Many of Polly's remaining years were spent in workhouses and doss-houses. Between 24 April 1882 and 24 March 1883 she sheltered continuously in the Lambeth Workhouse or its infirmary and she returned there for another twelve days on the following 21 May. Her name then disappears from workhouse records for another four years. The gap, again, reflects an attempt by Polly to better herself. For a short time she lived with her father. She was not 'fast' with men, he recalled, and was not in the habit of staying out late, but she drank heavily and they did not get on. Eventually they quarrelled and Polly left home. After that Walker heard that his daughter was living with a blacksmith named Thomas Stuart Drew in York Mews, 15 York Street, Walworth. He saw her for the last time in June 1886. His son had been burned to death in the explosion of a paraffin lamp and Polly attended the funeral. The quarrel still rankled too much for either of them to attempt a crossing of the gulf that had opened up between them and they did not speak to each other. It was nevertheless apparent from her respectable dress that her circ.u.mstances had improved.

Her movements during the last year of her life are rather better doc.u.mented. For one day 25 October 1887 she stayed in St Giles Workhouse, Endell Street. Then, from 26 October to 2 December 1887, she found refuge at the Strand Workhouse, Edmonton. On 19 December she reappeared at the Lambeth Workhouse but was turned out ten days later. The Mitcham Workhouse, run by the Holborn Board of Guardians, admitted her on 4 January 1888. She was sheltered there for more than three months but on 16 April was transferred to Lambeth, her place of settlement. Polly remained at the Lambeth Workhouse until 12 May. She then made a last attempt to pull the threads of her life together.

Polly left the workhouse to take up a position as domestic servant with Samuel and Sarah Cowdry, Ingleside, Rose Hill Road, Wandsworth. And she tried to reforge the broken links with her kinsfolk by writing a letter to her father: I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place, and going on all right up to now. My people went out yesterday, and have not returned, so I am left in charge. It is a grand place inside, with trees and gardens back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotallers and religious, so I ought to get on. They are very nice people, and I have not too much to do. I hope you are all right and the boy has work. So good-bye for the present. From yours truly, POLLY.

Answer soon, please, and let me know how you are.6 Walker sent a kind reply but heard nothing more. He did not learn, for instance, that on 12 July Polly absconded from her employer stealing clothing worth 3 10s. A few days later she took lodgings at 18 Thrawl Street. Apart from a day in the Grays Inn Road temporary Workhouse at the beginning of August Polly shared a room with Ellen Holland at Thrawl Street for something like six weeks. Mrs Holland liked Polly. She told the inquest that she had seen her the worse for drink on two or three occasions but had otherwise found her clean, quiet and inoffensive.

Polly left Thrawl Street about a week before her death. Her last few days are extremely mysterious. When Mrs Holland saw her in the early hours of 31 August, however, she gathered that Polly had been staying at the 'White House', a common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street.7 We do know that on the night of her murder she tried to return to 18 Thrawl Street and was turned out because she did not have her lodging money. Ellen Holland was the last person apart from the killer who is known to have seen her alive. That was at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road at 2.30 on the morning of 31 August. Mrs Holland wanted Polly to come home with her but she was then still sanguine about raising the money and reeled drunkenly off along the Whitechapel Road. Just over an hour later and less than three-quarters of a mile away her dead and mutilated body was found in Buck's Row. It was just a few days after her forty-third birthday.

Inadequate, impoverished, a prost.i.tute, probably an alcoholic Polly Nichols was all of these but she inspired affection in those who came to know her best. Despite his differences with his daughter Edward Walker waived away her faults at the inquest on 1 September. 'I don't think she had any enemies,' he said, 'she was too good for that.' On the same day William Nichols, Polly's estranged husband, was taken to Old Montague Street to identify her body by Inspector Abberline. Nichols was a pale man with a full, light-brown beard and moustache. Wearing a long black coat, dark trousers, a black tie and a tall silk hat, and carrying an umbrella, he appeared at the mortuary looking very gentlemanly and dignified, but when the lid of the coffin was removed and he saw the dead face of his wife he was much affected. 'I forgive you, as you are,' he told her, 'for what you have been to me.' And Polly's friend Ellen Holland was greatly moved by her death. At the inquest proceedings of 3 September the following exchange took place between her and Mr h.o.r.ey, the foreman of the jury: Mr h.o.r.eY: 'What name did you know her by?'

Mrs HOLLAND: 'Only as "Polly".'

Mr h.o.r.eY: 'You were the first one to identify her?'

Mrs HOLLAND: 'Yes, sir.'

Mr h.o.r.eY: 'Were you crying when you identified her?'

Mrs HOLLAND: 'Yes, and it was enough to make anybody shed a tear, sir.'8 Inspector Reid, Head of CID in H Division, had conducted the investigation into the George Yard murder. The body of Polly Nichols, however, had been discovered within the jurisdiction of the newly created J or Bethnal Green Division and Inspector Joseph Helson, Reid's counterpart in Bethnal Green, took charge of the inquiry. This third murder of an East End prost.i.tute, moreover, evoked a response from Scotland Yard in the portly form of Inspector Frederick George Abberline.

Police records describe Abberline as a fresh-complexioned man, five feet nine and a half inches in height, with dark-brown hair and hazel eyes. In 1888, it might equally truthfully have been said, he was forty-five and overweight, his thick moustache and bushy side-whiskers serving to accentuate the balding condition of his pate. Modest and soft-spoken, he reminded Walter Dew more of a bank manager or a solicitor than a detective-inspector first cla.s.s. But Abberline's track record befitted his rank. He had served twenty-five years in the Metropolitan Police, fourteen of them in the slums of Whitechapel. And during his years as H Division's 'Local Inspector' (18781887) he had built up an unrivalled knowledge of the East End and its villains and his even-handed and meticulous methods of work had won him the admiration and affection of his colleagues. In December 1887, after Abberline had been transferred to Scotland Yard at the express wish of James Monro and Adolphus Williamson, a.s.sistant Commissioner (CID) and Chief Constable (CID) respectively, a large company of Whitechapel citizens and ex-colleagues gathered to honour him with a presentation dinner at the Unicorn Tavern in Sh.o.r.editch. George Hay Young then spoke of him as 'the very ideal of a faithful, conscientious and upright officer' and Superintendent Arnold, Head of H Division, lamented Abberline's loss to Whitechapel 'for a better officer there could not be.' They presented him with a gold keyless hunting watch inscribed: 'Presented, together with a purse of gold, to Inspector F. G. Abberline by the inhabitants of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, etc., on his leaving the district after fourteen years' service, as a mark of their esteem and regard.'9 But Abberline was not out of the district for long. Ability and experience alike qualified him to investigate the Whitechapel murders. Hence it was, that in the autumn of 1888, he was sent to the East End to co-ordinate the work of the divisional detectives. In the ensuing months no officer would be more intimately involved in the investigation of the crimes. Few indeed would acquire such an encyclopaedic knowledge of the case.

The most strenuous efforts of Abberline and the detectives of J Division, however, yielded not the slightest clue to the ident.i.ty of Polly Nichols' murderer.

The Buck's Row killer had left nothing except Polly's body to mark his pa.s.sing. On the day of the murder several officers searched Buck's Row and its vicinity. Between five and six in the morning Spratling sent PC Thain to examine all the premises near the spot where the body had been found. The constable subsequently told the inquest that he 'searched Ess.e.x Wharf, the Great Eastern Railway, the East London Railway, and the District Railway as far as Thomas Street' but discovered neither weapon nor bloodstain. At eleven or twelve Spratling himself looked for clues in Buck's Row and Brady Street but he, too, returned empty-handed. Later, with Sergeant G.o.dley, he made a futile search of the Great Eastern Railway yard and of the premises of the East London and Metropolitan District Railways. Inspector Helson also examined the area. He discovered only one stain which 'might have been blood' in Brady Street.10 Extensive enquiries in the locality proved equally fruitless. No one in Buck's Row seemed to have seen or heard the killer. Three residents who lived very close to the spot where the body had been found were Mrs Emma Green, a widow, and Mr and Mrs Purkis. Emma Green lived with her three children at New Cottage, Buck's Row, adjoining and east of the stable gateway where Polly had lain, but no one in the house had heard anything untoward during the night. Mrs Green shared a front room on the first floor with her daughter and the first intimation that they had of the tragedy was Sergeant Kirby's sharp knock on the street door about four in the morning. Walter Purkis, the manager of Ess.e.x Wharf, lived with his wife in a house that fronted on Buck's Row, almost opposite the stable gateway. They occupied the front room on the second floor. His wife was awake most of the night; Purkis himself only slept fitfully and was awake between one and two. Yet, again, it was a policeman this time PC Neil who apprised them of the atrocity. Until then the street had been very quiet. And neither the keeper of the board school, immediately to the west of the stable yard, nor the watchmen at Browne & Eagle's wool warehouse and Schneider's cap factory, across the road, had heard anything suspicious.

At the time of the murder there had been men at work in nearby Winthrop Street three slaughtermen at Harrison, Barber & Co. Ltd and a watchman guarding a sewage works for the Whitechapel District Board of Works. None could shed the faintest light upon the mystery. Even those who had discovered Polly's body, apparently within minutes of her death, could not contribute a crumb of information on the perpetrator of the crime. Cross had neither seen nor heard a person or vehicle leave the body. Paul had seen no one running away. And until he found Polly's body PC Neil had seen and heard nothing suspicious. Yet his beat had never taken him far from Buck's Row. 'The farthest I had been that night was just through the Whitechapel Road and up Baker's Row,' he told the inquest.

Polly may have died without a cry of any kind. The proximity of the railway, however, might explain why no one heard a scream. Inevitably, too, one questions the efficacy of the local watchmen. Patrick Mulshaw, the Board of Works watchman, may not have been the only slacker. He went on duty at about 4.45 p.m. on 30 August, watching some sewage works in Winthrop Street, at the back of the Working Lads' Inst.i.tute, and was relieved at about 5.55 the next morning. He saw no one between three and four and heard no cry for help but admitted at the inquest to having dozed at times during the night. 'I suppose,' asked the coroner, '[that] your watching is not up to much?' 'I don't know,' replied the old man truculently, '[but] it is thirteen long hours for 3s. and find your own c.o.ke.'11 In the absence of genuine clues suspicion momentarily fell upon the three horse slaughterers who had been working at the yard of Harrison, Barber & Co. Ltd. in Winthrop Street on the night of the murder. These men had turned up in Buck's Row at some time after four and had stood as onlookers while Dr Llewellyn examined the body. One of them, Henry Tomkins of 12 Coventry Street, Bethnal Green, spoke on 3 September at the inquest. He related how he and his mates, James Mumford and Charles Britton, had worked at the slaughterhouse from between 8.00 and 9.00 p.m. on 30 August until 4.20 the next morning. They had learned of the murder, he explained, from PC Thain, who had called at the yard for his cape on his way for Dr Llewellyn, and after finishing work they had gone to see the body. PC Thain, testifying before the inquest a fortnight later, denied having alerted the slaughtermen to the murder, but apart from their presence in the vicinity and the nature of their calling there was nothing to connect them with the crime. Interrogated separately by the police, they all maintained that they had been working in Winthrop Street at the time of the murder, and since PC Neil had seen them there at 3.20 they were dismissed.12 The police made enquiries at common lodging houses, at coffee stalls and amongst prost.i.tutes, but the search for Polly's killer was completely barren of result. Surviving police reports leave us in no doubt of that. On 7 September Helson conceded that 'at present not an atom of evidence can be obtained to connect any person with the crime.' Twelve days later Abberline reported that 'not the slightest clue can at present be obtained.' And reviewing the case on 19 October Chief Inspector Swanson acknowledged that the 'absence of the motives which lead to violence and of any sc.r.a.p of evidence either direct or circ.u.mstantial, left the police without the slightest shadow of a trace.'13 There was little public criticism of the police investigation at this stage but later commentators have judged it wanting. Certainly the body could have been screened off and subjected to a more thorough examination in Buck's Row, and it would have been possible to carry out a more systematic and comprehensive search of the area. But in a busy part of the East End, just off the Whitechapel Road, these operations would have been difficult, perhaps ineffective, and however deficient the police procedures might appear in the context of modern standards of criminal detection they do not seem to have departed from Victorian conventions. When a body was discovered in the street it was inc.u.mbent upon the police to move it and in none of the Whitechapel murders did they waste much time in doing so.

The other frequently repeated allegation that untrained mortuary officials stripped and washed the body before it could be properly examined requires some qualification. It is true that Whitechapel had no public mortuary and that the body had of necessity to be taken to the workhouse mortuary in Old Montague Street, where the attendants Robert Mann and his a.s.sistant James Hatfield were both pauper inmates of the workhouse. It is also true that the attendants stripped and cleaned the body before the post-mortem. However, Mann and Hatfield were probably mistaken when they told the inquest that they received no instruction to leave the body alone and stripped it without a policeman being present. The attendants did not give their evidence until 17 September, nearly three weeks after the event, and were in any case both unreliable informants. Hatfield, for example, told the inquest that Polly had not been wearing stays, an a.s.sertion that was immediately disproved: CORONER: 'Would you be surprised to find that there were stays?'

HATFIELD: 'No.'

A JURYMAN: 'Did not you try the stays on [the body] in the afternoon to show me how short they were?'

HATFIELD: 'I forgot it.'

CORONER: 'He admits that his memory is bad.'

HATFIELD: 'Yes.'

Mann's testimony commanded equally scant respect from Coroner Baxter who informed his jury that the keeper was subject to fits and cautioned them that 'neither his memory nor statements are reliable.'14 The a.s.sertions of the mortuary attendants were in direct conflict with those of senior police officers. Spratling told the inquest that he instructed the attendants not to touch the body without authorization and Helson added that he was actually present when the body was stripped. The testimonies of these officers were taken as early as 3 September and we have no reason to disbelieve them.

What, then, really happened to Polly Nichols in the early hours of 31 August 1888? The failure of the police investigation has left us very little evidence upon which to speculate and that little has been distorted or lost over the past century by generations of myth makers. Some 'Ripperologists' have hidden deficient research amidst a wealth of fiction. Others have distorted what they have read in order to b.u.t.tress a favourite theory. Few have deemed it necessary to verify the facts. Looking up the Nichols murder in a book on Jack the Ripper we are thus likely to be misinformed about the place, time and manner of it, the nature of the weapon used and the degree of surgical skill employed, in short about almost every aspect of the case. After a century of misrepresentation and falsehood it is time to return to the original evidence. By treating it with respect and by carefully marshalling such clues as we have we can learn something of Polly's fate. We can recover a little of the elusive truth.

Stephen Knight, in his bestseller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, tried to persuade his readers that Polly had been the victim of three men. One was John Netley, a villainous coachman, in whose carriage she accepted a lift. Once inside she was fed poisoned grapes and slaughtered by the other two the artist Walter Sickert and Sir William Gull, onetime Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria! Their grisly task accomplished, Netley deposited the body where it was found and the terrible trio jogged merrily away. Knight's tale was the wildest fiction but the view that Polly had not been killed in Buck's Row at all, that she had been slain elsewhere, dressed after death and carried to the spot where she had been found or dumped from some pa.s.sing vehicle was seriously considered in 1888. Indeed, the relatively small amount of blood found at the spot and the manner in which Polly lay on her back with her legs extended 'as though she had been laid down' led Dr Llewellyn to form precisely this opinion when he first examined the body in Buck's Row.15 Other circ.u.mstances lend colour to the view. There were no cuts or slashes in Polly's clothing and no one in the vicinity of Buck's Row heard a disturbance or scream.

But these arguments do not carry conviction. There was certainly little blood where Polly's body was found but much of that from the throat had been absorbed by her dress and ulster and Llewellyn's post-mortem examination satisfied him that the blood from the abdominal mutilations had flowed into the abdominal cavity. The absence of cuts in Polly's clothing proves nothing. Her skirts, as the carmen saw, had been thrown up by the murderer. Her stays, which might have been expected to protect her abdomen, were indeed found fastened and undamaged. But Spratling and Helson, both of whom saw Polly's body before it was undressed, agreed at the inquest that the abdominal wounds could have been inflicted without the removal of the stays. Spratling said that they did not fit tightly and that he was able to see the wounds without unfastening them. Helson a.s.serted that although the stays were fastened fairly tightly they were too short; all the abdominal wounds were visible with the stays on and he discovered no wounds beneath the stays.16 It is almost certain that Polly died where she was found. Inspector Helson considered that her clothing had been too little disarranged for her to have been carried far. More telling though was the absence of a trail of bloodstains in the street for it is inconceivable that anyone could have carried Polly's body without clearly marking his progress in crimson splashes. It is just possible, although very unlikely, that she was deposited from a vehicle. A trap or cart may not have left wheelmarks on the cobbled street but it would surely have made a noise, especially in the peace of the early hours, and Charles Cross, the first to discover the body, heard no sounds of a vehicle. The time of death, however, provides the most compelling evidence for the murder having taken place in Buck's Row. At about 3.40 the carman Paul touched Polly's breast and thought he detected movement. Five minutes later PC Neil found her right arm warm above the elbow. And, despite the abdominal injuries, the loss of blood and the exposure of Polly's legs to the cold air, Dr Llewellyn discovered warmth in her body and legs soon after four and concluded that she had not been dead for more than half an hour. Polly seems to have died, then, only minutes before Cross came upon her and it is entirely on the cards that he unwittingly scared her attacker away.

Inspectors Helson and Abberline shared the belief that Polly had been killed outside the stable gateway in Buck's Row. As early as 2 September Helson told the press that 'both himself and Inspector Abberline had come to the conclusion that it [the murder] was committed on the spot.' He reaffirmed this view at the inquest the next day and again in his report of 7 September. And on 19 September Abberline reported that he had 'no doubt' that Polly Nichols and the later victim Annie Chapman had both been murdered where the bodies had been found.17 Even Dr Llewellyn, whose initial impression was that the body had been deposited outside the stable, came to accept that he had been mistaken.

Polly thus met her end at the entrance to the stable yard in Buck's Row. At 3.15 PC Neil patrolled the street and saw no one about. Twenty-five minutes later Cross came upon Polly's body, so soon after her death that he might easily have disturbed the murderer. If, as Llewellyn averred at the inquest, the crime could have been executed in four or five minutes Polly died between 3.30 and 3.40 a.m. When Mrs Holland last saw her, only an hour earlier, Polly was tipsy, in search of her 'doss money' and reeling eastwards along the Whitechapel Road. Further along that road she met her a.s.sa.s.sin and they retired to Buck's Row. The eastern end of the street was dismally lighted, narrow and tenanted on the south side only. High warehouses dominated the north side. Dark and relatively secluded, it was the regular resort of prost.i.tutes.

The injuries inflicted upon Polly Nichols were unlike Martha Tabram's but exhibited a similarly pointless ferocity. In two gashes the throat had been cut from ear to ear right back to the spinal column. Inspector Spratling was evidently incorrect when he reported that the spinal cord itself had been cut through but the vertebrae had been penetrated. More, cruel abdominal mutilations had laid the belly open from a point just below the breastbone to the lower abdomen. Either the injuries to the throat or those to the abdomen would have been sufficient to cause death. But, and the point would a.s.sume importance later, no part of the viscera was missing.

The manner in which these injuries were inflicted must be largely speculative. There were no signs of a struggle. The throat was cut from left to right. Dr Llewellyn at first held the view that the murderer had attacked Polly from in front. With his right hand he pushed her head back, his thumb bruising her right lower jaw and his fingers her left cheek, and with his left hand he held the knife that cut her throat.18 More recently several writers, notably Donald Rumbelow (on the strength of an opinion of James Cameron, the pathologist) and Arthur Douglas, have promulgated the view that the killer attacked Polly from behind. If this was the case he could have gripped her head with his left hand and used the knife with his right, the bruise on her left cheek resulting from the pressure of his left thumb and that along her right lower jaw from the pressure of his fingers. Polly's attempts to pull away from him, moreover, would have facilitated his efforts to expose her throat to the knife.19 The evidence of the bloodstains can help to resolve this problem for us. If Polly's throat were cut while she was erect and alive a strong jet of blood would have spurted from the wound and probably deluged the front of her clothing. But in fact there was no blood at all on her breast or the corresponding part of her clothes. Some of the flow from the throat formed a small pool on the pavement beneath Polly's neck and the rest was absorbed by the backs of the dress bodice and ulster. The blood from the abdominal wounds largely collected in the loose tissues. Such a pattern proves that Polly's injuries were inflicted when she was lying on her back and suggests that she may already have been dead.

The probable explanation of this evidence is that Polly was throttled before she was mutilated. Although she went to Buck's Row antic.i.p.ating s.e.xual intercourse neither Polly nor her killer are likely to have been lying down in the street, especially after the previous day's showers. She would presumably have expected to complete that transaction standing against a wall. It is possible that she was felled by a blow and in her besotted condition she would have proved an easy victim. But the fact that Polly's throat was severed when she was lying down and with so little spillage of blood, together with the apparent absence of any scream, points to prior strangulation. There are indications of this, too, in the medical evidence. We know from police reports that Polly's face was discoloured and her tongue slightly lacerated. And Dr Llewellyn's inquest deposition mentions a small bruise on the left side of her neck and an abrasion on the right.20 We can safely dismiss the notion that Polly's murderer cut her throat from behind. Whether he was left or right-handed, however, is impossible to determine. If he was kneeling by Polly's head, facing her feet, he would have gripped her face with his left hand and severed her throat (from left to right) with a knife held in his right hand. This technique would have directed the flow of blood from the left carotid artery away from him and is certainly consistent with the evidence of the facial bruises. Llewellyn himself came to doubt his earlier view of a left-handed killer.

Both the nature of the murder weapon and the degree of surgical skill exhibited by the murderer are now commonly misconceived. The error relating to the weapon dates back to contemporary press notices of the inquest proceedings. Some of these, including that in the prestigious Times, wrongly reported Dr Llewellyn as identifying the weapon as 'a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp.' The belief that the Buck's Row killer displayed expert surgical skill seems to have originated in Donald McCormick's Ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper, published over thirty years ago. By McCormick's account Llewellyn testified that the abdominal injuries had been 'deftly and fairly skillfully performed.'21 These errors have been perpetuated and even embroidered in the literature of the case. Thus, in the recent study by Colin Wilson and Robin Odell, the mutilations inflicted upon Polly were 'deftly and skilfully performed' (note the loss of the word 'fairly') and the weapon was an 'exceptionally long-bladed knife.'22 A comparison of contemporary police reports, press interviews and press notices of the inquest demonstrates that Llewellyn actually spoke of the weapon as a 'strong-bladed knife, moderately sharp.' It was not his contention that the knife had a particularly long blade. Indeed, in an interview reported by The Times on 1 September, he specifically refuted that view: 'The weapon used would scarcely have been a sailor's jack knife, but a pointed weapon with a stout back such as a cork-cutter's or shoemaker's knife. In his opinion it was not an exceptionally long-bladed weapon.'23 No contemporary substantiation has been discovered for McCormick's a.s.sertion that Llewellyn testified that the mutilations were 'deftly and fairly skilfully performed.' At the inquest the doctor credited the murderer with 'some rough anatomical knowledge', in other words he knew roughly what was where, but nothing whatsoever was said about his surgical skill.

Since Polly was undoubtedly lying down, and probably strangled, before the knife attack took place, the killer need not have been greatly bloodstained. The presence of so many slaughterhouses in the area, moreover, may have allayed suspicion when he made his escape. At that time Whitechapel Road was already busy. Even in Brady Street PC Thain saw one or two men walking to work in the direction of Whitechapel Road shortly before he was hailed by PC Neil. But no one suspected Polly's killer as he merged with the early morning's market traffic.

Polly Nichols had been a pauper. Few believed robbery a credible motive for the crime. This suggested a link between her death and the equally purposeless killings, in the same area, of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. For the first time police, press and public alike began to speak of a new and chilling possibility that the purlieus of London's East End harboured a deranged killer who would strike again. It was a thought that quickly found expression in street literature. One verse broadsheet, sung to the tune of 'My Village Home', regaled East Enders with Lines on the Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel: Come listen to a dreadful tale I'm telling, In Whitechapel three murders have been done; With horror many hearts they now are swelling, Those fearful deeds that now to light have come.

Twelve months ago a woman was found lying, In death's cold arms, how dreadful to relate, What agony they suffered here when dying They were nearly all found in the same state.

The first poor creature's death they all are thinking The same hand took her life that fatal night, Poor people now with fear they are shrinking Oh! may this crime be quickly brought to light.

Now scarcely had the news of that foul murder, Which filled all hearts with sorrow and dismay, When sad to tell the fate of Martha Turner, Poor soul, she met her fate near the same way.

'Twas thought that soldiers had killed that poor creature, And on them many people laid the blame, When found 'twas hard to recognise a feature.

To leave her so, oh! what a cruel shame.

And now poor Mary Nicholls' death relating, In Buck's Row, Whitechapel there did lie, While in the dark her body lay awaiting And no one there to see that poor soul die.

By workhouse clothes the body recognising, That cruel deed all around will show Who could have done that deed they are surmising, And murdered Mary Nicholls in Buck's Row?

4.

Leather Ap.r.o.n.

POLLY NICHOLS WAS the first victim of Jack the Ripper. Such is the conventional wisdom amongst students of the case. The earlier murders are dismissed as irrelevancies, products of the everyday violence of the East End.

This view would have found little favour in 1888 for although Emma Smith seemed to have been slain by drunken ruffians there had been nothing at all everyday about the murder of Martha Tabram. Her wounds had not been identical to those of Polly Nichols but both killings shared characteristics that set them apart from routine crime. Neither murder appeared to have had any connection with domestic quarrels, drunken affrays or street robberies. In both cases the murderer had left no clue to his ident.i.ty. And both crimes, even amidst the violence of the Victorian East End, had been remarkable for their savagery.

The last point, perhaps, was more evident then than it is now and the Ripper buffs of today, who so casually disregard the George Yard tragedy as 'just another murder', would do well to consider the impact that it made upon Martha Tabram's contemporaries. In his summing up George Collier, the deputy coroner, spoke of it as 'one of the most brutal [crimes] that had occurred for some years . . . almost beyond belief,' and newsmen appeared genuinely appalled and bewildered by the rage of Martha's killer. 'The wound over the heart was alone sufficient to kill,' puzzled the Ill.u.s.trated Police News of 18 August, 'and death must have occurred as soon as that was inflicted. Unless the perpetrator was a madman, or suffering to an unusual extent from drink delirium, no tangible explanation can be given of the reason for inflicting the other thirty-eight injuries, some of which almost seem as if they were due to thrusts and cuts from a penknife.' This journal, admittedly revelling in the sensational, devoted six drawings on its front page and more than a column of small print inside to the crime. But in the East End too the manner of Martha's death evoked unusual horror. Thus, on 11 August, the East London Observer devoted nearly two columns to a murder it considered 'so unique and mysterious.'1 At the beginning of September it was the general belief of the press that at least Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols had been slain by the same hand. And although we have no authoritative statement from the police on this point such clues as can be gleaned from the press indicate that they, too, were now seriously considering the possibility that all three Whitechapel murders were linked.

Three theories were current. One that the murders had been perpetrated by a gang of thieves originated in the report of a robbery in Whitechapel circulated by the Central News Agency.2 According to this tale a woman, leaving the Foresters' Music Hall, Cambridge Heath Road, on the night of Sat.u.r.day, 1 September, was accosted by a well-dressed man. Inveigling himself into her company, he walked a short distance with her but, not far from the spot where Polly Nichols had been killed, suddenly seized her by the throat and dragged her down a court. The villain was immediately joined by both male and female confederates. They brutally a.s.saulted their victim and despoiled her of her necklace, ear-rings, brooch and purse. She opened her mouth to scream but was silenced by a bloodcurdling threat from one of the gang. Laying a large knife across her throat he warned: "We will serve you as we did the others." The whole story was, apparently, a newspaper fiction, but even before it was publicly discredited it should have been obvious that there was a world of difference between its affluent if luckless heroine and the penniless wh.o.r.es slaughtered in George Yard and Buck's Row. Robbery could not plausibly be advanced as the reason for their deaths. The police themselves evidently toyed with the theory that Smith, Tabram and Nichols had been the victims of a 'High Rip' gang which levied blackmail upon prost.i.tutes and then took vengeance upon such as failed to pay them a proportion of their earnings.3 The most widely held view, however, was that the killer was a lunatic. As early as 31 August the Star fostered this theory in screaming headlines: A REVOLTING MURDER.

ANOTHER WOMAN FOUND HORRIBLY MUTILATED IN WHITECHAPEL.

GHASTLY CRIMES BY A MANIAC.

A day later it returned to the theme. The Osborn Street, George Yard and Buck's Row outrages, it insisted, had been committed by a single madman: 'In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilation . . . All three crimes have been committed within a very small radius. Each of the ill-lighted thoroughfares to which the women were decoyed to be foully butchered are off turnings from Whitechapel Road, and all are within half a mile. The fact that these three tragedies have been committed within such a limited area, and are so strangely alike in their details, is forcing on all minds the conviction that they are the work of some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder.'4 There was undoubtedly news value in such a theory. But there was substance too, as the East London Observer, commenting on the Tabram and Nichols murders, ponderously elaborated: 'The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced. The excess of effort that has been apparent in each murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being, as the extraordinary violence used is the peculiar feature in each instance.'5 For whatever reason, the notion of a homicidal maniac stalking the streets quickly took hold of the press and by 8 September, when both the leading East End weeklies endorsed it, their voices did little more than add volume to a chorus.

Talk of this kind naturally stoked the fire of excitement already kindled in the East End by the Buck's Row murder. In the week after Polly's death morbid sightseers came in groups of two or three to gaze at the gaudy green gates of the workhouse mortuary. Small crowds, twenty or thirty strong, gathered in Buck's Row to inspect the murder site. And the latest details of the outrage were hungrily devoured and discussed at street corners throughout the East End.

In Buck's Row a Daily News reporter mingled with the crowds on 4 September. He found groups of women cl.u.s.tered together, bending over what they supposed to be the bloodstained paving stones, gossiping nervously but insatiably about the murder, and men, for the most part sullen and taciturn, puffing at their pipes, hands thrust deep in their pockets. The reporter's account, if coloured, preserves for us something of the flavour of the common talk in those early September days of 1888.6 Mixed emotions compa.s.sion for the victim, anger against her killer and fear for themselves repeatedly surfaced amidst the gossip.

Reflections upon the character of the deceased were met with such emphatic expressions of compa.s.sion that the critic was invariably abashed into silence. 'No matter what she was, poor thing,' one woman chided, ''taint for the likes of us to judge her now.' 'No, that's right enough,' agreed another, 'whatever she was it was an awful cruel thing to do to her.'

The story that the murders had been committed by a gang of robbers had been published that morning in the papers and was widely credited by the gullible Buck's Row tattlers. But one bystander dismissed it. 'That's a got up yarn,' he scoffed. 'I rather wish it was true. If there was a gang like that, one or t'other of 'em 'd split before long, and it'd all come out. Bet your money this ain't been done that way.' No one was betting anything but this observation stimulated a lively discussion amongst the females as to what they would like to see done to the killer if it did come out. By general acclamation it was agreed that he deserved to be turned out in the midst of the Whitechapel women and then, 'seemingly forgetful of all the pain and pathos of the dreadful event, [the] women squeezed their elbows and clenched their fists, and went through a mimic performance on the person of the murderer.'

It was an anger fuelled by apprehension for the womenfolk were alert to the danger that the killer would strike again. 'Thank G.o.d I needn't be out after dark!' exclaimed one. 'No more needn't I,' chimed in another, 'but my two girls have got to come home latish and I'm all of a fidget till they comes.' A little woman with a rosy cherub face summed up the general view: 'Life ain't no great thing with many on us,' she said, 'but we don't all want to be murdered, and if things go on like this it won't be safe for n.o.body to put their 'eads out o' doors.'

Pity, anger, fear but, above all, fascination. The murder held the collection of gossips and loafers in Buck's Row as if by a spell. Some dropped away but their places were taken by fresh sightseers and every time new arrivals joined the crowd the supposed bloodstains were pointed out to them and the whole affair was avidly discussed again. And if the talk temporarily faltered the crowd 'stood and silently stared at the pavement and the brickwork of the adjacent house and minutely examined the scratches and other marks in the wall, as if these things helped them to realise the horror of it all.'

Polly Nichols was buried in the City of London Cemetery, Ilford, on the afternoon of Thursday, 6 September.7 The collection of the body proved complicated because although the time at which the cortege was to start had been kept a profound secret the date of the funeral had not and a large crowd had a.s.sembled about Old Montague Street. In order to get the body out of the mortuary, therefore, the undertaker resorted to stratagem. A two-horse, closed hea.r.s.e was observed jogging eastwards along Hanbury Street. The crowd made way for it to turn into Old Montague Street but instead it pa.s.sed on into Whitechapel Road and, doubling back, entered the mortuary by the back gate in Chapman's Court. The ruse worked. There was not a soul about when the undertaker's a.s.sistants placed the coffin into the hea.r.s.e.

The coffin was of polished elm and bore a plate inscribed with the words: 'Mary Ann Nichols, aged 42; died August 31, 1888.' It was driven to Hanbury Street, probably to No. 87, the house of Mrs Henry Smith, the undertaker, and there awaited the mourners. They were late in arriving, however, and by the time the cortege was ready to start news that the body was in the hea.r.s.e had been pa.s.sed around the district and the vehicle was surrounded by curious onlookers. With a police guard to keep the crowd at a distance the little procession the hea.r.s.e and two mourning coaches at length set off for Ilford. It turned into Baker's Row, pa.s.sed the corner of Buck's Row and entered Whitechapel Road, where police, stationed at intervals of several yards, ensured its pa.s.sage. The mourners included Edward Walker, Polly's father, William Nichols, her husband, and Edward John Nichols, her son, but the entire community appeared united in grief. Everywhere the greatest sympathy was expressed for the relatives and all the houses in the neighbourhood had their blinds drawn. 'The expenses of the funeral,' noted The Times, 'were borne by the relatives of the deceased, her father, husband, and son.'

When Polly was murdered Parliament had been in summer recess for eighteen days and would remain so until 6 November. Her death, nevertheless, sent the first ripples of alarm washing into the Home Office. For on 31 August, the day of the murder, L. & P. Walter & Son of Church Street, Spitalfields, manufacturers of clothing for export, sent a newspaper clipping and the following letter to Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary: We beg to enclose you [a] report of this fearful murder & to say that such is the state of affairs in this district that we are put to the necessity of [having] a night.w.a.tchman to protect our premises. The only way in our humble opinion to tackle this matter is to offer at once a reward.

At this time neither Matthews nor his advisers can possibly have antic.i.p.ated the furore the murders would ultimately visit upon them and they considered a brief reply, barren of explanation, sufficient to exculpate them from further concern in the matter. Signed by Edward Leigh-Pemberton, Legal a.s.sistant Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and dated 4 September, it curtly informed Walter & Son that 'the practice of offering rewards for the discovery of criminals has for some time been discontinued; and that so far as the circ.u.mstances of the present case have at present been investigated, they do not in his [i.e. Matthews'] opinion disclose any special ground for departure from the usual custom.'8 The direct responsibility for laying the killer by the heels fell to the Metropolitan Police. They were ill-prepared to meet the challenge. Nevertheless, in the context of the murder investigation, the extent and nature of their difficulties have been almost universally misconstrued. a.s.suredly the regime of General Sir Charles Warren, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1886 to 1888, was a troubled one. For while at loggerheads with his immediate superior, Henry Matthews, he made a determined effort to tighten up the structure and discipline of the force and was confronted by the need to police increasingly formidable demonstrations by socialists and the unemployed. The details of these much published differences do not concern us.9 Their impact upon the detective problem in Whitechapel does and that, contrary to popular belief, seems to have been negligible.

Take 'b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday'. On Sunday, 13 November 1887, the police, a.s.sisted by detachments of Life and Grenadier Guards, successfully held Trafalgar Square against converging processions of socialists, radicals and Irish Home Rulers intent upon holding a rally there in defiance of a ban by the Commissioner. As regular as clockwork we are told that Warren's stern policing of meetings of socialists and the unemployed, culminating in this fierce battle, embittered relations between the police and working-cla.s.s people, and are led to infer that this somehow impeded their investigation of the murders. In some districts, it is true, 'b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday' lingered as a bitter memory for more than twenty years. And Warren himself received hate mail. 'Beware of your life you dog' began one such communication. 'Dont venture out too fur [sic]. Look out. This is yours ' and a drawing of a coffin followed.10 But not one jot does any of this seem to have affected police operations in the East End. There, as we shall see, large numbers of people had reasons of their own for avoiding the police but neither that nor Warren's attempts to preserve public order at the expense of free speech prevented them from co-operating with them to ensnare Jack the Ripper. The murderer's victims were drawn from the weakest and most vulnerable members of the community, 'the poorest of the poor', as the Observer reminds us, and impelled by a sense of common outrage as well as rapidly increasing reward money, East Enders not only organised themselves into a proliferation of local vigilance committees to a.s.sist the police but flocked to them in such numbers with information that Abberline, co-ordinating the inquiry at ground-level, almost broke down under the strain of processing it. Even in October 1888, when Warren sanctioned a ma.s.sive house-to-house search north of Whitechapel High Street/Whitechapel Road, and when he feared that the socialists might orchestrate determined opposition to such an arbitrary measure, the community willingly accorded the police access to their homes. Both Warren, in a press notice of 17 October, and Robert Anderson, then head of CID, in a confidential minute six days later, happily acknowledged the fact, and for once the press agreed: 'the greatest good feeling prevails towards the police, and noticeably in the most squalid dwellings the police had no difficulty in getting information.'11 The skirmishing between Matthews and Warren was much more than a clash of uncongenial personalities because the two held widely divergent views on the extent of the Home Secretary's authority over the force and on matters of general policy. Again, however, although they ultimately produced Warren's resignation in November 1888, their squabbles did not exert a significant effect upon the conduct and prospects of the murder hunt. The records of the Whitechapel investigation do attest to the state of tension and distrust that existed between the two men. But Matthews supported a succession of initiatives proposed or endorsed by Warren the experiment with bloodhounds, the house-to-house search and, belatedly, the offer of a pardon to any accomplice of the murderer who would betray him and vetoed only one, the offer of a government reward. The reward question was a complicated one. However, there were good reasons for the rejection of such a proposal and the nature of the crimes, together with the failure of substantial City and private rewards, suggests that a government offer would not have been successful.

Exactly what the impact of Warren's reforms within the force itself was is more difficult to judge. At the time the central complaint of the radical and opposition press was that under Warren the police were being transformed from a civil into a military force primarily intended, not for the prevention and detection of crime, but for the policing of political rallies and demonstrations of the poor and unemployed. The results, according to the exponents of this view, had been far reaching and pernicious increasingly centralized control of the police, an emphasis upon drill and discipline, the discouragement of individual initiative throughout the force, the diversion of manpower and resources from the pursuit of criminals to political work and the consequent neglect of the CID.12 But the fact that such politically inspired vituperation was widely credited in 1888 does not oblige us to believe it now. Warren's regime at Scotland Yard is badly in need of reappraisal and until some diligent research student undertakes the task we have few firm facts to go on. The little we do know, however, suggests that the embattled Commissioner may have been grossly maligned.

Certainly Warren's appointment was followed by those of five other army officers, three as chief and two as a.s.sistant chief constables, and certainly, to improve discipline, he greatly increased the number of inspectors and sergeants. It is also true that Sir Charles quarrelled with some of his colleagues, including Sir Richard Pennefather, the Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District, and James Monro, the a.s.sistant Commissioner in charge of CID. The Warren Monro feud is especially significant here in that it is held to have left the detective branch leaderless and demoralized at the very time that it was confronted by the Whitechapel murders.

There were several sources of conflict between the two men.13 One lay in Monro's dual role as a.s.sistant Commissioner (CID) and Secret Agent. In the latter capacity he was the head of a small cadre of four CID inspectors designated Section D. Engaged entirely in political intelligence work, they were funded not from Metropolitan Police but Imperial funds, and Monro, as their chief, reported not to Warren but direct to the Home Office. Now Warren held the view that the position of Chief Commissioner was a.n.a.logous to that of the general in the field, subject to higher authority for general purposes but in complete control of the internal administration and discipline of his force. Naturally, then, he resented the independence of Section D and considered its existence subversive of good discipline. Monro, on the other hand, strove to retain his independence as Secret Agent and even to extend it to his functions as a.s.sistant Commissioner in charge of CID, and became increasingly exasperated by Warren's attempts to restrict his freedom of action. There were other difficulties. Since the CID was undermanned and overworked, Monro proposed the creation of a new post of a.s.sistant Chief Constable (CID) and nominated his friend Melville Macnaghten for the job. Warren suggested that Monro shed his secret service duties instead. In March 1888 the Home Office agreed to the appointment but when Warren objected that Macnaghten was unsuitable for the post quickly rescinded it. Eventually, in August, Monro resigned in protest against the 'change of policy and system' which the Chief Commissioner was seeking to impose.

Notwithstanding all this, the view that Warren was a military despot, alienating his men, is greatly overdone. It a.s.sumes that the alleged proofs of Warren's militarization of the police were all accurate which they were not. He did not, for example, greatly increase the number of army reserve men in the force since the Chief Commissioner had for several years been restricted to the employment of only 500 such at any one time. And it ignores Warren's not inconsiderable leadership qualities, demonstrated over many years of active service abroad. An early riser, he had an immense capacity for work; a strong disciplinarian, his strictness was tempered by humour and by a solicitous care for the welfare of his men; and a courageous soldier, he had displayed a disposition to lead by example, to share the dangers and privations of his command. Such qualities do not foment disaffection, at least among the rank and file.

Writing in 1910, Robert Anderson, Monro's successor, conceded that at first there was a 'dangerous want of sympathy' between Warren and his men. But when Sir Charles stoutly defended the force from Home Office imputations after 'b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday' the constables forgot their grievances so that, by the time Anderson joined the service, the Chief Commissioner's 'popularity with the uniformed force was established'. The deputation of police superintendents that called at Warren's home to pay him tribute after his resignation in November 1888 suggests that this was indeed the case. Superintendent Draper, their spokesman, admitted that Warren had been a stickler for discipline but 'repudiated the idea that such discipline was in any degree distasteful to the force so long as the regulations were administered with the fairness and equity which had characterized Sir Charles Warren's tenure of office.'14 In the CID, admittedly, things may have been a little different. Monro's resignation took effect on 31 August, the day that Polly Nichols died in Buck's Row. His successor, Dr (later Sir) Robert Anderson, possessed a keen a.n.a.lytical mind and twenty years' experience in intelligence work for the Home Office. But he came to the Yard suffering from fatigue and was in such poor health that Dr Gilbart Smith of Harley Street immediately prescribed him two months' leave for overwork. 'This, of course, was out of the question,' Anderson related in his memoirs. 'But I told Mr Matthews, greatly to his distress, that I could not take up my new duties until I had had a month's holiday in Switzerland. And so, after one week at Scotland Yard, I crossed the Channel.'15 Yet even these upheavals do not seem to have seriously prejudiced the murder inquiries. It should not be supposed, for example, that the departure of Anderson left the Ripper hunters leaderless. In the East End Inspector Abberline co-ordinated their activities, while at the Yard central continuity of supervision was provided for on 15 September by the appointment of Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson to oversee the investigation. Swanson, a shrewd Scot with twenty years' service in the Metropolitan Police, was freed from all other duties. He was given an office to himself. And he was to see 'every paper, every doc.u.ment, every report [and] every telegram' relating to the inquiry. 'I look upon him,' wrote Warren, 'as the eyes and ears of the Commissioner in this particular case.'16 When Anderson succeeded Monro he found some CID officers smarting over the treatment accorded their late chief. But the rift between Warren and the detective branch was but temporary. Anderson soon established a harmonious working relationship with the Chief Commissioner. 'My relations with Sir Charles were always easy and pleasant,' he wrote later. 'I always found him perfectly frank and open, and he treated me as a colleague, leaving me quite unfettered in the control of my department.' In the East End detectives showed no lack of commitment to the murder hunt. To judge from their reminiscences Abberline and Dew nearly exhausted themselves in the effort. And after the double murder of 30 September even the radical Star, ever eager to disparage Warren and his force, felt obliged to acknowledge their diligence: 'The failure of the police to discover the Whitechapel murderer is certainly not due to inactivity. No one who has had occasion to visit the police offices whence the investigations are being conducted can escape the impression that everybody is on the move, and it is probably a fact that very few of the chief officials and detectives have had their regular rest since last Sunday morning. One hears no complaint against the demand for extra duty, except in instances where the pressure is unevenly applied, for the police are individually more interested in the capture of the murderer than anyone else.'17 The general troubles of the Metropolitan Police, then, scarcely touched the Ripper investigation, and those writers who have sought in them some explanation of the killer's escape have largely misdirected their efforts. More, by dwelling upon them they have diverted attention away from the real causes of the police failure, which lay specifically in the nature of the detective problem in Whitechapel. The murders posed a most formidable challenge to the fledgling CID. Their difficulties stemmed from the character of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the area of the atrocities, from the primitive state of Victorian methods of criminal detection and, most of all, from the nature of the crimes themselves. Together these factors operated to stack the odds in favour of the murderer from the first.

Throughout the century Whitechapel and Spitalfields had been reputedly criminous as well as poor. For the criminal a residence on the border between the City and Metropolitan Police jurisdictions was highly advantageous and the Whitechapel-Spitalfields district lay just outside the City's north-eastern boundary, on and beyond the arc from Bishopsgate round to Aldgate. The market in Petticoat Lane, moreover, afforded ample facilities for the disposal of stolen goods. 'If the King's crown were to come within half a mile of Petticoat Lane,' boasted one thief in 1835, 'money would be found in an hour for its purchase.'18 The main refuge of the poor, criminal and non-criminal alike, lay in a maze of dirty streets, courts and alleys between Petticoat Lane and Brick Lane. But by 1888 the area was being transformed by the demolition contractor and by Jewish immigration into the East End.

The cutting of Commercial Street in the 1840s and the redevelopments inaugurated by the Artisans' Dwelling Act of 1875 cleared much slum housing. At the same time blocks of tenement flats, like the first Peabody Buildings in Commercial Street in 1864, were being erected to provide decent homes for the working poor. The effects of such developments were not entirely beneficial. Slum clearances tended to drive the poor into surrounding streets which were themselves overcrowded, and model dwellings offered accommodation at rates only the most prosperous artisans could afford to pay.

Jewish immigration is generally held to have improved the character of some streets. A colony of Iberian Jews, rich and respected Jews of the Sephardim, settled in London during the Protectorate and in the reign of Charles II. The Ashken.a.z.im settlement in the capital dates from the close of the 17th century and their first synagogue, in Duke's Place, Aldgate, was established in 1722. Thereafter every continental upheaval in which the Jews were sufferers brought influxes of refugees into England. The Russian pogroms of 18811882 and Bismarck's expulsion of alien Poles from Prussia in 1886 encouraged a new wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. Low rents, the proximity of the central business district and the presence of an existing Jewish community drew the newcomers in large numbers to Whitechapel, where the streets they overran became, by and large, quiet, law-abiding and clean. 'They have already taken one end of Great Pearl Street,' wrote Charles Booth, 'and it is probably the Jews alone who will turn out the prost.i.tutes from the end that is still bad.'19 Notwithstanding these changes crime and prost.i.tution lingered amidst the poverty and squalor, especially in parts of Spitalfields. On Booth's 'Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889' Dorset Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, George Street and Great Pearl Street were all marked in black, denoting that they were occupied by the lowest cla.s.s, that they were 'vicious, semi-criminal'. In these overcrowded, labyrinthine slums, where policemen were traditionally greeted with suspicion if not outright hostility, the Whitechapel killer had chosen a perfect hunting ground.

The methods by which the police were obliged to seek their quarry within this human warren were relatively crude. Although detectives had been appointed at Scotland Yard as early as 1842 the popular opposition to the use of plain clothes men as spies and agent provocateurs among their fellow citizens and the organization of the Metropolitan Police as a preventive force r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of the detective branch. The CID had been established in 1878 but there were still few aids to detection beyond photography and plaster of Paris for taking impressions of footprints. The second, in the Whitechapel context, was irrelevant and photography would be employed but sparingly during the investigation of the murders. It was not even the usual practice, for example, to photograph the bodies of victims before they were moved and in only one of the murders (that of Mary Jane Kelly) does it seem to have been done. It was possible in 1888 to identify blood as mammalian but not to prove that it was human or cla.s.sify it by blood group. Galton would not publish his work on fingerprints until 1892, the year after the last of the Whitechapel murders, and there would be no scientific laboratory at Scotland Yard until 1934.

Where inquiry into the history and circ.u.mstances of the victim revealed possible motives for murder these, in turn, suggested suspects. Otherwise the success of the Victorian detective largely rested upon a thorough knowledge of the local villains, upon the evidence of informers, and upon much legwork tracing and interviewing witnesses.

The Whitechapel murderer, however, may not have been a professional villain and probably worked alone. With only one possible exception there were no eye-witnesses to his attacks because they were committed at dead of night and in secluded locations. Indeed his victims, prost.i.tutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark or unfrequented byways and yards for s.e.x, greatly facilitated his crimes. Most baffling of all to the Victorian detectives, there was no obvious motive.

In the age of Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and Ted Bundy we are familiar with the phenomenon of the s.e.xual serial murderer but to our ancestors in the 1880s it was relatively unknown. Precedents of the Whitechapel or Jack the Ripper murders are alleged from the United States and Continental Europe but they are ill-researched and seem to have acquired only local notoriety. Certainly there had been nothing like the Whitechapel crimes in recent English experience. There our most ancient citizens would have had to think back nearly eighty years, to the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811, in order to recall murders at all comparable. Even then, horrific as the slaughter of the Marr and Williamson households had undoubtedly been, the motive for the atrocities had evidently been the obvious one of plunder. More, the Ratcliff Highway murderers had obligingly left their weapons behind them and it was the tracing of one of these, a bloodstained maul, to the Pear Tree public house in Wapping that eventually fixed suspicion upon John Williams, a seaman who lodged there.20 The Whitechapel killer, on the other hand, evinced no obvious motive and left no clue. In such a case orthodox police methods were almost futile.

During the investigation of the murders the police displayed a marked reluctance to share their knowledge with the press or with coroners' inquiries. The late Stephen Knight thought that this secrecy was unique to the Whitechapel killings and read into it evidence that the police were party to a government sponsored 'cover-up' of the Jack the Ripper affair. Knight and for that matter most other writers on the case was altogether ignorant, however, of the Yard's policy on press publicity in the 1880s.

The fact is that where the publication of information might secure the arrest of a known culprit the police were only too willing to make disclosures to the press. 'The press is a power in the detection of crime which we must not omit to take into account,' wrote Howard Vincent, the first Director of the CID, '. . . and when publicity is desirable their help is invaluable. Indeed, if the ident.i.ty of a culprit is clear, and the importance of a case is sufficient, the question of his capture is reduced to a mere question