The Real Mary Kelly (12 page)

With all the available engines in East London already pumping water from the Thames at St. Katherine’s Docks, new appliances were sent from across the river, from Southwark, Lambeth and even as far afield as Wandsworth and Peckham. London had seen nothing like it since the Great Fire in 1666 and would see nothing like it again until the Blitz 52 years later.

It took all night to get the fires under control and the engines were still pumping foul-smelling river water to damp down the smouldering ruins of the warehouse the following afternoon
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. Fortunately there had been no loss of life and, much to the disappointment of the spectators, the brandy did not explode. In the early hours people started to drift back to their homes to catch some sleep in what remained of the night for a working day would dawn within a few hours.

To this day the coincidence of two such conflagrations starting so close to each other and within four hours has not been explained. Arson is the obvious conclusion but little effort seems to have been made by the authorities at the time to follow this up. That is, perhaps, understandable, because within a few hours the police of H Division had other things on their minds, an event that relegated reports of the fires to positions of lesser importance in the local and national newspapers the following day. Few people apparently, either at the time or since, made any serious connection between the fires and what was to follow.
Yet if a man, for his own particular purposes, wished to clear the streets of as many observers and policemen as possible, what better way than to cause two simultaneous diversions on such a spectacular scale? It is also worth remembering that personality disorder and schizoid tendencies are frequently associated with fire-setting
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.

A little after 3.40am on that Friday morning a woman’s body was found in Bucks Row, Whitechapel, about a mile north of the fires. The Row, which has since been re-named Durward Street, consisted of a terrace of labourers’ cottages facing warehouses and a coal yard across a narrow cobbled street. The body was half on, half off the pavement when it was spotted by Charlie Cross, who was taking a short cut on his way to work. At first he thought the dark shape was a tarpaulin that had fallen from a passing wagon. Being a carman for Pickfords, he knew the value of a tarp and crossed the street to take a closer look.

As he drew near he saw that it was a woman and his initial presumption was that she was drunk – a not uncommon state of affairs in the streets around Whitechapel in the early hours of the morning – but as he got closer he saw that her skirt was lifted exposing her upper thighs. As he stooped to take a closer look he heard another man hurrying by on the other side of the street. He called him over and together they tried to ascertain whether she was dead, as Cross assumed. The other man, one Robert Paul, thought that he detected a slight movement of the chest, indicating that she might still be breathing but ‘very little if she is’
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.

They were both anxious not to be late for work so they decided to continue on their way and tell the first policeman that they encountered. Cross paused for a moment to pull her skirt down in an effort to restore a little dignity to the woman who they both instinctively recognised as one of the area’s unfortunates.

There were very few policemen around because of the fires and they had to walk nearly half a mile to Hanbury Street before they met PC Jonas Mizen. They told him what they had found and he set off at once in the direction of Bucks Row. By the time he arrived, two other policemen had also found the body. They quickly established that the woman was recently dead and only just beginning to cool, but whether any of them noticed at that stage that her throat had been cut is in some doubt. One of them went to fetch the nearest
police surgeon, Dr. Rees Llewellyn, who lived a few hundred yards away at 152 Whitechapel Road. Police surgeons were not employed full-time by the police but were (and still, for the most part are) local general practitioners appointed to act for the police as and when necessary. In 1888 few of them had any forensic training or experience.

Dr. Llewellyn arrived within minutes of being summoned. He confirmed death and that the woman’s throat had been cut but made no further detailed examination. He was struck by the relatively small amount of blood that had spilled into the gutter, ‘About a wine glass and a half’ he later recalled in evidence
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. He ordered that the body be taken to the parish mortuary at the Whitechapel workhouse in Old Montague Street, where he would examine it later, and at about 5am the dead woman was removed on a police hand cart.

It was only when the two mortuary attendants, themselves elderly residents of the workhouse, undressed the body and prepared it for the police surgeon’s arrival that they found to their profound shock that the woman’s abdomen had been slit open in two long incisions, one in the midline and the other extending from the groin to the left flank. Through the longer of the two, glistening coils of intestines were spilling out. They quickly summoned the superintendent who wasted no time in sending for Llewellyn immediately.

The inquest on the body found in Bucks Row was opened the following day, Saturday 1st September 1888, at the Working Lads’ Institute in Whitechapel Road only a few hundred yards from the scene of the murder
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. The coroner, Mr. Wynne Edwin Baxter, who had recently returned from his Norwegian holiday, sat facing the room beneath a gilt-framed portrait of Princess Alexandra. Baxter was a big man in every way and his broad shoulders and huge walrus moustache made him unmistakeable. To his right sat the expert witnesses and the clerk of the court and to his left the ranks of the all-male jury, women not being permitted to sit on juries until 1919. Facing the coroner were two rows of chairs reserved for the press and behind them sat the relatively few members of the general public that were allowed admission
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.

By the time the inquest opened the stamps of the Lambeth workhouse on some of her grey underwear had helped to identify the woman found in Bucks Row as Mary Ann Nichols. Mary Ann, or Polly as she was generally known,
was typical of the unfortunates who had reached that position in life through drink. She had been born Mary Ann Walker in 1845, the daughter of a locksmith. After marriage to William Nichols, a Fleet Street printer, she had five children but had begun drinking heavily even before the birth of the youngest in 1877. In 1880 they separated with William having custody of the children and, until he was able to prove that Polly was living as a prostitute, paying her a small allowance.

From then until 1888 she lived a life punctuated by spells in and out of various London workhouses and casual wards and sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square
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. In the summer of 1888, in a last despairing attempt to rescue a daughter that he loved despite everything, her father found her work as a servant to a religious, teetotal couple in Wandsworth. At first it looked as if it might work and she wrote a touchingly enthusiastic letter to him asking for news of her children, but a few days later she stole some clothes from her employers and headed for the nearest pawnbrokers. By the end of August she was living in a low grade doss house in the notorious (and inappropriately named) Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields
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. On the night of 30th August she didn’t have the four pence needed to secure her bed for the night so she embarked into the darkness to earn it, joking to the warden, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money – see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!’

After evidence of identification and the finding of the body had been heard, Dr. Llewellyn gave a detailed account of his post-mortem examination although, apparently in collusion with the coroner, he omitted to give a full account of the abdominal wounds, in particular not mentioning the protrusion of the bowels. As the full details had already appeared in many of that morning’s newspapers, it seems unnecessarily fastidious. It was not a course of action that Baxter would take at the next inquest. Nor did Dr. Llewellyn comment in his report that a ring appeared to have been removed from one of Polly’s fingers although, apparently, the fact was noticed by several other people. In light of what was to follow it may have been a significant omission.

The shocking details of Polly Nichols’s death stunned most of those present in court and ensured that the news of the fires was relegated to second place in newspapers around the world the next day. The absence of any signs of a
struggle, and the fact that in a narrow street of labourers’ cottages where people were asleep no-one had heard anything, seemed strange and sinister. It was almost as if a malign, supernatural presence had been lurking in the shadows of Bucks Row and the people of the East End shivered and locked their doors and windows even more securely that night.

On Monday 3rd September the inquest on Polly Nichols was adjourned for two weeks to allow the police to make further investigations and for Dr. Llewellyn, the less than competent police surgeon, to make another and fuller post-mortem examination. In particular the coroner had asked him to discover whether any of Polly’s internal organs were missing, a detail that had apparently not occurred to him during the first autopsy. But on 8th September, before it had resumed, another murder took place in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, less than half a mile from the Working Lads’ Institute, and Coroner Baxter was obliged to open a second inquest.

Number 29 Hanbury Street was a one of a long terrace of dilapidated houses that had long since outlived their purpose but were still used as overcrowded slum dwellings by the wretched inhabitants of Spitalfields. Originally they had been the houses of prosperous Huguenot silk weavers but the growth of the silk mills of Cheshire, coupled with repeal of the duty on imported French silk in 1860, spelled the end of the hand-woven silk industry in East London. By 1888 most of the weavers’ houses were unfit for human habitation yet were still homes to hundreds of people. In September 1888 number 29 – a house that
was suitable for maybe six people to occupy comfortably – housed 17, including Mrs. Harriet Hardiman and her 16-year-old son, who both lived in a noisome room on the ground floor which they also used for cutting up and selling cat meat. Several other families each occupied a single room in the three-storey building and, in common with most other houses in the street, the front door was never locked to allow them to come and go as they pleased.

The new victim was another unfortunate called Annie Chapman. She was 47 years old and, like Polly Nichols, alcoholic and of very short stature. Her body was found within an hour of her death by an elderly lodger, John Davis, coming down the steps from the back door of number 29 to use the privy at the end of the yard. The body lay just to the left of the steps, between them and the paling fence that divided the yard from that of the next door house. This time there was no chance of missing the finer points of the crime. Annie lay sprawled on her back, her head very obviously all but severed from her body and her entrails draped up over her right shoulder like a macabre necklace.

In a highly agitated state Davis ran out into Hanbury Street and blurted out the terrible news to the first men that he came across before rushing onwards to Commercial Street police station to summon help. Within minutes the police were on the scene and a crowd had begun to gather in the street outside. Unlike that of Polly Nichols, a very full post-mortem examination was carried out by Dr. George Bagster Phillips – the senior and highly experienced police surgeon to H Division – both in the yard before the body was moved and later in the Old Montague Street mortuary.

Davis had found the body just before 6am and a little over an hour before, when it was just becoming light, John Richardson, the landlady’s son, had sat on the steps to trim a piece of loose leather from the sole of his boot. He was certain that Annie’s body had not been there at that time. Albert Cadosch, a 28-year-old Frenchman who lodged next door at number 27, had been in the backyard a little after 5.30am. He had heard voices from the next yard and then something heavy falling against the 6ft fence, but he did not attempt to look over it as he was already late for work. It seems certain that Annie met her death between 5.30am and 6am when it was fully light and many people were up and about. The murderer it seemed had taken Annie through the hallway of 29, the front and
back doors of which were never locked, had carried out his execution and then made his escape without anyone having seen or heard anything unusual. For the second time in little over a week the mysterious killer had struck, carried out his dreadful mutilations and disappeared in the space of just a few minutes.

When the news became known of what was by now the fourth murder of an unfortunate in the area in five months, public concern began to rise nationally as well as locally. When the inquest opened on Monday 10th September, there was little enough space in the improvised courtroom for the coroner, his officers, the court officials, the jury and the witnesses, let alone the public and representatives of the press. Crowds built up on the pavement of Whitechapel Road soon after the doors opened, as people of all ages and classes jostled and pushed each other, hoping to gain admittance. After the shocking revelations of the last case, everyone wanted to hear for themselves the evidence of the police surgeon. They were to be disappointed, however, because the coroner’s officer, Mr. Banks, had instructed the police not to allow members of the public access to the building
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.

A contemporary drawing of the scene at Annie Chapman’s inquest still exists
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. It was done by a courtroom artist working for the
Pictorial News
and is undoubtedly an accurate depiction of the scene. Such artists were employed much as they are today – to record scenes in courtrooms in which, then as now, photography was not allowed. Combining it with the detailed descriptions of the event, which appeared in the local papers the following Saturday, it is possible to account for most of the people in the picture. Coroner Baxter sits on the far side of a heavy, leather-skivered table beneath the portrait of Princess Alexandra after whom the room was named. Always an imposing figure with his black walrus moustache, on that day he wore a white waistcoat, crimson silk tie and check trousers
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. To his left, facing the end of the table, sat the jury of 18 men. Immediately to his right was Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the senior police surgeon to H Division, and at the end of the table, facing the jury, were the two representatives of the police. According to the
East London Advertiser
these were Inspector Abberline and Inspector Helson, although the
East London Observer
says that Inspector Joseph Chandler, the police officer from Commercial Street police station who took charge of the scene of the crime in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street, was there rather than Abberline.