Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

hours, the temperature had hovered around the mid-40s. With the corpse left out in the open on such a chilly morning, and the victim losing a great deal of blood, her abdomen cut open and skirts pulled up, cooling would have occurred at a much faster rate than normal.
    Detective Inspector Abberline, together with D.S. George Godley, soon arrived at the crime scene, to assist in the fledgling investigation, and began by making a thorough and painstaking search of the yard, then of the house to which the yard belonged. Nothing of interest, or any clue, was discovered. Detectives questioned the owner of number 29, the tenants who resided there, and various witnesses who had been in the vicinity at the time when the crime was supposed to have been committed. Mrs Amelia Richardson, whose first-floor room was located immediately above the corridor leading from the front door, said that she had not heard any person either entering or leaving the house that morning. Because the ground floor and stone-flagged corridor was bare, she maintained that she usually heard people coming in and going out.
    John Richardson, aged thirty-five, the son of Amelia Richardson, lived a two-minute walk from Hanbury Street. He called by the house just before dawn that morning to check that the cellar in the yard was secure because he kept his work tools in there. He was adamant that when he looked into the yard, there was no corpse there then. “If there was,” he said, from his vantage-point at the top of the steps, “I could not possibly have missed seeing it.” Since dawn on that day was 4.51 and the body was not there then, Dr Phillips’s estimate of the time of death as being 4.30 was clearly incorrect.
    Another witness was Mrs Elizabeth Long of Church Street, the wife of a cart-minder who looked after boxes of fish piled on carts for the fishmongers of Billingsgate market. She was on her way to Spitalfields market at 5.30 when she saw a woman talking to a man outside 29 Hanbury Street. She was sure about the time because she heard the bell of the Brewery clock in Brick Lane strike the half-hour. She later made a positive identification of the dead woman at the mortuary, so there can be no doubt that it was the deceased whom she had seen. The brutal murder had therefore occurred in the narrow time frame of just 30 minutes.
    Lying on the ground near the head of the deceased was part of an envelope bearing a red postmark: ‘London, Aug. 23, 1888’. The words ‘Sussex Regiment’ appeared on an embossed blue seal on the back of the envelope and what appeared to be the first two letters of a word or place: ‘Sp,’ but the envelope was torn at that point, so it was impossible to say what the rest of the word might have read – Spitalfields perhaps? Inside the envelope were two pills. Police enquiries at the Royal Sussex Regiment in Farnborough led nowhere, although it was quickly established that the pills had belonged to the victim.
    The third finger of the victim’s left hand was bruised where two rings had been wrenched off; it was presumed that the murderer had stolen them. It was later established that they were made of brass and were, therefore, quite worthless. Enquiries at pawnbrokers and dealers within a five-mile radius proved fruitless.
    My father and I wondered if the murderer had taken the rings. While it must have appeared to the police as the only likely answer, it seemed to us that it was both out of character, and a trivial, time-wasting distraction where the primary reason for the attack was evidently to obtain the victim’s uterus – and time had been short. We thought that perhaps the rings might have been removed by someone else altogether: James Kent had returned to his workplace to obtain a piece of canvas. By the time Inspector Chandler arrived ten minutes later, the rings could have been removed by anyone who had gone into the yard to view the body. There was ample time for the theft to have taken place – and an abrasion to the victim’s finger suggested that they appeared to have been taken in haste – although who, in the rapidly growing crowd that had gathered in the yard to gaze at the body, might have stolen them, it is impossible to say.
    There was something odd about the murder scene. Under the victim’s skirts a large pocket was discovered. It was tied about her waist with a piece of knotted string. Torn at both the front and on one side, it was empty. But close to the dead woman’s feet were