Complete History of Jack the Ripper (7 page)

Tussaud’s, the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park, the People’s Palace in the East End, the South Kensington museums and the Tower all enjoyed brisk patronage. At Alexandra Palace holidaymakers gathered in their thousands in the drizzle to watch intrepid Professor Baldwin ascend in his balloon to 1000 feet and then parachute to the ground. More than 55,000 opted for Crystal Palace. There the entertainments ranged from organ recitals to military bands, from Keen the cyclist, matching his bicycle over 20 miles against horses, to Captain Dale, the ‘well-known Aeronaut’, from a monster fireworks display to a ‘Grand Fairy Ballet’. And when the day’s activities were done London’s rich night life, its pubs, theatres and music-halls, ensured conviviality and spectacle for those still anxious to postpone the damp journey home.

Amidst the holiday crowds that day were Joseph and Elizabeth
Mahoney, a young married couple. Their lives, like those of most East Enders, were hard. Joseph was a carman. His wife worked from nine o’clock in the morning to seven at night in a match factory at Stratford. And their combined earnings supported a frugal existence at No. 47 George Yard Buildings, a block of model dwellings occupied, as the
East London Observer
tells us, by ‘people of the poorest description’, in George Yard (present Gunthorpe Street), off Whitechapel High Street.

The Bank Holiday thus came as a kind if brief respite, and in defiance of bad weather the Mahoneys made the most of it. It was not until about 1.40 on the Tuesday morning that the weary couple arrived home. They went straight up to their room but Elizabeth, after taking off her hat and cloak, slipped out again for some provisions for their supper. Every night the gas jets illuminating the wide, stone staircase in George Yard Buildings were turned out at eleven, so it was completely dark on the stairs as she descended to the street. She was away but a few minutes. It was perhaps about 1.50 when she returned, having purchased provisions from a chandler’s shop in nearby Thrawl Street, and after supper had been disposed of the Mahoneys went to bed. Elizabeth had seen no one in descending or ascending the stairs, and that night the couple slept undisturbed.

Alfred George Crow was a licensed cab-driver. He, too, rented a lodging, No. 35, in George Yard Buildings. Crow got home that night at 3.30 a.m. Although he carried no light his eyes were good, and when he reached the first floor landing he saw someone lying there. It was not unusual to find vagrants sleeping on the landing so he took no notice of the silent figure and went straight up to his room, where he sought the comfort of his bed. Like the Mahoneys he heard no noise during the night.

It was another tenant, waterside labourer John Saunders Reeves from No. 37, who discovered the murder. Because he had to be up early for work, Reeves retired at about six on the Bank Holiday evening. The next morning he left his lodging at about 4.45. It was already getting light as he descended the stairs. And on the first floor landing he was horrified to come upon the body of a woman, lying on her back in a pool of blood. A few details – the absence of blood from the mouth, the clenched hands and the disarranged clothes, torn open at the front – registered in his brain before he stumbled down into the street to find a policeman.
¹

Reeves was soon back, leading PC Thomas Barrett 226H up the stairs to the landing. The body was that of a middle-aged woman, plump and about five feet three inches in height. Her hair and complexion were both dark. Her clothes, a black bonnet, long black jacket, dark-green skirt, brown petticoat and stockings, and pair of ‘side-spring’ boots, were old and worn. She lay on her back, her hands lying by her sides and tightly clenched, her legs open. ‘The clothes,’ Barrett told the inquest two days later, ‘were turned up as far as the centre of the body, leaving the lower part of the body exposed; the legs were open, and altogether her position was such as to at once suggest in my mind that recent intimacy had taken place.’
²

The woman was plainly dead. Nevertheless, Barrett sent immediately for a doctor and Dr Timothy Robert Killeen of 68 Brick Lane
arrived in George Yard at about 5.30 a.m. His hurried examination of the body revealed for the first time the awful extent of the woman’s injuries. She had been stabbed no less than thirty-nine times! The doctor concluded that she had been dead for about three hours and gave instructions for the body to be at once removed to the mortuary. Since there was no public mortuary in Whitechapel the police conveyed it to the deadhouse belonging to the workhouse infirmary in Old Montague Street.

At the mortuary Killeen conducted a post-mortem examination. His findings, presented to the inquest jury on 9 August, described the woman’s fearful wounds in detail. Upon opening the head he had found an effusion of blood between the scalp and the bone. The brain was pale but healthy. There were at least twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk: ‘the left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty, and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth . . . there was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to hemorrhage and loss of blood.’
³

Killeen disagreed with Barrett on one point. He saw no reason to believe that sexual intercourse had recently taken place. But he did proffer some clues as to the modus operandi of the killer. There was no evidence of a struggle. One of the wounds, he contended, might have been made by a left-handed person, but the rest appeared to have been inflicted by a right-handed person. And two different weapons had been used. Now, much has been made of Killeen’s testimony on this last point. It is worded differently by different reporters. The
East London Observer
quoted the doctor thus: ‘I don’t think that all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument, because there was one wound on the breast bone which did not correspond with the other wounds on the body. The instrument with which the wounds were inflicted, would most probably be an ordinary knife, but a knife would not cause such a wound as that on the
breast bone. That wound I should think would have been inflicted with some form of a dagger.’ In the
Daily News
his evidence is a little more specific: ‘In the witness’s opinion the wounds were not inflicted with the same instrument, there being a deep wound in the breast from some long, strong instrument, while most of the others were done apparently with a penknife. The large wound could have been caused by a sword bayonet or dagger.’
⁴

Inspector Edmund Reid, the ‘Local Inspector’ (Head of CID) in the Metropolitan Police’s H or Whitechapel Division, took charge of the investigation. From the outset the case promised to be a difficult one. The dead woman was not known to any of the tenants of George Yard Buildings. There was no clue to the author of the crime and no obvious motive for it. And despite the ferocity of the murder no inhabitant of the buildings had heard the slightest disturbance during the night. The last point is one of some significance. Inspector Ernest Ellisdon, in a report written only three days after the murder, explicitly stated that no blood was found on the stairs leading to the landing. This means that the victim was killed where her body was discovered. Yet, in a crowded tenement block, no one seems to have heard a sound. Francis Hewitt, the superintendent of the dwellings, occupied an apartment with his wife close to the spot where Reeves found the body. Indeed, for the benefit of one journalist, he took a foot rule and measured the distance between the two. They were only twelve feet apart. ‘And we never heard a cry,’ he told the reporter. Mrs Hewitt said that she heard a single cry of ‘Murder’ but that was early in the evening, and although it echoed through the building it did not seem to emanate from there. In any case, as the Hewitts explained, ‘the district round here is rather rough, and cries of “Murder” are of frequent, if not nightly, occurrence in the district.’ The Hewitts’ comment suggests a possible solution to the problem. But there is another – that the victim’s cries were stifled by strangulation before or during the knife attack. That, according to the
Illustrated Police News
, is what happened: ‘The difficulty of identification arose out of the brutal treatment to which the deceased was manifestly subjected, she being throttled while held down and the face and head so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible.’ Unfortunately, with the bulk of the police files now lost, it has proved impossible to corroborate this particular detail.
⁵

Hastily-compiled press reports soon apprised the general public of
the tragedy. One of the earliest, printed in the
Star
, appeared on the day of the murder:

The East End, accustomed as it was to everyday violence, was shocked by the ferocity displayed in this killing. Morbid sightseers visited George Yard Buildings to gaze at the crimson-stained flags where the body had been found. The victim, in the view of one local newspaper, had been ‘literally butchered’, the ‘virulent savagery’ of her killer ‘beyond comprehension’. Another spoke of the ‘feeling of insecurity’ occasioned by the realization that ‘in a great city like London, the streets of which are continually patrolled by police, a woman can be foully and horribly killed almost next to the citizens peacefully sleeping in their beds, without a trace or clue being left of the villain who did the deed.’ Indeed such was the consternation in and about George Yard that a few days after the murder about seventy local men held a meeting and appointed a committee of twelve to watch certain streets, chiefly between eleven at night and one in the morning. The St Jude’s Vigilance Committee, as it was called, was the first of several spawned by the Whitechapel murders. It comprised both working men and students from Toynbee Hall and met once a week to receive reports and concert recommendations for the better order and security of the district. The honorary secretary was Thomas Hancock Nunn.
⁷

If the public hoped for clues to emerge at the inquest they were disappointed. Wynne E. Baxter, Coroner for the South Eastern District of Middlesex, was on holiday in Scandinavia, so it was George Collier, the deputy coroner, who opened the proceedings
in the library of the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel Road, on the afternoon of Thursday, 9 August. He sat beneath a magnificent portrait of the Princess of Wales by Louis Fleischmann. Other paintings, royal portraits and landscapes, adorned the library walls in profusion. Collier was flanked on his right by Inspector Reid, smartly dressed in blue serge, and Dr Killeen, and on his left by the inquest jury. The general public had been excluded, but popular interest was reflected in the unprecedentedly large number of summoned jurymen who attended, twenty in all, and in the atmosphere that prevailed throughout the court. It was, commented the
East London Advertiser
’s reporter, ‘painfully quiet’.
⁸

But there were to be no major revelations that day. A succession of tenants from George Yard Buildings were called as witnessses – Elizabeth Mahoney, plainly clad in a ‘rusty-black’ dress and black woollen shawl and speaking so softly that she was ordered to stand next to the jury; Alfred George Crow, the young cab-driver with the ‘beardless, but intelligent face’ and close-cropped hair, dressed in a shabby green overcoat; and John Saunders Reeves, he who found the body, a short man wearing a black overcoat, corduroy trousers and ear-rings, his face ‘pale and contracted’ but sporting a slight, dark beard and moustache. Together with PC Barrett they did no more than detail the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body. The only other important witness was Dr Killeen, who presented the medical evidence.