The Real Mary Kelly (16 page)

In this he miscalculated. Apart from the danger of being observed by any one of a number of people who were out and about in Berner Street despite the light drizzle, or the coming and going of members of the club, he had not apparently realised that the yard itself was in use day and night by traders and their horses. It was one of these – Louis Diemschutz, a market trader dealing in cheap jewellery and who was also the club steward – returning to the yard at about 1am to drop off his stock, who apparently disturbed the killer in the act. As the pony turned into the shadowy entrance, it shied away to the left and refused to move on.

Diemschutz dismounted and discovered Stride’s body lying just inside the entrance against the right-hand wall. As it was soon established that death had taken place only minutes before and blood was still running over the cobbles from the wound in her neck, it now seems likely that her attacker had retreated into the darkness of the yard when he heard the approach of the pony and cart. If so, he was able to make his escape almost immediately as Diemschutz then rushed into the club to raise the alarm.

Within minutes Berner Street was thronged with people and two police surgeons, Dr. Frederick Blackwell and the ubiquitous George Bagster Phillips, were examining the body as it lay in the alleyway. Dozens of police were fanning out throughout the surrounding streets in the hope of apprehending anyone suspicious who seemed to be heading away from the area.

Elizabeth Stride, another unfortunate who had moved to England from her native Sweden 22 years previously had, like her two predecessors, died as the result of a wound to the throat inflicted by a sharp, narrow-bladed knife. Unlike them the initial incision had only partially severed the left carotid artery and not touched the vessels on the right of the neck. Death was not, as in their cases,
almost instantaneous through syncope – the sudden stopping of the heartbeat – but instead was the result of blood loss from the partially severed artery. A large quantity of blood was found flowing away from the body in the direction of the drain in the yard, which indicates that the heart was beating for some time after the wound was inflicted. In addition, bruising on the face and chest suggested that she had put up some degree of resistance. It was almost certainly the arrival of Diemschutz’s pony and cart that prevented Elizabeth Stride from suffering the same mutilations as the other victims. Had they arrived ten seconds earlier she may also have escaped with her life and have been able to give the only good description of the killer in history.

As it was, the murderer then demonstrated another example of his audacity and intelligence, not to mention a better understanding of the workings of the London police than most of its citizens possessed. London has not been a single city since the early Middle Ages. The historical City of London, roughly equivalent to Roman Londinium, covers a square mile within the boundary of the old city walls. To this day it is an autonomous and almost self-governing entity with its own police force and, officially, off-limits even to the sovereign without the express permission of the Lord Mayor. It is the financial heart of Britain and in 1888, just as today, relatively few people lived within its confines but flooded in by the hundred thousand to work there during the day. At night it was relatively unpopulated, the dark echoing canyons of thoroughfares like Bishopsgate, Poultry and Threadneedle Street silent except for the measured footsteps of policemen patrolling their beats.

Beyond the confines of the City, in what is generally called Greater London but which is in reality a conglomerate of hundreds of old towns and parishes such as Westminster, St. Marylebone, Whitechapel and Bow, a single police force, the Metropolitan Police, operates. The word London does not occur anywhere in their title or the description of their remit; instead it is charged with policing the Metropolis. The policing of London as such is the exclusive responsibility of the City of London Police and they guard the title jealously.

The City police force – both then and now – has its own Commissioner, appointed not by the government of the United Kingdom but by the Corporation of the City of London. Whilst there was no absolute rule that forbade a
Metropolitan policeman to enter City territory in the course of investigating a crime or in hot pursuit, it rarely happened and permission to do so was usually sought or, more commonly, the responsibility was passed from one force to the other. In the early hours of 30th September 1888, with Whitechapel in turmoil, the City of London was the one place that Francis knew would be a safe haven.

He must also have been sufficiently conversant with the local geography to know when he had passed from the Metropolis and into the City. Apart from the ceremonial entrance to the City at Temple Bar and boundary markers on some of the major roads, only subtle indicators tell a person whether they are within the purlieus of the City. The wrought iron lamp posts and the manhole covers carried, as they still do, a small shield with an embossed heraldic dragon – symbol of the City – but apart from that there was almost no way of knowing whether you were beyond the reaches of the Metropolitan police. Francis apparently knew, however, for he was only a hundred yards inside the City boundary when he encountered Catherine Eddowes and decided to make her his next victim.

Catherine, yet another unfortunate, but unlike her predecessors, thin and scrawny rather than well-built, had been released from protective custody less than 45 minutes earlier. She had been put in a cell in Bishopsgate police station by the City police, having been found entertaining a small crowd by giving a drunken imitation of a fire engine in Aldgate High Street some hours before. Having sobered up enough to falsely give her name as Mary Ann Kelly (and, in so doing, indicating how common an alias it was amongst the unfortunates), she had been released into the night, cheerily replying to the Gaoler, PC Hutt, when she was asked to close the door behind her, ‘All right. Goodnight Old Cock.
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’ She appears to have wandered about for the next half an hour until she fetched up about half a mile south on the corner of Duke Street and Church Passage, one of the three entrances to Mitre Square. Somewhere along the way she had encountered a man.

Mitre Square was a small cobbled area, actually more triangular than square in shape, enclosed on three sides by the tall warehouses and offices of City companies including Kearley and Tonge, a large tea and provisions merchants
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. On the south-west side there was vehicular access to the square from Mitre Street, and in the two opposite corners pedestrian passageways to Duke Street and
St. James’s Place. It was a secluded spot which, like much of the area, would have been thronged during the day – with workers taking short cuts through the warren of city streets and vans and drays making deliveries to the warehouses – but which by night was almost deserted. The night watchman at Kearley and Tonge and the beat constable passing through every 15 minutes were almost the only nocturnal inhabitants of Mitre Square.

Three Jewish friends had left the Imperial Club in Duke Street at 1.35am and noticed a woman talking to a man on the corner of Church Passage. Only one of them, Joseph Lawende, apparently got a reasonable look at them. At the mortuary they later identified the woman as Catherine Eddowes from her clothing. Lawende described the man as being about 30, 5ft 7in tall (although
The Times
said 5ft 9in) with a fair moustache and wearing a loose fitting pepper and salt coloured jacket, a grey peaked cap and a red neckerchief. He thought that the man had the appearance of a sailor. After nothing but a fleeting glance they hurried on by. In that part of London, after the events of the past few weeks, even men in groups didn’t linger in the streets in the early hours more than they had to.

Ten minutes later, at 1.45am, Constable Edward Watkins entered the square from Mitre Street in order to complete a circuit of it before leaving by the same route. The square was lit by only two gaslights, one at the entrance to Church Passage and the other on the western side towards the entrance to the alley leading to St. James’s Place. The south-eastern corner was in deep shadow and in its furthermost recess PC Watkins made out an even darker shape. He turned up the light on his bullseye lantern and shone it into the corner.

Catherine Eddowes’s body lay on its back, the three skirts and the grey petticoat that she was wearing pulled up, leaving her naked from the chest down. Her left leg lay straight in line with the body; the right was drawn up and bent at the knee. Dark blood was still trickling across the paving stones from a gaping wound in her neck, but what caused Watkins to recoil in horror was the jagged wound running from the ribcage to the pubic bone from which a loop of intestines had been pulled to be draped over her right shoulder. Some authors have ascribed Masonic significance to placing the intestines over the right shoulder in the cases of both Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, but the truth is
that the small bowel mesentery that the killer had divided runs obliquely from the lower right to the upper left of the posterior wall of the abdomen and so the right shoulder is the direction in which the small intestines most easily lie when mobilised
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. Another piece of gut was lying free on the pavement between her body and left arm.

The ashen-faced policeman ran to Kearley and Tonge’s warehouse on the opposite side of the square and shouted through the partially open door to alert the night watchman. ‘For God’s sake, mate, come to assist me … here’s another woman cut up to pieces.’ The watchman, George Morris, was himself an ex-copper and wasted no time in hurrying towards Aldgate to summon help. Watkins returned to guard the body, no doubt glancing into every darkened corner of the square and starting at every sound, real or imagined.

Within minutes there were policemen and doctors swarming around the body and the acting Commissioner of the City Police, Major Henry Smith, had been roused from his bed. The first medical man on the scene was George Sequeira, who had been called because he was known to be the nearest resident doctor to Mitre Square. He made no detailed examination of the body beyond confirming that, in the quaint wording of the time, ‘life was extinct’. Within a few more minutes the City Police surgeon, Dr. Frederick Brown, arrived and carried out a more detailed examination. Whilst he was doing so one of the policemen called attention to several objects that had been placed, apparently deliberately, by the side of the body. These included a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, a thimble and three shoe buttons. Once again it seems to be an indication that the killer had been looking for something but perhaps had been disturbed by the sound of PC Watkins’s boots as he approached up Mitre Street. When Brown had completed his examination of the body at the scene he gave orders for its removal to the City mortuary in Golden Lane, where he later carried out one of the most detailed post-mortems of any of the five victims.

Later, when the body was undressed in the mortuary, a portion of the right ear lobe dropped out of the clothing. Many commentators have seized on this and linked it to the references to cutting the ears off and sending them to the police contained in both the original ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the postcard that
followed. It seems more likely that this and at least some of the facial injuries that Catherine suffered were accidentally incurred in the semi-darkness as the killer held the long-bladed knife in one hand and frenetically explored her abdomen with the other.

But even as the body was being removed to the mortuary it appeared that the night’s excitements were not yet over.

At 2.55am that morning, a little over an hour after the discovery of the body of Catherine Eddowes, Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long was patrolling down Goulston Street, Whitechapel, about quarter of a mile north-east of Mitre Square. The east side of the street was made up by the Wentworth Model Dwellings, public amenity housing that consisted of a single, long, five-storey apartment building with several communal staircases served by passages that opened directly on to the street. In one of these entrances he spotted a piece of cloth and as he went to investigate he saw a chalked message on the black painted wall immediately above it. He picked up the piece of cloth and found that it appeared to be saturated with a mixture of blood and faecal material. He blew his police whistle to summon help and when others arrived it was soon established that the cloth exactly matched a piece that had been cut, apparently with a sharp knife, from Catherine Eddowes’s filthy apron.

It was an enormously important piece of evidence. It was assumed that the killer had used it to wipe his hands and, possibly, the knife after he made his escape from Mitre Square. Even more importantly, it was the first indication that the police had of the Ripper’s direction of travel after completing his night’s work. Goulston Street is about quarter of a mile east of Mitre Square and its southern end, near to where the piece of cloth was found, runs into the Whitechapel Road. It seems that the Ripper was heading for the Whitechapel Road and moving in a north-easterly direction. The police seem to have made little use of the information.

Successful serial killers are usually intelligent. It is now known they rarely live at the centre of their area of operations since simple geometry would make it too easy to track them down. Instead they tend to live at the periphery or even just outside it. It is also the case that the first killing in a series is usually
closest to the killer’s base. As confidence grows, so he ranges further afield
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. Of course such statistical knowledge was not available to the Metropolitan police in 1888. Had it been so, they might have concentrated their house-to-house search along the axis of the main artery of the East End, the Whitechapel Road. An area between half a mile and a mile from Bucks Row and including a street or so either side of the Whitechapel or Mile End Road would have been a good place to look.

A potentially even more disastrous mistake was to do with the chalk message on the wall of the Wentworth Model Dwellings. It became known in Ripper mythology as the Goulston Street graffito. There is now no accurate representation of it. Two policemen – Detective Constable Daniel Halse of the City of London Police and PC Alfred Long of the Metropolitan Police, the man who had discovered the piece of apron and the writing on the wall – both wrote the words down in their notebooks. Unfortunately the two versions did not agree. Halse wrote,‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ Long had it as,‘The Juews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ Both versions contain a double negative but they are syntactically different. The first is a message of defiance suggesting that the Jews were ready to take a stand against false accusations. The second seems more accusatory in tone, implying that the Jews were trying to evade their responsibilities. Of course they may have had nothing to do with the Ripper murders but the close proximity of the piece of apron meant that few people, including the police, doubted that the two things were connected. Judging by the clear evidence that Halse gave at the inquest later, compared with Long’s confused and hesitant testimony, it is likely that Halse’s version is the more accurate.