myself and the maid,’ he explained, adding that they were busy taking up carpets, ready for the arrival of decorators the next morning. At 11.30 a.m., Ruxton rounded up his three children and took them to the home of a family friend at Morecambe, asking if he could leave them there for the day.

Three cleaning ladies regularly worked for the Ruxtons but, rather than contacting one of them, when Ruxton returned to Lancaster he went to see one of his patients and asked for her help to prepare for the arrival of decorators next day. Mr Hampshire, who had never been inside the doctor’s house, found the staircase littered with straw and the carpets removed and partially burned in the yard, along with a man’s shirt and some towels. The bathroom was in a particularly filthy condition, the enamel of the bath grubby and yellowed and there were bloodstains and splashes throughout the house.

At 4 p.m., Ruxton went back to his friend at Morecambe and arranged for the children to stay the night. Having cleaned the house for Dr Ruxton, Mrs Hampshire was told that she could take the carpets and a bloodstained blue suit, if they were of any use to her. ‘I had it on this morning when I cut my hand,’ explained Dr Ruxton, assuring Mrs Hampshire that it was a good suit and she could easily have it cleaned. However, later that night, the doctor apparently had second thoughts. He went back to Mrs Hampshire’s house and barged in without knocking, picking up the suit from a chair and insisting on taking it to get it cleaned. When Mrs Hampshire protested, Ruxton demanded a pair of scissors and asked her to cut out a tag in the suit bearing the maker’s name and his own name. Although Mrs Hampshire offered to do it later, Ruxton insisted on supervising the removal of the label and disposing of it on the fire.

When the Ruxtons’ regular cleaning ladies Mrs Oxley, Mrs Smith and Mrs Curwen returned to the house, all noticed spots and smears of blood on the walls, stairs and curtains. Carpets had been removed and, after a succession of fires in his back yard, Ruxton finally sent one of the cleaners out for eau de cologne, which he sprayed liberally throughout the house.

By 14 October, the police were becoming more and more certain that the bodies in Moffat were those of Isabella Ruxton and her maid and began to dig up the back yard of the house in Dalton Square looking for the missing torso of ‘Body 1’, believed to be that of Mary Rogerson. Although whoever had dismembered the women’s bodies had taken great care to try and remove any identifying features, there appeared to be connections between the two bodies and the missing women. Mary had a distinctive pattern of four vaccination marks on her left arm, as did ‘Body 1’. A cast taken from the left foot exactly fitted one of Mary’s shoes and fingerprints from the corpse’s still intact left hand matched those found at the Ruxtons’ residence. Isabella Ruxton was known to suffer from humped toes and a bunion on her left foot. Although the toes had been removed and the bunion cut out, an X-ray taken of ‘Body 2’ showed characteristic inflammation on what remained of the left foot, suggesting the presence of a bunion and a cast of the right foot exactly fitted Isabella Ruxton’s shoes. Some of the body parts were wrapped in a sheet that exactly matched the one on Mrs Ruxton’s bed and Jessie Rogerson was able to identify a blouse that she had given her stepdaughter, which had also been used as wrapping. Although no body parts were found at Dalton Square, the police removed a flight of six stairs, bannisters, stair rods and linoleum from the house, which were sent to Professor Glaister for forensic testing. In addition, photographs of the missing women were superimposed onto X-rays of their skulls and found to be a perfect fit, although legally this could not be taken as conclusive evidence of identity.

The police soon had sufficient evidence against Dr Buck Ruxton to charge him with the murders of his wife and Mary Jane Rogerson, which he categorically denied. However, when he appeared at Lancaster Police Court on 26 November 1935 to face two charges of wilful murder, the prosecution announced their intention of calling more than 100 witnesses and produced more than 200 pieces of physical evidence. After a magisterial hearing lasting almost three weeks, Ruxton was committed for trial at the next Manchester Assizes and sent to Strangeways Gaol to await the start of the proceedings.

The trial opened in March 1936 before Mr Justice Singleton and Ruxton was charged only with the murder of his wife, Isabella. The court was told that the couple were initially infatuated with each other but their relationship gradually deteriorated because of Ruxton’s unfounded jealousy. The couple’s former maid, Eliza Hunter, witnessed some of the couple’s violent arguments and told the court that on one occasion when Isabella left her husband, he threatened, ‘She won’t come back alive. I will bring her back to the mortuary.’ Eliza claimed in court to have witnessed Dr Ruxton trying to strangle his wife and holding a knife to her throat and another maid claimed to have found a revolver under Ruxton’s pillow and heard Ruxton screaming at Isabella, ‘You are a dirty prostitute.’

Witness after witness was called to demonstrate that Ruxton had blown up the tiniest incidents out of all proportion, to such an extent that he had convinced himself that his wife was unfaithful. The fact that Robert Edmondson occasionally gave Isabella a lift to the local public baths, where she was taking swimming lessons, was sufficient to convince her husband that the couple were having an affair and when she went on an innocent excursion to Edinburgh with Robert and his parents and sister, Ruxton went as far as to hire a car so that he could follow her, hoping for concrete evidence that she was deceiving him.

Counsel for the prosecution Joseph Cooksey Jackson KC forwarded a theory that a violent row broke out between Isabella and her husband when she returned from visiting her sisters in Blackpool in the early hours of 15 September, during which she was beaten and strangled. It was thought that Mary Rogerson heard Isabella screaming and rushed to her assistance, only to be killed herself having witnessed Isabella’s murder.

It was suggested that Buck Ruxton then went into a frenzy of activity in an effort to conceal the two murders and cover up his crimes. He cut up the women’s bodies in the bathtub, in order to delay their identification and to make them easier to transport. Jackson offered two possible explanations for the cut on Ruxton’s hand, which he claimed to have done while opening a tin of peaches. Pointing out that there were no tins of peaches opened or otherwise found at Dalton Square, Jackson suggested that Ruxton had either cut himself accidentally while carving up the bodies or had deliberately slashed open his own hand to account for the bloodstains throughout the house.

Mrs Hampshire was called to testify about helping to clean the house in the aftermath of the killings. Having fainted in the witness box, she went on to claim that Ruxton had told her, ‘My wife has gone away with another man and left me with three children. A man comes to your house as a friend and you treat him as one; he eats from your table and makes love to your wife behind your back. It’s terrible. I could forgive extravagance or anything else but infidelity – never.’

A letter written by Dr Ruxton to Isabella’s sister was read to the court. Postmarked 6 October 1935, the letter to Mrs Jean Kerr Nelson was signed ‘Yours affectionately, Bommie’ and informed her that the writer was ‘broken-hearted and half mad’ because Isabella had left him. Ruxton told his wife’s sister that Isabella had taken rooms in Blackburn and spent more than £100 on clothes and furnishings, as well as owing almost £22 in gambling debts to a Lancaster bookmaker. Ruxton wrote that his wife was intending to go into business running a football pools scheme. ‘I am afraid I cannot knock sense into her. She is highly impulsive and thinks she can be a millionaire overnight,’ the letter continued, adding that Isabella was trying to help their maid who was ‘in a certain condition.’ Ruxton claimed that Isabella had been seen in Birmingham and could be intending to go to Canada. He complained, ‘I am simply distracted. I simply cannot keep my mind on my practice. You must ask her on your own to get her to come back to me.’

When it came to the forensic evidence, the jury was handed several volumes of photographs of the disarticulated remains found at Moffat. Professor Glaister testified that, in his estimation, if a person was uninterrupted and without fatigue, if he was dexterous and had decent lighting and sharp implements, he would be able to carve up a corpse such as ‘Body 2’ in around five hours. It was Glaister’s opinion that ‘Body 2’ had died from strangulation.

Glaister confirmed the presence of ‘mammalian blood’ in the bath outlet pipe and identified stains on linoleum, wood, a cupboard door and Ruxton’s blue suit as ‘human blood or human protein’. Under cross-examination by Norman Birkett KC for the defence, Glaister conceded that, after attempting to reconstruct the two bodies, he and Millar were left with forty-three portions of flesh of varying sizes, which they were unable to assign to either corpse. The most unusual of these was the so-called ‘Cyclops eye’, and it was suggested that this might have been a freak of nature – the sole remaining portion of a deformed foetus carried by Mary Rogerson. Glaister stated that in the opinion of the pathologists, the eye was ‘undoubtedly the product of a monstrous birth of some kind’, adding that such a condition was common in pigs and, in spite of rigorous testing, they did not believe that it was human and could not satisfactorily explain its presence among the remains.

On the ninth day of the trial, Ruxton took the witness stand in his own defence. He tearfully described himself and Isabella as ‘The sort of people who could not live with each other or without each other.’ The doctor admitted quarrelling with his wife, but said that their fights were only occasional and were always followed by ‘more than intimate’ reconciliations.

Dr Ruxton explained his former maid’s allegation that she had seen him throttling Isabella, telling the court that the maid had actually interrupted the couple while they were making love and had jumped to the wrong conclusion. He denied ever having threatened Isabella, although admitted that, on occasions, he had accused her of infidelity and might have said things ‘in a passion’ that he didn’t really mean.

Ruxton offered an explanation for all of the prosecution’s evidence against him. He explained the presence of blood on the stairs by relating that Isabella had fallen on the landing in 1932 and suffered a miscarriage. When it was put to Ruxton that he killed his wife after her return from Blackpool, the doctor sobbed, ‘It is a deliberate, fantastic story. You might as well say the sun was rising in the west and setting in the east.’ When questioned about the death of Mary Rogerson, the doctor dismissed the suggestion that he had murdered her as ‘Bunkum with a capital B.’

In total, Ruxton was to spend almost eight hours in the witness box, at times becoming very emotional and overwrought. His defence was that the bodies found at Moffat were not those of his wife and maid and, even if they were, he had nothing to do with their deaths. The only real evidence linking the remains to the Ruxton household was fingerprints that matched those taken from the left hand of ‘Body 1’ and, on examining photographs taken on the left hand, Birkett suggested that the pictures clearly showed that a ring had been worn on the ring finger.

‘If the hand and arm of “Body 1” are wrongly assigned, it would be plain that you are dealing with three bodies?’ he questioned Professor Glaister. However, all the medical witnesses were certain that the left and right arms of ‘Body 1’ were a pair and that there were too many points of similarity between the dentition and vaccination marks of Mary Rogerson and ‘Body 1’ for the identification to be in doubt.

It remained only for the opposing counsels and the judge to sum up the case for the jury. For the prosecution, Jackson dealt with the evidence of identity of the Moffat bodies, reminding the jury that a blouse mended by Jessie Rogerson, a pair of rompers belonging to the Ruxton children and a portion of sheet from Mrs Ruxton’s bed were all found with the human remains. Given the presence of an identical manufacturing fault in the hem of the sheet on Mrs Ruxton’s bed and that in which the legs and feet belonging to ‘Body 1’ were wrapped, Jackson contended that there was absolutely no doubt about the identity of the two Moffat bodies and proposed that a happy woman would never have left her husband and more especially her children.

Describing Ruxton as emotional and violent, Jackson suggested that the doctor had got the idea that his wife was having an affair with Robert Edmondson into his head and believed that the couple had shared a room at the Adelphi Hotel in Edinburgh. When Isabella returned from visiting her sisters at Blackpool, Ruxton wrongly assumed that she had been with her lover and a violent quarrel ensued. Jackson believed that, in the throes of a jealous rage, Ruxton seized Isabella by the throat and strangled her, killing Mary when she tried to protect her mistress.

For the defence, Birkett reminded the jury that it was the duty of the prosecution to prove his client guilty beyond all reasonable doubt and, in Birkett’s view, this had not been accomplished. Even if the jury was satisfied that the bodies in the ravine were those of Isabella Ruxton and Mary Jane Rogerson that did not necessarily mean that Dr Buck Ruxton’s was the hand that killed them. Birkett went on to dispute the evidence of Mrs Hampshire, Mrs Oxley, Mrs Curwen and Mrs Smith. Each of the women had entered the house several times after 15 September – the day of the supposed murders. They had seen the stairs, walls and carpets, cans of petrol and the fires in the yard and yet, at the time, not one of them had reported any suspicion of any wrongdoing having taken place. There was contradictory evidence regarding fires in the back yard, where Ruxton was said to have destroyed evidence and, although Ruxton was said to have driven 100 miles to dispose of skulls, bones, limbs and flesh in a ravine, not a single spot of blood was found in his car.

Nobody questioned Dr Ruxton’s affection for his three children yet, according to the prosecution, he had killed and chopped up their mother and nursemaid while they were in the house. Not only that but he had supposedly given away bloodstained items, such as his suit and carpets. While in the witness box, Ruxton asked, ‘Would I be such a fool as to give away my coat, trousers and waistcoat if I had committed a murder? Why would I not burn them?’

Mr Justice Singleton instructed the jury to ensure that the defendant was given the benefit of any reasonable doubts they might entertain. It was not for Ruxton to explain why his wife and Mary Rogerson had left him and the children, nor for him to show how or when they went. It was sufficient for Ruxton to say, ‘I did not kill my wife. She and Mary left on the Sunday morning and I thought they were going to Edinburgh. I have not heard from them since.’ It was clear, continued Singleton, that there were quarrels from time to time, as indeed there were in almost all marriages. Yet the fact that two people quarrel does not mean that one kills another.

The judge admitted that he found it strange that Isabella had not turned to her sister and that, given Mary’s closeness to her family, it was almost inconceivable that she would suddenly cut off all contact with them. Most surprisingly, since both Isabella and Mary purported to love the Ruxton children, neither woman had sent so much as a postcard and Singleton also found it strange that Mary would go away leaving her nightdress on a chair in her room. ‘I don’t suppose she is one who had many nightdresses,’ mused the judge. The judge also referred to the child’s romper suit found with the remains, asking if Isabella and Mary had left of their own accord, why would they have taken the rompers?

Singleton questioned why a man with a serious cut on his hand would suddenly start pulling up stair carpets ready for decorators, who had not yet been booked. The judge reminded the jury of the soiled bath and asked whether a miscarriage and a cut hand could have accounted for the amount of blood found on the stair carpets. Finally, Singleton commended the medical witnesses, describing them as ‘scrupulously fair’. He dismissed the so-called ‘Cyclops eye’, intimating that it had little to do with the case.

It took the jury just sixty-five minutes to reach a guilty verdict and Ruxton listened calmly as the death sentence was pronounced, ending what was then the longest murder trial in British history. The date of Ruxton’s execution was provisionally set for 1 April and for the next few days the newspapers were full of startling revelations about the Indian doctor.

Buck and Isabella had always presented themselves as a married couple and it was only after the trial that it was revealed that the couple were not legally wed. Indeed, Buck was already married to a woman named Motibai Jehangirj Ghadiala, who was usually known as Pearl.

Having abandoned his Indian wife without a backward glance in favour of Isabella, the couple set up home in a rented flat in Grove Park, where they were known for their frequent violent quarrels. However, both Buck and Isabella were ambitious and when Buck heard that an established medical practice in Lancaster was on the market, he immediately began negotiations to buy it. When he was successful, he quickly alienated the locals by bragging about how much money he intended to make, suggesting that one day Dalton Square would be renamed Ruxton Square in memory of him and his work. He was given the nickname ‘The Rajah’, which irritated him intensely, as did any reference to his Indian nationality. Although Ruxton had the typically black hair and dark skin of his race, he seemed to resent his heritage and bleached his hair yellow and lightened his skin with creams and face powder in an attempt to fit in. He was an eccentric and highly superstitious man, who was obsessional about cleanliness and had irrational fears of fire and of the dark.

Although Mr Birkett appealed Ruxton’s conviction, the appeal was dismissed on 12 May 1936, and in spite of a petition for his reprieve signed by 6,000 people, Ruxton met with the executioner at Strangeways Gaol on 12 May 1936. Shortly after his execution, a friend went to the News of the World newspaper and, acting on Ruxton’s instructions, handed the editor a sealed envelope.

The newspaper had interviewed a sobbing and apparently highly distressed Ruxton before his arrest for murder and reported his assertions, ‘I did not kill my Belle. I tell you she has gone away. She will come back. Tell everybody I am not guilty. Tell them I love my Belle too much to harm her.’ Now, the editor was handed an envelope containing a single sheet of paper, headed ‘Lancaster 14.10.35.’, which continued in Ruxton’s handwriting; ‘I killed Mrs Ruxton in a fit of temper because I thought she had been with a man. I was Mad at the time. Mary Rogerson was present at the time. I had to kill her. B Ruxton’ [sic].

‘Ruxton, in a paroxysm of Oriental rage, had strangled “his Belle”,’ reported the newspaper dramatically ‘while all the time three little children lay in an innocent sleep upstairs.’