Domestic violence was quite common as were attacks on people in the streets.
Much of this was a direct result of the drunkenness that was endemic in certain sections of East End Society and extreme poverty.
Robbery and assault-related violence was a common issue and the district's sizable criminal population went about their nefarious business, stealing from those who were less able to defend themselves.
So, to say the least violence wasn't uncommon in the area. Indeed such was the number of attacks that caused victims to cry "Murder!" that such cries were heard many times in a night and the populace at large had long grown used to ignoring such cries, believing them to be either the result of drunken brawls or domestic violence.
So, attempting to isolate particular cases of violence in an area that was rife with such cases is a little like trying to locate a needle in a haystack.
After some time of cool and pleasant time in the city, the storm struck again. It all began on one Saturday. It was February 25th and the year was 1888. I along with some of my colleagues was smoking, just outside our office near the alley connecting Spitalfields, when we heard the news of a 38-year-old widow named Annie Millwood, widow of a soldier named Richard Millwood being brutally stabbed. She lived in White's Row, Spitalfields. She was allegedly a prostitute and was often seen with strangers in lonely places. It wasn't a surprise, that perhaps one of her clients might have stabbed her. The news came, that she was admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. She was suffering from stab wounds to her legs and the lower part of her abdomen. It simply wasn't new to us. There were multiple gangs who operated here and we were forced to give them protection money. They would terrorise the people living there and whoever failed to give them money was beaten and often injured with knives. But her story was different. In her testimony, she said, that she had been attacked by a single man whom she did not know, and who stabbed her with a clasp knife which he took from his pocket.
Initially, it was thought to be the work of a gang member, if not the gang themselves. But due to the lack of eyewitnesses, the investigation could not move any further.
The incident gradually seemed to sink just like thousands of such stories in the neighbourhood. For newspapers such as ours, it wasn't necessarily a subject of much debate.
One month had passed away after that little disturbing incident in late February when on March 28th 1888, just a little over midnight, A woman called Ada Wilson, a dressmaker, heard a knock at the door, so she went to check, who it was.
When she opened the door, she saw a man standing outside. The man demanded money from her and threatened to kill her if she didn't give him money. When Ada refused, he took out a clasp knife and stabbed her twice in the throat. Her screams disturbed her upstairs neighbour, Rose Bierman, who came down to investigate the scream and found Ada Wilson in a state of near collapse in the hallway. Seeing her shout the young man disappeared into the street. I happened to cross that road minutes after the incident. When I crossed the road, two officers held me in and asked me if I saw something or not. According to eyewitnesses and the victim, Ada Wilson reported that the man in his early 30s, who was around five foot six in height and had a fair moustache and a sunburnt face standing outside. He wore a dark coat, light trousers and a wide-awake hat. When the man saw, her scream he fled into the darkness of the alleyway.
It was obvious it was done by a rookie or someone from the gangs trying to get something off. People of the east end would often involve themselves in such petty crimes. Or perhaps someone she owed money to. It was a dead end as she couldn't state her assailant and the case was eventually brought to a closure.
However, the assailant strikes again. But this time in a group. On a Tuesday on 3rd April 1888, following the Easter Monday bank holiday, 45-year-old Emma Elizabeth Smith was going home when she was assaulted and robbed at the junction of Osborn Street and Brick Lane, Whitechapel.In the early hours of that morning. Although injured, she survived the attack and managed to walk back to her lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She told the deputy keeper of the lodging house, Mary Russell, that she had been attacked by two or three men at the most, one of them was a teenager. Russell took Smith to the London Hospital, where a medical examination revealed that a blunt object had been inserted into her vagina, rupturing her peritoneum. She developed peritonitis and died at 9 am the following day.
Smith's life before her murder in 1888 remains mysterious and uncertain. According to reports and Police files that were gathered during the investigation, most of the information was missing or been taken away, mislaid or discarded from the Metropolitan Police archive before the transfer of papers to the Public Record Office. In one of the surviving records, Inspector Edmund Reid, who was the chief CID inspector of the Metropolitan police department notes a "son and daughter living in the Finsbury Park area".Walter Dew, a detective constable stationed with H Division, later wrote:
Her past was a closed book even to her intimate friends. All she had ever told anyone about herself was that she was a widow who more than ten years before had left her husband and broken away from all her early associations.
There was something about Emma Smith which suggested that there had been a time when the comforts of life had not been denied her. There was a touch of culture in her speech, unusual in her class.
Once when Emma was asked why she had broken away so completely from her old life she replied, a little wistfully: "They would not understand now any more than they understood then. I must live somehow."
The inquest was conducted on 7th April by the coroner for East Middlesex, Wynne Edwin Baxter and Edmund Reid of H Division Whitechapel, who investigated the attack.
But since Smith had not provided descriptions of the men who had attacked her and no witnesses ever came forward or were found. The investigation proved fruitless and the murderer or murderers were never caught. Walter Dew later described the investigation:
As in every case of murder in this country, however poor and friendless the victims might be, the police made every effort to track down Emma Smith's assailant. Unlikely as well as likely places were searched for clues. Hundreds of people were interrogated. Scores of statements were taken. Soldiers from the Tower of London were questioned as to their movements. Ships in docks were searched and sailors were questioned. He did believe Smith to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper, but his colleagues suspected her murder was the work of a criminal gang. Smith claimed that she was attacked by two or three men, but either refused to or could not describe them beyond stating one was a teenager. East End prostitutes were often managed by gangs, and Smith could have been attacked by her pimps as a punishment for disobeying them, or as an act of intimidation. She may not have identified her attackers because she feared reprisal.
Less than three months after that incident. On Tuesday 7th August, following a Monday bank holiday, a lady, called Martha Tabram, was found murdered. That morning I was going to my work and I remembered that I was getting late, so I took a shortcut through George Yard. Just when I entered the street, I saw multiple officers gathering up and questioning people about a murder.
It was as if fate brought me to its doorstep, not only did I get a piece of important news to cover, but I a glimpse of the story that was about to begin.
Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, and Whitechapel. In the early hours of the following morning, a resident of the Buildings, called Mrs Hewitt, was awoken by cries of "Murder!", but domestic violence and shouts of that nature were common in the area, So she ignored the noise and went back. At 2:00 a.m., two other residents, husband and wife Joseph and Elizabeth Mahoney, returned to the Buildings but saw no one on the stairs. At the same time, the patrolling beat officer, PC Thomas Barrett was walking his beat around 2 a.m. on the morning of August 7th when he passed by the North entrance to George Yard on Wentworth Street. Since the day before had been a bank holiday, the night had been more active than usual, with the streets full of merry-makers and no shortage of fights.
Constable Barrett later told the press that he had noticed a soldier loitering at the entrance to the yard who he assumed had been out taking advantage of the festivities as well. He then approached the soldier and asked if it was about time for him to be getting back to his barracks. The soldier told him he was waiting for a 'chum' who had gone inside the yard with a girl. It was a good enough answer for Barrett, and he continued on his way. Nearly one hour later at about 3:30 a.m., a resident of that street, Albert George Crow returned home after a night's work as a cab driver and noticed Tabram's body lying on a landing above the first flight of stairs.
It was not until just before 5:00 a.m. that another resident who was coming down the stairs going on his way to work, as a dock labourer, that's when John Saunders Reeves saw the body and quickly realised that she was dead.
Reeves fetched Barrett, who sent for Dr Timothy Robert Killeen to examine the body. Killeen arrived at about 5:30 a.m. and estimated that Tabram had been dead for around 3 hours. Her killer had stabbed her 39 times in the body and neck, including nine times in the throat, five in the left lung, two in the right lung, one in the heart, five in the liver, two in the spleen, and six in the stomach, also wounding her lower abdomen and genitals.
The local inspector of the Metropolitan Police Force, Edmund Reid of H Division Whitechapel, was in charge of the investigation. But it was a difficult one no one could identify who the woman was.
He arranged for PC Barrett to visit the Tower of London on 7th August in the hope that Barrett could identify the man he had seen standing in the street. Barrett did not recognise any of the men. A parade of soldiers who had either been absent or on leave at the time of the murder was arranged for August 8. As he described in a report to the police commissioner, Reid cautioned Barrett to 'be careful as to his actions because many eyes were watching him and a great deal depended on his picking out the right man and no other.' Barrett viewed all the men in the lineup, selecting one with medals on his chest. But when Reid reminded him to be very careful in his choice, he picked out a different man with no medals on his chest. He said later that he picked the second man after remembering that the man he had seen in George Yard had not had any.
The Star in their edition of the news wrote,
A Whitechapel Horror
Mysterious Murder in George Yard
It was the last holiday of the summer. Some Londoners, rising early and determined to spend this last day in the country or by the sea, ventured out to Epping Forest, Rye House, Hampton Court, Kew or the Kent and Sussex coasts. But as the day wore on an increasingly dull and leaden sky presaged yet more rain. It seemed to have done little else that summer. Rainy, thundery weather had persisted until the end of July, and August had begun wet and changeable. Not surprisingly, then, most holiday folk elected to shelter in the capital. To its attractions, they resorted to shoals.
Tussaud's, the zoological gardens in Regent's Park, the People's Palace in the East End, the South Kensington museums and the Tower all enjoyed brisk patronage. At Alexandra, Palace holidaymakers gathered in their thousands in the drizzle to watch intrepid Professor Baldwin ascend in his balloon to 1000 feet and then parachute to the ground. More than 55,000 opted for Crystal Palace. There the entertainments ranged from organ recitals to military bands, from Keen the cyclist, matching his bicycle over 20 miles against horses, to Captain Dale, the 'well-known Aeronaut', from a monster fireworks display to a 'Grand Fairy Ballet'. And when the day's activities were done, London's rich nightlife, its pubs, theatres and music halls, ensured conviviality and spectacle for those still anxious to postpone the damp journey home.
Amidst the holiday crowds that day were Joseph and Elizabeth Mahoney, a young married couple. Their lives, like those of most East Enders, were hard. Joseph was a Carman. His wife worked from nine o'clock in the morning to seven at night in a match factory at Stratford. And their combined earnings supported a frugal existence at No. 47 George Yard Buildings, a block of model dwellings occupied, as the East London Observer tells us, by 'people of the poorest description', in George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street.
The Bank Holiday thus came as a kind of brief respite, and in defiance of bad weather, the Mahoneys made the most of it. It was not until about 1.40 on Tuesday morning that the weary couple arrived home. They went straight up to their room but Elizabeth, after taking off her hat and cloak, slipped out again for some provisions for their supper. Every night the gas jets illuminating the wide, stone staircase in George Yard Buildings were turned out at eleven, so it was completely dark on the stairs as she descended the street. She was away for a few minutes. It was perhaps about 1.50 when she returned, having purchased provisions from a chandler's shop in nearby Thrawl Street, and after supper had been disposed of the Mahoneys went to bed. Elizabeth had seen no one descending or ascending the stairs, and that night the couple slept undisturbed.
Alfred George Crow was a licensed cab driver. He, too, rented a lodging in No. 35, in George Yard Buildings. Crow got home that night at 3.30 a.m. Although he carried no light his eyes were good, and when he reached the first-floor landing he saw someone lying there. It was not unusual to find vagrants sleeping on the landing so he took no notice of the silent figure and went straight up to his room, where he sought the comfort of his bed. Like the Mahoneys he heard no noise during the night.
It was another tenant, waterside labourer John Saunders Reeves from No. 37, who discovered the murder. Because he had to be up early for work, Reeves retired at about six on the Bank Holiday evening. The next morning he left his lodging at about 4.45. It was already getting light as he descended the stairs. And on the first-floor landing, he was horrified to come upon the body of a woman, lying on her back in a pool of blood. A few details – the absence of blood from the mouth, the clenched hands and the disarranged clothes, torn open at the front – registered in his brain before he stumbled down into the street to find a policeman.1
Reeves was soon back, leading PC Thomas Barrett 226H up the stairs to the landing. The body was that of a middle-aged woman, plump and about five feet three inches in height. Her hair and complexion were both dark. Her clothes, a black bonnet, long black jacket, dark-green skirt, brown petticoat and stockings, and a pair of 'side-spring' boots, were old and worn. She lay on her back, her hands lying by her sides and tightly clenched, her legs open. 'The clothes,' Barrett told the inquest two days later, 'were turned up as far as the centre of the body, leaving the lower part of the body exposed; the legs were open, and altogether her position was such as to at once suggest in my mind that recent intimacy had taken place.
The woman was dead. Nevertheless, Barrett was sent immediately for a doctor and Dr Timothy Robert Killeen of 68 Brick Lane arrived in George Yard at about 5.30 a.m. His hurried examination of the body revealed for the first time the awful extent of the woman's injuries. She had been stabbed no less than thirty-nine times! Clearly the murderer didn't want any stones unturned in fulfilling the job. The doctor concluded that she had been dead for about three hours and gave instructions for the body to be immediately removed to the mortuary. Since there was no public mortuary in Whitechapel the police conveyed it to the deadhouse belonging to the workhouse infirmary in Old Montague Street.
At the mortuary Killeen conducted a post-mortem examination. His findings, presented to the inquest jury on 9 August, described the woman's fearful wounds in detail. Upon opening the head he found an effusion of blood between the scalp and the bone. The brain was pale but healthy. There were at least twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk: 'the left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in-depth, there was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to haemorrhage and loss of blood.
Killeen disagreed with Barrett on one point. He saw no reason to believe that sexual intercourse had recently taken place. But he did proffer some clues as to the modus operandi of the killer. There was no evidence of a struggle. One of the wounds, he contended, might have been made by a left-handed person, but the rest appeared to have been inflicted by a right-handed person. And two different weapons had been used. Now, much has been made of Killeen's testimony on this last point. It is worded differently by different reporters.
Say for example in our newspaper The East London Observer quoted the doctor thus:
'I don't think that all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument, because there was one wound on the breast bone which did not correspond with the other wounds on the body. The instrument with which the wounds were inflicted, would most probably be an ordinary knife, but a knife would not cause such a wound as that on the breastbone. That wound I should think would have been inflicted with some form of a dagger.'
In the Daily News, however, his evidence is a little more specific:
'In the witness's opinion, the wounds were not inflicted with the same instrument, there being a deep wound in the breast from some long, strong instrument, while most of the others were done apparently with a penknife. The large wound could have been caused by a sword bayonet or dagger.
Inspector Edmund Reid, the 'Local Inspector' in the Metropolitan Police's H or Whitechapel Division, took charge of the investigation. From the outset, the case promised to be a difficult one. The dead woman was not known to any of the tenants of George Yard Buildings. There was no clue about the author of the crime and no obvious motive for it. And despite the ferocity of the murder no inhabitant of the buildings had heard the slightest disturbance during the night. The last point is one of some significance. Inspector Ernest Ellisdon, in a report written only three days after the murder, explicitly stated that no blood was found on the stairs leading to the landing. This means that the victim was killed when her body was discovered. Yet, in a crowded tenement block, no one seems to have heard a sound. Francis Hewitt, the superintendent of the dwellings, occupied an apartment with his wife close to the spot where Reeves found the body. Indeed, for the benefit of one journalist, he took a foot rule and measured the distance between the two. They were only twelve feet apart. 'And we never heard a cry,' he told the reporter. Mrs Hewitt said that she heard a single cry of 'Murder' but that was early in the evening, and although it echoed through the building it did not seem to emanate from there. In any case, as the Hewitts explained, 'the district round here is rather rough, and cries of "Murder" are of frequent, if not nightly, occurrence in the district.' Hewitts' comment suggests a possible solution to the problem. But there is another – that the victim's cries were stifled by strangulation before or during the knife attack. That, according to the Illustrated Police News, is what happened: 'The difficulty of identification arose out of the brutal treatment to which the deceased was manifestly subjected, she being throttled while held down and the face and head so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible.' Unfortunately, with the bulk of the police files now lost, it has proved impossible to corroborate this particular detail.
Hastily-compiled press reports soon apprised the general public of the tragedy. One of the earliest, printed in the Star, appeared on the day of the murder:
A Whitechapel Horror as it was titled,
A woman, now lying unidentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was ferociously stabbed to death this morning, between two and four o'clock, on the landing of a stone staircase in George's-buildings, Whitechapel.
George's-buildings are tenements occupied by the poor labouring class. A lodger going early to his work found the body. Another lodger says the murder was not committed when he returned home at about two o'clock. The woman was stabbed in 20 places. No weapon was found near her, and her murderer has left no trace. She is of middle age and height, has black hair and a large, round face, and belonged to the lowest class.
Albert' Crow's inquest was later published in our 11th August edition said:-
I live at 37, George Yard Buildings, and am a cab driver, my number being 6, 609.
I came home at half past three on Tuesday morning, which is about my usual time, although I am on day duty. I went straight up to my lodgings. I had no light with me and went up the same staircase as the last witness.
On my way up I noticed that somebody was lying on the first landing.
My eyesight is very good, and I noticed a body lying there, just as I turned the landing. I am accustomed, however, to find people lying sleeping there, and so I took no notice at the time - not even to ascertain whether the body was that of a male or female.
I don't know, therefore, whether the deceased was alive or dead at the time I saw her.
I went to bed and did not come out again before half-past nine, and up to that time, I heard no noise at all of any kind.
When I went down the stairs then, the body was gone, and I did not know what had been done with it.
When I first saw the body, I took so little notice that I am not prepared to say whether or not it was the body of this female at all."
The testimony of the residents and Dr Killeen indicated that Tabram was killed somewhere between 2:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.After the inquest, there were reports that someone who had attended the inquest had identified the yet-unknown victim as Emma Turner.
Following the newly given clue on August 11th, officers tracked down the person who claimed to have spent the evening with "Emma" Turner on the night she was murdered. Mary Ann Connelly, better known as Pearly Poll was her good friend and a prostitute. She was the only one who called Tabram by that name, and Henry Turner had never met her before. Connelly's whereabouts after the inquest were unverified, though she claimed to have been staying at a cousin's house. Despite her elusiveness, Connelly's account of what occurred that night would become the most often repeated storyline.
Connelly claimed that she had spent the evening at a bar drinking with Tabram, having made friends with her while they both lived in a lodging house. The two had picked up a couple of soldiers while out and about, with Martha pairing off with one soldier at the entrance to George Yard around 11:45 pm. Connelly and the other soldier went on to Angel Alley, returning to George Yard about half an hour later, at which point Connelly waited briefly and went home when Martha didn't show up.
An investigation of her records showed that she had a troublesome life. She was born Martha White in Southwark, London, on 10 May 1849. She was the youngest of five children born to Charles Samuel White, a warehouseman, and his wife, Elisabeth Dowsett. Her older siblings included Henry White, Stephen White, Esther White and Mary Ann White. She was 5 feet 3 inches tall and had dark hair.
In May 1865, her parents separated; six months later her father died suddenly. It was a hard time for the family. Later she went to live with Henry Samuel Tabram, a foreman packer at a furniture warehouse. The two married on 25 December 1869. In 1871 the couple moved to a house close to Martha's childhood home. She and Henry had two sons, Frederick John Tabram, born February 1871 and Charles Henry Tabram,born December 1872.
The marriage was troubled, due to Martha's drinking, which was heavy enough to cause alcoholic fits, and her husband left her in 1875. For about three years he paid her an allowance of 12 shillings a week, then reduced this to two shillings and sixpence when he heard she was living with another man.
Tabram lived on and off with Henry Turner, a carpenter, from about 1876 until three weeks before her death. This relationship was also troubled by Martha's heavy drinking habit and occasionally staying out all night to work as an occasional prostitute. She, and her sons, were listed as being overnight inmates at the Whitechapel Union workhouse's casual ward at Thomas Street on the census night of 1881. By 1888 Turner was out of regular employment and the couple earned income by selling trinkets and other small articles on the streets, while lodging for about four months at 4 Star Place, off Commercial Road in Whitechapel. Around the beginning of July, they left abruptly, owing rent, and separated for the last time about the middle of that month. Tabram moved to a common lodging house at 19 George Street, Spitalfields. By the time of her death, Tabram's economic situation had become so desperate that she was working as an active prostitute.
Whitechapel police set up two separate identity parades of soldiers. They brought Connelly on the scene, first bringing her to the Tower and then later to the Wellington Barracks at Pimlico. At first, Reid reported that she had behaved in a "flamboyant" way, shouting, "He ain't here!" when pressed and asked to identify someone. However at the second identity parade, she was more subdued and nervous but made an unsettling move by identifying two military men without hesitation. To both the press and the police, it appeared that she had just walked up and chosen two random people. The soldiers' alibis checked out and they were pursued no further.
Pearly Poll's odd, and shifty behaviour was far too confusing for the investigators, this made her testimony difficult to use, and the case never yielded a prosecutable suspect. Reid told local papers that he believed that the killer of Martha Tabram was probably "belonging to the same miserable class" as Pearly Poll, but had been intimidated into reporting what they knew by some "scoundrels of the locality."
Her body was formally identified on 14 August by her estranged husband, Henry Samuel Tabram. He testified to the police that Martha was married to him when she was 20 years old but the two only stayed together for roughly about six years as Martha was already drinking heavily. Although he tried to make her quit these bad habits it came of no use. Following these circumstances and lots of failed attempts, He decided to leave her alone. Despite being separated he continued to pay her an allowance until he discovered that she was living and having an affair with a carpenter called Henry Turner. By the time 39-year-old Martha was murdered, her relationship with Turner had reached its end as well. In his testimony, Turner said, Martha would often disappear for an entire night and blame her long absence on a "hysterical fit" that caused her to lose her memory. Turner admitted that while he had seen her go into a "fit" in the past, he had no idea whether they were genuine or not.