The ritual was acted out on Tuesday 7 August, the day after a Bank Holiday. Polite society was horrified by the publication in The Times the previous day of a deal being struck between the Liberal politician ‘Radical Joe’ Chamberlain and the Irish leader, Charles Stuart Parnell. It is most unlikely that this news reached the inmates of the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary or would have meant much to them if it did. As for Robert Mann, although he was totally unaware of it, his strange psyche had now entered the trawling phase and he was in search of his first victim.
‘[Trawling],’ writes Joel Norris, ‘does not consist of random or accidental patterns. It is an unconscious compulsion, a deliberate cruising for the likeliest prey … [It] is a series of compulsive, frenzied and paranoiac behaviour patterns in which the serial killer becomes very alert and focused… It is as if… there begins to operate a new level of behaviour programming which directs his every move.’1
Even so, this was not the fully formed Whitechapel murderer, not yet. We know today that serial killers develop and grow, probing the possibilities, weighing the options for their attack.
For Mann, the first problem would be actually getting out of the workhouse with its locked gates and gate-keepers. This was in fact surprisingly easy. As an inmate told Jack London in 1902, the Whitechapel Infirmary was ‘the easiest spike going’ and when London ran for it through the open gates, no one tried to stop him or gave chase. In October 1888, the Board of Guardians wrote to the residents of Queen Anne and Thomas Streets that ran to the east of the building that they would repair locks and gates ‘to keep the road free from nuisance’. In the same year, twenty-year-old Edward Maloney escaped through one of these back doors. This was Robert Mann’s physical portal into his other world, the door that led to a terrible destiny.
Would the inmates on each side of him have noticed that his bed was empty? Probably, but they were used to the man disappearing at odd hours on mortuary business and would have thought little of it. Mann would have put on his jacket and billycock hat, the workhouse uniform that looked for all the world like a civilian suit and checked that his clasp knife was in his pocket. Which route he took from the Infirmary is unknown, but it was probably south along Baker’s Row, then west along Old Montague Street, past ‘his’ mortuary in Eagle Place. There was no moon and the streets, as we have seen, were dim and badly lit. It was probably two or three in the morning and drunks were meandering aimlessly from pub to pub. So too were the unfortunates, the prostitutes like Annie Millwood who would become the tragic targets of Jack the Ripper. One of these was Martha Tabram.
Constable 226H Thomas Barrett was walking his beat at the regulation two and a half miles an hour along Wentworth Street at about the time that Mann left the Infirmary. A Dorsetman from Sherborne, Barrett had been with H Division for five years. Along with all his colleagues, who were to face fierce criticism in the weeks ahead, he carried a 14-inch hardwood truncheon, a ‘bull’s eye’ lantern and a whistle to summon assistance. Like all policemen, he knew his beat intimately – who belonged where and when and he was alert to strangers.
One such stranger was loitering near the entrance to the north end of George Yard. The man was aged between twenty-two and twenty-six, was about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches tall and wore the undress scarlet uniform of a Guardsman, with a good conduct stripe on one sleeve. When Barrett asked him what he was doing, he explained that he was waiting for ‘a chum who had gone with a girl’. Such transactions were commonplace. Prostitution was illegal, but there were an estimated 80,000 street girls in London and the police simply could not cope with a volume of trade like that. Better to turn a blind eye. Barrett walked on.