In the spring of 2009, police in two English counties were dealing with one dead man found in many places, and they could not put a name to him. The finds began on March 22 near the village of Cottered in Hertfordshire. A week later there was another near Wheathampstead, then one more, far to the north, near Asfordby in Leicestershire. On April 7 came a find near Puckeridge, and on April 11 another in Standon, both back in Hertfordshire. Every find came from the same man. The newspapers gave him the only name they had: the jigsaw man.
His real name was Jeffrey Howe. He was forty-nine, a kitchen salesman from Southgate in north London, and he had been killed in his own flat earlier that month. The man who killed him was living in his flat, spending his money and selling his belongings. He was a former nightclub doorman named Stephen Marshall, and when he finally stood in the dock he offered the court a story about other bodies that has never been tested.
Howe worked hard and lived alone. He was unmarried and had no children. His job selling kitchens took him around the country, and at one time he had worked as a chef in Italy. A former colleague who left flowers at his home in April 2009 remembered him as hardworking and kind, a friend he used to watch football with. His brother described a caring son and said the family had been left deeply traumatised.
Court reports described Marshall as Howe’s colleague and friend. A judge would later say that Howe looked up to the younger man and was frightened of him at the same time. When Marshall and his girlfriend, Sarah Bush, needed somewhere to live after they were turned out of her mother’s house, Howe let them stay in his flat in Southgate. A forensic scientist who worked on the case later summed up the motive in one word: greed. The couple paid no rent. They ate his food. They did not leave.
Howe was killed in his flat on the night of March 8 or 9, 2009, the court was later told. He was stabbed to death. His remains were later left at scattered points across Hertfordshire and Leicestershire.
The killing did not end Marshall’s interest in Howe; it was the start of it. With Howe gone, the couple took over the flat. They drew money from his bank account. They sold his belongings, and his car was sold through eBay. The Crown’s case at trial was that the motive had been exactly this, the home and the property of a man who had given them shelter. When Marshall was sentenced, the judge put it plainly: he had taken advantage of Howe while he was alive and then lived off his money once he was dead.
The remains held no obvious clue to who the dead man had been, and for several weeks the investigation in Hertfordshire was working on an unknown victim. By late April 2009 the operation had grown to about a hundred officers. The London Daily News, reporting on April 24, called it Operation Athena; other accounts gave a different operation name.
The break came from an inquiry that had begun before any of the finds. According to Ray Palmer, a principal forensic scientist at the Forensic Science Service who later presented the case to an American forensic symposium, a missing person inquiry begun some weeks before the first discovery eventually led detectives to identify the remains as those of Jeffrey Howe. Police identified him on April 23, 2009.
The two people who had been sharing his flat were already under scrutiny. Detectives had questioned Marshall and Bush and were unhappy with what they heard. Both were arrested on suspicion of murder, Marshall in the same block of flats after a tip-off, and their home was searched. On April 24 the London Daily News reported that a 37-year-old man, believed to be a colleague of the victim, and a 20-year-old woman were still being held.
The forensic case against Marshall was built from traces almost too small to see. Palmer’s team at the Forensic Science Service worked outward from the materials recovered with the remains, looking for clusters of fibers that might tie them to the place where the body had been handled.
Among that material they found blue viscose flock, and investigators were told to look for a dark blue or black item with a velvety, peach-skin finish. Green and red polyester fibers led them further. Industrial inquiries traced those fibers to a polo shirt made under the Kustom Kit brand by a firm called Charterhouse Holdings. The label code narrowed the garment to a batch of 3,034 sold between 2001 and 2004, and the shirt had been supplied and embroidered with the logo of the gym Marshall used.
One anomaly threatened to leave a gap in the evidence. Fibers from four inflatable mattresses were found among Marshall’s belongings, but material connected to the remains matched only three of them. A receipt recovered from the flat settled the question: the fourth mattress, bought at an ASDA store, had been purchased on April 18, 2009, after the remains were already in police hands, and so could never have been present when the body was disposed of. The scientists concluded that the body had been handled inside Howe’s flat while Marshall was living there.
A second line of evidence came from Scotland. Professor Sue Black and Lucina Hackman of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee examined the remains and gave evidence for the prosecution, according to the university’s announcement. The pair described their work on the BBC’s Crimewatch on February 25, 2010.
Marshall and Bush were tried together at St Albans Crown Court. They did not mount a joint defense. Marshall admitted disposing of Howe’s body but denied killing him. Bush denied any part in what had happened.
The witness box gave the jury a sharper picture of the man in the dock. Marshall, by then 38 and living in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, was described as a man with a history of violence and connections to the London underworld. He had worked as a nightclub doorman. One witness told the court of his links to the Adams family, a London criminal family.
In the third week of the trial Marshall changed his plea and admitted the murder of Jeffrey Howe, and the jury formally returned a verdict of guilty. Bush, then 21, at first held to her denials. She was acquitted of murder, but pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice, by helping to dispose of the body, and to giving false information to the police.
Mr Justice Cooke sentenced Marshall to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 36 years. Howe, the judge told him, had "looked up to you and was scared of you," and Marshall had exploited both. The judge described a violent man with past associations with hardened criminals, someone who could move easily between affable and domineering. Bush received three years and nine months for perverting the course of justice and two years and three months for the false information, the terms to run concurrently.
Detective Superintendent Michael Hanlon of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit described what had been done to Howe as "pure evil."
The most arresting words of the trial came from Marshall’s own side of the courtroom. His barrister, Peter Doyle QC, told the court that between 1995 and 1998, while Marshall was working as a nightclub doorman, he had been asked to help with four bodies: men, Doyle said, who had been killed by other people. Ray Palmer’s later account of the case recorded the same claim in plainer terms. Marshall said he had carried out several earlier "disposals" for underworld bosses.
The claim has an obvious shape. It placed four more bodies in Marshall’s past while placing four killings on somebody else’s account. It named no dead men, no killers and no places. It came after the guilty plea, when Marshall had nothing left to lose on the charge he faced, and it came from a man the judge had just described as comfortable among hardened criminals. No recovered body, no identified victim and no charge has been reported on the strength of what Doyle told the court.
It belongs with a long line of confessions that ran further than the evidence behind them. Most collapsed when investigators checked them. One, checked properly, helped free a woman who had been wrongly convicted.
The best known is Henry Lee Lucas. By 1990 he had once confessed to six hundred murders, and lawmen from across the United States had traveled to Texas to clear their cases with him. An investigator for the Texas attorney general, Mike Feary, told the Associated Press that for a time Lucas was admitting to seventy or eighty killings a day through "mail-in" confessions from agencies that could not send a detective. Attorney General Jim Mattox’s office issued a report in 1986 whose evidence conflicted with many of Lucas’s statements, and Mattox urged police who had cleared crimes on Lucas’s word to check them carefully. Feary said investigators were "pretty sure" Lucas had killed only three people. One of his own accounts put his companion Ottis Toole at a 1978 killing in Utah; investigators found that the two men had not met until February 1979.
Toole himself confessed widely. Authorities at one point said he and Lucas were responsible for at least a hundred killings. A Florida jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of a 64-year-old man in a 1982 boarding-house fire, a case in which his defense argued that his confession, improperly obtained, was the only evidence. He had also confessed to the killing of six-year-old Adam Walsh.
In Sweden, Sture Bergwall, known for years as Thomas Quick, confessed to more than twenty murders and was convicted of eight, committed between 1976 and 1988. He had been heavily medicated when he confessed. In December 2008 he withdrew the confessions, saying he had wanted attention, and one conviction after another was overturned. In July 2013 he was acquitted of the last murder charge. In March 2014, after twenty-three years in the secure psychiatric hospital at Säter, a court in Falun moved him to open care.
The case of Tommy Lynn Sells ran the other way. In 1997 a ten-year-old boy, Joel Kirkpatrick, was killed in his mother’s home in Lawrenceville, Illinois. His mother, Julie Rea, said she had fought an intruder who fled. She was charged in 2000 and convicted in 2002, with a sentence of sixty-five years. In 2004 Sells, linked by then to similar crimes in Missouri and Texas, confessed to the killing, and his account resembled hers; the Downstate Innocence Project developed evidence that he had been in the area. Her conviction was reversed on appeal, and at her retrial in 2006, where the jury heard the Sells confession, she was found not guilty. In 2010 she received a certificate of innocence.
What separated those cases was never the confidence of the person confessing. It was whether anything outside the confession agreed with it: a timeline, a witness, a body. Marshall’s account of the four bodies arrived with none of them.
The conviction is for one death. Jeffrey Howe was a salesman who had once cooked in Italy and liked to watch football with a friend, a man who opened his home to a colleague with nowhere else to go. His killer was undone in the end by fibers from a gym shirt and by a missing person inquiry that had begun before anyone knew there was a body to look for. Through the spring of 2009, as the finds came in from Hertfordshire and Leicestershire, the detectives working the case did not know who he was. The court that sentenced Stephen Marshall knew him by name.
• 1995 to 1998: Marshall works as a nightclub doorman; in 2010 his barrister tells the court that in this period he was asked to help with four bodies of men killed by others.
• March 8 or 9, 2009: Jeffrey Howe is killed in his flat in Southgate, north London, the court is later told.
• March 22, 2009: The first remains are found near Cottered, Hertfordshire.
• March 29, 2009: Remains are found near Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire.
• March 31, 2009: Remains are found near Asfordby, Leicestershire.
• April 7, 2009: Remains are found near Puckeridge, Hertfordshire.
• April 11, 2009: Remains are found in Standon, Hertfordshire.
• April 18, 2009: An inflatable mattress later examined by forensic scientists is bought, after the remains had been found.
• April 23, 2009: Police identify the victim as Jeffrey Howe.
• April 24, 2009: A 37-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman who shared Howe’s flat are reported held on suspicion of murder.
• 2010: Trial at St Albans Crown Court; in its third week Marshall pleads guilty to murder. He is sentenced to life with a minimum term of 36 years. Sarah Bush is acquitted of murder and sentenced to three years and nine months for perverting the course of justice.
• February 25, 2010: Sue Black and Lucina Hackman of the University of Dundee describe their work on the case on BBC Crimewatch.