Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (17 page)

At 12.30 a.m. the duty officer in charge on the main desk heard her shouting, asking when they were going to let her out of there. The officer smiled to himself, remembering the state she was in when she was brought in; he called back to her, saying, ‘When you can look after yourself.’ To which she replied back, ‘I can do that right now.’

The duty officer finished off some paperwork he was working on, and then went along to Eddowes’ cell, which he opened up. By this time it was 12.55 a.m. She certainly looked like she had sobered up; at least she was standing, and not staggering. ‘One last thing before I let you go,’ he said, ‘your name and address, what is it?’ Eddowes paused for a few moments, before replying ‘Mary Ann Kelly’; she then gave her address as 6 Fashion Street.

Prostitutes often gave false names and addresses when picked up by the police, but Eddowes did often use the name Kelly, as it was the name of a man, John Kelly, whom she’d had a relationship with a couple of years earlier. But why did she choose ‘Mary Ann’ and why the fictitious address of 6 Fashion Street? She was living at a common lodging house on 55 Flower and Dean Street at this time.

The duty officer led her along a passageway, to a door that led out to the street. As he pushed the door open for her, she asked him the time, to which he replied, ‘Too late for you to get any more drink.’ She said it wasn’t more drink she was after; she was worried she would get a beating from her man when she got home so late. She was probably making all this up in order to make him believe her fictitious name and address, and that she was an ordinary married woman. The duty officer was not exactly sympathetic, whatever her circumstances, and replied to her, ‘Serves you right – you have no right to get drunk.’ He then turned to walk back inside, telling her to make sure she shut the door. Even after being treated so appallingly by the duty officer, Eddowes still managed a smile as she waved cheerily to him and said, ‘Good night old cock’, before stepping out onto the street and turning left in the direction of Houndsditch and Mitre Square.

Mitre Square is situated just inside the City of London boundary. At this time, it was an enclosed square which housed three imposing warehouse buildings, three uninhabited houses and a shop, which backed onto its south-west corner. There were also two more smaller houses, which nestled between the warehouses, one of which was occupied by a City of London police constable, Richard Pearse. During the day the square was a little hive of industry, but when night fell and the workers left their premises, the square became a dark and usually deserted area.

Mitre Square had three entrances, the first being a fairly wide street which led from Mitre Street, the second being St James Place (known locally as the Orange Market), which was much narrower and not much more than an alley really, and the third, in the south-east corner of the square, being the long and narrow Church Passage, which stretched into the square from Duke’s Place.

Police Constable Edward Watkins, of the City of London Police, paced his beat through Mitre Square, as he did almost every other night. The only sounds to be heard were the echos of his own boots on the pavement, as well as that of a local cat meowing as it always did when he passed. It took Watkins approximately fifteen minutes to patrol the square. It was then 1.30 a.m. and, as usual, all was quiet. So quiet, in fact, that he used to say to his colleagues that you could hear a pin drop.

About five minutes after Watkins had left the square, three Jewish gentlemen, Harry Harris, Joseph Hyam Levy and Joseph Lawende, left the nearby Imperial Club on Duke Street. As they passed Church Passage they noticed a woman talking quietly with a man. The woman had her back to them, but they noticed that the couple were very close to each other, and the woman’s hand was resting on the man’s chest.

Being the gentlemen that they were, the three men did not like to see this type of thing happening, quite brazenly, on a street corner. Levy was more worried for his own safety than that of the others, so told his friends that with characters like that about they should stay together as a group, rather than go their separate ways home. He hurried past the couple as quickly as he could, trying to pay them as little attention as he could. When asked later if he could give the police a description of either of them, all he could say with any accuracy was that he thought the man was possibly about 3 in taller than the woman.

Joseph Lawende, however, was a little less disgusted than his friend, and a little more observant. Although he hadn’t seen the woman’s face, he was almost certain of what she was wearing. When later shown the clothing Catherine Eddowes had been wearing, he was absolutely certain that it was the same as worn by the woman he had seen that night.

The street lighting wasn’t particularly good in the square, but he had caught a brief glimpse of the man’s face and was able to provide police with a description. He described the man as aged about 30, 5 ft 9 in tall and of medium build. He went on to say that the man had a fair complexion, a small fair moustache and was dressed in a dark jacket, red neckerchief and a grey, peaked, cloth cap.

One would think that to describe someone so accurately, Lawende must have got a very good view of him indeed, but he later said that he only caught a brief glimpse of the man as he passed by, and since the couple were doing nothing particularly suspicious, he didn’t exactly pay either of them too much attention. When asked if he thought he would be able to recognise or identify the man if he were to see him again, he replied that he doubted it.

By 1.44 a.m. PC Watkins had returned to his starting position in the square. The only thing on his mind, at this time, was getting back to the police station and clocking off for the night. It was at this point, as he started to walk away, that he noticed a dark bundle on the ground, close to a corner of the square. It certainly couldn’t be the cat, as it was quite large; he lifted his lantern and shone it in the direction of the bundle. He reeled back in horror at the sight that confronted him, for it was the body of a woman, who was later identified as Catherine Eddowes. This was the second murder in one night, and just forty-five minutes apart, not that Watkins would have known that at this moment in time; all he was aware of was the ghastly sight that now confronted him.

Catherine Eddowes was lying on her back in a pool of blood; her throat had been cut open, almost from ear to ear, and her clothes were up above her waist, exposing all of the lower half of her body. Her stomach had been slashed and ripped open, leaving her intestines and bowels protruding.

PC Watkins had been in the police force for a number of years, during which time he had witnessed all types of crimes, including murder and rape, but he had never seen anything as horrific as this before. So bad were her injuries that he had to steady himself against the wall for a moment, and take in a breath of fresh air, before running across the square for help. He banged on the doors of Kearley and Tongs tea warehouse, which dominated the northern side of the square, where he knew a retired Metropolitan Police officer named George Morris was working as a nightwatchman.

George Morris barely had time to open the door before PC Watkins grabbed him. ‘Quick,’ he shouted, ‘grab your lamp and come with me, there’s a woman been cut to pieces over there.’ The two men ran across the square to where Eddowes’ body was lying. George Morris could hardly believe his eyes, and had to be shook back to reality by Watkins, who told him to run as fast as he could and fetch help. This was not an easy task for Morris, who was not exactly young at the time, but he nevertheless did as he was told and made his way to Aldgate, where he enlisted the help of two more constables, PC James Harvey and PC Holland.

PC Watkins, who had assumed charge of the operation until a senior officer arrived on the scene, immediately sent PC Holland to fetch a local doctor, Dr George Sequira, from his house on nearby Jewry Street. It was 1.55 a.m. when Sequira reached Mitre Square and examined Eddowes’ body. He later gave evidence at the inquest regarding his opinion on how she had been killed,and the time of death.

A short while later they were joined by more police officers from the City of London Police. Inspector Edward Collard arrived from Bishopsgate police station and ordered an immediate search of the neighbourhood, instructing that door-to-door inquiries were to be made of the area around Mitre Square. He was quickly followed by a number of detectives from the City of London Police, headed by Superintendent James McWilliam, head of the City of London Police Detective Department.

Officers from both police stations began to fan out through the streets of Whitechapel and the surrounding area. Anyone who looked even remotely suspicious was stopped and questioned, but no arrests were made. The killer, it seemed, was beginning to take on the mantle that the popular press had given him, which was that of a phantom, a ghostly figure who seemed to be able to appear and disappear into the night, without anyone ever seeing him. Directly opposite where the body of Eddowes was found lived City Police Constable Richard Pearce; his bedroom window looked directly down onto the murder scene, yet he neither heard nor saw a thing that night.

By 2.18 a.m. a police doctor, Frederick Gordon Brown, had also arrived on the scene and made a quick examination of the body. He certified that the victim’s throat had been cut, her torso had been ripped open and her intestines had been pulled out and laid over her shoulder. The killer had cut deep V shapes into her cheeks and eyes. The tip of her nose had been sliced off and her ear lobes had been nicked through with the blade. In addition, the killer had carefully removed her left kidney and her uterus, and taken them with him when he fled the scene. One rather strange item that was also missing was a portion of her apron, which had been ripped or torn from the article as a whole and also removed from the scene. Dr Brown later testified at the inquest that the body was still relatively warm when he examined her, and that there were no signs of rigor mortis having taken place at that point. He further testified that, in his opinion, Catherine Eddowes must have been killed within half an hour prior to him being called to the scene.

The police search turned up nothing: no witnesses or clues, and most certainly no suspects. No money was found on the corpse and there was no evidence that she had struggled with her killer, which left the police with absolutely nothing to go on. When one considers the enormously high number of police officers in the direct vicinity of the square that night, and at that exact time, it is amazing that no one saw or heard a thing.

It wasn’t exactly turning out to be a good night for the police: two prostitutes had been murdered within half an hour of each other, one of which was murdered in the City of London of all places, which was certainly not known for this type of thing. Add to this the abnormally large police presence, a witness who forgot what a possible suspect looked like almost immediately after accurately describing him to the police and a police officer who lived directly opposite the scene of the crime and did not hear or see a thing. This was turning into a newspaper reporter’s dream!

Under the eyes and ears of the police, the murderer had somehow tracked his victim into the square, killed her, mutilated her body and escaped completely, in total silence, and all in the space of fifteen minutes. But the night was far from over.

At 2.55 a.m., PC Long was patrolling his beat in Goulston Street, Spitalfields, which is just over a third of a mile away from Mitre Square. As he passed the entrance to 108–119 Wentworth Model Dwellings, he noticed a piece of material with bloodstains on it, lying on the floor near to the staircase. Although he did not know it at the time, the piece of material was the portion of the apron that had been ripped from the clothing Catherine Eddowes had been wearing when she was found dead in Mitre Square.

The piece of material looked very suspicious to PC Long as it had a considerable amount of blood and faeces on it, and was wet along one side. PC Long’s first thoughts were that the blade of a knife had apparently been wiped on it, which he thought could be consistent with maybe a fight or an attack of some sort. He had passed this spot just thirty-five minutes earlier and had not noticed anything there then, which led him to surmise that it must have been left there very recently. As PC Long bent down to pick the piece of material up, he noticed a message, written in chalk, on the wall just above it, which he also did not remember seeing before. He copied the wording down into his notebook, as follows:

The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing

PC Long then searched all six staircases in the buildings, in the hope that he might possibly find a weapon, a body, bloody footprints or even a trail of blood, but unfortunately he didn’t find anything. As he started to make his way back to the police station, he bumped into another police officer, who was from a different station to him. The police officer told him that a murder had been committed in Mitre Square, which in turn made PC Long even more suspicious of what he had found. Long told the other constable of what he had discovered, and left him in charge of the building, telling him to keep a close observation on the dwelling, to see whether anyone left or entered, while he was away. PC Long then took the piece of the apron along to Commercial Street police station, where he reported it to the inspector on duty, along with his report, which included a copy of the writing he found on the wall.

Could the piece of bloodstained apron have held a clue which has long been overlooked? It has never been established why the piece of apron was cut from Eddowes’ clothing in the first place or why it was dumped in the doorway of the flats in Goulston Street. It has been alleged that the Ripper may have used it to wipe Eddowes’ blood from his hands and face as he fled the scene, but when Abberline looked into this theory, he thought it highly unlikely, as the distance between Mitre Square and Goulston Street is approximately one-third of a mile, and would probably take about eight to ten minutes to walk. He argued that the murderer would never have seriously contemplated walking that distance through the London streets, whilst wiping away the blood from himself, knowing full well that the streets were full of policemen looking for anyone and anything suspicious at the time.