Criminal - The Bodies in the Bog

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

In the summer of 1984, a local newspaper reporter outside of Manchester, England, got a tip from the police. A foot had been found in a nearby bog. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, and members-only merch. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey y'all, I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found.

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It was hot, and all of a sudden, phone rings. In 1984, Rachel Pugh had recently started working for a local paper called the Wilmslow World, just south of Manchester in England. One of the things that I'd done was to build up very good relationships with the police. And they said to me, oh, Rachel, we've found a foot, which kind of brought me up short. A foot has been found in the moss get out there straight away so I got on my racing bike in the with my brand new beige shoes as you can see really good fashion choice um which I was wearing for the first time that day, bought out of my wages, and legged it out here to the farm, which was where they were extracting the peat. Peat is a spongy layer of soil found in wetlands.

It forms when dead plants don't fully decompose. When it's cut and dried, it can be used as fuel. A man cutting peat that day in a bog called Lindo Moss had spotted what he thought was a piece of wood. When he cleaned it off, he saw that it had toenails. When I got there, the police had just left taking the foot with with them and I spoke to the employers of the farm um a guy called Andrew Mould and I said I asked him very specifically I said this foot what what was the end of it like and he said oh it had been cut off very sharply and I thought I said, well, if it's been cut off, it must have been cut off something. And he agreed. And I asked them to take me out onto the moss to the exact area where this had been discovered.

That's where we met Rachel Pugh a few months ago. So what we've got is a big open area. And all around the edges there are trees. And if you can see over there, there are signs of where the moss has been cut into. So they took me out to the exact spot where they felt that this lot of peat had been extracted. Eventually we stopped by, like a mini cliff face, and it was much taller than me. It was probably 10 foot, 12 foot, a couple of metres high cliff face

with a trough of water underneath. And they just stopped and said, said well that's where it was so I had a little look and all I could see was layers and layer upon layer of peat completely undisturbed I thought to myself if somebody had buried something here, they'd have had to dig down and there would be disturbance. And I thought, but there's no sign of disturbance at all. This wasn't the first time a body part had been found in Lindo Moss. A year earlier, in 1983, the same peat worker, Andy Mould, found a round, hard object covered in peat. He said it looked like a black leather ball. He and another peat cutter cleaned it off and realized it was a human skull.

It had some skin and an eyeball still attached. He contacted the police. They wondered if the discovery of the skull could be connected to an open case they'd been investigating for 20 years. A woman named Malika Rain Bart had gone missing, and police suspected that her husband, Peter Rainbart, had killed her. But he denied it, and there was no body. When the remains were found in the peat bog, police questioned him again. Did they just say, we found his skull, and he thought, well, the jig's up, that's her? I believe that that is essentially what happened. The fact is, he confessed.

Detectives later said that when they confronted Peter Rain Bart about the skull, he said, It's been so long, I thought I would never be found out. Peter and Malika Rain Bart met in 1959 at a coffee shop where she worked as a waitress. Four days later, they got married. The story of their quick engagement was picked up by newspapers around the world. The Daily Oklahoman wrote that the couple decided on marriage 90 minutes after their first meeting.

Peter Rain Bart told the London Daily Herald, Malika has a kind of explosive charm. But about a year and a half after their wedding, Malika disappeared. Now here we are at the cottage. So describe what we're looking at right now. Yeah, I don't want to make too much of a mess. Oh, because someone lives here. Yeah, and you don't really want to spook them completely.

But we've got this cottage here, and I've forgotten what it's called. Can you see it from here? Heathfield. That's the one, Heathfield Cottage. And it's right on the edge of the moss. It's a small, white bungalow, and the garden goes down onto the edge of the moss. Peter Rainbart was living at Heathfield Cottage when Malika went missing. She was last seen there by a neighbour in October of 1960.

And the skull was found 300 metres from Heathfield Cottage. The assumption was made that this would be the skull of Malika Rain Bart. After the skull was found and police confronted Peter Rain Bart, he said things he'd never said to them before. He told the police that he and his wife had gotten into a fight. He said he was gay, which was criminalized at the time in the UK, and said that his wife was threatening to expose him. He said she came to the house demanding money.

He told police, quote, She flew at me. She was like a vixen. She clawed my face and I defended myself. Newspapers reported that Peter Rainbart had made a, quote, full confession, admitting that he'd killed his wife and eventually buried her body parts in a trench in Lindo Moss. Investigators went back to the bog to look for the rest of Malika Rainbart's body. They didn't find anything.

They started to have questions about the skull. It didn't look the way they thought it should, based on what Peter Rain Bart had described. He said he burnt the body and there was no sign of burning on this cranium. Professor and archaeologist, Melanie Giles. So they got it dated, radiocarbon dated, and a date came back as early Roman. The skull was almost 2,000 years old. By then it was too late, of course, and they had his confession. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Peter Rainbart tried to walk back his confession, but it was too late. He was sentenced to life in prison.

But the body of Malika Rainbart had still not been found. And then, eight months later, journalist Rachel Pugh got the phone call about the foot in the bog. There was this crime which was on everybody's radar. And there were so many questions outstanding. And on the day that I received a telephone call from the police people were very keen to find out more about what had happened because we still hadn't had a body everybody was primed for answers to the murder so what yeah so what did the police think? They thought that this might be evidence, this might be the body of Malika Rain Bart.

Before becoming a journalist, Rachel Pugh had spent some time working on an archaeological dig. She'd also read about a book called The Bog People, written by a Danish archaeologist named Peter Globe. The book talks about mummified bodies that have been found in bogs across Europe, including the Tollan man, who was found in a Danish bog in 1950 with a noose around his neck. His features were so well preserved that the author wrote, his face wore a gentle expression, the eyes lightly closed, the lips softly pursed, as if in silent prayer. It was as though the dead man's soul

had for a moment returned from another world. One book review in the London Telegraph had the headline, Pickled in Pete. And I thought to myself, hmm, maybe this is actually something archaeological. This is far more interesting than just an ordinary murder. I just felt in my bones that there was something really, really big here. Rachel Pugh decided to call a man named Rick Turner.

He had just started his job as the archaeologist for Cheshire County, where Lindo Moss is located. He went out to the bog the next day. He went straight to the spot, stuck his archaeological trowel in the peat, and instantly found a flap of skin, which he instantly knew was something rather interesting. We'll be right back. I'm sorry. and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives,

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What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. In an interview with archaeologist Rick Turner, a reporter described what he found in Lindo Moss on August 2nd, 1984. A flap of skin hanging out of the peat,

the color of espresso coffee, but unmistakably human skin. You could see the pores. Here's Rick Turner talking about that day in a BBC documentary from 1985. Well, following the discovery of the foot, I came out here the next morning, and this was the area that they were working at the time. So the foot would have come from a stack of peat in this particular region. And what I did was walk along the edge of this block of peat and saw what turned out to be a flap of skin protruding from very near the bottom. Having seen the flap of skin, what did you do?

The first thing I did was cover it up and sat down and thought about the consequences. We went back to the police, told them that we may have found part, more of the body or even the rest of the body. We had to then get the coroner's permission to excavate it. The police asked us if we could lift it in a day. They were getting a bit worried now about the possibility of vandalism, etc. The find was becoming known for various reasons. Rick Turner and his team decided to remove not just the body from the bog, but the entire block of peat around it.

They took it to the mortuary at the local hospital. And I think that in order to have him registered with the coroner, he had to be given a name, so he was called Pete Marsh. It was a joke, really. The coroner was to assess whether this great lump of peat containing human remains was potentially malika rain bart and so rick turner wanted above all for the body not to be damaged in any way because it needed to be preserved uncontaminated so that they would be able to find out exactly what was happening. And, of course, the police wanted to have an autopsy

and fairly soon they did carbon dating. And the carbon dating proved conclusively that it was not a modern body. It was moved to London. Archaeologists from the British Museum began to slowly excavate the body out of the block of peat. Here's archaeologist Melanie Giles. This was a really new technique

that allowed the archaeologists at the British Museum to excavate it forensically to recover as much information as possible without damaging the human remains, but to do it under very controlled conditions so that they had to, you know, only work in little stints so they could bring the body in and out of the refrigerator, keeping it as damp and as cool as possible. What archaeologists found was the mummified remains of a man's torso, arms and head. He has leathered skin, hair on his head and a beard. His fingernails are well manicured and you can clearly make out his facial features.

He isn't wearing any clothes except for a band of fox fur around his upper arm. He became known as the Lindo Man, and he was the best preserved bog body to have ever been found in Britain. So the bog has this magic to it in that it's cold, it's wet, and it excludes oxygen. But also the sphagnum moss, which is forming the peat, creates this kind of complex polysaccharide reaction where it inhibits decomposition, it inhibits decay. It stops time, basically.

And so organic material that goes into its depth is very well preserved. It gets tanned and stained through what we call a Maillard reaction. So organic material that goes into its depth is very well preserved. It gets tanned and stained through what we call a Maillard reaction. And bone isn't well preserved, but things that we normally lose as an archaeologist's hair, nails, intimate details of the creases of someone's skin or the whirls on their fingers, those are all really well preserved in the bog. The Lindow Man was so well preserved

that the contents of his last meal were still in his stomach. Researchers learned that before his death, he ate a slightly charred griddle cake. He had a small amount of mistletoe in his stomach too. Tests showed that the Lindow Man's body went into the bog about 2,000 years ago, and that he died when he was about 25. Bodies had been found in peat bogs for quite some time. Mostly people thought they died by accidents.

People had tried to cross really wet landscapes and fallen into the water and not been able to get out or they were murder victims who had been hidden from view by the murderer and it was only through the archaeological study the forensic study of these remains that we realized that with some of them there's something else going on. So where are we right now? So we're going into the storerooms. The Manchester Museum has four and a half million things. Four and a half million? Yes, but that includes two million insects,

rocks and minerals, a million botany sheets. Egypt and Sudan is only 18,000 objects from Egyptian and Sudanese antiquity. Dr Campbell-Price is curator of the Egypt and Sudan collections at the Manchester Museum. We met him one day after the museum had closed. The sound you can hear is the air conditioning unit,

which is controlling not so much the temperature as the humidity. So you don't want, of course, relative humidity to go above a certain point. Look at those, they're like whole sarcophagus. Yes, so this is essentially a mortuary of ancient Egyptian people. We'd asked if we could come and see a bog body they have in their collection, a head known as the Worsley Man. We walked up a set of stairs.

At the top, sitting on a table, was a cardboard box with a lid on it. It said, very fragile, handle with care. This is the head of Wesley Mann. Oh, this is him in this box. This is him in the box. He's not on display. He's not been on display for a long time.

So how many people, not many people come back and look at him? No, no, no. I think you're the first group of people who've asked to see him in quite a while. The Worsley Man is a skull that was found in a bog near Manchester in the late 1950s, also by a peat cutter. The peat cutter, a man named Pat Connolly, told the local paper, quote, I was walking along the trench, clearing out peat, when I saw what looked like a white ball.

I kicked it, and it rolled over. That looks like a skull, I thought. And it was a skull. The head of conservation at the Manchester Museum, Sam Beath, put on gloves and opened up the box on the table for us. Oh, there he is. Wow. Very, very fragile. You can see where his teeth were so clearly. He's still got a couple of teeth. So will you just describe what we're looking at?

So we're looking at a male skull. He's still got some tissue to the right-hand side around his ear and his lower jaw. There's a lot of it breaks around his right eye socket and the back of his head. They understand it's not just like a regular skeleton head. I mean, there's, as you say, tissue, kind of skin that you can... Yeah, so a lot of the flesh has been preserved because the chemicals in the bulb tend to preserve those sort of collagen-type materials.

So are we kind of looking at his ear? Yeah. Wow. The Worsley Man's skull was found in 1958, about three decades before the Lindo Man. In both cases, the bodies were initially suspected to be recent murder victims. It could be anything. A police representative told the local paper about the Worsley Man head in 1958.

According to a later news report, there were wild rumors circulating in the nearby village, quote, involving skeletons, murder murder and a hoard of gold. Doctors originally thought the skull had been in the bog for less than a year, but soon realised that it was very old. Researchers like Melanie Giles have been trying to learn more about how and why he died. We've had some forensic archaeologists look at the head recently again with us, so we can see this threefold trauma. So, a Worsley man has been decapitated,

but he also has a major wound across the top of the head, something like a big axe blow that has, that's probably fatal. But he also has a wound behind his right ear which is caused by a sword um and that the exterior wound is really quite massive it's just left a very fine nick on the um on the back of the cranium you know we can see on the flesh because it's so well preserved and then finally we have the decapitation injury on the flesh because it's so well preserved and then finally we have the decapitation injury on the back of the head so there's a lot of trauma and i would think that that happened quite rapidly but from several different assailants with different weapons involved and the other

main bog body we have from this area lindoman had quite a similar pattern of trauma so a major head injury he's also been garrotted a garrot is basically a thin wire or a rope that strangles somebody to death and then he's also had his throat slit and some archaeologists think that this is a pattern of what we might call ritualized sacrifice, the deliberate ending of somebody's life for making up of an offering of somebody to the gods. But there are many different interpretations. So it could be this is a punishment, an execution by a number of different people because somebody's transgressed one of their rights or rules in society. And I think you're seeing a number of people responsible for his death

trying to mete out really quite quickly in different ways. Everyone's got their part to play. They know they have to take this man's life. A recent study published in the journal Antiquity found that there are about 2,000 bog bodies that have been discovered throughout Europe. The study found that many of the bodies show signs of violent deaths and were killed during the Iron Age

and into the Roman period. It's clear that most of the bodies were put into the bog intentionally. Bogs are special places and we have written poems and stories and created depictions of them that describe them as wasteland, as terrible places. And they are dangerous, but they're also quite, we think, quite sacred places. Certainly the communities I work on, the Iron Age people, they're going out into the bog to cut their fuel, to mine bog ore, which is the main source of iron. That's making their tools, their blades, their chariot wheels. The bogs are full of quite

special plants. The moss itself is naturally antiseptic. It's a healing agent. So the bog is a rich place and a special place. And I think for later prehistoric communities, when you take something, you have to give something back. So what we know is that from the Bronze Age onwards, people are taking things back to the bog, offerings, bowls of food, animal sacrifices, cauldrons, jewellery, and they're placing them into the depths of the water.

And I think that is, they are what we might call an exchange society. You take something, you give something back. It's an offering. And in that sense, some of our human remains might be the high end of those offerings that you're making. And that might be something that you do particularly at a time of crisis, when you've tried your other ritual methods for appealing to the gods and it hasn't worked. And maybe you may need to make a spectacular offering of a life. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. Thank you. communicate, and plan for the future. In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings.

And it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. There are records of people discovering bodies in bogs for almost 400 years. Archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green has written that while most of the time the earliest discovered bodies were discarded, sometimes they were ground into a powder, put into jars, and sold as medicine. It was called mummy powder.

Egyptian mummies were also used to make mummy powder. It was believed that if you had a headache, you should take powdered skull. Even after people stopped using mummy powder as medicine, it continued to be used as a pigment for painters. It was called mummy brown. One London-based paint company manufactured it until 1964, when they told Time magazine that they'd run out of mummies, saying, quote, we might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint. Today, there's still a market for mummies, although not for making powder.

A mummy smuggling ring in the U.S. was broken up in 2011, and in 2019, officials at the Cairo International Airport found six preserved body parts, mummified legs, arms UK about the possession of human remains, and policies like the British Museums, which state that, quote, human remains should always be treated with care, respect, and dignity. Do you think that there's something, I mean, there are a lot of skeletons around that you can look at, but is there something about the fact that when you look at one of these bodies to see skin to see hair sometimes that you feel more connected to them that you want to know more about who they are and what lives and how they died yes there's something in i find compelling, enchanting even, about the preservation of somebody's facial features,

their hands, their feet. It encourages us to reach out across time, to touch them, to be with them and to tell their story. And as an archaeologist, I can see details in their lives and their deaths that I can't see in skeletal remains. I mean we think about cold cases you know the crime cold cases being you know decades old we're trying to solve something that happened 30 years ago no one's thinking something that happened 1500 years ago. 2000 years ago. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe, I don't know. I think, I still think there's a sense of obligation in archaeologists to tell other stories.

It might not be somebody from the recent community, but there is a sense of responsibility there. And I think the curators at the Manchester Museum feel that today. This man met a violent end. And I don't know, at the end of of the day whether he was a cattle thief or a local leader who was resisting the Romans or whether he was a kind of sacred figure who went to talk to the gods. What I do know is that the people who gathered up his decapitated head thought that the right place for that head was in that bog. So I still feel even if these people died 2,000 years ago, time collapses. It doesn't matter to me. Their stories still need telling.

It's been almost 40 years since the Lindo Man's body was found in Lindow Moss. He's now on display at the British Museum in London. His body is kept in a case, in a gallery that focuses on British and European history. I think that's one of the things that we can do to try and connect people with past humanity. I do think it's a good thing that we show bodies in museums because in Britain we don't do death well. We're very, very removed from mortality. And so most people's first encounter with some human remains

will be in a museum. And that's a wonderful moment, if it's done well, to kind of talk about the one certainty of human existence, to open up a conversation around death and dying and bereavement and loss, even if that body is 2,000 years old, and belief systems and different ways in which people treat the dead and the different ceremonies they have. And that, to me, is a good way of raising awareness

that different cultures have different rights and that the dead play roles often in the lives of the living. They're not dead and gone. They're actually really active participants. You have responsibilities towards them, but also you have these bonds with them. probably about three years after the discovery of lindow man i decided to go to the british museum to see um the person who my friends used to dub as rachie's old man they used to say to me how's your old man Rach and so I I walked into the British Museum and just walked up to this case and I could see in the case there was this crumpled body but with these perfectly polished fingernails and I felt I I felt a tear come to my eye. And I thought, we're looking eye to eye, and we've got history. And I sort of feel as though maybe our hands, our thoughts reached across the centuries.

Several years after Lindoman's discovery more than 70 bone and tissue fragments were found in the bog Some of the fragments are thought to be part of Lindoman's body Malika Rain Bart's body has never been found Lindomoss protected Lindoman for all those centuries and it's still protecting whoever's lying in there now what more secrets might there be Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nydia Wilson is our senior producer.

Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show

and Instagram at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind

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