Complete History of Jack the Ripper (10 page)

Robbery seemed to have been the motive for the attack on Ada Wilson. The fatal assault upon Emma Smith, less than a week later, was less easy to explain. Emma Elizabeth Smith, a 45-year-old widow, lived in a common lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. At seven o’clock on the evening of Easter Monday, 2 April 1888, she went out. Nine or ten hours after that she staggered back into the lodging house and told the deputy keeper, Mrs Mary Russell, that she had been set upon and robbed of all her money. She certainly looked in a dreadful state. Her head and face were injured, her right ear had nearly been torn off and she complained of pains in the lower part of her body. Mrs Russell immediately took Emma to the London Hospital. But her injuries were severe and she did not long survive them. A blunt instrument had been inserted into her vagina with great force and had ruptured the perineum. At nine o’clock on Wednesday morning she died of peritonitis.

Two days later, on 6 April, the
News
gave its version of the murder: ‘Yesterday the authorities of the London Hospital informed the coroner of the death in that institution of Emma Elizabeth Smith, aged 45, a widow, lately living at 18, George-street, Spitalfields. It appears that the deceased was out on Bank Holiday, and when returning home along Whitechapel-road early on Tuesday morning she was set upon by some men and severely maltreated. The men made off, leaving the woman on the ground in a semi-conscious condition, and have not yet been apprehended. She was taken home, and subsequently conveyed to the hospital, where she died.’
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This account leaves many questions unanswered. So what really did happen to Emma Smith in the nine hours or so after seven on Easter Monday?

At about 12.15 a.m. Margaret Hames, who lodged at the same address, saw her with a man at the corner of Farrance Street and
Burdett Road in Limehouse. The man was of medium height and wore a white silk handkerchief around his neck and a dark suit. More important, however, were the dying statements of Emma herself. Piecing together the fragments of information gleaned from her by Mary Russell and George Haslip, the house-surgeon at London Hospital, we can learn something of the fatal attack. Emma was walking home along Whitechapel Road about 1.30 on the Tuesday morning. By St Mary’s Church she saw three men coming towards her. Although she crossed the road to avoid them they followed her into Osborn Street, attacked and raped her, and made off with what little money she had. She remembered nothing of her assailants except that one was a youth, apparently about nineteen years old.
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Emma Smith was entered in the hospital records as married and a charwoman. In reality she was a friendless widow who supported herself at least partly by prostitution. She told Haslip, indeed, that she had not seen any of her friends for ten years. According to Walter Dew, writing fifty years later, she was once asked why she had broken so completely with her old life and friends. ‘They would not understand now any more than they understood then,’ she replied wistfully. ‘I must live somehow.’ Like Martha Tabram her living was made on the streets. Yet, by Dew’s account, the vestiges of a respectable past never entirely deserted her. ‘There was something about Emma Smith,’ he wrote, ‘which suggested that there had been a time when the comforts of life had not been denied her. There was a touch of culture in her speech unusual in her class.’ If Dew was not wearing the rose-coloured spectacles of age Emma must have fallen far by 1888 for contemporary records depict little refinement in her appearance or behaviour. Her clothing was in such a dirty and ragged condition that the police, who inspected it for clues, were unable to tell if any part of it had been freshly torn. And Mrs Russell often saw the consequences of her dissipated lifestyle. When she had been drinking she behaved like a madwoman. She frequently returned home with black eyes given her by men and one night came home and told Mrs Russell that she had been thrown out of a window.

There were certain similarities between the Smith and Tabram murders. Both seem to have been unprovoked attacks and both took place on Bank Holiday nights. They were committed within 100 yards of each other. And the victims had much in common. Both women were prostitutes and both were residents of common lodging houses in George Street. Emma Smith lived at No. 18. Martha Tabram’s last
known address was No. 19. It is interesting too that Martha Tabram sometimes masqueraded under the name ‘Emma’.

Yet it is most unlikely that the same hand slew both women. As far as we know Tabram was murdered by a lone killer. Smith was the victim of a gang of bullies. Tabram’s murderer used two weapons, a penknife and a long-bladed weapon like a dagger or bayonet. The injuries upon Emma Smith were inflicted, not with a knife, but with some blunt instrument, possibly a stick. Most telling of all was the apparent difference in purpose displayed by the attackers. Although the perpetrators of a particularly nasty street robbery and sex attack, the assailants of Emma Smith probably did not intend murder. Had they done so they would scarcely have allowed her to totter away and tell what she knew. It is very likely that they were intoxicated and left her unaware of the real extent of the injuries they had inflicted. But there can be no such doubts about the man who accompanied Martha Tabram into George Yard Buildings. No common street robber or drunken lout would have evinced the relentless fury of that attack. Her slaying bore all the hallmarks of a maniacal killer.

There is no evidence that the police or the press linked the Smith and Tabram murders as early as August. Although the inexplicable savagery of the Tabram slaying shocked East London it seems to have been regarded as an isolated, freak tragedy; no one suggested that the George Yard murderer might strike again. Prostitutes, from among whose ranks both victims had been chosen, plied the streets as brazenly as though nothing had happened. Heavy rain ushered out one of the wettest and coolest summers on record. On Thursday, 30 August, the showers were sharp and frequent and accompanied by loud peals of thunder and vivid flashes of lightning. That night two fires broke out in the London docks, reddening the sky above the East End with a great glow. Art traditionally depicts monsters fresh from Hell in just such settings, but no sense of foreboding, no premonition of disaster touched Polly Nichols as she tramped the streets that night.

Polly was a prostitute. Her life oscillated between the common lodging house, the workhouse and the pavement. And like Smith and Tabram before her she was middle-aged, destitute and frequently drunk. Witnesses later recalled glimpses of her on Thursday night and Friday morning.
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At about 11.00 p.m. she was seen in the Whitechapel Road and at 12.30 a.m. leaving the Frying Pan public house in Brick Lane. For about six weeks Polly had shared a room in
a common lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street with an elderly married woman named Ellen Holland. About a week before she had moved to another common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street but at 1.20 on the morning of Friday, 31 August, she was back at 18 Thrawl Street. Polly was the worse for drink and wearing a new black straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet. When the lodging house deputy turned her away because she did not have 4d. for a bed she was far from dispirited and asked the deputy to keep her bed for her while she went out to get the money. Then she turned away, laughing. ‘I’ll soon get my “doss” money,’ she cried, ‘see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!’

About an hour later Ellen Holland met Polly at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street. Ellen was on her way home after going to see the fire that had broken out that morning at Shadwell Dry Dock. Polly had come down Osborn Street and was alone. She was very drunk. The two friends talked at the corner for perhaps seven or eight minutes. As they did so the clock at St Mary’s, across the road, struck 2.30. Mrs Holland tried hard to persuade Polly to come home with her but she was determined to earn her ‘doss’ money. ‘I have had my lodging money three times today,’ she boasted, ‘and I have spent it . . . It won’t be long before I’ll be back.’ They parted. And that was the last time Mrs Holland saw Polly alive, a small, lonely figure, staggering eastwards along the Whitechapel Road.

A
T ABOUT
3.40 on the morning of Friday, 31 August, a carman was walking to work along Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. He was Charles Cross of 22 Doveton Street, Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, and he had worked at Pickford’s for more than twenty years. Buck’s Row seemed deserted. Cross was on the north side of the street and was walking towards Baker’s Row. The morning was chilly and still very dark.

For much of its length Buck’s Row was narrow, cobbled and gloomy. Beyond the board school it became wide and open. It was as he approached the end of the narrow section that Cross saw something on the opposite side of the street, a large object lying across the entrance to a stable yard. At first he thought it was a tarpaulin, but when he got halfway across the street he realized that he was mistaken. It was the body of a woman. Standing uncertainly in the middle of the street the carman then heard the approaching footsteps of another workman. The newcomer, walking in the same direction as Cross, was also a carman, Robert Paul by name, of 30 Foster Street, Bethnal Green. Cross went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come and look over here,’ he said, ‘there’s a woman lying on the pavement.’

Together they gingerly approached the silent form. She was lying on her back, her skirts raised almost to her stomach. Cross felt her hands. They seemed cold and limp. ‘I believe she’s dead,’ he ventured. Paul was not so sure. He found her face and hands cold and when he crouched down and tried to hear her breathe he could detect nothing, but touching her breast fancied there was slight movement. ‘I think she’s breathing,’ he said, ‘but very little if she is.’ He suggested that they prop her up but Cross would not touch her. In the gloom neither of them noticed the ferocious gashes in her throat that had nearly severed her head from her body. And, callously, neither were prepared to lose more time to the matter. Paul said that he would fetch a policeman except that he was behind time, and Cross was late himself. So, after attempting to pull down the woman’s skirts, they nonchalantly proceeded on their way intending to tell the first constable they might see. In Baker’s Row, at the junction of Hanbury and Old Montague Streets, they met PC Mizen 55H and told him of their discovery. ‘She looks to me to be either dead or drunk,’ enlarged Cross, ‘but for my part I think she is dead.’
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In the meantime the body had also been found by a policeman on
the beat. At about 3.45 PC John Neil 97J, a tall fresh-complexioned man with brown hair and a straw-coloured moustache and imperial, was patrolling eastwards along the south side of Buck’s Row. Thirty minutes earlier, when his beat had last taken him this way, he had seen no one. On this occasion he found the body. It was dark and the light from a street lamp some distance away on the opposite side of the street was poor. But, with the help of his lantern, Neil was able to inspect the woman more closely than the two carmen had done. She was lying on her back, lengthways along the footway and outside the gate to Mr Brown’s stables, her head towards the east, her left hand touching the gate. Her hands, which were open, lay by her sides and her legs were extended and a little apart. The woman’s eyes, wide open, stared upwards into the night. Blood oozed out of the wounds in her throat. Cross and Paul had partly pulled her skirts down and they were now a little above her knees. Lying by her side, close to her left hand, was a black straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet.

Neil felt her right arm and found it quite warm from the elbow upwards. At this moment he heard another constable patrolling up Brady Street from the Whitechapel Road, and as he passed the end of Buck’s Row Neil called him and flashed his lantern. It was PC John Thain 96J. ‘Here’s a woman has cut her throat,’ said Neil, ‘run at once for Dr Llewellyn.’ When PC Mizen arrived soon after, hotfoot from Baker’s Row, Neil sent him for an ambulance and further assistance from Bethnal Green Police Station.

While awaiting the doctor PC Neil scouted around. The gate, some nine or ten feet high, was closed. To the west of the stable yard was a board school, to the east a row of shabby two-storey houses inhabited, for the most part, by respectable working people. On the north side of the street, opposite the gateway, was Essex Wharf. When Neil rang the bell at the wharf the face of Walter Purkis, the manager, appeared at an upper window. The constable wanted to know whether anyone had heard a disturbance in the street but Purkis and his wife had heard nothing. Neil was soon reinforced by Sergeant Kirby. The sergeant knocked up Mrs Green, who lived at New Cottage, the house immediately to the east of the gateway, but she too had heard no disturbance. And when Neil examined the road with his lantern he discovered no trace of wheel marks or any other clue.