The Cases That Haunt Us
Page 2
The most extreme areas of the East End—the region bordering Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road, just north of the Tower of London and the London Docks—was a strange, distant, and fearful place to those fortunate enough to live elsewhere within the metropolis. Though it was but a short cab or railway journey away from central London, the virtual capital of the Western world when it was true that the “sun never set” on the richest and most economically productive empire in history, this district was a teeming, Dickensian area of factories, sweatshops, and slaughterhouses. Dominated by poor cockneys, it was increasingly populated by immigrants straight off the docks, particularly Eastern European Jews escaping persecution and pogroms, with their strange languages, insular customs, and wariness of gentiles. Many of them joined their fellow countrymen in the tailoring and leather trades centered around Brick Lane. Middlesex Street, better known as Petticoat Lane, became a bustling Sunday marketplace of Jewish goods and culture.
Here in Whitechapel, skilled jobs were scarce and disease was rampant. Those lucky enough to have a place to live were crammed into dirty and primitive accommodations without even the semblance of privacy. The rest, figured to be about 10 percent of the East End’s total population of nine hundred thousand, lived a day-to-day existence—on the streets, in the grim and notorious public workhouses, or in the hundreds of filthy “doss-houses,” which offered a bed for around fourpence a night, paid in advance.
Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was a prostitute, one of about twelve hundred in Whitechapel at the time, according to Metropolitan Police estimates. She was five feet two inches tall, forty-five years of age, and had five missing teeth. Many, if not most, of the women like Nichols were not prostitutes by choice. Existence for them (and often, their families) was so desperate that turning cheap tricks might mean the difference between eating and not eating, between having a place to sleep and taking their chances on the dark and dangerous streets. Add to this the chronic alcoholism through which many women tried to forget their hopelessness, and we see a segment of society living on the very fringe.
Polly Nichols was the mother of five children and the survivor of a tempestuous marriage that had finally broken up over her inability to stay away from the bottle, a situation initially caused, she claimed, by her husband William’s philandering. He was given custody of the children. At a little after 1:00 in the early morning hours of Friday, August 31, 1888, Polly was attempting to finesse her way into a doss-house on Flower and Dean Street, where she’d been sleeping for about a week. She’d spent most of the last month in another doss-house one block over on Thrawl Street, in a room she shared with four other women. But this evening, she didn’t have the required fourpence for her bed, having just spent money she’d earned earlier in the day on liquor at the Frying Pan pub down the block where it intersected with Brick Lane.
The deputy lodging housekeeper would not let her stay without payment. Polly told the man not to give her bed to anyone else and, giddy with drink, declared, “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” Apparently, the hat had been bought for her by a customer and made her feel more attractive.
At about 2:30 A.M., she met up with her friend Ellen Holland, also known as Emily. In the East End, multiple names were apparently common. Holland, who had previously shared the Thrawl Street room with Polly, had come out to watch a large fire, a common form of entertainment for those too poor to afford any other. She reported Polly to be extremely drunk and leaning against a wall for support.
Ellen urged her to go back to Thrawl Street, but Polly confessed, “I’ve had my lodging money three times today and I’ve spent it. It won’t be long before I’m back.” Then she wandered off in the direction of Flower and Dean Street.
That was the last time anyone saw Polly Nichols alive.
About 3:40 that morning, two carmen, or wagon drivers, Charles A. Cross and Robert Paul, were walking to work along Buck’s Row, about a block from London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, when Cross thought he saw a tarpaulin on the other side of the street near the entrance to a stable. He went over to examine it more closely and see if it was usable. But when he neared the tarp, he realized it was the body of a woman, her eyes wide open, hands by her side, skirts hiked up to her waist, and legs slightly parted. Next to the body was a black, velvettrimmed straw bonnet.
Cross called Robert Paul over. He felt the woman’s face, which was still warm, leading him to believe she might still be alive. He listened intently and thought maybe he detected a faint heartbeat. But Cross felt her hands, which were cold, and concluded she was dead. The two men left to find a policeman.
They found Metropolitan Police constable Jonas Mizen walking his beat on nearby Hanbury Street and told him what they’d found. Mizen hurried back with them to Buck’s Row, where Constable John Neil had just come upon the body on his own. With his lantern, Neil signaled another passing police officer, Constable John Thain. He directed Thain to go find Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the nearest general practitioner, then told Mizen to secure an ambulance, which in those days meant a two-wheeled wagon long enough to hold a stretcher.
Thain awakened Llewellyn, who arrived on the scene to examine the victim. By this time, two local slaughtermen, Henry Tomkins and James Mumford, were also on scene, though whether they had just happened to show up or had been passing the time with Constable Thain prior to his being called in on the case is unclear. Dr. Llewellyn noted severe lacerations to the victim’s throat, but little blood on or around the body. At about ten minutes to 4 A.M., he pronounced the woman dead, estimating that, since the legs were still warm, death had occurred no more than thirty minutes previously and that she had been killed on the spot. The body was taken to the mortuary at the Old Montague Street Workhouse Infirmary. By the time Inspector John Spratling arrived around 4:30 A.M., a crowd was already forming, and the news of the murder started filtering through Whitechapel. Spratling told the other officers to search the scene and surrounding area, then went to join Dr. Llewellyn at the mortuary to record the official description of the corpse.
At the mortuary, Spratling discovered some even more disturbing information than what he’d expect from the “routine” murder of a prostitute—though, strictly speaking, her status had not yet been confirmed since no identification had been made. Still, the circumstances and the fact that she was out on the street at that hour strongly suggested the vocation. Unfortunately, then as now, prostitute murders were not unheard of, often involving simple robbery or a customer who believed he’d contracted a disease. Once clothing had been removed from the body, Spratling could plainly see that in addition to the neck wounds, the abdomen had been ripped open and the intestines exposed.
The following morning Dr. Llewellyn returned to do a complete postmortem. He noted bruising on the face and neck and a circular incision on the neck that completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae as well as the major blood vessels of the neck. The deep cuts appeared to have been made with a sharp, long-bladed knife. Llewellyn believed the killer had at least some rough anatomical knowledge and, from a thumb bruise on the right side of the neck, thought he might be left-handed.
BEHAVIORAL CLUES
Looking at this case today with a body of knowledge and experience unavailable to the Victorian investigators (it would be several years before even fingerprinting was available), we could already start putting together some behavioral clues from the wound patterns. The severe bruising about the face suggests to me an initial “blitz-style” attack. In other words, the UNSUB attempted to neutralize his potential victim quickly and unexpectedly before she could put up a defense. This, in turn, suggests an offender who is unsure of himself and has no confidence in his ability to control her or get her where he wants her through any kind of verbal means—an inadequate personality as opposed to one with the confidence to think he can easily dominate women. This, as we’ll see, gives us even more clues to his personality and emotional background.
Then we have the deep, circular incision around the neck. This seems clear to me—an attempt to take the head off the victim. Those who have read any of our previous books will know that one of the ways we categorize killers and other sexual predators is according to whether we consider them organized, disorganized, or mixed—that is, a combination of the two types. A killer who wants to decapitate his victim, especially out on the street, which is always a high-risk environment, is someone who I would suggest is “not all there.” This is further underscored by the ripping open of the belly and the exposure of the intestines. That doesn’t mean he can’t mentally form criminal intent, and it doesn’t imply that organized killers are normal, socially integrated individuals. It does, however, tell me that this UNSUB’s motivations and fantasies are so aberrant that they would interfere with his routine functioning, even his ability to pull off an efficient crime. This is someone who both hates women and has a bizarre and perverse curiosity about the human body that I can only characterize as demented.
While we’re on this subject, let’s clarify one thing. All killers and sexual predators, in my opinion, have some degree of mental illness. By definition, you can’t willingly take another life in this manner and be mentally healthy. However—and this is a big however—though you may be mentally ill, that does not mean that (a) you do not know the difference between right and wrong and (b) you are unable to conform your behavior (not your thoughts necessarily, but your behavior) to the rules of society. This is the essence of the M’Naghten Rule, the original codified British legal test of criminal responsibility, which had already been in effect for more than half a century by the time of the Whitechapel murders and which still serves as the basis for the tests of insanity we use today. The rule is named for Daniel M’Naghten, who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert Peel, the organizer of London’s Metropolitan Police Force.
So someone can be mentally ill but still criminally responsible—they do what they do because they want to rather than because they have to. Some psychiatrists refer to this problem as a character disorder, a description that I think is pretty accurate.
But are some offenders so far gone that they really do not know what they’re doing is wrong? Sure, there are some, and from my experience they also tend to be delusional or hallucinatory. But we can often pick out this type rather quickly, and because they’re so disorganized and “crazy,” we usually catch them before long. Was the Whitechapel killer one of these? Had he gone over the edge from character disorder to total nutcase? We need more evidence before we can make that determination.
The murder victim was wearing several layers of clothing, which she would have had to do if she was homeless. Her only other personal possessions were a comb, handkerchief, and broken mirror. But on one of her petticoats, police noticed the laundry mark of the Lambeth Workhouse. By process of elimination, the victim was determined to be Mary Ann, or Polly, Nichols, although the initial attempt to have her body identified failed, possibly because of the mutilation. She was eventually identified by Mary Ann Monk, who had been at the Lambeth Workhouse at the same time. On September 6, 1888, she was buried in a pauper’s grave in the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford, Essex.
PATTERN CRIMES?
There was little to go on in solving the crime. Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson admitted that detectives were stumped by the “absence of motives which lead to violence and of any scrap of evidence, either direct or circumstantial.” In fact, Swanson and his colleagues just didn’t understand the motive. They’d have had no reason to; they’d never seen it before. However, despite the lack of experience with this type of crime, both Dr. Robert Anderson, assistant Metropolitan Police commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), and CID assistant chief constable Melville Leslie MacNaghten said that it was obviously the work of a sex maniac.
It was possible, though, that the Nichols killing was related to an earlier prostitute murder in the East End; no one was certain. In fact, they’re not sure to this day.
Martha Tabram, also known as Emma Turner, was the estranged wife of a warehouseman, Henry Tabram. After the estrangement, she lived on and off for a number of years with William Turner, who, though a carpenter by training, worked as a street hawker. This accounts for her two surnames. As in the case of Polly Nichols, each man eventually left her because of her excessive drinking.
On the evening of August 6, 1888, a bank holiday, Martha went out with her friend Mary Ann Connolly, known locally as Pearly Poll. Connolly later testified that the two of them had visited several pubs, including the Two Brewers, where they were picked up by two members of the Grenadier Guards, a prestigious unit of the army. They went to other pubs, including the White Swan on Whitechapel High Street, before finally parting company around 11:45 P.M. Poll and her guardsman then went into Angel Alley for stand-up sex against a wall. She saw Martha go into George Yard, presumably with similar intentions.
At around 3:30 the next morning, taxi driver Alfred Crow returned to his tenement flat on the northeast side of George Yard and saw what he thought was a derelict sleeping on the first-floor landing. About an hour and twenty minutes later, another tenant and dockyard laborer, John Saunders Reeves, came downstairs and saw what he realized was a body.
Dr. Timothy Killeen, who examined the body for the police at about 5:30 A.M., estimated that the approximately forty-year-old woman had died about two hours previously, or shortly before Crow first noticed her. Altogether, the victim had suffered thirty-nine stab wounds, with the breasts, abdomen and genitalia being the primary targets. Most of the wounds were unremarkable in terms of the likely weapon used, with the exception of a wound in the center of the sternum, which appeared to have come from a dagger or bayonet. This suggested that perhaps the crime had been committed by the guardsman with whom Martha Tabram had been seen earlier in the evening.
With two unsolved murders in the same area in the same month, uneasiness settled over Scotland Yard. But apart from those who knew either of the unfortunate victims, London as a whole, and even the East End, did not really take notice. After all, homeless prostitutes were the throwaways of society, and even though both crimes were exceedingly brutal and seemed without apparent motive, this was not something with which proper folk had to be overly concerned.
That all changed on the morning of Saturday, September 8, and in a sense, the world of criminology has not been the same since.
ANNIE CHAPMAN
Just before 6 A.M., carman John Davis finally got up after having spent a restless night. He left the third-floor flat he’d occupied for about two weeks with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury Street and went downstairs to go to the outside privy. To the left of the back-door steps, he suddenly saw a body. A woman was lying on her back between the steps and the fence of the property’s yard. Her dress had been pulled up over her head, her belly had been ripped open, and her intestines were not only visible this time, but pulled out and draped over her left shoulder. Other residents and passersby quickly assembled. Some of them and Davis each went off in search of a policeman. One, Henry Holland, found a constable a couple of bloc
ks away at Spitalfields Market, but the officer told him he could not leave his fixed point. This was but one example of the procedural rigidity of the law enforcement of the day, which would hamper many attempts at bringing the UNSUB to justice.
The first senior police officer on the scene was Inspector Joseph Chandler. He was on duty at the Commercial Street Police Station when he saw men running up Hanbury Street. When he realized what had happened, he rushed to the murder site, covered the body, then sent for Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon for H Division, the area where the crime had occurred. Phillips examined the brutally butchered but ritualistically arranged corpse. At the inquest, he described what he had seen:
The left arm was placed across the left breast. 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. The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen. The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom, and very fine teeth they were. The body was terribly mutilated. . . . The throat was dissevered deeply; the incisions through the skin were jagged, and reached round the neck. . . . On the wooden paling between the yard in question and the next, smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased lay, were to be seen.
Phillips went on to observe that all of the wounds appeared to have been made by a sharp knife with a narrow blade and that the evisceration indicated some medical knowledge. He speculated that all of the mutilations may have taken as long as an hour, though with what I’ve seen from even moderately experienced serial killers, I would suspect less time. As in the case of Polly Nichols, there was no evidence of a struggle. Apparently, the UNSUB had also attacked this one suddenly, neutralizing her before she could fight back.