by Robert House
The death of another prostitute on December 20, 1888, in Poplar, a few miles east of Whitechapel, briefly caused concern that the killer had returned. The murdered woman was named Catherine “Rose” Mylett. On the night of her death, Mylett was seen around 8 p.m. with two sailors on Poplar High Street near Clarke’s Yard. According to a witness, Charles Ptolomey, the sailors were acting in a strange manner—one was speaking to Mylett, while the other was “walking up and down.” Ptolomey heard Mylett cry out, “No! no! no!” and later said he took notice of the incident because he thought they “were there for no good purpose.”3 Several hours later, at 2:30 a.m., a woman named Alice Graves saw a drunken Mylett in the company of two men outside of the George public house on Commercial Road.
Mylett’s body was found in Clarke’s Yard about two hours later. She was lying on her side, her left leg stretched out in front of her, and her right leg drawn up, but her clothes were not disarranged. The police who investigated the matter found no signs of violence either on the body or at the crime scene and apparently did not think the woman had been murdered at all. When the divisional surgeon Dr. Matthew Brownfield conducted a postmortem examination, however, he discovered a thin white line around the woman’s neck and noticed “impressions of the thumbs and middle and index fingers of some person plainly visible on each side of the neck.” Brownfield concluded that the woman had been strangled to death. Yet for some reason, he did not bother to inform the police of this; instead, he told a reporter, and the results of his postmortem were printed in the Star newspaper. Dr. Brownfield’s conclusions on the matter came as a great surprise to the police, and Robert Anderson claimed that the first he heard of the opinion that the woman had been murdered was in the newspaper. Commissioner Monro was furious, and, hesitant to accept Brownfield’s conclusions, he sent Anderson to personally investigate the woman’s death. Monro also ordered Dr. Alexander O. MacKellar, the chief surgeon of the Metropolitan Police, to make a second examination of the body. But Dr. MacKellar seconded the opinion of Dr. Brownfield, forcing Monro to concede that the case was indeed one of murder, although it was “murder of a strange and unusual type.”4
Anderson’s investigations into the matter went so far as to his personally examining the body. Dr. Bond, the police surgeon for A (Whitehall) Division, also eventually examined the body and decided that death was from “accidental strangulation,” a conclusion that was shared, if not suggested, by Anderson. In a letter to Monro, Anderson suggested that Mylett’s death had resulted from some combination of a tight-fitting collar and the woman’s “drunken habits”—specifically, he thought the woman had fallen down in a drunken stupor, and “the weight of her head against the collar of her dress compressed the larynx and caused suffocation.” Anderson claimed that this theory was backed up by Dr. Bond, Mr. Wontner, and the coroner Wynne Baxter, who declared, “There is no evidence to show that death was the result of violence.” Anderson told Monro that despite the inquest verdict of “wilful murder,” he “did not intend to take any further action in the matter.”5
In comparison to the previous murders, this was a rather dull affair, and an article in the Star noted that the murder “failed to create any excitement even in the neighborhood,” adding, “The police themselves appear to have shared the general feeling of non-interest.”6 The press briefly speculated that the Ripper had returned but had changed his methods. One theory was that the Ripper had in fact strangled all of the victims with a thin cord, but the white line that would have shown evidence of strangulation was obliterated by the subsequent knife cuts. Ultimately, however, the questions raised by Mylett’s death were not answered, and the case was never solved.
By the beginning of 1889, active pursuit of the Ripper inquiry had started to dwindle. In late January 1889, Commissioner Monro decided that the extra plainclothes officers who had been drafted into Whitechapel to work the case were no longer needed, and told the Home Office that he was “gradually reducing the number of men employed on this duty as quickly as it is safe to do so.”7 By March 15, the extra plainclothes patrols had been phased out entirely, and in a letter to the Secretary of State, Monro said, “This duty has now ceased.”8 That same month, Detective Frederick Abberline was sent back to Scotland Yard to work on other cases, and Inspector Henry Moore took charge of ground inquiries in the Ripper case.
Six months went by. Then in July 1889, just when things seemed to be back to normal, there was another murder, in Spitalfields. The victim this time was Alice McKenzie, a middle-aged woman who had lived in a lodging house at 52 Gun Street with a laborer named John McCormack on and off for about six or seven years. According to Betsy Ryder, the deputy of the lodging house, McKenzie was “much addicted to drink” and “was in the habit of staying out all night if she had no money to pay for her lodging.” Ryder added that the police considered McKenzie to be a prostitute. Like two of the previous victims, McKenzie was said to have “worked hard for the Jews.”9
Around 8:30 p.m. on the night of Tuesday, July 16–17, 1889, Ryder saw McKenzie leave the lodging house with some money in her hand. McKenzie had been drinking and had not paid for her lodgings. Three hours later, she was walking briskly along Brick Lane, where she passed by an acquaintance named Margaret Franklin. Franklin asked McKenzie how she was getting on, to which McKenzie replied, “All right I can’t stop now.”10
At 12:15 a.m., P.C. Joseph Allen of H Division was “partaking of his supper” under a street lamp in Castle Alley, a narrow passageway that ran parallel to Goulston Street. He stood there eating for about five minutes and later said that the alley was completely deserted at the time. Just as Allen was leaving, P.C. Walter Andrews entered the street and stayed for about three minutes, during which time he saw nothing unusual. Half an hour later, Andrews’s beat took him back into Castle Alley. It had been raining for about five minutes, and he was walking near the back of the public baths, “trying the doors,” when he saw a woman lying on the pavement next to some carts. He touched the body and noted that it was quite warm, then blew his whistle for assistance. Sergeant Edward Badham, who had spoken to Andrews just a few minutes earlier, heard the whistle and rushed to Castle Alley. Andrews met Badham and told him, “Come on quick, here’s another murder,” and the two went back to look at the body. Badham instructed Andrews to stay at the murder site, while he went off to send information about the murder to the police station and call for a doctor.11 Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, Superintendent Thomas Arnold, and a number of police constables from adjoining beats arrived on the scene shortly afterward. Arnold directed several of the constables to search the immediate surroundings and inquire whether any suspicious-looking characters had been seen entering the local common lodging houses and coffee houses. When Commissioner Monro heard of the crime at 3 a.m., he immediately set off to examine the spot in person, for the purpose of “assisting at the inquiry.”
When Dr. George Bagster Phillips arrived around 1:10 a.m., he found the woman lying on her back with a pool of clotted blood under her head. The woman’s clothes had been pulled up, exposing her abdomen and genitals, and her throat was cut. Phillips’s postmortem examination report described the victim’s wounds, which were in this case decidedly less extensive than those in the previous murders. Yet there were similarities. The cause of death was a “division of the vessels on the left side” of the throat, which had been cut from left to right. There was also a seven-inch-long wound on the right side of the abdomen, but the cut was not very deep. There were several other scratches in the lower abdomen that cut through the top layers of the skin, one of which “became deeper over the pubis.”12
Phillips noted that “The clothing was fastened round the body somewhat tightly & could only be raised so as to expose about 1/3 of the abdomen,” and concluded that the “scoring and cuts of skin on Pubis were caused through the endeavor to pass the obstruction caused by the clothing.” In other words, it appeared that the killer struggled to get the woman’s clothes off to expose the abd
omen but ultimately failed to do so. In addition, because the ground under McKenzie’s body was dry, it seems that the murder had been committed sometime between approximately 12:23 a.m., when Andrews left Castle Alley, and around 12:45 a.m., when it started raining. If the attack happened nearer to the end of this period, it is possible that Andrews’s arrival in Castle Alley scared the killer off. These facts may explain the lesser degree of mutilation in this case. Still, Dr. Phillips concluded that it was not a Ripper murder, although he pointed out that he did not take into account “what I admit may be almost conclusive evidence in favour of the one man theory if all the surrounding circumstances & other evidence are considered.” Phillips stressed that his conclusion was based solely on “his own observations”—in other words, a comparison of McKenzie’s wounds with those of the previous victims.13
Dr. Thomas Bond also examined the body, a day after Phillips did, but by this time “decomposition had fairly begun,” and, what’s more, Phillips’s postmortem had disturbed the original condition of the wounds, which by then had been sewn up. Phillips was with Bond at the time of this second examination, and he described the original condition of the wounds and his various conclusions about them, to which Bond was in general agreement. As Bond stated, “In order to inflict the wound which I saw on the abdomen the murderer must have raised the clothes with his left hand & inflicted the injuries with his right.” Unlike Phillips, Dr. Bond concluded, “I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.”14 Commissioner Monro also believed that McKenzie had been killed by the Ripper, as he wrote in a report to the Home Office, stating that “Every effort will be made by the Police to discover the murderer, who, I am inclined to believe is identical with the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ of last year.” Monro admitted that once again, the assassin had “succeeded in committing a murder and getting off without leaving the slightest clue to his identity.”15
Alice McKenzie’s murder would go unsolved, and today it is still debated whether she was a victim of the Ripper. But the horrors were not yet over.
On September 8, 1889, the one-year anniversary of the murder of Annie Chapman, a man named John Cleary walked into the offices of the Herald newspaper just after 1 a.m. and declared that Jack the Ripper had murdered another woman in the East End. Cleary claimed that a police inspector who was an acquaintance of his told him that the mutilated body of a woman had been found at 11:20 p.m. in Backchurch Lane. Cleary added that he hoped to get a reward for supplying this information and gave his address as 21 White Horse Yard, Drury Lane.16
Two Herald reporters decided to go to the East End to investigate, and they asked Cleary to accompany them. Cleary declined, however, saying that it was too far from his home, so the reporters decided to go without him. After the reporters finally managed to locate Backchurch Lane, they “made a thorough search of the neighborhood” but found no mutilated body and no crime scene.17 They approached two policemen and asked whether there had been another murder in the area, but the constables knew nothing about it. Cleary, it seemed, was just another hoaxer.
Then strangely, three days later, the headless and legless body of a woman was found under a railway arch near the southern end of Backchurch Lane in Pinchin Street. There was no blood around the body, and the police thought that it must have been moved to the archway some time after the woman’s death. Yet in the absence of a head, it was impossible to identify the victim. In fact, it was not even possible to determine whether the woman had been murdered at all or whether she had died of other causes. There were no mutilations, except for one long cut down the center of the body, extending from the chest to the genitals. No organs had been removed from the abdomen, and as Commissioner Monro wrote in a report of the incident, “The wound looks as if the murderer had intended to make a cut preparatory to removing the intestines in the process of dismemberment & had then changed his mind.”18 There was a mark around the waist, as if a rope had been tied around the body, and a postmortem examination determined that some sort of saw had been used to sever the bones of the neck and the legs. Doctors estimated that the woman had died at least three or four days before the body was discovered—in other words, around the time that John Cleary went to the Herald office and reported a murder in that very location.
When the Herald reporters learned about the discovery, they immediately remembered Cleary and tried to locate him. They visited his supposed address at 21 White Horse Yard but were told that there was no one by that name living there. Eventually, it was discovered that Cleary’s real name was John Arnold. Arnold admitted that he had reported a murder at the Herald office and said that he gave a false name to avoid complications involving his wife, from whom he was separated. He claimed that he heard the story from a man who was dressed as a soldier, and he described the man as about thirty-five or thirty-six years old, and about five feet seven inches tall, with a fair mustache. Little more is known about Arnold, although he was known to the police as a gambler and a drunk. The police attempted to pursue a line of inquiry to see whether Arnold could identify the “soldier” who told him the story, but it is not know whether anything ever came of it.
The police eventually concluded that the “Pinchin Street torso” was not a Ripper murder and instead suspected that it was related to a series of crimes that had taken place in Battersea and Rainham. The inquest returned a verdict of “wilful murder,” and a CID report stated the police had no objection to the torso being buried, “if it will not interfere with our being able to fit the head to the trunk, if we ever get it.”19 But they never got it.
16
An Encore? The Murder of Frances Coles
P.C. Ernest Thompson was a new addition to the Metropolitan Police Force. He joined H Division in late December 1890, then six weeks later was sent on his first night patrol in the vicinity of the Royal Mint. As luck would have it, the date was Friday, February, 13, 1891. About 2:15 a.m., while patrolling a typically lonely stretch of road named Chamber Street, Thompson heard footsteps somewhere ahead, “proceeding in the opposite direction towards Mansell Street.” But it was dark, and Thompson “was not sufficiently close to discern the person,” nor did he think much of it at the time. He then turned into a dark arched railway underpass called Swallow Gardens and was shocked by the sight of a woman lying on the ground. The woman’s throat had been cut, and blood was still issuing from the wound, but Thompson thought he saw one of the woman’s eyelids move. It was just a few streets west of the spot where the Pinchin Street torso had been discovered five months earlier.1
Thompson immediately blew his whistle, alerting police constables on adjoining beats who soon arrived at the scene. One of them went to fetch a local doctor named F. J. Oxley, who came in short order and pronounced the woman dead. When H Division Superintendent Thomas Arnold showed up, he instructed that the surrounding area be searched and inquiries be made at all of the local lodging houses. None of the constables had seen anyone passing nearby at the time of the murder.
The victim was a twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Frances Coles. Since about the age of seventeen, Coles had “walked about the streets” and for several years previously had “given way to drunken habits,” staying at various lodging houses in the neighborhood of Commercial Street. In the days prior to her murder, Coles had been on a sort of bender, drinking pretty much nonstop for two days and nights with a ship’s fireman named Thomas Sadler. Sadler had been one of Coles’s clients on a previous occasion, and as he admitted, “I used her for my purpose.”2 According to Sadler’s police statement, he and Coles first got drunk on Wednesday, February 11, then spent the night together in a lodging house called Spitalfields Chambers on White’s Row. They proceeded to get drunk the following day as well, visiting numerous pubs around Brick Lane. By that evening, Sadler was well “getting into drink.” Sometime between 9 and 11 p.m., the two were walking down Thrawl Street when a woman in a red shawl struck Sadler on the head
, and then two men beat and robbed him, while Coles stood by and did nothing. After that, the pair got into an argument because Sadler claimed that Coles should have helped him when he was being beaten. They parted on bad terms. Around 11:30 p.m., Coles returned to the lodging house in White’s Row, where she sat in the kitchen and continued to drink.
After their argument, Sadler (according to his police statement) went to the docks, where he tried to gain admission on a boat that he had previously worked on called the S.S. Fez. He was in such a dazed and drunken state, however, that he was refused entry. He started cursing out a nearby policeman and some dock laborers, one of whom remarked that if the policeman would turn his back, “he would give [Sadler] a damned good hiding.” The policeman sauntered off, and Sadler was immediately beaten and kicked severely by the men. Sadler then wandered around, trying to find a bed in a lodging house, but he was penniless and drunk and couldn’t get in anywhere. He finally returned to Spitalfields Chambers, where he found Coles in the kitchen, “half dazed from drink.” Neither of them had enough money for a bed, and Sadler was turned out around midnight. He left Coles there in the kitchen, passed out on a bench. Sometime later, Coles woke up, and she was kicked out as well. According to conflicting statements, she left the lodging house either at 12:30 a.m. or around 1:30 to 1:45 a.m3
