Complete History of Jack the Ripper (9 page)

Poll stated that she would know both men again and promised the police that she would attend an identity parade at the Tower on Friday the 10th. But neither on that day nor the next could she be found. Without telling them she had, in fact, gone to spend a couple of days with her cousin, a Mrs Shean of 4 Fuller’s Court, Drury Lane, and it was not until the following Sunday that they contacted her again. The soldiers of the Tower garrison were eventually paraded before her at 11 o’clock on the morning of Monday, 13 August, but Poll failed to pick anyone out. A colourful if apocryphal account of this bizarre episode was printed in the
East London Observer
:

Poll now, however, disclosed the information that her soldier companions of Bank Holiday night had white bands around their caps. This suggested that they had been men of the Coldstream Guards and a parade of all the corporals and privates of that
regiment who had been absent or on leave at the time of the murder was held at Wellington Barracks, in Birdcage Walk, on 15 August. The proceedings began auspiciously enough. Poll identified two men, one as the corporal who had been with her and the other as the private with whom ‘Emma’ had gone up George Yard. Unfortunately the man picked out as the ‘corporal’ turned out to be a private named George. Besides three good conduct badges he had an alibi. George insisted that he had been with his wife at 120 Hammersmith Road from eight o’clock on the evening of 6 August to six o’clock the following morning and subsequent police enquiries verified his statement. Poll’s second man, another private named Skipper, protested that on the night of the murder he had been in barracks. When the regiment’s books demonstrated that this had, indeed, been the case, that he had been in barracks from 10.05 p.m. on 6 August, he too was cleared.
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Police officers later spoke disparagingly of Pearly Poll’s efforts. Walter Dew was a CID officer in 1888, attached to the H or Whitechapel Division of the Metropolitan Police. When he wrote his memoirs fifty years later he accused Poll of deliberately identifying the wrong men out of pique. Sir Melville Macnaghten, who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1889, heard a similar story. In a confidential note he prepared upon the Whitechapel murders in 1894 he asserted that she ‘failed, or refused, to identify’ the soldiers.
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There are grounds for such suspicions for Poll’s behaviour during the investigation did sometimes seem to exhibit the distrust of authority characteristic of her class. She thus went to stay with her cousin without troubling to inform the police, even though she was required for the identity parade at the Tower, and to one person who enquired where she was going she allegedly replied that she was going to drown herself. Later, when testifying before the inquest on 23 August, she displayed the same diffidence. On this occasion, complaining that her chest was ‘queer’, she gave her testimony through an officer. Yet all this does not necessarily mean that Poll deliberately sabotaged the investigation. She drank heavily on Bank Holiday night. Her recollections of that evening may well have been hazy. At the inquest she insisted that the two men whom she had picked out were, to the best of her belief, the ones who had been with her and Tabram, and if she was mistaken it is well to remember that PC Barrett enjoyed no better success. Why, moreover, did Poll volunteer her information in the first place if she did not wish to assist the police?

By 23 August, when George Collier reopened the inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute, the police investigation had thus ground to an ignominious halt. Popular excitement had now begun to wane and at two o’clock p.m., when the proceedings commenced, only a small crowd had gathered outside the Institute. As on the previous occasion the general public were excluded from the court, but they carefully scrutinized the witnesses as, one by one, they passed into the building.

The evidence heard inside identified the victim as Martha Tabram and dwelt at some length upon her character and history. On the circumstances surrounding her death, however, the only important witness was Pearly Poll. Wrapped in an old green shawl and speaking in a low, husky voice, she told the inquest of her Bank Holiday night out in Whitechapel with Martha and the two soldiers. And that being all, the proceedings came to an end.

In his concluding remarks to the jury Collier left them in no doubt as to what their verdict must be. ‘This was one of the most horrible crimes that had been committed for certainly some time past,’ he reminded them. ‘The details were very revolting, as they would remember from the doctor’s evidence on the last occasion, and the person who had inflicted the injuries could have been nothing less than a fiend.’ Martha Tabram had clearly been ‘foully and brutally murdered’. They could bring in no other verdict than one of wilful murder.
¹⁹

The jurors returned a unanimous verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, and when Martha’s death was registered two days later, that was recorded as the cause of death. ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ . . . words which would become frighteningly familiar to the people of the East End that autumn.

The facts of the Tabram slaying, like those relating to almost all of the Whitechapel murders, have been obscured by generations of supposition and invention. It is important to be clear about them. Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times. A special report upon the case, prepared in September 1888 by Chief Inspector Donald S. Swanson, noted that she had been stabbed ‘on body, neck and private parts with a knife or dagger’, and press versions of Dr Killeen’s inquest testimony indicate that there were no fewer than nine stab wounds to the throat.
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But there is no evidence that carotid arteries had been severed, the throat cut or the abdomen extensively mutilated.

The notion now sometimes expressed that the George Yard murderer displayed anatomical knowledge is a myth. It sprang, apparently, from the remarkable statements which Donald McCormick, in his book
The Identity of Jack the Ripper
(1959), placed in the mouth of Dr Killeen. According to McCormick, the doctor tentatively identified the murder weapons as a long-bladed knife and a surgical instrument, and told the police that ‘whoever it was, he knew how and where to cut.’
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Anyone who cares to examine the contemporary evidence will soon discover that these were not Killeen’s views. At the inquest he said that the murderer had employed two weapons. All but one of the wounds had evidently been inflicted with an ordinary penknife, but the wound on the breast bone had been inflicted with a strong long-bladed weapon, possibly a dagger or a bayonet. There is no reason to suppose that the doctor changed his mind upon this point. The records of the Metropolitan Police still contain a contemporary digest in tabular form of all the official reports made upon the case.
²²
In one column, headed ‘Nature and description of wounds as given in surgeon’s report’, is written the comment ‘twenty wounds on breast, stomach and abdomen apparently inflicted with a penknife.’ As for the killer’s supposed anatomical knowledge, there is no record that Killeen ever expressed an opinion upon the subject. To judge by what we know of the case the question would scarcely have arisen. There had been no systematic mutilation. Instead, in an apparent frenzy, the murderer had repeatedly stabbed his victim through and through. We know of no police inquiries amongst doctors, or even butchers and slaughter men, at this time, which in itself suggests that Killeen had given the CID no reason to suspect that the murderer might be possessed of anatomical knowledge.

The ‘fiend’ responsible for the outrage was never identified. Yet a view that the crime was perpetrated by soldiers has taken root in conventional Ripperology and will now be very difficult to shift. Paul Harrison’s optimistically titled
Jack the Ripper
:
The Mystery Solved
endorsed it as recently as 1991: ‘To this day the crime remains unsolved, though the Grenadier Guard theory seems highly probable since the wounds inflicted upon the body of Martha Turner/Tabram were like those caused by a bayonet.’
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My discerning readers will already know better. The truth is that there is no persuasive evidence against the soldiery.

Certainly Martha Tabram was last seen alive on Bank Holiday night, walking up George Yard with a soldier. But that was at
11.45 p.m. Dr Killeen estimated the time of her death as about 2.30 the following morning, an estimate that is consistent with the testimony of both Elizabeth Mahoney and Alfred Crow. Between 1.40 and 1.50 that morning Elizabeth climbed or descended the staircase in George Yard Buildings three times and saw nothing on the first floor landing. Crow noticed a body, almost certainly Martha’s, there at 3.30. Almost three hours thus elapsed between the time Pearly Poll last saw Martha alive and that of the murder, ample time for her to have ventured out again into Whitechapel Road or Commercial Street, found herself another client and returned to the relative seclusion of George Yard. The police realized this very well and their identity parades at the Tower and Wellington Barracks are evidence less of their conviction that the murderer was a soldier than of their diligence in following up the only leads they had.

Certainly, too, sergeants and corporals were then permitted to carry side-arms when on leave and Dr Killeen told the inquest that
just one
of Martha’s wounds might have been inflicted with a bayonet. But it is important to note that he did not positively assert that a bayonet had been used, only that the wound on the breast bone had been inflicted with a strong, long-bladed weapon which
could have been
a bayonet
or
a dagger. And even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that a bayonet was one of the guilty weapons, such a circumstance would not unequivocally have incriminated a soldier. The police, too streetwise to attach much importance to the alleged bayonet, explained this at the time to the
East London Advertiser
: ‘The police state that they should not be at all surprised to find that the murder was not entirely the work of soldiers or that soldiers had a [i.e. no] hand in the crime at all . . . Old bayonets, they assert, can at any time be bought in Petticoat Lane, and at the old iron stalls there, for about a penny each, and they have frequently been seen as playthings in the hands of the children.’
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A view propagated by some modern writers that the murderer was ambidextrous has even less to recommend it. It was suggested, of course, by the killer’s use of two weapons. However, Killeen’s testimony made it clear that although one wound
might
have been inflicted by a left-handed person the others all appeared to have been inflicted by a right-handed person. And the only sensible conclusion we can draw from that is that the murderer was right-handed.

Back in August 1888 no one seems to have feared that the George Yard murder might herald a series of such atrocities. There had,
however, already been three murderous attacks on women in the area that year.

The first, and in the context of the Tabram murder by far the most interesting, occurred on Saturday, 25 February 1888. At 5.00 p.m. that day Annie Millwood, widow of Richard Millwood, a soldier, was admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary from 8 White’s Row, Spitalfields. In infirmary records the cause of her admission is simply given as ‘stabs’. But an
Eastern Post
report is more revealing: ‘It appears . . . the deceased was admitted to the Whitechapel Infirmary suffering from numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body. She stated that she had been attacked by a man who she did not know, and who stabbed her with a clasp knife which he took from his pocket. No one appears to have seen the attack, and as far as at present ascertained there is only the woman’s statement to bear out the allegations of an attack, though that she had been stabbed cannot be denied.’

Annie recovered from her wounds. On 21 March she was discharged to the South Grove Workhouse, Mile End Road, but on 31 March, while engaged in some occupation at the rear of the building there, she suddenly collapsed and died. An inquest was held before Coroner Baxter five days later. It attributed Annie’s death to ‘sudden effusion into the pericardium from the rupture of the left pulmonary artery through ulceration’. In other words, she died from natural causes and not from the effects of the stab wounds.
²⁵

We are not told whether Annie was a prostitute or not but, although only thirty-eight, she was a widow and may have been maintaining herself in this way. White’s Row, off Commercial Street, was only a few minutes away from George Yard. And Annie was attacked by a stranger who wounded her ‘numerous’ times in the legs and lower torso with a knife. Annie’s case thus has much in common with Martha’s. Both women could easily have encountered the same man.

The victim of the second attack was Ada Wilson, a 39-year-old machinist of 9 Maidman Street, Burdett Road, Mile End. At about 12.30 on the night of 27–28 March Ada was about to go to bed when she heard a knock at the door. Opening it, she was confronted by a man, a total stranger. He looked about thirty, his face was sunburnt and he had a fair moustache. He was about 5 feet 6 inches tall. His clothes included a dark coat, light trousers and a wideawake hat. The man demanded money and told Ada that if she did not
at once produce the cash she had but a few moments to live. Then, when Ada refused to give him anything, he immediately drew a clasp knife from his pocket and stabbed her twice in the throat. Fortunately her screams attracted help and, after Dr Wheeler of Mile End Road had bound up her wounds, she was sent to the London Hospital. It had been a very dangerous attack indeed. Press reports of the incident commented: ‘it is thought impossible that the injured woman can recover.’ But Ada baffled their expectations and on 27 April, after thirty days in hospital, she was discharged as cured. Her assailant, who had probably been scared off by the screams, was never traced.
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