Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  Description age about 34 or 35. height 5ft 6 complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes slight moustache, curled up each end, and hair dark, very surley looking dress long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astracan. And a dark jacket under. Light waistcoat dark trousers dark felt hat turned down in the middle. Button boots and gaiters with white buttons. Wore a very thick gold chain white linen collar. Black tie with horse shoe pin. Respectable appearance walked very sharp. Jewish appearance. Can be identified.22

  A later version of the same story that was printed in the newspaper added that the man was carrying a “parcel” about eight inches long, covered in dark cloth, with a strap around it. We will return to Hutchinson’s statement shortly.

  At 2:30 a.m., a laundress named Sarah Lewis was walking along Commercial Street after having had a fight with her husband. She was going to visit her friend Mrs. Keyler at Miller’s Court. On her way there, she noticed a suspicious-looking “gentleman” standing near the Britannia pub, at the corner of Dorset and Commercial streets. In fact, Lewis had run into this same man just the night before, when she was walking with a female friend on Bethnal Green Road. The man had been carrying an ominous-looking shiny black bag about nine inches long and had approached the two women to ask whether one of them would follow him into an entryway. “I don’t like the look of this man,” Lewis’s friend said. “Come away.” The man put down the bag and then picked it up again. “What are you frightened about? Do you think I’ve got anything in the bag?” he asked. He then undid his overcoat and began to reach for something, at which point the two women ran off without looking back.23 When Lewis saw this man again at the Britannia, she was frightened and hurried past. The man looked up, but Lewis could not tell whether he recognized her. She later described him as about forty, short and pale-faced, with a small black mustache, a high round hat, a black coat, and salt-and-pepper trousers.

  After turning into Dorset Street, Lewis noticed a second suspicious-looking man standing across the street from Miller’s Court, “looking up the court” as if he was “waiting or looking for someone.” In all likelihood, this was George Hutchinson himself, because, according to his statement, he waited outside Miller’s Court “for about three quarters of an hour,” between 2:00 and 2:45 a.m. Lewis continued up the court, then went into the room of her friend Mrs. Keyler, directly across from Mary Kelly’s room, and dozed off in a chair.24

  By around 3 a.m., Hutchinson gave up on waiting for Kelly on Dorset Street and left. Around the same time, Mary Ann Cox returned home. This time, the lights in number 13 were out, and Cox heard no noise coming from the room. She went to her room at the far end of the court, but she was worried because she had not paid her rent, and she could not sleep.

  Sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m., Elizabeth Prater, upstairs in number 26, was awakened by her cat, Diddles. “I had a little black kitten, which need to come on to my neck,” she said. “It woke me up from 3.30 to 4.00, by coming on to my face, and I gave it a blow and knocked it off.” Just as the cat jumped to the floor, Prater heard a cry of, “Oh, murder!” She later described the sound as “a faintish one, as though some one had woke up with a nightmare.” The cry seemed to come from the court in back of the house, but Prater paid little attention to it. Such cries were common in Dorset Street.25 Sarah Lewis, at number 1 Miller’s Court, was also awake at this time. She had dozed off in the chair at Mrs. Keyler’s but then woke up, heard the clock strike 3:30 a.m., and could not fall back asleep. Around four o’clock, Lewis heard a woman’s voice cry, “Murder!” Unlike Prater, who said she only heard the cry faintly, Lewis described it as a “scream” or a loud shouting. But like Prater, Lewis was not particularly alarmed by the cry, “especially as a short time before there had been a row in the court,” she said.26 If the cry of “Murder!” actually came from Mary Kelly, it gives a good idea of the time of her death—specifically, sometime around 4 a.m. or shortly before. The difference in the perceived volume of the cry as heard by Lewis and by Prater is not very hard to explain. Lewis was sitting up, wide awake, in a ground-floor room, only about ten feet from Kelly’s room, whereas Prater was probably half-asleep, in a room that was apparently above the storage space in the front part of the house.

  At 7:30 a.m., another neighbor, Catherine Picket, was leaving the court to buy flowers at the market and went downstairs to borrow Kelly’s pelerine (a kind of cape), because her “poor shawl” was “thin as a cobweb,” and it was still raining.27 She knocked repeatedly at Kelly’s door, but there was no answer. Picket assumed that Kelly was still sleeping and left.

  At 10:45 a.m., John McCarthy sent his servant, Thomas Bowyer (aka Indian Harry), to collect the rent from “Mary Jane,” because she was 29 shillings in arrears. Bowyer went to number 13 and knocked on the door. Getting no answer, he knocked again. When he still received no response, Bowyer walked around to the corner by the gutter spout to look in Kelly’s window. He reached through the hole in the broken glass and pulled the curtain aside. What Bowyer saw was so hideous that he must not have believed his eyes—there were “two lumps of flesh” lying on a table near the door. Bowyer recoiled, then looked again, this time noticing “the body of somebody lying on the bed, and blood on the floor.” Bowyer rushed back into the shop. “Governor, I knocked at the door, and couldn’t make anyone answer,” he stammered. “I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood.” “Good God!” McCarthy responded, “do you mean to say that, Harry?” Both men returned to Kelly’s room, and McCarthy looked through the window. What he saw stunned him so badly that he was momentarily unable to speak. “Harry, don’t tell anyone,” he said. “Go for the police.” Bowyer ran off toward Commercial Street Police Station. McCarthy then changed his mind and ran off after him.28

  At the time, Detective Constable Walter Dew was in the Commercial Street Police Station talking with Walter Beck, the inspector in charge. Suddenly, Bowyer came charging into the station, panting. According to Dew, “The poor fellow was so frightened that for a time he was unable to utter a single intelligible word.” Eventually, Bowyer managed to stammer, “Another one . . . Jack the Ripper . . . awful . . . Jack McCarthy sent me.” The inspectors ran to the court, collecting constables along the way. Beck sent someone to fetch Dr. George Bagster Phillips in nearby Spital Square, then dispatched a telegram to Scotland Yard, informing his superiors that the crime scene was undisturbed, in case they wanted to use their bloodhounds to try to track the culprit. Beck closed off the court, and no one was allowed to enter or leave.29

  Dr. Phillips arrived at Miller’s Court around 11:15 a.m., and, seeing that the door was locked, looked in the window to determine whether there was anyone inside who required medical attention. The scene before him was all too plain. As Phillips later said, I “satisfied myself that the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not in need of any immediate attention from me.” Beck and Phillips agreed that they should wait for the bloodhounds before opening the door, and when Detective Frederick Abberline arrived at 11:30 a.m., he was informed that they were still waiting for the bloodhounds, which were supposedly on the way.30 At 1:20 p.m., however, Superintendent Arnold arrived and informed everybody that the order had been canceled, and the bloodhounds were not coming. He gave the order to break down the door, and McCarthy proceeded to tear it open with a pickax.

  The men entered the room and saw the horrific sight that was to be the Ripper’s most gruesome crime of all. Mary Kelly’s body had been savagely mutilated. Inspector Henry Moore later said that the murderer “cut the skeleton so clean of flesh that when I got here I could hardly tell whether it was a man or a woman.” Kelly was lying on her back, inclined to the left side of the bed, with her legs wide apart. Her throat had been severed, and then her body had apparently been moved to the middle of the bed and eviscerated. Much of the skin had been removed from her thighs, and her breasts had been cut off by circular incisions. One of her breasts was near her right foot and the other was under her head. Her intestines were by her left side
, her liver was between her feet, and on the table next to the bed were large flaps of skin and muscle that had been removed from her abdomen and her thighs. Her face had been mutilated “beyond recognition.”

  Before anything was disturbed, the police took at least two photographs of the body in situ. Detective Abberline then searched the room for clues. There had evidently been a large fire in the fireplace, and the ashes were still warm—in fact, as Abberline noted, the fire had been “so large as to melt the spout off the kettle.” The ashes were later carefully examined, and it was discovered that “a large quantity of women’s clothing had been burnt.” Abberline speculated that this was done “to make a light for the man to see what he was doing,” because, as Abberline pointed out, the only other light in the room came from “one small candle . . . on the top of a broken wine-glass.” Abberline also found a pipe, which turned out to belong to Joseph Barnett.31

  After receiving news of the murder, Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson sent word to Dr. Thomas Bond, the police surgeon for A (Whitehall) Division, to proceed to the scene. Anderson then rode to Miller’s Court in a cab and arrived at ten minutes before two. Meanwhile, news of the murder had reached the public. When the crowds cheering the Lord Mayor’s show got wind of it, as Walter Dew later recounted, “The cheers died in their throats; the smiles left their faces.”32 Throngs of curiosity seekers made their way to Dorset Street, only to find, to their disappointment, that the police had closed off the entire length of Dorset Street, with “a cordon of constables drawn across each end.”33 Four doctors—Dr. Phillips, Dr. Bond, Dr. Gordon Brown of the City Police, and Dr. John Rees—conducted examinations in the room until 4 p.m., when a horse-drawn cart arrived to remove the body. As reported in the Times,

  The news that the body was about to be removed caused a great rush of people from the courts running out of Dorset-street, and there was a determined effort to break the police cordon at the Commercial-street end. . . . Ragged caps were doffed and slatternly-looking women shed tears as the shell, covered with a ragged-looking cloth, was placed in the van. The remains were taken to the Shoreditch Mortuary.34

  The windows to Mary Kelly’s room were then boarded up, and the door to number 13 was padlocked.

  On November 10, at 7:30 a.m., a postmortem examination conducted at the mortuary next to the Whitechapel Church by Dr. Phillips, Dr. Bond, Dr. Brown, and Dr. William Dukes of Spitalfields concluded that as in the other cases, death had resulted from a severed carotid artery. The neck was severed down to the bone, and there were notches cut in the vertebrae of the spine, as with two of the previous victims. The throat had been slashed so many times that it was impossible to determine the direction of the cuts.

  On November 12, an inquest was held in a small committee room on the ground floor of the Shoreditch Town Hall, conducted by Dr. Roderick McDonald, MP, the coroner for the North-Eastern District of Middlesex. Superintendent Arnold of H Division, Detective Abberline of CID, and Inspector James Nairn, who had been imported from N Division to work the case, were in attendance representing the police, and large crowds gathered both inside and outside the hall. The fifteen jurymen were taken to view the body at the mortuary and then went to inspect Kelly’s room. After an hour, they were back in the inquest chamber, and the first witness, Joseph Barnett, was called. When handed the Bible, as reported in the Morning Advertiser, “he at once kissed it, and on being checked by the officer he said, ‘Oh, well, I don’t know nothing about such things.’ ”35

  In his inquest testimony, George Bagster Phillips gave only a very limited description of Kelly’s wounds and did not describe the mutilations at all. Coroner McDonald then said, “It was clear that the severance of the artery was the immediate cause of death, and unless the jury otherwise desired, this was all the evidence Dr. Phillips proposed to give that day.” The jury acquiesced. By the end of the afternoon, the inquest was over, and the jury had passed verdict of “Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.”36

  The funeral was held on November 19, and, as before,

  [A]n enormous crowd of people assembled at an early hour, completely blocking the thoroughfare. . . . As the coffin appeared, borne on the shoulders of four men, at the principal gate of the church, the crowd was greatly moved. Round the open car in which it was to be placed men and women struggled desperately to touch the coffin. Women with faces streaming with tears cried out “God forgive her!” and every man’s head was bared. The site was quite remarkable, and the emotion natural and unconstrained.37

  Kelly was interred at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone. No members of her family could be located to attend, and because neither Barnett nor any of Kelly’s friends had any money to speak of, Mr. H. Wilson, a sexton of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, generously paid the funeral costs. Barnett knelt in the clay, weeping as Kelly’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

  Thus ends the story of Mary Kelly. A year after the murder, Inspector Henry Moore took an American journalist on a tour of the murder sites, and the pair visited 13 Miller’s Court. By then, there was a new couple living in Kelly’s old room, but the woman invited “Mister Inspector” and his guest inside to look around. A man was lying in the bed, but he obligingly got up and pointed out the bloodstains that were still visible as dark streaks on the wall. When the man turned his face to the wall to go back to sleep, Moore wished him “pleasant dreams.”38

  Before moving on, I will take a moment to discuss the statement of George Hutchinson. Because Hutchinson gave such a detailed description of the man seen with Kelly at 2 a.m., and because he said he could identify the man again, the police took his statement very seriously. Detective Abberline, for one, was of the opinion that Hutchinson was telling the truth and regarded him as an important witness. Yet there are several aspects of Hutchinson’s statement that seem bizarre and somewhat questionable. The main problem is the great amount of detail Hutchinson noticed about the man, right down to a gold watch and chain, a horseshoe pin, and gaiters. In addition, Hutchinson did not give his statement to the police until November 12, three days after the murder and after the inquest was completed. He did so, quite possibly, in order to clear himself as a suspect after he learned that Sarah Lewis stated that she had seen a man standing across from Miller’s Court at 2 a.m. on the night of the murder. Thus, Hutchinson’s motive for giving the statement in the first place makes his description of the man he allegedly saw a bit suspicious.

  Several parts of his statement seemed to fit, however. Like P.C. William Smith, who saw a man on the night of the Berner Street murder carrying a “newspaper parcel 18 × 7 inches,” Hutchinson claimed that the man he saw had a “small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it.”39 Other aspects of Hutchinson’s description, such as the man’s age, height, and complexion, also generally match the descriptions given by Smith, Israel Schwartz, and Joseph Lawende, and the fact that Hutchinson said that the man was Jewish tallies with Elizabeth Long’s description of the “foreign”-looking man seen at the Chapman murder. But the well-dressed “toff” seen by Hutchinson did not match any of the other witness statements, which generally described a man who was more or less shabby-genteel and dressed like either a clerk or a sailor. In the end, it is impossible to know what to make of Hutchinson’s statement. Many Ripperologists think Hutchinson fabricated the story to deflect attention from himself as a potential suspect.

  In any case, even if Hutchinson was telling the truth, perhaps the man he saw with Kelly was not the killer. Hutchinson claimed that he saw Kelly on Commercial Street at approximately 2 a.m. and then stood outside the entrance to Miller’s Court until around 3 a.m. Yet it is entirely possible that Kelly got another client after this time. Recall that both Sarah Lewis and Elizabeth Prater heard a cry of “Murder!” sometime around 4 a.m. It seems unlikely that the well-dressed toff would have waited around in Kelly’s room for some two hours before killing her. Again, however, the evidence is open to various interpretati
ons.

  15

  The Curtain Falls

  The day before Mary Kelly was murdered, Sir Charles Warren tendered his resignation as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force. Warren resigned ostensibly because of his frustration at being censured by Home Secretary Henry Matthews for writing an article titled “The Police of the Metropolis” that appeared in Murray’s Magazine, but the department’s failure in the Ripper case must have factored into his decision. Warren stayed on as commissioner until November 27 and then was replaced by James Monro, Anderson’s predecessor as head of the CID.

  In the days and weeks following Kelly’s murder, the Home Office and the police were under great pressure to make progress in the case, but they were still apparently getting nowhere. The day after Kelly’s murder, Queen Victoria gave notice that the government would grant a full pardon to any accomplice “who shall give such information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the person or persons who committed the murder,” the only condition being that the accomplice was not “a person who contrived or actually committed the murder.”1 It was a desperate attempt to do something, anything really, to deflect the public’s anger at the fact that the murderer was still on the loose.

  On November 16, 1888, just one week after the murder, Dr. Hermann Adler gave a special Sabbath address to an assembly of Jewish workingmen and workingwomen, imploring them not to do anything “which would be calculated to raise the breath of calumny against their homes.” “These were troublous times,” Adler said, and “it was only necessary (Heaven forbid it) for an unconscientious person to make a false but terrible accusation, and a riot might ensue.” Adler entreated the assembly to “obey the directions of the police, especially in their house-to-house investigations.”2 It is unclear why Adler felt it necessary to ask his congregation to cooperate with the investigations then under way, although it may imply that some segments of the Jewish population were being less than helpful to the police.