The Real Mary Kelly (19 page)

He was making an important point but one which may have been lost on the jurors. Arteries such as the carotid have a thick muscular wall. When they are completely divided the muscle contracts and often closes the lumen of the vessel so tightly as to completely staunch the blood flow. If, however, as in this case, there is even the smallest part of the vessel wall not divided, this contraction cannot fully shut the vessel down and vigorous arterial haemorrhage continues. This undoubtedly accounts for the massive blood loss observed in the case of Elizabeth Stride compared with the other victims, where the carotid arteries were completely divided and blood loss was surprisingly small as a consequence. Whether any of the jurors or even the coroner appreciated this point is doubtful but it is evident that this is what Phillips meant by saying that the haemorrhage was due to
partial
severance of the left carotid artery.

The coroner asked whether there was any possibility that the wound could have been self-inflicted. Apart from the obvious point that no weapon had been found anywhere near the body, the question elicited another important observation from Phillips: ‘I have seen several self-inflicted wounds more extensive than this one, but then they have not usually involved the carotid artery. In this case, as in some others, there seems to have been some knowledge where to cut the throat to cause a fatal result.’ It is another important pointer to the fact that the most experienced of all the police surgeons believed that the murderer, assuming it to be the same man in each case, possessed anatomical knowledge.

The rest of Phillips’s testimony, although meticulous and detailed, was unremarkable until he was asked by a juror whether any part of the roof of the mouth was missing since Michael Kidney had said that Elizabeth had suffered from such a deformity. This obviously took both doctors by surprise and Phillips replied that such a thing had not been noticed. The coroner asked them to make a further examination of the body with particular emphasis on this point and
the inquest was adjourned until the following week. When it resumed Phillips confirmed that the hard and soft palates of the victim were perfectly sound. He also confirmed that stains found on one of the two handkerchiefs that Elizabeth had been carrying were probably fruit stains but apart from that no trace of grapes or their stalks were found anywhere near the body. He gave his opinion with an authority that put the matter beyond doubt. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either the skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’

This was an important piece of evidence because Matthew Packer, a fruiterer with a shop in Berner Street, somewhat belatedly remembered selling a bunch of black grapes to a man accompanied by a woman resembling Elizabeth about two hours before the murder. These grapes have featured prominently in the mythology of the Ripper. They first surfaced in a report in
The Times
on the day after the murder when it was claimed that some grapes were found tightly clasped in the right hand of the dead woman, and subsequent writers have repeated this statement. None of the policemen or the three doctors that saw the body
in situ
mentioned anything about grapes although all had seen the small packet of cachous clutched in her left hand. Several witnesses, however – including Louis Diemschutz, Mrs. Mortimer and Isaacs Kozebrodsky – told various newspapers that they had seen grapes in Elizabeth’s right hand. Dr. Phillips, when questioned by the coroner about the blood staining to the right hand, said that he could not account for it but, ‘There were small oblong clots on the back of the hand.’ Is it possible that in the poor light in the alleyway, these were mistaken for black grapes by the witnesses?

Stephen Knight, in
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, confidently put forward the theory that Dr. Gull and his Masonic accomplices, including the artist Walter Sickert, while riding around the East End in a coach on the lookout for Mary Kelly and her co-conspirators, spent the time injecting grapes with cyanide or some other noxious substance in order to drug the victims and more easily carry out the mutilations before dumping the bodies at pre-arranged locations. The fact that Gull was on public record in writing saying that he preferred raisins or grapes to alcohol as a restorative no doubt added fuel to this hypothesis. A late self-portrait of Walter Sickert,
Lazarus Breaks his Fast
, shows
the artist eating a bowl of what appear to be prunes with a spoon. Since Sickert is known to have been fond of prunes for breakfast this seems a much more reasonable proposition than supposing them to be grapes, as Knight does in order to suggest that the picture was the artist’s way of alluding to his part in the murder of Stride. Even a man as notably eccentric as Sickert is unlikely to have eaten grapes with a spoon unless they formed part of a fruit salad.

Despite the alleged finding of a grape stalk in the drain of Dutfield’s Yard by a pair of dubious private detectives who apparently never showed it to anyone else, it is likely that Packer – having read the account in
The Times
of the grapes in Stride’s right hand, which was also repeated by some other newspapers – conveniently remembered selling grapes to an unknown woman. He had a brief few days of glory, including being interviewed at Scotland Yard by the Assistant Commissioner, Alexander Carmichael Bruce, as well as by the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Evening News –
for which, no doubt, he received some recompense. In the end, however, his story was so full of inconsistencies and changes that everyone, including the police, decided that he was not a reliable witness and he was not asked to give evidence at the inquest. On the balance of probabilities it seems that grapes played no significant part in the death of Elizabeth Stride.

Another small mystery concerning Elizabeth Stride was that she told various people, including Michael Kidney, that she had nine children, two of whom drowned with her English husband in the
Princess Alice
disaster on 3rd September 1878. The
Princess Alice
was a paddle steamer returning from an excursion to Gravesend loaded with holidaymakers when it was in collision with a collier going downstream on a following tide. Six hundred and fifty people, including many children, were lost, the tragedy being compounded by the fact that it took place close to one of the main outfalls of the London sewers which was at the time in the process of discharging effluent into the river.

Elizabeth, who had arrived in England in 1866, married John Thomas Stride, a ship’s carpenter, in 1869 at St. Giles in the Fields. The couple feature in both the 1871 and 1881 census and in neither is there any sign of children. John Stride actually died in the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum in 1884 from heart failure. It seems likely that the couple never had children and that Elizabeth’s story was an attempt to gain sympathy and, possibly, compensation
although there is no record that she ever officially claimed relief from the
Princess Alice
Fund.

Wynne Baxter commenced his summing up on Tuesday 23rd October and it took several hours. He spent some time on the initial problems of identification which had been greatly exacerbated by Mary Malcolm’s insistence that the victim was her sister. It had been at times, he said, reminiscent of
The Comedy of Errors
since there were actually many similarities between Elizabeth Stride and Mrs. Malcolm’s sister. He accepted that the woman seen by Marshall, Brown and PC Smith were one and the same and that she was Elizabeth Stride, otherwise known as Long Liz. He left the matter of whether the man seen with her was the same on each occasion open although he suggested that honest differences in recollection of the same person seen briefly by three different witnesses could account for the apparent disparities in the descriptions. One puzzling thing was the parcel wrapped in newspaper, 18in long by 6 to 8in wide, which Smith was certain that the suspect had been carrying but which was not seen by either of the others. Baxter conceded that it was of course perfectly probable that a woman of Stride’s occupation might have been in the company of more than one man in the space of an hour. On balance though it seemed to be his opinion that it was the same man and that that man was the murderer. It took the jury no more than a few minutes to return the only verdict possible under the circumstances: Wilful Murder by Person or Persons Unknown.

Catherine Eddowes was identified within a few hours. Like all unfortunates she was well known around the pubs and doss houses of Spitalfields and the pawn ticket found in an old Colman’s mustard tin proved to be for a pair of good new boots that had been bought by her paramour John Kelly – a casual market labourer – in Canterbury, before they returned from hop picking a few days before. On their arrival penniless back in the capital he had allowed her to pawn them in order that they could pay for breakfast and then, it appears, a good deal of alcohol in addition, because there was nothing left of the half-crown that they had obtained for the boots by the time that Catherine ended up in Bishopsgate police station.

Kelly quickly came forward and identified the body in the Golden Lane mortuary as that of his partner. John and Catherine had shared not only their bed, when they had one, but much hardship and doubtless some good times during the seven years they had been together. It cannot have been a pleasant task for him to identify her. Catherine was the first victim in which facial mutilation had taken place. The tip of her small snub nose was missing as was the lobe of her right ear and there were a series of stab wounds to her face, some
taking the form of apparent glyphs such as the letter V, that have caused some historians of the Ripper murders to ascribe mystical or Masonic significance to them. Others maintain that they were accidental, caused by the wild flailing of her assailant’s knife in the darkness as he went about his work lower down the body. Most likely some of them at least were deliberate, a rehearsal for what was to follow, possibly to steel the murderer’s nerves for what he knew he had to do next, as well as a way of providing more of a link between the different killings.

Catherine Eddowes had been born in Wolverhampton 46 years before but had moved with her family to London as a baby. After the death of her father the family was split up and Catherine spent much of her early life in the workhouse or being looked after by relatives in the Black Country. At about the age of 20 she took up with Thomas Conway, an army pensioner, and bore him three children although she and Conway were probably never formally married. The couple scratched a living by hawking cheap trinkets and pamphlets written by Conway in the streets of the East End, before eventually splitting up due to Catherine’s drinking and Conway’s periodic violence. Not long afterwards she met John Kelly and moved into his lodgings in the notorious Flower and Dean Street.

The inquest was opened by Mr. S.F. Langham, coroner for the City of London, at the Golden Lane mortuary on Thursday 4th October. It seems to have been conducted with a good deal more courtesy and goodwill than was the case with some of Coroner Baxter’s confrontational hearings. Mr. Crawford, the solicitor representing the City Police, addressed the coroner at the start of the proceedings by stating that he was there to render the coroner and the jury ‘every possible assistance’. He added, ‘If, when the witnesses are giving evidence, I think it desirable to put any question, probably I will have the coroner’s permission to do so?’

‘By all means,’ replied Mr. Langham affably.

The first witness who gave evidence of identification was Catherine’s sister Eliza Gould, a widow who also lived in the stews of Spitalfields. She seems not to have been on particularly close terms with Catherine and was unsure about how long ago it was since she had last seen her. John Kelly then gave evidence of having lived with Catherine for the past seven years. Under questioning by Mr. Crawford and one of the jurors he painted a picture typical of the chaotic,
dysfunctional lives lived by the unfortunates of Spitalfields and their indigent partners. There was an initial insistence that Catherine was a woman of sober habits who never behaved in an immoral way, but he later admitted that she occasionally ‘walked the streets’ when they were short of money, which appears to have been most of the time. The fact that she had spent the night in Bishopsgate police station sleeping off the effects of drink was apparently of such little surprise to him when he heard of it on the Saturday night that he didn’t bother to inquire further but waited for her to turn up the next day, as she usually did. It was a world in which a man pawned the only pair of decent boots that he had in order to raise two shillings and sixpence – almost all of which was promptly spent on drink – and appeared totally unmoved by his partner having to sell herself to other men in the mean back alleys of Spitalfields in order to survive. Yet despite – or maybe because of – the unpromising milieu in which such people lived, they still managed to form bonds of real affection that bound couples like John and Catherine together for years at a time. It is striking that two other Ripper victims also had longstanding relationships with men to whom they were not married, Elizabeth Stride with Michael Kidney and Mary Jane Kelly with Joe Barnett.

Such couples frequently fell out, usually when ‘in drink’ to use the parlance of the time. On these occasions injuries were not uncommon. Walter Sickert, wondering at the relationship between the street prostitutes that he used as models and their consorts, wrote: ‘Extraordinary lives. Men who live on them, now & again hitting them with ’ammers, putting poisonous powders on cakes, trying to cut their throats, drugging their whisky &c.’ Whilst obviously greatly exaggerated for effect, he had a point. Bruises and the occasional black eye were a part of life for unfortunates but time and again they returned to their men for the companionship and protection that they afforded.

After John Kelly had finished his testimony, Frederick Wilkinson – the deputy of the lodging house in Flower and Dean Street which had been home to the couple for most of the previous seven years – gave evidence. He was particularly questioned about whether any strange man had taken a bed there between 1am and 2am in the morning on which the body had been found in Mitre Square. For some reason the police seemed convinced that when the killer left
Mitre Square he had headed north-east and taken a room in the very same doss house in which John Kelly was then asleep. Either that, or they suspected Kelly himself, although Wilkinson was convinced that he had not left the building after retiring to bed at about 10pm. After repeated questioning about who could have taken a bed in the early hours of the morning, he said that he could not remember but he might have made a note in his notebook, which he was duly sent back to the lodging house to fetch.