Joined by Detective Wren and Inspector Marshall, Dr Bond made a brief examination of the torso before looking about the recess where it had been discovered. ‘The wall was stained black at the place where the parcel had rested against it,’ he said. ‘I thought the body must have been there several days [my emphasis] from the state of the wall.’16
That evening the coroner’s officer delivered the torso to the mortuary at Millbank Street, where Bond made preparations for a postmortem the following day. As it was already in advanced putrefaction, he stored it overnight in spirits of wine.
He wasn’t the first to try to preserve it. Although the postmortem was to be conducted in the strictest secrecy, a part of the secret was already out. On 3 October the Evening News revealed that the torso had previously been pickled in some strong disinfectant, and correctly considered this a significant lead: ‘For weeks he must have kept the body concealed near either his office or apartment, waiting for favourable opportunities to make away with the body piecemeal.’
Implicit in the News’s coverage was an understanding that the victim had been butchered at an earlier date, and then preserved at the assassin’s discretion until he considered it opportune to transport his mocking handiwork to New Scotland Yard. He chose a time that couldn’t have been more embarrassing for Warren. Two days had passed since the outrages of Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride, and here was another one, mutilated beyond belief and dumped like an insult, under his nose.
‘The remains, it is almost certain, were hidden in the building sometime between Saturday evening and Tuesday morning,’ determined the Evening News. It was a considered assessment, as was its caveat: ‘There is now no doubt that a terrible murder has been committed, as from the way in which the body has been treated it is impossible that it could have been spirited away from a dissecting room after having answered the purpose of lawful operation, and a more sickening spectacle than the remains present can hardly be imagined.’
Bond got into it early the following morning. By 8 a.m. on 3 October, he and his assistant Charles Hibbert had begun the mouthwatering process of trying to work out exactly what it was they were looking at. For two hours the doors were locked and the press kept on the other side. Bond was to withhold the details of his findings in deference to the Home Office ‘for their guidance at the inquest’, scheduled four days hence, under Westminster coroner John Troutbeck. Why civil servants should be offering a physician ‘guidance’ isn’t stated, but more official interference was brewing, and it was to the Home Office that Bond and his notes would go.17
Press exclusion naturally didn’t quell press interest, and the scraps the papers assembled over the next few days were to prove remarkably accurate. ‘The head and neck have been severed at the juncture of the caryical and spinal vertebrae,’ reported the Evening News, ‘the arms have been disarticulated at the shoulder joints, while not only are the legs missing, but the pelvis has been sawn clean through [my emphasis], exposing all the viscera, and it is believed the organ referred to in the Chapman case [the womb] is also missing.’
Indeed it was. But in compensation for the missing womb, something else had turned up, or rather found its way into Jack’s scenario. About three weeks before, on 11 September, a workman called Frederick Moore had noticed something curious on the mudbank of the Thames, which ran adjacent to his timberyard. A ladder was procured, and a few minutes later he was on his way back up it, carrying a human arm. The limb quickly found itself in the possession of a policeman, who wrapped it in newspaper before transporting it to his station at Gerard Row.18
The Divisional Surgeon was called, a Dr Neville of nearby Pimlico Road, who had little difficulty in identifying the arm as that of a ‘well-formed, tall, and well nourished young woman, probably about 25 years of age’. In his view the victim was recently dead, and the arm had been in the water ‘two or three days’.
Who was she? Where was the rest of her, and had she been murdered? As soon as the medical examination was concluded, a Police Inspector had the arm removed to the mortuary, where it was preserved awaiting the orders of the aforementioned coroner, John Troutbeck. It was considered unlikely that any inquest would be held, but no one really knew, and the police went about the business of trawling the river for more body parts. After one day the project was abandoned, without success.
In the meantime, a familiar theory was on the road: the arm might have been ‘thrown onto the river bank by a medical student with a view to create a scare’. In response to this claptrap a representative of the Central News Agency ignored Scotland Yard and visited one of the leading London hospitals. He was assured that ‘the arm could not possibly have been removed by a student from any hospital dissecting room. Students are allowed to dissect only in the room set apart for the purpose.’19 This tallied with Dr Neville’s judgement. Although some surgical skill was evident, ‘the handiwork was scarcely good enough for a person acquainted with the principles of anatomy’.
The following day, a journalist from the Star interviewed Neville.
‘Were there any rings on the hands [sic] Doctor?’
‘No, and no sign of rings being worn that I could see.’
‘Was there anything to indicate whether the arm was that of a woman of refinement or the reverse?’
‘Well, I should say not a refined woman, for the nails were dirty.’
‘That might be due to immersion in the dirty water of the river?’
‘Certainly; but I also observed that the nails were not neatly trimmed as a lady’s generally are.’
Neville dismissed any possibility that it might be a man’s arm: ‘No doubt that of a young woman; under thirty years of age, I should say, judging from the freshness of the skin and the tension of the muscles and sinews.’
The arm had been tied near its shoulder end with a piece of cord, like a tourniquet. Neville had no explanation for this, ‘unless it was to prevent blood flowing from the limb while it was being conveyed to the water’.
‘Could this limb possibly have come from some dissecting room?’
‘I do not think so for a moment. If it had, there would have been on it some evidence of the dissection.’
No such sign was evident here. ‘Moreover,’ said Neville, ‘no dissecting room authorities would allow the removal of a limb.’
‘Then this discovery could not be due to some medical student’s hoax?’
‘I consider the matter of that explanation an impossible one. The limb must have been severed with a large sharp knife, whereas a dissecting knife is a small one.’
Irrespective of such informed opinion, the coppers were not going to abandon their ‘Insane Medical Student’. Loss of such an actor would compound the difficulty of selling Catherine Eddowes’ travelling kidney as a ‘hoax’. So what did Neville think the explanation was? ‘It certainly suggests to me that it was murder.’
The newspapers were in no doubt of it, and three weeks later Neville’s assumption had evolved into a certainty.
Back at Millbank mortuary, Dr Bond and his assistant Mr Hibbert had barely got the torso out of its preservative before Bond reportedly exclaimed, ‘I have an arm that will fit that.’
It’s more likely that the perception was Hibbert’s – he had previously examined the arm on 16 September. Now it was rejoined with the Scotland Yard trunk, and its fit was found to be impeccable. The body had cautiously begun to reveal something of itself, and thus some insight into whoever had killed her.
If Dr Neville had been right on 11 September that the arm was recently dead, and that it had been in the water two or three days, then the victim had been killed on or about 8 September – the same day as Annie Chapman.
Despite police efforts to disassociate this murder from the Whitechapel series, the date remains of resonance. If this unidentified woman wasn’t killed by the Ripper, then the police were obliged to accept that two independent killers with identical intent were abroad in the metropolis, and that these two different killer
s had murdered two different women on what was probably the same day. Moreover, both were of an identical mindset, making off with their victims’ wombs, and both electing to make a drama of their handiwork.
It was (and is) suggested that the assassin hauled his fifty pounds of putrescent flesh into the dangerous environs of New Scotland Yard in order to hide it. My perception of his reasoning is precisely to the contrary. I think he hauled it into the Met’s headquarters because that’s where he wanted it found. He’d used a saw to cut his victim in half, cut off her head, and carve through the bones of her arms. From there on he had demonstrated absolute control over the body parts: the head, legs and left arm were still missing, but he had flagged up his crime – the right arm in the river. Had he wished, of course, he could easily have slung the torso in after it. But he was thinking of Charlie. He was thinking of Charlie when he carried his segment of bloody apron to Goulston Street, thinking of Charlie when he cut compasses in Eddowes’ face on the square; and it was the same preposterous copper who brought him here. Jack was soon to make his motive in the vaults transparent, but even at this juncture the world’s most wilfully blind policeman must have known what was up.
We’ve seen Jack’s interpretation of Jubela and Jubelo at the crime scenes of Chapman and Eddowes. But what of Jubelum, the last to suffer Solomon’s vengeance? ‘It is my order that you be taken without the walls of the Temple, and there have your body severed in two, and divided to the north and south.’
Although Charles Warren was one of the world’s leading Masonic historians, we are enjoined to believe that not the remotest shadow of Solomon’s penalties crossed his mind. ‘No clue in the hands of the police,’ dribbled Home Secretary Henry Matthews, ‘however apparently unpromising, should be neglected.’20
The sawn-in-half body at New Scotland Yard, delivered as a possible jocular take on a ‘foundation sacrifice’, looked very promising indeed. It was right out of Warren’s past, out of Masonry, out of the Land of Moab – and Warren utterly neglected it. As a matter of fact, he made a point of going nowhere near it. Such insouciance (i.e. Establishment panic) ‘fanned the fire of rage and indignation’, wrote the New York Herald, ‘with which the blundering blindness of the London police is viewed in the great metropolis’.21
While Warren was fully engaged with the details of covering Jack’s tracks, the ungrateful psychopath was still having fun with body parts. Two more arms were to appear. The first had been found on Friday, 28 September, about a mile down the river in the grounds of the Blind School at Lambeth. It was quickly dismissed as having ‘nothing whatever’ to do with the torso at Scotland Yard. ‘An examination [by a medical expert],’ reported The Times, ‘shows that whereas the arms have been wrenched from the sockets of the body on the Embankment, the bones at the St George’s Mortuary consist of a complete arm and include the shoulder blade. Moreover, the arm found in the Thames at Pimlico was freshly amputated, but the arm in question must have been detached from the female trunk to which it belonged some very considerable time ago. Lastly, the bones constitute the left arm, and as the arm found in the Thames was also a left arm, they must belong to different bodies.’
This was apparently what Ripperologist Mr DiGrazia might call a ‘common arm’, or ‘garden arm’, of the sort that occasionally turns up in flowerbeds. ‘The police [it goes without saying] attach no importance to the Southwark [Lambeth Blind School] discovery.’
With this The Times has contradicted everything, including itself, and sounds like Swanson’s parrot. In his preliminary examination, Dr Hibbert categorically stated that the Pimlico arm was the right arm, and thus does not dismiss the arm in question here. And even if the Lambeth arm didn’t fit the Scotland Yard trunk, might not another arm suggest another murder? The police eagerly ‘attach no importance’ to it, but was it not once attached to a woman’s body? Furthermore, no doctor had said that the arms from the torso had been ‘wrenched from their sockets’. According to Hibbert, they were first cut into with a very sharp knife and then disarticulated through the joint, with a saw being used after that.
But why trouble with forensic niceties when Bro Swanson’s emergency service is on permanent call-out? ‘The Lambeth arm,’ concluded The Times, ‘is stated to have been the subject of dissection [i.e. sourced at a hospital], and is supposed to have been placed where it was found as a hoax.’ We might recall what Dr Neville said not two weeks before about ‘hoaxes’ pulled by medical students: ‘I consider the matter of that explanation an impossible one.’ Impossible is the word. The London medical schools didn’t open their doors to students for the autumn semester until 1 October.22
But even so, ‘the Student Arm-Collector’ had been up to his rotten little tricks again, in Peckham.
Given the circumstances, one might imagine the cops could have caught this mad little medic, even if they couldn’t catch the Ripper. One might imagine that the hospital authorities would by now be especially alert to missing arms. But the indefatigable ‘Medical Student’ managed to smuggle another arm out, which he deposited (after boiling it) in an East London street – timed, it would seem, to coincide with the resumption of Troutbeck’s second inquest into the Scotland Yard trunk.
Be they left or be they right, these Peckham bones were those of a woman’s arm. ‘There was a supposition in the locality that the discovery might have some connection with the discoveries at Whitehall and Pimlico,’ penned The Times in hushed acquiescence, ‘but this is not encouraged by the authorities.’ You can bet your Bobby’s helmet it wasn’t. So what – we wait breathlessly – might these bones have been? The authorities ‘appear to hold the belief that the present “find” is due to a senseless freak on the part of a medical student’.
Keep swallowing that Fowler’s Solution.
I just mentioned, somewhat prematurely, Troutbeck’s second inquest, and now I begin with the first. It was convened at the Sessions House, Westminster, on the morning of Monday, 8 October, Detective Inspector Marshall watching for the police. Frederick Wildbore, who found the torso, was naturally first witness up. Reiterating his story, he described the hazards of the vaults, and how he was more than certain the body wasn’t there before 28 September: ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t there last Friday because we had occasion to do something at that very spot.’23
George Budden, who brought the bundle out, told the same story, underlining the vault’s inhospitality: ‘It is a very dark place, always as dark as the darkest night in the day.’
Detective Hawkins, the first copper on the scene, had no argument with that. ‘The vault where it was said the body was lain was very dark, and the recess was across a trench [via a plank] which was also in the dark. I looked further along the recess where it had been and saw a piece of more dress material. The wall was very black and the place full of maggots.’24
Troutbeck heard next from the foreman of the works, William Brown, who deposed: ‘The works on the Embankment are shut off by a hoarding, 8 feet or 9 feet high, and there are three entrances with gates, two on Cannon Row and one on the Embankment.’ Although there was no nightwatchman, all these gates were locked at night except one, which was secured by a latch and string, admitting only those who knew how to pull it. ‘The approach to the vault from Cannon Row,’ said Brown, ‘was first by planks and steps, and planks again.’ He confirmed that his men had frequently been active in the vaults during the week before the discovery.
So we’re looking at an eight- or nine-foot fence, fifty pounds of dead flesh, and a place of hazard and absolute darkness. How the perpetrator got his burden there was unknown. But when he did it was irrefutably established. It had to have been after the works were closed on the night of Saturday, 29 September. This fact was finally nailed by a labourer called Ernest Hedge. He was in the vaults, he said, at five o’clock that afternoon, and was the last to leave the site. They were shutting down until Monday, and he had gone to fetch a hammer. Striking a light, he crossed the trench and had a last look around. ‘The
vault led to nowhere,’ said Hedge, ‘and there was no parcel there then.’25
This unequivocal evidence, establishing that there had been no torso in the vaults before Saturday, 29 September, was to have dramatic repercussions. Although Wildbore and his mates were certain about what they had seen – or rather not seen – the scenario was about to cop a bit of a bombshell. At the second inquest, some two weeks later, the authorities would try to deny the men’s deposition, insisting that all five had been blind to the body in the vault. Wildbore’s statement that ‘the body could not have been where it was found above two or three days’ was to be elasticised by the authorities into a comfortable six weeks.
It was quite the reverse of the shenanigans at Berner Street. There, those who had seen the grapes couldn’t possibly have seen them, while here, those who had not seen the torso couldn’t possibly have missed it. In other words, at both locations the conviction of on-site witnesses was to be subsumed within the requirements of an official cover-up.
As yet in ignorance of what he’d be obliged to say at the second inquest, Dr Bond was next to take the oath. His evidence constituted an emerging impression of the victim. ‘The trunk was that of a woman of considerable stature, and well nourished.’ It was seventeen inches long, twenty-eight inches at the waist, with a thirty-six-inch bust. He assumed she must have been about five feet eight, and maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Details of her butchery came next. ‘The lower part of the body and pelvis had been removed (about an inch and a half below the navel) and the fourth lumbar vertebra had been sawn through in the same way as the removal of the head.’ Decomposition was advanced.26
They All Love Jack Page 45
