Complete History Of Jack The Ripper Part 3

Chapman died on 25 December 1886, at 1 Richmond Villas, Grove Road, Windsor. The cause of death was registered as cirrhosis of the liver, ascites and dropsy. He was only forty-two. One of Annie's friends during her last years was Amelia Palmer, a charwoman and the wife of a dock labourer named Henry Palmer. In testifying before the inquest into Annie's own death she spoke of the great effect that John Chapman's death seemed to have had upon Annie, emotionally as well as financially. The termination of her allowance, which came by postal order made payable at Commercial Road Post Office, was the first indication Annie received that something was wrong. She then learned, upon inquiry of one of John's relatives living in London, that her husband was dead. Annie cried as she told Amelia about it. And two years later Amelia remembered how she had often seemed downcast when speaking of her children and how 'since the death of her husband she has seemed to give way altogether.'

Very possibly the sieve maker's interest in Annie disappeared with her allowance. At any rate he left her and moved to Notting Hill soon after the death of John Chapman. Annie struggled on alone. At times she seems to have benefited from the charity of relatives. Her brother, Fountain Hamilton Smith, last saw her in Commercial Street a week or two before her death. She did not tell him where she was living but said that she was not doing anything and needed money for a lodging. Smith gave her 2s. On the last evening of her life she may also have borrowed money from other relatives at Vauxhall. Yet there must have been limits to such sponging. Amelia Palmer knew that Annie had a mother and sister living at Brompton but did not think that they were on friendly terms. 'I have never known her to stay with her relatives even for a night,' she informed the inquest.

Annie did crochet work, made antimaca.s.sars and sold flowers. On Fridays she would take what she had made to Stratford to sell. When sober she was industrious but she was overfond of liquor: 'I have seen her often the worse for drink,' said Amelia. She turned, too, to prost.i.tution although, to judge by her photograph and police records, her appearance was unprepossessing. She was plump but only five feet tall. Her complexion was fair. Her hair was wavy and dark brown, her eyes blue. She had a large, thick nose, and two teeth were missing from her lower jaw.

About four months before her death Annie took up residence at Crossingham's lodging house, 35 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. Timothy Donovan, the deputy, remembered her as an inoffensive woman who never caused them any trouble and was on good terms with the other lodgers. Her main weakness was drink. Possibly her Stratford money was squandered on liquor. At least Donovan said that Annie was generally drunk on Sat.u.r.days.

Annie paid 8d. for a double bed. Her only regular visitor, however, was a man Donovan knew only as 'the pensioner'. In Annie's life 'the pensioner' is something of a mystery. If we are to believe the deputy he regularly came to the lodging house with Annie on Sat.u.r.days and stayed until the following Monday. More, he instructed Donovan to turn Annie away on any night that she tried to bring another man home with her. The pensioner, said Donovan, sometimes dressed like a dock labourer and at others had a gentlemanly appearance.

His real name was Ted Stanley. He lived at 1 Osborn Place, Osborn Street, Whitechapel, and he was not, in fact, a pensioner at all. In the inquest proceedings he is described as a bricklayer's labourer. We also know from police records that, on the night Polly Nichols was killed, Stanley was on duty at Fort Elson, Gosport, with the 2nd Brigade, Southern Division, Hants., Militia.

On 14 September 1888 Stanley made a statement at Commercial Street Police Station. Five days later he appeared as a witness at the inquest. Yet, he was scarcely forthcoming about his relations.h.i.+p with Annie. On the one hand, despite the repeated a.s.sertions of Timothy Donovan, he insisted that he had only visited Annie once or twice at the lodging house and absolutely denied telling Donovan to turn her away if she came with other men. On the other he admitted to having a.s.sociated with her in other places and to having known her for about two years. Whatever the exact nature of their relations.h.i.+p Ted Stanley shunned any involvement once he knew that Annie was dead. On the day of the murder he turned up at the lodging house to verify a rumour he had heard from a s...o...b..ack that she had been killed. a.s.sured that the news was true, he turned and walked straight out without another word.

Annie must have heard and talked about the Whitechapel murders but, crushed by ill health and poverty, and frittering most of the little she had on drink, she found herself regularly back on the streets. To judge by the testimony of the doctor who performed the post-mortem examination she was tuberculous and, although plump, had suffered great privation. A week or more before her death she was involved in a fight. It was the only fracas Donovan could remember her in and the date and details are vague.

Annie's antagonist was Eliza Cooper, a hawker and fellow lodger at 35 Dorset Street. On 19 September she gave her version of the debacle to the inquest. The trouble started, explained Liza, on Sat.u.r.day, 1 September. Annie brought Ted Stanley to the lodging house. When she began asking around for a piece of soap she was referred to Liza who loaned her one. Annie handed it to Stanley and he went out to get washed. Later that day Liza met Annie again and asked for the return of the soap. 'I will see you by and by' was the airy reply. On the following Tuesday the two women saw each other in the lodging house kitchen. Liza once more asked for her soap but Annie testily threw a halfpenny down on the table and said, 'Go and get a halfpennyworth of soap.' There was a quarrel which flared up again later in the day at the Britannia, on the corner of Dorset and Commercial Streets. On this occasion Annie slapped Liza's face and snapped: 'Think yourself lucky I did not do more.' Liza replied by striking Annie in the left eye and on the chest.

It is probable that, several weeks after the incident, Liza's memories of this sordid little squabble were already becoming confused. We may suspect, too, that she contrived to make herself the aggrieved party. Certainly, even if Annie was drunk, it is difficult to see in the vindictive, combative Annie of Liza's tale anything of the meek, inoffensive little woman of the other witnesses. John Evans, the night.w.a.tchman at 35 Dorset Street, spoke at the inquest of the fight only two days after Annie's death. He confirmed the cause of it (a piece of soap) but said that it took place in the lodging house kitchen. In two particulars at least Eliza was mistaken. The fight cannot have taken place as late as 4 September. Ted Stanley noticed that Annie had a black eye on Sunday, 2 September, and the next day Annie showed her bruises to Amelia Palmer. Timothy Donovan, moreover, told the inquest that Annie was not at the lodging house during the week preceding her death. The best evidence that we have places the fight in the middle of the previous week. Donovan said that it occurred about Tuesday, 28 August, and that two days later Annie was sporting a black eye from the encounter. 'Tim, this is lovely, ain't it?' she chirped. John Evans deposed that the incident took place on 30 August. It is also clear that Annie sustained bruises to the chest and right, rather than left, temple, a point that will prove of some significance when we come to consider the post-mortem evidence.

In the week previous to her murder Annie was not at the lodging house. The only glimpses we get of her come from her friend Amelia Palmer. On Monday, 3 September, Amelia met her in Dorset Street and noticed a bruise on her right temple. 'How did you get that?' she asked. By way of reply Annie opened her dress. 'Yes,' she said, 'look at my chest.' And she showed Amelia a second bruise. Their talk pa.s.sed from Annie's fight to other things. 'If my sister will send me the boots,' declared Annie, 'I shall go hopping [i.e. hop-picking].'

The next day Amelia saw Annie again near Spitalfields Church. Annie said that she felt no better and that she should go into the casual ward for a day or two. Amelia remarked that she looked very pale and asked if she had had anything to eat. 'No,' replied Annie, 'I haven't had a cup of tea today.' Amelia gave her 2d. to get some but told her not to spend it on rum.

Amelia last saw Annie alive on Friday, 7 September. At about 5.00 p.m. they met in Dorset Street. 'Aren't you going to Stratford today?' queried Amelia. 'I feel too ill to do anything,' said Annie. Some ten minutes later Amelia found her standing in the same spot, it's no use giving way,' Annie said, 'I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.'

Earlier that same day, the last of Annie's life, she had turned up again at 35 Dorset Street. Between two and three in the afternoon she arrived at the lodging house and asked to be allowed to sit downstairs in the kitchen. Donovan asked her where she had been all week and she told him that she had been 'in the infirmary'.2 Annie seems to have been coming and going for the rest of the day. Soon after midnight she came in saying that she had been to Vauxhall to see her sister. A fellow lodger told a newspaper that she went to 'get some money' and that her relatives gave her 5d.3 If so it was quickly expended on drink. John Evans informed the inquest that upon her return she sent one of the lodgers for a pint of beer and then popped out again herself.

At about 1.30 or 1.45 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day, 8 September, Annie was sitting in the kitchen, enjoying the warmth, eating potatoes and gossiping with the other lodgers. Donovan sent Evans to ask for her lodging money. Annie came up to the office. 'I haven't sufficient money for my bed,' she told the deputy, 'but don't let it. I shall not be long before I am in.' Donovan was scarcely sympathetic. 'You can find money for your beer,' he admonished her, 'and you can't find money for your bed.' But Annie was not dismayed. She would get the money. Leaving the office, she stood two or three minutes in the doorway. 'Never mind, Tim,' she repeated, 'I shall soon be back. Don't let the bed.' Evans, who had followed Annie upstairs now saw her off the premises. As she left the house, he told the inquest two days later, he watched her go. Not drunk but slightly the worse for drink, she walked through Little Paternoster Row into Brushfield Street and then turned towards Spitalfields Church. It was about 1.50 a.m.4 A little after six Annie's dead and mutilated body was discovered in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, just three or four hundred yards away from her lodging.

No. 29 was a three-storeyed house on the north side of the street. Built for Spitalfields weavers, it had been converted into dwellings for the labouring poor after steam had banished the hand loom. By 1888 the toll of time was beginning to show on its facade. It was a dingy property flanked by equally dingy neighbours, on one side a dwelling house and on the other, its yellow paint peeling from its walls like skin disease, a mangling house. Yet a discerning observer might have detected remnants of pride about No. 29. A signboard above the street door proudly proclaimed in straggling white letters: 'Mrs A. Richardson, rough packing-case maker.' And the windows of the first floor front room, in which Mrs Richardson slept, were adorned with red curtains and filled with flowers.

At the time of the murder No. 29 was a veritable nest of living beings. Mrs Amelia Richardson, a widow, rented part of it and sublet some of the rooms. She slept with her fourteen-year-old grandson in the first floor front room and used two other rooms. The cellar in the backyard housed her packing case workshops. In the ground floor back room she did her cooking and held weekly prayer meetings. The front room on the ground floor was a cats' meat shop. The proprietress, Mrs Harriet Hardiman, slept in the shop with her sixteen-year-old son. Mr Waker, a maker of tennis boots, and his adult but mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded son occupied the first floor back. The second floor front was tenanted by Mr Thompson, a carman, his wife and their adopted daughter. Two unmarried sisters who worked in a cigar factory lived in the back room on the same floor. The front room in the attic housed John Davis, another carman, together with his wife and three sons. While Mrs Sarah c.o.x, a 'little old lady' who Mrs Richardson maintained out of charity, occupied a back room in the attic. No less than seventeen persons thus resided permanently at No. 29. Others had legitimate business there. John Richardson, Amelia's son, and Francis Tyler, her hired hand, for example, both a.s.sisted her in her packing case business and used the cellar workshops.5 There must have been much coming and going and on market mornings at least the day began early. On Sat.u.r.day, 8 September, the morning of the murder, Thompson went out for work at about 3.50. Mrs Richardson, dozing fitfully on the first floor, heard him leave and called out 'good morning' as he pa.s.sed her room. Between 4.45 and 4.50 John Richardson visited the house on his way to work in Spitalfields Market. He called in to check on the security of the cellar. John Davis got up at 5.45 and went down to the backyard about a quarter of an hour later. And Francis Tyler, the hired help, should have started work at six. He was, however, frequently late. On the fatal Sat.u.r.day he had to be sent for and didn't turn up until eight.

Intruders might also be found on the premises. By the shop door in Hanbury Street was a side door which gave access to the rest of the building from the street. It opened into a twenty or twenty-five foot pa.s.sage. A staircase led to the upper floors and at the end of the pa.s.sage was a back door giving access to the backyard. Most of the houses in the area, like No. 29, were let out in rooms and many of the tenants were market folk, leaving home early in the morning, some as early as one. It thus became the general practice to leave street and back doors unlocked for their convenience and the inevitable result was the regular appearance in these houses of trespa.s.sers. One morning Thompson challenged a man on the stairs of No. 29. 'I'm waiting for the market,' said the man. 'You've no right here, guv'nor,' replied Thompson. Prost.i.tutes and their clients also used the premises. John Richardson told the inquest that he had found prost.i.tutes and other strangers there at all hours of the night and had often turned them out.

In taking his victim into the backyard of No. 29, therefore, the murderer, perhaps unknowingly, exposed himself to some risk. Yet the regular traffic in and out of the house also facilitated his purpose. For the permanent residents would scarcely have suspected anything amiss in the stealthy footsteps of the killer and his victim.

The backyard in which the body was found is of special interest to us. Although the house has long been demolished its appearance has been preserved in contemporary descriptions and drawings, in a few subsequent photographs, and in a rare piece of footage in that delightful if neglected James Mason film The London n.o.body Knows. Three stone steps led from the back door down into the yard. It was perhaps five yards by four, in some places bare earth, in others roughly paved with flat or round stones. Close wooden palings, about five and a half feet high, fenced it off on both sides from the adjoining yards. Standing on the steps, an observer would have seen, three or three and a half feet to his left, the palings that separated the yard from that of No. 27. In the far left-hand corner, opposite the back door, was Mrs Richardson's woodshed. In the far right-hand corner was a privy. The entrance to the cellar, which contained Mrs Richardson's workshops, lay immediately to the right of the back door.

It was John Davis the carman who found Annie's body. He is described in the press as a small, elderly man with a decided stoop. He rented a room in the attic of No. 29, where he lived with his wife and three sons. For much of the night of 78 September Davis could not sleep. From three to five he lay awake and then he dozed until the clock at Spitalfields Church struck 5.45. That, and the light stealing through his large weaver's window, told him that it was time to bestir himself for another day's toil in Leadenhall Market. Davis and his wife got up. She made him a cup of tea and then he trudged downstairs to the backyard. Downstairs he noticed that the street door was wide open and thrown back against the wall. That was not unusual. The back door was closed. He opened it and stood at the top of the steps leading into the yard. The sight that met his casual glance shook him to his boots.

The body of a woman, sprawled upon its back, lay in the yard to his left, between the steps and the wooden fence adjoining No. 27. Her head was towards the house, her feet towards the woodshed, and Davis noticed that her skirts had been raised to her groin. He did not wait to investigate further. Hurrying through the pa.s.sage, he stumbled out of the front door and into the street. There two packing case makers, James Green and James Kent, who worked for Joseph and Thomas Bayley of 23A Hanbury Street, were standing outside their workshop waiting for fellow workmen to arrive. And there, pa.s.sing through Hanbury Street on his way to work, was a boxmaker named Henry John Holland. Their attention was arrested by a wild-eyed old man who suddenly burst from the doorway of No. 29. 'Men,' he cried, 'come here!'

Hanbury Street and vicinity. marks No. 29, where the body of Annie Chapman was discovered, at about 6.00 a.m. on 8 September 1888 The workmen followed Davis back down the pa.s.sage and gazed at the body from the top of the yard steps. Davis, Kent and Green stood nervously at the back door. Holland, by his own account, ventured down into the yard itself but did not touch the body. Then they dispersed to find a policeman. Kent seems to have been thoroughly shaken by the experience. When he couldn't see a constable from the front of the house he poured himself a brandy and then pottered about his workshop in search of a piece of canvas to throw over the body. By the time that he returned to No. 29 Inspector Chandler had taken possession of the yard and a crowd had gathered in the pa.s.sage and about the back door. 'Everyone that looked at the body,' recalled Kent, 'seemed frightened as if they would run away.'

By the time that Chandler arrived the whole house had been alarmed. Mrs Hardiman, sleeping in the ground floor shop, had been disturbed by the heavy traffic through the pa.s.sage. She imagined that there must be a fire and sent her son to investigate. 'Don't upset yourself, mother,' he told her when he returned, 'it's a woman been killed in the yard!' Mrs Hardiman stayed in her room but Amelia Richardson, apprised of the news by her grandson, ventured down from the first floor. She found the pa.s.sage clogged with spectators but none of them seemed inclined to view the body at close quarters for there was no one in the yard except the dead woman. Soon afterwards the inspector arrived and, as far as Amelia knew, he was the first to enter the yard.6 At 6.10 Inspector Joseph Chandler, H. Division, was on duty in Commercial Street near the corner of Hanbury Street when he saw several men running towards him. 'Another woman has been murdered,' one of them gasped. There was no one in the backyard of No. 29 when Chandler arrived and, with the possible exception of Holland, he was the first to inspect the body closely. The woman lay at the bottom and to the left of the steps leading into the yard, parallel with the fencing dividing the yards of Nos. 29 and 27. Her head was nearly two feet from the back wall of the house and six or nine inches from the steps. She was lying on her back, her left arm resting on her left breast, her right arm lying down her right side, her legs drawn up and her clothes thrown up above her knees. The handiwork of the murderer had been literally ghoulish. In terse language Chandler recorded the grisly sight for his superiors later in the day: I at once proceeded to No. 29 Hanbury Street, and in the back yard found a woman lying on her back, dead, left arm resting on left breast, legs drawn up, abducted, small intestines and flap of the abdomen lying on right side, above right shoulder, attached by a cord with the rest of the intestines inside the body; two flaps of skin from the lower part of the abdomen lying in a large quant.i.ty of blood above the left shoulder; throat cut deeply from left and back in a jagged manner right around throat.7 The inspector at once sent for Dr George Bagster Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, and to the police station for further a.s.sistance and an ambulance. When the constables arrived he had the pa.s.sage cleared. He also ensured that no one touched the body and covered it with a piece of sacking.

Dr Phillips arrived at 6.30. Then in his fifties, he had been the local divisional surgeon for many years. Walter Dew, who knew him well, remembered him as ultra old-fas.h.i.+oned in dress and personal appearance. 'He used to look,' wrote Dew, 'for all the world as though he had stepped out of a century-old painting.'8 But his manners were charming, he was popular with the force and he knew his business. The doctor's inquest deposition of 13 September contains the fullest description of the appearance of Annie Chapman's body in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street: I found the body of the deceased lying in the yard on her back, on the left hand of the steps that lead from the pa.s.sage. The head was about 6 in. in front of the level of the bottom step, and the feet were towards a shed at the end of the yard. The left arm was across the left breast, and 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, and the tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips; it was much swollen. The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached. There was a large quant.i.ty of blood, with a part of the stomach above the left shoulder . . . The body was cold, except that there was a certain remaining heat, under the intestines, in the body. Stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but it was commencing. The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck.9 Phillips thought that the woman had been dead at least two hours, probably longer. He gave instructions for her to be removed and she was conveyed to the Whitechapel Mortuary on the police ambulance. The doctor and Chandler then made a careful search of the yard itself.

There were no signs of a struggle. On the back wall of the house, near where the woman's head had lain and about eighteen inches above the ground, were about six spots of blood. They varied in size from that of a sixpenny piece to that of a small point. There were also patches and smears of well clotted blood on the wooden palings, about fourteen inches from the ground. These too were close to the position of the head, immediately above the part where the blood had mainly flowed from the neck. Since there were no bloodstains in the pa.s.sage and no others in the vicinity of the house, Dr Phillips was convinced that the murder had occurred in the yard.

A macabre discovery awaited them near the palings and close to where the feet of the dead woman had rested. It comprised a small piece of coa.r.s.e muslin, a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb in a paper case. These articles appeared to have been the contents of the dead woman's pocket and Dr Phillips did not think that they had been casually cast to the ground. 'They had apparently been placed there in order,' he would tell the inquest, 'that is to say, arranged there.' Near the head position was a portion of an envelope containing two pills. The back of the envelope bore a seal and the words 'Suss.e.x Regiment' embossed in blue. On the other side was a letter 'M' in handwriting and, lower down, 'Sp' as if someone had written 'Spitalfields.' The rest of the envelope was torn away. It bore no postage stamp but there was a postmark in red: 'London, Aug. 23, 1888.'

A few other articles were found about the yard an empty nail box, a piece of flat steel and, about two feet from a water tap and saturated with water, a leather ap.r.o.n.10 Later in the morning Chandler visited the mortuary and examined the dead woman's clothing. If, as the inspector remembered, he arrived a few minutes after seven it is unlikely that anyone had had time to tamper with the clothes. Indeed, when he got there the body still lay on the ambulance and did not look as though it had been disturbed.

The main items were a black figured jacket that came down to the knees, a brown bodice, a black skirt and a pair of lace boots, all old and dirty. Chandler's evidence on the condition of the clothes, presented five days later to the inquest, was very loosely reported in the press but it is apparent that he discovered remarkably few bloodstains. The black jacket, which he found hooked at the top and b.u.t.toned down the front, was bloodstained about the neck, both inside and out, but otherwise bore only two or three spots of blood on the left arm. On the black skirt there was evidently only a little blood 'on the outside, at the back, as if she had been lying in it.' Chandler also mentions two bodices and two petticoats. The bodices were only stained about the neck and the petticoats were stained 'very little.' There were no traces of blood upon the stockings. The clothing was neither cut nor torn. But the woman wore a large pocket under her skirt, tied around her waist with strings, and this was torn, both down the front and at the side. It was empty.11 Dr Phillips conducted the post-mortem examination at the Whitechapel Mortuary that afternoon. The circ.u.mstances were difficult. When he arrived he was discomfited to discover that two nurses from the Whitechapel Union Infirmary had already stripped and partially washed the corpse and that it lay ready for him on the table. The mortuary itself was simply a shed belonging to the workhouse, lacking in proper facilities, and Robert Mann, the old keeper, a pauper inmate.

No report or post-mortem notes by Dr Phillips now exist. He presented his evidence, of course, to the inquest on 13 and 19 September, but no official record of the inquest depositions has survived. For our knowledge of his findings, therefore, we must largely trust to press notices of the inquest and this is most unfortunate.

When Phillips first appeared before the inquest he was reluctant, as we shall see, to divulge all the details of his examination, especially with regard to the abdominal mutilations, and Coroner Baxter excused him for the time being from so doing. Upon his recall six days later the coroner obliged him to present the suppressed evidence in full but the press considered his remarks upon the abdominal injuries unfit for publication and deleted that part of his testimony from their reports. There is thus an important gap in the press coverage of the medical evidence. Curiously enough, however, the problem confronting the historian is not so much what the press refused to report as what it did print. The details of the abdominal mutilations can be accurately recovered from other sources. But for the rest of Phillips' testimony we are virtually dependent upon the newspapers and they edited it so arbitrarily, and reported it in such vague and ambiguous language, as to render parts of it almost unintelligible. Our reconstruction of Annie Chapman's injuries, then, must necessarily be provisional, pending the discovery of more exact evidence.12 The doctor discovered a bruise over the right temple and two bruises, each the size of a man's thumb, on the fore part of the top of the chest. He did not think that they were recent and he was quite right because Annie had sustained them in her fight with Eliza Cooper. He found more recent marks, however, on the face and about the sides of the jaw. Below the lower jaw on the left side, one and a half to two inches below the lobe of the ear, were three scratches. They ran in the opposite direction to the incisions in the throat. There were also evidently two recent bruises on the right side of the head and neck, one on the cheek and the other at a point corresponding with the scratches on the left side.

Phillips deduced from these that the woman had been seized by the chin before her throat had been cut. And the coroner's questions prompted him to express the view that she had been partially suffocated: PHILLIPS: '. . . I am of opinion that the person who cut the deceased's throat took hold of her by the chin, and then commenced the incision from left to right.'

BAXTER: 'Could that be done so instantaneously that a person could not cry out?'

PHILLIPS: 'By pressure on the throat no doubt it would be possible.'

BAXTER: 'The thickening of the tongue would be one of the signs of suffocation?'

PHILLIPS: 'Yes. My impression is that she was partially strangled.'

There were the distinct marks of one or more rings on the proximal phalanx of the ring finger. An abrasion over the head of the proximal phalanx suggested that the killer had wrenched the rings from her finger.

The throat had been ferociously severed from left to right. The Telegraphy, reporting Phillips' testimony on this point, stated that 'the incisions of the skin indicated that they had been made from the left side of the neck on a line with the angle of the jaw, carried entirely round and again in front of the neck, and ending at a point about midway between the jaw and the sternum or breast bone on the right hand.' This is difficult to interpret. It might be taken to mean that there were two cuts, one along the line of the jaw and completely encircling the throat, the other commencing at the front of the neck and terminating on the right side between the levels of the lower jaw and the breast bone. The doctor also intimated that the murderer had attempted and failed to cut off the woman's head. He discerned two distinct clean cuts on the left side of the spine, parallel to each other and half an inch apart. 'The muscular structures between the side processes of bone of the vertebrae,' he said, 'had an appearance as if an attempt had been made to separate the bones of the neck.'

Phillips held that the woman had been partially suffocated before death and that death had resulted from syncope, the sudden loss of blood supply to the brain caused by the severance of the throat. The abdominal mutilations, he contended, had been inflicted after death. Albeit the coroner compelled him, upon his recall, to describe the abdominal injuries the press censored the details. Fortunately this gap in the record can be filled from two other sources.

An unsigned piece in the Lancet of 29 September set down the gist of Dr Phillips' description of the injuries to the abdomen and indicated why he thought he had detected professional skill in their execution. It tells us that 'the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed by the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the v.a.g.i.n.a and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the r.e.c.t.u.m, and dividing the v.a.g.i.n.a low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of an expert of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of a knife . . .' Chief Inspector Swanson also summarised the mutilations in his report of 19 October. 'Examination of the body,' he wrote, 'showed that the throat was severed deeply, incision jagged. Removed from, but attached to body, & placed above right shoulder were a flap of the wall of belly, the whole of the small intestines & attachments. Two other portions of wall of belly & "p.u.b.es" were placed above left shoulder in a large quant.i.ty of blood . . . The following parts were missing:- part of belly wall including navel; the womb, the upper part of v.a.g.i.n.a & greater part of bladder.'

It was Phillips' opinion that the injuries to the throat and abdomen had probably been inflicted with the same knife. He told the inquest that it must have been a very sharp weapon, probably with a thin, narrow blade at least six to eight inches long. It was not a bayonet and the type of knife commonly used by cobblers and in the leather trades would not be long enough in the blade. A slaughterman's knife, however, well ground down, might fit the bill. Baxter asked whether it could have been such an instrument as a medical man might employ in post-mortem examinations. 'The ordinary post-mortem case,' replied Phillips, 'perhaps does not contain such a weapon.' Swanson credited the doctor with substantially the same views: 'The Dr gives it as his opinion . . . that the knife used was not an ordinary knife, but such as a small amputating knife, or a well ground slaughterman's knife, narrow & thin, sharp & blade of six to eight inches in length.'

Phillips thought that the murderer had demonstrated anatomical knowledge and surgical skill in extracting the viscera. 'There were indications of it,' he said on 13 September. 'My own impression is that anatomical knowledge was only less displayed or indicated in consequence of haste.' Six days later he reaffirmed this view: 'I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, and effect them, even without a struggle, [in] under a quarter of an hour. 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.'

Hanbury Street lay within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police's H Division. The divisional head of CID was Edmund Reid, who had investigated the Tabram murder, but he was now enjoying his annual leave and the conduct of the Chapman inquiry fell to Chandler and Detective Sergeants Thick and Leach.

The division was also anxious to secure Abberline's services. 'I would respectfully suggest,' wrote Acting Superintendent West on the day of the murder, 'that Inspector Abberline, Central, who is well acquainted with H Division, be deputed to take up this inquiry as I believe he is already engaged in the case of the Buck's Row murder which would appear to have been committed by the same person as the one in Hanbury Street.'13 Abberline, in fact, had been instructed that very morning to a.s.sist the Chapman investigation.

West's view that the Buck's Row and Hanbury Street murders had been committed by the same man seems to have been general amongst the detectives investigating the crimes. Abberline certainly held to it and said so in his report of 19 September. And Inspector Helson of J Division, who had handled the Nichols investigation, evidently thought so too for he also actively a.s.sisted the H Division detectives working on the Chapman case.

The hunt for the Hanbury Street killer proved almost as frustratingly futile as had the previous investigations. Timothy Donovan and Fountain Smith quickly identified Annie's body but the police learned nothing of her history that suggested a serious suspect or a motive for her killing. The tenants at No. 29 were interviewed and their rooms were searched. Neither this, nor inquiries at adjoining houses, yielded a clue to the ident.i.ty of the murderer. Detectives visited common lodging houses in the hope that someone might remember a man who entered after two on the morning of the murder and who behaved suspiciously or carried bloodstains on his face, hands or clothing. But these inquiries proved as fruitless as those amongst prost.i.tutes and at local public houses.

Annie had been accustomed to wear bra.s.s rings on the third finger of her left hand. At the inquest Eliza Cooper spoke of three rings, which she said Annie had bought from a black man. Ted Stanley only remembered two. But when Annie's body had been found in Hanbury Street the rings were missing and an abrasion over the head of the proximal phalanx of the finger indicated that they had been wrenched off by force. Working on the a.s.sumption that the killer had mistaken them for gold rings, the police made inquiries at jewellers, p.a.w.nbrokers and other dealers throughout the area but met with no success.

Nor did the items found about the backyard yield a breakthrough. Dr Phillips did not think that the leather ap.r.o.n had any connection with the murder. It bore no traces of blood and did not look as if it had been recently unfolded. And so it proved, for Mrs Richardson told the inquest that the ap.r.o.n belonged to her son. Two days before the murder she had found it mildewed in the cellar and had put it under the water tap in the yard and left it there. Mrs Richardson also identified the nailbox and the piece of steel as her property.14 The police made a determined effort to trace the sender of the piece of torn envelope discovered near Annie's head. It bore the official stamp of the Royal Suss.e.x Regiment and on 14 September Inspector-Chandler visited the depot of the first battalion of the regiment at Farnborough to prosecute inquiries. There he learned that most of the men used the envelopes, which they could buy at the canteen, but none of them admitted to corresponding with anyone in Spitalfields and Chandler failed to match any of the signatures in the paybooks with the handwriting on the envelope. It became clear, moreover, that the sender of the envelope might not have been a soldier at all. The letter had been posted, not in the barracks, but at the nearby Lynchford Road Post Office. The postmasters there told Chandler that they stocked a supply of the envelopes and sold them to the general public!

An important development in the matter of the envelope occurred on 15 September. William Stevens, a painter and sometime lodger at 35 Dorset Street, turned up at Commercial Street Police Station and volunteered the information that he had seen Annie at the lodging house before she was turned out on the morning of her death. She said that she had been to the hospital and she had a bottle of medicine, a bottle of lotion and a box of pills with her. As she was handling the box it came to pieces. It had contained only two pills and Annie proceeded to wrap these in a piece of paper which she found on the kitchen floor by the fireplace. Stevens thought that the torn envelope bearing the stamp of the Royal Suss.e.x Regiment and the paper picked up by Annie from the kitchen floor at 35 Dorset Street were identical.15 It thus became apparent that the envelope had no connection whatever with the murderer and precious little with the victim.

In the light of these disappointments Chief Inspector Swanson's remark that the Chapman investigation 'did not supply the police with the slightest clue to the murderer' is perhaps understandable. And yet it is a harsh judgement. For the Chapman inquiry turned up three important witnesses. At the time, for reasons which will be explained shortly, the police never attached the significance to them that they deserved, but taken together their testimony reveals a good deal about the murderer and even, perhaps, a little about the murderer himself.

The first witness was John Richardson, Amelia's 37-year-old son. He lived at 2 John Street, Spitalfields, and worked as a porter in Spitalfields Market but he also a.s.sisted his mother with her packing case business at 29 Hanbury Street. Some time back the cellar at No. 29 had been broken into and a few tools stolen. Since then John had been in the habit of checking the cellar on market mornings and it was upon such an errand that he visited No. 29 between 4.45 and 4.50 on the morning of the murder.

The street door was closed. Richardson lifted the latch, walked through the pa.s.sage and opened the yard door. But he did not walk out into the yard. One of his boots had been hurting a toe so he sat down on the middle step, his feet resting on the flags of the yard, and cut a piece of leather from the boot with a table knife. It was getting light and from the step he could see that the padlock on the cellar door was secure. Therefore, having tied up his boot, he left the house and went to the market. He had no need to close the yard door which closed itself (Coroner Baxter refers to it as a swing door) but he did shut the street door. While sitting on the step about two minutes at the most Richardson saw no body in the yard. Yet, as he explained to the inquest, 'I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then.'16 The second witness was Mrs Elizabeth Long, the wife of a cart minder named James Long.

At about five that same morning she left her home at 32 Church Street to go to Spitalfields Market. It was about 5.30 as she walked westwards through Hanbury Street. She was sure of the time because she heard the clock of the Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane, strike the half hour just before she got to the street. A man and a woman were standing talking on the pavement near No. 29. How near it is impossible now to say because press reports of Mrs Long's inquest testimony do not agree. The Telegraph quotes her as saying that the couple were standing on the same side of the street as No. 29 and 'only a few yards nearer Brick Lane'. But The Times, which frequently reports inquest testimony erroneously, implies that they were actually outside the house, 'close against the shutters of No. 29.' Whatever, the woman had her back towards Spitalfields Market and hence faced Mrs Long as she approached, and the man's back was turned towards Mrs Long and Brick Lane. Mrs Long's evidence is crucial for she later visited the mortuary and positively identified Annie Chapman as the woman she had seen. Her companion was almost certainly the murderer.

At the inquest Mrs Long did her best to describe him: BAXTER: 'Did you see the man's face?'

MRS LONG: 'I did not and could not recognize him again. He was, however, dark complexioned, and was wearing a brown deerstalker hat. I think he was wearing a dark coat but cannot be sure.'

BAXTER: 'Was he a man or a boy?'

MRS LONG: 'Oh, he was a man over forty, as far as I could tell. He seemed to be a little taller than the deceased. He looked to me like a foreigner, as well as I could make out.'

BAXTER: 'Was he a labourer or what?'

MRS LONG: 'He looked what I should call shabby genteel.'

Mrs Long heard the man ask 'Will you?' and the woman reply 'Yes.' She then pa.s.sed them and went on her way without looking back.

Mrs Long's description is recorded in police records in almost identical terms: 'She only saw his back,' reported Chief Inspector Swanson, 'and would be unable to know him again. She describes him as apparently over 40 years of age. She did not see his face. He appeared to be a little taller than the woman and in her opinion looked like a foreigner. She thinks he had a dark coat on, but she could not recognize him again.'17 Albert Cadosch, a carpenter living at No. 27 Hanbury Street, next door to No. 29, was the last witness.

On the morning of the murder he got up at about 5.15 and went into his backyard. By then it was about 5.20. A fence of wooden palings, some five feet six inches high, divided the yard from that of No. 29. Just as he was going back into the house he heard voices. They were quite close, evidently in the backyard of No. 29, but the only word Cadosch could catch was 'No.' He went indoors but three or four minutes later returned to the yard. This time he heard another noise from the yard of No. 29. It sounded like something falling against the fence. The carpenter then left for work. When he pa.s.sed Spitalfields Church it was about 5.32.18 No further evidence on the Hanbury Street murder ever came to light. With the clues that we have already a.s.sembled, however, we can unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Annie's death.

Our sources depict her, on the last day of her life, as a pathetic little woman in the last extremities of want. When Amelia Palmer saw her in Dorset Street she was dest.i.tute. 'It is no use giving way,' said Annie, 'I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.' Yet she did not, as was her wont, go to Stratford. Indeed, if she had been ill in some infirmary it is more than probable that she had made nothing to sell there. Instead she went to Vauxhall to beg from one of her relatives. Annie returned to her lodging house at 35 Dorset Street soon after midnight. Apparently she had marshalled a few coppers but instead of using these to pay for a bed she converted them into drink. It was a fatal moment of weakness. For thus it was, that at about 1.50 a.m., she was turned into the street.

Annie had been drinking but she was not drunk and could walk in a straight line. Undoubtedly she banked upon raising her lodging money by prost.i.tution. John Evans, the night.w.a.tchman, saw her go through Little Paternoster Row into Brushfield Street and then turn towards Spitalfields Church. Four hours later she was dead.

We cannot know when or where Annie met her homicidal client. But there are some grounds for believing that she herself led him to the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. The premises were regularly used by prost.i.tutes. It was only three or four hundred yards away from her lodging house. And, for what it is worth, 29 was the number of Annie's regular bed at 35 Dorset Street.

The absence of blood in the pa.s.sage, street and adjoining backyards led Phillips and Abberline to the conclusion that Annie had been slain where found. But when?

There is a serious conflict in the evidence on this point. When Dr Phillips saw Annie's body at 6.30 he judged that she had been killed at least two hours previously, i.e. not later than about 4.30. John Richardson, on the other hand, visited the yard between 4.45 and 4.50 and was positive that the body was not there then. Could he have missed it? Inspector Chandler was inclined to think that he had.

At about 6.45 on the fatal morning Chandler had talked to Richardson in the pa.s.sage of No. 29. Upon that occasion the porter had told him about his early morning visit to the yard and had stated that he was sure that the woman had not then been lying there. But, according to Chandler, he had also said that 'he did not go down the steps.' The inspector surmised, therefore, that when Richardson had visited the yard he had merely opened the back door and stood on the top step. From such a position a downward glance to the right would quickly have determined that the padlock on the cellar was in place but Richardson's view of the left-hand side of the yard, where the body lay, might have been obscured by the back door, which opened outwards and swung to the left. Richardson, contended Chandler, had thus probably failed to see Annie's body.

Their faith in Dr Phillips, and Chandler's dismissal of Richardson, alike led the police to attach little significance to Mrs Long, who claimed to have seen Annie talking to a man near No. 29 at 5.30, or to Albert Cadosch, who thought he had heard voices from the backyard at about the same time. 'The evidence of Mrs Long, which appeared to be so important to the Coroner,' wrote Swanson, 'must be looked upon with some amount of doubt, which is to be regretted.'

It is time to appeal against this verdict of long standing and in doing so we are in good company since Coroner Baxter rejected it back in 1888.19 In the first place the doctor's estimate of the time of death is far from conclusive. It was not based, as such judgements are today, on the internal body temperature of the deceased, taken rectally or from the liver, but upon an estimate from touch only of the external body temperature coupled with impressions as to how far rigor mortis had advanced. But there were several factors present in this case which would have contributed to rapid heat loss. The morning of 8 September was fairly cold. Annie's clothes had been thrown up to expose her legs and lower abdomen to the air. Her abdomen had been entirely laid open. And she had lost a great deal of blood. At the inquest Phillips himself qualified his estimate by acknowledging the existence of such imponderables and he may easily have underrated their significance. If he did Annie was killed after, not before, 4.30.

The crucial witness is Richardson. Chandler's understanding of his evidence seems to have been quite erroneous. When the porter testified before the inquest, just four days after the murder, he was adamant that, far from standing on the top step, he had walked down the steps and then sat down on the middle step to cut a piece of leather out of his boot. Working thus, it is inconceivable that he would not have seen the body if it had been there. 'You must have been quite close to where the body was found?' queried Baxter. 'Quite right, sir,' replied Richardson, 'if she had been there at the time I must have seen her.'

Richardson had nothing to hide. Under rigorous interrogation he stated his evidence clearly and unequivocally. It was consistent, furthermore, with what he had already told the press for as early as 10 September the Telegraph had noted: 'Richardson sat down on the steps to cut a piece of leather from his boot.' We have thus no reason to disbelieve him. It is possible that Chandler misunderstood him on the morning of the murder. Richardson is less likely to have said that he did not go down the steps than that he did not go into the yard. Such a statement would have been consistent with his inquest deposition in which he averred that although he sat down on the step he did not venture out into the yard itself. It should be borne in mind that when Richardson and Chandler met on 8 September the porter neither made a formal statement nor gave an exhaustive interview. Indeed, if Chandler was talking to Richardson in No. 29 at 6.45 and was at the mortuary in Old Montague Street at a few minutes past seven they might not have done more than exchange a few hurried words. In these circ.u.mstances the inspector could well have misconstrued Richardson's story.

In the light of Richardson's deposition the conclusion that Annie was killed at some time between 4.50 and 6.00 seems inescapable. Even Chandler, questioned at the inquest, conceded that if Richardson went down the steps he cannot have failed to see the body. Consequently the testimonies of Mrs Long and Albert Cadosch are very important indeed. Mrs Long saw Annie talking to a man in Hanbury Street at about 5.30. Cadosch, who lived at No. 27, got up at about 5.15. Before he went to work he twice visited his backyard. On the first occasion he thought he heard voices from the yard of No. 29 and on the second, three or four minutes later, he heard a noise like that of something falling against the fence. When Cadosch pa.s.sed Spitalfields Church on his way to work it was 5.32. The experiences of these two witnesses are surely related and, given the vagaries of eyewitness evidence, the slight discrepancy in the times is not significant. We may thus place Annie's death at about 5.30.

Any reconstruction of the manner in which Annie met her death must take account of three facts. Firstly, although there were seventeen residents at No. 29, no less than five of them living in rooms overlooking the murder site, not one claimed to have heard any scream or cry. If, as Amelia Richardson told the papers20, some of the residents at the back of the house had slept with their windows open, this circ.u.mstance is even more remarkable. Secondly, having examined the body twice, Dr Phillips was confident that he had detected signs of strangulation. One and a half to two inches below the lobe of Annie's left ear were three scratches and there was a corresponding bruise on the right side of the neck. The face was swollen, the tongue swollen and protruding. 'There could be little doubt that he first strangled or suffocated his victim,' reaffirmed the Lancet on 29 September, 'for not only were no cries heard, but the face, lips, and hands were livid as in asphyxia, and not blanched as they would be from loss of blood.' Finally, the victim's throat had been severed while she was lying on her back. The bloodstains demonstrate this beyond reasonable doubt. Annie was wearing an outside jacket, hooked at the top, b.u.t.toned down the front and so long that it reached down to her knees. Yet, apart from stains about the neck, the only traces of blood that it carried were two or three spots on the left arm. The relatively few bloodstains found in the yard were close to the ground and near Annie's head about six small spots on the back wall of the house, perhaps eighteen inches above the ground, and patches on the wooden palings, about fourteen inches from the ground and immediately above the point where the blood had largely escaped from the neck.

The killer seems to have seized Annie by the chin. If he was standing talking to her and Cadosch's testimony would suggest that he was he gripped her with the right hand, his fingers producing the abrasions on the left side of the neck and his thumb the corresponding bruise on the right. By applying pressure to the throat he stifled any cry and throttled his victim, at least into insensibility. She was then lowered to the ground. At some point Annie may have fallen, or the murderer stumbled, against the fence. As she lay on the ground the killer deeply severed her throat in two cuts from left to right. If he knelt beside and to the right of the head, his back to the house, the knife would have been used in the right hand. The patches of blood on the fence, to the left of the head, and the spots on the left arm, which lay across the breast, may have been that which spurted from the wound as the murderer severed the left carotid artery. Dr Phillips believed that the abdominal injuries had been inflicted after death. The abdomen was laid open and the victim eviscerated. The small intestines were discovered above the right shoulder and part of the stomach above the left shoulder but the uterus, together with parts of the v.a.g.i.n.a and bladder, were taken away by the murderer. He wrenched the rings from the third finger of Annie's left hand and in throwing up her skirts discovered her pocket, attached by strings around the waist, and tore it open. The rings were never found but the contents of the pocket a piece of muslin, a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb in a paper case were discovered at Annie's feet. Dr Phillips' impression was that they had been carefully arranged there but their positions may have been quite fortuitous. The piece of envelope and the pills, which William Stevens had seen Annie place in her pocket, were found by the dead woman's head.

In at least one respect the Chapman killing was unique in the Whitechapel series. It was the only murder which was not committed during the hours of darkness. The sun rose at 5.23 and on this busy market morning there were already plenty of people about. Spitalfields Market had opened at five, at which time the western end of Hanbury Street had been clogged with market vehicles. When the killer and his victim entered the yard of No. 29, moreover, the house itself was rapidly coming to life. The carman Thompson had gone to work all of one and a half hours ago and Richardson had been in the yard within the last forty-five minutes. While the couple were still in the yard Cadosch visited the adjoining yard twice. And at 5.45, even as the murderer must have been completing his task, John Davis and his wife bestirred themselves. In slaughtering Annie when and where he did the murderer had thus taken an extraordinary risk. Yet his escape through the streets is scarcely less remarkable. There was a tap in the yard but the killer, perhaps fearful of capture, did not pause to wash the blood from his hands. We know this because Mrs Richardson saw a pan of clean water under the tap the evening before the murder and found it there, apparently undisturbed, in the morning. Emerging from No. 29, therefore, the murderer may well have been stained with gore. Secreted somewhere about his person was the murder weapon. And he must have had something in which to wrap or hold the pelvic organs he had just extracted from his freshly killed victim. But no one, in the grey dawn of that September morning, challenged or even seemed to notice him as he bore away his ghastly trophy.

On the question of the killer's ident.i.ty the Chapman murder produced what appeared to be the first tangible clues. During the Tabram investigation a suspicion that the murderer had been a soldier had enjoyed very general acceptance. This view, as we have seen, had little to recommend it but as late as the Chapman inquiry echoes of it survived in the police investigation of the torn envelope and their search for Annie's 'pensioner'. In testifying that the murder weapon could not have been a bayonet Dr Phillips went some way to discrediting the theory in the public mind and we hear little more of it.

The doctor's testimony incriminated his own profession. He was not the first to point a finger in their general direction for Dr Llewellyn, at the Nichols inquest, had already credited the killer with 'some rough anatomical knowledge.' But Phillips spoke with much greater conviction. We do not know all the factors that influenced his conclusions. However, the fact that the uterus had been extracted intact, that the murderer had divided the v.a.g.i.n.a low enough to avoid damage to the cervix uteri, did suggest to Phillips that the murderer's object had been to secure this particular organ and that he knew how to recognize and excise it without injury. It is also evident from the Lancet's statement that the killer secured the pelvic organs 'with one sweep of a knife' and from Baxter's comment that there were 'no meaningless cuts' that the random cuts or slashes present in the Tabram murder and in the later Eddowes and Kelly murders were absent in the Chapman case. 'The whole inference seems to me,' Phillips told the inquest, 'that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.' And if that was the case then, in the doctor's opinion, the knowledge and skill of the murderer had been impressive given the haste in which he had been obliged to work. 'I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman,' he said, 'and effect them, even without a struggle, [in] under a quarter of an hour.'

It is quite possible, of course, that the position of the lower cut severing Annie's uterus had been entirely fortuitous and that the absence of random mutilations simply reflected the killer's haste to escape from a perilous situation. Nevertheless, Dr Phillips had examined the victim's wounds and he had been a police surgeon for twenty-three years. His opinion commanded respect. Baxter was convinced and in his summing up on 26 September adverted to the killer's expertise in uncompromising terms: 'The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by some one who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts. It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.'21 Mrs Long's description of the man in the dark coat and brown deerstalker hat provided the further clue that the murderer may have been a foreigner. Jack Pizer, whose habit of abusing prost.i.tutes had made him an obvious suspect, had already introduced that possibility but there had never been any genuine evidence linking him with the murders and, as we shall see, within days of the Chapman murder he was conclusively eliminated from police inquiries. The first valid evidence implicating a foreigner, then, came from Mrs Long and in so far as her testimony contained the first description ever given of a man who was plausibly the Whitechapel murderer it cannot be ignored.

We have three accounts of Mrs Long's experience. The most detailed is that contained in her inquest deposition of 19 September. We know from the newspapers, however, that she made her original statement to the police as early as 12 September and that she identified Annie's body on the same day. Unfortunately no copy of that first statement has survived though something of it has perhaps been preserved in the 19 October report of Chief Inspector Swanson, whose technique it was to synthesize and summarize the contents of earlier doc.u.ments. Brief notices of Mrs Long's story were also circulated by the press on 12 and 13 September.22 Eyewitness testimony is at best treacherous. It can at least be said of Mrs Long that she reported the event while it was fresh in her memory and that a comparison of the different statements attributed to her suggests that her testimony remained consistent. Notwithstanding all which, the circ.u.mstances of Mrs Long's sighting oblige us to treat her evidence with caution. The couple did nothing to attract her attention and she pa.s.sed them by without speaking to them. Worse, she did not see the man's face. Something perhaps the sound of his voice or the darkness of his complexion gave her the impression that he was a foreigner but it can have been no more than an impression and she was honest enough to admit that she would not be able to recognize him again.

Between adjournments of the Coroner's inquiry Annie's remains were buried. An outcast in life, she was virtually so in death. Fountain Smith, her brother, was a printer's warehouseman. When he testified at the inquest on 12 September his appearance was judged 'very respectable' by pressmen. But he seemed to want to have as little to do with the proceedings as possible and gave his evidence in so low a tone as to be 'all but inaudible two yards off.' If the press accounts of the funeral are to be believed the other relatives also judged themselves respectable. And conscious, perhaps, of their respectability they contrived to bury Annie with the utmost discretion.

The family paid the funeral expenses and kept all the arrangements a profound secret. Apart from themselves only the police and the undertaker, Harry Hawes of 19 Hunt Street, knew when it would take place. At seven on the morning of Friday, 14 September, a hea.r.s.e was sent to the Whitechapel Mortuary. Quietly, expeditiously, the undertaker's men collected the body. It rested in an elm coffin draped in black. The coffin-plate read: 'Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years.' Driven to Hunt Street, the hea.r.s.e remained there until nine, when it set off for Manor Park Cemetery. There were no mourning coaches because the relatives, in order to avoid attracting attention, had arranged to meet the hea.r.s.e at the cemetery. 'All the arrangements were carried out most satisfactorily,' noted the Advertiser, 'and there was no hitch of any kind.'23 Sadly the terrors, the pa.s.sions, the recriminations evoked by the death of Dark Annie were not to be laid to rest as easily as her bones.

6.

The Man in the Pa.s.sage and other Chapman Murder Myths.

DURING THE CENTURY that has elapsed since the Hanbury Street tragedy authors have told and retold the story with undiminished appet.i.te. Unfortunately few of them bothered to adequately research the facts first. After studying the primary evidence and writing the previous chapter I read the accounts of the Chapman murder given in more than a score of supposedly factual Ripper books. Not one was free from error and most were literally riddled with them. The five pages of text that one centennial volume devoted to Annie contained at least twenty-eight errors. In the six-page account of another I counted no less than thirty-two! Some of these books were so gross