Friday, 9 November 1888. The day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. The day when the Right Honourable James Whitehead, the new Lord Mayor, would drive in state, amidst all the pomp and pageantry the wealthiest city in the kingdom could devise, to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand for his oath of office. Mary would have enjoyed the festivities. Apparently she had been looking forward to it. ‘I hope it will be a fine day tomorrow,’ she had told Mrs Prater on Thursday morning, ‘as I want to go to the Lord Mayor’s Show.’9
John McCarthy, Mary’s landlord, had other things on his mind. At 10.45 on Friday morning he was in his shop at 27 Dorset Street and checking his books with concern. He was not a hard man but he had already allowed Mary to clock up 29s. in rent arrears. So, calling Thomas Bowyer, his shop assistant, he sent him round to her room to see if she could pay the money. Perhaps he thought they might catch her before she disappeared to see the Lord Mayor’s procession.10
Bowyer knocked twice at the door of No. 13. Each time there was no answer. He stepped round the corner to the broken window and, reaching inside, pulled aside the curtain. A first glance into the room revealed two lumps of flesh on the bedside table. A second discovered Mary’s bloody and mutilated corpse lying on the bed itself. It was enough for poor Bowyer. He fled precipitately back to the shop. ‘Governor,’ he stammered, ‘I knocked at the door and could not make anyone answer. I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood.’ Such words, in the East End that autumn, presaged horrific murder, and filled with forebodings McCarthy returned with Bowyer to No. 13. There the sight which greeted the landlord when he looked through the window was even more stomach-turning than he had prepared himself for. The bedside table was covered with what looked like pieces of flesh and the body on the bed resembled that of a butchered beast. White-faced and shaken, he turned to Bowyer. ‘Go at once to the police station,’ he said, ‘and fetch someone here.’
At Commercial Street Bowyer found Inspector Walter Beck on duty. Chatting with him was Walter Dew, the young detective who, fifty years later, recalled for us Bowyer’s dramatic entrance. A youth, his eyes bulging out of his head, burst panting into the station. For a time he was so overcome with fright as to be unable to utter a single intelligible word. But at last he managed to babble something: ‘Another one. Jack the Ripper. Awful. Jack McCarthy sent me.’11 Soon they were hearing the tale from McCarthy himself who, having recovered his composure, had hurried after his assistant. ‘Come along, Dew,’ said the inspector, donning his hat and coat, and they set out together with Bowyer and McCarthy for the scene of the crime. They arrived at Miller’s Court at or soon after eleven. ‘The room was pointed out to me,’ recalled Dew. ‘I tried the door. It would not yield. So I moved to the window, over which, on the inside, an old coat was hanging to act as a curtain and to block the draught from the hole in the glass. Inspector Beck pushed the coat to one side and peered through the aperture. A moment later he staggered back with his face as white as a sheet. ‘For God’s sake, Dew,’ he cried. ‘Don’t look.’ I ignored the order, and took my place at the window. When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day.’
DORSET STREET
Miller’s Court and Mary Jane Kelly’s room
Miller’s Court was soon bustling with police personnel. Dr George Bagster Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, arrived at 11.15. Abberline was there by 11.30. Both must share some responsibility for the ensuing fiasco. The door of Mary’s room was locked but, incredibly, no attempt was made to force it until 1.30 in the afternoon. Although Phillips was primarily responsible for the delay the testimony he gave three days later at the inquest cannot be said to be very illuminating on the point. There he described how, having looked through the broken window and ascertained that Mary was beyond help, he decided that ‘probably it was advisable that no entrance should be made into the room at that time.’ It was left to Abberline, who had charge of the case, to explain this bizarre decision to the inquest: ‘I had an intimation from Inspector Beck that the dogs had been sent for [and] Dr Phillips asked me not to force the door but to test the dogs if they were coming.’12 The dogs, as we now know, were no longer available, and in the two and a half hours after eleven the police did little more than seal off Miller’s Court, accumulate statements from local residents and get in a photographer to photograph the corpse. At 1.30 Superintendent Arnold arrived. He brought the news that the order for the bloodhounds had been countermanded and gave immediate instructions for the door to be forced. John McCarthy then broke it open with a pickaxe. It was an unfortunate beginning to the investigation. Even the violence visited upon the offending door was unnecessary. Joe Barnett later told Abberline that the key had been missing for some time. The door had a spring lock that fastened automatically when it was pulled to but the catch could easily be moved back from the outside by reaching through the broken window!
The little room was cluttered. As the door was pushed open it banged against the bedside table. A moment later Abberline and his team were inside. The sight that met their eyes was one to haunt dreams.
Sparsely furnished, the room was nevertheless so small that there was very little space in which to move around. It was about twelve or fifteen feet square. The bedside table, against which the door had knocked, was close to the left-hand side of an ancient wooden bedstead and the right-hand side of the bedstead was close up against the wooden partition which sealed Mary’s room off from the rest of the house. The only other furnishings were another old table, a chair or two, a cupboard, a disused washstand and a fireplace. The grate contained the ashes of a large fire. There was little attempt at decoration. A cheap print, ‘The Fisherman’s Widow’, hung over the fireplace. But the floorboards were bare and filthy and although the walls themselves were papered the pattern was barely discernible beneath the dirt.
Mary’s body, grotesquely mutilated, lay on the bed, two-thirds over towards the left-hand edge, that nearest the door. The first person through the door was Dr Phillips. From Phillips, above all others, we might have expected an authentic report about the condition of the body but he tells us almost nothing. Certainly he spoke at the inquest three days later. On that occasion, however, he deliberately suppressed the details of Mary’s injuries. The immediate cause of death, he said, was the severance of the right carotid artery. From the blood-saturated condition of the palliasse, pillow and sheet at the top right-hand corner of the bed, and from the large quantity of blood found under the bedstead there, he deduced that she had been moved from the right-hand side of the bed after receiving her death wound.13
Phillips’ silence ensured that for a century little authentic scene-of-crime information was known about what was perhaps the Ripper’s last and most gruesome murder. Then, in 1987, a set of long-lost medical notes made by Dr Thomas Bond, who had worked with Phillips at Miller’s Court and during the subsequent post-mortem, came to light among a bundle of documents posted anonymously to Scotland Yard. These notes, written on 10 November 1888, after the post-mortem, blow to bits the untrustworthy news reports and the fictional flourishes of Ripperologists that have served to bridge the gap in the documentation for so many years.
Dr Bond had been sucked into the Ripper investigation as early as 25 October, when Anderson had written to him requesting him to review the medical evidence given at the inquests and to hazard an opinion respecting the killer’s alleged anatomical knowledge. ‘In dealing with the Whitechapel murders,’ the Assistant Commissioner had explained, ‘the difficulties of conducting the inquiry are largely increased by reason of our having no reliable opinion for our guidance as to the amount of surgical skill and anatomical knowledge probably possessed by the murderer or murderers.’14 Anderson looked to Bond for such guidance and, on the face of it, there were few more qualified to give it. For in addition to conducting the post-mortem examination in the celebrated Whitehall torso case at the beginning of October15 he had twenty-one years’ experience as police
surgeon to A Division.
When the Kelly murder occurred Bond had already studied police notes on the Buck’s Row, Hanbury Street, Berner Street and Mitre Square outrages. And at two on the afternoon of 9 November he turned up at Miller’s Court to conduct his personal examination of the latest victim. His notes, written the next day, tell us what he saw:
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle & lying across the abdomen, the right arm was slightly abducted from the body & rested on the mattress, the elbow bent & the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk & the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.
The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features & the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side of the body.
The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a [bedside] table.
The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, & on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about 2 feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed & in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.16
Bond’s statement that Mary’s body was found naked was contradicted by Phillips’ inquest testimony that she was clad in a linen under garment. Phillips was right because in a surviving police photograph of the scene a puffed sleeve of the garment is clearly visible about the top of Mary’s left arm. One possible explanation of the discrepancy is that most of the under garment had been cut away from the body in the process of mutilation.
From the moment the police and their surgeons descended upon Miller’s Court the local residents became little more than helpless bystanders to the drama being enacted in their midst. The few who saw inside the butcher’s shambles that was No. 13 were left numb with shock. One was Elizabeth Prater. Her husband, a boot machinist named William Prater, had deserted her five years since and she now earned a living by prostitution and lodged alone in No. 20 Miller’s Court, above Mary’s room. ‘I’m a woman myself,’ she sobbed to a Star reporter on the day of the murder, ‘and I’ve got to sleep in that place tonight right over where it happened.’ Mrs Prater had good cause to know what had happened. A pump stood in the court near No. 13 and Mrs Prater took advantage of a trip for water to peep through the window of Mary’s room. ‘I could bear to look at it only for a second,’ she said, ‘but I can never forget the sight of it if I live to be a hundred.’17
John McCarthy, who had forced the door, was among the first to enter No. 13. ‘The sight we saw,’ he said later in the day, ‘I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man. The poor woman’s body was lying on the bed, undressed. She had been completely disembowelled, and her entrails had been taken out and placed on the table. It was those that I had seen when I looked through the window and took to be lumps of flesh. The woman’s nose had been cut off, and her face gashed and mutilated so that she was quite beyond recognition. Both her breasts too had been cut clean away and placed by the side of her liver and other entrails on the table. I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this. The body was, of course, covered with blood, and so was the bed. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may never see such a sight again.’18
Tidings of the murder soon swept through the crowded courts and alleys of the East End. ‘Women rushed about the streets,’ said one report, ‘telling their neighbours the news, and giving utterance in angry voices to expressions of rage and indignation.’19 As the Lord Mayor’s procession swung into Fleet Street from Ludgate Circus the news burst upon the crowds lining the route there. Soon spectators were deserting the show in thousands and converging upon Dorset Street. Cordons of police at each end denied them access but the entrances from Bell Lane and Commercial Street became choked by crowds of excited, frightened-looking people.
At about four o’clock a one-horse carrier’s cart with a tarpaulin cover was driven into Dorset Street and halted opposite Miller’s Court. A long shell or coffin, scratched and dirty with use, was taken from the cart and carried into No. 13. The surgeons had completed their preliminary examination of the remains. The news that the body was about to be removed produced a great rush of people from the courts leading out of Dorset Street and a determined push against the police cordon at the Commercial Street end. ‘The crowd, which pressed round the van [cart], was of the humblest class,’ ran the Times report, ‘but the demeanour of the poor people was all that could be desired. Ragged caps were doffed and slatternly-looking women shed tears as the shell, covered with a ragged-looking cloth, was placed in the van.’20
After the remains had been driven to Shoreditch Mortuary the windows of No. 13 were boarded up and the door padlocked. The cordons at the ends of the street were withdrawn but although crowds of idlers roved through Dorset Street all evening there was nothing for them to see since two stalwart constables vigilantly guarded the passage into Miller’s Court.
In Whitehall the news of the latest murder was greeted with dismay. When Beck saw Mary’s mutilated corpse through the broken window he lost no time in apprising Commercial Street by fast-running constables and from there the news was promptly relayed by telegraph to Scotland Yard. Warren dashed off a brief note to Lushington. ‘I have to acquaint you, for the information of the Secretary of State,’ he wrote, ‘that information has just been received that a mutilated dead body of a woman is reported to have been found this morning inside a room in a house (No. 26) in Dorset Street, Spitalfields.’ The matter, he added, had been entrusted to Anderson. Messages then flew back and forth. The Home Office telephoned Warren. They wanted to be informed as soon as possible of any further news. And, after personally inspecting the scene of the murder, Anderson telephoned the Home Office. A scribbled note of his message still survives in the Home Office papers: ‘Body is believed to be that of a prostitute terribly muti [sic] much mutilated. Dr Bond is at present engaged in making his examination but his report has not yet been received. Full report cannot be furnished until medical officers have completed enquiry.’21
On Saturday morning the police returned eagerly to their investigation of the crime. Abberline was back at Miller’s Court, exploring the ashes cold in the grate of Mary’s room. It had been a large fire, so fierce that it had melted the spout of the kettle, but the only clues his search turned up were a few remnants of women’s clothing. A Times report assures us that they were a piece of burnt velvet, presumed to be the remains of a jacket, and the charred rim and wirework of a woman’s felt hat. Press versions of Abberline’s inquest testimony speak of the remnants of a skirt and the brim of a hat.22 What had been the purpose of this blaze? To destroy something? Abberline did not think so. He discovered but one piece of candle in the room and decided that the Ripper had been compelled to burn clothes in order to provide the light by which he mutilated his victim.
That same morning Doctors Phillips, Bond and Gordon Brown carried out a post-mortem examination at the mortuary. Press notices of their labours are brief and unreliable and leave the question as to whether any parts of the body were missing unresolved. Indeed, on the matter of missing organs, they performed a complete volte-face. The earliest reports of the autopsy insisted that after Phillips had ‘fitted’ the dismembered portions of Mary’s anatomy into their proper places all the organs had been fully accounted for. By the beginning of the following week, howe
ver, the same papers were confidently asserting the contrary. Thus, on 13 November, the Daily Telegraph: ‘We are enabled to state, on good authority, that notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, a portion of the bodily organs was missing.’23 To discerning members of the public the behaviour of the medicos would have proved a better guide. For on Saturday afternoon, only hours after the post-mortem had been terminated, Phillips and Dr Roderick Macdonald, the district coroner, went to the scene of the crime and, having sifted the ashes from the grate through a sieve, proceeded to inspect the residue for traces of burnt human remains. Obviously Mary’s corpse had not been restored complete.
In providing us with our first accurate account of the autopsy findings, Dr Thomas Bond’s newly discovered post-mortem notes finally settle this long standing controversy.24 They make harrowing reading. But they are an important part of the record.
Mary’s throat had been cut with such ferocity that the tissues had been severed right down to the spinal column and the fifth and sixth vertebrae had been deeply notched by the knife. The air passage had been cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage.
There were terrible mutilations to the face: ‘The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows & ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched & cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.’
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 42