The Real Mary Kelly (14 page)

The next question that Baxter asked was one of the most important in the whole enquiry. ‘Was there any anatomical knowledge displayed?’

Phillips’s considered reply was critical. ‘I think there was. There were indications of it. My own impression is that that anatomical knowledge was only less displayed or indicated in consequence of haste. The person evidently was hindered from making a more complete dissection in consequence of the haste.’ The doctor had spotted several tell-tale clues including possibly the most important. He had used the words ‘making a more complete dissection’. In other words he had recognised that the person who carried out the act was not merely seeking to kill and randomly mutilate but to explore the body in a rational, scientific way. Such a person, in his opinion, must have done it or witnessed it before and under more conventional circumstances.

Baxter pressed on: ‘Was the whole of the body there?’

It was the moment Phillips had been dreading. He hesitated before replying, ‘No; the absent portions being from the abdomen.’

The coroner asked whether the missing portions were such that it would have required anatomical knowledge to extract, to which the doctor answered, ‘I think the mode in which they were extracted did show some anatomical knowledge.’

At that point, whilst the whole courtroom was at a state of almost unendurable expectancy, the coroner adjourned the inquest for a further week. When it reconvened on 8th October and the police surgeon was recalled to give evidence, it was immediately apparent that he and the coroner were on a collision course. Phillips was deeply unhappy about revealing any detailed account of the abdominal mutilations in open court. In that he was absolutely right by the conventions
of the time. It was the job of the inquest to establish only the identity of the victim, the cause of death and to deliver an opinion as to whether that death was natural or unlawful. The details of what happened to the body after death had taken place were at that time no part of a coroner’s brief. The reserved, old-fashioned doctor was fiercely opposed to allowing the spectators in court and, through the ranks of reporters, the wider public outside to be party to the distressing facts. A confrontation between the two men was inevitable.

Before asking him to give evidence, Baxter – clearly anticipating the other man’s viewpoint – said, ‘Whatever may be your opinion and objections, it appears to me necessary that all the evidence that you ascertained from the postmortem examination should be on the records of the Court for various reasons, which I need not enumerate. However painful it may be, it is necessary in the interests of justice.’

Phillips replied, ‘I have not had any notice of that. I should have been glad if notice had been given me, because I should have been better prepared to give the evidence; however, I will do my best.’ After the coroner asked him if he would like to postpone his evidence Phillips continued:

‘No. I will do my best. I still think that it is a very great pity to make this evidence public. Of course, I bow to your decision; but there are matters which have come to light now which show the wisdom of the course pursued on the last occasion, and I cannot help reiterating my regret that you have come to a different conclusion
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.’

‘When I come to speak of the wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public. These details are fit only for yourself, Sir, and the jury, but to make them public would simply be disgusting.’

‘We are here in the interests of justice and must have all the evidence before us,’ said Baxter sententiously, adding, ‘I see, however, that there are several ladies and boys in the room, and I think they might retire.’
The Daily Telegraph
recorded that two women and a number of newspaper messenger boys left the court at that point, the latter no doubt under extreme protest.

Phillips then threw down the gauntlet: ‘In giving these details to the public I believe you are thwarting the ends of justice.’

It was an extraordinary accusation for an otherwise reserved professional man to make to a coroner in his own court and it indicates the extreme pressure that Phillips must have been feeling. It had no effect on Baxter, however, who replied: ‘We are bound to take all the evidence in the case, and whether it be made public or not is a matter for the responsibility of the press,’ displaying, like countless others after him, a touchingly misguided faith in the finer sentiments of the press when set against the sale of newspapers.

There was no contest and as if to settle the matter the foreman of the jury eagerly added that they too wished to hear the full account. The newspapers reported that several jurors joined in with, ‘Hear, hear’ at that point as if calling for an encore at the local music hall rather than hearing evidence in a court of law. After a few further exchanges Phillips made one final attempt to change the coroner’s mind: ‘I am of opinion that what I am about to describe took place after death, so that it could not affect the cause of death, which you are inquiring into.’

He was finally and humiliatingly crushed by Baxter saying, ‘That is only your opinion, and might be repudiated by other medical opinion.’ It was a calculated insult, meant to imply that Phillips’s professional view that death had been caused by an incision that severed the neck to the depth of the vertebral column might actually be mistaken.

With remarkable restraint Phillips replied, ‘Very well. I will give you the results of my post-mortem examination.’

In the event the account that followed was so unpleasant that most newspapers did not publish the details. Annie Chapman had been literally disembowelled. The perpetrator had opened the abdomen through a midline incision which bypassed the navel, leaving it on a small flap of skin and muscle. At that point the intestines had been freed from their attachments to the posterior abdominal wall and then strung out in a loop over Annie’s right shoulder, no doubt to make it easier to access the pelvis for what came next. It was a manoeuvre that only a surgeon or someone with understanding of dissection of the body would have been familiar with
⁹⁷
. Had the attachment – known as the root of the mesentery – not been divided, the intestines would have remained tethered in a slithery mass in the abdominal cavity, on top
of and completely obscuring the deep recesses of the pelvis and its contents which were the main objects of the operator’s attention. A non-medical person, even a butcher, might simply have cut through the bowels and removed them piecemeal, but in doing so a large quantity of liquid intestinal contents would have been released to drain into the pelvis, completely submerging its contents and befouling the operator in the process. By performing what is known as a surgical mobilisation of the intestines, the killer managed to avoid perforating the bowel, but this required considerable knowledge and skill as Phillips recognised.

What the murderer’s objective was then became apparent. The police surgeon described in measured tones the excision of the victim’s womb, ovaries and the upper third of the vagina in ‘one sweep of the knife’. When questioned by the coroner as to how long such a procedure would have taken, he said:

‘I think I can guide you by saying that I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, and effect them, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour
⁹⁸
. If I had done it in a deliberate way, such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour. The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.’

It is an astonishing statement but almost certainly true. Even the detail about taking the upper third of the vagina displays a profound degree of anatomical knowledge. Had the operator sliced through the obvious place, the narrow waist between the uterus and the vagina, he would have left the cervix behind since it protrudes several centimetres into the vault of the vagina. No-one without a thorough knowledge of human anatomy could have known that.

The coroner asked what had happened to the organs and Phillips reluctantly confirmed that they were missing. For the first time the public became aware that the killer not only explored the anatomy of his victims, he also removed intact specimens in the same way that medical students often did for more detailed and leisurely examination in their lodgings. But still the police, the general public and perhaps Phillips himself were disinclined to believe that the culprit could be an aspiring or qualified member of the medical profession despite almost overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Whitechapel was home to the London Hospital, one of the 12 great teaching hospitals of the capital and within easy walking distance of two more: Guy’s and St. Bartholomew’s. Medical students were ten a penny in the drinking haunts and music halls of the East End
⁹⁹
. Phillips was adamant both in his written notes and his oral testimony. The killer had detailed anatomical knowledge and some elementary surgical skills but, in his opinion, was not a fully trained doctor. Although clearly reluctant to face the possibility that such a brutal man could be a qualified doctor, a medical student remained a distinct but unspoken possibility.

The coroner then revealed to the court that he had been contacted by one of the London medical schools to say that an American doctor had recently approached it offering to buy human uteruses for £20 each, a considerable sum of money at the time. Despite police investigations the would-be purchaser was never traced and eventually it was discounted as a red herring. Baxter, however, did not waste the opportunity to remind Phillips that had he not insisted on the revelation regarding the removal of the organ from Chapman’s body being made in open court, the information regarding the American doctor would not have surfaced.

The two inquests continued in parallel until on 23rd September the jury at the inquest into Polly Nichols’s death duly returned a verdict of wilful murder by person or persons unknown. Three days later Annie Chapman’s jury did the same.

But if anyone thought that that was the end of the affair they were soon to be spectacularly disabused.

On 27th September, 19 days after the discovery of Annie Chapman’s body in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street and three days before the murders of two more unfortunates – Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes – on 30th September, a letter was received by the Central News agency. Central News was one of three main press agencies operating in London at the time, the others being Reuters and the Press Association. They did not themselves publish newspapers but gathered news via their own reporters or freelancers like Francis and then sold the stories on to other newspapers throughout Britain and around the world.

The letter had been posted the same day and bore a London EC postmark, which meant that it could have been posted within a few hundred yards of the Central News offices in Ludgate Circus and certainly no more than half a mile distant. The envelope was addressed in red ink to ‘The Boss, Central News Office’ and contained a letter that has since become the most notorious in the history of crime
¹⁰⁰
. In the same handwriting as the envelope it read:

Despite the apparently sensational nature of the letter the editor, John Moore, to whom as ‘The Boss’ it had apparently been directed, did nothing about it for two days before asking one of his journalists, Tom Bulling, to forward it with a covering note to Chief Constable Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Williamson, head of the CID at Scotland Yard. Bulling’s note read:

The police did not treat it as a joke, at least not initially. It was immediately
photographed and within a few days copies were circulated to police stations throughout the country as well as being released to the press, clearly in the hope that someone would recognise the handwriting. Unfortunately it was written in the standard educated copperplate of the time and no positive leads resulted. It was, however, entirely unlike the free scrawling handwriting of Bulling who has subsequently been credited with its authorship.

The text of the letter was published in
The Daily News
on 1st October. On the morning of the same day a plain postcard written in the same hand was delivered to Central News. It was postmarked 1st October and, like the letter, it too had been posted in London EC. Now known as the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard it read: