Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

“And fingerprints from these three fingers are identical with those found all over your house, Dr. Ruxton. There is not the least doubt that the body known as Number One is that of Mary Rogerson and that she was killed and dismembered by you in your house.”

They led Dr. Ruxton, stunned and silent, to a cell. For once he had nothing to say. But when on November 5 he appeared before a magistrates’ court and heard himself charged with a second murder, that of his wife, he was ready to fight back.

“A positive and damnable lie. It is all prejudice. Is there no justice? Do I look like a murderer?”

On November 26, nine magistrates, two of them women, gathered in the police court to decide whether Dr. Ruxton should be committed for trial.

They heard the hideous story, they listened to the hypocritical letters he had sent to his wife’s sister begging her to persuade Belle to come back to him, knowing all the time she was dead. They heard the experts, the testimony of the prison surgeon that the scars on the prisoner’s hand were not from a can opener but a surgical or similar keen edged knife.

The magistrates had no hesitation in sending the case to trial.

When it opened on March 2, of this year, in the city of Manchester a surprise was sprung. Dr. Ruxton was charged only with the murder of his wife, that of the nursemaid being held in reserve.

The prisoner pleaded not guilty to the charge. Before his eyes in court was a significant array of exhibits. A model of the house, part of the stairway, clothing, the bath, the stained blue suit, Mrs. Ruxton’s handbag proving she had returned to, but never left, the fatal house; jars of specimens, plaster casts, photographs of the reconstructed bodies.

The long array of witnesses took the stand, charwomen, a garbage man who had taken away the burned remains of Mary Rogerson’s best dress, the Rogersons, then came the experts with their deadly testimony that the blood on the woodwork of the house was human and of recent origin, that the telltale débris all pointed to murder.

In silence the court saw Mary Rogerson’s shoe fitted to a plaster cast of her foot from Moffat ravine. Mrs. Ruxton’s shoe fitted to a cast of her foot. Both a perfect fit.

Professor Glaister said that of sixty-eight portions of human remains examined by him and his colleagues, forty-three soft parts could not be assigned to any body. He built up a damning case against the prisoner. Even the fact that positive marks of identification had been removed was made to tell. Mary Rogerson’s eye with its cast, her freckled face skinned, her scarred thumb cut off, a birth mark on the arm cut out. Mrs. Ruxton’s prominent nose, her teeth, a bunioned toe. The prisoner had taken care of everything but one trifle — three fingers on one hand.

Dr. Ruxton took the stand in his own defense. He dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief. He sobbed and cried. He had fits of angry denial. He declared that the charge of killing his wife was “a deliberate fantastic story. You might as well say the sun rose in the west and set in the east.”

“It is suggested that you killed Mary Rogerson,” said his counsel the nimble-witted and noted Norman Birkett.

“Bunkum with a capital B. Why should I kill poor Mary?”

He explained his quarrels, his charges of infidelity, proved to be untrue, but at no time had he ever thought of violence. He told his story, of his wife’s departure. He explained everything, the stained carpets, the suit stained with blood when he helped his friend, Anderson the dentist, in extractions, the locked doors, his cut hand. He had never been to Moffat. All he carried down on the morning of Thursday, 19, was his camera.

Mr. Birkett, defense counsel, pointed out that the evidence was only circumstantial. No positive identification of the body had been made. Mrs. Ruxton had gone away on a previous occasion without writing. There was not the slightest evidence that Dr. Ruxton was responsible. Would any sane man dismember bodies with his children in the house, throw open his house to a succession of charwomen with sharp eyes. On one of these alleged trips to Moffat, Dr. Ruxton was using a hired car. Not a spot of blood had been noted on the car. The Crown, Mr. Birkett claimed, had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The summing up of the judge, Mr. Justice Singleton, on the last day of the trial, March 13, was one of the fairest ever delivered.

“It is important,” he warned the jury “that no innocent man shall suffer.”

The jury filed out. In an hour it came back with a verdict of guilty. Dr. Ruxton listened to his sentence: