The River Thames The criminal history of London has recorded numerous dismemberment murders; however, at no time have the crimes been as frequent as in the years surrounding the Thames Embankment Murders. The torso mysteries of 1873 and 1874 were very similar to the Embankment Murders. Is it possible that one man was responsible for both series? Could a man, perhaps a young medical student, have been imprisoned on unrelated charges or locked in a mental institution in the mid 1870s only to have been later released-to continue on with his killing spree? A good example is John Crawford Martin, who was sentenced in 1981 to ten years in prison on a murder charge. Upon his later release, he proceeded to kill and dismember the bodies of three females in Saskatoon, Canada. The river Thames has long been the end of the road for suicidal lunatics, victims of crime, and those involved in unfortunate accidents. Parliamentary returns for 1882 record that 544 corpses were found in the Thames, of which 277 cases resulted in open verdicts. The London Times, ran an article on June 15 of that year entitled "Undetected Murders," pointing out that "the facilities afforded by the river for the perpetration of secret murders" was one that need to be addressed. "It is not a pleasant thing to reflect that there may be many ruffians prowling about London who have already committed riverside outrages with impunity, and may be tempted to commit others owing to the general laxity that prevails in our arrangement for ascertaining the causes of suspicious deaths." A body recovered from the Thames was treated differently then one found on land. The actions of the river on a body made the medical experts job difficult. Factors involving decomposition, amount of time in the water, injuries to the body by boats, made the job of discerning murder from suicide or accident, a formidable task. Unfortunately, in the case of the Thames Mysteries, the river may never give up its secrets.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 18:25:57 +0000
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