by Robert House
Anderson came to head the CID in a rather roundabout fashion. In his early twenties, after spending some time in law school, he had flung himself into the “long life of a Christian witness,” traveling around Ireland as part of a small team of faith missionaries and trying to convert the uninitiated to the ways of Christ and the Gospel. Anderson seems to have enjoyed his work as a lay-preacher and noted many “happy blessings” in his diary from this period. In one entry he wrote, “A gentleman said that a week ago he was the vilest wretch in the county, but now saved.” The missionaries preached in church buildings or, when that was not available, “in schoolrooms, court-houses or jury-rooms, in private houses, cottages or barns, once at least in a ballroom, at times in the open air.”8 “We are living in the pilgrim fashion,” he wrote to his sister. Anderson later reminisced about this period of his life, noting that he was “greatly humbled by the record of the work there.”9 He would remain devoted to religious study throughout his life and wrote numerous well-received, yet controversial, books on biblical exegesis and interpretation.
Anderson, however, was not destined to remain a missionary. Through family connections, he gradually “drifted into Secret Service work,” first by writing a summary of the history of the militant Irish Fenians who were dedicated to the mission of overthrowing British rule in Ireland and establishing an independent Irish Republic. To achieve their goal, the Fenians employed both politics and terrorism, frequently bombing various locations in central London, including Scotland Yard itself. Anderson’s expert knowledge of Fenian organizations eventually became known in high official circles, and he was called to London to deal with Irish terrorist threats to domestic security and to report to the Home Office on political crime in general.10 In this role, Anderson was given access to the detective department of the MET, where he soon “got to know all that was worth knowing about their work.”11 Among other things, Anderson’s responsibilities included interrogating prisoners and infiltrating the ranks of London’s Fenians by planting informants within their numbers.
One of Anderson’s top spies was a man named Thomas Beach. British by birth, Beach was drawn to a life of adventure and wandering, and at the outbreak of the Civil War in America, he crossed the Atlantic and enlisted in the Northern Army under the assumed name Henri Le Caron. It was during this time that Le Caron (as he would henceforth be known) made the acquaintance of John O’Neill, who would later become head of the American Fenians. Through O’Neill, Le Caron learned of various Fenian plots, and after the war he decided to serve his country by infiltrating Fenian organizations as a spy for England. Le Caron initially wrote about the Fenian plots in letters to his father. When the letters were shown to a local Member of Parliament, Le Caron was put in touch with the Home Office, where he met Robert Anderson. Le Caron would serve as a British spy for the next twenty years, until he was finally outed as a spy during the Parnell Commission, a judicial inquiry that gravely damaged Anderson’s reputation and threatened a scandal at a high level of government.
Anderson ran in elite circles, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. He was invited to become a member of “Gossett’s Room,” a social club whose membership was generally limited to members of Parliament. In addition to advising the Home Office on political crime, Anderson served in other capacities, including as secretary of the Royal Commission on Loss of Life at Sea and secretary of the Prison Commission. He also was on the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh Commission, and in this capacity Anderson came to befriend the committee chairman, James Ludovic Lindsay, the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford. The two men shared an interest in astronomy.
By 1880, Anderson had begun lose interest in Secret Service work, and, as he later wrote, he had “openings for other work, both literary and professional, which would have made me independent of it.”12 But then an increase in Fenian bombings in London led to the creation of a new intelligence organization called the Special Irish Branch. At the request of the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, Anderson was “drawn back into Secret Service work,” both advising the Home Office on the creation of the new department and acting as a liaison in daily conference with its head, Adolphus Williamson.13 In the following years, James Monro took over as head of the Special Branch and as chief of the CID and was in both capacities at the start of the Ripper murders in 1888. After Monro’s resignation in August of that year, Anderson was appointed to the post of assistant commissioner (crime) of the Metropolitan Police and chief of the CID.
Operationally speaking, the Special Irish Branch was a suborganization within the MET, which employed many of the same detective methods as the CID—namely, the use of informants, the collection of information on suspected Fenians, and surveillance of suspected members. Monro, who retained his role as head of the Special Branch after his resignation from CID, maintained ties with his previous office in an unofficial capacity. The two departments were closely intertwined, and their functions often overlapped. Thus, it is highly likely that Monro was kept abreast of developments in the Ripper case, even though the case was not handled by his department.
Likewise, with his extensive background as a spymaster and an expert on Fenian activities, Robert Anderson was well acquainted with the inner workings of intelligence agencies such as the Special Branch. The Ripper murders would be his trial by fire. At the time of his appointment, however, Anderson was in such a state of fatigue from overwork that his doctor ordered him to take sick leave on the continent to recuperate. And thus, with notoriously bad timing, Scotland Yard’s new head of CID departed for a holiday in Switzerland on September 7, leaving the department without effective leadership just as the Ripper murders were getting under way. The day after Anderson’s departure, while Leather Apron was still in hiding from both the police and the East End mobs, another murder occurred. Anderson’s holiday was destined to be shorter than planned.
9
Annie Chapman
Annie Chapman was a middle-aged prostitute, short and stout, with dark hair, a thick nose, and a pale face. She was born Annie Eliza Smith in 1840 or 1841, the daughter of George Smith, a private in the 2nd Regiment of Life Guards.1 In 1864, when Annie was in her early twenties, her father committed suicide, coincidentally by cutting his own throat. Five years later, Annie married a coachman named John Chapman. The couple had three children.The oldest daughter, Emily, died of meningitis at the age of twelve, and a son named John was born a cripple in 1880. After this, Annie started drinking heavily. Eventually, she and her husband separated, apparently because Annie’s drinking and “immoral ways” forced the couple to move off the estate where he was employed. Also, it seems that Annie was stealing from her husband’s employer.2
After the separation, Chapman moved to Spitalfields and began to work as a prostitute. As her friend Amelia Palmer put it, Chapman “was not very particular what she did to earn a living.”3 By June 1888, Chapman had taken up residence in “Crossingham’s,” a lodging house at 35 Dorset Street that was run by a man named Timothy Donovan. Dorset Street was in contention with Flower and Dean Street as one of the most criminal locations in the entire East End. “It was a street of whores,” Ralph Finn wrote in his memoirs, which “teemed with nasty characters—desperate, wicked, lecherous, razor-slashing hoodlums.”4 By the late 1880s, Chapman had become involved with a bricklayer named Edward Stanley. The two were together only on weekends, but Stanley frequently paid for Chapman’s bed at Crossingham’s and told Donovan to kick her out if she tried to enter the lodging house with any other man.5
Around September 1, 1888, Chapman got into a fight with a woman named Eliza Cooper, another prostitute who was said to be a rival for Stanley’s affections. It seems that an argument broke out between the two women at the Britannia pub, where they were drinking with Stanley and another man, called Harry the Hawker. Then later, back at Crossingham’s, Chapman slapped Cooper in the face and said, “Think yourself lucky I did not do more.” In retaliation, Cooper punched Chapman, giving her a black eye. When Donovan
later noticed the black eye, Chapman remarked, “Tim, this is lovely, ain’t it.”6
For the next few days after the fight, Chapman did not stay at Crossingham’s, and her whereabouts during this time are unknown. When Amelia Palmer ran into Chapman on September 3 on Dorset Street, Chapman showed her the bruises from the fight with Cooper and said she was feeling sick. The following day, Palmer again saw Chapman near Christ Church on Commercial Street, and Chapman again said that she felt sick and wanted to go to the casual ward (a free clinic). Annie claimed that she had not eaten anything that day, so Palmer gave her two pence for a cup of tea. “Don’t have rum,” Palmer said.7
The next day, Palmer encountered Chapman on Dorset Street. She claimed that “she felt too ill to do anything.” “I must pull myself together and go out and get some money,” she said, “or I shall have no lodgings.”8 By 11:30 that night, Annie was somewhat “the worse for drink” and returned to Crossingham’s, where she sat in the kitchen and shared a beer with another lodger. She then went to the Britannia pub and continued to drink, but within two hours she was back at Crossingham’s, eating a baked potato. The night watchman asked Chapman for money for her bed, but she didn’t have it. She went to see Tim Donovan and told him, “I have not any money now, but don’t let the bed; I will be back soon.” “You can find money for drink, but not for your bed,” Donovan chided her. When Chapman left around 2 a.m., she told the night watchman, “I won’t be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me.” Her whereabouts for the next three and a half hours are unknown.9
Just a five-minute walk north of Crossingham’s was Hanbury Street, described as a “foul, stinking neighborhood where the children are stunted little creatures with vicious faces, old features, and where the women’s faces would frighten one.”10 At 4:45 a.m., a man named John Richardson entered 29 Hanbury Street, where his mother, Amelia, a packing-case maker, both lived and had a workshop in the basement. The front door led from the street into a hallway that went to the back door, which opened onto a fenced-in yard about fifteen feet square. Both the front and the back doors were normally unlocked, and after a recent break-in, Richardson had been in the habit of stopping by to make sure the basement was secure and to throw out prostitutes who used the first-floor landing and the yard for “immoral purposes.” After checking the basement door (the entrance of which was off the yard), he sat on the steps at the back door to cut away a piece of leather that was protruding from his boot. He later said that he had seen nothing unusual at the time.11
About a half-hour later, just as the sun was rising, a woman named Elizabeth Long was walking along Hanbury Street toward Spitalfields Market, when she passed a man and a woman standing on the sidewalk, close against the shutters in front of number 29. The man was turned away from Long, but the woman was facing her, and Long later identified the woman as Annie Chapman. The man and the woman were talking loudly, and Long overheard the man ask, “Will you?” to which Chapman replied, “Yes.”12 “I did not see the man’s face,” Long later said, “but I noticed that he was dark. He was wearing a brown low-crowned felt hat. I think he had on a dark coat, though I am not certain. By the look of him he seemed to me a man over forty years of age. He appeared to me to be a little taller than the deceased.” She described the man as “what I should call shabby-genteel,” and added, “He looked like a foreigner.”13 “Foreigner” was a euphemism meaning “Jew.”
Next door to 29 Hanbury Street was the residence of a carpenter named Albert Cadosch. Around 5:20 a.m. Cadosch went into his backyard, apparently to use the outhouse. A wooden fence, five and a half feet tall, separated his yard from the yard of number 29, and when Cadosch was returning to the back door of his house, he heard a voice from the other side of the fence say, “No!” Cadosch went back inside, then reentered the yard three or four minutes later. This time he heard “a sort of fall against the fence.” Unfortunately, Cadosch did not look over the fence. Instead, he went back inside and then left for work. When he passed the clock at Spitalfields Church, it was 5:32.14
It was shortly after 5:45 a.m. when a resident at 29 Hanbury Street named John Davis entered the backyard and made a shocking discovery. Sprawled between the steps and the fence was the severely mutilated body of a woman. The woman was lying on her back with her clothes disarranged and her legs drawn up, and there was blood everywhere. Davis was terrified and ran out of the house. He returned with some men who had been working at a packing-case maker’s a few houses down, but the men were too afraid to go into the yard and instead went off to find a police officer. When Inspector Joseph Chandler of H Division showed up, it was about 6:15, and there were several people standing in the passage. Chandler briefly surveyed the situation and then sent for the divisional surgeon, Dr. Bagster Phillips, who lived only a few minutes away in Spital Square. After Dr. Phillips arrived, Chandler carefully examined the crime scene and searched the yard. The body was then taken to the Whitechapel mortuary in the same ambulance that had carted Polly Nichols’s body there a little more than a week ago.
Word of this new murder sent the residents of the East End into a panic. “The excitement in the neighborhood of Whitechapel this morning is intense,” an article in the Echo stated. “The discovery of this terrible crime, following as it does so rapidly upon the murders in George-yard and Buck’s-row, seems to have paralyzed the inhabitants with fear. All business in the vicinity of the scene of the murder, has, apparently, for the time, been stopped. The streets were, this morning, swarmed with people.”15 The newspapers did a roaring business selling the latest editions, and it was not long before everyone was discussing all of the gory details of the latest crime. One woman reading a newspaper account of the murder was apparently so affected that she collapsed “in a fit” and died a few days later. She had been “killed by emotion,” the Star reported.16
The inquest, which began two days later, only served to increase the panic. Dr. Phillips’s testimony on the third day of the inquest made it clear that not only had Chapman been brutally mutilated, but the killer had apparently tried to decapitate her. “There were two distinct clean cuts on the body of the vertebrae on the left side of the spine,” Phillips stated. “They were parallel to each other, and separated by about half an inch. The muscular structures between the side processes of bone of the vertebrae had an appearance as if an attempt had been made to separate the bones of the neck.”17 According to Phillips, the cause of death was a severed carotid artery resulting from a jagged left-to-right incision across the throat. Phillips thought that Chapman had been “partially strangled” before her throat was cut, and he pointed out, “The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen.” Phillips also noted that “The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached.”18
Phillips then mentioned “various other mutilations of the body” but added that these were so gruesome that it would be too “painful to the feelings of the jury and the public” to describe them. He argued that he did not see any point in detailing the postmortem mutilations at all, because his descriptions up to that point were already sufficient for the court to determine cause of death. Coroner Wynne Baxter accepted this line of reasoning, apparently satisfied that the doctor had a record of the wounds. Baxter subsequently changed his mind and recalled Dr. Phillips several days later, telling him that it was necessary that “all the evidence the doctor had obtained from his post-mortem should be on the records of the Court for various reasons which he need not then enumerate, however painful it might be.”19 The two men argued back and forth for a few minutes, until Dr. Phillips finally agreed to describe the mutilations, but only after all of the women and the children had been cleared from the inquest chamber.20 The evidence he gave was omitted from the Times report of the inquest, because it was deemed “totally unfit for publication,” and several people in the inquest chamber apparently fainted as he gave it.21 T
he following summary was reported in the Lancet:
Mr. Phillips . . . stated that the mutilation of the body was of such a character as could only have been effected by a practised hand. It appears that the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, 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. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri.22
Phillips’s opinion that the mutilations indicated “a practised hand” led the police to wonder whether the murderer might be a doctor or someone with rough anatomical knowledge, such as a butcher. The question of whether the Ripper had anatomical knowledge was later debated by other doctors, and it has been a controversial topic among Ripper scholars ever since.
