The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  At 1.30 in the afternoon, Superintendent Arnold arrived at the crime scene, with the unwelcome news that no bloodhounds would be coming.

  ‘I wish I’d known this earlier, sir,’ Abberline complained. ‘We could have been in this room almost three hours ago.’

  ‘There was a misunderstanding,’ Arnold said, ‘and I only had the information confirmed a short while ago. Now let’s get inside here and see what we’ve got.’

  ‘The door is locked on the inside,’ Abberline pointed out, ‘and we’ve no idea where the key is, so we’re going to have to break it down.’

  None of the officers present had noticed that the broken window was close enough to the door to allow somebody to reach inside and just release the catch.

  John McCarthy, the landlord who actually owned the premises, was the obvious person to effect an entrance, and he used a pickaxe to force the door. The first person to enter the dwelling was Dr Phillips.

  When he stepped inside, he saw a very small room, perhaps about twelve feet square, and cluttered with furniture. The bedside table was so close to the entrance that the door had banged into it when it was opened, and there was little space for the investigators who had followed him to move around. The right side of the bed was pushed tight up against the wooden partition which divided the old back parlour of the house and formed one wall of Mary Kelly’s room. There was a second table in the room, a wooden chair, a wash stand, a cupboard and an open fireplace, over which was hanging a cheap mass-produced print entitled ‘The Fisherman’s Widow’. The floor was bare and dirty, with a single small ragged rug on it, and the walls were papered, but so encrusted with the dirt deposited by years of neglect that the pattern – if any – was impossible to make out.

  The sight which greeted Phillips and the police officers who entered the room hot on his heels was undeniably the stuff of nightmares.

  John McCarthy was one of the first to go inside the premises and he, of course, knew Mary Kelly personally. Later that day he made a statement in which he described what had greeted them in the room:

  The sight we saw 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.

  Even before the police had entered the room in Miller’s Court, it was perfectly clear to them that they were dealing with another atrocity perpetrated by the man known as Jack the Ripper, and it was also obvious that the most senior officers of the Metropolitan Police force needed to be informed as quickly as possible.

  Inspector Beck had dispatched constables to carry the news of the killing to the police station at Commercial Street shortly after he had arrived at Miller’s Court, and an initial report was then sent to Scotland Yard by telegraph.

  * * *

  Charles Warren was at his desk in his office at Scotland Yard when this report arrived, and read it with a growing sense of dismay. News of his resignation had yet to be published – indeed, he hadn’t heard from Matthews since he’d sent his letter, though he had no doubt that it would be accepted imminently – but clearly ‘Michael’ had decided not to wait any longer, and had got started on the next phase of his campaign immediately.

  Warren had no option, and did his duty. As soon as he had acquainted himself with the details of the murder, he passed on the information to Godfrey Lushington, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office. His note read: ‘I have to acquaint you, for the information of the Secretary of State, 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 in Dorset Street, Spitalfields.’

  The information produced an instant reaction from the Home Office, where a member of staff immediately telephoned Charles Warren and instructed him to advise them of any further developments. In response to this, Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner and the head of the Metropolitan Police CID, went to Miller’s Court in person to inspect the scene of the crime and the victim and then telephoned the Home Office. The person to whom he spoke made a brief note of the substance of his message. It read: ‘Body is believed to be that of a prostitute much mutilated. Doctor 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.’

  But it wasn’t just the Home Office which was concerned about the brutal murder. News of this latest atrocity spread quickly throughout Whitechapel and the East End and, like all of the earlier murder scenes, Dorset Street and especially the area around Miller’s Court quickly became the focus of crowds of people, their mood both angry and frightened. The court itself had already been placed off-limits to spectators on Inspector Abberline’s orders, and the police also set up cordons at both ends of Dorset Street. News of the latest atrocity even spread into the crowds which had assembled in and around Fleet Street, and thousands of people deserted the route of the Lord Mayor’s procession to head to the scene of this new killing by the fiend of Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper.

  At around four o’clock that afternoon, a cart pulled by a single horse, and with a tarpaulin covering the cargo area at the rear the vehicle, drove down Dorset Street and stopped close to the narrow passageway which gave access to Miller’s Court. The tarpaulin was removed and a battered old lightweight coffin was lifted from the cart and carried down to number 13. It was obvious that the police and doctors were about to remove the body and take it to the mortuary, and this generated a huge wave of excitement through the crowd, and people made a determined effort to push through the police cordon at the Commercial Street end of Dorset Street itself.

  The Times report was typical of those describing the scene: ‘The crowd, which pressed round the van, was of the humblest class, 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.’

  The coffin containing the pitiful remains of Mary Kelly was carried out of Miller’s Court and placed in the cart, after which it was driven to Shoreditch Mortuary where the post-mortem examination would be conducted. As soon as the cart had driven away, the police boarded up the windows of number 13 and placed a padlock on the door of the room to secure the crime scene. Shortly afterwards, the police cordons at the ends of Dorset Street were removed, but access to Miller’s Court itself was restricted to only the occupants of that grim residential area, and the passage from Dorset Street was guarded by two constables for the rest of the day and all that night.

  The quantity of blood found in the room at Miller’s Court confirmed that Mary Kelly had died there, on her bed, before the mutilations to her body were carried out and that, together with the fact that she was lying on her back and was virtually naked when she died, obviously suggested that her killer was one of her clients, or had at least been pretending to be a client.

  But beyond that, and as with all the previous killings, Jack the Ripper appeared to have left no clues in his wake.

  Saturday, 10 November 1888

  London

  On the Saturday morning, the day after the mutilated remains of Mary Kelly had been discovered, Warren received a terse note from Henry Matthews telling him that his resignation had been accepted and that the London press would be informed accordingly. The note also
reminded him that until a replacement was appointed to the post of Commissioner Warren was to continue discharging his duties.

  When Warren’s resignation was later announced in the House of Commons it would be greeted with cheers and catcalls, and the London newspapers, especially the more radical elements of the press, would go to town on him.

  At that stage, Warren was unaware just how long he would have to continue acting as Commissioner, and it would be over another two weeks until his successor – James Monro, the former head of the CID, and a man with whom Warren had argued vehemently earlier that year – would be appointed, in fact on 27 November.

  At the same time as Warren was mulling over the entirely anticipated response from Henry Matthews in his Scotland Yard office, over in Spitalfields the police had returned in force to Miller’s Court.

  They were led by Detective Inspector Abberline who, despite the commissioner’s entirely negative response to his suggestion about the geographical positions of the previous murders, had also plotted this killing on his map. Unfortunately for his theory, the location of the latest murder seemed to be entirely random, and nothing whatsoever to do with the neat triangles he had discovered that the locations of the previous five killings had formed. He hadn’t dismissed his earlier conclusion, but even he had to admit that his logic was now looking somewhat suspect.

  The police officers had returned to the scene of the crime to carefully inspect the premises in daylight. Unfortunately, despite studying the contents of the tiny room with considerable care, they discovered little more than had been apparent the previous day, and what they did find added nothing useful in their hunt for the killer.

  The only significant evidence was found in the cold ashes of the fireplace. It was obvious that the fire had been burning while Mary Kelly was being slaughtered and then butchered, and it had clearly been a very significant blaze, so hot that the spout of the kettle had actually melted.

  Abberline instructed one of the officers to sift through the ashes left in the grate, just in case the killer had by some chance been trying to burn a crucial piece of evidence. The detective spent the better part of half an hour looking closely at every single piece of ash that was big enough to appear useful, and at the end of it he called Abberline over to show him what he’d found.

  ‘It’s not much, I’m afraid, sir,’ the detective said, ‘and I don’t think it’s going to be very much help to us. All I found were these few pieces of burnt material. They look to me as if they might have come from a woman’s clothing, and my guess is that they’re probably the remains of a skirt, and possibly also some bits of a hat.’

  Abberline prodded the charred fragments with the end of his finger in a thoughtful manner. There seemed no obvious reason why the killer should have wished to destroy the clothes which, he presumed, Mary Kelly had been wearing before her death, or even when she was killed, but it looked as if that was what he had done. It was difficult to imagine how any clue could have been a part of those clothes, and Abberline was keenly aware that trying to recover any evidence from the handful of burnt fragments would be simply impossible. So whatever the killer had done to the garments didn’t matter, and would under no circumstances help to identify him.

  Then a thought struck him, and he suddenly realized that he might have identified the clear and logical solution to the mystery.

  ‘I know why he did it,’ Abberline said. ‘It’s obvious. Just take a look around this place.’

  The other officers glanced around the tiny room, their complete lack of understanding manifest in their facial expressions.

  ‘Think about it,’ Abberline continued. ‘This room is really small and very dark. It’s only got two tiny windows. We’re standing here with the door open, both windows uncovered and in full daylight. At night, with only that single gas lamp outside in the courtyard, even if there was nothing over the windows, it would still be dark in here. With the windows covered, it’d be pitch black, and the killer would definitely have covered the windows so that nobody could look inside and see what he was doing. The only source of illumination we found in here was one small candle. I think the reason he built up the fire was to provide enough light for him to see what he was doing. There’s no fuel – no wood or coal, I mean – so he had to burn whatever he found in here, which was the clothes Mary Kelly had been wearing.’

  Whilst the police officers were picking over the contents of Mary Kelly’s room, three doctors – George Bagster Phillips, Thomas Bond and Frederick Gordon Brown – were together performing the post-mortem on the body at the Shoreditch Mortuary, a procedure that would last for some six and a half hours due to the severity of the mutilations.

  Dr Thomas Bond, who had also worked with Phillips at Miller’s Court, provided a detailed, if gruesome, and extremely accurate description of the injuries he had seen on her body when he’d inspected it at the crime scene. Bond was highly qualified, having had over twenty years’ experience as a police surgeon, and had been asked to help with the Ripper investigation by Assistant Commissioner Anderson, who was trying to determine what degree of anatomical knowledge the murderer actually possessed, in view of the comments made by various doctors at the previous inquests. Anderson hoped that a definitive statement by Thomas Bond would help him to identify the likely trade or profession followed by the murderer, which in turn might narrow the list of potential suspects.

  With regard to the killing of Mary Kelly, Bond stated the following:

  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 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 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.

  Detailed though Dr Bond’s statement was, it was incorrect in one particular: Kelly’s body was not naked because when she was killed she was wearing a linen undergarment. However, the ferocity and extent of the mutilations performed on her meant that the killer’s knife had sliced through the material of her underclothes, which had then been pulled aside to reach the flesh underneath, and so she had appeared to be naked upon initial inspection of the crime scene.

  The appalling state of the corpse, the mutilations so extensive and terrible that the body was only barely recognizable as a human being, had meant that the three doctors needed to work slowly and carefully to ensure that they didn’t miss anything. But, actually, that was exactly what they did: they missed something. One of her organs.

  ‘He took her heart,’ Dr Bond said flatly as he took a step back from the expanse of raw meat that twenty-four hours earlier had been the torso of a young woman.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Phillips replied, gesturing wordlessly not just at the corpse but at the piles of flesh which had also been removed from the room at Miller’s Court. ‘It’s not somewhere in amongst all this lot?’

  ‘No. I’ve checked twice. The organ is definitely not here and I ca
n see where the major blood vessels have been severed. He must’ve taken it with him.’

  Dr Phillips made a note, but then another thought struck him.

  ‘Actually, there’s another possibility,’ he said. ‘At the scene, we all noted that there had been a very intense fire burning in the grate, presumably at the time that the mutilations were being committed. Perhaps the killer didn’t take the heart with him, but burnt it instead. As soon as we’ve finished here I’ll go back to Miller’s Court and check the ash.’

  When the examination was complete, and the three doctors had written up their notes, Phillips voiced his concern to the district coroner, Dr Roderick Macdonald, and later that day the two men returned to Miller’s Court to inspect the ashes in the fireplace which Inspector Abberline and his men had already picked through. The police had been looking for clues; Phillips had a different objective in mind. But no trace of the woman’s heart, or in fact any evidence of burnt human tissue, was found in the ashes discovered in the fireplace.

  The conclusion was as obvious as it was inescapable: just as he’d done with Catharine Eddowes’s kidney, the killer must have taken the organ away with him.

  Following the post-mortem, Dr Bond was able to turn his attention to the request from Assistant Commissioner Anderson concerning the degree of medical expertise displayed by Jack the Ripper. He had studied the police notes and files relating to four of the previous murders, those of Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes, and of course he had examined the body of Mary Kelly both at the scene of the crime and during the post-mortem examination.