Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast · Blue Ewe Media

430: The Thames Torso Murders Revisited w/ Suzanne Huntington

·1 hr 38 min·5 clips

Suzanne Huntington found only 38 UK dismemberment cases across 63 years, then narrowed them to 12 London female cases.

Eric returns to the Thames Torso Murders with Suzanne Huntington. He says another book on the subject brought him back to the topic after he had already talked about it with Sarah Bax Horton last fall. From there, the conversation settles into a careful look at several nineteenth-century body-part cases. Suzanne works through them one by one instead of trying to force them into a single theory. That matters. When the evidence is strong enough, she compares dates, locations, and postmortem details. When it is thin, she leaves a case alone and moves on. The Battersea 1873 material gives her something real to work with. The Battersea 1874 case does not. She is plain about the fact that there is not enough there to prove a connection to anything else. The episode treats that limit as part of the job. It does not smooth over uncertainty. It keeps coming back to chronology and documentation. Blackfriars becomes one of the clearest examples in the discussion. A dredging operation by Blackfriars Bridge brought up a body, and the medical details include adipocere, or grave wax. That gives the case a strange physical weight even while the bigger questions stay open. Suzanne and Eric keep asking what the record can actually support. They do not rush toward a neat conclusion. Instead, they compare what is known, separate it from guesswork, and leave the gaps visible. The pace stays steady and interview-led throughout. Suzanne does most of the narrative lifting while Eric keeps the discussion on track. The result is a historical true crime conversation built on patience, restraint, and close reading of old evidence.

As heard by us

A steady, evidence-first look at a case that still resists neat answers.

Eric and Suzanne return to the Thames Torso Murders with a steady, unshowy kind of attention. Suzanne's book gives the conversation a useful frame, and the episode does its best work when it stays close to the surviving evidence, moving from Battersea to Blackfriars without…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a careful revisit of the Thames Torso Murders, framed as fact or fiction and anchored in the 1873-1874 cases.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast