Jigsaw Murders: GP butchered wife and maid in Lancaster

Lancaster Guardian

True crime short revisits a horrific historical murder, where Doctor Buck Ruxton - a Lancaster GP butchered his wife and maid before disposing of their dismembered bodies in Scotland.  Features commentary from forensic expert, Jo Millington.   Watch the full show here https://www.shotstv.com/watch/vod/52753627/true-crime-chronicles-brides-in-the-bath

Transcript

00:00Two dismembered bodies were found in a ravine in Scotland but they weren't

00:06bodies of local women and it didn't take the police long to figure out that they

00:13were in fact the bodies of two women who had been reported missing in Lancaster.

00:18The missing women were Mrs. Isabella Ruxton, wife of Dr. Buck Ruxton and her

00:25maid Mary Rogerson. And it soon turned out that Dr. Buck Ruxton, a well-respected

00:33GP in Lancaster, was hiding some very dark secrets.

00:40He dismembered the bodies of his victims and then transported them across the

00:46border into Scotland so when they were found they had been submerged in water

00:51for some time after having been dismembered back at his property.

00:57Police had never seen anything quite like this before and the first officer

01:03on the scene had taken great care to note down exactly where each body parts

01:09was found. Something which would greatly help crack this bizarre case.

01:15Dr. Buck had taken quite extreme measures to obfuscate the investigation by removing a lot of the

01:25identifying features from these bodies. His focus really as a doctor was that he

01:31knew that he would need to dismember the body, he would need to try and remove

01:38identifying features because he was aware that those things would lead to an

01:45identification. So he was removing things like birthmarks and the tips of

01:50fingers, feet, because they had, I think his common-law wife had a quite a

01:56distinctive bunion. He was removing things that would lead to

02:01their identification, teeth and such like.

02:09A local newspaper proved to be one of the items that brought Buck Ruxton down.

02:15Despite taking great care when it came to removing anatomical evidence there

02:20were some things that he had overlooked. After having gone to those lengths and

02:26depositing the body in essentially a different country, he's wrapping those

02:32body parts in a very distinctive local newspaper. So that essentially gave the

02:40investigators a place where these bodies had likely originated from. And of course

02:47once that link was made and then there were other reports of missing

02:52women from the village, then it starts to kind of pull the picture together.

02:58So it sounds like, you know, to some degree he had a really careful and

03:06methodical approach to the killing and the discarding of the body

03:11parts and yet he was leaving really significant clues which he perhaps had

03:18overlooked because they weren't linked to anatomy and medical knowledge about

03:24the victims and it's that unfortunately that we see is downfall.

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