Capital punishment
SICK CRIMES ARE A BRIDGE TOO FAR… BUT WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE?
UMBRELLA HIT Waterloo Bridge
As Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov waited for a bus on London’s Waterloo Bridge on September 7, 1978, he felt a sharp jab in his thigh and saw a man hurrying away. The 49-year-old Soviet critic had been cunningly injected by a hidden mechanism inside an umbrella that fired a pellet containing lethal ricin into his bloodstream. Markov would die four days later. Authorities believe his murder was a Cold War hit by the KGB and Communist Bulgaria’s Secret Service. Ten days earlier, another defector had been targeted the same way in Paris but survived. Communist agent Francesco Gullino, codenamed “Piccadilly”, has since been named as the prime suspect, but denied involvement in the killing before his own death. No-one has ever been charged.
THE PUTNEY PUSHER Putney Bridge
Just who was the callous jogger captured in this fuzzy CCTV image? It was the question London’s police were asking in 2017 after a runner in blue shorts and grey T-shirt pushed a 33-yearold woman in front of a bus on Putney Bridge at 7.40am on May 5. Only quick-thinking by driver Olivier Salbris saved her life. He swerved his red, 12-ton double decker just in time and avoided hitting the woman’s head by just a few inches. Despite launching a huge public appeal, trawling hours of camera footage and quizzing 50 people, detectives were unable to identify the mystery man. A Met Police spokesperson told the Daily Star: “The investigation was closed in December 2018 after officers exhausted all lines of inquiry.”
In the mid-1960s a spate of murders involving young women rocked the capital. All of the victims were sex workers, found partly clothed or nude. The unknown serial killer was dubbed “Jack the Stripper” as his crimes appeared to echo those of Jack the Ripper, the still unidentified culprit who butchered sex workers in Victorian London. On February 2, 1964, the body of Hannah Tailford, 30, was pulled from the Thames foreshore beside a sailing club near Hammersmith Bridge. Two months later Irene Lockwood, 26, was found close by. The gruesome finds continued over the coming months, with four more bodies discovered and linked to two earlier murders. Most of the eight victims had been strangled and had their teeth removed. A huge manhunt was launched and 7,000 suspects interviewed. Despite paint on the bodies linking the killer to a west London trading estate, and the release of an E-fit, noone was ever charged and then the murders suddenly stopped. Theories about the killer’s identity have since included champion boxer Freddie Mills and convicted Welsh child killer Harold Jones, who was living in the area at the time.
GOD’S BANKER Blackfriars Bridge
On the morning of June 18, 1982, a postal worker noticed a body dangling from a rope attached to scaffolding below Blackfriars Bridge, spanning the River Thames, in the heart of the city. The corpse was identified as Roberto Calvi, who’d been missing for nine days, following the collapse, with £800million debts, of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, where he was chairman. Dubbed “God’s Banker” due to his murky links with the Vatican, the 62-year-old had already been found guilty of illegal currency transactions and was facing another fraud trial. Police found Calvi’s clothes stuffed with five bricks and £12,500 in three currencies. His death was initially treated as suicide, but after two inquests an open verdict was recorded. Forensic tests would show there were no marks on his shoes from the scaffolding, his neck injuries didn’t imply hanging and he hadn’t touched the bricks in his pockets. It was murder. Could his dealings with members of the Catholic Church even be involved? In 2005 five people, with alleged Mafia links, were tried in Italy for his murder, but acquitted. To this day the case remains unsolved and the truth behind Calvi’s death still baffling.
TORSO IN THE THAMES Tower Bridge
A man walking over Tower Bridge spotted the torso of a young boy floating in the River Thames on September 21, 2001, and raised the alarm.
Wearing only a pair of orange shorts, the victim’s head and limbs had been removed. He had been poisoned and his throat slit to drain the blood.
Detectives, who called him “Adam”, worked out he was aged between four and seven and had lived in Nigeria. Experts agreed he had been killed in a ritualistic murder, perhaps linked to voodoo or as some twisted human sacrifice.
Adam’s shorts were linked to Germany and a mysterious woman called Joyce Osagiede, who claimed to have once looked after him. Police also found links to people traffickers in Africa.
But who murdered “Adam” and why, along with his real identity, continue to remain elusive.
Former case detective Nick Chalmers admits: “There are people responsible who haven’t been brought to justice.”