Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (11 page)

The deceased had been suffocated or strangled before her throat was cut. This was clear from the discolouration of her tongue, which was caused by lack of oxygen. Since the heart had stopped beating
before
her throat was cut, this explained the lack of blood found at the scene of the crime.

The victim’s throat had been cut from just below the left ear to the lower jaw in a four-inch gash, and from the way the flesh was torn, it was apparent that the cut had been made from left to right. This aspect of the murder would prove to be a significant feature when linking it to the four subsequent murders. A second
eight-inch
cut, parallel with, but an inch lower than, the first incision, almost encircled the neck; it, too, had been made from left to right.

A deep jagged incision, where the tissues had been cut, ran the full length of the woman’s abdomen on the left side. Several more wounds had been inflicted which crossed her body, and three or four more long cuts had been drawn down the right side of her abdomen.

Dr Llewellyn gave his opinion that the murderer “must have had some rough knowledge of anatomy”, and that a “strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence”, had been employed in the attack.

Because the victim was almost insensible from drink, the doctor considered that “it would not have needed a strong man to kill her”. The entire attack, he thought, had taken just four minutes, five at the most.

The victim had not been raped or sexually assaulted. The murderer did not appear to have shown any sexual interest in her; it was plainly apparent that the only reason her skirts were pulled up was to allow the murderer access to the abdomen to make the appalling incisions.

As for the estimated time of death, Dr Llewellyn’s opinion was that it had occurred at 3.30 – “give or take ten minutes either way”. This fitted in well with the evidence of the police constable who had found the body. P.C. Neil had last walked down Buck’s Row at 3.15 a.m. when he had seen no one – though this was not quite what he would tell the inquest jury the following afternoon; Cross and Paul discovered the victim’s body twenty-five minutes later. This allowed the murderer a maximum of some twenty minutes to escort the victim along Buck’s Row to the closed stable gates, persuade her to lie down on the pavement, damp from the rain that had fallen earlier, strangle or suffocate her, cut her throat, pull up her skirts to inflict the wounds to her abdomen, and then escape, all without being seen or heard. It all seemed incredible, yet it had been done.

When news of a murder broke later that day, a steady stream of people made their way to the Whitechapel mortuary to see if they could identify the victim, Ellen Holland amongst them. There, and in the presence of the detectives who were investigating the case, she tearfully identified the torn body lying on the mortuary table as her friend, but she knew the victim only as Polly.

The ferocity of the attack – the third murder to take place in Whitechapel since Easter – terrified the local inhabitants, made headline news around the world and confounded the police. Editorial comment on 31 August in
The Star
read: “The brutality of the murder is beyond conception and description.”
The New York Times
on 1 September stated: “A strangely horrible murder took place in Whitechapel … the most dangerous kind of lunatic is at large.” Women, children and even grown men ventured out of doors after dark only if they had to, and even then, reluctantly. Trade suffered as customers stayed away from the area and
shopkeepers
reported that their business had almost halved. There was no description of a suspect, no helpful clues had been left at the scene of the crime, nor, it seemed, was there an obvious motive. Not even the victim’s true name was known. In fact, as far as Scotland Yard was concerned, “there was nothing to go on at all”.

On the day of the murder, Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline of the Criminal Investigation Department (established ten years before in 1878) at Scotland Yard, was appointed as
co-ordinating
officer to direct the work of the local detectives. At forty-five years of age, he was almost five feet ten inches tall, portly, with thinning, side-parted dark-brown hair, hazel eyes and a long, aquiline nose. A carefully trimmed moustache, which met his whiskers at the angle of the chin, gave him more the appearance of a bank manager than a police officer, according to a colleague, Inspector Walter Dew. Abberline’s pedigree was faultless: enlisted in the Metropolitan Police in 1863 and appointed to Islington; promoted to sergeant two years later and assigned to Highgate; moved to plain clothes in 1867 with orders to investigate Fenian activity, for which he was commended; promoted to inspector in 1873 and transferred to Whitechapel where he remained for fourteen years, ten of them as inspector; promoted to Scotland Yard in December 1887 and promoted again to Inspector First Class. He was quiet, unassuming, methodical and patient, a skilled amateur watchmaker in his spare time, and the ideal choice to head the murder investigation.

Detective Sergeant George Godley, assigned the same day to assist Inspector Abberline, was already involved in the
investigation
. He was thirty-one years old, had joined the Metropolitan Police eleven years previously, and was now a sergeant stationed in Bethnal Green Police Station. Earlier that morning, following the discovery of the body, he had assisted Inspector Spratling in a search of Buck’s Row, the East London and District Railway embankment, the railway lines, and the Great Eastern Railway yard – but no weapon, blood nor evidence of any kind was found.

Later on the evening of the same day when the initials ‘Lambeth Workhouse, P.R.’ were found stitched into the corpse’s petticoats, an inmate of Prince’s Road Workhouse, Mary Ann Monk, was traced who had shared a bed with the murdered woman earlier that year. Only then was the victim, Polly, properly identified: she was a middle-aged, penniless prostitute, and her name was Mary Ann Nichols.

The police investigation concluded that there had been no robbery; Dr Llewellyn’s examination had showed that the murder was not sexually motivated. Since there was no trail of blood, Abberline concluded that the murder had taken place at the stable gates where the body was found.

The inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols commenced on 1 September, the day after the murder, and unusually, it appeared to have been arranged in haste. It was held at the Whitechapel Working Lads’ Institute and conducted by Mr Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner for South-East Middlesex, a well-known and popular local solicitor. The police were represented by Inspector John Spratling and Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, the latter of whom took the jury to view the body, along with Mr Banks, the coroner’s assistant. In his testimony, the victim’s father, Mr Edward Nichols, said: “She had no enemies that I knew of; she was too good for that.” Yet the fact remained that Mary Nichols’s butchered body was found in a Whitechapel street after what appeared to have been a vicious and pointless attack.

When P.C. Neil gave his evidence, the coroner asked him if he had heard any noise that night. He replied, “No; I heard nothing.” When pressed further by the coroner, and asked if anybody could have escaped into the Whitechapel Road, he replied, “Oh yes, sir. I saw a number of women in the main [Whitechapel] road going home.”

On the fifth and final day of the inquest, the jury brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful murder by a person or persons unknown’. It prompted the coroner to remark notably that “it was a murder of no ordinary character”.

The murder investigation proved fruitless; no one living in Buck’s Row, close to the stable gates where the body was found, had seen or heard a thing – this included Walter Purkiss and his wife, both light sleepers, whose first-floor bedroom almost overlooked the scene of the murder. Neither were the night
watchmen
from the warehouse and factory nearby able to provide any information. All common lodging houses were visited and their occupants questioned; enquiries were made among tradesman, shopkeepers and prostitutes who were, in this instance,
uncharacteristically
eager to assist the police, but without result. Inspector Abberline was perplexed and almost two weeks later he was forced to admit, “not the slightest clue can at present be obtained”.

Quite apart from
our
obvious question –
why
had Lizzie Williams murdered Mary Ann Nichols? – there was another more puzzling issue. Nichols had been throttled to death before her throat was cut. So why had the murderer twice cut the throat of someone who was already dead?

As my father and I were to discover, Lizzie Williams
did
have a motive to murder Mary Nichols; we just hadn’t found it yet. We also made an astonishing discovery that led us to unravel the mystery, and the dawning realisation that, no matter how hard the police, or we, may have looked, nothing could even begin to make sense until the death of the final victim, Mary Kelly. Only
then
would it be possible to start fitting together the pieces of the puzzle.

But that revelation was still some way off, and we now had to look into the second murder.

I
t was just eight days later, during the early daylight hours of Saturday, 8 September – the inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols would not be concluded for another two weeks – that the body of another butchered woman was discovered. The time was 6.00 a.m. and the corpse lay on its back in the small backyard of a Whitechapel tenement building.

Number 29 Hanbury Street, a large, three-storey terraced house that had seen better days, was built for immigrant weavers and their families of the previous century. Now a cats’ meat shop occupied the front room on the ground floor where Harriet Hardiman, a saleswoman, lived with her sixteen-year-old son, and sold cubes of horse meat to cat owners for their pets. The other rooms in the building housed several families – all of them poor. The owner of the house, Mrs Amelia Richardson, was a widow, and a sign above the front door announced that she was a
packing-case
maker. She lived with her grandson, Thomas, aged fourteen, on the first floor at the front of the house, although she also used a room on the ground floor and the basement. There were thirteen other tenants living in the house.

At the front of the house, opening on to the pavement, were two adjacent doors. The one on the right led directly into the shop, the other, below the sign, gave access to a long stone-flagged corridor twenty-five feet long and three feet wide which ran the full depth of the house. A dog-leg staircase from the corridor at the far end gave access to the upper floors of the house, and just beyond that, a door opened on to a flight of three stone steps which descended into a small backyard some fifteen feet square and paved with stones of irregular sizes. At the rear of the yard and to the right was a small wooden shed that housed an outside lavatory. A second wooden shed on the left was used for storing firewood.

It was John Davis, an elderly man, who discovered the body. He occupied the front attic of the house with his wife and three adult sons. Just before 6 o’clock he rose from his bed and made a cup of tea for himself, then went downstairs, intending to use the lavatory. As he pushed open the back door to the yard, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. A woman was lying on her back at the foot of the steps – she was obviously dead. A gaping red gash appeared to encircle her throat and her skirts were pushed up to her groin. Her abdomen was torn open and her intestines, like so many sausages, were ripped out of her body. Her legs were spread wide apart as though sexual intercourse had taken place. A pool of crimson blood from her dreadful wounds slowly widened as it spread across the yard even as Davis looked. Horrified, he turned and fled back down the corridor the way he had come, yanked open the front door and burst into the street where he shouted at two men, whom he knew by sight, to join him.

Two labourers, James Green and James Kent, waiting outside their workplace, Bayley’s Packing Case Manufacturers at 23 Hanbury Street, and a third man, Henry Holland, a boxmaker who was on his way to work, responded quickly to the cry of alarm. They followed Davis back through the house to the open back door, and there they gazed down upon the hideous spectacle. Only Holland went down the steps to the yard, but he did not approach the body.

While the three men ran off in search of a policeman, Kent returned to his workshop where he took a drink of brandy to steady his nerves and found a piece of canvas, which he took back with him and used to cover the body.

On Commercial Street, near to the corner of Hanbury Street, the men found Inspector Joseph Chandler on duty, and blurted out their discovery, “Another woman has been murdered”. Chandler returned with them and was the first police officer to reach the crime scene. It was then shortly after 6.10 a.m. Chandler sent for police reinforcements, the ambulance and Dr George Phillips, the police surgeon, who arrived at 6.30.

Dr Phillips’s examination showed that the victim’s face was swollen and her head was turned on its right side. The tongue too was swollen and was now dark blue in colour, indicating that the victim had been suffocated or strangled, perhaps only partially, since death had occurred, Phillips said, when the supply of blood to the brain was interrupted because the throat had been severed. The incision to the skin was jagged, indicating the direction in which the cut had been made – from left to right.

There were three scratches to the victim’s neck, below the lobe of her left ear. They ran in the opposite direction to the incisions about the throat. They appeared to be the marks left by the three middle fingernails of the murderer’s right hand; yet if that were the case, my father and I thought that they must have been unusually long nails. Were they a man’s nails, we wondered, or was it more likely that such long nails might have belonged to a woman?