Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  The killer seems to have seized Annie by the chin. If he was standing talking to her – and Cadosch’s testimony would suggest that he was – he gripped her with the right hand, his fingers producing the abrasions on the left side of the neck and his thumb the corresponding bruise on the right. By applying pressure to the throat he stifled any cry and throttled his victim, at least into insensibility. She was then lowered to the ground. At some point Annie may have fallen, or the murderer stumbled, against the fence. As she lay on the ground the killer deeply severed her throat in two cuts from left to right. If he knelt beside and to the right of the head, his back to the house, the knife would have been used in the right hand. The patches of blood on the fence, to the left of the head, and the spots on the left arm, which lay across the breast, may have been that which spurted from the wound as the murderer severed the left carotid artery. Dr Phillips believed that the abdominal injuries had been inflicted after death. The abdomen was laid open and the victim eviscerated. The small intestines were discovered above the right shoulder and part of the stomach above the left shoulder but the uterus, together with parts of the vagina and bladder, were taken away by the murderer. He wrenched the rings from the third finger of Annie’s left hand and in throwing up her skirts discovered her pocket, attached by strings around the waist, and tore it open. The rings were never found but the contents of the pocket – a piece of muslin, a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb in a paper case – were discovered at Annie’s feet. Dr Phillips’ impression was that they had been carefully arranged there but their positions may have been quite fortuitous. The piece of envelope and the pills, which William Stevens had seen Annie place in her pocket, were found by the dead woman’s head.

  In at least one respect the Chapman killing was unique in the Whitechapel series. It was the only murder which was not committed during the hours of darkness. The sun rose at 5.23 and on this busy market morning there were already plenty of people about. Spitalfields Market had opened at five, at which time the western end of Hanbury Street had been clogged with market vehicles. When the killer and his victim entered the yard of No. 29, moreover, the house itself was rapidly coming to life. The carman Thompson had gone to work all of one and a half hours ago and Richardson had been in the yard within the last forty-five minutes. While the couple were still in the yard Cadosch visited the adjoining yard twice. And at 5.45, even as the murderer must have been completing his task, John Davis and his wife bestirred themselves. In slaughtering Annie when and where he did the murderer had thus taken an extraordinary risk. Yet his escape through the streets is scarcely less remarkable. There was a tap in the yard but the killer, perhaps fearful of capture, did not pause to wash the blood from his hands. We know this because Mrs Richardson saw a pan of clean water under the tap the evening before the murder and found it there, apparently undisturbed, in the morning. Emerging from No. 29, therefore, the murderer may well have been stained with gore. Secreted somewhere about his person was the murder weapon. And he must have had something in which to wrap or hold the pelvic organs he had just extracted from his freshly killed victim. But no one, in the grey dawn of that September morning, challenged or even seemed to notice him as he bore away his ghastly trophy.

  On the question of the killer’s identity the Chapman murder produced what appeared to be the first tangible clues. During the Tabram investigation a suspicion that the murderer had been a soldier had enjoyed very general acceptance. This view, as we have seen, had little to recommend it but as late as the Chapman inquiry echoes of it survived in the police investigation of the torn envelope and their search for Annie’s ‘pensioner’. In testifying that the murder weapon could not have been a bayonet Dr Phillips went some way to discrediting the theory in the public mind and we hear little more of it.

  The doctor’s testimony incriminated his own profession. He was not the first to point a finger in their general direction for Dr Llewellyn, at the Nichols inquest, had already credited the killer with ‘some rough anatomical knowledge.’ But Phillips spoke with much greater conviction. We do not know all the factors that influenced his conclusions. However, the fact that the uterus had been extracted intact, that the murderer had divided the vagina low enough to avoid damage to the cervix uteri, did suggest to Phillips that the murderer’s object had been to secure this particular organ and that he knew how to recognize and excise it without injury. It is also evident – from the Lancet’s statement that the killer secured the pelvic organs ‘with one sweep of a knife’ and from Baxter’s comment that there were ‘no meaningless cuts’ – that the random cuts or slashes present in the Tabram murder and in the later Eddowes and Kelly murders were absent in the Chapman case. ‘The whole inference seems to me,’ Phillips told the inquest, ‘that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.’ And if that was the case then, in the doctor’s opinion, the knowledge and skill of the murderer had been impressive given the haste in which he had been obliged to work. ‘I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman,’ he said, ‘and effect them, even without a struggle, [in] under a quarter of an hour.’

  It is quite possible, of course, that the position of the lower cut severing Annie’s uterus had been entirely fortuitous and that the absence of random mutilations simply reflected the killer’s haste to escape from a perilous situation. Nevertheless, Dr Phillips had examined the victim’s wounds and he had been a police surgeon for twenty-three years. His opinion commanded respect. Baxter was convinced and in his summing up on 26 September adverted to the killer’s expertise in uncompromising terms: ‘The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by some one who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts. It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.’21

  Mrs Long’s description of the man in the dark coat and brown deerstalker hat provided the further clue that the murderer may have been a foreigner. Jack Pizer, whose habit of abusing prostitutes had made him an obvious suspect, had already introduced that possibility but there had never been any genuine evidence linking him with the murders and, as we shall see, within days of the Chapman murder he was conclusively eliminated from police inquiries. The first valid evidence implicating a foreigner, then, came from Mrs Long and in so far as her testimony contained the first description ever given of a man who was plausibly the Whitechapel murderer it cannot be ignored.

  We have three accounts of Mrs Long’s experience. The most detailed is that contained in her inquest deposition of 19 September. We know from the newspapers, however, that she made her original statement to the police as early as 12 September and that she identified Annie’s body on the same day. Unfortunately no copy of that first statement has survived though something of it has perhaps been preserved in the 19 October report of Chief Inspector Swanson, whose technique it was to synthesize and summarize the contents of earlier documents. Brief notices of Mrs Long’s story were also circulated by the press on 12 and 13 September.22

  Eyewitness testimony is at best treacherous. It can at least be said of Mrs Long that she reported the event while it was fresh in her memory and that a comparison of the different statements attributed to her suggests that her testimony remained consistent. Notwithstanding all which, the circumstances of Mrs Long’s sighting oblige us to treat her evidence with caution. The couple did nothing to attract her attention and she passed them by without speaking to them. Worse, she did not see the man’s face. Something – perhaps the sound of his voice or the darkness of his complexion – gave her the impression that he was a foreigner but it can have been no more than an
impression and she was honest enough to admit that she would not be able to recognize him again.

  Between adjournments of the Coroner’s inquiry Annie’s remains were buried. An outcast in life, she was virtually so in death. Fountain Smith, her brother, was a printer’s warehouseman. When he testified at the inquest on 12 September his appearance was judged ‘very respectable’ by pressmen. But he seemed to want to have as little to do with the proceedings as possible and gave his evidence in so low a tone as to be ‘all but inaudible two yards off.’ If the press accounts of the funeral are to be believed the other relatives also judged themselves respectable. And conscious, perhaps, of their respectability they contrived to bury Annie with the utmost discretion.

  The family paid the funeral expenses and kept all the arrangements a profound secret. Apart from themselves only the police and the undertaker, Harry Hawes of 19 Hunt Street, knew when it would take place. At seven on the morning of Friday, 14 September, a hearse was sent to the Whitechapel Mortuary. Quietly, expeditiously, the undertaker’s men collected the body. It rested in an elm coffin draped in black. The coffin-plate read: ‘Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years.’ Driven to Hunt Street, the hearse remained there until nine, when it set off for Manor Park Cemetery. There were no mourning coaches because the relatives, in order to avoid attracting attention, had arranged to meet the hearse at the cemetery. ‘All the arrangements were carried out most satisfactorily,’ noted the Advertiser, ‘and there was no hitch of any kind.’23

  Sadly the terrors, the passions, the recriminations evoked by the death of Dark Annie were not to be laid to rest as easily as her bones.

  6

  The Man in the Passage and other Chapman Murder Myths

  DURING THE CENTURY that has elapsed since the Hanbury Street tragedy authors have told and retold the story with undiminished appetite. Unfortunately few of them bothered to adequately research the facts first. After studying the primary evidence and writing the previous chapter I read the accounts of the Chapman murder given in more than a score of supposedly factual Ripper books. Not one was free from error and most were literally riddled with them. The five pages of text that one centennial volume devoted to Annie contained at least twenty-eight errors. In the six-page account of another I counted no less than thirty-two! Some of these books were so grossly misleading as to merit dismissal to the fiction shelves.

  The longevity of errors, once made, is quite remarkable. Back in 1928, for example, Leonard Matters wrote that John Davis, the market porter who discovered Annie’s body, ‘lived in the very room overlooking the backyard.’ It was an error that would have been nailed by the most casual reading of the contemporary printed inquest testimony, for Amelia Richardson’s deposition made it quite clear that Davis lived in the front attic, at the top of the house and overlooking Hanbury Street. But William Stewart, undeterred by anything as vulgar as fact, seized and elaborated upon Matters’s statement. Davis, said Stewart, lived in a room ‘just above the cellar and within a few feet of the spot where the body was discovered.’ In this form the blunder survived at least until 1966, nearly forty years after Matters, when Robin Odell incorporated it into the revised edition of his book Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction. Similarly, Donald McCormick’s gaffe that Annie’s killer extracted one of her kidneys, published back in 1959, is still alive and well, as a glance at Peter Underwood’s recent Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Mystery will attest.1

  Some fictions are almost as old as the murder itself. Repeated in book after book, they have marched relatively unscathed by research into our own day and have achieved the status of minor myths. Indeed, one might be forgiven for believing in the existence of an unspoken understanding amongst Ripperologists that once assertions have been committed to print they take the form of Holy Writ, that the oftener they are published the more authoritative they become, an attitude somewhat evocative of Lewis Carroll’s lines in The Hunting of the Snark:

  Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

  That alone should encourage the crew.

  Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

  What I tell you three times is true.

  For far too long these myths have clouded our understanding of the character and background of the victim, the details of the crime, even the appearance of the murderer, and it is high time that they were categorically refuted.

  Until 1939 no one doubted that Dark Annie had been a prostitute. Then William Stewart dismissed the belief that all the Ripper’s victims were streetwalkers. Far from it, ‘there is abundant proof that Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly were “one-man” women and that the former was able to support herself by artificial flower making and crochet work.’ Inordinately proud of his discovery, Stewart adverted to it repeatedly. Thus, on a subsequent page, he tells us: ‘Several witnesses stoutly denied that Chapman was a regular streetwalker. According to them she was comparatively respectable, and as an artificial flower maker and crochet worker she was capable of earning sufficient money to keep her off the streets.’2

  Now, exploring the evidence for these assertions, we find that Stewart’s ‘abundant proof’ and ‘several witnesses’ comes down to the inquest deposition of just one witness – Amelia Palmer. Amelia did, indeed, say that Annie was respectable. She never used bad language. Although often the worse for drink she was easily affected by liquor. And she was ‘a very industrious, clever little woman in crochet and things of that kind.’ But Amelia’s testimony is open to the objection that she was obviously trying to say the best of a friend of five years’ standing. Nor did she deny that Annie was a prostitute. In fact, under close interrogation she was obliged to concede that Annie had sometimes stayed out late and ‘was not particular how she earned her living.’3 Timothy Donovan, moreover, told the inquest that Annie often tried to bring men with her to the lodging house. Perhaps, however, we should not cavil too much at Stewart on this point. At least there was some basis for his contention which is more than can be said for many of his other statements.

  More durable misconceptions, popularized by Donald McCormick, surround Annie’s origins. ‘Of all the Ripper’s victims,’ he wrote in 1959, ‘she was the only woman with a respectable middle-class background. The fact that she had “known better days” did not endear her to some of the other prostitutes and she seems to have made a few enemies among them because of this . . . She had formerly lived at Windsor, where she was married to an Army pensioner, Fred Chapman, who was also a veterinary surgeon.’4 Apart from Annie’s residence at Windsor there is little or no truth in any of these statements but they continue to be repeated today and figure in two of the centennial studies.

  Amelia Palmer’s deposition, once again, is partly responsible for the misunderstandings. Amelia certainly did tell the inquest that Annie had been married to one Frederick Chapman, a Windsor veterinary surgeon, and this is possibly what Annie told her. But like many humble folk Annie seems to have been prone to romancing about her past as a means of enhancing her status in the eyes of present cronies. ‘The other women in the lodging house,’ noted the Star, ‘say that from what she had said at different times Dark Annie was well connected. She used to do crochet work, and, from her conversation it was evident she was a woman of some education.’5 Amelia’s error was corrected on the second day of the inquest, however, when Fountain Smith, Annie’s brother, explained that she had been married to a coachman named John Chapman. The notion that Chapman had been an army pensioner, also false, originally sprang from garbled news reports which confused him with Ted Stanley, the ‘pensioner’ who sometimes slept with Annie at 35 Dorset Street.

  Research at St Catherine’s House does not suggest that Annie was of middle-class origin. Her parents were married in Paddington on 22 February 1842. They were George Smith of Harrow Road and Ruth Chapman of Market Street. Smith is described on the marriage certificate as a private in the second battalion of Lifeguards. His father, Thomas Smith, was a shoemaker, and Ruth’s fath
er, William Chapman, belonged to the same trade. George never seems to have been promoted. On 25 February 1861, when his son Fountain Hamilton was born, he was still a private in the same regiment.

  Before 1916 service in the army was always on a voluntary basis. In the mid-Victorian period the officer corps was dominated by a hierarchy of wealth, kinship and connection, but this was certainly not the case with the ‘other ranks’. Indeed, the long period of enlistment (nominally for life between 1829 and 1847), low pay and harsh discipline and conditions of army life for the rank and file meant that ‘going for a soldier’ tended to be seen as an act of desperation or last resort. There were a few gentleman rankers but recruitment was primarily from the unemployed and least skilled sections of the working-class.6 Our evidence suggests overwhelmingly, then, that Annie’s father was of humble origin, a conclusion that is reinforced by the record of Annie’s own marriage in 1869. By then George Smith was dead but his former occupation is noted on the certificate as ‘servant’. Fountain Hamilton Smith, Annie’s brother, was a printer’s warehouseman in 1888.

  The fact that Annie and her kin are recorded at respectable addresses is little indication of their social status since they were probably in service and living in the homes of their employers. In June 1873, for example, when Annie’s second daughter was born, the family were living at 17 South Bruton Mews, Berkeley Square, off New Bond Street, and their presence there is seemingly explained by a news report of 18887 which states that John Chapman had once been the valet of a nobleman who lived in Bond Street and had been forced to resign his position because of Annie’s dishonesty. We will encounter this situation again when we come to investigate the case of Elizabeth Stride, the next victim. Registered as a prostitute in her native Sweden, Elizabeth came to England in 1866 and found a place in the service of a gentleman living near Hyde Park. Three years later, when she married, her address was recorded as 67 Gower Street, probably the residence of her employer at the time.