Miray Kose

The Victorian era consisted of many interesting occurrences. Political reform, expansion of foreign policy, development of trade and, most importantly, murder mysteries. Murders that no one, not even the best detectives of Scotland Yard, could solve. One of these is the infamous Whitehall Mystery.

Many of you might know the Whitehall Mystery to be a board game. Well, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that this board game, involving of spreading the limbs of a poor victim around London, has actually really occurred! In my book, Game of Iniquity, I briefly mention the Whitehall murders whilst the two protagonists, Gabriel Ashmore and Alexander Wakefield, pay a visit to Scotland Yard. I found these murders, because of their strange nature, quite fascinating. In this blog, I want to tell you all a bit more about these murders (and why they are rather ironic).

London, 1888. Mutilated body parts of a woman have been found on the river Thames embankment, Pimlico, on the 11th of September. This was shocking as Pimlico was a fancy neighbourhood, the last place where one would find a severed arm and shoulder. This might have been common occurrence in Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper was roaming at the time, but certainly not in Pimlico.

However, the police force was, surprisingly, not that bothered about this. You see, they blamed medical students. They used to either steal or questionably obtain corpses to conduct their practicals on, and then dump them in the river. (Meaning if you had lived in 19th century London, it would be totally normal to see floating body parts in the river.) The police concluded that the medical students must have been playing a prank on them.

In the meanwhile, another arm turned up on the side of the road. This was just completely ignored, until the real alert occurred. October 2, a vault was found. Within the vault was, you guessed it, a body part. A whole torso of a woman. Wrapped in cloth and tied with string. Now, the morbidly ironic part is that the vault was found on the building site of the new police headquarters, New Scotland Yard. The killer was taunting the police.

Now, everyone thought this was the work of the notorious Jack the Ripper. He had the same technique, often leaving the police notes. In one he wrote: ‘Catch me when you can’. Jack might have been one awful human being, but he certainly had a sense of humour. He also infamously dismembered his female victims, just as the Whitehall Mystery killer did.

Now the question is, did Jack the Ripper commit these murders? The police concluded, no. Historical records don’t go into too much detail about why they did so. However, as Alexander Wakefield identifies in Game of Iniquity, it was clear that their modus operandi (mode of operation) was totally different. Jack’s victims suffered progressive abdominal and genital area mutilation, whilst the Whitehall killer dismembered his victims.

The strange thing is that dismembered torsos have been found prior and post 1888. One in 1878 and one in 1889. This gives rise to the question: is there is a link between these previous murders and the Whitehall Mystery, or did Victorian criminals merely love dismembering torsos? The police have never arrested anyone for these crimes. Therefore, we shall never know.

This concludes the Whitehall Mystery: A horrific, unsolved murder, conducted by a sadistic man (or woman), for reasons completely unknown.