Medicine: Medical Sleuthing

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In the Flushing Nurse Murder, a dour little Scottish building superintendent named McClosky was found to have killed and dismembered a young woman, and to be burning up the fragments in the furnace of his building. McClosky had picked up the girl on an elevated platform, did not know her name, knew only that she was a nurse who had trained in Philadelphia. The face was burned beyond recognition. By a minute analysis of the fragments, Dr. Marten established that she was a blonde, about 30 years old, 5 ft. 2 in. tall, weighing about 125 lb. On the torso he found an unusual surgical scar. Detectives were sent to Philadelphia to go over the operative records of nurses who had trained there. Eventually they found the record of the operation which would have produced the scar. The description of the patient corresponded to Dr. Marten's findings. The surgeon who performed the operation came to New York, scrutinized the scar and identified it as his handiwork. The murderer was convicted, executed at Sing Sing.

Published last week was a unique and formidable treatise entitled Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case.* Distinctly not for laymen, this is a minutely detailed technical account of one case—the horrid and complicated crime of Dr. Hakim Bakhtyar Rustomji Ratanji, better known as Dr. Buck Ruxton, who two years ago killed his wife and her maidservant, drained the bodies of blood, performed all sorts of mutilations (including removing the flesh from the faces and pulling teeth to hinder dental identification), cut the bodies into scores of fragments which he threw into a ravine called "The Devil's Beef Tub" in southern Scotland (TIME, March 23, 1936).

Authors of Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case are two of the medical experts who worked on it, Dr. John Glaister of Glasgow and Dr. James Couper Brash of Edinburgh. Laboriously they reconstructed the grisly remains and assembled a mass of evidence identifying them as Mrs. Ruxton and her servant. For example, the servant was said to have suffered from tonsillitis; the doctors found microscopic evidence of recurrent tonsillitis in the remains. Mrs. Ruxton was said to have had a bunion on one foot; the doctors found a corresponding deformity in the foot bones of her skeleton. They were able to distinguish prior tooth extractions from Dr. Ruxton's extractions, and these were consonant with the victims' known dental histories.