Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (21 page)

Abberline classed these dogs as a silly intrusion, which only served to hamper his inquiries, rather than help them. After waiting over an hour, he decided enough was enough and instructed one of his men to smash in the door with an axe handle.

The ghastly scene that befronted the police officers who entered Kelly’s room that morning is something that can only be appreciated by reading the actual post-mortem report by Doctor Thomas Bond, a distinguished police surgeon from A Division. His report read as follows:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen.

The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.

The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.

The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood, which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.

The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.

The neck was cut through the skin and other tissues right down to the vertebrae, the fifth and sixth being deeply notched. The skin cuts in the front of the neck showed distinct ecchymosis [large bruise]. The air passage was cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage [attachments for the various muscles in the neck].

Both breasts were more or less removed by circular incisions, the muscle down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs were cut through and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.

The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin, including the external organs of generation, and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin fascia, and muscles as far as the knee.

The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle. Both arms and forearms had extensive jagged wounds.

The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand moreover showing the same condition.

On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away. The left lung was intact. It was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung there were several nodules of consolidation.

The pericardium was open below and the heart absent. In the abdominal cavity there was some partly digested food of fish and potatoes, and similar food was found in the remains of the stomach attached to the intestines.

Dr George Bagster Phillips was also present at the scene, and gave the following testimony at the inquest:

The mutilated remains of a female were lying two-thirds over towards the edge of the bedstead nearest the door. She had only her chemise on, or some underlinen garment. I am sure that the body had been removed subsequent to the injury which caused her death from that side of the bedstead that was nearest the wooden partition, because of the large quantity of blood under the bedstead and the saturated condition of the sheet and the palliasse at the corner nearest the partition.

The blood was produced by the severance of the carotid artery, which was the cause of death. The injury was inflicted while the deceased was lying at the right side of the bedstead.

11

Hell

T 
he police were not completely surprised when they burst into the room, as some of them had managed to get a brief glimpse of what was in store for them through the broken window. When true horror hits one in the face, however, it can have such an impact that it often renders grown men speechless, as was the case of one of the first officers on the scene, who collapsed and had to be taken to hospital, where he didn’t say a word for ten days.

Abberline later admitted that he had never seen anything so terrible in his life before. ‘It was like hell in there,’ he said.

The investigation nevertheless had to continue, with notes, drawings and diagrams being taken. The official police photographer also had, almost certainly, the worst job of his career. One of the first things that struck Abberline, apart of course from the mutilation, was Kelly’s clothes, which were neatly folded and placed on a chair in one corner of the room. Her boots were placed in front of the fireplace, probably in order to dry them out after the rain of the previous day.

Abberline reasoned that when Kelly had placed these items so neatly and carefully in her room, assuming that it was her who had done this, she must have felt completely at ease with whoever it was she was sharing her bed with that night.

Another very important thing that Abberline noted was that the door lock had not been forced in any way. In fact, when the police had smashed through one of the door panels with their axe, they still had to reach in and turn the door handle in order to open the door. Considering that Kelly had been murdered indoors, the only Ripper victim not to be killed on the street, this meant that the killer had either been invited in, in all probability by Ms Kelly as a paying customer, or that she had forgotten to lock her door and her killer had just walked in. This last scenario is highly unlikely, as it would then point to a random killing. The slaughter of Mary Kelly was certainly the most horrific of all the Jack the Ripper murders, but there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was most definitely the work of the same killer, and it is a well-established fact that the Ripper did not work on a random basis.

The problem Abberline had with the theory of the killer being invited in is that there was only one witness who said he saw Kelly with a man on the night of her death, and that was George Hutchinson. When Abberline went back over Hutchinson’s original statement, however, he noticed one vital flaw, which was that Hutchinson had said he got a good look at the man. This is a very detailed description indeed, especially considering the fact that it was raining heavily at the time and also very dark, as London, during this period in time, was lit only by the occasional gas lamp. To be able to pass a man in the early hours of the morning and be able to pick out the direction his moustache turned, the colour of his eyes, his bushy eyebrows, even his ethnicity, and add to this what pin he was wearing in his necktie and upon his watch chain, is almost an impossibility. To make Hutchinson’s description even more implausible is the fact that he said the man ‘Was wearing a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes’. Surely, Abberline argued, such a hat, pulled down over the man’s eyes, would have obscured most of his facial features completely, let alone the colour of his eyes and the bushiness of his eyebrows.

There is also the fact that when Hutchinson first saw the man standing on the corner of Thrawl Street and Commercial Street, he said he was making his way home after just returning from Romford, where he had been working as a labourer, and that it was then 2 a.m. When he last saw the man, who was by this time with Mary Kelly just outside Miller’s Court, it was then 3 a.m. The distance between Thrawl Street and Miller’s Court is less than a mile, probably no more than ten to fifteen minutes’ walking distance at the very most, so how come it took Hutchinson an hour to complete this journey? He said he was an ordinary working man, who had finished a hard day’s work and was on his way home at the time. I personally find it implausible for a labourer to be returning home at 2 a.m., and even more implausible that he would hang around in the cold, dark and pouring rain at such a time whilst following a prostitute and her client, and that it should take him a whole hour to do so.

This was the only alleged sighting of a man with one of the victims just before their death; a man who could well be Jack the Ripper. However, with just this one, rather unreliable witness statement to go on, Abberline found himself frantically going back over all the old evidence, witness statements and possible suspects.

The main suspects were Aaron Kosminski, Michael Ostrog, Dr Francis Tumblety and Montague John Druitt. Abberline’s own prime suspect, however, was Severin Klosowski, alias George Chapman.

12

The Suspects

A
ARON
K
OSMINSKI

The first suspect was Aaron Kosminski, who was born in the Polish town of Klodawa, which was then in the Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Jozef Kozminski, a tailor, and his wife Golda
née
Lubnowska. Kosminski left home in 1882, when he was just 17 years old, and immigrated to England, where he embarked on a career as a barber in the Whitechapel area of East London. This was an area that many Jewish refugees chose, many of whom were fleeing pogroms and economic hardship in Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia at the time. It was an impoverished slum area but at least it was cheap and they could afford a room there. A short while after he settled in, his sisters, brother and widowed mother also left Russia and joined him in Whitechapel.

In July 1890 and again in February 1891, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town Workhouse because of what was termed as ‘his insane behaviour’, although this ‘behaviour’ was never explained at the time. When he was discharged from the Mile End Old Town Workhouse on the second occasion, he was dispatched immediately to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to the Imbeciles Asylum at Leavesden.