In his summing up at the inquest on Polly Nichols, Wynne Baxter referred to three other murders that formed a pattern. He was tangentially correct, but in making this assertion he was laying the foundations of the myth of the Ripper before the Press coined the name. By that time of course, Annie Chapman was dead and Baxter included what was actually a red herring, the attack on Emma Smith, on Tuesday 3 April. Smith, as we have seen, was a forty-five-year-old prostitute who was assaulted by three men near the Chocolate and Mustard Mill at the corner of Wentworth Street and Brick Lane in the early hours of the morning. When she got back to her lodgings in George Street, the deputy keeper took her at once to the London Hospital. Her face was bruised and her right ear almost torn off. A blunt instrument, perhaps a stick, had been forced into her vagina and her perineum had been torn. She fell into a coma and died from peritonitis on Wednesday 4 April.
The case is dissimilar from the attacks on the others. Serial killers do not operate in threes and the wounds were clearly the result of a beating. It is possible that this was some sort of pimp-related attack, the vaginal injuries making a symbolic point. This is certainly how the police saw it, but Baxter believed differently. All four victims – Smith, Tabram, Nichols and now Chapman – were ‘of middle age, all were married and lived apart from their husbands in consequence of intemperate habits, and were at the time of their death leading an irregular life, in each case the inhuman and dastardly criminals are at large in society’.1
It is interesting that Baxter should refer to criminals (plural) perhaps because of Emma Smith’s account of a three-man attack, but it also shows a complete lack of understanding of how a serial killer’s mind works.
The murder of Polly Nichols unleashed the ghoul in ordinary people. They came in ones and twos to gawp at Robert Mann’s green doors, totally unaware that this was the Ripper’s lair. They stood on street corners and wandered up and down Buck’s Row, looking for the exact spot where the body was found. There was nothing new in all this. ‘’Orrible murder’ had been a staple diet of the London Press for three quarters of a century, but there was something about this spate of murders that made them special, out of the ordinary.
In the early hours of Saturday 8 September, the lustmord as German psychologists were beginning to call it, came upon Robert Mann again. The depression phase after the Nichols murder had left him with a sense of emptiness, almost disappointment.
‘For days or weeks after the most recent murder,’ writes Joel Norris, ‘the killer will inhabit a shadowy world of gloom in which he feels his own sorrow. All the while he is going about the business of life as if he were normal… But soon the fantasies begin to assemble in his mind; his uncontrollable urges begin to overtake him again… Again, an unwary stranger will cross his vision, enter his corridor of death and the killing ritual will once more be carried out to its inevitable conclusion.’2
The unwary stranger was born Eliza Anne Smith in Paddington in 1841, when her killer was a six-year-old boy living in Whitechapel. She married coachman John Chapman in May 1869 at All Saints’ Church in Knightsbridge and moved around the West End until 1881 when John got a job as coachman in Windsor, Berkshire. The union produced three children – Emily, Annie and John, but Emily died of meningitis when she was nine and John was born crippled. Perhaps it was this sad combination that led Annie senior to drink and by 1884 she had left John and ended up in Spitalfields.
Until Christmas, 1886, Annie received an allowance of ten shillings a week from John, but his death ended all that.3 Perhaps the loss of allowance also ended a relationship she had with John Siffey – the pair had lived at 30 Dorset Street. By May 1888, Annie was usually to be found at Crossingham’s dosshouse, at 35, so she had not moved far and made a living by selling flowers, crochet work and occasional prostitution. Annie was not well and her fierce temper got her literally into scrapes. In the days before she died, she had a nail-gouging, hair-pulling fight with another prostitute, Eliza Cooper, which began at Crossingham’s and continued in the Britannia pub on the corner of Dorset and Commercial Streets.
On 4 September, Annie bumped into a friend, Amelia Palmer. She was still bruised from the fight and told Amelia that she intended to go to the casual ward to get help. Amelia gave the woman twopence and told her not to buy drink with it. We do not know if Annie Chapman actually went to the casual ward, but if she did, this would have been the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary and she may have met Robert Mann there. Evidence for her having got some medical help from somewhere would come later, but on Friday 7 September she met Amelia again, in Dorset Street. ‘It’s no good me giving way,’ Annie said. ‘I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.’
This was at five in the afternoon and at half past eleven Annie turned up at Crossingham’s where the deputy, Timothy Donovan, saw her in the kitchen. Half an hour later, fellow lodger William Stevens saw Annie put two tablets into an envelope and place them in her pocket. The envelope bore the feather and garter crest of the Sussex Regiment and would become a classic Ripper red herring in the hours and years that followed. About half past twelve, another lodger, Frederick Stevens (no relation of William) drank a pint of beer with Annie, but exactly where is unknown. It was probably the Britannia. By 1.35 am she was back at Crossingham’s eating a baked potato. Donovan asked her for the 8d for her bed (Annie always slept in a ‘double’ when she could afford it). ‘I haven’t got it,’ she told him. ‘I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary. Don’t let the bed. I’ll be back soon.’
John ‘Brummy’ Evans, Crossingham’s nightwatchman, saw her wander off towards Little Paternoster Row and Brushfield Street – ‘I won’t be long, Brummy,’ Annie called to him. ‘Make sure Tim keeps the bed for me.’
The next time anyone saw Annie Chapman she was standing outside No 29 Hanbury Street talking to Robert Mann. We have no idea when he left the Infirmary but again he took the mortuary key and helped himself to a knife. Dr George Bagster Phillips, who carried out the post mortem on Annie, doubted whether the murder weapon was of the type to be found in a post-mortem room. That said, he also denied that it was a bayonet, or a slaughterer’s knife ‘unless ground down’ and we are left wondering what sort of knife he thought it was. Was Mann later than usual or had his trawl taken him longer? And why did he choose Annie Chapman?
In the case of some serial killers, physical appearance can be everything. Virtually all of Ted Bundy’s victims had long, straight dark hair with a centre parting. On the other hand, the targets of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, looked very different and ranged widely in terms of age and occupation. Peter Kurtin’s victims were of all ages and of both sexes. In the sense that Mann’s victims so far – Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols – were both forty-something and must have looked like bag-ladies, Annie Chapman was perfect. It is of course possible that she had gone to Whitechapel Infirmary – and been given her pills – and that Mann recognized her (it was, after all, only days earlier).