The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (12 page)

The murder of Mary Kelly prompted a number of unique events. Owing perhaps to the secure nature of the crime scene, photographs of the body were taken
in situ
, the only time this was done in the whole case. Queen Victoria, via a telegram sent to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury on 10 November, spoke of her grave concern:

This new most ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, &
our detectives improved. They are not what they should be. You promised, when the 1st murders took place to consult with your colleagues about it.
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Henry Matthews also received a letter three days later, demonstrating that her Majesty was as exasperated as everybody else with the lack of progress:

The Queen fears that the detective department is not so efficient as it might be. No doubt the recent murders in Whitechapel were committed in circumstances which made detection very difficult; still, the Queen thinks that, in the small area where these horrible crimes have been perpetrated, a great number of detectives might be employed, and that every possible suggestion might be carefully examined and, if practicable, followed.

Have the cattle boats and passenger boats been examined?

Has any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms by themselves?

The murderer’s clothes must be saturated with blood and must be kept somewhere.

Is there sufficient surveillance at night?

These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the account of this horrible crime.
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The Metropolitan Police finally capitulated – in part – to the reward lobbyists by making a most unusual offer of:

Her Majesty’s Gracious pardon to any accomplice not being a person who contrived or actually committed the murder who shall give such information and evidence as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the person or persons who committed the murder.

And Dr Thomas Bond, who, after completing the lengthy post-mortem on Mary Kelly, was made familiar with the particulars surrounding the previous deaths, produced an overview of the sort of person he thought the murderer might have been. Bond believed that the five murders from Nichols to Kelly were ‘no doubt’ committed by the same person but, contrary to the views of other doctors, he thought the murderer lacked anatomical knowledge, even that of a butcher or horse-slaughterer. He also thought that the murderer’s hands and arms would have been bloodied, as would his clothes, and as such would probably wear an overcoat or similar apparel to hide the stains.

Dr Bond described the murderer as physically strong, but quiet and inoffensive in appearance, probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed, although probably not in regular employment. He would therefore have had a small regular income or pension or lived with people of respectable character who likely entertained suspicions they evidently were not communicating to the police. The murderer was probably solitary and eccentric in his behaviour.
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What Thomas Bond did, in effect, was create the first example of what has become a modern police tool used to assist investigations into the behaviour of serial murderers like ‘Jack the Ripper’ – offender profiling.

The funeral of Mary Kelly took place on 19 November, paid for in full by Mr H. Wilton, clerk of St Leonard’s church, Shoreditch, from where the cortège began its journey to St Patrick’s Roman Catholic cemetery in Leytonstone. The coffin bore the inscription ‘Marie Jeanette Kelly, died November 9, 1888, aged 25 years’, and on it were placed two crowns and a cross, made of heartsease and white flowers. The funeral itself was sparsely attended by associates of Mary from Miller’s Court and Joseph Barnett. However, the show of grief and sympathy from the public was considerable:

At half-past twelve, as the coffin was borne from the mortuary, the bell of the church was tolled, and the people outside, who now numbered several thousands, manifested the utmost sympathy, the crowd, for an East-end one, being extremely orderly. Vehicles of various descriptions took oppositions outside the church railings, and traffic was completely blocked until the hearse moved off. The funeral procession, which left Shoreditch Church at a quarter to one, made but slow progress through the crowds of people and vehicles. All along the route through Whitechapel and Cambridge Heath signs of sympathy were to be seen on every hand.
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The awful affair in Miller’s Court was seen as yet one more atrocity in an escalating series with seemingly no predictable end, and, needless to say, tensions were still running high in the East End. A good example of the sensational release of such tensions came two days after Mary’s funeral, in the heart of the very district of doss houses frequented by the unfortunate victims of the Whitechapel murderer, when a prostitute claimed to have been attacked by a man who she said was ‘Jack the Ripper’.

At 7.30 on the morning of 21 November, Annie Farmer had picked up a potential client whom she described as ‘shabby genteel’ and took him back to her lodging house at 19 George Street, the same doss house that had once been home to Martha Tabram only months before. The man paid for both of them, but the arrangement descended into violence, as two hours later a piercing scream was heard, after which the man was seen running from the house. Passing two men standing in the street, he was heard to exclaim, ‘What a ----- cow!’ before disappearing from view.
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Annie seemed obviously distraught, for her throat had been cut, and she said she had been attacked by Jack the Ripper himself. It was not long before word got out of another outrage, and crowds began to assemble excitedly in front of no 19. Before long a panic ensued.

The uproar was probably all for nothing, for the throat injury she had sustained was rather superficial, and subsequently it was discovered that Annie had been hiding coins in her mouth. This led the police to assume that she had attempted to rob the man, who had obviously remonstrated with her and, following her scream, made a run for it. In truth, the wound may well have been self-inflicted, but, despite this, Annie never recanted her story. The man never came forward to give an account of himself, and thus the case was dropped. The police were obviously circumspect about the whole issue,
and no official record of any investigation survives. However, they were of the belief that Annie Farmer might well have known her attacker, hence her reluctance to give any information that might have led to his discovery.
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Another Ripper scare erupted following the discovery of the body of Catherine (a.k.a. Rose) Mylett in Clarke’s Yard, Poplar High Street on 20 December. The Mylett case was a peculiar one – at her inquest, four doctors stated that the evidence pointed to death by strangulation, as there were signs that a cord had been used around her neck. Dr Thomas Bond, directed by Robert Anderson to make a late examination, changed his opinion from homicide to ‘natural causes’, and the whole affair led to some rather acrimonious exchanges between the officials.
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Anderson appeared to be wilfully pushing for a non-homicide verdict, as there were no signs of a struggle. Coroner Wynne Baxter also favoured death by natural causes, but in the face of weighty medical opinion a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ was given. The evidence to suggest that Mylett was killed by Jack the Ripper was flimsy at best, even non-existent, but perhaps it was more the timing of the homicide, combined with the nature of the crime scene and the character of Mylett herself, rather than the way it was done that made the public at least show concern that Jack the Ripper had attempted another outrage.

Alice McKenzie, like Mary Kelly before her, had a mysterious past. It is believed she was born around 1849 and was brought up in Peterborough, moving to the East End sometime before 1874. She was known by many as ‘Clay Pipe Alice’ on account of her regular habit of smoking a pipe. She had scars on her forehead and was missing part of a thumb, the result of an industrial accident some years previously. In about 1883, she had got together with a man named John McCormack,
an Irish porter who had been doing casual work for Jewish traders in Hanbury Street, and together they lodged at various doss houses in the district over the years before settling at ‘Mr Tenpenny’s’ lodging house at 52 Gun Street, near Spitalfields market.
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Between 3.00 and 4.00 on the afternoon of 16 July 1889 McCormack had returned to the lodging house after his morning’s work. He found Alice there and, having money, he gave her 1s 8d, the 8d for the rent and the rest to do with as she saw fit, before going to bed. It was the last time he would see her, and it would later transpire that she left without paying the deputy for their bed.
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At 7.10 p.m., a blind boy named George Dixon claimed that Alice had taken him to a pub near the Cambridge music hall on Commercial Street. He heard Alice ask someone if they would stand a drink, and the reply was ‘yes’. After remaining a few minutes, he was led back to Gun Street and left there.
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Elizabeth Ryder, the deputy of Mr Tenpenny’s, saw Alice between 8.00 and 9.00 p.m. at the lodging house; Alice was on her way out, and it was noted that she had some money in her hand. It was believed for a while that she had gone out with a fellow lodger named Margaret ‘Mog’ Cheeks, and, according to Mrs Ryder, both women had not returned to the house when she checked at 3.30 the following morning, 17 July.
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The final sighting of Alice McKenzie was made at 11.40 p.m. by a Margaret Franklin in Flower and Dean Street, where she was sitting on the steps of her lodging house with two friends. Alice passed by, seemingly in a hurry, and when asked how she was, merely replied, ‘All right, can’t stop now,’ before turning into Brick Lane.
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At 12.50 a.m., PC Walter Andrews found the body of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley, a narrow thoroughfare which ran
off Whitechapel High Street. Blood had flowed from two stabs in the throat, and her abdomen was superficially mutilated. What made this latest victim a contender for the next Ripper murder was the opinion of some of the medical officials. Although Dr George Bagster Phillips, a doctor who by sheer experience of the Whitechapel murders was probably well informed enough to confidently assert that this was not the work of ‘Jack the Ripper’,
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Dr Thomas Bond disagreed,
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and his opinion was shared by the new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, James Monro, who stated, ‘I need not say that every effort will be made by the police to discover the murderer, who, I am inclined to believe, is identical with the notorious Jack the Ripper of last year.’
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Robert Anderson, inconveniently on holiday at the time of McKenzie’s murder, did not share this opinion and later wrote that it was committed by ‘another hand’, at the same time suggesting that Monro had changed his mind as he had intimated to Anderson that it was ‘an ordinary murder and not the work of a sexual maniac’.
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The last of the Whitechapel murders took place on 13 February 1891 after a considerable lull. The victim, thirty-one-year-old prostitute Frances Coles, was found at 2.15 that morning by PC Ernest Thompson in Swallow Gardens, a rather pleasant name for what was effectively a grim railway arch that ran between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street, not far from the Tower of London. As PC Thompson approached the railway arch, he believed he could hear footsteps walking at a normal pace east towards Mansell Street. When he found Frances Coles, she was still alive and opened one eye as he bent to examine her.
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She apparently died on the ambulance, the result of a large cut in her throat.

The movements of Frances on the day of her death were
well documented on account of her undertaking a lengthy pub-crawl with James Sadler, a ship’s fireman with whom Frances had been before and who reacquainted himself with her the day before her death. The night of 12 February was not a happy one by all accounts, and both of them got very drunk visiting numerous public houses. After Sadler was attacked and robbed by a small group of ruffians in Thrawl Street, the couple had an argument and parted, reuniting at their lodging house in White’s Row, Spitalfields, several hours later. Frances was found drunk and crying, and Sadler was bloodied from a fight he’d had at the London docks; now very drunk, he had tried to be readmitted to his ship but was refused and found himself in an abusive confrontation with some men who promptly beat him up as a result. He left Frances drunkenly sleeping at a table in the lodging house, the last time he saw her alive, but returned around 3.00 a.m. so drunk he could barely speak. He was turned away again. The night became too much for him, and he went to get his wounds attended to at the London Hospital, spending the remainder of the night there.
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Sadler immediately became prime suspect for the murder, and he was arrested on 15 February and charged the following day, but thanks to the testimony of favourable witnesses in the absence of hard evidence, as well as good legal representation by the Seamen’s Union, charges against him were dropped on 2 March, before the case even went to court. Whether Sadler did murder Frances Coles will probably never be known, but one thing is for certain: he was not ‘Jack the Ripper’, as he was at sea on the fateful nights of the previous murders.

And so ended the Whitechapel murders. But their legacy carried on long after the death of Frances Coles, as the police continued to make enquiries and file reports for many years
after, and the press somehow managed to keep the story ticking over, despite the lack of new crimes. The taunting letters from potential ‘Jack the Rippers’ had begun to dwindle to a trickle compared to the frenzied days of 1888, but it seems appropriate to mention the last recorded communication, which was sent on 14 October 1896:

Dear Boss

You will be surprised to find that this comes from yours as of old Jack-the-Ripper. Ha. Ha. If my old friend Mr Warren is dead you can read it. You might remember me if you try and think a little. Ha. Ha. The last job was a bad one and no mistake, nearly buckled, and meant it to be the best of the lot & what curse it, Ha Ha I’m alive yet and you’ll find it out. I mean to go on again when I get the chance wont it be nice dear old boss to have the good old times once again. You never caught me and you never will. Ha Ha.

You police are a smart lot, the lot of you could nt catch one man Where have I been Dear Boss you’d like to know, abroad if you would like to know, and just come back. Ready to go on with my work and stop when you catch me. Well good bye Boss wish me luck. Winters coming ‘The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing’ Ha Ha have you heard this before.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper
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Police reports and communications discussing this latest missive – and ultimately dismissing it – would become the final official documents in the Whitechapel murders file.