by Trow, M. J.
The jury is still out on the number of murders committed by Jack. Melville Macnaghten, head of the Met’s CID from 1891, claimed there were five. At the time, the media postulated as many as eleven, although this included one of the torso killer’s victims, found under railway arches in Pinchin Street.3 My own view4 is that Jack killed seven times, all but one of his crimes being perpetrated in the adjacent parishes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the East End.
The killing zone was unique in London: a desperately poor tangle of dingy streets, courts and alleyways, where drunkenness, chronic poverty and violence were a way of life. In 1888 it had a 90 per cent immigrant population, composed of recently arrived Jews, mostly from Russia and Poland so that it became known as the ghetto. Journalists were fascinated by it, writing articles and even poetry on the dilapidated buildings and wrecks of lives who occupied them. Jack London, in 1902, described it as The Abyss. He stayed there for some weeks, with ex-Detective Sergeant William Thick of H Division, known to the underworld as ‘Johnny Upright’. London checked himself into the casual ward of the workhouse – ‘The Spike’ – and mixed with the dossers who scrounged their ‘tommy’ (food) as best they could. The experience affected London profoundly and one friend said he was never the same again. For him, Spitalfields and Whitechapel were the mouth of hell. An estimated half a million people lived there in varying degrees of poverty and desperation, alleviated by drink and, in some cases, paid for by prostitution.
Martha Tabram was born Martha White in Southwark, south of the river, in May 1849. She married twenty years later and had two children, but her constant drunkenness led to a marital breakdown. For about two years she lived with William Turner and used both this and her married name on the streets of Whitechapel where she was working by 1888. By this time, she was 39, but looked older. She had something of a reputation as a cadger, causing a nuisance by pestering family members for cash.
Late on the night of Monday 6 August 1888 she was in the company of another prostitute, Mary Ann Connolly, known as Pearly Poll, and two off-duty soldiers of the Coldstream Guards, based at Wellington Barracks. The four had drunk in various pubs (the area was littered with them) before Poll had gone off with her Guardsman up Angel Alley off Whitechapel High Street and Martha had gone up parallel George Yard with hers.
At 4.45 the next morning, John Reeves, a dock labourer, stumbled over Martha Tabram’s body on his way to work. It was lying on the first-floor landing of the tenement block at 37 George Yard Buildings. The subsequent inquest showed that the woman had been partially strangled and stabbed thirty-eight times in the abdomen and groin. The thirty-ninth stab wound was probably delivered first and was the most likely cause of death. It had been made by a long, strong blade, possibly a bayonet, rammed into her chest. The finding of the inquest, delivered on 23 August, was one that would become depressingly familiar in the weeks ahead – ‘murder by some person or persons unknown’.
The Whitechapel murderer had struck for what I believe was the first time. But the Thames torso killer had already beaten him by fifteen years.
Polly Nichols met Jack as she walked along Buck’s Row, today’s Durward Street. She had left the Frying Pan pub on the corner of Thrawl Street and Brick Lane at half past twelve in the morning of Friday 31 August. Fifty minutes later she staggered drunk into the doss house at 18 Thrawl Street. Single beds in these houses cost 4d and many ‘ladies of the night’ went out on the streets to earn the cost of a place to sleep. Polly did not have 4d, but she told the doss house deputy, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’
An hour and ten minutes later, another prostitute, Ellen Holland, met Polly at the corner of Brick Lane and Osborn Street. The East End was literally alight that night. Huge crowds thronged the roads to the docks to watch a huge blaze that threatened Shadwell Dry Dock. It had started in the warehouses of Gibbs & Company and quickly spread, even after an unusually wet summer, to the adjacent Gowlands’s Coal Wharf. It would be morning before it was put out and by then Polly Nichols was dead. She’d told Ellen Holland she’d earned her doss money three times over, but had spent it and she wandered off in the direction of ‘Flowery Dean’ (Flower and Dean Street, today’s Lolesworth Close).
Mary Ann Nichols was 45 at the time of her death. She was 5ft 2ins and was married with five children. By 1880, the marriage had broken down, partly because of her husband William’s infidelities and partly because of her drinking. She moved from doss house to doss house and in and out of various workhouses. At the end of 1887 she was living rough – ‘carrying the banner’ as it was euphemistically called – and sleeping in Trafalgar Square. Her one chance to get out of a downward spiral of poverty and drink had come earlier in that month of August 1888 when she got a job as a maid to a respectable and religious family in Wandsworth. She stole clothes worth £3 10s from them and left.
Carman Charles Cross found Polly’s mutilated body lying at the entrance to the locked gates of Brown’s Stable Yard. The subsequent post-mortem carried out by Dr Rees Llewellyn of the Whitechapel Road revealed that she had been strangled with what police and police surgeons today call a ‘blitz’ attack and her throat had been cut right back to the vertebrae. There were jagged, deep cuts to her abdomen and genitals, less tentative than the attack on Martha Tabram. Some Ripperologists today see this as the work of two different men, but they could also be the same killer growing in confidence and getting into his stride. The murder of Martha Tabram caused little more than a ripple in the press. After all, brutality of this kind was endemic on the streets of Whitechapel. Much of it was drink-related and prostitutes, inevitably, were the usual and easy targets. Frederick Charrington was heir to a fortune by virtue of his father’s brewery company but the sights he saw in the Abyss saw him walk away from that fortune and become a lifelong teetotaller, doing what he could to ban the demon drink. Outside the Rising Sun, he saw a man beating his wife to a pulp.
I looked up and saw my own name in high gilt letters … and it suddenly flashed into my mind that that was only one case of dreadful misery and fiendish brutality in one of the several hundred public houses that our firm possessed.
The murder of Polly Nichols however drew more press interest. Tabloid newspapers were making their presence felt at the time. Cheap paper manufacture coupled with an increasingly literate public meant that sales were on the increase if the right stories could be found. Then, as now, sex and slaughter sold; except that Victorian middle-class sensibilities would not accept titillation over the breakfast table – so ‘’orrible murder’ reigned instead. There was a political, anti-establishment dimension to this too, the radical Star in particular having it in for Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Met, for his rough handling of the working class in the Trafalgar Square riots of Bloody Sunday in November 1887. Local papers like the East London Advertiser and the Eastern Argus saw a chance to challenge the nationals, The Times and the Telegraph. The Whitechapel murderer was their pin-up boy, although of course they railed about the monstrosity of it all. It was in all their interests to keep lurid crime on the front page and in moments of quiet (for instance there were no Ripper murders during October 1888) a need to drag in any and every salacious detail to keep readership up.
And the readership drooled over the details concerning ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman on 9 September. Late on Friday the 7th, Annie was admitted to the kitchen of Crossingham’s doss by the deputy, Timothy Donovan. She had had a fight days before, was still bruised as a result and was taking tablets she had almost certainly got from Whitechapel Infirmary. She couldn’t afford her bed for the night and left Crossingham’s at a little after half past one on Saturday morning. Four hours later, she was seen by fellow prostitute Elizabeth Long talking to a man outside 29 Hanbury Street. He was a little taller than her (she was only 5ft) and Elizabeth heard him say, ‘Will you?’ And Annie said, ‘Yes.’
What probably happened minutes later is that the couple went through the door that led to
an alleyway. This in turn opened onto a small yard at the back of number 29, with a 6ft wooden fence around it, a privy and three steps down to ground level. At a little before six, carman John Davis, who worked in the market in Leadenhall Street and lodged at number 29, went into the yard, probably to use the privy before he went to work. He saw Annie Chapman lying at the bottom of the steps. Her skirts had been pulled up, her body ripped and her intestines were lying over her shoulder. Horrified, he ran for help.
‘The abdomen had been entirely laid open’ was The Lancet’s précis of Dr George Bagster Phillips’s post-mortem.
The intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; whilst 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 …
In common with many serial killers the world over, Jack was taking trophies, body parts which would remind him of the thrill he had experienced during the murder, except that the phrase ‘serial killer’ had not been coined yet and there was no one who had experience of such a phenomenon. To all concerned, from coroners to police surgeons to hard-bitten detectives and certainly to the public, the Whitechapel murderer had to be a maniac and that meant a slavering lunatic with terrifying strength and hideous features then appearing nightly on the London stage in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.
The Star encapsulates the sensation perfectly:
London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half-beast, half-man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community … Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood – all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London … is simply drunk with blood and he will have more …
He had two more on the same night. The ‘double event’ took place on Saturday 29/Sunday 30 September. The torso killer was also back at work by this time, as we shall see, but so far the only find had been the arm near the sluice along Chelsea Reach, below Grosvenor Road. That had taken place three days after the murder of Annie Chapman and, if it caused any ripple of interest, that disappeared by the morning of 30 September as Londoners awoke to appalling atrocities.
The body of Elizabeth Stride had been found in the narrow entrance to Dutfield’s Yard along Berner Street. Her throat had been cut, but there were no tell-tale mutilations, Jack’s ‘signature’ carved in blood. That was because he had almost certainly been interrupted by travelling salesman Louis Diemschutz who drove his pony and trap into the yard a little after one o’clock on that Sunday morning. The animal had shied at the unexpected bundle in its path and Diemschutz had got down and lit a match. Seeing the blood trickling in the gutter, he ran for help up the nearest stairs to the International Working Men’s Club, of which he was a member. While he was doing this, Jack was almost certainly crouching behind the open gate and saw his chance to escape.
Lust-murderers like the Ripper have an overwhelming compulsion not just to kill but to mutilate in their own unique way. Frustrated and with the blood of Liz Stride on the blade in his pocket, he went west in search of another victim. Such was the furore in the press and the demands on the Met that police patrols had been stepped up. Perhaps this was why, with so many ‘cusses of coppers’ around, Jack went out of his comfort-killing zone into the territory of the City Police. Here he met Kate Eddowes.
Those who raged in the press against prostitution would have said that this meeting was fate, a kind of divinely orchestrated vengeance from God for a wicked lifestyle (witness the ‘Moab and Midian’ letter written to the Central News Agency which we will discuss later). In fact none of Jack’s victims began a life of vice. They were not the children of prostitutes, merely the daughters of poverty. Kate hailed from Wolverhampton and the family moved to Bermondsey when she was a child. In the 1860s she lived with an ex-army man, Thomas Conway, who wrote chapbooks which the pair sold in Birmingham and elsewhere. By 1880 the relationship had collapsed, despite producing three children, and Kate was drinking heavily. She moved in with a market porter, John Kelly, the following year and the pair seemed to be happy. Even so, work was irregular and they slept more often than not in doss houses. From time to time Kate went into the workhouse.
The last day of her life is well chronicled. She was arrested, dead drunk, in Aldgate High Street and locked up at Bishopsgate Police Station to sober up. At one in the morning, Constable George Hutt released her on the improbable grounds that it was ‘too late for you to get any more drink’ (improbable because the pubs rarely closed) and she wandered away with a cheery ‘Good night, old cock’. Half an hour later she was seen talking to a man who was probably her murderer at the entrance to Church Passage which led to Mitre Square.
It was here, in the darkest corner and ironically outside a policeman’s house, that nightwatchman George Morris of the nearby warehouses of Kearley & Tonge found her butchered body. What had alerted him was the arrival, on his nightly rounds, of Constable Edward Watkins. Within twenty minutes, the square was full of policemen and two doctors. One of these, Police Surgeon Frederick Brown, noted the appalling savagery and made a detailed sketch of what he saw. Kate Eddowes had been ripped upwards from the pubis to the breastbone. Her liver had been slit, her colon dumped feet from the body and her uterus and one kidney had been removed. It was the worst attack yet but it followed the pattern of Annie Chapman. What was new was the mutilation to the face. The earlobes had been cut, the eyelids nicked, and there was a deep gash across the nose and cheek. Most oddly of all there were two triangular cuts, like inverted vs, one on each cheek.
Police combing the area in the next hour found a torn piece of Kate’s apron lying in a drain by a stand pipe in Goulston Street, some three minutes away to the east. What they did not find was her killer. If the timings of the police patrols have been logged accurately, Jack had partially strangled Kate, cut her throat, carried out the dreadful mutilations and gone, wiping his bloodied hands on the apron section, in a space of fifteen minutes.
The most enigmatic of Jack’s victims was Mary Jane Kelly and she most resembles the torso victims in that she was 25 (all the others were in their forties). By 9 November when Mary died, the torso-related murder known as the Whitehall Mystery had been and gone, from the finding of the trunk in the Scotland Yard foundations to the second part of the inquest on 22 October. Despite press attempts to link all these murders, Jack did not strike at all during October, so there is a gap of nearly six weeks in his killing spree after the frenzy of the ‘double event’.
Mary told so many different stories about herself that it is difficult to know what to believe. She probably came from County Limerick in Ireland and may or may not have lived with a collier in Wales until he was killed in a pit accident in 1881 or 1882. She came to London in 1884 and, almost certainly living by her wits and prostitution, moved about considerably, latterly with Billingsgate porter Joseph Barnett. Alone of Jack’s victims, Mary rented a room, 13 Miller’s Court off Dorset Street, and owed several weeks back rent by the time she died.
It was in this context that her body was found. ‘Indian Harry’ Thomas Bowyer went to Mary’s room to demand the rent on the morning of Friday 9 November. It was Lord Mayor’s Day but for a rent collector it was business as usual. The door was locked, but a window pane was broken and Bowyer could peer into the dingy, 12ft by 12ft room. What was left of Mary Kelly lay on the bed, her legs open, her face unrecognizable and her body hacked to pieces. Doctors Thomas Bond and Bagster Phillips carried out the subsequent post-mortem and both men saw the corpse in situ where at least two photographs were taken.
The face was gashed in all directions, building on the more systematic work on Kate Eddowes and the throat had been cut right back to the vertebrae, the fifth and sixth being no
tched by the blade. Both breasts had been removed with circular cuts, one placed under the dead woman’s body. The stomach had been ripped open and the skin removed. Both legs had been hacked so that the right thigh bone is clearly revealed in one of the photographs. Flesh from the body had been placed on the table next to the bed. Mary’s heart was missing – another trophy for a serial killer. Bond estimated that Jack had taken perhaps two hours to carry out the mutilations and this, of course, was the only time that he killed indoors.
According to Melville Macnaghten – and most theorists since – Mary Kelly was the last of the victims of Jack the Ripper. So appalling were the mutilations and so sated was the murderer, that his mind gave way altogether and … Thereafter, various official views, usually offered years later in unreliable memoirs and always with a certain smugness on the part of their authors, range from vague stories of suicide (such as Montague Druitt in the Thames) to incarceration in asylums. None of these is very satisfactory and they were almost certainly intended to show Macnaghten and his predecessor Robert Anderson in a better light. We shall meet this arrogant ‘I know who it is but I can’t tell you’ attitude at least twice more in this book.
My own view is that Jack did kill again. He was indeed sated after Mary Kelly and it was thirty-three weeks before he took to the streets again. The torso killer had struck again by this time too, but it was the summer of 1889 and the hypertension caused by the Ripper seems to have waned. Nobody, it appears, was ready for what happened to ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice McKenzie on Wednesday 17 July.
