To be a successful forensic scientist,
you need more qualities than
just your scientific knowledge and your ability to interpret evidence.
A really good forensic scientist will also
have to be imaginative, creative and innovative.
This case about Buck Ruxton and the Jigsaw Murders illustrates how this kind of
thinking can be essential to solve a case
which has a problem in it that has never been encountered before.
The Buck Ruxton case starts back in
1935 in the little town of Moffat down in Southern Scotland,
and it's a nice town where people go for a little holiday.
And running through it as a river.
And there's a bridge over the river and you can stand on the bridge and enjoy the view.
And someone was doing just that when they
noticed these rather odd packages down in the river.
And when it was investigated,
it was found that these packages were actually parts of
human bodies wrapped up in newspaper,
and presumably someone had thrown them in the river to get rid of them.
Well, when all these packages had been collected up and opened,
a problem very quickly became apparent,
and the question was how many bodies because it was clearly more than one.
And the second question is of course, who were they?
And this is why it's called the Jigsaw Murder because the
two pathologists who came in to work on this case,
their first task was like a jigsaw,
re-assembling all the parts into a certain number of bodies.
And when they had reassembled these human Jigsaws,
they could determine that they had two bodies, two female bodies.
But where did these bodies come from?
Well, that question was answered by the newspaper wrapping.
Now national newspapers in the United Kingdom are
mostly printed in London and then distributed across the whole country.
So they are not particular to any particular place.
However, this murderer had made a mistake because some of the newspaper wrapping had been
for a special edition of the newspaper that had been
printed for the town of Markham down in Lancashire.
So the police officer in Moffat has
to call his counterpart in Markham and ask him the very simple question,
do you have two women missing.
And sure enough, the Markham police were aware that two women had recently gone missing,
a "Mrs." Ruxton and her maid Mary.
I put the Mrs. in quotation marks because she
was not actually legally married to her husband Buck Ruxton,
which back in 1935 was a little bit scandalous of course.
Now the two medical examiners,
the pathologists had reassembled
the bodies and now the police had two possible identities for the bodies.
So this shows one of the bodies here.
And you can see that a lot of the flesh including all of
the possible distinguishing marks which would
enable you to identify the body have been removed.
So the police and the pathologists were given
the then unknown task of identifying the body.
So they developed a new technique.
What they did was to go to the Ruxton home down in Markham,
and they looked for photographs of the women.
And of course, when a photograph is taken,
the subject of the photograph will pose
a particular angle and hold still while the photograph is taken.
So what they did was to take the skulls from the river,
hold those skulls at exactly the same angle that is in that photograph,
take a picture, and then they superimposed the two photographs over each other.
And here is the result.
And you can see there is Mrs. Ruxton.
You can see her face,
you can see that typical 1930s type of hat,
and you can see the skull.
And you can see there's a perfect match up between
the face of the skull and the face of Mrs. Ruxton.
And this is the technique they used to try to
prove that the bodies were those of Mrs. Ruxton and the maid Mary.
Buck Ruxton was arrested.
This wasn't the only evidence of course.
When his house was examined,
there were blood stains everywhere for instance.
So there was certainly evidence that something horrible had happened in his home.
He went to trial.
He claimed he was innocent,
but the jury thought otherwise.
He was convicted of murder and he was sentenced to death by hanging.
The case was a little bit controversial at the time,
and some people writing in newspapers claimed that this evidence here,
these photographs, this was not
good enough to convict someone of murder and send them to hang.
However, the controversy was ended by Buck Ruxton himself.
On his way to execution,
he confessed he had done the murders,
and that confession fully validated this new technique
that these innovative pathologists had used in this case.
Roderick BatesAssociate Professor
