The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  It was the first positive step in the identification process: a man who might well have known the dead woman. He was taken to the City Mortuary that day, and immediately identified the body. The following morning, 3 October, he assisted detectives in locating Mrs Eliza Gold, Kate’s sister, who also immediately confirmed the identification of the dead woman, naming her as Catharine or Kate Eddowes.

  At the inquest into her death, held on 4 October at the City Mortuary in Golden Lane, it was the medical evidence which was the most sensational, as it had been with the previous killing of Annie Chapman.

  Dr Brown took the stand and began describing what he had discovered during the post-mortem examination, findings which simply substantiated and elaborated upon his original medical report, which he first read out to the inquest jury, and which summarized the sight which had greeted PC Watkins that night.

  ‘The body was found on its back,’ Brown stated, reading from his report, ‘the head turned to left shoulder; the arms by the side 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 torn up above the abdomen; the thighs were naked; left leg extended in 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 two 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.’

  ‘Very well, doctor. Now could you please describe the full extent of the mutilations which were inflicted on the body.’

  Brown referred to his notes before he replied, and then provided a brief list of the major injuries he had discovered, and his reply also confirmed another rumour which had already begun circulating: a suggestion that yet again the killer had removed some parts of his victim’s body as grisly souvenirs.

  ‘The abdomen had been sliced open using an upwards cut,’ he said, ‘a cut which ran from the groin to the breast. The liver had been stabbed and cut several times. The groin showed evidence of both cuts and stabs. A large part of the intestines had been cut away from the body and about two feet of the colon had been separated entirely. The left kidney and a part of the womb had been sliced off and removed. The entire womb had not been extracted, and a stump about three quarters of an inch in length remained, but the kidney had been entirely detached and removed. I should add that this procedure required a good deal of knowledge as to its position, because it is apt to be overlooked, being covered by a membrane. It had been carefully taken out and removed, and the murderer clearly possessed both a knowledge of the location of the organs which overlaid it and the way of removing them.’

  This bombshell, and Brown’s cold and clinical description of the mutilations inflicted on the woman, silenced the court for a few moments.

  ‘I should also add,’ he went on, ‘that these were not the only injuries. The woman’s face had also been targeted by her killer. He cut a line into each of her eyelids and carved two inverted ‘V’ shapes into her cheeks. He inflicted a large cut below her mouth and across the bridge of her nose, and he also removed the tip of her nose and the lobe of her right ear.’

  He then moved on to more specific details about the manner of the woman’s death.

  ‘The absence of blood at the scene was, in my opinion, because the victim had first been asphyxiated. This means that her heart would already have stopped beating before the knife was used to cut her throat and perform the post-mortem mutilations on her body. Because she was already dead, there would have been little blood flow from the severed veins and arteries.’

  Inevitably, in view of what Brown had described about the mutilations to the body, the coroner asked the same predictable question.

  ‘You’ve told us that the individual who carried out these mutilations possessed a high degree of surgical skill. Could he in fact have been a doctor, for example?’

  Dr Brown chose his words with some care when he replied, keenly aware of how inflammatory the suggestion was.

  ‘I cannot answer that with any degree of certainty, sir. What I can say is that the murderer must have possessed both some surgical skill and a fair degree of anatomical knowledge. I am basing this conclusion upon the way in which the woman’s left kidney had been removed. It required a great deal of knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed.’

  ‘Knowledge that a doctor would obviously possess,’ the coroner suggested.

  ‘That is true, sir. But such a knowledge might also be possessed by someone in the habit of cutting up animals, someone like a butcher or a slaughterman, or perhaps even a hunter, as well as somebody who had undertaken medical or surgical training.’

  Among the other witnesses, the nightwatchman George Morris was unequivocal in the evidence he gave, both to reporters and at the inquest. Because of his police training, he was particularly alert, and had even hoped the murderer would appear in Mitre Square.

  ‘It was only last night,’ he said, ‘that I made the remark to some policeman that I wished the butcher would come around Mitre Square, and I would soon give him a doing, and here, to be sure, he has come and I was perfectly ignorant of it.’

  ‘Did you hear anything at all that night?’ the coroner asked him.

  ‘Yes, sir. As I always do, I heard the heavy footsteps of every patrolling police officer who entered the square throughout the night.’

  ‘But you heard nothing else?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m absolutely certain I heard no other noise, no cry or other sound, during the whole of that night.’

  Friday, 5 October 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  The post-mortem of Elizabeth Stride had been carried out on Monday, 1 October in the St George’s Mortuary and, because of the interest and alarm which were surrounding the series of murders in Whitechapel, on this occasion both the doctors who had attended the scene of the murder conducted the examination.

  Dr Blackwell carried out the autopsy procedure himself whilst Dr Phillips noted down his comments and findings. For at least a part of the time, Dr Reigate was also in attendance, as well as Edward Johnson, who was Dr Blackwell’s assistant and had been the first medically trained person to see the body in Dutfield’s Yard. In the search for clues and other information, this time it was the doctors themselves who stripped the clothes from the corpse and examined them.

  The cause of death was not difficult to ascertain, as the wound in the neck had partially severed her left carotid artery and the windpipe. No marks were found on the throat to indicate strangulation, but it was noted that the silk scarf Stride was wearing around her neck had been pulled very tight.

  ‘This could possibly be how the killer first incapacitated this woman,’ Dr Blackwell suggested. ‘If he seized this scarf and pulled it tight around her neck, perhaps by twisting a loop in it so that it acted as a garrotte, that would both incapacitate the woman and allow the murderer to pull her backwards off her feet, and possibly all the way dow
n onto the ground. And when she was lying flat and helpless, he would be able to deliver the fatal wound to her throat.’

  ‘As a possible scenario,’ Phillips agreed, ‘that does make sense. What about the cut itself, the wound to the throat. Do you believe that could have been administered by somebody who possessed anatomical knowledge?’

  Blackwell paused for a moment before he replied, then lifted the dead woman’s chin up and back so that he could examine the wound more closely.

  ‘That is more difficult to say,’ Blackwell replied, ‘because it is only a single wound. But I see no signs of hesitation or fumbling in the use of the knife, and I think that whoever did this is certainly accustomed to use a heavy knife. And from the position of the cut, I think it would be fair to say that the killer must have possessed at least some degree of medical knowledge.’

  Dr Phillips agreed with his colleague, and would later tell the coroner at the inquest that ‘there seems to have been some knowledge where to cut the throat to cause a fatal result’.

  The autopsy was one thing, but while the doctors were making their painstaking examination of the corpse, the identity of the victim was still unknown.

  The hand of fate then dealt the police a wild card – or perhaps more accurately a joker – in the form of Mrs Mary Malcolm. She lived at number 50 Eagle Street, Red Lion Square in Holborn, and was the wife of a tailor. On the evening of 1 October, she visited the mortuary and asked if she could see the body, which she’d explained could be that of her sister, Mrs Elizabeth Watts.

  ‘Now I’m not so sure about this,’ she said, as she stared down at the corpse. ‘I think it might be her but because there’s only this gaslight in here, you see, I can’t make her out very clearly.’

  ‘But surely,’ the sergeant who had accompanied her to the mortuary asked patiently, ‘you can recognize the face of your own sister?’

  ‘Well, it’s not that really. I think it’s her face all right, but you see Elizabeth has a crippled foot – it’s her right foot, actually – and I don’t think that this woman suffers from that problem.’

  ‘So this body has your sister’s face, but not her feet. Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘I suppose it is, really. Look, I’d better come back tomorrow when it’s daylight and I’ll be able to see better.’

  ‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ the sergeant said, escorting her to the door of the St George’s Mortuary.

  Nobody at the police station seriously expected to see the woman again, but she did, as promised, return the following morning. In fact, she went to the police station and the mortuary twice. On her first visit to inspect the body again, she said she was unsure of the identification, but on her second appearance she was absolutely certain.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said brightly. ‘That’s definitely Elizabeth.’

  ‘You are sure now, are you?’ the same sergeant asked, with a certain degree of world-weariness.

  ‘Quite sure, because of this small black mark here on her leg. That’s an old adder bite that she got when we were children.’

  ‘So despite the fact that you’ve explained that your sister has a crippled right foot, and that this body does not, you’re still certain that this is Mrs Elizabeth Watts?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Malcolm said, still sounding confident, but slightly less so than she had a minute or so earlier.

  ‘Now what can you tell us about her?’

  ‘Well, she’s rather fallen on hard times,’ Mrs Malcolm said, now apparently treading on firmer ground. ‘She’s lived in a number of East End lodging houses, and I’ve been supporting her in a small way for about the last five years.’

  ‘What do you mean by “supporting her”?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘We had this arrangement, you see. We would meet every Saturday afternoon at four at the corner of Chancery Lane, and I would give her what money I could afford. But the thing is that last Saturday she didn’t appear, and that night, well, I can tell you I had the strangest dream, and a sort of premonition thing that something terrible had happened to her. And then when I heard about the murder I was quite sure that that’s what it was.’

  Unlikely though her story sounded, the police had no option but to call her as an identification witness at the inquest, simply because she still claimed to be certain about the identity of the dead woman.

  At the inquest, held on the afternoon of Tuesday 2 October, Mrs Malcolm reaffirmed her identification of the body as that of her sister, and provided a number of statements which cast her sibling in a fairly dim and unattractive light.

  ‘I mustn’t speak ill of the dead,’ she said, ‘but I happen to know that my sister was several times arrested by the police for being drunk and disorderly, but that’s not the worst of it. Once I heard a knock on the door and when I opened it I discovered that she’d left a naked baby on my doorstep for me to look after.’

  The coroner looked somewhat bemused by this unexpected accusation.

  ‘At the moment, Mrs Malcolm, we’re concerned only with the identification of the body. So let me ask you again: you are quite certain that it is your sister Mrs Elizabeth Watts?’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure,’ she replied, ‘because of the adder bite, you see.’

  The fundamentally inconclusive identification and rambling statements made by Mrs Malcolm failed to impress either the police or the coroner, and their doubts were confirmed a short time later when the real Mrs Elizabeth Watts, who had married a brick-maker named Stokes and was then living in Tottenham, reported to the police. Her right foot was indeed crippled, the result of an accident, but in all other respects the story told by Mrs Malcolm was the purest fantasy. The two women had not in fact met for years, and Mrs Stokes was understandably aggrieved at the tall tales her sister had been telling about her.

  But despite the best efforts of the imaginative Mrs Malcolm, the real identity of the victim of the Whitechapel murderer was fairly quickly established. Her name was Elizabeth Stride, she was Swedish by birth, and had been living at 32 Flower and Dean Street, a common lodging house.

  Her past was something of a mystery and, just like the severely deluded Mrs Malcolm, she clearly had a fairly vivid imagination. She had repeatedly claimed to friends and acquaintances that she had lost her husband and two of her children in the sinking of a pleasure steamer named the Princess Alice on the Thames.

  This was a genuine disaster and had occurred on 3 September 1878, when the vessel collided with a steam collier named the Bywell Castle, and sank with the loss of over 600 lives. In the struggle to escape the sinking ship, Stride claimed that a man clambering up a rope ladder directly in front of her had kicked her in the face, an action which knocked out her front teeth.

  In fact, the whole tale was made up by Stride, perhaps in an attempt to gain sympathy – and possibly more tangible benefits – from people that she talked to. The reality of both her life and the death of her husband were markedly different.

  Once the dead woman had been identified, all of her friends and acquaintances were questioned by the police during the days following her murder. In fact, working under the orders of Inspector Abberline, the police would make strenuous efforts to identify anybody who might have some reason for wishing Stride dead, as well as those who might have seen or heard something on the night of the killing. Every house in Berner Street would be visited and, again at Abberline’s instigation, some eighty thousand pamphlets were sent out to the owners and occupiers of properties in the surrounding area requesting information, these being followed up by house-to-house enquiries.

  The wording on the handbill read:

  POLICE NOTICE

  TO THE OCCUPIER

  On the mornings of Friday, 31st August, Saturday 8th, and Sunday, 30th of September, 1888, Women were murdered in or near Whitechapel, supposed by some one residing in the immediate neighbourhood. Should you know of any person to whom suspicion is attached, you are earnestly requested to communicate at once with the nearest Po
lice Station.

  Metropolitan Police Office, 30th September, 1888.

  The questioning also extended to the Thames Police who interrogated sailors from ships berthed in the docks or on the river, while Metropolitan Police officers questioned butchers and slaughterers, and such diverse groups as Greek Gypsies and cowboys working at the American Exhibition. All the common lodging houses in the area were also visited and some two thousand residents questioned.

  But this very obvious activity did little to quell the growing unrest in the East End of London. Shortly after the ‘double event’, a rally was held in Victoria Park, which about a thousand people attended, to call for the resignation of Sir Charles Warren as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and of Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary. Neither man, of course, responded to these calls.

  But the murder of Elizabeth Stride differed in one important respect from the three which had occurred previously, in that for the first time the police had witnesses who had seen something that might help identify the killer. Two men in particular – PC 452H William Smith and a Hungarian man named Israel Schwartz – each believed they might have actually seen the murderer.

  PC Smith had been allocated a long and circuitous beat that took him almost half an hour to cover, and which included Berner Street. He had walked down that road at about half past midnight on the morning Stride was killed, and had seen a man talking to a woman he later identified as Elizabeth Stride. He noticed the red rose decorating her coat, and was able to confirm that the two people had been close to where Stride’s body was later found, although they were on the opposite side of the street from Dutfield’s Yard.

  Israel Schwartz’s evidence was far more sensational. He told the police that he had walked into Berner Street at about a quarter to one that morning, and as he approached the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard he had seen a woman standing near the yard entrance, and had watched her as she was accosted by a man who tried to pull her into the street. She resisted, and the man had then thrown her down onto the pavement.