When the body of 30-year-old Hannah Tailford was found by
rowers on the Thames shore near Hammersmith Bridge on February 2, 1964,
the similarities to previous murders of Rees and Figg's corpses were uncanny. Naked apart
from a pair of stockings, she had also been strangled, several teeth
were missing, and her semen-stained underwear had been stuffed in her
mouth.
It was an ugly end to a life that had seen precious little beauty.
Born at Prestwick Pit Houses,
Hannah was excluded from several schools as a child due to disruptive
behavior. As a teenager she ran away to London, where she was soon "on
the game", gaining convictions for soliciting and theft into the
bargain. She became so desperate that on one occasion she even placed a
classified ad in her local newspaper, offering her unborn baby for sale
to the highest bidder.
The last confirmed sighting of
Tailford was on January 24, and pathologists estimated that she could
have been in the water for a week or more. As with Rees, there were
several lines of enquiry that appeared to present themselves.
Tailford was said to have connections in a murky world of underground sex parties and "stag films"
She frequented a coffee stall near Trafalgar Square where she was known
to have been offered money to have sex on camera. One individual
connected to these activities committed suicide a few days before Hannah
Tailford was found.
In his book on the case,
Found Naked And Dead,
Brian McConnell reports that Tailford told friends of being paid to
participate in bizarre orgies at the homes of aristocrats. Such stories
tallied with the lurid tales of high society sex parties revealed during
the Profumo Scandal of 1963, in which a British government minister's
affair with a call girl was exposed.
Tailford told a friend she had attended an orgy at the
home of a French diplomat named Andre, and on another occasion had been
paid £25 and taken by a limousine to a house where a man
in a gorilla costume had sex with her while a crowd of upper-crust
revellers cheered him on.
Could Tailford have been
silenced by someone with connections to this sleazy world? Tempting
though the theory may have been, it seemed unlikely. Nevertheless,
during the investigation police interviewed hundreds of people who they
knew to have consorted with prostitutes, among them an international
soccer player, and several clergymen.
Yet the
possibility that Tailford had fallen victim to a "maniac," as the
newspapers put it, was shortly to become even more terrifyingly
plausible.
The Jack the Stripper murders have never been solved.
