The absence of the lower organs, including the womb, made it impossible to determine whether or not she had ever borne children. Neither could he say whether wounds to the neck were the cause of death. ‘There was nothing to suggest that it was sudden,’ said Bond. But internal examination revealed that the heart was pale and totally drained of blood, with no blood-staining of any other organ. This suggested death was not by suffocation or drowning, but most likely from blood loss, ‘proving to my mind, that she died of haemorrhage’.27
She bled to death, but her arm didn’t? This possibly explains the tourniquet around it, designed to keep blood in the limb while the rest of her body was drained.
‘The date of death,’ continued Bond, ‘as far as we could judge, would have been six weeks or two months before the discovery, and the decomposition occurred in the air and not in water.’ He found no other wounds on the torso, but over it ‘were clearly defined marks, where the strings had been tightly tied’. ‘The body appeared to have been wrapped up in a very skilful manner, and was absolutely full of maggots.’28
Certain of these conclusions were soon to resonate:
1) The date of the victim’s death.
2) The absence of blood in the body.
3) Its infestation with maggots.
Bond had just about done, and was poised to hand over to Dr Hibbert for his findings on the arm. But at Troutbeck’s intercession he concluded with a résumé: ‘She was not a stout woman, but she was a fully developed one. There was no abnormal excess of fat, but the body was that of a thoroughly well nourished plump woman.’ In his view, as he’d indicated, ‘the hand was certainly not that of a woman used to manual labour’. Raising issues of class, this was a point of interest to Troutbeck. ‘Would the hand be that of a refined woman [i.e. not a whore]?’29
It was left to Hibbert to complete the reply. He confirmed that it was a right arm, and summarily quashed any hopes that its discovery might be the result of a jape by a medical student. ‘For a surgical motive the cut would have been made to leave the skin outside,’ but in this case the arm ‘had been separated from the trunk at the shoulder joint and then the bone was sawn through’. Although the amputation could have served no anatomical purpose, he acknowledged that it had been made with a certain amateur skill. The arm was severed, he said, ‘by a person who knew where the joints were, and then cut them pretty regularly’. Did this apply to both arms? Hibbert answered in the affirmative.
Intelligence rather than anatomical expertise had guided the knife. Unlike the torso, the limb was charged with blood, and ‘when the string was loosened it was found there was a great deal of blood in the arm’. The skin appeared very thin and corrugated from immersion in the water, but in comparison to the body was not much decomposed. There were no scars or bruises. A few dark hairs under the arm matched hairs on the torso, and gave an indication of hair colour: she was a brunette. Hibbert’s testimony was of particular interest in terms of forming a picture of the victim. Assessing her as a few years younger than Dr Bond would have it, he estimated her age as twenty. ‘The hand itself was long, well shaped, and carefully kept, and the nails were small and well shaped.’30
Unless she’d had a manicure at the morgue, this was curious. Dr Neville had described the nails as ‘not neatly trimmed as a lady’s generally are’. But this of course preceded the discovery of the torso. Bearing in mind that no postmortem was anticipated for the arm, it’s easy to suppose that Neville’s view was formulated in the expectation of the cops dismissing the limb, as they were to do with the Lambeth arm, and the Peckham arm. But now it couldn’t be ignored, and no way was its owner a skivvy. This hand hadn’t shoved a scrubbing brush or heaved coal. If its owner worked, it was probably in the service of a lady, assuming she wasn’t a lady herself.
À propos of that, Inspector Marshall was next up, with some pertinent information. It was revealed that the torso was wrapped in a dress that, if not worn by her at the time of her death, had very probably belonged to the victim. But he didn’t bother to give the jury any measurements, so we cannot be sure. ‘It is a broche satin cloth,’ he said, ‘of Bradford manufacture, but an old pattern, probably of 3 years ago.’ There was nothing special about it – it probably cost sixpence ha’penny a yard. He went on to describe his visits to the vault immediately after the discovery of the torso, and later with two other officers: ‘I made a thorough search about the vaults in the immediate vicinity. I examined the ground and found a piece of newspaper [produced]. I also found a piece of string, which seems to be a piece of sash-cord and Mr Hibbert handed me two pieces of material which he said had come from the body. With regard to the piece of paper, I have made enquiry, and find it is a piece of the Echo, dated the 24th August 1888. Mr Hibbert also handed me a number of small pieces of paper which he said were found on the body, and I find they are pieces of The Daily Chronicle.’31
Marshall went on to contradict everyone who had given an opinion on the matter of access to the site. ‘It is easy, I think, to get over the hoarding in Cannon Row, but there are no indications of anyone having done so.’ As to the length of time the torso had been in the vault, he deferred to the builders, and especially Hedge. ‘I should think,’ he said, ‘the body had been where it was found for days, from the stain on the wall. But the witness who has been examined declares most positively that it was not there on Saturday, as he was on the very spot.’ Troutbeck recalled Hedge, and he reconfirmed this: ‘I looked into the very corner with a light for the hammer. I am quite sure the parcel could not have been there without my seeing it [my emphasis].’32
This was to become a point of supreme importance, and to present a dilemma for the court. ‘The fact that everyone is of opinion that no stranger could have put the parcel in such an out of the way corner,’ said the Post, ‘considerably narrows the scope of the enquiry, and on Monday week other workmen will be called who will prove that the parcel was not in the vault on the Saturday before the Monday it was found.’
With everyone certain the torso wasn’t there until after the works closed on Saturday, 29 September, Troutbeck adjourned for two weeks.
The press was in no doubt that this was another Ripper outrage. ‘There are upon the body found in the cellars exactly the same proofs of a purpose as have been afforded by two, at least, of the cases in Whitechapel’ (as was obvious to everyone but the Metropolitan Police), wrote the Scotsman. ‘The first of the series of the murders and mutilations was committed on August 7th, the second August 31st. Put these facts by the side of the statement of the medical men that the woman whose mutilated body has been found on the Thames Embankment was murdered in early August, and it becomes impossible to doubt that the same person was responsible for all the bloodshed.’33
It was a ‘PERFECT CARNIVAL OF BLOOD IN THE WORLD’S METROPOLIS’, headlined the New York Times. ‘It is an extremely strange state of affairs altogether – THE POLICE APPARENTLY PARALYSED.’ This was certainly true of the mesmerised dupe at their head. A hysterical Freemason was working mirrors out of Scotland Yard, and straight coppers didn’t have a chance. ‘Careful inquiries’, together with ‘a thorough search of the enclosed ground’, were reported. But Jack had another trick up his sleeve, and such painstaking subterranean efforts were soon to manifest themselves as an embarrassing sham.
‘Of course,’ moaned the Daily Echo, ‘no information as to what has transpired is afforded by any of the officers, who – as evidenced by their attitude to the Press in the East End during the past few days – very zealously obey the stringent orders they have to “give nothing to reporters”. Their object is to ascertain whether any other portions of the mutilated body have been hidden away, either beneath the heaps of debris lying about on all sides, or in the long corridor-like vaults beneath the buildings.’34
The police put up the usual appearance of going about their investigations, claiming to have scoured every inch of ground and even draining an abandoned well. Marshall was specifically looking for the vi
ctim’s head. But even without it, he must by now have had a reasonable understanding of who she was.
Give or take a year or two, she was about twenty, an imposing young woman, voluptuous even, and tall by the standards of the day. She had dark brown hair, and took care of her appearance: there were no working-girl scars on the arm, and it was a well-manicured hand. Certainly she was no malnourished unfortunate from London’s East End. The common material of her dress indicated that she looked like a lady rather than actually being one. It was a pretty safe bet that she was a girl in service. She had been dismembered indoors, and her torso most probably stored (in a vat or a barrel of disinfectant) in the same place. Were this the case, she was less likely to have been employed as a lady’s maid than as some sort of domestic in the house of the man who killed her. No way was Jack crazy enough to haul fifty pounds of murdered flesh too far, and the locations at which the body parts were found suggested that she might well have lived in the area of their discovery – at Pimlico, on the north side of the Thames, or maybe Battersea, just over the bridge. It wasn’t too wild a guess, therefore, to picture a tall, rather refined girl, in domestic service, perhaps to a gentleman, in residence near the river.
Somebody out there thought they recognised her.
Lilly Vass was eighteen years old when she vanished in July 1888. With only the clothes she stood in she had left her home in Chelsea, and had never been heard of since. On 7 October, motivated by reports of ‘dreadful things’ in the newspapers, her mother went (again) to the police, and shortly after found herself in the mortuary at Millbank. Understandably, she was ‘quite unequal to the ordeal of making an inspection’, but nevertheless was able to give details of her missing child. Lilly seemed to fit the bill. About five feet six inches tall, she was ‘fairly stout, with fine arms, and of dark complexion’. Mrs Vass said that her daughter had been in service with a lady at Sealcott Road, Wandsworth Common (adjacent to Battersea), and had left home on 19 July, ‘ostensibly to go back to her situation’. But Lilly had lied: ‘Although I have always found her a truthful girl, I am bound to say that she had deceived me in one respect.’ She had in fact left her situation in Wandsworth, ‘although she had told me she had not’. For some reason Lilly had quit, and had apparently elected to keep her new whereabouts a secret.35
‘She was not a girl devoid of sense,’ said her mother. ‘I think that if she were alive she would write, even if she did not wish me to know where she was.’ Mrs Vass was convinced her daughter had been abducted, and it was therefore possibly her employer who didn’t want anyone to know where she was. This mystery person may have been a new ‘mistress’, but more likely it was a ‘master’, and her murderer. The reason she lied may well have been so as not to upset her mother with any intimation of immorality. Did this explain why she had left home without packing any clothes? Had she been promised a new wardrobe? She had told her mother ‘that she thought she was going to travel [with her employer] to the Isle of Wight’.36
Now, the Isle of Wight has no less interest to me than does Conduit Street. Ten thousand places in England would mean nothing compared to this frequent haunt of my candidate, where he sailed his yacht and ‘took in the bracing air’. It seems that Lilly’s new employer had promised to take her on a ferry, but had actually had something rather different in mind. Two days after Mrs Vass went to the police, a letter was received at Leman Street police station in Whitechapel. ‘I am going to do another job right under the very nose of damned old Charlie Warren,’ it warned. We can confidently assume that the first job was already under Warren’s nose at New Scotland Yard.
Lilly Vass barely made the London press – the above is sourced from provincial newspapers. Journalists in the capital showed a curious lack of interest, but not less than did the police, who quietly dropped any further investigation. The geography was too dangerous. Although the British press willingly sold the ‘Fiend in his Lair’ routine, they kept well away from the West End. Only one Dr Forbes Winslow broached the possibility of an upmarket assassin. In a letter to The Times he expressed his ‘confident belief that the murderer is not of the class to which “Leather Apron” belongs, but is of the upper-classes of society’. This went down like a rock, and Winslow was virtually in a minority of one.37
Not so in the United States. With no predisposition to protect certain class interests, the American newspapers took a more inquisitive view. Interviewed by the New York Herald in early October, a physician called Dr Alan Hamilton demonstrated a remarkably modern understanding of the serial killer. In response to a question about the Ripper’s state of mind (and he had no doubt that the Scotland Yard trunk was Jack’s work) Hamilton replied, ‘Oh, he is probably reading the newspaper accounts of the murders and enjoying it, going all over the crimes again in his imagination.’ And fantasy would ‘demand more reality’: ‘The more he gives way to his passion, the more pleasure it is likely to give him.’ Referencing similar ‘monomaniacs’, he thought it was very likely that the culprit was ‘an intensely refined, over-educated man, who had degenerated into a condition of ultra-sensuality’. Capping this assessment, he added, ‘I should not be at all surprised to hear that he is a man living in an aristocratic part of the city.’38
Such conclusions, however, could be given no credence by the Metropolitan Police. If Jack was operating outside the East End, they were going to have to start investigating outside the East End – and that would be a whole different ball-game. Victorian gentlemen would not be so ready to call Jack a ‘genius’ if his target became Kensington ladies. With West End wives and daughters on the slab, they might demand more than the pathetic sideshow from the police thus far. Warren’s arse was already on the line. Society might panic, the idiot might be fired, and a real policeman brought in. Disaster would ensue. Any honest broker wouldn’t need more than a wet weekend to sort this nonsense out, and Salisbury’s government would fall. It was an inflammatory time for Jack to up the ante.
On 5 October the Central News Agency received another letter. Following ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘Saucy Jacky’, it was designated as the murderer’s third. This extraordinary communication could, and should, have busted Jack the Ripper. Instead, by selectively quoting from it, the police turned it into another writ of deceit.
On 8 October, under the headline ‘ANOTHER COMMUNICATION KEPT SECRET’, the Evening News published a version of it: ‘A third communication has been received from the writer of the original “Jack the Ripper” letter and postcard, which acting upon official advice, it has been deemed prudent to withhold for the present. It may be stated, however, that although the miscreant avows his intention of committing further crimes shortly, it is only against prostitutes that his threats are directed, his desire being to respect and protect honest women.’
Could any trick the Met pulled ever approach the obscenity of this? Suddenly everyone is prepared to give the Purger’s mail a bit of credibility. Suddenly everyone is supposed to see the socially responsible side of Jack. Far from belittling this letter as the work of a ‘hoaxer’, now everyone wants to take him at his word – not a bad chap, really, bit of a gent even: he doesn’t kill anyone but fourpenny whores, and then only in Whitechapel. You can rest easy in your West End beds. So utterly ridiculous is this deception a sloth could see through it. By trying to invest the murderer with some sort of ‘moral code’, the authorities are attempting to dissuade the public from believing he’s moved up West.
Laughably, like the Victorian police (and in deference to the ‘canonical’), Ripperology is also obliged to try to dismiss the Scotland Yard trunk. It invalidates all their favourite candidates. This wasn’t Kosminski carrying half a woman who weighed almost as much as he did out of the East End. The letter could not have been written by Kosminski either, a certifiable moron who probably had difficulty spelling his own name. Nor was it penned by that hilarious non-starter Michael Ostrog, who existed only as some sort of disturbance in the mind of Sir Melville Macnaghten.
How does th
is letter square with that mincing junk out of The A to Z in respect of the torso? If ‘the police never imagined there was any connection with the Whitechapel Murders’, what were they doing withholding a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ that made an unequivocal reference to it? Clearly a connection had been made, and when we come to the full text of this letter it will be understood why. It was ‘deemed prudent to withhold [it] for the present’, wrote the Evening News. But like Joseph Lawende’s description of the man in Mitre Square, it was withheld forever.
This is the only letter from the Ripper that the Metropolitan Police wanted everyone to believe was genuine. ‘Hoax’ had gone onto temporary hold. It is little wonder that Scotland Yard withheld the accurate text. It went into Warren like an arrow. This wasn’t a policeman attempting to protect the public, it was a Freemason attempting to protect Masonry – at least, the upper echelons of its ruling elite. I shall have more to say of this letter by and by (including the manipulation of its text), but for the moment, this is how it is presented in the archives.
The handwriting below isn’t the Ripper’s, but belongs to a journalist at the Central News Agency called Thomas J. Bulling. Why he copied the original rather than sending it to Scotland Yard is supposedly unknown. ‘It is odd,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Stewart Evans, ‘that Bulling chose to transcribe this letter instead of sending it.’ In my view it is less ‘odd’ than obvious.
It is a document that screeches of interference. By copying it, you could make it say whatever you like. At this juncture, what the police most definitely would have liked was for Jack himself to deny responsibility for the Scotland Yard trunk, and that’s exactly what this dodgy bit of conjuring purports to do. ‘I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall.’ I do not believe Jack the Ripper wrote that. I think it was written at the behest of Donald Swanson. Before we get into it, let’s have a look at Bulling’s text.
They All Love Jack Page 46