On the morning of September 29, 1935 Susan Haines Johnson glanced over an old stone bridge and down into the Gardenholm Linn stream in Moffat, Scotland and saw a gruesome sight.
Her eyes caught a bundle rocking slightly in the water with the shocking and unmistakable shape of a human arm sticking out where the fabric had caught on a rock.
The young hiker, on holiday with her family, was rooted to the spot as her eyes outlined the decomposed shape of the hand and fingers.
Police from the Dumfriesshire Constabulary were alerted to the scene where they discovered more remains.
As the cops searched the area they found four more bundles, each containing extensively mutilated body parts including thigh bones, legs, sections of flesh, and a human torso and pelvis.
And two human heads.
It was a 70-piece jigsaw puzzle that nobody wanted to complete.
Long before advances in forensic science, what made this case particularly challenging for authorities was how attempts had been made on both bodies to remove traditional identifiable elements, such as fingerprints.
The killer, Dr Buck Ruxton, knew exactly what he was doing when he killed and mutilated his wife Isabella Ruxton and their maid Mary Jane Rogerson… or so he thought.
What he didn’t anticipate was that his very murder case would help pave the way for modern forensic methods, with the help of a newspaper, a baby grow and... maggots.
“The police went to the ravine and they picked up the body parts and took them to the local mortuary before painstakingly trying to put them back together,” Jeremy Craddock, author of The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics, told the M.E.N.
“They thought that the bodies were a man and a woman at first. The doctor read this in a newspaper report and was delighted - he thought he had gotten away with it and that he had committed the perfect murder.
“Being in the medial profession, he knew how to dismember and disarticulate the bodies so that they would be harder to identify.
“But he wasn’t as clever as he thought - the police knew he’d had medical training due to the tools he used."
Meanwhile, a Morecambe slip edition of the Sunday Graphic, dated 15 September 1935, was used to wrap the body parts, suggesting the location of the killings was in Lancashire.
Then there was dental evidence and the fact he had used his own children’s clothing to wrap the body parts in - and a partial print from Mary matched an item in his home.
If that wasn’t enough, photographs of Isabella and Mary transposed over the two skulls matched perfectly.
And Glasgow-based entomologist, Alexander Mearns, deduced the remains could not have been under the bridge for less than 12 to 14 days by the age of the maggots that infested them, helping to date the murders.
Jeremy, who teaches multimedia journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “A lot is made of the maggots, but I've established in my research that it was never presented as evidence at the trial - just used by the forensic scientists to confirm in their own minds their theory on how long the bodies had been in the ravine.
“But it was the first time maggots had been used in this way in a murder case.
“It was various factors that convinced the jury the bodies were those of Isabella and Mary and that Ruxton did it. It was far from the perfect crime.”
Buck Ruxton, born Bukhtyar Chompa Rustomji Ratanji Hakim, moved from Bombay, India to the UK in 1927 to train in Edinburgh, where he met his wife Isabella.
The couple relocated to Lancaster where Ruxton established a medical practice at the family home at 2 Dalton Square.
But while his patients loved him, behind closed doors he was hiding a different side to his character.
He used to beat Isabella and started to suspect she was having an affair.
The jealousy ate him up so much that when she arrived home late on September 14, 1935 after a trip to see the Blackpool Illuminations with her sisters visiting from Edinburgh - he flew into a murderous fury.
Jeremy, 51, from Warrington, said: “Isabella drove back afterwards and it's thought Ruxton killed her and the maid late that night or the early hours of the following morning.
“In public, he had a kind nature but in private he was a controlling and jealous man who beat his wife.
“He believed that she was having an affair so he killed her in a fit of rage. Their children’s maid came out and saw what he’d done. He then killed her too.
“He tried to cover his tracks in the hours and days immediately after the murder, trying to get his acquaintances to tell the police false stories for two weeks following the murders. He told people that his wife and the maid had both walked out on him.”
The next day the doctor left his three children with a friend and went about chopping up the two bodies in the family bath.
He removed parts of the carpet which were soaked in blood and drove up to Scotland to dispose of the women like trash, before fabricating his story to his community and to the police.
But his scheming did little more than buy him some time.
Jeremy said: “The forensic scientists established quickly that they (the remains) were linked to the missing women from Lancaster.
“They believe he dismembered them in a bath and cut them up with a surgical knife. He drove them to Scotland in his car, which is a two hour drive.
“Their house was splattered with blood and he ripped up the carpets which had been stained and said it was his blood from when he cut himself opening a can of peaches. So he did not cover his tracks well at all.”
After his arrest on October 12, 1935 Buck was remanded until he stood trial for the two murders.
Jeremy said: “He had a hearing in Lancaster then I think he was moved to Walton, but mostly he was at Strangeways until his trial, which was in March 1936 at Manchester Assize court on Ducie Street.
“When the trial took place there were thousands of people outside the court supporting him.
“In a time before the NHS, the popular doctor was highly regarded for how he would often waived medical fees for those who couldn't pay, so many members of the community could not believe what he had done.”
A petition for clemency was signed by 10,000 people including sympathetic locals who held the doctor in high regard - but was disregarded and Ruxton was sentenced to death for his crimes.
The next day on May 12, 1936 he was hanged at Strangeways, aged 37.
Jeremy has been fascinated by this story since he was a boy, so it was only natural that it would form the base of his book, which is due to be published by the History Press in 2021.
“I have always found the case fascinating,” he said. “The crime itself is one that I was familiar with from being a young child. It happened in Lancaster and I’m from Kendal.
“My dad used to take us out to his house where the murder took place. I was obsessed with it. So perhaps because of that I have always been fascinated by true crime.
“I have been writing fiction for years and never had a go at a nonfiction book until this point. With this story, there has not been a proper book that details the case, although a lot has been written about it.”
Despite the fact it's still in progress, the book has already been snapped up for television.
The Jigsaw Murders has been optioned for TV by Elaine Collins, of Tod Productions, who is responsible for bringing Shetland to the BBC and Vera to ITV.
Jeremy added: “True crime is massive at the moment. To have the backing of such a prominent producer is incredible. It’s a dream come true.”
The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics is out next year. To keep updated visit jeremycraddock.com.
