We cannot know how many potential victims Robert Mann walked past by the time he turned left into George Yard or precisely what he intended to do to the one he chose. In the event, that choice was made for him, in a way eerily like that of Annie Millwood. Stumbling out of the near-darkness towards him, clutching her chest, was thirty-nine-year-old Martha Tabram. Her dark hair was swept up in a bun, but rather dishevelled now and for all her plumpness, she looked a lot older than she was. She wore a black bonnet and a long black jacket, the colour of mourning, the colour of death. What riveted Mann however was the blood trickling over her fingers from a gaping wound in her sternum. Perhaps she called out to him, shocked, losing blood, dying. If so, she was calling to the wrong man.

The pauper inmate now flashed from one phase through another to a third. The murder of Martha Tabram was opportunistic and did not follow the classic pattern of modern serial killers. Mann became in profiling terms a ‘raptor’, attacking virtually as soon as he saw his victim. Perhaps the wooing phase, in which murderers ‘disarm their victims by winning their confidence’ lasted in this case mere seconds. Perhaps Martha collapsed into Mann’s arms on the first floor landing, already dead. This is important, because somehow the killer’s attention must have been alerted. Martha was physically above him when he was at street level and he must have climbed the steps to reach her. Once she was on the ground at his feet, like a cadaver on the slab, the wooing phase became the capture became the killing.

‘The moment of murder itself,’ writes Joel Norris, ‘is the emotional high for most confessed serial killers. At this instant, when the victims were dying at their hands, many… report an insight so intense that it is like an emotional quasar, blinding in its revelation of truth. In those seconds of acting out the absolute pinnacle of their own anguish, some report spontaneous orgasms, a sexual release so complete that it is clearly their moment of triumph, a powerful statement of their own existence when they can face the collective demons of their past without the least trace of fear.’²

We do not know the exact order of events, but at some point, Mann hauled up the dying woman’s green skirt and brown petticoat, forcing her legs apart before he opened his clasp knife and went to work. He stabbed her left lung five times, her right twice. One thrust hit the heart, five the liver, two the spleen and six the stomach. The breasts, the belly, the groin – the physical attributes that make a woman a woman. Clearly, police and doctors reasoned at the time, this was a sexual attack. Most of us would still accept this today, but in the case of Robert Mann, it was different. Frenzied though the thirty-nine wounds were, they were in a pattern. The killer knew where to strike.

The whole thing was probably over in minutes. Mann wiped his blade, closed and pocketed the knife and made his way down the staircase to the street. Now he was in the totem phase:

The murderer’s fantasy has been so all-consuming that he is drained after the crime and begins to slide quickly into depression.³

In an attempt to hold on to the high, many serial killers take a trophy or totem by which to relive the moment and there is evidence that Mann did this in the later killings. But this was not yet the Whitechapel fiend. He was an apprentice in murder, feeling his way. Certainly, he showed already the signs of the disorganized killer. He had taken a weapon with him and intended to do someone harm – showing a degree of organization – but the injured Martha Tabram had suddenly presented herself and Mann, on impulse, mutilated her. But now he made no attempt to conceal the deed, not even to give the corpse some dignity by pulling down her skirt. Perhaps, deep inside his twisted unconscious, he was rather proud of his work and wanted to display it.

Any killer’s natural instinct is survival. Mann had to get back to the Infirmary before he was missed, checking as he walked the scum-cobbled streets that there was no blood on him. He probably returned the same way he had come, his heart skipping a beat as he saw the flashing helmet plate of Constable Barrett checking locks along Wentworth Street. It was probably nearly three o’clock by now and the market porters and labourers would be up soon, their hobnailed boots clattering on the cobbles.

One of them was John Reeves, on his way to work at the largest docks in the world, at 4.45 am. In early August, it was getting light by then and Reeves could see, on the landing below his home at Number 37, the mutilated remains of Martha Tabram. He dashed into the street and found Constable Barrett still patrolling and the two went back to the body. The policeman sent for a doctor and the first man to pronounce on the handiwork of Jack the Ripper was Dr Timothy Killeen, of 68 Brick Lane. It was now 5.30 am and Killeen estimated that the murder had taken place three hours earlier. This would chime with other testimony at the inquest when Joseph Mahoney and his wife deposed that they had climbed the stairwell at 1.40 and 1.45 respectively (Mrs Mahoney going out to a grocer’s shop in Thrawl Street to buy some supper) and had seen nothing. Alfred Crow, however, a twenty-four-year-old cab driver from Number 35, had seen what was undoubtedly Martha’s body lying on the first landing, at 3.30. In the dark, he assumed she was drunk or ‘carrying the banner’ and walked on. Dr Killeen, unknowingly, prolonged the totem phase for Robert Mann because he ordered the woman’s body to be taken to the mortuary in Eagle Place, the mortuary where the man who would become known as the Whitechapel murderer and Jack the Ripper worked.

Bodies found in the street were placed in ‘ambulances’, basically two-wheeled biers large enough for a coffin or ‘shell’ and covered over with tarpaulin. A pair of policemen were usually detailed to take the sad load to whichever mortuary had been designated. In this case, they would have had to knock on the door of the Infirmary in Baker’s Row and the keeper would have gone to the Male wards to rouse Robert Mann, the mortuary keeper. We do not know precisely where the key was kept, but it was probably hanging in an office where it could be easily reached. We can only imagine what terror rushed through Mann’s mind when two policemen came for him some hours after he had stabbed a woman to death in George Yard Buildings.

Now, bizarrely, his victim was brought back to him and he had the leisure to survey his handiwork up close and personal. It is highly likely that Robert Mann, perhaps with an older inmate, James Hatfield, stripped and washed Martha Tabram. They would certainly do so in later murders and this was probably the accepted pattern, making life easier for the doctor when he came to perform his post mortem. There was of course nothing sinister in this. Mann was not attempting to destroy vital forensic evidence by handling the corpse. Fingerprint evidence lay four years in the future and it was not until 1905 that such evidence resulted in an actual conviction in court.⁴ It would be nearly a century before DNA technology would be available. On the other hand, for a man with the mortuary keeper’s psychosis, here was a golden opportunity for which many serial killers long.

The process of inquests emerged from the work of medieval ‘crowners’ (coroners) who permitted juries to view bodies of suspected murder victims. This was partly because of the suspicious belief that the wounds of a corpse would ‘bleed anew’ in the presence of a killer and that ‘murder will out’. In a macabre way, of course, dead men do tell tales and this is the precise purpose of a post mortem today; to ascertain the exact cause of death. As early as 1861, Dr William Guy of King’s College, London, wrote:

The great rule to be observed in conducting post-mortem examinations [is] to examine every cavity and every important organ of the body… even when the cause of death is obvious.

It is likely that Dr Killeen used the autopsy techniques advanced in recent years by Professor Rudolf Virchow and written in English by Sims Woodhead in 1883. The protocol began with observations at the scene of crime. This was followed by an external examination in the mortuary with the body clothed (when, in daylight, more could be observed). If, as I assume, Mann and Hatfield had already stripped and washed Martha Tabram, the procedure was already disrupted. The naked body was then examined with internal dissection of the wounds. Finally, in this order, the brain, thorax and abdomen were to be opened.

Killeen went to work that same day, Tuesday 7 August, behind the green doors of the Whitechapel mortuary. Though little better than a shed, it was brick-built, its murky windows allowing enough daylight for him to see by. Colour changes to Martha’s skin would have been more difficult to see in artificial light. Killeen would have noted the position of the hands, whether the fingers were curled or not and whether there were any cuts which could be defensive wounds. He would have checked the clothing which Mann and Hatfield had probably removed, looking for dirt or blood. If the mortuary pair had already washed the body, bruising would be obvious. Martha Tabram’s body would have been stiff from rigor mortis by the time it arrived at the mortuary and this process would continue for the rest of the day.

At this stage of course, no one in authority and not the men clustered around the corpse in Eagle Place, had any idea who Martha was, so any scars or moles would have been observed by Killeen to aid identification. The absence of a hymen proved that the dead woman was not a virgin and the obvious attacks to the breast, belly and genitals indicated the work of a sexual sadist; the sexual sadist who was standing at Killeen’s elbow as he carried out his routine.

Killeen carefully measured the stab wounds and counted them. He was convinced that thirty-eight of the wounds were inflicted by a right-handed assailant using a pen or clasp knife, short-bladed and single edged. The thirty-ninth wound (actually, of course, the first) was different. It was deeper and wider, possibly made by a double-edged dagger or bayonet. This was the wound to the chest. The doctor cut Martha Tabram open, displaying the abdomen and thorax while her killer watched, rapt with attention in the uniquely prolonged totem phase. The vagina and uterus were checked for signs of recent sexual activity.

Mann’s job would have been to provide buckets of water, both hot and cold, and to provide Killeen with a bottle of 1-20 carbolic acid, turpentine, linseed oil and any number of rags, sponges and towels. If rags were in short supply, newspapers would do – even those in the future that carried the latest atrocities in Whitechapel and letters from Jack the Ripper!

There is no evidence that Timothy Killeen was a police surgeon, and it is not clear why he was sent for by the police. There was a tendency for non-police surgeons involved in autopsies, today called pathologists, not to take their job too seriously. Killeen seems to have been thorough – hence his awareness of two weapons being used – but he seems only to have concerned himself with the wound areas. In other words, Martha Tabram’s skull was not opened.

During the day of the post mortem, a photograph was taken of the dead woman, as Robert Mann would have seen her on the slab. We can imagine him clucking around the police photographer, arranging a blanket decorously to cover her modesty as if he were the most caring person in the world. In the photograph, the eyes are closed and the mouth is slightly open, as though she is snoring in her sleep. Someone – almost certainly her killer – has brushed her hair away from her face. The throat – the trademark of Mann’s later work – appears untouched, but a report by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in September refers obscurely to wounds ‘on body, neck and private parts…’ [my italics].

Meanwhile the police operation swung into action. Divisional Inspector Edmund Reid launched the inquiry that Tuesday. The Weekly Dispatch described him as ‘one of the most remarkable men of the century’; he was an actor, singer, conjuror and balloonist and made the first parachute jump in British history at 1,000 feet above Luton. Such was his fame that he was used as a prototype for Detective Dier in the crime novels of Charles Gibbon. He and Constable Barrett visited the nearest barracks, at the Tower, but the constable failed to recognize the soldier he had seen loitering in Wentworth Street. Reid interviewed the residents of George Yard Buildings, an area described by the East London Advertiser as:

…a number of courts and alleys in which some of the poorest of the poor, along with thieves and roughs and prostitutes, find protection and shelter in the miserable hovels bearing the name of houses.

He talked to the Mahoneys, to Alfred Crow and to Francis Hewitt, the superintendent of the Buildings, whose wife had heard a cry of ‘murder’ earlier in the evening, both a reminder of the kind of area Whitechapel was and of the problem facing the police.

The next day, Reid and Barrett were back at the Tower and an identity parade took place. Although no one could know it at the time, this marked the first piece of sloppy police work in the hunt for the man who would become Jack the Ripper. Barrett picked out first one man, then another and immediately backtracked on the first, on the grounds that the man he saw wore medal ribbons – the soldier in the line did not. This man, who might have plunged his bayonet into Martha Tabram, was allowed to go without his name being taken. The second was John Leary who told police that he and a comrade, Private Law, had gone on a pub crawl that began in Brixton. From there, the pair had parted company and Leary had walked through Battersea, Chelsea, past Charing Cross and into the Strand, where he met up with Law again. The two had a final drink in Billingsgate some time around five before returning to barracks. When these men’s stories tallied, the police were satisfied, blithely ignoring the fact that neither of them had an alibi for the time of Martha Tabram’s murder.

The inquest which opened at 2 o’clock on Thursday 9 August in the Working Lads’ Institute in Whitechapel Road was typical of those that would follow in the Whitechapel murders. The coroner, the larger than life Wynne Baxter, was holidaying in Scandinavia and his place was taken by his deputy, George Collier. The George Yard residents were called first, then Constable Barrett and Dr Killeen, following the pattern of involvement in the crime. There was still no definite name for the deceased, although Martha Turner had been suggested as a result of her description circulated to 116 infirmaries throughout London. Accordingly, Collier adjourned proceedings for two weeks.

The timing was unfortunate, because on the day of the inquest, husky-voiced prostitute Mary Ann Connolly, known as Pearly Poll, gave a definite name for the dead woman and had been with her on the night she died. She was Martha Tabram, otherwise known as Emma Turner; and Sergeant Eli Caunter, of H Division, whom the underworld knew as ‘Tommy Roundhead’ elicited more information from her friend. She and Martha had been drinking with soldiers in various Whitechapel pubs between ten and eleven forty-five on 6 August. Nobody was in any doubt about the way in which this would end. Pearly Poll took her soldier up Angel Alley, which ran parallel to George Yard into which Martha disappeared with hers.

Another identity parade was to be held at the Tower on 10 August, but Pearly Poll had disappeared. Relations between East End prostitutes and the police were naturally strained and would worsen in the weeks ahead, as the Met and eventually the City Force failed to provide any effective protection for working girls. Eli Caunter tracked Pearly Poll down at her cousin’s home in Fuller’s Court, Drury Lane and the identity parade duly took place on the 13th.

The less than helpful Mary Connolly now suddenly remembered that the men she drank with – the man she had sex with – had white cap bands. This meant that they were Coldstream Guardsmen, who were stationed at the Wellington Barracks and the whole Tower episode had been a waste of time. Misidentifications and muddle like this complicate any police enquiry, but somehow, Barrett’s missing of white cap bands, even in the darkness of Whitechapel, is reprehensible.

The next day, 14 August, Pearly Poll picked out two men from the Coldstreamers. She identified one as the corporal who went up Angel Alley with her, except that he was actually Private George. The police again failed by meekly accepting his story, corroborated by his wife, that he was at home until 6 am on the night in question with her at 120 Hammersmith Road. To an untrained eye, of course, George’s two good conduct stripes looked very like a corporal’s chevrons. The other soldier, Private Skipper, could prove that he had been in barracks from 10.05 pm on the night that Martha Tabram died. Once again, we have inferior investigative work. Comrades back their comrades – the whole essence of army life depends on it.⁵ Wives, too, lie for their husbands. The assumption that most Ripperologists have made, that Mary Connolly wrongly identified the two men must therefore be questioned and it is highly likely that Private Skipper’s bayonet was the weapon that thudded into Martha Tabram’s breastbone on that dingy landing in George Yard. The rest was down to Robert Mann.

When the inquest re-opened under Collier on 23 August, a line could be drawn under Martha Tabram’s murder. Information from that day and the diligent research of Ripper historians since has enabled us to piece together a portrait of Jack the Ripper’s first victim. She was born Martha White, daughter of Charles and Elizabeth, at 17 Marshall Street, Southwark, on 10 May 1849. At that time, Robert Mann was fourteen and already living in the Whitechapel workhouse. Martha’s father died suddenly – a reminder of the almost instant destitution that could befall families – in November 1865. On Christmas day, four years later, Martha married Henry Tabram in the Trinity Church, Newington and the couple had two children, Frederick born in 1871 and Charles the following year.

The Tabrams were a volatile couple, a situation by no means uncommon in the East End and rows were usually about her drinking. When Henry finally had enough and left her in 1875, Martha took up with another man. Tabram subsequently reduced his maintenance to her from a hefty 12 shillings a week to half a crown. At some point, Martha moved in with a William Turner in rented accommodation at 4 Star Place and used his surname, though it is doubtful if they ever married. He too had left because of her drinking and at the time of her death lived in the Victoria Working Men’s Home in Commercial Street. Three weeks before she died, Martha had moved to 19 George Street. Turner had bumped into her three days before she met Robert Mann and gave her 1/6d for her to buy stock as a street hawker. She was known to have pestered other people for money, including her sister-in-law, Ann Morris. On one occasion she had been sentenced to seven days’ hard labour for this offence.

The story of Martha Tabram is an all too tragic one and all too common in the Abyss. In fact her life – apart from putting her in harm’s way on the street – has no bearing on her death. That is the fanciful stuff of conspiracy theorists. What I believe happened was this. Martha Tabram went up George Yard with Private Skipper of the Coldstream Guards shortly before midnight. There was a quarrel, probably about payment for her services and Skipper, furious, lashed out with a bayonet stab. He hurried back to barracks and would have got there before one o’clock, perhaps persuading his mates with some cock and bull story to lie for him. Shocked and badly hurt, Martha collapsed and passed out, coming to at some unknown time in the small hours. Perhaps she saw, through the mists of her pain, the shadowy figure of Elizabeth Mahoney, going up the stairs at George Yard Buildings with the supper she had just bought in Thrawl Street. It was now nearly two o’clock and Martha hauled herself up the stairs to where she knew there would be help. She was just a victim of street crime, an everyday event in Whitechapel. The coroner’s jury’s verdict? ‘Murder, by person or persons unknown.’ And that person, in the eyes of the deputy coroner ‘must have been a perfect savage to inflict such a number of wounds on a defenceless woman that way’.

‘A perfect savage’ had to suffice for the general public of 1888. We have to get closer.