Complete History of Jack the Ripper (21 page)

Richardson had nothing to hide. Under rigorous interrogation he stated his evidence clearly and unequivocally. It was consistent, furthermore, with what he had already told the press for as early as 10 September the
Telegraph
had noted: ‘Richardson sat down on the steps to cut a piece of leather from his boot.’ We have thus no reason to disbelieve him. It is possible that Chandler misunderstood him on the morning of the murder. Richardson is less likely to have said that he did not
go down the steps
than that he did not
go into the yard.
Such a statement would have been consistent with his inquest deposition in which he averred that although he sat down on the step he did not venture out into the yard itself. It should be borne
in mind that when Richardson and Chandler met on 8 September the porter neither made a formal statement nor gave an exhaustive interview. Indeed, if Chandler was talking to Richardson in No. 29 at 6.45 and was at the mortuary in Old Montague Street at a few minutes past seven they might not have done more than exchange a few hurried words. In these circumstances the inspector could well have misconstrued Richardson’s story.

In the light of Richardson’s deposition the conclusion that Annie was killed at some time between 4.50 and 6.00 seems inescapable. Even Chandler, questioned at the inquest, conceded that if Richardson went down the steps he cannot have failed to see the body. Consequently the testimonies of Mrs Long and Albert Cadosch are very important indeed. Mrs Long saw Annie talking to a man in Hanbury Street at about 5.30. Cadosch, who lived at No. 27, got up at about 5.15. Before he went to work he twice visited his backyard. On the first occasion he thought he heard voices from the yard of No. 29 and on the second, three or four minutes later, he heard a noise like that of something falling against the fence. When Cadosch passed Spitalfields Church on his way to work it was 5.32. The experiences of these two witnesses are surely related and, given the vagaries of eyewitness evidence, the slight discrepancy in the times is not significant. We may thus place Annie’s death at about 5.30.

Any reconstruction of the manner in which Annie met her death must take account of three facts. Firstly, although there were seventeen residents at No. 29, no less than five of them living in rooms overlooking the murder site, not one claimed to have heard any scream or cry. If, as Amelia Richardson told the papers
²⁰
, some of the residents at the back of the house had slept with their windows open, this circumstance is even more remarkable. Secondly, having examined the body twice, Dr Phillips was confident that he had detected signs of strangulation. One and a half to two inches below the lobe of Annie’s left ear were three scratches and there was a corresponding bruise on the right side of the neck. The face was swollen, the tongue swollen and protruding. ‘There could be little doubt that he first strangled or suffocated his victim,’ reaffirmed the
Lancet
on 29 September, ‘for not only were no cries heard, but the face, lips, and hands were livid as in asphyxia, and not blanched as they would be from loss of blood.’ Finally, the victim’s throat had been severed while she was lying on her back. The bloodstains demonstrate this beyond reasonable doubt. Annie was wearing an
outside jacket, hooked at the top, buttoned down the front and so long that it reached down to her knees. Yet, apart from stains about the neck, the only traces of blood that it carried were two or three spots on the left arm. The relatively few bloodstains found in the yard were close to the ground and near Annie’s head – about six small spots on the back wall of the house, perhaps eighteen inches above the ground, and patches on the wooden palings, about fourteen inches from the ground and immediately above the point where the blood had largely escaped from the neck.

The killer seems to have seized Annie by the chin. If he was standing talking to her – and Cadosch’s testimony would suggest that he was – he gripped her with the right hand, his fingers producing the abrasions on the left side of the neck and his thumb the corresponding bruise on the right. By applying pressure to the throat he stifled any cry and throttled his victim, at least into insensibility. She was then lowered to the ground. At some point Annie may have fallen, or the murderer stumbled, against the fence. As she lay on the ground the killer deeply severed her throat in two cuts from left to right. If he knelt beside and to the right of the head, his back to the house, the knife would have been used in the right hand. The patches of blood on the fence, to the left of the head, and the spots on the left arm, which lay across the breast, may have been that which spurted from the wound as the murderer severed the left carotid artery. Dr Phillips believed that the abdominal injuries had been inflicted after death. The abdomen was laid open and the victim eviscerated. The small intestines were discovered above the right shoulder and part of the stomach above the left shoulder but the uterus, together with parts of the vagina and bladder, were taken away by the murderer. He wrenched the rings from the third finger of Annie’s left hand and in throwing up her skirts discovered her pocket, attached by strings around the waist, and tore it open. The rings were never found but the contents of the pocket – a piece of muslin, a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb in a paper case – were discovered at Annie’s feet. Dr Phillips’ impression was that they had been carefully arranged there but their positions may have been quite fortuitous. The piece of envelope and the pills, which William Stevens had seen Annie place in her pocket, were found by the dead woman’s head.

In at least one respect the Chapman killing was unique in the Whitechapel series. It was the only murder which was not committed during the hours of darkness. The sun rose at 5.23 and on this
busy market morning there were already plenty of people about. Spitalfields Market had opened at five, at which time the western end of Hanbury Street had been clogged with market vehicles. When the killer and his victim entered the yard of No. 29, moreover, the house itself was rapidly coming to life. The carman Thompson had gone to work all of one and a half hours ago and Richardson had been in the yard within the last forty-five minutes. While the couple were still in the yard Cadosch visited the adjoining yard twice. And at 5.45, even as the murderer must have been completing his task, John Davis and his wife bestirred themselves. In slaughtering Annie when and where he did the murderer had thus taken an extraordinary risk. Yet his escape through the streets is scarcely less remarkable. There was a tap in the yard but the killer, perhaps fearful of capture, did not pause to wash the blood from his hands. We know this because Mrs Richardson saw a pan of clean water under the tap the evening before the murder and found it there, apparently undisturbed, in the morning. Emerging from No. 29, therefore, the murderer may well have been stained with gore. Secreted somewhere about his person was the murder weapon. And he must have had something in which to wrap or hold the pelvic organs he had just extracted from his freshly killed victim. But no one, in the grey dawn of that September morning, challenged or even seemed to notice him as he bore away his ghastly trophy.

On the question of the killer’s identity the Chapman murder produced what appeared to be the first tangible clues. During the Tabram investigation a suspicion that the murderer had been a soldier had enjoyed very general acceptance. This view, as we have seen, had little to recommend it but as late as the Chapman inquiry echoes of it survived in the police investigation of the torn envelope and their search for Annie’s ‘pensioner’. In testifying that the murder weapon could not have been a bayonet Dr Phillips went some way to discrediting the theory in the public mind and we hear little more of it.

The doctor’s testimony incriminated his own profession. He was not the first to point a finger in their general direction for Dr Llewellyn, at the Nichols inquest, had already credited the killer with ‘some rough anatomical knowledge.’ But Phillips spoke with much greater conviction. We do not know all the factors that influenced his conclusions. However, the fact that the uterus had been extracted intact, that the murderer had divided the vagina low enough to avoid
damage to the cervix uteri, did suggest to Phillips that the murderer’s object had been to secure this particular organ and that he knew how to recognize and excise it without injury. It is also evident – from the
Lancet
’s statement that the killer secured the pelvic organs ‘with one sweep of a knife’ and from Baxter’s comment that there were ‘no meaningless cuts’ – that the random cuts or slashes present in the Tabram murder and in the later Eddowes and Kelly murders were absent in the Chapman case. ‘The whole inference seems to me,’ Phillips told the inquest, ‘that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.’ And if that was the case then, in the doctor’s opinion, the knowledge and skill of the murderer had been impressive given the haste in which he had been obliged to work. ‘I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman,’ he said, ‘and effect them, even without a struggle, [in] under a quarter of an hour.’

It is quite possible, of course, that the position of the lower cut severing Annie’s uterus had been entirely fortuitous and that the absence of random mutilations simply reflected the killer’s haste to escape from a perilous situation. Nevertheless, Dr Phillips had examined the victim’s wounds and he had been a police surgeon for twenty-three years. His opinion commanded respect. Baxter was convinced and in his summing up on 26 September adverted to the killer’s expertise in uncompromising terms: ‘The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by some one who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts. It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.’
²¹

Mrs Long’s description of the man in the dark coat and brown deerstalker hat provided the further clue that the murderer may have been a foreigner. Jack Pizer, whose habit of abusing prostitutes had made him an obvious suspect, had already introduced that possibility but there had never been any genuine evidence linking him with the murders and, as we shall see, within days of the Chapman murder he was conclusively eliminated from police inquiries. The first valid evidence implicating a foreigner, then, came from Mrs Long and in
so far as her testimony contained the first description ever given of a man who was plausibly the Whitechapel murderer it cannot be ignored.

We have three accounts of Mrs Long’s experience. The most detailed is that contained in her inquest deposition of 19 September. We know from the newspapers, however, that she made her original statement to the police as early as 12 September and that she identified Annie’s body on the same day. Unfortunately no copy of that first statement has survived though something of it has perhaps been preserved in the 19 October report of Chief Inspector Swanson, whose technique it was to synthesize and summarize the contents of earlier documents. Brief notices of Mrs Long’s story were also circulated by the press on 12 and 13 September.
²²

Eyewitness testimony is at best treacherous. It can at least be said of Mrs Long that she reported the event while it was fresh in her memory and that a comparison of the different statements attributed to her suggests that her testimony remained consistent. Notwithstanding all which, the circumstances of Mrs Long’s sighting oblige us to treat her evidence with caution. The couple did nothing to attract her attention and she passed them by without speaking to them. Worse, she did not see the man’s face. Something – perhaps the sound of his voice or the darkness of his complexion – gave her the impression that he was a foreigner but it can have been no more than an impression and she was honest enough to admit that she would not be able to recognize him again.

Between adjournments of the Coroner’s inquiry Annie’s remains were buried. An outcast in life, she was virtually so in death. Fountain Smith, her brother, was a printer’s warehouseman. When he testified at the inquest on 12 September his appearance was judged ‘very respectable’ by pressmen. But he seemed to want to have as little to do with the proceedings as possible and gave his evidence in so low a tone as to be ‘all but inaudible two yards off.’ If the press accounts of the funeral are to be believed the other relatives also judged themselves respectable. And conscious, perhaps, of their respectability they contrived to bury Annie with the utmost discretion.

The family paid the funeral expenses and kept all the arrangements a profound secret. Apart from themselves only the police and the undertaker, Harry Hawes of 19 Hunt Street, knew when it would take place. At seven on the morning of Friday, 14 September, a
hearse was sent to the Whitechapel Mortuary. Quietly, expeditiously, the undertaker’s men collected the body. It rested in an elm coffin draped in black. The coffin-plate read: ‘Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years.’ Driven to Hunt Street, the hearse remained there until nine, when it set off for Manor Park Cemetery. There were no mourning coaches because the relatives, in order to avoid attracting attention, had arranged to meet the hearse at the cemetery. ‘All the arrangements were carried out most satisfactorily,’ noted the
Advertiser
, ‘and there was no hitch of any kind.’
²³

Sadly the terrors, the passions, the recriminations evoked by the death of Dark Annie were not to be laid to rest as easily as her bones.