by kindels
CHAPTER 6
Thursday, 30 August 1888 marked the night of the London Docklands fires and the eve of the first of the Ripper murders. At about nine o’clock in the evening, the warehouse of an engineering company in the Shadwell dry dock turned into an inferno when an oil lamp fell on to the bone-dry straw of a damaged packing case, setting it alight. A second unconnected fire broke out in a bonded warehouse nearby, in the South Quay of the Pool of London. Thunderous black storm-clouds, hanging low over London Bridge, turned a vivid blood-red as they reflected the furious leaping flames, and East Enders, ignoring the driving rain, turned out in their thousands to observe the grand spectacle.
Standing in the throng of sightseers was a small, dirty, emaciated woman. At fifty years of age, Ellen Holland was a penniless, convicted drunk. Soon after midnight, when the rain finally stopped, she turned away from the raging fires and headed back to Thrawl Street in Whitechapel and her paid bed for the night.
When Holland neared the junction of Osborne Street and the Whitechapel Road, the bell of St Mary’s church chimed half past two. It was then that she met an old friend, Polly, who was drunk, reeking of gin, and barely able to keep her balance as she staggered about on the pavement.
At forty-three years of age, Polly was a small, unattractive, poorly dressed woman with dark brown hair turning a premature grey. The few teeth she had left were crooked and stained dark brown by nicotine and neglect. Her dirty clothes and voluminous skirts marked her out as a vagrant.
A bed in Thrawl Street’s White House, a common lodging house, had to be paid for in advance. Anyone loitering in the house at nightfall with insufficient money for a doss, a bed for the night, would be turned out into the street. To have no bed on a cold, early autumn night was bad enough at the best of times, but the prospect of a sadistic murderer stalking the dark streets and alleyways of Whitechapel must have made it all the more terrifying. Ellen Holland, who had already paid for her bed, offered to share it with her friend. The offer was refused. “I’ve ’ad me doss money three times already,” Polly said, “an’ it’s all gone. But it won’t be long before I’m back.” The implication seemed to be that she intended to find one more client for sex before using the money she would earn to pay for her bed. Her hand lightly touched the brim of a black straw bonnet that someone had given to her. And then she made her parting remark, “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” She turned and staggered away eastwards along the almost deserted Whitechapel Road, lit only by a few gas street lamps and the bright crimson glow from the distant Docklands fires. Ellen Holland, who watched her until she disappeared into the impenetrable darkness, was the last person known to have seen Polly alive.
At 3.40 a.m., just over an hour later, Charles Cross, a labourer, was walking from his home in Doveton Street to Pickford’s in Broad Street where he worked. It was the same route he always took and it brought him through Buck’s Row, a narrow cobbled street that ran from Brady Street in the east to Baker’s Row in the west, where it widened to twice its width just past the Board School. It was one street away from, and ran parallel to, the Whitechapel Road, close to the London Hospital. A row of small terraced cottages housing eight families stood on the south side; warehouses and factories lined the north side of the row. Usually deserted after dark, there was just a single gas-lamp at one end, so it was almost pitch-black and, past midnight, always deathly quiet.
The evidence that Cross gave, both to the police and at the inquest which began the following afternoon, was that, as he drew level with Brown’s stable yard, next to the last cottage in the row, he saw by the poor light what he thought was a tarpaulin pushed up against the closed stable gates. Thinking he could use it, he crossed the road to take a better look. He was halfway across the road when he realised that the dark shape was the body of a woman. She was lying still, dressed in dirty rags, and her skirts were pushed up almost to her waist.
Cross summoned a second man, Robert Paul, walking not far behind him and also on his way to work, and together they examined the body. Cross took the woman’s hand, found it to be cold and concluded that she was dead. Paul touched her face, which he noted was cold, and then he put his ear to the woman’s chest to see if he could detect any sign of life. He thought she might have been breathing, but very little if she was, and both men agreed that she was probably dead.
Neither Cross nor Paul had time to wait for help, because they had to go to work, so they pulled the woman’s skirts down to her knees to give her some decency, then continued on their way, hoping to find a constable to whom they could report their find. At the corner of Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row, they met P.C. Jonas Mizen and told him that they had found a woman whom they believed was dead.
However, no sooner had Cross and Paul left Buck’s Row when the victim was discovered again, this time by P.C. John Neil at 3.45 a.m. as he was walking his beat. He had last passed through the street thirty minutes earlier but had seen no one. By the dim light of his hand-held oil lamp, Neil could see that the woman’s throat had been cut. He looked about for assistance and when he saw the light of another lamp at the far end of Buck’s Row, he waved his lamp to attract attention. P.C. Thain, who had been walking his beat, joined P.C. Neil by the body, and he (Neil) instructed him to fetch Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the police surgeon, who lived in the Whitechapel Road. When P.C. Jonas Mizen arrived, P.C. Neil instructed him to fetch an ‘ambulance’, a heavy wooden hand-cart used to convey the dead, wounded and injured, which took two men to pull, and also reinforcements from Bethnal Green Police Station.
Dr Llewellyn arrived at the murder scene at about 4.00 a.m. and briefly examined the body by the woefully inadequate light of P.C. Neil’s lamp. After noting the dreadful gaping wound to the woman’s throat, Llewellyn pronounced her dead and ordered that her corpse be taken to the Whitechapel Mortuary. This was little more than a rickety, windowless shed attached to the workhouse. Because Cross and Paul had pulled down the woman’s skirts before they left, the doctor did not realise that she had sustained severe abdominal injuries also.
As Neil and Thain lifted the corpse on to the hand-cart, Thain noticed that the clothing on the dead woman’s back was soaked with blood. A hand-sized clot of blood had congealed on the pavement and more blood had flowed into the gutter, though, as P.C. Neil reported later, “There was not as much blood as he expected to find, not more than a half-pint or so.”
After the body arrived at the makeshift mortuary, Inspector John Spratling from Bethnal Green Police Station turned up to make a note of her injuries. During the course of examining the corpse so that he could make his report, he lifted the victim’s skirts and made a horrifying discovery. Her abdomen had been torn open and her bowels were protruding through the open wounds. Dr Llewellyn was summoned for a second time that night, and this time he carried out a more thorough examination of the body by the slightly better light of an overhead gas-lamp.
The victim was lying on her back on an old wooden butcher’s block which was used as a mortuary table. She was fully clothed. Her tongue, protruding past her teeth, had turned a livid dark blue. On the right side of her face was a light blue bruise the size of a thumb. This corresponded with another bruise on the left side of her face. It appeared to indicate the manner in which the murderer had gripped the victim’s face as she was attacked.
The deceased had been suffocated or strangled before her throat was cut. This was clear from the discolouration of her tongue, which was caused by lack of oxygen. Since the heart had stopped beating before her throat was cut, this explained the lack of blood found at the scene of the crime.
The victim’s throat had been cut from just below the left ear to the lower jaw in a four-inch gash, and from the way the flesh was torn, it was apparent that the cut had been made from left to right. This aspect of the murder would prove to be a significant feature when linking it to the four subsequent murders. A second eight-inch cut, parallel with, but an inch lower than, the first incision, almost encircled t
he neck; it, too, had been made from left to right.
A deep jagged incision, where the tissues had been cut, ran the full length of the woman’s abdomen on the left side. Several more wounds had been inflicted which crossed her body, and three or four more long cuts had been drawn down the right side of her abdomen.
Dr Llewellyn gave his opinion that the murderer “must have had some rough knowledge of anatomy”, and that a “strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence”, had been employed in the attack.
Because the victim was almost insensible from drink, the doctor considered that “it would not have needed a strong man to kill her”. The entire attack, he thought, had taken just four minutes, five at the most.
The victim had not been raped or sexually assaulted. The murderer did not appear to have shown any sexual interest in her; it was plainly apparent that the only reason her skirts were pulled up was to allow the murderer access to the abdomen to make the appalling incisions.
As for the estimated time of death, Dr Llewellyn’s opinion was that it had occurred at 3.30 – “give or take ten minutes either way”. This fitted in well with the evidence of the police constable who had found the body. P.C. Neil had last walked down Buck’s Row at 3.15 a.m. when he had seen no one – though this was not quite what he would tell the inquest jury the following afternoon; Cross and Paul discovered the victim’s body twenty-five minutes later. This allowed the murderer a maximum of some twenty minutes to escort the victim along Buck’s Row to the closed stable gates, persuade her to lie down on the pavement, damp from the rain that had fallen earlier, strangle or suffocate her, cut her throat, pull up her skirts to inflict the wounds to her abdomen, and then escape, all without being seen or heard. It all seemed incredible, yet it had been done.
When news of a murder broke later that day, a steady stream of people made their way to the Whitechapel mortuary to see if they could identify the victim, Ellen Holland amongst them. There, and in the presence of the detectives who were investigating the case, she tearfully identified the torn body lying on the mortuary table as her friend, but she knew the victim only as Polly.
The ferocity of the attack – the third murder to take place in Whitechapel since Easter – terrified the local inhabitants, made headline news around the world and confounded the police. Editorial comment on 31 August in The Star read: “The brutality of the murder is beyond conception and description.” The New York Times on 1 September stated: “A strangely horrible murder took place in Whitechapel … the most dangerous kind of lunatic is at large.” Women, children and even grown men ventured out of doors after dark only if they had to, and even then, reluctantly. Trade suffered as customers stayed away from the area and shopkeepers reported that their business had almost halved. There was no description of a suspect, no helpful clues had been left at the scene of the crime, nor, it seemed, was there an obvious motive. Not even the victim’s true name was known. In fact, as far as Scotland Yard was concerned, “there was nothing to go on at all”.
On the day of the murder, Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline of the Criminal Investigation Department (established ten years before in 1878) at Scotland Yard, was appointed as co-ordinating officer to direct the work of the local detectives. At forty-five years of age, he was almost five feet ten inches tall, portly, with thinning, side-parted dark-brown hair, hazel eyes and a long, aquiline nose. A carefully trimmed moustache, which met his whiskers at the angle of the chin, gave him more the appearance of a bank manager than a police officer, according to a colleague, Inspector Walter Dew. Abberline’s pedigree was faultless: enlisted in the Metropolitan Police in 1863 and appointed to Islington; promoted to sergeant two years later and assigned to Highgate; moved to plain clothes in 1867 with orders to investigate Fenian activity, for which he was commended; promoted to inspector in 1873 and transferred to Whitechapel where he remained for fourteen years, ten of them as inspector; promoted to Scotland Yard in December 1887 and promoted again to Inspector First Class. He was quiet, unassuming, methodical and patient, a skilled amateur watchmaker in his spare time, and the ideal choice to head the murder investigation.
Detective Sergeant George Godley, assigned the same day to assist Inspector Abberline, was already involved in the investigation. He was thirty-one years old, had joined the Metropolitan Police eleven years previously, and was now a sergeant stationed in Bethnal Green Police Station. Earlier that morning, following the discovery of the body, he had assisted Inspector Spratling in a search of Buck’s Row, the East London and District Railway embankment, the railway lines, and the Great Eastern Railway yard – but no weapon, blood nor evidence of any kind was found.
Later on the evening of the same day when the initials ‘Lambeth Workhouse, P.R.’ were found stitched into the corpse’s petticoats, an inmate of Prince’s Road Workhouse, Mary Ann Monk, was traced who had shared a bed with the murdered woman earlier that year. Only then was the victim, Polly, properly identified: she was a middle-aged, penniless prostitute, and her name was Mary Ann Nichols.
The police investigation concluded that there had been no robbery; Dr Llewellyn’s examination had showed that the murder was not sexually motivated. Since there was no trail of blood, Abberline concluded that the murder had taken place at the stable gates where the body was found.
The inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols commenced on 1 September, the day after the murder, and unusually, it appeared to have been arranged in haste. It was held at the Whitechapel Working Lads’ Institute and conducted by Mr Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner for South-East Middlesex, a well-known and popular local solicitor. The police were represented by Inspector John Spratling and Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, the latter of whom took the jury to view the body, along with Mr Banks, the coroner’s assistant. In his testimony, the victim’s father, Mr Edward Nichols, said: “She had no enemies that I knew of; she was too good for that.” Yet the fact remained that Mary Nichols’s butchered body was found in a Whitechapel street after what appeared to have been a vicious and pointless attack.
When P.C. Neil gave his evidence, the coroner asked him if he had heard any noise that night. He replied, “No; I heard nothing.” When pressed further by the coroner, and asked if anybody could have escaped into the Whitechapel Road, he replied, “Oh yes, sir. I saw a number of women in the main [Whitechapel] road going home.”
On the fifth and final day of the inquest, the jury brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful murder by a person or persons unknown’. It prompted the coroner to remark notably that “it was a murder of no ordinary character”.
The murder investigation proved fruitless; no one living in Buck’s Row, close to the stable gates where the body was found, had seen or heard a thing – this included Walter Purkiss and his wife, both light sleepers, whose first-floor bedroom almost overlooked the scene of the murder. Neither were the night watchmen from the warehouse and factory nearby able to provide any information. All common lodging houses were visited and their occupants questioned; enquiries were made among tradesman, shopkeepers and prostitutes who were, in this instance, uncharacteristically eager to assist the police, but without result. Inspector Abberline was perplexed and almost two weeks later he was forced to admit, “not the slightest clue can at present be obtained”.
Quite apart from our obvious question – why had Lizzie Williams murdered Mary Ann Nichols? – there was another more puzzling issue. Nichols had been throttled to death before her throat was cut. So why had the murderer twice cut the throat of someone who was already dead?
As my father and I were to discover, Lizzie Williams did have a motive to murder Mary Nichols; we just hadn’t found it yet. We also made an astonishing discovery that led us to unravel the mystery, and the dawning realisation that, no matter how hard the police, or we, may have looked, nothing could even begin to make sense until the death of the final victim, Mary Kelly. Only then would it be possible to start fitting together the pieces of the puzzle.
CHAPTER 7
It was just eight days later, during the early daylight hours of Saturday, 8 September – the inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols would not be concluded for another two weeks – that the body of another butchered woman was discovered. The time was 6.00 a.m. and the corpse lay on its back in the small backyard of a Whitechapel tenement building.
Number 29 Hanbury Street, a large, three-storey terraced house that had seen better days, was built for immigrant weavers and their families of the previous century. Now a cats’ meat shop occupied the front room on the ground floor where Harriet Hardiman, a saleswoman, lived with her sixteen-year-old son, and sold cubes of horse meat to cat owners for their pets. The other rooms in the building housed several families – all of them poor. The owner of the house, Mrs Amelia Richardson, was a widow, and a sign above the front door announced that she was a packing-case maker. She lived with her grandson, Thomas, aged fourteen, on the first floor at the front of the house, although she also used a room on the ground floor and the basement. There were thirteen other tenants living in the house.
At the front of the house, opening on to the pavement, were two adjacent doors. The one on the right led directly into the shop, the other, below the sign, gave access to a long stone-flagged corridor twenty-five feet long and three feet wide which ran the full depth of the house. A dog-leg staircase from the corridor at the far end gave access to the upper floors of the house, and just beyond that, a door opened on to a flight of three stone steps which descended into a small backyard some fifteen feet square and paved with stones of irregular sizes. At the rear of the yard and to the right was a small wooden shed that housed an outside lavatory. A second wooden shed on the left was used for storing firewood.