The Bodies In The Ravine

A grisly discovery on a country walk

Unknown photographer. Public domain image

Bukhtyar Rustomji Rantanji Hakim came to Edinburgh, Scotland, from India in 1927 to study medicine. He qualified as a doctor, changed his name by deed poll to Buck Ruxton, and took as his common-law wife a Scottish cafe manager named Isabella Kerr. They moved to Lancaster and had three children, but it was not a happy partnership. Ruxton was a jealous man with a fiery temper, known by servants and the Lancashire police to have threatened to kill his wife on several occasions.

Matters came to a head on 15th September 1935, when Ruxton strangled Isabella. Their maid, Mary Jane Rogerson, witnessed the murder, so Ruxton immediately suffocated her. With both women dead, a cunning calm descended on him. He dismembered the two bodies, remov­ing Isabella’s fingertips to prevent identification of the corpse, wrapped the body parts in news­paper, drove 100 miles to Moffat in Scotland, and dumped them in a ravine.

However, Ruxton had made two fatal mistakes. One was that the newspaper he used was a special edition of the Sunday Graphic, sold only in the Lancaster area. The other was that he was not as thorough with his treatment of Mary Jane’s body as he had been with Isabella’s.

A fortnight later, two ramblers looked into the ravine and saw what appeared to be a human leg. Police recovered 43 separate pieces of flesh which were passed on to two forensic experts, Professors John Glaister and James Brash. Glaister and Brash matched a finger discovered in the ravine to the prints of Mary Jane that were all over Ruxton’s house. They then used forensic anthropology to identify the other victim by superimposing a life-size photo of Isabella’s head over an X-ray of one of the skulls from the ravine. The date of the killing was matched to the dis­appearance of the women by fixing the age of the maggots on their putrefying remains.

Ruxton was arrested, charged, tried and convicted. He was hanged at Strangeways Prison, Manchester, on 11th May 1936.

Where the bodies were discovered. Public domain image

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