How the discovery of dismembered body parts led police to the ‘Jigsaw Killer’
In early 2009, a leg was discovered wrapped in plastic in the small village in Hertfordshire, UK. Soon after, an arm was discovered in another town in the same county. Two days later, police were called to a field near Ashfordby in Leicestershire after a farmer found a human head. Its eyes, ears and nose had been removed.
A week after that, another leg was unearthed. And, finally, on April 11 2009, a farmer called the police after spotting a ‘suspicious suitcase’ in a ditch in Colliers End, Hertfordshire. It contained a decomposing torso with a clear stab wound to the back.
After a police conference was held to detail their findings, a man got in touch to say that his brother, Jeffrey Howe, was not answering calls and matched the description given by officers.
Howe lived in the same building as personal trainer Stephen Marshall, 38, and sex worker Sarah Bush. When police came knocking, the couple claimed Jeffrey had ‘packed up and left.’
But detectives suspected that Howe had been killed for monetary gain, as Marshall and Bush had used his bank card to make several purchases – such as takeaway pizzas and Indian takeout – since he ‘vanished’.
Police arrested Marshall and Bush on April 23, 2009. Soon, jigsaw pieces began to form together and tell the horrific story of what had led Jeffrey Howe’s body parts to be scattered across Hertfordshire and its neighbouring counties.
Marshall had met Jeffrey through work and the kitchen salesman offered him and Bush a place to stay in November 2008. Jeffrey later confessed to friends that the pair were not paying rent and were stealing his food.
Marshall had stabbed Jeffrey twice and Bush had helped him clean up the scene and dispose of the body parts. Together, the pair then planned to live in his flat for free and plunder their victim’s bank account. The motive was simply greed, the jury was told.
Prosecutor Stuart Trimmer detailing the case:
'This was a very unpleasant murder. A striking thing was the way Stephen Marshall dismembered Jeffrey Howe. He didn’t cut any bones, he cut around the joints if he could manage it. None of the bones were damaged. We had a very senior expert come down from Edinburgh and, in response to how Jeffrey Howe’s body had been cut up, he said “if my students had done it [this way] in a dissection, I would have given them a merit.”
‘When it came to the trial, Marshall had claimed Jeffrey Howe had raped Bush and that’s how the violence had come about. But Bush said something completely different. She said she happened upon Marshall killing Jeffrey. After his death, they took his home and sold his car and phone. These transactions proved to be important evidence.’
The court heard that Marshall had run a gym in Hertfordshire where he was said to have made several high-up connections with London’s criminal underworld. The killer claimed to have ‘dealt with’ people and hid their corpses in the Epping Forest in Essex. It is somewhere within the vast green space that Jeffrey Howe’s missing hands are thought to be buried.