by James Moore
The murder of Mary Ann Nichols, a woman with dark, greying hair, brown eyes and a small scar on her forehead, is widely regarded as the first of five victims that can almost certainly be ascribed to the Ripper. Mary Ann, better known as Polly, was a formerly married woman who had fallen into prostitution and was almost certainly an alcoholic by the time she was killed, aged 43. At 12.30 a.m. on 31 August 1888 Polly was seen leaving The Frying Pan pub on Brick Lane, returning to her lodgings around the corner in Thrawl Street. However, she was behind on the rent and was turned out. A little drunk, Polly laughed, pointed at a new straw bonnet she was wearing and said, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money.’ At 2.30 a.m., a few hundred yards away, she told a fellow lodger, Ellen Holland, that she’d actually had the money for her bed earlier in the day but had since spent it on drink. As the pair parted company, Polly was apparently confident of finding the 4d she needed and was last seen walking in an easterly direction along the Whitechapel Road.
The Frying Pan pub on Brick Lane, where Polly Nichols drank on the night of her murder, is now a hotel. (© James Moore)
Just over an hour later her body was found. It was lying three quarters of a mile away in Buck’s Row, which has since been renamed Durward Street. Her skirt had been hitched up and her throat had been cut twice. The lower part of her abdomen had been slashed and violently ripped open with a knife. One large, jagged wound extended from her rib cage to her pelvis.
Police had little to go on, but there was soon speculation in the press that there were links between Mary Ann’s murder and that of the deaths of two other prostitutes, Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, earlier that year. Modern researchers have concluded that it is unlikely that those murders had demonstrated the same modus operandi as the Ripper. However, it was at this point that Scotland Yard began investigating the possibility that a serial killer was at large in London, with Inspector Frederick Abberline brought in on the case for the first time.
Suspicion soon fell upon a man called John Pizer, nicknamed Leather Apron. He was a bootmaker of Polish extraction who had a history of mistreating local prostitutes. He was alleged to have held a knife to their throats. Local women told a reporter from the Star newspaper that he was often to be found in The Princess Alice pub on Commercial Street, lurking in the shadows. Pizer was not picked up until after the murder of the next victim, Annie Chapman, but was ruled out when he appeared to have cast-iron alibis for both murders.
Annie’s body was found at 6 a.m. on 8 September near the back yard of a house on Hanbury Street in Spitalfields. Her throat was cut and she had been disembowelled – part of her uterus was missing too. Coming just a week after Polly Nichols’ death, the two crimes bore a striking resemblance. Annie was a 47-year-old woman who had fallen on hard times and while she made money from doing crochet work and selling flowers, she was also an occasional prostitute. She was described by one witness as being often ‘the worse for drink’. Annie’s pub of choice was The Britannia on Commercial Street, and it was here, in the days leading up to her death, that she got into a fight over a man with Eliza Cooper.
In the early hours of 8 September she had been unable to find money for her lodgings and had gone out to raise some. One report put her in the Ten Bells on Commercial Street at 5 a.m. when a man put his head round the door and called her out. At 5.30 a.m. she had been seen with a man with a dark complexion who the witness thought looked foreign. He wore a deerstalker hat and dark overcoat. A few minutes later Annie was dead. After her death a different pub, the Prince Albert which stood on the corner of Brushfield and Steward Street, provided police with a possible clue to her killer. An hour and a half after Annie had been murdered, the landlady, a Mrs Fiddymont, had served a man with a half of ale. She was struck by his wild appearance. His shirt was torn and he had blood on his right hand. He was later identified as a Swiss butcher called Jacob Isenschmidt. He was one of a number of suspects followed up by Inspector Abberline and his men. Isenschmidt was taken into custody but while he was being detained the real culprit struck again – killing twice in twenty-four hours.
The Ten Bells in London’s Spitalfields where Ripper victim Annie Chapman was seen on the morning of her murder in 1888. (© James Moore)
The murders of two more prostitutes, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, on 30 September 1888, unleashed panic on the streets of London. Liz’s body was discovered at 1 a.m. in a yard next to a Jewish social club in Berner Street. She had been killed just minutes before Louis Diemschutz stumbled upon her corpse in his horse and cart. Her throat had been cut, though this was her only wound, probably because the killer had been disturbed. Just forty-five minutes later, Catherine’s corpse was found in Mitre Square by a patrolling policeman. It was only walking distance away. She had also been killed just a few minutes earlier. This time, as well as being slashed at the throat, her face had been disfigured and her abdomen had been mutilated. Her intestines had been removed as well as a kidney and her uterus.
Liz, 44, who was regularly in trouble for being drunk and disorderly, had been seen drinking at The Queen’s Head on Commercial Street with an Elizabeth Tanner at 6.30 p.m. on the evening of her death. She may also have been seen at 11 p.m. that evening in the company of a man with a dark moustache at The Bricklayer’s Arms on Settles Street. However, despite lots of people being at the social club that night, no one seemed to have seen Liz’s killer.
Catherine Eddowes, 46, had also been drinking on the night of the 29th. In fact she had been found drunk in the road on Aldgate High Street and was taken to a police station to sober up before being released at 1 p.m. The last sighting of her was probably at 1.35 a.m. when she was seen with a man described as having a fair moustache, a peaked cloth cap and red scarf.
Towards the end of September, Scotland Yard, now under intense pressure to find the murderer, received a letter purporting to be from the killer. He signed himself Jack the Ripper. More missives followed, including the infamous ‘From Hell’ letter, which came with a box that allegedly contained one of the victim’s kidneys. The police conducted a huge manhunt involving hundreds of interviews and many arrests but they simply could not come up with a plausible suspect.
A month went past. Then, on Friday 9 November, there was another murder, of a prostitute called Mary Jane Kelly. This killing was the most savage to date. Mary, aged 25, had been killed in her own bed at her lodgings in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street – possibly by a client that she already knew. Her body was discovered at 10.45 a.m. on the 9th by a man who had come to collect the rent. Like the other victims, her throat had been slashed and her abdomen had been sliced open. Her organs had been removed and her heart was missing. Mary Jane’s breasts had also been cut off, her thighs cut and her face had been obliterated. She wore only a chemise and her other clothes were folded on a chair, though some had been burnt in the fireplace. It was judged that her death must have occurred between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. that morning.
Much of Kelly’s movements during the day before her murder appear to have involved pubs. A tailor called Maurice Lewis claimed to have seen Kelly drinking with friends at a hostelry called The Horn of Plenty on Crispin Street on the evening of the murder. However, the same man also claimed to have seen her at the Britannia at 10 a.m. on 9 November, after the likely time of her death. It’s probable that he had confused her with another woman. More convincing was the testimony of Elizabeth Foster, a friend of Mary Jane’s, who drank with her in the Ten Bells on the evening of the 8th. Mary Jayne left the pub at 7.05 p.m. Later that evening, at about 11 p.m., she was also spotted drinking in The Britannia with a well-dressed young man with a dark moustache. Three quarters of an hour later, and by now drunk, Mary Jane was seen by her neighbour Mary Ann Cox going into Miller’s Court with a man. She described him as a man in his thirties who had a ginger moustache, was wearing a bowler hat, a long shabby coat and was carrying a pail of beer. Mary Jayne could soon be heard singing a ditty in her room. The singing had stopped when another neighbour, Elizabeth Prater
, who had the room above Mary Jane’s, went to bed at 1.30 a.m. At 2 a.m. labourer George Hutchinson claimed to have seen Mary Jane walking arm in arm with a man in a dark astrakhan coat outside the Queen’s Head on Commercial Street and said he saw them go into Mary Jane’s lodgings at Miller’s Court. At 4 a.m. Elizabeth Prater woke up and said she heard a faint cry of ‘oh murder’. About an hour later she got up and went to the Ten Bells for a glass of rum but saw nothing suspicious. At 5.45 a.m. Mary Ann Cox thought she head the footsteps of a man leaving Miller’s court. Confusingly, at around 8.30 a.m., after the time at which surgeons believed she died, Mary Jane was seen again by a Caroline Maxwell complaining of having had too much beer, though this testimony is in doubt because of her poor description of the victim and the fact that she had only met her once or twice before.
Over the next three years, there were more murders linked to the Ripper, but all efforts to find the shadowy serial killer failed. Traditionally only the murders of Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly, known as the ‘canonical five’, can definitely be identified as having been the work of the same person. Fierce debate still surrounds the true identity of the Ripper, with scores of candidates suggested during more than a century of analysis. Abberline’s preferred culprit was a Polish man called Severin Klosowski, otherwise known as George Chapman, who became a publican and went to the gallows in 1903 after killing three women, though in a very different manner (see here). He once worked as a barber in the basement of The White Hart on Whitechapel Road, which is also near where the body of a possible early victim, Martha Tabram, was found.
The truth about the Ripper will almost certainly never be known, but millions of people remain fascinated by the mystery and tourists still tour locations related to the murders in London’s East End. Many of the pubs associated with the crimes have since disappeared. One, The Frying Pan, which Polly Nichols frequented, is now a hotel. Traces of the original pub have all but gone, though the old name and a crumbling crossed frying pans motif is still discernable on the top of the building. Other existing pubs have more tenuous links to the Ripper story, including The Bell on Middlesex Street where Frances Coles, a later possible victim, drank the night before her death on 13 February 1891.
The Ten Bells, a place where at least two of the victims were known to have drunk, and a place the murderer himself may have known well, was renamed Jack the Ripper in the 1970s. It has now reverted to the name which refers to the peals of bells that ring out from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church across the road. The Ten Bells retains a brooding Victorian atmosphere complete with murals and original tiles. It is the perfect place in which to ponder the true identity of the Ripper and, above all, remember his unfortunate victims.
LOCATIONS: Ten Bells, No. 84 Commercial Street, London E1 6LY, 020 7366 1721, tenbells.com; The Brick Lane Hotel, formerly The Frying Pan, www.hotelbricklane.com; The White Hart, No. 89 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7RA, 020 7247 1546; The Bell, No. 50 Middlesex Street, London, E1 7EX, 020 7247 3459, www.thebellpub.co.uk; The Princess Alice, No. 40 Commercial Street has recently closed. The Britannia was at No. 87 Commercial Street and the Queen’s Head was at No. 74 Commercial Street but both have since closed. The Prince Albert was at No. 21 Brushfield Street and the Horn of Plenty, formerly on Crispin Street, has also gone. The Bricklayer’s Arms was at No. 34 Settles Street and is now a grocery shop.
A FATAL DRINK WITH A SERIAL SADIST, 1891–2
The Wellington Hotel, Waterloo Road, Lambeth, London; Sherlock Holmes, Charing Cross, London
The Wellington likes to claim that the Great Train Robber Buster Edwards used to drink there. It was the nearest watering hole to the flower stall he ran outside Waterloo station after being released from jail in 1975. But eighty years earlier, the Wellington was the scene of a crime committed by a man who was far more dangerous and one whom some believe to have been Jack the Ripper himself.
At 7 p.m. on 13 October 1891, a woman called Constance Linfield noticed Ellen ‘Nellie’ Donworth in the company of a well-dressed gentleman going arm in arm into an unlit courtyard at the rear of the Wellington, opposite Waterloo Station. Nellie was a 19-year-old prostitute who had left her lodgings at 6 p.m. that evening saying that she was going to meet a man. A few minutes after Constance had seen Nellie with the stranger, a local stallholder called James Styles, who was standing outside the Wellington, saw Nellie staggering as if drunk before suddenly falling down in a heap. Styles ran to her aid. As he helped her up, Nellie told him, ‘Someone has given me a drink.’
Writhing in agony Nellie was taken home. Despite the pain, she managed to tell her landlady, ‘A tall gentleman with cross eyes, a silk hat, and bushy whiskers gave me a drink twice out of a bottle with white stuff in it.’ Within a couple of hours, Nellie was suffering with violent convulsions. A doctor who attended her that evening recognised them as the kind associated with the poison strychnine. By 10 p.m. Nellie was dead. A post-mortem conducted three days later revealed that the doctor’s suspicions had been right – she had been poisoned with strychnine. But the police were unable to identify the culprit.
Poor Nellie’s rendezvous that night, initially at the nearby York Hotel, had been with Dr Thomas Neill Cream, a serial sadist who had already killed in America and was now embarking on a spate of cruel murders in London. He had been born in Scotland in 1850 and educated at both McGill University in Montreal and St Thomas’ Hospital in London before going back to Canada in 1879 where he started practising as a doctor.
There he began performing illegal abortions and was soon linked to the strange deaths of two women. Cream escaped jail due to a lack of evidence, but soon moved to Chicago in the United States. There he started prescribing remedies for epilepsy and in 1881 a man called Daniel Stott died after using one of them. Stott’s death was not considered suspicious until Cream contacted the coroner to accuse a local pharmacist of poisoning Stott. Stott’s body was dug up and found to be full of strychnine. But it was Cream who ended up accused of murder – he had been having an affair with the man’s wife. Although convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Cream was given clemency after just ten years. It’s thought he used his father’s inheritance to bribe his way out.
Thomas Neill Cream, a sadistic murderer who went to the gallows for his crimes in 1892. (Courtesy McCord Museum)
Having created too much heat on the other side of the Atlantic, Cream returned to London in October 1891. He took up lodgings in Lambeth and immediately began preying on the local prostitutes, looking for more victims. He was not just a killer but an attention seeker also. Following the death of Nellie Donworth he wrote a letter to the doctor conducting the inquest demanding money in return for helping to solve the crime, signing it ‘A. O’Brien, detective’. He also wrote to an MP, using another pseudonym, accusing him of the murder and threatening blackmail. The letters were passed to the police, but at this stage the authorities had no idea they were dealing with a serial killer.
The Wellington, near Waterloo Station in South London. Nellie Donworth fell ill nearby. (© James Moore)
Just a few days after Nellie’s death, on 20 October, Cream met another prostitute, 27-year-old Matilda Clover, at the Canterbury Music Hall, and the pair later returned to her lodgings. Another servant at the accommodation, Lucy Rose, reported seeing Matilda come in with a man in a silk hat and a bushy moustache who called himself Fred, and left sometime later that evening. Then, in the middle of the night, the house was awakened by Clover’s screams. She was found stretched out across her bed suffering from searing pains and said, ‘That man Fred has poisoned me … he gave me some pills.’ She died the next morning at 9 a.m. But, having had a history of alcoholism, her death was put down to natural causes.
At the end of October, Cream attempted to poison another prostitute, Lou Harvey. He took her to the Northumberland Arms near Charing Cross, since renamed the Sherlock Holmes. After treating Lou to a glass of wine, he gave her some pills to take, supposedly to improve h
er complexion, before leaving. But Lou was suspicious and only pretended to take them. When Cream had gone, she threw them in the river, while he must have assumed she had died. Lou’s testimony would later prove vital in convicting Cream.
In April 1892, after a trip back to Canada, Cream struck again, this time killing two prostitutes, Alice Marsh, 21, and Emma Shrivell, 18, whom he’d fed a dinner of Guinness and tinned salmon laced with strychnine. Before they died, again in agony, they also mentioned a man called Fred. It was now clear that a maniac was on the loose and the unknown murderer was branded the ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ by the newspapers.
During his six month killing spree, Cream continued to draw attention to himself by writing more letters accusing notable doctors and others of being involved in the crimes in a bid to extort more money. But that summer, Cream made a crucial error. He befriended a former New York City detective, John Haynes. The pair discussed the Lambeth Poisoner case but Haynes was surprised when Cream mentioned two names that had not cropped up in the coverage – Matilda Clover and Lou Harvey.
Haynes passed on his concerns to the London police who put Cream under surveillance. They then discovered his conviction for murder in America. Clover’s body was exhumed and it was concluded that strychnine, not booze, was the real cause of her death. Detectives also tracked down Lou Harvey who had been lucky enough to survive Cream’s clutches – and she identified him.