It was here that he obtained his murder weapon, the sharp knife which various doctors described at inquests. Here he obtained the preservative for Annie Chapman’s and Kate Eddowes’ wombs, for Kate Eddowes’ kidney and for Mary Kelly’s heart. Here, he wallowed in his macabre fascination with the dead and was able to indulge whatever bizarre fantasies filled his mind. American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer had a similar compulsion:

‘He needed to enshrine his fascination with bodies,’ writes David Canter, ‘especially dead bodies and brought his victims into his apartment for the early stages of that ritualistic creation. He was planning to build a reliquary that would display the various reminders of his deadly sexual conquests. When asked what the purpose of this display was, he replied that it was “a place where I could feel at home”.’

For Robert Mann, this was the function of the mortuary. And here, watching at doctors’ elbows, he learned the rudiments of anatomy which litter his kills.

I cannot stress too much the importance of this building for Robert Mann. With the help of John Bennett’s researches, I was able to stand on the site of the mortuary. It is very ordinary, like the man who worked there, merely a narrow alleyway between the gardens of modern houses on a small estate to the south of Old Montague Street. When serial killer Fred West was eventually arrested for murder, he was mortified to learn that the police had taken his house (lair and murder site) apart brick by brick. ‘The foundations of his world had literally and symbolically been dug up,’ writes David Canter. ‘The web he had created had been destroyed.’¹²

I do not know when the mortuary was demolished. One account suggests the late 1880s, which had to be very soon after the murder of ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice. But we know from the events of Francis Coles’ murder that it was still in use in February 1891. John Bennett believes it was not closed until 1894 or 1895 when the Davenant School was built close by.¹³ This is crucial to Mann; the loss of this building and the privacy it afforded him, away from the bustle of the Infirmary, was devastating and explains as much as his physical illness why he was unable to continue his murderous work.

There is no doubt that Robert Mann was a huge risk-taker, the mark of a psychopath. He killed in the open, sometimes in near-daylight, always near to habitation. He walked past scores of people on the way to murder, his knife in his pocket. He walked back past them too, with blood on the blade and sometimes body parts in his pocket. Such was the unpredictability of his job as mortuary keeper that no one found his nocturnal wanderings unusual or worthy of question, but he could have been stopped at any moment.

One question remains unanswered. The coroner, Wynne Baxter, told the jury to disregard Mann’s testimony, because he was subject to fits. We have no idea what sort of fits these were of course. If they were epileptic, of the minor type called petit mal, this could be a reference to a serial killer’s aura phase, during which he would have seemed distant, not really aware of events around him. If more severe, of the grand mal type, then this is likely to be temporal lobe epilepsy. Only 10% of epileptics suffer from this type, but 79% of serial killers do. It is linked to a wide range of antisocial behaviours which includes anger, paranoia and regression.

‘How could he have killed so many people without it being noticed?’ David Canter asks, rhetorically, of the serial killer Fred West. ‘This poorly educated, intellectually dull man…’ We could ask the same of Robert Mann. ‘People thought he was harmless,’ Canter goes on, ‘because he lacked fluency and was inarticulate.’ And that was precisely the mistake Wynne Baxter made when he dismissed Mann as unreliable. He became, in that one sentence, a dribbling, senile village idiot as far as the Press of the day were concerned and the line has been followed by every writer on the Ripper ever since. In the graphic novel From Hell which has acquired iconic status, he is portrayed as ancient and actually has a falling-down fit in the mortuary in the presence of doctors and policemen.

David Canter is probably asking a lot when he says ‘if only the original investigators had taken more notice of the geographical pattern of the crimes they might have got close to the culprit’. Serial killers were then called ‘habitual murderers’ if any such title was given to them. And they were so rare that no one in Britain at the time had any experience of them. But the facts speak for themselves. Not everything about Robert Mann fits the pattern we now expect of serial killers. We cannot tick all the boxes simply because we do not know enough about him. It may be that he fits our pattern of disturbed behaviour exactly, but the historical paper trail is simply not there. That is because of the social class from which he came and the social system into which he fitted. When I was researching this book, looking for the mortuary in Old Montague Street, I found a newly-painted phrase on a wall every bit as tantalizing as the Goulston Street graffito. It read ‘Hitherto Pauper’ which of course describes Robert Mann. Before this book he was just one of thousands; now he is the Whitechapel murderer.

Do I believe that Robert Mann was guilty? Yes, I do. Can I prove it? No – that was the job of the men of 1888 and they failed. There were all sorts of understandable reasons why they did, but the bottom line is that they let him get away with murder. Foremost among those reasons is the very ordinariness of Robert Mann, pauper inmate and mortuary keeper; and, just for a few weeks, Jack the Ripper.