by Trow, M. J.
Analyst Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield has studied British murder during the twenty years 1980–2000 and has come up with some fascinating observations, especially on motivation.
Behind the man with the knife is the man who sold him the knife, the man who did not give him a job, the man who decided that his school did not need funding, the man who closed down the branch plant where he could have worked, the man who decided to reduce benefit levels …3
And very quickly, the whole fraught question of what makes a serial killer descends into political name-calling. Even the briefest of comparisons with a century earlier gives us a grimmer picture than anything we have known. When the torso killer walked London, there was no welfare state. School boards were only just being set up in school-less areas. Medicine was expensive, hospitals still centres of disease. Social benefits extended only to the dreaded workhouse for the poor, a place where only the truly desperate went. Consumption and diphtheria killed thousands and cholera and typhus fever were only yesterday. Men and women worked to the rhythm of giant, soulless machines. Too many of them became lost in a downward spiral of poverty and vice. Most of them, somehow, coped. Some of them succumbed, dying alone in the scum-smeared alleyways of Spitalfields and Whitechapel. One or two of them became serial killers.
Chapter 14
The Cat’s Meat Man
The starting point for the investigation of any murder is the crime scene. Thanks to our current obsession with serial killers and cop shows on television, we are very familiar with the men in white suits, hoods and overshoes. We understand that everything must be photographed, measured, bagged and tagged. What is not observable to the naked eye can nevertheless be analysed in the laboratory, where the microscope and DNA analysis are vital tools of the trade. Even in the 1870s and 1880s when policemen walked all over crime scenes in hob-nailed boots, they at least looked for alien footprints, carriage or cart tracks and items in the vicinity which may have a bearing on the case. Sometimes, in fact, these casual finds, which were not crime-related, caused problems. The leather apron found near the body of Ripper victim Annie Chapman in the yard behind 29 Hanbury Street, led to a vigilante obsession to find ‘Leather Apron’ and the arrest of the innocent John Pizer, whose nickname that was. In fact the apron belonged to one of number 29’s residents who had washed it and left it there to dry.
Police surgeons called to crime scenes followed the precepts of Professor Virchow to the letter. Once they had satisfied themselves that the victim was actually dead, they checked for body warmth, noted the position of the corpse in relation to its surroundings, blood patterns, disarrangement of clothes and so on. Dr George Brown, called to the Ripper’s handiwork in Mitre Square, made very accurate drawings of the position of the body in a corner of the Square, the obvious external wounds and even a close-up of the unusual mutilations of the face.
The police themselves made a complete list of the clothes and belongings of Annie Chapman so that we know exactly what she was wearing on the night she died. They also took photographs at the crime scene in 13 Miller’s Court, the dingy room rented by Mary Kelly. Other photographs may have been taken in situ of other victims, but there is no mention of them and none has survived.
The problem with the torso killings is that there is no crime scene. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the murderer killed his victims and cut them into pieces along the riverbank. But the nature of the dismemberment means that considerable time and care was taken. The torso killer must have had relatively secure premises where he knew he would not be disturbed. This makes him a very different kind of killer from Jack, an opportunistic murderer who took huge chances and could easily have been caught in the act. In the murder of Katherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, if we are to believe the official time-keeping, Jack overpowered the woman, cut her throat, slashed her abdomen, removed uterus and one kidney and disfigured the face, all in the fifteen minutes between police patrols of the square. The torso killer is cool and suave by comparison. He kills indoors and has leisure to carry out his dismemberment.
It is this cold, unemotional act that is the most unusual aspect of the torso cases and, to Professor Laurence Alison, the most interesting. Professor Alison is Academic Director of the National Centre for the Study of Critical Incident Decision Making in Liverpool University’s School of Psychology. His core of interest lies in ‘processes by which individuals make sense of ambiguous, complex or contradictory information’. In the context of this book I am the individual and they do not come any more ambiguous, complex or contradictory than the torso killings! Professor Alison is perhaps best known outside purely academic circles for his book on Robert Napper, the killer of Rachel Nickell in 1992 which he co-wrote with colleague Marie Eyre.1 He is familiar with sexual assault in all its grim manifestations and we worked together on a recent television documentary on Jack the Ripper.2
What strikes Alison as odd is what is not there in terms of motive. Where is the frenzy, the removal of sexual organs, the focus on genitalia which we associate with sexual killers and which was very obvious in the Ripper murders themselves? We will return to this later.
Disposal of a body is one of the most difficult problems for any murderer. David Whitelaw wrote in the 1930s:
One can hardly picture a worse fate for even the most callous of murderers than that they should be doomed throughout eternity to carry with them portions of their victims, seeking resting places for their grim burden and finding none.3
In 1869 the tailor Pierre Voirbo killed a man with whom he had quarrelled over money, dismembered his body and filled the head with molten lead before throwing it into the Seine in Paris. Other body parts he stashed under his floor tiles however and these were discovered by clever detective work on the part of Gustave Macé. Donald Hume hired a biplane eighty years later to scatter bits of Stanley Setty whom he had killed in a fight. He mistook the Essex marshes of the Thames Estuary for the open sea and the body parts were found. Even so, Hume could only be charged at the time with accessory to murder – the actual crime being the dumping of the portions. One of the most famous cases was that of Louis Voison, a Belgian butcher who lived during the years of the First World War in a basement at 101 Charlotte Street, virtually across the road from the torso finds in Alfred Mews and its neighbouring squares. Something of a ladies’ man, Voisin found himself caught in a love triangle with his two mistresses and with the help of one of them, Berthe Roche, battered the other, Emilienne Gerard, to death. As a butcher, Voisin had no problem dismembering Emilienne. Her torso was wrapped in her underwear and forced into a sack. The legs were wrapped in brown paper. He loaded them onto his cart and wheeled them across Bloomsbury to Regent Square, where he dumped them behind railings. The body was identified via the underwear and the dead woman’s head and hands were found in a barrel of sawdust in Voisin’s apartment. He was hanged at Pentonville in March 1918.
The key to concealment through dismemberment is to leave no traceable clue on the bodies. This may be why the torso killer removed wedding rings; it may also be why he removed heads. In the case of Elizabeth Jackson, he was taking a calculated risk by wrapping her body parts in portions of her own clothes, although, as we have seen, the laundry label L E Fisher led nowhere. Nor did scars on the torso victims help. True, Elizabeth Jackson was eventually identified by scars on her arm, but the burn scar on the 1873 victim was wrongly attested to by Mary Cailey’s family and the rose tattoo on the Bedford Square corpse produced no results at all.
What can the various post-mortems on the torso victims tell us? There is no doubt that by the standards of the time – and using the Virchow method by 1887 – the police surgeons did a first-rate job. They were able to match up body parts accurately, make intelligent guesses at the height and age of the deceased and hint at least, because of the good condition of the hands, that the victims were prostitutes. They were hampered of course by two things. First, the immersion of body parts in the Thames caused damage in th
e form of postmortem bruising which obscured what on dry land would be obvious. Tar on one body portion almost certainly came from mooring ropes or planking on the sad, ghastly journey downriver. The skin distorts in water to such an extent that features are unrecognizable. No one going through the awful experience of viewing Drs Hayden and Kempster’s reconstructed head in 1873 saw anyone they knew and the face found on the foreshore in 1888 was equally anonymous. Elsewhere, in the case of the Scotland Yard torso and that found in Pinchin Street, decomposition had set in which caused its own problems. Second, the real breakthrough in forensic science lay just around the corner. Fingerprint evidence, which might have been forthcoming from the bruises on body parts, on parcel wrappings and string, lay only three years in the future, but it would not be until 1905 that a guilty verdict by a jury was delivered on this evidence alone.4 And, impressive though Dr Thomas Bond was in terms of his autopsy work, the truly outstanding pathologists – Bernard Spilsbury, Keith Simpson, Donald Teare, Francis Camps – belonged to later generations.
What the post-mortem evidence can tell us loud and clear is that whoever dismembered these eight women – and we can legitimately say, murdered them too – was skilled with both knife and saw. This is why the 1902 torso killing in Salamanca Place, Lambeth, is not part of the series. The road lies just off the Embankment between Lambeth and Vauxhall Bridges, but the cuts were done roughly and badly, with none of the precision of the 1870s and 1880s murders and some of the flesh was parboiled. Virtually every book on the Whitechapel killings raises the same issue of dexterity with the knife. Was Jack the Ripper a doctor? Certainly, a medical man would have the skills to commit both the Whitechapel and the torso murders, but the fact is that this kind of murder by medical practitioners is extremely rare. There have been plenty of homicidal doctors – Harold Shipman probably holds the world record for the largest number of victims5 – but they tend to kill with that far easier method at their disposal, poison. Alone of murderous medics, Buck Ruxton used dismemberment of his wife and maid to disguise his killing of them near Moffat, Scotland, in 1935 and came up against a formidable forensic team in Professor James Brash of Edinburgh University and Professor John Glaister of Glasgow. Their brilliant deductive work, coupled with the fact that Ruxton wrapped the body parts in newspaper which could date the murders fairly precisely, led to the doctor’s execution in May 1936.
It was much more likely that the torso killer was a butcher. Such a man would have the skill with which to separate limbs neatly at the joints and would have somewhere in which to carry out not only the murder, but the dismemberment as well. If we refer back to The Lancet’s detailed discussion of the 1873 murder, we find an interesting tell-tale observation:
It is not a little remarkable, however, that although the right leg between the knee and ankle is perfect, on the left side the leg has been sawn in two and only the upper part has been found. It is possible that there may have been some mark on the lower portion of the leg, the murderer has taken the precaution to destroy.6
This could of course have been some scar or foot malformation which would have identified the victim, but it could also have been the mark of a rope by which the woman was suspended from a meat hook while her body drained of blood before the joint cutting began. A butcher could target prostitutes as well as anyone else. Once again, in the 120 years of discussion on the identity of Jack the Ripper, slaughtermen, especially shochets or Jewish slaughtermen, are often high on Ripperologists’ lists. We have already met Jacob Isenschmid, the mad pork butcher of Holloway. Around the corner from the murder site of Polly Nichols in Buck’s Row were the operating abattoirs in Winthrop Street. In fact, as Jack was cutting her throat, the slaughtermen there were already at work in the early morning of 31 August 1888.
Several of the letters purporting to be written by the Whitechapel murderer referred to butchers and others offering advice to police carried the same notion. On 24 September 1888, the very first one, a letter with a SE London postmark came from someone who wrote, ‘I am a horse slaughterer and work at [name blacked out] address [name blacked out.]’.7 On 3 October, W Longley of Yalding, Kent, had heard from hop-pickers’ gossip that Jack might be a slaughterman. J W Causier of Yetminster, Sherborne, went even further to say that Jack was a Jewish slaughterman. E W Clark from Addiscombe narrowed it down to one of the Winthrop Street slaughtermen who gave evidence at the inquest on Polly Nichols; and Charton and Legrange from the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho, even added a name, that of a man called Bluendenwall, derived from the table-rappings of a séance.
Of the 220 letters and postcards sent to newspaper offices and the Met and City police in the ‘Autumn of Terror’, all are now believed to be hoaxes.8 But we are not looking for Jack the Ripper; we are looking for the torso killer. We have already heard from the religious maniac who promised death and destruction to the women of Moab and Midian in connection with the Whitehall Mystery, but are there any other tangible clues? On 4 October, ‘Jack’ wrote to Vine Street police station (although the letter was found, unposted, in Vincent Square, Westminster) – ‘I have written this on the embankment, near Waterloo.’ The following day, ‘Jack Ripper’ wrote to Sir Charles Warren, ‘Head Police Officer’: ‘I have done another one and thrown it in the river …’ Two days later, ‘Jack’ wrote ‘again’ to Warren, this time at the correct address of 4 Whitehall Place. ‘Just a few lines to tell you I shall begin my knife operations again on or near Blackfriars Bridge …’ On 15 October ‘Dear Boss’ received a note to the effect that yet another body had been dumped in the river. October of course was the month in which the various parts were found in the foundations of Scotland Yard; only one arm came from the Thames.
A week later, ‘Good bye ta ta’ wrote ‘One of the two women I told you about is a Chelsea girl and the other is a Battersea girl. I had to overcome great difficulties in bringing the bodies where I hid them. I am now in Battersea.’ The next day, in an unusually long missive, ‘H.I.O. Battersea’ assured the police that the leg found at Whitehall ‘does not belong to the trunk you found there’. C Division received a brief, ill-written note three months later, in January 1889: ‘I chucked some old wo[man?] in the thames because [she] began to squeal …’ It was signed Jack Bane.
A butcher perhaps, but can we get closer? One vital clue lies in the way the body parts were distributed. The torso killer had to be able to pass through London streets carrying portions of a human body and not arouse suspicion. One of the most bizarre facts that we find if we look at the social history of London – indeed, any major city – in the nineteenth century is the sheer number of people who keep odd hours. Bank Holidays were still a novel idea; the concept of ‘nine to five’ unknown. Shopkeepers lived above their shops and were literally open all hours for their customers. The great markets of London opened at four or five in the morning, so carmen, costers, flower sellers, draymen and a whole host of street sellers were out and about early. But the torso killer was not merely a distributor of body parts; he had the skill to create the parts in the first place. That means in all probability he was a travelling butcher, with his meat on a handcart or in a pony-drawn trap. And the most likely candidate that fits that bill is the cat’s meat man.
A children’s nursery book from the time shows a maid opening a door to the Cat’s Meat Man while a rosy child and cats and dogs scamper round his feet.
He calls ‘Meat, meat!’
All down the street;
And dogs ‘bow wow’,
And cats ‘mi-ow’
While kittens sly
Come purring by,
As if to say –
‘Do serve us, pray,
The first of all,
For we’re so small.’
The man throws bits
Of meat to kits,
And cats, and dogs;
Then on he jogs,
And down the street
Still cries ‘Meat,
meat!’
All very jolly. In re
ality, cat’s meat men had a hard life peddling their wares door to door all over London. A photograph from 1901 by John Galt now in the Museum of London shows a moustachioed man with an apron and billycock hat standing by his two-wheeled hand-cart. In 1853, Charles Manby Smith in Curiosities of Life remembered as a child that the cat’s meat man was always on time and always welcome. The one he remembered had a pony and trap and the cat’s breakfast cost a halfpenny. In the year that Victoria was crowned (1837) there were said to be about 2,000 of them in the capital, but the social commentator Henry Mayhew believed this had fallen to about 300 by 1851. Their cries of ‘Co! Mee-att!’ would bring every stray in the neighbourhood onto the streets. For reasons he does not explain, social analyst Charles Booth said that cat’s meat men were most addicted to the showy funerals which, by 1889, were frowned upon as passé and rather vulgar.
What kind of killer are we looking for among the cat’s meat men? His profession meant that he could wheel his cart, day or night, along embankments, across bridges, down alleyways, under railway arches. He could even have been a regular visitor among the workers on the Scotland Yard building site or perhaps he was allowed there to feed the strays who no doubt haunted the building as they haunted most of London. It was worth the builders’ while to pay the man to feed the cats in order to keep them there to reduce the rat population from the river. This is highly likely because we know from the Whitehall torso finds that he must have made at least two visits, both to bury and to dump. Beneath the upper, acceptable layers of horse meat in his cart lay human body parts that once were Elizabeth Jackson and the other unknown victims he had created.