Complete History of Jack the Ripper (26 page)
Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Philip Sudgen
But there was a sign that the worst of the panic was over. The Whitechapel Road had recovered its nerve. There groups of men and women chatted, joked and laughed boisterously upon the flagstones until long after one. And there prostitutes, driven by necessity to ply their trade at whatever risk, had reappeared. Young, noisy women, decked out in their finery, strutted or lounged at the brightly-lit crossroads. After one these began to disappear, leaving only the most desperate of their kind – the old, half-fed, impoverished drabs, to crawl about from lamp to lamp until the first signs of dawn.
Thereafter East End life began to return to its regular rhythms. Those who had feared to stir abroad after dark or who had not dared to stray from the lighted main throughfares began to move freely again. Those who had fled Whitechapel started to return. Even so, more than a week after the murder, a constable could tell Thames Police Court that the Bow Road was still being troubled by disorderly women whom the murders had driven out of Whitechapel. And, not merely in the East End but all over the metropolis, the calm was fragile. The discovery of a woman, drunk and suffering from a wound in the throat, in a by-way of Shepherd’s Bush Road one night brought crowds flocking to the scene in the morning. When Ann Kelly, the ‘victim’, was treated at the West London Hospital it transpired that her wound was superficial and apparently self-inflicted. An assault upon another woman, Adelaide Rutter or Rogers, a few days later in Down Street, Piccadilly, triggered off another scare in the West End. ‘The wildest rumors were flying about the West End this morning of a murder analogous to the Whitechapel tragedies being attempted,’ said the
Star.
And as late as 19 September hostile mobs might still menace any suspicious-looking character. That night a policeman had to rescue a drunken cabinet-maker named Thomas Mills from a crowd in Wellington Row, Shoreditch. He found them pulling him about and shouting: ‘We’ll lynch him, he’s Leather Apron!’
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There were people, of course, who sought to derive advantage from the tragedies. On the weekend of the murder the occupants of neighbouring houses in Hanbury Street did a brisk trade in charging sightseers a penny each to view the backyard of No. 29 from their own rear windows. The proprietor of a small waxworks in Whitechapel Road was just as quick off the mark. By daubing a few streaks of red paint on three old wax figures and by placarding three lurid pictures outside his premises he induced hundreds of passers-by to part with their pennies in order to view the ‘George Yard, Buck’s Row and ‘Anbury Street wictims.’ On the afternoon of Monday, 10 September, another opportunist – William McEvoy, a ship’s fireman – was using the scare to cadge drinks at public houses in the area of Cable Street, St George’s. His technique was to intimidate landlords by telling them that he had been locked up all day on suspicion of having committed the murder and then to demand liquor. Refusals were met with obscene language. Arrested, he struck a police constable at the station and the next day was sentenced at Thames Police Court to seven days’ hard labour.
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In the meantime public journals and their correspondents maintained a spirited discussion about the motive for the murders and the nature of their perpetrator.
Dark Annie’s pocket had been rifled and her rings wrenched from her finger. But robbery could not stand as a credible motive for crimes distinguished by ‘a rage of cruelty, a fantastic brutality.’ If Annie had been attacked by a common thief the abdominal mutilations would have been quite pointless since death had already resulted from the loss of blood at the throat.
So the press floundered about in search of a more adequate explanation. Was the killer a religious maniac bent upon the extirpation of sin by the slaying of whores? Or were his crimes actuated by revenge for some real or fancied injury suffered at their hands? Was he, perhaps, a member of some heathen sect that practised barbaric rites? Did he crave notoriety and seek to horrify the nation by acts of unexampled ferocity? Or was he simply a drunkard? The Reverend Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, a kindly if eccentric clergyman with a passion for writing letters to
The Times
, thought that he could detect the hand of a jealous woman in the affair.
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But it was still the lunatic theory that led the field. Its most prestigious advocate was Dr L. Forbes Winslow, specialist in mental disorders, author of the
Handbook for Attendants on the Insane
, founder of the British Hospital for Mental Disorders and consultant in many of the principal criminal cases of the period. His contention was that homicidal mania was incurable but might be difficult to detect in that it sometimes lay dormant. Hence, when interviewed at Scotland Yard, he advised the detective department to call for returns from the various asylums so that the whereabouts of all such patients discharged by them as ‘cured’ might be ascertained.
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No serious challenge to the lunatic theory emerged until the end of the month. Then, on the last day of the Chapman inquest, Coroner Baxter introduced the possibility of an economic motive for the crimes.
The Nichols inquest was resumed on 17 September and adjourned to the 22nd, when it was concluded. The jury returned the only verdict possible – ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’. The Chapman inquest occupied five days in all – 10, 12, 13, 19 and 26 September. Again the coroner was Mr Wynne Baxter and the venue the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel
Road. Again, despite much valuable testimony, a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ was recorded.
The proceedings in the Chapman case were enlivened by the intermittent sparring of Mr Baxter and Dr Phillips.
Phillips appeared before the court on the third day. He testified that death had occured from syncope, or heart failure, caused by the loss of blood from the throat. And that being the case he asked the coroner if he might be excused from giving details of the abdominal injuries. These, he pointed out, had been inflicted
after
death and were not necessary in order to understand the cause of death. Baxter demurred. ‘The object of the inquiry,’ he reminded the doctor, ‘is not only to ascertain the cause of death, but the means by which it occurred. Any mutilation which took place afterwards may suggest the character of the man who did it.’ However, in deference to Phillips’ obvious reluctance to proceed, he postponed that part of his evidence until an adjourned sitting.
On 19 September Dr Phillips was recalled to conclude his testimony. Again he lodged a strong protest at having to reveal the details of the abdominal mutilations, alleging that to give publicity to this information would ‘thwart the ends of justice’. But Baxter was not to be thwarted. Never before, he observed, had he heard of a request to keep back evidence at an inquest. And he swept aside Phillips’ main argument: ‘I delayed the evidence in question as long as possible because I understood you to say that there were reasons which you knew, but which I don’t know, why that course was desirable in the interests of justice. It is now however nearly a fortnight since the death, and therefore justice has had some little time to avenge itself.’ The court was cleared of women and newsboys and the unhappy doctor then proceeded to give evidence that the press considered unfit for publication.
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This dispute between Baxter and Phillips has been many times described but with little understanding of the issues involved.
Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal. He was simply conforming to the code of practice that Howard Vincent had bequeathed to the CID, a code that required the utmost discretion on the part of police officials in all cases in which the identity of the culprit had not yet been established. It
was a controversial policy then and has been generally abandoned by police authorities since. Yet, as we have seen, it rested upon important considerations.
Baxter had a weighty case too. In the first place he was obliged by law to take the whole of Dr Phillips’ evidence for the Statute de Coronatore required coroners to inquire into the nature, character and size of every wound on a dead body and to enter the information on their rolls. The purpose of this requirement was to preserve the evidence of the crime. In the event of a suspect not being brought to trial until long after the date of the offence the only authoritative record of the injuries and marks found upon the body of the victim might be that in the inquest depositions. Similarly, as Baxter intimated at the Chapman inquest, it was important that the testimonies of all witnesses be fully entered in the records of the court so that their evidence might in future be turned up even if they themselves could no longer be traced. There was, finally, the question of publicity. Baxter believed – and most police officers today would probably endorse the view – that the publication of police knowledge furthered the process of detection by eliciting fresh information from the press and general public. And it was in justification of this belief that, on the last day of the Chapman inquiry, he presented the court with what appeared to be dramatic new evidence bearing upon the case.
Taking his lead from Dr Phillips, who had suggested at the previous sitting that the killer had slain Annie in order to secure a specimen of the uterus, Baxter told the court that the murderer need not necessarily have been a lunatic. For the doctor’s testimony had elicited new evidence – evidence that pointed to the existence of a market for the organ in question:
Within a few hours of the issue of the morning papers containing a report of the medical evidence given at the last sitting of the Court, I received a communication from an officer of one of our great medical schools, that they had information which might or might not have a distinct bearing on our inquiry. I attended at the first opportunity, and was told by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum that some months ago an American had called on him, and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the organ that was missing in the deceased. He stated his willingness to give £20 for each, and explained that his object was to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication on which
he was then engaged. Although he was told that his wish was impossible to be complied with, he still urged his request. He desired them preserved, not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine, in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition, and he wished them sent to America direct. It is known that the request was repeated to another institution of a similar character. Now, is it not possible that the knowledge of this demand may have incited some abandoned wretch to possess himself of a specimen . . . I need hardly say that I at once communicated my information to the Detective Department at Scotland yard.
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The coroner’s solution to the mystery, quickly dubbed the ‘Burke and Hare theory’ by the newspapers, received a mixed reception. The press, itself bitterly opposed to the CID’s secrecy policy, generally welcomed his contribution as a vindication of their own stand. ‘The whole civilized world is concerned in bringing the murderer to justice,’ declared
The Times
, ‘and it cannot afford to be beaten in the attempt. The police will be expected to follow up with the keenest vigilance the valuable clue elicited through the coroner’s inquest, and, since the lines of their investigation are plainly chalked out by information which they themselves failed to collect, it will be a signal disgrace if they do not succeed.’
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The medical fraternity, on the other hand, predictably moved to refute it. James Risdon Bennett thus considered any insinuation of a Burke and Hare analogy a ‘gross and unjustifiable calumny on the medical profession.’ And he claimed that, either in Britain or America, there were ample facilities for procuring uteri in any number for legitimate research without recourse to crime.
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Baxter’s integrity is not in doubt but it would be instructive to learn just how much truth there was in the information he was given. The press quickly received assurances from most of the main medical schools that no such application as that mentioned by Baxter had been made to them. There were, however, two important exceptions – the schools attached to the University College and Middlesex Hospitals. Spokesmen for these institutions refused to elucidate the matter. But, if a report in the
Telegraph
is to be credited, although intimating that some of the details of the story as it had been put out were inaccurate they ‘indignantly repudiate the suggestion that it was a hoax or that the matter has no importance’ and ‘talk somewhat mysteriously about “the interests of justice” being imperilled by
disclosure.’
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This certainly suggests that there was some basis for the coroner’s theory. Nevertheless, a week later the
British Medical Journal
, perhaps with the reputation of the profession in mind, did its best to bury the whole story:
It is true that enquiries were made at one or two medical schools early last year by a foreign physician, who was spending some time in London, as to the possibility of securing certain parts of the body for the purpose of scientific investigation. No large sum, however, was offered. The person in question was a physician of the highest reputability and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities in his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real foundation for the hypothesis, and the information communicated, which was not at all of the nature the public has been led to believe, was due to the erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard and to which a negative reply was given. This theory may be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained by its author.
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