Lucy Worsley ‘confident’ her true crime documentary solves Thames Torso murders

A TV historian believes her team has uncovered the identity of a serial killer responsible for a series of unsolved murders of women in Victorian London nearly 140 years ago.

Dubbed the Thames Torso Murderer, the killer operated at the same time as Jack the Ripper, and his chilling hallmark was dismembering his female victims and scattering their body parts in and around the River Thames.

The spate of killings, which included at least four incidents, took place between 1887 and 1889 and were never solved.

The case has now been reinvestigated in a new three-part BBC documentary series, Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club.

Worsley, 52, believes that she, fellow historian Sarah Bax Horton, and a team of researchers have finally solved the case.

“I mean, we don’t have evidence that could be used in a court of law, but I am personally very confident that we’ve identified the killer,” the historian and TV presenter told the Press Association.

“Sarah Bax Horton, who made the breakthrough, has been working on this for years and years, it’s like her life’s work.”

In the documentary series Worsley interrogates new theories about the identity of the killer and consults with forensic pathologists and psychologists.

She also assembles a team of historians and writers to form her own Murder Club.

“One thing that people might not know about the river is that it’s a really good ally for a murderer,” she explained.

“And one really strange thing about this series is that it was all happening at the same time as Jack the Ripper. He takes all the attention and overshadows the Thames Torso Murderer.

“But one thing about Jack the Ripper was that he was very violent and clearly motivated by a very immediate hatred of women, slashing and cutting and doing horrible things.

“But the Thames Torso Murderer was a more calculating killer in the sense that it would have been much harder to catch him.

“Well, we’ve only just caught up with him, and that’s because if you cut up a body and put it in the river, the river is helping you, it’s destroying the evidence of how you killed your victims.”

“The breakthrough that Sarah Bax Horton made, the lady who solved it, was realising that the river was a common factor, and that a serial killer probably had committed crimes against women before, like smaller incidents.

“She put those two ideas into a newspaper search engine, and out came this guy.

“She searched the newspapers for the periods of the killings to see if there were any other crimes against women involving violence, and found a connection to the river. That was the answer.”

Out of the spate of killings, only one woman was identified – a pregnant prostitute named Elizabeth Jackson, aged in her early 20s.

Worsley said she wanted to focus on the victims as opposed to the killer in the series.

“Often there’s a fair critique of true crime, which is that it glorifies the killer, it elevates him as a kind of hero.

“So we really wanted to make sure that we paid attention to the victims, the women along the way.

“That was the most emotionally engaging and wonderful part of the project. I visited three of their gravesites.

“None of them actually had proper graves, because these were all pauper burials. The killer picked women who were vulnerable, on the edges of society, women who would not be missed by society.”

Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer.