Annie and the Ripper

by Tim Champlin

  "Whoever was in there with her must've come out the door and reached back through the window to lock the place; that hole in the window's too small to climb out of."

  "Reckon so," McCarthy said, scrubbing a hand over his unshaven chin.

  "Did anyone see who she was with last night?" Abberline asked.

  "I didn't, but there might be a few of her friends around here who could put y'wise to that. She ran with a few of these women who rent from me."

  "Thanks. I'll want to question them soon."

  Doctor Llewellyn took out his cigar case and offered a smoke to Abberline as the two men moved off a few yards.

  "Thanks. I need the aroma of fresh tobacco to clear the stench from my nostrils."

  The doctor produced a match and the two men lit up. Abberline seldom smoked, especially now that he was working himself back into condition. But there were times, such as this, when a cigar was the only thing that could insulate his senses from such horrible things.

  Curious onlookers came crowding up, and several of the neighbors thrust their heads out of upstairs windows to see what the fuss was about. Word apparently spread quickly about what the ground floor, number 13 Miller's Court contained.

  And still they waited. Abberline finished his cigar, and ground out the stub under his shoe. He turned up his coat collar. The pale November sun had warmed the street as much as it would this day, but the air was still chill.

  Abberline pulled out his watch. "It's nigh onto 1:30." Just as he snapped it shut, a Hansom drew up to the curb and a uniformed constable stepped out.

  "Where's the commissioner?" Abberline snapped, irritated by the long delay. "Is he bringing the man with the bloodhounds?"

  The constable had a strange look on his face. "Commissioner Warren won't be coming, sir. Nor will the dogs. Sir Charles resigned last night, and his resignation was accepted this morning by Home Secretary Matthews."

  "What?"

  "That's what I was just told at headquarters when I went asking for him." As if trying to emphasize the truth of his astounding statement, he added, "The story will be in the afternoon papers. Something about a clash of jurisdiction. But all that's beyond me, sir." He edged away.

  Abberline turned to McCarthy. "Get something to force this door."

  "No need." McCarthy reached through the broken window and turned the latch.

  Doctor Llewellyn pushed the door and it knocked against a table by the bed. The doctor squeezed inside. Abberline motioned for a photographer who'd been summoned and was waiting. "Get some good views of all this before anything is touched or disturbed," he told him as the big, bearded man hauled his bulky camera and tripod inside. The man never batted an eye. He acted as if he photographed scenes like this every day. He set up quickly, loaded his flash tray with powder and shot the room and the body from various angles, taking care not to touch anything or get blood on his equipment. Within a few minutes, he was done and departed to develop his plates in the lab.

  Abberline shoved inside, leaving the door open to clear the smoke and let some of the heat out of the room from the remains of a fire. He was struck by how small the twelve-foot by twelve-foot room seemed. It was furnished only with a bed, two small tables and a chair.

  Mary Jane was lying on her back, wearing a chemise or some type of linen undergarment. The body was near the edge of the bed nearest the door. The other side of the bed was touching the wall partition. The bedcovers had been thrown back.

  Stunned by the sight, Abberline reluctantly looked as the doctor pointed out both the obvious and the less obvious. He found himself holding his breath as he surveyed the carnage. Nothing he'd observed in his police career could compare with this.

  During the doctor's recitation, done in a flat, unemotional voice, Abberline completely forgot to take out his pencil and notebook. It didn't really matter. He'd get it all later in the autopsy report if he needed to. "Her eyes haven't been damaged," he managed to say. "I wonder if the Ripper left them alone purposely to challenge the police to find his image in them."

  "Not much telling what goes through that man's mind," Doctor Llewellyn said. "Indoors here, he had shelter and he had time, so he let his blood lust have free rein. He could hardly have done a more thorough job."

  While the doctor continued to examine the remains, Abberline turned his attention to the coal grate. "Looks like he tried to burn some clothes. Must have been a really hot fire," he said, raking at the embers with a poker and pulling out a tin kettle with the handle and spout melted off. He made a mental note to have the police sift the ashes. "Some women's clothing. Could have belonged to Maria Harvey, though" he added, noting Mary Jane's clothing neatly folded on the chair beside the bed. He wondered if the Ripper had tried to burn any of his own garments that might have been blood-stained.

  "That's about all I can see here," the doctor said after fifteen minutes. "Have the body taken away to Shoreditch mortuary for a detailed post mortem and inquest."

  As the two men exited, a one-horse carrier's cart turned into Dorset Street. Two men unloaded a scratched and dirty shell of a coffin that had obviously seen much use.

  The crowd surged forward against the roped-off area. "Stay back, now folks," one constable said gently. "They'll be bringing her out."

  Silence fell over the crowd. Caps were doffed and eyes glistened as the shell containing all that was left of Mary Jane Kelly was carried from the room, placed in the cart and driven away.

  For some reason, Abberline felt drained as he watched the horse-drawn cart disappear around a corner. It was daytime and he'd had plenty of sleep, but his limbs felt heavy. He had a desire to go home, lie down and sleep for two days. Maybe he'd wake up and be relieved to discover this was all just a nightmare.

  Doctor Llewellyn moved up beside him, slipping his coat back on against the November chill. "I know how you feel. This really took it out of me, too."

  "Doc, she was a prostitute, and consorted with several men she called husbands. But, lordy! She was only twenty-five, had auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes and the most charming Irish accent you ever heard. A laugh and sunny disposition you'd swear were bubbling up from innocence." He swept a hand at the throng around them. "See how they loved her."

  Doctor Llewellyn shook his head. "And the further shame of it, she carried a three month old fetus who'll never see the light of day."

  CHAPTER 11

  The mutilation of Mary Jane Kelly was discovered at mid-morning and effectively put a stop to the Lord Mayor's Day celebration. When word reached the crowds lining the thoroughfare for the parade, nearly everyone left and drifted toward Miller's Court until the nearby streets were clogged with several thousand people. The celebration and the parade dwindled away and halted as the somber mood enveloped the multitude who'd turned out, anticipating a carefree holiday.

  Even after Kelly's body was removed to the mortuary, it took the police more than an hour to completely clear the streets. Number 13 Miller's Court was barricaded until the door could be repaired. The window was boarded up.

  Doctor Llewellyn conducted the autopsy, assisted by Doctor Brown and Doctor Bagster Phillips. The extensive mutilations were recorded, and even the physicians, who by now were used to such things, remarked at the brutality of the attack. They discovered her heart was missing.

  "Did that monster eat it?" Abberline asked Doctor Llewellyn two days later when the surgeon was giving a verbal summary of the post mortem findings.

  "I shouldn't be surprised, given his statement in that letter that he'd eaten a portion of a victim's kidney," the doctor replied.

  "He could have grilled it over that roaring fire he had going in the grate," Abberline said.

  The doctor slowly shook his head. "A very twisted, angry man, indeed."

  The two men were watching from a distance as Kelly's coffin was carried from St. Leonard's Mortuary in Shoreditch to make its way to St. Patrick's Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone. Uniformed police had to clear a path through the mass of peop
le jamming the street in front of St. Leonard's. The pallbearers finally reached the tall black hearse, opened the back doors and slid the coffin inside. Women in the crowd were openly weeping; men removed their hats.

  "Well, it's not just the morbidly curious," Abberline remarked as the crowd slowly fell back to allow the passage for the team of black horses who were snorting and tossing their plumed heads at the crush around them.

  The high wheeled, glass-sided hearse pulled away, the reins handled by a tall man in a black suit. Two mourning coaches, jammed to capacity, followed after.

  "Who's the man up top with the driver?" Abberline asked.

  "Henry Wilton, verger at St. Leonard's Mortuary. Since no one knows where her relatives are, he was determined she would have something better than just a pauper's funeral. He paid for all this himself."

  The funeral cortege passed slowly along the street, trailed by several hundred on foot, many of whom would probably walk all the way to the cemetery.

  "Fred, you think we'll have this many mourners at our own taking off?" Doctor Llewellyn asked quietly.

  "Doubtful," Abberline answered.

  "If all these people are testifying on her behalf, she'll probably walk right into heaven," the doctor continued, apparently in a reflective mood.

  "I'm not going to speculate on that," Abberline said. "My job is to catch up with her killer who's still stalking the earth." He changed the subject. "Who's presiding at the inquest tomorrow?"

  "Doctor Roderick MacDonald. He's a former police surgeon for K Division, and he's not happy about holding the inquest in Shoreditch at all, tying up the time of a coroner's jury. He contends the inquest should be held in Whitechapel since that's where the murder happened."

  "I wish everyone would stop arguing about whose job it is and cooperate to help find this Ripper," Abberline said. "I'm getting sick of these everlasting squabbles. At the town hall?"

  "Yes."

  "Should be interesting. I imagine a lot of witnesses will testify."

  "Since I led the autopsy, I'll be one of the first."

  "Well I hope to get some useful leads from the testimony. The investigation has been thrown into a jumble since Sir Charles resigned. It's mostly a matter of jurisdiction. No one is quite sure who's giving orders to whom." He looked sideways at the doctor. "Did I tell you Queen Victoria sent a messenger to Scotland Yard late Friday?"

  "No. What for?"

  "Like everyone else, Her Majesty has a theory. Since most of the murders have occurred on weekends, she suggested the police check butchers who arrive on cattle boats that tie up weekends on the Thames before heading across the channel. Time enough for the killer to come ashore and do his dirty work, then disappear back to the boat."

  "Probably as good a theory as any."

  "I've seen those cattle boats," Abberline said. "They routinely travel from Ireland to Portugal, with stopovers here in London. The City of Cork, and The City of Oporto are two vessels that come to mind."

  "I'm not convinced The Ripper has any special anatomical expertise, such as a butcher might have," the doctor said. "Any person of average intelligence can study an anatomy book with illustrations and gain a good idea where the various organs are located."

  "Agreed. Besides, the police have questioned every butcher, meat cutter and medical student they can find. If it's someone off a cattle boat, he must be very familiar with the Whitechapel district to be able to vanish so quickly and so completely. It's almost as if he knows where each constable is going to be and knows the routine of how they walk their beats. That's one reason we've put out so many plainclothes men to roam at random. I was one of them."

  "Well, I was never very good at forming theories or solving puzzles," Doctor Llewellyn said. "Maybe that's why I'm not a good diagnostician."

  "To each his own." He stopped walking. "I have to get back to the office. I'll see you at the inquest tomorrow."

  "Until then." The doctor turned to flag down an approaching Hansom cab.

  Doctor MacDonald began the inquest by establishing that the jurymen had all been taken to the mortuary over the weekend to view the body, completely covered, except for the face. One of the men described Kelly's face as looking like "one of those horrible anatomical specimens." Then they'd gone to 13 Miller's Court where they'd viewed the bloody room.

  Abberline, settled into a wooden armchair at one side of the room, listened to the first witness, Joseph Barnett, the husband, as he told of last seeing Kelly at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday evening when she was talking to Maria Harvey. The court then elicited the information from him about her background. He said she told him she was born in Limerick, but had been taken to Wales as a young child where her father was employed in an ironworks. She claimed to have six brothers and sisters. At age sixteen she married a collier named Davis who was killed in an explosion two years later. Because of the long delay in receiving her compensation, she claimed she was driven to prostitution to survive. She moved to London when she was twenty, and then lived with a succession of four men at different times.

  The next witness was a laundress, Sara Lewis, who went to Miller's Court at 2:30 a.m. to visit a Mrs. Keyler who lived in the room opposite number 13.

  Abberline wondered why she'd be visiting at that hour, but suspected she was a prostitute and didn't want to admit it in public. She described a man she saw standing outside the lodging house door—stout, tall and wearing a "wide-awake" hat. She was sitting in Mrs. Keyler's place, unable to sleep at 4:00 a.m. when she heard a woman scream, "Murder!" It seemed to come from just outside the door. Asked if she was frightened or if she woke up anyone else, she shrugged and said, "No, since there was only one scream."

  A Mrs. Prater, another close neighbor, confirmed that she heard a scream around the same time.

  Both women's statements coincided with medical evidence that Kelly had been killed between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m.

  But Sara Lewis and Mrs. Prater were both contradicted by the next witness, a Mrs. Maxwell, wife of a lodging-house keeper at 14 Dorset St. She stated she saw Mary Kelly at 8:30 Friday morning at the corner of Miller's Court. She'd known Mary about four months. Mrs. Maxwell said she offered her a drink, but Mary declined stating the reason she was up so early was because she felt bad and had just vomited a glass of beer. This coincided with morning sickness. Mrs. Maxwell sympathized with her and they had a brief conversation. Half an hour later, Mrs. Maxwell saw Mary outside the Britannia pub talking to a man in a plaid coat. She said Mary was wearing a velvet bodice, dark skirt, maroon shawl, and no hat.

  There was considerable murmuring among the spectators when she finished her testimony since Mrs. Maxwell's statements had put Mary alive less than two hours before her body was discovered.

  Abberline discounted this testimony in his own mind as a probable case of mistaken identity. He accepted the medical estimate for time of death at not later than 4:30 a.m.

  Doctor Llewellyn was then called, and began to give the autopsy findings, but the coroner cut him short. "No need to go into all the grisly details, doctor," Doctor MacDonald said. "By making all that information public, we might be interfering with the police investigation. Please confine your testimony to the direct cause of death."

  Llewellyn shifted uneasily in his chair, but said, "Mary Jane Kelly was found dead from the mortal effects of the severance of the right carotid artery."

  The coroner rose from his chair. "I do not propose to hear any more evidence today. A verdict as to the cause of death can be drawn from what we've already heard. It is not the jury's duty to uncover the murderer." He turned to the jury. "If you've heard enough to render a verdict, you may do so now. If not, we can adjourn and reconvene in a week or fortnight and hear any additional evidence you wish."

  There was a stir in the gallery.

  The jurymen whispered among themselves. Then the foreman stood. "We have heard enough. We, the jury, find that the deceased met her death at the hands of a person, or persons, unknown."

 
Abberline was stunned. The inquest had lasted only half a day. He sought out Doctor Llewellyn as the crowd filed out of the town hall building.

  "Never saw anything like it," the doctor said. "A truncated inquest when there was still much to be heard and made part of the official, public record. Politics reigns."

  The next day, Abberline was in his office, scanning the newspapers that were still crowing over the resignation of Sir Charles Warren, whom they all considered a hindrance to a proper investigation. True or not, he was gone, and the Metro police were in the hands of an interim supervisor.

  Roger Clark came to the office door. "Inspector, another witness on the Kelly murder has come forward, and the police want you to hear what he has to say. He's downstairs in the hearing room."

  "Send him up here. More congenial surroundings."

  "Right away."

  Five minutes later, a man came in, holding a soft cap in his hands. He doffed a well-worn cape, hanging both on the coat hooks.

  "I'm Inspector Abberline." He shook the man's calloused hand. "Have a chair, Mister…?"

  "George Hutchinson, sir."

  "No need to be formal here," Abberline said, closing the office door. Instead of going behind his desk, he pulled up a straight chair a few feet away.

  Hutchinson looked to be about forty, somewhat taller than average with a lean, weathered face and slender, wiry build. He'd dressed in well-worn tweed jacket, but had on his scuffed work boots.

  "I need to tell you some things that might help with the Mary Jane Kelly murder." He glanced furtively over his shoulder as if to be sure they were alone in the room.

  "Why didn't you come forward at the inquest yesterday?"

  "I planned to, but it ended too quickly before I could get off work."

  Abberline wondered how many others should have testified, but never got the chance.

  Hutchinson leaned forward in his chair, clasping and unclasping his hands between his knees.