Buck Ruxton (born Bukhtyar Chompa Rustomji Ratanji Hakim; 21 March 1899 – 12 May 1936) was an Indian-born physician convicted and subsequently hanged for the September 1935 murders of his common-law wife, Isabella Ruxton (née Kerr), and the family housemaid, Mary Jane Rogerson, at his home in Lancaster, England. These murders are informally known as the Bodies Under the Bridge and the Jigsaw Murders, while Ruxton himself became known as The Savage Surgeon.
The case became known as the "Bodies Under the Bridge" due to the location, near the Dumfriesshire town of Moffat in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, where the bodies were found. The case was also called the "Jigsaw Murders" because of the painstaking efforts to re-assemble and identify the victims and determine the place of their murder. Ruxton himself earned the title of "The Savage Surgeon" due to his occupation and the extensive mutilation he inflicted upon his victims' bodies.
The murders committed by Buck Ruxton would prove to be one of the United Kingdom's most publicised murder cases of the 1930s. The case itself is primarily remembered for the innovative forensic techniques employed to identify the victims and to prove that their murders had been committed within the Ruxton household.
Early life Childhood and youth Buck Ruxton was born in Bombay, British India (now Mumbai), on 21 March 1899 into a wealthy middle-class Parsi family of French origin.
Ruxton received a respectable upbringing, and despite being a sensitive youth with few friends, he was highly intelligent and received a thorough education. By his teenage years, he had resolved to pursue a career in medicine. With the financial support of his parents, Ruxton studied at the University of Bombay, where he qualified as a Bachelor of Medicine in 1922. The following year, he qualified as a Bachelor of Surgery at the same institute. Shortly after completing his studies, Ruxton obtained employment at a Bombay hospital, where he specialised in medicine, midwifery, and gynaecology.
On 29 October 1923, Ruxton was commissioned into the Indian Medical Service as a medical officer; he served in postings at Basra and, later, Baghdad, before relinquishing his commission in October 1926.
In May 1925, Ruxton married a Parsi woman named Motibai Jehangirji Ghadiali. The marriage was an arranged one, which ultimately turned out to be short-lived. When Ruxton relocated to Britain the following year, he concealed all evidence of this marriage, although in 1928, he did contact his father-in-law, Jehangirji, requesting he immediately send him the sum of £200 via telegraphic transfer.
Relocation to Britain With financial assistance from his family and the Bombay Medical Service, Ruxton relocated to Britain in 1926. He attended medical courses at London's University College Hospital under the name Gabriel Hakim, before moving to Edinburgh in 1927 to begin studies towards obtaining a Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons. Although Ruxton failed his entrance examination, the General Medical Council authorised his practising medicine in the United Kingdom on the strength of the qualifications he had earlier obtained in Bombay. Shortly thereafter, he legally changed his name via deed poll to "Buck Ruxton".
While studying to become a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Ruxton became acquainted with a 26-year-old woman named Isabella VanEss, who managed a café in the city. At the time of their acquaintance, Isabella was still legally married to a Dutchman whom she had wed in 1919, but this marriage had only lasted a matter of weeks, and she had resumed using her maiden name of Kerr. The two began courting, and Isabella was with Ruxton when he relocated to England in 1928. He worked as a locum to a London doctor, a fellow Parsi named Manek Motofram, and later as an assistant to a Stepney-based doctor named. B. R. Rygate. In August the following year, Isabella gave birth to the couple's first child, a daughter they named Elizabeth Ava.
Establishment of medical practice In 1930, the Ruxtons relocated from London to Lancaster, Lancashire, where he established a medical practice at his family home at 2Dalton Square.
Ruxton had made great efforts to assimilate himself into British society, and he quickly acquired a reputation among his patients as a diligent and compassionate general physician who was well-respected and popular within the community. He is known to have waived his treatment fees on several occasions when he felt his patients could not afford to pay them. The following year, a second daughter, Diane Rose, was born. Two years later, in July 1933, Isabella gave birth to a son named William Gladstone. The same year, the Ruxtons employed a young maid and live-in housekeeper named Mary Jane Rogerson (b. 8 October 1915), primarily to care for their children.
Jealousy and domestic violence Despite his esteemed reputation within the Lancaster community, the relationship between Buck and Isabella Ruxton was fraught, and he became increasingly suspicious of Isabella's alleged infidelity, reportedly exploding into fits of rage or bouts of tearful hysteria and self-pity behind closed doors. On several occasions, these arguments would prompt Isabella to pack her belongings and return to Edinburgh with her children, although inevitable phone calls from Ruxton in which he would tearfully plead with Isabella to return to Lancaster would prompt her to return to him, and he would later state to investigators that on the frequent occasions Isabella would return to Dalton Square, she would almost invariably say to him: "I wonder how I could ever pick up an argument with you".
It is unknown precisely when Ruxton began to accuse Isabella of adultery and assault her, although loud quarrels between the couple had resulted in police interventions on several occasions. The disputes between the couple occasionally had to be settled at the Lancaster police station, where police would observe Ruxton talking erratically before bursting into tears. Furthermore, Isabella is known to have attempted suicide by inert gas asphyxiation in 1932, and this suicide attempt had resulted in her suffering a miscarriage.
On one occasion in 1933, Isabella complained to police that her husband had begun beating her; when police visited Ruxton's practice to investigate her claims, Ruxton denied he had assaulted his wife, alleging that Isabella had been unfaithful to him. Nonetheless, within twenty-four hours of this incident, Isabella had returned to her partner. On another occasion in April 1934 a Lancaster policeman had been called to the Ruxton household following another quarrel. Upon his arrival, the officer was informed by Ruxton: "Sergeant, I feel like murdering two persons ... my wife is going out to meet a man".
In early-September 1935, Isabella Ruxton travelled to Edinburgh to visit one of her sisters. In her company were a prominent Lancaster family named Edmondson, with whom the Ruxtons were closely acquainted. To tend to the needs of his practice, Ruxton himself did not accompany his common-law wife on this trip, and thus remained in Lancaster. He would later confess to investigators that he had been convinced that as Isabella had been known to occasionally keep social company with a young man named Robert Edmondson—an assistant editor in the local Town Hall—she had been conducting an affair with him, and thus had used this trip as a means for the pair to continue their supposed affair. Hotel records would later confirm each adult had booked into separate rooms while they had stayed in Edinburgh.
Murders Commission On the evening of 14 September 1935 Isabella Ruxton left the family home to view the Blackpool Illuminations and visit two of her sisters (both of whom lived near Blackpool). She left Blackpool to return home at approximately 11:30pm. Upon her return to Dalton Square in the early hours of Sunday, 15September, Ruxton's jealousy and paranoia apparently overwhelmed him, and he most likely strangled Isabella into submissiveness, unconsciousness, or death with his bare hands, before beating and stabbing her body. Either to prevent their housemaid from discovering his crime or because she had actually witnessed the act, Ruxton extensively bludgeoned and either strangled or asphyxiated Mary Jane Rogerson; he probably also stabbed her body either before or after death. The amount of blood subsequently discovered on the stairs, walls, and carpeting of the Ruxton household indicates excessive blood flow prior to the bodies' mutilation, leading to the conclusion that Ruxton had stabbed either or both of the victims extensively shortly before or after death, or during the actual act of murder.
On the day prior to the murders, Ruxton informed one of the two charwomen he and Isabella employed not to come to his premises until Monday 16September; within hours of the murders he had visited the home of the other charwoman he employed and likewise told her not to clean his premises until 16September, explaining that Isabella and Mary Jane had travelled to Edinburgh. After he had driven his children to the home of a Morecambe dentist with whom he and Isabella had formed a close friendship and asked the couple to look after his children for the day, he returned to his home and proceeded to extensively dismember and mutilate both bodies in the bathroom of his home in an effort to hide their identities. Several hours later, at approximately 4.30pm, Ruxton visited the home of one of his patients, a MrsHampshire, and asked both her and, shortly thereafter, her husband to return to Dalton Square with him to help him "prepare for the decorators", who were expected to arrive the following morning to perform work he claimed had been arranged several months previously.
When MrsHampshire arrived at Dalton Square, she found the house in a state of disarray. As she would later testify at Ruxton's trial, all the carpeting had been removed from the stairs, and several sections of the flooring were littered with straw, which also protruded from beneath a locked bedroom door. Moreover, in the waiting-room of the property, Mrs.Hampshire discovered several rolled-up sections of carpeting, stair-pads, and a stained suit. In the garden of the property, she also discovered two further sections of carpeting, and several burned towels. Before the Hampshires left Dalton Square, they were given several sections of stained stair carpeting and Ruxton's stained suit to keep, upon the condition they thoroughly cleaned them.
Discovery On the morning of 29 September 1935 a young woman named Susan Haines Johnson glanced over the parapet of an old stone bridge located north of the Dumfriesshire town of Moffat. Upon the banks of the stream—named Gardenholme Linn—which ran beneath the bridge, Johnson noticed a bundle wrapped in fabric that had lodged against a boulder, with a partially decomposed human arm protruding from the package.
Police from the Dumfriesshire Constabulary were called to the scene. Discovering the remains within the package were human, officers searched the stream, surrounding ravines, and the nearby Annan River, discovering two human heads, and four further bundles, each containing extensively mutilated human remains including thigh bones, legs, sections of flesh, and a human torso and pelvis. These human remains were in an advanced state of decomposition, and had been wrapped in bedsheets, a pillow-case, children's clothing, and several newspapers (two editions of the Daily Herald dated 6 and 31August 1935, an edition of the Sunday Graphic dated 15September 1935, and undated portions of the Sunday Chronicle).