Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club (BBC2)
Jack the Ripper’s gory murders in late Victorian London are not only the most famous unsolved crimes in history.
The five killings (or perhaps more) are also the most widely investigated, the subject of thousands of books, with amateur detectives accusing dozens of suspects — including Queen
Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, Alice In Wonderland writer Lewis Carroll and the artist Walter Sickert.
One online resource, casebook.org, comprises around four million words, including about 10,000 newspaper articles. No detail, however tiny, is ignored, and all the facts have been scrutinised to exhaustion . . . or so you’d think.
The astonishing truth, historian Lucy Worsley reveals in her Victorian Murder Club, is that the Ripper was not the only serial killer at large in London’s East End at the end of the 1880s.
This three-part true-crime documentary makes a convincing case that another maniac was stalking and butchering women — and he has been almost completely overlooked. Who, until this series aired, had heard of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’?
The killings are still shocking, nearly 140 years later, with victims dismembered and their body parts dumped in the river or discarded in alleyways. One obvious theory is that the crimes were committed by a sailor, a bargeman or a docker — someone working on the Thames.
But another intriguing suggestion is that the murderer traded in horseflesh — a ‘cats-meat man’, pushing a cartload of raw pet food around the city.
He could have trundled a barrow piled high with human remains through Petticoat Lane market and no one would have looked twice.
The astonishing truth, historian Lucy Worsley reveals in her Victorian Murder Club, is that the Ripper was not the only serial killer at large in London’s East End at the end of the 1880s, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS says
This three-part true-crime documentary makes a convincing case that another maniac was stalking and butchering women — and he has been almost completely overlooked. Who, until this series aired, had heard of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’?
Prof Lucy has a taste for murder. Her podcast Lady Killers, covering cases ranging from the infamous to the forgotten, numbers more than 60 episodes.
This is her most painstaking investigation yet, enlisting the aid of three experts in her murder club: two more historians, Kate Lister and Rose Wallis, and novelist and TV presenter Nadifa Mohamed.
Their biggest challenge was convincing us that these murders were not also the work of Jack the Ripper.
One expert, Dr Drew Gray, argued the link was obvious — a prime suspect for the torso murders lived in a house where the Ripper’s second victim, Annie Chapman, was found in the back yard.
That seems too much of a coincidence to be dismissed. But pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy insisted the killers had to be two different men, with very different psychological profiles.
The Ripper’s victims were mutilated but not chopped into pieces nor bundled up in sacking.
Though the ‘murder club’ has echoes of Richard Osman’s bestsellers, these were certainly not cosy killings, and Lucy’s handling of the story sometimes felt too lighthearted.
Inspecting one crime scene, where segments of a fourth corpse were found, she gave a shudder and murmured, ‘Ooh . . . creepy!’
But the clues and red herrings are well presented, and the insights into London’s brutal past are fascinating. It’s . . . well, a ripping yarn.
