by Trow, M. J.
At almost the same time, a gardener was making a gruesome discovery in Bedford Square, a few hundred yards to the south-east and only minutes walk from Alfred Mews.2 Thrown over the railings in the gardens in the centre of the square was a parcel and in it a human arm which had been dipped into lime in an attempt to destroy it. These remains were taken to the police who, under the direction of Chief Inspector Richard Williams and Inspector Hollis of the Great Northern Railway, found more body parts. They were taken to St Giles’s Mortuary and the police surgeons went to work.
We have to see all this in the context in which the Victorians did. Even a casual flick through national and local newspapers of the time paints a nightmare world which we cannot imagine. Five years earlier, an Irish maidservant, Kate Webster, had quarrelled with her employer, Mrs Julia Thomas at her house in Park Road, Richmond. The quarrel led to Julia being thrown downstairs and then strangled by Kate, who had the perennial problem of body disposal. She opted for dismemberment, hacking Mrs Thomas’s head off with an aptly named cutthroat razor and her arms and legs with a meat saw from the kitchen. She parboiled the limbs and torso in a copper and burned the woman’s intestines and internal organs. Nauseated by the process though she was, Kate packed the body parts into a wooden box only to discover there was no room for the head and one foot. Rumours that she tried to sell the fatty scum from the copper as dripping were never substantiated, but she was not the last killer to make such a literal profit from her work.3 She shovelled the foot onto a dung heap and stuffed the head into a black bag. Neither the foot nor the head was ever found, even though Kate had the nerve to allow two friends, the Porters from Notting Hill, to carry it for her to a railway station. She engaged the help of Robert Porter to help her carry the trunk with the body parts to Richmond Bridge and, when the lad walked off, she threw it into the river.
Here it was found by a coal heaver the next morning and the finds taken to Inspector Harber at Barnes police station. Subsequently, the ‘Barnes Mystery’ became a source of local fascination and Kate Webster wandered around in her dead mistress’s clothes, arranging for the sale of the house and contents before planning to return to Ireland.
When neighbours became suspicious, police searched Mrs Thomas’s house and found a razor, an axe and charred bones. Kate Webster was arrested in Ireland and brought back to face trial. Had the Thames torso killer ever been caught, the prosecution would have faced the same problem that Sir Henry Gifford, the Solicitor General, did at Kate’s trial. With no head, how was it possible to prove that the separated and half-cooked corpse had once been Julia Martha Thomas? In the event, the evidence against Kate was too strong, largely circumstantial though it was and she was hanged at Wandsworth gaol by the executioner William Marwood.
But the horrors did not end with Kate Webster, whose wax likeness soon appeared at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors (which was open, by the way, between 8am and 10pm, six days a week). In September 1884, a disgusted ‘countryman’ wrote to the Holborn Guardian to complain about an abandoned graveyard in the area where bones had been removed from desecrated tombs. Parcels containing newborn infants were turning up regularly all over the Metropolis and in November a box was sent through the post to the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt. It contained a dead baby and a covering letter from its parents. Inspector Andrews from Scotland Yard (quite possibly Walter Andrews ‘a jovial gentlemanly man, with a fine personality and a sound knowledge of his job4 ), was sent to investigate. But there had been no crime. The baby had died of natural causes and the distraught parents wanted to bring attention to the fact that there was no burial space available in their area.
Against this background of brutality and tragedy with headlines of other atrocities reading ‘Shocking Case’ and ‘Extraordinary Outrage’, the body parts found at King’s Cross merited little space. ‘The police’, noted the Clerkenwell Press routinely, ‘are investigating the affair and the coroner has been communicated with’.5
And it soon became clear that not one, but two different bodies were involved. Almost a month earlier, on 25 September, Charles Fitch of 179 Barnsby Road found human bones in the Ornamental Gardens of Mornington Crescent. The Crescent lies to the northwest of Alfred Mews along Hampstead Road, a continuation of the Tottenham Court Road. There is about a quarter of a mile between the two finds. A constable who only appears by his collar initials in the Clerkenwell Press – PC 559 of ‘S’ Division – took the remains to nearby Albany Street police station. The police surgeon here, having examined the remains, decided that these bones had been used for anatomical purposes, but beyond that was infuriatingly vague. Does this mean that the Mornington Crescent find was a hoax, the rather unpleasant prank of a medical student, which The Lancet back in 1873 assured its readers could not happen? Or could the police surgeon have been wrong? He had only a left arm, hand and two feet to work with, but was convinced they belonged to a female and she was young.
There was a delay as a result of deciding which body parts belonged to which victim and the inquest was not held until 11 November. Dr Danford Thomas opened the proceedings at St Giles coroner’s court on all the remains found, including the portion located by police officers from the pavement outside 33 Fitzroy Square, which was a drill hall and armoury (and is today, with a certain irony, part of the London Foot Hospital!).
The first witness was George Peck, the Bedford Square gardener who explained his finding of the ‘pieces of flesh’ on the ground. Questioned by the coroner, Peck told the jury that the parts were wrapped in brown paper and the package had been thrown over the railings. The lime that covered the flesh also ended up on the iron spikes. A constable from Tottenham Court Road police station had collected the parts in a basket.
William Meager was employed as scavenger by the St Giles Board of Works and was sweeping Alfred Mews on the morning of 23 October when he saw a newspaper parcel some 15 yards away from the dustbin of a family called Thexton. He simply scooped it up, not checking the contents. That pleasure fell to Inspector Summers of the Met who found a quantity of a woman’s hair in the rubbish dumped by Meager at the King’s Cross refuse tip.
Constable 305E John Watts was on his beat on the southwest side of Fitzroy Square when he noticed a ‘quantity of human flesh’ outside number 33. This was clearly placed beyond the iron gate and railings that led to the building’s semi-basement because the officer had to ask a caretaker to let him go down to investigate. Here he found the ‘lower parts’ of a body at a distance of about a foot apart. They were covered in a strongly smelling white powder. The Pall Mall Gazette was adamant that this drop was done with great coolness and in a tiny window of opportunity: ‘The side walk in front of the house is constantly patrolled by police … it is believed that the parcel was deposited between ten o’clock and ten fifteen, when the police relief takes place.’
Dr Samuel Lloyd told the inquest jury that the body parts found in Alfred Mews, Fitzroy Square and King’s Cross station all came from the same individual. His next observation was odd however. He believed, from the shape of the delicate arms, hands and well-manicured nails, that the victim was a gentlewoman. The face was smooth and the hair long and fair.
The thick black lines represent the cuts made to dissect the body. The shaded areas are the parts that were never found.
The scant information on this murder – or was it, including the Mornington Crescent find, two murders? – is not helpful. There is nothing like the detail of the 1873 torso, but of course more than that of 1874. If this victim was not a prostitute, but a woman of refinement as the appearance suggested, why did no one come forward to report her missing? I think the answer lies in the tattoo which was found on the dead woman’s arm. It was a rose and in the 1880s, the only sort of women who had themselves tattooed were those who tended to the exotic and avant-garde. At the upper end of such an echelon were society beauties such as Jenny Jerome, the American heiress who had married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1873. At the lower end were the relat
ively well-to-do street walkers we met in Chapter 7. It may be of course that Dr Lloyd had little experience of such ladies of the night (although as a divisional police surgeon, that is hardly likely). Lloyd believed her to have been between 25 and 50, but if there was a head, albeit a decaying one, why was he not able to paint a clearer picture or estimate a rough time of death and its cause? The body had been dissected by ‘some one skilled, but certainly not for the purposes of anatomy’.
The Mornington Crescent finds had lain in the St Pancras Mortuary for some time and had been buried. Lloyd wanted these exhumed to see if they were the missing parts of the Alfred Mews corpse. Inspector Langrish from Bow Street was in charge of the case and told the jury that his investigations were ongoing. The Times of two weeks earlier had quoted Lloyd as saying that two different bodies were involved, then he retracted and said one. He guessed that the murder probably took place sometime around April (though he would not be drawn on that at the inquest). Dr Danford Thomas promised to ask the Home Secretary, while arranging for the exhumation, whether a reward should be posted.
One curious facet of the case was that many of the body parts appeared to have been slightly crushed by being piled at some stage on top of one another; some of the 1873 finds exhibited similar characteristics. Each had been placed in some sort of receptacle and, as with virtually all the other torso murders, dismemberment had been carried out soon after death.
If Langrish and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Roman, were hoping for someone to come forward to identify the victims or to provide some clue, they were hoping in vain. In what is probably the most bizarre of all the torso killings, the body parts found off the Tottenham Court Road were never given a name. But I believe we can be certain that they were victims of the same man.
And he would strike again, as we have seen, in 1887, 1888 and 1889, before vanishing into the river mist for ever.
Chapter 11
Men Behaving Madly
Whoever the torso murderer was and whatever his motivation, he must rank as a serious contender for the world’s first serial killer. The term and the concept were unknown to the Victorians, but everybody from the ranks of the police, doctors and journalists expected someone who dismembered people in this way to be a literal monster. They thought exactly the same about Jack the Ripper. Both killers would be certifiable lunatics, with wild, rolling eyes, irrational behaviour and would literally be dripping blood. This is why, in 1873, the press made great play of the two Broadmoor escapees. We now know enough about serial killers to know that they never exhibit these tendencies, but there were many men at the time who did and if several of them were once considered potential Rippers, they could have been the torso killer too.
The extraordinary social spotlight thrown on the East End as a result of the Whitechapel murders revealed disturbing facts about some of the men who lived there. None of them was Jack, but they all bore watching.
Aaron Davis Cohen was 23 when he was arrested by Constable 91H John Patrick. He was brought before Thames Magistrates Court the next day, charged with being, in the unkind legal language of the time, ‘a lunatic wandering at large’. It may be mere coincidence that Gertrude Smith, Mary Jones and Ellen Hickey, all prostitutes, were arrested at the same time. Or it may be that Cohen was rounded up with them in one of the Met’s periodic brothel raids. On the same day, 7 December 1888, he was taken to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary and admitted under the name of David Cohen. He gave his address as 86 Leman Street, but that was a Boys’ Club at the time and this may be an example of his irrationality.
For the next fortnight, Cohen stayed in the Infirmary in Baker’s Row and the medical officer, Dr Larder, noted that he was violent and noisy, threatening other inmates, damaging property and dancing. The Infirmary had its share of ‘imbeciles’ as they were called, usually harmless, sad introverts, but Cohen was too much of a handful and was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum on 21 December. Here he had to be force-fed and spent the next nine months being destructive and dirty. By October 1889 he was ill and confined to bed and died of phthisis (tuberculosis) on the 20th. To those who believe that Mary Kelly was the last of the Ripper’s victims, the removal of Cohen from the streets a month later explains why the Whitechapel murders stopped. There is of course no evidence against the man at all. As a Jew, he would be most unlikely to kill a gentile, let alone five; inter-racial killings are a rarity among serial murderers.1
Another ‘lunatic at large’ was Thomas Hayne Cutbush. He was the nephew of Superintendent Charles Cutbush who shot himself in 1896 after several years of depression. Thomas lived in Albert Street, Kennington, and may have contracted syphilis in 1888. Since the disease takes several years to affect the brain, it is unlikely that it triggered the paranoid delusions which led to him abandoning his job and wandering at night. He often returned home with muddy clothes.
On 5 March 1891 he was detained as a lunatic in Lambeth Infirmary but escaped, staying on the run for four days. During this time, with a knife he bought in Houndsditch, he assaulted Florence Johnson and Isabelle Anderson in Kennington, by prodding them in the bustles. In this, he was almost certainly emulating a sadist named Colicott who had stabbed six women earlier in the year in the Kennington area. Astonishingly, Colicott got off on a technicality and it was as well that none of the women was seriously hurt. Cutbush was arrested on 9 March and committed to Broadmoor where he died in 1903. The Sun newspaper, on 13 February 1894, suggested Cutbush as a possible Whitechapel murderer, but in his famous ‘memoranda’, Sir Melville Macnaghten quite rightly pointed out that no one capable of the appalling slaughter in 1888 would be content merely to prick girls’ bustles three years later.
On 11 September 1888, when the Whitechapel murders were escalating and the torso killer had already claimed four victims, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner at the Yard, wrote a memo to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, private secretary to Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary. He mentioned three suspects and complained that his officers were being constantly hampered by reporters who followed them everywhere and compromised leads by badgering potential witnesses before the police could do their job properly. Two dangerous men were mentioned by name; the third was simply a description of a blood-stained man in a brothel and proved a dead end. Warren wrote of his second suspect: ‘A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a Surgeon – has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.’2
Oswald Puckeridge was actually a chemist. He was born in 1838 and married Ellen Puddle thirty years later. He was admitted to Hoxton House private asylum in Shoreditch on 6 January 1888 and released, as Warren says, on 4 August. No further information is forthcoming. If the police found him and questioned him they could not link him to the Whitechapel killings. All we know is that he died on 1 June 1900 in Holborn Workhouse in the City Road.
Warren’s first suspect is Jacob Isenschmid ‘the Holloway lunatic’: ‘The lunatic Isensmith [sic] a Swiss arrested at Holloway … is now in an Asylum at Bow and arrangements are being made to ascertain whether he is the man who was seen on the morning of the murder in a public house by Mrs Fiddymont.’3
On 11 September, three days after Annie Chapman was murdered and the day Elizabeth Jackson’s arm was found near the sluice by Ebury Bridge Road, two doctors, colleagues from Holloway, reported the peculiar behaviour of a local tenant in Mitford Road. This was a pork butcher named Isenschmid and his wife, who had not seen him for two months, told police that he carried knives with him wherever he went. Found and arrested the next day, it became clear that Isenschmid suffered annual bouts of insanity towards the end of each summer and had been in and out of Colney Hatch for a while. He had classic delusions of grandeur, calling himself ‘the king of Elthorne Road’, and could be very threatening, ostentatiously honing his knife blade. He seemed a likely Ripper for a while, although he had no definite links with Whitechapel, but he was still under psychiatric care when
the later murders took place and was effectively off the hook as a result. For the rest of his life he was mostly in institutions and, despite his profession, cannot have been the torso killer either.
Henry James was far less likely to attack anyone than either Puckridge or Isenschmid but he had his collar felt in the Ripper case anyway. He was seen on the day of Annie Chapman’s death on Cambridge Heath Road, moving in a peculiar way. Thomas Ede, a railway signalman, reported him to the police because he had seen a blade protruding some four inches out of his pocket. James was discounted as a ‘harmless lunatic’ according to local press reports and it was probably his wooden arm that made him move oddly. This is typical of the mindset of the average Victorian working man, who paid to gawp at freak shows like the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick.4 Anyone with a physical deformity was likely to own a sick mind too.
‘Innocent or guilty,’ say the authors of the incomparable Jack the Ripper: A to Z cryptically, ‘it is research centred on Aaron Kosminski … which will most likely lead to the identification of Jack the Ripper, if it has not done so already.’5
If we assume that all the torso murders were carried out by the same man, then that man is not the Polish-Jewish hairdresser Kosminski who did not come to England until 1882. Eight years later he was removed from his brother Wolf’s house in Sion Square and admitted to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse Infirmary. This was 12 July and three days later he was released into his brother’s care. By early February 1891 he was readmitted to another infirmary in Greenfield Street, examined by Dr Edmund King and committed to Colney Hatch where he stayed until April 1894. From there he was sent to the Leavesden Asylum near Watford where he died in 1919. His delusions included hearing voices. He never washed, refused to work and only ate scraps from gutters because he believed fresher food might be poisoned. Kosminski’s involvement in the Ripper case is beyond the scope of this book, although it is likely to be an example of a misidentification by senior police officers not sufficiently au fait with the minutiae of the investigation. He appears as No. 2 in the infamous Macnaghten Memoranda probably written in 1894: ‘He had become insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies.’ Another variant of the same document adds that his hatred was directed at ‘the prostitute class’.
