Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

inquest which began the following afternoon, was that, as he drew level with Brown’s stable yard, next to the last cottage in the row, he saw by the poor light what he thought was a tarpaulin pushed up against the closed stable gates. Thinking he could use it, he crossed the road to take a better look. He was halfway across the road when he realised that the dark shape was the body of a woman. She was lying still, dressed in dirty rags, and her skirts were pushed up almost to her waist.
    Cross summoned a second man, Robert Paul, walking not far behind him and also on his way to work, and together they examined the body. Cross took the woman’s hand, found it to be cold and concluded that she was dead. Paul touched her face, which he noted was cold, and then he put his ear to the woman’s chest to see if he could detect any sign of life. He thought she might have been breathing, but very little if she was, and both men agreed that she was probably dead.
    Neither Cross nor Paul had time to wait for help, because they had to go to work, so they pulled the woman’s skirts down to her knees to give her some decency, then continued on their way, hoping to find a constable to whom they could report their find. At the corner of Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row, they met P.C. Jonas Mizen and told him that they had found a woman whom they believed was dead.
    However, no sooner had Cross and Paul left Buck’s Row when the victim was discovered again, this time by P.C. John Neil at 3.45 a.m. as he was walking his beat. He had last passed through the street thirty minutes earlier but had seen no one. By the dim light of his hand-held oil lamp, Neil could see that the woman’s throat had been cut. He looked about for assistance and when he saw the light of another lamp at the far end of Buck’s Row, he waved his lamp to attract attention. P.C. Thain, who had been walking his beat, joined P.C. Neil by the body, and he (Neil) instructed him to fetch Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the police surgeon, who lived in the Whitechapel Road. When P.C. Jonas Mizen arrived, P.C. Neil instructed him to fetch an ‘ambulance’, a heavy wooden hand-cart used to convey the dead, wounded and injured, which took two men to pull, and also reinforcements from Bethnal Green Police Station.
    Dr Llewellyn arrived at the murder scene at about 4.00 a.m. and briefly examined the body by the woefully inadequate light of P.C. Neil’s lamp. After noting the dreadful gaping wound to the woman’s throat, Llewellyn pronounced her dead and ordered that her corpse be taken to the Whitechapel Mortuary. This was little more than a rickety, windowless shed attached to the workhouse. Because Cross and Paul had pulled down the woman’s skirts before they left, the doctor did not realise that she had sustained severe abdominal injuries also.
    As Neil and Thain lifted the corpse on to the hand-cart, Thain noticed that the clothing on the dead woman’s back was soaked with blood. A hand-sized clot of blood had congealed on the pavement and more blood had flowed into the gutter, though, as P.C. Neil reported later, “There was not as much blood as he expected to find, not more than a half-pint or so.”
    After the body arrived at the makeshift mortuary, Inspector John Spratling from Bethnal Green Police Station turned up to make a note of her injuries. During the course of examining the corpse so that he could make his report, he lifted the victim’s skirts and made a horrifying discovery. Her abdomen had been torn open and her bowels were protruding through the open wounds. Dr Llewellyn was summoned for a second time that night, and this time he carried out a more thorough examination of the body by the slightly better light of an overhead gas-lamp.
    The victim was lying on her back on an old wooden butcher’s block which was used as a mortuary table. She was fully clothed. Her tongue, protruding past her teeth, had turned a livid dark blue. On the right side of her face was a light blue bruise the size of a thumb. This corresponded with another bruise on the left side of her face. It appeared to indicate the manner in which the murderer had gripped the victim’s face as she was attacked.
    The deceased had been suffocated or strangled before her throat was cut. This was clear from the discolouration of her tongue, which was caused by lack of oxygen. Since the heart had stopped beating before her throat was cut, this explained the lack of blood found at the