Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (12 page)

At 2 a.m., Annie Chapman stepped out onto the streets of East London once again. At least it had stopped raining, which meant there might be a few lonely souls back out on the streets looking for company. From the limited information we have to hand, the lonely souls were indeed far and few between. It might have stopped raining, but it was still cold and windy, and the dark, narrow streets of Spitalfields were almost bereft of life. Chapman found herself shuffling along from one doorway to the next, pausing here and there for a while trying to keep warm, and hoping and praying that she might find a customer with a few pennies to spend.

It is unsure whether she did any business at all that night, as she certainly didn’t return to the lodging house, but one of the witnesses, Mrs Elizabeth Long, who gave evidence at the inquest, later testified that she had seen Chapman talking to a man at five o’clock that morning, just past the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Mrs Long said she was certain of the time, as she had heard the clock on the Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane, strike the half hour just as she had turned onto the street. As she passed them, she overheard the man ask, ‘Will you?’ To which Chapan replied, ‘Yes.’ Mrs Long described the man as in his forties, slightly taller than Chapman, of dark complexion, possibly foreign, ‘shabby-genteel’ in appearance, and wearing a deerstalker hat and dark overcoat.

Apart from the murderer, it seems very likely that Mrs Long was the last person to see Annie Chapman alive. Another witness at the inquest, Albert Cadosch, who lived nearby, had gone into the neighbouring yard at 27 Hanbury Street at about 5.30 a.m. to use the outside toilet. Whist there he heard voices in the yard next door, followed by the sound of something crashing against the adjoining fence. Cadosch didn’t know it at the time, but in all probability this crashing sound was the noise of Annie Chapman’s body as she was pushed up against the fence by the murderer.

It was still quite dark at six o’clock that morning, when John Davis, a market porter, left his home at 29 Hanbury Street, to go to work at nearby Spitalfields Market. As he came out of his back door into the yard, he saw something lying on the ground between the doorway and the garden fence, which he at first thought was a dog. As he got closer, he realised it was in fact the body of a woman, which was later identified as Annie Chapman.

Davis could see immediately that she was dead, by the position and the amount of blood on and around her body. He rushed back into the house and alerted several neighbours, before running off to Commercial Street police station to report what had happened. Abberline and several members of his team were on the scene within minutes. Nothing was to be touched, Abberline ordered, until he had spoken to as many witnesses as possible; but within minutes, Abberline’s boss, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, had also arrived on the scene. Completely ignoring Abberline, he publicly ordered an immediate search of all common lodging houses, to ascertain if anyone had entered that morning under any suspicious circumstances, or with blood on their hands or clothes. While Swanson strutted about giving out orders, and showing the press and the public exactly who was in charge of this case, Inspector Abberline quietly went about his duty speaking to local people and taking notes from anyone who could possibly throw some light on the case.

There were sixteen people living at 29 Hanbury Street, none of whom had seen or heard anything at the time of the murder. The passage led from the street door right through the house, and out to the backyard. It was never locked as it was frequented by the residents at all hours of the day and night, as the yard was the location of the only toilet in the house. The street door was wide open when Chapman’s body was discovered, which was also quite normal. Another witness said he had often seen strangers, both men and women, in the passage of the house, using the yard’s toilet as if it were a public one.

While the yard was still undergoing a thorough search, Abberline was busy noting all of Chapman’s private belongings, which were pitifully lacking, to say the least. These items included a piece of muslin, a comb, and the coins and brass rings, which he had noted laid out around the feet of the corpse. Abberline discovered later that the bloodstained envelope also found in the yard, with the crest of the Sussex Regiment upon it, did in fact belong to Chapman. She had apparently picked it up from her lodgings and used it to carry two pills in, for her lung condition.

The coins and the brass rings, which Abberline had told his constable to make a note of, strangely went missing sometime between having been found and the time of the inquest. They were never mentioned again, not even in surviving police records. This could, of course, have been nothing more than an oversight or police incompetence, but during this period, medical students, who were not exactly paid large amounts of money, were known to polish farthings and try to pass them off as half sovereigns. As the rumours surrounding Jack the Ripper grew, so too did the assumption by many people that the Ripper was undeniably someone with a knowledge of surgery: a medical student perhaps?

After the preliminary police investigation at the scene of the crime, Dr George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon, examined the body and noted that Chapman was probably killed sometime between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. He also made several notes on her injuries and the position she was found.

The body was conveyed later that day to Whitechapel mortuary, in the same police ambulance that had been used for Polly Nichols. The inquest into Annie Chapman’s death was opened on 10 September at the Working Lad’s Institute, Whitechapel. The coroner was Wynne Edwin Baxter. Dr George Bagster Phillips described the body as he saw it at 6.30 a.m. in the backyard of the house at 29 Hanbury Street:

The left arm was placed across the left breast. The legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side. The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen. The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom and very fine teeth they were. The body was terribly mutilated … the stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but was evidently commencing.

The throat was dissevered deeply; the incision through the skin were jagged and reached right round the neck … On the wooden paling between the yard in question and the next, smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased lay, were to be seen. These were about 14 inches from the ground, and immediately above the part where the blood from the neck lay.

Dr Phillips also commented on the instrument that was used to mutilate and murder Annie Chapman, stating that it must have been around 6–8 in in length, a very sharp and narrow blade, possibly the type used by a slaughterman which has normally been ground down in the sharpening process.

He ruled out the use of a bayonet or a sword type of weapon. He also discounted the possibility that it might have been an instrument used by a medical practitioner, as a knife of this particular shape would only be used for post-mortem purposes, and the ordinary surgical case would not contain such an instrument. However, he did go on to say that there were indications of anatomical knowledge.

Owing to the particularly cool weather for that time of year and the amount of blood Chapman had lost, it was very difficult to decipher the exact time of death as the body was cold when he first examined it. All he could say with any certainty was that there was no evidence of a struggle having taken place, and that he was positive the deceased had entered the yard alive.

Apart from the disappearing coins, another strange thing regarding Chapman’s body was that, when she was found, there was a handkerchief tied around her throat: not a scarf, which might have possibly been worn to ward off the cold weather, but an ordinary small handkerchief. Dr Phillips testified that, in his opinion, the handkerchief was not tied on after the throat was cut. In other words, it was there when the killer struck, so firstly, why was the handkerchief there at all, and secondly, how could the killer have cut Chapman’s throat while completely avoiding the handkerchief, and getting no blood on it whatsoever?

Her throat had been cut from left to right, and she had been disembowelled, with her intestines pulled out of her abdomen and placed over each of her shoulders. The morgue examination also revealed that part of her uterus was missing. Dr Phillips also concluded that Chapman’s protruding tongue and swollen face led him to think that she may have been asphyxiated with the handkerchief around her neck before her throat was cut. He was certain that she was killed on the spot where she was found, as there was no blood trail leading from the street to the yard.

Dr Phillips formed the opinion that the murderer must have possessed some anatomical knowledge in order to have sliced out the reproductive organs in a single movement with such a relatively short blade. Dr Phillips’ theory was, however, dismissed by other experts, who thought it more likely the organ had been removed by mortuary staff, who took advantage of bodies that had already been opened to extract and sell the organs as surgical specimens, in a lucrative market at the time.

It was also suggested in some circles that Chapman had been murdered deliberately to obtain the uterus. This theory was based on the premise that an American had made enquiries at a London medical school for the purchase of such organs. Both the
Lancet
and the
British Medical Journal
were dismissive of this idea; the
British Medical Journal
reported that the physician who requested the samples had left the country eighteen months before the murder and was a highly reputable doctor, although they didn’t name him. The
Chicago Tribune
then picked up on this story and claimed the American doctor was from Philadelphia.This quickly led others to speculate that the man in question was the notorious Francis Tumblety, who had either lived in, or travelled to, almost every American state and later became a prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.

7

Arrests

A
t this point in the investigation, neither Inspector Abberline, nor any of his fellow officers, had any real suspects in mind. It was alleged that Abberline had been ordered direct from Scotland Yard: to start giving the public and the press what they were seemingly clambering for: arrests. There were far too many strange and suspicious-looking people on the streets, especially around the East End, and the public did not feel safe.

Abberline was far from comfortable with this method of working; he had been a policeman for far too long to issue casual arrest warrants based upon a person’s looks or sometimes erratic behaviour. Using a special hand-picked team of men, he continued with his investigations in the manner he saw fit, while leaving what he termed these ‘panic arrests’ to lower ranked officers and other stations.

Not only was Abberline and his team working diligently to catch the killer, the ordinary citizens of the East End also did their best to assist the police as much as they could. They reported every suspicious person and every overheard piece of conversation which they deemed to be relevant to the case. These actions were commendable, but they also hindered the investigations to an extent, as every single witness statement that was reported to the police had to be recorded and looked into.

So great was the amount of extra work that this entailed that it actually took officers off the street. Abberline was under great strain and pressure to bring the murderer to justice, and with this now smaller team of detectives actually out on the streets, it meant that he would spend almost the whole day directing his staff, and then go out onto the streets himself, often in disguise.

He had been known to spend hours on the streets, often until the early hours of the morning. Then, feeling too weak to walk home, he would hail a hansom cab to finally arrive home, worn out and weary, at 5 a.m. Even then he was often deprived of sleep, as just as he was about to get into bed, he would often be sent a telegram, summoning him back to the East End to interrogate some lunatic or suspected person whom the inspector in charge would not take the responsibility of questioning.