Yeardley:  This episode contains dramatic recreations of historical scenes and depictions of violence that some listeners may find disturbing. So, please take care when listening. Also, the words spoken by the actors in this series are taken from letters, diary entries, legal transcripts, and period newspaper interviews.

[music]

 Small Town Dicks presents Beyond Recognition, the First Modern Murder.

[somber music] [bell tolling]

Yeardley:  It’s the evening of September 23rd, 1935, in Lancaster, Northern England. Peter Rogerson is desperate. He’s the brother of Mary, the Ruxton family’s nanny, and he is angry. And in this time and place, what he’s about to do just isn’t done.

[banging on door]

 A working class young man does not show up irate and unannounced, banging on the door of a prominent doctor, demanding answers. But Rogerson’s on a mission. His sister Mary has disappeared, and he thinks Dr. Buck Ruxton has something to do with it. In fact, the whole Rogerson family is suspicious, all 11 siblings and their parents.

[door opens]

Ruxton:  Yes, what is it?

Peter:  Dr. Ruxton, I’m Peter Rogerson, Mary’s brother. I need to speak with you.

Yeardley:  Mary’s 19. By all accounts, she’s a sweet, innocent girl and she’s been working for Ruxton and his common law wife, Isabella, for two years. She’s been living with them here at 2 Dalton Square. The three Ruxton kids love her, she’s devoted to them, and she worships Isabella. Ruxton opens the door wide for Peter and steps aside.

Ruxton:  Well, then, do come in.

[door slams]

Yeardley:  Ruxton shoots Peter a concerned frown, the one the doctor uses with his patients.

Ruxton  So, what is it that you want now?

Peter:  Now, you know exactly what I want, doctor. We haven’t seen or heard from our Mary for almost two weeks. She was here last, wasn’t she? Now, it’s not like her at all to just go wandering off. So, I’m hoping that you can at least-

Ruxton:  Tell you where your sister is? I have no idea. She left with my wife, and I don’t know where she is either. So, we’re in the same bloody boat.

Yeardley:  Ruxton ushers Peter into a chair and begins pacing as he speaks. He seems nervous. He says Mary and Isabella broke into his safe and made off with a whopping 30 pounds in cash. He tells Peter that Mary was involved with a boy who worked in the local laundry. A boy who got her pregnant.

Peter:  Pregnant? That is damned nonsense, that is. She’s got no boyfriend. She never has had. How could you even suggest such a thing?

Ruxton:  And apparently Mrs. Ruxton has taken Mary to Scotland to get that problem taken care of.

Yeardley:  Peter is dumbfounded. Mary’s not a thief. Mary’s not interested in dating and she is certainly not pregnant and she would never ever run off and not contact her family. This is madness. When Peter says he’s ready to go to the police, Ruxton reacts like he’s been slapped.

Ruxton:  Do not involve the police. Surely, you know abortion is illegal. Think of the shame for both of us. I’m a doctor. I have my reputation to protect. Listen to me, young man. Mary has been working with my wife to deceive me. Sometimes, I feel I could choke them both.

Yeardley:  That threat is too much for Peter. He jumps to his feet and steps toward Ruxton who puts up his hands and backs off.

Ruxton:  Oh, forgive me, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m frantic. I feel I could kill myself if it wasn’t for my poor children.

Yeardley:  Peter stares at Ruxton. One minute, he’s angry. The next, the doctor is heartbroken. He’s almost weeping as he guides Peter toward the front door.

Ruxton:  Thank you for coming, Peter. I’m sure this will all work out. Just remember, no police. And do let me know when you hear from Mary.

Yeardley:  The minute Peter is gone, Ruxton drops the anguish routine. He’s pretty sure his performance did the trick, though it’s not entirely an act. His concern for his own situation is deep and genuine. But not for Isabella and Mary’s whereabouts. He knows exactly where they are. He killed them a week ago.

[upbeat music]

Yeardley:  Previously on Beyond Recognition.

Sue:  Most murders are not premeditated, and you’re suddenly faced with a dead body. What do you do?

Jeremy:  This is where the choice is made.

Tom:  He removed the noses, he took out the eyes, he removed the lips, he took off the ears.

Sue:  Most people don’t know how to dismember a body. Ruxton had the skills.

Yeardley:  I’m Yeardley Smith. From Audio 99, this is Beyond Recognition. Episode 4, Bodies of Evidence.

[upbeat music]

Yeardley:  In our previous episode, Dr. Buck Ruxton murdered his common law wife Isabella and their nanny, Mary Rogerson. He chopped up their bodies in his bathroom, drove the remains to Scotland 100 miles north of Lancaster and threw them off a remote bridge into a rushing stream. Ruxton is confident he’s pulled off the perfect crime. And of course, he can manipulate the Rogersons. In his mind they’re simple folks, no match for his brilliance.

 But the family aren’t the only people interested in Mary. The investigation is bringing in the top pathologists in the UK, experts who will make revolutionary advances in forensic techniques. But they’re also going to make a staggering mistake. And Ruxton will have to face an enemy he never anticipated. The most powerful, venomous voice in the United Kingdom, the press.

Tom:  That interaction with Rogerson was a big mistake. And Ruxton should have just kept to the very simple script of saying, “They’ve run off. We don’t know what happened.”

Yeardley:  That’s former Edinburgh detective, Tom Wood, again. Tom is an expert on the case and the author of Ruxton: The First Modern Murder.

Tom:  The fact that he said that Mary might be in a certain condition, as he used to describe it, was a red light to the Rogerson family, because they knew Mary was an innocent kid. And therefore, they knew that this business about pregnancy was just plain wrong. And instead of allaying their anxiety and actually putting them off, that actually encouraged them to take further action.

Yeardley:  But Ruxton doesn’t know that. He thinks he’s keeping a lid on things. On September 29th, 1935, two weeks after the murders, Ruxton is starting to feel like he’s in the clear. He’s been poring over the daily papers, searching for even the smallest story about body parts discovered in Scotland. There’s been nothing.

 But that same day, 100 miles north, on the outskirts of the Scottish village of Moffat, two tourists on a stroll look over the side of an old stone bridge. Remember Susan and her brother, Alfred, from Episode 1? They see body parts, a lot of body parts. They call the police, which on this Sunday in Moffitt consists of one man, Sergeant Robert Sloan.

Tom:  Now to explain, Robert Sloan has absolutely no training whatsoever in criminal investigation, in crime scene management. There was no crime scene management as such then. He has never attended a scene of a major crime like this. There is no reason to think that he is the man that’s going to make a decent job of this incredibly complex and difficult crime scene.

Yeardley:  But somehow, he does. Sergeant Sloan has witnessed horrors and atrocities on the front lines in World War I. So, the rotting bodies and maggots didn’t faze him, but that experience was all he had going for him.

Sue:  So, he went by instinct, on what he thought might be important.

Yeardley:  This is Dame Sue Black. She’s the leading forensic anthropologist in the UK and the author of Written in Bone, which devotes a chapter to the Ruxton case. So, as the afternoon sun goes down on this ghastly spectacle at the bridge, Sergeant Sloan carefully maps out the scene. He takes meticulous notes. He gathers the decaying body parts wrapped in cloth and newspaper.

Sue  And for him to recover those packages, to be able to then retain all of the wrappings around the material, to be able to go through all of that thinking, it’s the principle of you recover everything and you destroy nothing. But that wasn’t in our processes and procedures until a lot, lot later. But he was doing it, and he had that gut instinct that said, “This might be important,” and of course, it was hugely important.

[music]

Yeardley:  Back in Lancaster, the Rogerson family is unaware of this discovery. They’re still waiting to hear from Mary, and they’ve had enough. All they know is the last time she was seen alive was at Ruxton’s home and now he’s claiming she was pregnant.

Tom:  They didn’t buy any of the cover stories about Mary, about how she might have been pregnant and how she had run away in some sort of union with Bella. And the Rogers go to Lancaster police, and they report Mary was missing. The police take the report but do nothing about it.

Yeardley:  The Lancaster police station is directly across Dalton Square from the Ruxton home. The cops are well aware Isabella has accused Ruxton repeatedly of domestic violence. Then, the couple makes up and the pattern continues. The official police opinion, this is just another fight. Nobody’s actually disappeared and, in a few days, the women will return and it’ll all get back to normal.

 But as a matter of routine procedure, the cops call Ruxton to the station anyway. He’s not concerned. He’s been holding off reporting Isabella’s disappearance, waiting for the right moment that falls between suspicion and concern, and he’s prepared. Ruxton strides briskly across the Square and gives Constable John Winstanley an earful.

[footsteps]

John:  He said his wife had gone away on September 15th and taken the maid with her. He said, referring to Mrs. Ruxton, “She can’t have any love for the children, but I would take her back even now.” He then produced a bunch of keys. He put them on the table and said, “Go and search the house.” He seemed very agitated during.

Yeardley:  The meeting Ruxton displays his full range of emotional dramatics. He’s outraged, he’s indignant, heartbroken, threatening and forgiving. Winstanley makes note of it all but does nothing more. As over the top as the performance is, the police still see Ruxton as a man of integrity. There’s no evidence he’s done anything wrong. And really, who are the cops going to side with? A revered prominent doctor or a working-class family worried about a missing nanny who might be pregnant? The cops are stonewalling the Rogersons, but the family isn’t backing down. Again, Tom Wood.

Tom:  They knew their daughter and they were not going to be cowed by the doctor. They were not going to be browbeaten by the police who sort of dismissed them. They were not going to go for any of that. They were going to pursue this.

Yeardley:  The Rogersons can’t afford to hire a private detective. They have no faith in anything Ruxton is telling them. So, they’re down to one option and it’s a long shot.

Tom:  They wrote letters to every newspaper in the land just about, a letter saying, “Missing nursemaid. Our daughter, Mary, she’s described such and such so and so is missing. She’s away in the company of Mrs. Isabella Ruxton.” And this arrived on the news editor’s desks of all the newspapers in the UK.

Yeardley:  And that’s where the letters stayed.

Tom:  And all of them just were disregarded. It wasn’t a news story. So, it was just one of thousands of such letters that would have come in to news editors every day.

Yeardley:  And now, the Rogersons have hit a wall. Their hopes of finding Mary or finding anyone in authority who even cares about their missing girl have run out.

[upbeat music]

 In the first few days after the discovery of the body parts in Scotland, the newspapers are all over it. There has been nothing like this since Jack the Ripper. Mutilated corpses don’t normally turn up in quiet Scottish towns like Moffat. The freakish, gripping mystery sparks sensational headlines. The bodies under the bridge, the ravine murders, the jigsaw murders. And in 1935, it’s hard to underestimate the scope and influence of the press. A full two-thirds of the UK population read a newspaper daily.

Tom:  There were half a dozen newspapers in the UK at that time that had circulations of over a million copies a day. And so, the competition for this bloody murder kind of story was absolutely enormous because this was Agatha Christie come to life, and everybody read Agatha Christie novels. So, there was an enormous public interest immediately from when the bodies were found.

[clock ticking]

Yeardley:  One of those millions of people reading about the killings is Buck Ruxton. A few days ago, he thought there was nothing to link him to the crime. But now, the body parts hadn’t washed away, it’s almost impossible for him to comprehend. And rumors are bubbling up. Despite Ruxton’s popularity in Lancaster, people are starting to talk, could those two bodies in Scotland be Isabella and Mary?

[somber music]

 Now, 160 miles away in Glasgow, a man is sitting down to breakfast when his wife mentions this peculiar story in the morning papers. This mess of body parts found in a stream bed. The man says he’s not interested. He’s focusing on his porridge and toast. But then, just a few minutes later, he gets a call from the police, and he starts to get very interested.

 The man’s name is John Glaister. He’s professor of forensic medicine at the University of Glasgow, one of the most respected pathologists in the UK. The police say they want him to lead the scientific side of the investigation, so they pick him up for what should be an easy 1-hour drive to the bridge outside Moffat. Today it takes 3 hours. Literally overnight, the desolate bridge, known mainly as a local lovers’ lane, has transformed into a ghoulish mob scene. Glaister would recall it later in his autobiography, Final Diagnosis.

John: As we neared our destination, the traffic, normally thin at that lonely spot, began to thicken. For the last mile, we were forced to a crawl, caught up in the procession of vehicles, some of which were press cars, but many packed with sightseers.

Yeardley:  Glaister steps out of the car and works his way through the line of grim cops. He’s a thin, dapper man with a small, well-trimmed mustache and black horn-rimmed glasses. At the bridge, he looks like what he is, a calm, quiet academic in a sea of wide-eyed rubberneckers, hoping for a glimpse of horror. But that’s not what Glaister’s looking for. He gazes over the bridge where officers are still combing the stream banks for hunks of flesh. And he sees things the public doesn’t notice or even care about. Here’s Tom Wood.

Tom:  He comes downinto the ravine and the body parts are no longer there, of course, they’ve all been taken. But he sees surrounding them, insects, bugs, flies, maggots, blue bottles, leaves, twigs, stones, branches. And he takes all of that and that was quite unique. That wasn’t done then, and Glaister was really the father of that holistic view about crime scene management.

[flies buzzing]

Yeardley:  The next stop is the small stone shed that passes for a mortuary inside the Moffat cemetery. That’s when Glaister meets up with his friend and colleague, Dr. Gilbert Millar, pathologist from Edinburgh University. The stink of rot is almost overpowering as Glaister and Millar examine the maggot-infested pile of putrefying human remains. After a couple of hours, they determine it’s two people. That’s about as specific as they can get because the genitalia has been sliced away completely. They call this pile of putrefying remains body number 1 and body number 2.

Tom:  And while Glaister wasn’t absolutely sure, he says that body 2, which turned out to Bella’s remains, body 2 had certain male characteristics. What’s remarkable is what a great job Ruxton had done in disguising these bodies so that even someone like Glaister and others just as eminent as him were fooled for quite some time.

Yeardley:  This is where things go wrong. How do the top forensic minds in the kingdom, scientists with decades of experience, mistake a female body for a male body, even if it is severely mutilated? Here’s Professor Sue Black.

Sue:  Because Isabella was so much larger than was Mary, I suspect it was a simple mistake that had made them think, “Oh, one’s bigger, one’s smaller. It’ll be a man and a woman.” We would never make that assumption these days. But they did then, because I think it’s probably fair to say that anthropologically now, we are more advanced in our understanding of the variation of human form than perhaps a general anatomist was at the time. If there was no obvious reproductive structures or breast type structures or scalp hair, for example, they wouldn’t have questioned the anatomical opinion.

[upbeat music]

Yeardley:  Five days after the discovery, under the Gardenholme Bridge, Ruxton opens his copy of the Daily Express. He scans through the latest account with creeping dread. One sentence leaps out at him.

Reporter:  The pathological experts are examining the remains of the mutilated man and woman found at Gardenholme Linn. The Daily Express.

Yeardley:  “[gasps] Yes,” he thinks, “they think it’s a man and a woman, not two women, and they think the male could be 60 years old.” For Ruxton, it’s vindication. He is thrilled. He’s fooled not only the police, but the pathologists. He’s going to get away with this.

[somber music]

 Ruxton’s got another thing going for him too. The macho territorial ego of the cops. In 1935, cops from different jurisdictions didn’t work together and highly educated academic pathologists felt they were above the police. Glaister’s vision of forensic experts and law enforcement joining forces is unheard of. Again, Sue Black.

Sue:  I think there’s a bit of arrogance from police forces and arrogance often from pathologists who at the time felt that they were the masters of all trades. And you suddenly found this multidisciplinary team coming together, and we hadn’t seen anything like that in the UK before.

Yeardley:  Communication among United Kingdom crime authorities in different jurisdictions was anything but united. It was almost nonexistent. Ruxton had worked with police. He knew about this lack of cooperation.

Sue:  You’ve got to remember that if you were in Glasgow, you didn’t speak to Edinburgh. And if you were in Edinburgh, you didn’t speak to Glasgow. And if you were in Scotland, you didn’t speak to England. And so, you had a real compartmentalization of geography.

Yeardley:  This is something Ruxton was counting on when he dumped the bodies across the border, but he wasn’t counting on Glaister’s crew.

Sue:  They transcended that. That was something that they really opened up the doors that said, “We don’t have to be parochial about this, we’ve got experts elsewhere in the same field. Let’s bring them in.”

Yeardley:  Glaister’s men share a common bond. They’ve all served in World War I. They’ve all witnessed the horrors of the front lines where they had to put aside ego and work as team to survive. Glaser’s first recruit is the top anatomy expert in the UK, Professor James Cooper Brash. If anyone can reassemble this human jigsaw puzzle, Brash is the man. But it’s not going to happen in a cramped, stinking graveyard shed in Moffat. Glaister and Millar need a fully equipped lab to do a full forensic investigation. Though Glaister is based at the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh is closer. It’s also the academic home of both Brash and Millar. In the Moffett mortuary, Glaister’s maggots are packed up. The body parts are placed in metal tanks filled with chemical preservative, and it all hits the road.

[engine]

Tom:  The body parts are taken to Edinburgh University, where nothing happens for the first three or four days because they are being stabilized in a tank of formalin and the scientists can’t handle these body parts until they are stabilized. Otherwise, they’ll just fall apart. So, there’s a natural gap there.

Yeardley:  So, Glaister and his team are battling not only the time setback, but the vexing job of putting the bodies back together. It’s a puzzle that challenges even Professor Brash. There are a lot of missing pieces, including an entire torso. The authorities are still searching, but they’re desperate. So desperate they resort to using a clairvoyant.

Reporter:  Yesterday, a clairvoyant arrived in Moffat from Cumberland and with the aid of a chicken bone, endeavored to find the missing parts of the bodies at Gardenholme Linn. The clairvoyant who came voluntarily to offer his assistance, was unsuccessful in his efforts. The Daily Record.

Yeardley:  With the chicken bone failure, Brash does his best. But the bodies lying on the lab tables are little more than random appendages, incomplete pieces of muscle and bone that form a grisly suggestion of two human outlines.

Tom:  The scientific investigation in Edinburgh is off on the wrong foot from the start because they’re looking to identify a man and a woman. To get off on the wrong foot like that can be absolutely fatal to the investigation.

[suspenseful music]

Yeardley:  It’s hard for Glaister to imagine a worse situation. The pathologists have no idea who these victims are. The police have no idea who the killer is. And the press and the public are breathing down their necks waiting for an answer to this horror show. As the days tick by, the authorities need a breakthrough desperately. And they’re about to get one, from a completely unexpected source.

[upbeat music]

 While millions of people follow the case in the newspapers, back in Dumfriesshire County, Sergeant Sloan collects newspapers of his own. Here’s Tom Wood.

Tom:  In Moffat, Sergeant Sloan, he’s looking at these newspapers and the wrappings of the body parts, and from the start he’s been convinced that these hold the key. The very clever thing that Robert Sloan did was to preserve the newspapers and all the knitwear and the cloth around the bodies.

Yeardley:  It’s work well above his pay grade. He’s a small-town beat cop, not a forensic scientist.

Tom:  He knew that this was a race against time because this stuff was literally disintegrating before his eyes. And so, he used his ingenuity and managed to get some x-ray film from the local hospital and managed to put the paper on the x-ray film so as to preserve them. And by doing that, he preserved the evidence which then went on to be crucial in the case.

Yeardley:  Sloan takes his newspaper theory to his boss, Chief Constable Black. He’s the man in charge of the investigation in Dumfriesshire, the county that includes Moffat. Black is no fool. His force is small, and this case is big. He calls in an expert from Scotland Yard, Inspector Jeremiah Lynch, a veteran detective who specializes in missing persons cases. Lynch takes the dates and names of the three newspapers used to wrap the body parts and sets out to discover exactly where they were distributed, knowing that could lead them straight to the killer.

The biggest clue is a partially ripped September 15th headline in the Sunday Graphic referring to the crowning of a Carnival Queen in Morecambe. Lynch talks to circulation managers, distributors and local newsstand agents. He discovers that this was a special insert of the paper circulated in just two areas, Morecombe and Lancaster. In Lancaster, only 28 people had the edition actually delivered. Lynch makes a list of those people, a list that includes the name Buck Ruxton.

Sue:  It was the major thing that took the police force in Scotland down across the border and into Lancaster. If he hadn’t had that bit of paper, then I don’t think they would have got to the resolution that they did. And every way along the process, you can see if they didn’t do that, then they wouldn’t have got this. But I think the most critical part was identifying the distribution of that newspaper. And that recognition comes back down to that police officer who worked on instinct.

Yeardley:  The news that the murder probably happened in Morecombe or Lancaster, not Scotland, hits the papers. The papers hit Ruxton’s kitchen table, and the story hits him like a gut punch right in the middle of his morning tea.

[glass drops]

Reporter:  It has been brought to light that the newspapers in which parts of the bodies were wrapped included one of September 15th, the latest date previously having been believed to be September 2nd. The Scotsman.

[somber music]

Yeardley:  Ruxton knows he wrapped the pieces of his wife and nanny in papers from September 14th, papers delivered to his home in Lancaster. At the time, he didn’t see it as a problem. I mean, why would he? How long could newsprint last in water? Arrogant and calculating as ever, Ruxton ratchets up his “woe is me” routine. He writes a rambling, emotional letter to his wife’s sisters.

Ruxton:  My dear sister, I am heartbroken and half mad. Isabella has again left me. She’s trying to help our maid, who’s in a certain condition. I hope she does not involve herself in any trouble with the law. The children are asking for her daily and I really cannot sleep without her. You must ask her to come back to me.

Yeardley:  That’s right. Ruxton’s talking about the woman he strangled, skinned and eviscerated less than a month ago. But Isabella’s sisters don’t know that. What they do know are the couple’s volatile, chaotic relationship patterns.

Tom:  Her sisters didn’t want any part of it. They thought that these two were made in hell for each other. They would fight it out and eventually they would get it back together.

Yeardley:  Remember, they think Isabella is still alive and Ruxton wants to keep it that way.

Tom:  If you look at the letters he wrote, it was all about, first of all, “I’m a victim. What they’re saying subliminally is, “Look over there, look at Bella, look at Mary, look at what terrible people they are. Don’t look at me.” That’s what they’re saying, “Don’t look at me.”

Yeardley:  But Ruxton is going to get looked at. And three weeks after Mary has disappeared, the Rogersons are about to get a break. 86 words appear on the front page in one of the many newspapers they’d written to. 86 words that will change their lives and shake Ruxton to the core. It starts like this.

Reporter:  Headline, the disappearance of a Mary Rogerson, a pretty 21-year-old nurse girl who vanished three weeks ago from the house of a well-known local doctor, has caused her parents grave anxiety. She has been in the service of Dr. Buck Ruxton, a medical practitioner working in Dalton Square. The Daily Record.

[somber music]

Tom:  The Daily Record in Glasgow then was the biggest newspaper in Scotland. They just so happened to have a space to fill a sidebar, as they describe it, which means it was a little story going down the side of a page. And that was the reason that story was in the newspapers.

Yeardley:  Glasgow detective, Lieutenant William Ewing, opens his copy of the Daily Record that morning.

Tom:  He noticed the story, these two women missing from Lancaster. And of course, by that time, it was emerging that one of the newspapers round about the body parts was in Lancaster. So, he said, “What’s going on here? We’ve got two people missing. We’ve got two bodies.” The only problem, of course, was that the bodies at that time were still thought to be that of a man and a woman. But that raised the alarm.

Yeardley:  When Ewing mentions this to his boss, Chief Constable William Black, it’s a light bulb moment. Black is sure this connection between the missing women and the found bodies is way more than coincidence. But Black and his men know that this theory comes with a heavy implication. That Glaister, Brash and Millar, these brilliant forensic experts, are absolutely wrong about one incredibly significant fact. The two bodies are female. The Dumfriesshire police broker a sit down with Glaister and his team. It’s a dicey move. A bunch of local cops have to suggest that they know more than these renowned pathologists. Minutes into this potentially explosive situation, something unexpected happens.

Tom:  I would love to have been in the meeting where they were discussing the identity of these skeletons and body parts. And in comes a little lab assistant and he taps the great Professor Glaister on the shoulder and says, “By the way professor, I thought I’d like you to know we found three female breasts.” You can just imagine the penny drop moment. Three breasts? Immediately, wow, we’ve been wrong all along, that we’re nothing dealing with a man and a woman. We’re dealing with two women.

Yeardley:  Glaister knows there’s no arguing with this kind of physical evidence, no debating three breasts. He and his team officially change their opinion.

Sue:  Now, for somebody of their standing at the time to admit publicly that they were wrong, that was an incredible step. They’d gone beyond an ego. It wasn’t to do with that. It was about, “We need to solve this.” But the very fact that they changed their opinion, I think is just astounding.

Yeardley:  Up until this point, Isabella’s corpse had been identified only as body number 2. The forensic description was the body is a 5 foot 6, well-nourished 60-year-old male. On October 10th, there’s another story, this time about body number 1, Mary Rogerson. When Ruxton reads it, he’s in shock.

Reporter:  It is now learned that the young woman was not older than 25 and was just over 5ft in height, with brown hair and a fairly small head, which was possibly slightly inclined towards the right shoulder. Her voice is thought to have been rather high pitched, while four teeth in the center of the upper jaw would be slightly prominent. The fourth tooth from the center of the right upper jaw was missing and would be readily recognized when she smiled or laughed. It is thought that she was of the working class. Her hands, it is understood, showed a certain amount of care. She might have been employed in an occupation where it was necessary for her hands to be a fairly good appearance. Aberdeen Press and Journal.

Yeardley:  Let’s just call it like it is. This is a person Ruxton did his best to obliterate, to turn into an anonymous pile of limbs, discarded like garbage into a stream leading to the sea, to waste away. Now, body number 1 is that much closer to the identity she had in life. The daughter, sister and nanny who was loved and adored. A person who used to smile and laugh, a person named Mary Rogerson. It’s a crippling blow to Ruxton’s future as a free man, not to mention his ego.

[intriguing music]

 So, the pieces are starting to come together. The forensic team has determined both bodies are female, and a maid named Mary Rogerson has disappeared from Lancaster. Chief Constable Black makes a call to the top cop in Lancaster, Captain Henry Vann. Vann confirms what’s said in that 86-word news story, that Mary Rogerson worked for a local doctor named Ruxton. In fact, Captain Vann admits he’s dealt with the Ruxtons. The Lancaster police know all about the marital problems and disappearances at 2 Dalton Square, but they’ve done nothing.

Tom:  They had not connected the dots, even though the dots were plainly connectable. And certainly, Lancaster’s view would be this is not just a man and a woman having a bad marriage or a bad relationship. This is the doctor. This is the doctor and his wife, so just back off it. And so, they ignored a whole lot of warnings that they should have taken heed of.

Yeardley:  Black’s call does the trick. It rattles the hell out of Captain Vann. He gets to work.

Tom:  And Vann realizes that he’s behind the game and that his force has been lackadaisical and that they have fallen way behind the argument.

Yeardley:  Afterward, Black sends a note to a colleague on the Glasgow force. It reads, “Lancaster are only now stirring themselves, but I believe we will see some action soon.” And boy, is he right.

Tom:  About 1 o’clock in the morning, the Rogerson’s are actually dragged out of their beds and into police headquarters in Lancaster to be quizzed by all these senior detectives. And I mean, when you think about these poor people, their daughter’s gone missing. All these days ago, nobody’s paying any attention to them. And all of a sudden, they’re dragged into the police headquarters, and they are quizzed about their daughter. Mary.

[train sounds]

Yeardley:  Constable Black and a contingent of his top Glasgow detectives take a train to Lancaster for a meeting of the minds with Captain Vann and his officers. Jessie Rogerson, Mary’s stepmother, is called into the police station once again. They want to show her something, a woman’s blouse.

[somber music]

 Jessie takes one look and breaks down. She knows exactly what it is, or at least what it used to be. Last Christmas, she’d washed the second-hand blouse, sewn a patch under the arm and given it to Mary. That means something, and it’s not good. She’s right, of course. The blouse was used to wrap two arms and a piece of flesh that may have belonged to Mary. A few months ago, it was a Christmas gift. Now, it’s evidence.

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 At this point, it’s 12 days after the body parts were found. The police, from both sides of the border, add up what they know. So, they know the bodies are female. Even though the pathologist made a major blunder before they figured that out. Newspapers that wrapped the body parts were distributed exclusively in the Lancaster area. Whoever dissected the bodies knew what they were doing, had some kind of medical knowledge. And so, the state of decomposition matches up with the point in time when two women from Lancaster went missing. And those two women are directly connected to a doctor who had the surgical skills to take apart a human body. And his name is Buck Ruxton.

 There’s nothing to prove Ruxton actually committed this crime. And he is sticking with his story, which is Isabella and Mary will come home any day now. Ruxton is the victim in all this. And these poor dead people found in the ravine, whoever they are, have nothing to do with him. On top of that, a lot of people in Lancaster think the respected doctor is an innocent man. Which leaves the authorities a long way from getting Ruxton behind bars.

[upbeat music]

 On the next episode of Beyond Recognition, an investigator experiments on himself to come up with a new technique to recover prints from mutilated fingers. And the team pioneers an eerie method of victim identification more akin to witchcraft than police work.

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 Beyond Recognition was written and produced by Peter Gilstrap. I’m your host, Yeardley Smith. Thanks to our story editors, Barbara Bogaev and Sasha Khokha. Logan Heftel was our sound supervisor with editing and sound design from Soren Begin, Sarah Ma, Christina Bracamontes, and Aaron Phelps. Field recordings in Moffat and Lancaster were captured by Sean Kerwin and Kit Cummings. Original music was composed by Logan Heftel.

 The series was produced by Audio 99 under the direction of executive producer, Gary Scott. Our social media maven is Monica Scott. Beyond Recognition was inspired by the book, Ruxton: The First Modern Murder, written by Tom Wood. Among our many other sources are The Jigsaw Murders by Jeremy Craddock, Written in Bone by Sue Black, and the Trial of Buck Ruxton, edited by R.H. Blundell and G.H. Wilson, as well as original interviews and period news accounts.

 The actors in this episode are Ramesh Matani as Buck Ruxton, Jason Kennett as Professor Glaister, Gideon Emery as Peter Rogerson, Richard Greene as John Winston, Caroline Feraday reading the news quotations.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]