The unidentified people who died in the 1878 sinking of SS Princess Alice were not the only people pulled from the Thames whose names and stories remained unknown. The river treats its victims brutally, carrying them miles away from where they entered the water, and knocking them against debris and passing water traffic so as to render them unrecognisable. Sometimes bodies remain in the water for weeks before they are found, by which point natural processes have similarly altered their appearance beyond recognition. Other times, they enter the water already rendered unidentifiable by the person or persons who killed them. An obvious way of doing this is dismemberment. Almost exactly five years before the sinking of SS Princess Alice, a grizzly discovery was made in the Thames at Battersea. I am not going to delve into that case here, but the Thames Torso Murders are one of the most shocking crimes relating to the river. Luckily for you, the excellent historians at Criminal Corpses have a post on the case, which you can find here.
We all have cases that we recall from formative times in our lives and they tend to locate us in a time and place very accurately. For my mother, that case is the disappearance of Genette Tate, a thirteen year old girl who went missing in 1978 while delivering newspapers. No trace of her has ever been found. Genette was thirteen when she went missing in 1978; my mother was twelve. A couple of years earlier, in 1975, a teenager named Lesley Whittle was kidnapped and murdered. This is the case my partner best remembers as having had an emotional impact on her; both Lesley Whittle and my partner were seventeen years old at the time. For most women my age, it seems that the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, as well as that of Sarah Payne, stand out particularly vividly in our memories.
It is not only a shared profile that can breed this intense feeling for a case; geographical proximity can have much the same effect. Growing up in London, I remember feeling intense disquiet when the torso of a child was found in the River Thames in September 2001. The body belonged to a black male, probably aged between four and seven years old. Nicknamed Adam by investigators, the child was missing both head and all four limbs, and was found wearing a pair of orange shorts. Dismemberment is almost always a feature primarily used to assist in concealing the identity of a body, but Adam's case was different. His limbs had been expertly removed, and his blood had been drained from his body. Police were able to determine from the post-mortem results that Adam had originally come from the somewhere in or around Benin City in Nigeria, and that he had only been in the UK for a matter of days before he was killed. This led police to explore the possibility that Adam had been trafficked into the UK and then killed so that his body parts might be used in a form of medicine known as 'muti'. Such killings have been reported elsewhere in the world (this New York Times article from 2004 gives some examples), but as far as I am aware this is not something that has been found in the UK, either before or since. Despite a lengthy investigation, which included a false identification by a purportedly mentally ill woman, Adam's name remains unknown, along with the identity of his killer or killers.
Some unidentified bodies are those of infants, usually whose mothers have given birth to them in secret (and potentially also in denial), but it is extraordinarily rare for the body of an older child to turn up and remain unclaimed. In 1985, two bodies, one adult woman and one child, were found hidden in barrels that had been dumped in Bear Brook National Park in New Hampshire, USA; neither could be identified. Fifteen years later, two more bodies, also in a 55 gallon drum, were found near to the original dump site, inexplicably missed by the police during the first investigation. The new bodies were those of two more young girls. The story that unfolds from these discoveries is really quite extraordinary, involving yet another body, this time hidden under a mountain of cat litter, a mystery child abandoned at a trailer park, and some incredibly dedicated internet sleuths. The story deserves space to be told properly, and New Hampshire Public Radio have put together a fantastic podcast about what happened which you can find here - I really recommend it.
The UK Missing Persons Unit has a website with a searchable database of people who have been found deceased and have yet to be identified. Please be aware that there is an option in some of the cases to view sensitive images - these are almost always photographs of the bodies themselves. Though they are not gory, they may still be disturbing. None of the photos I include here are of actual people - they are all composite images or sketches. The oldest case included on the database is from October 1966 and it concerns a man whose decomposed remains were found in a derelict house. The most recent case is from January of this year, in which a relatively young woman was found deceased on a beach in Invernesshire. I spend more time than I probably ought to admit thinking about these people in general, and some of them in particular.
06-023864
Only about a tenth of cases of unidentified bodies actually involve crime. In May 2006, a woman experiencing stomach pains was admitted to St Helier's Hospital near Sutton. The name and date of birth she gave when admitted appear to have been false and when the woman died, she was found to have a stomach full of packages of cocaine. She is believed to have been a recent arrival from Ghana.
06-022590
A great many of the unidentified were homeless before they died and seem to have lost touch with their families. In 2003, a man estimated to be aged between sixty and eighty years of age was found floating in Lower Pool River Thames. On the man's person was a purse which contained a note. The note read, 'My name is Patrick Jones. I have no relatives'.
03-000303 'Patrick Jones'
Other countries have their share of John and Jane Doe databases, including Belgium, Portugal, and of course the Doe Network in the United States. Be aware that not all of these sites hide the photographs of remains as standard, so be prepared if you click through the links. At one time it could be assumed that bodies which were not identified relatively quickly were unlikely to be identified at all. Nowadays, one might think, developments in DNA have surely meant that far fewer bodies go unidentified than was previously the case. Unfortunately, that is not so, in part because a DNA profile of a deceased individual is only useful if they have been reported missing and a DNA sample provided to law enforcement; in some cases, it is possible that nobody has realised they are missing. In the USA, the DNA Doe Project does fascinating work on broadening the search using different tools, namely genetic genealogy, to identify people. I will do a post on this subject at a later date, but it's worth checking out their website here.
By virtue of this being an island nation, bodies that enter the water at coasts throughout Europe might easily find their way to British shores; for this reason, Devon has a surprisingly high number of unidentified bodies on their books. Many of these bodies are not complete, such as the leg in a training shoe that was found last year near the Isle of Man; while this may initially seem extremely sinister, the decomposition process combined with the destructiveness of water traffic gives an alternative to more nefarious explanations.
Case: 21-000448
Such incomplete remains present obvious challenges to law enforcement and jawbones that were discovered in various parts of the country 50+ years ago are unlikely to ever be matched to an identity. Submersion in water, particularly over a prolonged period, present similar problems; a man found in the sea near Cadgwith in 1969 had probably been in the water for up to four months, and his name has never been uncovered. In some cases, even the individual's sex cannot be definitively determined, such as the remains found in Epping Forest in 2003, which had been there for fifteen to twenty years and had no useful features beyond false teeth and a gold wedding ring.
The vast majority of the people included on the British database are men. There are 495 unidentified men, compared with just 68 women (7 of the remains are of uncertain sex). This raises a number of questions, but it is worth bearing in mind that (according to the Genesis Trust), only about 14% of the street homeless population are women. Perhaps men's connections tend to be more tenuous, the protections of familial and communal ties less secure for them. Exploring these cases can be extremely unsettling, making us feel the threat of being unanchored, of being somehow cast adrift and lost. It unearths our very deep and very primal fear of being forgotten.
The body of Joyce Vincent, a forty-year-old woman, was found in her flat in Wood Green, North London, in 2006. Joyce had likely died two years prior to being found. I am haunted by her death, the fact that her television was still on when she was found, and that she was only discovered because bailiffs forced entry as her housing benefit had only covered half the rent and she was two years in arrears. In 2011, Carol Morley directed a docu-drama entitled Dreams of a Life about Joyce Vincent and I urge you to track it down and watch it. It is very moving. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that absolutely nobody cares about the people I have written about here. Joyce's sisters were looking for her, and they hired a private detective to track her down. Joyce's address was discovered, but when their letters went unanswered, her sisters had no choice but to assume she had cut off contact with them. The stories in this post are of missed connections, false assumptions, painful memories, and wounds that are still too raw to be examined. In many of these cases, somebody, somewhere, wonders, even if only sometimes... Whatever happened to X?
Joyce Vincent
On the evening of November 18th 1987, a fire broke beneath a wooden escalator at King's Cross Station. 31 people died that day and for sixteen years one of those victims remained unidentified. Known only as Body 115 (his mortuary tag number), the man's grave was marked by an inscription reading simply 'unknown man'. In the early 2000s, the man was finally identified using skull measurements. His name was Alexander Fallon and he was 72 years old when he perished in the fire. After the death of his wife in the 1970s, Fallon had sold his house and moved to London, where he began sleeping rough. Fallon kept up sporadic contact with his daughter until 1987, when all communication stopped. His name has now been added to both his grave and to the memorial to the King's Cross victims. While there is considerable justification for the identification being made without DNA evidence being considered necessary, not everybody was convinced. For families who have spent decades missing a lost loved one, unidentified bodies can be a bittersweet kind of hope that closure might finally come.
Alexander Fallon
Every urban centre lives with fire in the shadows of its collective memory and London is no different. King's Cross is of course one such blaze, but there are plenty of others, from the Great Fire in 1666 all the way through to the Grenfell Disaster more recently. Not all of London's communities remember the same events as vividly as others, however, and not everybody will agree on the circumstances surrounding them. Such is the case with a fire that started on the night of Saturday 17th January 1981 at number 439 New Cross Road in South East London. That will be next week's post.
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