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

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.