Jack the Ripper
Episodes 172, 173, & 174: Why History's Most Notorious Serial Killer Continues to Evade Us
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Part 1: It’s October 24, 1887. Protestors have gathered in Trafalgar Square, a flashpoint where London’s notoriously destitute East End meets, clashes with the wealthy West End. Trafalgar Square itself was a symbol of how disillusioned, out of touch London aristocracy had become. Built a few decades prior as a monument to commemorate the grandeur of the empire, Nelson’s Column stood at the center of the square, an impressive monolith of stone and bronze. But the working class in London was not pleased. First, the area where Trafalgar Square now stood used to be home to hundreds of working class folks, already struggling to survive. They were evicted, their shops closed, their houses demolished, and they were forced into the slums of the East End to sink or swim on their own in overcrowded, dirty, and dangerous conditions. Second, construction of Nelson’s column, a monument to honor a military hero, took way longer and cost way more than it was supposed to. The working poor were outraged that London was spending so much money on the square that no one even wanted when they could have spent it on hospitals, public housing, and much needed food instead. The poor saw the square as a hostile spatial takeover, the wealthy elite literally tearing down the spaces of the destitute to build a monument to themselves and so it was often a place of protest, like the one now taking place on October 24, 1887. Hundreds of London’s poor have gathered in the square, many have been sleeping there night after night. They are angry, unruly. They carry signs demanding basic human necessities: food, shelter, decency. They beg the government to provide jobs so they can work. They don’t want to be homeless. They want to make a life for themselves but society won’t let them. Police officers watch from the sidelines until they’ve had enough. They rush in on horseback, scattering the crowd. They hit protestors with their batons. They arrest people. On this day, 10 particularly troublesome protestors are arrested. One of them is a woman by the name of Polly Nichols. She’s immediately labeled as the most difficult one in the bunch. She resists her arrest, swears at the officers and fights back. She’s thrown in a cell for a time before, finally subdued, she’s released back onto the streets of East London. Streets where, less than a year later she’ll be found brutally murdered, the first victim of notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, but really, a victim of the broken society she was protesting to repair. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I’ve been losing my voice the past couple days so this might get interesting. Bear with me folks. Today, and for the next couple weeks actually because this is a three parter, a History Fix first, we are talking about the infamous Victorian era London serial killer Jack the Ripper. I’ve resisted talking about Jack the Ripper until now because this story is so almost over covered at this point. It certainly isn’t lesser known history. But it is very misunderstood history. So my goal here is not to tell you about something you’ve never heard of, it's really to correct the mistakes and misconceptions in a story that you’re probably quite familiar with. And if you aren’t familiar with it, well then it’s both I guess. Before we go any further I want to note that this is not a story for young listeners or for the faint of heart. This is heavy and graphic and gory. So, anyone not prepared for that, turn back now. I will try to give you a heads up before I reveal anything too horrible, I’ll tell you to skip ahead however many minutes or whatever so you can decide if you want to hear the gory parts or not. But, you know, this is the story of a vicious murderer stalking and killing women for sick sadistic reasons so it really isn’t a story for young audiences. I love my young listeners but skip this one y’all.
When I told my husband Joey I was finally planning to cover Jack the Ripper he said “oh yeah, wasn’t he like the first serial killer or something?” No. He wasn’t. Not by a long shot. In fact, I already covered the person thought to be the first official serial killer last Spooktober, Gilles de Rais. That’s episode 135. Gille de Rais operated in the early 1400s, predating Jack the Ripper by almost 500 years. So if Jack the Ripper isn’t the first serial killer then surely he was the most prolific, the most violent, the most shocking. Well, no actually, he wasn’t those things either. There are serial killers with far more victims than Jack and with far more shocking modus operandis. So why is Jack the Ripper so notorious, so well known? There are a few reasons for that, but the main reason is the circumstances surrounding his killings, the context in which they took place. So, this was a time when newspapers had just become a very big thing. Newspapers were a big business in London in the 1880s. In 1884, for example, there were something like 15 evening papers, 9 weekly papers, and 383 London local newspapers. This boom is mostly due to new technology that made it much easier and cheaper to print newspapers and so more and more people can afford them, they are much less expensive, and so people are buying newspapers like crazy. You also have to realize, there’s no TV. There isn’t even radio. There certainly isn’t the internet. If you want to know what’s going on, you have to get that information from a newspaper. It’s the only way. Also, literacy rates were higher than ever. About 75% of men and 70% of women in 1880s London were literate, could read. So people are gobbling up newspapers left and right and that made the newspaper business quite lucrative.
With a highly lucrative newspaper business, money to be made, right, and lots of competing newspapers, we see more and more drastic measures being taken to sell papers. This means super interesting, attention grabbing headlines. We see sensationalized news emerge where an interesting story becomes more important than an accurate story for really the first time. Click bait… the accidental theme of this Spooktober. So Jack the Ripper absolutely blew up, went viral in modern terms, that’s what we’d call it now, not because he was the first serial killer or the most prolific or anything like that, but because he was on the frontpage of hundreds of newspapers for months and that had never really happened before with any other serial killers or murderers. It all came down to the timing, the context in which his crimes took place. And actually, most of what we know about Jack the Ripper today comes from these newspapers. And that’s part of the reason why this story has gotten so twisted because, as I said, accuracy wasn’t really their main concern. They’d write whatever they had to to sell papers. As for the police files, the actual legit documentation of these crimes, most of that has been lost. A lot of it was lost decades later during the Blitz, the bombing of London during World War II, which destroyed virtually all of the City of London Police files. And then most of what wasn’t destroyed in World War II was likely just thrown away at some point. That was common practice, to just throw away old files and evidence to make room for new stuff. Especially since this case was officially closed in 1892, four years after the murders, despite never figuring out who Jack the Ripper was. They had exhausted all of their leads, there hadn’t been a murder in 4 years, they were like “eh, oh well, toss it.”
And you have to keep in mind, these murders happened between August and November of 1888. In 1888 there’s no fingerprint technology, it’s about to emerge but the police aren’t using it yet. They certainly don’t have a database of fingerprints to compare to. There’s definitely no concept of DNA. They can’t do blood typing. They can’t even figure out if blood is animal or human. There’s virtually no forensic evidence. So the only way to solve a murder is to quite literally catch the murderer in the act. A witness has to come forth and say “I saw so and so kill so and so.” That’s the only way, eyewitnesses, and we all know how unreliable eyewitnesses can be. So getting away with murder in 1888 was actually pretty easy.
Then we also have to take into account where these murders happened and who the victims were. We don’t know for sure how many people Jack the Ripper murdered. Definitely at least 4 but maybe as many as 18 women. Most experts narrow it down to 5 women. These women are known as the canonical five and I’m going to get into each of their stories here next. These first two episodes are about the victims, the women. The third and final episode we’ll dig more into the suspects and theories. All of these women were what were referred to as “unfortunates” in Victorian England. They were destitute, they were poor, most were sex workers, forced into prostitution in order to afford a place to sleep for the night. All of them were alcoholics. That’s a strong throughline here. So, people at the time and in the decades since look at that and they say “ah, they were asking for it. Look how they lived their lives, getting drunk, soliciting strange men, sleeping on the streets. They were asking for it.” And so, with that kind of victim shaming attitude, how hard were they really trying to find this guy? If he had been murdering noble women of London’s aristocracy, would their efforts have gone farther? There was borderline an attitude at the time of “good, someone needs to get rid of these women, clean up the streets. Someone needs to cleanse our city of these unfortunates, these loose immoral women who are too lazy to work and who don’t contribute to society, who are a burden to society.” That was definitely a sentiment that went around. That’s terrible. That’s awful. Because they’re completely ignoring the context in which these women lived. They are ignoring the glaring unresolved societal issues of Victorian London that put these women in the situations they were in.
The Jack the Ripper murders took place in East London. East London, the East End, was notoriously poor. This was a place of industry, with factories where people worked long hours for little money. There were docks where ships came in so there were a lot of poor immigrants in the east end as well. It was the working class part of London. The opposite of that was the West End. West London was where the aristocracy lived. It was very posh. There were fancy houses and high end shopping. It was all about the luxury and indulgence of the rich. It was well lit, dotted with gas lights. East London was dark and dirty and dangerous. So we have this major social inequality in London and it’s very very pronounced by the 1880s. It’s very apparent. There is no social security. There is no welfare. The government is not taking care of poor people or really doing anything effective to try to help poor people or remedy this socioeconomic inequality. Everything they do try to do honestly just makes things worse. Like, they set up work houses to give poor people a place to live, the idea here being that they would have a place to sleep and then they would work, they would contribute labor in return. But these were basically prisons. Families were separated. People did terrible backbreaking work for long hours, smashing up stones into gravel, untangling ropes that cut into and blistered their fingers, processing animal parts. These were all the jobs that literally no one else wanted to do. And of course they were horribly mistreated and abused, the people in these workhouses. In many cases they were starved. There are reports of people fighting over the job of processing the animal parts so that they could suck the marrow out of the animal bones they were so hungry. So, you know, any efforts the city of London was taking to remedy these socioeconomic problems were backfiring horribly. Workhouses were last resorts. People would literally rather sleep on the streets, curl up in an alley somewhere than go into a workhouse. There were lodging houses too, also called doss houses, where you could pay 4 pence for a bed for the night but come morning they kicked you out. It was just a place to sleep. You couldn’t hang out during the day and you couldn’t leave your stuff either. So many people carried all of their belongings around with them all the time. If you couldn’t afford the 4 pence for a bed, you could pay 2 pence for what was called a “twopenny hangover.” This is where, you didn’t get a bed to lay down in, but they would stretch a rope across the room and you could literally just hangover the rope to sleep. It was something to lean on. This is likely where the term “hangover,” like how bad you feel after a night of drinking, came from.
And that brings me to alcohol. What a perfect segue. Alcohol was a major societal problem at this time. A lot of these people didn’t have the 4 pence for a bed for the night because they spent it on alcohol. They are drunk a lot of the time which means, first of all they aren’t in good health, also they don’t have their wits about them at all, and also they are viewed as degenerates by society. In those days alcohol was closely linked to morality. Drinking alcohol was seen as immoral. Today that’s thankfully changed. We view alcoholism today as a disease. It’s a health condition. Back then, it was loose morals. You weren’t sick, you were just a bad person. And so the poor residents of East London were judged very harshly and unfairly by a society that had set them up to fail and was doing absolutely nothing to help them or to remedy the situation they were victims of.
That was especially true for women because women had almost no opportunities to work, to contribute to society, to earn their keep, to make a way for themselves in the world. There were really only two boxes for women, two cages for women is more appropriate, in 1880s London. Ideally you got married, you had some kids, and you were a homemaker, you took care of the house and the kids. That’s cage number one. Cage number two you worked. But there were very few working opportunities for women at that time. Men, all kinds of jobs available. Women, not so much. Working class women were mostly in service jobs as maids or housekeepers, nannies in middle class or aristocratic homes. These were jobs for single women only, spinsters. If you got pregnant, you would be fired and cast out on the streets, cageless. So, to say that there were very few opportunities for women is kind of an understatement. This is why so many of them turned to sex work because there was literally nothing else they could do to earn money. Of note, prostitution was legal in London in the 1880s but brothels were not. This meant that sex workers had nowhere safe to operate. They were operating on the streets, in back alleys, in parks, wherever they could and usually with complete strangers. So this was obviously a very dangerous situation for these women that they were forced into out of desperation.
Keeping that in mind, let’s talk about the women, the victims of Jack the Ripper. All of these women were killed in the Whitechapel district of East London between August and November of 1888. I’m just going to focus on the canonical five otherwise it would take me way more than three episodes to tell this story. Although, of note, some experts think that there is likely a sixth victim, Martha Tabram, who would have actually been the first, if she was, in fact, killed by Jack the Ripper. She was murdered on August 7th, 1888 and her body was found sprawled at the bottom of a stair landing with 39 stab wounds. 38 of the stab wounds were inflicted with a quote “ordinary pen-knife” but one looked like it had been made with something like a bayonet which led police to believe that she had been killed maybe by a soldier or sailor. So, from that, I can see why Martha Tabram is not one of the canonical five. This isn’t really Jack the Ripper’s MO. He’s a Ripper, not a stabber. But, she’s probably the closest case we have to a sixth victim, August 7th, 1888.
The first official Jack the Ripper victim was Mary Ann Nichols who went by the name Polly, Polly Nichols. Polly was born in 1845 in central London, the daughter of a blacksmith. She got married when she was 22 years old to a man named William Nichols and they had 5 children together. William was a printer which is a respectable job. It’s not a high paying job but it’s respectable. So Polly is in cage number one, remember I talked about the two cages for women at the time. She is starting out her adult life as a homemaker in a relatively poor but respectable family. But Polly and William had a really bad relationship. They fought constantly. It was not a happy home. At some point William started having an affair with the neighbor. According to Polly’s father later, this neighbor woman had cared for Polly when she gave birth to their children. William began having an affair with her. Polly was obviously heartbroken by this and she resorted to alcohol to sort of self-medicate at a time when she was quite depressed by what was happening in her relationship with her husband. She became an alcoholic, and of course this just made everything worse. The domestic disputes intensified and, when she was 34, she left her family for good. She left William and her 5 children. She left cage one. She’s cageless for a time and, like other cageless women, she most likely resorted to sex work to get by. Now, she was getting some money from William. They were separated but he had to pay her essentially alimony as his wife. He pays her a certain amount a week. Well, in 1882, he found out that she was a sex worker and he used that as evidence that she had abandoned the marriage. This was adultery right? She had abandoned the marriage and, therefore, he didn’t have to pay her anymore. Nevermind that all of this pretty much started with his own adultery, his affair with that neighbor woman. He’s never accused of abandoning the marriage, of course, only Polly. So William stops paying Polly this weekly amount. Because of this, Polly can no longer afford wherever she’s been sleeping and she is forced to enter the workhouses. She bounces around between different workhouses in the East End: Lambeth Workhouse, Giles Workhouse, Strand Workhouse, Mitcham Workhouse. At one point she moves in with her father, but that doesn’t go well. He doesn’t like her drinking. He testified later that she was a quote “dissolute character and drunkard whom he knew would come to a bad end,” end quote. He also said later quote “I don’t think she had any enemies. She was too good for that,” end quote. So that seems contradictory but I think Polly’s father loved her and wanted to help her. I think it was the alcohol that drove a wedge between them and ultimately made this living arrangement fail. Her father said that he never kicked her out but she eventually left on her own.
She went back into the workhouses for a time until she got a job as a domestic servant in May of 1888. She went to work in the home of Samuel and Sarah Cowdry in Wandsworth, a district in south London. During this time, Polly wrote a letter to her father. She wrote quote “I just right to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place, and going 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 teetotalers 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” end quote. So it seems like, you know, this seems like a good gig she has now. She’s in cage 2 now, right, domestic service. But this doesn’t last long. Polly worked at the Cowdry house for 2 months but then was dismissed after she stole some clothing and linens worth about 3 pounds, 3 shillings. Which seems crazy, right, but that’s actually quite a lot of money. 3 pounds, 3 shillings is equal to 756 pence and, if you remember, a night in a lodging or doss house cost 4 pence. So that’s 189 nights of having a bed to sleep in. Or, a large glass of gin cost 3 pence so that’s 252 glasses of gin. Makes it a bit more understandable why she would do something so obviously stupid.
So Polly left cage one and now she has been cast out of cage two and she is cageless once more. That brings us to the night of August 30, 1888. It was pouring down rain, thundering and lightning. At 11 pm, Polly is seen walking down Whitechapel Road, despite the rain. She is probably out soliciting as a sex worker, looking to make some money. Can we confirm that, no, but it’s likely. I did find that the going rate she could earn for prostitution was 2 or 3 pence or a stale loaf of bread. So, that’s pretty bleak. This is not a get rich quick scheme. One encounter would not even afford you a bed in a lodging house. It would, however, afford you a large glass of gin which, remember, cost 3 pence. And so many of these women spent their earnings on alcohol and they kept going until they’d had enough to drink, first of all, and then hopefully enough for a bed for the night although we know Polly also sometimes slept rough which meant she slept on the streets. In December of 1887 she was caught sleeping in Trafalgar Square and was sent to a workhouse. So we know she had to resort to this at times.
On the night of August 30th, she is seen walking in a thunderstorm at 11 pm. At 12:30 am there are reports of her leaving a pub called the Frying Pan and she goes back to the lodging house where she is hoping to sleep. She doesn’t have enough money for a bed though so she is just hanging out in the kitchen of the lodging house. At around 1:30 am she gets kicked out because she doesn’t have the money to stay. They kick her out into a thunderstorm. She reportedly asked the lodging house guy to save her a bed and said quote “Never mind! I’ll soon have my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now,” end quote. She was talking about a black velvet bonnet she was wearing that no one had ever seen her wear before.
At 2:30 am she runs into a woman she knows out on the streets named Emily Holland. Emily would later testify that Polly was quote “very drunk and staggered against the wall,” end quote. Emily said Polly told her that she had had her doss money three times that day and drank it away. They talked for a few minutes and then went their separate ways. We know this was at 2:30 am because Emily mentioned hearing the church bells chime.
Fast forward to 3:15 am, on a street called Bucks Row which runs parallel to Whitechapel Street where Polly and Emily had stopped to chat. At 3:15 two police officers pass down Buck’s row on their usual patrol and don’t see anything. Everything is normal. Then, at 3:40 or 3:45, so about 30 minutes later, a man named Charles Cross was heading to work when he noticed a woman lying on the sidewalk. Now, this wasn’t that crazy of a thing to come across at this time and in this place. Sleeping rough was a thing. Sometimes people resorted to sleeping on the streets. Sometimes people passed out drunk on the streets. But Charles realizes something is off with this one. He calls to another man named Robert Paul to come check her out with him. The two men report that the woman’s face and hands are cold but the rest of her is warm. Also she appears to have a faint heartbeat. But then, get this, they don’t want to be late for work so they just take off. They just leave her there. They’re gonna tell the first police officer they see. Before they even get to, another police officer finds Polly and he calls for a Dr. Lewellyn who lives nearby. Dr. Lewellyn examines the body and pronounces that she is dead quote “but a few minutes,” meaning she probably was alive when Charles and Robert found her. But, honestly, there’s really nothing they could have done anyway.
Skip forward about a minute if you don’t want to hear the extent of her injuries. This one’s not that bad but, still, I promised I’d warn you. Polly’s throat had been slit with an 8 inch gash, essentially from ear to ear. This was a very deep cut, all the way down to the vertebrae and it had severed the arteries on either side of the neck. It’s likely this is what ultimately killed her, she bled out. Although, of note, it looked like she had also been strangled somewhat. According to inquest testimony that was reported in the Times newspaper quote “There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb. There was a circular bruise on the left side of the face which also might have been inflicted by the pressure of the fingers,” end quote. There was no blood on her chest or down her front which you might expect if her throat had been cut while she was standing. So this leads us to believe that she was first strangled, grabbed by the neck by someone facing her and forced onto the ground, lying on her back. Then her throat was slashed. All the blood is pooled under her neck and head which indicates that that happened while she was laying on the ground. Her only other injury is to her lower abdomen. According to that inquest testimony quote “There were no injuries about the body until just about the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. The wound was a very deep one, and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. There were three or four similar cuts running downwards, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downwards,” end quote.
Polly had been killed in a highly populated, though very dark, area. There were people sleeping in the houses all around her. She had been killed literally right under the bedroom window where a woman named Emma Green was sleeping. Emma said she was a very light sleeper but that she wasn’t woken up until police arrived. So this means her attack probably happened very quickly. He likely had her down on the ground and slashed her throat pretty much instantly, which severed her windpipe and would have made it impossible for her to yell out. So this was, you know, this was horrifying. It was a brutal murder that had taken place out in the open where anyone one could have walked up on it. It was brazen. It was bold. But, at this point, it was a one off thing and, unfortunately, it wasn’t all that uncommon. There was a lot of violence on the streets of East London. This was just another murder of a quote “unfortunate,” and in the minds of many Londoners, the city was better off for it.
But Polly Nichol’s murder, turns out, was not a one off thing. It was only the beginning. And that takes us to our next victim, Annie Chapman. Annie was born in 1841 which made her 3 or 4 years older than Polly. Polly was 44 when she was killed, Annie would lose her life at 47. But, before all that, Annie was born the daughter of a member of the household cavalry. These were guards who protected the royal family. So her father had a very respectable job which makes the path Annie’s life would take all the more surprising. When she was 12 years old, 4 of her siblings died of scarlet fever within 3 weeks. This was absolutely devastating to the family. Her father never got over it. He turned to alcohol to drown out his depression but ultimately took his own life 9 years later. After that, Annie’s mother was forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet. One of those lodgers was a man named John Chapman. Annie married John when she was 28 years old.
John Chapman was a coachman, he drove carriages for people. This was a high paying, high ranking domestic service job and it took the couple to the country estate of his employer where they lived in their own home on the property. Okay so they’re doing well. There is a portrait, a photograph of Annie and John Chapman, you’re seeing it now if you’re watching the video version of this on either YouTube or Patreon. This is in the style of a portrait that would have been taken to display over a mantel, over a fireplace. Well, if you had a mantel, you had a parlor, which meant you were relatively well off. You had your own home with a parlor that’s more of a middle class thing. Annie and John had 3 children but tragedy would strike her home once again. Their youngest son was born with some sort of deformity, he was crippled, and so he was sent off to live at a home for children with disabilities which I imagine was not a good situation in, this would have been in the 1870s. Their oldest daughter died of meningitis at the age of 12. So Annie had 3 children but she really only had one who survived, a daughter.
This is, you know, once again, devastating. Just like her father before her, Annie turned to alcohol to cope and quickly became an alcoholic like her father had been. She actually spent a year in rehab but, after returning home, quickly relapsed. And this led to the destruction of her marriage. John also drank, he was likely also an alcoholic. So it was a bad situation. Annie and John separated in probably 1884 and John paid Annie 10 shillings a week as a sort of alimony. But then John died in 1886 of cirrhosis of the liver which is why I think he was also an alcoholic. Annie was reportedly very sad over the death of John even though they had been separated for the past couple years. Annie had actually walked the 25 miles on foot from London to Windsor where John lived to try to visit him before he died but arrived too late.
After that is when, it seems she may have turned to prostitution, after that weekly payment from her now dead husband stops. She relies on money from sex work to afford beds in lodging houses and she’s hanging out with kind of a rough crew at this point. She’s also not in good health herself. She complained to several people in early September of 1888 that she was not well. A bottle of medicine was found in the room where she had been staying after her death. And that brings us to Friday, September 7, 1888. At around 5 pm, Annie’s friend Amelia Palmer reports seeing her on the streets and she appeared to be sober. She said something like “I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.”
By 11:30 pm Annie returns to the lodging house, apparently still without the money because she asks if she can just hang out in the kitchen. At 12:10 am, now on September 8th, a fellow lodger named Frederick Stevens said he drank a pint of beer with Annie in the kitchen and that she seemed quite drunk already, which probably explains why she didn’t have her lodging money. According to Frederick, Annie left the lodging house at 1:00 am. She comes back at 1:35 reportedly eating a baked potato. I love this. This has to be the Victorian London equivalent of drunk food, like pokey sticks or cookout. She gets her a baked potato and she comes back. But she still doesn’t have the money for a bed. She tells the night watchmen to hold her bed for her and that she’s going to go out and get the money and she’ll be right back. And so she leaves the lodging house again just before 2 am, heading towards Spitalfields Market. Spitalfields is a neighborhood in Whitechapel. Spital comes from the word hospital, not like drool. I know, it’s not a very appetizing name Spitalfields but it’s not actually referring to spit. So Annie leaves again to get this doss money and she never comes back.
That takes us to 29 Hanbury Street. This was another sort of lodging house where about 16 people lived. There were so many people coming and going at all hours of the night and day that the front door was sort of always open. You could pass right through the house and go out into a small fenced backyard behind it. This is something that people off the street, prostitutes and rough sleepers would have known about. It was relatively private compared to, you know, just sleeping on the street. So people who didn’t even live at 29 Hanbury would have frequented this back yard. A woman named Elizabeth Long reported seeing Annie in that backyard of 29 Hanbury around 5:30 am talking to a man but she couldn’t see the man’s face. He had his back to her. She hears the man ask “will you?” and Annie replies “yes.” Just after that a man named Albert Cadosch who lived next door went out into his own backyard to use the outhouse. It was separated from the 29 Hanbury yard by a 5 foot fence and it was pitch black dark so he couldn’t really see anything but he said he heard voices. All he could make out was a woman saying “no” and then he heard something falling into the fence. He doesn’t think anything of it, carries on with his business. It’s not unusual for people to be out at night doing weird things. He didn’t want to get involved.
Just before 6 am, John Davis, who lived at 29 Hanbury street, walked out into the backyard and discovered the body of Annie Chapman laying at the bottom of the steps, sort of between the steps and the fence. The state she was left in shows a clear escalation from the murder of Polly Nichols about a week before. Maybe the killer had more time, maybe he was just becoming more bold as serial killers are known to do. According to the inquest testimony which is really long so I’m just going to summarize it, also skip ahead about a minute if you don’t want to hear this part, her face was swollen and her tongue was protruding from her mouth as if she had been strangled. Her throat was also cut deeply as Polly Nichol’s had been. It had definitely been cut while she was laying on the ground because blood was splattered on the fence next to her head about 14 inches off the ground. Her neck was so deeply cut that it looked like the killer was trying to actually sever her head from her body, like cut through the vertebrae in her neck. Her abdomen had been cut all the way down and laid open. This is where the mutilation of Annie Chapman goes beyond that of Polly Nichols. This is that escalation I was talking about. He opened up her abdomen completely. Her intestines had been removed and placed above her shoulder. Her uterus and part of her bladder had also been removed and were nowhere to be found. The inquest testimony notes quote “Obviously the work was that of an expert- of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife, which must therefore must have at least 5 or 6 inches in length, probably more. The appearance of the cuts confirmed him [him being the doctor who responded to the scene] in the opinion that the instrument, like the one which divided the neck, had been of a very sharp character. The mode in which the knife had been used seemed to indicate great anatomical knowledge. He thought he himself could not have performed all the injuries he described, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour. If he had done it in a deliberate way such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon it probably would have taken him the best part of an hour," end quote. But of course we know the killer did not have the best part of an hour because Annie was seen alive right there in the yard at 5:30 and then discovered, dead, just before 6:00.
The report also showed that she suffered from possibly tuberculosis or maybe syphilis, maybe both. It says quote “the deceased was far advanced in disease of the lungs and membranes of the brain,” end quote. This possibly explains why Annie wasn’t feeling well in the days leading up to her death and why she was taking medicine that was later found in a room where she often slept. She was already dying when she was killed.
Annie’s death, as the second Ripper victim, is significant because it shows a clear escalation from that of Polly Nichols. Her body was much more badly mutilated, whole organs were removed and missing. And this gives us a really powerful clue as to who this guy might have been. The doctor said that, what he saw, looked like it had been done by someone with a lot of anatomical knowledge. Not just anyone could have done that so precisely to Annie, not so quickly, and not in the pitch black dark as the yard would have been at that time. This was someone who knew what they were doing. The brutality of this murder, the escalation from that of Polly Nichols, led to an absolute field day in the press. Who was this monster who could cleanly remove a uterus with one swipe of his knife in the dark and with potential witnesses all around? This was the stuff of nightmares. London was horrified. But, here’s the thing, they kind of liked being horrified. They loved gruesome murders and tales full of blood and gore. Those sorts of stories were trending in Victorian England at this time where they ran to purchase penny dreadfuls, pamphlets full of horror stories and violent crime. Now the newspaper stories satiated their morbid curiosities. But the Whitechapel murders, as they were coming to be called, were far from over and the brutality would continue to escalate over the next two months, far beyond the Victorian gore lovers' wildest dreams. That’s next week, don’t miss it.
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