Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (50 page)

I assume by “partition” Elizabeth was referring to cracks in the floor. Elizabeth Prater secured her door for the night by wedging two tables against it and went to bed. She’d had something to drink, she testified, and slept soundly until a kitten began restlessly walking over her at approximately 4:00 A.M., waking her up. By now, the room below her was dark, Elizabeth testified. Suddenly, she said, “I heard a cry of ‘oh! Murder!’ as the cat came on me and I pushed her down.” She said the voice was faint and from close by and that she did not hear it a second time. Elizabeth fell back asleep and woke up again at 5:00 A.M. Men were harnessing horses in Dorset Street as she walked to the Ten Bells public house for an eye-opener of rum.

John McCarthy was working hard in his chandler’s shop at midmorning. He was also trying to figure out what to do about room 13 in the building he leased at 26 Dorset Street. As he worked on that foggy, cold Friday morning, he was forced to ponder the inevitable. Joseph Barnett had moved out more than two weeks ago and Mary Kelly was £1 9s. behind in the rent. McCarthy had been patient with Mary Kelly, but this simply could not continue.

“Go to number 13 and try and get some rent,” he told his assistant, Thomas Bowyer. It was close to eleven when Bowyer walked over to Mary Kelly’s room and knocked on the door. He got no response. He tugged on the handle, but the door was locked. He pushed the curtains aside and looked through the broken window and saw Mary Kelly naked on the bed, covered with blood. He ran back to his employer, and both he and McCarthy hurried to Mary’s room and looked in. Bowyer ran to find the police.

An H Division inspector made haste to get to the scene, and he sent immediately for Police Surgeon Dr. George Phillips and wired Scotland Yard about the latest Ripper murder. Within half an hour, the crime scene was crowded with inspectors, including Frederick Abberline, who ordered that no one in the courtyard was allowed to leave, and no one could enter without police authorization.

Charles Warren was also telegraphed. Abberline inquired if the commissioner would like the bloodhounds to respond. The seasoned investigator probably knew full well what a waste of time that would be. But he was following orders. The order was countermanded and the dogs never came. By the end of the day, the press would learn that Warren had resigned.

There was no rush to get inside Mary Kelly’s room. As Dr. Phillips said in the inquest, he looked through “the lower broken pane and satisfied myself that the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not in need of any immediate attention from me.” The police removed a window from Mary Kelly’s room and Dr. Phillips began to take photographs through the opening. At 1:30 P.M., police used a pickaxe to pry open the door, and it banged against a table left of the bedstead. Police investigators and Dr. Phillips entered the room and what they saw was unlike any travesty the men had ever encountered in their entire careers.

“It looked more like the work of a devil than a man,” McCarthy would later recount at the inquest. “I had heard about the Whitechapel murders but I swear to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this.”

Mary Kelly’s body was two-thirds of the way across the bed, almost against the door. Crime-scene photographs reveal remains so mutilated that she may as well have been run over by a train. The Ripper hacked off her ears and nose and slashed and defleshed her face down to the skull. She had no features left, only her dark hair, still neatly styled, probably because she never struggled with the Ripper. There wasn’t room to attack her from behind the bed, so he attacked her from the front. Unlike the Camden Town murder, Mary was face up when a strong, sharp blade severed her right carotid artery. Blood soaked through the bed and pooled on the floor.

Abberline, who was in charge of the case, searched the room. He found burned clothing in the fireplace and surmised that the killer continued to feed the fire while he worked so he would have enough light to see, “as there was only one piece of candle in the room,” Abberline testified. The heat was so intense that it melted the spout of a kettle. One might wonder how a fire could burn so brightly and not have been noticed in the courtyard, even through drawn curtains. Someone might have worried that the room was on fire, unless the fire was a low, hot, steady one. As usual, people were minding their own affairs. Maybe the Ripper worked by the tiny light of the single candle in the room. Sickert didn’t mind the dark. The “pitch dark,” he said in a letter, “is lovely.”

Except for a coat, all of Maria’s dirty laundry had been burned. Mary Kelly’s clothing was found neatly folded by the side of the bed, as if she had willingly undressed down to her chemise. Her killer ripped and cut and hacked into her body, laying it wide open, mutilating her genitalia to a pulp. He amputated her breasts and arranged them next to her liver on the side of the bed. He heaped her entrails on top of the bedside table. Every organ except her brain was removed, and her right leg was flayed open to the knee, exposing a completely defleshed, gleaming white femur.

Plainly visible on the left arm are curved cutting injuries, and a dark line encircling her right leg just below the knee suggests the Ripper may have been in the process of dismemberment when, for some reason, he stopped. Perhaps the fire had burned down or the candle was about to go out. Maybe it was getting late and time for him to make his escape. Dr. Thomas Bond arrived at the scene at 2:00 P.M., and in his report he said that rigor mortis had set in and increased during the course of his examination. He admitted he could not give an exact time of death, but the body was cold at 2:00 P.M. Based on that, and on rigor mortis and the presence of partially digested food in her ripped-open stomach and scattered over her intestines, he estimated she had been dead twelve hours by the time he reached the scene.

If Dr. Bond was correct in saying that rigor mortis was still in the process of forming when he began to examine the body at the scene by 2:00 P.M., then it is possible that Mary had not been dead as long as twelve hours. Her body would have been cold long before that. It was drained of blood, she was slender, her body cavity was exposed, and she was covered by nothing but a chemise in a room in which the fire had gone out. Also, if witnesses are to be believed, Mary Kelly was still alive at 1:30 A.M. Times given to police and at the inquest were based on area church clocks that rang the half hour and the hour, on changes of light, and when the East End was silent or beginning to stir.

It may be that the most reliable witness to time of death in Mary Kelly’s murder is the kitten that began walking over Elizabeth Prater at around 4:00 A.M. Cats have extraordinarily good hearing and the kitten may have been disturbed by sounds directly below. It may have sensed the pheromones secreted by people who are terrified and panicking. About the time the kitten woke up Elizabeth, she said she heard from nearby someone cry, “Murder!”

Mary Kelly would have seen what was coming. She was undressed and on the bed. She was face up. She might have seen him pull out the knife. Even if the Ripper threw a sheet over her face before cutting her throat, she knew she was about to die. She would have lived for minutes as she hemorrhaged and he began slashing her. We can’t assume the Ripper’s victims felt no pain and were already unconscious when he began mutilating them. It isn’t possible to know in Mary Kelly’s case if the Ripper started on her belly or her face.

If the Ripper hated Mary Kelly’s sexually alluring, pretty face, he might have started there. Or it may have been her abdomen. She may have felt the cuts as the loss of blood quickly caused her to shiver. Her teeth might have begun to chatter, but not for long as she grew faint, went into shock, and died. She may have drowned as blood gushing out of her carotid artery was inhaled through the cut in her windpipe and filled her lungs.

“The air passage was cut through at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage,” reads page 16 of the original autopsy report.

She could not have screamed or uttered a sound.

“Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts.”

This would require a sharp, strong knife with a blade that was not so long as to make the weapon unwieldy. A dissecting knife has a four- to six-inch blade and a handle with a good grip. But a common killing knife available to the Ripper would have been the kukri, with its unique blade that sweeps into a forward bend. The blade lengths can vary, and the knives are sturdy enough for chopping vines, branches, or even small trees. When Queen Victoria was the Empress of India, many British soldiers wore kukris, and the knives would have found their way into the English market.

Jack the Ripper wrote in a letter dated October 19th that he “felt rather down hearted over my knife which I lost comming [sic] here must get one tonight.” Two days later, on the Sunday night of October 21st, a constable discovered a bloody knife in the shrubbery not far from where Sickert’s mother lived. The knife was a kukri. Such a knife could have been used on Mary Kelly. The kukri was used in battle to cut throats and sever limbs, but because of its curved blade, it is not a stabbing knife.

“The skin & tissues of the abdomen . . . were removed in three large places. . . . The right thigh was denuded in point to the bone. . . . The lower part of the [right] lung was broken and torn away. . . . The Pericardium was open below & the heart absent.”

These autopsy details come from pages 16 and 18 of the original report and seem to be the only pages from any of the autopsies to have survived. The loss of these reports is truly a calamity. The medical details that would tell us the most about what the killer did to his victim are not as clearly defined in the inquests as they would be in autopsy reports. It was not mentioned in Mary Kelly’s inquest that her heart was taken. That was a detail the police, the doctors, and the coroner thought the public didn’t need to know.

Mary Kelly’s postmortem examination was held at the Shoreditch mortuary and lasted six and a half hours. The most experienced forensic medical men were present: Dr. Thomas Bond of Westminster, Dr. Gordon Brown of the City, a Dr. Duke from Spitalfields, and Dr. George Phillips and an assistant. Accounts say that the men would not complete their examination until every organ had been accounted for. Some reports suggest that no organs were missing, but that isn’t true. The Ripper took Mary Kelly’s heart and possibly portions of her genitals and uterus.

The inquest began and ended on November 11th. Dr. Phillips had barely described the crime scene when Dr. Roderick McDonald, the coroner for Northeast Middlesex, said that it would not be necessary for the doctor to go into any further particulars at that time. The jurors—all of whom had viewed Mary Kelly’s remains at the mortuary—could reconvene and hear more later, unless they were prepared to reach a verdict now. They were. They had heard quite enough. “Wilful murder against some person unknown.”

Immediately, the press fell silent. It was as if the Ripper case was closed. Scans through days and weeks and months of newspapers after Mary Kelly’s inquest and burial reveal few mentions of the Ripper. His letters continued to arrive and they were filed “with the others.” They were not printed in respectable newspapers. Any subsequent crimes that might have brought up the question of the Ripper were eventually dismissed as not being the work of the Whitechapel fiend.

In June 1889, dismembered female remains were found in London. They were never identified.

On July 16, 1889, an Unfortunate named Alice McKenzie, known to “be the worse for drink” now and then, went out to the Cambridge Music Hall in the East End and was overheard by a blind boy to ask a man to treat her to a drink. At close to 1:00 A.M., her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, her throat cut, and her clothing pushed up to display severe mutilation to her abdomen. Dr. Thomas Bond performed her autopsy and wrote, “I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.” The case was never solved. Little public mention was made of the Ripper.

On August 6, 1889, an eight-year-old girl named Caroline Winter was murdered in Seaham Harbour on England’s northeast coast, not far from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her skull was bashed in, her body “bearing other terrible injuries,” and she was dumped in a pool of water near a sewer. She was last seen playing with a friend who told police that Caroline was talking to a man with black hair, a black mustache, and dressed in a shabby gray suit. He offered Caroline a shilling to come with him, and she did.

The female torso found in the railway arch off Pinchin Street on September 10th showed no sign of mutilation, except for dismemberment, and there was no evidence that her death was caused by a cut throat, even if she had been decapitated. An incision down the front of the torso could not have been the work of the Ripper, according to the official report. “The inner coating of the bowel is hardly touched and the termination of the cut towards the vagina looks almost as if the knife had slipped, and as if this portion of the wound had been accidental. Had this been the work of the previous frenzied murderer we may be tolerably sure that he would have continued his hideous work in the way which he previously adopted.” The case was never solved.

On December 13, 1889, at the Middlesbrough docks, also on England’s northeast coast, just south of Seaham Harbour, decomposing human remains were found, including a woman’s right hand that was missing two joints of the little finger.

“I am trying my hand at disjointing,” the Ripper wrote December 4, 1888, “and if can manage it will send you a finger.”

On February 13, 1891, a prostitute named Frances Coles was found with her throat cut in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. She was approximately twenty-six years old, and “of drunken habits,” according to police reports. Dr. George Phillips performed the postmortem examination and was of the opinion that the body wasn’t mutilated and he did “not connect this with the series of previous murders.” The case was never solved.