‘She was a prostitute then?’ Warren asked.
‘That’s what Reid believes, yes. Her body was found on one of the landings of the building, not inside a room, which suggests that she was probably not a resident there. But what is particularly alarming about this case is that the woman died as a result of a frenzied attack with a knife. We won’t know all the details until the post-mortem is carried out, but Reid said that it looked as if she’d been stabbed as many as forty or fifty times.’
For the first time since Abberline had entered his office, Charles Warren looked shocked.
‘The work of a lunatic?’ he asked.
‘We have no idea at this stage, sir, but it certainly looks like the killer was either a madman or somebody in the grip of an incredibly strong emotion. If she wasn’t a prostitute but a respectable woman, I suppose it is just possible that the murderer could have been her husband, slaughtering his wife in a frenzy of anger for some slight. But at the moment Reid doesn’t think that was what happened. Obviously we won’t know for certain until we can identify the body.’
Warren nodded.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Find out who she was as quickly as you can, and then catch this maniac. Keep me informed.’
Without another word, the commissioner turned his attention back to the reports on his desk.
* * *
When Charles Warren returned from work at 4 Whitehall Place that evening, he found a hand-delivered letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He didn’t recognize the handwriting at first, and the short message on the single sheet of paper inside the envelope meant nothing to him.
It was only when he took it up to his study and compared the handwriting with that on the note that the stranger had left for him that he realized they had almost certainly been written by the same person. The man who’d confronted him in his home was the murderer of this poor woman. The appalling realization hit Warren hard, though he knew there was nothing he could do about it. And the meaning of the message he had been sent was obscure in the extreme.
The text read: ‘Remember the symbol. George Yard. The first of six and the first point of the first triangle. The apex is next.’
Warren studied the note and the envelope for several minutes, trying to decide what it meant, and what the killer was trying to convey, but no matter how he tried, it simply didn’t make sense. Finally he locked it away in the same drawer as the original note and went into his chamber to dress for dinner.
* * *
‘You seem a little distracted tonight, Charles,’ his wife murmured, as she replaced her soup spoon in the bowl. Preparing a consommé was not one of their cook’s greatest talents, but this evening she seemed to have done quite a good job.
Fanny Margaretta Haydon had married Charles Warren twenty-four years earlier, and knew him and his moods better than anyone else. She knew that he was unhappy in his work, because of the circumstances. He was used to the ordered and disciplined life of the army, and the haphazard – and above all civilian – organization of the Metropolitan Police was a constant source of irritation to him, not to mention the frequent arguments he had with the Home Secretary.
But he rarely brought these frustrations home with him, and tried as far as he could to keep the battles he had to fight in his office away from his wife and children. But this evening, Fanny could see very clearly that there was something gnawing away at her husband.
Warren smiled slightly from the opposite end of the long table where they habitually dined together.
‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he replied. ‘I’ve had a very trying day, I’m afraid, and I’ve got rather a lot to think about at the moment.’
Fanny looked at him with mild concern.
‘Would it help if we talked about it?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes you’ve found that helps to clarify your problems.’
Warren shook his head.
‘Thank you for making the offer, Fanny,’ he replied, ‘but it’s not that kind of a problem.’ He paused for a moment, then shrugged and continued. ‘There was a particularly vicious murder of a woman in London last night, and the worry is that there may be a maniac on the loose.’
Fanny’s hands flew involuntarily to her face in shock as he said this, but she quickly regained her composure.
‘A maniac? Whereabouts – I mean, where was this poor woman killed?’
‘Nowhere near here,’ Warren reassured her. ‘She was murdered in Whitechapel. And she appears to have been a person of no consequence, just an unfortunate, perhaps killed by an angry client.’
Fanny Warren nodded, somewhat reassured by this piece of news, but her face still pale and drawn.
‘But still,’ she murmured softly, ‘that poor woman.’
* * *
In his study later that evening, Warren took out both notes again and puzzled over them for some time, wondering what he should do for the best. He and his family would shortly be leaving London for his annual leave, which they would this year be spending in the south of France, and for a few minutes he wondered if he needed to cancel or modify those arrangements. But then he shook his head.
The killing of some woman, most probably a prostitute, in London wasn’t, in his opinion, anything like sufficient justification for him to change his plans, and would only result in questions being asked about the reason, questions which he would be completely unable to answer.
There had been an unmistakable air of menace about his unidentified caller, though Warren had never expected the man’s veiled threats to be manifested in such a violent and dramatic way. Perhaps he should have obeyed his first instinct, simply shot ‘Michael’ dead in his drawing room and faced the consequences. He could easily have concocted a story about being attacked in his home by a deranged foreigner, and he knew Ryan would have backed him to the hilt.
But it was too late for that now, and the commissioner guessed that, having committed this brutal murder, ‘Michael’ would keep well out of sight. But, perhaps, the very fact that Warren had left the capital might stop whatever action the man had planned next. After all, while he and his family were enjoying the sun and taking the waters in Provence, they could have no idea what the foreign killer was up to in London, and it was at least possible that the man might do nothing more during his absence. Because the real purpose of the murder, he was certain, was to apply pressure on him, to make his position as the commissioner untenable, and to force him to surrender the menorah, and that Warren wouldn’t do.
No, to continue with his leave exactly as he’d planned it was probably the best decision in the circumstances.
Thursday, 9 August 1888
Whitechapel, London
From the start, it had been clear to Inspector Edmund Reid that the case would be difficult to solve, because the murderer had left no convenient clues to his identity, and at that stage he didn’t even know the identity of the victim, knowledge which might conceivably provide a motive, and which might in turn generate a list of possible suspects.
‘You mean nobody knows who she was?’ Reid asked.
Constable Barrett shook his head.
‘We’ve spoken – that’s me and the other constables – to every tenant in that building and none of them have ever seen her before. Or at least, that’s what they told us.’
‘Do you think any of them weren’t telling the truth?’
Barrett shook his head again.
‘Not really, sir. It’s the kind of building where people come and go all the time, and if this woman was an unfortunate she might well have used the premises in the past as a nice quiet spot to take her clients. But if she did, she’d have taken care to keep out of sight, and so it’s quite possible that none of the residents would have ever seen her before.’
‘You’re probably right, Barrett, but that does leave us with a bit of a problem, because she wasn’t carrying anything on her person that we could use to identify her. I suppose we’ll just have to start looking further afield, try and find out if any
body’s missing. And you told me that nobody heard anything either?’
‘None of the people we interviewed heard a sound that night, sir. I find that difficult to believe, and I’m wondering if maybe one or two of them did hear a scream or a bit of a struggle, and decided not to get involved. But whatever the truth of that, none of the residents will admit to it.’
Reid muttered in irritation.
‘And I’m sorry about the identity parades as well, sir,’ Barrett added. ‘I really thought they might have done the trick.’
‘Well, if you couldn’t identify him, you couldn’t, and that’s the end of it.’
In the absence of other ideas, one of the first things Inspector Reid had done that week was to arrange two identity parades.
Earlier on the Monday evening, before the murder had taken place and whilst patrolling his beat, PC Barrett had observed a uniformed soldier – he had been almost certain that the man was a private in the Grenadier Guards – loitering in the vicinity of the George Yard Buildings and had briefly questioned him. As result of this, later that day and on the following day, 8 August, Barrett had been sent to the Tower of London to attempt to identify the soldier he had seen, but had been unable to do so.
So two days after the murder had taken place, the police still had no idea who the dead woman was, far less why she had been slaughtered. And, of course, absolutely no idea of the identity of her killer. The investigation seemed to have come to a grinding halt almost before it had even begun, and Inspector Reid was not in the best of tempers when he attended the inquest on the afternoon of 9 August.
This was held in the Library of the Working Lads’ Institute on Whitechapel Road, and was conducted by the Deputy Coroner, George Collier, because the Coroner for the South Eastern District of Middlesex, Wynne Baxter, was on holiday in Scandinavia.
Alfred George Crow described seeing the shape of a woman lying on the landing, a woman he had assumed was sleeping, and John Saunders Reeves and PC Barrett explained the circumstances of the finding of the body and raising the alarm. The constable graphically described what he had seen on the stone landing, and particularly the position of the woman’s limbs and the conclusion which he had drawn from that.
‘My impression was that she had been engaged in sexual activity when the murder took place,’ Constable Barrett said.
‘And what evidence do you have for making that statement?’ Collier asked.
‘Her clothes were all pulled up, her skirts drawn up above her waist, and she was lying on her back with her legs wide apart. All of her private areas were exposed.’
Collier made a note, and then called for the medical evidence to be given.
Dr Killeen’s evidence shocked the inquest into silence.
‘Her injuries,’ Killeen said, when he stood up to describe what he had observed, ‘were simply appalling. I counted a total of thirty-nine stab wounds, mainly to her body but also to her neck.’
‘Can you be more specific, doctor? Exactly where were these wounds?’
‘Of course. She had been stabbed nine times in the throat and seven times in her lungs. She received two wounds to the right lung and five to the left. Her killer inflicted six stab wounds to her stomach, and five to her liver. Two of the blows penetrated her spleen, but only one cut into her heart. It was clearly a frenzied and extremely brutal attack.’
‘Clearly,’ the coroner echoed. ‘And presumably several of these wounds could have been fatal. Could you determine which was the specific blow that killed her?’
Killeen shook his head.
‘The stab wound to the heart would certainly have killed her within seconds, and the injuries to her lungs would have caused her death, though not quite as quickly. Several of her other injuries would have proved fatal without immediate medical treatment, and might possibly have still resulted in her death even if such treatment had been available. But in fact I am perfectly certain that none of these blows killed her.’
Collier paused in the act of writing a note and looked across at Killeen.
‘I’m sorry, doctor? What do you mean by that?’
‘When I examined the face of the dead woman, I found clear evidence of recent bruising, suggesting that some object had been placed firmly over her nose and mouth. This would imply that she was suffocated before the stabbing took place.’
‘So you mean that all these other injuries were inflicted after her death?’ the coroner asked.
‘That is my conclusion, sir, yes. At the very least, I believe that she was certainly unconscious, but most probably dead, before the attack took place. I would have expected there to have been more blood at the scene if she had been stabbed while her heart was still functioning normally. And my contention is supported by the absence of any defensive wounds on the body. If she had been attacked by a man wielding a knife, I would have expected that she would have suffered injuries to her arms and hands as she tried to protect herself from him. But I found no such evidence, and the position of her body on the stone landing gave the impression of having been quietly laid down. There were no signs of a struggle having taken place.’
The coroner looked down at the notes he had made.
‘In his evidence, Constable Barrett stated that he believed the dead woman had probably been murdered whilst participating in a sexual act. Did you find any evidence to support this conclusion?’
Killeen shook his head.
‘I agree that the gross position of the body and the disarranged clothing suggested this, but from a medical point of view I found no signs that this had been the case. The woman had taken part in a connection earlier that day but not, as far as I could tell, immediately before her death.’
‘So her killer was presumably not motivated by some kind of sexual impulse?’
‘That, sir, I cannot say. I can only give as my opinion that this woman was not murdered during an act of connection, despite the appearance of the body when it was found.’
George Collier nodded, and thought for a few moments before continuing.
‘So perhaps it is possible that the woman believed that an act of intimacy was about to take place,’ he asked, ‘and willingly took up the position in which she was found, but was then suffocated by her companion before being mutilated?’
‘That is outside my area of competence, sir. I can only provide information of a strictly medical nature. But the sequence of events you have suggested is certainly possible.’
‘Thank you, doctor. Are there any other matters which are relevant in this case?’
‘There is one very curious feature which I noticed,’ Killeen said. ‘I have already explained about the various penetrating stab wounds which the victim suffered, but I feel I should also point out that these injuries were caused by two different weapons. The majority of the wounds were inflicted by a knife with a short and narrow but sharp blade, perhaps even a large penknife or claspknife. But the gravest injury on the body was caused by a much bigger and heavier weapon, something like a dagger or even a bayonet.’
The coroner stared at him for a moment before replying.
‘Two weapons?’ he asked. ‘Are you suggesting that this woman might have been murdered by a gang, or at least by two people working together?’
Again Dr Killeen could not be certain.
‘I can only say, sir, that I’m certain that two different weapons were employed in this attack. I cannot be sure that they were wielded by two different hands.’
When Inspector Reid gave evidence, the coroner was surprised to learn that the woman was still unidentified.
‘So you still have no idea of the identity of this woman, Inspector?’ Collier asked him.
‘No, sir, I’m afraid we haven’t,’ Reid replied. ‘She was not a tenant of the George Yard Buildings, and none of the residents there had ever seen her before, so we have to assume that she entered the building to seek shelter or for some other reason. She apparently had no business being where she was found.’
‘C
an you suggest what other reason she could have had for being there, Inspector?’
‘We have to consider the possibility that she was an unfortunate, sir, in which case she might have been using the building for a tryst with a client, but at present we don’t know if this was in fact the case.’
‘And nobody in the building or anywhere else has recognized her face?’ the coroner persisted.
Reid allowed himself a slight smile as he replied.
‘In fact, sir, three women have positively identified the victim, but unfortunately they have all suggested entirely different names for her. I am confident that we will learn her identity shortly, probably through the press reports of the murder, but at this stage we still do not know who she was or what she was doing in the George Yard Buildings.’
In fact, one of the three women who had contacted the police had correctly recognized the dead woman as ‘Martha Turner’, the other name by which Tabram was known, but because of the conflicting testimony of the other two women, the police were still uncertain on this point.
At the conclusion of the inquest, the jury, entirely unsurprisingly, concluded that the unidentified woman had been murdered by a person or persons unknown.
Later that day, Inspector Reid had something of a stroke of luck. Another person came forward to the police who was not only able to supply the name of the victim, but could also clarify the sequence of events which had taken place that night.
That afternoon, Mary Ann Connelly – Pearly Poll – the prostitute who had been with Martha Tabram on the evening of 6 August, walked into the Commercial Street police station. She was taken to the mortuary where she immediately identified the body as that of her friend Martha Tabram, and provided a description of what the two women had been doing on the night of the killing.
The Ripper Secret Page 13