Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  The previous Tuesday, April 3, at around four or five in the morning, a prostitute named Emma Smith stumbled into her lodgings on George Street. She had been severely beaten, her right ear was nearly torn off, and she was holding a bloody woolen wrap between her legs. Smith told the deputy of the lodging house that she had been “shockingly ill-treated by some men” and was “badly injured in the region of the abdomen.”11 After she was rushed to the London Hospital, it was discovered that the blood between her legs came from a torn peritoneum, the thin membrane that lines the abdominal wall and covers most of the organs of the body. Smith was able to describe the attack to the house surgeon Dr. G. H. Hillier, before slipping into a coma. Smith “was reticent with regard to the details but distinctly denied having addressed the men in solicitation.”12 She died the following day. Dr. Hillier made a postmortem examination of the body and determined that death had been caused by peritonitis resulting from injuries to the abdomen, the peritoneum, and the perineum. He noted that Smith “appeared to know what she was about,” but that she had been drinking.13

  Emma Smith was a forty-five-year-old widow, rumored to be a “common prostitute of low type.” It was said that she often went out at night and returned at “all hours, sometimes very drunk,” and that she “acted like a madwoman when in that state.”14 She had been last seen at 12:15 that Tuesday morning, a Bank Holiday, at the corner of Farrance Street and Burdett Road, Limehouse, talking to a man who wore dark clothes and a white scarf. The woman who saw Smith noted that she herself had been “struck in the mouth a few minutes before by some young men,” and added, “the quarter was a fearfully rough one.”15 Smith was later returning home when two or three young men, one of whom Smith described as a youth of about nineteen, began to follow her from St. Mary Matfelon Church on Whitechapel Road. Near Taylor’s Cocoa Factory at the corner of Brick Lane and Wentworth Street, the youths beat her, and then one of them, horrifically, rammed some sort of “blunt instrument,” apparently with great force, into her vagina. She was robbed and left to die.16

  Somehow, Smith made it back to her lodgings and was taken to the hospital by the deputy lodging house–keeper, Mary Russell, and other lodgers, who claimed, for some reason, that they “didn’t think it necessary to report the circumstances to the police.”17 As a result, the police did not learn about the attack until three days later, when they were informed that an inquest was to be held. The police inquiry of the murder was put in the hands of a forty-two-year-old “clever East End detective” named Edmund Reid, who in 1887 had replaced Frederick Abberline as the local inspector of H Division (Whitechapel). Unfortunately, Reid’s investigations went nowhere. At the inquest, conducted by the East Middlesex Coroner Wynne E. Baxter, it was determined that Smith had been murdered by “some person or persons unknown.” “It was impossible to imagine a more brutal and dastardly assault,” Baxter said.18

  From what little we now know, it seems probable that Emma Smith fell victim to a violent gang of youths. Yet there are some curious aspects to the story. For one thing, the newspaper report of the inquest states that Smith “seemed unwilling to go into details, did not describe the men nor give any further account of the occurrence to witnesses.”19 In addition, Smith apparently did not want to notify the police about the attack. These facts may suggest that she, like Ada Wilson, invented the story about the gang to conceal the fact that she was a prostitute and to cover her shame at being attacked by a customer, who then beat and sexually assaulted her. But such speculations must be left for the time being.

  In an interesting coincidence, another rather brutal attack occurred the same night Smith was assaulted. The details are vague, but it appears that a thirty-four-year-old woman named Malvina Haynes was stabbed in the vicinity of the Leman Street railway station. A police constable, alerted by her screams, found Haynes lying in a pool of blood with a “scalp wound of rather an extensive character.” When she was later asked about the details of the assault, Haynes replied, “I cannot remember, my mind is gone.”20 Very little is known about this incident or about the nature of her wounds.

  Most researchers dismiss the notion that Jack the Ripper committed any of the attacks mentioned here. By contrast with the Ripper’s later technique, the modus operandi in all cases appears to have been clumsy, and all of the victims were left alive by their attackers. Yet the possibility remains that any of these crimes may have been early Ripper attacks, and I will reexamine them later in the book. Still, horrific as they were, the events of early 1888 were just an opening act. Four months after the murder of Emma Smith, an even more ferocious and mysterious murder occurred, again on the night of a bank holiday and a mere hundred yards from the spot where Smith had been attacked.

  6

  Martha Tabram

  On Saturday, August 4, 1888, the actor Richard Mansfield presented London with the first stage performance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum Theatre in Westminster. The story concerned Dr. Henry Jekyll, an upper-class doctor who is repeatedly transformed into the sadistic monster Mr. Hyde after drinking a potion concocted in his lab. The Times’s review of the play was not very positive, although the reviewer did admit that Mansfield’s performance was “morbidly fascinating.” The Daily News, on the other hand, described the performance as a work of genius. “Whenever Mr. Mansfield becomes Hyde,” the reviewer said, “his savage chuckles, his devilish gloating over evil, his malignant sarcasms, his fierce energy of hate and revelling in all sinful impulses awaken strange sensations in the spectator.”1 Like the notorious twentieth-century serial killer Ted Bundy, Jekyll was “constantly haunted with a horror of the crimes of his other self.” The theatrical effort, coming as it did in the middle of a rather “dull period of the dramatic calendar,” was judged to be a good omen. Luckily for the dullness of the theatrical season, a much more compelling drama soon began to unfold on the streets of the East End.

  That following Monday was a rather gray bank holiday, characterized by a “dull leaden sky” and “more or less rain.”2 Thousands of London’s residents visited the city’s various indoor attractions, including Madame Tussaud’s, the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, the Tower of London, and the People’s Palace. In the evening, they went out on the town, attending the theaters and the music halls, before returning home in a damp rain.

  In Whitechapel, it was another typically rough night, and two “very noisy and quarrelsome” brawls reportedly took place on Wentworth Street. According to a newspaper account, a Mr. and Mrs. Reeves reported that a disturbance started at “the dead wall of Leterworth Buildings, in George Street. The first row commenced about 11:30 p.m., followed by another at 12:20 a.m., when both Mr. and Mrs. Reeves asserted they heard cries of ‘Police!’ ‘Help!’ and terrible screaming.” Sometime after 1 a.m., more fights broke out. Then at 2 a.m. more piercing screams were heard. The article added, “Only a few roughs seemed to constitute this crowd, which seemed to be moving in the direction of George Yard.”3 Nothing more is known about these street brawls, but such incidents were not uncommon, given the “desperate character of the neighbourhood.”

  At 4:45 a.m., a dock laborer and a tenant of nearby George Yard Buildings named John Saunders Reeves was leaving home to look for work when he discovered a woman lying on her back in a pool of blood on the second-floor stone-staircase landing.4 Reeves rushed off to get help and soon returned with P.C. (police constable) Thomas Barrett of H Division. Barrett found the woman lying with her arms at her sides with her fists clenched, her legs spread open, and her clothes pulled up, exposing her abdomen and genitals.5 She had been dead for at least an hour. Another tenant in the building, a cabdriver named George Crow, had actually stumbled across the body at around 3:30 a.m., but it had been too dark to see, and Crow assumed that the woman was a passed-out drunk, because he was “accustomed to seeing people lying about there.”6 Earlier that night, a little before 2 a.m., another resident, Mrs. Mahoney, passed the sam
e spot with her husband and saw no one. The superintendent of George Yard Buildings, Mr. Francis Hewitt, later pointed out that although his room was a mere twelve feet from the spot of the murder, he had heard nothing on the night in question.7 In short, no one had seen or heard any disturbance at all.

  P.C. Barrett sent for Dr. Timothy Killeen in nearby Brick Lane. Killeen arrived by 5:30 a.m., at which time he estimated that the woman had been dead for about three hours. The body was then taken in an ambulance (in those days, a hand-pushed carriage) to what served as Whitechapel’s “mortuary”—in fact, just a shed in the yard of the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary in Eagle Place, off Old Montague Street.

  On August 9, the deputy coroner George Collier initiated an inquest into the woman’s death at the Working Lads’ Institute on Whitechapel Road. At that time, the identity of the victim—a heavy-set woman, about five feet three inches in height, who appeared to be in her forties—was still a mystery. As the superintendent of George Yard Buildings noted, however, “Although the deceased is not known by name, her face is familiar. She is undoubtedly an abandoned female.”8 Collier took the testimony of several witnesses and then adjourned the inquest for a fortnight. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid was again left in charge of the investigation.

  By August 16, Henry Tabram of East Greenwich had identified the murdered woman as his wife, Martha.9 Tabram, a foreman packer at a furniture warehouse, claimed that he and his wife had separated thirteen years earlier. When asked why, Tabram replied, “Drink, sir; she drank.”10 Martha Tabram was a thirty-seven-year-old “common prostitute,” who in many respects matched the profile of the majority of the Ripper’s later victims. One witness at the inquest, Mrs. Mary Bousfield of Commercial Road, claimed that Martha was an occasional street hawker, who dealt in “needles, pins, menthol cones, &c,” and added, “she would rather have a glass of ale than a cup of tea.”11 Bousfield added that the deceased woman was her lodger and that she went by the name Turner. In fact, Martha had been living with a carpenter named Henry Turner on and off for the last twelve years, and the couple had separated only three weeks previously.

  The murder inquiry seemed to get off to a good start, because the police had a promising lead to follow up. The lead came from none other than P.C. Barrett himself. Barrett had been on duty in George Yard on the night of the murder, and about 2 a.m. he encountered a grenadier of the Tower Guards in Wentworth Street at the north end of George Yard, who claimed to be “waiting for his mate who had gone away with a girl.”12 Barrett later described the soldier as age twenty-two to twenty-six years, five feet nine or ten inches, with dark hair and a small mustache turned up at the ends. Furthermore, Barrett said that he would recognize the man again. Thus, on the morning after the murder, Inspector Reid arranged an identity parade of guardsmen at the Tower of London. Unfortunately, the identification proved to be a confused affair, and the guardsman whom Barrett ultimately identified was able to provide a solid alibi. Inspector Reid was forced to conclude that the young constable had “made a great mistake.”13

  Then another witness came forward. Two days after the murder, a large and somewhat manly looking prostitute named Mary Ann Connelly (aka “Pearly Poll” or “Mogg”) informed the police that she and Tabram had been drinking at several pubs on Whitechapel Road with two soldiers between 10:00 and 11:45 p.m. on the night in question. The women then took the soldiers off to separate locations for “immoral purposes.” Connelly went into Angel Alley with one of the soldiers, a man she called “the corporal,” and Tabram went into George Yard with the other, apparently a private. “We parted all right,” Connelly said, “and with no bad words; indeed we were all good friends. I know nothing of what became of [the] deceased after we left her.”14 Some thirty or forty minutes later, Connelly and her client went their separate ways near the corner of George Yard, and the “corporal” walked off toward Aldgate.

  Connelly told the police that she would recognize the soldiers if she saw them again, so Inspector Reid arranged a second lineup at the Tower the next morning.15 Connelly didn’t show up for the identification, but she was eventually tracked down and agreed to attend an identity parade on Monday, August 13. A description of the incident was reported in the Echo:

  “Pearly Poll” was asked, “Can you see here either of the men you saw with the woman now dead?” “Pearly Poll” in no way embarrassed, placed her arms akimbo, glanced at the men with the air of an inspecting officer and shook her head. This indication of a negative was not sufficient. “Can you identify anyone?” she was asked. “Pearly Poll” exclaimed, with a good deal of feminine emphasis, “He ain’t here.”16

  Connelly then informed Inspector Reid, somewhat belatedly, “They are not here they had white bands around their hats.”17 This meant the soldiers were likely Coldstream Guards, so Reid arranged for yet another identification to take place at the Wellington Barracks in Pimlico on August 15. On this occasion, Connelly picked out two privates and declared that she was positive of her identification. One of them was a man named George, whom Connelly referred to as “the corporal.” The other was a man named Skipper, who, according to Connelly, was the man who went off with Tabram. Skipper was shown to have returned to the barracks by 10 o’clock on the night of the murder. George, on the other hand, had indeed been away from the barracks on the night of Tabram’s murder and, as stated in the Echo, “that circumstance, coupled with the fact of ‘Pearly Poll’s’ certainty as to his features, at first placed him in rather an awkward position.” But George was able to prove his whereabouts on that night “beyond doubt.”18 Inspector Reid concluded that Pearly Poll was an unreliable witness and that her evidence was worthless.

  In any case, it seems unlikely that the soldiers Connelly described had anything to do with the murder. The evidence suggests that Tabram was murdered between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m., and, as Chief Inspector Swanson wrote in a report on the murder, “two and a quarter hours had elapsed” between the time Tabram went off with the soldier and the earliest time she could have been murdered. As Swanson pointed out, “A close inquiry did not elicit that she had been seen with any one else than the soldier, although from the lapse of time, it is possible she might have been.”19

  Tabram’s wounds were frightful. Dr. Killeen’s postmortem found that Tabram had been stabbed numerous times in an apparently frenzied attack targeting the chest, the upper abdomen, and the neck. “On examining the body externally I found no less than thirty-nine punctured wounds,” Killeen reported, mostly in the torso and the neck.20 In addition, there was one larger and deeper wound to the heart, which apparently penetrated the breastbone. According to Killeen, this wound must have been caused by some sort of “sword-bayonet or dagger,” whereas the rest of the wounds might have been done with a “penknife.” The building superintendent, Mr. Hewitt, who saw the body in situ, described this wound specifically. There was “blood flowing from a great wound over her heart,” he said. “There were many other stab wounds of a frightful character on her.”21 As the Echo pointed out, the one stab to the heart was sufficient to kill, and “if the lesser wounds were given before the one fatal injury, the cries of the deceased must have been heard by those who, at the time of the outrage, were sleeping within a few yards of the spot where the deed was committed.” The paper added, “Unless the perpetrator were a madman, or suffering to an unusual extent from drink-delirium, no tangible explanation can be given of the reason for inflicting the other thirty-eight injuries.”22

  The exact nature of Tabram’s wounds is difficult to determine, because the newspaper reports of Dr. Killeen’s inquest testimony varied somewhat in details. For example, a report printed in the Evening News on August 10 stated, “Dr. Kaleene [sic] . . . found 39 punctured wounds on the body and legs.”23 Of all of the papers that covered the inquest, this is the only mention of any wounds in “the legs.” Most of the newspaper accounts listed twenty-one puncture wounds in the organs—five in the left lung, two in the right lung, one in the heart, five in the li
ver, two in the spleen, and six in the stomach. Yet one newspaper, the East London Observer, noted the existence of an additional wound: “The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth.”24 The exact location of this three-inch cut “in the lower portion of the body” is not given, but Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, in his summary report of the murder, noted that there were “39 wounds on body, and neck, and private part.”25 This mention of a wound in the “private part” is almost certainly a reference to the same wound that the Observer claimed was in the “lower portion of the body.”26 The fact that the other newspapers did not remark on the wound at all suggests that they deemed this detail of Killeen’s testimony too obscene to print. The Observer also noted that “there was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated”—this was another detail that was not specified in any of the other newspaper accounts.27 In other words, both the Evening News’s mention of a wound in the “legs” and the Observer’s comment on a wound in the “lower portion of the body” were both probably referring to the same wound and were simply euphemisms for “genitalia.” In this respect, it is perhaps important to remember that the victim Annie Millwood was described as having “numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body.”28

  To illustrate the point, we need only compare two similarly worded extracts of Killeen’s testimony in the East London Observer and the East London Advertiser, both of which were printed on August 11. In each version, Killeen’s testimony is given in the same sequence, and both papers use almost the same wording to describe the twenty-one specific puncture wounds to the organs. Then, the Observer continued, “The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth. From appearances, there was no reason to suppose that recent intimacy had taken place.”29