Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (11 page)

By the time she was released into the street it was 1 a.m.; PC Hutt asked Catherine to pull the door to on her way out. As she did so she said, ‘Good night, old cock,’ and he saw her
turn in the direction of Houndsditch. Forty-five minutes later, she was dead, the next victim of Jack the Ripper.

The murder of Catherine Eddowes, the most violent yet in the series, provides the key to the entire story set out in this book, so I’m going to look at her life and the events leading to
her death in detail.

She was born on 14 April 1842 in Graisely Green, Wolverhampton, to George Eddowes, a tin-plate worker, and his wife Catherine, the sixth child of twelve. By the time she was two years old, the
family had made the big decision to move to London, probably walking all the way, and settled in Bermondsey, one of several impoverished neighbourhoods south of the river Thames. Catherine was
educated at St John’s Charity School but tragedy soon struck when her mother died in 1855, when she was thirteen, followed by her father two years later. The children, now orphans, went their
separate ways, many going to the Bermondsey Workhouse, but Catherine
returned to Wolverhampton and stayed with an aunt, finding employment as a tin-plate stamper, a job she
may have obtained through family connections.

By the early 1860s, she began a relationship with a man named Thomas Conway who drew a pension from the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. Together they eked out a living around the Midlands, often
selling cheap ‘chap-books’ written by Conway, the content of which usually consisted of little histories, nursery rhymes or accounts of current events. One of their books was a ballad
commemorating the execution of Catherine’s cousin, Christopher Robinson, which was sold among the crowds gathered for his hanging for murder.

In 1863, Thomas and Catherine’s first child, Catherine Anne (or ‘Annie’) Conway was born in Norfolk where Thomas was employed as a labourer. By 1868, the family had moved to
London, taking lodgings in Westminster. By this time Catherine was using the surname Conway, a common enough thing to do when a couple were living as man and wife – she even had
Thomas’s initials crudely tattooed on her arm – but there is no record that they ever married. It was at Westminster that their second child, Thomas, was born. Continually on the move,
the Conways moved to Southwark where their last child, Alfred, was born in 1873.

By now, things were not going too well and Catherine’s growing taste for alcohol had become an issue, as had Thomas’s occasionally violent behaviour towards her. At Christmas 1877,
Catherine’s older sister Emma met her for the last time and noted that she was sporting a black eye. With domestic problems mounting, the inevitable happened and Catherine separated from
Thomas in 1881. Her daughter Annie had already left home, and the two boys stayed with their father.

Another older sister of Catherine’s, Eliza, lived in Spitalfields and Catherine followed her there, settling in the common lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean
Street, where she began a relationship with a labourer named John Kelly. They were to remain as a couple at the lodging house for the rest of her life. Soon after, Catherine became a grandmother
when her daughter Annie gave birth to a son, Louis. But although she lived not too far away in Bermondsey, Annie’s relationship with her parents was fraught. Thomas had come to stay with her
at one time and had left on bad terms, and Catherine’s regular visits to borrow money resulted in Annie and her family moving house without telling her mother of the new address.

During September 1888, Catherine and John Kelly, now an established couple, decided to go ‘hopping’, a popular escape from the grime of the city. Every year many families from the
poorer districts of London would go to Kent to pick hops, earning some money with the seasonal work and at the same time benefitting from the cleaner air of the countryside. Unfortunately, bad
weather that summer resulted in a poor crop and soon the couple, along with many others in the same situation, were forced to make the long walk back from Kent to London, penniless. As Catherine
and John did so, they struck up a friendship with a Mrs Emily Burrell and her partner, who were on their way to Cheltenham. Mrs Burrell gave Catherine a pawn ticket for a man’s shirt which
was no use to them as they were not going to London.

When they reached the city on 27 September, weary and footsore, Catherine and John went their separate ways for the night: John stayed at 52 Flower and Dean Street and Catherine went to Shoe
Lane, in the City of London, to stay at the casual ward there, where the homeless were allowed brief
accommodation, usually for one night only. They only had four pence
between them, and that paid for John’s bed. When she left the ward the following morning, she told others there that she had returned to London ‘to earn the reward offered for the
apprehension of the Whitechapel Murderer. I think I know him.’ The superintendent of the ward warned her not to get herself killed, to which she replied: ‘Oh, no fear of
that.’

On the morning of 29 September, Catherine and John reunited and went to Jones’s pawnbrokers near Christ Church Spitalfields to pawn a pair of John’s boots; with the two shillings and
six pence they received, they bought some provisions and had breakfast in the kitchen at 55 Flower and Dean Street. The last time the couple were together was at about 2 p.m. in Houndsditch, by
which time they appeared to be penniless again. John said he would find some casual work somewhere and Catherine said she would cross the river to see her daughter at an address in Bermondsey
(which she did not know her daughter had left) and get some money from her. She never made it to Annie’s, but by 8.30 p.m. she had managed to get herself extremely drunk – where the
money came from to pay for this is not clear, but prostitution could well have been one option, despite John Kelly later saying that he was not aware of Catherine ever having earned money through
‘immoral purposes’. And so Catherine Eddowes was found slumped, drunk, in a doorway in Aldgate High Street, arrested and placed in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station.

Her release at 1 a.m. the following morning was charged with a tragic serendipity: being in the custody of the City police, she was allowed to go once she was deemed sober enough to look after
herself, which was the City police policy. Had she been found drunk a short distance further east, she
would probably have been spotted by a Metropolitan police officer and
taken to Leman Street or Commercial Street police stations. It was Metropolitan police policy to hold drunks until the following morning – in which case Catherine would not have encountered
the Whitechapel murderer.

It is an historical anomaly that the City of London has its own force within the boundaries of the Met police. It goes back centuries, when the city, the heart of London, had the first paid law
men. When the Met was founded in 1829 Sir Robert Peel tried to take over the city area, but the City Corporation resisted, and despite another attempt ten years later, the City police was given
statutory power to remain an independent force, as it is to this day.

It was Catherine’s bad luck that she was found drunk in the city area, and forty-five minutes after her release, her brutally mutilated body was found in Mitre Square by City PC Edward
Watkins. Mitre Square was a small enclosure mostly surrounded by warehouses, except for two houses (one occupied, one empty) and the backs of properties on Mitre Street. There were three entrances,
one from Mitre Street, another from St James’s Place (now called Mitre Court) and Church Passage, which ran from Duke Street. PC Watkins’s beat usually took fifteen minutes to cover and
that night he was working ‘left handed’, which means he was walking his beat in reverse, a common enough ploy used by patrolling officers to confuse any potential wrongdoer who had
become accustomed to the route of the beat. When he passed through Mitre Square at 1.30 a.m. there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen and he continued on his way. Yet at 1.44 a.m. he
returned to the square and, turning to the dark, south-west corner, he saw a body lying on the pavement. As he
shone his lantern across the body, he could see that the woman
had been killed and her body mutilated. He later told a reporter from the
Daily News
that:

Watkins immediately ran the eighty yards or so across the square to the large Kearley and Tonge warehouse to seek help from the nightwatchman there, George Morris, who happened
to be a retired Metropolitan policeman. After seeing for himself the gruesome sight splayed across the pavement, Morris left Watkins with the body, raced out of the square, through Mitre Street and
into Aldgate, all the while blowing his old policeman’s whistle: City police officers were not issued with whistles at that time.

He managed to find PCs James Harvey and James Holland and they all ran back to Mitre Square. PC Holland was promptly dispatched to nearby Jewry Street to fetch Dr George Sequeira, who arrived at
the scene at 1.55 a.m. At the same time,
Inspector Edward Collard at Bishopsgate Police Station heard news of the murder and left for Mitre Square, after sending a constable
to fetch Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the City police surgeon, who lived at Finsbury Circus. Arriving at the scene at approximately 2.18 a.m., Dr Brown noted that several policemen were there along
with Dr Sequeira, but nobody had yet touched the body.

According to Dr Brown’s report:

Dr Brown stated that the cause of death was ‘haemorrhage from the left carotid artery. Death was immediate and the mutilations were inflicted after death.’ It is
the same cause of death as given for Elizabeth Stride, so soon before, which confirms that the Ripper was about to start mutilating Elizabeth when he was disturbed, then felt compelled to strike
again.

A pencil sketch of the crime scene, with the body
in situ
, was also made before Catherine Eddowes was taken to the mortuary in Golden Lane. The face had been horrifically mutilated; a
piece of her ear dropped from her clothing when she was undressed at the mortuary, her nose had been cut off and two inverted ‘V’ cuts were evident under each eye. As if this was not
enough, it was found that her left kidney and her womb were missing. Dr Brown later commented that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it. He stated that the killer must have
possessed ‘a good deal of knowledge as to the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them’.

A comprehensive list of Catherine’s clothing and belongings found on her person was made at the mortuary by a police inspector. Because she was homeless, she was wearing everything she
owned and carrying all her belongings. As well as everything listed here, Dr Brown also noted in his report on
her body that nearby was a mustard tin containing two pawn
tickets: one for John Kelly’s shoes, the other the one she had been given as they walked back from hop picking. This is the list: