Episode 150! Who Was Jack the Ripper? Part 1

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London in 1888:

 

Victorian London was not a happy place to be, and the facts speak for themselves. Prostitution was rife, poverty and crime were prevalent, and 19th-century housing was barely habitable. Finding work in 1888 was extremely difficult for the residents of Whitechapel, feeding into the cycle of poverty and depravity.

 

Soot and smoke generally filled the air, and there were still grazing sheep in Regent's Park in the mid-Victorian period — it was said that you could tell how long the sheep had been in the capital by how dirty their coats were. They went increasingly from white to black over days.

 

The nights were riddled with gas lamp-lit streets and dark, foggy alleyways.

 

The city was steeped in poverty and all manner of crime and disease.

 

Many children were seen as a strain on their parents' resources, and it is believed that two in every ten died before reaching five years old.

 

breeding ground for crime and poor behavioral habits, including murder, prostitution, and violence – and vicious circles like these were rarely broken in such poor districts

 

Streets were dirty, and fresh food was scarce. Pollution and sewage smells filled the air.

 

Urine soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury. It was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia coming from the pavement was horrible. Also, the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was discoloring their shop fronts.

 

London in the 19th century was basically filled with cesspools.

 

There'd be brick chambers, maybe 6 feet deep, about 4 feet wide, and every house would have them.

 

It was more common to have a cesspool in the basement in central London and in more crowded areas.

 

Above the cesspool would be where your household privy, or toilet, would be.

 

These made the general smell in crowded London pretty awful.

 

There would have been horses everywhere. By the 1890s, there were approximately 300,000 horses and 1,000 tons of horse droppings a day in London. The Victorians employed boys ages 12 to 14 to dodge between the traffic and try to scoop up the excrement as soon as it hit the streets.

 

Shit everywhere.

 

The streets were lined with "mud,"... except it wasn't mud. 

 

Life was much harder for women than men generally.

 

The lack of proper work and money led many women and girls into prostitution, a high-demand service by those wishing to escape their grim realities.

 

These women were commonly known as "unfortunates,"

 

They owned only what they wore and carried in their pockets - their dirty deeds would pay for their bed for the night.

 

There was an extraordinary lack of contraception for women.

 

Doctors performed unorthodox abortions in dirty facilities, including the back streets.

 

Many women would die of infection from these ill-performed surgeries or ingesting chemicals or poison.

 

The insides of the houses throughout the borough were no less uninviting and more reminiscent of slums.

 

Many of these dilapidated homes were makeshift brothels.

 

Prostitution was a dangerous trade, as diseases were passed from person to person very quickly, and doctors did not come cheap.

 

Most work came through casual or 'sweated' labor, like tailoring, boot making, and making matchboxes.

 

There was very little job security, and the work premises would more than likely be small, cramped, dusty rooms with little to no natural light.

 

Workhouses were another alternative, set up to offer food and shelter to the poorest of the community in return for hard, grueling labor in even worse conditions.

 

large portions of the population turned to drinking or drugs to cope with everyday life

 

Pubs and music halls were abundant in the East End, and booze was cheap, too, making it a viable means of escapism for many.

 

Crime rates spiraled and were unmanageable by London's police force in 1888. Petty crime like street theft was normality.

 

High levels of alcohol-related violence, gang crime, and even protection rackets were everywhere.

 

The high level of prostitution meant that vulnerable women were often forced to earn a living on the streets, leaving them easy targets for assault, rape, and even murder.

 

Police stations and the detectives at the helm lacked structure and organization, with many crimes being mislabelled, evidence going missing, or being tampered with was common. 

 

The maze of dingy alleyways and dark courtyards, each with multiple entrances and exit points, made the district even more difficult to police. There were even some parts of Whitechapel that police officers were afraid to enter, making them crime hotspots.

 

With that brief look into what it was like in Whitechapel, it is no wonder that Jack the Ripper could get away with his crimes. That being said, let's look at the crimes and victims.

 

Mary Ann Nichols:

 

Mary Ann Nichols led a brief life marked with hardships. Born to a London locksmith in 1845, she married Edward in 1864 and gave birth to five children before the marriage dissolved in 1880.

 

In explaining the roots of the separation, Nichols' father accused Edward of having an affair with the nurse who attended one of their children's births. For his part, Edward claimed that Nichols' drinking problem drove them to part ways.

 

After separating, the court required Edward to give his estranged wife five shillings per month, over 600 pounds today— a requirement he successfully challenged when he found out she was working as a prostitute.

 

Nichols then lived in and out of workhouses until her death. She tried living with her father, but they did not get along, so she continued to work as a prostitute to support herself. Though she once worked as a servant in a well-off family home, she quit because her employers did not drink.

 

On the night of her death, Nichols found herself surrounded by the same problems she'd had for most of her life: lack of money and a propensity to drink. On 31st August 1888, she left the pub where she was drinking and walked back to the boarding house where she planned to sleep for the night.

 

Nichols lacked the funds to pay for the entrance fee, so she went back out to earn it. But, according to her roommate, who saw her the night before someone killed her, she spent whatever money she did earn on alcohol.

 

That night Mary was wearing a bonnet that none of the other residents of the lodging house had seen her with before. Since she intended to resort to prostitution to raise the money for her bed, she felt this would be an irresistible draw to potential clients. So, she was escorted from the premises by the deputy lodging housekeeper. She laughed to him, "I'll soon get my doss money, see what a jolly bonnet I have now."

 

At 2.30 on the morning of 31st August, she met a friend named Emily Holland by the shop at the junction of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road.

 

Mary was very drunk, and she boasted to Emily that she had made her lodging money three times over but had spent it.

 

Concerned at Mary's drunken state, Emily tried to persuade her to come back to Wilmott's with her. Mary refused, and, telling Emily that she must get her lodging money somehow, she stumbled off along Whitechapel Road.

 

That was the last time that Mary Nichols was seen alive.

 

At 3.45 a.m., a woman's body was found with her skirt pulled up to her waist, lying next to a gateway in Buck's Row, Just off Whitechapel Road. This location was around a ten-minute walk from the corner where Mary met Emily Holland.

 

According to some newspaper reports, the woman's throat had been cut back to the spine, the wound being so savagely inflicted that it had almost severed her head from her body.

 

Within 45 minutes, she had been placed on a police ambulance, which was nothing more than a wooden hand cart. She had been taken to the mortuary of the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary.

 

Here, Inspector Spratling of the Metropolitan Police's J Division arrived to take down a description of the, at the time, unknown victim, and he made the horrific discovery that, in addition to the dreadful wound to the throat, a deep gash ran along the woman's abdomen - The killer had disemboweled her.

 

The funeral of Mary Ann Nichols took place amidst great secrecy to deter morbid sightseers on Thursday, 6th September 1888.

 

Strangely, the ruse used to get Mary Nichols's body to the undertaker's could be said to have included an element of foreshadowing.

 

Mary Nichols's body was brought out of the mortuary's back gate in Chapman's Court, from where it was taken to the undertaker's premises on Hanbury Street.

 

Two days later, the murderer struck again and murdered Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street.

 

Annie Chapman:

 

Annie Chapman didn't always lead a hard life. She lived for some time with her husband, John, a coachman, in West London.

 

However, after the couple had children, her life began to unravel: Her son, John, was born disabled, and her youngest daughter, Emily, died of meningitis. She and her husband both began to drink heavily and eventually separated in 1884.

 

After the separation, Chapman moved to Whitechapel to live with another man. While she still received ten shillings per week from her husband, she sometimes worked as a prostitute to supplement her income.

 

When her husband died from alcohol abuse, that money stopped. According to her friends, Chapman "seemed to have given away all together." Then, a week before she died, Chapman got into a fistfight with another woman over an unreturned bar of soap.

 

At 5 p.m. on Friday, 7th September, Annie met her friend, Amelia Palmer, in Dorset Street. Annie looked extremely unwell and complained of feeling "too ill to do anything."

 

Amelia met her again, ten minutes later, still standing in the same place, although Annie was trying desperately to rally her spirits. "It's no use giving way, I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings," were the last words Amelia Palmer heard Annie Chapman speak.

 

At 11.30 p.m. that night, Annie turned up at Crossingham's lodging house and asked Timothy Donovan if she could sit in the kitchen.

 

Since he hadn't seen her for a few days, Donovan asked her where she had been? "In the infirmary," she replied weakly. He allowed her to go to the kitchen, where she remained until Saturday morning, 8th September 1888.

 

At 1.45 a.m., Donovan sent John Evans, the lodging house's night watchman, to collect the fourpence for her bed from her. He found her a little drunk and eating potatoes in the kitchen. When he asked her for the money, she replied wearily, "I haven't got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary."

 

Annie then went to Donovan's office and implored him to allow her to stay a little longer. But instead, he told her that if she couldn't pay, she couldn't stay.

 

Annie turned to leave, but then, turning back, she told him to save the bed for her, adding, "I shall not be long before I am in. I shall soon be back, don't let the bed."

 

John Evans then escorted her from the premises and watched her head off along Dorset Street, observing later that she appeared to be slightly tipsy instead of drunk.

 

At 5.30 that morning, Elizabeth Long saw her talking with a man outside number 29 on Hanbury Street. Since there was nothing suspicious about the couple, she continued on her way, hardly taking any actual notice.

 

Thirty minutes later, at 6 a.m., John Davis, an elderly resident of number 29, found her horrifically mutilated body lying between the steps and the fence in the house's backyard.

 

Annie had been murdered, and her body mutilated. She had a cut across her neck from left to right and a gash in her abdomen made by the same blade.

 

Her intestines had been pulled out and draped over her shoulders, and her uterus had been removed. The doctor conducting the post-mortem was so appalled by the damage done to her corpse that he refused to use explicit detail during the inquest. Police determined that she died of asphyxiation and that the killer mutilated her after she died. 

 

She was later identified by her younger brother, Fountain Smith.

 

The severing of the throat and the mutilation of the corpse were similar to that of the injuries sustained by Mary Ann Nichols a week previously, leading investigators to believe the same assailant had murdered them.

 

At this point, the killings were known as 'The Whitechapel Murders."

 

Elizabeth Stride:

 

The Swedish-born domestic servant arrived in England in 1866, at which point she had already given birth to a stillborn baby and been treated for venereal diseases.

 

Stride married in 1869, but they soon split, and he ultimately died of tuberculosis in 1884. Stride would instead tell people that her husband and children (which they never actually had) were killed in an infamous 1878 Thames River steamship accident. She allegedly sustained an injury during that ordeal that explained her stutter.

 

With her husband gone and lacking a steady source of income, like so many of Jack the Ripper's victims, Stride split the remainder of her life living between work and lodging houses. 

 

On Saturday, 29th September 1888, she had spent the afternoon cleaning two rooms at the lodging house, for which the deputy keeper paid her sixpence, and, by 6.30 p.m., she was enjoying a drink in the Queen's Head pub at the junction of Fashion Street and Commercial Street.

 

Returning to the lodging house, she dressed, ready for a night out, and, at 7.30 p.m., she left the lodging house.

 

There were several sightings of her over the next five hours, and, by midnight, she had found her way to Berner Street, off Commercial Road.

 

At 12.45 a.m., on 30th September, Israel Schwartz saw her being attacked by a man in a gateway off Berner Street known as Dutfield's Yard. Schwarz, however, assumed he was witnessing a domestic argument, and he crossed over the road to avoid getting dragged into the quarrel.

 

Schwartz likely saw the early stages of her murder.

 

At 1 a.m. Louis Diemschutz, the Steward of a club that sided onto Dutfield's Yard, came down Berner Street with his pony and costermongers barrow and turned into the open gates of Dutfield's Yard. Immediately as he did so, the pony shied and pulled left. Diemschutz looked into the darkness and saw a dark form on the ground. He tried to lift it with his whip but couldn't. So, he jumped down and struck a match. It was wet and windy, and the match flickered for just a few seconds, but it was sufficient time for Diemschutz to see a woman lying on the ground.

 

He thought that the woman might be his wife and that she was drunk, so he went into the club to get some help in lifting her.

 

However, he found his wife in the kitchen, and so, taking a candle, he and several other members went out into the yard, and, by the candle's light, they could see a pool of blood gathering beneath the woman.

 

The crowd sent for the police, and a doctor was summoned, pronouncing the woman dead. It was noted that, as in the cases of the previous victims, the killer had cut the woman's throat. However, the rest of the body had not been mutilated. This led the police to deduce that Diemschutz had interrupted the killer when he turned into Dutfield's Yard.

 

The body was removed to the nearest mortuary - which still stands, albeit as a ruin, in the nearby churchyard of St George-in-the-East, and there she was identified as Elizabeth Stride.

 

On the night of her burial, a lady went to a police station in Cardiff, and made the bizarre claim that she had spoken with the spirit of Elizabeth Stride. In the course of a séance, the victim had identified her murderer.

 

Nothing ever came of this…obviously.

 

CATHERINE EDDOWES:

 

Unlike the other Jack the Ripper victims, Catherine Eddowes never married and spent her short life with multiple men.

 

At age 21, the daughter of a tin plate worker met Thomas Conway in her hometown of Wolverhampton. The couple lived together for 20 years and had three children together. But, according to her daughter, Annie, the pair split "entirely on account of her drinking habits."

 

Eddowes met John Kelly soon after. She then became known as Kate Kelly and stayed with John until her death.

 

According to her friends and family, while Catherine was not a prostitute, she was an alcoholic. The night of her murder — the same night Elizabeth Stride was killed — a policeman found Catherine lying drunk and passed out on Aldgate Street.

 

She was taken to Bishopsgate Police Station, locked in a cell to sober up. But instead, she promptly fell fast asleep.

 

By midnight, she was awake and was deemed sober enough for release by the City jailer PC George Hutt. Before leaving, she told him that her name was Mary Ann Kelly and gave her address as 6 Fashion Street.

 

Hutt escorted her to the door of the police station, and he told her to close it on her way out. "Alright. Goodnight old cock" was her reply as she headed out into the early morning.

 

At 1.35 a.m., three men - Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy, and Harry Harris saw her talking with a man at the Church Passage entrance into Mitre Square, located on the eastern fringe of the City of London.

 

Ten minutes later, at 1.45 a.m. Police Constable Alfred Watkins walked his beat into Mitre Square and discovered her horrifically mutilated body lying in the darkness of the Square's South West corner. The killer had disemboweled her. But, in addition, the killer had targeted her face, carving deep "V"s into her cheeks and eyelids. He had also removed and gone off with her uterus and left kidney. Finally, he had cut open her intestines to release fecal matter.

 

Dr. Frederick Brown, who performed the post-mortem examination of Eddowes' body, concluded that the killer must have some knowledge of anatomy if he could remove her organs in the dark.

Mary Jane Kelly:

 

She is the victim about whom we know the least.

 

We know virtually nothing about her life before she arrives in the East End of London. What we do know is based on what she chose to reveal about her past to those she knew, and the integrity of what she did tell is challenging to ascertain. Indeed, we don't even know that her name was Mary Kelly.

 

According to her boyfriend, Joseph Barnett, with whom she lived until shortly before her death, she had told him that she was born in Limerick, in Ireland, that her father's name was John Kelly, and that she had six or seven brothers and one sister.

 

The family moved to Wales when she was a child, and when she was sixteen, she met and married a collier named Davis or Davies. Unfortunately, her husband was killed in a mine explosion three years later, and Mary moved to Cardiff to live with a female cousin who introduced her to prostitution.

 

Mary moved to London around 1884, where she met a French woman who ran a high-class brothel in Knightsbridge, in which establishment Mary began working. She told Barnett that, during this period in her life, she had dressed well, had been driven about in a carriage, and, for a time, had led a lady's life.

 

She had, she said, made several visits to France at this time, and had accompanied a gentleman to Paris, but, not liking it there, she had returned to London after just two weeks.

 

She began using the continental version of her name and often referred to herself as Marie Jeannette Kelly.

 

After that, her life suffered a downward spiral, which saw her move to the East End of London, where she lodged with a Mrs. Buki in a side thoroughfare off Ratcliff Highway. Soon after her arrival, she enlisted her landlady's assistance in returning to the West End to retrieve a box that contained dresses of a costly description from the French lady.

 

Mary had now started drinking heavily, which led to conflict between her and Mrs. Buki. Relations between them became so strained that Mary moved out and went to lodge at the home of Mrs. Mary McCarthy at 1 Breezer's Hill Pennington Street, St. George-in-the-East.

 

By 1886 she had moved into Cooley's typical lodging house in Thrawl Street, and it was while living here that, on Good Friday, 6th April 1887, she met Joseph Barnett, who worked as a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market.

 

The two were soon living together, and, by 1888, they were renting a tiny room at 13 Miller's Court from John McCarthy, who owned a chandler's shop just outside Miller's Court on Dorset Street.

 

She and Barnett appear to have lived happily together until, in mid-1888, he lost his market job, and she returned to prostitution, which caused arguments between them. During one heated exchange, a pane in the window by the door of their room had been broken.

 

The precariousness of their finances had resulted in Mary falling behind with her rent, and by early November, she owed her landlord twenty-nine shillings in rent arrears.

 

On 30th October 1888, Joseph Barnett moved out, although he and Mary remained on friendly terms, and he would drop by to see her, the last time being at around 7.30 on the evening of Thursday 8th November, albeit he didn't stay long.

 

Several people claimed to have seen her during the next fourteen hours.

 

One of them was George Hutchinson, an unemployed laborer, who met her on Commercial Street at 2 a.m. on 9th November. She asked him if he would lend her sixpence, to which he replied that he couldn't as he'd spent all his money.

 

Replying that she must go and find some money, she continued along Commercial Street, where a man coming from the opposite direction tapped her on the shoulder and said something to her, at which point they both started laughing.

 

The man put his arm around Mary, and they started walking back along Commercial Street, passing Hutchinson, who was standing under the lamp by the Queen's Head pub at the junction of Fashion Street and Commercial Street.

 

Although the man had his head down with his hat over his eyes, Hutchinson stooped down and looked him in the face, at which point the man gave him what Hutchinson would later describe as a stern look.

 

Hutchinson followed them as they crossed into Dorset Street, and he watched them turn into Miller's Court. He waited outside the court for 45 minutes, by which time they hadn't reemerged, so he left the scene.

 

At around 4 a.m., two of Mary's neighbors heard a faint cry of "Murder," but because such cries were frequent in the area - often the result of a drunken brawl - they both ignored it.

 

At 10. Forty-five on the morning of the 9th November, her landlord, John McCarthy, sent his assistant, Thomas Bowyer, round to Mary's room, telling him to try and get some rent from her.

 

Bowyer marched into Miller's Court and banged on her door. There was no reply. He tried to open it but found it locked. He, therefore, went round to the broken window pane, reached in, pushed aside the shabby muslin curtain that covered it, and looked into the gloomy room.

 

Moments later, an ashen-faced Bowyer burst into McCarthy's shop on Dorset Street. "Guvnor," he stammered, "I knocked at the door and could not make anyone answer. I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood."

 

"Good God, you don't mean that," was McCarthy's reply, and the two men raced into Miller's Court, where McCarthy stooped down and looked through the broken pane of glass.

 

McCarthy would later recall the horror of the scene that greeted him. "The sight we saw I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more the work of a devil than of a man. I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may never see such a sight as this again."

 

Someone immediately sent for the police, and one of the first officers at the scene was Walter Dew, who, many years later, would recall the horror of what he saw through that window:- "On the bed was all that remained of the young woman. There was little left of her, not much more than a skeleton. Her face was terribly scarred and mutilated. All this was horrifying enough, but the mental picture of that sight which remains most vividly with me is the poor woman's eyes. They were wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror."

 

Possible victims:

 

Martha Tabram

 

On Tuesday 7th August, following a Monday bank holiday, prostitute Martha Tabram was murdered at about 2:30 a.m. Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel, shortly before 5:00 a.m. She had been stabbed 39 times about her neck, torso, and genitals with a short blade. With one possible exception, a right-handed individual had inflicted all her wounds.

 

Based on statements from a fellow prostitute and PC Thomas Barrett, who was patrolling nearby, Inspector Reid put soldiers at the Tower of London and Wellington Barracks on an identification parade, but without positive results. Police did not connect Tabram's murder with the earlier murder of Emma Smith, but they did connect her death with later murders.

 

Most experts do not connect Tabram's murder with the others attributed to the Ripper because she had been repeatedly stabbed, whereas later victims typically suffered slash wounds and abdominal mutilations. However, investigators cannot rule out a connection.

 

Rose Mylett

 

On Thursday 20th December 1888, a patrolling constable found the strangled body of 26-year-old prostitute Rose Mylett in Clarke's Yard, off Poplar High Street. Mylett (born Catherine Millett and known as Drunken Lizzie Davis and Fair Alice Downey) had lodged at 18 George Street, as had Emma Smith.

 

Four doctors who examined Mylett's body thought she had been murdered, but Robert Anderson thought she had accidentally hanged herself on the collar of her dress while in a drunken stupor. At Anderson's request, Dr. Bond examined Mylett's body, agreeing with Anderson. Commissioner Monro also suspected it was a suicide or natural death as there were no signs of a struggle. The coroner, Wynne Baxter, told the inquest jury that "there is no evidence to show that death was the result of violence." Nevertheless, the jury returned a verdict of "wilful murder against some person or persons unknown," and the case was added to the Whitechapel file.

 

Alice McKenzie:

 

Alice McKenzie was possibly a prostitute and was murdered at about 12:40 a.m. on Wednesday 17th July 1889 in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Like most of the previous murders, her left carotid artery was severed from left to right, and there were wounds on her abdomen. However, her injuries were not as deep as in previous murders, and the killer used a shorter blade. Commissioner Monro and one of the pathologists examining the body, Bond, believed this to be a Ripper murder. However, another of the pathologists, Phillips, and Robert Anderson, disagreed, as did Inspector Abberline. Later writers are also divided and either suggest that McKenzie was a Ripper victim or that the unknown murderer tried to make it look like a Ripper killing to deflect suspicion from himself. At the inquest, Coroner Baxter acknowledged both possibilities and concluded: "There is great similarity between this and the other class of cases, which have happened in this neighbourhood, and if the same person has not committed this crime, it is clearly an imitation of the other cases."

 

Pinchin Street torso:

 

A woman's torso was found at 5:15 a.m. on Tuesday 10th September 1889 under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. Extensive bruising about the victim's back, hip, and arm indicated that the killer had severely beaten her shortly before her death, which occurred approximately one day before discovering her torso. The victim's abdomen was also extensively mutilated in a manner reminiscent of the Ripper, although her genitals had not been wounded. The dismembered sections of the body are believed to have been transported to the railway arch, hidden under an old chemise. The age of the victim was estimated at 30–40 years. Despite a search of the area, no other sections of her body were ever found, and neither the victim nor the culprit were ever identified.

 

Chief Inspector Swanson and Commissioner Monro noted that blood within the torso indicated that death was not from hemorrhage or cutting of the throat. The pathologists, however, pointed out that the general bloodlessness of the tissues and vessels told that bleeding was the cause of death. Newspaper speculation that the body belonged to Lydia Hart, who had disappeared, was refuted after she was found recovering in hospital after "a bit of a spree." Another claim that the victim was a missing girl called Emily Barker was also refuted, as the torso was from an older and taller woman.

 

Swanson did not consider this a Ripper case and instead suggested a link to the Thames Torso Murders in Rainham and Chelsea and the "Whitehall Mystery". Monro agreed with Swanson's assessment. These three murders and the Pinchin Street case are suggested to be the work of a serial killer, nicknamed the "Torso killer," who could either be the same person as "Jack the Ripper" or a separate killer of uncertain connection. Links between these and three further murders—the "Battersea Mystery" of 1873 and 1874, two women were found dismembered, and the 1884 "Tottenham Court Road Mystery"—have also been postulated. Experts on the murders—colloquially known as "Ripperologists"—such as Stewart Evans, Keith Skinner, Martin Fido, and Donald Rumbelow, discount any connection between the torso and Ripper killings based on their different modi operandi.

 

Monro was replaced as Commissioner by Sir Edward Bradford on 21st June 1890, after a disagreement with Home Secretary Henry Matthews over police pensions.

 

Frances Coles:

 

The last murders in the Whitechapel file were committed on Friday 13th February 1891, when prostitute Frances Coles was murdered under a railway arch in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. Her body was found only moments after the attack at 2:15 a.m. by PC Ernest Thompson, who later stated he heard retreating footsteps in the distance. As contemporary police practices dictated, Thompson remained at the scene.

 

Coles was lying beneath a passageway under a railway arch between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street. She was still alive but died before medical help could arrive. Minor wounds on the back of her head suggest that she was thrown violently to the ground before her throat was cut at least twice, from left to right and then back again. Otherwise, there were no mutilations to the body, leading some to believe Thompson had disturbed her assailant. Superintendent Arnold and Inspector Reid arrived soon afterward from the nearby Leman Street police station, and Chief Inspectors Donald Swanson and Henry Moore, who had been involved in the previous murder investigations, arrived by 5 a.m.

 

A man named James Sadler, who had earlier been seen with Coles, was arrested by the police and charged with her murder. A high-profile investigation by Swanson and Moore into Sadler's history and his whereabouts at the previous Whitechapel murders indicates that the police may have suspected him of being the Ripper. However, Sadler was released on 3rd March for lack of evidence.

 

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