Complete History of Jack the Ripper (12 page)

Polly left the workhouse to take up a position as domestic servant with Samuel and Sarah Cowdry, Ingleside, Rose Hill Road, Wandsworth. And she tried to reforge the broken links with her kinsfolk by writing a letter to her father:

Walker sent a kind reply but heard nothing more. He did not learn, for instance, that on 12 July Polly absconded from her employer stealing clothing worth £3 10s. A few days later she took lodgings at 18 Thrawl Street. Apart from a day in the Grays Inn Road temporary Workhouse at the beginning of August Polly shared a room with Ellen Holland at Thrawl Street for something like six weeks. Mrs Holland liked Polly. She told the inquest that she had seen her the worse for drink on two or three occasions but had otherwise found her clean, quiet and inoffensive.

Polly left Thrawl Street about a week before her death. Her last few days are extremely mysterious. When Mrs Holland saw her in the early hours of 31 August, however, she gathered that Polly had been staying at the ‘White House’, a common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street.
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We do know that on the night of her murder she tried to return to 18 Thrawl Street and was turned out because she did not have her lodging money. Ellen Holland was the last person apart from the killer who is known to have seen her alive. That was at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road at 2.30 on the morning of 31 August. Mrs Holland wanted Polly to come home with her but she was then still sanguine about raising the money and reeled drunkenly off along the Whitechapel Road. Just over an hour later and less than three-quarters of a mile away her dead and mutilated body was found in Buck’s Row. It was just a few days after her forty-third birthday.

Inadequate, impoverished, a prostitute, probably an alcoholic – Polly Nichols was all of these but she inspired affection in those who came to know her best. Despite his differences with his daughter Edward Walker waived away her faults at the inquest on 1 September. ‘I don’t think she had any enemies,’ he said, ‘she was too good for
that.’ On the same day William Nichols, Polly’s estranged husband, was taken to Old Montague Street to identify her body by Inspector Abberline. Nichols was a pale man with a full, light-brown beard and moustache. Wearing a long black coat, dark trousers, a black tie and a tall silk hat, and carrying an umbrella, he appeared at the mortuary looking very gentlemanly and dignified, but when the lid of the coffin was removed and he saw the dead face of his wife he was much affected. ‘I forgive you, as you are,’ he told her, ‘for what you have been to me.’ And Polly’s friend Ellen Holland was greatly moved by her death. At the inquest proceedings of 3 September the following exchange took place between her and Mr Horey, the foreman of the jury:

Inspector Reid, Head of CID in H Division, had conducted the investigation into the George Yard murder. The body of Polly Nichols, however, had been discovered within the jurisdiction of the newly created J or Bethnal Green Division and Inspector Joseph Helson, Reid’s counterpart in Bethnal Green, took charge of the inquiry. This third murder of an East End prostitute, moreover, evoked a response from Scotland Yard in the portly form of Inspector Frederick George Abberline.

Police records describe Abberline as a fresh-complexioned man, five feet nine and a half inches in height, with dark-brown hair and hazel eyes. In 1888, it might equally truthfully have been said, he was forty-five and overweight, his thick moustache and bushy side-whiskers serving to accentuate the balding condition of his pate. Modest and soft-spoken, he reminded Walter Dew more of a bank manager or a solicitor than a detective-inspector first class. But Abberline’s track record befitted his rank. He had served twenty-five years in the Metropolitan Police, fourteen of them in the slums of Whitechapel. And during his years as H Division’s ‘Local Inspector’ (1878–1887) he had built up an unrivalled knowledge of
the East End and its villains and his even-handed and meticulous methods of work had won him the admiration and affection of his colleagues. In December 1887, after Abberline had been transferred to Scotland Yard at the express wish of James Monro and Adolphus Williamson, Assistant Commissioner (CID) and Chief Constable (CID) respectively, a large company of Whitechapel citizens and ex-colleagues gathered to honour him with a presentation dinner at the Unicorn Tavern in Shoreditch. George Hay Young then spoke of him as ‘the very ideal of a faithful, conscientious and upright officer’ and Superintendent Arnold, Head of H Division, lamented Abberline’s loss to Whitechapel ‘for a better officer there could not be.’ They presented him with a gold keyless hunting watch inscribed: ‘Presented, together with a purse of gold, to Inspector F. G. Abberline by the inhabitants of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, etc., on his leaving the district after fourteen years’ service, as a mark of their esteem and regard.’
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But Abberline was not out of the district for long. Ability and experience alike qualified him to investigate the Whitechapel murders. Hence it was, that in the autumn of 1888, he was sent to the East End to co-ordinate the work of the divisional detectives. In the ensuing months no officer would be more intimately involved in the investigation of the crimes. Few indeed would acquire such an encyclopaedic knowledge of the case.

The most strenuous efforts of Abberline and the detectives of J Division, however, yielded not the slightest clue to the identity of Polly Nichols’ murderer.

The Buck’s Row killer had left nothing except Polly’s body to mark his passing. On the day of the murder several officers searched Buck’s Row and its vicinity. Between five and six in the morning Spratling sent PC Thain to examine all the premises near the spot where the body had been found. The constable subsequently told the inquest that he ‘searched Essex Wharf, the Great Eastern Railway, the East London Railway, and the District Railway as far as Thomas Street’ but discovered neither weapon nor bloodstain. At eleven or twelve Spratling himself looked for clues in Buck’s Row and Brady Street but he, too, returned empty-handed. Later, with Sergeant Godley, he made a futile search of the Great Eastern Railway yard and of the premises of the East London and Metropolitan District Railways. Inspector Helson also examined the area. He discovered only one stain which ‘might have been blood’ in Brady Street.
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Extensive enquiries in the locality proved equally fruitless. No one
in Buck’s Row seemed to have seen or heard the killer. Three residents who lived very close to the spot where the body had been found were Mrs Emma Green, a widow, and Mr and Mrs Purkis. Emma Green lived with her three children at New Cottage, Buck’s Row, adjoining and east of the stable gateway where Polly had lain, but no one in the house had heard anything untoward during the night. Mrs Green shared a front room on the first floor with her daughter and the first intimation that they had of the tragedy was Sergeant Kirby’s sharp knock on the street door about four in the morning. Walter Purkis, the manager of Essex Wharf, lived with his wife in a house that fronted on Buck’s Row, almost opposite the stable gateway. They occupied the front room on the second floor. His wife was awake most of the night; Purkis himself only slept fitfully and was awake between one and two. Yet, again, it was a policeman – this time PC Neil – who apprised them of the atrocity. Until then the street had been very quiet. And neither the keeper of the board school, immediately to the west of the stable yard, nor the watchmen at Browne & Eagle’s wool warehouse and Schneider’s cap factory, across the road, had heard anything suspicious.

At the time of the murder there had been men at work in nearby Winthrop Street – three slaughtermen at Harrison, Barber & Co. Ltd and a watchman guarding a sewage works for the Whitechapel District Board of Works. None could shed the faintest light upon the mystery. Even those who had discovered Polly’s body, apparently within minutes of her death, could not contribute a crumb of information on the perpetrator of the crime. Cross had neither seen nor heard a person or vehicle leave the body. Paul had seen no one running away. And until he found Polly’s body PC Neil had seen and heard nothing suspicious. Yet his beat had never taken him far from Buck’s Row. ‘The farthest I had been that night was just through the Whitechapel Road and up Baker’s Row,’ he told the inquest.

Polly may have died without a cry of any kind. The proximity of the railway, however, might explain why no one heard a scream. Inevitably, too, one questions the efficacy of the local watchmen. Patrick Mulshaw, the Board of Works watchman, may not have been the only slacker. He went on duty at about 4.45 p.m. on 30 August, watching some sewage works in Winthrop Street, at the back of the Working Lads’ Institute, and was relieved at about 5.55 the next morning. He saw no one between three and four and heard no cry for help but admitted at the inquest to having dozed at times during
the night. ‘I suppose,’ asked the coroner, ‘[that] your watching is not up to much?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replied the old man truculently, ‘[but] it is thirteen long hours for 3s. and find your own coke.’
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In the absence of genuine clues suspicion momentarily fell upon the three horse slaughterers who had been working at the yard of Harrison, Barber & Co. Ltd. in Winthrop Street on the night of the murder. These men had turned up in Buck’s Row at some time after four and had stood as onlookers while Dr Llewellyn examined the body. One of them, Henry Tomkins of 12 Coventry Street, Bethnal Green, spoke on 3 September at the inquest. He related how he and his mates, James Mumford and Charles Britton, had worked at the slaughterhouse from between 8.00 and 9.00 p.m. on 30 August until 4.20 the next morning. They had learned of the murder, he explained, from PC Thain, who had called at the yard for his cape on his way for Dr Llewellyn, and after finishing work they had gone to see the body. PC Thain, testifying before the inquest a fortnight later, denied having alerted the slaughtermen to the murder, but apart from their presence in the vicinity and the nature of their calling there was nothing to connect them with the crime. Interrogated separately by the police, they all maintained that they had been working in Winthrop Street at the time of the murder, and since PC Neil had seen them there at 3.20 they were dismissed.
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The police made enquiries at common lodging houses, at coffee stalls and amongst prostitutes, but the search for Polly’s killer was completely barren of result. Surviving police reports leave us in no doubt of that. On 7 September Helson conceded that ‘at present not an atom of evidence can be obtained to connect any person with the crime.’ Twelve days later Abberline reported that ‘not the slightest clue can at present be obtained.’ And reviewing the case on 19 October Chief Inspector Swanson acknowledged that the ‘absence of the motives which lead to violence and of any scrap of evidence either direct or circumstantial, left the police without the slightest shadow of a trace.’
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There was little public criticism of the police investigation at this stage but later commentators have judged it wanting. Certainly the body could have been screened off and subjected to a more thorough examination in Buck’s Row, and it would have been possible to carry out a more systematic and comprehensive search of the area. But in a busy part of the East End, just off the Whitechapel Road, these operations would have been difficult, perhaps ineffective, and
however deficient the police procedures might appear in the context of modern standards of criminal detection they do not seem to have departed from Victorian conventions. When a body was discovered in the street it was incumbent upon the police to move it and in none of the Whitechapel murders did they waste much time in doing so.

The other frequently repeated allegation – that untrained mortuary officials stripped and washed the body before it could be properly examined – requires some qualification. It is true that Whitechapel had no public mortuary and that the body had of necessity to be taken to the workhouse mortuary in Old Montague Street, where the attendants – Robert Mann and his assistant James Hatfield – were both pauper inmates of the workhouse. It is also true that the attendants stripped and cleaned the body before the post-mortem. However, Mann and Hatfield were probably mistaken when they told the inquest that they received no instruction to leave the body alone and stripped it without a policeman being present. The attendants did not give their evidence until 17 September, nearly three weeks after the event, and were in any case both unreliable informants. Hatfield, for example, told the inquest that Polly had not been wearing stays, an assertion that was immediately disproved: