Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  Not knowing whether she was dead or alive, and worried they were going to be late for work, they made sure her skirts were pulled back down to preserve her modesty and made their way west in the direction of Baker’s Row with the intention of alerting the first policeman they found. Charles Cross and Robert Paul walked out of Buck’s Row and into the history books, for they had unwittingly discovered the body of Mary Ann Nichols, commonly known as ‘Polly’, who is widely regarded today as the first victim of Jack the Ripper.

  She was born Mary Ann Walker in Fetter Lane, near Fleet Street, in the City of London, in 1845. In 1864 she married a printer, William Nichols, at St Bride’s Church. Together they had five children, but the marriage was troubled and in 1880 Mary Ann and William separated for the final time: they had lived apart on five or six previous occasions. He claimed it was due to her drinking, but Mary Ann’s father said that William had an affair with the young midwife who attended Mary Ann through the birth of her last child.

  Whatever the reason, Mary Ann was left to her own devices while her husband and other close family members looked after the children. William paid her a weekly allowance of five shillings for her subsistence, but after hearing that she had begun earning a living through prostitution around 1882, he stopped the payments. Mary Ann spent the rest of her life in various workhouses and infirmaries – where the ‘charitable’ regime was brutal, and inmates slept in rat-infested wards and spent the days in cruel manual labour – and in dosshouses, whenever she could afford a bed. She was arrested for vagrancy in Trafalgar Square in 1887, sleeping rough, and went back to the workhouse. In May 1888 things seemed to look up when she spent a brief time in the service of a wealthy family in Wandsworth, but the job ended disastrously when she left unannounced, taking some valuable clothes with her. The couple who employed her were teetotal, and she was an alcoholic: her own father testified at her inquest that she was ‘a dissolute character and drunkard whom he knew would come to a bad end’.

  Eventually, in the summer of 1888, Mary Ann found her way to the lodging houses of Spitalfields, at first sharing a bed with another prostitute in a dosshouse in Thrawl Street, then moving on to nearby Flower and Dean Street, to a notorious dosshouse called The White House where women were allowed to share beds with men, and then back again to Wilmott’s in Thrawl Street, where she was staying on the last day of her life. She was forty-two years old, 5 foot 2 inches tall, with greying brown hair and a number of teeth missing from her upper and lower jaws.

  At 11 p.m. on the night of 30 August 1888, a Thursday, she was seen strolling down the Whitechapel Road on her own; at 12.30 a.m. the following morning (31 August), she was seen leaving the Frying Pan public house, at the corner of Thrawl Street and Brick Lane (it’s now a restaurant and small hotel). By approximately 1.30 a.m. she had returned to the kitchen of the dosshouse in Thrawl Street somewhat the worse for drink. Unable to produce four pence for her bed, she was asked to leave, but she confidently told the warden to keep her regular bed for her, as she would soon get her doss money because she was wearing a ‘jolly bonnet’. She had on a little black hat that none of the other women there had seen before.

  Just under an hour later, she was seen by a friend from the lodging house, Emily Holland, at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road; Holland later said that Mary Ann was ‘very drunk and staggered against the wall’, and that she claimed to have had the money for her bed three times already that day, but had spent it all on drink. Emily tried to persuade her to return to the dosshouse, where they could share a bed, but Mary Ann was confident that one more client would give her the money she needed, and said, ‘It won’t be long before I’m back.’ The couple chatted for several minutes, and Emily remembered the church clock striking 2.30 a.m. before they parted. Mary Ann walked unsteadily eastward along Whitechapel Road. This was the last record of her being seen alive. The route to her death took her from close to the place where Emma Smith was attacked, past the famous Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which started in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and where the Liberty Bell and Big Ben were both cast, for at least half a mile to Buck’s Row, the dingy alley where her body was found.

  After discovering Mary Ann’s body the two carmen, Cross and Paul found PC Jonas Mizen at the corner of Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row and told him about the murder. In the meantime, probably moments after the two carmen had left the scene, PC John Neil was walking along Buck’s Row in the direction of Brady Street and he too noticed the body, which had not been there thirty minutes earlier when his beat last took him along the street. He went to investigate, but he could not possibly have prepared himself for what he discovered.

  Mary Ann was lying on her back, her head was facing in an easterly direction, and her left hand was near to the stable yard gate. Her eyes were ‘wide open and staring’, which means she may have died with her killer’s face, or at least the outline of his shape, in her sight – a last, terrible vision. Her open hands were palm upwards and her legs were laid out and slightly apart. With the benefit of his policeman’s lamp, PC Neil could see that blood was oozing from a gash in the woman’s throat. He signalled by flashing his lantern to PC John Thain, a fellow constable he heard passing the end of Buck’s Row in the distance, and told him to fetch Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn who lived nearby at 152 Whitechapel Road.

  Having left Charles Cross and Robert Paul, who continued on their way to work, PC Mizen arrived at Buck’s Row and was immediately told to fetch the ambulance. Dr Llewellyn quickly arrived at the scene and pronounced Mary Ann dead. Under his orders, her body was taken by ambulance to the mortuary in Old Montague Street for proper inspection and that’s when more injuries that had been concealed by her clothing were discovered.

  The throat had actually been cut twice, one incision going as deep as the spine. The abdomen had a long, jagged cut which ran from the centre of the bottom of the ribs down to the groin, and there were a number of other cuts and stabs to the lower abdomen. There were two small deep stab wounds to the vagina. There were also two bruises that were noticeable, one on the right lower jaw and the other on the left cheek, like the impression of a thumb print. Dr Llewellyn made the assumption that the murder was carried out by a left-handed person due to the perceived direction of the cut to the throat, but later expressed doubt about this.

  Mary Ann’s body was soon identified after the words ‘Lambeth Workhouse’ were found stencilled inside her petticoats. Inquiries at the workhouse brought forward a number of people who could put a name to the murdered woman and eventually William Nichols confirmed the identity of his dead wife. An inquest was convened, observed on behalf of the Metropolitan police by Inspector Joseph Helson, divisional inspector of J Division (Bethnal Green) within whose jurisdiction the body was found. On the second day of the inquest, Helson was joined by a new figure in the story, Inspector Frederick Abberline.

  Abberline, who has since become famous for his role in the Ripper case, was brought in because of his great knowledge of the East End. He’d been Inspector of H Division (Stepney) for fourteen years, from 1873 until 1887, when he was transferred to the Commissioner’s Office at Scotland Yard, which basically removed him from field-work. He was described as ‘portly and gentle speaking’, the type of policeman who could easily be mistaken for a bank manager or solicitor. He was very highly regarded, and when somebody with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Whitechapel and the goings-on there was required, Abberline was sent back to his old haunts. Now, he would be in charge of the individual investigations into the murders of the women who would soon be known as the victims of one man.

  The day after the murder, 1 September 1888, was also the first day in office for the new Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Dr Robert Anderson. Unfortunately, Anderson, upon starting his new job, immediately left Britain on extended sick leave: it meant that the man who, as head of the CID, would be responsible for overseeing the Whitechapel murder cases was not present as events unfolded through the coming weeks,
but he would eventually be privy to all the reports and details of the investigations.

  The inquest and press interviews with local residents revealed more about the night of the murder. Mrs Emma Green was a widow who lived at New Cottage with her three children, and even though they lived right next to the murder site, and their bedroom windows were almost directly above where the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found, none of the family were woken in the night by any noise outside. Just opposite was Essex Wharf where Walter Purkiss, the caretaker, was with his wife in the first-floor front bedroom. Again, neither heard any noises from Buck’s Row, even though Mrs Purkiss was awake much of the night and was at one point pacing up and down the room suffering with insomnia. The only resident of the street who may have heard anything significant was Harriet Lilley of 7 Buck’s Row who had heard a ‘painful moan’, followed a little later by whispering, which may have been the exchange between the two carmen, Cross and Paul.

  All this amounted to very little useful evidence, with potential witnesses generally describing what they did not, rather than what they did, hear. The murder remained a mystery, generating the usual inquest verdict of ‘murder against person or persons unknown’. The cause of death was attributed on the death certificate to ‘loss of blood from wounds to the neck and abdomen inflicted by some sharp instrument’. But Mary Ann may well have been strangled to the point of unconsciousness, if not death, before she was stabbed: this would explain the lack of noise from her and her bruises. It was clear from the medical evidence of where the blood pooled that she was lying down when her body was slashed.

  Mary Ann has earned her place in the annals of crime because she is acknowledged as the first victim of the Ripper, but perhaps a kinder, fairer epitaph would be the comment made at her inquest: that she was very well liked by people she knew, and even her father, who despaired of her drinking, said she had no enemies. It is sometimes hard to remember the victims as human beings, with personalities, friends and relatives, when their lives are subsumed into the greater quest for an answer to this huge mystery. But if they had died like so many women of their class, in the workhouse, their sad lives would be completely forgotten. As it is, because they are Ripper victims, they have achieved a strange immortality.

  After Mary Ann’s death, links were made between her murder and those of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. The idea that criminal gangs were responsible for these terrible crimes was diminishing. Even though the police were still looking into the movements of such gangs, the press had other ideas; the Star, a popular radical evening newspaper which would later report extensively and sensationally about the Whitechapel murders, claimed quite confidently that this latest murder was ‘the third crime of a man who must be a maniac’.

  Once again, no culprit was found, but attention began to veer towards the eastern European Jewish immigrants. Not only were they the scapegoat for many of Whitechapel’s social problems, they also now became a scapegoat for the murders. Amid this growing suspicion and friction, rumours began to circulate about a Jewish slipper-maker with a reputation for ill-using prostitutes. Known only as ‘Leather Apron’, because he was supposedly often seen wearing such a garment, his profile began to grow as tale after tale of his sinister behaviour reached the press. The more sensational newspapers, in their turn, began to build him up as something to be feared, a ‘noiseless midnight terror’ who lurked in the shadows and from whom no woman was safe. Despite the stories, ‘Leather Apron’ could not be traced.

  But fear was beginning to grip the whole area, and when, only nine days later, another body of an unfortunate was found, again with her corpse brutalized, the public, the press and the police all began to speculate about a madman killer on the loose.

  It was about 6 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, 8 September 1888, when John Davis, one of seventeen residents of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, went down the stairs of the house and opened the back door leading to the yard. He noticed that the front door of the house, which led directly to the passageway that went to the yard door, was open, but this was nothing unusual. Nor was it unusual to find drunks sleeping it off in the passageway. He was about to leave for work and was probably going to use the outdoor privy before setting off. As the back door swung open, he was shocked to see the mutilated body of a woman lying at the bottom of the stone steps leading to the back yard. She was lying beside the fence that separated the yards of numbers 27 and 29, with her head almost touching the steps. Her skirts had been pulled right up, revealing a horrendous gash to the abdomen. On one shoulder were pieces of flesh from the belly and over her other shoulder was a pile of intestines. Around her neck was a deep jagged wound that almost severed her head from her body. This latest victim of the Whitechapel horrors was forty-seven-year-old Annie Chapman, known to some as ‘Dark Annie’, because of her dark hair, or ‘Annie Sivvey’.

  Annie Chapman was born Annie Eliza Smith in Paddington, London, in 1841. Like the three women who were murdered before her that year (and many of the unfortunates) she had a family – and yet she ended up in the squalid district of Spitalfields where she would ultimately meet her end. Again, like the others, alcohol was a major factor in her descent to the very bottom of the social pile.

  Annie married John Chapman, a coachman, in 1869. There is a studio photograph of them, probably at the time of the wedding, looking every inch the respectable, attractive young couple. They had three children, two daughters and a son, who was born a cripple. The elder daughter tragically died from meningitis aged twelve. Owing to John’s work, they were provided with simple accommodation by his employers and lived in many affluent parts of west London, as well as Clewer in Windsor; it was while they were here that Annie left the family in around 1885 as a result of her heavy drinking and the behaviour that resulted from it.

  It is possible that John was a heavy drinker too, because the ten shillings he paid Annie weekly following their separation stopped when he died of cirrhosis of the liver and dropsy on Christmas Day, 1886. The two surviving children, the boy living in an institution called The Cripples’ Home, and a girl who had been well educated (possibly at the expense of John’s employer) and was living in France, wanted nothing to do with their mother.

  Back in London, Annie was living with a sieve-maker named John Sivvey, a nickname from his trade, but he left her soon after her husband’s death, perhaps because the money dried up. According to one friend, Annie appeared to be very affected by John’s death, and ‘seemed to have given away all together’.

  By the spring of 1888, Annie had begun living at a dosshouse in Dorset Street, Spitalfields, known as Crossingham’s, run by a keeper called Tim Donovan. She began a relationship of sorts with a man called Edward Stanley, a bricklayer’s mate known as ‘The Pensioner’, and they often spent weekends together at Crossingham’s, their bed paid for by Stanley. He also sometimes paid for her bed there during the week, but told Donovan to kick her out if she ever came back with another man.

  Like most of the other unfortunates, Annie tried to make an honest living selling crochet work and flowers, but it rarely paid enough to keep her, and the pub had the first call on any money she made. In the summer of 1888, she bumped into her younger brother, Fountain Smith, and asked for money, but he had given her loans before and now cut her off.

  At some time in the first days of September, Annie got into a fight with fellow lodger Eliza Cooper; some accounts say it was over the attentions of Edward Stanley, others say it was over a bar of soap, and the place where the fight took place was variously given as in Crossingham’s itself or the Britannia pub at the corner of Dorset Street and Commercial Street. Whatever the case, Annie received several bruises to the chest and a black eye. Her health had been poor all year, and she had been in and out of the infirmary; the injuries would not have made her feel any better. She was clearly unwell when she met a friend, Amelia Palmer, near Christ Church on the evening of 7 September, the night leading up to her death. Annie complained of feeling ill and said sh
e had been to the infirmary where they had given her some pills and a bottle of medicine; she appeared world-weary, but knew what she had to do, saying, ‘It’s no good my giving way. I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings’. Amelia Palmer gave her the money for a cup of tea, making her promise not to spend it on rum.

  Later that evening, Annie was seen in the kitchen at Crossingham’s by several people. Some witnesses saw her take out the box of pills which promptly broke and she had to use a scrap of envelope to keep them in. At about 1.35 a.m., the lodging keeper, Donovan, approached Annie for her bed money, but she had nothing to give.

  ‘Don’t let the bed, I will be back soon,’ she told him.

  ‘You can find money for drink, but not for your bed,’ Donovan reproved her.

  He watched as she walked up Little Paternoster Row in the direction of Brushfield Street and Spitalfields Market. Annie would never return. The last person to speak to her was the nightwatchman, and she told him she would not be long, and to make sure ‘Tim [Donovan] keeps my bed for me.’

  For the next three-and-a-half hours, there is no information about Annie. It was cold for the time of year, and the streets were wet with rain, an unpleasant night to be out, especially for someone who was clearly unwell. At 5.30 a.m. a woman was seen talking to a man on the street just a few yards from 29 Hanbury Street, where the body was found, and the witness, Elizabeth Long, was certain the woman was Annie, although she did not know her. She later testified that the couple were talking loudly but seemed to be getting on, and she heard the man ask ‘Will you?’ and the woman reply ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Long described the man as of ‘shabby-genteel’ appearance and said he looked like a ‘foreigner’, a word that was used in the East End as a euphemism for Jewish. She estimated his age as forty, and said he was wearing a dark overcoat and a deerstalker hat. But he had his back to her, so she got no look at his face.