Complete History of Jack the Ripper (64 page)

At the extremes Inspector Reid attributed all nine murders to the Ripper and Superintendent Arnold felt that he was responsible for no more than four, apparently those of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Mary Kelly.
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Possibly Arnold was influenced by the views of Dr Phillips. Phillips, who performed or attended the last six post-mortems in the series, is known to have discounted Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles as Ripper victims and to have entertained serious doubts about Kate Eddowes. ‘After careful & long deliberation,’ he wrote in 1889, ‘I cannot satisfy myself, on purely anatomical & professional grounds, that the perpetrator of all the Whitechapel murders is one man. I am on the contrary impelled to a contrary conclusion in this, noting the mode of procedure & the character of the mutilations & judging of motive in connection with the latter.’
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In the opinion of Sir Melville Macnaghten the Ripper slew five victims – Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly. Inspector Abberline and Sir Robert Anderson both opted for a tally of six by adding Martha Tabram to Macnaghten’s names. Walter Dew believed that these six women were ‘definite’ Ripper victims. But he made the total seven because he felt that Emma Smith had been the Ripper’s first victim.
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Dr Bond personally examined the wounds inflicted upon Mary Kelly and Alice McKenzie and studied medical notes relating to four of the earlier victims (Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes). In his view all these six had been killed by the same man.

Obviously there was no contemporary consensus. We must look at the evidence and make up our own minds.

A careful sifting of the facts suggests that, despite Dr Phillips, we are pretty safe in ascribing at least four victims to Jack the Ripper – Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly. To that number Martha Tabram and Liz Stride should probably be added.

The only reason for discounting Martha is the nature of her injuries. For as far as we know her throat was not cut nor was any attempt made to disembowel her. The actual degree of mutilation she sustained is uncertain because of lack of precise information. My friend Jon Ogan, a much respected authority on the Whitechapel murders, sees evidence of similar motivation on the part of her killer as in the subsequent crimes. Martha’s clothes were turned up to reveal the lower torso but Dr Killeen did not believe that sexual intercourse had taken place. So Jon contends that the murderer displaced the clothing in order to mutilate the corpse and finds support for his view in the cut, three inches long and one inch deep, in Martha’s lower abdomen. This is certainly an interesting hypothesis. But although Martha sustained thirty-nine wounds the three-inch cut seems to have been the only one in the lower torso and cannot be said to bear comparison with those inflicted upon Polly Nichols, the next victim. Martha’s injuries, moreover, suggest that she was subjected to a less organized and disciplined attack than those that followed. It is arguable, given the large number of wounds and use of two weapons, that she was slain by more than one assailant. If that was the case then Privates Leary and Law have got to be prime suspects.

Nevertheless, bearing in mind that this was the first murder, the departures from the Ripper’s mature modus operandi are not necessarily significant. It is a mistake to think that a killer’s technique
will invariably remain the same. Experience and circumstance alike prompt development and change. The techniques of some serial murderers are known to have varied much more dramatically than is suggested by Martha’s case. David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’ killer who terrorized New York in the seventies, only reverted to the revolver after an unsuccessful and particularly gruesome attempt to knife a girl to death. Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf vampire of 1929–30, exchanged knife for hammer in a deliberate attempt to confuse the police. And Peter Sutcliffe strangled his twelfth victim, Marguerite Walls, with a ligature in 1980, mainly, as he claimed at his trial, to escape the stigma of his nickname, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’.

In time and place, type of victim, the sudden, silent onslaught, the signs of strangulation, the multiple stab wounds, the absence of weapons or clues left at the murder scene, above all in the frenzied character of the attack, in virtually every other respect, the Tabram murder is kin to its successors.

Macnaghten discounted Martha on grounds which are now known to have been largely erroneous. Abberline, Anderson, Reid and Dew, on the other hand, all included her among the Ripper victims. This, indeed, seems to have been a general police view in 1888. We know that suspects detained after the Chapman murder were also questioned as to their movements on the dates of the Tabram and Nichols atrocities. And when Matthews called for a report on the murders in October 1888 he was sent briefs dealing with the Tabram, Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes killings.

The case for supposing Martha Tabram to have been a victim of Jack the Ripper is thus very strong. Of recent writers only Sean Day and Jon Ogan have cared to espouse it.
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But on balance the present evidence suggests that they are right.

There are also doubts about Liz Stride. Her injuries, like those of Martha Tabram, were dissimilar to those of the four certain victims. The evidence has been discussed earlier and need not detain us here. Most of the difficulties are resolved if we accept that the murderer was disturbed by Diemschutz rattling up with his pony and barrow and, all circumstances considered, it appears probable that Liz, too, fell victim to the same man.

The remaining possibilities are Emma Smith, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles. We can discount Emma Smith. Contemporary sources prove that she was set upon by three ruffians, and although she was
badly beaten and sexually assaulted her assailants did not, apparently, intend murder. After the attack Emma walked home. She died in hospital the next day.

It is undoubtedly possible that the Ripper slew both Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles. Their injuries were similar, though not identical, to those of the canonical victims. The differences, however, may be more significant than the similarities, because by then the Ripper’s technique had become all too well-known. As police court records attest, the 1888 atrocities inspired a spate of imitative attacks. And there will always be a suspicion in the cases of Alice and Frances that they fell victim to copycat killers.

So how many women did Jack the Ripper strike down? There is no simple answer. In a sentence: at least four, probably six, just possibly eight.

It is unlikely, though, that the career of Jack the Ripper was launched in George Yard Buildings or Buck’s Row. Earlier attacks by the same man almost certainly occurred. Two such possibilities are documented in this book – the non-fatal knife attacks on Annie Millwood and Ada Wilson in the spring of 1888.

The attack on Ada Wilson seems to have been the outcome of a robbery which badly misfired and took place at Mile End, well to the east of the Ripper’s known range. It is best discounted. That on Annie Millwood is a different proposition entirely. Annie lived in White’s Row, very close to George Yard, and since she was a widow may well have been supporting herself by prostitution. Apparently she was the victim of an unprovoked attack by a stranger and sustained ‘numerous’ stab wounds in the legs and lower body. This incident, like many of the Ripper’s known atrocities, took place on a weekend.

If Annie was attacked by the George Yard murderer, and there is every chance that she was, we may, at last, be beginning to document the evolution of Jack the Ripper: a casual, botched attack on Annie Millwood in Spitalfields in February, the ferocious but disorganized slaying of Martha Tabram in George Yard in August and, finally, the emergence of the killer’s mature modus operandi, that which would earn him his terrible sobriquet, in Buck’s Row three weeks later.

We know much more about the victims today than the police did at the time. They were not the broken-down harridans, mostly in their forties but looking ‘nearer sixty’, of popular legend. Two, Mary Kelly and Frances Coles, were attractive young women in
their mid-twenties. The rest were middle-aged but few looked their years. Indeed, it is interesting that police and press estimates of age, based on appearance, consistently misjudged their ages by making them younger than they are now known to have been. In some cases the difference was considerable. A reporter who saw the body of Polly Nichols said that her features were those of ‘a woman of about thirty or thirty-five years.’
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She was forty-three. The official police description of Kate Eddowes described her as about forty. She was well over forty-six.

Children of decent working-class parents, virtually all the women had slipped into destitution through failed marriages and drink.

The inquest testimony respecting them is frequently misleading. Time and time again we are told that they were quiet and inoffensive, sober and industrious, that they kept regular hours and did not walk the streets. We are entitled to take such protestations with a pinch of salt.

The men who cohabited with these women did not wish to be accused of living from the fruits of prostitution. Lodging house keepers could scarcely admit that their tenants were other than models of propriety without incurring charges of running disorderly houses and having their licenses revoked. And no one, at that time of popular outrage over the murders, could have found it easy to speak ill of the dead. Charity was the mood of the hour and the women of the streets knew it. ‘The people speak so kind and sympathisin’ about the women he has killed,’ one told the
Pall Mall Gazette
, ‘and I’d not object to being ripped up by him to be talked about so nice after I’m dead.’
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In a district of low incomes, unemployment and housing shortages, women bereft of male support fared badly. For the types of work commonly offered – charring, washing and hawking – supply far exceeded demand. Inevitably, prostitution became an instrument of survival. All the Ripper’s victims were regular or casual prostitutes. In the awesome surroundings of the coroner’s court their friends felt constrained to suppress the fact. But in the kitchens of the lodging houses it was another matter. Here, amidst communities which pirouetted regularly on the edge of disaster, the prostitute incurred little opprobrium. As Thomas Bates, the watchman, said of Liz Stride: ‘Lor’ bless you, when she could get no work she had to do the best she could for her living, but a neater and a cleaner woman never lived!’
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Stephen Knight, in his book
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, argued that the Ripper victims knew each other. If this were true it would suggest that the murderer was known to them also, that the killings were not random.

Knight pointed out that although the bodies were discovered in different parts of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Aldgate, the women all
lived
in one tiny part of Spitalfields.
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His data are by no means always valid. He tells us, for example, that Liz Stride and Michael Kidney lived at 35 Dorset Street, where Annie Chapman is known to have stayed, but this is not correct. When Liz was with Kidney they were living at 35 Devonshire Street, off Commercial Road. Still, Knight’s observation was basically sound. At the times of their deaths all the victims were living in the small cluster of squalid streets about Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Three were in Flower and Dean Street itself, Liz Stride at No. 32, Kate Eddowes at No. 55, and Polly Nichols either at No. 55 or No. 56. Another two were in nearby Dorset Street. Annie Chapman regularly stayed at No. 35. And Mary Kelly lodged at 13 Miller’s Court, which was part of No. 26. The other victims lived in lodging houses in George Street (Tabram), Gun Street (McKenzie) and White’s Row (Coles).

Unfortunately, we cannot infer any personal relationships from these addresses. The fact is that the Flower and Dean Street area was notorious throughout the East End as the lodging house quarter. Its cheap beds attracted the indigent from all parts of East London. In 1888 a report of the London City Mission claimed that there were forty lodging houses in the area accommodating some 4000 souls.
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The history of the victim is usually crucial in a murder case. This is because the killer nearly always turns out to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of the deceased. But our research into the lives of the Whitechapel murder victims has uncovered no link between a major suspect and any of the dead women. Nor has it suggested any convincing new suspect. At present there is nothing to indicate that Jack the Ripper was anything but that most elusive of criminals, the murderer of strangers.

A great deal of printer’s ink has been spilled in speculation about the Ripper’s modus operandi. The evidence assembled in this book enables us to reconstruct its mature form with some confidence.

It is probable that the victims accosted or were accosted by the murderer in thoroughfares like Whitechapel Road and Commercial
Street, and that they then conducted him themselves to the secluded spots where they were slain. This was certainly the case with Mary Kelly, who died in her own room in Miller’s Court. And it was probably true of the others. Martha Tabram is known to have serviced another client in George Yard just three hours before she was killed there. Annie Chapman met her death in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street and there is reason to believe that she led her killer there. The house is known to have been a resort of prostitutes, it was within a few hundred yards of Annie’s lodging house at 35 Dorset Street and 29 was also the number of Annie’s regular bed in the lodging house. Buck’s Row, Dutfield’s Yard and the dark corner of Mitre Square were also frequently used by prostitutes.