The Real Mary Kelly (18 page)

Since a substantial number of other people had already identified the victim as Long Liz Stride this was surprising, but Mrs. Malcolm would not be budged despite cautions and prolonged questioning. The coroner, who obviously had access to the witness statements made to the police, asked her, ‘Did you not have some special presentiment that this was your sister?’

Malcolm replied, ‘Yes … I was in bed, and about twenty minutes past one on Sunday morning I felt a pressure on my breast and heard three distinct kisses. It was that which made me afterwards suspect that the woman who had been murdered was my sister.’ The coroner pointed out to the jury that he was allowing this ‘evidence’ to be heard only because of the doubt about the identity of the victim. It was a less than subtle way of telling the jury that he personally placed no store on the veracity of the witness. The down-to-earth Baxter clearly had no truck with psychic visitations and spectral kisses in the small hours of the night. In the event he was proved correct because when the inquest was resumed for what would be the last time on Tuesday 23rd October, the outraged sister – now called Mrs. Elizabeth Stokes – appeared and said that, far from turning up twice a week for a regular handout from her sister Mary, she had not seen her for years. The indignation she expressed regarding the blackening of her character by her own sister knew no bounds although, as the coroner’s subsequent summing up showed, she was probably little different in character from the picture her sister had drawn. Whatever Mary Malcolm’s motives were, or indeed whether she was genuinely mistaken, has never been determined because she disappeared from the scene and never subsequently spoke of the matter.

The police had interviewed many people in Berner Street and the surrounding area in the hope that someone may have seen Long Liz in the company of a man in the hours before she died. Several of these, including Mrs. Fanny Mortimer who lived opposite the International Working Men’s Educational Club, gave initially negative reports but later their memories seemed to improve under the relentless interest of the reporters, invariably helped by small monetary incentives
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. In the end the police authorities decided that only three accounts were consistent and reliable enough for the witnesses to give evidence at the inquest. These were the beat policeman PC William Smith who passed the couple in Berner Street about 30 minutes before the killing; William
Marshall, a workman in an indigo warehouse who was standing by the door of his house at 64 Berner Street for some time and noticed the couple as they walked past him at about 11.45pm; and James Brown, a dockside labourer who passed a couple on the corner of Fairclough Street – where he lived – and Berner Street as he went to a local shop to buy something for his supper at about 12.45am.

They were all certain that the woman was Elizabeth Stride, who they each individually identified in the mortuary. PC Smith observed that she was wearing a flower on her coat when he saw her but the other two were not sure. All three said that the man was about 5ft 7in in height, Marshall thought that he was ‘rather stout’ and ‘middle aged’ whilst Brown put his age at about 28. All described him as wearing a black or dark coat, Smith and Brown describing it as ‘cutaway’ and Marshall as ‘long’. Brown was not sure whether or not he was wearing a hat, Smith said that he had on a dark felt deerstalker hat and Marshall that he wore a round hat with a peak, adding, ‘It was something like what a sailor would wear.’

Marshall gave perhaps the best description and, under a certain amount of pressure from the coroner, agreed that the man he had seen was of a clerical type, ‘I should say he was in business, and did nothing like hard work.’ He was decently dressed and mildly spoken with an educated accent. As the couple strolled past him with the man’s arm around her shoulder he heard him say, ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ Brown did not hear him speak as he passed them on the corner of Fairclough Street where the man was standing leaning on a wall with one hand, but heard the woman say, ‘Not tonight but some other night.’

It is of course impossible to say whether all three witnesses saw the same man over the course of an hour although it is reasonably certain – since Elizabeth Stride had a striking Scandinavian beauty not easily forgotten – that it was the same woman. However, as the coroner pointed out, the descriptions of the man are sufficiently alike, taking into account the variations that occur within any group of witnesses to the same events that it probably was. The noteworthy thing that all three were agreed on was that he was clean-shaven. In 1888 that was unusual for a man. Surveys of group and crowd photographs of the time show that fewer than 20 per cent of men did not sport either a beard or a
moustache; indeed it was compulsory that all men in the army and the police wore moustaches, as group photographs of the police and the army at the time show. In the army it was not until 1916, when the need for men outweighed sartorial considerations, that this rule was dropped. Francis, assuming the man in the Chapman inquest picture is him, belonged to the clean-shaven minority of men at the time.

There is a discrepancy in age between Marshall who thought he was middle aged and Brown who put him as 28, but by his own admission, Brown only got a fleeting glance in a poorly lit section of the street. How easy it is for a witness to be mistaken about age can be seen from the evidence that Louis Diemschutz gave after identifying the body of Elizabeth Stride in the mortuary. After a careful look in, presumably, good lighting he put her age at 28. She was in fact 45. Importantly, the descriptions match the one given by Mrs. Long, who almost certainly saw the Ripper outside 29 Hanbury Street talking to Annie Chapman. On that occasion he was wearing a billycock hat but on the night of 29th September he was wearing either a hat with a small peak or a deerstalker. Both hats are soft enough to have been carried in a pocket or stuffed inside his coat so the possibility also exists that he may have alternated between the two.

Marshall, Smith and Brown were not the only people who claimed to have seen Long Liz and her putative killer that night. Mrs. Fanny Mortimer, the housewife living almost opposite the club, originally told the police that she had heard and seen nothing, but later – when interviewed by various newspapers including the
Evening News –
she gave a much more lurid account of the evening’s events. ‘I was just going to bed Sir when I heard someone cry out “Come out quick; there’s a poor woman here that’s had ten inches of cold steel in her.”’ A few minutes later she was amongst the small crowd who gathered in the narrow entrance to the yard to stare at the body huddled by the wall and the trail of blood still congealing in the gutter through the cobblestones. ‘Then I see a sight that turned me all sick and cold. There was the murdered woman a-lying on her side, with her throat cut across till her head seemed to be hanging by a bit of skin. Her legs was drawn up under her, and her head and the upper part of her body was soaked in blood. She was dressed in black as if she was in mourning for somebody.’ It was just the sort of stuff that the reporters wanted to
hear and they were prepared to pay well for it. It is also so inaccurate as makes it unlikely that Fanny Mortimer had been near enough to see the body at all. Of all the victims, Liz Stride had the smallest neck wound and, at that stage, it was partially covered by her scarf.

She also mentioned a young man she had seen hurrying along Berner Street a few minutes before the murder carrying ‘a shiny black bag’. The young man in question – Leon Goldstein – came forward as soon as he heard about the account in the newspapers and proved to be a commercial traveller in cigarettes, dummy packets of which he carried in his bag. Another of her sightings, which she did not apparently mention to the police, was that of a couple, ‘A young man and his sweetheart were standing at the corner of the street about twenty yards away, before and after the time the woman must have been murdered, but they told me they did not hear a sound.’

The most celebrated of the apparent sightings was that made by Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, who was hurrying down Berner Street on his way home. Schwartz did not speak good English and he gave his evidence at Leman Street police station through an interpreter. He described seeing a man pulling a woman out of the entrance of Dutfield’s Yard at about 12.45am and throwing her down on the pavement. The woman, who, like Stride, was dressed in black, cried out three times, ‘but not very loudly’. At that moment the man called out ‘Lipski’ to another man smoking a pipe on the opposite side of the street. This alarmed Schwartz since Lipski had become a well-known anti-Semitic term of abuse in the locality since the poisoning of Miriam Angel by Israel Lipski in a house in an adjoining street the previous year
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. Schwartz apparently took to his heels and was pursued for some distance down Berner Street by the pipe smoker before the latter broke off the chase.

This evidence would seem on the face of it to be the most critical of all since it appeared to implicate at least one other person in the murder. The newspapers reported it with varying details the following day; in one account the pursuer was wielding a knife rather than a pipe and in another the assailant pulled the woman back into the alleyway after throwing her to the ground. For some reason Schwartz was not called to give evidence at the inquest. This may have had something to do with the difficulties in giving evidence through an interpreter
but is more likely to be because – since no-one else had reported the incident – the police decided that Israel Schwartz should join Fanny Mortimer and later Matthew Packer, as an unreliable witness.

Finally, with the problems of identification over and the facts surrounding the finding of Elizabeth Stride’s body established, the court was able to turn its attention to the medical evidence. The first doctor to testify was Dr. Frederick Blackwell, the nearest police surgeon to Berner Street. When he had arrived at about 1.16am the body was still warm to the touch. He gave a graphic description of the placid expression on the face of the deceased, an expression which is still apparent in the mortuary photographs. He also mentioned the check silk scarf wound around the neck and tied in a bow on the left side. The incision, he said, commenced 2in below the angle of the jaw on the left, just below the scarf which showed signs of having been cut by the knife along its lower edge. The great vessels on the left of the neck had been partially severed and it was from these that the considerable stream of blood which stretched along the gutter to a drain near the back door of the club had been flowing. The cut continued across the neck, completely dividing the windpipe, and terminated an inch below the angle of the jaw on the right but without damaging the major vessels on that side. A juror asked whether there would have been any possibility of the victim crying out after the incision was made and received Dr. Blackwell’s categorical assurance that there would not.

The grim mood of the court was interrupted for a while by the testimony of Michael Kidney, a dock labourer with the doleful expression of a bloodhound, with whom Stride had been cohabiting intermittently for the previous three years. After giving evidence that supported the identification of the victim, Kidney launched into an attack on the police who, he claimed, could have caught the culprit if they had accepted his offer of help. He had presented himself at Leman Street police station on the previous Monday in, even by his own admission, an intoxicated state and asked to be given the services of ‘a strange young detective’. This prompted a certain amount of merriment in court which turned to outright laughter when, in answer to a further question from a juror as to whether he had any specific information, he replied, ‘I am a great lover of discipline, Sir.’

When it became apparent that Kidney had no more useful information to give, the coroner dismissed him and soon it was the turn of George Bagster Phillips, the doyen of the various police surgeons associated with the Ripper murders. He gave evidence of having been called to Dutfield’s Yard at 1.20am on the morning of Sunday 30th October and arriving at the scene some time after Dr. Blackwell. He confirmed all the details concerning the position and state of the body and also referred to the small packet of cachous that had been found clutched in Elizabeth’s left hand. Later in his evidence a juror asked whether it might not have been expected that a victim of such a violent assault would have dropped the packet at once. The reply that he received, ‘That is an inference that the jury would be perfectly entitled to draw’, is absolutely typical of such a considered and meticulous witness as Phillips.

A detailed account of the post-mortem examination then commenced. Phillips, who as the senior police surgeon to H Division was in charge, reported with his customary manners that,‘Dr. Blackwell and I made a post-mortem examination, Dr. Blackwell kindly consenting to make the dissection, and I took the following note: