In July 1942, a demolition worker named Benjamin Marshall descended into the basement of a bombed-out Baptist chapel in Vauxhall, south London. He set to work with his spade, clearing the debris on the floor, when he noticed a paving slab was loose. Lifting it up, he discovered a mummified body.
Finding a corpse in the church wasn’t a huge shock. More than 100 people had been killed in the fire that had followed the bombing of the building in October 1940, at the height of the Luftwaffe attacks on London known as the Blitz. But Marshall and his colleagues summoned the local police anyway. They, too, initially assumed it was another victim of the Blitz: part of the skull was missing, as were the lower arms and legs. Presumably they had been blown off in the blast.
Nonetheless, the police asked a pathologist, Dr. Keith Simpson, to take a look. He realized that something was wrong. The head appeared to have been intentionally removed from the torso, as were the limbs below the elbows and knees. The amputa-
The police had a pretty good idea of who she was: Rachel Dobkin. The previous year, a woman named Polly Dubinski had reported that her sister Rachel had gone missing, and she accused Rachel’s estranged husband, Harry Dobkin, of being involved. The pair, she said, had a bad relationship, and Harry resented his wife’s requests for financial support. At the time, the police had been unable to trace Rachel or pin anything on Harry. But now they noted that Harry had formerly worked as a night watchman for an office next to the very chapel where the body turned up.
Short of money and fed up with his wife’s demands, Dobkin had decided that the Blitz offered an opportunity. With so many people dying violent deaths—40,000 between September 1940 and May 1941, half of them in London—who
