The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  Police Constable John Neil missed seeing them by minutes. Nearly half an hour had passed since he had last walked through Buck’s Row, although his beat was a short one and could be covered at a brisk walk in twelve minutes. Shining his bull’s-eye lamp into the stable gateway he saw what the two men had not been able to see, that the woman had been murdered. Blood was oozing from an ugly gash in her throat which had been cut almost from ear to ear. The windpipe and gullet had been completely severed. Her eyes were open, and though her hands and wrists were cold, her arms were still warm from the elbow up. The flashing of his lamp as he examined the body attracted the constable on an adjoining beat, and Neil called to him to run and fetch a doctor. There was a surgery close by and within a quarter of an hour a Dr Llewellyn was at the scene. He made a cursory examination of the body, watched by several policemen who obligingly shone their lamps on the body, and two or three men who, having just finished work at a nearby slaughterhouse, were on their way home.

  On the left side of the neck, about an inch below the jaw, there was an incision about four inches long starting from a point immediately below the ear. On the same side, but an inch below, and beginning an inch in front of it, was a second incision which ended at a point three inches below the right jaw. This second incision, about eight inches long, had cut the throat back to the vertebrae.

  The main arteries had been severed but there seemed to be very little arterial blood on the ground. Most of it, the police realized when they lifted the body on to the ambulance, had soaked into the woman’s clothes as it flowed down her back from her neck to her waist. In spite of her posture and the massive loss of blood, her legs were still warm. The doctor guessed that she had been dead not more than half an hour. On his instructions the body was taken to the mortuary adjoining the local workhouse.

  The body was left in the workhouse yard until two pauper inmates, one of them subject to fits, had had their breakfast and were ready to start stripping the body. The police inspector who was present jotted down a list of the clothing as they took it off – a reddish-brown ulster somewhat the worse for wear, a brown frock of coarse linsey, black ribbed wool stockings. She was wearing two petticoats, one of grey flannel and the other of wool, which had to be cut through the bands to be taken off. As the attendant tore them down with his hands, exposing the brown stays, the inspector saw in the lower part of the abdomen, two or three inches from the left side, a deep jagged incision and other mutilations. He hurriedly summoned Dr Llewellyn who came at once and made a thorough post-mortem examination of the body, which was that of a woman of about forty or forty-five. There was some bruising along the lower edge of the jaw on the right side of the face that might have been caused by a punch or thumb pressure. On the other side of the face was a circular bruise, which again might have been caused by finger pressure. Apart from the injuries to the throat and to the abdomen already mentioned, there were several other incisions running across the abdomen as well as several downward slashes on the right side of the body. The abdomen had been cut open from the centre of the bottom of the ribs along the right side, under the pelvis to the left of the stomach – there the wound was jagged; the omentum or fatty membrane which covers the front of the stomach was cut in several places and there were two small stab wounds on the vagina. From the angle of the wounds, which were from left to right, Dr Llewellyn thought that these mutilations might have been done by a left-handed person using a stout-backed knife such as a cork-cutter or a shoemaker might use with a blade about six to eight inches long.

  The first problem was to identify the woman. Her only possessions were a comb, white pocket handkerchief and a broken mirror. But stencilled on the bands of her two petticoats was the mark of Lambeth Workhouse. The police hoped that the matron there might be able to identify the clothing, which could have been issued at any time in the previous two or three years. The broken mirror was a good indication that the woman had been dossing in a common lodging house where mirrors were a luxury not normally provided. As the police started to question the lodging-house keepers and news of the murder spread, first one woman and then another came forward to try to identify the body. It was soon learned that a woman answering the description of the victim had been living in a lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. Women were fetched and they identified her as Polly. She had been sleeping at the lodging house for about six weeks up until the last eight to ten days. A girl who had been sharing her bed had last seen her alive about an hour before her body was found. Earlier that same evening she had staggered back to the lodging house from the Frying Pan public house in Brick Lane but had been turned away because she had not got the 4d. doss money for a bed.

  ‘I’ll soon get my doss money,’ she had laughed. ‘See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’

  She had been wearing a new black straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet. She was forty-two years old, 5 ft. 2 ins. tall, with brown hair turning grey and five front teeth missing; her clothes were shabby and stained and the boots she was wearing had the uppers cut and steel tips on the heels. After she had left the lodging house she was seen about an hour later in the Whitechapel Road staggering drunkenly against a wall. Her friend had tried to persuade her to come back to the lodging house with her. Instead Polly boasted that she had had her lodging-house money three times that day but had spent it, that she was going to get some more money for her lodgings and that she would soon be back. At 3.40 a.m., about an hour and a quarter later, she was found with her throat cut not three-quarters of a mile distant from the spot where she had last been seen.

  An inmate of the Lambeth Workhouse who was taken to the mortuary within a day or two of the killing identified the body as that of Mary Ann (or Polly) Nichols. According to her own statement made in the Mitcham Workhouse on 13 February 1888, Nichols had been born in August 1845 in Shoe Lane off Fleet Street. Her father, Edward Walker, was a blacksmith and her husband, William Nichols, a Fleet Street printer. She was married when she was nineteen years old, in the printer’s church of St Bride’s, Fleet Street on 16 January 1864. She and her husband had lived for six years (no dates) at No. 6, D Block, Peabody Buildings, Stamford Street, paying rent of 5s. 9d. per week. When they separated in 1880 after several years of marital disputes she went into Lambeth Workhouse and it was agreed that her husband should allow her 5s. every week, which he did for two years. She never had a home from the time of her separation from her husband. According to the same statement, she didn’t know where her husband had been living for the past six or seven years.

  William Nichols, her husband, was in fact now living in the Old Kent Road. According to him he had not seen his wife for three years. They had five children; the oldest (now twenty-one) was lodging with his grandfather and the youngest (eight or nine) was living at home. They had separated several times because of her drunken habits, but each time he took her back she got drunk again and eventually the break became final. In 1882 he learned that she was living the life of a prostitute, and he discontinued the weekly allowance. In consequence she became chargeable to the Guardians of the Parish of Lambeth who summonsed the husband to show cause why he should not contribute to her support. They dismissed the summons when they learned the grounds on which he had discontinued the allowance. Since then, after three or four years of intermittent living and quarrelling with her father, she had drabbed her way through workhouses in Edmonton, the City of London, Holborn and Lambeth. She had tried to make a new start and left the Lambeth Workhouse on 12 May for a job as a domestic servant in Wandsworth. She stuck it for two months and then absconded with clothing worth £3 10s., which she probably pawned, and since then had been living in the lodging house in Thrawl Street and a similar one in Flower and Dean Street close by.

  After ten days in the Lambeth Workhouse in December 1887, Nichols was turned out. Five days later she surfaced in the Mitcham Workhouse which was run by the Holborn Board of Guardians, and where she stayed for more than three months. As she had not acquired a ‘s
ettlement’ by meeting the requisite period of residence without chargeability, the Holborn Union, after giving relief, applied to the justice for an ‘order of removal’ transferring her back to the Lambeth, where a ‘settlement’ had been acquired. This was effected on 16 April 1888.

  There was no apparent motive for her murder. An early theory was that she was the victim of a gang allegedly terrorizing and ill-treating prostitutes who did not hand over part of their earnings to them. There was some evidence for this theory: two prostitutes had already been mutilated in a similar manner and been murdered within three hundred yards of Polly Nichols months before the Ripper killings.

  * * *

  Mary Ann Nichols

  Periods spent in Workhouses and Infirmaries. Bracketed dates indicate consecutive periods of refuge.

  Lambeth Workhouse

  {24.4.82–18.1.83

  Lambeth Infirmary

  {18–20.1.83

  Lambeth Workhouse

  {20.1–24.3.83

  Lambeth Workhouse

  21.5–2.6.83

  Strand Workhouse, Edmonton

  26.10–2.12.87

  Lambeth Workhouse

  19–29.12.87

  Mitcham Workhouse (Holborn) and Holborn Infirmary (Archway Hospital)

  {4.1–16.4.88

  Lambeth Workhouse

  {16.4–12.5.88

  Gray’s Inn Road temporary Workhouse (Holborn)

  1–2.8.88

  * * *

  The first had been Emma Elizabeth Smith, a common prostitute of the lowest type, living in a lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She was thought to be a widow with a son and daughter living somewhere in the neighbourhood of Finsbury Park as she was often heard to say that she thought they ought to do something for her.

  She had been living in George Street for about eighteen months. Generally she left the lodging house between six and seven in the evening, returning home at all hours. When she was drunk she fought and behaved like a madwoman and it was quite a common sight to see her with a black eye and other injuries which she would explain away by saying that she had been fighting or had fallen down.

  The discovery of Polly Nichols’s body

  She had left the lodging house at the usual hour on 2 April and at 12.15 a.m. the next day was seen talking to a man dressed in dark clothes and a white scarf in Fairance Street, Limehouse. She was not seen again until she staggered into the house some four hours later and told the deputy that she had been assaulted and robbed in Osborn Street. Much against her will she was taken to the London Hospital by the deputy and another lodger.

  She said that she had been attacked by four men but either she could not or was in no condition to describe them. Her face was bloody and her ear was cut, but the worst injuries had been internally inflicted. Something, not a knife, had been inserted into her vagina with such force that it had broken, but not cut, the partition between the front and back passage. Next day she died of peritonitis.

  The police were not informed of the attack until 6 April, when the Coroner’s Office told them that the inquest was to take place the next day.

  After such a time lapse there was very little for the police to look into, although they went through the motions of investigating. The place where Emma Smith had been attacked was pointed out to them by the lodger who had taken her to hospital. There were no bloodstains to be seen on the pavement but an examination of her clothing showed that her woollen shoulder wrap was saturated in blood. She had apparently taken it off and put it between her legs to soak up the blood when she realized how badly she had been injured. The rest of her clothing was in such a dirty and ragged condition that it was impossible to tell if any part of it had been freshly torn.

  One puzzling factor was that after the attack she must have walked nearly a quarter of a mile to the lodging house in George Street and from there half a mile to the London Hospital. In so doing she must have passed a number of police constables on duty in Brick Lane and Osborn Street itself. Since she must have been in great pain and walking with considerable difficulty, why did she not ask for help? Why was she so reluctant to go to hospital? Had the police been told earlier they might have got some answers to these questions.

  The second pre-Ripper victim had been Martha Tabram whose body, with thirty-nine puncture wounds, was found at 3 a.m. on Tuesday, 7 August on the first-floor landing of George Yard Buildings. In neither case had the killer been caught. The foreman of the coroner’s jury subsequently alleged class bias and said that, if a reward had been offered for the George Yard murderer, neither this nor the murder of Polly Nichols that was shortly to follow would have happened. Regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was convinced that a substantial reward would have been offered for the killer if the victim had been rich.

  In the Nichols case the apparent ease with which the murderer had struck and then escaped was baffling. The circumstances in which the body was found proved conclusively that she had been killed where she was found. It was equally apparent that she must have met her death without a cry or shout for help, for the spot was almost under the windows of a Mrs Green, a light sleeper, and opposite the bedroom of a Mrs Purkiss, who was awake at the time. Worse from the investigating point of view was that as well as the beat policemen there were three watchmen close by, none of whom had heard any screams. It seemed astonishing that the killer could have escaped, because he must have had blood on his hands or clothes. However, there were so many slaughterhouses in the area that people would take little note of bloodstained hands and clothing, which would explain why he failed to attract attention as he disappeared into the twilight of the Whitechapel Road and lost himself in the early morning market traffic.

  Not only was there no motive but there was no suspect. Robbery and jealousy as motives were out. Police inquiries in the locality, of the policemen on the adjoining beats and in every quarter where it was thought that there might be a lead, failed to throw up an atom of evidence to connect anyone with the crime. The inquiries did reveal that a man named Jack Pizer, nicknamed Leather Apron, had been ill-treating prostitutes in this and other parts of the metropolis for some time and a fruitless search was made to find him and eliminate him from the inquiry, although there was nothing to connect him with the murders. Suspicion that he was the killer, however, hardened into near certainty when a second body was discovered eight days later with a piece of leather apron close by.

  This second body was found shortly after 6 a.m. on Saturday 8 September, at the back of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, less than half a mile away from Buck’s Row. The house, like hundreds of others in the area, had been built for the Spitalfields weavers, but when steam power drove out the hand looms they had been taken over as cheap lodging houses. Seventeen people slept in the house, from a woman and her son in a cat’s-meat shop on the ground floor to the five adults in the room in the attic. There was a yard at the back and a side hall or passage giving access to the stairs. As the house was let by rooms it was customary to leave the front and back doors of the passage open. The local prostitutes knew this and used the yard for their casual pick-ups. John Davis, whose mother ran a small business from the first floor making packing cases, subsequently told the coroner’s inquest that at night he often found prostitutes and their clients in the yard and on the first-floor landing and didn’t hesitate to turn them out.

  The dead woman was last seen alive at 5.30 a.m. by a park keeper’s wife on her way to market. She remembered seeing a man and a woman, her back to the shutters, outside a house, apparently haggling. She was certain of the time because the brewer’s clock was striking the half hour. Subsequently she identified the body as that of the woman she had seen. The only description she would give of the man was that he looked like a foreigner, was apparently over forty years of age, of a shabby genteel appearance and wearing a deerstalker hat, probably brown. She had not seen his face as he had his back towards her. As she walked past them she had heard him ask ‘Will you?
’ and the woman’s reply ‘Yes’. She had not looked back and, in the noise and bustle of the market carts, nobody saw them go into the passage and close the door behind them.

  No attempt was made to conceal the mutilated body. The passage was about four feet above ground level and had three stone steps down to the yard. To the right of the steps there was a small recess and to the left a wooden fence about five and a half feet high. The woman was about six inches in front of the bottom step, lying parallel to the fence with her feet pointing towards a small woodshed. According to the coroner’s reconstruction of what had probably happened, they had entered the yard and closed the back door.

  The wretch must have then seized the deceased, perhaps with Judas-like approaches. He seized her by the chin. He pressed her throat, and while thus preventing the slightest cry, he at the same time produced insensibility and suffocation. There was no evidence of any struggle. The clothes were not torn … The deceased was then lowered to the ground and laid on her back; and although in doing so she may have fallen slightly against the fence, the movement was probably effected with care. Her throat was then cut in two places with savage determination, and the injuries to the abdomen commenced.

  The body was found by one of the lodgers, the elderly John Davis, who had been living in the house for only two weeks. He had been awake from about three o’clock to five and then had slept for half an hour. He got up at about quarter to six and came downstairs just as the church clock was striking six. The yard door was closed, although whether it had been on the latch he couldn’t say. When he pushed it open and started down the steps he saw the body. Some men from a case-maker’s shop nearby had seen him stumble into the street with his trouser belt in his hands and heard him call them to come and look in the yard. Out of curiosity they had followed him through the passage but none of them would go down the steps. Nor would any of the crowd that soon began to gather outside in the street as the news of the murder began to spread. Some workmen ran off to fetch the police; one of them, after swallowing some brandy, fetched a tarpaulin to throw over the mutilated remains.