10/31/2005
Elizabeth Stride
After the murder in Dutfield's Yard, the police conducted house-to-house interviews with the people in that neighborhood. Any bystanders that had aggregated to watch the police conduct their examination were interrogated.
The dead woman was approximately five feet two inches tall with a very light complexion and dark brown curly hair. She was dressed predominantly in black with a red rose decorating her jacket. Nothing to identify her nor anything of value was found in her pocket.
After a few red herrings, she was identified as Elizabeth Stride, who was born in 1843 in Sweden. She had most likely come to England as a domestic worker. She had made up a story that she was a survivor of the Princess Alice boating disaster that had occurred in 1878, claiming that her husband and two children had drowned. This story was useful in getting charity from the Swedish Church in London and in generally arousing sympathy for her. The real story is that her husband John Stride was a survivor of the Thames River tragedy, but he had died later in the poorhouse.
She lived with a laborer named Michael Kidney for three years before her death. She was a well-liked woman who people nicknamed "Long Liz." While she may have occasionally prostituted herself, for the most part she earned a living by doing sewing or cleaning work. Once in a while, she became drunk and boisterous, an event noted more than once in the magistrate court.
She left her lodging house in the early evening and did not tell anyone where she was going. She had a small amount of money in her pocket that she had earned by cleaning rooms. At the time she left the lodging house, there was no rose on her jacket.
Dr. Phillips testified that the woman died because of her throat wounds. This time there was no indication of strangulation, although the killer may have caught Liz by her scarf and pulled her backwards while cutting her throat. Dr. Blackwell characterized the killer as someone "who is accustomed to use of a heavy knife."
This time, many witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen Liz just before her death. One of them was Constable William Smith who was walking his beat around Berner Street and saw Liz talking to a man around 12:30 in the morning, shortly before her death. The man that Smith saw was around thirty years old with dark hair and moustache. His complexion was also dark. He estimated that the man was about five feet seven. This man was dressed in a dark felt deerstalker hat with a black diagonal cutaway coat, white collar and tie. He had a good-sized parcel in his hands.
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10/28/2005
The Double Event, concludes
While the police were coping with yet another Whitechapel murder, a most extraordinary thing happened just 1/4 of a mile away in Mitre Square. Some 24 yards square, it was generally a respectable area surrounded by commercial buildings and warehouses, with very few residences. At night, when the businesses were closed, Mitre Square became a dark and somewhat secluded area.
Mitre Square was on the beat of Police Constable Edward Watkins of the City Police. He had been through the square at 1:30 and all was quiet. He came around again at 1:44 a.m., some 45 minutes after the discovery of the woman in Dutfield's Yard. Again, it was quiet and deserted. When he shined his lantern in one corner of the square, he made a horrible discovery.
He described it to the coroner a few days later: "I saw the body of a woman lying on her back with her feet facing the square, her clothes up above her waist. I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach was ripped up. She was lying in a pool of blood."
He ran over to one of the businesses on the square to get George Morris, a retired constable who worked as a night watchman. With his whistle, he got help from a couple more policemen. The City Police then began to search the area to see if the killer could still be found.
At 2:18, Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown got to the scene of the crime and made his examination. Her abdomen had been ripped open and she had fearful mutilations to her face. The "body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been dead most likely within the half hour," he later said at the inquest.
There was no money found on the corpse and there was no evidence that she had struggled with her killer.
All in all, the Mitre Square event was pretty amazing, if for nothing more than the aggregation of police in that particular area at the time of the crime. In addition to Watkins and Morris, another policeman, whose beat included a perimeter of Mitre Square had reached the square at about 1:42 a.m. Like the other policemen, he heard nothing and saw nobody. Also, there was a police constable who lived on the square who slept through the entire thing.
As it turned out, the murderer got his victim into the square, killed her, carved her up silently and completely escaped in the space of fifteen minutes. But the night was not over yet.
At 2:55 a.m. Constable Alfred Long found a piece of a bloody apron lying in the entrance to a building in Whitechapel's Goulston Street. Just above the apron, written in white chalk on the black bricks of the archway was the wording:
The Juwes are
The men That
Will not
be Blamed
For nothing.
The piece of bloody apron came from the woman who had been murdered in Mitre Square and the police believed that the writing was the killer's. A constable was left to guard the writing and some preparations were made to have the writing photographed. But before the writing could be photographed, it was ordered destroyed in a highly controversial move by Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Warren explained his rationale for an action which would be criticized for over a hundred years:
The writing was on the jamb of the open archway...visible to anybody in the street and could not be covered up...I do not hesitate to say that if the writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.
How this murderer was able to accomplish two such murders in such a short time, particularly with the mutilations of the second victim, without being seen by the police or anybody and then, when the area was in a heightened state of alarm, create the chalk writing on the archway is nothing short of amazing.
09:29 Posted in The Double Event | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
10/23/2005
The Double Event
Louis Diemschutz, a Russian Jew, was driving his pony cart to Dutfield Yard, off Berner Street in Whitechapel at 1 a.m. on Sunday, September 30, 1888. Diemschutz and his wife lived at the International Working Men's Educational Club (IWMC) and took care of the club's premises. The IWMC was a club composed primarily of Eastern European Jewish Socialists.
In his spare time, Diemschutz sold costume jewelry at various outdoor markets and was returning from this commercial enterprise when he pulled into the club yard. As he did so, he saw an object on the ground near the wall of the club building. He struck a match and saw that it was a woman.
Diemschutz rushed into the club and got a young member to help him. When they saw that the object was a woman with a stream of blood running from her body, the two men ran screaming for a policeman.
A few minutes later, Police Constable Henry Lamb and his associate were on the scene. Lamb felt warmth in the woman's face, but could detect no pulse. His associate went immediately to look for a doctor. PC Lamb did not see any signs of a struggle, nor were the woman's clothes unduly disturbed, like the earlier victims whose skirts had been raised up past their knees.
Dr. Frederick Blackwell was on the scene at 1:16 a.m. with his assistant who had arrived a few minutes earlier. He detailed his findings at the inquest:
"The deceased was lying on her left side obliquely across the passage, her face looking towards the right wall. Her legs were drawn up, her feet close against the wall of the right side of the passage. Her head was resting beyond the carriage-wheel rug, the neck lying over the rut...
"The neck and chest were quite warm, as were also the legs, and the face was slightly warm. The hands were cold. The right hand was open and on the chest, and was smeared with blood. The left hand, lying on the ground, was partially closed, and contained a small packet of cachous (breath sweeteners) wrapped in tissue paper.
"The appearance of the face was quite placid. The mouth was slightly opened... In the neck there was a long incision ...(which) commenced on the left side, 2 inches below the angle of the jaw, and almost in a direct line with it, nearly severing the vessels on that side, cutting the windpipe completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side..."
Dr. Phillips, the police surgeon had joined Blackwell at the scene of the crime. Between the two of them, the estimate of her time of death was between 12:36 and 12:56 a.m.
The police continued to investigate the death scene, but nothing in the way of clues or weapon was found. They did determine however that the chairman of the IWMC had walked through the yard around 12:40 a.m., some 20 minutes before the body was found and saw nothing suspicious nor was anyone standing around. Likewise, Diemschutz had not seen anyone when he pulled into the yard at 1 a.m.
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10/21/2005
Dark Annie, concludes
At the inquest, Phillips said, "The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body." This police surgeon with 23 years of experience was very surprised that the mutilations had been done so skillfully and in what must have been a short period of time, saying that he could have not done such work in less than fifteen minutes and more likely an hour.
Coroner Wynne E. Baxter agreed in his summation:
"The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts (like in the Tabram murder). It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room."
Phillips conjectured that the murder instrument was not a bayonet or the type of knife used by leather workers, but rather a narrow, thin knife with a blade between 6 and 8 inches long. The kind of knife used by slaughtermen and surgeons for amputations could have been such an instrument.
Abrasions on Annie's hands indicated that her rings had been forced off her. Later, from conversations with Annie's friends, police were able to determine that Annie wore cheap brass rings, which may have been mistaken for gold.
Inspector Abberline, who was in charge of the Polly Nichols murder, was instructed to help with the Chapman murder which was in Spitalfields, a different police jurisdiction. However, the lead inspector was Joseph Chandler of the Metropolitan Police's H Division. There seemed common agreement among the inspectors that the same man who killed Polly Nichols also killed Annie Chapman.
The Chapman investigation was just as frustrating as the Nichols investigation. The physical evidence - the leather apron, a nailbox and a piece of steel - were owned by Mrs. Richardson, one of the residents, and her son. The envelope with Sussex Regiment seal on it was widely sold to the public at a local post office. Furthermore, a man at Annie's lodging house saw her pick up the envelope from the kitchen floor to put her pills in when her pillbox broke.
Extensive conversations with the associates of Annie Chapman yielded neither good suspects nor any reasonable motive for the crime. Nor was there any suspicious person found escaping the scene of the crime.
However, the investigation was not entirely fruitless and three important witnesses were found, one of which almost certainly caught a glimpse of the murderer. The first witness, John Richardson, was Mrs. Amelia Richardson's son. Between 4:45 and 4:50 on the morning of the murder, he visited 29 Hanbury to check the locks on the cellar in which Mrs. Richardson kept her tools and goods for her packing case enterprise.
He opened the yard door and sat down on the step to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been hurting his foot. As it was beginning to get light outside, he could see that the cellar locks had not been tampered with while he sat fixing his boot. He could also see that at that time, there was no body of Annie Chapman in the backyard. "I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then," he said at the inquest.
Another witness, Albert Cadosch, living next door to 29 Hanbury Street testified that he heard voices coming from the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street just after 5:20 a.m. The only word he overheard was No. A few minutes later, around 5:30 a.m., he heard the sound of something falling against the fence.
The most important witness was Mrs. Elizabeth Long who was coming to the Spitalfields market and passed through Hanbury Street when she heard the Black Eagle Brewery clock strike 5:30. She saw a man and a woman talking "close against the shutters of No. 29." Mrs. Long identified Annie Chapman in the mortuary as the woman who had been facing her as she passed down Hanbury Street. Unfortunately, the man Annie was conversing with, who was almost certainly her killer, had his back to Mrs. Long. She did her best to describe him in her testimony to Coroner Wynne E. Baxter:
Some of the merchants in the area were quick to sense the growing anti-Semitic fever and took action to contain it. They formed the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was primarily composed of Jewish businessmen. George Lusk, a building contractor and vestryman in his local church, was elected to head this committee of 16 prominent local citizens. This committee, far from being the vigilante group that some had claimed, was closer to an organized "neighborhood watch." Samuel Montagu, who was the Jewish Member of Parliament for the Whitechapel area, offered a reward for the capture of the Whitechapel killer, an action sanctioned by the Mile End committee.
In a week or so, the bawdy nightlife of Whitechapel surged back to its normal pitch. There were just too many people whose daily subsistence depended upon prostitution and other forms of evening entertainment to let the pace lapse for long.
While Whitechapel was unsatisfied with the lack of results of the police investigation, it was hard to fault the police for the quantity of work that was produced. On Tuesday, September 11, a few days after the death of Annie Chapman, John Pizer, the famous "Leather Apron," was arrested.
Despite attempts by his family to portray Pizer as a victim of malicious rumors, there was sufficient evidence to show Pizer was an unpleasant character with at least one documented case of stabbing, for which he served six months at hard labor. The allegations of bullying and extorting money from prostitutes were never proven. The East London Observer described in a not altogether unbiased view, Pizer's testimony to Coroner Baxter:
He was a man of about five feet four inches, with a dark-hued face, which was not altogether pleasant to look upon by reason of the grizzly black strips of hair, nearly an inch in length, which almost covered the face. The thin lips, too, had a cruel, sardonic kind of look, which was increased, if anything, by the drooping dark moustache and side whiskers. His hair was short, smooth, and dark, intermingled with grey, and his head was slightly bald on the top. The head was large, and was fixed to the body by a thick heavy-looking neck. Pizer work a dark overcoat, brown trousers, and a brown and very much battered hat, and appeared somewhat splay-footed
When Baxter asked Pizer why he went into hiding after the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, Pizer said that his brother had advised him to do so.
"I was the subject of a false suspicion," he said emphatically.
"It was not the best advice that could be given to you," Baxter returned.
Pizer shot back immediately. "I will tell you why. I should have been torn to pieces!"
Just because Pizer was an unpleasant character did not make him the Whitechapel murderer. First of all, he had alibis for the times at which Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman were murdered. When Polly was killed, Pizer was at a lodging house, which was corroborated by the proprietor. When Annie was killed, he was afraid to be seen and was staying with relatives, a story, which was corroborated by several people. Secondly, he lacked the skill to carve up Annie Chapman and remove her uterus.
Pizer was released, but a number of others were picked up and questioned. Some were just eccentric and drunken characters that shot off their mouths about the murders; others were insane. Few were worthy of prolonged investigation, either because they lacked the medical skills or because they had alibis for the time the women were murdered. Often the alibis consisted of confinement in asylums or jails.
Insanity and medical qualifications became the key factors in sorting out suspects. Another factor was foreign origin, recalling Mrs. Long's testimony in the Annie Chapman murder. The focus on medical knowledge led the police well beyond the reaches of Whitechapel into the middle and upper classes of London as the eccentric and violent behavior of some surgeons and other physicians came into question.
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10/19/2005
Dark Annie, part2
Just before two in the morning on Saturday, September 8, a slightly drunken Annie was turned out of her lodging house to earn money for her bed. Later that morning, she was found several hundred yards away in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.
29 Hanbury Street was just across from the Spitalfields market. 17 people made the building their home, five of which had rooms overlooking the site of the murder. Of those five or so with rooms overlooking the site of the murder, some had their windows open that night.
Spitalfields Market opened at 5 a.m., so there were many other people gathered that morning with businesses in the building at 29 Hanbury preparing for the opening of the market. Residents were leaving for work as early as 3:50 a.m. The streets around the market were filled with the commercial vehicles delivering to the marketplace. John Davis, an elderly carman who lived with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury, found Annie's body just after 6 a.m. He noticed that her skirts had been raised up to her pelvis. He went immediately to get help and returned with two workmen. By the time a constable was called, everybody in the house had been awakened.
Yet, amazingly enough, even though the sun rose at 5:23 that morning, and so much traffic was present at that early hour, no one heard any suspicious disturbance or cry nor was anyone seen with bloody clothing or weapon. There was clean tap water in the backyard where Annie was found, but the murderer did not use the water to wash the blood from his hands or knife. Also amazing was the risk that the murderer took in this daylight crime.
Dr. George Bagster Phillips, veteran police surgeon, was called to the spot and described what he saw for the inquest:
"I found the body of the deceased lying in the yard on her back...The left arm was across the left breast, and the legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side, and the tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips; it was much swollen. The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached. There was a large quantity of blood, with a part of the stomach above the left shoulder...The body was cold, except that there was a certain remaining heat, under the intestines, in the body. Stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but it was commencing. The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck."
Dr. Phillips estimated that Annie Chapman had been dead approximately two hours. The absence of any cry heard by the residents of 29 Hanbury could be explained by the evidence that she was strangled into unconsciousness and immediately thereafter had her throat slashed.
She had been murdered where she was found. While there was no sign that Annie had fought off her attacker, there was a strange occurrence that Dr. Phillips noted near the feet of the corpse. Annie had apparently kept in her pocket a small piece of cloth, a pocket comb and a small-tooth comb, all of which had appeared to be purposely arranged in some order.
An envelope was found near her head containing two pills. On the back of the envelope were the words Sussex Regiment. The letter M and lower down Sp were handwritten on the other side. There was a postmark that said London, Aug. 23, 1888. Also, a leather apron was found along with some other trash around the yard.
The testimony that Dr. Phillips gave at the inquest gave a more detailed view of the ferocity of the murder. The murderer had grabbed Annie by the chin and slashed her throat deeply from left to right with the possible failed attempt to decapitate her. This was the cause of death. The abdominal mutilations, described in the September 29 edition of the Lancet, were post mortem:
The abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed by the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of an expert - of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.
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10/17/2005
Dark Annie
Because the people of Whitechapel firmly believed that the deaths of Martha Tabram, Emma Smith and Polly Nichols were connected, there was a great deal of pressure upon the police to bring the criminal(s) to justice. Three theories were entertained: (1) a gang of thieves was responsible, such as the men who robbed and assaulted Emma Smith, (2) a gang extorting money from prostitutes penalized the three women for failing to pay, (3) a maniac was on the loose.
Considering how poor the victims were, the first two theories were not very plausible, so the final theory became popular. The East London Observer commented on the Tabram and Nichols murders:
The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced. The excess of effort that has been apparent in each murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being, as the extraordinary violence used is the peculiar feature in each instance.
A request was made of the Home Secretary for a reward to be offered for the discovery of the criminal. Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, had no idea at this point what he was dealing with and declined to offer a reward, laying responsibility at the feet of the Metropolitan Police.
Today, with all the techniques of modern forensic science and psychology, a serial killer is a major challenge for a metropolitan police force. Some serial killers will never be caught regardless of the sophistication and skill of the authorities in that jurisdiction. London's Metropolitan Police in Victorian times was operating almost completely in a knowledge vacuum with no modern forensic tools available to them. Fingerprinting, blood typing and other staples of forensic technique were not yet developed for police use. Even photography of victims was not a usual practice. There was no crime laboratory at Scotland Yard until the 1930's.
Police today have developed elaborate profiling techniques to identify serial killers and have amassed a database of information with which forensic psychologists and psychiatrists can determine the kind of individual perpetrating the crime. In 1888, the police were ignorant of sexual psychopaths. They had seen nothing like the Ripper crimes in England in their experience.
From all accounts he is five feet four or five inches in height and wears a dark, close-fitting cap. He is thickset and has an unusually thick neck. His hair is black, and closely clipped, his age being about 38 or 40. He has a small, black moustache. The distinguishing feature of his costume is a leather apron, which he always wears...His expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent.
With all this publicity, including the fear of mob violence, "Leather Apron" went into hiding.
Annie Chapman, known to her friends as "Dark Annie," was a pathetic woman. She was essentially homeless, living at common lodging houses when she had the money for a night's lodging, otherwise roaming the streets in search of clients to earn a little money for drink, shelter and food.
She was 47 when she died, a homeless prostitute. But her life had once been much different in 1869 when she was married to John Chapman, a coachman. Of the three children they had, one died of meningitis and another was crippled. The stress of illness and the heavy drinking of both husband and wife caused the breakup of their marriage. Things became much worse for Annie when John died and she lost the small financial security his allowance had provided her. The emotional shock of his death was just as bad as the financial loss and she never recovered from either.
Suffering from depression and alcoholism, she did crochet work and sold flowers. Eventually she turned to prostitution, despite her plain features, missing teeth, and plump figure. For the most part, she was very easy going. However, a week before her death, she got into a fight with a woman over a piece of soap and Annie was struck on the left eye and on her chest.
On Friday, September 7, 1888, Annie was told her friend that she was feeling sick. Unknown to her, she was suffering from tuberculosis. "I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings," she told her friend Amelia.
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10/16/2005
Mean Streets
This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city...a shocking place...an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on...gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.
Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets
The East End of London was in Victorian England a place outcast from the city both economically and socially. Some nine hundred thousand people lived in this teaming slum. Here the cattle and sheep would be herded through the streets of Whitechapel to the slaughterhouses nearby where they were bludgeoned, bleating with fear and pain. The streets were stained with blood and excrement. Rubbish and liquid sewage gave the area a horrible smell.
Most of the inhabitants lived in tenement houses under deplorable conditions:
Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who has been dead thirteen days.
Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast LondonFor the most part the people who lived in this East End were the working poor, those who worked occasionally, those who did not work at all, and criminals. Most people lived on a day-to-day basis. More than half of the children born in the East End died before the age of five. Of those who survived, many were mentally and physically handicapped.
Prostitution was one of the only reliable means through which a single woman or widow could maintain herself. The police estimated that in 1888 there were some 1,200 prostitutes in Whitechapel, not including the women who supplemented their meager earnings by occasional prostitution.
There were over 200 common lodging houses in Whitechapel, accommodating almost 9,000 people. The sleeping rooms were long rooms with rows of beds, often infested with vermin and insects. If a woman had not earned enough money that day to pay for a bed for the night, she would have to find someone who would let her sleep with him in return for sexual favors. Otherwise she slept on the street.
However, despite various urban renewal efforts and the improvement in environmental conditions brought about by the Jewish settlers, Whitechapel was still an area known for its poverty and crime. In the squalor of crowded tenements, narrow darkened slum streets and alleys, the Whitechapel murderer had found a perfect place for his work.
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The First Lady, concluded
Identification would not be easy. All she had on her was a comb, broken mirror and a handkerchief. The Lambeth Workhouse mark was on her petticoats. There were no identifying marks on her other inexpensive and well-worn clothes. She had a black straw hat with black velvet trim.
The woman was approximately five feet two inches tall with brown graying hair, brown eyes and several missing front teeth.
But later, as news of the murder spread around Whitechapel, the police learned of a woman named "Polly," who lived in a lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street. Eventually a woman from the Lambeth Workhouse identified her as Mary Ann Nichols, age 42. The next day her father and her husband identified her body.
Polly had been the daughter of a locksmith and married William Nichols, a printer's machinist. They had five children. Her drinking had caused their marriage to break up. For the most part, Polly had been living off her meager earnings as a prostitute. She still had a very serious drinking problem. Every once in awhile, she would try to get her life back together, but it never worked out. She was a sad, destitute woman, but one that most people liked and pitied.
The inspector in charge of the investigation was a police veteran named Frederick George Abberline who had been on the force 25 years, most of which had been spent in the Whitechapel area.
The murderer of Polly Nichols left nothing behind in the way of witnesses, weapon or any other type of clue. None of the residents nearby heard any kind of disturbance nor did any of the workmen in the area notice anything unusual. Even though Polly had been found very shortly after her death, no vehicle or person was seen escaping the scene of the crime. At one point, suspicion focused upon three horse slaughterers who worked nearby, but it was proven that they were working while the murder occurred.
At the time of Polly Nichols' death, the inhabitants of London's Whitechapel area had already heard about a number of attacks on women in that neighborhood. Whether or not one or more of these attacks was perpetrated by the man who later became known as Jack the Ripper is controversial. However, in the minds of the people of Whitechapel, most of these crimes were linked indisputably.
On Monday, August 6, 1888, several weeks before Polly Nichols' murder, Martha Tabram, a 39-year-old prostitute, was found murdered in George Yard. The time of death was estimated to be 2:30 a.m. She had been stabbed 39 times on "body, neck and private parts with a knife or dagger," according to Dr. Timothy Killeen's post-mortem examination report. There was no indication that the throat had been slashed or her abdomen extensively mutilated. With the exception of one wound that had been delivered with a strong knife with a long blade, such as a dagger or bayonet, many other wounds had been inflicted with a penknife.
According to another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, known as Pearly Poll, she and Martha had been together in the company of two soldiers until a few hours before Martha was killed. The police took Poll to check out the soldiers at the Tower garrison, but the soldiers she identified were cleared of the crime. A constable who had been on duty in the vicinity of George Yard also saw a soldier in that area around the time of Martha's death, but this soldier was never properly identified.
Some months earlier, Emma Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute, was attacked on April 2, 1888 at seven o'clock in the evening within 100 yards of where Martha Tabram was found. Her head and face were badly injured and a blunt instrument had been rammed into her vagina. She told the woman at her lodging house that several men robbed and assaulted her.
While these incidences of violence so close together in Whitechapel were linked so firmly in the minds of their neighbors, the crimes themselves were very different. Tabram was probably murdered by one individual, while several men assaulted Smith. Robbery was clearly the motive of the Smith assault, but not the murder of Tabram. The nature of the wounds inflicted was quite different. Thus, it is not likely that the same assailant was responsible for both crimes. Only the Tabram murder bears any similarity to the work of the man eventually known as Jack the Ripper.
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The First Lady
When Charles Cross walked through Whitechapel's Buck's Row just before four in the morning Friday, August 31, 1888, it was dark and seemingly deserted. It was chilly and damp, not unusual for London even in the summer, especially before dawn. He saw something that looked like a tarpaulin lying on the ground before the entrance to a stable yard.
As he walked closer, he saw it was a woman lying on her back, her skirts lifted almost to her waist. He saw another man walking the same way. "Come and look over here," he asked the man, assuming that the woman was either drunk or the victim of an assault. As they tried to help her in the darkened street, neither of the two men saw the awful wounds that had nearly decapitated her. They fixed her skirt for modesty's sake and went to look for a policeman.
A few minutes later, Police Constable John Neil happened by the body while he was walking his beat. From the light of his lantern, he could see that blood was oozing from her throat which had been slashed from ear to ear. Her eyes were wide open and staring. Even though her hands and wrists were cold, Neil felt warmth in her arms. He called to another policeman who summoned a doctor and an ambulance.
Neil awakened some of the residences in the respectable neighborhood to find out if they had heard anything suspicious, but to no avail. Soon, Dr. Rees Llewellyn arrived on the scene and examined the woman. The wounds to her throat had been fatal, he told them. Since parts of her body were still warm, the doctor felt that she had been dead no longer than a half-hour, perhaps minutes after Neil had completed his earlier walk around that area.
Her neck had been slashed twice, which had cut through her windpipe and esophagus. She had been killed where she was found, even though there was very little blood on the ground. Most of the lost blood had soaked into her clothing. The body was taken to the mortuary on Old Montague Street, which was part of the workhouse there. While the body was being stripped, Inspector Spratling discovered that her abdomen had been wounded and mutilated. He called Dr. Llewellyn back for a more detailed examination.
The doctor determined that the woman had been bruised on the lower left jaw. The abdomen exhibited a long, deep jagged knife wound, along with several other cuts from the same instruments running downward. The doctor guessed that a left-handed person could have inflicted these wounds very quickly with a long-bladed knife. Later, the doctor was not so sure about the killer being left-handed.
If (the victim's) throat were cut while she was erect and alive, a strong jet of blood would have spurted from the wound and probably deluged the front of her clothing. But in fact there was no blood at all on her breast or the corresponding part of her clothes. Some of the flow from the throat formed a small pool on the pavement beneath (her) neck and the rest was absorbed by the backs of the dress bodice and ulster. The blood from the abdominal wound largely collected in the loose tissues. Such a pattern proves that (her) injuries were inflicted when she was lying on her back and suggests that she may have already been dead.
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Perennial Thriller
Mark Kelly
"Jack the Ripper! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag."
Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
By today's standards of crime, Jack the Ripper would barely make the headlines, murdering a mere five prostitutes in a huge slum swarming with criminals: just one more violent creep satisfying his perverted needs on the dregs of society. No one would be incensed as were the respectable families of the pretty college students that were Ted Bundy's victims or the children tortured and mutilated by John Wayne Gacy. We have become a society numbed by horrible crimes inflicted upon many victims.
Why then, over a hundred years later, are there allegedly more books written on Jack than all of the American presidents combined? Why are there stories, songs, operas, movies and a never-ending stream of books on this one Victorian criminal? Why is this symbol of terror as popular a subject today as he was in Victorian London?
Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic whodunit. Not only is the case an enduring unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths have tried to solve for over a hundred years, but the story has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it. He comes from out of the fog, kills violently and quickly and disappears without a trace. Then for no apparent reason, he satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from the scene forever. The perfect ingredients for the perennial thriller.
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