Complete History of Jack the Ripper (34 page)
Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Philip Sudgen
I came round [to Mitre Square] again at 1.45, and entering the square from Mitre Street, on the right-hand side, I turned sharp round to the right, and flashing my light, I saw the body in front of me. The clothes were pushed right up to her breast, and the stomach was laid bare, with a dreadful gash from the pit of the stomach to the breast. On examining the body I found the entrails cut out and laid round the throat, which had an awful gash in it, extending from ear to ear. In fact, the head was nearly severed from the body. Blood was everywhere to be seen. It was difficult
to discern the injuries to the face for the quantity of blood which covered it . . . The murderer had inserted the knife just under the left eye, and, drawing it under the nose, cut the nose completely from the face, at the same time inflicting a dreadful gash down the right cheek to the angle of the jawbone. The nose was laid over on the cheek. A more dreadful sight I never saw; it quite knocked me over.
PC Watkins at once ran across the square to Kearley & Tonge’s. Finding the door ajar, he pushed it open and hailed the watchman. Inside George Morris was sweeping the steps down towards the door. As he remembered it, the door behind him was knocked or pushed and he turned round, opened it wide and discovered the constable. ‘For God’s sake, mate,’ gasped Watkins, ‘come to my assistance.’ Morris was a Metropolitan Police pensioner himself. Getting his lamp, he followed Watkins outside. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Oh dear,’ replied Watkins, ‘there’s another woman cut up to pieces!’
Watkins showed Morris the body and then, mounting guard over it, sent him off to bring more help. The watchman dashed out into Mitre Street and then into Aldgate. There, blowing his whistle furiously, he attracted the attention of Police Constables James Harvey and James Thomas Holland.
The news reached Inspector Edward Collard at Bishopsgate Street Police Station at 1.55. Telegraphing it to HQ and sending a constable for Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police Surgeon, at 17 Finsbury Circus, Collard set out for the scene of the crime. When he arrived, at two or three minutes past two, he found a doctor as well as several policemen already there. Dr George William Sequeira of 34 Jewry Street, Aldgate, had been called out by PC Holland at 1.55. He would tell the inquest later that the woman had not been dead for more than fifteen minutes before he saw her. But neither Sequeira nor anyone else touched the body until the arrival of Dr Gordon Brown.
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The dead woman lay on the pavement in the southern corner of Mitre Square, her head perhaps eighteen inches from the wall and railings that enclosed the rear and yard of Heydemann’s premises, her feet towards the carriageway out of Mitre Street. A ‘coal plate’, immediately to the left of the victim’s head, guarded the entrance to a coal chute, and an arched grating, to the left of her legs, admitted light to the cellar of the empty house next to Mr Taylor’s shop. The
back wall of the house was parallel with, and several feet to the left of, the body. A later generation would damn the spot as ‘Jack the Ripper’s Corner’. Back in 1888, on the eve of the murder, it had no such sinister repute but it was the darkest corner in the square and a favourite place for prostitutes and their clients. The lamp-post was sixty-five feet away. And, since the corner of Mr Taylor’s shop interposed between the murder site and a ‘lantern lamp’ on the corner of the Walter Williams & Co. warehouse in Mitre Street, the spot was plunged into shadow after lighting-up time.
Dr Frederick Gordon Brown reached Mitre Square at about 2.18 and we are indebted to him for almost all of our scene-of-crime information. He found the dead woman stretched out upon her back. Her throat had been cut and her abdomen ripped open. Her intestines had been lifted out and placed over her right shoulder and one detached portion of intestine, perhaps two feet long, had been placed between her body and her left arm. Her face had been savagely mutilated. The doctor took careful notes and four days later made this report to the inquest:
The body was on its back; the head turned to left shoulder; the arms by the side[s] of the body as if they had fallen there, both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent; a thimble was lying off the finger on the right side; the clothes drawn up above the abdomen; the thighs were naked; left leg extended in a line with the body; the abdomen was exposed; right leg bent at the thigh and knee; the bonnet was at the back of the head; great disfigurement of face; the throat cut across; below the cut was a neckerchief; the upper part of the dress was pulled open a little way; the abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; they were smeared over with some feculent matter; a piece of about 2 feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design; the lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut obliquely through; there was a quantity of clotted blood on the pavement on the left side of the neck, round the shoulder and upper part of arm, and fluid blood coloured serum which had flowed under the neck to the right shoulder, the pavement sloping in that direction; body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been dead most likely within the half hour; we looked for superficial bruises and saw none; no blood on the skin of the abdomen or secretion of any kind on the thighs; no
spurting of blood on the bricks or pavement around; no marks of blood below the middle of the body; several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed; there was no blood on the front of the clothes; there were no traces of recent connection.
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The appearance of the body in Mitre Square was also depicted by Brown in a pencil sketch he made upon the spot. This sketch, long lost, was one of several discovered in 1966 by Sam Hardy in the basement of the London Hospital and published by Professor Francis Camps in the
London Hospital Gazette
.
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There may be a slight discrepancy between the evidence of Dr Brown and that of Inspector Collard. Brown stated that several buttons were found in the clotted blood, which was near the left side of the neck and about the left shoulder and upper arm, and that a thimble was discovered near the right hand. In his inquest testimony, however, Collard swore that Sergeant Jones picked up three small black buttons (‘generally used for women’s boots’), a small metal button, a common metal thimble and a small mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, all by the left side of the body. The inspector recorded two other important details. The dead woman was not in possession of any money and there was no evidence that she had put up a struggle.
After he had examined it, Dr Brown gave instructions for the body to be taken to the City Mortuary in Golden Lane. By then Mitre Square had become the centre of a frantic police investigation. In 1888, as now, the City of London had its own police force, responsible to the corporation. Its Commissioner, Sir James Fraser, was on leave at the end of September and, in any case, ripe for retirement. So the search for the Mitre Square killer was directed by Major (later Lieutenant Colonel Sir) Henry Smith, the Acting Commissioner, and Inspector James McWilliam, head of the City Detective Department.
On the night of the murder Smith was roused from his bed at Cloak Lane Police Station. He recalled that awakening vividly in his memoirs, published in 1910:
The night of Saturday, September 29, found me tossing about in my bed at Cloak Lane Station, close to the river and adjoining
Southwark Bridge. There was a railway goods depot in front, and a furrier’s premises behind my rooms; the lane was causewayed, heavy vans were going constantly in and out, and the sickening smell from the furrier’s skins was always present. You could not open the windows, and to sleep was an impossibility. Suddenly the bell at my head rang violently. ‘What is it?’ I asked, putting my ear to the tube. ‘Another murder, sir, this time in the City.’ Jumping up, I was dressed and in the street in a couple of minutes. A hansom – to me a detestable vehicle – was at the door, and into it I jumped, as time was of the utmost consequence. This invention of the devil claims to be safe. It is neither safe nor pleasant . . . Licensed to carry two, it did not take me long to discover that a 15-stone Superintendent inside with me, and three detectives hanging on behind, added neither to its comfort nor to its safety. Although we rolled like a ‘seventy-four’ in a gale, we got to our destination – Mitre Square – without an upset, where I found a small group of my men standing round the mutilated remains of a woman.
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When Inspector McWilliam heard the news he went first to the City Detective Office at 26 Old Jewry. Arriving at 3.45, he wired the news to Scotland Yard and then set out for Mitre Square via Bishopsgate Street Police Station. Major Smith, Inspector Collard, Detective Superintendent Alfred Foster and others of his colleagues were already at the scene when he reached the square.
Although the previous murders had all taken place within Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the City Police had by no means remained complacent. The Tabram and Nichols murders in August had caused Smith to instruct his detective department to employ extra men in plain clothes to patrol the eastern fringes of the City, maintain a close watch on prostitutes and account for every man and woman seen out together after dark. In his memoirs the major claimed to have employed nearly one third of his total force upon such duties and fondly pictured them sitting on doorsteps, smoking pipes, loafing about pubs and gossiping with all and sundry in the September sunshine. ‘It was subversive of discipline,’ he conceded, ‘but I had them well supervised by senior officers.’
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At the very moment that the hapless woman in Mitre Square was being murdered and mutilated, indeed, three City detectives – Outram, Halse and Marriott – were searching the passages of houses only a few streets away. At
about 1.58, when they received tidings of the murder, these detectives were on the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street.
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Tragically the elaborate precautions taken by the City Police proved insufficient to save the woman found dead in Mitre Square. Major Smith was undoubtedly galled at the failure of his strategy. But he was also beginning to understand something of the ruthless efficiency of the man he was up against. In no crime was this demonstrated more clearly than in this killing in the City.
The murderer had passed through Mitre Square like some invisible phantom. PC Watkins, whose beat took in the square, found it deserted at about 1.30. On returning, just fourteen or fifteen minutes later, he discovered the body but even then saw no one and heard nothing suspicious as he entered the square. Watkins entered and left Mitre Square by Mitre Street. At about 1.41 or 1.42 another patrolling constable, PC James Harvey 964, reached (but did not, apparently, enter) Mitre Square from the opposite direction – through Duke Street and Church Passage. This was several minutes before Watkins found the body but yet, as Harvey assured the inquest, ‘I saw no one [and] I heard no cry or noise.’ A third City policeman, PC Pearce, actually lived in Mitre Square. From the window of their house at No. 3 he and his wife might have witnessed the murder but they both slept throughout the entire incident. George Morris, the watchman at Kearley & Tonge’s offices, had been a Metropolitan Police constable. When alerted to the atrocity by Watkins he was working only about two yards inside Kearley & Tonge’s front door and the door itself had been ajar for perhaps two minutes. According to a statement he made in the
Star
, Morris ‘had gone to the front door to look put into the square two moments before Watkins called to him.’ Notwithstanding all which he, too, knew nothing of what had occurred. Finally there was George Clapp, the caretaker who slept at the back of Heydemann’s, overlooking the murder site. ‘During the night I heard no sound or any noise of any kind,’ Clapp told the coroner. Indeed, he had not learned of the murder until between five and six the next morning and by then the Mitre Square victim was lying in Golden Lane Mortuary.
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In less than fifteen minutes, then, the murderer inveigled his victim into Mitre Square, killed her, mutilated her and made good his escape, taking – as it would soon transpire – the woman’s left kidney and womb with him, all virtually under the noses of four serving or ex-policemen!
George Morris, at least, made no excuse. ‘The strangest part of the whole thing,’ he explained to the press later in the day, ‘is that I heard no sound. As a rule I can hear the footstep of the policeman as he passes by every quarter of an hour, so the woman could not have uttered any cry without my detecting it. It was only last night I made the remark to some policemen that I wished the butcher would come round Mitre Square, and I would soon give him a doing, and here, to be sure, he has come, and I was perfectly ignorant of it.’
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Having failed to prevent the murder the City Police moved swiftly to apprehend the murderer before he could go to ground or leave the district. It was at best a long chance for there was every possibility that the killer escaped across the City boundary within the ten minutes it took for the news of the Mitre Square tragedy to reach Bishopsgate Street Police Station. No one could be absolutely certain, however, that the Mitre Square and Whitechapel murderers were one and the same man. And even if he was it was by no means out of the question that he operated out of a base in the City.
The earliest detectives on the scene were Detective Sergeant Robert Outram and Detective Constables Daniel Halse and Edward Marriott. They had been searching the passages of houses in the neighbourhood and were on the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street when, at about two minutes to two, they first received intimation that their presence was needed in Mitre Square. When they got there and realized that a murder had been committed they set out at once in different directions to look for suspects. In the light of subsequent events the proceedings of one of the three – Daniel Halse – are important. He described them at the inquest: ‘I gave instructions to have the neighbourhood searched and every man examined. I went by Middlesex Street into Wentworth Street, where I stopped 2 men who gave satisfactory accounts of themselves. I came through Goulston Street at 20 past 2 and then went back to Mitre Square.’ Inspector McWilliam, upon his arrival at the square, also ordered immediate searches of neighbouring streets and lodging houses. Several men were stopped and searched but without any tangible result.
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