The Cases That Haunt Us (3 page)

But are some offenders so far gone that they really do not know what they’re doing is wrong? Sure, there are some, and from my experience they also tend to be delusional or hallucinatory. But we can often pick out this type rather quickly, and because they’re so disorganized and “crazy,” we usually catch them before long. Was the Whitechapel killer one of these? Had he gone over the edge from character disorder to total nutcase? We need more evidence before we can make that determination.

The murder victim was wearing several layers of clothing, which she would have had to do if she was homeless. Her only other personal possessions were a comb, handkerchief, and broken mirror. But on one of her petticoats, police noticed the laundry mark of the Lambeth Workhouse. By process of elimination, the victim was determined to be Mary Ann, or Polly, Nichols, although the initial attempt to have her body identified failed, possibly because of the mutilation. She was eventually identified by Mary Ann Monk, who had been at the Lambeth Workhouse at the same time. On September 6, 1888, she was buried in a pauper’s grave in the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford, Essex.

PATTERN
CRIMES?

There was little to go on in solving the crime. Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson admitted that detectives were stumped by the “absence of motives which lead to violence and of any scrap of evidence, either direct or circumstantial.” In fact, Swanson and his colleagues just didn’t understand the motive. They’d have had no reason to; they’d never seen it before. However, despite the lack of experience with this type of crime, both Dr. Robert Anderson, assistant Metropolitan Police commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (
CID
), and
CID
assistant chief constable Melville Leslie MacNaghten said that it was obviously the work of a sex maniac.

It was possible, though, that the Nichols killing was related to an earlier prostitute murder in the East End; no one was certain. In fact, they’re not sure to this day.

Martha Tabram, also known as Emma Turner, was the estranged wife of a warehouseman, Henry Tabram. After the estrangement, she lived on and off for a number of years with William Turner, who, though a carpenter by training, worked as a street hawker. This accounts for her two surnames. As in the case of Polly Nichols, each man eventually left her because of her excessive drinking.

On the evening of August 6, 1888, a bank holiday, Martha went out with her friend Mary Ann Connolly, known locally as Pearly Poll. Connolly later testified that the two of them had visited several pubs, including the Two Brewers, where they were picked up by two members of the Grenadier Guards, a prestigious unit of the army. They went to other pubs, including the White Swan on Whitechapel High Street, before finally parting company around 11:45 P.M. Poll and her guardsman then went into Angel Alley for stand-up sex against a wall. She saw Martha go into George Yard, presumably with similar intentions.

At around 3:30 the next morning, taxi driver Alfred Crow returned to his tenement flat on the northeast side of George Yard and saw what he thought was a derelict sleeping on the first-floor landing. About an hour and twenty minutes later, another tenant and dockyard laborer, John Saunders Reeves, came downstairs and saw what he realized was a body.

Dr. Timothy Killeen, who examined the body for the police at about 5:30 A.M., estimated that the approximately forty-year-old woman had died about two hours previously, or shortly before Crow first noticed her. Altogether, the victim had suffered thirty-nine stab wounds, with the breasts, abdomen and genitalia being the primary targets. Most of the wounds were unremarkable in terms of the likely weapon used, with the exception of a wound in the center of the sternum, which appeared to have come from a dagger or bayonet. This suggested that perhaps the crime had been committed by the guardsman with whom Martha Tabram had been seen earlier in the evening.

With two unsolved murders in the same area in the same month, uneasiness settled over Scotland Yard. But apart from those who knew either of the unfortunate victims, London as a whole, and even the East End, did not really take notice. After all, homeless prostitutes were the throwaways of society, and even though both crimes were exceedingly brutal and seemed without apparent motive, this was not something with which proper folk had to be overly concerned.

That all changed on the morning of Saturday, September 8, and in a sense, the world of criminology has not been the same since.

ANNIE
CHAPMAN

Just before 6 A.M., carman John Davis finally got up after having spent a restless night. He left the third-floor flat he’d occupied for about two weeks with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury Street and went downstairs to go to the outside privy. To the left of the back-door steps, he suddenly saw a body. A woman was lying on her back between the steps and the fence of the property’s yard. Her dress had been pulled up over her head, her belly had been ripped open, and her intestines were not only visible this time, but pulled out and draped over her left shoulder. Other residents and passersby quickly assembled. Some of them and Davis each went off in search of a policeman. One, Henry Holland, found a constable a couple of blocks away at Spitalfields Market, but the officer told him he could not leave his fixed point. This was but one example of the procedural rigidity of the law enforcement of the day, which would hamper many attempts at bringing the
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to justice.

The first senior police officer on the scene was Inspector Joseph Chandler. He was on duty at the Commercial Street Police Station when he saw men running up Hanbury Street. When he realized what had happened, he rushed to the murder site, covered the body, then sent for Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon for H Division, the area where the crime had occurred. Phillips examined the brutally butchered but ritualistically arranged corpse. At the inquest, he described what he had seen:

The left arm was placed across the left breast. The legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side. The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen. The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom, and very fine teeth they were. The body was terribly mutilated… . The throat was dissevered deeply; the incisions through the skin were jagged, and reached round the neck… . On the wooden paling between the yard in question and the next, smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased lay, were to be seen.

Phillips went on to observe that all of the wounds appeared to have been made by a sharp knife with a narrow blade and that the evisceration indicated some medical knowledge. He speculated that all of the mutilations may have taken as long as an hour, though with what I’ve seen from even moderately experienced serial killers, I would suspect less time. As in the case of Polly Nichols, there was no evidence of a struggle. Apparently, the
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had also attacked this one suddenly, neutralizing her before she could fight back.

A message was sent to Inspector Frederick George Abberline of Scotland Yard’s H Division, and he quickly showed up on the scene. Abberline, who was forty-five years old and married for the second time (his first wife died of consumption the same year he married her), is something of a legend in police circles, though details of his personal life are rather sketchy. He had risen quickly through the ranks from constable (patrolman) to sergeant, to undercover operative and detective, and then to inspector. Abberline would come to take charge of all the detectives in the Whitechapel investigation.

As he waited for Abberline and other Scotland Yard officials to arrive, Inspector Chandler had the crime scene thoroughly searched. The woman’s pocket had been slit open and its contents included such ordinary items as two combs, a piece of muslin, and a folded envelope containing two pills. About two feet away, they found a bloodstained leather apron, of the type worn by slaughterhouse workers or possibly cobblers or leather workers. Since the apron was not wet with blood, it was highly questionable whether it was related to the crime. And since in those days there was no scientific means of typing blood, or even determining for certain whether it was from a human being or an animal, a bloodstained garment from one of the many slaughterhouses in the area would have been easily explainable. Still, any potential clue was likely to have a “life of its own,” as this one certainly did.

Dr. Phillips told the inquest he believed the three personal items had been placed with some care—the muslin and the combs at the victim’s feet and the envelope by her head. Two farthing coins were also near the body, though this detail was kept secret by the police to help qualify suspects. If this description is accurate, it’s another indication of a particular psychosis and mental instability. We often find this in disorganized or mixed offenders—that is, a brutal frenzy of attack, together with careful, ritualistic elements that indicate a need to control or master small, discrete components of the crime scene or victim.

One of my earliest major profiling cases involved the murder of a twenty-six-year-old teacher of handicapped children who was mildly handicapped herself with curvature of the spine. She was found strangled, severely beaten, and sexually abused at the top of the stairwell of the apartment building where she lived with her parents on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, New York. She had been spread-eagled and tied with her own belt and nylon stockings around her wrists and ankles, though the medical examiner determined she was already dead when that was done. The cause of death was ligature strangulation with the strap of her pocketbook. The NYPD photos showed a scene of appalling gore and cruelty, and this told me a lot about the offender. What told me even more was that her nipples had been cut off after death and placed on her chest, her comb was set in her pubic hair, and her earrings had been placed symmetrically on the ground on either side of her head. This type of compulsiveness and strange ritualism amidst such a frenzy of disorganized mayhem said to me that my prey had some deep and long-term psychological problems. The method of sexual assault, with the victim’s umbrella inserted into the vagina, told me that this guy had real problems with normal sexual functioning and, even though he’d be in his twenties, was still very much in the pre- or early adolescent stage of sexual fantasy, experimentation, and curiosity about the female body. Taken together with his obvious sociopathic hostility, it didn’t take much imagination to see that we were dealing with a very dangerous individual. I was therefore extremely gratified that we were able to help in hunting down and catching the offender, who, as I’d predicted, lived in the neighborhood, was underemployed, without a car or meaningful job, and had close relatives in the victim’s building.

Based at least in part on Dr. Phillips’s description of the murder scene at Hanbury Street, I believe the police were dealing with a similar type of offender there, but, of course, they would not have had sufficient comprehension to realize it. Though all the evidence was not yet in, I would have begun honing my profile to reflect a fairly unsophisticated offender, like the killer ninety years later in New York, a combination of a violent and sexually immature and inadequate personality.

Dr. Phillips had the unidentified body removed to the Whitechapel Infirmary Mortuary on Eagle Street, and in the afternoon he conducted a full postmortem, which confirmed some of his earlier observations, including facial bruising as we have discussed previously. Laceration wounds of the neck showed that the killer had tried to separate the various bones of the neck after death, the type of perverse anatomical curiosity I would liken to the attempt to remove Nichols’s head.

But there was more. Not only had the intestines been severed from their attachments within the abdomen and placed over the shoulder, the uterus, half of the vagina, and most of the bladder had been entirely removed, apparently cut out with some care. They were not found with the body. The murder of street prostitutes, as we’ve suggested, was not uncommon. But the postmortem mutilation was essentially unknown to the Victorians.

Not so, unfortunately, to us. What we see here is not only a fevered overkill, but a man who may be taking anatomical souvenirs. The removal of the uterus and vagina suggests to me someone who hates women and probably fears them. By removing the victim’s internal sexual organs, he is, in effect, attempting to neuter her, to take away that which he finds sexually threatening. Since, along with this, there is no evidence of traditional rape, the fear of women and their sexual power is a pretty strong bet.

The victim was identified as Annie Chapman by a washerwoman friend named Amelia Palmer. Chapman, born Eliza Anne Smith, was a stout five feet two with brown hair and blue eyes. Of all the victims, she was the most pathetic. In her late forties, her autopsy showed signs of malnutrition and chronic diseases of the lungs and membrane surrounding the brain, which might have killed her before long if the
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hadn’t. She had been married to John Chapman, who’d made his living as a coachman for wealthy families in Mayfair. They had three children, one of whom was a girl who died in infancy and another who was physically handicapped. This was not unusual for the poor. Her marriage, like those of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols, was said to have broken up over her drinking, but since John died four years later of cirrhosis, one might suspect the problem was not one-sided. In any event, she was living by her wits, supplementing whatever small amounts of money she could earn on the streets from selling matches, flowers, and her own crocheting with even smaller amounts from prostitution, working the area right around Spitalfields Market. At the time of her death she was living in Crossingham’s Common Lodging House on Dorset Street, where she’d earned a reputation for a violent temper through brawls with other prostitutes. She was also alleged to be a petty thief, and her late former husband had lost at least one job in Mayfair because of her thievery.