We have all heard of Jigsaw, the popular protagonist in the Saw franchise movies. However, the UK has a real-life Jigsaw killer.
Stephen Marshall earned the nickname from the media when he stabbed his landlord, Jeffrey Howe, and scattered his dismembered body across two counties.
Jeffrey Howe had taken pity on Marshall when he needed somewhere to stay, letting him live with his girlfriend, Sarah Bush, in his flat. Jeffrey had met Marshall through his work as a kitchen salesman; they were also drinking buddies.
The couple took advantage of the kind gesture. Marshall (38) and Bush (21) took over the property and sold Jeffrey’s possessions online. They then went further, emptying Jeffrey’s bank account.
Marshall planned to kill Jeffrey and then take over his identity.
Stephen Marshall
Born in 1971, Marshall was a British bodybuilder, personal trainer, and former nightclub doorman.
He grew up in the UK and developed his initial career around fitness and security. At one point, he even owned his own gym in Hertfordshire.
During the 1990s, he worked as a doorman in London. It was during this time that he established links to London’s criminal underworld, specifically one notorious crime family.
He had a history of violent offences, including assault and battery, criminal damage, possession of drugs, and possession of a firearm.
He was described as highly volatile and prone to severe mood swings. This behaviour escalated as his cocaine addiction did.
Body Parts
With a deteriorating financial and personal life in 2008, Marshall had nowhere to stay. That is when Jeffrey offered to let him live rent-free in his flat.
On 8th or 9th March 2009, Marshall stabbed Jeffrey to death. The couple then straight away started accessing his bank account and selling his possessions, even selling his car on eBay.
The murder was discovered when members of the public found body parts. His left leg was found in a lay-by in Hertfordshire.
A week later, an arm was discovered forty minutes away on a grass verge. Two days after that, a farmer found his head, one hundred miles away. The head had been mutilated to make identification harder.
Finally, his torso and arm were discovered in a suitcase in a ditch in Hertfordshire.
The scattered remains initially made it difficult to identify the victim. The police started by releasing certain physical details to the public.
After Jeffrey’s friends and family reported him missing, dental records led to the remains being identified.
Investigation
Having identified Jeffrey, the police went to his flat and discovered Marshall living there. The couple claimed that Howe had just packed up and left. Officers, however, noticed that Marshall appeared nervous during questioning.
It was not long after the identification that detectives discovered Marshall had previously lived close to where some of the body parts were discovered.
A forensic team was sent to the flat. Despite the attempted clean-up, they discovered traces of Jeffrey’s blood in the bedroom, bathroom, and beneath the carpets.
Microscopic green fibres from a T-shirt found in Marshall’s bedroom matched fibres that had come from the duct tape wrapped around some of the body parts.
Marshall’s digital footprint was the next thing to raise suspicion. CCTV caught the couple selling Jeffrey’s possessions, and their eBay sales were linked to them. The police then spent time tracing the vehicle journeys the couple had taken to dispose of the body.
Conviction
Marshall had boasted to friends of his skill at butchering corpses, saying he had similarly disposed of four other men during the 1990s. Bush had also admitted to her friends when drunk that Marshall had killed Jeffrey.
Faced with the mounting evidence, Marshall admitted to dismembering the body and disposing of it but denied murder. He later changed his plea to guilty.
The judge who sentenced Marshall told him he would serve a minimum of thirty-six years in prison.
Bush was acquitted of murder but was given two concurrent sentences for helping dispose of the body parts and giving false information to the police during the investigation. She was sentenced to three years and nine months. Her lawyer still maintains that she acted under pressure from Marshall, scared of what might happen to her if she did not help him cover his tracks. The judge noted Bush received a relatively lenient sentence due to her background, having spent most of her life in care before falling into prostitution, alongside the loss of her first child at just 10 days old.
Marshall and Bush took the generosity of Jeffrey to offer them a place to stay and murdered him for financial gain. Marshall will not be eligible for parole until 2046.
Bush served 45 months (just under four years) of her sentence before being released from prison.
Be sure to check out our deep dive article on Monday where we look at another UK murder, that of Stuart Everett.