What kind of killer were the police looking for in 1888–9? Two days after the murder of Mary Kelly, they arrested the White-Eyed Man. That night, a Mrs Humphreys, going about her business in George Yard (which may or may not have been prostitution) was terrified by a bespectacled man who leapt out of the fog at her. She had the presence of mind to ask who he was and what he was doing; he laughed and ran away. When she screamed ‘Murder!’ however, a particularly alert crowd appeared from nowhere and grabbed him. He was rescued by the police who held him overnight, ascertaining that he was Dr William Holt, of St George’s Hospital and that he was a lone vigilante wandering the streets in search of Jack.
The importance of this story is not Holt himself, but the fact that Mrs Humphreys, the Whitechapel mob and the police were all on the lookout for just such a man. It was the media who christened Holt ‘the white-eyed man’ because it was better copy than ‘man with glasses’. To them, the Whitechapel murderer would be heavily bloodstained after each killing, would probably be carrying his murder weapon in a parcel or bag and would be a raving maniac with mad, staring eyes. Any number of stereotypes like this were reported by frightened women and worked up into ever more unlikely caricatures by the Press. And in this, the average man in the street, be he policeman, carman or journalist was consciously or unconsciously following the scientific orthodoxy of the day.
In 1890, Henry Havelock Ellis wrote The Criminal in which he lamented the fact that England had not kept up with the science of criminal psychology which was burgeoning elsewhere. He believed that criminals were of certain types – ‘political’, ‘by passion’ and ‘insane’. About 100 people a year were imprisoned under the category of ‘insane’ and Ellis admitted to being in the dark about causation:
The lunatic may be influenced by the same motives that influence a sane person, but he is at the same time impelled by other motives peculiar to himself and to which we have no means of access.1
Italians Enrico Ferri and Napoleone Colajanni included ‘cosmic’ causes such as temperature and diet. Biological causes covered anatomy, physiology, psychology. The social factor depended on the price of beer and the price of bread. Others were looking at physical characteristics – the sexual offender, wrote Ottolenghi, ‘…presents the most rectilinear nose, though he shows the undulating profile of nose more frequently than any other group of criminals’. Marro, also working in Italy, believed that sex-offenders were usually full-bearded; rapists had fair hair and blue eyes. The greatest authority of all, Cesare Lombroso, believed that the typical sex offender had bright eyes, a cracked rough voice, swollen lips and eyelids. He was occasionally hump-backed or deformed. ‘The eye of the habitual homicide is glassy, cold and fixed; his nose is often aquiline… the jaws are strong; the ears long; the cheek bones large; the hair dark, curly, abundant; the beard often thin; the canine teeth much developed; the lips thin.’
Had Jack been caught, he would probably have had long arms, a weak chest or heart disease. He may or may not have been among the 20% of murderers who blushed. He would probably have been a smoker and may have been unusually sensitive to change in the weather. And he would have shown no remorse. The French authority Despine noted an Albanian killer who resented the fact that the traveller he had killed and robbed had less on him than the cost of his bullets. When Thomas Wainwright was asked how he could murder such an innocent girl as Helen Abercrombie, he said, ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick legs.’
Whereas Havelock Ellis does not mention the Ripper at all, Richard von Krafft-Ebing does. His book Psychopathia Sexualis appeared in German in 1886 but later editions cite the Whitechapel murders as Case 17. It is not actually very helpful because Krafft-Ebing was probably working from newspaper accounts and gets the number of murders wrong:
On December 1 1887 [there is no such attack but this is probably a variant on the non-existent ‘Fairy Fay’, a creation of the media], July 7 [no such attack], August 8 [Tabram], September 30 [Stride and Eddowes], one day in the month of October [no such attack] and on the 9th November [Kelly], on the 1st of June [possibly the torso of prostitute Elizabeth Jackson, not a Ripper killing] the 17th of July [McKenzie] and the 10th of September [the Pinchin Street torso] 1889, the bodies of women were found in various lonely [sic] quarters of London ripped open and mutilated in a peculiar fashion. The murderer, known as Jack the Ripper, has never been found. It is probable that he first cut the throats of his victims, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away; in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind. He does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.
This is an early and classic explanation of Robert Mann’s motives, up to a point. We know today that rape and what Krafft-Ebing calls ‘lustmurder’ (a killing with clearly intended mutilation of the genitals) is not directly about sex, but about power and control over his victims. Of the 238 cases that Psychopathia details, only thirteen involve lustmurder and most of these were carried out on children by inadequates. He lists the deeply deranged Joseph Vacher, who assaulted both sexes. Inevitably dubbed the ‘French Ripper’ because of his disembowelling signature, he was precisely the sort of dribbling lunatic everybody was hunting in London in 1888. Spurned by a lover, he had shot himself in the face in an attempted suicide as a young man and was deaf and facially paralyzed as a result. He was caught in August 1897 and guillotined, aged twenty-nine.
Other examples that Krafft-Ebing cites have echoes of Robert Mann. Vacher’s signature was very similar, with strangulation and throat-cutting as the MO. Vincenz Verzemi, another serial killer, carried pieces of clothing and intestines away from his victims ‘because it gave him great pleasure to smell and touch them’.2 The Italian also described to his doctors how he felt during the killing, which fits the phases psychiatrists understand today – ‘…while committing his deeds he saw nothing around him (apparently as a result of intense sexual excitement, annihilation of perception/instinctive action)’. After such acts he was always very happy. ‘I am not crazy, but in the moment of strangling my victims I saw nothing else.’
Even more instructive in the case of Robert Mann was a ‘certain Gruyo’. He had led a blameless life until he was forty-one when he began strangling middle-aged prostitutes. He killed six, setting about ‘his horrible deeds with such care’ that he remained undetected for ten years. He strangled his victims and tore out intestines and kidneys.
The farmhand, simply called ‘E’ by Krafft-Ebing, was a child-killer who began having convulsions from the age of five. He had no memories of these convulsions or of committing his crimes and could not explain why he had done what he did. An unnamed former soldier in the Algerian army killed a middle-aged prostitute – ‘The abdomen was ripped open, pieces of intestines were cut out, so was one of the ovaries – other parts were strewn around about the corpse.’ The MO was strangulation.
It must be said that Krafft-Ebing’s work, like Havelock Ellis’s, is a strange mixture of accurate, even modern, psychiatric awareness and almost medieval mumbo-jumbo. Krafft-Ebing is still looking at shapes of heads in sexual offenders and implies that masturbation is the first step on the road to lustmurder (clearly something that senior Scotland Yard men believed too). Did any of his ideas permeate through to the police on the streets of Whitechapel? Probably not, but in September 1913, in response to a query from the journalist George Sims, ex-Detective Inspector John Littlechild of Special Branch said of Dr Tumblety ‘Although a “Sycopathia Sexualis” subject he was not known as a “Sadist” (which the murderer undoubtedly was)’ and this corresponds to many of Krafft-Ebing’s cases which cover crimes of exhibitionism, bestiality and homosexuality, but not violence or murder.
As psychiatry developed as a science and as the serial killer became more common, there were further opportunities to study the behaviour of such people. Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kurtin, the monsters of Weimar Germany, were perhaps the most notorious, and in England, John Christie and Gordon Cummings in the war and post-war years were classic examples. But there was one early attempt at what today we call profiling and that was on the Whitechapel murderer himself in the report by Dr Thomas Bond. Although he only actually witnessed one post mortem (Kelly) he nevertheless had access to all the medical reports and under the aegis of Robert Anderson would have been able to talk personally to Phillips and the other doctors concerned. How right was he in the case of Robert Mann?
‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength.’ Mann was the son of a silk weaver and may have been brought up even as a small child to use the loom, which required very strong wrists. A dock labourer at various stages in his life, he would have been hauling weights on and off ships and as a mortuary attendant would have been lifting literally dead weights on and off mortuary slabs and in and out of coffins as a matter of routine.
‘…and of great coolness and daring.’ Undoubtedly; look back over the events of the killings and note how close he was to being caught on every occasion, except perhaps Mary Kelly.
‘There is no evidence that he had an accomplice.’ Except in very unusual circumstances, serial killers work alone. That fact by itself should have stopped such fanciful ‘highest in the land’ type stories in their tracks.
‘He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually that may be called satyriasis.’ This is the male equivalent of nymphomania and we now know that serial sexual murder motivation is more complex than that. Bond is right about the periodical, almost cyclical nature of the compulsion, however. He rejected religious mania as a motive, although the Press of the day did not. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, a century after Jack, saw himself as ‘the street cleaner’, prompted by God to rid the world of prostitutes.
‘The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet, inoffensive-looking man, probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed.’ Robert Mann was fifty-three and wore the ‘shabby-genteel’ suit of a pauper inmate.
‘I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if blood on his hands or clothes were visible.’ In this, Bond has obviously not taken into account the fact that Mann understood enough about arteries and blood-flow to avoid saturation in blood. He almost certainly wore an overcoat, at least in the autumn because of the weather, but ironically Bond’s suggestion of a cloak has opened the door to the red herring of the gentleman-killer.
‘…he would probably be solitary and eccentric in his habits.’ Robert Mann, by definition, worked alone. He did have James Hatfield as his assistant in the mortuary, but we know from the historical record that he just as often worked by himself. His ‘eccentricity’ may be measured by Coroner Baxter’s view of him, as being unreliable with a bad memory and not fit to be in charge of such important matters as murder victims.
‘… also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension.’ As a workhouse inmate, until 1872, he would have been an ‘in-and-out’ man, seeking work in the docks and elsewhere. After that his only work would have been picking oakum, winding wool or, from an unknown date, tending the dead in the Eagle Place mortuary. In that capacity, his ‘small income’ may have been derived from distraught relatives and friends of the deceased (not to mention police photographers) who may have given him tips.
‘He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times.’ Certainly, Robert Mann’s fits would have been recognized and I will discuss those later, but equally, the withdrawal association with both the aura and the depression phases of the serial killer would fit this pattern. No one would doubt that the staff at the Whitechapel Infirmary would be ‘respectable persons’, but I doubt that many Victorians would have included pauper inmates in the same category.
Fast-forward to 1988, the centenary of the Ripper. In that year, Special Agent John E Douglas, of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI, based at Quantico, Virginia, was asked to provide a profile of Jack for a television programme. How well does this fit Robert Mann?
‘An asocial loner.’ Because we know so little about Mann, it is impossible to be accurate on this. Only two other men from the East End had been in the Whitechapel Infirmary as long as he had, but that does not make them all friends. James Hatfield referred to Mann as ‘my mate’, but that probably meant work-partner in the mortuary rather than any term of endearment.
‘Employment in positions where he could work alone and experience vicariously his destructive fantasies, perhaps as a butcher or hospital or mortuary attendant.’ Bingo! Mann must have spent hours alone with corpses, including victims of street violence and especially his own targets.
‘Dress neat and orderly.’ As we have discussed, this fits the garb of the workhouse.
‘Sexual relationships mostly with prostitutes.’ This is a grey area for Mann. His life in the workhouse was by definition celibate; Whitechapel, along with most others, had segregated wards. He was born in an area infested with prostitutes and there is every possibility when he was out working in the docks that he used their services.
‘May have contracted venereal disease.’ Once again, we simply do not know. All forms of sexually transmitted diseases were common-place among the low life of the East End and several of the silly theories on the Ripper’s identity turn on it. Of the actual victims, only Liz Stride was mentioned as having treatment for it, but Mary Kelly’s stay in a Cardiff infirmary may have been linked with the disease.
‘Aged in his late twenties.’ This is the most difficult aspect to come to terms with. We know that Mann was fifty-three in the autumn of 1888 but we do not know of earlier attacks. Serial killers do not suddenly commit murder as part of a mid-life crisis, but Douglas, like all behaviourists today, bases his findings on twentieth/twenty-first century killings. So American profilers will say that most serial killers are white and many are addicted to pornography. Neither of these has any relevance for 1888 when the coloured community in London was tiny and pornography was impossibly expensive for the ordinary man. It may of course be that Robert Mann did have a history of violence before the Autumn of Terror but the record has not yet thrown this up. Experts have estimated that in the Victorian period, large numbers of crimes, especially of a sexual nature, went unreported and only 8% ended in a conviction in court. In 2006, Stephen Wright, the Suffolk strangler, killed five prostitutes in and around Ipswich at the age of forty-six.
‘Employed since the murders were mostly at weekends.’ For the ‘canonical five’ this is true, but neither Martha Tabram (Thursday) nor Alice McKenzie (Wednesday) fit this pattern. It has led Ripperologists to speculate on visiting sailors whose ships were in port, but it may simply be that a more lax gatekeeper on duty gave Mann access to the mortuary key and so his murder weapon.
‘Free from family accountability and so unlikely to have been married.’ Ironically, Mann did live with a family of sorts in the workhouse, but since I believe he had no genuine friends and could explain his nocturnal wanderings, this was irrelevant. Workhouse records, however, show that he was unmarried.
‘Not surgically skilled.’ Douglas has gone along with Dr Bond’s opinion, but most doctors, especially the police surgeon Phillips, disagreed. In my view, Mann showed a considerable degree of anatomical knowledge (which may not be the same thing as surgical skill) and this is evident in all the killings. He cut throats so that his victims could not cry out. He cut away from his own body, so that he was not bloodstained. He removed two uteri, a kidney and a heart, all except the heart done at speed and in very poor light. How can anyone doubt that the Ripper did possess some surgical ability?
‘Probably in some form of trouble with the police before the first murder.’ Again, this is unknown. Ironically, he was in trouble with the police after the murder of Polly Nichols because of washing her body when told not to.
‘Lived or worked in the Whitechapel area and his first homicide would have been close to his home or place of work.’ This goes to the very heart of this book; Robert Mann’s workhouse home and even more his mortuary lair were only three minutes’ walk away from Buck’s Row where Polly Nichols died, five from the murder site at 29 Hanbury Street and so on.
‘Undoubtedly the police would have interviewed him.’ Of course, they did; not as a suspect, but as a mortuary attendant and it was not so much an interview as a general conversation.
In 2000, John Douglas stood by his earlier analysis and in The Cases That Haunt Us elaborated further. He analyzed the canonical five murders one by one, drawing valuable clues from each one. The attack on Polly Nichols was of the ‘blitz attack’ type, suggesting a killer who was unsure of himself and ‘has no confidence in his ability to control her or get her where he wants her through any kind of verbal means – an inadequate personality’. Mann was no suave Ted Bundy, and he failed to get Polly exactly where he wanted her, in the tight-space confines of Brown’s Stable Yard. Douglas sees the abdominal mutilations, the signature, as symptoms of a frenzy of anger and a release of sexual tension. The deep cuts to the throat, perhaps suggesting an attempt at decapitation, imply true dementia.
The attack on Annie Chapman was carried out, says Douglas, by a ‘fairly unsophisticated offender… a combination of a violent and sexually immature and inadequate personality’. Let us not read ‘sexually immature’ to mean a very young man. It may be that because of his long years in the workhouse, Mann’s sexual experience was virtually nil.
Interestingly, Douglas refers to Chapman’s wounds as showing ‘a perverse anatomical curiosity’. The removal of her uterus is explained by Douglas as being done by ‘someone who hates women and probably fears them [remember that when the nurses arrived to wash Annie’s body, Mann left the mortuary]. By removing the victim’s internal sexual organs, he is, in effect, attempting to neuter her, to take away that which he finds sexually threatening.’3 Laurence Alison is describing the killer Robert Napper, but the comparison with Mann is compelling – ‘…and finally, choosing to interact with other human beings by tearing them apart, exploring their body cavities and reducing them to nothing more than meat’.4
Douglas agrees with most people that the ‘double event’ was the work of the same man (others believe that because Liz Stride was not mutilated, she was killed by someone else, perhaps even pointing to a ‘domestic’ involving her partner, Michael Kidney). Then, unaccountably, Douglas claims that Stride was killed with a short-bladed knife and that leads him into all sorts of ‘linkage’ difficulties. Was Jack carrying two knives? Were there two lustmurderers on the streets of London that night? There is, in fact, nothing in the Stride inquest or medical reports to suggest a shorter blade and if the cuts seem shorter, we must remember that the killer was interrupted by Louis Diemschutz.
In his overview profile of 2000, Douglas has changed his mind about the killer’s medical skill. He now says ‘indicated some anatomical knowledge or curiosity’ which of course fits Robert Mann very well. The Whitechapel murderer was a disorganized killer, leaving his victims displayed with no attempt to hide them. I would claim that he is actually a mix of disorganized and organized, in that he took the murder weapon with him and returned it after use, ready, as it were, for next time. Interestingly, Douglas clings to the white male killer because there are no recorded cases of females killing in this way and because all the victims are white. This is typical intraracial killing and explains why Anderson et al were wrong when they thought that a Jew was responsible; none of the seven victims was Jewish. Douglas opts for the likely age of the killer as being between twenty-eight and thirty-six, but admits that ‘age is a difficult characteristic to categorize… we would not eliminate a viable suspect exclusively because of age’.5
Douglas expected the Whitechapel murderer to come from an unstable family with an absent father or domineering mother. By the time Robert Napper hit his teens his ‘attitude towards his parents would have brimmed with unbridled hatred and he would have developed a loathing of siblings, peers and the world in general’.6 The census of 1841 shows the Mann family living in Hope Street, Whitechapel, on the edge of the focus of Jack’s activities, as outlined by geo-profiler Spencer Chainey. The area would have been exactly within Robert Mann’s ‘mental map’, a comfort zone he had known from early childhood. His father, also Robert, is listed as a silk weaver, aged fifty and his mother Elizabeth is forty-six. Robert junior is five and his sister Amelia is seven. Given the relatively advanced ages of Robert senior and Elizabeth, it is likely that Robert and Amelia were the youngest of a larger family, the older siblings having moved away. Elizabeth would have been forty-one when her son was born, but in an age of no effective contraception, late births were inevitable. Robert senior died in the summer of 1847. His death certificate gives no occupation, but he died in the newly-extended workhouse in Baker’s Row, on 17 July. Henry Chapman was the registrar and the informant was Ann Meek, present at the death. It is likely that she was a workhouse nurse, and was illiterate in that she made her mark on the certificate. The cause of death was common enough in the disease-ridden ‘hungry forties’ – typhus fever.
The hungry forties in fact explains the collapse of the Mann family and it was all too common a story. From independent weaver in 1841 to death in the workhouse six years later is a reminder of how tough it was to make a living in competition with the factories and in a time of recession. Assuming that Mann senior had always been a silk weaver, he would have known the good times of the mid 1820s when there were thousands of weavers in the East End, but it would all have been downhill economically after that.
By 1851, Robert Mann, aged fifteen, is listed in the Whitechapel Workhouse records, but there is no mention of his mother or sister. This would have been his last year in the boys’ ward – afterwards he would have mixed with the adult males, ‘the broken workmen, the drunkards and dissolute, the inadequate and handicapped, the crippled and retarded’.7 What had happened? There is no record of the deaths of Elizabeth or Amelia Mann so both must have left the workhouse by then. The most likely explanation is that Elizabeth remarried or at least found a new partner between 1847 and 1851. The workhouse was full of widows whose status in life had suddenly plummeted with the loss of a breadwinning husband and the way to avoid the hated ‘Bastille’ was to find another. But why leave Robert behind? Perhaps Elizabeth was ashamed of the fits her son had by now experienced or was unable to cope. Perhaps it was the choice of her new husband. Either way, it speaks volumes for motivation. Elizabeth Mann had found a new lover after Robert’s father’s death and had abandoned the boy to a sort of Hell-on-Earth. As Laurence Alison says, ‘Research has shown that neglect and isolation are powerful disinhibitors to violence.’ Once released, caged animals will often attack others because the ‘normal prohibitions against aggression’ are missing.
All Mann’s victims, except Mary Kelly, were middle-aged and serial killers often fantasize about murdering their mothers. Some of them actually do it; others carry out their revenge killing on total strangers. Again, the comparisons with Robert Napper are staggering – ‘From [Napper’s] perspective [his mother] was a hypocrite and his dad was just a bastard who abandoned them.’8
In looking at pre- and post-offence behaviour, Douglas notes that the killer would have returned to an area ‘where he could wash his hands of blood and remove his clothing’. This, of course, was the mortuary. He did not need to visit grave sites as many killers do because, in the case of four of his victims, he had the bodies all to himself for days before burial and in the case of Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly, had their body parts in his mortuary.
In my experience, profilers are as human as the rest of us. In 2000, John E Douglas plumped for David Cohen (Martin Fido’s suspect) as plausible because it was presented, very ably by Fido, on a plate.9 As we have seen, David Canter has done the same thing with James Maybrick.
What, then, is the case against Robert Mann? David Canter tells of a script he once offered to a film company in which the offender was as banal as his motive. It was turned down because, said the company, ‘the audience would feel cheated by such a denouement. They would want to learn that it was all even more complicated than they could have imagined, not less so’.10 And so it is with Jack. This does an appalling disservice to the truth. Murder is very rarely exotic and conspiratorial; the only thing that is bizarre about serial killers is the crimes they commit. Everything else is ordinary.
Who could be more ordinary than Robert Mann? Born to an impoverished weaving family in an area of impoverished weavers, he was left in the workhouse when his father died. Similar things happened to thousands of others. He would have been brought up in a harsh environment in a system that was deliberately designed to be ghastly. The Salvation Army Shelter for Women in Hanbury Street (one of the kinder institutions of its day) had rows of hard wooden beds, looking like coffins, and the ‘uplifting’ legend painted on the wall, ‘Are you ready to die?’ ‘A child brought up in an institution,’ warned ‘General’ William Booth of the Salvation Army, ‘is too often only half-human.’ When not in the workhouse picking oakum so that his hands bled, he would be out on the streets hours before dawn, waiting for a ship to arrive in the docks. Routinely, of 500 men at the dock gates, only twenty were taken on to work; the others shuffled away to find what ‘tommy’ they could by whatever means. They joined similar queues for the casual ward, the Spike, and those who failed here too, carried the banner in doorways and alleyways and Itchy Park. But this was the lot of thousands of the poor in nineteenth-century London and only one of them became Jack the Ripper. It would be fascinating to be able to note that the boy Robert Mann was abused, physically or even sexually by his mother; that she was a vicious drunk; that he exhibited signs commonly found in future serial killers, called the triad – bed-wetting, fire-starting and the torture of animals. The fact is that I cannot. The very reason that Mann was never caught is that we know so very little about him.
What we do know is that he lived and died in Whitechapel. And Robert Mann’s death certificate contains a quiet bombshell. He died on 2 January 1896, in the Infirmary at Baker’s Row, his home for years. The informant was the Assistant Medical Officer, A Strange and the Registrar, J E Brown. The cause of death as certified by S Moses LRCP was phthisis with chronic Bright’s disease and bronchitis as secondaries. The bombshell lies in the occupation column which reads general labourer and gives a former address as 48 Wentworth Street.
By the time of Mann’s death, there was no such number, the house having been demolished, but that indefatigable Ripper researcher John Bennett told me exactly what it was. 48 Wentworth Street was a doss-house, first opened in 1851. Between 6 April 1870 and 20 October 1888 (when it probably closed) it was owned by William Francis of Rochester Row, Westminster. It had three floors and was registered to hold twenty-five lodgers.
As Arthur Morrison wrote in 1889, Wentworth Street was:
black and noisome, the road sticky with slime and palsied houses, rotten from chimney to cellar, leaning together, apparently by the mere coherence of their ingrained corruption. Dark, silent, uneasy shadows passing and crossing – human vermin in this reeking sink, like goblin exhalations… women with sunken, black-rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces appear and vanish by the light of an occasional gaslamp and look so like ill-covered skulls that we start at their stare. Horrible London? Yes.11
Look again at Spencer Chainey’s geoprofile. Wentworth Street lies exactly in the epicentre of Jack’s hunting ground, that tangle of the most wicked streets of the East End. Robert Mann knew those dingy courts like the back of his hand and he killed within the classic ‘circle’ pattern which today’s geographical profilers recognize. The pattern of his kills is very telling, pointing to the lair that was so important to him – not who he killed, but where he killed was vital. Martha Tabram died on a landing on stairs in George Yard Buildings, an area perhaps four feet square. Polly Nichols was slaughtered on the pavement in Buck’s Row, but her killer was trying to force her into the confined space of Brown’s Stable Yard. Annie Chapman met her grisly end in the small yard behind No 29 Hanbury Street. Liz Stride’s throat was slashed in the narrow entrance to Dutfield’s Yard, just wide enough to allow a pony and trap through. Kate Eddowes was butchered in the darkest corner of claustrophobic Mitre Square. Mary Kelly’s body was eviscerated in the room in Miller’s Court that measured twelve feet by twelve. Alice McKenzie died in the narrow confines of Castle Alley, between two coster carts. Why? Of course the killer wanted somewhere private where he would not be disturbed, but much more than that, Robert Mann was trying to recreate his mortuary, that confined space in which he spent time alone with the dead.