The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  ‘So you went off to find a quiet spot with your soldier while Tabram did the same with the other one? Is that right?’ Inspector Reid asked her.

  ‘I already told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m just confirming what you said. Do you think you would recognize either of these soldiers again?’

  Connelly shrugged.

  ‘Don’t know that, do I? Might be able to, I s’pose.’

  Inspector Reid was hopeful that ‘Pearly Poll’ would be his key witness, the person who would help him solve the case quickly. If she could identify either of the two soldiers who she and Tabram had been with that night, that might be all the evidence he would need to secure a conviction.

  Unfortunately, his early optimism would prove to be almost entirely misplaced.

  Friday, 10 August 1888

  4 Whitehall Place, London

  ‘It’s been almost a week since that brutal murder, Reid, and as far as I can see we know virtually nothing more about this killer and his motive than we did when the body was found. Is that a fair assessment of the situation?’

  The commissioner was annoyed, and when Charles Warren was annoyed he never made any secret of it.

  Inspector Edmund Reid, standing haplessly to attention in front of Warren’s desk, could only nod.

  ‘I thought you told me that the Connelly woman would be able to identify the man that Tabram went off with that night?’

  Reid nodded again.

  ‘That was my understanding, sir, but when it came to it she either couldn’t or wouldn’t do so. I had her taken to the Tower of London and to Wellington Barracks, and she viewed two identity parades of soldiers from the Grenadier Guards that I had organized especially for her. She saw nobody that she recognized at the Tower, but at Wellington Barracks she picked out two men who she said she was certain were the soldiers she and Martha Tabram had entertained that night.’

  ‘There you are then. Presumably you arrested these two men?’

  Reid shook his head.

  ‘Obviously we questioned them both, and the first thing we checked was where they were on the night of the sixth, when the murder took place. Both of them turned out to have completely solid and unbreakable alibis, supported by several reputable people, so quite clearly she was mistaken. Either that or she was just being deliberately mischievous.’

  Warren nodded.

  ‘Do you think she was trying to mislead you? Are you even sure that she was speaking the truth when she identified the body as this Martha Tabram?’

  ‘That is one thing about which we’re quite certain, sir. The dead woman was definitely Martha Tabram, and we’ve had that confirmed by her estranged husband, a man named Henry Samuel Tabram who lives in East Greenwich. As far as Connelly is concerned, I think she rather regretted coming forward to the police in the first place, because ever since she made her initial statement she’s become extremely unhelpful and evasive. In fact, she vanished from sight shortly afterwards, and we later discovered that she’d gone into hiding, and had moved in with one of her cousins who lives in a house in Fuller’s Court, off Drury Lane.’

  ‘Why do you think she did that?’

  Reid shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘She has no liking for authority, sir, because of her profession. Like Tabram, she earns most of her living from prostitution, and I think she’s keen to avoid coming too much to the attention of the police. She probably thought that she could just identify Tabram’s body and tell us what happened that night, and that would be the end of it. I don’t think she reckoned with identity parades and all the rest of it.’

  For a few moments, Warren stared down at the report on the desk in front of him, his eyes scanning the typewritten paragraphs. Then he looked again at Reid.

  ‘So you got nowhere with Connelly. Did you find any other witnesses? Anyone who saw or heard anything suspicious that night?’

  ‘That’s the peculiar thing about this case,’ Reid replied. ‘That poor woman was murdered and then mutilated on the inside landing of a building where dozens of other people were sleeping – or perhaps even awake, at that time in the morning, and getting ready to leave for work – and not one of them was aware that it was happening. Either some of the residents did hear something but chose not to get involved, or the killer was apparently able to carry out the murder in complete silence, which I find difficult to believe. And nobody outside the building saw anyone enter or leave it, either by themselves or with Tabram. The killer seems to be a ghost, or at least able to act like one. It was as if he popped up at the scene of the crime, carried out the murder and then vanished just as silently and invisibly as he had appeared.’

  Warren grunted with displeasure.

  ‘And what else have you done?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve just followed standard procedure, sir, because there’s nothing else we can do. My men have been out and questioned everybody in the area, concentrating on those residents nearest to the scene of the crime, obviously, and we’ve learned absolutely nothing. Nobody there, apart from one or two of the drinkers in the local public houses, seems to have known anything about Martha Tabram, and the few people who had seen her in the area only knew that she liked her gin and was probably a prostitute. But there are a couple of other points that I think I need to acquaint you with, sir.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This killing has shocked the residents of the East End, and especially Whitechapel. I had to station a constable by George Yard for a few days after the murder because of the crowds of sightseers who arrived there wanting to visit the scene. Some of them weren’t satisfied with just seeing the building, either. They were determined to find their way inside and get a look at the blood-stained stones where the woman’s body was discovered. I know Whitechapel is a pretty rough area, but we don’t have many killings there, and so this has been quite a shocking event.

  ‘And there’s been another unusual happening as well. This week a group of about seventy local men held a meeting in Whitechapel and apparently decided that they needed to supplement our efforts in the district. They’ve formed a thing called the St Jude’s Vigilance Committee. The idea is that about a dozen strong and fit men have been appointed to keep watch in certain streets in the area for two to three hours after eleven at night, looking out for anything suspicious. I’ve been told that the committee will be holding weekly meetings to discuss any activity reported by their watchers, which they will then convey to the police. Their idea is obviously to try to increase the safety of women on the streets of Whitechapel. I’m not keen on this kind of vigilante action, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

  Warren shook his head. His private fear was that if ‘Michael’ was apprehended in the act of committing another murder and then told his story in open court, Warren’s own career might be over, despite the lack of evidence of what he had done in Jerusalem. In fact, it would suit him very well if a group of unofficial Whitechapel vigilantes did interrupt a murder and kill the perpetrator, and he decided immediately to encourage that possibility.

  ‘I don’t think that having a number of extra pairs of eyes on the streets will do any harm, Reid. They could be a useful extra unofficial force in Whitechapel, just in case this murderer decides that one killing wasn’t enough.’

  ‘So you think he’ll strike again, sir?’ Reid asked.

  ‘I don’t know that, obviously,’ Warren replied sharply. ‘All I would say is that this murder appears to be completely without motive, as if the killer simply selected a victim at random and then slaughtered her. If that is the case, and Tabram wasn’t murdered because of something she had done, or hadn’t done, then there may well be more such horrific events to come.’

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Edmund Reid left the commissioner’s office and made his way down the stairs and out into the street. As he turned back towards Whitechapel, his thoughts were troubled. He hadn’t regarded the murder of Martha Tabram as anything other than an isolated and most un
usual event. The possibility that it could be the first of a series of such crimes had genuinely never even occurred to him.

  And he was particularly disturbed by the commissioner’s final comments. It was almost as if Charles Warren knew that there would be further murders. And that really made no sense.

  * * *

  In fact, Warren was already virtually certain that there would be more killings. He believed there would be a series of murders in the East End of London to demonstrate the incompetence of the police force and particularly that of the head of the organization, Warren himself. ‘Michael’ had clearly planned that the pressure would eventually build to such an extent that Warren would have no option but to hand over the menorah or resign in disgrace. The obvious, and in fact the only, way to prevent this from happening would be to catch the killer in the act, and ideally silence him permanently there and then.

  But that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, because ‘Michael’ had absolute freedom of choice and complete freedom of movement. He could select the date and time of his next killing, the place where he would perform the murder and, of course, the victim, who would be some unfortunate woman who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Warren could see no way of guarding against such an entirely random and essentially motiveless killing.

  Even flooding the streets of Whitechapel with every police officer he could deploy wouldn’t guarantee success, because the killer could simply wait until the operation was scaled down, or seize the opportunity presented by a distracted constable or some other circumstance. The reality was that he hadn’t got anything like enough officers to patrol every street in the East End of London for every night throughout the hours of darkness.

  But Charles Warren was pragmatic. His detectives had failed to find any clues to the identity of the killer of Martha Tabram, and there was obviously no way that the commissioner could suggest where they might look, simply because he didn’t know, so the best chance of success was to wait for ‘Michael’ to strike again, and hope that the next time he would be more careless in his actions, or might even be seen during the commission of the crime.

  Warren realized that this would inevitably mean the death of another prostitute in Whitehall, but he was prepared to trade the life of an ‘unfortunate’, or even the lives of several such women, to preserve his secret.

  When he reached home that evening, there was another hand-delivered letter waiting for him on the silver tray in the hall. He recognized the handwriting immediately, and took it upstairs to his study before he opened it.

  The message inside was short and cryptic: ‘Time for the apex. You’ll hear of my work very soon.’

  Or perhaps I won’t, Warren thought. If the killer struck in the latter half of the month, he and his family would be taking their annual leave in the south of France. At worst, Warren would return to the city to find that another killing had taken place in his absence, but at best the fact that the commissioner was away from England might possibly make ‘Michael’ stay his hand.

  Only time would tell.

  Friday, 31 August 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  A few minutes after 3.30 in the morning, a cart driver named Charles Cross, who lived at Bethnal Green, was walking through Whitechapel on his way to work at Pickford’s. The sun was still well below the horizon and the streets were dark and badly lit, but Cross was treading a familiar path, a journey which he made virtually every day.

  His route took him along Buck’s Row, which ran roughly parallel to Whitechapel Road, and was very busy during the day, being close to the London Hospital, Whitechapel train station, Spitalfields Coal Depot, and with numerous office buildings in the area, but at that time of the morning, it was completely deserted.

  Cross was whistling softly to himself as he walked, a popular tune of the day, but as he neared the entrance to Brown’s stable, the sound died on his lips. Something – or possibly someone – was lying in the narrow alcove by the stable door. He came to a halt a few feet away and stared down at the shape lying on the pavement.

  It was clearly the figure of a woman, lying unnaturally still and silent. For a few seconds, Cross didn’t know what to do, then he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, following the same route that he had taken on his way to work. He looked round and saw a man walking down the street towards him. He turned away from the woman and strode out to intercept him.

  ‘Come and look over here,’ Cross said. ‘There’s a woman lying on the pavement.’

  The new arrival was a man named Robert Paul also from Bethnal Green, who was another cart driver.

  ‘Sleepin’ it off, I s’pose,’ Paul suggested.

  But Cross shook his head. There was something about the unnatural stillness of the body of the woman, and her disarranged clothing, which to him implied that something much more serious had happened to her.

  The two men crossed to where the body lay on its back, the skirts pulled up to the woman’s stomach. Cross touched her hands, which felt cold and limp to him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I believe she’s dead.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Paul replied. ‘I mean, her hands and face is cold, but I reckon she’s still breathing.’

  Neither man had a torch or matches or any other form of illumination, and so neither of them could see the woman’s body clearly.

  ‘Well,’ Cross stated, ‘whatever’s happened to her, she needs a doctor, double quick. And look at her skirts,’ he added, ‘all rucked up like that.’

  For the sake of modesty, they pulled down her skirt to cover her abdomen and legs, and then left the scene as quickly as they could to find a policeman. Within a few minutes they spotted Police Constable 55H Jonas Mizen at the corner of Old Montague Street and Hanbury Street.

  ‘She looks to me to be either dead or drunk,’ Cross said, as Mizen listened to their report, ‘but for my part I think she’s dead.’

  Their duty done, both men left the area and hurried away towards their places of employment.

  Constable Mizen ran swiftly down Buck’s Row towards the scene of the reported crime, but in fact he was not the first to arrive.

  Following his usual patrol route, the beat officer for that part of Whitechapel, PC 97J John Neil, had already discovered the body just a few moments earlier. As he bent to examine the shape on the ground, he heard the sound of another police officer’s heavy footsteps and flashed his lantern to summon him. The new arrival was Constable 96J John Thain, who was patrolling past the end of Buck’s Row.

  ‘Here’s a woman has cut her throat,’ Neil said. ‘Run at once for Dr Llewellyn.’

  Thain left immediately, running down the Whitechapel Road to number 152, the home and surgery of Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn.

  Within a minute or so, Constable Mizen arrived beside the body as well, and Neil, who had taken charge of the scene because he was the first police officer to have arrived there, sent him away as well.

  ‘You’d better get over to the station at Bethnal Green,’ Neil instructed. ‘We’ll need an inspector here as quickly as possible, and an ambulance for the body.’

  There was clearly nothing that Constable Neil could do for the woman, who he was quite certain was dead, so while he waited for either the doctor or some other police officers to arrive, he carried out a quick check of the immediate area, searching for possible witnesses. He questioned Walter Purkis, the manager of nearby Essex Wharf, but neither he nor his wife had heard anything suspicious during the night.

  Shortly afterwards, Sergeant Kirby arrived on the scene, himself checked the body to confirm that the woman was beyond medical help, and then joined Neil in his search. Kirby questioned a woman named Green who was resident in New Cottage, the house right beside where the body had been discovered, but she hadn’t heard anything either. In the meantime, Neil checked the roadway, looking for the marks left by the wheels of carts, but found nothing, suggesting that the woman had probably died where she had been found.

&nb
sp; ‘So what do we have here, Constable?’ Dr Llewellyn asked, as he strode up to the entrance to the stable at a little after four in the morning.

  Constable Neil directed him straight to the body, and the doctor bent down to begin his examination.

  In the light from the bulls-eye lantern held by the police officer, Llewellyn immediately saw that massive injuries had been inflicted to the woman’s throat. As a rudimentary assessment of the time of death, he felt the temperature of her limbs. Her hands and wrists were cold, but her body and legs were still quite warm.

  ‘I think she’s probably been dead for no more than about half an hour,’ he told Constable Neil.

  Whitechapel was then beginning to come alive, and groups of spectators were starting to gather at the scene. Soon afterwards the police officers were joined by three horse slaughterers who had been working overnight in Barber’s slaughterhouse in nearby Winthrop Street.

  ‘Her throat’s been cut but there doesn’t seem to be much blood,’ Neil remarked, staring down at the corpse.

  ‘That’s quite correct,’ Llewellyn confirmed. ‘I see very little around the body, which is not what I would have expected, given the severity of the wounds to her neck. The arteries appear to have been sliced completely through.’

  Llewellyn stepped back from the body and glanced around at the police officers and the growing crowd of sightseers.

  ‘Move her to the mortuary,’ he instructed, his irritation obvious. ‘She’s dead, so there’s nothing more I can do here. I will make a further examination of her there.’

  With the better light afforded by the sunrise, it soon became clear that quite a lot of blood had soaked into both her clothes and her hair, and when the body was lifted off the ground to be placed in the coffin, a considerable amount of congealed blood was exposed underneath it.

  There was a delay getting access to the mortuary in Old Montague Road, and it wasn’t until after five in the morning when the keeper, Robert Mann, eventually appeared with the keys to open up the building.