A dog walker’s unusual interest from her dogs led to the discovery of two black bin bags in the River Stour on 27 August 2020 – inside, mummified legs, feet and arms without hands. Two days later, police divers recovered skull fragments, facial bones and two loose teeth in a thin blue plastic bag 150 metres downstream. On Tuesday, six years on, Suffolk’s senior coroner Nigel Parsley ruled that the man – known only as the Croft Man – died from a ‘violent assault’ and was ‘more likely than not unlawfully killed’.
Radiocarbon dating indicated he was born before the early 1950s and died between 2008 and 2012, placing him in his late 60s to 70s. Searches against national and international databases for missing persons and criminal activity produced no match. His identity remains unknown.
“Coroner rules Croft Man unlawfully killed after mummified remains found in River Stour in 2020; identity unknown.”
Parsley noted that the removal of the man’s hands and the injuries to his head and face ‘appear to have been an attempt to hamper his identification’. ‘We must remember that the Croft Man was somebody’s son,’ he said. ‘He lived for 60 to 70 years. He may well have had family, he almost certainly had friends. It’s a tragedy we cannot identify him as there must be some loved ones somewhere wondering where their loved one is.’
The pathologist, Dr Ginni Fitzpatrick-Swallow, could not give a cause of death but reported ‘multiple blows to the head’. ‘To completely destroy a skull like that seems from a dismemberment point of view unnecessary,’ she added.
Dog walker Julie Dunn-Beechin told the inquest she spotted the bags in the water and her dogs sniffed around. It ‘didn’t seem right’ to her, so she called park ranger Samuel Morgan, joking she may have been watching ‘too many Midsomer Murders’. Morgan looked through a small hole in a bag and saw ‘what I thought looked like mummified skin and bone’ and what appeared to be an arm ball joint. Inside the bags were also rocks, bricks and what looked like ‘a partially dissolved Toilet Duck soap’.
Superintendent Mike Brown of Suffolk Police estimated the bags were dropped between 13 and 19 August, around two weeks before discovery. ‘The most likely and preferred hypothesis is that there’s a criminal element,’ he said, suggesting the person could have ‘skill in butchery’. DNA testing indicated a white northern European male with blonde or light hair and blue or green eyes. ‘Our victim has likely met a violent and unnatural death,’ Brown added. ‘Because of the length of storage, the individual could have been found in a state by somebody who doesn’t want to come to the attention of police and has tried to dispose of them by throwing them away.’
The coroner concluded it was an unlawful killing, but the man’s name – and who killed him – remains a mystery that may never be resolved.
