The Real Mary Kelly (20 page)

Frederick William Foster, the architect and surveyor who had produced accurate and highly detailed plans of Mitre Square and the surrounding area for the inquest, showed the jury the likely route taken by the murderer from Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street to Mitre Square, a distance of about three quarters of a mile. It would, said Mr. Foster, have taken from 12 to 15 minutes to walk it. He was then asked whether a man travelling on foot from Mitre Square to Flower and Dean Street would have passed through Goulston Street and replied that, although there was more than one possible route, that one would have been the most direct. In this he was correct but in fact a man taking that route would only have passed through the extreme northerly end of Goulston Street and the entry where the blood-stained piece of apron had been found was more towards the southern end. A man walking south down Goulston Street would have been heading back towards the Whitechapel Road.

When Wilkinson returned with his notebook he was unable to shed much light on who might have booked in between 1am and 2am and admitted that a doss house such as the one of which he was deputy housed upwards of a hundred people every night and his records did not include the names of any of them. He remembered that at emptying out time the next morning there were at least six men he did not recognise, but at what time any of them had arrived he could not say. With at least 50 doss houses in Flower and Dean Street alone and a similar density in the surrounding streets, the floating population of Spitalfields ran into many thousands every night, crammed into an area of less than half a square mile. It is little wonder that the police found the job of tracking individuals and identifying strangers completely beyond their capabilities.

It was now time for the medical evidence to be given, the part that most of the pressmen and, no doubt, their readers had been waiting for. This time
there was no opposition by any of the police surgeons involved to making all the details known. Like Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman she too had been disembowelled through a long midline incision.

Dr. Brown gravely gave his evidence about the condition of the body when he first saw it on the pavement in Mitre Square: ‘The abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; a piece of the intestines was quite detached from the body and placed between the left arm and the body.’

Mr. Crawford, the city solicitor, then intervened. ‘By “placed”, do you mean put there by design?’

‘Yes,’ said Dr. Brown.

‘Would that also apply to the intestines that were over the right shoulder?’ asked Crawford and again he received the affirmative. The section of intestine that had been cut out was almost certainly the descending colon, although it was not described as such at the time. In life it lies directly in front of the left kidney and the operator’s intention in removing it was no doubt to give him better access to the organ which, it was later found, had been ‘expertly removed by division of the renal artery’.

It would require very precise knowledge of human anatomy to know that and when the coroner subsequently asked Brown if anatomical knowledge had been shown in removing the kidney, he replied, ‘It would require a great deal of knowledge as to its position to remove it. It is easily overlooked. It is covered by a membrane.’ This is true, the membrane in question being the posterior peritoneum, and Dr. Brown’s comment that it could be easily overlooked was meant to apply to the well-lit surroundings of the post-mortem room. A pavement in a dark corner of Mitre Square was quite another proposition.

The first doctor actually to arrive on the scene had been Dr. George Sequeira who, although not a police surgeon, was known by the police to be the nearest resident doctor. He was not called to give evidence until the second day of the inquest but when he did so it was in marked contrast to Dr. Brown’s. He had not fully examined the body but pronounced life to be extinct and gave it as his opinion that Catherine had been dead for no more than 15 minutes. He then told the jury, ‘I think that the murderer had no design on any particular organ
of the body. He was not possessed of any great anatomical skill.’ Some historians have used this statement to support their arguments that the Ripper was not a doctor or medical student. Dr. Sequeira however was 30 years old and had qualified with the LSA diploma, the lowest qualification that allowed a man to practise medicine, less than two years before. By contrast Dr. Brown was 45 and had at least 15 years’ more experience than Dr. Sequeira. George Bagster Phillips, who conducted the post-mortem on Annie Chapman and oversaw those on Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, was by far the most experienced surgeon involved in the Ripper murders. He was never in any doubt that they were dealing with someone with an excellent knowledge of anatomy if not an actual practising surgeon. Most surgeons and anatomists today would agree with him.

Brown continued his testimony. Having completed his examination of the body in Mitre Square and having found, once again, surprisingly little blood on the front of Catherine’s clothing but a large quantity draining away along the pavement suggesting that she had been lying on the ground, presumably unconscious, before having her throat cut, he decided that it would be prudent to call Dr. George Bagster Phillips before having the body removed to the mortuary. This shows how much store his colleagues placed in Phillips and, since he now had more experience than anyone else in dealing with the results of the Ripper’s activities, it was probably a wise decision.

The two doctors conducted the post-mortem at 2.30pm that afternoon. They noted the sun bronzing of her arms caused by her recent hop-picking expedition to Kent with John Kelly. Brown then described in remorseless detail the mutilations to Catherine’s face which had brought a new level of horror to the killings, before moving on to describe the wounds to the neck.

Once again it seemed that the weapon used had an extremely sharp, narrow, long blade with a pointed tip like a typical amputation knife. And again, revolting as the mutilations were, none of them were perpetrated before the victim was dead. A sadistic, woman-hating killer is much more likely to inflict injuries whilst the object of his hatred is still conscious, but the Ripper apparently never did so. By the same token, a frenzied schizophrenic – his mind disintegrating into turmoil and confusion – would not have been capable of going about the killings and the subsequent dissections in the methodical, ordered way in which the Whitechapel murderer did. Inevitably it was the mutilations that captured the attention of the police rather than the killings themselves and perhaps that caused them not to look for a pattern or a motive but to assume, as they so often stated, that they were ‘the work of a madman’.

The police surgeon then turned his attention to the abdominal wounds:

Two important points emerge from this part of Brown’s evidence. Once again the Ripper had used a typical surgeon or pathologist’s method of opening the abdomen, avoiding the umbilicus by directing the incision to the right of it and leaving it on a small flap of tissue. This is done because the umbilicus, or navel, is composed of very tough fibrous tissue which is exceedingly difficult to penetrate with a needle, making the job of sewing up the abdomen at the end of the operation or post-mortem difficult. By avoiding it – and for reasons lost in the mists of time it is always bypassed to the right – the operator saves himself this difficulty. There is no logic to this if the killer intended, as he obviously did, to leave the wound open. It would have been much easier, and quicker, simply to have continued the incision down the midline in a single sweep that bisected the navel. In taking a few extra seconds to bypass it, he was revealing the fact that he had either dissected the human body himself or had observed others doing so. It was not a manoeuvre that, for instance, a butcher or a slaughter man would have made.

The other point concerned the observation that Brown made regarding the position of the knife when the ensiform cartilage (which is an old-fashioned name for the structure that is now known to surgeons as the xiphisternum, or the lower end of the breastbone) was divided. It shows that the operator was positioned on the right side of the body. This is the side from which doctors worldwide are taught to examine the human body and from which the vast majority of open surgical operations on the abdomen are carried out. It may be a small point but again it seems to indicate that the Ripper was familiar with medical procedures.

As well as the missing left kidney, the womb had again been excised, although this time less expertly as it had been divided through its lower third, leaving the cervix behind. However, given that the entire operation was carried out between PC Watkins’s first passing the spot on his beat at 1.30am and his return 15 minutes later, in the darkest corner of Mitre Square whilst kneeling on the paving stones, it was an astonishing feat. Few medical students or even surgeons, then or now, could emulate it, even if so inclined. Brown was asked if he thought that the murderer had been disturbed during the act and replied that he thought he had had adequate time to complete his task, the reason being, he said, was that the lower eyelids had been nicked. He clearly thought that this was deliberate and would not have been done if the operator had been under particular pressure of time. He was then asked why he thought the facial mutilations had taken place to which he replied, ‘Simply to disfigure the corpse, I should think.’

At the end of the first day of the inquest the coroner announced that the Lord Mayor had put up a £500 reward for the discovery of the murderer. It was a sum worth the equivalent of £25,000 today and was widely welcomed, the more so because the Home Secretary and the civil authorities had steadfastly resisted offering any reward for the Ripper’s capture until then, despite enormous pressure to do so from the press and the general public.

The inquest was then adjourned until Thursday of the following week. When it re-convened, Catherine’s daughter Mrs. Annie Phillips was questioned about the possible whereabouts of her father and two brothers, whom the police had been unable to trace. Her father was supposedly Thomas Conway, the army pensioner with whom Catherine had taken up in her early life and whose initials ‘T.C.’ were tattooed on her forearm. Despite extensive police investigations, the police had been unable to trace him. Annie, who seemed to be indifferent to the fate of her family and did not even appear to be particularly put out by her mother’s awful death, was of no further assistance to the proceedings and was soon dismissed.

The police and other residents of Mitre Square gave further evidence of the finding of the body; Lawende and his friends, who had encountered the mysterious pair at the entrance to Mitre Square, gave their evidence before the
attention of the court was turned towards the vexed question of the Goulston Street graffito.

Constable Alfred Long of the Metropolitan Police took the brunt of it. He could not remember – under questioning by Mr. Crawford, the solicitor representing the City Police – whether he had written the word ‘Jews’ or ‘Juwes’ in his notebook, nor was he certain whether he had placed the word ‘not’ in the correct position. When he revealed that he had not even brought his notebook to court with him, Crawford asked the coroner to direct that he be sent back to his police station in Westminster to fetch it.

Whilst he was gone, Detective Constable Daniel Halse of the City Police gave his evidence of the finding of the Goulston Street graffito. Compared to Long’s evidence it was a model of clarity and precision. He had no doubt whatever about the order of the words or the spelling of the word ‘Juwes’. He described the height of the letters, the fact that they were written in a ‘good schoolboy’s round hand’ and made the observation that the writing appeared to be fresh otherwise, as he pointed out, there would have been signs of rubbing caused by people passing by in the narrow passageway. In the absence of the writing itself, DC Halse’s version is likely to be the most accurate to have come down to us.