Complete History of Jack the Ripper (63 page)

There was no repetition of the outrages and in April 1890 plain-clothes patrols were finally withdrawn. Nearly a year later, in the cold February of 1891, the last real Ripper scare occurred.

Frances Coles was the prettiest of all the Whitechapel murder victims. The daughter of a former bootmaker, she was twenty-six, about five feet tall and had brown hair and eyes.
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Her descent into drink and prostitution is as mysterious as that of Mary Jane Kelly. In 1891 her father, James William Coles, was a ‘feeble old man’ in the Bermondsey Workhouse, Tanner Street, and her sister, Mary Ann Coles, a single and entirely respectable lady living at 32 Ware Street, Kingsland Road. Frances, too, once held a respectable if humble position at a wholesale chemist’s in the Minories, where her work involved ‘capsuling’ or ‘stoppering bottles’. Frances said that she could earn from six to seven shillings a week. But she didn’t like the work. It hardened the skin of her knuckles and she complained to her sister that they had become very painful.

Frances seems to have slipped into prostitution when she was only eighteen. In 1891 James Murray, one of her clients, told police that she had been living in doss houses in the Commercial Street area and soliciting in Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Bow for some eight years. When he first met her she had been staying at Wilmot’s lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street.

Frances did her best to keep it all from her family. On Boxing Day 1890 she visited her sister for tea. Frances gave her to understand that she was still working at the chemist’s and living with an elderly lady in Richard Street, Commercial Road. Perhaps Mary Ann knew or sensed the truth. She noticed that Frances ‘was very poor, and
looked very dirty’. Sometimes she smelt of drink. Frances regularly visited their father at the workhouse and used to take him to church on Sundays. As late as Friday, 6 February 1891, when he saw his daughter last, the old man thought she was living in Richard Street. He seems to have known that she had left the chemist but not how she was earning her living. Frances promised to call on him again a week on Sunday. It was an appointment she never kept.

Enter James Thomas Sadler, ship’s fireman, fifty-three years old, estranged from his wife and belligerent in his cups.

On 11 February Sadler was discharged from his ship, S.S.
Fez
, and made his way into Commercial Street. He had been a former client of Frances Coles. So when they saw each other in the Princess Alice public house they teamed up again. They slept together that night at a common lodging house at 8 White’s Row, Spitalfields, and spent much of the next day drinking at various pubs in the area. Sadler gave Frances 2s. 6d. and between 7.00 and 8.00 p.m. on the 12th she bought a new black crape hat at a millinery shop, 25 Nottingham Street, Bethnal Green. Peter Hawkes, who served Frances, remembered that she was ‘three sheets in the wind’ (i.e. drunk).

At some time during the evening Frances quarrelled with Sadler. Apparently Sadler was knocked down and robbed in Thrawl Street. ‘I was then penniless,’ he told police later, ‘and I had a row with Frances for I thought she might have helped me when I was down.’ It is to be doubted whether Frances, in her intoxicated condition, was capable of helping herself let alone Sadler. No matter, the two went their separate ways.

Frances returned to the lodging house in White’s Row, where she sat on a bench in the kitchen, rested her head in her arms on the table and promptly fell into a drunken stupor. Some time after that Sadler came back. He was drunk. Worse, his face was bleeding, his clothes smothered in dust and he was spoiling for a fight. ‘I have been robbed,’ he told the lodgers, ‘and if I knew who had done it I would do for them.’ Neither Sadler nor Frances had their lodging money. Charles Guiver, the watchman, helped Sadler to clean up in the yard and then, with great difficulty, persuaded him to leave. Later, when Frances woke up, she left too. Witnesses were to dispute the times. Guiver thought that Sadler left just before midnight, Frances between 1.30 and 1.45 a.m. But as Samuel Harris, one of the lodgers, remembered it,
Sadler left at about 12.30 and Frances only three or four minutes after that.

Frances was seen at about 1.30 in Shuttleworth’s eating house in Wentworth Street. She was alone and asked for three halfpenceworth of mutton and some bread and ate the food in the corner. She stayed for about fifteen minutes. Joseph Hassell, who worked there, asked her to leave three times. But Frances had nowhere to go. ‘Mind your own business!’ she told him. Finally, at about 1.45, he put her out and she turned in the direction of Brick Lane.

2.15 a.m., Friday, 13 February 1891. PC Ernest Thompson 240H was patrolling his beat westwards along Chamber Street. Leman Street Police Station was only minutes away but PC Thompson must have been nervous. He had been in the force for less than two months and this was his first night on the beat alone. It was a night that would haunt him for the rest of his short life.

As he made his way along the street the constable heard, in the darkness ahead of him, the retreating, unhurried footsteps of a man. The man was too far away to see but he seemed to be walking in the same direction as Thompson, towards Mansell Street. Thompson paid it no attention. But then, turning left into Swallow Gardens, a short passage that led under a dismal railway arch into Royal Mint Street, he saw something lying in the middle of the roadway under the arch. When he shone his lamp on it he discovered that it was a woman. Blood was flowing from her throat. And, as Thompson stood horrified, he saw her open and shut one eye. In an instant the constable was blowing frantically on his whistle. The latest victim was Frances Coles. She died there under the arch, before a doctor could arrive.

Frances may have been thrown down violently because there were wounds to the back of her head. Certainly Dr Phillips, who performed the autopsy, and Dr F. J. Oxley, the first medical man on the scene in Swallow Gardens, agreed that her throat had been cut while she was lying on the ground. Phillips concluded that the murderer had held Frances’ head back by the chin with his left hand and cut her throat with a knife held in his right. The knife had been passed three times across the throat – from left to right, right to left and then left to right again. The killer had worked from the right side of the body and it had been tilted in such a way as to suggest that he had tried to avoid becoming bloodstained. Frances’ clothes were found in perfect order and there were no abdominal mutilations. Phillips did not think that
the attacker had demonstrated any skill and he did not believe that he was the perpetrator of the 1888 murders. Dr Oxley told the inquest that although there was but one incision of the skin there must have been two wounds because the larynx had been opened in two places. He thought that they had been made by someone standing in front of the fallen woman.

The police quickly found a suspect in Tom Sadler. He knew and had quarrelled with the dead woman. Then, at about three on the fatal morning, less than an hour after PC Thompson’s discovery in Swallow Gardens, Sadler returned to the lodging house in White’s Row and asked to be allowed to sit in the kitchen. Again he was bloodstained and again he claimed to have been set upon and robbed, this time in Ratcliff Highway. Sarah Fleming, the deputy, noticed that he was so drunk that he could scarcely stand or speak intelligibly. She turned him away. ‘You are a very hard-hearted woman,’ he grumbled. ‘I have been robbed of my money, of my tackle and half a chain.’ Duncan Campbell, a seaman at the Sailor’s Home in Wells Street, told an even more incriminating story. He said that at about 10.15 the same morning a man had sold him a knife for a shilling and a piece of tobacco. He identified Sadler as the man.

At Thames Magistrates’ Court on 16 February Sadler was charged with the murder of Frances Coles and remanded pending further investigations. Detectives were cock-a-hoop. They seemed to have the murderer of Frances Coles. Might they have Jack the Ripper as well? Careful inquiries were set afoot into Sadler’s whereabouts at the times of the other Whitechapel murders.

It was a false dawn. The case against Sadler soon fell apart. Ample witnesses were discovered to testify that Sadler had not been with Frances in the hours immediately preceding her death. In particular, they proved that the fireman’s story of a second beating that night had been true. At between 1.15 and 1.50 he got into a fight with some dock labourers outside the gates of St Katharine Dock, a scrimmage that left him bleeding profusely from a wound in the scalp. And the knife? Well, Dr Phillips did not think that the murder weapon had been a very sharp knife. But even so, it is exceedingly doubtful if the knife sold to Duncan Campbell could have done the business. Thomas Robinson, a marine stores dealer to whom Campbell sold the knife, found it so blunt that he had to sharpen it before he could use it at supper. Dr Oxley saw the knife
after
it had been sharpened. Yes, it could have been used by the murderer in its present condition,
he said, but ‘if it were much blunter . . . it could not have produced the wound.’ There is a further point. The murderer of Frances Coles displayed some presence of mind. Would Sadler, in his besotted condition, have been capable of carrying out the deed? Witnesses who saw him that morning leave us in no doubt of his incapacity. Sergeant Edwards saw Sadler outside the Royal Mint only fifteen minutes before Frances died. He said that he was ‘decidedly drunk’ and weaving about on the pavement. And Sarah Fleming, an hour later, found him scarcely able to stand. Let Dr Oxley have the last word: ‘If a man were incapably drunk and the knife blunt I don’t think he could have produced the wound . . . If a man were swaying about I don’t think he could control the muscles of his hand and arm sufficiently to cause the wound.’

Wynne Baxter, presiding at the inquest into Frances’ death, carefully presented the evidence. His jurors were not impressed by the case against Sadler and on 27 February returned a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown. Four days after that all proceedings against him in Thames Magistrates’ Court were dropped. As Sadler left the court his cab was loudly cheered by the crowds standing outside.

It was the right decision. We know that as late as 1894 Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the CID, still suspected Sadler. But the contemporary evidence – and there is plenty of it – contains little to justify his view.

Attempts to link Sadler with the 1888 murders foundered the moment his voyages were documented. On 17 August 1888 he signed on at Gravesend for a voyage to the Mediterranean in the
Winestead.
This vessel did not return to London until 1 October and Sadler was discharged on this date. In other words, when Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes met their deaths, the fireman was safely at sea.

Friday, 13 February. Unlucky for Tom Sadler, most assuredly for Frances Coles, but also for PC Thompson, alone on night duty for the first time. Those footsteps in the dark troubled him. If he had given pursuit could he have caught the murderer? Could he have captured Jack the Ripper? It was, and is, useless to speculate. For Thompson remained with Frances and, in truth, he could do no other. Police standing orders, tightened up after the 1888 atrocities, required a constable finding a murder victim to summon assistance and remain on the site. In any case Frances
was still alive when Thompson appeared and he could not possibly have abandoned her.

Yet the events of that night remained with the young constable. Frederick P. Wensley, who would rise from the ranks to become Chief Constable of CID, knew Thompson. ‘I fancy that the lost opportunity preyed on Thompson’s mind,’ he wrote, ‘for I heard him refer to it in despondent terms more than once, and he seemed to regard the incident as presaging some evil fate for himself.’
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The forebodings proved true. In 1900 Thompson was stabbed to death when he intervened to prevent a disturbance at a coffee stall in Commercial Road.

Perhaps the Ripper hunters sensed that they were actors in a historic drama. For despite frustration and failure an undoubted camaraderie grew amongst them. Still preserved at Bramshill Police Staff College is a walking stick presented to Abberline by the detectives who worked on the case with him. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police History Museum holds a pipe presented to Inspector Nearn. It is inscribed: ‘Souvenir to James Nearn, Whitechapel Murders, 1888, from six brother officers.’

There were no Ripper-type slayings after 1891. But the Metropolitan Police file on the murders was never officially closed and for some years afterwards the force kept a weather-eye open for likely suspects. Thus, when William Grant Grainger, yet another ship’s fireman, was arrested for stabbing a woman in Spitalfields in February 1895, police tried hard to establish his whereabouts at the dates of the Ripper murders. They were not even able to prove his presence in London in 1888.
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The Ripper, for whatever reason, had gone. But his crimes were the stuff of legend and would not be forgotten. Around them a century of claim and counter-claim, discussion and debate, fictioneering and fraud, had already begun.

R
EADERS WHO HAVE
stayed the distance now know as much about the Jack the Ripper murders as history can tell. It is time for us to stop and take stock of what we have learned. The answers to many of the questions commonly asked about the case are already within our grasp. On other matters the historical record is silent.

There were nine killings in the series. How many are likely to have been slain by the same hand, that of the man we now call Jack the Ripper? Popular report at the time credited him with all nine. But detectives and surgeons who worked on the case held widely divergent views.