Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (9 page)

The details of what had happened to her that night, as she reported before her death, were that she was returning home, ‘after having a drink or two’, when a group of three or four young men started to follow her. She first noticed them as she crossed the road near to Whitechapel church and made her way into Brick Lane. The men stopped her on the corner of Brick Lane and Wentworth Street, where they pushed her into a doorway, and beat, raped and robbed her. If this wasn’t bad enough, before leaving the scene, one of them slashed at her face with a knife causing the severing of her ear, while another of the men viciously jabbed a blunt object into her vagina, tearing the perineum.

Emma Smith passed out with the excruciating pain and collapsed in a heap in the doorway. Passers-by ignored her, probably thinking she was just another rough sleeper taking refuge in the doorway, but some twenty minutes later, when she finally regained consciousness, she managed to pull herself to her feet and drag herself back to her lodgings, which were at least 1 mile away.

The murder of Emma Smith was at first attributed to one of the many Whitechapel gangs who were known to patrol the area in which the incident occurred, extorting money from prostitutes in return for their protection. In fact, it wasn’t until September 1888 that she was first attributed as a Ripper victim by the press.

Whether or not Emma’s death should be attributed to the Ripper is debatable. There is no reason to doubt her story that she was attacked by a group of men, but no other Ripper victim, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Stride, according to witness Israel Schwartz’s account, was believed to have been killed by more than one man. Neither was any other Ripper victim raped. These two facts, however, do not necessarily mean that Emma Smith was not a victim of the Ripper, for what if the Ripper had been one of the members of the group that attacked and killed her? This is a possibility, but unfortunately, there is little evidence to back this theory.

The second possible Ripper victim was Martha Tabram, who was found dead in a stairwell in Spitalfields just three weeks prior to Mary Ann Nichols, on 7 August 1888, in what we would now term classical Ripper victim pose.

Martha Tabram had previously been married to Henry Samuel Tabram, but their marriage ended after six years due to Martha’s heavy drinking, which seemed to be a common factor in most of these cases. She moved in with another man but that relationship was also affected by Martha’s drinking, which left her to fend for herself in the only way she knew: prostitution.

Bank holiday Monday, 6 August, Martha Tabram went out with a friend, Mary Ann Connelly, who was known as Pearly Poll. They visited a number of local pubs during the evening, where witnesses say they were seen with various men, some of whom were soldiers. When questioned by the police later, Pearly Poll said that Martha and her had picked up two guardsmen, a corporal and a private in the Two Brewers public house, and then drank with them in several pubs including the White Swan on Whitechapel High Street.

It was around 11.45 p.m. when the two women left the White Swan. Pearly Poll took her corporal into the nearby Angel Alley, and waved goodbye to Martha as she took the private into George Yard. Both, obviously, for the purpose of having sex. This was the last time Pearly Poll would see Martha Tabram alive.

At 4.45 the following morning, it was just starting to get light as John Reeves, a tenant of George Yard Buildings, left his lodgings and saw the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood on the first-floor landing. Reeves rushed off and found PC Barrett patrolling nearby. The body, although not yet identified, was that of Martha Tabram. She was lying flat on her back, face upward, with her arms and hands outstretched by her sides. Her knees were bent and her legs open in a manner which could suggest intercourse had possibly taken place.

When questioned later on, PC Barrett stated that at about 2 a.m. he had seen a young Grenadier Guardsman in Wentworth Street, close to the northern end of George Yard. PC Barrett questioned the guardsman, asking him what he was doing there, to which the guardsman replied that he was waiting for ‘a chum’ who had gone off with a girl. This explanation satisfied PC Barrett at the time, but his superiors questioned his immediate acceptance of it later, after the post-mortem revealed that one of the wounds found inflicted on the body was a deep wound to the sternum, which appeared to have been caused by a dagger or bayonet, thereby leading the police to believe that the guardsman PC Barrett saw that night could well have been the murderer. Further inquiries were made, but no further evidence of the guardsman’s identity or whereabouts was ever offered up, and for all intents and purpose, the case was put on the back burner, so to speak.

The bayonet wound was not the only injury that the post-mortem revealed. It showed five wounds to the left lung, two to the right lung, one to the heart, five to the liver, two to the spleen and six to the stomach. There were also numerous smaller wounds to various parts of the body, making a total of thirty-nine in all, suggesting a frenzied attack, rather than a straightforward murder, carried out in the anger of the moment.

According to Dr Timothy Killeen, who undertook the post-mortem, the killer focused his attack on the breasts, belly and groin area. In his opinion, all but one of the wounds were inflicted by a right-handed attacker, and all but one seemed to have been the result of an ordinary small knife, or penknife. The one, which was different was the bayonet wound, as already mentioned.

This, then, was the basis of the case that Abberline was now confronted with. Three prostitutes mutilated and murdered, all within a very short distance of each other, and all within a period of less than six months. As intriguing as this might have sounded to Inspector Abberline at the time, nothing could have prepared him for the horrors he was to face in the months that followed.

4

In Charge?

T 
here was no doubt, in most people’s minds that Inspector Abberline was the ideal man for this case, due to his extensive experience in the area. He was placed in charge of a team of detectives, who would be investigating what was first known as the Whitechapel murders, but would eventually become known worldwide as the Jack the Ripper murders.

The name of the policeman most people still associate with the Jack the Ripper case is, of course, Inspector Frederick Abberline, but theoretically, the man in overall charge of the investigation into the Ripper murders was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson.

Swanson was placed in overall charge of the investigation into the Whitechapel murders from 1 September 1888. He was freed from all other duties and given his own office at Scotland Yard from which to co-ordinate inquiries. He was given permission to see all the paperwork, reports and documents relating to the investigation. His appointment to the case was one of the few actions taken by his close friend, Deputy Commissioner Robert Anderson, between his sudden appointment to head of the CID that morning and his equally sudden departure on leave to Switzerland later that afternoon.

Swanson, however, was not familiar with Whitechapel at all, which is why Abberline was re-assigned back to H Division in order to co-ordinate operations on the ground. As a result, Abberline ended up doing most of the actual legwork on the case and became the officer most associated with the investigation in the mind of the public.

Abberline relished being put in charge of such a case, for what he had at first perceived to be a sole murder case, was quickly turning into part of a series of murders, and particularly grizzly ones at that, which had caught both the public’s and the media’s imagination. What he didn’t know at this point, however, was that he would be reporting all his findings to Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. Not that there was anything strange in this, for it was completely normal police procedure for someone of Abberline’s rank to have to report to a senior officer. What did rankle him, however, was the fact that he hadn’t been told that it would be Swanson whom he would be working under. In all probability, Abberline assumed that he would be directly responsible to Deputy Commissioner Robert Anderson himself, and would not need to have to report his every move to someone he classed as just a ‘personal friend’ of the deputy commissioner.

Abberline’s first day in his new office was Saturday 1 September, just a matter of hours after Polly Nichols had been found murdered; he did not have time to settle in, go through the few facts of the case or even organise his team. He instead had to rush straight off to the Whitechapel Working Lad’s Institute on Whitechapel Road, next to the present-day Whitechapel Underground Station, where the inquest into Nichols’ death was being opened. It was noted that Inspector Frederick Abberline attended on behalf of the CID, but after all the rush to get there, he found that the inquest had now been adjourned until Monday 3 September.

Earlier that Saturday morning, Dr Llewellyn had conducted a post-mortem on the body of Polly Nichols, in which he concluded with the following:

5 teeth missing; slight laceration on tongue; bruise on lower part of right jaw (possibly from a punch or thumb pressure); circular bruise on left side of face (possibly also from finger pressure); left side of neck, 1 inch below jaw, 4 inch incision starting immediately below the left ear; a second throat incision starting 1 inch below and 1 inch in front of the first, running 8 inches in a circular direction around the throat and stopping 3 inches below the right ear, completely severing all tissues down to the spine, including the large vessels of the neck on both sides; no blood found on breast of clothes or of body; on the lower part of abdomen, 2 to 3 inches from the left side ran a very deep, jagged wound, cutting the tissues through; several incisions ran across the abdomen; 3 or 4 similar cuts ran down the right side of the abdomen.

The next morning, Sunday 2 September, Abberline had to break his promise to his wife Emma to accompany her to church. Needless to say, Emma wasn’t very happy with this, as they had always attended church together. This was his first full day at his new job, and already he was breaking promises to her. Abberline had no alternative but to attend a meeting with his new team at the Whitechapel office, where he was to instruct them to take witness statements while the facts were still fresh in their minds. Every hour that was allowed to lapse could lose them valuable time, possible evidence and, most certainly, momentum.

From the little they had gleaned so far, the officers in Abberline’s team couldn’t see his reasoning on this. There were no actual witnesses to the crime, apart from a motley collection of people, neighbours and so on who happened to be on the streets during the hours that Polly Nichols was last seen alive, and the time she was found dead. Abberline was adamant on this, reasoning with them that if they could gain two pieces of identical evidence from the people who had been on the streets that night, they might just add up to one real piece of evidence that could lead to a conviction.

The team obeyed Abberline’s instructions and gathered every scrap of information they could, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. They interviewed three men, Henry Tomkins, Charles Brittain and James Mumford, who all worked as slaughtermen at Barber’s Knacker’s Yard, Winthrop Street, approximately 150 yards from Buck’s Row. Tomkins, Brittain and Mumford left the slaughterhouse at midnight on the 31st, and walked to the end of the street together, none of them seeing anything suspicious at the time.

At 12.30 a.m., an un-named witness said he saw Polly Nichols leaving the Frying Pan pub on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street, and said that she was alone at the time. Sometime later, although the exact time is unknown, PC Neil passed through Winthrop Street and saw, through an open doorway, Tomkins, Brittain and Mumford hard at work.

At around 1.20 a.m., the house deputy at 18 Thrawl Street, which was the doss house where Polly had been staying, said that she had turned up asking for her room, but he had shown her out as she didn’t have any money to pay for it. He stated that she seemed somewhat drunk, or merry, as he put it, and just smiled at him as she left, saying, ‘Don’t you go worrying about me, I’ll soon get my doss money.’ Her departing shot to him was, ‘See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now’, referring to her new hat.

Sometime after that, probably around 2 a.m., a huge fire had broken out at Shadwell Dry Docks, and a local woman, Emily Holland, was returning from watching the fire when she stopped for a moment to shelter from the rain, outside a grocer’s shop on the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street. She heard someone cough behind her and turned to see Polly Nichols, whom she was acquainted with, standing in the doorway behind her. She said that she felt sorry for her as she looked very drunk holding on to the wall beside her. Holland told Nichols that it was very late and tried to persuade her to go home to her lodgings in Thrawl Street, but Polly seemed oblivious to what she was telling her and just laughed, saying that she had her doss money several times that night but had drunk it away every time. She then proceeded to show Emily, her new bonnet, saying, in a very slurred voice, not to worry about her, that she would be alright. Polly Nichols then staggered as she pushed past Holland and started to walk away, along Whitechapel Road, in the direction of Buck’s Row. That was the last time Emily Holland would ever see Polly Nichols alive.