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

uterus had also been removed from the second and fourth Jack the Ripper victims.

    There must have been about a thousand easier places to dump a murdered woman’s torso than this vault and the fact that it was done nevertheless probably indicates that the murderer was trying to send a strong message of defiance to the police, and perhaps even trying to deliberately taint the brand new police building by murder.

    This type of defiance and scorn of the police is reminiscent of Jack the Ripper himself, judging by the notorious letters purporting to come from him (although the jury is out on whether most of those, with the possible exception of what is called the George Lusk letter, were faked). The Jack the Ripper murders were still taking place at this exact time, so could he have been responsible? The answer is yes, but unlikely. Although the uterus was missing and that had also been the case with two of the Ripper victims, there is an overwhelming difference between the murders – Jack the Ripper flaunted his handiwork and did not try to hide the identity of his victims whereas the mysterious Whitehall killer went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of the victim and in fact she was never identified.

    There is a strong possibility that this ‘torso murderer’ was a second murderer and a strong possibility that he was a second serial killer because other body parts from other unidentified but murdered women were found in 1887 and 1888 in both the Thames and in the Regents Canal. It is an intriguing possibility that the ‘torso murderer’ was not only demonstrating scorn for the police and tainting their new building but by his actions he was also effectively competing for attention with Jack the Ripper. ‘Look,’ he was saying, ‘I’m out here too, I started before you, and I’m even more brazen than you’.

    However, there is a small possibility that it was Jack the Ripper but he had been forced to change his modus operandi for practical reasons. Whitechapel had prostitutes, thousands of them, in situ but there weren’t any around the Norman Shaw police building (they would have been very stupid ones), so he could not kill a prostitute and leave her lying there. Instead perhaps, if it was Jack, he killed a woman elsewhere and then (for practical reasons) brought only the torso to the building.

    The case still attracts interest because it may show that Jack the Ripper’s murders were indeed predated by another, as yet unknown, serial killer.

3   NORTH LONDON
1) 1987 King’s Cross fire

    Tube: King’s Cross.

    At the top of the Piccadilly, Northern and Victoria line escalators at King’s Cross, there is an unobtrusive little plaque under a clock on the left-hand side as you go towards the Hammersmith & City Line. The plaque states ‘In memory of the 31 people who lost their lives in the King’s Cross Underground Fire of 18th November 1987’. King’s Cross Station is open until about 12.15a.m., Monday to Sunday.

TICKET HALL INFERNO

    ‘I could hear everybody’s little prayer to Jesus.’
    Ron Lipsius, King’s Cross fire survivor.

    The King’s Cross fire in 1987 claimed 31 victims including a 7-year-old schoolboy, stockbrokers, Colin Townsley (one of the 150 firemen who fought the fire), Alexander Fallon and others.
    In 2004, 16 years after his death in the fire, Fallon was finally identified as ‘Body 115’. His remains at last had a name to personalise and dignify them. Scottish-born Fallon had been 72 and homeless at the time of his death. Living rough in London after the tragic death of his wife from cancer, on that November night he had presumably been inside King’s Cross station for warmth.
    The King’s Cross station fire began at 7.33p.m. on 18 November 1987, when someone’s carelessly-discarded match, or possibly a cigarette butt, ignited extensive dry material that had been collecting for years underneath the partly wooden escalator on the Piccadilly line. Chillingly,