The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (6 page)

On 1 May 1869, Annie married coachman John Chapman, and they lived at various addresses in west London thereafter. Their first child, Emily, was born in 1870, followed by Annie Georgina in 1873, after which John got a job as a coachman and domestic servant to a wealthy family in Berkshire, which necessitated a return to Clewer. Their final child, Alfred, was born in 1880; he was crippled, and it seems that from here the Chapman’s fortunes began to falter. By now Annie was drinking heavily and was apparently often in custody for drunkenness,
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and eventually this situation reached the point where it was no longer advisable for her to be living on the estate of a respectable Berkshire family. Annie and John separated sometime around 1881, and she returned to London, with John giving her a weekly allowance of 10 shillings, a not inconsiderable sum at the time. In 1882, the eldest daughter, Emily, died of meningitis, and Annie’s life took a further downturn in 1886, when, on Christmas Day, John died of cirrhosis of the liver, ascites and dropsy, taking his generous maintenance payments with him. That year, Annie took up with a man named Jack, who made sieves for a living and was known as ‘Jack Sievy’, no doubt the source of Annie’s nickname. They lived at 30 Dorset Street, Spitalfields, a common lodging house, and Annie attempted to support herself by making antimacassars and selling articles in the street,
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being described as ‘very industrious when sober … a very clever little woman’.
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Such descriptions came from Amelia Palmer, a resident of 30 Dorset
Street, who claimed to have known Annie for quite some time; much of what we know about Annie Chapman’s life in Spitalfields comes from her inquest testimony and interviews.

After breaking up with the sieve-maker, Annie got together with Ted Stanley, known generally as ‘The Pensioner’, even though he was not particularly old, nor had he drawn a pension from the army. He would occasionally stay with Annie at her latest lodging house of choice, Crossingham’s at 35 Dorset Street, where they were regarded as man and wife.
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He had been away from the East End from 6 August until 1 September and had last seen Annie alive in Brushfield Street the day after his return. He noticed that she had a blackened eye.
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Annie had indeed received a black eye and other bruising during a quarrel with Eliza Cooper, a fellow lodger at Crossingham’s. However the reasons for the fight and the exact location where it took place differ according to various accounts. One explanation was that it had been caused by jealousy over the attentions of Stanley,
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the other that it was over a bar of soap.
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Also, according to Eliza Cooper, the argument began at Crossingham’s and continued afterwards at the Britannia, the pub on the corner of Dorset Street and Commercial Street, where the fight took place.
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John Evans, the night watchman of Crossingham’s, stated that the fight took place at the lodging house itself as early as Thursday 30 August.
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Whatever the date or venue for the incident, a number of people were made aware of Annie’s bruises, including Timothy Donovan, the lodging house deputy, and Amelia Palmer. She had met Annie in Dorset Street on 3 September, where they had had a brief chat about the bruising, Annie complaining that she was not feeling too well. They met again the following day, and again Annie commented on her health and that she had not eaten all day. With that, Palmer gave her twopence to get
something, advising her not to spend it on alcohol. It is believed that Annie spent some time at the infirmary,
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for by Friday 7 September, she had acquired a bottle of medicine and some pills. Amelia Palmer again saw her in Dorset Street at 5.30 that afternoon, and things were not good. Annie’s health was obviously deteriorating, and she felt too ill to do anything, but said, ‘I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.’
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And so to Annie Chapman’s final hours. At 11.30 p.m. on the night of Friday 7 September she asked for permission to be readmitted to the lodging house and forty minutes later shared a pint of beer with fellow lodger Frederick Stevens. At about 12.15 a.m. Stevens was with Annie – who appeared sober – in the kitchen, and, while there, she took out a box of pills, which immediately broke open. She fashioned a makeshift wrap from a piece of envelope found on the kitchen mantelpiece. With that she left, Stevens thinking she may have gone to bed. However, he saw her leave Crossingham’s at 1.00 a.m. She had returned a little over thirty minutes later and was sitting in the kitchen eating a baked potato when John Evans was sent to collect her doss money, but she did not have it. Deputy Timothy Donovan chastised her for seemingly always having money for beer rather than rent, and with that, in a situation very similar to Mary Ann Nichols’s a week earlier, she promised to get the money quickly and asked Evans to keep her regular bed free for when she returned. Evans watched as she left by a door into Little Paternoster Row, turned right and walked up to Brushfield Street. It was 1.45 a.m.
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A number of newspapers
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mentioned that a woman of a similar description to Annie Chapman was seen in the Ten Bells pub at the corner of Commercial Street and Church Street at around 5.00–5.30 a.m., one account saying she was
drinking with a man, others claiming that a man wearing a skull cap beckoned her outside. However, without further proof that the woman was indeed Annie Chapman, these reports are hardly conclusive.

At about 5.30 a.m., Elizabeth Long was walking along Hanbury Street on her way to Spitalfields market and, as she passed no. 29, she saw a woman whom she later identified as Annie standing against the shutters of the house with a man. She felt certain of the time as she had just heard the clock of Truman’s brewery strike the half-hour. Mrs Long saw the woman’s face but she did not see the man’s, except to notice that he was dark. She described him as wearing a brown deerstalker hat, and she thought he had on a dark coat, but was not quite certain. She could not say what the age of the man was, but he looked to be over forty and appeared to be a little taller than the woman. He seemed to be a foreigner and had a ‘shabby genteel’ appearance. She could hear them talking loudly and she overheard him say to the woman, ‘Will you?’, to which she replied, ‘Yes.’ They remained there as Mrs Long passed, and she continued on her way without looking back.
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Thirty minutes later, John Davis found Annie Chapman’s brutally mutilated body in the back yard.

At the time of her death, Annie Chapman was described as five feet tall, stout, with a pallid complexion, blue eyes and dark-brown wavy hair. Her teeth were good, although there were two missing in the lower jaw. She had been wearing a long black figured coat that came down to her knees, a black skirt, two bodices, two petticoats, lace-up boots, red and white striped woollen stockings and a red and white neckerchief. There were also some slight abrasions on her fingers where three brass rings that she had been seen wearing prior to her death had been removed. The cause of Annie’s apparent ill-health was ascertained in Dr Phillips’s post-mortem examination,
in that she was ‘far advanced in disease of the lungs and membranes of the brain’.
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She was already dying.

The post-mortem findings were effectively cut short during the inquest on the wishes of Dr Phillips. However, the medical journal the
Lancet
published an account of his findings:

the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of an expert – of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of a knife.
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This judgement was important, for although Dr Rees Llewellyn commented that the killer of Mary Ann Nichols may have had some rough anatomical knowledge, Dr Phillips was convinced that Annie Chapman’s murderer was blessed with significant expertise, adding that:

I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, and effect them, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour. If I had done it in a deliberate way, such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour.
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Wynne Baxter’s inquest, which took place at the Working Lads’ Institute and lasted five days spread over a fortnight, generated more evidence in addition to that gleaned from those party to Annie Chapman’s final days. One witness was
her younger brother, Fountain Smith, who claimed to have last seen her on the Commercial Road a fortnight before her death, giving her two shillings. Importantly, the residents of Hanbury Street itself gave tantalizing glimpses of what occurred on that fateful morning.

John Richardson was the son of Amelia Richardson, a widow who rented out the first two floors of no. 29 and ran a small packing-case business from the cellar and the back yard. Mrs Richardson was very trusting of those who lived in the house, and it was not unusual for the front door to be unlocked; perhaps as a result of this, some tools had been stolen from the cellar some time before.
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Subsequently, John Richardson, who lived in nearby John Street, would often visit the house on his way to work and check that the cellar doors were locked. This he did at 4.45 on the morning of 8 September and, after doing so and satisfying himself that all was well, sat on the steps leading from the back door in order to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been annoying him. It was just getting light, and he could see the yard all around him, noticing nothing unusual. He declared, ‘I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there.’
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Albert Cadosch, a Parisian-born carpenter, lived next door at no. 27. At about 5.20 a.m. he said that he went outside to his back yard (probably to use the outdoor privy) and on his return he heard somebody say, ‘No.’ A few minutes later, he had to go back and as he passed the fence that divided the yards of nos. 27 and 29 he heard what he believed was something falling against it from the other side. When he left the house immediately after, he noted that the time was 5.32 a.m. on the clock of Christ Church as he passed it.
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Had Cadosch heard the murder taking place? Despite this, the residents of no. 29 heard nothing out of the ordinary until the commotion
surrounding the discovery of the body erupted around 6.00 a.m.

And what a commotion it was. Large crowds assembled outside Commercial Street police station, Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street.
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At the latter, the street was heaving with onlookers, local residents were leaning out of windows to catch the spectacle, and some entrepreneurial characters even profited from the situation, selling refreshments and, in some cases, charging money to view the murder site from the windows of neighbouring houses. Fear, excitement and anger were tangible; never, said one newspaper,

have the streets of East London presented such an appearance of mingled excitement, awe, and indignation, until within the last few days. Poor murdered Polly Nicholls, lying butchered outside the Essex Wharf in Buck’s-row, was bad enough in all conscience, and sent every spectator of the spot where the body was found away with a desire for vengeance against the perpetrator of so foul a deed; but the latest butchery of Annie Chapman at Hanbury-street has driven the inhabitants of Whitechapel nearly crazy.
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Occasionally the crowds would burst into sporadic unruliness, giving the police cause to break up ‘lynch mobs’ who responded furiously to the many rumours sweeping the neighbourhood. Some men, pointed out as somehow suspicious, would find themselves fleeing for their safety, and unfounded stories of potential arrests saw excitable hordes descend upon police stations. ‘Leather Apron’ was still the name on everybody’s lips, perhaps exacerbated by the news that a leather apron had been found in the yard of no. 29 near the body – an item which was proven to belong to Mrs Richardson. Further
supposed sightings of him were made, each time causing considerable excitement, regardless of whether it was truly the man himself or just a sensational claim by an overexcited and perhaps ignorant bystander. The police continued their search for ‘Jack Pizer’, and on the 10 September got their man when Sergeant William Thick went with a fellow officer to 22 Mulberry Street in Whitechapel, the home of John Pizer, and arrested him. Alas, the breakthrough would not be a long-lasting one, for, under questioning, Pizer – who indeed fitted several of ‘Leather Apron’s’ attributes – could prove where he was at the times of the two preceding murders. He was staying at Crossman’s lodging house in Holloway, north London, at the time of Nichols’s murder and had spoken to a policeman on Seven Sisters Road about that night’s dock fire, which was visible even from that distance. On 6 September, he had returned to Mulberry Street, where his family, aware that he may be at risk from those who thought of him as ‘Leather Apron’, kept him at home. His alibis were impeccable, and even though accounts vary as to whether Pizer was indeed ‘Leather Apron’ or was even believed as such by the public at large, he took the singular opportunity of appearing at the Chapman inquest on 12 September to clear his name.
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The police, however, had other leads to follow. At 7.00 on the morning of Annie Chapman’s death, a Mrs Fiddymont, landlady of the Prince Albert pub on Brushfield Street, was standing in the ‘first compartment’ of the bar, talking with her friend Mary Chappell. A man entered the pub whose appearance frightened her. He was wearing a brown stiff hat, a dark coat and no waistcoat; his hat was pulled down over his eyes, and with his face partly concealed he asked for half a pint of ‘four ale’. Mrs Fiddymont was struck by the fact that there were blood spots on the back of his right hand, on his collar
and below his ear and that he behaved furtively. The man drank the beer in one gulp and immediately left. Mary Chappell followed the man into Brushfield Street and, noting that he was heading in the direction of Bishopsgate, pointed him out to a bystander, Joseph Taylor, who followed before losing sight of him.
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