Complete History of Jack the Ripper (20 page)

West’s view that the Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street murders had been committed by the same man seems to have been general amongst the detectives investigating the crimes. Abberline certainly held to it and said so in his report of 19 September. And Inspector Helson of J Division, who had handled the Nichols investigation, evidently
thought so too for he also actively assisted the H Division detectives working on the Chapman case.

The hunt for the Hanbury Street killer proved almost as frustratingly futile as had the previous investigations. Timothy Donovan and Fountain Smith quickly identified Annie’s body but the police learned nothing of her history that suggested a serious suspect or a motive for her killing. The tenants at No. 29 were interviewed and their rooms were searched. Neither this, nor inquiries at adjoining houses, yielded a clue to the identity of the murderer. Detectives visited common lodging houses in the hope that someone might remember a man who entered after two on the morning of the murder and who behaved suspiciously or carried bloodstains on his face, hands or clothing. But these inquiries proved as fruitless as those amongst prostitutes and at local public houses.

Annie had been accustomed to wear brass rings on the third finger of her left hand. At the inquest Eliza Cooper spoke of three rings, which she said Annie had bought from a black man. Ted Stanley only remembered two. But when Annie’s body had been found in Hanbury Street the rings were missing and an abrasion over the head of the proximal phalanx of the finger indicated that they had been wrenched off by force. Working on the assumption that the killer had mistaken them for gold rings, the police made inquiries at jewellers, pawnbrokers and other dealers throughout the area but met with no success.

Nor did the items found about the backyard yield a breakthrough. Dr Phillips did not think that the leather apron had any connection with the murder. It bore no traces of blood and did not look as if it had been recently unfolded. And so it proved, for Mrs Richardson told the inquest that the apron belonged to her son. Two days before the murder she had found it mildewed in the cellar and had put it under the water tap in the yard and left it there. Mrs Richardson also identified the nailbox and the piece of steel as her property.
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The police made a determined effort to trace the sender of the piece of torn envelope discovered near Annie’s head. It bore the official stamp of the Royal Sussex Regiment and on 14 September Inspector-Chandler visited the depot of the first battalion of the regiment at Farnborough to prosecute inquiries. There he learned that most of the men used the envelopes, which they could buy at the canteen, but none of them admitted to corresponding with anyone in Spitalfields and Chandler failed to match any of the signatures in the paybooks
with the handwriting on the envelope. It became clear, moreover, that the sender of the envelope might not have been a soldier at all. The letter had been posted, not in the barracks, but at the nearby Lynchford Road Post Office. The postmasters there told Chandler that they stocked a supply of the envelopes and sold them to the general public!

An important development in the matter of the envelope occurred on 15 September. William Stevens, a painter and sometime lodger at 35 Dorset Street, turned up at Commercial Street Police Station and volunteered the information that he had seen Annie at the lodging house before she was turned out on the morning of her death. She said that she had been to the hospital and she had a bottle of medicine, a bottle of lotion and a box of pills with her. As she was handling the box it came to pieces. It had contained only two pills and Annie proceeded to wrap these in a piece of paper which she found on the kitchen floor by the fireplace. Stevens thought that the torn envelope bearing the stamp of the Royal Sussex Regiment and the paper picked up by Annie from the kitchen floor at 35 Dorset Street were identical.
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It thus became apparent that the envelope had no connection whatever with the murderer and precious little with the victim.

In the light of these disappointments Chief Inspector Swanson’s remark that the Chapman investigation ‘did not supply the police with the slightest clue to the murderer’ is perhaps understandable. And yet it is a harsh judgement. For the Chapman inquiry turned up three important witnesses. At the time, for reasons which will be explained shortly, the police never attached the significance to them that they deserved, but taken together their testimony reveals a good deal about the murderer and even, perhaps, a little about the murderer himself.

The first witness was John Richardson, Amelia’s 37-year-old son. He lived at 2 John Street, Spitalfields, and worked as a porter in Spitalfields Market but he also assisted his mother with her packing case business at 29 Hanbury Street. Some time back the cellar at No. 29 had been broken into and a few tools stolen. Since then John had been in the habit of checking the cellar on market mornings and it was upon such an errand that he visited No. 29 between 4.45 and 4.50 on the morning of the murder.

The street door was closed. Richardson lifted the latch, walked through the passage and opened the yard door. But he did not walk
out into the yard. One of his boots had been hurting a toe so he sat down on the middle step, his feet resting on the flags of the yard, and cut a piece of leather from the boot with a table knife. It was getting light and from the step he could see that the padlock on the cellar door was secure. Therefore, having tied up his boot, he left the house and went to the market. He had no need to close the yard door which closed itself (Coroner Baxter refers to it as a swing door) but he did shut the street door. While sitting on the step – about two minutes at the most – Richardson saw no body in the yard. Yet, as he explained to the inquest, ‘I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then.’
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The second witness was Mrs Elizabeth Long, the wife of a cart minder named James Long.

At about five that same morning she left her home at 32 Church Street to go to Spitalfields Market. It was about 5.30 as she walked westwards through Hanbury Street. She was sure of the time because she heard the clock of the Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane, strike the half hour just before she got to the street. A man and a woman were standing talking on the pavement near No. 29. How near it is impossible now to say because press reports of Mrs Long’s inquest testimony do not agree. The
Telegraph
quotes her as saying that the couple were standing on the same side of the street as No. 29 and ‘only a few yards nearer Brick Lane’. But
The Times
, which frequently reports inquest testimony erroneously, implies that they were actually outside the house, ‘close against the shutters of No. 29.’ Whatever, the woman had her back towards Spitalfields Market and hence faced Mrs Long as she approached, and the man’s back was turned towards Mrs Long and Brick Lane. Mrs Long’s evidence is crucial for she later visited the mortuary and positively identified Annie Chapman as the woman she had seen. Her companion was almost certainly the murderer.

At the inquest Mrs Long did her best to describe him:

Mrs Long heard the man ask ‘Will you?’ and the woman reply ‘Yes.’ She then passed them and went on her way without looking back.

Mrs Long’s description is recorded in police records in almost identical terms: ‘She only saw his back,’ reported Chief Inspector Swanson, ‘and would be unable to know him again. She describes him as apparently over 40 years of age. She did not see his face. He appeared to be a little taller than the woman and in her opinion looked like a foreigner. She thinks he had a dark coat on, but she could not recognize him again.’
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Albert Cadosch, a carpenter living at No. 27 Hanbury Street, next door to No. 29, was the last witness.

On the morning of the murder he got up at about 5.15 and went into his backyard. By then it was about 5.20. A fence of wooden palings, some five feet six inches high, divided the yard from that of No. 29. Just as he was going back into the house he heard voices. They were quite close, evidently in the backyard of No. 29, but the only word Cadosch could catch was ‘No.’ He went indoors but three or four minutes later returned to the yard. This time he heard another noise from the yard of No. 29. It sounded like something falling against the fence. The carpenter then left for work. When he passed Spitalfields Church it was about 5.32.
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No further evidence on the Hanbury Street murder ever came to light. With the clues that we have already assembled, however, we can unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Annie’s death.

Our sources depict her, on the last day of her life, as a pathetic little woman in the last extremities of want. When Amelia Palmer saw her in Dorset Street she was destitute. ‘It is no use giving way,’ said Annie, ‘I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.’ Yet she did not, as was her wont, go to Stratford. Indeed, if she had been ill in some infirmary it is more than probable that she had made nothing to sell there. Instead she went to Vauxhall to beg from one of her relatives. Annie returned to her lodging house at 35 Dorset Street soon after midnight. Apparently she had marshalled a few coppers but instead of using these to pay for a bed she converted them into drink. It was a fatal moment of
weakness. For thus it was, that at about 1.50 a.m., she was turned into the street.

Annie had been drinking but she was not drunk and could walk in a straight line. Undoubtedly she banked upon raising her lodging money by prostitution. John Evans, the nightwatchman, saw her go through Little Paternoster Row into Brushfield Street and then turn towards Spitalfields Church. Four hours later she was dead.

We cannot know when or where Annie met her homicidal client. But there are some grounds for believing that she herself led him to the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. The premises were regularly used by prostitutes. It was only three or four hundred yards away from her lodging house. And, for what it is worth, 29 was the number of Annie’s regular bed at 35 Dorset Street.

The absence of blood in the passage, street and adjoining backyards led Phillips and Abberline to the conclusion that Annie had been slain where found. But when?

There is a serious conflict in the evidence on this point. When Dr Phillips saw Annie’s body at 6.30 he judged that she had been killed at least two hours previously, i.e. not later than about 4.30. John Richardson, on the other hand, visited the yard between 4.45 and 4.50 and was positive that the body was not there then. Could he have missed it? Inspector Chandler was inclined to think that he had.

At about 6.45 on the fatal morning Chandler had talked to Richardson in the passage of No. 29. Upon that occasion the porter had told him about his early morning visit to the yard and had stated that he was sure that the woman had not then been lying there. But, according to Chandler, he had also said that ‘he did not go down the steps.’ The inspector surmised, therefore, that when Richardson had visited the yard he had merely opened the back door and stood on the top step. From such a position a downward glance to the right would quickly have determined that the padlock on the cellar was in place but Richardson’s view of the left-hand side of the yard, where the body lay, might have been obscured by the back door, which opened outwards and swung to the left. Richardson, contended Chandler, had thus probably failed to see Annie’s body.

Their faith in Dr Phillips, and Chandler’s dismissal of Richardson, alike led the police to attach little significance to Mrs Long, who claimed to have seen Annie talking to a man near No. 29 at 5.30, or to Albert Cadosch, who thought he had heard voices from the backyard
at about the same time. ‘The evidence of Mrs Long, which appeared to be so important to the Coroner,’ wrote Swanson, ‘must be looked upon with some amount of doubt, which is to be regretted.’

It is time to appeal against this verdict of long standing and in doing so we are in good company since Coroner Baxter rejected it back in 1888.
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In the first place the doctor’s estimate of the time of death is far from conclusive. It was not based, as such judgements are today, on the internal body temperature of the deceased, taken rectally or from the liver, but upon an estimate from touch only of the external body temperature coupled with impressions as to how far rigor mortis had advanced. But there were several factors present in this case which would have contributed to rapid heat loss. The morning of 8 September was fairly cold. Annie’s clothes had been thrown up to expose her legs and lower abdomen to the air. Her abdomen had been entirely laid open. And she had lost a great deal of blood. At the inquest Phillips himself qualified his estimate by acknowledging the existence of such imponderables and he may easily have underrated their significance. If he did Annie was killed after, not before, 4.30.

The crucial witness is Richardson. Chandler’s understanding of his evidence seems to have been quite erroneous. When the porter testified before the inquest, just four days after the murder, he was adamant that, far from standing on the top step, he had walked down the steps and then sat down on the middle step to cut a piece of leather out of his boot. Working thus, it is inconceivable that he would not have seen the body if it had been there. ‘You must have been quite close to where the body was found?’ queried Baxter. ‘Quite right, sir,’ replied Richardson, ‘if she had been there at the time I must have seen her.’