Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (14 page)

Guests of the casual wards were required to stay at least two nights and one day, and to refuse to work was to end up homeless again. Rosier accounts of these degrading places can be found in gilded publications that tend to mention only “shelters” for the poor that provided uncomfortable but clean beds and “good meat soup” and bread. Such civilized charity was not to be found in London’s East End unless it was at Salvation Army shelters, which were generally avoided by the street-smart who had gotten cynical. Ladies of the Salvation Army regularly visited doss-houses to preach God’s generosity to paupers who knew better. Hope was not for a fallen woman like Mary Ann Nichols. The Bible could not save her.

She had been in and out of the Lambeth Workhouse several times between the previous Christmas and April 1888. In May she vowed to change her ways and took a coveted job as a domestic servant in a respectable family home. Her vows did not last, and in July she left in shame after stealing clothing valued at £3 10s. Mary Ann sank deeper into her drunken ways and returned to the life of an Unfortunate. For a while she and another prostitute named Nelly Holland shared a bed in a doss-house in the maze of decaying buildings on Thrawl Street, which ran from east to west for several blocks between Commercial Street and Brick Lane in Whitechapel.

After a while, Mary Ann moved on to White House on nearby Flower and Dean Street and stayed there until she ran out of money and was evicted on August 29th. The following night, she walked the streets wearing everything she owned: a brown ulster fastened with big brass buttons engraved with the figures of a man and a horse; a brown linsey frock; two gray woolen petticoats with the stenciled marks of the Lambeth Workhouse; two brown stays (stiff bodices made of whalebone); flannel underclothing; ribbed black woolen stockings; men’s sidespring boots that had been cut on the uppers, tips, and heels for a better fit; and a black straw bonnet trimmed in black velvet. In a pocket she had tucked a white handkerchief, a comb, and a bit of broken looking glass.

Mary Ann was spotted several times between 11:00 P.M. and 2:30 the following morning, and in each instance, she was alone. She was seen on Whitechapel Road, and then at the Frying Pan Public House. At around 1:40 A.M., she was in the kitchen of her former lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, where she said she was penniless and asked that her bed be kept for her, promising to return soon with money for payment. She was intoxicated, witnesses said, and on her way out the door she promised to be back soon and bragged about her “jolly” bonnet, which appeared to have been recently acquired.

Mary Ann was last seen alive at 2:30 A.M. when her friend Nelly Holland came upon her at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road, across from the parish church. Mary Ann was drunk and staggering along a wall. She told Nelly that so far this night she had earned three times what she needed for her bed at the lodging house but had spent it. Despite her friend’s pleas that she come with her and go to bed, Mary Ann insisted on trying one last time to earn a few pennies. The parish church clock chimed as Mary Ann wove her way along the unlighted Whitechapel Road, dissolving into darkness.

Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later and half a mile away on a street called Buck’s Row that bordered the Jews’ Cemetery in Whitechapel, Charles Cross, a carman, was walking along Buck’s Row on his way to work and passed a dark shape against some gates on a footpath near a stable yard. At first he thought the shape was a tarpaulin, but he realized it was a woman lying motionless, her head to the east, her bonnet on the ground by her right side, her left hand up against the closed gateway. As Cross was trying to get a better look to see what was wrong with her, he heard footsteps and turned around as another carman named Robert Paul appeared in the street.

“Take a look,” Cross called out as he touched the woman’s hand. “I believe she is dead.” Robert Paul crouched down and put a hand on her breast. He thought he felt a slight movement and said, “I believe she is still breathing.”

Her clothing was disarrayed, and her skirt was raised above her hips, so the men decided she had been “outraged” or raped. They chastely rearranged her clothing to cover her, not noticing any blood because it was too dark. Paul and Cross rushed off to find the nearest constable and happened upon G. Mizen 55 Division H, who was making his rounds at the nearby corner of Hanbury and Old Montague streets, on the west side of the Jews’ Cemetery. The men informed the constable that there was a woman on the pavement either dead or “dead drunk.”

When Mizen and the two men reached the stable yard on Buck’s Row, Constable John Neil had come across the body and was alerting other police in the area by calling out and flashing his bull’s-eye lantern. The woman’s throat had been severely cut, and Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who lived nearby at 152 Whitechapel Road, was immediately roused from bed and summoned to the scene. Mary Ann Nichols’s identity was unknown at this time, and according to Dr. Llewellyn, she was “quite dead.” Her wrists were cold, her body and lower extremities were still very warm. He was certain she had been dead less than half an hour and that her injuries were “not self-inflicted.” He also observed that there was little blood around her neck or on the ground.

He ordered the body moved to the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse mortuary, a private dead house for workhouse inmates and not intended for any sort of proper forensic postmortem examination. Llewellyn said he would be there shortly to take a better look, and Constable Mizen sent a man to fetch an ambulance from the Bethnal Green police station. Victorian London hospitals did not have ambulances and there was no such thing as rescue squads.

The usual means of rushing a desperately sick or injured person to the nearest hospital was for friends or Good Samaritan passersby to carry the patient by the arms and legs. Sometimes the cry “Send for a shutter!” rang out, and the afflicted one would be conveyed on a window shutter carried like a stretcher. Ambulances were used by police, and most police stations had one of these unwieldy wooden-sided handcarts with its lashed-in sturdy black leather bottom that was equipped with thick leather straps. A tan leather convertible top could be unfolded, but probably did little more than offer partial protection from prying eyes or bad weather.

In most cases, an ambulance was used to remove a drunk from a public place, but occasionally the cargo was the dead. It must have been quite a chore for a constable to navigate a handcart at night along unlighted, narrow, rutted streets. Such an ambulance is extremely heavy, even without a patient, and is very difficult to turn. Based on the one I found in Metropolitan Police storage, I would guess that the cart weighs several hundred pounds and would have been extremely difficult to pull up the most gentle hill, unless the constable at the handles was strong and had a good grip.

This morbid means of transportation was one that Walter Sickert would have seen had he lingered in the dark and watched his victims being carted away. It must have been thrilling to spy on a constable huffing and straining as Mary Ann Nichols’s almost severed head lolled from side to side while the big wheels bounced and her dripping blood speckled the street.

Sickert is known to have drawn, etched, and painted only what he saw. Without exception, this is true. He painted a handcart that is almost identical to the one I saw in police storage. His picture is unsigned, undated, and titled
The Handcart, Rue St. Jean, Dieppe.
Some catalogues refer to it as
The Basket Shop,
and in the painting the view is from the rear of a handcart that has what looks very much like a folded-down tan convertible top. Stacked in front of a shop across the narrow, deserted street are what appear to be large, long baskets, similar to what the French used as stretchers for the dead. A barely visible figure, possibly a man wearing some sort of hat, is walking along a sidewalk, looking over to see what is inside the cart. At his feet is an inexplicable black square shape that might be a piece of luggage, but could be part of the sidewalk, rather much like an open iron sewer trap. In Mary Ann Nichols’s murder case, the newspapers reported that the police did not believe the “trap” in the street had been opened, implying that the killer had not escaped through the labyrinth of vaulted brick sewers that ran beneath the Great Metropolis.

A trap is also an opening in stage floors that gives actors quick and easy access to a scene in progress, usually to the surprise and delight of the unsuspecting audience. In most productions of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,
the ghost enters and exits through the trap. Sickert probably knew far more about stage traps than sewer traps. In 1881, he played the ghost in Henry Irving’s
Hamlet
at the Lyceum Theater. The dark shape at the figure’s feet in Sickert’s painting could be a theater trap. It could be a sewer trap. Or it could be a detail Sickert created to tease viewers.

Mary Ann Nichols’s body was lifted off the street and placed inside a wooden shell that was strapped into the ambulance. Two constables accompanied the body to the mortuary, where it was left in the ambulance outside in the yard. By now, it was after 4:30 A.M., and while the constables waited at the mortuary for Inspector John Spratling, a boy who lived in George Yard Buildings helped the police clean up the crime scene. Pails of water were splashed on the ground, and blood flowed into the gutter, leaving only a trace between the stones.

Police Constable John Phail later testified that as he watched the washing of the pavement he noticed a “mass of congealed” blood about six inches in diameter that had been under the body. It was his observation that contrary to what Dr. Llewellyn had said, there was quite a lot of blood, and it appeared to Phail that it had flowed from the murdered woman’s neck under her back and as far down as her waist. Dr. Llewellyn might have noticed the same details had he turned over the body.

Inspector Spratling arrived at the mortuary and impatiently waited in the dark for the keeper to arrive with the keys. By the time Mary Ann Nichols’s body was carried inside, it must have been after 5:00 A.M., and she had been dead for at least two hours. Her body, still inside the shell, was placed on a wooden bench that was typical of those used in mortuaries then. Sometimes these benches or tables were acquired secondhand from butchers at the local slaughterhouses. Inspector Spratling pulled up Mary Ann’s dress for a closer inspection in the gas lamp’s gloom and discovered that her abdomen had been slashed open, exposing the intestines. The next morning, Saturday, September 1st, Dr. Llewellyn performed the autopsy and Wynne Edwin Baxter, the coroner for the South-Eastern Division of Middlesex, opened the inquest into Mary Ann Nichols’s death.

Unlike grand jury proceedings in the United States, which are closed to everyone except those subpoenaed, death inquests in Great Britain are open to the public. In an 1854 treatise on the office and duties of coroners, it was noted that while it may be illegal to publish evidence that could prove important in the trial, these facts were routinely published anyway and benefitted the public. Details might serve as a deterrent, and by knowing the facts—especially when there are no suspects—the public becomes part of the investigative team. Someone might read about the case and realize that he or she has helpful information to add.

Whether this reasoning is valid or not, coroners’ inquisitions and even ex parte proceedings were usually fair game to journalists in 1888, as long as their reporting was truthful and balanced. As appalling as this may seem to anyone unaccustomed to the publication of evidence and testimony before the actual trial, were it not for Britain’s open policy there would be virtually no detailed death investigation records of Jack the Ripper’s crimes. With the exception of a few pages here and there, the autopsy reports have not survived. Many of them were lost during World War II, and others may have disappeared in a clerical, or careless, or dishonest Bermuda Triangle.

It is regrettable that so many documents are missing, because much more could be learned if we had access to the original police reports, photographs, memorandums, and whatever else is gone. But I doubt there was a cover-up. There was no “Rippergate” instigated by police authorities and politicians who were trying to shield the public from a shocking truth. Yet the doubters continue to champion their theories: Scotland Yard has always known who the Ripper was but protected him; Scotland Yard accidentally let him go or tucked him into an asylum and didn’t inform the public; the royal family was involved; Scotland Yard didn’t care about murdered prostitutes and wanted to hide how little the police did to solve the homicides.

Untrue. No matter how badly the Metropolitan Police may have botched the Ripper investigation, there was no deliberate mendacity or disinformation that I could find. The boring fact is that most of what went wrong was due to sheer ignorance. Jack the Ripper was a modern killer born a hundred years too soon to be caught, and over the decades, records, including the original autopsy report of Mary Ann Nichols, have been lost, misplaced, or spirited away. Some ended up in the hands of collectors. I myself bought an alleged original Ripper letter for $1,500.

I suspect the document is authentic and possibly even written by Sickert. If a Ripper letter was available in 2001 through a search by a rare-documents dealer, then that letter at some point must have disappeared from the case files. How many others disappeared? I was told by officials at Scotland Yard that the overriding reason they finally turned over all Ripper files to the Public Record Office in Kew is that so much had vanished. Police officials feared that eventually there would be nothing left except reference numbers linked to empty folders.

The fact that the Home Office sealed the Ripper case records for a hundred years only increased the suspicion of conspiracy enthusiasts. Maggie Bird, the archivist in Scotland Yard’s Records Management Branch, offers a historical perspective on the subject. She explains that in the late nineteenth century it was routine to destroy all police personnel files once the officer turned sixty-one, which accounts for the absence of significant information about the police involved in the Ripper cases. Personnel files on Inspector Frederick Abberline, who headed the investigation, and his supervisor, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, are gone.