Free Bloody London: Shocking Tales from London’s Gruesome Past and Present by Declan McHugh

at about 8.45a.m. on the 30th when a man who appeared ‘nervous’ came in sight holding a parcel contained in a sack. It was a heavy parcel judging by his struggle to carry it, but he managed to take it down the stairs past the attendant. When the man left, the attendant saw the parcel had been left behind and couldn’t resist peeking; to his horror he saw the parcel contained a dead, mutilated young girl.

    The 6-year-old girl’s body was found wrapped in brown paper and with a clothesline knotted around the neck fastened in a reef knot. In addition, both her throat and her chest had been sliced and her legs and arms had been broken and tied to the sides. Sandy soil was all over her face. Some of the child’s clothes were missing and had been used as a gag.

    The killer was never found despite the always particularly intensive police work that follows the murder of a child.

    One bizarre thing: at the inquest a man stood up and said that there were six different clues that indicated a woman had done it.

    Note: If this murder, which defeated 700 detectives at the time, was committed today, the killer would probably be in custody awaiting trial within one week. The police would look for DNA evidence on or in the body plus fingerprints on the parcel and would then check the criminal records. They would also concentrate their efforts on men living within ½ km of the child’s house because clearly it was an opportunistic snatching and killing since the child had done something unusual by leaving the school by herself and so could not have been stalked and no pattern could have been followed. The police would also question known sex offenders living locally and they would analyse the sandy soil to try to find useful clues to where the girl had seemingly been buried in a shallow grave before being dug up again. They would also concentrate on men in the area with knowledge of both Lambeth and Islington (Lambeth is a long way from Islington and a public toilet there is a very strange place to dump a dead child’s body). They would no doubt also pay attention to the fact the clothesline had been tied in a reef knot and try to find out more about the origins of both the clothesline and the brown paper. They would also do microscopic analysis for fibres.

    The torso in the basement of New Scotland Yard

    On 2 October 1888 the torso of a woman was discovered in a vault among the foundations for the New Scotland Yard building that was being constructed on the Victoria Embankment at that time. Today the building is well known as the Norman Shaw building and the case is referred to as the ‘Whitehall mystery’.

    Whoever committed the murder (assuming, as is likely, it was the same person who deposited the torso), had taken both risks and pains to do what he did. It is presumed the torso was left at night-time and although there was no watchman on the site at night-time, it was very dark, and it would have been dangerous to have even attempted to leave anything on-site since there were trenches and holes and the vault would have been pitch black.

    The site was surrounded by 7ft high hoardings except for one entrance point which was accessed by a little gate with a latch that was moved by a piece of string. A casual person would be unlikely to stumble upon that obscure entrance to the worksite which indicates that probably either the person had somehow some knowledge of the site already, or had done some surveillance as the workmen had gone about their tasks.

    An arm which was later found to belong to this particular body had previously been found floating in the Thames on 11 September at Pimlico, and about two weeks after the torso discovery a leg was also found by a police dog, buried near the construction site. Neither the other arm and leg nor the head was ever found. The uterus had been removed and the doctor thought the actual murder had been committed up to two months earlier. The missing uterus is significant because the