Historian Lucy Worsley is putting on a deerstalker cap to try to solve a grisly series of 137-year-old murders of Victorian London women. It’s not the ones you think.
The spate of killings, which have come to be known as the Thames Torso Murders, were committed at the exact same time as Jack the Ripper’s crimes and some within a stone’s throw of his Whitechapel MO.
The coincidence seems too great, so it is an avenue the new BBC docuseries Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club wanders down in its three-part investigation.
Worsley, 52, admits to Metro she was rather invested in the theory that the serial killers were one and the same. ‘I took some persuading,’ she admits. ‘The police at the time didn’t think that they were the same person, but it just boggled belief that there would be two operating at once.’
That was, until Worsley learned something which later seemed ‘obvious’: ‘When you’ve got people living in conditions of deprivation, overcrowding, a transient population, you do get more serial killing because it’s easier for people to disappear, which is sad and chilling but also logical,’ she says with a blend of the lurid and the levelheaded that runs through our discussion.
The Thames Torso Murders were four (canonical) killings with a hallmark that saw dismembered body parts scattered in and around the River Thames, which itself became an accomplice in the case, washing away any evidence.
Of the four victims, only one was identified as Elizabeth Jackson, who was a pregnant prostitute in her early twenties. Other cases at the turn of the century have been associated with the serial killer.
Dissected limbs might not be some people’s cup of tea, but Worsley is not one of those people. The macabre details in this case never faze her. ‘I do like grisly stuff,’ she admits, adding, ‘I feel a guilty pleasure in saying that, but it’s true, and I know that I’m not alone.’
I felt that he was probably the most notorious serial killer that people had never heard of
That rubbernecking is part of the reason Worsley here assembles a murder club – yes, like Richard Osman’s, but she notes that they are a tradition that dates back to the early 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle had his own Crimes Club. Worsley’s version boasts 100 percent more women.
They are historians and experts, who also occasionally resemble a rein on the horse that is Worsley’s imagination. ‘They would say to me, “Hang on Lucy, you’re getting ahead here, just remember to be careful about what we’re talking about,” she says, ‘because it is distressing.’
That is not to say the BBC’s eminent historian isn’t immune to it all. ‘Where I do get distressed is not so much the knives and the blood and the cuts and the gore. It’s thinking about the living women and the reaction of their relatives when it was discovered what had happened to them. I’m totally moved by that.’
The misogyny of the period is a drumbeat of the series, even if it didn’t surprise Worsley. She was still glad to mark the lives of these women who remain unrecorded – beyond the grim newspaper illustrations of their body parts, some of which were rendered with lewd breasts, despite being factually incorrect.
While the murder club doesn’t quite succeed in identifying each of the women in this many, many decades-old closed case, the docu-series presents an incredibly compelling case for who the Thames Torso Murderer really was. Watching the episodes, it seems almost too good to be true.
Worsley is clearly delighted with their sleuthing results. ‘When I started upon it – I will let you into a secret here, I thought, “This will be very interesting and we’ll find out lots of twists and turns, but there’s no way we can solve a case this cold”.
‘Blow me down with a feather if we didn’t. To my satisfaction. It’s not going to stand up in a court of law, I accept that.’
This doesn’t reflect well on me, but the pleasure I had in exploring the turns of his dark psychology
We shan’t reveal the exact details, but it’s cracked by the late-in-the-game addition of true crime author (itself, a coup for Reddit detectives and websleuths) Sarah Bax Horton, who used the online database of newspapers, which the police at the time didn’t have access to (thank you technology).
Into the advanced search bar, Bax Horton put: the time frame of the four killings, combined with filters for the River Thames and crimes against women.
‘Out popped our suspect,’ trills Worsley. ‘The pleasure of making that connection. I really envy her having had that experience as a historian.’
While Worsley remains button-lipped on the name (it isn’t Jack the Ripper), she does say: ‘I felt that he was probably the most notorious serial killer that people had never heard of.’
Watching the show, as well as talking with the ever-knowledgeable BBC presenter, you do wonder why the Thames Torso Murder wasn’t treated to the same infamy as his contemporary, despite being ‘weirder, darker and cleverer’ than the Ripper, as she puts it.
But Worsley has an explanation for that too, chalking it up to the grim fascination with contemporary East London, in terms that map out a blueprint for our modern relationship with true crime.
‘People knew, because they had read articles, about the dehumanising way in which they felt life was lived there,’ she says. ‘There’s this thing called poverty tourism, where people go to places and revel in the bad conditions, and that was definitely going on in Victorian Whitechapel.’
Jack the Ripper ignited a bonfire of publicity. In journalistic terms, the Thames Torso Murders just didn’t have the same cut through. Worsley and Bax Horton’s findings in this docu-series could go some way to changing that, hopefully for the killer’s discarded female victims more so than the man himself.
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club airs on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday January 5. All episodes are available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.
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