It was Elizabeth Long, also known as Darrell, who witnessed the conversation. The wife of a cart-minder living in Church Row, she was on her way to Spitalfields Market at half past five. She remembered the time because she heard the brewery clock in Brick Lane strike. Having visited the mortuary later to look at the deceased, she was certain that the woman she saw was Annie Chapman. She did not see the man’s face (and that fact alone, of course, saved Robert Mann’s life when they met in the mortuary) but was able to describe his general appearance. ‘He was wearing a brown low-crowned felt hat. I think he had on a dark coat, though I am not certain. By the look of him he seemed to me a man over forty years of age. He appeared to me to be a little taller than the deceased.’⁴ Pressed by the coroner, she could not comment on whether he was a working man, but he looked ‘foreign’ and ‘what I should call shabby-genteel’. Both these almost throwaway phrases have led Ripperologists in two wrong directions. First, ‘foreign’ was usually a euphemism for Jew in the East End. Given that about 90% of the community was now Eastern-European Jewish in origin, this is not surprising; but it could of course be wrong. It was after all half past five in the morning and not fully light. The other description – ‘shabby-genteel’ – opened the way to the middle-class murderer down on his luck, someone ‘slumming’ in the East End for the sheer hell of it. And that in turn is only a relatively short step to the caped, top-hatted ‘toff’. In fact the headgear of the man seen talking to Annie Chapman has become part of Ripper folklore. Most experts today, following the account for example of the Suffolk Chronicle, refer to a deerstalker cap of the type made memorable by Sherlock Holmes. Such headgear was usually called a cap, not a hat and as it has no crown at all, hardly fits Mrs Long’s description as per the Daily Telegraph. The low-crowned variety accords exactly with the billycock hat worn by workhouse inmates.

Elizabeth Long also heard a brief conversation. The man asked ‘Will you?’ and the woman answered ‘Yes.’ As she continued on her way to the market, Annie led Mann literally into Joel Norris’s ‘corridor of death’. It was the dingy passageway that led from the front of No 29 Hanbury Street to the enclosed yard at the back. This was a place often used by prostitutes as one of the house’s inhabitants testified at Annie’s inquest. Three stone steps led down from the back door of this passage and there was a locked door leading from the yard down to a cellar. There was a wooden fence nearly 6 feet high around the premises and a lavatory and woodshed in the far corner.

At about 5.20 am Albert Cadoche, a carpenter who lived next door at No 27 was in his own yard when he heard a thud as though something fell against the adjoining fence. Since seventeen people lived at No 29 and some operated a packing-case business, he thought no more of it. In fact, what he almost certainly heard was Annie Chapman, unconscious and partially throttled, hitting the fence as Robert Mann squeezed her throat. While Cadoche was walking back through his house on his way to work, the Whitechapel murderer was living up to his name.

The timings of Long and Cadoche do not add up, but if Mrs Long heard the brewery clock chime the quarter hour, not the half, then it all works. Alternatively one of the two clocks referred to (Cadoche cites Spitalfields church) was wrong. It was only a quarter of an hour later that John Davis got up. He was a carman who lived with his wife and three sons in one of the attic rooms of No 29. He had a cup of tea and then went to the yard, presumably to use the lavatory. There he saw Annie Chapman’s body at the bottom of the three steps, with her head towards the house and her legs towards the woodshed. Her skirts had been hauled up to her groin and Davis did not wait to see more. He ran back along the passage into Hanbury Street, by which time Robert Mann was probably just returning by way of the mortuary having washed the knife and Davis bumped into two packing-case workers, James Green and James Kent. Henry Holland, a boxmaker from Aden Road, was also within hailing distance. A rattled John Davis led the three back to the yard, but only Holland had the nerve to descend the steps. Today, of course, he would be compromising a murder scene, but such niceties were beyond the forensic scope of 1888. At least he did not touch the body and the four men ran back to Hanbury Street again in search of a policeman. At this point, however, they seem to have scattered. Kent got as far as a pub and downed a brandy to settle his nerves. Green went to his workshop at Bailey’s packing-case premises at 23A and did nothing, presumably in shock. Holland reached Spitalfields Market and found a constable there, but the man, following procedure, could not leave his fixed spot and refused to budge. Holland was so appalled that he reported the constable later that day at Commercial Road police station. Fatuously rigid though this policeman’s activity seems by modern standards, he could not have intercepted the killer. It was by now six o’clock and Robert Mann was on his way with all the other Infirmary inmates to breakfast.

While the various inhabitants of No 29, none of whom had heard or seen anything suspicious in the night, were realizing that all hell was breaking loose on their premises, John Davis got to Commercial Road police station at 6.10, blurting out, ‘Another woman has been murdered.’ Inspector Joseph Chandler, already aware from the sound of running feet that there was an emergency, followed Davis to the murder scene.

The ghouls were already choking the passageway and the street outside No 29 when Dr Phillips arrived. With his surgery at 2 Spital Square, Phillips was the Police Surgeon for H Division and dominates the medical aspects of the Ripper killings from now on. By definition better qualified in ghastly crime than Llewellyn who had carried out the Nichols post mortem, Phillips made a careful note of what he saw at the crime scene. There was a piece of muslin and two combs, one in a paper case, near the body. These he described as ‘apparently… arranged there’ which gave rise to all sorts of Masonic speculation as we saw in an earlier chapter. In fact, Inspector Chandler, who of course witnessed the same scene a few minutes earlier, makes no mention of any ‘arrangement’. It seems likely that the muslin, the combs and the pills in their Sussex Regiment envelope, had spilled out of Annie’s pocket. Any such situation will tend to produce a pattern of sorts, and no one says any item was placed between the dead woman’s feet.

As to the body itself, the left arm lay across the left breast and the legs were drawn up, and outwards, the feet on the ground. The swollen face was turned to the right and the swollen tongue showed signs of partial strangulation. The small intestines were lying on the right of the body above the shoulder and part of the stomach lay over the left. The body was cold (it was a chilly day) and rigor mortis was beginning to set in. The throat had been deeply gashed with a jagged cut and there were various patches and spatters of blood on the ground and fence which convinced Phillips that the woman had been butchered where she lay.

Inspector Chandler supervised the removal of the body by ambulance to the mortuary and examined the yard, taking charge of the items from Annie’s pocket. At the inquest, he was quizzed about the envelope and whether the partially visible address was written in a man’s hand. Chandler could only reply, ‘I should imagine so.’ Other items found in the yard had no relevance at all to the murder, especially a leather apron, soaking in water, which, it turned out, belonged to John Richardson, whose mother lived at No 29 and had placed the apron ‘to soak’ on the previous Thursday. ‘Leather apron’ is another of those infuriating red herrings that plague Ripperology, as we shall see.

Constable 31H Edward Badham accompanied Annie’s body to the mortuary and somebody sent for Robert Mann. It was about seven o’clock when the mortuary keeper turned up and he and Badham waited until Chandler arrived, along with Detective Sergeant William Thick, with whom Jack London would lodge briefly thirteen years later. While Badham took down a description, probably from Chandler’s dictation, two women came from 35 Dorset Street to identify the body. According to Badham’s testimony at the inquest, only Thick touched the clothing. No one touched the body.

Look up Robert Mann in any Ripper book and he will be described as an inmate pauper who kept the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary Mortuary and appeared as a witness at the inquest on Mary Nichols. What it will not tell you is that he also appeared in court in the case of Annie Chapman. The dialogue from the Daily Telegraph’s edition of Friday 14 September is clear, that on the third day, Thursday 13 September, Mann told coroner Baxter of his involvement in the case.

This explains why Baxter was able to tell the jury in the Nichols inquest on 17 September that Mann was subject to fits and was unreliable as a witness. Something in his behaviour at the Chapman inquest must have made Baxter ask questions of the Infirmary staff. The reason that researchers have missed Mann is that The Telegraph reported his name as Marne, thereby causing confusion.

Inspector Chandler was recalled to explain that he arrived at the mortuary soon after seven. At that point the body had not been disturbed and he briefly left Constable 376H Barnes in charge with Mann. Mann testified that he stayed at the mortuary until Dr Phillips came. Since Phillips was not called to carry out his post-mortem work until after two o’clock, Mann was with Annie Chapman’s body, alone for much of the time, for nearly seven hours. He said that the mortuary door was locked except when two nurses from the Infirmary – Frances Wright and Mary Simonds – came to undress the body. What he did not say was which side of the locked door he was. As in the case of Polly Nichols, the nurses claimed the police told them to do this and to wash the corpse; the police denied it. It eventually transpired that instructions came from the clerk to the Guardians and the matter was cleared up.

What was not cleared up was exactly what Mann was doing. One newspaper account says he left the mortuary while the stripping was being done – we shall discuss the possible significance of this later. Baxter had not yet let rip about the inadequacies of pauper mortuary attendants – in fact he would do so now and again four days later when he met Mann for a second time on the closing day of the Nichols inquest. Why, then, should the two nurses be sent for, in that Mann – and occasionally Hatfield – did this job routinely? Even more confusingly, according to the Telegraph’s account of the 14th, Mann passed his key to the police. Presumably, this was only a temporary measure and it would have been returned to him.

It was now that Baxter began his rant. He had already snapped at John Davis, and criticized the police for sloppy work. Now he turned his invective on the dead-house provision:

‘The fact is that Whitechapel does not possess a mortuary…We have no right to take a body there. It is simply a shed belonging to the workhouse officials. Juries have over and over again reported the matter to the District Board of Works. The East-end, which requires mortuaries more than anywhere else, is most deficient. Bodies drawn out of the river have to be put in boxes and very often they are brought to this workhouse arrangement all the way from Wapping. A workhouse inmate,’ he sneered, ‘is not the proper man to take care of a body in such an important matter as this.’

The foreman of the jury then went off at a tangent on the matter of rewards and when Baxter returned to ‘the witness’ (Robert Mann) he asked him if he was present during the post mortem. The answer was yes and he said that he had handled the bloody handkerchief and put it in some water, on the orders of Dr Phillips. Mann assumed that the nurses had removed the handkerchief from the body.

‘How do you know?’ Baxter asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ Mann admitted.

‘Then you are guessing?’

‘I am guessing.’

‘That is all wrong, you know!’ Baxter snapped, and to the jury,

‘He is really not the proper man to have been left in charge.’

And the coroner for Middlesex was more accurate in that censure than he knew.

Dr Phillips’ post mortem was far more complete than Llewellyn’s on Polly Nichols. When he got to the mortuary at two o’clock he was surprised to find the body already stripped and on the table. To the coroner he complained again of having to work in the appalling conditions he found at Eagle Place and Baxter agreed, adding that ‘at certain seasons of the year it is dangerous to the operator’. Annie Chapman had been partially washed. This may have been carried out by nurses from the Infirmary or it may have been done by Robert Mann. As we have seen, he witnessed the post mortem itself, helping Phillips out with the menial work while all the time enjoying the spectacle that lay before him.

Phillips noted the bruises caused earlier by the fight with Eliza Cooper, and opening the brain and other organs led him to believe that Annie was seriously ill – ‘far advanced in disease of the lungs and membranes of the brain’. In other words, she would not have survived on the streets much longer, even if she had not met the man who now washed her bloody handkerchief in a mortuary bucket. So thorough was Phillips that he noted abrasions on the dead woman’s fingers where rings had been removed. Were these taken by the Whitechapel murderer as a trophy as he killed her? Or were these taken by the Whitechapel murderer as he washed her corpse?

Annie’s throat had been cut with such force as if the killer was attempting to separate the bones of the neck. The other mutilations were carried out after death, but Phillips deferred to the coroner as to whether the revolting details should be made public. The coroner needed to know in order to ascertain the cause of death and to try to understand motivation. Phillips’ circumspection is a reminder that this was still Victorian England and the middle classes in particular who read the Telegraph did not want to be put off their breakfasts. In the event, the full technical details appeared in the Lancet where only medical men would read them.

On the crucial question of whether the killer displayed any anatomical knowledge, Phillips answered, ‘My own impression is that… anatomical knowledge was only less displayed or indicated in consequence of haste.’ The blade of the murder weapon was 5 or 6 inches long and Phillips said that for him to carry out a similar disembowelling i.e. for post-mortem purposes, would take him an hour. The killer had done it in less than fifteen minutes.

Baxter grew quite dramatic in his summing-up – ‘here a few feet from the house and a less distance from the paling they must have stood. The wretch must have then seized the deceased, perhaps with Judas-like approaches. He seized her by the chin. He pressed her throat and while thus preventing the slightest cry, he at the same time produced insensibility and suffocation’… ‘There are two things missing. Her rings had been wrenched from her fingers and have not been found and the uterus has been removed… There are no meaningless cuts… No mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room.’

Had Coroner Baxter left it there, the whole thrust of the police investigation at the time and of Ripper research ever since might have closed in on Robert Mann years ago. Instead, Ripperologists went down the ‘mad doctor’ line and Baxter himself, as unable as anyone to understand the totemic phase of the serial killer, made the assumption that the uterus was the motive for the attack and was actually for financial gain – the selling of wombs. He told the court that he had been contacted by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum with news that months earlier he had been approached by an American who was prepared to pay £20 for a uterus and that he intended to give one away free with each copy of a book on which he was working. Bizarre as this story is, it does link in with the notorious Dr Tumblety.

Francis Tumblety was a Canadian quack whose name first appears as a possible suspect in a letter written by Inspector John Littlechild in 1913. Ripper experts Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey have built a plausible case against Tumblety, but we cannot actually place him in Whitechapel at all. He was arrested on charges of gross indecency with men and jumped bail, probably being in custody at the time of the Kelly murder. He was known to be a flamboyant dresser and with his height given at anything between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet 4, would have been very noticeable on the streets of the East End.

‘[The murderer’s] anatomical skill,’ Baxter concluded, ‘carries him out of the category of a common criminal, for his knowledge could only have been obtained by assisting at post-mortems or by frequenting the post-mortem room.’

A careful reading of this eliminates the surgeon himself. Who it does not eliminate is the mortuary-keeper.