Jeffrey Howe was killed for his flat. He was forty-nine, a kitchen salesman in Southgate in north London, and in November 2008 he let a man he drank with move in because the man had nowhere to go. Stephen Marshall was thirty-eight, a nightclub doorman with a history of violence. He arrived with his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend Sarah Bush. They paid no rent, took his food, and did not leave when they said they would. Howe complained about it to a friend at Christmas. On the night of March 8, 2009 Marshall stabbed him twice in the back while he slept. One wound punctured a lung. Howe took up to an hour to die.
What made the case notorious was what happened next, and what made it squalid was the reason for it.
Marshall spent about twelve hours dismembering the body in the flat. The Home Office pathologist told the court the limbs had been taken off skilfully and cleanly. The prosecution said the flesh of the scalp and face had been removed and that the eyes, ears, tongue and the structures of the neck had been cut away. The parts were driven out of London and scattered across Hertfordshire and Leicestershire. Because nothing recovered could be identified, the police did not know for six weeks who the dead man was. The press called the unidentified remains the Jigsaw Man, and afterwards called Marshall the Jigsaw Killer.
The motive was the tenancy. Marshall intended to go on living in the flat and to take over the life attached to it. He and Bush emptied Howe's bank account and wrote cheques from it to themselves, sold his furniture, advertised his car on eBay, and claimed housing benefit on the flat by forging his signature on a document saying he was leasing it to them. A man was killed and taken apart over about twelve hours so that two people could keep a rented flat in Southgate and go on drawing benefit on it.
Two people were arrested in north London on April 23, 2009, and Howe was named as the victim the same day.
Marshall pleaded not guilty to murder when the trial opened at St Albans Crown Court, then changed his plea to guilty. In February 2010 he was sentenced to life with a minimum term of thirty-six years. Bush pleaded guilty to two counts of perverting the course of justice, for helping dispose of the body and for lying to police who were looking for a missing man, and was sentenced to three years and nine months.
During those proceedings, on February 1, through his barrister, Marshall told the court something nobody had asked him for. He said that between 1995 and 1998, while working the door at a London nightclub, he had dismembered four other men and disposed of them in Epping Forest.
The admission surprised the police. He then refused to give them details of the other men. He named nobody, and gave police nothing they could act on. Missing persons cases were reopened on the strength of it. No remains were recovered, no charge was ever brought, and nothing he said was ever tested.
This archive holds a series of these, and they resolve in different directions. Henry Lee Lucas confessed to about six hundred murders and cleared 213 cases, and the Texas Attorney General's own report found he could not have committed the great majority; the credible figure is around three. Ottis Toole claimed hundreds with him and was convicted of two. Sture Bergwall confessed to more than thirty in Sweden and was convicted of eight, all of which were quashed. Tommy Lynn Sells described about twenty-two killings that were corroborated, and one of his accounts freed a woman wrongly convicted of murdering her own son.
What separates them is not how convincing the teller was. It is whether anything outside the account agreed with it. Lucas was believed and was wrong. Sells was checked and was largely right. Marshall's claim sits in the third category, the one that cannot be resolved at all, because he made it and then declined to say anything further about it.
There is a reason to take it seriously and a reason not to. In its favour: he demonstrably could dismember a body, and had done it competently enough that a Home Office pathologist commented on the skill. Against it: he had just pleaded guilty to murder and was facing a life sentence, he volunteered the claim rather than being asked for it, and he then withheld every detail that could have tested it. He offered it at the one moment when it could no longer cost him anything.
The archive records the conviction, which is one. Four dismemberments are attributed to nobody, and four men, if they exist, are unnamed.
Jeffrey Howe was a Manchester United supporter who had cooked in Italy and sold kitchens around the country, and who took in a man who needed somewhere to stay. It took six weeks after his death for anyone to be able to say his name.