Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Precisely when did the woman die? Dr Blackwell noted that her hands were cold. But he detected some warmth in her face, and her neck, chest and legs were quite warm. The fact that the clothes were not wet with rain also indicated that she had not been lying in the yard long. On the other hand there were factors present conducive to a slow loss of body heat. The victim would have bled to death comparatively slowly because only the vessels on the left side of the neck had been cut and even then the carotid artery had not been completely severed. Furthermore, the night itself had been very mild. It was Blackwell’s opinion, nevertheless, that when he arrived in the yard the woman could not have been dead ‘more than twenty minutes, at the most half an hour.’ We know that Blackwell reached Dutfield’s Yard at 1.16. He was saying, then, that the murder took place after 12.46 and very possibly after 12.56 a.m.

  Dr Phillips informed the inquest that the woman had been alive ‘within an hour’ of his own arrival at the scene of the crime. Since existing versions of his testimony neglect to tell us when that was, however, his statement is difficult to interpret. Blackwell thought that Phillips arrived between twenty and thirty minutes after himself. If so Dr Phillips’ evidence places the time of death after 12.36–12.46 a.m.

  While Johnston was examining the body PC Lamb had the yard gates closed and posted a man at the wicket. He then made a cursory investigation of the club premises, turning his light on the hands and clothes of inmates and searching rooms. Finding nothing suspicious, he next turned his attention to the cottages across the way. The tenants had retired for the night. Lamb found them in a state of undress and very frightened. We do not know the details of his exploration of these cottages but under the circumstances it was almost certainly perfunctory. ‘I told them [the tenants] there was “nothing much the matter”,’ he said at the inquest, ‘as I did not wish to scare them more.’ The constable’s preliminary searches also evidently took in Hindley’s store and two waterclosets in the yard. When he returned from his perambulations he found West and Phillips with the body.

  Perhaps because Dutfield’s Yard was easily sealed off the police occupied it for some hours. The onlookers that had gathered there were detained until they had been identified and searched by the police and examined for bloodstains by Dr Phillips. The body itself was eventually removed to St George’s Mortuary, Cable Street, and at 5.30 PC Albert Collins washed the last vestiges of gore from the yard. No weapon, no clue to the murderer, had been found.

  By then the real centre of the night’s events had long since moved, some three-quarters of a mile and twelve minutes’ walk away, to a small, stone-cobbled square, just within the eastern boundary of the City of London.

  Behind Mitre Street, off Aldgate, is Mitre Square. About twenty-four yards square, it was accounted a ‘respectable’ place, largely comprised of business premises, and was, during business hours, extensively used. But, although close to the junction of Fenchurch Street, Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, Mitre Square was ill-lit and almost deserted after dark. Only two lamps directly illuminated the square itself. A lamp post stood in the northwestern part of it and a ‘lantern lamp’ was affixed to the wall at the entrance of Church Passage, in the eastern corner. The silence of the square after nightfall reflected the relative seclusion of its location and the fact that it could boast but an insignificant resident population, the few houses that existed there, mostly dilapidated and empty, crouching in the shadow of tall warehouses that dominated Mitre Square on every side. ‘This particular square,’ wrote a journalist, ‘is as dull and lonely a spot as can be found anywhere in London.’7

  Ironically the only private residents of Mitre Square at its moment of notoriety were a City policeman – PC Richard Pearce 922 – and his family. They lived at No. 3, one of two tenements in the western corner of the square, sandwiched between the warehouses of Walter Williams & Co. and Kearley & Tonge. The adjacent house was an empty, tumble-down slum with broken windows. These were the only dwelling houses that actually faced into the square. In the southern corner of Mitre Square, fronting upon Mitre Street, was a row of four further houses. Their back windows overlooked the square but no less than three of the houses were empty and the fourth, the shop of Mr Taylor, a picture-frame maker, at the end of the row, was customarily locked-up and unoccupied at nights.

  Some of the warehouses did contain caretakers or watchmen. In the southeast part of the square, between the row of empty houses and Horner & Company’s warehouses was a private yard. It belonged to Messrs Heydemann & Co., general merchants, of 5 Mitre Street, and the second and third floor back windows of their premises, behind the yard, commanded an uninterrupted view of the southern and western parts of Mitre Square. George Clapp, the resident caretaker, slept with his wife in a back room on the second floor. The only other resident in Heydemann’s premises was an old nurse who attended Mrs Clapp. She slept in a room on the third floor. Across the square from Heydemann’s, in the premises of Kearley & Tonge, wholesale grocers, a watchman, George James Morris, started work at 7.00 p.m.

  There were three approaches to Mitre Square – one carriageway and two narrow foot passages. The carriageway led into the square from Mitre Street, passing between Mr Taylor’s shop on the right and the Walter Williams & Co. warehouse on the left. At the eastern corner of the square was Church Passage. It communicated with Duke Street. The other passage ran from St James’ Place (‘the Orange Market’) to the northern point of Mitre Square.

  At about 1.44 a.m., just three-quarters of an hour after the Dutfield’s Yard discovery, PC Edward Watkins 881 of the City Police approached Mitre Square from Mitre Street. All was quiet. George Clapp and his wife had been in bed since about 11.00 and PC Pearce since 12.30. They were now sleeping soundly. George Morris, Kearley & Tonge’s watchman, was cleaning the offices on the ground floor of their counting house block. PC Watkins’ beat normally took him about twelve or fourteen minutes to patrol. When he had last explored Mitre Square, at about 1.30, it had been deserted. And so, as he stepped into the square, it seemed now. There was no sound but that of his own footsteps. Yet, turning right into the southern corner of the square, the constable beheld in the beam of the lantern fixed in his belt one of the most gruesome sights he had witnessed in seventeen years of police work.

  Four days later, before the coroner, Watkins described what he had found in the tersest language: ‘I next came in at 1.44. I turned to the right. I saw the body of a woman lying there on her back with her feet facing the square [and] her clothes up above her waist. I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach was ripped up. She was laying in a pool of blood.’ To the representatives of the press the constable was a little more expansive. ‘She was ripped up like a pig in the market,’ he told the Star, ‘. . . I have been in the force a long while, but I never saw such a sight.’ The Daily News carried his most detailed account:

  Mitre Square. × marks the spot where the body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered, at 1.44 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September 1888

  I came round [to Mitre Square] again at 1.45, and entering the square from Mitre Street, on the right-hand side, I turned sharp round to the right, and flashing my light, I saw the body in front of me. The clothes were pushed right up to her breast, and the stomach was laid bare, with a dreadful gash from the pit of the stomach to the breast. On examining the body I found the entrails cut out and laid round the throat, which had an awful gash in it, extending from ear to ear. In fact, the head was nearly severed from the body. Blood was everywhere to be seen. It was difficult to discern the injuries to the face for the quantity of blood which covered it . . . The murderer had inserted the knife just under the left eye, and, drawing it under the nose, cut the nose completely from the face, at the same time inflicting a dreadful gash down the right cheek to the angle of the jawbone. The nose was laid over on the cheek. A more dreadful sight I never saw; it quite knocked me over.

  PC Watkins at once ran across the square to Kearley & Tonge’s. Finding the door ajar,
he pushed it open and hailed the watchman. Inside George Morris was sweeping the steps down towards the door. As he remembered it, the door behind him was knocked or pushed and he turned round, opened it wide and discovered the constable. ‘For God’s sake, mate,’ gasped Watkins, ‘come to my assistance.’ Morris was a Metropolitan Police pensioner himself. Getting his lamp, he followed Watkins outside. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Oh dear,’ replied Watkins, ‘there’s another woman cut up to pieces!’

  Watkins showed Morris the body and then, mounting guard over it, sent him off to bring more help. The watchman dashed out into Mitre Street and then into Aldgate. There, blowing his whistle furiously, he attracted the attention of Police Constables James Harvey and James Thomas Holland.

  The news reached Inspector Edward Collard at Bishopsgate Street Police Station at 1.55. Telegraphing it to HQ and sending a constable for Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police Surgeon, at 17 Finsbury Circus, Collard set out for the scene of the crime. When he arrived, at two or three minutes past two, he found a doctor as well as several policemen already there. Dr George William Sequeira of 34 Jewry Street, Aldgate, had been called out by PC Holland at 1.55. He would tell the inquest later that the woman had not been dead for more than fifteen minutes before he saw her. But neither Sequeira nor anyone else touched the body until the arrival of Dr Gordon Brown.8

  The dead woman lay on the pavement in the southern corner of Mitre Square, her head perhaps eighteen inches from the wall and railings that enclosed the rear and yard of Heydemann’s premises, her feet towards the carriageway out of Mitre Street. A ‘coal plate’, immediately to the left of the victim’s head, guarded the entrance to a coal chute, and an arched grating, to the left of her legs, admitted light to the cellar of the empty house next to Mr Taylor’s shop. The back wall of the house was parallel with, and several feet to the left of, the body. A later generation would damn the spot as ‘Jack the Ripper’s Corner’. Back in 1888, on the eve of the murder, it had no such sinister repute but it was the darkest corner in the square and a favourite place for prostitutes and their clients. The lamp-post was sixty-five feet away. And, since the corner of Mr Taylor’s shop interposed between the murder site and a ‘lantern lamp’ on the corner of the Walter Williams & Co. warehouse in Mitre Street, the spot was plunged into shadow after lighting-up time.

  Dr Frederick Gordon Brown reached Mitre Square at about 2.18 and we are indebted to him for almost all of our scene-of-crime information. He found the dead woman stretched out upon her back. Her throat had been cut and her abdomen ripped open. Her intestines had been lifted out and placed over her right shoulder and one detached portion of intestine, perhaps two feet long, had been placed between her body and her left arm. Her face had been savagely mutilated. The doctor took careful notes and four days later made this report to the inquest:

  The body was on its back; the head turned to left shoulder; the arms by the side[s] of the body as if they had fallen there, both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent; a thimble was lying off the finger on the right side; the clothes drawn up above the abdomen; the thighs were naked; left leg extended in a line with the body; the abdomen was exposed; right leg bent at the thigh and knee; the bonnet was at the back of the head; great disfigurement of face; the throat cut across; below the cut was a neckerchief; the upper part of the dress was pulled open a little way; the abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; they were smeared over with some feculent matter; a piece of about 2 feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design; the lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut obliquely through; there was a quantity of clotted blood on the pavement on the left side of the neck, round the shoulder and upper part of arm, and fluid blood coloured serum which had flowed under the neck to the right shoulder, the pavement sloping in that direction; body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been dead most likely within the half hour; we looked for superficial bruises and saw none; no blood on the skin of the abdomen or secretion of any kind on the thighs; no spurting of blood on the bricks or pavement around; no marks of blood below the middle of the body; several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed; there was no blood on the front of the clothes; there were no traces of recent connection.9

  The appearance of the body in Mitre Square was also depicted by Brown in a pencil sketch he made upon the spot. This sketch, long lost, was one of several discovered in 1966 by Sam Hardy in the basement of the London Hospital and published by Professor Francis Camps in the London Hospital Gazette.10

  There may be a slight discrepancy between the evidence of Dr Brown and that of Inspector Collard. Brown stated that several buttons were found in the clotted blood, which was near the left side of the neck and about the left shoulder and upper arm, and that a thimble was discovered near the right hand. In his inquest testimony, however, Collard swore that Sergeant Jones picked up three small black buttons (‘generally used for women’s boots’), a small metal button, a common metal thimble and a small mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, all by the left side of the body. The inspector recorded two other important details. The dead woman was not in possession of any money and there was no evidence that she had put up a struggle.

  After he had examined it, Dr Brown gave instructions for the body to be taken to the City Mortuary in Golden Lane. By then Mitre Square had become the centre of a frantic police investigation. In 1888, as now, the City of London had its own police force, responsible to the corporation. Its Commissioner, Sir James Fraser, was on leave at the end of September and, in any case, ripe for retirement. So the search for the Mitre Square killer was directed by Major (later Lieutenant Colonel Sir) Henry Smith, the Acting Commissioner, and Inspector James McWilliam, head of the City Detective Department.

  On the night of the murder Smith was roused from his bed at Cloak Lane Police Station. He recalled that awakening vividly in his memoirs, published in 1910:

  The night of Saturday, September 29, found me tossing about in my bed at Cloak Lane Station, close to the river and adjoining Southwark Bridge. There was a railway goods depot in front, and a furrier’s premises behind my rooms; the lane was causewayed, heavy vans were going constantly in and out, and the sickening smell from the furrier’s skins was always present. You could not open the windows, and to sleep was an impossibility. Suddenly the bell at my head rang violently. ‘What is it?’ I asked, putting my ear to the tube. ‘Another murder, sir, this time in the City.’ Jumping up, I was dressed and in the street in a couple of minutes. A hansom – to me a detestable vehicle – was at the door, and into it I jumped, as time was of the utmost consequence. This invention of the devil claims to be safe. It is neither safe nor pleasant . . . Licensed to carry two, it did not take me long to discover that a 15-stone Superintendent inside with me, and three detectives hanging on behind, added neither to its comfort nor to its safety. Although we rolled like a ‘seventy-four’ in a gale, we got to our destination – Mitre Square – without an upset, where I found a small group of my men standing round the mutilated remains of a woman.11

  When Inspector McWilliam heard the news he went first to the City Detective Office at 26 Old Jewry. Arriving at 3.45, he wired the news to Scotland Yard and then set out for Mitre Square via Bishopsgate Street Police Station. Major Smith, Inspector Collard, Detective Superintendent Alfred Foster and others of his colleagues were already at the scene when he reached the square.

  Although the previous murders had all taken place within Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the City Police had by no means remained complacent. The Tabram and Nichols murders in August had caused Smith to instruct his detective department to employ extra men in plain clothes to patrol the eastern fringes of the City, maintain a close watch on prostitutes and account for every man and woman seen out together after dark. In his memoirs the major claimed to have employed nearly one third of his t
otal force upon such duties and fondly pictured them sitting on doorsteps, smoking pipes, loafing about pubs and gossiping with all and sundry in the September sunshine. ‘It was subversive of discipline,’ he conceded, ‘but I had them well supervised by senior officers.’12 At the very moment that the hapless woman in Mitre Square was being murdered and mutilated, indeed, three City detectives – Outram, Halse and Marriott – were searching the passages of houses only a few streets away. At about 1.58, when they received tidings of the murder, these detectives were on the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street.13

  Tragically the elaborate precautions taken by the City Police proved insufficient to save the woman found dead in Mitre Square. Major Smith was undoubtedly galled at the failure of his strategy. But he was also beginning to understand something of the ruthless efficiency of the man he was up against. In no crime was this demonstrated more clearly than in this killing in the City.

  The murderer had passed through Mitre Square like some invisible phantom. PC Watkins, whose beat took in the square, found it deserted at about 1.30. On returning, just fourteen or fifteen minutes later, he discovered the body but even then saw no one and heard nothing suspicious as he entered the square. Watkins entered and left Mitre Square by Mitre Street. At about 1.41 or 1.42 another patrolling constable, PC James Harvey 964, reached (but did not, apparently, enter) Mitre Square from the opposite direction – through Duke Street and Church Passage. This was several minutes before Watkins found the body but yet, as Harvey assured the inquest, ‘I saw no one [and] I heard no cry or noise.’ A third City policeman, PC Pearce, actually lived in Mitre Square. From the window of their house at No. 3 he and his wife might have witnessed the murder but they both slept throughout the entire incident. George Morris, the watchman at Kearley & Tonge’s offices, had been a Metropolitan Police constable. When alerted to the atrocity by Watkins he was working only about two yards inside Kearley & Tonge’s front door and the door itself had been ajar for perhaps two minutes. According to a statement he made in the Star, Morris ‘had gone to the front door to look put into the square two moments before Watkins called to him.’ Notwithstanding all which he, too, knew nothing of what had occurred. Finally there was George Clapp, the caretaker who slept at the back of Heydemann’s, overlooking the murder site. ‘During the night I heard no sound or any noise of any kind,’ Clapp told the coroner. Indeed, he had not learned of the murder until between five and six the next morning and by then the Mitre Square victim was lying in Golden Lane Mortuary.14