Complete History of Jack the Ripper (13 page)

Mann’s testimony commanded equally scant respect from Coroner Baxter who informed his jury that the keeper was subject to fits and cautioned them that ‘neither his memory nor statements are reliable.’
¹⁴
The assertions of the mortuary attendants were in direct conflict with those of senior police officers. Spratling told the inquest that he instructed the attendants not to touch the body without authorization and Helson added that he was actually present when the body was stripped. The testimonies of these officers were taken as early as 3 September and we have no reason to disbelieve them.

What, then, really happened to Polly Nichols in the early hours
of 31 August 1888? The failure of the police investigation has left us very little evidence upon which to speculate and that little has been distorted or lost over the past century by generations of myth makers. Some ‘Ripperologists’ have hidden deficient research amidst a wealth of fiction. Others have distorted what they have read in order to buttress a favourite theory. Few have deemed it necessary to verify the facts. Looking up the Nichols murder in a book on Jack the Ripper we are thus likely to be misinformed about the place, time and manner of it, the nature of the weapon used and the degree of surgical skill employed, in short about almost every aspect of the case. After a century of misrepresentation and falsehood it is time to return to the original evidence. By treating it with respect and by carefully marshalling such clues as we have we can learn something of Polly’s fate. We can recover a little of the elusive truth.

Stephen Knight, in his bestseller
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, tried to persuade his readers that Polly had been the victim of three men. One was John Netley, a villainous coachman, in whose carriage she accepted a lift. Once inside she was fed poisoned grapes and slaughtered by the other two – the artist Walter Sickert and Sir William Gull, onetime Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria! Their grisly task accomplished, Netley deposited the body where it was found and the terrible trio jogged merrily away. Knight’s tale was the wildest fiction but the view that Polly had not been killed in Buck’s Row at all, that she had been slain elsewhere, dressed after death and carried to the spot where she had been found or dumped from some passing vehicle was seriously considered in 1888. Indeed, the relatively small amount of blood found at the spot and the manner in which Polly lay on her back with her legs extended – ‘as though she had been laid down’ – led Dr Llewellyn to form precisely this opinion when he first examined the body in Buck’s Row.
¹⁵
Other circumstances lend colour to the view. There were no cuts or slashes in Polly’s clothing and no one in the vicinity of Buck’s Row heard a disturbance or scream.

But these arguments do not carry conviction. There was certainly little blood where Polly’s body was found but much of that from the throat had been absorbed by her dress and ulster and Llewellyn’s post-mortem examination satisfied him that the blood from the abdominal mutilations had flowed into the abdominal cavity. The absence of cuts in Polly’s clothing proves nothing. Her skirts, as the carmen saw, had been thrown up by the murderer. Her stays, which
might have been expected to protect her abdomen, were indeed found fastened and undamaged. But Spratling and Helson, both of whom saw Polly’s body before it was undressed, agreed at the inquest that the abdominal wounds could have been inflicted without the removal of the stays. Spratling said that they did not fit tightly and that he was able to see the wounds without unfastening them. Helson asserted that although the stays were fastened fairly tightly they were too short; all the abdominal wounds were visible with the stays on and he discovered no wounds beneath the stays.
¹⁶

It is almost certain that Polly died where she was found. Inspector Helson considered that her clothing had been too little disarranged for her to have been carried far. More telling though was the absence of a trail of bloodstains in the street for it is inconceivable that anyone could have carried Polly’s body without clearly marking his progress in crimson splashes. It is just possible, although very unlikely, that she was deposited from a vehicle. A trap or cart may not have left wheelmarks on the cobbled street but it would surely have made a noise, especially in the peace of the early hours, and Charles Cross, the first to discover the body, heard no sounds of a vehicle. The time of death, however, provides the most compelling evidence for the murder having taken place in Buck’s Row. At about 3.40 the carman Paul touched Polly’s breast and thought he detected movement. Five minutes later PC Neil found her right arm warm above the elbow. And, despite the abdominal injuries, the loss of blood and the exposure of Polly’s legs to the cold air, Dr Llewellyn discovered warmth in her body and legs soon after four and concluded that she had not been dead for more than half an hour. Polly seems to have died, then, only minutes before Cross came upon her and it is entirely on the cards that he unwittingly scared her attacker away.

Inspectors Helson and Abberline shared the belief that Polly had been killed outside the stable gateway in Buck’s Row. As early as 2 September Helson told the press that ‘both himself and Inspector Abberline had come to the conclusion that it [the murder] was committed on the spot.’ He reaffirmed this view at the inquest the next day and again in his report of 7 September. And on 19 September Abberline reported that he had ‘no doubt’ that Polly Nichols and the later victim Annie Chapman had both been murdered where the bodies had been found.
¹⁷
Even Dr Llewellyn, whose initial impression was that the body had been deposited outside the stable, came to accept that he had been mistaken.

Polly thus met her end at the entrance to the stable yard in Buck’s Row. At 3.15 PC Neil patrolled the street and saw no one about. Twenty-five minutes later Cross came upon Polly’s body, so soon after her death that he might easily have disturbed the murderer. If, as Llewellyn averred at the inquest, the crime could have been executed in four or five minutes Polly died between 3.30 and 3.40 a.m. When Mrs Holland last saw her, only an hour earlier, Polly was tipsy, in search of her ‘doss money’ and reeling eastwards along the Whitechapel Road. Further along that road she met her assassin and they retired to Buck’s Row. The eastern end of the street was dismally lighted, narrow and tenanted on the south side only. High warehouses dominated the north side. Dark and relatively secluded, it was the regular resort of prostitutes.

The injuries inflicted upon Polly Nichols were unlike Martha Tabram’s but exhibited a similarly pointless ferocity. In two gashes the throat had been cut from ear to ear right back to the spinal column. Inspector Spratling was evidently incorrect when he reported that the spinal cord itself had been cut through but the vertebrae had been penetrated. More, cruel abdominal mutilations had laid the belly open from a point just below the breastbone to the lower abdomen. Either the injuries to the throat or those to the abdomen would have been sufficient to cause death. But, and the point would assume importance later, no part of the viscera was missing.

The manner in which these injuries were inflicted must be largely speculative. There were no signs of a struggle. The throat was cut from left to right. Dr Llewellyn at first held the view that the murderer had attacked Polly from in front. With his right hand he pushed her head back, his thumb bruising her right lower jaw and his fingers her left cheek, and with his left hand he held the knife that cut her throat.
¹⁸
More recently several writers, notably Donald Rumbelow (on the strength of an opinion of James Cameron, the pathologist) and Arthur Douglas, have promulgated the view that the killer attacked Polly from behind. If this was the case he could have gripped her head with his left hand and used the knife with his right, the bruise on her left cheek resulting from the pressure of his left thumb and that along her right lower jaw from the pressure of his fingers. Polly’s attempts to pull away from him, moreover, would have facilitated his efforts to expose her throat to the knife.
¹⁹

The evidence of the bloodstains can help to resolve this problem for us. If Polly’s throat were cut while she was erect and alive a strong jet
of blood would have spurted from the wound and probably deluged the front of her clothing. But in fact there was no blood at all on her breast or the corresponding part of her clothes. Some of the flow from the throat formed a small pool on the pavement beneath Polly’s neck and the rest was absorbed by the backs of the dress bodice and ulster. The blood from the abdominal wounds largely collected in the loose tissues. Such a pattern proves that Polly’s injuries were inflicted when she was lying on her back and suggests that she may already have been dead.

The probable explanation of this evidence is that Polly was throttled before she was mutilated. Although she went to Buck’s Row anticipating sexual intercourse neither Polly nor her killer are likely to have been lying down in the street, especially after the previous day’s showers. She would presumably have expected to complete that transaction standing against a wall. It is possible that she was felled by a blow and in her besotted condition she would have proved an easy victim. But the fact that Polly’s throat was severed when she was lying down and with so little spillage of blood, together with the apparent absence of any scream, points to prior strangulation. There are indications of this, too, in the medical evidence. We know from police reports that Polly’s face was discoloured and her tongue slightly lacerated. And Dr Llewellyn’s inquest deposition mentions a small bruise on the left side of her neck and an abrasion on the right.
²⁰

We can safely dismiss the notion that Polly’s murderer cut her throat from behind. Whether he was left or right-handed, however, is impossible to determine. If he was kneeling by Polly’s head, facing her feet, he would have gripped her face with his left hand and severed her throat (from left to right) with a knife held in his right hand. This technique would have directed the flow of blood from the left carotid artery away from him and is certainly consistent with the evidence of the facial bruises. Llewellyn himself came to doubt his earlier view of a left-handed killer.

Both the nature of the murder weapon and the degree of surgical skill exhibited by the murderer are now commonly misconceived. The error relating to the weapon dates back to contemporary press notices of the inquest proceedings. Some of these, including that in the prestigious
Times
, wrongly reported Dr Llewellyn as identifying the weapon as ‘a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp.’ The belief that the Buck’s Row killer displayed expert surgical skill seems
to have originated in Donald McCormick’s
Identity of Jack the Ripper
, published over thirty years ago. By McCormick’s account Llewellyn testified that the abdominal injuries had been ‘deftly and fairly skillfully performed.’
²¹
These errors have been perpetuated and even embroidered in the literature of the case. Thus, in the recent study by Colin Wilson and Robin Odell, the mutilations inflicted upon Polly were ‘deftly and skilfully performed’ (note the loss of the word ‘fairly’) and the weapon was an ‘exceptionally long-bladed knife.’
²²

A comparison of contemporary police reports, press interviews and press notices of the inquest demonstrates that Llewellyn actually spoke of the weapon as a ‘strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp.’ It was not his contention that the knife had a particularly long blade. Indeed, in an interview reported by
The Times
on 1 September, he specifically refuted that view: ‘The weapon used would scarcely have been a sailor’s jack knife, but a pointed weapon with a stout back – such as a cork-cutter’s or shoemaker’s knife. In his opinion it was not an exceptionally long-bladed weapon.’
²³
No contemporary substantiation has been discovered for McCormick’s assertion that Llewellyn testified that the mutilations were ‘deftly and fairly skilfully performed.’ At the inquest the doctor credited the murderer with ‘some rough anatomical knowledge’, in other words he knew roughly what was where, but nothing whatsoever was said about his surgical skill.

Since Polly was undoubtedly lying down, and probably strangled, before the knife attack took place, the killer need not have been greatly bloodstained. The presence of so many slaughterhouses in the area, moreover, may have allayed suspicion when he made his escape. At that time Whitechapel Road was already busy. Even in Brady Street PC Thain saw one or two men walking to work in the direction of Whitechapel Road shortly before he was hailed by PC Neil. But no one suspected Polly’s killer as he merged with the early morning’s market traffic.

Polly Nichols had been a pauper. Few believed robbery a credible motive for the crime. This suggested a link between her death and the equally purposeless killings, in the same area, of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. For the first time police, press and public alike began to speak of a new and chilling possibility – that the purlieus of London’s East End harboured a deranged killer who would strike again. It was a thought that quickly found expression in
street literature. One verse broadsheet, sung to the tune of ‘My Village Home’, regaled East Enders with
Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel
: