Bid to identify body parts found in bin liners
Police were today working to discover whether body parts found in carrier bags and bin liners behind a pub belonged to two or three victims.
More remains were discovered last night in several carrier bags and a bin liner about 100 yards from the site of the original find in which a tramp found pieces of two human legs in a bin liner behind the College Arms in Camden, north London.
Scotland Yard said the first remains belonged to a woman and a teenage girl.
Police believe the newly found remains belong to a young woman but it was not clear whether there were two victims or three.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “At 4pm yesterday officers searched a wheelie-bin in Plender Street which is 100 yards north of the original find and they found a black bag containing the lower torso of a young woman.
“They then found seven or eight carrier bags inside containing other body parts.
“They have all been taken to St Pancras mortuary where they will be examined. It is not known whether these parts are from the same two victims that we have already found parts of.”
The torso was believed to belong to a girl as young as 14 – possibly the woman’s daughter.
The search for more body parts will continue, the spokesman added.
Detectives said both victims were white Caucasian but post mortem tests had failed to establish a cause of death.
They believe both were killed over Christmas, within the last seven days.
The body parts were found in a bin on a cobbled parking area at the back of the College Arms pub which is in the middle of a housing estate comprising several blocks of flats.
The estate was sealed off and all rubbish collections were stopped while teams of specially trained search officers hunted through Christmas waste looking for other body parts.
Detectives have trawled the missing persons databases but have come up with no likely identities for the victims who they believe could have been mother and daughter.
Det Chief Superintendent Dave Cook said he was keeping an open mind about the motive for the killings.
More than 40 officers are being assigned to the case and it was expected to take them several days to go through all the rubbish on the estate.
Search teams wearing red gloves used portable floodlights to peer into the bins as they continued searching the bins throughout yesterday evening.
The bins on the estate were thought to have been last emptied on Friday and detectives believe some of the body parts might already have been collected. If necessary they will search rubbish tips.
A source said: “It’s an extremely unpleasant job but if there is anything there we will find it.
“The forensic science service will need a further week to narrow down the time of death from the leg and torso part and may be able to tell within 48 hours whether the victims were related.”
