The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  From the steps the woman’s face was clearly visible. Her hands were raised with the palms upwards as though she had fought for the throat. Her hands and face were smeared with blood as though she had been struggling. Her legs were drawn up with the feet resting on the ground and the knees turned outwards. Her long black coat and skirt had been pushed up over her bloodstained stockings and she had been disembowelled. According to the staccato police report she was

  lying on her back, dead, left arm resting on left breast, legs drawn up, abducted, small intestines and flap of the abdomen lying on right side above right shoulder attached by a cord with the rest of the intestines inside the body; two flaps of skin from the lower part of the abdomen lying in a large quantity of blood above the left shoulder; throat cut deeply from left and back in jagged manner right around the throat.

  There was a handkerchief of some kind tied around the neck. The throat had been so savagely cut that the head was almost severed from the body. According to some newspapers the handkerchief had been tied on by the killer to stop the head from rolling away, but later evidence showed that the woman had been wearing the handkerchief as a neck scarf and that she was wearing it when she was murdered.

  Inspector Joseph Chandler was on duty in Commercial Street when he saw several men running down Hanbury Street towards him and was told what had happened. He arrived at the house within a few minutes of the discovery of the body. Already a crowd (some reports say a mob) had gathered outside the house and he had to force his way through. As the crowds built up they began to threaten local Jews, abusing those they met in the streets and, according to the East London Observer, repeatedly asserting ‘that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime, and that it must have been done by a Jew’. As soon as reinforcements arrived Chandler cleared the passage of sightseers and refused to allow anyone into the yard until the body had been examined by the divisional surgeon who had been sent for. He hastily arranged for telegrams to be sent to Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline at Scotland Yard, who had been called in to assist in the Buck’s Row murder, and to several other officers informing them of what had happened.

  While he waited for the surgeon to arrive, Inspector Chandler made a preliminary search of the ground, watched by the scores of faces craning out of the back windows for a view; for some days afterwards the tenants did a brisk business charging sightseers for a look from their windows. He covered the body with some sacking. The yard had not been properly paved and it was a patchwork of stones and earth. He could detect no signs of a struggle, nor of anyone having climbed over the fence. None of the palings was broken but there were some bloodstains on the fence about fourteen inches above the ground, immediately above the blood that had flowed from the woman’s throat. The only other bloodstains, varying in size from a sixpenny piece to a pinpoint, were on the back wall of the house, at the head of the body.

  The police had no scientific advisers other than the divisional surgeons, whose role was much like that of today’s scene-of-crime officers. Divisional surgeons like Dr George Bagster Phillips, with twenty years’ practical experience to draw on, were invaluable to an investigation. After formally certifying that the woman was dead he ordered the body to be taken to the mortuary. Ironically, it was carried away in the same shell that had been used for Polly Nichols the week before.

  Phillips made a thorough search of the yard, which yielded several clues. Several items had been deliberately placed or scattered about the yard. The woman’s clothing had not been torn but the pocket of her underskirt had been cut open at the front and at the side. A piece of muslin, a comb and a paper case were lying close to the body. A wedding ring and its ‘keeper ring’ to stop it slipping off, both brass, had been forcibly removed from a finger. Near her head was part of an envelope and a piece of paper containing two pills. On the back of the envelope was the seal of the Sussex Regiment and on the other side the letter M and a Post Office stamp ‘London, 28 Aug., 1888’.

  There was also a leather apron lying saturated with water about two feet from the water tap.

  One popular rumour was that the murderer had scrawled, on the wall of the yard, ‘Five; fifteen more and then I give myself up.’ Equally dramatic was the story told by a young woman called Lyons the following day. She claimed to have met a strange man in Flower and Dean Street close by who asked her to meet him at half past six at the Queen’s Head public house and have a drink with him. Having made her promise that she would meet him he disappeared, but met her at the appointed time. As they were drinking he startled her by saying, ‘You are about the same style of woman as the one that’s murdered.’ When she asked him what he knew about her he muttered, ‘You are beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don’t always find ’em.’ The man then hurriedly left the bar. The young woman had followed him until they were near to Spitalfields Church when, suddenly realizing that he was being followed, the man had rushed away and was lost sight of. The woman’s description was identical with the published descriptions of the elusive Leather Apron. According to The Times the police had already searched more than two hundred common lodging houses for him.

  Shortly before 2 p.m. on the Saturday afternoon Dr Phillips went to the mortuary to make the post-mortem and was astonished to find that the body had been stripped, the blood washed off the chest and the clothes tossed into a corner of the shed except for the handkerchief which was still tied around the neck. The clerk of the guardians had ordered this to be done and detailed two nurses for the work. Later, at the inquest, Phillips protested as he had done before, at the conditions in which he was forced to work. It was incredible that so large a borough did not have its own mortuary. Bodies dragged from the river had to be packed in boxes.

  It was the victim’s friend Amelia Farmer who identified her. She told the coroner at the inquest when it opened on Monday, 10 September at the Working Lad’s Institute, Whitechapel Road, that she lived in a common lodging house at 30 Dorset Street. She identified the body as that of Annie Chapman, nicknamed Siffey, who for the past four years had lived in common lodging houses in and about Spitalfields and Whitechapel. She was then receiving an allowance of ten shillings a week from her husband. Some eighteen months past the payments had stopped and it was then that Chapman had learned that he had died, aged forty-two, on Christmas Day 1886 after a six-month illness.

  Annie’s family background was military. Her father had been a guardsman and she had grown up in the military barracks in London and Windsor. She was twenty-eight years old when she married a coachman, John Chapman, in 1869. They had three children, one of them, a boy, was possibly a cripple. The family moved to the countryside, to Clewer near Windsor, but eventually Annie’s drinking habits forced John to reluctantly separate from his wife. Annie took to the roads about Clewer and Windsor like a common tramp before eventually making for London.

  Chapman, by all accounts, was a clever woman. She was quiet, sociable and well educated. Occasionally she tried to earn some money by selling flowers or doing crochet work. Frequently she got drunk, usually on her favourite rum, and as she was not fussy about how she earned her living she was soon well known as a prostitute on the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel. In 1886 she was living with a man who made iron sieves. It was for this reason that she was nicknamed Siffey or Dark Annie Sievey.

  Amelia Farmer had seen her two or three times in the week before she died. She had met her on the Monday when she had complained of feeling unwell. At the time she was sporting a black eye and had a badly bruised chest, the result of a drunken brawl with Liza Cooper, a prostitute Chapman had known for fifteen years. Dark Annie, as Chapman was also known, occasionally spent the weekend at the lodging house with a man locally known as the Pensioner. He lived only a short distance away in Osborn Street. The quarrel between the two women had started over a piece of soap that Dark Annie had borrowed for the Pensioner to wash with. She promised to return it but did not do so, and when she was asked for it the follo
wing week she contemptuously tossed a halfpenny to Liza and told her to go and buy some more. Later, they happened to meet in the Britannia public house. Liza was drunk – probably Dark Annie was also – and they started to quarrel. They were still quarrelling when they staggered back to the doss-house kitchen. Dark Annie finally slapped the other woman’s face and told her, ‘Think yourself lucky I did not do more.’ Now Annie was about forty-one years old, stout and well-proportioned; she was described as one who had seen better days. She was a small woman, only five feet tall, with dark brown wavy hair, blue eyes, a large thick nose and two teeth missing from her bottom jaw. She was a formidable opponent. Unfortunately, she had badly underestimated Liza Cooper who mauled her and kicked her and blacked her eye and badly bruised her chest. When Amelia Farmer saw her some days later she was still creeping around like a sick cat. Next day, Tuesday, 3 September, she had met her again by the side of Spitalfields Church. Dark Annie again complained of feeling unwell and said that she thought she would go to the casual ward for a day or two. She had had nothing to eat or drink that day except for a cup of tea. Amelia Farmer had given her twopence for a cup of tea and told her not to have any rum. She didn’t see her again until 5 o’clock on the Friday afternoon when she asked her if she was going to Stratford. Annie again complained of feeling too ill to do anything. She was listless and didn’t want to move but said, ‘It’s no use my giving way. I must pull myself together and go out and get some money, or I shall have no lodgings.’ That was the last time Amelia Farmer had seen her alive.

  The next witness was Timothy Donovan, the deputy of the common lodging house at 35 Dorset Street. Twenty-nine-year-old Donovan was a dying man, wasting away from consumption aggravated by alcoholism causing cirrhosis of the liver. He died just a few weeks later in the London Hospital on 1 November, 1888. He told the court that Annie Chapman had lived in the lodging house for about the past four months except for the last week, during which time he had not seen her until the Friday evening. Around 7 o’clock she had come into the lodging house and asked him if she could go into the kitchen. Donovan had known her for about sixteen months and let her stay in the kitchen until nearly 2 a.m. when he was compelled to turn her out as it was obvious by then that she wasn’t going to rent a bed. She told him that she had been ill and in the infirmary and asked him to trust her for the doss money. He told her that she knew the rules, and that she could not stay without paying. Normally, Annie would get drunk on a Saturday night, but not during the rest of the week. Tonight, however, she had been drinking, but she could walk straight. Donovan did not see which way she went out but, as she left, she told him that even though she had no money he was not to let her bed, which was still vacant, as she would soon be back.

  Apart from an unconfirmed report that she had been serving at a public house in Spitalfields market less than half an hour before she was murdered, the last two people to see her alive were the night watchman at the lodging house, who saw her walk away in the direction of Brush field Street, and the park keeper’s wife, who saw her talking to her killer.

  Not all of Dr Bagster Phillips’s evidence could be published in the newspapers. Some of it could only be reproduced in The Lancet. In court he began by saying that the woman’s face and tongue were swollen and that there was bruising on the face and chest. There were abrasions on the finger where the rings had been torn off. The incisions in the throat indicated that they had been made from the left side of the neck. There were two distinct cuts, parallel to each other, and about half an inch apart. From the way the muscles had been worried it seemed as though the killer had tried to cut through the spine and take off the head.

  The abdomen had been entirely laid open and the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments which had been lifted out and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis, the uterus and its appendages with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been entirely removed. Obviously the work was that of an expert – or one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.

  The cause of death, he concluded, was visible from the injuries he had described. From these appearances he was of the opinion that death arose from syncope, or failure of the heart’s action in consequence of loss of blood caused by the severance of the throat. The report further showed that, besides being undernourished, she was already dying from chronic diseases of the lungs and brain which would have killed her within a short time.

  Cross-examined by the coroner, he thought that the murder weapon must have been a very sharp knife with a thin, narrow blade, at least six inches to eight inches long, probably longer. The injuries could not have been inflicted with a sword-bayonet or bayonet. They could have been done with a post-mortem knife but ordinary surgical cases might not contain such an instrument. Knives used by slaughtermen, which were well ground down, were possible alternatives but those used in the leather trade would not be long enough in the blade. There were indications that the murderer had some anatomical knowledge. Even without a struggle he did not think that he could have committed all the injuries in under a quarter of an hour. Had he done them in a deliberate way, as a professional, it would probably have taken him the best part of an hour.

  The leather apron which had been found he dismissed as of no importance. There had been no blood on it and from its appearance it had not been recently unfolded. Some staining on the wall of a nearby house looked like blood but on examination turned out to be urine. Referring again to the bruises on Annie Chapman’s face he said that those about the chin and the sides of the jaw were recent but those on the chest and temple were several days older. Clearly the latter were the result of the brawl with Liza Cooper. He thought that the killer had taken hold of Chapman by the chin and made his incision from left to right. To a suggestion that she might have been gagged he could only point to the swollen face and protruding tongue, both of which were signs of suffocation.

  It seemed as if society as a whole had needed some horror such as this to awaken them to the fact that within a cab-hire distance of the palaces and mansions of the West End there were ‘tens of thousands of fellow creatures begotted and reared in an atmosphere of godless brutality, a species of human sewage, the very drainage of the vilest production of ordinary vice; such sewage ever on the increase, and in its increase for ever developing fresh depths of degradation’.

  An unknown moralist in a letter to The Times laid the blame for the killings squarely on society and not on the half-crazed monster terrorizing the East End in his search for blood and whose legend was even then being created. Society had sown the seed and must reap the harvest.

  The Revd Samuel Barnett, vicar of St Jude’s, Whitechapel, more pragmatically thought that the Whitechapel horrors would not have been in vain if ‘at last’ the public conscience was awakened to the life that these horrors revealed. ‘The murders were, it may almost be said, bound to come; generation could not follow generation in lawless intercourse, children could not be familiarised with scenes of degradation, community in crime could not be the bond of society and the end of all be peace.’ As one of those who for years had known of the conditions that the killings had brought to the general attention of the public, he offered some practical remedies to these problems. He was careful to point out that these criminal haunts were of limited extent. The greater part of Whitechapel was as orderly as any part of London and the life of most of its inhabitants was as moral, if not more so, as that lived in some of the wealthier parts of the capital. Most of its evil was concentrated in an area of about a quarter of a mile square and to deal with it, or at least to bring it under control, he offered some practical suggestions.

  There could be more efficient police supervision. There had never been enough policemen to do anything more than to contain crime within certain areas. Rows, fights and thefts had been allowed to go unchecked in these rookeries of
crime so long as the main thoroughfares were safe. More policemen were therefore needed to enforce the law in these areas. There should be, at least, adequate street lighting and cleaning. The back streets were gloomy and dirty and encouraged crime.

  Barnett failed to point out that this was not the fault of the local authority. It was a simple question of economics. Because of the general poverty of the area the amount of money that could be raised on the rates was simply not enough to pay for these basic services. Unless some sort of financial help was forthcoming from the richer boroughs, and the East End as a whole made London’s responsibility, then the squalor and vice of Whitechapel could never be mitigated.

  Yet neither the Revd Barnett nor The Times, in which there was some quite lengthy comment on his proposals, was bold enough to suggest that this was a matter of public responsibility rather than private charity. The most sensitive of the issues that the Revd Barnett raised had concerned private property and the fat profits that could be made by landlords and tenants who let, sub-let and sub-let again, piling lease upon lease until a situation was reached, as in 29 Hanbury Street, where seventeen people could exist in grossly overcrowded squalor. He could only express the pious hope that such properties would be bought by public-spirited philanthropists who would not batten on the easy profits that could be made from prostitution and flagrant overcrowding. His final conclusion was that society had to make fresh and determined efforts to extirpate the existing evils which were an intolerable reproach to a Christian and civilized society. Either that or ‘acquiesce in the desolating conclusion that our social organisation demands for its base a festering mass of unexplored and irredeemable iniquity’.