Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Chapter Nineteen. These Characters About

Catherine Eddows spent Friday night in a casual ward north of Whitechapel Road because she did not have fourpence to pay for her half of John Kelly's bed.

It had been seven or eight years now that she had been living with him in the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Before Kelly, she was with Thomas Conway, the father of her children - two boys, fifteen and twenty, and a daughter named Annie Phillips, twenty-three, who was married to a lampblack packer.

The sons lived with Conway, who had left Catherine because of her drinking habits. She had not seen him or her children in years, and this was by design. In the past when she would come around, she was always in need of money. Although she and Conway had never been married, he had bought and paid for her, she used to say, and his initials were tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm.

Catherine Eddows was forty-three years old and very thin. Hardship and drink had given her a pinched look, but she may have been attractive once, with her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and black hair. She and Kelly took one day at a time, holding themselves together mostly by hawking cheap items on the streets, and now and then she cleaned houses. They usually left London in the fall because September was harvest season. They had only just gotten back on Thursday from weeks of "hopping" with thousands of other people who had fled the city for migrant work. Catherine and Kelly had spirited themselves away from the East End to roam the farming districts of Kent, gathering hops used in the brewing of beer. The work was grueling, and the couple earned no more than a shilling per bushel, but at least they were far away from smog and filth and could feel the sun on their bodies and breathe fresh air. They ate and drank like royalty and slept in barns. When they returned to London, they had not a cent.

Friday, September 28th, Kelly returned to the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields, and Catherine stayed without him in a free bed at a casual ward. It is not known what she did that night. Kelly later stated at her inquest that she was not a woman of the streets, nor was he the sort to tolerate her being with another man. Catherine never brought him money in the morning, he added, perhaps to forestall any intimations that she might have picked up a pittance here and there through prostitution. He was adamant that she did not have an addiction to alcohol and was only occasionally "in the habit of slightly drinking to excess."

Catherine and Kelly considered themselves man and wife and were fairly regular in paying the nightly rate of eightpence for their double bed at Flower and Dean Street. It was true they might have a word or two now and then. Some months earlier she had left him for "a few hours," but Kelly swore under oath that he and Catherine had been getting along just fine of late. He said that on Saturday morning she offered to pawn some of her clothing so they could buy food, but he insisted that she pawn his boots instead. She did, for half a crown. That pawn ticket and

another one they had bought from a woman while hopping were safely tucked inside one of Catherine's pockets, in hopes she might be able to reclaim Kelly's boots and other valuables someday soon.

Saturday morning, September 29th, Catherine met up with Kelly between ten and eleven in the old clothing market at Houndsditch, a healed gash in the earth that in Roman days had been a moat protecting the city wall. Houndsditch ran between Aldgate High Street and Bishopsgate Within, and bordered the northeast side of the City of London. As Catherine and Kelly spent most of his boot money on food and enjoyed what for them was a hearty breakfast, she moved into the outer limits of her life. Within less than fifteen hours, Catherine Eddows would be bloodless and cold.

By early afternoon, she was dressed in what must have been everything she owned: a black jacket with imitation fur around the collar and the sleeves, two outer jackets brimmed in black silk braid and imitation fur, a chintz shirt with a Michaelmas daisy pattern and three flounces, a brown linsey dress bodice with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front, a gray petticoat, a very old green Alpaca skirt, a very old ragged blue skirt with a red flounce and light twill lining, a white calico chemise, a man's white vest with buttons down the front and two outer pockets, brown ribbed stockings mended at the feet with white thread, a pair of men's lace-up boots (the right boot repaired with red thread), a black straw bonnet trimmed with black beads and green and black velvet, a white apron, and "red gauze silk" and a large white handkerchief tied around her neck.

In her many layers and pockets were another handkerchief, bits and pieces of soap, string, white rag, white coarse linen, blue and white skirting, blue ticking and flannel, two black clay pipes, a red leather cigarette case, a comb, pins and needles, a ball of hemp, a thimble, a table knife, a teaspoon, and two old mustard tins safely securing a precious stash of sugar and tea she had bought with Kelly's boot money. He did not have money for their bed that night, and at 2:00 P.M., Catherine told him she was going to Bermondsey in the southeast part of the city. Maybe she could find her daughter, Annie.

Annie used to have a house on King Street, and apparently Catherine didn't know that her daughter had not lived in that house or in Bermondsey for years. Kelly said he wished Catherine wouldn't go anywhere. "Stay here," he said to her. She was insistent, and when Kelly called out to her to be careful of the "Knife" - the street name for the East End murderer - Catherine laughed. Of course she would be careful. She was always careful. She promised to be back in two hours.

Mother and daughter never saw each other that day, and no one seems to know where Catherine went. Perhaps she walked to Bermondsey and was dismayed to find that Annie had moved. Perhaps the neighbors told Catherine that Annie and her husband had left the neighborhood at least two years ago. Perhaps no one knew who Catherine was talking about when she said she was looking for her daughter. It's possible Catherine didn't intend to go to Bermondsey at all and just wanted an excuse to earn pennies for gin. She may have been all too aware that no one in her family wanted anything to do with her. Catherine was a drunken, immoral woman who belonged in the dustbin. She was an Unfortunate and a disgrace to her children. She did not return to Kelly by four o'clock, as she had said she would, but got herself locked up at Bishopsgate Police Station for being drunk.

The police station was just north of Houndsditch, where Kelly had seen Catherine last when they were eating and drinking away his boot money. When word reached him that she was in jail for being drunk, he figured she was safe enough and went to bed. At the inquest, he would admit that she had been locked up before. But as was said of the other Ripper victims, Catherine was a "sober, quiet" woman who got jolly and liked to sing when she had one drink too many, which, of course, was rare. None of the Ripper's victims were addicted to alcohol, friends swore from the witness stand.

In Catherine Eddows's time, alcoholism was not considered a disease. "Habitual drunkenness" afflicted someone "of a weak mind" or "weak intellect" who was destined for the lunatic asylum or jail. Drunkenness was a clear indication that a person was of thin moral fiber, a sinner given to vice, an imbecile in the making. Denial was just as persistent then as it is now and euphemisms were plentiful. People got into the drink. They had a drop to drink. They were known to drink. They were the worse for drink. Catherine Eddows was the worse for drink Saturday night. By eight thirty, she had passed out on a footway on Aldgate High Street, and Police Constable George Simmons picked her up and moved her off to the side. He leaned her against shutters, but she could not stay on her feet.

Simmons called for another constable and they got on either side of her to help her to the Bishopsgate Police Station. Catherine was too drunk to say where she lived or whether she knew anyone who might come for her, and when she was asked her name, she mumbled, "Nothing." At close to 9:00 P.M., she was in jail. At quarter past midnight, she was awake and singing to herself. Constable George Hutt testified at the inquest that he had been checking on her the past three or four hours, and when he stopped by her cell at approximately 1:00 A.M., she asked him when he was going to let her go. When she was capable of taking care of herself, he replied.

She told him she was capable of that now, and wanted to know what time it was. Too late for her to get "any more drink," he said. "Well, what time is it?" she persisted. He told her "just on one," and she retorted, "I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home." Constable Hutt unlocked her cell and warned her, "And serves you right; you have no right to get drunk." He brought her inside the office for questioning by the station sergeant, and she gave a false name and address: "Mary Ann Kelly" of "Fashion Street."

Constable Hutt pushed open swinging doors that led to a passageway, showing her out. "This way, Missus," he said, and told her to make sure to pull the outer door shut behind her. "Good night, ol' Cock," she said, leaving the door open and turning left toward Houndsditch, where she had promised to meet John Kelly nine hours earlier. Probably no one will ever know why Catherine headed that way first and then set out to the City, to Mitre Square, which was an eight- or ten-minute walk from Bishopsgate Police Station. Perhaps she planned to earn a few more pennies, and trouble wasn't likely in the City, at least not the kind of trouble Catherine was considering. The wealthy City of London was crowded and thriving during the workday, but most people whose jobs brought them into the Square Mile did not live there. Catherine and John Kelly didn't live there, either.

Their common lodging house at Flower and Dean Street was outside the City, and since Kelly was unaware of her after-hours entrepreneurial activities (or so he claimed after her death), perhaps she concluded that it was wise to stay in the City for a while, and not wander home and get into a row. Perhaps Catherine simply didn't know what she was doing. She had been in jail less than four hours. The average person metabolizes approximately one ounce of alcohol - or about one beer - per hour. Catherine must have had quite a lot of alcohol on board to have been "falling down drunk," and it is possible that when Constable Hutt bade her good night, she was still intoxicated.

At the very least, she was hung over and bleary headed, maybe suffering from tremors and blank spots in her memory, too. The best cure was a little hair of the dog that bit her. She needed another drink and a bed, and could have neither without money. If her man was going to give her hell, maybe it was best if she earned her pennies and slept somewhere else the rest of the night. Whatever she was thinking, it doesn't appear that reconnecting with Kelly was foremost on her mind when she left the police station. Heading to Mitre Square meant walking in the opposite direction from where Kelly was staying on Flower and Dean Street.

Some thirty minutes after Catherine left her jail cell, Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveler, and his friends Joseph Levy and Harry Harris left the Imperial Club at 16 and 17 Duke Street, in the City. It was raining and Lawende was walking at a slightly faster pace than his companions. At the corner of Duke Street and Church Passage, the street that led to Mitre Square, he noticed a man and a woman together. Lawende would state at the inquest that the man's back was to him, and all he could tell was that the man was taller than the woman and wearing a cap that might have had a peak.

The woman was dressed in a black jacket and a black bonnet, Lawende recalled, and as bad as the lighting conditions were at the time, he was later able to identify these items of clothing at the police station as having belonged to the woman he saw at 1:30 A.M., an exact time he based on the clubhouse clock and his own watch. "I doubt whether I should know him again," Lawende said of the man. "I did not hear a word said. They did not either of them appear to be quarreling. They appeared conversing very quietly - I did not look back to see where they went."

Joseph Levy, a butcher, did not get a good look at the couple, either, but he estimated that the man was perhaps three inches taller than the woman. As he passed down Duke Street, he commented to his friend Harris, "I don't like going home by myself when I see these characters about." When questioned closely by the coroner at the inquest, Levy amended his statement a bit. "There was nothing I saw about the man and woman which caused me to fear them," he said.

City of London officials would assure journalists that Mitre Square was not the sort of place where prostitutes prowled, and that City Police routinely were on the lookout for men and women together at late hours. If constables were instructed to take note of men and women in the Square at late hours, perhaps this suggested that questionable activity did go on there. Mitre Square was poorly lit. It was accessible by three long, dark passageways. It was filled with empty buildings, and a policeman's leather heels striking the pavement could be heard from far away and allowed plenty of time to hide.

Because Catherine Eddows was seen with a man just before her murder, it was theorized that before she was locked up, she had made an appointment to meet a client in Mitre Square. Such a suggestion seems unlikely if not absurd. She was with Kelly until 2:00 P.M. She was drunk and in jail until 1:00 A.M. It is hard to believe she promised a customer a late-night rendezvous when quick sex could be bought during day hours, too. There were plenty of stairways, tumbledown buildings, and other deserted shambles where hidden activities could go on. Even if Catherine had made the "appointment" while she was drunk, there is a good chance she would not have remembered it later. It is simpler to assume that while she may have headed toward the City in search of business, she had no particular client in mind but was looking for the luck of the draw.

The Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police, Henry Smith, who may have been as tenacious as Captain Ahab was in his hunt for the great white whale, probably didn't anticipate that the fiend would surface in his own neighborhood and get away with murder for a hundred years. As usual, Smith was sleeping poorly in his quarters at Cloak Lane Station, built into Southwark Bridge on the north bank of the Thames. A railway depot was in front and vans clanked and rattled at all hours. The furrier's business behind his rooms gave off the stench of curing animal hides, and he had not a single window he could open.

Smith was startled when his telephone rang, and he groped for it in the dark. One of his men told him there had been another murder, this one in the City. Smith dressed and hurried out the door to a waiting hansom, "an invention of the devil," as he called it, because in the summer he was miserably hot, and in the winter he froze. A hansom was designed to carry two passengers, but this early morning the one Smith climbed into carried the superintendent and three detectives in addition to himself. "We rolled like a seventy-four [a warship] in a gale," Smith recalled. But "we got to our destination - Mitre Square," where a small group of his officers stood around the mutilated body of Catherine Eddows, whose name they did not yet know.

Mitre Square was a small, open area surrounded by large warehouses, empty houses, and a few shops that were closed after hours. During the day, fruit vendors, businessmen, and loiterers filled the Square. It was entered by three long passageways, which at night were thick with shadows barely pushed back by gaslights on the walls. The Square itself had only one lamp, and it was some twenty-five yards from the dark spot where Catherine was murdered. A City Police constable and his family lived on the other side of the Square, and heard nothing. James Morris, a watchman stationed inside the Kearley amp; Tonge Wholesale Grocers warehouse, also in the Square, was awake and working and heard nothing.

It seems that once again, no one heard a sound when the Ripper butchered his victim. If times sworn to can be trusted, Catherine Eddows could have been dead no more than fourteen minutes as P. C. Edward Watkins's beat brought him back into Leadenhall Street and then into the Square. He could walk his beat in twelve to fourteen minutes, he testified at the inquest, and when he passed through the Square last at 1:30 A.M., there wasn't the slightest hint of anything out of the ordinary. When he shone his bull's-eye lantern into a very dark corner at 1:44 A.M., he discovered a woman lying on her back, her face to the left, her arms by her sides with the palms turned up. Her left leg was straight, the other bent, and her clothes were bunched up above her chest, exposing her abdomen, which had been cut open from just below the sternum to her genitals. Her intestines had been pulled out and tossed on the ground above her right shoulder. Watkins ran to the Kearley amp; Tonge warehouse, knocked on the door, and pushed it open, interrupting the watchman, who happened to be just on the other side, sweeping the steps.

"For God's sake mate, come to my assistance," Watkins said. Watchman Morris stopped sweeping and fetched his lamp as an upset Morris described "another woman cut up to pieces." The two men hurried out to the southwest corner of Mitre Square, where Catherine's body lay in a pool of blood. Morris blew his whistle and ran up to Mitre Street, then to Aldgate, where he "saw no suspicious person about," he recalled at the inquest. He ran and blew his whistle until he found two constables and told them, "Go down to Mitre Square. There has been another terrible murder!"

Dr. Gordon Brown, the police surgeon for the City Police, arrived at the scene not long after two o'clock. He squatted by the body and found next to it three metal buttons, a "common" thimble, and a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets. Based on body warmth, the complete absence of rigor mortis, and other observations, Dr. Brown said that the victim had been dead no longer than half an hour, and he saw no bruises or signs of struggle or evidence of "recent connection," or sexual intercourse.

Dr. Brown was of the opinion that the intestines had been placed where they were "by design." This may be too complicated when one considers the circumstances. In both Annie Chapman's and Catherine Eddows's cases, the Ripper was in a frenzy and could scarcely see what he was doing because it was so dark. He was probably squatting or bent over the lower part of the victim's body when he slashed and tore through clothing and flesh, and it is more likely that he simply tossed the intestines out of the way because it was certain organs he wanted.

Police and newspaper reports vary in their details of what Catherine Eddows's body looked like when it was found. In one description, a two-foot segment of colon had been detached from the rest and was arranged between her right arm and body, but according to The Daily Telegraph, the piece of colon had been "twisted into the gaping wound on the right side of the neck." It was fortuitous that City Police Superintendent Foster's son, Frederick William Foster, was an architect. He was immediately summoned to draw sketches of Catherine's body and the area where it was found. These drawings depict a detailed and disturbing sight that is worse than any description at the inquest.

All of Catherine Eddows's clothing was cut and torn open, blatantly displaying a body cavity that could not have been more violated had she already been autopsied. The Ripper's cuts opened the chest and abdomen to the upper thighs and genitals. He slashed her vagina and across the tops of the thighs as if he were reflecting back tissue in preparation for dismembering her legs at the hip joints.

The disfigurement to her face was shocking. Peculiar, deep nicks under both eyes were similar to artistic accents Sickert used in some of his paintings, particularly the portrait of a Venetian prostitute he called Giuseppina. The most severe damage to Catherine Eddows's face was to the right side, or the side exposed when the body was discovered, the same side of Giuseppina's face that has disturbing black brush strokes reminiscent of mutilation in a portrait of her titled Putana a Casa. A morgue photograph of Catherine Eddows resembles Giuseppina; both had long black hair, high cheekbones, and pointed chins.

Sickert was painting Giuseppina in the years 1903-04. My search through letters and other documentation and my queries to Sickert experts produced no evidence that anyone who might have visited Sickert in Venice had ever actually met or seen the prostitute. Sickert may have painted her in the privacy of his room, but I have yet to find any evidence that Giuseppina existed. Another painting of the same period is titled Le Journal, in which a dark-haired woman has her head thrown back, her mouth open, as she reads a journal that she bizarrely holds high above her stricken face. Around her throat is a tight white necklace.

"What a pretty neklace I gave her," the Ripper writes on September 17, 1888.

Catherine Eddows's "pretty necklace" is a gaping gash in her throat that is shown in one of the few photographs taken before the autopsy and the suturing of the wounds. If one juxtaposes that photograph with the painting Le Journal, the similarities are startling. If Sickert saw Catherine Eddows when her throat was laid open and her head lolling back as shown in the photograph, he could not have done so unless he was in the mortuary before the autopsy or was at the crime scene.

Catherine Eddows's body was transported by hand ambulance to the mortuary on Golden Lane, and when she was undressed under close police supervision, her left ear lobe fell out of her clothing.