Beyond Recognition Preview Episode 4

[00:00:03] At the heart of this violent bloody case is a love story, a very unusual love story.

[00:00:12] This was Agatha Christie come to life.

[00:00:15] It's not something I've given a great deal of thought too about where to dump bodies,

[00:00:19] but if I was driving from Moffitt up to Edinburgh, I can't think of it any other sport.

[00:00:29] The Rucksaint case is different.

[00:00:35] Any investigation before the Rucksaint case was ancient history,

[00:00:41] because it changed the way that we investigate serious crime.

[00:00:47] The public has been lining up for courtroom seats since before dawn.

[00:00:53] Leakcomers are offering wives of cash for a position at the front of the line.

[00:01:02] An army of press from around the world are on hand to document every dark and dramatic moment.

[00:01:10] The Andreken Nishab is a new limited series coming to the small town Dix-Pod Castle IV on July 19.

[00:01:18] Don't miss it.

[00:01:24] Hi, Tom, how are you?

[00:01:25] I'm well, Simon, thank you very much. Hope you're too.

[00:01:28] Well, I'm, and did you miss me?

[00:01:31] Because I had the misfortune to listen to your effort without me.

[00:01:36] Introducing small town Dix and you'd refer to yourself as talking from a new headquarters in Edinburgh.

[00:01:43] Is it something I missed at the ADM we had last week?

[00:01:47] You know the rules, Simon, if you go and holiday, you can't expect to find things to seem as soon as you come back.

[00:01:54] You're desks moved and you're in a different office.

[00:01:59] Do things change, do you?

[00:02:01] No, no, no.

[00:02:03] Tom, it was a great episode of Small Town Dix.

[00:02:06] The only thing about episodes, see I wanted to talk to you about the benefit of our listeners as well.

[00:02:12] Because it's a subject that we've touched on, well, actually done an interview over, although it's not been published yet with domestic abuse.

[00:02:19] And what I wanted you to do, just to touch on was it's maybe hard for people to remember what women's place was almost 100 years ago in 1935.

[00:02:30] Because this is a domestic case, that's how it starts off as most models are.

[00:02:35] The domestic, what was going on in the background that would make it so difficult for a woman to even have the police listen to it in those days?

[00:02:43] Yeah, it was very interesting. There are so many modern residences with this case because as you see,

[00:02:48] it's a case of coercive control.

[00:02:51] I mean, didn't even know that there was such a thing called coercive control.

[00:02:55] But that's what it was because Buckruxton, Dr. Ruxton, was a very old-fashioned man that it wanted women to be in their place,

[00:03:03] wanted his wife to be, although she was a common law wife, of course, to be homekeeper, look after the children.

[00:03:10] And of course, the reason he'd been attracted to her is because she was anything but that.

[00:03:16] She was effervescent, she was sexy, she was bubbly, she was intelligent, she was sassy.

[00:03:22] And he's so often you see this, the man is attracted to the woman for once it raises but then wants to change them.

[00:03:28] And so that's what happened with Ruxton and Bella.

[00:03:32] And of course in these days, listen, Simon, in my young day in the police service, the wisdom was you did not get involved

[00:03:40] between a man and his wife or you did not get involved in the domestic circumstance at all.

[00:03:46] And if that was true, and I joined it was even true, but then particularly when you're talking about people who were very middle class

[00:03:54] and Buckruxton and his wife with both pillars of the community.

[00:03:59] The last thing the local police in Lancaster, tiny force remember, the last thing they wanted to do was get involved in any of that stuff.

[00:04:06] Best left it'll sort itself out. And of course ultimately that led to catastrophe and it meant that the Lancaster police were away behind the game.

[00:04:16] So Tom, small-terned decks are making a fantastic job of this, and then I'll show know it's people can see the link to go to small-terned decks of fantastic podcasts and listen to this latest episode four bodies of evidence.

[00:04:30] I think that kind of sums up what episode four is about. And it was fascinating. I listened to it again today, and there's so much to unpack in there.

[00:04:39] That obviously we're not going to try and do here because it's done expertly.

[00:04:43] We stuff that I forgot about the you're written about in the root rucks, in the first modern mother.

[00:04:49] Some of the different, the intermology and some of the fingerprint stuff and the facial recognition.

[00:04:54] All of that stuff that came out, all the ground breaking for the NZ work that came out.

[00:05:00] You must have been absolutely taken aback when you researched that and found out what had gone on here.

[00:05:07] Yeah, I really was because you see I thought I knew all about the rucks in the case, but when you actually start to research it and we've been researching it and a year writing it

[00:05:15] and the biggest challenge I had, I think we've discussed this before is actually boiling down. I had something like 1.5 million words of trying to get that down at 75,000.

[00:05:25] And that was the biggest challenge of it. But it's a hugely compelling case but it's hard and this new episode is really about people.

[00:05:33] And about the important part that Mary Rodgers and his family played in this, they were at the bottom of the social pile. They were at the bottom of the social pile and yet still,

[00:05:44] they had the chuts by they had the character to take on the establishment.

[00:05:48] They weren't going to be phobed off by lame excuses about their sister and the daughter going away and being pregnant and things like that.

[00:05:57] They just didn't believe that, they knew Mary and the New York character and they weren't going to let it go and they continued and then the unsung heroes of this case really.

[00:06:06] Yeah, and it starts off episode four starts off telling us the reenactment of Peter Rodgers and going to the door of the doctor in Lancaster, which was a real social breach of etiquette if you like.

[00:06:20] And of course, rocks and takes a man and he explains to him, Tom, the other theme of episode four that I thought you may be of interest to a listeners was that this was developing into a very complex circumstantial case.

[00:06:34] Because of the length of time, because of the lack of bodies in the case, the identification itself being such a problem.

[00:06:41] Can you explain to Creme Time and listeners, I know you've done this before in previous cases, but it's such a core part of we're working on the criminal evidence system in Scotland.

[00:06:51] Can you explain about circumstantial evidence and what the principles of our for the court?

[00:06:56] So this case to stand up because again, in episode four, Yavale tells us that the emphasis is always here. This is going to go to a jury.

[00:07:05] This is going to go in front of a jury and it's not me, you've got to convince it's not the press, we've got to convince it's not even the judge, we've got to convince this got to be women in the jury who understand the evidence and get it.

[00:07:17] I'll do that, but just going to just wait, wind you back a minute and come back to Peter Rogers and going to that house.

[00:07:24] When Roxton invites him in and tries to elaborate on what has happened and suggests that his sister was both dishonest and had behaved in some immoral way, he makes a critical mistake because in all these cases it's best to keep it simple.

[00:07:44] It'd be much better to say, I don't know where they are. I'm as worried as you are, I have no idea where they are, the left I don't know but instead he tries to, he tries to dominate the young man, the young working class man by throwing back his sister's immorality and his face because a critical mistake because Peter young Peter, he doesn't believe it and he smells a rat and thereafter far from a laying his anxiety.

[00:08:13] And reassuring him which is what Roxton tried to do, he actually raises suspicion and Peter Rogers and goes away from that house, not in any way reassured but actually more certain that something's going terribly wrong.

[00:08:28] So that was a mistake by Roxton and you've seen it and I've seen it often when you speak to suspects they tried to be too clever, they tried to be too clever and they always trick themselves them.

[00:08:41] We don't lie on it though. Well, absolutely, becoming back to circumstantial case the best we have had at described and I think it was a famous lotchief justice described as circumstantial case as being like a silken net which goes over a suspect none of the strands of the net are strong enough in themselves to secure a conviction but combined they give an overall strength of the case.

[00:09:08] So I've likened it to the description of a tent you put up a tent, it's got a strong central pole. You've got a strong central piece of evidence but it's got to be supported by guy ropes and these guy ropes are the circumstantial threads of evidence which have got to be complete.

[00:09:26] But circumstantial case of course is much more difficult to prove and in the rucksaint case of classic you had no murder weapon. You had no witnesses, you had no confession.

[00:09:38] You had no direct evidence of any sort, you just had a whole lot of silken threads which bound buck rucksaint in two the circumstances of the deaths of Bill and Mary.

[00:09:50] And that's the best way I can describe circumstantial evidence.

[00:09:54] That's a good job, Tom. Thanks for doing that for us. That's why the investigation here was so thorough and so it was so varied. There was so many spokes of that particular case had to come together.

[00:10:06] Even the reconstruction, the forensic reconstruction of the house, the bathroom and particular back at the lab in Glasgow. The forensic guy was in the house for 12 days. It's all brilliant stuff for how to build a case, isn't it?

[00:10:19] Absolutely was and I have to say they did an outstanding job. To the extent that that case really served as a shining example on down the years.

[00:10:30] And of course it will come to later on the story actually served as a model, as a prototype of the sort of crime scene management and evidence gathering that we enjoyed.

[00:10:42] And I used to work it wisely and enjoyed when we joined the police service. And we didn't know we all were, you know, you turn up and there's a whole scene's a crime set up and they've got a van and they collect samples.

[00:10:54] And you have no idea that just a few decades earlier this was not the case. You always assume that this is always the case.

[00:11:02] But it started in 1935 and it started with a rucksaint case.

[00:11:07] I love the light bulb moment on the way. The way you're absolutely describes it, the super plane and he's bad and he wakes up and he says he's kind of half awake when he realizes that the what maggots comes in to his head.

[00:11:19] But we'll leave that for our listeners to listen to themselves in this small time deck to episode fantastic.

[00:11:26] We'll speak to you next week about the fifth episode because we're getting to an eti-gritty now and we're getting to the real crux of the case here.

[00:11:34] We are and you're right. I think it's more to index of made a fantastic job with us. And I'm very proud of the way that they've taken my book and made it into this podcast.

[00:11:42] I hope the our listeners enjoy it half as much as I did.

[00:11:46] I thought it was interesting that an episode for the mention that FBI your old power came into it.

[00:11:52] They authenticated the fingerprint technique and whatnot. That's obviously your old buddies. That's where you first crossed the past and rest again this.

[00:12:00] Of course, the FBI connection is a Glasgow city police connection. It was Percy Silato who we have discussed and we're going to program about Percy Silato.

[00:12:09] It was Percy Silato who made friends with Jared Gerhover, the famous founder of the FBI.

[00:12:15] At a crime conference in Chicago in 1934, it was Silato who made that connection. And that's why the Glasgow fingerprint bureau was always famous and became their CRO.

[00:12:27] It was because of that enduring connection. The course, the controversial thing about that whole thing was sending the dermal fingerprint to FBI for authentication and not Scotland jarred.

[00:12:39] It seemed to be an outrage. But of course, Silato was absolutely right in doing so because he suspected and nothing was probably right that the fingerprint bureau got the jarred.

[00:12:52] We'd have found some way of fudging it because they thought that fingerprints were there.

[00:12:58] Absolut total domain and they didn't know anybody plighting around with it. No matter how evil they were.

[00:13:04] And so I think Silato was right but it wasn't without controversy.

[00:13:07] It's interesting to know then that even Percy Silato, when he came to Glasgow, he benefited from the social skills that we're having in the West of Scotland.

[00:13:16] And he was able to go over network with the FBI successfully because that's how you're West of Scotland, track that one.

[00:13:22] Percy Silato loved Glasgow and did not want to leave Glasgow but what you've got to remember at Percy Silato is spent his early years in the South African Desert.

[00:13:32] He's only companion was a leopard. So I suppose compared with that.

[00:13:38] I suppose you're right. I suppose in terms of the social skills Glasgow was preferable.

[00:13:44] Great stuff Tom. I look forward to episode five and I'll read a lesson to in preparation for our next chat.

[00:13:51] Take care Tom. Speak soon.

[00:13:52] Thank you. Enjoy.

[00:13:57] It's a serene September morning in 1935 about two miles north of the Scottish farming village of Muffet.

[00:14:07] An area known as the Devil's Beef Top.

[00:14:11] It's a beautiful area despite the name an isolated region of deeper veines rolling green hills and massive chunks of rock that punch out from the earth like Narald Stone Fists.

[00:14:24] The river Annen lines through it all flowing out to the sea.

[00:14:31] It's a lonely striking place that attracts hikers and nature lovers from around the United Kingdom.

[00:14:39] People like 24-year-old Susan Johnson and her 19-year-old brother, Alfred.

[00:14:45] Susan and Alfred are tourists from the Glasgow area just out for a morning stroll on a lovely fall day.

[00:14:53] Birds are chirping, a skies are blue, then crossing an old stone bridge.

[00:15:02] Susan and Alfred stumble upon a brutal scene so dark and out of place.

[00:15:08] It's hard for them to make sense of what they're actually seeing.

[00:15:13] They go there on a fishing holiday and I'd be not walking.

[00:15:17] That Susan's niece, Sheila Livingstone, Alfred was her father.

[00:15:23] But apparently Susan had looked over the bridge and seen what she thought was a woman's hand.

[00:15:31] And father had scrambled down into the ravine and he had unwrapped one of the parcel and seen a face looking up at him.

[00:15:43] Except that it's not actually a face, not anymore.

[00:15:49] The skin has been completely removed so have the eyes, the nose, the lips, the ears and teeth.

[00:15:57] They've all been cut away. It's absolutely unimaginable.

[00:16:02] Alfred stares down in shock at this thing, this adult head wrapped in a child's one-zee.

[00:16:11] Al-Bassuzzi was a very talented fisherman and father was a great shop.

[00:16:18] They played everything that moved in ancient, so they were quite used to thinking through something.

[00:16:25] But I could assure you they weren't used to anything like this.

[00:16:32] The choking stench of decomposition drifts up to Susan on the bridge as she looks down at her brother.

[00:16:39] Alfred stands up at turns away from the rotting head. He gays his downstream, hoping his stomach will settle.

[00:16:47] It's not going to.

[00:16:51] What he sees are more packages strewn about on the grassy banks.

[00:16:57] Arms and legs partially wrapped in torn cloth and newspaper.

[00:17:01] He notices hunks of something scattered among the weeds.

[00:17:06] He's not sure what it is, but the flies and maggots have already figured it out.

[00:17:12] Human flesh