The Working Lads’ Institute, 285 Whitechapel Road, had been opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales three years before. The Alexandra Room, named after the Princess, was a large reading room with tall windows overlooking the street and, because Whitechapel had no coroner’s court of its own, it had been selected by Mr. Wynne Baxter, the coroner for the Southern division of East Middlesex, as a suitable place in which to hear inquests. Under normal circumstances the room was easily large enough to accommodate the jury and officers of the court as well as members of the public and the three or four local reporters that might normally be expected to attend an inquest. That was certainly the case on 9th August. The East London Advertiser commented that ‘there was scarcely any one present except the authorities and those connected with the case, the public being conspicuous by their absence’.
Baxter himself was away, taking a summer cruise through the fjords of Scandinavia, so the inquest was conducted by his deputy, Mr. George Collier57. Mr. Collier was a very different character from his bluff and forthright senior colleague. During the entire proceedings he was ‘painfully quiet’ according to the Advertiser. Although reports of the first day of the inquest appeared in at least 14 local and national newspapers in the days that followed it is apparent that most of them are syndicated copies of the same second-hand account. Almost all, including the nationals such as The Times, The Manchester Guardian, The People and The Daily News, reported the police surgeon’s name as ‘Keleene’ (it was actually ‘Killeen’), indicating that they used the same source for their stories. Only two local papers, the East London Advertiser and the East London Observer, contain accounts of the inquest that were obviously written by reporters who were actually present. Both of them paint vivid and colourful accounts of the scene, describing the dress and the voices of the witnesses in detail. Of the two, the report in the Advertiser bears most resemblance to the later journalistic style of Francis Craig. There is his typical use of quotation marks to indicate that he is making a joke as in his description of the jury as ‘20 good and true men of this county’. When giving the cause of death both the Advertiser and the Observer used the American spelling ‘hemorrhage’, and in a later account in the Advertiser of Polly Nichols’s funeral the reporter spells the word ‘ruse’ as ‘rouse’, which although pronounced to rhyme with ‘blues’, is an American spelling still in use today58. It is slender evidence that Francis was the Advertiser’s correspondent but he was resident in the district served by both the Advertiser and the Observer and it is highly likely that he was writing for one or other of them. On balance the Advertiser seems the more likely.
On the first day of the inquest the identity of the victim had not been established although several people had come forward and given conflicting names. The first witnesses were people who lived in George Yard Buildings, on the staircase of which the body had been discovered. The building was one of a series of ‘model dwellings’, community housing put up by public and private subscription to house the working poor of London and the major cities of Britain in the 19th century. The apartments all shared semi-open communal staircases which served as convenient places for the destitute to sleep and for prostitutes to take their clients since the meagre gas lighting was extinguished at 11pm.
Monday 6th August was a bank holiday and a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney – who had been out celebrating – had come in a little before 2am. They had not noticed anything on the stairs although, as Mrs. Mahoney pointed out, it was so dark that they might easily have missed seeing a body unless they had tripped over it. Alfred Crow, a cab driver, was the next witness. He had noticed a body lying on the staircase when he returned home at 3.30am but took no notice as he was used to seeing vagrants sleeping there. An hour and a quarter later John Reeves, a dock labourer, descended the stairs on his way to work. By that time it was light and he saw the body of a woman, her skirts pulled up over her head, lying in a pool of blood. He did not stop to look further but hurried off to find a policeman.
Dr. Timothy Killeen, the police surgeon, arrived at the scene at 5.30am and his evidence was listened to in shocked silence by the small audience in the Alexandra Room. The woman, who Dr. Killeen estimated to be about 36 (she was actually 40)59, had been slaughtered by 39 separate stab wounds to the stomach, lower abdomen and chest. Following the post-mortem examination that he conducted later the same day, he ascertained that the abdominal wounds, several of which had pierced the stomach, liver and spleen, had all been inflicted by a sharp, short-bladed knife like a penknife but a large chest wound which had penetrated the sternum and just nicked the heart could only have been done with a strong, rigid instrument such as a sword bayonet or a dagger. The cause of death, he stated, was haemorrhage from the various stab wounds.
The coroner listened gravely to Dr. Killeen’s evidence and then addressed the jury. Since there was doubt about the woman’s identity he was going to adjourn the inquest for a fortnight. He added that the man who could have inflicted 39 wounds on a poor defenceless woman must have been a perfect savage.
When Francis left the Working Lads’ Institute that day an idea seems to have taken root in his mind. Before the inquest resumed on 23rd August he had visited a solicitor – exactly who is not known since he had dismissed Arthur Ivens in May of the previous year – sworn an affidavit and on Monday 20th, presented it in person to the High Court of Justice: Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, in the Strand. It sought leave to strike out Paragraph 5 of his petition and to make certain other alterations. Permission was duly granted by the Registrar, Mr. D.H. Owen, and the following day Francis returned to file the amended document and the supporting affidavit60.
It was an extraordinary thing to do. The petition had in effect lain dormant since being filed in March two years before, as all attempts to serve it on Elizabeth had failed because of her disappearance. Why had Francis suddenly gone to the trouble and the significant expense of swearing an affidavit and making radical changes to a document that he had probably not given much thought to for more than two years? To have gone to that degree of inconvenience and expense at any time would have been odd but for a hard-up newspaper man to have taken several days off right in the middle of the most sensational murder investigation of the time seems almost incomprehensible.
The clue lies in Paragraph 5. It is the one in which he names Mrs. McLeod [sic] as the owner and proprietor of the various brothels in the Kings Cross and Holloway districts in which Elizabeth was alleged to have entertained her clients, including Harry MacBain [sic]. Why would Francis suddenly have decided to spare the reputation of a woman who he held responsible for Elizabeth’s behaviour and ultimate disappearance? He could not have been worried by the threat of her bringing a suit for libel since the divorce petition was protected by legal privilege and, in any case, since it had not yet been made public, she would have had no way of knowing that she had been named in it. It seems much more likely that Francis wanted something from her.
That something was the whereabouts of his wife.
The time and money that he had spent using private detectives to track down Elizabeth after she had left him in March or April 1885 had alerted him to Ellen Macleod’s activities and he may even have met her in his fruitless efforts to get Elizabeth to return to the marital home. He undoubtedly knew how and where to get in touch with her and it seems that at some time between 21stAugust and the night of the first Ripper murder ten days later he visited Ellen Macleod and made her an offer. In return for her telling him where to find Elizabeth he would strike her name and the addresses of her brothels from the divorce petition. Should he succeed in finding her and having the petition served, in due course when the case came to court Ellen Macleod would not have to suffer the indignity of having her name made public.
It probably seemed like a reasonable offer to Ellen. As far as she knew, Francis simply wanted to divorce his errant wife and he needed to know her address for that reason. Did she in fact know it? Mary Jane Kelly was known to have received letters from time to time and presumably she sent some also. She had also visited her ex-employer in the West End in the company of ‘Mrs Buki’ to retrieve her French gowns so it seems possible, if she and Elizabeth were one and the same, that the two women had kept in contact. It may even have been the case that Elizabeth used Ellen Macleod as the conduit between herself and her own family.
Whether the changes to the petition were actually made remains in some doubt. The copy that is held by The National Archives bears a few minor initialled corrections but they look as if they were made when the document was first drawn up in March 188661. In that document Paragraph 5 remains resolutely un-struck out. The affidavit, an almost identical document, has crosses besides Paragraphs 5 to 9 – those in which Ellen and her premises are named – but they too have not actually been struck out. Maybe he made the changes in his own copies and that was enough for Ellen. She was satisfied and Francis, apparently, went away with what he wanted.
The stage was now set for the next act.