Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (8 page)

By the spring of 1888, Annie had begun living at a dosshouse in Dorset Street, Spitalfields, known as Crossingham’s, run by a keeper called Tim Donovan. She began a relationship of sorts
with a man called Edward Stanley, a bricklayer’s mate known as ‘The Pensioner’, and they often spent weekends together at Crossingham’s, their bed paid for by Stanley. He
also sometimes paid for her bed there during the week, but told Donovan to kick her out if she ever came back with another man.

Like most of the other unfortunates, Annie tried to make an honest living selling crochet work and flowers, but it rarely paid enough to keep her, and the pub had the first call on any money she
made. In the summer of 1888, she bumped into her younger brother, Fountain Smith, and asked for money, but he had given her loans before and now cut her off.

At some time in the first days of September, Annie got into a fight with fellow lodger Eliza Cooper; some accounts say it was over the attentions of Edward Stanley, others say it was over a bar
of soap, and the place where the fight took place was variously given as in Crossingham’s itself or the Britannia pub at the corner of Dorset Street and Commercial Street. Whatever the case,
Annie received several bruises to the chest and a black eye. Her health had been poor all year, and she had been in and out of the infirmary; the injuries would not have made her feel any better.
She was clearly unwell when she met a friend, Amelia Palmer, near Christ Church on the
evening of 7 September, the night leading up to her death. Annie complained of feeling
ill and said she had been to the infirmary where they had given her some pills and a bottle of medicine; she appeared world-weary, but knew what she had to do, saying, ‘It’s no good my
giving way. I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings’. Amelia Palmer gave her the money for a cup of tea, making her promise not to spend it on
rum.

Later that evening, Annie was seen in the kitchen at Crossingham’s by several people. Some witnesses saw her take out the box of pills which promptly broke and she had to use a scrap of
envelope to keep them in. At about 1.35 a.m., the lodging keeper, Donovan, approached Annie for her bed money, but she had nothing to give.

‘Don’t let the bed, I will be back soon,’ she told him.

‘You can find money for drink, but not for your bed,’ Donovan reproved her.

He watched as she walked up Little Paternoster Row in the direction of Brushfield Street and Spitalfields Market. Annie would never return. The last person to speak to her was the nightwatchman,
and she told him she would not be long, and to make sure ‘Tim [Donovan] keeps my bed for me.’

For the next three-and-a-half hours, there is no information about Annie. It was cold for the time of year, and the streets were wet with rain, an unpleasant night to be out, especially for
someone who was clearly unwell. At 5.30 a.m. a woman was seen talking to a man on the street just a few yards from 29 Hanbury Street, where the body was found, and the witness, Elizabeth Long, was
certain the woman was Annie, although she did not know her. She later testified that the couple were talking loudly but seemed to be getting on, and she heard the man ask ‘Will you?’
and the woman reply ‘Yes.’

Mrs Long described the man as of ‘shabby-genteel’ appearance and said he looked like a ‘foreigner’, a word that was used in the East End as a
euphemism for Jewish. She estimated his age as forty, and said he was wearing a dark overcoat and a deerstalker hat. But he had his back to her, so she got no look at his face.

At about the same time, Albert Cadosch, who lived next door to No. 29, went out to the yard at the back of the house, probably to relieve himself, and heard voices in the adjoining yard. He
heard a woman’s voice saying ‘No!’, and then the sound of something falling against the five-foot-high fence which separated the two yards. Like everyone living in the area,
Cadosch was used to drunks and prostitutes in the yards, and took little notice. It is more than possible that he heard the murder of Annie Chapman taking place, and had he peered over the fence he
may have witnessed it.

Half an hour later, John Davis stumbled on the body. In a state of shock, having glimpsed the horrific injuries, he ran out into Hanbury Street and came across Henry Holland, who was on his way
to work. Nearby were two other men, James Green and James Kent, standing outside the Black Swan pub at 23 Hanbury Street, waiting to go to work at the packing case manufacturer’s at the
rear.

‘Men, come here!’ Davis shouted. ‘Here’s a sight, a woman must have been murdered!’

After seeing the body for themselves, the men spread out looking for assistance; at the end of Hanbury Street was Inspector Joseph Chandler who accompanied them back to No. 29. Chandler
immediately sealed off the passageway leading from the front of the house to the back yard and sent for police reinforcements and for the divisional surgeon, Dr
George
Bagster Phillips, who lived at Spital Square close by.

In his initial examination of Annie’s corpse, Dr Phillips noted the obvious injuries to her body, as well as the bruising to her chest and eye from the fight a few days earlier. Removed
from, but still attached to her body and placed over her right shoulder, were her small intestines and a flap of her abdomen. Two other portions of the abdomen were placed above her left shoulder
in a large quantity of blood. The uterus, the upper part of the vagina and the greater part of the bladder had been removed and were missing.

There were also abrasions on the fingers which indicated that the two brass rings Annie always wore had been forcibly removed. Dr Phillips also noted that despite the massive injuries to her
neck and torso, there was not a significant amount of blood loss from the body, and that her tongue was left protruding from her swollen head, indicating that she was strangled before being
mutilated.

Dr Phillips said that he himself, a surgeon, could not have carried out such a mutilation in less than a quarter of an hour.

The style of Annie’s murder was clearly similar to that of Mary Ann Nichols, eight days before. Dr Phillips did not give too much away at the inquest regarding the injuries to Annie
Chapman, but his findings were published in the medical journal the
Lancet
a few weeks later. He stated that the murderer would have had to possess some form of medical or anatomical
knowledge: ‘Obviously the work was that of an expert – of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs
with one sweep of a knife.’ The autopsy also revealed the reasons for Annie’s apparent illness: she was suffering from advanced disease of the lungs which had begun to affect the
membranes
of the brain; in other words, she was already terminally ill. She would have died soon, just not so gruesomely.

The inquest, as always, generated new information and brought forward more witnesses. A piece of leather apron was found in the back yard, leading to a minor flurry of sensation in that it was
somehow linked to the mysterious ‘Leather Apron’ character. It was soon realized that it had no genuine significance as it was left there by Amelia Richardson, a resident who ran her
own packing case business from the house. Testimony from her son, John, was rather more interesting. Being in the habit of checking the security of the cellar doors (in the back yard) following an
earlier burglary, John had sat on the steps leading from the back door at 4.45 a.m. that morning and had seen nothing. He also commented that it was already getting light.

One story that appeared in several newspapers claimed that Annie was seen in the Ten Bells pub on Commercial Street between 5 and 5.30 a.m. Some accounts say she was drinking with a man, others
that she was alone, and that a man wearing a skull cap and no jacket popped his head in the door and called for her before immediately leaving, at which she followed him out. Apparently the
description of the woman tallied with that of Annie Chapman, especially with regard to age, hair and clothing. This story is not reliable, however: there were plenty of other women who fitted the
loose description.

At about 7 a.m. that same morning, a Mrs Fiddymont, who ran the Prince Albert Pub on Brushfield Street, said that a man came into the pub and excited quite a bit of suspicion. He was wearing a
dark coat and a brown stiff hat which was pulled down over his eyes. He asked for half a pint of ‘four ale’ and Mrs Fiddymont was immediately struck by the fact that there
were blood spots on the back of his right hand, on his collar and below his ear, and that he behaved most suspiciously, as if he didn’t want to attract attention to himself. The
man drank the beer in one gulp and left in a hurry, at which Mrs Fiddymont’s friend, Mary Chappell, followed him into Brushfield Street. She pointed the man out to passer-by Joseph Taylor who
followed him in the direction of Bishopsgate before he lost sight of him.

This was the kind of vague testimony the police became used to, as the murders created such a storm of publicity. The killer of Mary Ann Nichols was not caught, and yet another vicious murder
involving horrific mutilations created a tidal wave of anger, frustration and sheer panic amongst the East End community. The fact that he had taken Annie through the passageway of a busy house, at
a time when at least some of the seventeen lodgers living in the building were likely to be getting up for work, and walked back out the same way, presumably with blood on him and carrying the
organs he removed from the body, without being seen, added to the escalating fear and hysteria. Newspaper reports spoke of outbreaks of unrest in the area and innocent men being targeted as
‘Leather Apron’. The police had to use precious resources and men just keeping the peace.

Despite their problems, there was a brief glimmer of hope when, on 10 September, Sergeant William Thick went to the Whitechapel home of John Pizer, a Jewish slipper-maker, and arrested him on
suspicion of Annie Chapman’s murder, and of being ‘Leather Apron’ himself. Fortunately for Pizer, despite being a person of interest to the police for some time, he could show he
was elsewhere when both Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman were murdered. On 31 August, he was
in Holloway in north London, staying at a lodging house called Crossman’s
(just over a century later, in 1989, I moved to Holloway, another of the small ways in which my own story overlaps with the history I have researched). He had even spoken to a policeman regarding
the glow from a fire in the London docks that could be seen even from that distance. On 8 September he was at home, kept there by his family who felt, with the rumours flying about that he was
‘Leather Apron’, it was wise to keep a low profile. With Pizer having cast-iron alibis, there was nothing else of substance for the police to go on, and there was a growing feeling of
dissatisfaction with them. The sensational newspapers summed up the situation in outlandish terms, none more so than the
Star
:

This kind of reporting only created more anger and panic. Accounts of public reaction to Annie Chapman’s murder make it sound as if the entire East End of London had
taken leave of its senses and was gripped by hysteria. On the morning of the murder, Hanbury Street and the surrounding thoroughfares were crammed with excitable onlookers, some of whom took
advantage of the large crowds by selling refreshments.
Perhaps even more macabre was the ‘renting’ of the windows of those houses which looked down on the back
yard of No. 29. Residents made a tidy profit charging one penny a go, so that interested people could look down on the murder site and perhaps catch a glimpse of the bloodstains.

Outbreaks of civil unrest occurred, usually related to sightings of men who appeared suspicious. It did not take much for somebody to be labelled a suspect, and the very word that the murderer
had been seen in some part of the district caused lynch mobs to gather to seek out their quarry. One often-quoted story was that a local criminal nicknamed ‘Squibby’ was being chased by
two policemen through Spitalfields on the day of the Annie Chapman murder and, when the gathered masses saw this, they automatically assumed that the officers were chasing the killer and joined in.
Apparently ‘Squibby’ was quite a bullish character and it would often take more than one officer to arrest him, but on this occasion he practically begged them to get him somewhere safe
as the mob howled for his blood.

To top it all, a lady called Mary Burridge, living in Blackfriars, after reading one of the typically gruesome newspaper accounts, fell into a fit at her home. She briefly recovered but relapsed
and died soon after. It appeared she was effectively frightened to death.

In mid-September, in the absence of Dr Robert Anderson, who was still on sick leave, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson was given the important task of overseeing all information regarding the
Whitechapel murders. A well-respected officer, Swanson was authorized by Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner Charles Warren to be the Commissioner’s ‘eyes and ears’ to be
‘acquainted with every detail . . . He must have a
room to himself, and every paper, every document, every report, every telegram must pass through his hands. He must
be consulted on every source.’

Because of this, the importance of Swanson in this case cannot be overemphasized, and it is fair to say that his knowledge of the crimes exceeded that of any other officer, even though he was
not out on the streets involved with fieldwork. Because his was the desk over which crossed the witness statements, the pathology reports and every scrap of suspicion from every officer involved,
he was the one to make and veto decisions about all the forensic work. Inspector Abberline, who joined the hunt for the Ripper shortly before, has traditionally been given the honour of being the
officer in overall charge of the case; however, that role really fell to Swanson. His experience would lead to his comments about the murders, and even the identity of the killer himself, being
taken very seriously in later years. I certainly feel that his words should, and do, carry enormous weight: nobody knew every dimension of the case as well as Swanson.