The Real Mary Kelly (17 page)

Goulston Street was densely populated with immigrant Jews. If the Ripper wanted to foment anti-Jewish feeling, he could not have chosen a better place to do so. The police were already focusing their investigations on Jewish men and as a manoeuvre to throw them further off the scent it could hardly have been improved upon. More importantly it may have been another example of the murderer’s handwriting and as such it could have been compared to the writing on the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. It should have been a breakthrough.

Major Henry Smith, the acting Commissioner of the Citypolice, was alerted
to the discovery. He appreciated the importance of it immediately and ordered a police photographer to the scene to record the writing
in situ
even though, technically, Goulston Street was not within his jurisdiction. Unfortunately Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Commissioner, arrived before the photographer. He was horrified. Throughout his brief police career he seems to have been haunted by the possibility of crowd violence getting out of control. The previous year he had been responsible for the vigorous suppression by 2,000 police and 400 troops of a Socialist and Irish Home Rule demonstration in Trafalgar Square which resulted in the deaths of three demonstrators. It became the first of three such notorious events in Anglo-Irish political history to be known as Bloody Sunday. Now, faced with such a potentially inflammatory slogan in the heart of a Jewish area at a time when the local population was in a state of near-hysteria, he made an astonishing decision. He ordered that it should be immediately scrubbed from the wall.

His subordinates and officers of the City Police pleaded with him in vain. It was pointed out that the entrance could be screened with a tarpaulin, extra men could be drafted in to keep spectators away. It was even suggested that the word Juwes could be erased to lessen the impact of the slogan. In fact, since it was written in words in which even the capital letters were only three quarters of an inch high, an observer would have had to be very close indeed to read it in the darkness of the entranceway
¹⁰⁷
.

It was to no avail. Warren was adamant, the graffito must go. A bucket of water and scrubbing brushes were sent for and, before anyone had thought to check the accuracy of the two policemen’s notes, the words were expunged forever. This action by the most senior policeman in England was so extraordinary that many historians since have concluded that there must have been a darker reason for it and it has added further ammunition to the already considerable arsenal of the conspiracy theorists. His own reports seem to confirm that a genuine fear of crowd unrest, either by disgruntled Jews or by an anti-Semitic mob (or both), overrode basic police procedure and led to him making an overhasty decision
¹⁰⁸
. Whichever it was, it almost certainly sealed his fate, because in little over a week he had sent in his second resignation to Home Secretary Henry Matthews, and this time it was accepted.

The murder of two victims on the same night raised the whole affair to a new level. Where before there had been a certain prurient interest by the British middle classes in the murder of a series of unfortunates in a seamy part of London, there was now a worldwide focus on the case. There was general incredulity that a single individual seemed able to hoodwink the entire might of the Metropolitan Police, hitherto regarded as the finest and best-equipped force in the world. The Irish Troubles of recent years had resulted in the formation of the non-uniformed detective branch, later to become the Criminal Investigation Department and the model for similar forces around the world, yet even this seemed impotent to stop a single man from committing the most heinous of crimes right under its own nose.

The use of science in solving crime was just beginning. Photography, the chemical detection of blood stains, toxicological examination of stomach contents and tissue samples were all being employed in the investigation of crime and had already resulted in the conviction of such celebrated poisoners as Dr. Edward Pritchard and Mary Ann Cotton
¹⁰⁹
. The problem for the police was that they had no-one to use the techniques on. Even when they had opportunities to use the most modern of technology such as photography they were squandered as the events in Goulston Street had shown.

By 3rd October the ‘Double Event’ had become the main story in newspapers worldwide. Reporters booked passages to London from all parts of the globe and the telegraph wires were hot with syndicated stories sent out by the agencies. No-one doubted that the Ripper would strike again and soon. As the thirst for news became insatiable so, seemingly, did the Metropolitan police become more obdurate in their refusal to cooperate with the reporters. It became a war in which the world’s press pilloried the police and in return the police refused to allow the reporters access to the murder sites or to view the bodies in the mortuaries. The comment in
The Boston Daily Globe
of 9th November was typical of many in newspapers both domestic and foreign:

On the following day
The New York Sun
said:

In general the City Police seem to have been better disposed towards the gentlemen of the press and, as a consequence (and probably deservedly), came in for far less criticism than the increasingly unpopular Sir Charles Warren and the Mets.

As well as the saturation of the East End by police drafted in from other divisions, all over London the local residents were by this time taking an active part in attempting to track down the Ripper. Several local vigilante groups sprung up, the best known of which, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, had been formed on 10th September. George Lusk, a local builder and restorer of music halls, was elected president
¹¹⁰
. He seems to have been a man of some self-importance and soon drew attention to himself by writing letters to the national newspapers. He then asked for police protection for himself and his family because he became convinced that his house in Mile End was being watched by a bearded stranger. If it was, the man was never apprehended or identified.

A little more than two weeks after the ‘Double Event’, at about 5pm on 16th October, Lusk received in the post a 3in square cardboard carton and a crudely written letter. The box contained half a human kidney. As with so many of the events of that autumn, Lusk’s first reaction was that it was a hoax and that it was the kidney of a dog. Instead of handing the items to the police, immediately he put them into his desk drawer and it was not until two days later when he mentioned them to members of the Vigilance Committee that it was decided that they should seek another opinion. Accordingly it was taken to the surgery of a local general practitioner, Dr. Wiles. He was not there and his assistant Mr. F.S. Read looked at the specimen instead. He correctly identified it as a human kidney and advised that it should be taken to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, curator of the pathological museum at the London Hospital.

There are several versions of Openshaw’s reaction. Some reports have him declaring that it was ‘the ginny left kidney of a forty five year old woman’ but other and probably more accurate reports give a much more considered and circumspect reply. Openshaw, as an experienced histopathologist, would have been well aware that it is totally impossible to tell from microscopic appearance the sex of a kidney, and the age could only be guessed at in the broadest of terms. Moreover, unlike the liver, alcohol – whether gin or otherwise – leaves no stigmata on the kidney.

He was, however, able to give several valuable pieces of information. Firstly, the kidney had been preserved in spirits of wine within a short time of being harvested. This was the medical term for rectified ethyl alcohol which was an unusual preservative for human tissues at the time. Most hospitals and dissecting rooms used formaldehyde for this purpose and this left a pungent and unmistakeable odour on anything with which it came into contact. Spirits of wine could, however, easily be purchased at any pharmacy and the term could even be used to mean any ethanol-based spirit, such as gin or brandy.

The second useful piece of information was that about an inch of the renal artery was still attached to the specimen. Since it was already known that two inches remained in Catherine Eddowes’s body and the total length of an adult left renal artery is about three inches, this strengthened the possibility that her body could have been the source of the organ.

In order to try to confirm that the half kidney came from the murdered woman, the microscopic findings of Dr. Openshaw were compared to those of Dr. Brown, who had conducted the post-mortem on Catherine Eddowes. Brown had reported that the remaining right kidney had shown ‘slight congestion of the bases of the pyramids’. Dr. Openshaw and Dr. Sedgwick Saunders – a pathologist employed by the City of London Police who had also examined the Lusk kidney – agreed that it showed early signs of Bright’s disease. This expression is almost never used today since it is far too imprecise, but then it signified any type of kidney disease. Whether Brown’s congestion and Openshaw and Saunders’s signs of Bright’s disease were the same is now debateable and, without the microscopic sections to compare, impossible to resolve.

The letter too has been subjected to microscopic analysis over the ensuing years. The crude handwriting looked nothing like the neat script of the ‘Dear Boss’ letters but since the wording appears to be a none-too-successful attempt to portray the author as illiterate and, possibly, Irish, it could have been a deliberate ruse. The letter read:

Too many others have pointed out that the misspellings of ‘knife’ and ‘while’ are far from convincing, as well as the inconsistency of writing ‘Mr’ and ‘Mishter’ to require any further detailed analysis here. It is fairly clear that, whoever the author was, it was a deliberate attempt to make it appear to have come from a semi-literate and probably Irish source.

It seems unlikely that Francis was the author. If he wanted to make an impact and demonstrate his connection with the body in Mitre Square, he would surely not have waited two weeks to do so if the kidney was already in his possession. Nor is he likely to have introduced a new suspect in the form of a semi-literate Irishman into the field. He had already established a strong persona in the form of Jack and a new suspect could only weaken his objective of connecting the crimes and linking them to a single killer. It is more likely to have been the result of a prank by a student who had ready access to the dissecting room of his medical school, and comic Irishmen were popular fare in the music halls in which medical students tended to spend rather more of their time than in the lecture theatres.

The inquest on Elizabeth Stride was opened by Wynne Baxter at the Vestry Hall in Cable Street, St. GeorgeintheEast on Monday 1st October and that on
Catherine Eddowes by Mr. Samuel Langham, coroner for the City of London, at the coroner’s court, Golden Lane on Thursday 4th October. Baxter opened his proceedings by saying that although the victim’s name had been given on the inquest notice as Elizabeth Stride, there was some doubt in the matter and until official identification was complete it would be better to refer to her as an unknown woman. The reason for this uncertainty would soon become apparent.

The early witnesses, all men who had been present in the Working Men’s Educational Club together with Louis Diemschutz, the discoverer of the body, gave evidence first. There was no disparity in their testimony and all were agreed that the death must have occurred within a few minutes of the pony and cart turning into the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard shortly before 1am. They were also agreed that no-one had heard a sound from the yard during the relevant period. Three tenements occupied by Jewish families fronted on to the yard and the residents of these too had heard nothing. There had been a certain amount of noise from the clubroom, where a few people who had remained after the end of the political discussion were singing Russian songs, but it was generally agreed that had anyone cried out it would surely have been heard by someone.

Then there was a bizarre turn of events which made it clear why the initial identification of the body as being that of Elizabeth Stride was now in some doubt.

Mary Malcolm – the wife of a tailor who lived in Red Lion Square, Holborn – testified under oath that the murdered woman was her sister, Elizabeth Watts.
The Daily Telegraph
reported that she was deeply affected by the experience of giving evidence
¹¹¹
. She had visited the mortuary three times and, despite initial doubts, she had finally been convinced that the body was that of her sister by the finding of a small black mark on her leg caused, so she said, by an adder bite in childhood. She too had been bitten by the same snake and she displayed her hand for Baxter’s inspection. The coroner glanced at it and dismissed it as being ‘nothing but a scar’. Mrs. Malcolm then went on to blacken her sister’s name with a catalogue of her vices – including prostitution, alcoholism, admissions to lunatic asylums and feigning epilepsy in order to be absolved from her misdoings. For her own part she painted a picture of a dutiful and caring sister who had seen her errant sibling regularly twice a week and helped her out with small sums of money and cast off clothing.