The Real Mary Kelly (23 page)

Eventually Superintendent Arnold arrived bringing word that neither the bloodhounds nor Sir Charles Warren would be coming, and at 1.30pm he gave the order to break open the door. No doubt because it was his property, John McCarthy was allowed the job of forcing the lock. Had they known it, all that was required was for an arm to be inserted through the broken window and the knob on the spring lock could have been turned with ease, as Mary Jane and Joe had been using this method for some weeks. As it was McCarthy forced the end of a pickaxe between the door and the frame and leaned against the shaft.
With a splintering of wood, the door flew open only to strike the bedside table that was just to the right of the entrance.

It was a small room, no more than 12ft square. On the wall to the left of the door two windows looked out onto the yard. The wooden-framed bed was to the right of the door, hard against the flimsy partition that divided the room from the rest of the house. A couple of wooden chairs and two small tables comprised the rest of the sparse furniture, one table near the far window and the other between the bed and the door. The men entered, Abberline and Phillips leading.

A fire had been burning in the grate and despite the time of year the room was still warm. The offal-like smell of flesh that was already starting the process of decomposition hit them like a foetid blanket. Even Phillips, who had seen thousands of bodies in the course of his work, must have recoiled at the sight that confronted them. The official accounts given in the reports of the inquest are simply inadequate to convey the sheer awfulness of the scene.

The bed was sodden with blood and liquid faeces. Lying towards the near edge were the remains of what had once been a human being. The few small recognisable details served to emphasise the horrific unreality of the rest. Mary Jane’s left arm lay crooked at the elbow, the hand hanging languidly into the cavity that once contained her internal organs but which was now as empty as a carcass on a butcher’s hook. The smooth white skin of her forearm was savagely disfigured by a series of parallel knife wounds. The puffed sleeve of her cotton shift, still recognisable, covered her shoulder but the rest of the garment had disappeared into the reeking mess on the bed. Her legs were splayed apart and flexed at the knees in an obscene parody of sexual accessibility but where her external genitalia had once been was now a gaping, bloody cavity. The flesh and muscle of the right leg had been carved from the bone and an unsuccessful attempt had been made to hack through it with the little hatchet that normally stood by the fireplace to chop kindling for the fire. The doctors would later catalogue the position of the various viscera that had been arranged around the corpse like bouquets of flowers at a wake, but they all noticed her amputated breasts, one of which lay like a cushion beneath her head while the other had been placed by her right foot.

Most hideous of all was her head. Mary Jane’s features had been systematically sliced away taking with them the nose, cheeks and eyebrows, leaving behind only her vivid blue eyes to stare sightlessly up from the putrid remains. Her once beautiful thick dark hair lay in a matted, blood-soaked halo framing the remains of her face. It was a sight the like of which none of them had seen before or would ever see again.

Silently the men turned their attention to the rest of the room. At the foot of the bed, eloquent in its orderliness, was a neatly folded pile of day garments. The training imparted by her mother and her time as a lady’s maid had left their imprint on Elizabeth. In terrible contrast, lying on the surface of the table beside the bed was a mass of almost unrecognisable flesh that later turned out to be the front wall of the abdomen, which had been removed in three large flaps. The partition wall beside the bed had been sprayed with arterial blood and the pillow and sheets on that side were also drenched in it. Abberline found a clay pipe that later turned out to belong to Joe Barnett, and a stub of candle stuck in a broken wine glass on the table by the window, and that was about it. Apart from the charred remains in the fire no other item remained that gave any clue as to the identity of either the killer or the victim.

Following the ‘Double Event’, Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had decided that in the event of any further Ripper murders Mr. Thomas Bond should be called upon to conduct the medical enquiries. Bond was a surgeon at the Westminster Hospital and one of the first lecturers in forensic medicine to be appointed in Britain. Although he was a man of significant medico-legal experience and had already been involved in the Whitehall torso case, as his obituary in 1901 made clear, despite his title he was not actually an operating surgeon but more of a high-class general practitioner
¹²²
. This may well help to explain the contrary view he took later regarding the degree of anatomical and surgical skill displayed by the Ripper.

He arrived at 2;pm, about half an hour after the room had been broken into. He had already read all the notes pertaining to the previous four murders and was in the process of writing a report to which he would now be able to add his first-hand experience of the death of Mary Jane.

It had also been decided that, in the event of another Ripper crime, the body would be photographed
in situ
before being examined or removed to the mortuary for further examination to take place. A local photographer, no doubt badly shaken and more used to taking portraits of civic worthies and wedding groups, recorded the scene in the room from two different angles. In order to get as wide an angle for the first picture as possible, he set up his tripod in the yard and took the photograph through the open window. The second of the two surviving pictures was taken from the other side of the bed after apparently pulling it away from the partition wall. Curiously the photographer was apparently working for the City Police rather than the Mets, and after copies in Scotland Yard’s files disappeared – probably having been purloined as souvenirs by an official – copies were found in the City Police archives by Donald Rumbelow in 1968. However, by that time they had already been published in other places, notably by the French forensic pathologist Alexandre Lacassagne in his 1899 book,
Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques
.

By this time news of the discovery of yet another Ripper crime had become common knowledge and people began drifting away from the Lord Mayor’s Show in their thousands and streaming towards Spitalfields, where the police were already struggling to keep them out of Dorset Street. It was clear that they needed to get the body away from Miller’s Court as soon as possible. Bond, assisted by Phillips, conducted an examination of the body on the bed and made a series of gruesome discoveries.

They soon established that, unlike the other victims, Mary Jane had briefly realised the danger she was in and had managed to fight off her attacker for a few seconds, since her right hand had a defensive wound on the thumb where she had attempted to grab the knife blade and a series of abrasions on the back where it may have been forced against the wall. Who can imagine what she must have felt in that last moment as she recognised her assailant and it suddenly blazed in on her that it was he who had been responsible for the terror of the past three months? She had been lying towards the right side of the bed, nearest to the wall, when her neck had been cut severing the windpipe, the muscles and all the major vessels right down to the spinal column. It had been all over in a few seconds, allowing just enough time for a single muffled cry of ‘Murder’ before merciful death enveloped her.

The killer almost certainly started by amputating both breasts before slitting open her abdomen and systematically emptying it of its contents. The organs were distributed about the bed in a way that mocked any shred of dignity that her death might otherwise have had. The uterus, genitalia, both kidneys and one breast formed a macabre pillow beneath her head, the other breast was by her right foot, the liver between her legs, the intestines – which had been totally excised – were between her body and the wall, and her spleen lay to the left of the body. Within the stomach and abdominal cavity were the partially digested remains of fish and potatoes. It seems that Mary Jane had made enough from one of her clients that night to buy herself a fish and chip supper
¹²³
.

The final discovery was the most chilling of all. Mary Jane’s heart had been extracted from within the chest by opening the pericardial sac from beneath the diaphragm. Despite a thorough search of the room and its human debris it was not found, although attempts were later made by the authorities to suppress that fact. The symbolic nature of the act is inescapable although it was lost on people at the time. She had once stolen someone’s heart and he was now taking hers.

A horse-drawn cart carrying a temporary coffin or ‘shell’ arrived and, as soon as the two doctors had completed the initial examination, the cadaver and the other remains were scooped up and removed, covered by an old tarpaulin and taken to the Shoreditch mortuary. This was the first hint of official interference in the conduct of the investigation. Dorset Street was in Spitalfields and the official mortuary for that district was the Whitechapel one attached to the Old Montague Street workhouse to which the bodies of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman had been taken. It was to lead to trouble once the inquest opened.

Mr. Bond conducted a full post-mortem examination at the mortuary later that day, although most of the work had already been performed by the Ripper. Almost all that remained to be done was to open the chest cavity and ascertain the condition of the lungs on which he found some pleural adhesions and some nodular consolidation. Both are signs of previous mild tuberculosis, although the condition was so common in 19th-century Britain as to be nothing more than incidental
¹²⁴
. He did not apparently open her skull and examine the brain as Phillips had done on previous occasions and in many respects his examination report was much more perfunctory than those undertaken by the H Division police surgeon. In fact, as a police surgeon seven years older than Bond, it is likely that Phillips had carried out many more post-mortems in the course of his career than Bond, whose main job was treating the living.

In addition to the
in situ
and mortuary post-mortem reports, Bond gave his opinion on the murders and wrote a detailed profile of the man likely to be responsible for the atrocities. He made two important points: firstly he was certain that the five murders were committed by the same man (although he had not been asked to comment on the murder of Martha Tabram).
Secondly, he was sure that all of the victims were lying supine at the time that the necks were cut. In fact both of these points had previously been made by Phillips in his evidence to the various inquests but Bond, as a surgeon at a prestigious teaching hospital and forensic consultant to Scotland Yard, inevitably carried more weight.

He expressed some views on the times that had elapsed between death and the finding of the bodies and in some of these he was well wide of the mark. He believed that three or four hours might have elapsed in the cases of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes, despite all of the facts arguing against this. In each case not only was there definite evidence from policemen and others that there had been no body at the spot 15 minutes before the discovery of the corpse, but there had been clear medical evidence that the bodies were still warm, rigor mortis having not set in and, in two cases, liquid blood still flowing from the wounds. Bond was in direct opposition in these assertions to the police surgeons who were actually present within minutes of each of the crimes. In the Miller’s Court case he deduced that death had occurred between 1am and 2am whereas, judging by the evidence of Mary Ann Cox, ElizabethPrater and Sarah Lewis, it is much more likely that it took place at around 3.45am.

He also differed from Phillips and Brown, the most experienced of the City and East End police surgeons, in stating quite categorically that no surgical skill or anatomical knowledge had been displayed in any of the murders. He went further and said, ‘In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.’ This was completely contrary to the views of both Dr. Phillips and Dr. Brown, but then it must be remembered that Bond had only actually seen the last body where an unprecedented degree of savagery had been used with absolutely no attempt to employ any surgical or dissecting skill. Mary Jane’s body had been literally hacked to pieces in a way that suggested that the murderer was in a completely different frame of mind at the time.

In addressing the type of person who could have perpetrated such deeds, Bond wrote: