Having tramped his usual beat of Duke Street, St James’s Square, King Street, Greenchurch Place, Leadenhall Street, Mitre Street and back to the Square, Watkins flashed the bull’s eye lantern on his belt into the corners and saw Kate Eddowes lying on her back with her clothes thrown up. Her throat was cut and her stomach ripped open. Without touching the body, Watkins dashed across the Square to Kearley and Tongue’s, the door of which was ajar and called to the watchman, George Morris, who was sweeping the steps inside. ‘For God’s sake, mate, come to my assistance,’ a shaken Watkins blurted. ‘Here is another woman cut to pieces.’

The City Police, unlike their Metropolitan counterparts, carried no whistles, but Morris did. Having checked the body with Watkins, the nightwatchman ran along Mitre Street into Aldgate, blowing his own whistle. He met Constables 814 James Holland and 964 James Harvey on their respective beats adjacent to Watkins and Holland ran for a doctor. The nearest was George Sequeira at 34 Jewry Street and Holland knocked him up at 1.55.

That was the time when Inspector Edward Collard, on duty at Bishopsgate, got the call. He telegraphed to headquarters and sent a runner to the City’s Police Surgeon, Dr Frederick Brown, who wrote the fullest medical notes of any of Robert Mann’s victims, as we shall see. Collard reached Mitre Square at three minutes past two. Sequeira was already there and handed to Collard the debris of the murder – black boot buttons, a thimble and a mustard tin containing pawn tickets.

Sequeira noted that the corpse lay in the darkest corner of the Square, but that there was enough light for the killer to carry out his mutilations. From the state of the body he believed the woman had died no more than a quarter of an hour before he arrived.

Dr Brown’s sketch of what he saw has survived and backs up his crime scene description. The woman who had been Kate Eddowes lay on her back, her head turned to her left. The arms had flopped to her side, with palms upwards and fingers bent. Her bonnet was underneath her head and the upper part of her dress had been torn open. The body, which was still warm, had been subjected to appalling mutilations. The throat was cut across and the intestines drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder. Part of this, about two feet long, had been placed between the body and the left arm, Brown thought deliberately. The face was gashed and bloody and the right ear almost cut off. Brown ordered the body to be taken to the mortuary.

We have already seen that Robert Mann killed Kate Eddowes out of his killing zone. That meant that this time there would be no prolongation of the totem phase. He could not gaze in admiration at his handiwork, because the job of mortuary keeper at the Golden Lane mortuary fell to his counterpart, a Mr Davis.

While the police carried out house-to-house enquiries in and around Mitre Square, which, as usual, yielded nothing, there was more bustle of activity further east. Plain-clothes man Sergeant Robert Outram was in conversation with his colleagues Constables Daniel Halse and Edward Marriot at the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street when they heard Morris’s whistle. They reached the Square and then scattered in search of the killer. It was Halse who, unknowingly, was on Robert Mann’s trail.

The mortuary keeper’s frenzy in Mitre Square meant that he had been less careful than usual. He had blood and excrement on his hands and a uterus and a kidney in his pocket, along with a knife. He must have known he would not have long before the next police patrol arrived, so he had sliced off a piece of the dead woman’s apron and had taken it with him, wiping his hands as he went. He got to the standpipe along Goulston Street, near the Wentworth Model Dwellings, Number 108–119, and rinsed his hands and perhaps the knife there, throwing the bloody rag down before moving on.

The risk he took now was huge. He was carrying parts of a woman’s body and a murder weapon and he was trudging through the nightmare of what Ripperologists call the ‘double event’. Robert Mann was at last on his way home, the Ripper going back to his lair. He would have been relatively calm by now, his lust sated, at least for a while. He must have become aware of increased activity, police patrols everywhere, people clustering at street corners and outside pubs, rumours flying in the blood-spattered night. We cannot be sure of times, but it was probably somewhere around 2.30 that Mann reached the standpipe. Where he had been in the forty-five minutes since he killed Kate is unknown. Perhaps he was hiding in the shadows, ducking police patrols, blending with the nightly flotsam of the East End. Perhaps the timings given by Constable 254A Alfred Long were incorrect.

Long testified at Kate’s inquest that when he passed the Goulston Street standpipe at 2.20, there was no sign of the apron. On his return at 2.55 it was there and chalked on the black tiles of an entrance leading to a staircase in Wentworth buildings the infamous words ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’

More ink has been wasted on this irrelevance than on any other single ‘clue’ in the Ripper case. Constable Halse, who saw it too, believed the writing was fresh, but his version was worded slightly differently, according to the notes he made at the time – ‘The Juwes are not the men who will be blamed for nothing.’ Either way, the double negative has caused huge confusion over the years. Convinced that this had a bearing on the Whitechapel murders, the Metropolitan authorities, ultimately Sir Charles Warren himself, ordered the writing removed, especially as, on Sunday morning, the Jewish stallholders were already setting up for their street trading in what was still called Petticoat Lane, the whole area of Wentworth and Middlesex Streets. There is little doubt that Warren’s decision was a sensible one in the sense that race relations were a problem and the recent murders had added to the tension, but it should have been photographed first. In the event, I believe the ‘Goulson Street Grafitto’ to have no more import than John Richardson’s leather apron in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. Urban crime scenes – even rural ones – have items in the vicinity which are totally unconnected with the crime. Contrary to popular fiction and the conspiracy theories so beloved by Ripperologists, the most successful serial killers do not advertise, do not stand out. They are merely faces in the crowd and that is why they are so difficult to catch.

While Dr Brown prepared for the post mortem he would conduct on the dead woman, police enquiries focused on her identity. The pawn tickets should have been clinchers, but both of them were for false names. One was marked Emily Birrell, 52 White’s Row and the other Jane Kelly, 6 Dorset Street. Certainly Joseph Jones, the pawnbroker of 31 Church Street, remembered the woman who had pledged the boots two days earlier, but it was the tattooed initials on the dead woman’s left forearm that brought proof. ‘T C’ stood for Thomas Conway. It was under the name of Conway that Kate had been admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary in June 1887 with a burnt foot. At that time she had given her address as Flower and Dean Street. Once again, the Infirmary; once again, a possible contact with Robert Mann.

John Kelly, coming from Cooney’s doss in Flower and Dean, viewed the body in the mortuary and identified the deceased from the TC initials. He had heard that Kate Conway, as she sometimes called herself, had been taken in drunk to Bishopsgate and so had not been unduly alarmed when she had failed to make their four o’clock rendezvous in Houndsditch. The rest of it was pieced together by weeping relatives at the inquest, by dosshouse deputies and by dedicated teams of Ripperologists over the years, to the extent that the theme of the 2007 Ripper Conference was Kate Eddowes.

She was born on 14 April 1842, when Robert Mann was a little boy still in the bosom of his Whitechapel family, to George and Catherine Eddowes of Wolverhampton. When she was two the family moved to Bermondsey and on the death of her mother when Catherine junior was thirteen, the family was scattered, Catherine returning to an aunt in Wolverhampton. Unhappy, the girl ran away to Birmingham to live with an uncle, Thomas Eddowes. At some point in her late teens or early twenties, Kate met an Irishman, Thomas Conway, an ex-private in the 18th Foot (Royal Irish) and they lived together in Wolverhampton from about 1864.

The common-law union produced three children and the pair made a precarious living selling chapbooks that Conway may have written himself. It is not known when the ‘Conways’ came to London, but they were there by 1881 when the relationship ended. It was then that Kate met John Kelly in one of the Flower and Dean dosses and although they had the occasional tiff, were by and large together until the day she died. Kate’s three sisters, one of whom, Eliza Gold, gave a tearful character reference at her inquest, all lived in London and her daughter, Annie Phillips, admitted that when she (Annie) moved last, she did not tell her mother because of Kate’s habit of scrounging money off her.

The problem with accuracy in the backgrounds of women of the Abyss is not helped by friends’ and relatives’ testimony. We shall see a classic example of this later in the inquest on Liz Stride, but there are examples of it in the Eddowes’ inquest too. John Kelly swore Kate did not go out ‘for any immoral purpose’ and that, though occasionally drunk, never drank to excess. Dr Brown’s post mortem would prove him wrong on the second count and her murder by Robert Mann on the first. Frederick Williamson, the deputy at Cooney’s, believed that Kate earned her money by hawking and charring. She was a jolly woman, always singing. But she wasn’t when Dr Brown saw her on the slab in the Golden Lane mortuary.

We cannot help noticing that the inquest on Kate Eddowes was in every way superior to those presided over by Coroner Baxter in the Metropolitan district. To begin with the Coroner’s Court was next to the mortuary, a rather imposing building and rather than allowing Robert Mann virtually a free hand, as at Eagle Place, mortuary-keeper Davis was supervised as he stripped the body and laid it out, both by police and a medical team. ‘Team’ is the operative word here because Brown was observed at work in the mortuary by Dr Sequeira and by George Phillips who of course had handled the post mortems on Mann’s earlier victims. Sedgwick Saunders analyzed the dead woman’s stomach contents. This doubling up of medical expertise was deemed desirable by the practice of the day because it made mistakes less likely. What it also did, however, was to increase the areas of dissension and disagreement with which defence counsel at any subsequent trial could have had a field day.

With Brown working at half past two that Sunday afternoon, Kate’s body was showing marked signs of rigor mortis. Her face was badly mutilated, with a gash over the bridge of the nose that extended to the cheek and cut through to the jaw bone. The tip of the nose had been removed and a cut had split the upper lip. There was a triangular flap cut into each cheek and the eyelids had been nicked vertically. An ear fell off as Davis removed her clothing.

Kate’s throat had been cut with a sharp, pointed knife, with a gash 6 or 7 inches wide. The larynx was severed below the vocal cord so that she would have been unable to cry out in Mitre Square. The jugular vein was opened and there was a hole in the left carotid artery. Death would have been caused by haemorrhage and would have been virtually instantaneous.

The post-mortem mutilations to the body were extensive. The front walls of the abdomen were laid open from breastbone to groin, with an upward, ripping motion. The liver had been stabbed and slit. The killer had cut in a jagged line, changing direction at the navel and slicing to the right of the vagina and rectum. The groin had been stabbed to a depth of one inch and there was a 3-inch cut on the perineum. The left thigh was also cut, as was the right, the muscles here sliced right through. Because all these hideous wounds had been made after death, the amount of blood on the killer would not have been great. He knelt or crouched on the right side of the fallen woman to carry out the mutilations.

Kate’s stomach contents were examined by Sedgwick Saunders, the City analyst. He was particularly looking for traces of poison which might explain why Kate was so easily overpowered, but found none. Part of her colon had been cut away and the left kidney had been removed, leaving the renal artery in place. ‘I should say,’ Brown wrote, ‘that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it.’ While the vagina and cervix were uninjured, the womb itself had been taken away.

In an attempt, perhaps the first by a medical man, to decide on a possible motive for this butchery, Brown believed that the perpetrator had ‘considerable knowledge of the positions of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them … It required a great deal of medical knowledge’. Unlike Wynne Baxter, who thought that Annie Chapman’s uterus may have been removed for financial gain, Brown knew that the ‘parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose’, and again admits the Victorian lack of understanding of serial killer motivation – ‘I cannot assign any reason for the parts being taken away.’ But then Brown led the world in the wrong direction by his statement, ‘Such a knowledge might be possessed by someone in the habit of cutting up animals.’

What is impressive about Brown is that he noted that ‘there were no indications of connexion’. In other words, although perhaps his own reasoning would not have taken him this far, the Whitechapel murders are not directly sex-related. Robert Mann’s psychology was far more complicated than this.

Dr Sequeira, who observed the post mortem, disagreed with Brown – ‘I think that the murderer had no design on any particular organ of the body. He was not possessed of any great anatomical skill.’ Allowing for the fact that Sequeira’s exact meaning may have been that he thought that the killer had a certain anatomical skill, the semantics in doctors’ responses to coroners’ questions are important. To them, ‘anatomical knowledge’ was not the same as ‘medical skill’. The medical fraternity, then as now, was a close-knit community, where backs were scratched and operating-room errors covered up. The slur of the ‘mad doctor’ was utterly rejected by medical practitioners; no one who had taken the Hippocratic oath could slaughter women in the streets. And in trying to protect their own, doctors like Sequeira were also protecting Robert Mann.

Three photographs of Kate Eddowes were taken in the Golden Lane mortuary. In the one of poorest quality, she is lying naked in her coffin, the gash clearly visible in her throat. In the others, she has been propped against a wall and the photograph shows all the injuries having been stitched up roughly by Brown. The neatest stitches, extending from the navel to the throat, are Brown’s closure after his post-mortem procedures. Kate’s face is an appalling mess. And no one has combed her hair.

The ‘comedy of errors’ that was Liz Stride’s inquest opened on Monday 1 October and continued until the 5th. Her body had been taken to the mortuary at St George’s-in-the-East (a building which still stands, now in ruins) and the indefatigable Wynne Baxter held forth at the Vestry Hall in Cable Street. There were twenty-four jurymen and they all trooped through the mortuary to gawp at Liz’s corpse. The only existing photograph shows her wild, uncombed hair and clear damage to her mouth. Bearing in mind that her other nicknames were Hippy-Lip Annie and Mother Gum, the post-mortem findings on her intact palette make no sense. The various witnesses, passers-by, police and doctors, gave the testimony we have already heard, but two people caused the proceedings to turn into farce.

It had not yet been fully established who the dead woman was. After all, she had only been in the mortuary for forty-eight hours and a tearful Mary Malcolm appeared to tell the court that the deceased was her sister, Elizabeth Watts. Mary was a tailor’s wife, living in Holborn and told the tragic tale of her sister, who had married the son of a wine merchant from Bath, but had been unfaithful to him. She turned to drink and frequented low lodging houses. On the night of the ‘double-event’, Mary was in bed and about twenty past one felt pressure on her breast and three distinct kisses – a phantasm of the dying. Mary had visited the mortuary and identified Elizabeth from an old snake bite on her leg. So dissolute was Mary’s sister that she once left one of her children as a baby naked on her doorstep. She was constantly asking for hand-outs.

On Tuesday the 5th an outraged Elizabeth Watts, now Stokes, having remarried, was in court to refute furiously everything that Mary Malcolm had said about her. They had not seen each other for years and she was clearly very put out that her sister should slander her. Since all the other testimony, of dosshouse deputies and officials of the Swedish church who kept careful records, proved that Elizabeth Stride lay dead in St George’s mortuary, we can only wonder at Mary Malcolm’s testimony. Was she merely an attention-seeker, drawn out by the bizarre events of the Autumn of Terror, longing for some kind of limelight, however brief? Whatever the motives, the Mary Malcolms of this world merely add to the litany of nonsense that dogs the Whitechapel murders.

Michael Kidney was another example. Whether or not he was the assailant who had pushed Liz Stride to the ground outside Dutfield’s Yard, his behaviour in court was certainly odd. On Monday (he deposed on Wednesday) he had gone to Leman Street Police Station with information that he had on the killer. He wanted to catch the man himself, however, and needed a ‘young, strange [i.e. unknown to Whitechapel] detective’ to get the job done. Inspector Reid reminded the court that Kidney was drunk at Leman Street and the coroner reminded Kidney that he could not go about hiring policemen for his own amusement. Even at this stage, Kidney refused to pass any information on.

In the more relevant and rational world of medical evidence, George Phillips also testified on the Wednesday. He had performed the post mortem two days earlier and noted the mortuary temperature – 55°. He clearly carried out a full necropsy, referring to the skull, brain, heart and stomach, even though none of these had been damaged. The stomach contained partly digested food, including cheese and potatoes.

Phillips was recalled the next day and had been asked to re-examine the body. This was largely in response to another Mary Malcolm-like busybody whose evidence has tainted Ripper enquiries for a century and a quarter. Matthew Packer was not called to the inquest but was an old grocer living at 44 Berner Street, two houses away from the Dutfield’s Yard entrance and he gave evidence to J H Batchelor and Mr Grand, private detectives of the Strand, who had been employed by both the Evening News and the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. All three men went to Scotland Yard and spoke personally to Charles Warren, whose handwritten notes of Packer’s testimony still survive. The grocer explained that he had sold grapes to a woman answering Liz Stride’s description and described the man she was with. Since the matter of rewards was now being hotly discussed (the City of London offered one in the case of Kate Eddowes) and since Grand, if not Batchelor, had a long list of aliases and shady dealings, we can ignore Packer’s testimony altogether. All the details, such as the flower that Liz wore, he could have gleaned from the Press that week and Packer often contradicted himself. The last word, though, was Phillips’s – ‘Neither on the hands or about the body of the deceased did I find grapes, or connection with them. I am convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either the skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’

The cases of Mary Malcolm, Michael Kidney, Matthew Packer and Messrs Grand and Batchelor, fascinating though they are as glimpses of the frailties of human nature, should be thrown into the Ripper shredder once and for all.