Read Online The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman - Free Book Online
Authors: Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman
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compassion on the Ripper’s part, but strictly to save his own skin. Bruises found on Stride’s shoulders and collarbone indicated where he grabbed hold of her before dragging her to the ground. A single sweep of his knife was enough to sever her windpipe (all five of his victims died in this way, with their throats slit right to left). On this occasion, however, as he knelt to rip open Stride’s abdomen, he was disturbed and forced to flee – possibly by the approach of a horse and cart, whose driver (a steward in a nearby working men’s club) first discovered the still warm corpse.
The Ripper wasted little time in stalking a replacement prostitute victim. Within the hour, and only half-mile away in Mitre Square, Aldgate, he accosted and murdered streetwalker Catherine Eddowes – who ironically had just been released from Commercial Street police station. In the words of Constable Watkins, the ‘peeler’ who found her body, the crime scene revealed by his bull’s-eye lantern resembled nothing so much as ‘the slaughter of a pig in market’. A curious feature of this murder was that the Ripper placed part of the intestine between her left arm and body.
Pathologist Dr F. Gordon Brown commented that the abdominal cuts had ‘probably been made by one kneeling between the middle of the body’, and said there had been little or no bleeding since they were inflicted after death. However, Kate Eddowes had also sustained multiple facial wounds (one of which severed the tip of her nose), while the gash in her throat ran almost from ear to ear. ‘All the vessels in the left side of the neck were severed,’ said Dr Brown, ‘and all the deeper structures in the throat were divided down to the backbone. Both the left carotid artery and jugular vein were opened, death being caused by haemorrhage from the cut artery.’
Such an attack would undoubtedly have left bloodstains on the Ripper’s hands, cuffs, some outer clothing and, very probably, his boots (elastic-sided boots were widely worn in 1888). He evidently paused afterwards to wash his hands in a sink in the passage north of the Square; the bloodstained water was still visible when Major Smith, the acting City Police Commissioner, arrived on the scene. The Ripper’s disciplined conduct in the wake of his earlier street murders indicates a calculated awareness of the risks he ran. Each mutilation, carried out at the murder scene, was a ‘high risk’ situation, and he made off fast afterwards with his body-part souvenirs. If that was an obvious precaution to take, his ability always to make his way apparently unnoticed through ill-lit streets and alleyways – burdened by the urgent need of a wash at very least, and most likely a change of clothing – speaks of methodical advance planning on the Ripper’s part.
Furthermore, on the night of 30 September 1888, his awareness of the hue and cry certain to follow the discovery earlier of Stride’s body half a mile away would have been doubly acute: this was a time when Ripper-mania was at its height in dockland London. And yet – on this one occasion when the ritual mutilation had been denied him – he now took an even greater risk by remaining in the same general area and committing a second murder within the hour. Not content with that, he also made time to sever and remove the coveted body parts from this second victim before attempting to flee: no easy task in any circumstances, on that darkened strip of pavement where Eddowes was murdered. As Doctor Brown revealed at the inquest, ‘The left kidney was completely cut out and taken away. The renal artery was cut through three-quarters of an inch . . . the membrane over the uterus was cut through and the womb extracted, leaving a stump of about three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb was absent – taken completely away from the body, together with some of the ligaments . . .’
The conclusion must be that the ritual was of supreme importance to
The Ripper wasted little time in stalking a replacement prostitute victim. Within the hour, and only half-mile away in Mitre Square, Aldgate, he accosted and murdered streetwalker Catherine Eddowes – who ironically had just been released from Commercial Street police station. In the words of Constable Watkins, the ‘peeler’ who found her body, the crime scene revealed by his bull’s-eye lantern resembled nothing so much as ‘the slaughter of a pig in market’. A curious feature of this murder was that the Ripper placed part of the intestine between her left arm and body.
Pathologist Dr F. Gordon Brown commented that the abdominal cuts had ‘probably been made by one kneeling between the middle of the body’, and said there had been little or no bleeding since they were inflicted after death. However, Kate Eddowes had also sustained multiple facial wounds (one of which severed the tip of her nose), while the gash in her throat ran almost from ear to ear. ‘All the vessels in the left side of the neck were severed,’ said Dr Brown, ‘and all the deeper structures in the throat were divided down to the backbone. Both the left carotid artery and jugular vein were opened, death being caused by haemorrhage from the cut artery.’
Such an attack would undoubtedly have left bloodstains on the Ripper’s hands, cuffs, some outer clothing and, very probably, his boots (elastic-sided boots were widely worn in 1888). He evidently paused afterwards to wash his hands in a sink in the passage north of the Square; the bloodstained water was still visible when Major Smith, the acting City Police Commissioner, arrived on the scene. The Ripper’s disciplined conduct in the wake of his earlier street murders indicates a calculated awareness of the risks he ran. Each mutilation, carried out at the murder scene, was a ‘high risk’ situation, and he made off fast afterwards with his body-part souvenirs. If that was an obvious precaution to take, his ability always to make his way apparently unnoticed through ill-lit streets and alleyways – burdened by the urgent need of a wash at very least, and most likely a change of clothing – speaks of methodical advance planning on the Ripper’s part.
Furthermore, on the night of 30 September 1888, his awareness of the hue and cry certain to follow the discovery earlier of Stride’s body half a mile away would have been doubly acute: this was a time when Ripper-mania was at its height in dockland London. And yet – on this one occasion when the ritual mutilation had been denied him – he now took an even greater risk by remaining in the same general area and committing a second murder within the hour. Not content with that, he also made time to sever and remove the coveted body parts from this second victim before attempting to flee: no easy task in any circumstances, on that darkened strip of pavement where Eddowes was murdered. As Doctor Brown revealed at the inquest, ‘The left kidney was completely cut out and taken away. The renal artery was cut through three-quarters of an inch . . . the membrane over the uterus was cut through and the womb extracted, leaving a stump of about three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb was absent – taken completely away from the body, together with some of the ligaments . . .’
The conclusion must be that the ritual was of supreme importance to
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