Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman E-Book

John Morris

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 continue to exert a macabre hold on our imagination. Among the first serial murders, their brutality and bizarreness, and the seeming impossibility of detection have a terrible fascination. What kind of person could have performed such horrific deeds, and could have overstepped the boundary of what marks humankind? How could they not have been caught by the unprecedented police effort? The murders were reported on around the world and the murderer was the first to be given a macabre nickname. He has been the subject of hundreds of books and several films but his identity remains a mystery. Suspects have included the eminent Victorian doctor Sir William Gull, royal gynecologist Sir John Williams and the painter Walter Sickert. Conspiracy theories abound, involving Masonic, Jewish and other connections. This is the story of the extensive research of John Morris and his late father. Starting with the many unresolved questions about the murders they shockingly concluded that they could be answered if Jack was in reality a woman, not a man. But who could she be? After many twists and turns they reach an all too plausible conclusion…

Leseprobe

JACK THE RIPPER

THE HAND OF A WOMAN

JOHN MORRIS

‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, III, 8

For Dad, a hard act to follow

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chronology of the Murders

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Appendix I

Appendix II

Bibliography

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One name, more than any other, conjures up images of thick swirling fog, dark Victorian passageways and shadowy gas-lit squares, brutally slaughtered victims, a faceless murderer clutching a blood-stained knife, and a timeless unsolved mystery… Jack the Ripper.

Several years ago, and long before the prospect of writing my own book about this most elusive of all murderers ever occurred to me, I visited a London bookshop. There I skimmed through the pages of another Ripper paperback, the title of which I am now unable to recall. Recently I was reminded of a brief passage from that work. The author mentioned that, during the course of his writing, he felt there were three people living in his home, although the dinner table was only ever laid for two. The third occupant in the household, the uninvited guest, was of course Jack. During the latter period when I was working on Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman, I felt the same way, but it was not the murderer who shared our family home.

After our investigation started, but well before it finished, sadly my father, Byron Morris, died aged ninety-six. An aircraft engineer by profession, many of his earlier years were spent pursuing his hobby of watchmaking, the very same part-time activity enjoyed by Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, the co-ordinating officer instructed by Scotland Yard to track down the Whitechapel murderer. The last years of my father’s life were devoted to historical research, and in this field he made many unexpected discoveries, of which the true identity of Jack the Ripper and the motive for the terrible crimes are just two.

After his death, I continued with our project alone, but I always felt that he was standing at my shoulder helping and encouraging me. Sometimes when I was uncertain how to proceed, a small voice would make a suggestion that invariably turned out to be the right one; at other times I would ask my father for advice and it was always given; whether this was from my subconscious and the many years of his welcome guidance and influence, or perhaps a voice from beyond the grave, having checked various aspects of the case with the original sources, I do not know. But whichever is correct, I am truly grateful for his encouragement, help and love.

I wish to thank Jonathan Williams, my literary agent, for his dedication, impeccable editorial advice, incisive judgement, so much selfless hard work, and of course, his friendship. Without him, this book, to which he contributed so much, would never have seen the light of day and, I have little doubt, the truth about the murders would never have become known.

I also wish to thank Mick Felton of Seren; not only for publishing my work, which almost goes without saying, but for his true professionalism, commitment and acuity in showing me what more was needed to make the original account so much more compelling, and I hope, more enjoyable too.

My thanks also to the management and staff of Druids Glen Resort for their kindness in allowing me the extensive use of their business facility.

With grateful thanks also to my wonderful family, my fiercest critics who encouraged me from the outset; for their invaluable suggestions, sometimes solutions, and always absolute confidence, my sister for a historical perspective, and particularly my wife Yvonne, for her infinite patience and the inexplicable trust she placed in me. I shake my head as I wonder why.

John Morris Druid’s Glen, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, July 2011

PROLOGUE

I clearly remember my first eureka moment, that split-second when, in an instant, everything became crystal clear, and the previously obscure was now bindingly obvious.

I was born in the early 1950s and grew up in rural Northamptonshire during an era when young children were expected to listen to what their elders had to say. Usually I found their talk to be dull, but occasionally the conversation would become more interesting. At such times, I would listen eagerly and the hours would fly.

It was on one of these occasions that I heard about a mysterious character called Jack the Ripper. He captured my imagination and has continued to haunt my life ever since. He was said to have murdered his unfortunate victims, all ‘fallen women’, in London’s East End district of Whitechapel during the autumn of 1888. The killings were all brutal, bloody and carried out using a scalpel-sharp knife. One of the reasons for his notoriety was that he was never caught.

There was great conjecture about the murderer’s identity; was he a doctor, a lawyer, or even a member of the Royal Family? Some of those whose enthralling discussions I absorbed so readily had been young themselves in 1888. The impact that the events of that year made on them must have been immense, because more than 70 years afterwards, they were still talking about the murders.

So it has been for me too. From my early introduction to the present day, I have theorised endlessly about the murderer’s identity and possible motives for the terrible crimes. I devoured anything and everything on the subject, from books, newspaper and magazine articles, to cinema, television and radio programmes. Cuttings about the ‘latest discovery’ are crammed inside the covers of more than fifty books about the Ripper on my bookshelves.

Four authors in particular have influenced my views on the Whitechapel murders. Stephen Knight, in his best-selling book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), declared that he had solved the mystery once and for all. The Manchester Evening Newsreview of the book asserted that Knight had “tied up so many loose ends”. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, a grandson of Queen Victoria, had married a Catholic in a secret ceremony and she had given birth to his child, Knight claimed. When the Establishment found out about the affair, the young woman was abducted and disappeared following a police raid, and her friends, five prostitutes from Whitechapel, then tried to blackmail the Royal Family. Sir William Gull, the Queen’s surgeon, had taken it upon himself to solve the problem. As a high-ranking Freemason, he set about his task in what was alleged to be true Masonic style; tracking down each of the conspirators, then cutting their throats and disembowelling them. The bodies of one of the victims was discovered in Mitre Square, which, Knight maintained, held great symbolic significance for Freemasons, while another had her intestines thrown over her shoulder, as further evidence of Masonic ritual and involvement.

For a while, this hypothesis satisfied me and I convinced myself that the case had been solved at last, but it troubled me at the same time. Though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something was wrong, including the question of which shoulder was demanded by Masonic ceremony, and all the loose ends had most definitely not been tied up.

The Whitechapel murders raise many questions, most of which have never been satisfactorily answered or explained. Why was the throat of the first victim, Polly Nichols, cut twice – when she was already dead? She had been suffocated or strangled – as evidenced by the dark blue colour of her tongue according to the medical report of Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the police surgeon who performed the post mortem.

Why, when the second victim, Annie Chapman, was murdered, was the pocket of her apron almost torn off? For what reason were a number of personal items arranged neatly by her feet? Why, and for what reason, was Chapman’s uterus ripped out of her body and taken away by the murderer?

When Elizabeth Stride’s body was discovered, lying inside an open gateway in Berner Street, only her throat had been cut and nothing more. Why just a cut throat when, up to that point, the injuries inflicted on the two previous victims had been getting worse in their severity?

When Catherine Eddowes’s mutilated body was found in a dark corner of Mitre Square, why was the inverted letter ‘V’ carved into each of her cheeks and what did it mean? Why were her nose, ears, lips and eyelids slashed? And why had her uterus and left kidney been cut out of her body and removed from the scene of the crime?

What was the meaning of the cryptic message inscribed on the black brick door surround at the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street?

The Juwes are

The men That

Will not

be Blamed

for nothing

Were they written in the murderer’s own hand? And did the murderer deposit a bloodied part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron on the ground in the doorway, to draw attention to the strange message, as has been supposed, or might there be an entirely different explanation for both the writing and the severed part of the soiled apron?

Mary Jane Kelly, a young, pretty Irish girl, was the murderer’s fifth and final victim. Said to have been born in Limerick in Ireland, Mary Kelly moved to Wales with her family when she was very young. While she lived in Wales, the young Mary learned her new tongue and adopted the accent of her childhood friends. She later lived with a cousin in Cardiff before moving to London in 1884 with her young son. She was just twenty-one.

Four years later, Mary Kelly was killed in her tiny rented room during the early hours of a cold November morning on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. She was more horrendously disfigured than any of the previous victims, and her death posed the most important question of all.

After that murder, Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, a housewife, gave a written statement to the police, and later also swore on oath at Kelly’s inquest, that she had both seen the victim and carried on a conversation with her at the entrance to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly had lived. But this had happened, Mrs Maxwell insisted, several hours after it has been conclusively established that Kelly was dead. How was this possible?

A more general question was why the murderer appeared to have no sexual interest in any of the victims? None of them had been raped, or sexually interfered with, or had their undergarments removed – save for the purpose of cutting up their bodies. And all of them, with the exception of Mary Kelly, appeared to have voluntarily lain down, as though they were expected to perform the sexual act.

Was it significant that the first four murders took place within the relatively short time-frame of thirty days, while the fifth and last killing took place more than five weeks after the fourth murder? Was there some reason for this delay, and, if so, what might it have been?

What was the catalyst for the murders? What momentous event or series of events could have turned someone into a brutal, serial killer – carrying out horrific murders, almost beyond comprehension, even by the standards of Ed Gein, on whose character Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates and Tom Harris’s Buffalo Bill were both based? Edward Theodore Gein, born in 1906, a serial killer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, whose gruesome death toll is unknown, adopted the practice of murdering his victims, then fashioning household items from their skin, bones and body parts. Convicted of murder in the first degree, Gein was found legally insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he remained until his death in 1984.

Why did the murders end with the inconceivably savage disfigurement of Mary Kelly? Had the murderer finally achieved his purpose, and if so, what was that purpose?

And finally, the most elusive question of all: why was the murderer never caught?

None of these questions has ever been answered satisfactorily.

Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (2002), a meticulously researched almanac, provides information on almost everything that anyone could wish to know about the Whitechapel murders – except the answers to the questions who and why? But while Sugden did not actually provide the answers I was looking for, at least he succeeded unwittingly in pointing me in the right direction.

I had expected Patricia Cornwell’s book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (2002) to provide the conclusive evidence for which I was searching. But, regrettably, this book also failed to live up to expectations. Despite the thorough and deep research that Cornwell had undertaken, I was disappointed that her proposed suspect, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), the German-born English impressionist painter, was supported by so little, if any, concrete evidence. Her ‘proof’ seemed to consist of several of Sickert’s drawings, pictures, canvases and a number of anonymous and denigrating letters sent to the police which Sickert may or may not have written. The ‘Dear Boss’ letter, delivered to Scotland Yard almost three weeks after the murder of the second victim, Annie Chapman, which Cornwell claimed Sickert had written, was an important pillar of the writer’s case and it was that letter which gave birth to the infamous sobriquet Jack the Ripper. Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard, declared in Criminals and Crime (1907) that “the letters were the work of an enterprising journalist”, but was unable to provide the evidence needed to substantiate his claim. It was not until well over one hundred years later that his theory was confirmed, by Dr Andrew Cook, in Jack the Ripper: Case Closed (2009), who established that the letter was indeed written by a journalist. Walter Sickert did not write that letter.

Patricia Cornwell also claimed that Sickert suffered from a misshapen penis and was incapable of consummating the sexual act. This, she suggested, caused in him such a hatred of women that he was compelled to murder them, dissect their bodies, and remove their reproductive organs. But at no stage did she explain why the murders began and, just as importantly, why they ended so abruptly. There is no mention in Cornwell’s book of the extraordinary and compelling evidence given by Mrs Caroline Maxwell – which is central to the Kelly murder.

Disappointingly, none of the answers I hoped to find were provided in Patricia Cornwell’s book and there was little or no other persuasive evidence to suggest that Walter Sickert was anything other than an oddity or a misfit – traits that are not sufficient to merit him being called a serial killer.

In 2004, my father, an active and perceptive amateur historian, then aged ninety-two, began to research his latest subject, Sir John Williams, born in 1840, the third of four brothers on a small farm in Gwynfe, a village near Carmarthen in west Wales. John Williams had struggled to rise above his humble origins, and went on to become a physician to royalty and Professor of Obstetric Medicine at University College Hospital in London. In June 1905, after his early and unexpected retirement two years earlier, the deputation he headed won the sixteen-month fight to establish the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Sometime after the result of my father’s research into the life of Sir John Williams was published in the South Wales Evening Post, the book Uncle Jack (2005) appeared. Within its pages, the author Tony Williams identified his great-great-uncle, Sir John Williams, as “Britain’s most notorious murderer”.

My father refused to believe that Williams, a gifted, brilliant and philanthropic doctor, could possibly be Jack the Ripper. Reading Uncle Jack did nothing to change that view. If anything, it reinforced my father’s opinion that, while Williams may have shared the same weaknesses as many of his fellow men as far as women were concerned, this did not make him a murderer. In any event, what motive could he possibly have had? Sadly, like all books written on the subject to date, Uncle Jack was also a huge disappointment to me. The many questions and explanations I was seeking remained unanswered.

As my father and I worked our way through the long list of suspects, we listed the essential attributes the murderer would have to have in order to accomplish, and get away with, the terrible crimes: a knowledge of anatomy, some surgical skill, access to specialist knives, the baffling ability to disappear into thin air, and a motive, at the very least, to commit murder. Then my father’s eyes suddenly lit up and he told me whom he thought the murderer could have been….

That was my first eureka moment.

The realisation had come about as he recalled a short extract, just seven words, from a passage in one of the many scores of books we had read. It supported its author’s contention as to the identity of his suspect perfectly, but it didn’t ring true for us. It was only when we turned the passage about, that its true meaning, and the possible identity of the murderer, became clear, and the motive behind one of the murders, at least, was now patently obvious.

But simple conjecture, however plausible, is never enough, and so we began our own line of research. As our investigation progressed and the evidence mounted, the person my father identified as the Whitechapel murderer became increasingly probable. Like pieces in a jigsaw, one important fact after another slotted neatly and effortlessly into place. Just as a thick London fog might lift to reveal a clear blue sky, the picture of what really happened all those decades ago gradually began to emerge. Not only were we able to confirm the murderer’s identity, we also unearthed the catalyst for the killings – why they started, why they ended, the motive for all the murders and an explanation for the injuries inflicted on each of the murdered women.

After an intensive investigation lasting almost three years, I finally had the answers to my questions: Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman is the result of that research.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE MURDERS

Friday, 31 August Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was 43. Her body was discovered at 3.40 a.m. in a gateway in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut twice, her abdomen ripped open.

Saturday, 8 September Annie Chapman, known as Dark Annie, was 47. Her body was discovered at 6.00 a.m. in a backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut, her abdomen ripped open. Her uterus had been excised from her body and removed from the scene.

Sunday, 30 September Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, was 45. Her body was discovered at 1.00 a.m. inside an open gateway to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut. She was the first of two victims to be murdered that night in what came to be known as the ‘double event’.

Catherine Eddowes, the second victim to be murdered that night, was 46. Her body was discovered at 1.44 a.m. in Mitre Square, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut, her face mutilated, her abdomen ripped open, and her uterus and left kidney both excised and removed from the scene.

Friday, 9 November Mary Jane Kelly at 25 was by far the youngest victim. Her body was discovered at 11.00 a.m. in a rented room at 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel. Her throat had been severed, her body hacked to pieces and almost all her internal organs removed. They were recovered later, except for her heart. No trace of it was ever found.

In the autumn of 1888, the bodies of these five women, all of them prostitutes, were discovered in Whitechapel within a one-mile radius of each other. The murders were investigated by the finest senior detectives from Scotland Yard, recognised then as the best and most efficient police force in the world. Despite the most intensive hunt for a killer ever carried out in Britain up to that time, no one was caught, nor was the reason why such terrible crimes had been carried out ever discovered. In the many decades that followed, innumerable theories have been put forward as to the identity of the killer, none of them conclusive. Up to now, the identity of the murderer and the motive behind the murders have remained insoluble mysteries.

CHAPTER 1

9 November 1888

It surpassed Dante’s vision of hell. Not in his wildest imagination could the supreme medieval poet have dreamed up a scene of such horror. There was blood everywhere: on the bed, on the floor, on the walls and even on the ceiling. Pieces of skin, flayed from the victim’s abdomen, and flesh from her thighs lay on a small bedside table; more skin and lumps of flesh, hacked from her arms and legs, were left on a larger table. Several feet of intestines and the young woman’s spleen were strewn across the bed, where blood had soaked through the thin mattress and dripped silently into a widening, crimson pool on the floor. Her uterus, kidneys and one severed breast had been pushed under her head. The other breast lay beside her right foot. Her liver nestled between her feet on a coverlet caked in yet more blood. The stench of blood and gore was overwhelming – enough to make a person retch. The small room at number 13 Miller’s Court was truly hell on earth.

Mary Kelly was an attractive young woman and the final victim of the Whitechapel murderer, more popularly known as Jack the Ripper. Her stiffening corpse lay on its back near to the left-hand side of the bed. Her face, drained of colour, was turned away from the wall, her sightless pale blue eyes having lost their shine, stared from behind a thin grey film towards the middle of the room. She was almost naked, save for a sheer linen undergarment which had been slashed away at the front. Her right carotid artery had been savagely cut, and her throat severed to the spine, which was deeply scored by the blade of a knife; a torrent of blood from the gaping wound had matted almost all her long, light-coloured hair. Her nose had been hacked off and lay on one side, while her cheeks, eyebrows and ears were partially removed. Several cuts ran obliquely from her lips to her chin and her face was covered in so much blood that she was barely recognisable. Her knees were bent and her legs had been forced unnaturally wide apart. Mary Kelly’s torso was torn open from her ribs to her private parts, her insides viciously ripped out. Her right arm was placed in such a way that her hand was pushed inside the now empty cavity of her belly. With her entire body hideously disfigured, she resembled a slaughtered beast hanging on a butcher’s hook rather than a human being, and certainly not a young, attractive woman.

At that time of year, November, and during the colder winter months, damp mists rising from the Essex marshes would drift towards London driven by light, easterly winds. There, they combined with the toxic black smoke spewed from a hundred thousand chimneys to create a permanent miasma: the filthy, poisonous, sulphurous mist of a London pea soup fog.

At 8.30 a.m. several hours after the murder on that same cold grey morning, a woman emerged from Miller’s Court. She walked briskly up the narrow stone passageway to the corner of the lane, and then turned right into Dorset Street. Mrs Caroline Maxwell, a housewife who lived in a lodging house opposite the arched entrance to the court, saw her, though her vision would have been somewhat impaired by the thick foul mists swirling around the streets.

While the finer features of the woman were obscured, Maxwell could see the brightly coloured clothes she was wearing: a green bodice, a brown linsey skirt and a red knitted crossover shawl. They were the very same clothes that Mary Kelly had been wearing when Caroline Maxwell had met her the previous day.

Maxwell called out to her across the street, as the woman hurried from the passageway. “What, Mary, brings you up so early?”

The woman immediately turned towards her.

‘I have the horrors of the drink upon me as I have been drinking for some days past,’ the woman replied in a familiar Welsh accent.

After a further brief exchange, it started to rain, and both women moved on.

Shortly after 11.00, more than two hours later, Thomas Bowyer, a shop assistant, called to Kelly’s room to collect from her 29 shillings in rent arrears. When there was no reply, he went to a side window where he knew there was a broken pane of glass. He reached in, pushed aside a dirty old coat that served as a curtain, and peered into the room. Once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, what he saw caused him to jerk backwards, and he fell to the ground in shock. Bowyer picked himself up, fled to the shop nearby where he worked and quickly came back with his employer, John McCarthy, who was both a grocer and Kelly’s landlord. McCarthy put his eye to the window, and then he too recoiled in startled horror.

McCarthy immediately sent Bowyer to Commercial Street police station to summon help. He soon returned to Miller’s Court with two police officers: Inspectors Walter Beck and Walter Dew. Beck looked in through the same broken window and what he saw appalled him. He pleaded with Dew not to look, but his advice was ignored and Dew took his turn at the window. There, in the darkness of the small room, he saw a terrible sight which he would never forget.

In a ceremony that dates from the time of Magna Carta, the annual Lord Mayor’s Show in London is traditionally held on the second Friday in November. A procession accompanies the new, incoming Lord Mayor to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. There, he is presented to the King or Queen and Judges of the High Court, and swears his oath of loyalty to the Crown. The event is a pleasant and enjoyable affair, generally regarded as a welcome break at what is usually a dreary time of year. This particular day, bitter cold, wet and with dark rain-clouds covering the entire sky, was no exception, and even if it was not destined to be enjoyable, it was certainly going to be unforgettable, but for an entirely unexpected reason.

For a brief time, the atrocities that had plunged Whitechapel into a state of terror that autumn were forgotten in the excitement of the moment. The colour, music and pageantry of the procession were a welcome and diverting distraction for the many thousands of visitors who had come to the East End of London, and who packed the pavements to watch the show. But as the long cortege slowly emerged from the mists on Ludgate Hill, two small boys mischievously joined in at the front. The incoming Lord Mayor, Sir James Whitehead, who led the parade, hung fast to the reins of his startled white horse, and tried hard not to fall as the boys in front of him waved large boards above their heads, danced and jumped about. Gradually, as the procession drew closer, a deathly hush descended on the crowds. The celebratory flags and festival banners were lowered, the music and cheering died away and an ominous silence filled the air.

Written on the boards the boys were waving was the latest newspaper headline:

Another

Whitechapel

Murder

The Star

Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline, Scotland Yard’s best and most experienced detective, and officer appointed to coordinate the murder investigation, arrived at Miller’s Court at 11.30 a.m., soon after the alarm was raised. He was accompanied by Detective Sergeant George Godley, who had been assigned to assist him following the discovery of the body of Mary Ann Nichols ten weeks before. There they joined Inspectors Walter Beck and Walter Dew, Dr George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon for the Metropolitan Police, who had arrived 15 minutes before, Thomas Bowyer and John McCarthy.

Abberline requested tracker dogs – bloodhounds – to pursue the murderer’s scent, though recent trials on Hampstead Heath to assess their effectiveness had produced inconclusive results. While they waited for the bloodhounds, Burgho and Barnaby, to arrive, Abberline ordered cordons to be placed at the entrance to Miller’s Court. These were to prevent the crowds, who were now abandoning the Lord Mayor’s procession in their thousands, from descending on the crime scene. These onlookers were already blocking Dorset Street, and hundreds more continued to arrive as the news of yet another murder spread.

By noon, forty more police had arrived at Miller’s Court, and while some struggled to hold back the quickly growing crowd, others questioned witnesses, took statements and searched the small paved yard of the court, the seven tenement houses, the dustbin and the narrow passageway that led past McCarthy’s shop, for evidence, clues and traces of blood.

It was not until early afternoon – more than two hours after Bowyer’s gruesome discovery – that the detectives learned that the bloodhounds would not be coming after all. Their use had been discontinued just over a week earlier, unbeknown to the detectives, and they were no longer available. At 1.30 p.m. the door of 13 Miller’s Court was forced open, and Inspector Abberline, D.S. George Godley, Inspectors Walter Beck and Walter Dew followed Dr George Phillips, and squeezed into Mary Kelly’s single-room apartment. They yanked away the dirty old coat from the window, allowing light to flood into the room. What Bowyer, McCarthy, Beck and Dew had glimpsed through the window was bad enough, but in bright daylight the scene was infinitely worse. All five men were horrified, and some of them became physically ill at the ghastly sight that confronted them.

The dwelling was small – no more than five or six paces from wall to wall. It contained an old wooden bed, a small bedside table, a larger table, a cupboard, two chairs and a washstand. A faded reproduction of ‘The Fisherman’s Widow’ by the English artist Frank Bramley hung from a nail above the mantelpiece in what might have been half-hearted attempt to lift the young woman’s spirits in such dismal surroundings. Given the painting’s subject matter – a sad-looking woman staring at a large wooden memorial cross in a desolate graveyard – it seemed unlikely to succeed.

Dr Thomas Bond, another police surgeon, arrived at Miller’s Court at 2.00 p.m. and, together, the two doctors examined the victim’s remains while the four detectives searched the room for clues, and continued their fingertip search of the court.

With forensic detection in its infancy, Scotland Yard’s Fingerprint Bureau yet to be established, and effective DNA profiling still more than a century away, the detectives had little more to assist them than their own eyes and gut instinct. As they searched the room, they noticed that a fire in the hearth had burned so fiercely that it had melted the handle and spout of a kettle standing on the hob. Abberline probed the large grey mound of cold ashes in the fireplace. As he prodded and poked, a piece of curved wire emerged; it was about eight inches long and attached to it was a small piece of charred material, the remains of a woman’s felt hat. Further investigation of the ashes produced two more pieces of material. The larger, also burnt at the edges, twelve inches square and dark brown in colour, was all that remained of a woman’s cotton twill skirt. A smaller piece of black velvet might have been the remains of a cape.

The police brought in a professional photographer, Joe Martin of Cannon Street Road, to photograph the remains of the victim. Already a veteran of three photographic murder assignments in Whitechapel that autumn at Scotland Yard’s request, Martin produced a pin-sharp image of his latest, and most grotesque, subject. It is one of only two known likenesses of Mary Jane Kelly.

When the photographer had left, the doctors continued their lengthy examination of the corpse and began to reconstruct the young woman’s body. They collected the pieces of skin, as well as the flesh and organs which had been ripped from the victim and strewn across the bed and about the room. Every body part, no matter how small, was carefully retrieved and replaced in and on the corpse in the approximate position it would have occupied in life.

One of the doctors also raked through the ashes in the grate, but there was nothing left to find. The corpse, sewn together as well as it could be, was removed to the mortuary in the late afternoon. But despite a thorough search of the room, the court, and the passageway to Dorset Street, one organ could not be located. The victim’s heart was missing.

The stub of a solitary candle stood on top of a broken wine glass placed on the small bedside table. Lying across a chair was Mary Kelly’s underwear, but her outer clothes were nowhere to be found. The damaged kettle, coupled with the large pile of ashes, provided confirmation of an intense blaze. Following a two-day investigation at the murder scene, the detectives reasoned that the murderer must have burned Kelly’s clothes in order to generate more light to see by as he carried out his terrible work, though they were at a loss to explain why he had not burned her underwear also. Afterwards, the murderer had left and made good his escape. It was a rational enough conclusion to draw.

And it would have been, except that there is no record of anyone seeing Mary Kelly wearing the hat and clothes, the remnants of which were found in her fireplace, and for the strange testimony of Mrs Caroline Maxwell. She gave a written statement to the police, and later testified under oath at the inquest which commenced on Monday, 12 November, that she had both seen Mary Kelly and spoken with her on the morning of the murder: the woman whose features were obscured by the fog; the woman who was wearing a green bodice, a brown linsey skirt and a red knitted crossover shawl; the woman who had spoken with a Welsh accent….

As to the time of Mary Kelly’s death, the police investigation turned up two witnesses, both residents of Miller’s Court, who had heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ just before 4.00 a.m. Dr Thomas Bond estimated Kelly’s time of death as between 1.00 a.m. and 2.00 a.m. Dr George Bagster Phillips estimated the time of her death as between 4.45 a.m. and 5.45 a.m. However, the latter gave his opinion that a body ripped apart in such a cold room would lose heat far more quickly than a victim whose body had not been so extensively mutilated. That morning the outside temperature had dropped to almost 39 degrees Fahrenheit, so it had been quite cold.

Whether Mary Kelly died as early as 1.00 a.m., or at 4.00 a.m. when the two independent witnesses heard what may have been her last scream for help, or even as late as 5.45 a.m., which Dr Phillips estimated as the latest time of death, it is certain that she was already dead by the time of Caroline Maxwell’s encounter with the woman she believed to be Mary Kelly at 8.30 a.m. that same morning.

This anomaly in the evidence has never been satisfactorily explained. The dilemma would haunt Inspectors Frederick Abberline and Walter Dew to the end of their days. Philip Sugden, in The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, described it as, “an unanswered riddle”. Stephen Knight, in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, said it “is one of the enduring mysteries of the case”.

In its edition published on 10 November, the day after the murder, an editorial in The Times ran: “The murders, so cunningly continued, are carried out with a completeness which altogether baffles investigators. Not a trace is left of the murderer, and there is no purpose in the crime to afford the slightest clue…”.

During the course of Mary Kelly’s murder, and the subsequent mutilations to her body, the murderer would, according to the doctors who examined the corpse, have been covered in a great deal of blood, especially on his hands and clothing. Near the side of the building in which the murdered woman lived, and fixed to the end wall, was a hand-operated water pump. However, no one who was covered in blood could have used the pump in daylight without the risk of being seen from any one of the tenement houses opposite; though perhaps unbeknown to the murderer, three of them were currently unoccupied. Sunrise on that day was at 7.07, but by the time the murderer was making good an escape, that time was already long past.

But if the clothes that had been burned in the fire – a woman’s felt hat, a dark brown skirt and a black velvet cape – were not Mary Kelly’s clothes, and Kelly was not known to own a hat, they could have been the blood-stained clothes of the murderer. If the murderer then dressed in Kelly’s clean outer clothes in order to escape, this might explain how Caroline Maxwell believed that she had encountered Mary Kelly.

What all this means is that over 120 years of traditional thinking has to be set aside. The persistent, single-minded belief that the Whitechapel murders were committed by a man must now be replaced by the possibility that the murderer known as Jack the Ripper could actually have been a woman.

CHAPTER 2

There are several, generally held misconceptions about the Whitechapel murders. One is that the victims were all hacked to death with a knife. They weren’t. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, ‘Polly’, was throttled to death before her throat was cut. Another is that the bodies of the five victims were ripped to pieces. Again, they weren’t. The third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut, but no further mutilations were inflicted on her body. Yet another supposition is that all the victims were murdered under cover of darkness. Wrong again. The estimated time of death of the second victim, Annie Chapman, was 5.30 a.m., more than forty minutes after dawn and five minutes after sunrise. The most important misconception of all, however, is that Jack the Ripper must have been a man.

The hypothesis that the Whitechapel murderer may have been a woman is not new. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline had briefly discussed the prospect with a colleague, Dr Thomas Dutton, after the murder of Mary Kelly, and it was Abberline himself who suggested that the killer might indeed have been a woman. Dutton considered the notion unlikely, but suggested that if it were a woman, the only kind of person capable of committing such horrendous crimes would have to be a midwife, and a mad midwife at that.

The idea had some merit. A midwife would possess the anatomical knowledge necessary to locate the uterus and other organs in the female body; she would have easy access to surgical knives, and the very nature of her profession would enable her to explain away any blood on her clothing and to account for the late hours when she was out and about on the streets. An element of madness thrown in for good measure would provide a valid reason why she had been driven to murder and maim in the first place.

But it seemed to my father and me that madness was too convenient an excuse. When an explanation cannot be found for some form of irrational behaviour, then describing it as an act of madness provides a neat answer – the easy way out, because no further explanation or answer is required to be given. The assumption was that madness explained everything. Or at least it might have done were it not for the fact that the Whitechapel murders raised so many questions that not even the charge of madness could explain. Abberline must have thought so too, because he doesn’t appear to have pursued his Mad Midwife theory any further.

The only woman mentioned as a possible suspect for the Whitechapel murders, though some two years later, was a Mary Pearcey from Kentish Town in north London.

Mary Pearcey, born in 1866, was the daughter of Thomas Wheeler, a convicted murderer, who was hanged on 29 November 1880. She was said, in contemporary newspaper reports, to have been an attractive woman with “lovely russet-coloured hair and pale blue eyes”. After a relationship with a carpenter – John Pearcey – from whom she took her surname, broke down, she moved in with a furniture remover, Frank Hogg, who was already involved in a relationship with a Phoebe Styles. Styles became pregnant by Hogg, and Mary Pearcey persuaded Hogg to marry Styles. Mary Pearcey and Phoebe Hogg became the best of friends, and Pearcey doted on Hogg’s baby, also named Phoebe.

On 24 October 1890, Phoebe Hogg went to Pearcey’s home with her baby. At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the neighbours heard shouting and loud screams. That evening, Hogg’s corpse was found on a rubbish heap in Hampstead, bearing the marks of a vicious assault. Her skull had been smashed and her throat cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. It was eerily reminiscent of the assault on Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, whose throat had also been slashed to the spine. A mile away from Mary Pearcey’s home, a baby’s pram was found abandoned, its cushions wet with blood. The body of Hogg’s eighteen-month-old baby was later found dead at a house in Finchley. She appeared to have been smothered.

A blood-stained carving knife and a poker were found at Mary Pearcey’s home; blood spatters in one of the rooms suggested that the murder had taken place there, and the body removed to the Hampstead rubbish heap some time afterwards. If Pearcey had been responsible for the Whitechapel murders, this latest killing in Hampstead would have represented a sharp change in the murderer’s modus operandi since all the previous victims had been slaughtered where their bodies were discovered. Furthermore, Hogg’s body showed no sign of mutilation – a complete contrast to four of the Whitechapel murder victims.

Mary Pearcey was charged with Phoebe Hogg’s murder, and, despite her protestations of innocence, she was found guilty and hanged at Newgate prison on 23 December 1890. She was just 24 years old.

While it seems unlikely that Pearcey was responsible for the Whitechapel murders, the idea that they might have been committed by a woman was at least seriously considered by detectives from Scotland Yard in late 1890.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes, also expressed his opinion that the murderer might have disguised himself as a woman, both to avoid capture and to allow him to meet with women without arousing their suspicions. Sir Arthur also thought that the murderer might have been a midwife.

Ten days after the murder of Annie Chapman, the Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, a perceptive and regular contributor to The Times who used the acronym S.G.O., wrote in the newspaper’s letter columns that he thought he could detect the hand of a woman in the murders. The analogy he drew appeared to suggest that jealousy between two women living together (perhaps in a lesbian relationship, though Osborne was unclear on the point) had led to violence, and therefore jealousy might have been the motive for the murders. It was Osborne’s belief “that one or both of these Whitechapel murders [Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman] may have been committed by female hands” (The Times, 18 September 1888). This premise was almost explored further in Tom Cullen’s