Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

a middle-aged woman was found drunk in Aldgate High Street. She was wearing a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, a red silk handkerchief tied about her neck, a black jacket trimmed with imitation fur, a brown linsey bodice with a black velvet collar, and a white apron over a dark-green chintz skirt, imprinted with a daisy and lily flower pattern.
    She was causing a nuisance by marching up and down the pavement imitating a fire engine. By the time P.C. Louis Robinson forced his way through the large crowd that had gathered to watch the woman’s impromptu performance, she had collapsed to the ground where she lay in a dishevelled heap and was quite unable to move. With the help of another constable, P.C. George Simmonds, P.C. Robinson managed to lift her to her feet, arrested her and together the officers took her into custody at Bishopsgate Police Station. When Sergeant James Byfield asked the woman her name, she was too drunk to answer him, and she was put into a cell until the effects of the drink wore off.
    Several times during the course of the evening she was visited in her cell by P.C. George Hutt, who had come on duty at 9.45 p.m., and by 11.45 she had sobered considerably and could be heard singing to herself. At 12.30 a.m. she asked P.C. Hutt when she would be allowed to leave, and he replied, “Shortly”.
    Twenty-five minutes later, Hutt judged the woman fit enough to be released. He unlocked her cell and escorted her back to the main office. Sergeant Byfield asked her again for her name, this time so that he could enter her details on the release record. She gave her surname as ‘Kelly’. It was the surname of John Kelly, the man she had been living with for the past seven years. Her first names, she said, were ‘Mary Ann’. She gave her address as 6 Fashion Street in Spitalfields, which Byfield also noted on his form. At 1.00 a.m., and perhaps at the very moment when she was being discharged from custody, the body of the first of that night’s victims was discovered.
    Within the hour, the night had claimed its second victim – the woman in the black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, the woman whom Sergeant Byfield had earlier released from custody.
     
    The first victim, Elizabeth Stride, was forty-five years old. Her body was discovered by Louis Diemschutz, a steward, and a salesman of cheap jewellery at a market near Crystal Palace in south London. At 1.00 a.m. he returned with his pony and cart to his home in The International Working Men’s Educational Club in Berner Street, where a meeting of Polish and Russian Jews had taken place some hours before. The back entrance to the club could be reached from Dutfield’s Yard. The pony shied away to the left as he turned into the yard, and when he stopped to investigate the reason why, he was shocked to find, by the light of his match, the body of a woman lying on the ground just inside the open gates.
    Leaving his pony and cart standing in the gateway, Diemschutz fled through the yard and into the club to seek help. There, he blurted out his discovery, and within moments he was followed back out to the yard by several club members who had lingered on to talk after their meeting ended. One of them, Isaac Kozebrodski, a Polish tailor, brought along a lit candle. By its dim and flickering light, they could make out a two-inch wide gash which ran around the woman’s throat. A widening pool of blood, which matched in colour the single red rose the deceased had been wearing in her buttonhole, flowed from the open wound in a steady stream which reached to the back door of the club, almost ten feet away.
    P.C. Henry Lamb, the constable Diemschutz and Kozebrodski summoned, thought there might be a chance that the victim was still alive. He found that her face was warm, but there was no pulse and the spilled blood was starting to congeal. P.C. Lamb’s report stated that there were no signs of a struggle and the victim’s clothing had not been interfered with. He said, “She looked as if she had been quietly laid down.”
    Chief Inspector West from Leman Street Police Station, located to the south of Whitechapel Road, arrived at the crime scene and ordered a search of Dutfield’s Yard for blood, clues and the murder weapon – but nothing came to light. Twenty-eight people who had gathered to watch the police investigation were detained by P.C. Lamb when he closed the gates to Dutfield’s Yard, effectively locking