Jeffrey Howe, forty-nine, was a kitchen salesman who had worked around the country and had once been a chef in Italy. He had been married twice, followed Manchester United, and owned two Jaguars. His brother called him a jovial, charming character with a heart of gold who would get on with anyone; neighbors in Southgate, north London, found him quarrelsome. From November 2008 he let Stephen Marshall, thirty-eight, and Marshall's twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Sarah Bush, stay at his ground-floor flat when they needed somewhere to live, by one account without paying rent. Marshall has been described both as a nightclub doorman and as a bodybuilder and personal trainer who once owned a gym in St Albans; he lived latterly in Borehamwood, had worked with Howe, and had a record of violence and associations with hardened criminals.
On the night of March 8 or 9, 2009, Marshall stabbed Howe twice in the back while he slept, one wound puncturing a lung; Howe took up to an hour to die. Marshall then spent about twelve hours dismembering the body in the flat. The Home Office pathologist said the limbs had been removed skillfully and cleanly, and the prosecution told the court that the flesh of the scalp and face had been taken off and that the eyes, ears, tongue and structures of the neck had been cut away. The parts were driven out and scattered across Hertfordshire and Leicestershire, and they were found between March 22 and April 11; the hands never were. Because the remains could not be identified, the press called the victim the Jigsaw Man, and for six weeks police did not know who he was.
The motive was the flat and what came with it. Marshall and Bush took over the property, drew money from Howe's bank account, claimed his housing benefit and sold his belongings, including putting his car up on eBay. Bush helped dispose of evidence and gave police false information about where Howe was. The two were arrested in north London on April 23, 2009, and the dead man was named the same day.
Marshall pleaded not guilty at St Albans Crown Court on January 12, 2010, and changed his plea to guilty on January 29. Bush was acquitted of murder but pleaded guilty to helping dispose of the body parts and to giving false information, and received three years and nine months with a concurrent two years and three months, the judge accepting that she had acted under duress. On February 1, 2010, Mr Justice Cooke sentenced Marshall to life with a minimum of thirty-six years, together with two convictions for perverting the course of justice. "He looked up to you and was scared of you and the evidence is you exploited that," the judge told him, describing a man who could be affable one moment and domineering the next. "The act of dismembering Jeffrey Howe can only be described as pure evil," said Detective Superintendent Michael Hanlon of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit.
Marshall told investigators, and by one report a witness, that he had dismembered four other men between 1995 and 1998 while working the door at a London nightclub, that he had once cut up bodies for a London crime family, and that he had disposed of them in Epping Forest. Police reopened a number of missing persons cases on the strength of it. No charge was brought and no remains were recovered. The conviction is for one murder.