Once again this month, London Calling has returned to the ever-popular COLIN BAINBRIDGE for another batch of fascinating stories linked to the amazing history of the UK capital. Enjoy!
11 WAPPING SKELETON
In the autumn of 1891, Elizabeth Risley was returning home in the late hours from her job as a barmaid in Wapping when, out of the mists, an apparition manifested itself in the form of a tall, skeletal man in ragged clothes. For a few seconds, they stared at each other before he pulled out a cut-throat razor, cut off a lock of her hair and disappeared into the night.
Elizabeth Risley had just been accosted by Godfrey Teesdale, otherwise known as the Wapping Skeleton.
Records show that Risley went to the police, who logged the attack, but they didn’t really take it seriously. In the weeks and months that followed, there were similar reports of a strange figure emerging, as if from nowhere, to cut hair from his victims. The majority of these attacks only emerged after Teesdale was caught.
In the spring of 1892, a Miss Connie Gowden was attacked by the skeleton, only on this occasion the cut-throat razor struck her neck and the carotid artery. She tragically bled to death and was found 30 minutes later. The police, with a murder on their hands, now started to take notice.
Other than the description of a tall, pale skeletal figure, the police still had no evidence and were somewhat clueless.
Some five months later, a police officer, William Blenkinsop, was coming to the end of his late-night patrol when he noticed a light on at the St George’s mortuary. Given the lateness of the hour, he decided to take a look. A forced door and a broken lock alerted him to make his way gingerly into the building, and what he saw would stay with him for a very long time.
The gangly and grotesque form of the Wapping Skeleton was engaged in a perverted sexual act on a female cadaver. Blenkinsop tackled the fiend to the ground and subdued him before going for reinforcements.
Godfrey Teesdale’s sick crimes were over.
A search of his lodgings revealed he had been very busy and that most of his crimes had gone unreported. Over 600 clippings of hair were found. Over 1,000 items of ladies’ undergarments. There were over 800 teeth found, some from fresh corpses in mortuaries and some from graves in the West Ham cemetery where Teesdale worked as a grave digger. Although it was unproven, police believe he often made sexual assaults on female corpses as they lay in their coffins, and in their graves, before he filled the grave in.
Teesdale was tried and convicted of murder and hanged in 1893.