£8k tapestry prize Rankin with the best
Former top cop turned crime writer reveals how files on gruesome 1930s double murder rewrote history of forensic probes
BY SARAH WARD CRIME writer Ian Rankin has spoken about his £8000 prize for tapestry and weaving skills.
The author drew parallels between the crafts and his own writing, describing both as a “slow process” mostly done alone.
Rankin, who is known for his Inspector Rebus novels, was introduced to the skills by his wife, Miranda Harvey.
The couple co-founded the Cordis Prize for Tapestry.
Rankin said: “It turned out our prize was the biggest in the world, and suddenly artists from all over the world became interested.”
“Enthusiastic amateur” Miranda is taking part in an exhibition at Inverleith House in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens. She said: “Edinburgh is an absolute hub of this art form.” BY JANE HAMILTON Crime Reporter HE was the handsome town doctor. She was his glamorous wife. Together with their three children they seemed to have the perfect life.
But behind closed doors, it was a different story.
Dr Buck Ruxton was a violent, jealous man, convinced the sociable Isabella was having affairs. His jealousy took over and, on September 14, 1935, he strangled, then beat or stabbed Isabella.
Their housemaid, 19-year-old Mary Rogerson, stumbled on the murder and Ruxton killed her too before mutilating their bodies beyond recognition.
He then drove hundreds of miles to Moffat in Scotland to dispose of the remains.
And the savage surgeon might have got away with it but for some unsung investigative heroes and a small Daily Record story.
On September 29, 1935, two young women walking in the countryside peered into a ravine and spotted a parcel with a leg sticking from it.
Their grisly find led to fingers, legs, skulls and a torso. Forty-three pieces of flesh and tissue were recovered from more than one mutilated and dismembered body. These were the ‘jigsaw murders.’
Forensic scientists began putting the pieces together, and with police tried to prove the remains belongs to Isabella Ruxton and her maid Mary Rogerson, reported missing in Lancaster two weeks before. In a time before DNA analysis and sophisticated forensic techniques, the scientists produced stunning breakthrough work and research that would lead to Ruxton’s conviction and execution. Hence the murder mystery that gripped the world also became the start of modern-day forensic investigation. When he was still Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police, Tom Wood was handed an old file given to the force by the family of legendary Edinburgh detective Lieutenant John Sheed after he died. It contained paperwork and photographs relating to the Buck Ruxton murders – a case Wood had grown up hearing about and thought he already knew. Wood said: “I put them to one side and said I must read them later. This was in the early 2000s but later became much later. When I retired I started to read them. They hadn’t been read in 80 years.
“I thought I knew the Ruxton case. My mother, a teenager in 1935, could recite a street song about it. But as I delved into this file, original statements, records of meetings, transcripts, yellowed and foolscap pages a more complex and different story emerged.
“It was a story of long forgotten heroes that deserved to be told.”
Wood had a distinguished and sometimes controversial 36-year police career. He was dubbed the ‘rock’n’roll copper for overseeing the earliest Hogmanay street parties and promoting a more open approach to prostitution.
He transformed the force’s clear-up rate, which in 1998 was the worst in the country, and made sure it was the first to routinely swab offenders for DNA. He also led the hunt for serial killer Angus Sinclair, who died this week.
By the time he retired the force was one of the best in the country.
Wood dipped into writing after Sinclair was convicted to tell the inside story. But Ruxton had been on his mind for years and he felt he had a “duty to tell the story
EX- LOTHIAN DEPUTY CHIEF COSTABLE TOM WOOD