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.

[birds chirping and water running] [somber music]

Yeardley:  It’s a serene September morning in 1935. About 2 miles north of the Scottish farming village of Moffat, an area known as the Devil’s Beef Tub. It’s a beautiful area, despite the name, an isolated region of deep ravines, rolling green hills, and massive chunks of rock that punch out from the earth like gnarled stone fists. The River Annan winds through it all, flowing out to the sea. It’s a lonely, striking place that attracts hikers and nature lovers from around the United Kingdom. People like 24-year-old Susan Johnson and her 19-year-old brother, Alfred.

 Susan and Alfred are tourists from the Glasgow area, just out for a morning stroll on a lovely fall day. Birds are chirping, the skies are blue. Then, crossing an old stone bridge, Susan and Alfred stumble upon a brutal scene so dark and out of place, it’s hard for them to make sense of what they’re actually seeing.

Sheila:  We’d gone there on a fishing holiday and had been out walking.

Yeardley:  That’s Susan’s niece, Sheila Livingstone. Alfred was her father.

Sheila:  But apparently, Susie had looked over the bridge and seeing what she thought was a woman’s hand. And father had scrambled down into the ravine, and he had unwrapped one of the parcels and seen a face looking up at him.

Yeardley:  Except that it’s not actually a face. Not anymore. The skin has been completely removed. So have the eyes, the nose, the lips, the ears and teeth. They’ve all been cut away. It’s absolutely unimaginable. Alfred stares down in shock at this thing, this adult head wrapped in a child’s onesie.

Sheila:  Aunt Susie was a very talented fisherman. And father was a great sht. They slayed everything that moved and ate it, so that they were quite used to things gruesome.

Yeardley:  But I can assure you, they weren’t used to anything like this.

[birds chirping and water running]

 The choking stench of decomposition drifts up to Susan on the bridge as she looks down at her brother. Alfred stands up and turns away from the rotting head. He gazes downstream, hoping his stomach will settle. It’s not going to. [flies buzzing] What he sees are more packages strewn about on the grassy banks, arms, and legs partially wrapped in torn cloth and newspaper. He notices hunks of something scattered among the weeds. He’s not sure what it is, but the flies and maggots have already figured it out. Human flesh, all dumped like garbage, left to rotten in the pale September sun.

Sheila:  It’s a lovely area. It’s very beautiful. Lots of lovely woods, very calm, and peaceful. The last thing you’d expect to find would be something as gruesome as that.

Yeardley:  But there’s something here that reaches far beyond gruesome. Something about the mutilated remains left in this tranquil Scottish ravine that speaks to another level of violence.

Sheila:  To have people dismembered, it’s so extreme. It’s the idea that a human being could do that. And I am a human being, and someone like me did something like that. You think, “Whoa, would I ever? Could I ever?” The horror of, “Oh, my God, we are people. And this is the sort of stuff that people do.”

Yeardley:  What Sheila’s aunt and father discovered that morning nearly nine decades ago in this small town of Moffat would make headlines around the world and would lead to a bizarre and problematic investigation.

 Out of sheer necessity, forensic scientists would be forced to develop methods that would forever change how murders are investigated and solved. And as Sheila says, this crime pushed the sick and twisted boundaries of exactly the sort of stuff that people do.

 From Audio 99, this is Beyond Recognition, Episode 1, Horror In The Ravine.

 I’m Yardley Smith and I co-host another podcast you might have heard of called Small Town Dicks. In that show, I talk with detectives about the biggest cases they’ve worked in the small towns they come from. One of our favorite guests has been Tom Wood.

 Tom is a retired deputy chief constable from Scotland. Over a 40-year career, helped solve some of the toughest crimes in the UK. And at one point, we had him on the podcast to talk about a story that he’d been tracking for years, the Ruxton case. In fact, Tom wrote a book about it. The Ruxton case is an appalling, grisly crime, which, unfortunately, there are a lot of appalling, grisly crimes, but this one is different. This one ushered in the modern era of forensics.

Tom:  If I could put it simply, any investigation before the Ruxton case was ancient history. Any investigation after the Ruxton case was what we would describe and recognize as being modern, science-led criminal investigation because it changed the way that we investigate serious crime.

Yeardley:  We never released that episode on Small Town Dicks for the reason that it was a bigger, more inconceivable saga than our usual 45-minute episodes have the space to tell. But it’s a fascinating story, so we decided to make its own podcast. And that’s what you’re listening to now.

 So me, I’m a bona fide true crime enthusiast. As co-host of Small Town Dicks, I’ve heard a lot of true crime stories and I’ve heard a lot about forensics. But this groundbreaking, revolutionary, Big Bang level investigation from 1935, it was news to me. And now that I know something about it, I can’t wait to share it with you.

 Over the next six episodes, we’re going to go back in time. We’ll be talking to the last surviving relatives of the people connected with the case, because everyone who was directly involved back in the 1930s is dead. But we’re going to bring key moments of the story back to life through dramatic readings and recreations based on our deep research. And you’re going to hear about pioneering criminal investigators who had the daunting task of reconstructing over 70 body parts of God knows how many people found in that ravine in Moffett. Was it a couple? Was it a family? Were they old, young, male, female? It was all a mystery.

 And beyond trying to solve those questions, the cops had another job, the obvious one. They had to figure out who actually committed the crime. How many killers with how many knives were behind this display of carnage, worse than anything authorities had seen since Jack the Ripper?

 The UK’s top detectives and forensic scientists were up against a monumental task which was unlike anything they dealt with before. First, it bears remembering that this was long before DNA testing, obviously, long before blood analysis, profiling, crime scene management. I mean, there’s no floodlights for night work, no yellow police tape to keep people from trampling across your crime scene. And cell phones? of course not. Most people in the UK didn’t even have telephones. But if you opened a British newspaper in 1935, you’d have read every gory detail of the Ruxton case. The press called it the “Crime of the Century.” And throughout the kingdom, the case became part of pop culture. Here’s Tom Wood.

Tom:  I remember mentions of the Ruxton case from my childhood because my mother had been a teenager when the murders occurred. And of course, the Ruxton murders were THE story of the age. There was incredible media coverage of the Ruxton case. It was in all the newspapers, it was on the radio. And it was the talk of everybody, the talk of the neighborhood.

 As a kid, I remember my mother singing the little ditties that arose from the Ruxton case. There was this popular song when my mother was a teenager sung by Nelson Eddy, and it was called When I Grow Too Old To Dream, I’ll Have You To Remember.

[song playing] When I grow Too Old To Dream, I’ll Have You To Remember.

 But she used to sing it with different words. When you grow too old to scream, I’ll have you to dismember. [laughs] And this was one of the playground songs that were popular following the Ruxton case.

Yeardley:  The Ruxton horror became a sensational tale, something parents warned their children about. That is, with the notable exception of Sheila Livingstone’s father, Alfred. Alfred never talked to her about what he discovered that morning under the bridge in Moffat.

Sheila:  No, he didn’t. Well, you wouldn’t, would you, to a child who was nine, you wouldn’t say, “One day, I found people cut up in pieces in a ravine.” Mother must have told me when I was in my teens. When I was at that stage, we were all reading devil worshipping books, The Devil Rides Out, the devil does this, that, and the next thing. And I was able to scare my friends with the fact that my family had been involved in this horrible, gruesome case when we as teenagers were going through that gruesome phase, it’s very easy to be kind of lighthearted about it when you’re talking about it, when it has happened to somebody else. But I was trying to imagine what it would be like if I had been the one who had made that horrible discovery when it’s not a horror movie and it’s actually happening in the real world, very shocking.

[somber music]

Yeardley:  Before Tom Wood retired from the police force in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, he rescued a forgotten, bulging file on its way to the trash bin. It was filled with letters, police reports, memos, phone transcripts, all kinds of leftover material from the long, closed Ruxton investigation.

Tom:  I was brought this bundle of papers. The documents, they have not been read for 80 odd years. I looked at them and I saw that they related to the Ruxton case.

Yeardley:  Remember, Tom had heard about the case since he was a kid, when his mom sang that horrible song about it. And then in the 1960s, he’d sat through training lectures about it as a rookie cop.

Tom:  I knew all about the Ruxton case and so I put them in a bottom drawer for another ten years and just forgot about them and thought, “Well, what else is there to learn?” Until I was clearing out stuff and I thought, “Right, I’m going to read these and then chuck them out.” And as I read through them, there was a wealth of stuff. There must have been several hundred documents. I realized that I hadn’t known about the Ruxton case. These documents shed a completely different light on the case. People who had been involved in the case had been written out of history somehow. And I really did feel almost a debt, I almost felt honor bound to draw these people back out from the shadows and into the light and write about their role in the case.

 But there was more to it than that. The way that I investigated crime in the 1970s and 1980s and the 1990s, and the way that crime is investigated now, really in a large part, is due to the legacy of this case. That’s how important the Ruxton case was.

Paul:  I would say in my assessment of the Ruxton case, that was really sort of like the O.J. Simpson coming-out-party of forensics.

Yeardley:  That is Paul Holes. He’s one of my co-hosts on Small Town Dicks. I love that guy. Paul spent 27 years as a cold case and predatory crimes investigator for the sheriff’s office in the San Francisco Bay Area. And let me tell you, this guy knows forensics. He’s used evidence to help put some of California’s most heinous offenders behind bars.

Paul:  O.J. Simpson, DNA was pretty much unheard of until that trial started. And now, you have DNA analysts testifying in court about the technology of DNA, and now the public was just fascinated with what this DNA technology was. In the Ruxton case, more weight had to be put on the scientific and medical testimony, and it’s complex. And for these experts to try to convey this to laypersons, and these are laypersons back in the 1930s, so science was something that most of them probably really didn’t have any type of education in, this was a challenge. And to this day, expert testimony is that challenge, you have to be able to articulate your results so the average person can understand it. So that, to me, is really what I would say is the pinnacle aspect of the Ruxton case when it comes to forensics.

Yeardley:  But before we get into the revolutionary forensics work, we need to go back to the bridge just outside the small Scottish farming town of Moffat, back to the afternoon of September 29th, 1935. Back to the body parts.

[flies buzzing]

 It’s been four hours since Susan Johnson glanced over the parapet of the Gardenholme Bridge, where, down in the stream bed, she saw what she would describe for the rest of her life as a woman’s severed arm waving at her. Now, Susan and her brother Alfred are back in Moffat at the Buccleuch Arms Hotel. From the lobby, Susan uses the only phone in the place to call the local police. She explains that she and her brother found what appear to be human remains in the stream bed north of town. It is not the kind of call the local police are used to getting.

 The law enforcement presence in Moffat doesn’t amount to much. But then, you probably don’t need much law enforcement in a village where there are more sheep than people and the worst crime is bicycle theft. Susan hangs up the phone and gets ready for an early dinner.

 Meanwhile, about 2 miles outside of town the afternoon sun is fading on the deserted Gardenholme Bridge. The temperature is dropping, shadows are rising. And down there in the gully, next to the trickling stream, the woman’s severed arm is waving at nobody. But not for long.

Tom:  On that Sunday afternoon, the only person on duty in the police station was Sergeant Robert Sloan. He’s the officer in charge of the Moffat police station. There’s a few men, three or four men, they didn’t have any police cars. They were all on bikes at that time. And he gets the call, and he has to deal with it.

Yeardley:  Sergeant Sloan arrives at the Buccleuch Arms Hotel. There, he interviews Susan and Alfred, nodding slowly as they talk, jotting down notes in pencil. He’s familiar with the bridge. There’s a path down there along the stream used by local couples. It’s secluded and lonely. It’s an ideal spot for a lovers’ lane. Or, a brutal murder.

 Around 4 o’clock, Sergeant Sloan asks Alfred to walk with him to the body site. They head north on high street, the main road that goes in and out of Moffat. The small shops dwindle as the landscape changes into deep green fields and low rolling hills with flocks of grazing sheep. Alfred shoves his hands in his pockets against the chill, while Sloan pushes his bike alongside him. They don’t talk much. Here’s Janet Tildesley. She lived in Moffat for 26 years.

Janet:  So, it’s quite an empty, quite a deserted road that goes up to Edinburgh. But there are kind of like moors and fields on either side of it. So, if you were going to get rid of body, you’d have to park the car and you’d have to take all the body parts out and you’d have to walk somewhere and bury them or dump them. Whereas this, it’s a ravine.

Yeardley:  Tildesley knows the area really well. She’s a trustee at the Moffat Museum.

Janet:  It’s not something I’ve given a great deal of thought to, about where to dump bodies. But if I was driving from Moffat up to Edinburgh, I can’t think of any other spot where there is a drop right at the side of the road.

Yeardley:  As Sergeant Sloan approaches the bridge near that drop, Alfred begins to point out where to look for the parcels. But he really doesn’t have to, the smell leads the way.

Tom:  This is from Sergeant Sloan’s police report, dated the 29th September 1935. “On arriving there, I looked over the east parapet. I observed the right forearm and hand of a human being. Also, a human head laying amongst the rocks in the bed of the stream. I descended to where these objects were lying. I then observed another head, a large number of pieces of flesh with skin attached. [voice fades away]

Yeardley:  This roll call continues until Sergeant Sloan’s cold and thorough inventory of horrors becomes as mundane as a grocery list.

Tom:  So on his own, Sloan scrambles down into the bed of the ravine, which is strewn with decomposed, stinking body parts. Some of them are lying out in the open. Some of them are wrapped in newspaper and old cloth. The blue bottles and maggots are everywhere. And that’s the scene that faces him.

 When Sloan realizes what he’s seeing in front of him, he immediately shouts back up to the parapet of the bridge. Sloan says, “Go back to Moffat. Call Inspector Henry Strath in Lockerbie. Explain to him we’re going to need backup.” Back up. Because, as Sloan puts it, “because of the serious nature of this discovery.”

Yeardley:  Alfred does as he’s told. Then, with the last rays of light disappearing fast, the sergeant stands alone with the crickets and the flies and the stench beneath the old stone bridge. He lights up a Woodbine cigarette and stares at the litter of human debris.

Tom:  Robert Sloan was not a trained detective. He had no criminal investigation experience. He had no equipment. He had nothing, literally nothing.

[suspenseful music]

Yeardley:  Sloan joined the Dumfries County police 15 years ago. The crimes he’s dealt with have been minimal. Stuff like vandalism and Saturday night drunks. He’s been a good, capable cop, and he was promoted to sergeant in 1932. But in all those years on the job, he’s never seen anything remotely like what’s been found under the Gardenholme Bridge. So, Sloan improvises a plan of action and, wait for it, that plan will define the future of forensic police work.

Tom:  Robert Sloan, how I do not know, still amazes me how he carried out such a perfect crime scene management exercise. He controlled the scene, he made notes, he made measurements. Everything is immaculate. Reading his statement now, it looks like a statement which could have been written 24 hours ago. His performance is frankly astonishing. And it brought forensic science from being the icing on the cake to being the cake.

Yeardley:  I know. I know what Sloan did at the scene may sound obvious. If you’ve ever seen a TV crime show, you already know what to do. But remember, in 1935, these procedures weren’t taught to police. These methods simply didn’t exist.

Tom:  Many officers at that time would have shown no forensic awareness. Several other Scottish murders at that time were badly botched by forensically ignorant local cops not wanting to ask for help. Sloan was part of the operation that changed all that.

Paul:  Even today, the average patrol officer who has had some crime scene training often just tramples over critical evidence.

Yeardley:  That’s Paul Holes again.

Paul:  So, for Officer Sloan to take the steps that he did back in the 1930s really shows that he was a deep thinker. He understood the magnitude of everything at that location and that even the smallest clue needs to be paid attention to and that his actions could actually destroy evidence in the case. He just had that natural intellect to understand the importance of that location and all the evidence there.

[suspenseful music]

Robert:  I am Robert Sloan, and my grandfather was Robert Sloan, the police sergeant who was involved in the Buck Ruxton case in Moffat in the 1930s. My grandfather meticulously drew the site and took measurements and laid everything out.

Yeardley:  Sadly, that’s about all Sloan knows about his grandfather, who died in 1940, 12 years before Robert was born.

Robert:  I think to actually go down into that gully where the body parts were and make the discovery that he made, it must have been horrendous for him. It’s just unimaginable. It’s unimaginable.

Yeardley:  Today, all the relatives that knew Robert Sloan’s grandfather are dead. There are no memories to recall, no stories to tell. Robert’s only connections with the man are an old photograph and the name they share.

Robert:  And that causes me a bit of grief as well, I’d say, because there’s just so much. I’ve got so many questions and they’ll never be answered. They’ll never be answered.

[water running and birds chirping]

Yeardley:  We now go back to 1935. It’s early Monday morning, the day after Susan and Alfred Johnson have discovered the body parts. Skies are cloudy. Sloan and a dozen other officers from Glasgow and Edinburgh, along with two bloodhounds, are on the scene at Gardenholme Bridge.

 They’re scavenging the bushes, sifting through the weeds and tall grass, digging under fallen branches. By sunset, the search extends hundreds of yards up the ravine from the bridge. The hunt turns up another batch of atrocities. More body parts. These mutilated remains join Sunday’s collection at the small mortuary in Moffat. The police begin unwrapping the parcels, revealing a horrible jumble of human anatomy.

 To make matters worse, there are no identifying features on the faces. Fingerprints have been destroyed. The genitals have been removed. The police have no idea how many bodies they’re dealing with or the gender of these individuals, or even how they actually died. But as the stack of limbs and flesh grows higher on the old wooden table at the mortuary, some things are becoming clearer.

 With no blood spatter and many of the body parts wrapped in paper and cloth, the police conclude this is a body dump site. It’s an attempt to cover up a crime. It is not the murder scene. And another thing stands out. These victims were not randomly, savagely hacked apart. This was a dissection. And it was done by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, someone with a deep knowledge of human anatomy. I mean, that could be a surgeon, it could be a medical student, a mortician, and that throws a wide net.

 There are major hospitals and medical schools close by in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but that’s all the police know. There are no witnesses, no motives, no list of suspects, nothing to go on. And whoever’s behind this has worked hard to keep it that way. It’s a strange, unsettling case, the kind that leaves battle-scarred cops and veteran detectives completely in the dark. And it’s only the second day, two days since the grisly discovery in the ravine turned the tiny village of Moffat upside down and started what would become one of the most important murder investigations in history.

[upbeat music]

Yeardley:  Coming up on Beyond Recognition.

Tom:  They thought that these two were made in hell for each other.

Janet:  Every house has got a room that is ideal for dismemberment.

Tom:  This was Agatha Christie come to life.

[suspenseful music]

Yeardley:  Beyond Recognition was written and produced by Peter Gilstrap. I’m your host, Yardley 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.

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