[Beyond Recognition music]

Yeardley:  Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you, guys? Welcome to our Beyond Recognition bonus episode, where Dan, Dave, Paul and I are going to chat about the series and some of the things that really stood out for us. And in case it’s been a minute since you listened to the series, we’re going to pull some clips from the show as we discuss. But also, be warned. If you haven’t heard the series at all, there will be spoilers. So, you might want to start with Episode 1 before you listen to this gem, which is Episode 7. And with that, let’s get to it. I am here with Detective Dan.

Dan:  Hello.

Yeardley:  Hello. [laughs] And Detective Dave.

Dave:  Hello.

Yeardley:  Hello. And the one and only, Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hello.

Yeardley:  Hello. Paul was actually just telling us about his recent travels, where he got stuck in the eye of a hurricane in Houston. No food, no water, no anything. I keep telling him he should stay home, but of course, he’s about to hit the road again.

Paul:  Yeah. No, and also the computer crash that caused me to drive from Wisconsin to Colorado Springs. Took me two and a half days all through cornfields, from Wisconsin through Nebraska, Iowa. A lot of agriculture. It was cool to see, but I like the mountains.

Yeardley:  Yeah. So, Small Town Fam, hopefully, all or most of you have listened to our limited series that we released this summer called Beyond Recognition about the Ruxton murders, it is six-part series. Really, really well done. Not just because I narrate. Really, hats off to the team behind the scenes that did this beautiful sound design and took Tom Wood’s book, Tom Wood, who’s been a guest on the pod many times, about the Ruxton murders and really brought it to life. Anyway, it’s fab.

[music]

 Paul, as our forensic expert, what were your thoughts?

Paul:  Well, the Ruxton case is a case that very early on in my career, I stumbled across just a book that was in my laboratory’s library. It was a fascinating case. Circa 1992. That’s how long ago I first heard about the Ruxton case.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Paul:  And so, in some ways, I did study it. It’s an example, as we’ve talked about, that you had investigators, forensic scientists, that for their time, were brilliant. How many times do we run across cases? Whether it’s historic cases or whether it’s cases in the modern era where you go, “What in the hell were they thinking?” [chuckles]

Yeardley:  Right.

Paul:  But in this case, you have people who were smart, they thought out of the box and they progressed the investigative and forensic fields. And so, it’s really illustrative. No matter what era you’re in, you have brilliant minds that are working in law enforcement, working in forensics. They help progress our abilities to solve cases.

Yeardley:  And also, super interesting that this case, because of course, we didn’t have the DNA technology that we have, now, really was purely circumstantial. There were no witnesses in the, kind of like, “Oh, yeah, I saw him loading parcels into the rented car, or I saw a guy throwing shit off the bridge into the ravine.” We had nothing like that.

 And so, for these investigators to be able to build a compelling case against Dr. Ruxton, again based on so much out of the box thinking, is, I think really exciting in terms of when you’re listening to a podcast like this, but also always compelling, and fascinating and so cool. So, bravo, all, y’all, if you’re listening up there in heaven. [chuckles] Hats off to you.

Dave:  Agreed.

Yeardley:  Dave, what do you think?

Dave:  There’s fascinating things in this case. I took notes on the series. One of my bullet points is, “Little mistakes.” And the first thing I have is statements, early on statements that he has.

Yeardley:  This is Ruxton.

Dave:  Ruxton. Ruxton offered, I’m sure it was a moment of paranoia and panic where he walks across the street, I’m mean, the police department’s right across the street from Ruxton’s house.

[footsteps]

 He walks in and gives him a bulleted list of, “This is what I’ve been doing for the last several days.”

Yeardley:  Murder suspects don’t just show up with bullet pointed itineraries. Van scans through it. It’s the story of 17 days in the life of an innocent man, and the details are glaringly mundane. Things like children’s party in the evening, came home for lunch, work as usual, evening at home with the kiddies, shave.

Tom:  The police think it’s extremely odd not to say suspicious.

Dave:  Investigators know this. When you’re so detailed about little things, like, tied my shoes.

Yeardley:  Right.

Dave:  Shaved.

Yeardley:  Ate toast.

Dave:  Ate toast. [Yeardley laughs] Crap like that, nobody’s writing that down. We’re talking about a double murder. And then, Ruxton throws his keys on the desk of the investigator and says, “Go, search my house.”

Yeardley:  Right.

Dave:  They don’t take the opportunity to even do a little follow up and just do a walkthrough.

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Dave: It’s like, Ruxton’s bluffing them, saying, “I’m wide open to a search and they didn’t recognize.” “Hey, we could check this box right now.” They’re like, “No, don’t worry about it, Dr. Ruxton.”

Yeardley:  Because you’re a doctor and you’re well respected in the community.

Dave:  Exactly.

Dan:  This is what I would tell younger officers, when they give you consent, take it.

[laughter]

 Call their bluff. You’re going to have to check that box, eventually. And if they’re going to just give it up, then take it.

Yeardley:  Before they change their mind.

Dan:  Exactly.

Paul:  And that timeline, that detailed type of timeline that sometimes suspects will provide, there’s a very easy way to undermine that, because they’ve obviously just sat down and constructed something that is going to, in essence, eliminate them from having the ability to commit the crime, whether it’s because they’re separated time, space, whatever.

 But somebody brings in that type of written statement, you collect it and you say, “Okay, I want you to give me that timeline again, right now,” and let’s see how much it overlaps. They’re not going to be able to reproduce something like that with the same detail. There’s going to be things messed up. I’ve seen this firsthand in a case. This is where now you catch them in a lie. As long as investigators are savvy to that technique, they can undermine that real quick.

Dave:  Yeah. So, you have these mistakes. The second I have is Ruxton outsourced the crime scene cleanup crew.

Mary:  I noticed the stairs were in a dirty condition. The bathtub was a very dirty yellow, right up to about six inches from the top. I was very much surprised and told the doctor so. I gave the bath a good scrub, but could not get the stains off. I noticed blood dripped on the floor, and it had been roughly wiped up.

Dan:  You can be calculating and sophisticated as a criminal. But Buck Ruxton made terrible mistakes in this case like, he rented a car to transport the bodies up to Scotland, and then on the way back did a hit and run on a bicyclist.

Yeardley  Who actually lived and was able to get up. His bicycle was mangled. Meanwhile, that’s the bicyclist’s main form of transportation. He’s so pissed that Ruxton didn’t actually stop and go, “Dude, I’m really sorry,” that he reports it to the police.

Dave:  Right.

Yeardley:  It is supposed, that if Ruxton had gotten out and said, “Oh, my God, are you alright?” and tried to make it right, that the guy would have been like, “Yeah. No problem.” But he was such a jerk that it turned out to be the thing that places Ruxton right near where the bodies are dumped.

Beattie:  The car didn’t stop, and I took the number and reported it. I noticed that the driver waved as he passed. I shouted at him to stop, but he didn’t do so.

Yeardley:  That day, Beattie reports the accident to a local cop, who makes a call to the police station in the next village down the road. When Ruxton drives through a few minutes later, he’s pulled over.

Tom: There’s a wee boy in the car. And so, the policeman takes the view that it’s no big deal, really, and the doctor goes on his way. But the policeman, being in a very quiet county station, makes a full report of this. And so, this is a major problem for Ruxton. And he knows it. He knows he’s made a stupid mistake.

Yeardley:  A thing I always forget is Ruxton had his youngest child in the backseat, while he’s transporting the bodies of the child’s mother and the nanny in the fucking trunk and throwing them into a ravine. Like, really, dude?

Dave:  That’s a huge mistake with the bicyclist, because now you need an alibi for your alibi.

Yeardley:  Right. [laughs]

Dave:  For someone who fancies himself as intelligent and sophisticated as Dr. Ruxton, not a very good criminal.

Yeardley:  What do you think, Paul?

Paul:  I think that that’s spot on in terms of what Dave’s saying, is that here you have an offender that prides himself on his intellect. But we’ve seen over and over, just because somebody is smart within a certain field with Dr. Ruxton, it’s the medical field, does not mean that they are very good at committing a crime, especially if it is a crime that has not been thoroughly thought out in the first place. So, here, you see that aspect of, “Yes, he’s a bright guy, at least in terms of being able to obtain a medical degree,” but he’s a dunce when it comes to how to commit to this type of crime.

 The other thing is though, is that what happens in violent crime, you can plan it as thoroughly as you want, but there’s always another dynamic you can’t control. And it can be how the victim responds. All of a sudden, the victim is fighting. We’re not expecting the victim to fight back. And now, you’re leaving DNA, because you’ve been punched in the nose and you’ve got a bloody nose, or you have a guy on a bicycle that you hit after you [chuckles] have dumped the body parts.

 These are those uncontrollable variables that law enforcement, you always hope for that type of thing. You get something where you go, “Aha. All right, Ruxton’s saying he’s over here and now I’ve got a witness showing that he was out there where the bodies were found.”

Yeardley:  Yeah.

[ambient music] [sad music]

Dave:  Sergeant Sloan deserves a ton of credit.

Yeardley:  Sergeant Sloan is first on the scene at the body dump, which is this ravine in Scotland. And Sloan works in Scotland, not in England, where the murders took place.

Dave:  Yeah. To have that kind of vision of, “What do I need to do and how am I going to do this?” He’s all by himself. Sergeant Sloan’s efforts are some of the main features of what did we learn from this case. That’s spectacular. You really have no blueprint or roadmap, but now you’ve set the bar, pretty impressive.

Tom:  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.

Dave:  Sergeant Sloan, as he’s going through the packaging around these body parts, discovers, “Oh, there’s some really very specific local stories in these newspaper cutouts. Let’s figure out where this applies.”

Yeardley:  Sloan takes his newspaper theory to his boss, Chief Constable Black. Black is no fool. 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 that could lead them straight to the killer. Here’s Professor Sue Black.

Sue:  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.

Dave:  That’s probably the most fascinating part of the case to me, is they narrow it down to two different little hamlets. One of them is where Mr. Ruxton lives. It doesn’t take long for the investigator to figure out. I think they had 28 people that subscribed to this periodical, and they’re like, “Well, anybody of these 28, missing anybody in their life?”

 Well, Dr. Ruxton’s got two people he hasn’t seen for a while. Hmm. That’s gum shoot stuff. That’s really good. And eventually, you get to this point where everyone’s looking at Dr. Ruxton’s local PD going, “Hey, you guys going to move this?”

Yeardley:  In Lancashire, that little police department you’re talking about.

Dave:  Correct. The local PD for Dr. Ruxton and his wife. They end up with a lot of egg on their face, I think after the folks in the north start putting together, “Hey, I think we figured out where our suspect is from.” And they moved very quickly. They make arrests before they’ve really dug into the evidence and tried to link it to Dr. Ruxton.

Tom:  The problem is that usually in these cases, before you arrest someone on a murder charge, you’ve got a fair amount of evidence. Here, they did things the other way around. They arrested him first, and then went looking for the evidence. So, this puts you under the most enormous time pressure. Because, of course, once somebody is in custody, the clock is running and they start to get all sorts of legal representation, etc., etc. So, you are under the gun. So, this put the prosecution, and put all the police and the scientists under the most enormous pressure.

Dave:  It’s completely backwards from the way we do things. Typically, you’re trying to reverse engineer the crime. It’s just really impressive. The foresight and the vision that Sloan had right at the beginning, all the way through these forensic scientists that helped piece this all together. I wrote a note down, I said, “This is the first real use of a multidisciplinary team.” And that’s pretty standard, nowadays.

Yeardley:  How do you mean? Can you explain that?

Dave:  So, in this case with Ruxton, they have entomologists. They have forensic scientists who are experts in anatomy. They have fingerprint experts. They have all kinds of folks who are giving their two cents. They all focused on, “Let’s make sure we do this the right way.” And that’s special.

Paul:  Dave is straight on point. Back in the early 1900s, to see this cooperative between various disciplines, you have your forensic disciplines, also the investigative side, I was struck by the thoroughness that they approached the evidence in the case for the technology that they had at the time. This is where we see the identification using superimposition of negatives, like X-rays of the skull over photographs to show how the anatomy is lining up.

Yeardley:  For the first time, specialists came together with new concepts and methodologies in order to dig up enough circumstantial evidence to mount a prosecution. Again, forensic anthropologist, Sue Black.

Sue:  The one thatprobably more than anything, sealed it, was the superimposition of the skull onto the photograph of Isabella. Even today, that’s the one that is shown as being iconic. It was the first time that was done. That was compelling.

Yeardley:  Also, when Glaister collects the bugs, they come to it not immediately. They don’t come to it right away. This idea that you could actually formulate a timeline based on the maggots and the flies, because there’s two weeks in Ruxton’s timeline that they can’t actually account for. And so, that, again, was brand new where this entomologist goes, “Well, hang on.”

Dave:  Right. That’s a landmark moment and criminal investigation.

Paul:  It’s huge. Just to make a comment, flies are amazing creatures when it comes to death investigation. I hate them in my personal life.

[laughter]

 They’re nasty little creatures, in part because of what they do to bodies.

Dave:  You are what you eat.

Yeardley:  Eww.

Paul:  [laughs] Yeah. But they sense death so fast, and they will deposit their eggs, sometimes within minutes after a creature or human is dead. I’ve been out at a crime scene and watched a fly pump its eggs into the nostrils of a woman. It sounds like a machine gun. And it’s just like, “Wow.” This fly is probably just flying around and goes, “There’s something around here that I can lay my eggs on.” Sure enough, does that.

 And so, going back to this era to recognize, “Hey, these maggots can tell us something.” We now know today in terms of determining time of death, insects are the best for bodies that are older than a few days. So, Glaister was really on the cutting edge.

Dr. Erica McAlllister:  The Ruxton maggots are really important, because they’re the first time in the UK that we’ve used maggots, we’ve used forensic entomology to help prosecute a murderer in this case.

Yeardley:  Dr. Erica McAllister is Senior Curator for Diptera and Siphonaptera at the Natural History Museum in London.

Dr. Erica McAlllister:  The maggots were so useful, because they properly gave a timeline. And using that timeline, they were able to incriminate Dr. Ruxton and his movements to link them in with the dumping of the bodies.

Paul:  Today and should be at least par for course, collect all the insect evidence. I have collected so many various stages of bugs from actual flies, where I literally use flypaper, hang it up while I’m out at a crime scene, and then I’m laying out jars of methanol and having these flies land in the jars of methanol, and they die and then now I collect that. But then, of course, the maggots scooping them up from the various areas and looking for different types of maggots, because they’re not just flies. You have beetle larvae that are going to be there, and there’s this whole succession of insects that come who have access to the body and they come at different stages of the decomposition. So, you have to look for all of that.

 Some of these insects decide, after they feasted on the body, that they’re going to go and bury themselves in the soil or climb up a tree and be in the bark. So, you have to look for that kind of evidence. But it’s huge for death investigation, particularly with cases like this, where it’s been more than a few days since the victims were killed, and they’ve been left outside.

Yeardley:  That’s incredible. And a fun fact, apparently, seven of the original Ruxton maggots that were found at the scene are still in a museum in Glasgow in a tiny little vial, like seven of the original Ruxton maggots.

[intense music]

Dave:  I think the other tragic, and it’s more of a commentary on society back then, was Mary is very much a victim of this crime and she’s not really treated like a victim.

Yeardley:  That is so true. Just as a reminder to our listeners, Mary is the Ruxton children’s nanny. And that being her station in life likely had something to do with the fact that the police considered Mary, less important a victim than say, Isabella, who was Ruxton’s wife. In fact, they don’t even charge Ruxton with Mary’s murder even though it’s fucked up, because the body they can only actually identify, because Ruxton has disfigured and dismembered the bodies of Mary and Isabella so thoroughly. When they finally get a positive identification of one of the bodies, it’s Mary’s.

 Though Ruxton’s not being charged with Mary’s murder, confirming one of the bodies as Mary bolsters the circumstantial case that the other is Isabella, after all, they were connected as employer and live in employee. They disappeared at the same time from the same location, the two bodies were found together. The crown’s message to the jury is, “If this is Mary, that must be Isabella.”

 What a risk where they go, “Well, we know this is Mary’s body. Therefore, this other body must be Isabella’s.”

Dave:  You know, I can go two ways with that. I actually have a note about it.

Yeardley:  Oh, do.

Dave:  One charge equals Bella is on my note pad here. Attorneys sometimes do that to hedge their bets. So, I’m going to take one of these, take it to trial, see how it goes. If we get that, then we can move to the other. For me, it’s so obvious, this is a crime compounded by another crime.

Yeardley:  How do you mean?

Dave:  You murder your wife and then you’re like, “Well, there’s a witness,-

Yeardley:  Uh-huh.

Dave:  -who’s seen me with my hands around my wife’s neck, I need to kill her too.” And Mary and Bella were very close.

Yeardley:  Yes.

Dave:  I think probably Dr. Ruxton resented a lot of that, because he probably knows, “Well, Mary knows all the secrets, since they’re besties.” So, you have that aspect. For me, what’s most disappointing is some of the best evidence as far as identification belongs to the Mary side of this case, which is, body parts wrapped in a garment that has identifying features on it, like a patch that was sewn on by Mary’s mother. That’s very specific.

 And fingerprints, where the forensic fingerprint guy is testing ways to get past the sloughed skin of the epidermis, and goes to an experiment to try to burn that layer away and get down to the dermal layer to confirm fingerprints on victim with fingerprints found in the house. That’s really powerful evidence. To me, the easiest case of these two to try would have been the Mary side of it. For reasons, we’ve already detailed, but there’s two things. They could have been hedging their bets. For me, if you’re hedging your bets, I would have gone with the Mary case first.

Yeardley:  Yeah. I was asked in an interview recently about the six-part series that we did, what was one of the things that surprised you about this Ruxton case? Really, one of the things that surprised me was how forgotten it is, that even in Glasgow, where Sloan and Glaister were operating out of, people don’t actually know their names so well. 90 years, that’s a while, but it’s not like 500 years.

Dan:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  I really loved what the team was able to do to bring Tom Wood’s book to life in a way that really lends itself to a podcast.

Dan:  I love the book, and I love Tom digging into Buck Ruxton’s mindset.

Yeardley:  Yeah. The book is called the Ruxton: The First Modern Murder, and it is by Tom Wood.

Dan:  I got it on Amazon.

Tom:  I realized that I hadn’t known about the Ruxton case. These documents shed a completely different light on the case. People who’d been involved in the case had been written out of history somehow. 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.

Yeardley:  So, if you guys haven’t actually heard the Beyond Recognition series yet, I highly recommend it.

Dave:  Yeah. The professional work done by the investigators on this speaks for itself. And a great outcome, in my opinion.

 The other thing I want to highlight is everyone involved in the creation and production of this, Yeardley from the voice of the narration, [Yeardley laughs] all the way down to everybody else who touched this project. Really impressive. Great job to the Audio 99 team that put it together.

Yeardley:  Indeed, the new Audio 99.

Dave:  I’m digging the music.

Yeardley:  Great music. Original music by our phenomenal head of production, Logan Heftel. But so many people on our small, but mighty Audio 99 team touched this podcast, and I was so proud of them. So, hats off to the team.

Dave:  Absolutely.

[music]

Yeardley:  Thanks all. Small Town Fam, thanks for joining us here on this special episode, this recap debrief. You guys are awesome. A new season of Small Town Dicks starts on September 20th. So, mark your calendars. Or, maybe you just want to sit in your car right now, so that when the first episode drops, you can just turn the key and get ready to get on the road and listen.

Dave:  Just don’t drive north and run into bicyclist. [Yeardley laughs]

Dan:  Get drive from Wisconsin to Colorado Springs.

Yeardley:  You could do that.

[laughter]

Paul:  Listen to a lot of podcasts doing that.

Yeardley:  You guys are great. We’ll see you next time.

[somber music]

Yeardley:  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.

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