Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

a number of articles that the police assumed had been rifled from her pockets: it was as though the murderer had been searching for something, and had then discarded the various items which were unwanted. According to the report of Inspector Abberline, dated 19 September, the items were a small-toothed comb, a larger comb in a paper case and a piece of coarse muslin, folded in two. The inquest testimony of Dr George Bagster Phillips was that “They had apparently been arranged there.” While little further information is available, either from the inquest records or from contemporary newspaper reports, it seems clear that both Inspector Chandler and Dr Phillips thought that the items had not been casually discarded or tossed to one side; more that they had been quite deliberately tidied up.
    It was an unusual and unexpected find for which no obvious explanation presented itself. As part of his summing up on 26 September, the final day of the inquest, the coroner, Wynne Baxter, commented: “All was done with cool impudence and reckless daring: but perhaps nothing is more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets, and the arrangement of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet.” My father and I wondered: if the murderer had been a man, would he have tidied up his victim’s possessions with such precision after the killing. Or was it rather more likely that the culprit might have been a woman acting out of habit: a careful, meticulous woman?
    For what it’s worth, William Stewart, author of Jack the Ripper: A New Theory , published in 1939, gave his view that the victim’s possessions were arranged at her feet in “a typically feminine manner”, though this was, of course, merely his opinion.
    There was something else strange too. In the yard was a tap with a pan of clean water underneath. Mrs Amelia Richardson said it had been left there the night before so that the occupants of the house could wash their hands after they had used the water closet, or when they had returned from their work perhaps? Yet it appeared to have been untouched; the water was still clean. Whoever had committed this dreadful crime must have been covered in blood; Dr Phillips certainly thought so, yet the murderer did not appear to have used the water to wash away the blood.
    Within two hours of the body’s discovery, the Hanbury Street victim was identified. Her name was Annie Chapman, known to her friends as Dark Annie. She was forty-seven years old, separated from her husband three or perhaps four years before, and had lived a sad life thereafter, most of it as a prostitute. She lived in Crossingham’s lodging house in nearby Dorset Street.
    It was a most peculiar crime by any standard and it bore all the hallmarks of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols committed just over a week before. They were both middle-aged prostitutes, drunk at the time of their deaths – Nichols more so than Chapman – and they had accompanied the murderer to a quiet and secluded place. Then, it was believed, they had lain down on the ground voluntarily , as though they were ready and willing to perform the sexual act. In neither case was any scream for help reported, nor were there signs that a struggle had taken place; the women had been throttled , Chapman only partially so, and their throats had been cut – from left to right – their abdomens’ ripped open. But far greater injury had been inflicted upon Annie Chapman’s lifeless body: her uterus cut out and removed from the scene of the crime. Whereas Nichols had been murdered in the dead of night, Chapman had been killed as much as half an hour after sunrise.
    It could have been only a matter of minutes between the commission of the murder and the discovery of the body when the alarm was raised, because blood was still flowing from the victim’s open wounds. Yet, once again, the murderer, supposedly covered in blood, had escaped on what was a fine, bright morning, when the streets were coming alive, then had somehow, silently and mysteriously disappeared.
    The newspapers had a field day – and they too were in no doubt as to the sex of the murderer. The headline in The Star on 8 September announced: “A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts…”. The Times on 10 September reported: “This person, whoever he might be, is doubtless labouring under some terrible form of insanity, as each of the