Unlike her killer, Polly Nichols was not a local. She was born on 26 August 1845, in Dean Street, off Fetter Lane when Robert Mann as a ten-year-old perhaps still lived in Hope Street, Whitechapel with his family. Polly’s father, Edward Walker, was a locksmith. She married printer’s machinist William Nichols at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street in January 1864. The couple lived with her father in Trafalgar Street, Walworth and moved in 1874 to some Peabody Buildings model dwellings for the poor, in Stanford Street, near Blackfriars Road. They had five children, three boys and two girls, but the marriage was over by 1880. The cause is uncertain. Certainly, William had an affair with a nurse and subsequently married her, but Polly left home at least five times before that, leaving her husband to cope as best he could with five children. As in the case of Martha Tabram, Polly’s maintenance of five shillings was cut once her husband found out she was living with another man. That, briefly, was the blacksmith Thomas Drew, but Polly was drinking and he kicked her out in June 1886.

Her one chance – as it turned out her last – fell to Polly in May 1887 when she found employment as a servant with the Cowdray family in Rose Hill Road, Wandsworth. She wrote to her father, telling him what a ‘grand place’ the house was and that her employers were teetotal and religious. On 12 July she stole clothing worth £3 from the ‘very nice people’ and ended up in the East End.

Historian Philip Sugden sums her up accurately – ‘inadequate, impoverished, a prostitute, probably an alcoholic’ – Polly Nichols was not about to pass up the prospect of cash in hand that early morning along Buck’s Row.

Hours before she met Robert Mann, Polly was drunk and was wandering along Whitechapel Road. It was 11.30 pm. An hour later, she left the Frying Pan pub on the corner of Brick Lane, even more the worse for drink. And at twenty past one she was knocking on the door of 18 Thrawl Street asking for her bed back. Perhaps she preferred the ambience to that of the White House, perhaps she had quarrelled with someone there. In the event she had no money and was turned away. Merrily tipsy, she called out, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money; see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’ If she’d bought the bonnet with her earnings that night, she poured the rest of it down her throat back at the Frying Pan. Her friend and fellow dosser Ellen Holland saw her at half past two on the corner of Brick Lane and Whitechapel High Street. She told her she had earned her doss three times already, but had spent it. She would not go back with Ellen to Thrawl Street, but instead staggered off towards Buck’s Row and her meeting with destiny.

Drunk as she was, Polly Nichols probably had difficulty focusing on Robert Mann. He was wearing a shabby suit and a billycock hat and was watching her intently. Did she accost him with the time-honoured, ‘Are you good natured, dearie?’ Did she put her hand on his arm? His chest? In the body language of the street, the first move always came from the street girl. There would not be much ‘wooing’ involved; Polly Nichols was streetwise. There was a gap in the brickwork just behind her, where the wall curved inwards towards a stable door. Mann would have much preferred to be on the other side of that door, but it was padlocked.

It was between 3.20 and 3.30 and Mann may have seen Constable 973 John Neil patrolling the area fifteen minutes earlier. In that Buck’s Row and Baker’s Row were Neil’s beat, it is even possible that the two men knew each other. It would have been vital then that Mann shrink out of sight in the shadows and his dark clothes helped him there. Mann struck with appalling speed and ferocity, gripping Polly’s throat just under the jaw line with such power that she fell backwards to the pavement, losing consciousness as she did so. When she hit the ground, all the hesitant probing of the Martha Tabram incident vanished and with his right hand, Mann slashed her throat in two gashes, from ear to ear and back as far as the spine. Then he went to work on her body.

It was less than ten minutes later when Charles Cross, a carman on his way to work turned into Buck’s Row from Brady Street. He would not have seen the mortuary keeper hurrying away in the opposite direction, but he did see what he thought was a tarpaulin in the gateway to Brown’s Stable Yard. Just as he realized it was a woman, he was joined by Robert Paul, another carman going to work. Cross touched the woman’s hands and told Paul that he thought she was dead. Neither man could detect signs of life and they decided to carry on to work and tell the first policeman they saw. One of them, out of decency, pulled Polly’s skirts down to give her some dignity.

It was unlikely that Robert Mann saw the little huddle that followed, but had he done so, he would have noticed three men at the junction of Hanbury Street and Old Montague Street, which was on his way home. Two of them were Paul and Cross, the third was Constable 56H James Mizen. In one of those eerie slips of the tongue that are occasionally found in murder cases, Cross said, ‘You are wanted in Baker’s Row.’ He meant of course, Buck’s Row and quickly corrected himself. Robert Mann lived in Buck’s Row and was at that moment getting himself into his dormitory bed, careful not to disturb his fellow inmates. Had Mizen actually gone to Baker’s Row, he might have caught Jack the Ripper.

By the time Mizen got to Polly Nichols’ body, Constable Neil was already there. He in turn had flashed his bull’s eye to attract the attention of 96J John Thain patrolling at the far end of the street. Neil sent Thain to find Dr Rees Llewellyn at his premises at 152 Whitechapel Road. Mizen went to fetch an ambulance and summon further help from Bethnal Green police station. When Sergeant Kirby arrived with other officers, a house to house began. Walter Purkiss in the Essex Wharf building had seen nothing; neither had Emma Green of New Cottage, outside which the dead woman lay.

Llewellyn got there by four and noted the relatively little blood around the body – no more than a wine glass and a half, by a rough reckoning – and the woman’s legs were still warm. He estimated the time of death at about 3.30. Under his instruction, Neil and Mizen loaded Polly onto the ambulance and together with Sergeant Kirby trundled it around the corner to Eagle Place, to the mortuary where Robert Mann knew she would be brought. It cannot have been much more than an hour and a half later and the mortuary keeper was being asked to survey his handiwork in daylight. When he entered the mortuary yard in front of those green doors, he found Inspector John Spratling of J Division peering down at the corpse on the bier and making notes in the half light. Spratling boasted in the years ahead that he smoked blacker tobacco and drank blacker tea than anyone else in the Force; this obviously worked – he lived to be eighty-six. Mann must have watched with his own very personal brand of morbid curiosity as he saw Spratling lift the corpse’s skirts to reveal her mutilated stomach with the intestines exposed. Spratling was appalled – ‘I have seen many terrible cases,’ he told the Press later, ‘but never such a brutal affair as this.’ He sent for Dr Llewellyn again.

Llewellyn’s evidence has caused problems in the Ripper case. Although qualified in Obstetrics from London University in 1873, he was not a Police Surgeon and his notes on Polly Nichols have not survived. Spratling’s report, presumably based on his own observations and those of Llewellyn in the mortuary explain that the throat had been cut from left to right with two distinct cuts – still, at this stage, the work of a relative amateur – that had severed the windpipe and spinal cord. The left cheek and right lower jaw showed bruising where Mann had gripped her before making the incisions. The abdomen was ripped open from the ribs to the groin and there were two distinct cuts to the vagina. The knife used was strong-bladed and the killer left-handed. By 19 October, a further report from Chief Inspector Swanson states that Llewellyn was now having second thoughts about this, but the right-hand/left-hand debate has caused endless controversy and is an example of the careless forensic work which often appears in the reports of non-Police Surgeons.

The sequence of events at the mortuary is not clear. Because Spratling was already there when Mann arrived, the mortuary keeper had no opportunity at that stage to wash the body. It is very likely he was told not to and when Dr Llewellyn arrived, the whole issue was out of his hands. Llewellyn carried out the post mortem that morning and it is at least possible that he did this soon after being summoned by Spratling. Mann would have assisted, stripping the body of the red-brown Ulster, the brown linsey frock, the white chest flannel, two petticoats, the stays, the black stockings and the men’s side-sprung boots. The ‘jolly bonnet’ would have been placed with the rest, probably in a corner of the mortuary and somebody noticed the laundry mark on one of the petticoats – ‘Lambeth Workhouse, PR’, which would later help in identification.

At some point, however, Mann and his assistant, fellow pauper James Hatfield did wash the body, so there must have been a sufficient gap for all this to happen. This is an important piece of evidence because it is one of the only two times that Mann’s name actually appears in the historical record, as we shall see.

The speed of events is dazzling. Coroner’s inquests have always been held as soon as possible after an unnatural death. Wynne Baxter, now back from holiday, presided over this one, again at the Working Lad’s Institute. Baxter was a vain and contentious figure, a flashy dresser who had been accused of electoral improprieties to obtain this post in the first place. He was critical of the police handling of the case and added to the invective against them that would grow in the weeks ahead. At the mortuary, Robert Mann and James Hatfield were busy, showing the corpse to various visitors. The sequence is unclear, but Mary Monk, an inmate of Lambeth Workhouse arrived at 7.30 pm on 31 August and identified Mann’s victim as Mary Ann Nichols. It is likely that Ellen Holland made a similar sad pilgrimage. The next day, Inspector Abberline brought William Nichols to the mortuary. Mann scraped back the coffin lid and the dignified estranged husband was very moved. All he saw of course was what we can see today from the faded mortuary photograph, Mann’s shroud tastefully covering the wounds he had inflicted. Polly’s eyes are slightly open, as is her mouth. Her hair appears to have been brushed. ‘I forgive you as you are,’ Nichols mumbled, ‘for what you have been to me.’²

During the inquest, Baxter and his jurymen arrived to view the body, in accordance with practice and Robert Mann would have come face to face with the men charged with pronouncing his guilt. Perhaps this was too much for him, because it was James Hatfield who took charge at this point, in that it was he who showed the jury Polly Nichols’ stays. This of course implies that some and probably all of the dead woman’s clothes were kept in the mortuary, which would horrify forensic officers today, but was probably procedure back in 1888.

Despite the horrific mutilations carried out on Polly, it had been three weeks since Martha Tabram’s murder and few, if any links were yet made. There was no sense of outrage and terror – that would start to build a week later. The fullest report of the post mortem comes from The Times. Five of Polly’s teeth were missing (although this had no connection with Mann’s attack). One inch below the left jaw was an incision 4 inches long. Below that was a circular incision which terminated about 3 inches below the right jaw. This was about 8 inches long, severing all the vessels of the neck, down to the vertebrae. The murder weapon would have been long-bladed, ‘moderately sharp and used with great violence’. The fact that Llewellyn reported no blood on the breast indicated that he was making his external examination after the body had been washed. The fact that there was no blood on the clothes at this point indicates that Polly was lying down when the throat wounds were made and that the blood ran outwards and downwards onto the pavement where we know it was washed away by the son of Emma Green who lived in the house outside of which the attack took place.

There was a jagged wound to the left of the abdomen, very deep and there were several incisions across the body. Others ran downwards and all wounds were made by the same knife. There is nothing in this version that implies Llewellyn followed procedure by opening up body cavities. Spratling’s description of stomach wounds were probably visible externally. When Baxter asked the doctor if the killer had any medical skill to carry out these mutilations, his answer was, of course, absolutely correct; he ‘must have had some rough anatomical knowledge, for he seemed to have attacked all the vital parts’. So had he in the case of Martha Tabram, but no one considered this, seeing only the frenzy of the thirty-nine stabs.

Having heard Llewellyn’s testimony, Baxter adjourned proceedings until the Monday. Abberline was in attendance, as was Inspector Joseph Helson and Sergeant Patrick Enright, both of J Division. The Telegraph reported Enright as being from Scotland Yard, but this is probably a confusion with Abberline. Inspector Spratling was called as the first witness on that Monday (3 September) and explained his note-taking at the mortuary, the body appearing to have been unwashed for some time. He next saw it when it was stripped – the implication being that he must have left the mortuary at some time and Enright volunteered the information that that had been carried out ‘by two workhouse officials’ [Mann and Hatfield]. Baxter asked if they had any authority to do this and Enright was emphatic – ‘No, sir; I gave them no instructions to strip it. In fact, I told them to leave it as it was.’ Once again, we have an example of police sloppiness. Between them, Spratling and Enright left a murder victim to untrained amateurs. The fact that I believe one of them to be the Whitechapel murderer is an irrelevance. Baxter saw no problem with any of this – ‘I don’t object to their stripping the body,’ – but he wanted to see the clothes. Enright mentioned the Lambeth Workhouse label and explained the ‘PR’ initials – Prince’s Road. He was not in a position to say how the stays were adjusted. Spratling was. The stays were loose-fitting, he told the inquest and he could clearly see the wounds without unfastening them.

The rest of the police testimony that day concluded with the house-to-house enquiries and search of the area. Bearing in mind that this killing occurred closest of all to Mann’s mortuary and the Infirmary, no one thought to make enquiries there. It was out of the killer’s immediate orbit as far as the police of 1888 were concerned. Slaughtermen Harry Tomkins, James Mumford and Charles Britten, working in the slaughterhouse in Winthrop Street when the murder took place, heard nothing. Tomkins was quick to dissociate himself from the Unfortunate. ‘Are there any women about there?’ the Coroner asked. ‘Oh, I know nothing about them; I don’t like ’em.’ Baxter, getting more irritable as the day wore on, snapped, ‘I did not ask you whether you like them; I ask you whether there were any about that night.’ There were, of course – Polly Nichols was one of them – but the slaughterers heard and saw nothing until Constable Thain told them there was a body nearby.

Inspector Helson first heard about the murder at quarter to seven that Friday morning. He viewed the still-clothed body in the mortuary, at which point the stays were still fastened. There was a little blood on the collars of the dress and Ulster, but no cuts to the cloth and no obvious signs of a struggle.

With Mary Ann Nichols positively identified by Ellen Holland and Mary Monk, Baxter adjourned the inquest until 17 September.

On that Tuesday, Dr Llewellyn was recalled. He had re-examined this body – exactly why and exactly when is unclear – and ‘there was no part of the viscera missing’.³ Polly Nichols was buried in Ilford cemetery on Thursday 6 September, her body very probably in the care of Robert Mann until that date. And Robert Mann emerges into the full glare of history as the eighth witness that morning. He told the coroner and his jury that the police came to the workhouse shortly before five o’clock. He unlocked the mortuary, took the body inside, locked the door and kept the key [my italics]. He then went for breakfast, that wholesome fare with its pint of tea and then went back with Hatfield and undressed the woman.

Baxter asked him if the police were there at the time. Mann said no, mentioning Inspector Helson by name.

Coroner:		Had you been told not to touch [the body]?
Mann:		No.
Coroner:		Did you see Inspector Helson?
Mann:		I can’t say.
Coroner:		I suppose you do not recollect whether the clothes were torn?
Mann:		They were not torn or cut.
Coroner:		You cannot describe where the blood was?
Mann:		No, sir, I cannot.
Coroner:		How did you get the clothes off?
Mann:		Hatfield had to cut them down the front.
A juryman:		Was the body undressed in the mortuary or in the yard?
Mann:		In the mortuary.

I have quoted this dialogue in full because they are almost the only words we know to have been spoken by the Whitechapel murderer. Baxter delivered his bombshell immediately after Mann’s answer to the juryman – ‘It appears the mortuary keeper is subject to fits and neither his memory nor statements are reliable.’ We will examine Robert Mann’s fits later, but in that one line, Coroner Baxter dismissed him as a possible Ripper and consigned him to the dustbin of history. Other journalists reporting this inquest use casual phrases like ‘poor old keeper’ and so Ripper historians today have dismissed Mann as a toothless imbecile, some grotesque Dickensian gargoyle, the caricature of a mortuary attendant, like Dr Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Igor. Why should Wynne Baxter have made this statement? It can only be because he had cross-questioned Mann in his court before and must have made enquiries about him at the Infirmary. It was the only time that the authorities – albeit not the police – were actually investigating the Whitechapel murderer.

We do not know how Robert Mann reacted in the witness box, but a moment’s reflection would have made him realize that he had been let off the hook. He would not receive another grilling or a cross-examination because the coroner, the high and mighty Mr Baxter, had effectively excused him from the story. Robert Mann was fifty-three when he appeared before the coroner, not the dribbling imbecile of popular fiction. It is possible that the reporters (who got a great deal wrong) confused Mann with his assistant James Hatfield. He was sixty-two and his performance in the witness box was no better than Mann’s according to most experts’ opinions.

When asked who was at the mortuary when they undressed Polly Nichols, Hatfield’s answer was ‘Only me and my mate.’ Towards the end of his evidence, Baxter said, ‘He admits his memory is bad’ (although evidence of this appears nowhere in the newspaper’s report) and Hatfield agreed. The answers he gave, however, were not as rambling and incoherent as has been assumed. He remembered the exact sequence of removing the clothes, and told the jury he had torn the petticoat and chemise with his hand. ‘There were no stays.’ Baxter asked him who had given authority to do this. ‘No one gave us any. We did it to have the body ready for the doctor.’ Baxter’s rather fatuous question – ‘Who told you a doctor was coming?’ was answered with a polite, ‘I heard someone speak about it.’ Doctors always came to mortuaries in the cases of suspicious deaths and as Mann’s assistant, Hatfield, would have known that. But an even sillier question came from the coroner next. ‘Having finished, did you make the post-mortem examination?’ There must have been a silence of disbelief in the Working Lads’ Institute, but Hatfield saved Baxter’s embarrassment by answering, ‘No, the police came.’ This is probably another example of Baxter’s irascibility and was probably delivered in a sarcastic, contemptuous tone. Later in the proceedings he would rail against the inadequacy of the mortuary and its attendants. On Helson’s instructions, Hatfield had cut the Lambeth Workhouse label out of the petticoat band. The next bizarre interchange came when a juryman, confused by Hatfield’s assertion that there were no stays, reminded him that when the jury had viewed the corpse on 1 September, Hatfield had actually tried the stays on to show how short they were.

‘We cannot do more,’ sighed Baxter.

But we must. Mann’s testimony can now be reassessed in the light of what we believe. He knew Helson perfectly well in that he used his name unbidden. He remembered that Polly Nichols’ clothes were not cut because he had not cut them. He could not remember the blood because he had deliberately kept the memory of the blood fresh in his mind from its first appearance, warm and liquid, in Buck’s Row, not as it appeared, crusted and brown in the mortuary. The rest of it – ‘I can’t say, I can’t say’ was a screen to hide what he really knew. And he couldn’t say in case it incriminated him.

What is more interesting is that he consciously shifts attention to his ‘mate’, mentioning Hatfield by name, whereas Hatfield does not mention Mann at all, except that he went to the mortuary with him. And what were the jury to make of Hatfield’s disturbing admission that he tried on the dead woman’s stays? This one incident throws a bizarre spotlight onto the world of mortuary assistants.

If Robert Mann’s testimony on 17 September was flaky, it is hardly surprising. Because in the early hours of Saturday 8 September, he had killed ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman.