Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

Two corpses were mutilated beyond identification — yet the English police could put their finger on the map and say with certainty, “Look here for the murderer!”

I

The list of doctors who have willfully been false to the Hippocratic oath of the medical profession to heal, and not to kill, is a long one. Scores in every country on the globe have used their professional knowledge for greedy gain or so that they might taste the sweet savor of revenge. Others have used that knowledge so that they might rid themselves of wives with whom they could no longer live. Wives they hated, wives who bored them, wives who drove them to exasperated madness.

Dr. Buck Ruxton was now about to add himself to this last class. When his wife Belle came home from her jaunt, her death certificate would be ready for her.

Though it was Saturday night, September 14, 1935, and there was fun going on — moving picture houses crowded, music halls jammed, public houses buzzing with football and racing talk to the clatter of glasses and the blare of the radio — in this busy English manufacturing town of Lancaster, there was not a sound at Number 2, Dalton Square.

Behind the façade of the gray three-storied house across from the Town Hall and Courthouse, nothing stirred. The doctor’s three children were in bed, so was their nurse, pretty Mary Rogerson.

In his office the doctor sat at his desk, twiddling a pencil in his fingers, looking at the dock, waiting for the sound of that opening door to signal the return of the doomed woman.

He was a strange man to find in this Lancashire mill town to which he had come six years earlier, yet this Hindu doctor had thousands of patients on his books.

He was a Parsee, a member of that large and wealthy community of Persian origin, who live in Bombay. He had graduated in surgery and medicine at Bombay University. His name then had been Gabriel Hakim — Dr. Gabriel. He had married a Parsee bride, whose first name was Motibai. She had borne him a child.

But the wife which Lancashire knew was not this one.

The doctor had left his Parsee wife and child in Bombay, to come to the famous Edinburgh University in Scotland for a postgraduate course. He had not been long there when he met and was fascinated by a Scotswoman who was manageress of a restaurant. Belle had been married, but had got rid of her husband. She fell for this lithe, sallow-faced, dark-haired, magnetic, voluble and persuasive student, who always had money to spend.

The doctor, under the Scotswoman’s Northern charms, forgot the teachings of Zoroaster in whose cult he had been reared, right thought, right speech, right action. Resolutely he determined to cut himself apart from his former life, to forget India, his wife and child whom he had never mentioned to Belle, and to create a new life for himself. As a preliminary and in order to avoid his being traced, he instituted court proceedings and adopted the name of Buck Ruxton.

As he sat in his office this night he reviewed his life of the past seven years. He had prospered. He had paid four thousand pounds for his practice. He owned his house. He had many friends. He had three lovely children; two daughters, aged six, four, and two-year-old Billy, and yet his heart was black with hate and bitterness — such hate, suspicion, distrust as drove the Moor Othello to his destruction of Desdemona.

He remembered a phrase he once wrote in a letter to Belle just before he brought her to Lancaster.

“It’s women like you who make men hate women.”

She said she loved him, yet he felt she never was truly his, that he was not her lord and master as he would have had her admit.

“You’re not in India now, Bommie,” she kept saying to him, “and a wife has some freedom here, don’t forget that.”

Her cold mocking laugh, her neglect of him when he wanted her most, the uncertainty of life with her, one moment a consuming fire, the next a block of ice, the constant friction of East and West, of ancient ideas and modern, the clash of two strong wills, and ever present domestic turmoil, all had made his life a hell past endurance.

He could stand it no longer. The time had come to end this conflict. She loved the children. He would tear her away from them. He would rid himself of this torment and heal his burning wounds.

He had good cause for jealousy. Was she not running around with a young local solicitor? He believed they were writing to each other, telephoning. Had she not gone with him on an automobile trip to Edinburgh, a fortnight earlier. Oh, yes, she had said the young man’s family were with them, but could he believe her? She lied, as she had lied so often before, to taunt him, to mock him.

And now tonight she was off in the car, alone to Blackpool and its beach pleasures and excitements. To see her sister, Mrs. Nelson, who had come there from Edinburgh for a visit. That was what she said. How was he to know that she was speaking the truth?

If she were not? The pencil snapped in two in his strong, slender fingers.

He would kill her, rid himself of this torture once and for all. Only — there was the law. For those who murdered there was the gallows. For fools who murdered, that was. Not for subtle, cunning brains such as his. There were ways and means to circumvent the punishment of the law. Tricks that only a surgeon knew.

His mind went back to Bombay, to the Towers of Silence overlooking tropical foliage, roof terraces, the sparkling waters. Here the Parsees brought their dead. He saw the bearers passing through the low door, the dead body exposed to sun and air and to the multitude of screaming vultures. In twenty minutes the bones were picked bare. Twenty minutes to destroy the evidence of death.

But this was England, where men took a strange interest in the causes of sudden death. Where detectives, aided by doctors, sought at the root of murder. He must match his Asiatic wits against their Western — his medical skill against the science of experts.

The perfect crime, this will o’ the wisp which tempts so many to their doom, was taking shape in his imagination. They had caught Dr. Crippen, Dr. Cream with his capsules of poison, smiling Dr. Palmer, callous Dr. Lam-son, Dr. Cross, the careless, Dr. Bougrat, Dr. Pommerais, the American Dr. Webster, but they would not catch Dr. Ruxton. He would see to that.

Dr. Ruxton stiffened. A car stopping. A key in the front door. He rose to his feet, and with that action, his brain cleared of its miasma of murder. Belle was home safe. In an instant she would be in the room with her careless “Hello, pa,” and her kiss. Belle, his Belle whom he adored. Oh, she had her faults, but who had not?

He heard the door closing and impulsively took a step toward the hall, ready to greet her. And then he heard her start to go upstairs. Such are the simple things which determine the fate of mortals. Had she come to greet him naturally, all would have been well, but she did not come.

So. She was afraid to face him. She had been up to something. He ran out into the hall. He followed her up the carpeted stairs.

“Belle!”

She turned and looked down at him, swinging her bag on her wrist.

“Oh, hello, pa. I thought you would be off to bed.”

“You thought nothing of the kind,” he flashed at her, “you know very well I wait up for you. Where were you?”

“At Blackpool. You know I was at Blackpool.”

“How do I know?”

She made a weary gesture. “Oh don’t start that all over again. I’m tired.”

“You were out with that young fellow again — I can see it — the way you act.”

“Oh go to bed,” she snapped.

They were her last words in life. One step up and his lithe hands closed about her throat and stayed there. He shook her in his passion. Then suddenly he let his hands go, and the lifeless body folded up in a heap, on the landing of the first floor.

He had just heard a strange stifled sound. He turned his head. Standing in the doorway of her bedroom was the nursemaid, twenty year old Mary Rogerson, her eyes distended with terror, her hand to her mouth. For a moment Dr. Ruxton looked at the witness of his crime, then with a cat-like bound, as she took her hand away and opened her mouth to scream, he was upon her. Again and again his hand struck her neck. The blood gushed from her mouth and stained nightdress and carpet.

Suddenly sobered Dr. Ruxton stepped back, the full hideous realization of what he had done, upon him. Oh, to plan death had been easy, but now it was accomplished, how different. He had two bodies, instead of one, calling for explanation, and that explanation he could never give. He must think, think quickly. Now that the deed was done, he must cover it up, he must set about the battle of wits which lay before him. He must safeguard his life — protect his children who lay sleeping a few feet away.

Turning up his sleeves he dragged the two bodies into the bathroom and laid them there. Then he came softly downstairs to his surgery. When he went upstairs again he carried a keen edged surgeon’s knife and its extra blades. He entered the bathroom and locked the door behind him. The light burned long in that room which he was using for his hideous task.

It was about six in the morning when he came out, haggard and unshaven, a cut on his right hand. He had suddenly recollected. Mrs. Oxley, one of three charwomen he employed throughout the week, was due to arrive this Sunday morning at seven. He cleaned himself, locked the bathroom door once more, came down, took the car and drove to Mrs. Oxley, whose husband he saw.

“Tell Mrs. Oxley not to come. Mrs. Ruxton and Mary have gone on a trip and I am taking the children to Morecambe.”

He returned home. He was busy about nine o’clock when the bell rang. He wrapped a rag about the right hand he had cut and went down. It was a Miss Partridge with a Sunday paper. He took it and said — “The maid is away with my wife in Scotland.”

At ten o’clock he had to open the door to the milkwoman. She looked at his hand. “Why, you’ve hurt t’hand, doctor.”

“Yes, I jammed it.”

A boy delivered a copy of the Sunday Graphic. After he left, the doctor went out to buy four gallon cans of gasoline. He was just carrying them in when a patient arrived.

“Oh, Mrs. Whiteside,” he told her. “I’ll have to put off your son’s operation till tomorrow. My wife has gone to Scotland. There’s just myself and the little maid in the house and we — we’re busy taking up the carpets ready for the decorators in the morning.”

It was only when she had gone that he realized what he had said on the spur of the moment. He stood for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. The woman would never think twice about what he said. She was thinking of nothing but her son’s operation.

There was a child’s laugh upstairs. The youngsters were awake. Their father stood at the bottom of the stairs rigid as a statue then, galvanized into action, ran up. He must get them out of the house. He went into the nursery to meet their questions.

“Mummy’s away. Yes, and Mary, too. Daddy will help you dress.”

He hurried them into their clothes, downstairs to the car. He drove them to the neighboring town of Morecambe with its beach and sea and left them with friends, the Andersons.

“Belle popped off suddenly on a trip to Edinburgh. She took Mary with her,” he explained. “My hand? Oh, I wanted to give the youngsters breakfast. All I could find was a can of peaches, and I cut my fingers on it.”

He drove back to Dalton Square and closed the door upon the dreadful contents of the house. He was busy from eleven-thirty to four, on various tasks. He pulled the stained carpets from the stairs. He kindled a fire in the yard and burned various articles. He must leave nothing to chance. And it was while he was working that it occurred to him that in order to give an innocent aspect to matters which might possibly carry the taint of his guilt he must go about his life as if nothing had occurred. He must have in the charwomen as usual, must behave in a natural casual way.

He cleared the bathroom, but locked up two of the bedrooms, and at four went out and asked a patient, Mrs. Hampshire, if she would care to come and clean his house a bit. Mrs. Ruxton had gone to Blackpool and Mary Rogerson, the maid, on a trip. Mrs. Hampshire had never worked for him but she agreed to go back with him.

She found the house in a mess, the carpets up, and straws on the stair. Dragged there by his son Billy, said the doctor, in play.

The bathroom was in a mess, the bath tub a dirty yellow up to six inches of the top.

“Give it a good clean and a scrub. What can you do when the woman of the house does not care?” he said.

Mrs. Hampshire set to work, while the doctor went out. She found some of the carpet from the stair in a roll in the surgery waiting room, and there was a blue suit all bundled up. In the yard were several pieces of carpet all stained and where there had been a fire, half-consumed towels and a shirt, all stained with blood.

Dr. Ruxton brought his children back to get some of their clothes and left Mrs. Hampshire and her husband in the house when he drove away with them. He said they could have the roll of carpet and the blue suit. And so they took these when they locked up the house at nine-thirty. They were careful to put out all the lights.

No eye admittedly saw Dr. Ruxton return to his house nor saw him leave it again in the early morning with an uncanny load. No eye spied upon what he did with his burden. No one noted that the mileage of his car had been increased by two hundred miles. The murderer had won the first battle.

At a few minutes after nine Mrs. Hampshire was amazed to see the doctor arrive dirty and unshaven, in flannel trousers and a raincoat, He who was usually so neat, had come without collar or tie.

“My, how ill you look.” She remarked.

“Do I? My hand pained me all night. By the bye, you took away the carpet and the blue suit. Just occurred to me it wouldn’t look nice to have such a messy thing as that come from my house.”

“Oh that’s all right,” said Mrs. Hampshire. “I can pay for the cleaning.”

Dr. Ruxton hesitated. Early that morning he had realized he had made a blunder but one that could be rectified. But how to get this blood smeared suit away from the woman without exciting her curiosity.

“Well let me cut off the name tag anyway. Let me have the scissors. No, my hand hurts me, you’d better do it.”

“Oh, I’ll do it after you go.”

“No, do it now.”

Mrs. Hampshire cut off the tag and he threw it into the fire. Dr. Ruxton was convinced the suit went to the cleaners. Mrs. Hampshire, whom he asked about it several times to make sure, said it had gone.

When he got back to the house there was Mrs. Oxley waiting to get in. She did not mention she had been there at seven-forty and had been unable to get in. The doctor must have been there during the night or early morning for there was a light burning. She asked where the missus and Mary were and he said they had gone to Edinburgh. They had planned it between them — the two women. She cleaned around all morning, saw the mess in the yard but said nothing, then went home.

Mrs. Hampshire was back in the afternoon. She bothered Dr. Ruxton with her questions about Mrs. Ruxton. Was she in Blackpool or Edinburgh and hadn’t he told someone she was in London. Finally he saw he must win her sympathy and shut her up.

“I will tell you the truth,” he said, “my wife has gone away with another man — left me with the three children. It’s terrible. I can forgive extravagance and she was a wasteful woman, but not infidelity.”

Mrs. Hampshire believed him, for the poor man laid his head on his hands and sobbed.

That night he was alone in the house. He still had work to do. Next morning he went off on an expedition. No one would have known of it, but he upset a cyclist in one of the towns of the Lake district who took his number and gave it to the police. Dr. Ruxton had a passenger with him but the young man whom he was using as a shield and a blind to the object of his trip from home could not have testified in a court. He was two year old Billy Ruxton.

He was back, however, by two when two of the usual charwomen Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Curwen arrived. Mrs. Smith noticed blood stains on the stair woodwork and made a comment, but the doctor had a ready answer. He had cut his hand and the blood dripped. And he said the same thing to Mrs. Curwen who pointed out blood on the stair casement window curtain. He ripped off the bloodied portion and took it away.

“People will be saying I murdered someone,” he said with a twisted smile, and the women laughed heartily at the idea.

That night he had a sudden quiver of apprehension. He had slipped up on a detail. If the two women had gone, of course they would have taken clothes with them, in addition to those they had worn. He had already disposed of his wife’s dress and things and of Mary Rogerson’s stained nightdress, but their traveling things, no.

He made a hasty search, gathered together some clothes, including one of Mary’s dresses with glass buttons, and with a can of gasoline made a fire in the yard.

Next morning he felt he had all but closed the door upon his crime. He went to the Andersons and took his children to the carnival at Morecambe.

On Thursday, September 19, Mrs. Oxley got to the house at seven-thirty. Dr. Ruxton told her to hurry breakfast as he had to see a specialist about his hand. She got him his breakfast in a hurry and he ate it in a hurry. She was in the kitchen washing up when she heard him bring his car round to the back door and come in. As he passed the kitchen door he shut it and went upstairs. He came down and up again several times, but she did not see what he was carrying. Which was just as well for both persons. He left the house at eight.

When Mrs. Oxley began to work, there did not appear to be anything wrong with them, though the two bedrooms had a faintly musty odor.

It was close on three o’clock when the doctor got back. Time enough to have gone a good many miles. He said, however, he had been to a nearby town and lost his way.

That night he brought back his children from Morecambe. There was no longer that beneath his roof which they must not see, must never know of.

On Friday Mrs. Curwen and Mrs. Oxley were again at the house. When they exclaimed about a bad smell, it did not take Dr. Ruxton long to set them right. The odor came from the walls they had been stripping of paper. He sent out for a sprayer and some eau-de-cologne.

He might have been uneasy, had he seen one of Mrs. Curwen’s operations. In a corner of the yard almost hidden from sight she came on a blanket in a basin of water. The water was reddish. She wrung the blanket and put fresh water on it, but did not mention the matter to the doctor.

And the doctor went about his usual business, seeing his patients, his ordinary efficient self. He handled all inquiries about his wife and Mary with the utmost composure. They had left his home on a trip Sunday morning. He was just a bit worried, he had not heard from them.

He was untouched by remorse. What was done was done. He had carried out the perfect crime. It would not, it could not be brought home to him. With his surgeon’s knife he had destroyed and removed from the two bodies every means of identification.

Yet even as he stalked in his pride through the streets of Lancaster, nemesis was stirring to life a hundred miles to the north where Dr. Ruxton believed he had concealed his secret.

II

Miss Susan Johnson, when she set out light-heartedly for a stroll on the morning of September 29, had no idea of the part she was to play in the most thrilling murder story to flash into the daily press of Great Britain since the discovery of the remains of Belle Crippen in the London cellar of her husband, Dr. Crippen.

With her brother Alfred she had come to spend a few days vacation in the town of Moffat, a well known health resort in the south of her native country, Scotland. Not that she needed to drink its famous mineral waters whose chemical taste attracted so many visitors. Nor was the scenery so different from that of the Glasgow suburb of Lenzie in which she lived, within a trifling journey of Loch Lomond and the mountains.

No, something else, she could not say what, had brought her to the Spa. It was a nice morning and she left the town behind her and began to climb. She could see the river Annan. And had her ears been alive to sounds long dead. She could have heard the tramp of Caesar’s legions on the old Roman road to her left. If she kept on she would come to that dismal forbidding hole known as the Devil’s Beef Tub.

But she did not get that far. When she came to the arched stone bridge spanning Gardenholm Linn, she stopped there for a rest and leaned over the parapet. She looked down into the eighty-foot deep ravine, dropping sheer from the roadway, at the bottom of which ran, a narrow swift current of the river, and she shuddered. It certainly was a fine place for terrible doings.

All at once she started, then leaned forward. What was that down on a ledge? It couldn’t be possible. She couldn’t be seeing what she thought she saw. A parcel, something tied, and out of it sticking a foot, a leg, a human leg. She must be seeing things!

She felt she had enough of a walk. Her one thought was to get back to Moffat.

“You’re daft,” said her brother when she told him.

“I’m not daft. If you don’t believe me, you can go back with me.”

“But what would anyone be getting rid of a body there for? Why, it’s the main road from Carlisle to Edinburgh and cars passing all day. Oh, well, just to please you, Susan. Come on.”

Alfred Johnson climbed down into the ravine and with a stick gingerly poked at the parcel. It certainly was a foot and leg with most of the flesh removed. There was another suspicious looking parcel nearby. He prodded it. It was hard and round. Suddenly he knew. A head.

He came scrambling up.

“You weren’t so daft after all,” he conceded. “That down there is a matter for the police. Here, here, don’t faint. I can’t carry you home to the hotel.”

Police Inspector Strath and others of the Dumfriesshire Constabulary undertook a search of the ravine. Their first finding consisted of four bundles, one wrapped in a white silk waist, one in a pillow slip, and two in pieces of cotton sheeting. Distributed in these bundles were thirty anatomical portions including one trunk, two heads three arms and hands, two legs and feet. Adhering to the trunk was straw. Pages of newspapers had been used as inner wrapping.

Next day a roadman found four more bundles wrapped in newspapers.

The poor remains were taken to the Moffat morgue or mortuary and deposited there. The county police saw at once that they were confronted with one of the most terrible crimes they had ever dealt with, and one which might prove as insoluble as the still mysterious Brighton trunk crimes which had baffled Scotland Yard.

They called upon the criminal investigation department of the Glasgow police, and a hurry call was sent to two of Scotland’s most noted medical crime experts. These were Dr. Gilbert Miller of Edinburgh University and Dr. John Glaister, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University, now carrying on the tradition of his father who had for thirty-three years occupied the same chair and written the textbook still used in the class.

The present Professor Glaister has written a number of books on his subject and is rising rapidly into fame as one of the foremost figures in the world of criminal investigation.

The anatomical portions were conveyed to the crown or state laboratory in Edinburgh and there Professor Glaister struck the first blow in the battle.

A strange and gruesome feature was that on the wrappings there was not a single spot of blood. The blood had been carefully drained from the bodies before anything else had been done.

“This is the work of someone with surgical experience,” said the expert. “Someone who has worked in a dissecting room, perhaps even one of my own profession.”

The two men, assisted by Dr. Brash, Professor of Anatomy began the uncanny business of building up the portions into their respective bodies. It was announced at first that the remains were those of a man and a woman, for one of the trunks was missing.

Streams in the neighborhood were drained and fished, for there had been heavy rains and it was thought other portions might have been carried away from the ravine to places lower down.

The police were deluged with inquiries as to missing persons. It seemed incredible that so many people could have vanished out of touch with relatives and not been reported. But none of those reported missing seemed to match up with exhibits in the Edinburgh laboratory.

In the first week of October several other portions were found near by the ravine. They enabled Professor Glaister to pronounce both bodies as those of women, and, though there were still missing a torso, two feet and an arm and hand, to give some definite picture of the two victims.

Number One was that of a woman of twenty to twenty-five years of age, plump and well developed. She had been killed by blows from a blunt instrument on the head. Several teeth were missing, some drawn after death. Though there was no trunk, she had both arms, hands and legs.

Number Two, with trunk, was that of an older woman, 35 to 40. A bone in the neck, fractured, pointed to strangulation with the hands. Signs of bleeding in the lungs indicated asphyxia. All teeth missing but one, some removed before death, some shortly after. One of the missing legs was found nine miles from the ravine October 28, and the missing hand and arm, after a storm which laid low the gorse, on November 4.

The more the experts studied the remains, the more convinced they were that the work was that of a man who knew his anatomy and surgery. Each individual joint had been severed with a sharp instrument.

And what at first glance had appeared to be savage brutality, the work of a sadist killer revelling in his job, now took on another and more revealing significance.

The butcher had gone to incredible pains to destroy every mark of identification. He had made sure no identification could ever be made of the remains.

Both heads had been scalped to destroy hair. So that the eyes might not be identified by size, color, by a possible cast or other defect, they had been taken out. Noses, ears, lips had been cut off and faces skinned. Skin had been removed from the limbs. Toes which by their nails, malformations, corns or bunions could have been identified had been cut off. Fingers had been mangled and severed.

The tongue tip of the elder woman had been cut off. The doctors looked at each other with startled surmise. Had the woman talked too much and so stirred her killer to a madman’s fury.

Police and experts bending over the hideous relics, turning over the rags in which they had been wrapped, might well have at this point given up hope of bringing home the killing to any individual. Where were they to look for him in the area of England and Scotland, or even further afield.

Surely it must be some demon of perversity which lures a man to the hideous crime of murder with the promise of safety — with the deluding gift of being able to commit the perfect crime — and then with snickering glee sees him leave on the scene of his crime a damning clue to his identity.

How did the police with almost unerring determination put their finger on the map and say — look here for a murderer.

Wrapped round one of the bundles had been a sheet of paper, the picture section of a newspaper, the Sunday Graphic, dated September 15, a paper distributed all over both Scotland and England. How then was it possible to say where this particular copy came from?

Because the picture page was a slip or insert page for local circulation only. It depicted the crowning of a carnival queen for the town of Morecambe in Lancashire, England. The page was circulated only in Morecambe and the four mile distant town of Lancaster, the county seat, both of which lay roughly a hundred miles south of Moffat.

It was reasonable to believe that the person who had wrapped this bundle had received the newspaper on the morning of Sunday, September 15, in one or the other of these two towns.

Who was this person, author of the abominable crime?

Inquiries addressed to the Chief Constable of Lancaster, Henry James Vann, brought the reply that no one had been reported missing there, but the affair took another turn on October 2.

On that day, a Mrs. Rogerson called at the police office and reported that for three weeks she had had no word of her daughter Mary who had been nursemaid to Dr. Ruxton.

“What does Dr. Ruxton say?” asked Vann.

“Lying hound as he is, he says the lass went away with the missus to have a child. Mary was a decent lass. Ah’d have known if she was that way.”

“You say Mrs. Ruxton is away, too?”

“Yes, sir. I can’t make nothing of it. Mary would have written me, but Ah’ve had never a postcard from her.”

Vann questioned the poor woman. She had last seen Mary on her half day off, September 12. That was the last time she saw her. Not hearing from or seeing her, they grew anxious, Mary’s brother saw Dr. Ruxton who said Mary had gone off with his wife, Sunday morning, the 15th. The doctor came to see them a week later and said Mary was pregnant and his wife had taken her away to be treated. He blamed a laundry boy.

The indignant parents waited till Oct. 1 and then went to see Dr. Ruxton. He told them he could not find out where Mary and his wife had gone. They had taken thirty pounds which he had had in his safe. When that was gone he expected them to come back. He asked the Rogersons to wait and not inform the police, but they could wait no longer.

When the unhappy mother left his office, Vann sat thoughtful and concerned. Two women missing, neither of them reported as such. It was strange, it was suspicious. Both gone from this doctor’s house.

Twice before there had been trouble between husband and wife at 2 Dalton Square: Early in 1934, Mrs. Ruxton had asked protection. And in May of this year only, Dr. Ruxton had made some excited statements about his wife and a young solicitor of the town, and asked if the postal authorities could not intercept correspondence or telephone messages.

III

Vann decided to act. He sent for Dr. Ruxton who came at once, and after being questioned, said he had made no report because of possible harm to his practice. His wife and Mary Rogerson had gone away to Edinburgh. He had written there but received the letter back. He showed the letter.

“Belle can’t have any love for the children,” he said bitterly. “Not even a postcard for our six year old Elizabeth.”

A description of Mary Rogerson was circulated. Next day Dr. Ruxton called on Vann.

“See here,” he said indignantly. “All this damn nonsense is ruining my practice. Can anything be done to stop this talk. Why they’re linking it up with that Moffat business. You know about that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Vann quietly. “I read the papers. Don’t worry. Let me have a detailed description of Mrs. Ruxton.”

Thereafter there may have been two shadowy ghosts following Dr. Ruxton as he went about the town and on his journeys, but there was also a more substantial shadow in the person of a detective.

On October 12 Vann again sent for Dr. Ruxton and asked him for a statement of his movements between September 14 and 30. It would have to be taken down in writing, which might be used as evidence.

“Certainly, only too pleased to tell you all I can,” said Dr. Ruxton easily. His wits against this stolid Englishman’s. There was no question of the winner. Had he not prepared for this?

He stated that he was in bed when Mrs. Ruxton came home from Blackpool after midnight Saturday. She wakened him shortly after six on Sunday morning and suggested they should go for a drive after breakfast and would he go and get the car. So he got the car and brought it to the door, and waited around for his coffee and toast. He was in the bathroom when she came and called through the door that she had changed her mind and was going to Edinburgh on business about setting up a football pool agency and she was taking Mary with her.

So he called out, “Well you can’t have the car, and that is that.” She made no answer but “Toodle oo, I’m off, pa. There’s a cup of tea on the hall table.” He heard them go out. A moment later he came out of the bathroom and looked out of the front door. The car was still there. He concluded they took the bus or train.

He got the children up later in the morning and tried to open a can of peaches. He cut his hand severely and bled all over his shirt, clothes, the stairs. He managed to dress the fingers and threw the towel, gauze, etc. into the yard and later the shirt and, as he always did with such things, tried to burn them with petrol.

The suit? Oh yes, it got in such a mess he gave it to Mrs. Hampshire. She had had it cleaned.

Vann shook his head.

“No, Doctor, she did not. That suit is in our possession.”

For a moment the questioned man’s face grew more sallow, then he smiled.

“I don’t see what that has to do with my wife’s continued and wilful absence.”

He continued to counter Vann’s questions as midnight came and the early hours of the morning, all unaware that at his house the experts were at work.

Professor Glaister who had arrived from Glasgow was busy in the bathroom testing the stains there and on the stairs. The stains were those of human blood. Under his direction men were digging by lamplight in the yard, collecting debris and deposits from the earth, and each minute the professor’s face grew more grave. From the drain trap came a mess of animal matter of human origin, traces of internal organs.

Detective Hammond of the Glasgow criminal investigation department was collecting fingerprints in the kitchen.

It was towards five in the morning when Dr. Ruxton with a wan but triumphant smile affixed his signature to the statement of his absence of any knowledge concerning the missing women. Vann had gone from the room, and now as he returned Dr. Ruxton rose to his feet and greeted him.

“All nonsense this, Vann, but I suppose it had to be gone through with in the line of duty. Well, I’m ready for bed.”

He was amazed to see Vann’s grim stare.

“Why — anything wrong?”

“I have just gone over the report of the experts.” Said Vann slowly. “Dr. Ruxton, I am going to prefer a very serious charge against you. I charge that you feloniously and wilfully and with malice aforethought did kill and murder Mary Jane Rogerson.”

For a moment Ruxton was taken aback but only momentarily. “Most emphatically not,” he stormed. “Of course not. The furthest thing from my mind. What motive and why?”

“Mrs. Rogerson has identified the white silk waist found at Moffat as one she bought at a jumble sale for a penny and gave to Mary. Mrs. Holmes has identified the child’s rompers also found. She gave them to Mary. The sheeting is identical with sheets in your house. A Sunday Graphic was delivered to your house. A page from that paper was used as wrapping.”

“But good God, man,” Ruxton retorted, “that’s no proof either of these bodies was that of Mary Rogerson. How could anyone identify them?”

“By the fingerprints.”

“By... by the fingerprints — but — I understood the fingertips had been removed — all the papers said so—”

“The man who killed Mary Rogerson,” said Vann slowly, “made just one slip — he was just a little hurried in his work — and when he was destroying the marks of identification — he missed three fingers of Mary Rogerson’s hand—”.

“But—”

“And fingerprints from these three fingers are identical with those found all over your house, Dr. Ruxton. There is not the least doubt that the body known as Number One is that of Mary Rogerson and that she was killed and dismembered by you in your house.”

They led Dr. Ruxton, stunned and silent, to a cell. For once he had nothing to say. But when on November 5 he appeared before a magistrates’ court and heard himself charged with a second murder, that of his wife, he was ready to fight back.

“A positive and damnable lie. It is all prejudice. Is there no justice? Do I look like a murderer?”

On November 26, nine magistrates, two of them women, gathered in the police court to decide whether Dr. Ruxton should be committed for trial.

They heard the hideous story, they listened to the hypocritical letters he had sent to his wife’s sister begging her to persuade Belle to come back to him, knowing all the time she was dead. They heard the experts, the testimony of the prison surgeon that the scars on the prisoner’s hand were not from a can opener but a surgical or similar keen edged knife.

The magistrates had no hesitation in sending the case to trial.

When it opened on March 2, of this year, in the city of Manchester a surprise was sprung. Dr. Ruxton was charged only with the murder of his wife, that of the nursemaid being held in reserve.

The prisoner pleaded not guilty to the charge. Before his eyes in court was a significant array of exhibits. A model of the house, part of the stairway, clothing, the bath, the stained blue suit, Mrs. Ruxton’s handbag proving she had returned to, but never left, the fatal house; jars of specimens, plaster casts, photographs of the reconstructed bodies.

The long array of witnesses took the stand, charwomen, a garbage man who had taken away the burned remains of Mary Rogerson’s best dress, the Rogersons, then came the experts with their deadly testimony that the blood on the woodwork of the house was human and of recent origin, that the telltale débris all pointed to murder.

In silence the court saw Mary Rogerson’s shoe fitted to a plaster cast of her foot from Moffat ravine. Mrs. Ruxton’s shoe fitted to a cast of her foot. Both a perfect fit.

Professor Glaister said that of sixty-eight portions of human remains examined by him and his colleagues, forty-three soft parts could not be assigned to any body. He built up a damning case against the prisoner. Even the fact that positive marks of identification had been removed was made to tell. Mary Rogerson’s eye with its cast, her freckled face skinned, her scarred thumb cut off, a birth mark on the arm cut out. Mrs. Ruxton’s prominent nose, her teeth, a bunioned toe. The prisoner had taken care of everything but one trifle — three fingers on one hand.

Dr. Ruxton took the stand in his own defense. He dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief. He sobbed and cried. He had fits of angry denial. He declared that the charge of killing his wife was “a deliberate fantastic story. You might as well say the sun rose in the west and set in the east.”

“It is suggested that you killed Mary Rogerson,” said his counsel the nimble-witted and noted Norman Birkett.

“Bunkum with a capital B. Why should I kill poor Mary?”

He explained his quarrels, his charges of infidelity, proved to be untrue, but at no time had he ever thought of violence. He told his story, of his wife’s departure. He explained everything, the stained carpets, the suit stained with blood when he helped his friend, Anderson the dentist, in extractions, the locked doors, his cut hand. He had never been to Moffat. All he carried down on the morning of Thursday, 19, was his camera.

Mr. Birkett, defense counsel, pointed out that the evidence was only circumstantial. No positive identification of the body had been made. Mrs. Ruxton had gone away on a previous occasion without writing. There was not the slightest evidence that Dr. Ruxton was responsible. Would any sane man dismember bodies with his children in the house, throw open his house to a succession of charwomen with sharp eyes. On one of these alleged trips to Moffat, Dr. Ruxton was using a hired car. Not a spot of blood had been noted on the car. The Crown, Mr. Birkett claimed, had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The summing up of the judge, Mr. Justice Singleton, on the last day of the trial, March 13, was one of the fairest ever delivered.

“It is important,” he warned the jury “that no innocent man shall suffer.”

The jury filed out. In an hour it came back with a verdict of guilty. Dr. Ruxton listened to his sentence:

“Buck Ruxton, you have been convicted on evidence which can leave no doubt in the minds of anyone. The law knows but one sentence for the terrible crime which you have committed. The sentence of this court upon you is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution, and shall there be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prison, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Dr. Ruxton looked at the pronouncer of his doom, then raised his hand with the palm outward as though in salute, and stepped down from the dock.

Back in Strangeways Prison, Manchester, he busied himself about his appeal. He was sure that he could argue himself out of the noose on the point of the clean car and other items of defense. But when the Court of Criminal Appeal heard his case on April 27, the appeal was dismissed.

And once more Dr. Ruxton, his name inscribed on the roll of infamous medicos, was taken back to his prison there to await the doom which comes one morning on the stroke of eight to those deluded mortals who plan the perfect crime.