A boy’s dog scratching at a rubbish heap near a flour mill uncovered a charred human head, its features burned beyond recognition. Days later a woman’s torso turned up nearby, but no one had been reported missing, and the case stalled until police found a torn scrap of calico left in a landlady’s cellar by a young butcher named William Henry Scott. It matched, thread for thread, a fragment of chemise recovered with the remains.
After nine days of police court hearings, Scott was committed for trial on 31 October 1866, accused of a murder most foul: that of a Sydney woman with whom he had been living as husband and wife. The magistrate praised the remarkable police investigation, which had traced an entire body back to a single scrap of fabric, describing the case as “unprecedented in our annals of crime”.
