Raymond
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The Torso In The Thames"Adam" is the name given to a young African boy whose torso was discovered in the River Thames, London on September 21, 2001.
He is believed to have been between the ages of four and seven. The murder is believed to be linked to a ritual killing.
Despite the use of the best forensic science in the world and ground-breaking investigative techniques, the London Metropolitan Police Service have not caught the killer.
The torso was first discovered on the afternoon of Friday September 21, 2001 as it floated past the Tower of London towards Tower Bridge in Central London.
A passer-by crossing the bridge had noticed an orange object in the water, and realising it was a body as it passed under the bridge, alerted the police.
The Metropolitan Police sent it’s marine search unit to the scene, who recovered the torso further upstream. The body was found to be the torso of a young black child, the orange being a pair of shorts around the stumps of the legs.
The discovery of the torso shocked police, and prompted massive media coverage in the United Kingdom and around the world. The police named the body Adam in the absence of any positive identification.
Police soon realized after recovering only the torso, that the circumstances were unusual and not typical of a sex-related murder.
It was initially suspected that the murder was a medicine murder. This type of killing involves the removal of body parts such as the ears or genitals. However Adam's genitals were not removed, and the police ruled out this theory.
Experts on African religion consulted by Scotland Yard believe Adam may have been sacrificed to one of the 400 'Orisha' or ancestor gods of the Yoruba people, Nigeria's second-largest ethnic group.
Oshun, a Yoruba river goddess is associated with orange, the colour of the shorts, which were placed on Adam's body 24 hours after he was killed as a bizarre addition to the ritual. The body was then stored for a further 24 hours before being offered to the Thames.
A post-mortem was carried out on Adam's remains. This established from the amount of British food and pollen in Adam's lungs that he had only been in the United Kingdom for a few days.
A potion that contained ingredients used in African ritual magic was also discovered.
A closer examination of the cuts where the head and limbs were sliced from the body shows that they were carried out by an expert using extremely sharp knives specially prepared for the purpose.
In a horrific operation reminiscent of animal sacrifice, the flesh around the limbs and neck was first cut down to the bones, which were then slashed with a single blow from an implement much like a butcher's meat cleaver. Adam would have been stretched out horizontally or upside down during the sacrifice and kept in position while the blood was drained from the body.
Officers working on the case believe that the level of expertise involved could show the perpetrators imported a magician or priest to carry out the ritual. They also believe the amputated body parts will have been kept as powerful magical trophies.
Detectives were now working on the horrifying theory that he was bought as a child slave in West Africa and smuggled to Britain solely to be killed.
Adam's bones were also analysed to see if it could determine his geographical origins.
As everything a person eats bears the trace of the soil of where it was grown or reared, soil samples were compared to places around the world. Scientists determined from this that Adam originated in the Yoruba Plateau in Nigeria, Africa.
Metropolitan police travelled to Nigeria and launched a campaign to track Adam's parents. Despite visiting primary schools and looking at reported missing children in the region, there was no success.
Progress on the case has been considerable given the lack of evidence and the existence of only Adam's torso. However, the lack of dental records or face imagery has been a major block to solving the crime. Still, Metropolitan police believe the publicity surrounding the case has acted as a deterrent for further ritual crimes in the UK.
The police also note that Adam would never have been found if his body had washed out into the North Sea, which would have occurred only two turns of the tide after his discovery.
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