Mrs. Sullivan, a nurse, had expected her son Brian to be in London. When she let herself into Tower Lodge on the evening of January 24th, 1938, she found him upstairs, dead from gas. His death was only one piece of a much darker puzzle.
Three weeks earlier, on January 4th, Captain William Butt had ordered Nurse Sullivan to take his ailing wife Edith to the pictures. “And that’s an order,” he said. When they returned, the side gates and garage doors stood open. Edith shouted, “There, that man’s gone again.
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She never saw her husband alive again. The captain was a womanizer, a former army man who’d married a wealthy spinster and slowly bled her dry. The couple had settled in Cheltenham, where Edith’s mental health deteriorated and Nurse Sullivan moved in to care for her around the clock. Her son Brian, a young man with a passion for ballroom dancing, had fallen in with a convicted fraudster named Kenneth Newman and ended up broke.
Captain Butt helped pay for the lease on Tower Lodge, and Brian became a regular guest there. On January 10th, a lorry driver reported seeing two men parked on Haw Bridge the night before. A woman’s glove and scarf were found thrown in the mud there. Police dismissed a fragment of flesh and blood found on the bridge as animal remains.
They were wrong. On February 5th, three fishermen hauling nets a mile downstream of Haw Bridge felt their load grow impossibly heavy. Entangled in the mesh was a white, bloated, putrefying male torso. One of the men was violently sick over the side of the boat.
The body was missing its head, arms, and legs. Cord had been tied under the armpits and around the waist, each attached to a large white brick. Chief Superintendent Albert Wayman told reporters one arm had been dissected cleanly with a saw, the other torn raggedly, with legs cut off close to the hips and the head removed near the spine. The dragging of the river became a public spectacle.
By Sunday, a crowd of 5,000 had gathered on the banks. Fisherman Jack Dudfield and his friend Alf Chamberlain pulled out a man’s right arm, the hand chopped off and a brick tied to the elbow. Days later, a pensioner dragged up a right leg and foot, then a left leg and foot, each with a rope and brick. Only the head, the hands, and the left arm were still missing.
Police now made the connection. Captain William Bernard Butt had been missing since January 4th. On February 7th, three senior detectives searched Tower Lodge. In the alcove under the stairs, white bricks had been ripped out, and the garden contained bricks identical to the ones tied to the headless body.
They also found rope and string matching the cord used on the torso. Inside the house, a case held an Automobile Association key ring with nine keys, a pair of white woolen underpants, and clothing belonging to Brian Sullivan. The pieces were coming together, but the picture still made no sense. Then the glove found on Haw Bridge was traced through a laundry mark.
It belonged to a woman in London’s West End with 28 convictions for prostitution, married since 1934 to Brian Sullivan’s friend Kenneth Newman. The discovery fed a growing theory that Brian and his mother had been running an illegal abortion clinic out of Tower Lodge. Kenneth Newman was interviewed, but his alibis held. The eminent pathologist Dr.
Bernard Spilsbury tried a pair of Captain Butt’s shoes onto the severed legs. They fit perfectly. A return railway ticket from Gloucester to Cheltenham, dated January 15th and found in the grounds of Tower Lodge, had been sold to a young man matching Brian Sullivan’s description exactly: five foot seven, clean-shaven, horn-rimmed glasses, slightly effeminate in the way he walked. Brian had been alive and traveling around the area five days after his mother had last seen him.
But no one was ever tried for the captain’s murder. The inquest on March 29th returned an open verdict on the body of an unidentified person. And what of Brian Sullivan’s supposed suicide? His mother insisted he did not die by his own hand.
She claimed the suicide note was out of character, and that the gas pipe had been severed. But the police never formally named Captain Butt as the sawn-up man, and no one was ever arrested. Mrs. Sullivan successfully sued a national newspaper for suggesting she and her son performed illegal abortions.
Mrs. Butt died on August 9th, 1945, taking whatever secrets she had to the grave. The case of the headless man remains a thousand clues with no answers, unless someone still alive knows what really happened to the good captain and his young friend.
