Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [31]
What is certain is, at 10.45am on Friday 9 October, the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show, John McCarthy sent Thomas Bowyer, his assistant, to 13, Miller’s Court to collect Kelly’s outstanding rent of 29 shillings. He knocked twice at the door but there was no answer. Bowyer went around to the side to the broken window. What he saw through the window sent him racing back to McCarthy. They returned to Miller’s Court and looked through the broken window together.What they beheld must have looked as though from a nightmare. Kelly had been butchered.The privacy that the cramped room had afforded the Ripper had given him free rein for his impulses.
Bowyer was immediately dispatched to Commercial Street police station. His arrival startled Inspector Walter Beck and Detective Walter Dew. Bowyer’s garbled message (‘Another one. Jack the Ripper. Awful’) was all they needed to hear to galvanise them into action.They were at the scene by 11.00am. Unable to open the front door (Barnett said that the key had been lost sometime before, probably the night of the quarrel when the window was broken), Beck went round to the side and the broken window. Inside, an old coat was hung over the gap in the pane to keep out the draught. (Attempts to trace the coat’s owner led only to Mrs Harvey, who had left some clothing with Kelly.) Beck drew it back and blanched. He stepped back and told Dew not to look. Needless to say, he did, and what he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Dr Phillips arrived at 11.15am, followed by Inspector Abberline at 11.30am. The delay in opening the door can only be attributed to them. No attempt to force the door was made until 1.30pm due to the mistaken belief that the bloodhounds would soon be arriving to track the area. At 1.30pm, Dr Anderson arrived. Meanwhile, the Court had been sealed off but little else had been done. Following Anderson’s command, McCarthy broke the door open with a pickaxe.The job could have been done by reaching through the broken window and releasing the catch, as Barnett and Kelly had done since the loss of the key.
McCarthy’s statement that, ‘It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man’ seems entirely apt.The crime scene photograph that adorns almost every spine-broken book on the Ripper case, as terrible as the image it contains, cannot do justice to what they must have witnessed that day. Until 1987, it was all that we had to understand exactly what the Ripper had done to Kelly in that cramped space. Phillips’ brief report at the inquest meant that there was little authentic evidence that remained and thus gave way to years of false supposition by many theorists. One of the central beliefs was that Kelly’s uterus had been taken to conceal the fact that she was pregnant. Both of these claims were proved incorrect when Dr Thomas Bond’s notes taken at the crime scene and the post-mortem were returned anonymously to Scotland Yard in 1987.
A brief summary and conflation of the two sets of findings should demonstrate how terrible the mutilations to Kelly’s body were. Her throat was cut right down to the spinal column, the knife had notched several vertebrae. The face was mutilated by irregular slashes and the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears were partially removed. Both breasts had been removed by circular incisions. The intercostal muscles had been cut and the contents of the thorax were visible.The skin and tissues of the abdomen had been removed in three large flaps and the viscera removed.The right thigh had been denuded across and including outer labia and part of right buttock removed. The left thigh had been stripped to the knee and the left calf gashed. Both arms bore extensive wounds and the right thumb bore a superficial 1-inch incision. There were several abrasions on the back of the right hand and forearm.The lower part of the right lung had been torn away. The uterus, kidneys and one breast had been placed under the head. The other breast was by the right foot.