Arm of Eve:Sarah Bax Horton
Sarah Bax Horton: Introducing my new award-winning book Arm of Eve: Investigating the Thames Torso Murders
This February, my new book Arm of Eve: Investigating the Thames Torso Murders won the 2024 Ripperology Books and More Book of the Year. I was thrilled to receive the award as a tribute to my research and analysis of this lesser-known case which features on the Metropolitan Police ‘Jack the Ripper’ files. The subject of the Whitechapel Murders has fascinated me since early 2017, when I discovered that my great-great grandfather Harry Garrett was a Metropolitan Police sergeant who worked at H Division’s Leman Street police station between 1888 and 1896. His career at Whitechapel encompassed all eleven unexplained deaths featured on the official Ripper files.
My new book is introduced in these few thrilling lines:
Before Jack the Ripper, another monster prowled the waterways of Victorian London …
Jack the Ripper is often called the world’s most notorious unidentified killer, but he was not the first modern serial killer on the streets of London. Before him was another murderer who hunted from the River Thames – one arguably more sadistic and mercurial.
The Thames Torso Killer has always lurked in the Ripper’s shadow, despite the fact he murdered and dismembered at least four people over two years. He started to kill in 1887, over a year before the Ripper, and his last murder was in 1889, almost ten months after the death of Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim.
In Arm of Eve, Sarah Bax Horton conducts her own investigation and uses modern criminal profiling to come up with her own suspect – a known criminal who knew the Thames like the back of his hand.
My prime suspect as a contemporaneous rival to Jack the Ripper is James Crick, a waterman and lighterman based at Horsleydown on the south bank of the River Thames adjacent to today’s Tower Bridge. A waterman carried passengers in a skiff or wherry whilst a lighterman transported goods using a range of craft including barges. Crick fits the type of criminal profile that was applied to Jack the Ripper, of having an absent father, a dominant mother, and being a risk-taker whose frustration and aggression were often targeted against women. Like Hyam Hyams, named as the Ripper in my first book One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper, the first victim of his violence was his wife.
In September 1889, the so-called “Pinchin Street torso” case, was commonly attributed to Jack the Ripper despite its perpetrator being the also unidentified Torso Killer. It occurred at a time when my prime suspect, Crick, was on bail for the rape and attempted murder of a female stranger. Its location was within a couple of minutes walk of the Ripper murder location of Berner Street (today’s Henriques Street) and the headquarters of the Ripper investigation, Leman Street police station. In my hypothesis, although Crick evaded being charged with multiple murders, he was convicted of a serious lesser offence, for which he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to fifteen years imprisonment with hard labour.
A previously undiscovered suspect as the Torso Killer, Crick is arguably the best yet. Over one hundred and thirty-five years later, it is likely that no better will be found. He was a violent sex offender who was mobile on the capital’s waterways, meaning that he could access the diverse locations which feature in the case. The inland sites for depositing body parts all have close access from the river or docks. I piece together a case against him, ending with a true crime reconstruction of each murder. If not Crick, the Torso Killer was a man very like him; highly mobile and skilled, a river worker based on the south bank and operating in central London. I conclude by asking two questions: Was James Crick the Thames Torso Killer, or a violent rapist who paid his debt to society? And, if Arm of Eve argues a sufficiently convincing hypothesis, to what extent was justice done in his lifetime?
Sarah Bax Horton is a historical biographer and true crime writer. She read English and Modern Languages at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Fascinated by genealogy, her discovery of a Whitechapel “H Division” police ancestor inspired a re-examination of the Jack the Ripper case in her debut One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper (Michael O’Mara Books, 2023). Her new book Arm of Eve: Investigating the Thames Torso Murders (The History Press, 2024) won the 2024 Ripperology Books and More Book of the Year.
Crime Cymru 