Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

sense until the death of the final victim, Mary Kelly. Only then would it be possible to start fitting together the pieces of the puzzle.
    But that revelation was still some way off, and we now had to look into the second murder.

CHAPTER 7
     
     
    I t was just eight days later, during the early daylight hours of Saturday, 8 September – the inquest into the death of Mary Ann Nichols would not be concluded for another two weeks – that the body of another butchered woman was discovered. The time was 6.00 a.m. and the corpse lay on its back in the small backyard of a Whitechapel tenement building.
    Number 29 Hanbury Street, a large, three-storey terraced house that had seen better days, was built for immigrant weavers and their families of the previous century. Now a cats’ meat shop occupied the front room on the ground floor where Harriet Hardiman, a saleswoman, lived with her sixteen-year-old son, and sold cubes of horse meat to cat owners for their pets. The other rooms in the building housed several families – all of them poor. The owner of the house, Mrs Amelia Richardson, was a widow, and a sign above the front door announced that she was a packing-case maker. She lived with her grandson, Thomas, aged fourteen, on the first floor at the front of the house, although she also used a room on the ground floor and the basement. There were thirteen other tenants living in the house.
    At the front of the house, opening on to the pavement, were two adjacent doors. The one on the right led directly into the shop, the other, below the sign, gave access to a long stone-flagged corridor twenty-five feet long and three feet wide which ran the full depth of the house. A dog-leg staircase from the corridor at the far end gave access to the upper floors of the house, and just beyond that, a door opened on to a flight of three stone steps which descended into a small backyard some fifteen feet square and paved with stones of irregular sizes. At the rear of the yard and to the right was a small wooden shed that housed an outside lavatory. A second wooden shed on the left was used for storing firewood.
    It was John Davis, an elderly man, who discovered the body. He occupied the front attic of the house with his wife and three adult sons. Just before 6 o’clock he rose from his bed and made a cup of tea for himself, then went downstairs, intending to use the lavatory. As he pushed open the back door to the yard, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. A woman was lying on her back at the foot of the steps – she was obviously dead. A gaping red gash appeared to encircle her throat and her skirts were pushed up to her groin. Her abdomen was torn open and her intestines, like so many sausages, were ripped out of her body. Her legs were spread wide apart as though sexual intercourse had taken place. A pool of crimson blood from her dreadful wounds slowly widened as it spread across the yard even as Davis looked. Horrified, he turned and fled back down the corridor the way he had come, yanked open the front door and burst into the street where he shouted at two men, whom he knew by sight, to join him.
    Two labourers, James Green and James Kent, waiting outside their workplace, Bayley’s Packing Case Manufacturers at 23 Hanbury Street, and a third man, Henry Holland, a boxmaker who was on his way to work, responded quickly to the cry of alarm. They followed Davis back through the house to the open back door, and there they gazed down upon the hideous spectacle. Only Holland went down the steps to the yard, but he did not approach the body.
    While the three men ran off in search of a policeman, Kent returned to his workshop where he took a drink of brandy to steady his nerves and found a piece of canvas, which he took back with him and used to cover the body.
    On Commercial Street, near to the corner of Hanbury Street, the men found Inspector Joseph Chandler on duty, and blurted out their discovery, “Another woman has been murdered”. Chandler returned with them and was the first police officer to reach the crime scene. It was then shortly after 6.10 a.m. Chandler sent for police reinforcements, the ambulance and Dr George Phillips, the police surgeon, who arrived at 6.30.
    Dr Phillips’s examination showed that the victim’s face was swollen and her head was turned on its right side. The tongue too was swollen and was now dark blue in colour, indicating that the victim had been suffocated or strangled, perhaps