Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [11]
John Evans, the lodging house’s nightwatchman, saw her leave. As she left, she said: ‘I won’t be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me.’ He watched her walk into Little Paternoster Row in the direction of Brushfield Street. Evans, too, would state that he thought she was the worse for drink but the likelihood is that he, Stevens and Donovan all took her ill-heath for drunkenness. Her post-mortem would reveal that she hadn’t had alcohol for hours. At 5.30am, Elizabeth Darrell (or Durrell) saw a woman whom she identified as Chapman talking with a man outside 29, Hanbury Street. The man had his back to her but she described him as being over forty. Although she did not see his face, Darrell describes him as looking ‘like a foreigner’, wearing a deerstalker hat, possibly a dark coat and being of ‘shabby genteel appearance’.The man asked Chapman,‘Will you?’ Chapman replied, ‘Yes.’
29, Hanbury Street
29, Hanbury Street was home to seventeen people at the time of Annie Chapman’s death. Mrs Amelia Richardson, a widow, was listed as the occupant but she rented out over half of the house and lived in the front room of the first floor with her grandson, Thomas. The cellar and backyard were used for her packing-case manufacturing business in which she was assisted by a man named Francis Tyler and her son, John, who lived in Spitalfields and worked as a porter at the market. The house had a front and back door. Both of these were rarely locked and often left open at night. They were joined by a passageway that ran the length of the house. As a result, people were often found dossing there.Although Mrs Richardson wasn’t aware of this, John made it his business to check on the house, usually on days that he was going to market.
On the morning of 8 September, John Richardson checked the house between 4.40 and 4.45am. He went through the passageway and stood on the steps leading into the backyard. Here he paused to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been chafing his foot. Although he didn’t look around thoroughly, he saw nothing in the yard that was out of the ordinary.
At some point between 5.15 and 5.30am (three contemporary sources state three different times) Albert Cadosch (or Cadoche or Cadosh) of 27, Hanbury Street (next door) went into his yard. From behind the fence separating the two houses he heard a conversation between some people in 29’s backyard. The only word he caught was a woman saying, ‘No’. He did not investigate. Nor was his curiosity piqued when, three minutes later (either 5.18, 5.28 or 5.33) he returned to the yard and heard something fall heavily against the other side of the fence dividing the two properties.
At about 6.00am (on this, most sources seem fairly clear), John Davis, one of 29’s many tenants, entered the backyard. It was there that he found the body of Annie Chapman. She was lying on her back, her dress pulled up over her knees and her intestines were placed over her right shoulder. After summoning two men from a nearby packing-case manufacturers, Davis went to fetch the police. Soon the rest of the house was awake, just in time for the police to arrive and secure the building.
At 6.30am, H Division surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips arrived. According to his on-the-spot examination, Chapman had been dead for two to three hours. Phillips subsequently shortened this period because it was, ‘a fairly cool morning and... the body would be more apt to cool rapidly from its having lost a great quantity of blood’. He also noted that the face and tongue were ‘very much swollen’, suggesting that Chapman had been strangled before being mutilated. Blood smeared on the fence corresponded with where the victim lay, confirming that she had been murdered there.
Phillips’ post-mortem notes that Chapman’s throat had been severed by a jagged incision.A flap of the stomach wall,