It was around 7:40am on May 5, 2017, when driver Oliver Salbris pulled the number 430 bus out from stop FE on Putney Bridge, heading south. Traffic is slow in South West London at that time of day and he couldn’t have been doing more than around 12mph. If the bus had been moving any faster then things might have played out differently.
One minute, the road was clear. The next, a woman was falling into the bus’s path. Salbris swerved, missing her by inches. It was only when CCTV footage of the incident was released to the media that August that he saw how narrowly catastrophe had been avoided. “I didn’t realise,” he told reporters, “that I was that close to her”.
The woman’s fall was no accident. The bus’s dashboard footage revealed, frame by frame, what had happened. A jogger can be seen running in the opposite direction. Though his face is obscured, there’s a decent enough outline to work with: he’s a stocky white male, with short brown hair and brown eyes – wearing dark blue shorts and a grey t-shirt. As he runs towards the woman, he seems to make a decision. In one stride, he’s next to her, arms outstretched. After shoving her into the path of the bus, he carries on running without a backwards glance.
He jogged back 15 minutes later, ignoring his shaken victim’s attempts to confront him. For a while, the strange case of the Putney Pusher – a moniker invented by the press – was big news. It made the national news and was quickly picked up by various online forums devoted to speculation surrounding the man’s motives and identity. But, four-and-a-half years later, the seemingly straightforward identification case remains unsolved. The man was never caught, despite London’s vast array of CCTV cameras and a swell of public outrage.
The mystery has remained a keen focus for amateur internet sleuths. “The Putney Bridge Pusher [is] now turning into a genuine mystery,” reads one Reddit post from August 2017. There are plenty of people with an interest in the case who still care about resolution. In May 2021, a Reddit thread opened examining the case on its fourth anniversary. How, several posters wondered, was he never caught? Perhaps he worked for an embassy (“what surprises me was that his movements were not tracked on leaving the bridge”), or was staying at the nearby Premier Inn (“he could have been in his room less than 2 mins after the attack. Stay safe people!”).
“My theory was always that he was traveling there on business”, one Redditor told me. Another explained how she’d lived locally for almost her entire life. Both her and father are keen runners, she says, and not long after the incident, a fellow jogger had acted aggressively towards her father, she claimed, without any provocation. There was no way of saying if it was the Putney Pusher or not.
In the weeks and months after the CCTV footage was released in August 2017, London’s Metropolitan Police worked through a list of 50 suspects and arrested three men, who were eventually released without charge. One – an American banker who later provided an alibi showing he was in California at the time – received so many social media death threats that he felt compelled to hire a security detail and go into hiding.
Reading through the mass of theories, patterns emerge. The man is likely affluent, perhaps working in financial services or similar. He might be a tourist, or he could be local. His actions clearly show a terrible disregard for human life. He may well be a sociopath. At the end of 2018, a ‘body language expert’ even told The Sun that the pusher’s running style suggested “pent-up anger… or even someone who works under pressure”.
But what does the brief CCTV clip really show? It reveals a bizarre act of apparently random violence: not a complete psychological profile. The idea that a bloodthirsty banker is, or was, running the streets of suburban South West London might be imaginatively satisfying, however thin the actual proof. The lack of hard evidence is what makes the mystery.
In June 2018, the Met closed its investigation into the Putney Pusher, after the first flurry of arrests and inquiries had produced nothing of value. Since then the case has been cold. And it remains something the Met isn’t particularly keen to talk about today. “As all lines of enquiry are now exhausted, the investigation has been closed, pending any new information or evidence which may come to light,” the force said in early September when asked to talk about the case for this story.
But how was the Pusher never caught? London is the capital of one of the most surveilled nations on Earth. According to figures released in 2020, there are around 5.2 million CCTV cameras in operation around the UK, in both public and private ownership. Around 691,000 of these are in London, making it the only city outside of China in the global top ten. It’s thought that the average Londoner is captured on camera around 300 times a day.
That the Putney Pusher seemingly vanished into thin air, despite the brazenness of his actions, seems unlikely. It’s a point that baffles Mark Johnson, legal and policy officer at the civil liberties non-profit Big Brother Watch. “[What’s] extraordinary,” he says, “is that this person managed to remain anonymous in what is the surveillance capital of Europe”. To this day, there is no public evidence the Putney Pusher was captured on another camera in the city. Instead, the brief snippet of bus CCTV footage remains the only evidence of the man’s existence.
Despite the scale of everyday surveillance in London, finding the Putney Pusher was never a foregone conclusion. “Unfortunately the image [in this case] showed a person of fairly generic appearance in running gear with no distinguishing features,” says Matt Ashby, a lecturer in crime science at University College London, who has studied the use of CCTV as an investigative tool. Ashby explains that even in cases where CCTV is available to investigators, it doesn’t mean it will always be useful. “This meant that anyone who police suspected of being the offender could simply point out that the image could show any jogger of a similar height and build”.
Despite the number of cameras in London, there are plenty of blind spots and people can quickly vanish into the hubbub. “The vast majority of streets in London are not covered by public CCTV, which tends to be confined to town centres and central London,” says Ashby. “Many shops and other businesses have CCTV cameras that might cover part of the street outside, but obviously there are no shops on Putney Bridge.” He adds that while buses have lots of cameras, there are around 17 on a typical double-decker, most of them face inwards.
The main argument for proponents of CCTV was that it would make our cities safer. Privacy, it was argued when the technology was first being installed at scale in the 1990s, was surely a small price to pay for peace of mind. It’s never quite worked out that way. Accountability remains opaque at best. Though technically there is the right under data protection laws to see footage of yourself that’s recorded on CCTV – actually obtaining it is a different matter, as researchers have discovered. The link between the presence of surveillance cameras and crime prevention is fairly negligible, Johnson claims. To this day, there is still no established consensus on its effectiveness in solving certain kinds of crime.
It’s not that CCTV doesn’t have its uses. In 2019, a man called Paul Crossley was jailed for a minimum of 12 years for attempted murder after pushing a 91-year-old man onto the rails at Marble Arch tube station. Crossley, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was caught on CCTV and quickly apprehended. In February 2021, a mother-of-two dubbed the ‘Pimlico Pusher’ was given a ten-month suspended sentence and ordered into a mental health treatment programme after pushing a woman into a bus, after a minor altercation in a supermarket.
These cases command our attention by their rareness, explains Mohammed Rahman, a senior lecturer in criminology at Birmingham City University. The Putney Pusher adds another layer of intrigue. “It was an unprovoked and deliberate attack that could have resulted in the victim being killed,” Rahman says “Most people tend to feel safe when walking on a public path during daylight hours, and therefore while the case generated public attention, it would have also instilled fear in many of becoming a potential victim, especially women”.
It’s a specific form of urban anxiety. After years of drowning deaths in Manchester’s canals, rumours spread of a sociopathic ‘pusher’ serial killer. That these claims were repeatedly debunked doesn’t seem to matter – they provided a kind of perverse clarity. For many, random mishap and tragedy proved more terrifying than the sceptre of a fictitious killer.
Though it’s been less than half a decade, the world of surveillance technology has moved on since the Putney Pusher. If a similar case was to happen now, would the perpetrator still be able to slip away uncaught? “The other interesting thing is the facial recognition element, [though] it doesn’t look like there’s full frontal capture of [the assailants] face,” Johnson says. Back in 2017 facial recognition deployment was in its relative infancy and London had not yet begun trialling live recognition systems in public spaces. Similarly, retrospective facial recognition systems, using photos captured via CCTV or other systems, were less accurate than they are now.
The use of such technology – and its level of sophistication – has vastly increased since the case of the Putney Pusher. In late September this year, the Met received approval to expand its facial recognition systems to look at CCTV footage. “It’s an incredibly unregulated space,” Johnson says. “The databases that law enforcement have are vast and the introduction of retrospective facial recognition by UK policy forces is concerning. But this technology is inherently flawed and rights-abusive, so it’s important to be clear that retrospective facial recognition is not the answer”.
