by Trow, M. J.
The Thames had its own community of gypsies who migrated along the whole of the tidal river’s banks, camping on the open shore in summer or dossing in the rookeries before their demolition for Joseph Bazalgette’s Embankment. Some of them worked irregularly in the docks, but many eked out a meagre existence by fishing, still using sticks and spears thrown from rough willow-wood canoes. They were in some ways an archaic throwback and were trusted and loved by no one. One of them was Solomon Hearne who camped on the open ground at Lammas Hard along the Town Meadows in Fulham, just east of Wandsworth Bridge. He found a woman’s leg lying on the foreshore wrapped in the collar of a chequered Ulster, identical to the one found days earlier near Albert Bridge.
At Battersea Mortuary, Dr Felix Kempster preserved the limb in spirits of wine which was now his routine procedure. He confirmed that the leg belonged to the other body parts and had been cut off just below the knee.
Two more sections would be found on 7 June. David Goodman, a nitric acid maker of 15 Prairie Street, Queen’s Road, Battersea, found a piece of flesh on the mud at Palace Wharf, Nine Elms, slightly downriver from the leg. Much further downstream, near the West India Docks at Limehouse, lighterman Edward Stanton saw a dark bundle floating in the water. It was tied with string. The material was the ulster’s sleeve and the parcel was passed to Inspector Hodson of Thames Division who was already on the river supervising a search for body parts. Kempster confirmed that the sleeve contained a right leg and foot, all belonging to the same body.
But the grisly discoveries went on. Saturday 8 June saw rain driving over the city, threatening a return of the dismal summer of the previous year. William Chidley, lighterman, was already at work at Bankside in Southwark by eight o’clock and he hauled a floating package to the shore. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and contained a woman’s left arm. Kempster reported that the
limb was well moulded and the hand small and shaped with every appearance of having been well cared for. The arm had been severed from the body in a very skilled manner and the person who cut it off must have had a very considerable knowledge of anatomy.
The police themselves found the next body part later that day. At about half past twelve, an object was noticed in midstream between Battersea Park Pier and Albert Suspension Bridge. There was no wrapping this time, possibly because it had become detached, but the body section was the lower back, pelvis and buttocks. Sub-inspector Joseph Churcher took the find to Battersea mortuary.
It must have been manna from heaven for Claude Mellor when he made the next discovery of 8 June. He was a journalist who had been assigned to the torso story and he was walking along Chelsea Embankment at mid-day. He was passing a line of evergreens that skirted the railings that edged the gardens of a private estate when he noticed something hidden in the undergrowth. He found patrolling Constable 182B Jones and took him back to the site. It was clear by the broken bush-tops that the object had been thrown over into the garden. It also became clear to whom the property belonged as detectives made their enquiries; this was the home of Sir Percy Shelley, whose ancestor Mary had created one of the most terrifying of all horror monsters, the ‘Prometheus unbound’ that we know today as Frankenstein’s Monster. A freak of unnature sewn together from body parts.
And that, metaphorically, was what Drs Bond, Kempster and Hebbert were doing at Battersea mortuary on 10 June. In his report presented as a medical paper later in the year, Hebbert refers to this murder as the Thames case, which rather downgrades the others and by the time he was lecturing he could afford to be smug because the victim, alone of the torsos, had been identified. First, he lists the parts found – ‘two large flaps of skin, the uterus and placenta; both arms and hands; both thighs; both legs and feet; the trunk divided into three parts’. In other words, all that was missing, as in nearly all the other cases, was the all-important head. The top portion of the trunk had been removed from the head at the sixth vertebra by a series of clean, confident cuts. The chest had been opened in front by the midline, the sternum cut through and the contents of the chest (lungs and heart) had been removed. The arms had been removed by three or four long, sweeping cuts, the joints neatly disarticulated. The skin was peeling off in places from the sodden flesh, but the portion had not been in the water that long.
The second section of the trunk contained both breasts and fitted exactly with the first, including the vertical cut through the sternum. The ribs were present and, although the intestines had gone, the kidneys, spleen, pancreas and liver were still in place, along with the duodenum and part of the stomach. Despite decomposition of the liver, all the internal organs were healthy.
The final part of the trunk showed that the thighs had been removed by long sweeping incisions and the same skilful disarticulation of the joints. The pelvis contained the lower part of the vagina and rectum and the front part of the bladder, including the urethra. Hebbert was able to say that the vagina itself showed no damage, either from violent rape or childbirth and this is important in terms of explaining the killer’s motivation which we will examine later. The flaps of skin to which Hebbert referred came from the abdominal walls and right buttock. The skin was fair and the pubic hair a light sandy colour. The uterus had been cut, but the existence of placenta and the organ’s dilation made it clear that the woman had been pregnant and the foetus removed by her killer. The dead woman would have been between six and seven months pregnant.
It was the arms that would confirm the corpse’s identity days later. Indentations on a finger of the left hand implied a wedding ring, but a number of circular scars on the upper left arm indicated vaccination. It was the inch long scar on the lower forearm that would provide the vital clue. The leg sections fitted perfectly and were well shaped with no deformity to the feet.
What conclusions could the doctors draw? The dead woman, they knew, was over 24 years old and probably under 35. Her hair and complexion were fair. As usual, Hebbert wrestled with the problem of height, but his best calculations gave a measurement of 5ft 4¾ins. A fine-tooth saw had cut through bone and a very sharp knife through skin. All joints except the left knee had been very neatly disarticulated. There appeared to be no sign of hard manual work by the condition of the hands and no marks of a garter on either leg. All parts belonged to the same body and death probably took place about twenty-four hours before the discovery of the first two portions, i.e. 1 or 2 June. There was no evidence of the cause of death, but again, the medical men were quick to distance their profession from such foul deeds; ‘the skill not showing the anatomical knowledge of a surgeon, but rather the aptitude learnt by a butcher, horse-knacker or other person used to deal with dead animals and to readily separate limbs at the joints’.2
The doctors of course were concerned with the purely medical. The police took their findings and added their own, talking to reporters in an attempt to identify the corpse. The Times of 13 June reported that the body was accompanied by ‘an old brown linsey [woollen] dress, red selvedge, two flounces round bottom, waistband made of small blue-and-white check material similar to duster cloth, a piece of canvas roughly sewn on end of band, a large brass pin in skirt and a black dress button (about the size of a threepenny piece) with lines across in pocket’. The torn ulster was grey with a black crosshatching pattern forming a check design. The material was good quality, but old. The drawers were old too, with square patches on both knees with the telltale ‘L E Fisher’ written in black ink. The various parcels had been tied with black mohair bootlaces, pieces of Venetian blind cord and string. All these articles could be viewed by anxious (or of course morbidly curious) friends or family of missing persons.
The problem was that, the name apart, the clothes were ten a penny with nothing unique about them. Any of them could have been picked up for a song in, for example, the Rag Fair in Whitechapel and there was no guarantee that they had belonged to the deceased anyway. But surely, somebody out there, the police hoped, must have missed a sandy-haired girl in her mid-twenties, seve
n months gone, who chewed her nails to the quick.
The thick black lines represent the cuts made to dissect the body. The shaded areas are the parts that were never found.
Red herrings dogged the police enquiries at every turn. On 9 June a ‘small liver’ was found floating in the river at Wapping. It was taken as a matter of course to Battersea, but it did not belong to the dead woman. In fact, Dr Kempster was not even sure it was human. Early the next day, lighterman Joseph Squires had found the dead woman’s right arm, folded double with string near Southwark Bridge. The pickle jar found on 13th however had no connection with the Thames mystery. It did contain the body of a foetus, but in Kempster’s opinion, had not come from the murdered woman. Infanticide was not uncommon in Victorian England, where poor women, at a time of nonexistent birth control, often felt they had no choice but to visit the highly dangerous abortionists who haunted London’s back streets.
Missing persons enquiries were also, at first, leading nowhere. Constable Fisher of the Hertfordshire police let the Met know that his sister was missing. Although technically Mrs Wren by 1889, her maiden name was L E Fisher and she was 25 years old. She had labelled many of her clothes and had abandoned her husband and child on 18 May 1888 to live with another man. Whether she was the same L E Fisher as the barmaid at the Old Dock Tavern along the Thames the police never discovered. That L E Fisher was missing too.
There are three L Fishers listed in the census of 1881; the only L E Fisher would have been 9 at the time of the Horsleydown Mystery. The L E Fisher who was the missing barmaid was found to be alive and well and living in Ramsgate, Kent.
By the time of the resumed Inquest on Saturday 16 June, the police had been carrying out extensive searches for the dead woman’s missing head, including the use of dogs. The fiasco of bloodhounds in the Ripper case nine months earlier was not forgotten and the Weekly Herald was one of several newspapers openly critical of police efforts:
The advisability of employing bloodhounds to trace the perpetrator of the crime has been eagerly discussed by the inhabitants of the district. It is considered, however, by experts that the time has gone by for such an experiment [the murder was assumed to have happened some six weeks previously] and it is pointed out that in the case of the Blackburn murderer who was discovered by such means, the circumstances were different and that the present case does not admit of that.3
The Blackburn case was the murder of 7-year-old Emily Holland in 1876. She was abducted shortly after four o’clock as she walked Bisley Street in Blackburn on 27 March. She was on her way to a local shop to buy tobacco. The dogs were called in to aid in the search for her and discovered her dismembered body in a trunk (some accounts say chimney) wrapped in a copy of the Preston Herald. She had been raped and her throat had been cut prior to dismemberment. Emily’s killer was local barber, 26-year-old William Fish, a father of three who ran a shop in nearby Moss Street. He was hanged at Liverpool Gaol on 14 August.
Jasper Waring’s excellent dog Smoker was called in again, after his triumph in the foundations of Scotland Yard ten months earlier. Since most of the body parts had been found in water and the Shelley section clearly thrown from the riverside walkway, Battersea Park was the only area where any kind of scent might remain. It was too tall an order for Smoker however and the police came to the conclusion that the head had either been burnt or buried.
Wynne Baxter had had only one portion of a torso to work on. Braxton Hicks had an entire body without a head. The regulations were very clear; inquests were held on bodies in the area where they were found and since most of the body parts had been located on the river’s south bank, the jurisdiction fell to the coroner for mid-Surrey who held court at the Star and Garter pub in Battersea on Saturday 16 June.
Dr Thomas Bond was the first witness and revealed that he had been called in by Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. R Michael Gordon, anxious to lay the torso murders at Jack’s door, believes this had a connection with the Ripper, but Anderson’s role covered all crime in London. Having explained the medical findings, Bond asserted that, in his opinion, the same man was responsible for the dismemberment at Rainham and in Whitehall. When Hicks asked him if the heads, thrown into the river, would sink, Bond answered ‘Yes’. It was the correct answer to an obvious question, but neither coroner nor police surgeon fully understood the workings of a serial killer’s dark mind.
The fact that the dead woman had been pregnant led the coroner to follow a line of enquiry that included abortion. Could this have been carried out ‘by means of drugs’? Without the brain, throat or stomach, Bond could not comment. And if the killer was skilled at dismemberment, did he also have the medical knowledge to know that these body parts must never be found, or they might lead directly to him?
The various riverside witnesses whose testimony we have heard already followed Bond into the make-shift witness box and Hicks, assured by Inspector Tunbridge that enquiries were still ongoing, adjourned the inquest until 1 July.
It was now that a breakthrough happened, the first meaningful one in the entire case. Catherine Jackson came forward to identify the dead woman, not as the elusive L E Fisher, but as her daughter, Elizabeth; and she recognized her corpse, lying in Battersea mortuary, in an ever-increasing state of decomposition, by the scars on her left forearm.
The police could now put, literally, flesh on the bones of their investigation. Elizabeth had been 24 years old, 5ft 5ins tall, plump and well formed. She had reddish gold hair with lovely teeth and nicely shaped hands. The Ulster was indeed hers, given to her not long before she disappeared by a family friend, Mary Minter. And the police also discovered that Elizabeth had bought old clothes labelled L E Fisher; the apparent red herring had been netted after all.
Elizabeth Jackson was the youngest of three daughters – the others were Annie and May – born to Mr and Mrs Jackson in Chelsea in 1865. In common with many young girls throughout the country, she began work as a servant in 1881 and was of ‘excellent character’ until November 1888 when she suddenly left both home and job. The last link with her family was in Turk’s Row, Chelsea, when Annie met her in the street. The sisters rowed about Elizabeth ‘picking up men for immoral purposes’ and the younger girl left. The next time Annie saw her, she was lying headless and in pieces on a mortuary table.
Chapter 7
The Women of Moab and Midian
Turk’s Row lies off fashionable Sloane Square, but it is only a stone’s throw from the river and the various body parts found in and near Battersea Park. Elizabeth Jackson had travelled some three hundred yards from her place of work to her death.
The police uncovered the fact that Elizabeth was living with a ‘protector’ (pimp) called Charlie and during November she took up with John Faircloth, a miller and Cambridgeshire man who was 37 and had served in the Grenadier Guards. Edward Cardwell’s army reforms of 1870–1 had altered the enlistment period for Other Ranks. Such men served six years with the colours and six with the Reserve. It is likely that Faircloth had already ‘done his time’ and the pair seem to have gone to Ipswich for four months, although exactly why is unclear. It was here that Elizabeth bought the L E Fisher clothing. They were in Colchester on 30 March 1889 and unable to find work, returned to London. Elizabeth was some five months pregnant by this time and they moved into the lodging house of Mrs Paine in Manilla Street, Millwall, on 18 April. This was very near the river, next to the West India Dock pier. At Elizabeth’s last inquest, Mrs Paine reported that Faircloth was violent towards the woman who appeared to be his common law wife. They parted on 28 April, perhaps four days before she died, Faircloth going south to try his luck in Croydon.
Elizabeth told him she was going home to her mother, but Catherine Jackson was in the workhouse by then, so it is likely that her father was dead and there was nothing that passed for a family home. On 29 April Elizabeth left Mrs Paine’s owing a week’s rent. She was sleeping rough on the Thames Embankment, along with a lot of o
ther down-and-outs. Journalist George R Sims wrote a few years later:
… soon after 1 a.m. the sleepers-out have settled down into their al fresco slumbers and so the Embankment presents a picture of the mingled magnificence and despair that is perhaps without parallel in the world. Here the lost souls wander gloomily. Here the homeless vagabond and the prowler in search of prey herd together. Men, old and young, grey-haired women and girls just come to womanhood crowd together in sheltered corners … there are some desperate men among the Embankment ‘dossers’ – men who would not hesitate to fling their stunned and despoiled victims into the Thames if the opportunity were given them … But not all these children of the night are criminals or roughs. Some are the sons and daughters of despair.1
From this hard, cold bed, Elizabeth made her way back to her old Chelsea haunts. Her mother’s friend, Mrs Minter of Cheyne Road, met her and gave her 3d for a meal and the old Ulster her body parts would later be found wrapped in. Elizabeth was coping but could not go into the workhouse because she knew her mother was there. Mrs Minter saw her again the next day in the same place, still soliciting, no doubt. Later that day, another witness, Annie Dwyer, from Turk’s Row, saw Elizabeth with a man wearing a dark coat, light moleskin trousers and a rough cap. Like all the eyewitness accounts of men seen talking to the Ripper’s victims shortly before their deaths, this is almost useless. Annie believed the man might have been a sailor, but there is nothing overtly in his dress to indicate this. He was probably simply a client.
