by Trow, M. J.
Constable 239H William Pennett was a sergeant by the time he appeared in a group photograph of his Division. He is sitting on the floor in front of senior officers, with his ankles crossed and his helmet in his lap. He looks grim and determined, probably much as he did about five in the morning of Tuesday 10 September when he discovered a mutilated torso under a railway arch in Pinchin Street. The line was owned by the Tilbury & Southend Railway Company. This was just yards from Cleary’s claimed murder site in Back Church Lane; in fact Pennett had just walked along it. There were four arches that led to the Whitechapel Vestry stone yard and all except the first were boarded off. At first, as he shone his bull’s eye lantern, Pennett saw nothing, but then a sense of horror gripped him. A headless, almost naked, female torso lay on its front about one foot from the right-hand wall of the arch and about eighteen feet from the Pinchin Street pavement. The right arm lay under the body, the left alongside the trunk and a bloody, torn chemise was draped over the neck and right shoulder. Pennett rolled the body over, despite the appalling smell and saw the bowels protruded through a deep gash in the abdomen.
The procedure for any London policeman was to remain with a corpse. Pennett told a passing street cleaner to find the nearest constable, but decided he could not wait for that and blew his whistle. Two colleagues arrived, Constables 205H and 115H, one of them running off to the King David Lane police station for reinforcements while the other stayed with Pennett and they inspected the archway. There was no discernible blood on either the ground or the wall and the body itself was already starting to decompose.
Pennett wrongly believed that the killer was still nearby and on this premise the machinery of the overstretched H Division swung into motion, with Reid and his colleague Inspector Charles Pinhorn in charge of the investigation on the ground. Pinhorn had already worked on the Liz Stride case and knew this patch like the back of his hand. Both men reported to Superintendent Thomas Arnold as head of H Division, another experienced officer who had been involved in the Israel Lipski case two years earlier.1 Under Pinhorn a search of the immediate area uncovered two men asleep in the archway next to the body. Richard Hawke was a sailor, sleeping off a night of drink alongside fellow tippler Michael Keating, who lived at 1 Osborne Street, Whitechapel, but had clearly been too drunk to make it home the previous night. At Leman Street these two were sure there was no body there when they arrived, which meant that the murderer had taken a huge risk by placing it feet from the sleeping men. In the pitch blackness under the arch of course he may have been totally unaware of their presence.
The first medical man on the scene was Dr Percy Clark who arrived about six o’clock. He was assistant to the police surgeon, George Bagster Phillips, who had presided over most of the Ripper’s victims. Phillips was on holiday so Clark supervised the removal of the remains to the mortuary of St George’s in the East (the shell of which still stands) – and examined it further.
Hebbert’s Exercise in Forensic Medicine makes it clear that he was present at the Pinchin Street victim’s post-mortem. The trunk was plump and well formed, the breasts full and there was dark hair in the armpits and on the pubes. The hands were small and the nails were well kept. Rigor mortis had come and gone, the flesh already turning green. The cut surfaces at the hips were dry and black, that at the neck moist and red. The various organs were weighed (there is no mention of this in Hebbert’s earlier reports) and all were confirmed as being ‘fairly healthy’. The stomach appeared to contain plums and there was no abnormality of the intestines. The uterus was weighed and measured and the ovaries were found to be cystic and already degenerating. Hebbert estimated the woman’s height to have been 5ft 3½ins and she would have been between 25 and 40 years old. She had never borne children, nor had she suckled one. The vagina was distended so she was not a virgin. The hands gave no indication of hard manual work but intriguingly, the right little finger had a small circular hardening which might have been caused by writing. There was no mark of a wedding ring. The cause of death was blood loss. All the dismemberment cuts were made after death with a very sharp knife. Once again, as with earlier victims, Hebbert judged that the killer was skilled in anatomy in the sense that a butcher or slaughterer would be. The cuts ‘do not indicate a special anatomical knowledge of the human body’.2
What does not appear in Hebbert’s report is the odd description issued by the police to the press: ‘… both elbows discoloured as from habitually leaning on them. Post-mortem marks apparently of a rope having been tied around the waist.’
Once again, there was hysteria in the East End, Pinchin Street being clogged with the ghouls who had had a field day in similar dingy thoroughfares in Whitechapel over the previous eighteen months.
On 11 September, the day after the torso was discovered, the Commissioner of the Met, James Monro, wrote a detailed report to J S Sanders, private secretary to Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary. In it, he explained that Pinchin Street was one of the quieter areas of the East End. Most of the buildings along it were warehouses, the south side formed by the railway and its arches, so that it was not a street that would be busy with locals day and night, unlike most of Whitechapel. Monro was at pains to point out that the officer who found the body passed the place and checked it every half an hour, despite the huge pressure the Division was under. Monro believed that the torso had been placed in the archway between five and five thirty on the morning of 10 September. This is almost the only occasion in all the eight torso murders when such precise timings are possible. And yet the police still missed their man.
The thick black lines represent the cuts made to dissect the body. The shaded areas are the parts that were never found.
From the forensic evidence, Monro worked on the basis that the woman died on the night of Sunday 8 September. This was exactly a year after the murder of Ripper victim Annie Chapman and that dark – and irrelevant – fact probably led all sorts of people to all sorts of speculation. Monro’s next conjecture was very sound and leads us closer to our man:
The body must have been concealed, where the murder was committed during Sunday night, Monday and Tuesday up till dawn. This leads to the inference that it was so concealed in some place to which the murderer had access, over which he had control, and from which he was anxious to remove the corpse.
Monro conjectured that this took place in a house or lodging and that the body had to be removed before the smell began to arouse suspicions of neighbours.
The dump site was important and Monro allowed himself some rhetorical questions. Was this Jack’s handiwork? If it was, it represented a new departure, because of the very different MO involved. Of the Ripper’s victims, only Mary Kelly died indoors. And all of them were the work of a disorganized killer who selected his victims by place, carried out a frenzied ‘blitz’ attack and left them where they lay. Monro did not use this terminology but even so he doubted whether the Pinchin Street victims came under this category. There was no sign of the Ripper’s frenzy, no focus on the reproductive organs; rather, there was an almost leisurely skilled dismemberment of the body and no definite cause of death. If the body had not been found in Whitechapel no one would have made any connection with the Ripper at all.
Monro had clearly seen the corpse himself and makes the interesting point that the wound leading to the vagina may have been made to simulate the widely reported Ripper crimes. Monro’s conclusion was that this was not Jack’s work, but that it bore a closer link with murders ‘known as the Rainham mystery, the new Police building case and the recent case in which portions of a female body (afterwards identified) [i.e. Elizabeth Jackson] were found in the Thames’.3
What evidence had the police on the ground uncovered? Detailed searches in the area revealed nothing. Waste ground, carts and the railway line were scoured. Thames Division rowed up and down the stretch of river around Wapping known as the Lower Pool, looking in vain for other body parts to complete the Pinchin Street torso. Blood-stained clothing was found in Batt
y Street, not far to the north-east, but it proved to be menstrual blood and completely irrelevant.
In the days ahead, the New York Herald remembered the story of John Cleary. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who had headed up the Ripper investigation between September and October of the previous year, interviewed the paper’s night editor, Mr Cowen and Mr Fletcher, one of the reporters who had gone to Back Church Lane days earlier on a wild goose chase. Cleary had given his address as 21 White Horse Yard, clearly a lodging house. The deputy there, Mr Yates, knew no one of that name, but a John Leary had stayed there for three weeks and left, owing rent. When this man was eventually found, he was not the informant who had gone to the Herald. As a result of police enquiries, John Arnold, a newspaper seller, came forward to say that it was he who had gone to the Herald although he gave no explanation of why he gave a false name and address. He had been approached on the evening of Saturday 7 September, having left the King Lud pub at Ludgate Street and was walking up Fleet Street. A man in a uniform had said to him, ‘Hurry up with your papers; another horrible murder’. When Arnold asked where, he was told, ‘In Back Church Lane.’
Arnold’s description of the man was detailed. He was 35 or 36 years old, about 5ft 6 or 7ins, with a fair complexion and moustache. He wore a cheesecutter cap (a working man’s flat cloth version) and a black tunic with black shoulder cords and lightish coloured buttons. He also carried a parcel about 6 to 8 inches long. The uniform details are odd. They do not sound military, but may be connected with the railways or even the docks. Above all, the mention of a parcel smacks of similar descriptions of men seen talking to Ripper victims on the various nights in question. As was apparent at the time, most people expected Jack to be carrying his murder weapon with him, either in a parcel or a Gladstone bag.
I believe there is more to Mr Arnold than meets the eye but in the event, the police had no luck tracing ‘uniform man’.
At Leman Street, Superintendent Arnold briefed Dr George Bagster Phillips, back from holiday and Colonel Bolton Monsell, the Chief Constable of the Met. They were joined by Monro and a decision was made to transfer one hundred extra men from other divisions into Whitechapel. Detectives Godley and Thick were dispatched to make house-to-house enquiries, focusing on butchers’ premises and to sift the usual batch of missing person reports. Thick may have annoyed more than a few residents in this context because H T Hazelwood of High Road, Tottenham, wrote to the Home Office suggesting that he, Thick, was probably the Ripper and should be watched.
The inquest opened in the Vestry Hall, Cable Street, St George’s in the East, with the ever-flamboyant Wynne Baxter in the chair. Reid was there along with Henry Moore from the Yard. We have already in effect heard Constable Pennett’s testimony. Inspector Pinhorn explained that the arches in Pinchin Street were regularly used by down-and-outs who were turned out night after night. He could not explain how the torso had got there. It would have had to be carried on a coster cart or similar vehicle and at that time of the morning, such carts would be travelling in the opposite direction, those bound for Spitalfields Market not leaving until six o’clock. There was no sign of wheeltracks or footprints in the dust and debris near the body. In all this, Pinhorn seems to have had a touching faith in the mindset of a murderer, as though someone who had recently killed and cut up a woman would not be using his cart before the accustomed hour!
The medical evidence would have to wait because Dr Clark was busy with another case at the Old Bailey and Phillips was still making his own investigation on the Pinchin Street corpse. Accordingly, Wynne Baxter adjourned until 24 September.
Until then, likely suspects were rounded up by the police and odd characters were reported to them. They all had to be investigated. The New York Herald felt a certain proprietary interest in all this because of the ‘John Cleary’ link and somehow came up with a possible identity of the Pinchin Street corpse – Lydia Hart, an East End prostitute. She was however found alive, if not too well due to drink, in an infirmary by one of her sons.
By the time the inquest was resumed, Drs Clark and Phillips were available and gave their findings to a packed courtroom. Clark believed the murder had taken place about twenty-four hours before he saw it, which would take us to the early morning of Sunday, 9 September. The body seemed to have been recently washed and there were bruises on the back which were caused in life. The pale mark around the waist was caused, he believed, not by a rope but by ordinary clothing. The backs of both hands and forearms were badly bruised. This would have been caused by a tight grip. There was an old injury to the right index finger and a vaccination mark on the left upper arm. ‘Both elbows were hardened and discoloured, as if they had been leant upon.’
Bagster Phillips gave his evidence next, explaining that Dr Gordon Brown, the newly appointed City Police surgeon, had attended the post-mortem too. He had also officiated in the case of the Ripper victim Kate Eddowes, butchered in Mitre Square, and had produced the most detailed of all the Whitechapel murder reports. Phillips assured Wynne Baxter’s jury that there was no sign of poison and this evidence may have been given in relation to the later Ripper cases in which it was rumoured poison was used. He believed the disarticulation weapon to be at least 8 inches long and that the wounds had been carried out by someone ‘accustomed to cut up animals’. He also believed that the actual murder might have been committed by a cut to the throat which had been hidden by subsequent decapitation.
The two down-and-outs under the arches with the body gave their evidence. Michael Keating, licensed shoe-black from Osborn Street, said he could not afford his doss money for the night and so was ‘carrying the banner’, the all-too frequent necessity of the East End’s desperately poor. ‘I was not sober’ he hardly had any need to tell the jury. The first thing he had been aware of that morning was the police waking him up and the inspector (Pinhorn) covering the body with a piece of sacking in which Keating kept his blacking box. This was not a regular sleeping spot for the shoe-black and he was not aware of other sleepers at the time. Richard Hawke, from St Ives in Cornwall, had been paid off his ship seven or eight weeks before and had been staying at Greenwich Hospital. He had left there two weeks before and gave no account of himself until he reached the Pinchin Street arches at about twenty past four on the morning of 10 September. He had drunk about three pints and ‘was not exactly sober’. With him was another seaman from the Sailors’ Home and they both lay down in the next arch to the one where the body was found. Neither of them saw or heard anything.
Next came cabman Jeremiah Hurley, of 10 Annibal Place, who worked for John Smithers of Well Street. He was knocked up by a policeman at five o’clock (this was an unofficial service local beat ‘bobbies’ often did) and was entering Pinchin Street from Phillips Street at five thirty when he saw a man ‘who had the appearance of a tailor’. Author R Michael Gordon says that this man was located and he had no knowledge of the murder, although what it was about his appearance that led Hurley to assume he was a tailor it is difficult to say.
Inspector Henry Moore showed the jury a plan of the crime scene as drawn by Inspector Charles Ledger of G Division. It still survives and is a very accurate drawing, showing the boarded up arches and two lamp brackets fitted to the wall.
When Dr Phillips was recalled, the coroner asked if there was any similarity between the Pinchin Street victim and ‘the woman in Dorset Street’ (Mary Kelly). The reply was that Kelly’s injuries showed wanton savagery, whereas the Pinchin Street corpse bore the hallmarks of careful dismemberment for the sake of disposal.
That was as far as the inquest could go and Wynne Baxter was no doubt less than happy when he told the jury to consider their verdict. It could only be ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’.
Sergeant Godley’s missing persons angle was still throwing up possibilities however. The Morning Advertiser of 30 September carried the story that the Pinchin Street torso could have been that of Emily Barker from Northampton. Her mother claimed
that she had made the chemise wrapped around the remains (which would explain why it had no manufacturer’s label) and that she recognized the mark on her finger. Emily had last been seen alive by a missionary ‘carrying the banner’ in a doorway two days before the Pinchin Street discovery. She had not been fully clothed then and was clearly living a ‘wild life’. In fact, Emily was too short and too young to be the Pinchin Street victim and the Advertiser reported on 1 October that Scotland Yard were satisfied that the remains were not those of Emily Barker, whom presumably they had found alive and well.
Four days after that, the Pinchin Street victim was preserved in alcohol and laid to rest. Inspector Moore reported on 5 October:
I attended at the cemetery at time specified and witnessed the interment. It was placed in grave number 16185 and upon the metal on box was the following:
This case contains
body of a woman (unknown)
found in Pinchin Street
St Georges-in-the-East
10th Septr./89.
Do clues still lie in that specially sealed box in the East London Cemetery, Plaistow, waiting for a more technologically advanced age … like ours?
