by Trow, M. J.
Constable Walter Andrews found her body lying between two costers’ carts along Castle Alley, a narrow, dark thoroughfare that ran between Whitechapel High Street and Wentworth Street. Her throat had been cut and her skirts were pulled up to reveal Ripper-style mutilations. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and the body was still warm, the throat wound still trickling blood. In all likelihood, Andrews’s arrival had disturbed Jack at his work because the cuts were not as deep and determined as in earlier examples of the Ripper’s handiwork and the subsequent post-mortem would reveal that no organs were missing. All this led Bagster Phillips, who had presided over all the Ripper’s victims’ post-mortems, to doubt whether this was a Ripper crime at all, but merely a copycat killing, designed to deflect the authorities from someone who knew Alice personally. Thomas Bond however was sure that the Castle Alley murder was a Ripper crime and I am personally inclined to accept his views.5
In a sense, the number of victims belonging to the man who was Jack is irrelevant. The only other full book on the torso murders attempts to tie them in with these – in other words, using Macnaghten’s ‘canonical five’ for the Ripper plus the four the author attributes to the torso cases,6 Jack’s tally should be nine. I personally believe that Jack killed seven times, although his first attack, on Martha Tabram, may have been carried out on a woman already dead.
What is certain is that the torso killer was not the Whitechapel murderer. Whoever he was, he must have been eternally grateful to Jack, who not only hid his crime at the time, but has left him in a river fog of obscurity ever since.
Chapter 5
The Whitehall Mystery:
Scotland Yard, September 1888
Scotland Yard was full. Since the Police Act of June 1829, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police had been housed at 4 Whitehall Place. The building’s back door opened onto Scotland Yard, the area in Westminster where Scottish visitors attending the court of James I had stayed in the early seventeenth century. As the headquarters staff grew and policing became more complex, additional buildings were annexed by the Force and the whole place was bursting at the seams.
There was a need to find somewhere new and larger and the idea was to utilize the site being developed further south along the Embankment, reclaimed from the river by Joseph Bazalgette in 1863. Originally the property had been bought from the Crown to become an opera house whose architect was Norman Shaw. In 1885, with opera house plans already drawn up and the foundations in place, the police took over instead and Shaw modified his drawings. The result was red and white brick Gothic, with circular turrets, small offices and labyrinthine corridors. Until 1967 this building was the symbol of the lantern-jawed detective in trilby hat and trenchcoat, smoking his pipe and driving out through its gates in a gleaming black Wolseley, sirens clanging. Two and a half thousand tons of granite were quarried by the convicts on Dartmoor and shipped to the site.
Work had already begun on New Scotland Yard – a project that would not be completed until 1891 – when a labourer, Frederick Moore, saw something lying in the river mud at low tide. It was 11 September 1888 and the whole of London was buzzing with the murders of Annie Chapman in Whitechapel three days earlier and of Polly Nichols the previous week. Perhaps men like Moore were more alert than usual to gruesome discoveries; it had not yet been established that the Ripper’s killing zone was firmly fixed in the East End.
Moore was working that day at Deal Wharf near Grosvenor Road and saw a pale object lying near the sluice off Ebury Bridge Road. Grosvenor Road ran parallel to the river and what Moore found was lying only a couple of hundred yards away from where a section of the Rainham torso had been discovered the previous year. Speaking at the later inquest, Moore told the coroner, ‘I went over and picked it up. I found that it was a woman’s arm, with a string attached to the part nearest the shoulder.’ In fact, Moore’s attention was drawn to the macabre find by other workmen; only he, it seemed, had the nerve to handle it.
This stretch of the river linking Pimlico and Chelsea was the patch policed by B Division and Constable 127 William James was the first on the scene. Constable 634A T Ralph passed the offended limb to Dr Nevill who examined it in the local mortuary. He believed the arm had been recently amputated and that it had been removed from the body with great skill.
On 16 September the arm was re-examined by Dr Thomas Bond and Dr Charles Hebbert, both of whom were about to become embroiled in the Ripper case. The pair carefully measured the limb, a right arm, and found that it had been removed cleanly using seven separate cuts. The lack of pronounced muscles, the condition of the nails and the long, tapering fingers led them to conclude that this was a woman’s arm and that in life she was Caucasian, about 20 years old with a dark complexion. She would probably have been about 5ft 9ins tall.
The arm had been removed after death by ‘a person with some knowledge of anatomy’,1 and a ligature had been used to prevent the draining of blood from the cut end. Hebbert seems to have believed that a newspaper was at some time wrapped around the stump, but does not say why. By the time he examined the arm, decomposition was under way.
It was two and a half weeks after that that more of the body was found. Carpenter Frederick Windborn was one of the huge gang of skilled and unskilled men employed by J Grove & Sons to convert Norman Shaw’s opera house into Scotland Yard. The foundations were already in place, a series of gloomy catacombs between the busy thoroughfare of Parliament Street with its solid government buildings and the embankment that skirted the river. The maps produced by G W Bacon for the Ordnance Survey in that year merely show a blank space alongside Westminster Pier, which gives a totally false impression. In reality, it was a series of vaults below ground level with wooden fences, scaffolding and cranes all over the place; a busy site in a city that is constantly being rebuilt.
At six o’clock in the morning of Monday 1 October (it was barely light by then) Windborn with his mate George Bodden collected his tools from his usual hiding place behind some boards. This was standard practice for workmen. Carrying heavy chisels and hammers around was awkward and leaving them in plain sight at the workplace was inviting theft. Presumably, there were little caches of equipment all over the catacombs of Scotland Yard. In reaching for his gear, Windborn felt something and struck a Lucifer to see what it was. It was a parcel, but he thought no more about it and started work on the floors above. It was still there the next day when he collected his tools again and at one o’clock, probably during Windborn’s lunch break, his foreman, Mr William Brown joined him and the conversation turned to the parcel. Brown ordered it to be opened. The parcel was some 2½ feet long and perhaps 2 feet wide. It was paper wrapped in string and inside was the maggotinfested torso of a woman.
At the subsequent inquest, Windborn and Bodden explained the significance of the dumping site. Windborn was in the habit of leaving his tools there over the weekend and believed that the particular vault was difficult to locate. Even in broad daylight, it required the use of a match to find your way about. Bodden had fetched the parcel on the instructions of Brown and realized that it was cloth wrapped around what he took to be ‘old bacon’. The string that held it all together was of different types.
Brown himself went to King Street police station at 3.30 that day to report the gruesome find. Detective Constable Hawkins of A Division returned with two uniformed men and gave his version of events to the coroner:
I saw lying in the vaults of the new police buildings an open parcel in dress material, which had been tied round and a body of a woman in it. I looked further along the recess where it had been and saw a piece of more dress material. I saw the place where it had stood. The wall was very black and the place full of maggots. I left the body in charge of a constable and sent for the medical officer, Mr Bond.2
Bond arrived shortly after four and noted everything that Hawkins had seen.
I thought the body must have been there several days from the state of the wall; but I could form no defin
ite opinion as to how long it had been there. The lower part of the large bowel and all the contents of the pelvis were absent. The decomposition was very far advanced and the body was absolutely full of maggots.3
The luckless A Division constables had the task of loading up the remains onto an ambulance (actually a handcart) and wheeling it round to the mortuary in Millbank Street. In keeping with many of London’s mortuaries at the time, Millbank was
in the yards attached to a dwelling house and shop and it is almost devoid of proper modern appliances. A few wooden partitions have been run up, but there is neither antecedent room to conduct post-mortem examinations, nor means for ensuring the most ordinary sanitation and assisting in the ready and safe identifications of the dead.4
Whoever murdered the woman found in the basement of Scotland Yard had luck on his side. In 1888, fingerprinting was still, in practical use, three years away; genetic fingerprinting, DNA, still a century in the future. By the 1920s, forensics experts had a relatively tight grasp on the time it takes for a body to putrefy, but Bond was still having to make educated guesses.
Aitchison Robertson in 1921 broke down the decomposition pattern as follows. The first evidence of putrefaction is of a sweet, sickly smell that pervades a room in which a body is lying. That neither Windborn nor Bodden was aware of a smell may be due to the fact that the vault was too airy or because of the general pervading smell of the river. It is also possible that the dress material effectively kept the odour in. It all depends on the weather. Early October in London can be mild, but if it was cold, it may be six or seven days after death that the smell becomes obvious.
Between the first and third day after death, the skin over the abdomen turns greenish yellow and this spreads to the genitals, trunk, limbs, chest and neck, which turn green or brown. Gases in the intestine cause the body to swell. The degree of larval infestation also gives a clue as to the length of time a body has been left exposed. The common blowfly lays first, usually in the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose and mouth. The eggs take three weeks to develop. The problem is that other insects lay later – green and grey flies three or four days post-mortem, Lepidoptera and Colcoptera three or four months. After eight months, Picophila and Anthomyia arrive along with Necrobia. Because Bond was probably unaware of this egg-laying cycle, he could not be sure how long the woman had been dead.
At the inquest, labourer Ernest Hodge swore that the parcel was not there on Saturday 29 September, but of course in the near darkness he may have missed it.
On the night of the find, the trunk was immersed in an alcohol solution in Westminster mortuary (one of the better equipped morgues in London) to kill the maggots and aid in the post-mortem of the next day. Once again, Bond and Hebbert were called upon to piece together what had once been a life. The body was female; unlike the Rainham torso, the breasts were present. The head had been severed at the sixth cervical vertebra and the pelvis and lower abdomen at the fourth lumbar vertebra. The bones at each end of the remaining spine had been cut through, not disarticulated. The body’s length was 17ins, the chest 35½ins and the waist 28½ins. The skin was not badly decomposed, the breasts large and prominent and the nipples small and well-shaped. There were no visible scars or other marks which might have aided identification, except the tell-tale marks of the string which held the parcel together. The lineae albae (nerve-carrying tendons) were no longer present with the abdomen. As with the Rainham corpse, the cuts were clean and the limbs disarticulated.
The neck was decomposed but the head had been removed by two clean lateral cuts joined with jagged incisions in front and behind. The heart and lungs were healthy, indicating as did the Rainham body that this woman did not suffer from any of the endemic chest conditions like tuberculosis which dogged the working class. The stomach contained partly digested food, but perhaps because of the passage of time that had elapsed, it was not possible to say what it was. Such forensics were possible. For instance, in the Ripper murders of the same year, where the bodies were all found within hours and sometimes minutes of death, stomach contents were easily identified. The liver, spleen and kidneys in the Whitehall case were normal, so this was not, like so many working-class women, an alcoholic. The armpit hairs were dark; like the Rainham corpse, another brunette.
The most fascinating piece of evidence of course was the reuniting of the Pimlico right arm to this trunk. The claim that hairs from the arm and armpit were identical may have been guesswork, but there was no doubt at all that the arm was a perfect fit.
What could Bond and Hebbert tell the coroner at the forthcoming inquest? The Whitehall body was that of a well-nourished woman and the breasts indicated that she had never suckled a baby. Death, they believed, had occurred two months previously, which would take the murder to early August. The dismemberment all happened post-mortem and, tellingly, decomposition had happened in the open. The presence of maggots were testimony to this.
What does not appear in the Hebbert article is the fact that the newspaper Windborn mentioned as part of the wrapping of the parcel was the Echo dated 24 August 1888; if the doctors were right, some weeks after the murder.
Chief Superintendent Joseph Henry Dunlap was placed in charge of the case and his eyes and ears on the ground was Chief Inspector Wren of A Division. This unit, covering Whitehall, had 38 inspectors in 1888, 60 sergeants and 835 constables, giving a total strength of 935 men. As many as possible were combing the area, checking buildings old and new, knocking on doors, asking questions. By the beginning of October, the Whitechapel murderer, now dubbed Jack the Ripper by a slavering press had claimed at least four victims,5 including, only three days before the Whitehall discovery, two women on the same night. Questions were being asked of the police of the Metropolis and they were all under a huge spotlight.
Such was the influence of the Ripper crimes that the Whitehall discovery chimed with one of the more bizarre elements of it. Shortly before or after Windborn made his find and certainly on the same day, Robert James Lees, from Peckham, visited the police with theories from the ‘Other Side’. Lees was one of a large number of what the Victorians called sensitives, mediums who claimed to have links with the spirit world. Today, desperate police forces, especially in the United States, occasionally consult psychics to find some kind of solution to ongoing cases. Just as often, psychics attach themselves unbidden to task forces and scenes of crime officers, firmly believing that they can help. What they usually do is to muddy operational waters and often compromise crime scenes.
Such a one was Robert Lees, but he got short shrift in 1888. He wrote in his diary for 2 October, ‘Offered services to the police to follow up East End murders – called a fool and a lunatic.’ The next day he ‘got trace of a man from the spot in Berner Street [Dutfield’s Yard, the murder site of Elizabeth Stride]’. This time he went to the City police, who were investigating the second murder on the night of the ‘double event’, that of Katherine Eddowes – ‘called a madman and a fool’. On the Thursday (4 October) he went to Scotland Yard itself – ‘same result but promised to write to me’.6 There is in fact no independent evidence that Lees went to the police at all – only his diary quoted above. Presumably, however, if he got the response he claims, an incredulous or bored desk sergeant would not even have bothered to enter the details of his visit. Lees is not known to have had any telepathic flashes of insight into the torso killer.
Bloodhounds were brought in to assist A Division in the search for more body parts. A trunk and an arm had been found, but what about the other arm and legs? Above all, what about the head? The dogs appear to have been used to no effect, although without the farce associated with Barnaby and Burgho, the Scarborough-based pair bred by Mr Edwin Brough and brought in at the insistence of Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Police, to help with the Ripper murders. In embarrassing trials held in Hyde Park on 9 October, the dogs lost their own handlers in the fog.
The dump site itself (no murder site was ever identified in any of the to
rso murders) was described by The Times. Steps led down from the Embankment and a slope led further into the bowels of the building. The ground was rough here and should have produced at least possible results of boot-prints which could have been used in eliminating the workmen on the site. Given the darkness of the place however, this must have been problematic. Because of the difficulty in reaching the exact spot where the torso was found, The Times reporter surmised that the body must have been left there in the day (when light was minimal instead of non-existent) and must have been left by someone familiar with the building’s layout. The conventional way into the site was via gates on Cannon Row and as these were locked, high and difficult to negotiate, this was not likely to have been the way the torso was delivered. Access from the river was much more likely, either via one of the innumerable carts of builders’ materials coming and going, or from the Westminster Pier where timber was unloaded.
A bizarre coincidence was reported on 20 October, but it came from the pages of the Illustrated Police News, one of the most salacious scandal sheets of the day and having no actual connection with the police at all. The ‘First Evidence’ referred to in its banner headline concerned a resident of Llanelly, South Wales, who found himself in Cannon Row the Saturday before the body was found (29 September) – a day when Ernest Hodge said there was no parcel there. The unnamed witness saw three men outside the Scotland Yard site, two of them with a barrow containing a bundle. A third man climbed over a hoarding into the ground, presumably with said bundle. The Welshman reported all this to the police who duly apprehended a workman who admitted to having been there. ‘Beyond this the police, it is said, succeed in obtaining no clue.’7
None of this makes sense. If these three men were really dumping a body part, would they choose the most difficult way in full view of a nosy bystander? And if the police did interview someone in this context, why is there no record of it anywhere? This seems to be an example either of the man from Llanelly building up his part for his fifteen minutes of fame or the Illustrated Police News indulging in a little fiction for the sake of good copy.
