Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [7]
Neil rang the bell at Essex Wharf (across the road from the stable yard) and asked if anyone had heard a disturbance.
Neither the manager,Walter Purkiss, nor his wife had heard anything, despite having had a restless night’s sleep. Further enquiries were made by Sergeant Kerby, who had arrived at the same time as Dr Llewellyn. Kerby enquired at the house of Mrs Emma Green, who lived with her daughter and two sons at the first of the houses on Buck’s Row. None of them had noticed anything unusual during the night.
Dr Llewellyn’s on-site examination confirmed that the woman was dead and had been, he estimated, for about half an hour. Although there was very little blood around her, or in the gutter nearby, there were no bloodstains to suggest that the body had been dragged there. Neither was there any evidence of a struggle. Llewellyn ordered the woman to be removed to Old Montague Street Workhouse infirmary mortuary, where he would make a further examination.
At the inquest Thain, Mizen and Neil would tell how, once the body had been moved, a patch of congealed blood was revealed, about six inches in diameter. More, however, had been absorbed by the woman’s clothes. PC Thain found, when lifting her onto the stretcher, that her back was covered with blood which smeared his hands.
Mizen, Neil and Kerby escorted the body to the mortuary. After visiting the crime scene, Inspector Spratling, divisional inspector of J Division, arrived at the mortuary to find it locked up and the body on the stretcher in the yard. While he waited for Robert Mann, the keeper of the mortuary, to arrive, he took a description of the woman. Mann arrived between 5.00 and 5.20am whereupon the body was taken inside. It was there that Spratling summoned Dr Llewellyn once more for, lifting the woman’s clothes, he found that the wound to her throat was the least of their concerns. Her abdomen had been viciously ripped open up to the sternum and her intestines exposed.
Dr Llewellyn’s post-mortem noted the following: There were lacerations to the tongue. Bruises to both sides of the jaw were probably caused by pressure from a thumb and fingers. There were two deep incisions in the neck, the second and longest of which cut right down to the vertebrae.There were no wounds to the body above the deep, jagged wound to the abdomen on the left and several similar cuts to the abdomen on the right. All of these were inflicted violently downwards and from left to right, ‘as might have been done by a left-handed person’. He concluded:‘All the injuries had been caused by the same instrument.’ No part of the viscera was missing. Later, he would express doubts about his original supposition that the murderer was left-handed.
Identifying the victim seemed difficult, but within a day her name was revealed and her life began to take shape for the investigators. As news of the latest murder spread through the East End, it transpired that a woman fitting the deceased’s description had lodged at 18,Thrawl Street. One occupant, Ellen Holland, identified the body as ‘Polly’. A more solid identification resulted from the laundry mark of Lambeth Workhouse in the victim’s petticoats. Mary Ann Monk, an inmate of the workhouse, identified the woman as Mary Ann Nichols, 43, who had been at the workhouse as recently as May that year. The police then traced the deceased’s father, Edward Walker, and her estranged husband, William Nichols, both of whom identified the body the next day.
Mary Ann Nichols’ story, like the inquests’ verdicts, was one that would become familiar during the Whitechapel murders. Born in 1845, she had married William in 1864. During their marriage they had