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The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian London
The Thames Torso Murders have been overshadowed by Jack the Ripper and his crimes, but were just as brutal and gruesome. They began in 1887 in London's East End, just north of the Thames River in Rainham, England. The killer took one victim that year, another in 1888, and two more in 1889. He resumed his crimes in 1902, taking his last victim south of the Thames and leaving her body in a pile of dismembered parts as he had done with most of his other victims.
This work delves deep into the case of the Thames Torso Murders. It begins with a look at London in the late 1800s, a time of great confusion and tremendous population increase, and the killer's path to London, which seems to include a murder in Paris in 1886. The book then examines in great detail each murder and the investigation that may have been hindered by the search for Jack the Ripper.
It also raises the idea that Jack the Ripper and the Torso Murderer may have been the same man - Severin Klosowski, better known as George Chapman, the Borough Poisoner. It ends with an examination of Serial Killers; the Ripper, Torso, and Borough Poisoner murder cases; the search for clues to the serial killer responsible for the five Thames Torso murders; and Wolff Levisohn, a dark horse who seems to have known much about all three sets of murders, testified at Chapman's murder trial, and then faded away as Chapman was sent to the gallows.
This work delves deep into the case of the Thames Torso Murders. It begins with a look at London in the late 1800s, a time of great confusion and tremendous population increase, and the killer's path to London, which seems to include a murder in Paris in 1886. The book then examines in great detail each murder and the investigation that may have been hindered by the search for Jack the Ripper.
It also raises the idea that Jack the Ripper and the Torso Murderer may have been the same man - Severin Klosowski, better known as George Chapman, the Borough Poisoner. It ends with an examination of Serial Killers; the Ripper, Torso, and Borough Poisoner murder cases; the search for clues to the serial killer responsible for the five Thames Torso murders; and Wolff Levisohn, a dark horse who seems to have known much about all three sets of murders, testified at Chapman's murder trial, and then faded away as Chapman was sent to the gallows.
247 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 27, 2017
There are only two books about the Thames Torso Murders. I have both of them. (The other, The Thames Torso Murders by M. J. Trow is actually quite good & I recommend it.) They do not agree on how many torso murders there were, when they started, or when they stopped. Which makes it difficult to get a grip on the subject at all. Trow discusses women's torsos & other body parts found in or near the Thames in 1873, 1874, 1884, 1887, 1888, and 1889. Gordon discusses women's torsos and other body parts found in or near the Thames in 1887, 1888, 1889, and 1902. Trow has no particular theory to flog, and I think he leaves out the 1902 murder because she doesn't really fit with the others (she was dismembered, yes, and found near the Thames, yes, but she was also cooked and--perhaps the most signal difference between her and the others in Gordon's series--they found her head with the rest of her).
Gordon does have a theory, and in a subset of historical criminology that abounds with stupid theories, this is honestly one of the stupidest. Gordon is trying, ineffectually, to argue that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were (a) the same person and (b) George Chapman, he who was convicted and hanged for slowly poisoning three common-law wives to death with antimony.
Gordon argues that it's too coincidental for the East End of London to be home to three serial killers at the same time, but I find that less implausible than that George Chapman, who murdered by slow poison and with definite Munchausen's by Proxy overtones, is also Jack the Ripper, who strangled and mutilated prostitutes, and also the Thames Torso Murderer, who murdered women in some unknown fashion, dismembered them, and disposed of their bodies with such skill that only one of his victims was ever identified. It's true that serial killers can change their M.O. as needed, but if I've understood the idea of the signature correctly, Chapman, the Ripper and the TTM all murdered for quite different reasons and thus with quite different signatures. A man who murdered the way Chapman did wouldn't murder the way the Ripper did, and neither Chapman nor the Ripper dismembered corpses the way the TTM did. (And that may have been pure practicality and not a signature at all. The one intelligent idea in this book is that the Thames Torso Murders may not have been the work of a serial killer in the strict sense; they may have been the work of a backstreet abortionist or abortionists who had to dispose of the body when an abortion went wrong. And even that idea has some major stumbling blocks.) In each series, the thing that is superfluous to the murder--the thing that therefore is what the killer needs--is different. (And there isn't a meta element as there is in the inevitable comparison, the Zodiac Killer: you can argue that the Zodiac Killer's signature was actually his need to feel superior to the police.) And it is nonsense to ask, as Gordon does, "are we really dealing with two men, or are these the manifestations of a demented split personality--both of which happen to be serial killers?" (166). Absolute fucking nonsense. While Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (which Gordon uses as a template) is allegorically a brilliant discussion of hypocrisy and of the idea of the shadow self, it is not how actual psychology works. It is especially not how sociopathy works (an argument that Patricia Cornwell also tries to make, in another very stupid book about Jack the Ripper), nor how Dissociative Identity Disorder (if that's what he means by "a demented split personality") works.
On top of this dreadful, ludicrous thesis, Gordon is a bad writer on the sentence level, has no idea how to put together an argument, and cannot even put facts together into a comprehensible narrative. He is under the mistaken impression that rhetorical questions are an actual tool of argumentation. Asking the question in such a way that the desired answer is obvious does not make the desired answer the correct one.
Gordon is sloppy and wrong both about his background material (Burke & Hare) and about his actual subject matter (at one point he conflates Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman). He speculates irresponsibly, wildly, and with a kind of willfully blind stupidity that I find infuriating.
And OH MY FUCKING GOD this book was copy-edited by wolves. Drunk wolves. Drunk giggling wolves. An incomplete list of mistakes includes:
"formally" for "formerly"
"complimentary" for "complementary"
"course" for "coarse"
"mantel" for "mantle"
I read this book because (a) I am a completist and (b) the Thames Torso Murderer is relevant to one of the books I'm working on. I'm not sure either reason was sufficient.
Gordon does have a theory, and in a subset of historical criminology that abounds with stupid theories, this is honestly one of the stupidest. Gordon is trying, ineffectually, to argue that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were (a) the same person and (b) George Chapman, he who was convicted and hanged for slowly poisoning three common-law wives to death with antimony.
Gordon argues that it's too coincidental for the East End of London to be home to three serial killers at the same time, but I find that less implausible than that George Chapman, who murdered by slow poison and with definite Munchausen's by Proxy overtones, is also Jack the Ripper, who strangled and mutilated prostitutes, and also the Thames Torso Murderer, who murdered women in some unknown fashion, dismembered them, and disposed of their bodies with such skill that only one of his victims was ever identified. It's true that serial killers can change their M.O. as needed, but if I've understood the idea of the signature correctly, Chapman, the Ripper and the TTM all murdered for quite different reasons and thus with quite different signatures. A man who murdered the way Chapman did wouldn't murder the way the Ripper did, and neither Chapman nor the Ripper dismembered corpses the way the TTM did. (And that may have been pure practicality and not a signature at all. The one intelligent idea in this book is that the Thames Torso Murders may not have been the work of a serial killer in the strict sense; they may have been the work of a backstreet abortionist or abortionists who had to dispose of the body when an abortion went wrong. And even that idea has some major stumbling blocks.) In each series, the thing that is superfluous to the murder--the thing that therefore is what the killer needs--is different. (And there isn't a meta element as there is in the inevitable comparison, the Zodiac Killer: you can argue that the Zodiac Killer's signature was actually his need to feel superior to the police.) And it is nonsense to ask, as Gordon does, "are we really dealing with two men, or are these the manifestations of a demented split personality--both of which happen to be serial killers?" (166). Absolute fucking nonsense. While Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (which Gordon uses as a template) is allegorically a brilliant discussion of hypocrisy and of the idea of the shadow self, it is not how actual psychology works. It is especially not how sociopathy works (an argument that Patricia Cornwell also tries to make, in another very stupid book about Jack the Ripper), nor how Dissociative Identity Disorder (if that's what he means by "a demented split personality") works.
On top of this dreadful, ludicrous thesis, Gordon is a bad writer on the sentence level, has no idea how to put together an argument, and cannot even put facts together into a comprehensible narrative. He is under the mistaken impression that rhetorical questions are an actual tool of argumentation. Asking the question in such a way that the desired answer is obvious does not make the desired answer the correct one.
Gordon is sloppy and wrong both about his background material (Burke & Hare) and about his actual subject matter (at one point he conflates Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman). He speculates irresponsibly, wildly, and with a kind of willfully blind stupidity that I find infuriating.
And OH MY FUCKING GOD this book was copy-edited by wolves. Drunk wolves. Drunk giggling wolves. An incomplete list of mistakes includes:
"formally" for "formerly"
"complimentary" for "complementary"
"course" for "coarse"
"mantel" for "mantle"
I read this book because (a) I am a completist and (b) the Thames Torso Murderer is relevant to one of the books I'm working on. I'm not sure either reason was sufficient.
January 15, 2010
Meh. Although the author does an excellent job detailing the Torso Murders and the social climate of London's East End, his book suffers from the same flaws as nearly every other Jack the Ripper book. Gordon makes far too many assumptions and opinions stated as fact. The notion that the Torso Killer and the Ripper were one and the same is by no means as certain as he makes it out to be. He excludes any evidence that does not fit his theory of Severin Klosowski/George Chapman as the killer. While I think the case against Klosowski is stronger than that of any other Ripper possible, there is no proof he was the ripper or the torso murderer, all of Gordon's assertions to the contrary. At best, we can prove he is the KIND of man who would have done it. Also, I found Gordon's overuse of the exclamation point to be incredibly annoying.
This book is about as good or as bad as any Ripper book you'll come across (excepting of course Philip Sugden's wonderful Complete History of Jack the Ripper). And that's really kind of sad.
This book is about as good or as bad as any Ripper book you'll come across (excepting of course Philip Sugden's wonderful Complete History of Jack the Ripper). And that's really kind of sad.
August 12, 2022
Jack the Ripper - still unidentified despite the many books on the usual suspects - has defined serial murder, especially in the Victorian era. But there was another series of murders every bite as gruesome, the dismembered bodies of women that were discovered in London between 1887-1889 with similar murders in the early 1900s.
The problem with the book is that very little is known about these murders, and most of the victims have never been identified. So it cannot be informative about the murders themselves, and has to settle for theorizing, repeating information that has been published elsewhere and giving a portrait of Victorian era poverty (this part is quite good) and establishing why it was a perfect environment for the serial criminal.
More theory than factual analysis and yet there is just enough of a good read, and just enough information about these often overlooked crimes that it should be on the shelf of anyone who is researching or setting their novels in the era.
November 16, 2019
I'm fascinated by historical true crime. I haven't read that much about Jack the Ripper and I'd never heard of the Thames Torso Murders, so I got sucked into buying this book. If I could give it less than one star I would. Gordon isn't much of a writer, The book is full of repetition, unnecessary exclamations (readers can figure out whether the material is exciting all by themselves; they don't need the writer to tell them about it), and sloppy writing. I don't usually skip ahead in books, especially when I've paid for them, but if I hadn't, I never would have finished this one. One of his other books was called impressive and exhaustive by Ripperologist. I find that hard to believe, but I won't be reading anything else he writes. I suggest others stay away as well!
June 10, 2020
Tone was a bit weird for the topic and the author presented some theories as facts. However, there are several useful primary sources.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews