Robert Mann struck again thirty-three weeks after killing Mary Kelly in 13 Miller’s Court. It was the longest gap between his killings but after the extent of the mutilations carried out on Kelly, this is hardly surprising. There may have been another reason for the time lag, however, and this will be discussed later.
Such was the hysteria in the East End – indeed all over London – that any new outrage was likely to be attributed to Jack, and the extraordinary police presence by November underlined the seriousness of the situation. Apart from the uniformed patrols which were so important as a deterrent, the number of plain-clothes officers on patrol rose from twenty-seven in September (after the murder of Annie Chapman) to 143 after the discovery of Mary Kelly’s body. By the January of 1889, they were cut to 102 and in the next month to forty-seven. By March they had stopped altogether.
The first attack that was wrongly attributed to Jack by some newspapers took place only eleven days after Mary Kelly’s murder. Annie Farmer was a forty-year-old prostitute who usually dossed at Satchell’s, No 19 George Street. It was here she took a client on the night of 20 November and paid for a double bed. As we have seen in a previous chapter, attitudes of lodging-house keepers varied enormously. Some knew their customers very well, others barely at all. Whoever was overseeing Satchell’s that night turned a blind eye to the fumblings in the narrow wooden box-bed until there was an ear-piercing scream and Annie Farmer staggered into the kitchen with blood seeping from a throat wound. Her client was already on his toes, still fully clothed and he dashed off into Thrawl Street.
The description of the man given to police is yet another in the long list of men who were not Jack. He was about thirty-six years old, with a dark complexion and a black moustache, stood 5 feet 6 inches tall and wore a shabby suit and a round black hat.
The client was real enough, but the attack probably was not. ‘Married’ quarters in lodging-houses usually afforded some privacy, so we only have Annie Farmer’s word for what happened. Her throat wound was very superficial and had been carried out with a dull-edged knife. Annie admitted to having coins in her mouth and the police realized that this was a case, actually very common, of a prostitute robbing her client. By slicing her throat and screaming ‘murder’ she hoped to keep the cash and get rid of its owner in one fell swoop. It almost worked.
It was a month later that a much more serious attack took place and this time, it led to murder. Rose Mylett, also called Catherine, ‘Drunken Lizzie’ Davis and ‘Fair Alice’ Downey was twenty-six when she died in the early hours of Thursday 20 November. At her inquest, her mother filled in the sketchy details we have heard before on women of the Abyss. Rose had been married briefly to an upholsterer named Davis and gave birth to a son, probably in 1881.1 The boy was at school in Sutton, South London, when his mother died.
Rose had a number of different addresses. Sometimes she lived in Limehouse or Poplar; sometimes at 18 George Street, just across the road from Satchell’s, making her a neighbour of Annie Farmer. Her most sinister neighbour, however, was Robert Mann, because sometimes she stayed with her mother in Pelham Street, off Baker’s Row, in the shadow of the Workhouse Infirmary.
On the night she died, Rose was seen talking to two sailors in Poplar High Street, near Clarke’s Yard. This was about 7.55 pm and the witness was Charles Ptolomay, who was walking along England Row on his way to work as a night attendant at another infirmary, that of the Poplar Union Workhouse. She seemed fully sober, but Ptolomay heard her shout ‘No, no, no!’ to the two men. At her inquest, Ptolomay described the shorter of the two men, who seemed to be in earnest conversation with Rose, as about 5 feet 7 inches. His friend was much taller, perhaps 5 feet 11 and looked like a ‘Yankee’. Presumably the sailors were in uniform and locals like Ptolomay would have seen all the uniforms of the world sailing into the busiest docks on earth.
Rose may have been haggling over a price or perhaps she was not prepared to have a threesome on what was probably a cold night.
She was seen alive once more, outside the George pub in Commercial Road, by Alice Graves, who clearly knew her. Rose seemed to be drunk, but Alice could not provide a better description of the two men she was with other than the fact that they were sailors.
The next time a passer-by saw her, it was Constable Robert Goulding patrolling his usual beat through Clarke’s Yard. By now it was 4.15 am and Goulding’s bulls-eye shone on what appeared to be a bundle of rags in a corner. At first, the constable concluded that here was another Unfortunate, someone ‘carrying the banner’ who had frozen to death or died of malnutrition. Rose lay on her left side, her body still warm and there was no sign of injury or assault, her clothes were in place and, it would be revealed later, 1 shilling and 2 pence in her pocket.
Death was certified by Dr Harris, the assistant to Dr Matthew Bromfield, the Police Surgeon of K Division who lived at 171 East India Dock Road. Inevitably, it was his post-mortem report that was presented at the inquest:
‘Blood was oozing from the nostrils,’ Bromfield wrote, ‘and there was a slight abrasion on the right side of the face… On the neck there was a mark which had evidently been caused by cord drawn tightly round the neck, from the spine to the left ear… There were also impressions of the thumbs and middle and index fingers of some person plainly visible on each side of the neck. There were no injuries to the arms or legs. The brain was gorged with an almost black fluid blood. The stomach was full of meat and potatoes which had only recently been eaten. Death was due to strangulation. Deceased could not have done it herself …’
This extraordinary finding opened a can of worms. Sir Robert Anderson, anxious to prove that this was suicide, not yet another probably unsolvable murder that would damage his police force, took the unusual step of visiting the Poplar mortuary to examine the corpse himself. In rapid succession, while Bromfield and Harris were carrying out the post mortem, Dr Alexander McKellar, the Met’s surgeon-in-chief and Dr Hebbert, assistant Police Surgeon of A Division both turned up to lend their considerable medical weight.
The arguments over whether Rose was murdered or committed suicide raged on throughout the January of 1889. Anderson clearly did not trust Bromfield’s judgement. He had found no traces of alcohol in the dead woman’s stomach, even though Alice Graves had sworn she’d seen Rose drunk. And medically, there was no sign of a birth, despite Rose’s mother’s testimony. The mark on the dead woman’s neck was very faint and Anderson had observed for himself at the crime scene that there was no sign of a ligature or of a struggle. He put pressure on Dr Thomas Bond, the usually reliable ex-Police Surgeon of A Division and the man abruptly changed his mind – ‘death was due to strangulation; it was produced accidentally and not by homicidal violence’. In other words, Rose had choked in a drunken stupor and strangled herself with the stiff collar of her dress.
The coroner, Wynne Baxter, was furious with all this police and medical interference, having clashed with the Met as we have seen in previous chapters. Accordingly, he made sure that the jury returned a verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’.
The whole thing was very unsatisfactory, but what was ludicrous was the fact that Rose Mylett was officially logged as an alleged Ripper victim. Laying aside the rather implausible accident or even suicide suggestion, nothing about Rose’s death fits the pattern of the earlier killings. There was no use of a knife, no mutilation, not even disturbance of clothing. The most plausible theory remains that one or other of the sailors lost his temper with Rose and strangled her. This was not a sex crime in the accepted sense and it certainly was not Ripper-related. This was just part and parcel of the endemic violence of the East End. Only the New York World laid the next outrage at Jack’s door, removed from the scene as the paper inevitably was by some 3,000 miles.
What had Robert Mann been doing in the weeks since he butchered Mary Kelly? As after all the other killings, he would have experienced acute depression. Perhaps after Kelly, with its unparalleled violence, the depression was worse than ever. As Dr Joel Norris puts it:
No real power is achieved and the killer is left feeling as empty, forlorn and damned as he had throughout the entirety of his life.2
In this mood, Mann may have contemplated giving himself up to the police. He might have considered writing a confessional letter such as those that were now flooding in to various newspapers and police stations. One written in block capitals and posted to Leman Street Police Station was sent with a London EC postmark on 10 November, the day after Kelly died. ‘Look out for the next,’ one of these letters warned. The next would be Clay Pipe Alice.
By the summer of 1889, the fantasies that drove Robert Mann to murder were crowding in his brain again. But by now, the bottom had fallen out of his world. We have already noted the condemnation of the unsatisfactory mortuary in Eagle Place by coroners of the day. The Infirmary authorities, no doubt stung by this, pushed for extra funding and the buildings were refurbished. This included the erection of a new mortuary within the Infirmary grounds. Since Alice McKenzie’s body was taken to the old ‘shed’, in Eagle Place,3 we must conclude that the new building was not ready. When the day came that the old mortuary, Mann’s mortuary, the Ripper’s lair, was taken out of use it would have a profound effect on the Whitechapel murderer.
Alice McKenzie came from Peterborough; like so many women of her class, drifting from job to job and man to man until she met the Irish porter John McCormack, who also used the surname Bryant, and worked casually for Jewish tailors along Hanbury Street. This was in 1883 and the couple lived as man and wife in various dosshouses in the Spitalfields area. Friends of the woman whose inquest they attended on 17 July claimed that she earned her living by charring. The police knew, however, that from time to time she turned to prostitution. She also drank to excess and was in the habit of smoking clay pipes.
At the time of her encounter with Robert Mann, Alice and McCormack were living at Tenpenny’s Lodging House, 52 Gun Street. He came home from work at about 4 pm and gave Alice 1 shilling and 8 pence before going to bed. The 8d was to pay for their bed that night, but they had a row and Alice stormed out. It would be the last time McCormack saw her alive. He woke up between 10 and 11 pm to find that Alice had not paid for the bed. Elizabeth Ryder, the wife of the deputy, told McCormack he could stay put despite the lack of money. After all, he was a regular. He went back to bed and rose again at 5.45 am. By this time, Alice was dead.
Can we log her last movements? About 7 pm she had met George Dixon, a blind boy she obviously knew, a fellow lodger in Gun Street, and she took him to a pub near the Cambridge Music Hall. At some point while they were there, Dixon heard Alice asking a man to buy her a drink. The man had said ‘Yes’. She still may have had McCormack’s cash on her or she may have spent it, but this was a standard ice-breaker prior to picking up a client and perhaps she arranged to meet the man later. She took Dixon back to No 52 and went out again.
By 8.30 pm, Alice was back at Tenpenny’s, the worse for drink. Elizabeth Ryder, to whom she did not speak, saw her leaving once more. Just over three hours later, the last sighting took place. Margaret Franklin, who had known Alice since she came to the East End, was sitting with Catherine Hughes and Sarah Mahoney on the front step of a barber’s shop at the Brick Lane end of Flower and Dean Street. It was 11.40 pm on 16 July. Margaret asked Alice how she was doing. ‘All right,’ Alice answered. ‘I can’t stop now.’ To Margaret, she appeared to be sober. An hour later she would be dead.
Robert Mann probably left the workhouse by the usual back door sometime around midnight. There was a marked difference from his last sortie back in November. The massive police presence he’d seen then had gone. Instead, he saw the usual bobbies, ambling purposefully at their steady 2½ miles an hour, checking locks and door catches, nodding to the odd passer-by. Nor did he see any of the obvious plain-clothes men, trying to blend, to look like any other denizen of the Abyss, but actually standing out like sore Metropolitan thumbs.
Once again, Robert Mann had a choice. And clearly, we do not know which one he took. If he went south along Charles Street, that would take him to the busy Whitechapel Road with its larger selection of whores. If he went west, along Old Montague Street, the range would be smaller but the alleyways darker, the gas lamps fewer – his ideal killing ground.
He had acted out in his mind again and again the thrill of his crimes – the initial resistance of skin to his knife-tip, the rush of blood, the hacking through sinew. He would have known all their names by now, his victims, either because he had read them himself or because it would have been the talk of the Infirmary. Now, as 16 July became the 17th, Mann was focused, alert. His exact route may be unknown to us, but it was not random. He knew this area like the back of his hand and knew that a corpse from here would be brought to his mortuary. Perhaps he saw Alice along Whitechapel High Street or Wentworth Street that runs parallel to it. She was exactly his type – short, mousy-haired, middle-aged. He probably couldn’t see her freckles in the gas-light. He approached her, picked her up as he had the others. She was drunk, relatively helpless; his. They would have discussed his needs and agreed a price. He would have flashed a coin from his pocket to prove he was good for it. All this would have taken two, perhaps three minutes. She knew a place, she may have told him, up Castle Alley.
His heart probably sank when he saw it. Along the twisted length of the alleyway, cluttered with carts and rubbish there were four gas lamps. It was too bright, and perhaps too public, for what Mann had in mind. But now, in a sense, it was too late for them both…
Sergeant Edward Badham, Warrant No. 65001, knew Robert Mann and he was no stranger to his handiwork either. He may have been the Sergeant Betham reported in some newspapers as having accompanied Inspector Walter Beck to 13 Miller’s Court to see the body of Mary Kelly. He was certainly one of the officers who had taken Annie Chapman’s body to the Eagle Place Mortuary and would have met Mann there. But by the time Badham rendezvoused with Constable Walter Andrews outside the Three Crowns pub on the corner of Old Castle Street and Castle Alley, Mann was already making his way home.
Badham was a beat sergeant and was doing his rounds at 12.45, meeting Andrews at the pre-arranged time and pre-arranged place. ‘All right?’ ‘All right, sergeant.’ All was well, Badham walking away north-west up the alley towards Wentworth Street; Andrews in the opposite direction, south-east towards Whitechapel High Street. It could only have been a minute or two later that Andrews came upon the body of Alice McKenzie lying near a gas lamp between two costers’ carts. It took him seconds to realize that this was another Ripper victim. The woman’s throat had been cut, with dark blood still oozing from the wound. Her heavy skirts had been hauled up above her abdomen and there was a great deal of blood there. Andrews touched the woman’s skin. Still warm. Then he heard the footsteps.