Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

During her desolate times, Mary Ann had been an inmate at numerous workhouses, which were huge, dreaded barracks packed with as many as a thousand men and women who had nowhere else to go. The poor despised the workhouses, yet there were always long lines on cold mornings as the penniless waited in hopes of admission into what were called "casual wards." If the workhouse wasn't full, and a person was taken in by the porter, he or she was carefully interrogated and searched for money. The discovery of even a penny sent the person back out on the street. Tobacco was confiscated; knives and matches were not allowed. Every inmate was stripped and washed in the same tub of water and dried off with communal towels. They were given workhouse-issue clothing and directed to stinking, rat-infested wards where canvas beds stretched out between poles like hammocks.

Breakfast at 6:00 A.M. might be bread and a gruel called "skilly" made with oatmeal or moldy meat. Then the inmate was put to work, performing the same cruel tasks that had been used to punish criminals for hundreds of years: pounding stones, scrubbing, picking oakum (untwisting old rope to reuse the hemp), or sent to the infirmary or mortuary to clean the sick ward or tend to the dead. It was rumored among inmates that the incurably sick in the infirmary were "polished off" with poison. Dinner was at 8:00 P.M., and the inmates got leftovers from the infirmary's patients. Filthy fingers attacked mounds of table scraps and stuffed them into ravenous mouths. Sometimes there was suet soup.

Guests of the casual wards were required to stay at least two nights and one day, and to refuse to work was to end up homeless again. Rosier accounts of these degrading places can be found in gilded publications that tend to mention only "shelters" for the poor that provided uncomfortable but clean beds and "good meat soup" and bread. Such civilized charity was not to be found in London's East End unless it was at Salvation Army shelters, which were generally avoided by the street-smart who had gotten cynical. Ladies of the Salvation Army regularly visited doss-houses to preach God's generosity to paupers who knew better. Hope was not for a fallen woman like Mary Ann Nichols. The Bible could not save her.

She had been in and out of the Lambeth Workhouse several times between the previous Christmas and April 1888. In May she vowed to change her ways and took a coveted job as a domestic servant in a respectable family home. Her vows did not last, and in July she left in shame after stealing clothing valued at?3 10 shillings. Mary Ann sank deeper into her drunken ways and returned to the life of an Unfortunate. For a while she and another prostitute named Nelly Holland shared a bed in a doss-house in the maze of decaying buildings on Thrawl Street, which ran from east to west for several blocks between Commercial Street and Brick Lane in Whitechapel.

After a while, Mary Ann moved on to White House on nearby Flower and Dean Street and stayed there until she ran out of money and was evicted on August 29th. The following night, she walked the streets wearing everything she owned: a brown ulster fastened with big brass buttons engraved with the figures of a man and a horse; a brown linsey frock; two gray woolen petticoats with the stenciled marks of the Lambeth Workhouse; two brown stays (stiff bodices made of whalebone); flannel underclothing; ribbed black woolen stockings; men's sidespring boots that had been cut on the uppers, tips, and heels for a better fit; and a black straw bonnet trimmed in black velvet. In a pocket she had tucked a white handkerchief, a comb, and a bit of broken looking glass.

Mary Ann was spotted several times between 11:00 P.M. and 2:30 the following morning, and in each instance, she was alone. She was seen on Whitechapel Road, and then at the Frying Pan Public House. At around 1:40 A.M., she was in the kitchen of her former lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, where she said she was penniless and asked that her bed be kept for her, promising to return soon with money for payment. She was intoxicated, witnesses said, and on her way out the door she promised to be back soon and bragged about her "jolly" bonnet, which appeared to have been recently acquired.

Mary Ann was last seen alive at 2:30 A.M. when her friend Nelly Holland came upon her at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road, across from the parish church. Mary Ann was drunk and staggering along a wall. She told Nelly that so far this night she had earned three times what she needed for her bed at the lodging house but had spent it. Despite her friend's pleas that she come with her and go to bed, Mary Ann insisted on trying one last time to earn a few pennies. The parish church clock chimed as Mary Ann wove her way along the un-lighted Whitechapel Road, dissolving into darkness.

Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later and half a mile away on a street called Buck's Row that bordered the Jews' Cemetery in Whitechapel, Charles Cross, a carman, was walking along Buck's Row on his way to work and passed a dark shape against some gates on a footpath near a stableyard. At first he thought the shape was a tarpaulin, but he realized it was a woman lying motionless, her head to the east, her bonnet on the ground by her right side, her left hand up against the closed gateway. As Cross was trying to get a better look to see what was wrong with her, he heard footsteps and turned around as another carman named Robert Paul appeared in the street.

"Take a look," Cross called out as he touched the woman's hand. "I believe she is dead." Robert Paul crouched down and put a hand on her breast. He thought he felt a slight movement and said, "I believe she is still breathing."

Her clothing was disarrayed, and her skirt was raised above her hips, so the men decided she had been "outraged" or raped. They chastely rearranged her clothing to cover her, not noticing any blood because it was too dark. Paul and Cross rushed off to find the nearest constable and happened upon G. Mizen 55 Division H, who was making his rounds at the nearby corner of Hanbury and Old Montague streets, on the west side of the Jews' Cemetery. The men informed the constable that there was a woman on the pavement either dead or "dead drunk."

When Mizen and the two men reached the stable yard on Buck's Row, Constable John Neil had come across the body and was alerting other police in the area by calling out and flashing his bull's-eye lantern. The woman's throat had been severely cut, and Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who lived nearby at 152 Whitechapel Road, was immediately roused from bed and summoned to the scene. Mary Ann Nichols's identity was unknown at this time, and according to Dr. Llewellyn, she was "quite dead." Her wrists were cold, her body and lower extremities were still very warm. He was certain she had been dead less than half an hour and that her injuries were "not self-inflicted." He also observed that there was little blood around her neck or on the ground.

He ordered the body moved to the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse mortuary, a private "dead house" for workhouse inmates and not intended for any sort of proper forensic postmortem examination. Llewellyn said he would be there shortly to take a better look, and Constable Mizen sent a man to fetch an ambulance from the Bethnal Green police station. Victorian London hospitals did not have ambulances and there was no such thing as rescue squads.

The usual means of rushing a desperately sick or injured person to the nearest hospital was for friends or Good Samaritan passersby to carry the patient by the arms and legs. Sometimes the cry "Send for a shutter!" rang out, and the afflicted one would be conveyed on a window shutter carried like a stretcher. Ambulances were used by police, and most police stations had one of these unwieldy wooden-sided handcarts with its lashed-in sturdy black leather bottom that was equipped with thick leather straps. A tan leather convertible top could be unfolded, but probably did little more than offer partial protection from prying eyes or bad weather.