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A Torso in the Thames

By David Cocksedge

ON THE early morning of 5 October 1974 birdwatcher Mr. Richard Leighton went for a walk along the north bank of the River Thames at Rainham in Essex , England . At Cold Harbor Point, at the water's edge, he saw a white, pinkish object which at first he thought was a dead sheep. On closer inspection he found that it was the upper part of a human male torso, minus head and arms. He quickly reported his macabre find to local police and so began a sensational murder investigation.

In the next ten days four other parts of a human body were washed up the foreshore of the Thames at different points over a distance of approximately ten miles. Commander Albert Wickstead took charge of the case and a post-mortem examination was soon underway. Pathologist Dr Alan Grant at Guy's Hospital, London reported that all the pieces originated from the same body, all severed by saw and knife. It was his opinion that all the pieces were immersed at about the same time, roughly five days prior to 5 October. He could not determine a cause of death but formed the view, because of the congestion of the lungs, that death was due to a head injury. Dr Grant also noted pigmented spots on the left foot and leg, an area of pallor with a sharp margin on the leg, and vertical cuts on the chest and stomach.

Parts of the body still missing were the head, left arm, both hands, left upper leg and right lower leg, including the foot. No positive identification could be made, but London detectives are adept at ferreting out facts and rumors and Commander Wickstead became reasonably sure that the murdered man was a well-known local petty crook named William Henry Moseley, who had mysteriously disappeared several days before the torso was found. Dr Grant took blood samples from Moseley's wife Ann and their three sons, which compared with the blood in the torso, suggesting a strong connection.

Almost a year went by without a breakthrough in this case. Then, on 7 September 1975 a family that was blackberrying in Chakdell Wood near Hatfield, Hertfordshire, discovered an area of disturbed soil, and a human hand with its fingers poking out of the mud.

Local police cordoned off the area and a forensics team then removed the top earth from the makeshift grave to a depth of three and a half feet to expose the body of an adult male wrapped in a candlewick bedspread. The right arm was standing up straight from the shoulder.

The body was fully clothed and in the right breast pocket of the jacket was the stub of a pencil. Due to a long spell of dry, hot weather, it was in an advanced state of decomposition. A post-mortem examination determined that the cause of death was a close proximity gunshot wound entering the right temple and exiting behind the left ear. The round had passed through the skull and was never found. There were many bruises on the body, consistent with kicks and blows administered before death. There was also a mark across the right leg, possibly caused by a rope or other restraining device. The man had been savagely tortured and then executed.

Fingerprints were taken from both hands and sent to Scotland Yard. The body was immediately identified as that of Michael Henry Cornwall. He had been aged 37 and had been a close friend of William Moseley. Throughout their lives they had been engaged in many crimes together. Now it seemed that both men had been murdered. Re-examination of Moseley's torso revealed that he too had been subjected to torture before death. Finger and toenails had been removed with a pair of pliers and there were traces of cigarette burns all over his body.

Soon the members of London 's criminal underworld began to talk. The police learned that three days before the torso was found three men had been discussing the death of Moseley at a family funeral. Back in 1968 a man named Reginald Dudley (54) had been involved in a fight with Moseley and had tried to ram a broken bottle into his face. Moseley fended off the blow and punched Dudley to the ground, where he gave him a good kicking. Dudley swore revenge because he had been made to look small in front of a large number of North London villains in their local public house. Moseley referred to Dudley as a “grass” (a police informer). It was well known that Dudley frequently met a Detective Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan Police who had an unsavory reputation of not being entirely honest.

Dudley 's friend was Robert Maynard (40) who was also in the jewellery trade. The two were known all over London in the criminal underworld as ‘Legal and General': partners in crime. It was Dudley and Maynard plus a third man who had been discussing Moseley's death.

On 18 October 1974 Mick Cornwall was released from prison and returned to his North London haunts hoping to find his old friend Bill Moseley. But Moseley had been missing for a month and there was no news of him until Cornwall heard rumors that bits of Moseley's dismembered body had been found in the Thames in Essex . Cornwall then embarked on his own one-man crusade to find the killers and exact his revenge. Specifically, he was looking for Dudley and Maynard. When these men heard that Cornwall was after them, they “tooled up” (armed themselves) and set an ambush for him.

During the ensuing months Cornwall bizarrely formed an intimate relationship with Kathleen, the daughter of Reg Dudley and during the summer of 1975 they lived together at a flat in Thornton Heath, South London . When the amorous Cornwall left her for another woman, Kathleen Dudley betrayed her former lover to her father. Cornwall was last seen on or about 22 August 1975. Rumors grew in London 's criminal underworld that he had been lured to a remote location and then murdered and that there was a positive link between his killing and the disappearance of Bill Moseley.

After a long and painstaking investigation Commander Wickstead and his task force arrested seven people on charges arising out of the two gangland killings and in April 1976 they were committed for trial from Epping Magistrates Court to the Old Bailey in London . The trial, the longest in British criminal history till then, lasted for seven months. The Crown's prosecution team stressed the chilling fact to the jury that both Moseley and Cornwall had not been tortured to extract information, but simply for sport.

Two men, Reginald Dudley of Stapleton Hill Road , Holloway and Robert Maynard, of Ager Road, Camden , were found guilty of murdering William Moseley and Michael Cornwall. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Dudley's daughter, Kathleen (30) was given a two-year suspended sentence for conspiring to cause Cornwall grievous bodily harm. Greengrocer Charles Clarke (56) was jailed for four years for causing both victims bodily harm. All four appealed against conviction but the verdicts were upheld by three Appeal Court judges in London in April 1979. The other defendants were acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence to convict them.

But there was one more macabre twist to this murderous tale. On 28 July 1977, a police officer was called to a public toilet in Richmond Avenue , Islington, where he was shown a human skull. This was examined by criminal pathologists soon afterwards. The mummified, partially leatherized head was accompanied by a dark blue woolen balaclava with holes cut in areas consistent with the eyes and mouth, all wrapped in pages of The London Evening News dated 16 June 1977 – the day that the trial had ended at the Old Bailey. The head and the balaclava were extremely cold and moist to the touch and appeared to be in a state of thawing. Fractures were noted on both sides of the hyoid bone.

X-ray evidence revealed a fracture of the nose and a double fracture of the lower jaw, with the loss of a molar tooth in the left upper jaw. All the facial injuries indicated that the man had been subjected to severe blows just before death. The cuts in the neck structure were made by an eighteen-teeth-per-inch Eclipse high-speed hacksaw blade and were consistent with those recorded from sections of the torso identified as that of William Moseley. Further X-ray pictures showed other identical points of comparison and unity.

After he had been murdered and decapitated, Moseley's head had been stored in either a refrigerator or a deep-freeze cabinet. Sometime after the trial at The Old Bailey, someone unknown had taken it out of frozen storage, wrapped it in newspaper and left it to be found in the public toilet in Islington.

The whole case had lasted nearly two years. Initially, there had been only mangled parts of a body found in the River Thames. Then a second body, which was more readily identified, was finally followed by the discovery of a human skull. There were no initial clues, but Wickstead and his team had slowly gathered evidence by penetrating the secrecy of London 's criminal underworld, using their professional skills honed from years of experience in investigative police work.

The conspiring murderers had calculated that by dismembering Moseley's body, throwing the parts into different reaches of the Thames and removing the skull they had surely defeated any criminal pathologist. They were certain that the body could not be identified, and the killing traced back to themselves. They were wrong.

(Research: Clues to Murder' by Tom Tullett, Grafton Books, 1987).

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