Lucy Worsley: Sarah Everard case makes me fear we are not somehow "better" than the Victorians

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Thinking about what happened in 2021 to Londoner Sarah Everard sends a shiver down every woman’s spine. The 33-year-old was walking home at night when she was tricked into getting in the car of an off-duty police officer, a man she probably felt she could trust. She was raped and murdered.

Just over 130 years earlier, despite the passage of time between the two women’s lives, there’s a depressing sense of déjà vu with another Londoner, also named Sarah. In 1889, Sarah Warburton was raped by a waterman, the Victorian equivalent of a taxi driver.

Sarah Warburton had been in a pub south of the river, but her home was on the north bank. The new Tower Bridge, intended to solve this problem, was still only half finished. As Sarah got into this friendly waterman’s boat, another woman reassured her that “she would be perfectly safe with him.”

I believe Sarah Warburton’s attacker was the Victorian serial killer known as the Thames Torso Murderer. He was the most notorious killer you’ve probably never heard of, because Jack the Ripper overshadows him.

It sounds shocking that two killers could be living in the same city at the same time. Yet overcrowded, transient communities – like the poorer parts of 1880s London – enable serial killers to operate.

The Torso Murderer dismembered his victims, leaving body parts in and around the river. By the time Sarah Warburton got into that boat in October 1889, four headless female torsos had been found: at Rainham, Essex (1887), Whitehall (1888), Battersea (June 1889) and Whitechapel (September 1889).

The murders remained unsolved for 130 years. But in our new series Victorian Murder Club, we showcase the work of a third Sarah: a researcher called Sarah Bax Horton, who has – to my satisfaction – discovered the culprit. The evidence wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but it’s still compelling.

Bax Horton’s breakthrough was to use something the Victorian police could not: a digital newspaper database. She searched it using two filters: one for the Thames, and another for violent crimes against women, and deduced that the Torso Murderer had probably also committed a string of lesser crimes, just as Sarah Everard’s killer had been accused of multiple incidents of indecent exposure.

Out of her search popped the rape of Sarah Warburton, and the name of the waterman who assaulted her: James Crick. He fits the profile, and the timeline, and had something crucial for these river-based crimes: the privacy and mobility of his boat. Sarah Warburton’s testimony in court, reported in the newspapers, claimed Crick told her that if she made a noise, he would “settle” her, “as I have done other women that have been found in the Thames".

The newspapers revealed that despite previous accusations of domestic violence and rape, the police had failed to convict Crick. If they’d done so, perhaps his murder victims might have lived. Just as opportunities were missed to stop Sarah Everard’s killer. But after Crick picked up Sarah Warburton, his luck turned. A passing police officer heard her screams and arrested him, and Sarah’s courtroom testimony put him away in prison. And after that, the Thames Torso Murders stopped.

For me, the most chilling thing is the way the women who got into Crick’s boat must have trusted him. I hate advising other women to be careful at night. The people who should change their behaviour aren’t women, but the men who want to kill them. But as the just-published inquiry into Sarah Everard’s death reveals, it “remains the case that women in public spaces are at risk from those men who choose to predate upon them".

You’d expect us to be somehow “better” than the Victorians. I fear we’re not.

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Lucy Worsley: Victorian Murder Club begins Monday 5 January at 9pm on BBC Two.

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