Original subtitles

No.

During 1935, the threat of widespread conflict increased dramatically, as Mussolini's troops

attacked Abyssinia.

Italian tanks and bombs soon crushed the primitive weapons of their opponents.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler introduced conscription as part of a massive build-up of his forces.

On a more peaceful note, Britain's King George V and Queen Mary celebrated their silver jubilee.

They were charged by their granddaughters Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.

And in New Jersey, the trial of Bruno Hauptman for kidnapping Charles Lindbergh's baby son

came to a climax as he was found guilty.

Great Britain is a small, crowded island, but the highlands and lowlands of Scotland remain

one of its few really lonely and deserted places.

Visitors flock there to enjoy the solitude and scenery, but sometimes they have a more

sinister purpose.

Near the Dampricia resort of Muffet, on Sunday 29th September 1935, Miss Susan Johnson was

enjoying a quiet afternoon stroll.

As she reached this bridge over a stream called the Lin, she looked over the parapet.

Court in the undergrowth was an oddly shaped package, and to her horror, she realized that

it was a human arm.

Miss Johnson raced back to fetch her brother from the hotel.

He found other parts of a human body below the bridge.

They had been wrapped in newspapers and pieces of sheet.

The local police were called, and led by Sergeant Sloan, they searched up and down the stream

and its ravine.

During the late afternoon, four more bundles of human remains were found.

The two had been wrapped in a fairly ordinary pillowcase and piece of sheet.

But the other two were more unusual.

A woman's blouse had been used for one and a pair of children's bloomers for the other.

Over the next six weeks, the search whitened and several more human body parts were found

in the Lin and the River Anon into which it flowed.

On the 28th of October, a left foot was found about nine miles south of Moffatt near the

Edinburgh to Carlisle Road, and a final discovery was a right forearm on the 4th of November.

The Dampresia police called in Scotland Yard.

And a cursory examination showed that the bodies had been expertly dissected.

All the remains were taken to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh,

where an initial forensic examination was carried out.

There were two heads, both of which were too badly decomposed to tell immediately whether

they were male or female, one complete upper body and parts of another.

And like some ghastly jigsaw puzzle, 17 separate pieces of limb and some 43 other pieces of soft tissue.

Most had started to decompose and were infested with maggots.

The police estimated that the remains must have been dumped in the stream at least ten days earlier.

Many of the pieces had been washed up well above the normal level of the water,

and there had been heavy rain on the night of the 18th, 19th of September, which had caused a spade.

The press reveled in the discoveries putting forward many bizarre theories.

Early police uncertainty as to the number of bodies and their sex allowed rampant speculation.

But it was finally confirmed that the bodies were of two women.

None had gone missing locally, but the Lindbridge is close to the Glasgow to Carlisle Road,

so it was apparent that the bodies could have been brought in from further afield.

The police had their first break when they examined the pieces of newspaper.

One came from a special edition of the Sunday graphic of the 15th of September,

which had only been distributed in the Lancaster and Morgan areas of Northwest England.

Dumpfriesha Police passed this information to their colleagues further south,

and a few hours later they were in contact again.

One of their detectives had remembered an item in the local paper,

which had mentioned the disappearance of a young nursemaid in Lancaster some three weeks earlier.

She worked for an Indian doctor named Buck Ruxton,

and Lancaster Police were already interested in Dr. Ruxton

since not only had his nursemaid disappeared, but his wife as well.

The father of the Ruxton's nursemaid, Mary Rogerson,

had reported her missing when she failed to come to see them as she normally did every weekend,

and Dr. Ruxton had told them she had gone away unexpectedly.

Mrs. Rogerson was asked to examine the clothing which had been found with the bodies.

She immediately identified the blouse as one which she had recently mended for her daughter.

She also mentioned that the Ruxtons were sometimes given children's clothes by Mrs. Holmes.

And Mrs. Holmes identified the child's rompers as one she had given to Mary Ruxton.

In particular, she recognized the knot which had been used to tie the elastic.

Lancaster Borough Police, under their chief constable Captain Van, now took over the case.

It emerged that Dr. Ruxton had himself contacted them to say that his wife and nursemaid had disappeared.

Buck Ruxton was known to be a volatile and highly strong man.

He had been born in Bombay on the 21st of March 1899.

He was a Parsi, whose original name was Buktia Rostongi Hakim.

Hakim had qualified in medicine at Bombay University with first-class honors.

He had then worked as a ship's doctor and for the Indian Medical Service.

This had arranged for him to come to London for further training at University College Hospital.

In 1927, Hakim moved to Edinburgh to study to become a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

While there he met and started living with Isabella Van S, a strong-willed local girl who was still married to a Dutchman.

She moved back to London with him. In 1929, they had a daughter.

By this time, Hakim had changed his name by Dietpo to Buck Ruxton.

In 1930, Ruxton bought a substantial general medical practice in Lancaster.

The couple moved to a large terrace house in Dalton Square, where Dr. Ruxton established his surgery.

The Ruxtons had a second daughter and a son.

Mary Rogerson was taken on to help look after them.

Police inquiries showed that Isabella Ruxton, as she called herself, although the couple had never been formally married, had last been seen alive on Saturday the 14th of September.

Her sister, Mrs. Nelson, was holidaying in nearby Blackpool, and Mrs. Ruxton had driven there to see her.

They had gone to see the famous tower and illuminations.

The first time, she was in the house, she was in the house.

Isabella had then set off home at about 11.30 in the evening.

The next morning, her husband started to create a certain amount of confusion back in Lancaster.

Then asked her husband to tell her not to come to work that morning, since his wife had gone to Edinburgh with Mary Rogerson.

When the local news agent, Mr. Capstik, delivered the Sunday graphic, Ruxton appeared with a bandage tapped, and explained that he had shut it in the door.

He again mentioned that Mary Rogerson had gone off with his wife to Edinburgh, but later told friends that he had cut his hand badly while opening a tin while preparing for the day.

She had been doing his children's breakfast.

Ruxton then turned up unexpectedly at 4.30 in the afternoon at the house of Mrs. Hampshire, the patient who sometimes did extra housework for his family.

He asked her to come round immediately to help him get the house ready for decorators.

Ruxton now told Mrs. Hampshire that his wife was in Blackpool, and that Mary Rogerson had gone on holiday.

When she arrived at the house, Mrs. Hampshire found that the carpet had already been removed from the stairs.

It was rolled up in a waiting room, together with a badly stained suit.

In a corner of the yard at the back of the house were two landing carpets and some partly burned towels.

Ruxton told Mrs. Hampshire that she could take the suit and the old carpets. She got her husband to help carry them away.

But the next morning he turned up again, wanting to take the suit to be cleaned.

When the Hampshire said that they would do it, he seemed happy to leave it with them once the label had been cut out.

But when she came to clean the carpets, Mrs. Hampshire found that they had been soaked in what appeared to be blood.

Even after some 30 buckets of water had been thrown over them, they were still running dark red.

Back at his house later that Monday morning, Ruxton told Mrs. Arxley that his wife had in fact gone off to London.

He later repeated this, saying that she had run off with another man and broke down weeping.

Blood was noticed on some stairpads and the bottom of the landing curtains. Ruxton rushed them away to be burned.

Various upstairs rooms had been kept locked.

On Thursday the 19th of September, while his breakfast was being prepared, Ruxton brought his car to the back door and made several trips up and downstairs.

Throughout that week, Ruxton kept a fire of curtains, carpets, wallpaper and clothing, burning in his backyard.

On the 20th of September, Ruxton told a friend that Mary Ruggison had been pregnant and implied that his wife had taken her away for an abortion.

On the 1st of October, just after the remains had been found near Muffet, the Ruggison told Ruxton that they were reporting their daughter's disappearance to the police.

Ruxton now started complaining to Captain Van that he was being hounded by the press and asked him to issue a statement exonerating him from any suspicion.

Van replied that he would be happy to do so, but only once he was sure that there was nothing suspicious.

After several more visits by Ruxton to the police station to complain of harassment, Van finally asked him to come back on the 13th to account for his movements in late September.

Ruxton was questioned at length, and finally at 7.30 that evening he was charged with the murder of his wife and Mary Ruggison.

The police were sure that Ruxton had murdered his wife and nursemaid. They were also sure that the Muffet bodies were theirs, but at the time they arrested the doctor, they could not be absolutely certain, although the clothing and newspaper provided a strong link.

The forensic examination which provided the conclusive proof was extraordinary and gave the case its particular fame.

For the first few days, Professor John Brash of Edinburgh University's anatomy department concentrated on building up the two bodies, assigning the various dissected pieces to them.

Soon his team had created fairly good outlines.

The investigation was now taken over by a team headed by John Glaester, Regis Professor of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University.

This concluded that one of the bodies was a young woman aged between 18 and 25 and about 4'11 inches tall.

The other was an older woman of between 35 and 45, about 5'4 inches tall.

It was very noticeable that an attempt had been made to prevent identification of the bodies by removing certain features.

And once the police provided details of the two missing women, Glaester and his team were able to make a positive identification.

Mrs. Ruggison had had curiously thin calves and ankles. The flesh had been stripped away.

She also had prominent front teeth. These had been removed.

Mary Ruggison had had a distinctive birthmark on her right forearm. This was gone.

She also had a squint in one eye. Both had been removed.

Using a photograph of Mrs. Ruggison, Professor Glaester was able to superimpose the skull of the correct angle, so as to provide a near perfect match.

The tiara, which she was wearing in the photograph, was particularly helpful. It showed the forensic photographers exactly how much of an enlargement to make.

The same technique was applied to a photograph of Mary Ruggison, with a similarly uncanny result.

Casts were taken of the two left feet which had been found.

When these were tested against the shoes of the two women, there could be little doubt that each fitted one shoe precisely.

The final conclusive proof was provided by Detective Lieutenant Bertie Hammond of the Glasgow fingerprint laboratory.

Although the fingertips of both women had been badly decomposed, enough of the dermal print below the surface skin remained on the younger body to create a fingerprint.

This was matched to those of Mary Ruggison, found at Dalton Square.

Such blood-stained items as remained had been washed or burned too much to provide any links with the women.

But blood stains on the floor and skirting boards in the bathroom and tissue in the drain pipes suggested something had been recently cut up in the bath.

Dr. Buck Ruggison's trial began in Manchester High Court on Monday 2nd of March, 1936.

It was one of the most notable cases ever heard of the High Court there, and public interest was intense.

Mr. Justice Singleton presided, and the case before him had a curious historical footnote.

For almost exactly ten years later, three of the council who appeared were to lead Britain's team at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Hermann Göring and the other leading Nazis found themselves being prosecuted by the same team which had led the case against Dr. Ruggison.

Hartley Shawkras and David Maxwell Fife.

Ruggison's Defense Council, Norman Birkitt, was to be one of the two British judges.

The prosecution began by describing how Ruggison had carried out the murders and tried to conceal them.

A series of witnesses described how the doctor was pathologically jealous of his wife and convinced that she was always trying to have affairs.

The doctor's extraordinary behavior during the three weeks after his wife's disappearance was detailed, and so was his adamant denial during police questioning that he had had anything to do with it.

It was suggested that Ruggison had waited up for his wife to return from Blackpool and then killed her during a quorum, probably by stabbing.

Mary Ruggison must have witnessed Isabella Ruggison's death and been murdered to silence her.

Her skull had been fractured, but her death had been caused by other means.

What made the trial sensational was the forensic evidence produced by Professor Glaster.

Always dispassionate, he played down the matching of the photographs to the skulls, agreeing with the defense that this technique was not a conclusive proof of identity.

But on other matters, Glaster was firm.

He used a specially constructed model of the house to show how it was likely that the killings had been carried out on the landing or stairs.

And the bodies then taken to the first floor bathroom.

He was sure that the blood patterns in the bathroom showed that Ruggison had cut himself while expertly dissecting his victims in the bath.

Detective Lieutenant Hammond backed up Glaster ably, describing how he would normally look for at least eight matching points in a fingerprint before being ready to identify it positively.

In this case, he had found more than 20.

Many years later, Professor Glaster described how this technique of being able to construct an identifiable fingerprint using the dermis only, had probably been the truly revolutionary forensic breakthrough in the case.

Normally, a fingerprint is taken with the surface layer in position.

But because of the exposure of the dead bodies, this layer had been shed, and therefore, the only remaining portion was the dermis, the underlying or true skin.

Now, there was a print on one of the fingers of Mary Ruggison, and so we made comparisons between the dermal print and the print discovered on a decanter at Dr. Rexon's house.

And the requisite number of points on which to establish identity were available.

Now, the important part about this bit of evidence is that it was admitted by the courts, and as far as I know, as the first time a dermal print has been used in evidence in a motor case.

All this was backed up by the evidence of the blouse and the child's blooms, and the fact that other parts of the bodies had been wrapped in pieces of sheet, which precisely matched samples found in the Ruggison's house.

Up against this almost watertight prosecution case, Norman Burkitt had a thankless task.

He was reduced to pointing out that there was only circumstantial evidence that it was Ruggison who had actually killed the women and taken them to Scotland.

He pointed out that it was significant that no traces of blood had been found in Ruggison's car, given the length of the journey from Lancaster to Moffatt.

Ruggison himself was the only defense witness. He was histrionic, tearful, and morose, denying that he had done anything to his wife and nursemaid.

He claimed that they had run off and left him, and that the blood had come from his cut hand.

In his summing up, Mr. Justice Singleton agreed that the jury must not automatically assume that because the two women had been found murdered, Dr. Ruggison must have done it.

However, he then went on to say that never in his experience had the forensic evidence in a case been so expertly gathered and presented.

He made clear that in his view, the links between the bodies and the house were incontrovertible, and that Ruggison's behavior could only be explained in one way.

The all-male jury obviously agreed with this analysis. They were sent out on the 13th of March and were back in less than an hour.

The unanimously found Ruggison guilty of both murders. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

Buck Ruggison spent his last few weeks of life in Manchester's strange ways prison.

An appeal on the grounds of the judge had not given sufficient weight in his summing up to the absence of blood stains in Ruggison's car was turned down.

On the 12th of May, 1936, Buck Ruggison was executed at strange ways prison.

After his death, a Sunday newspaper published a confession, for which it had contributed some £3,000 towards his defence costs.

Ruggison admitted that he had killed his wife in a fit of jealousy, and Mary Ruggison because she had seen him do it.

The brilliant forensic work which had made Buck Ruggison's case so famous was proved to be correct in every detail.