IDENTIFICATION OF THE DECEASED
An inmate from the Lambeth Workhouse later identified the deceased as Mary Ann Nichols, 42, commonly known as Polly, who had been in the aforementioned workhouse in April and May of last year.
Mary Ann Nichols left the workhouse in May to take a position as a domestic in Wandsworth Common, but this did not last and soon she was wandering the streets and staying at lodging houses or the workhouse.
Nichols was married but had lived apart from her husband and children for years.
NO ONE HEARD ANYTHING
It is extraordinary that the noise of this brutal slaying seemingly did not arouse the sleeping tenants in the area. Buck’s Row being a street tenanted by a respectable class of people, far superior to the surrounding streets.
There was a mark found on the jaw on the right side of the face as though made by a thumb, and another bruise on the left side. There was a cut under the left ear, reaching the centre of the throat, and another from the right ear to the centre. The neck was severed down to the spine. The gashes in the abdomen must also have been inflicted with extreme savagery.
Dr Llewellyn stated that the injuries were the most severe and shocking he had ever seen in his career.
*
Just like Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols had been walking those Whitechapel streets in the early hours. The papers reported that the police thought she’d been killed by a person whose company she was keeping, a polite way of saying she was a prostitute, also just like Emma and Martha.
I kept seeing Emma Smith, the bag of broken twigs, lying there bleeding to death on the hospital bed. I thought of her birdlike legs and the little dunnock and how Emma had been put in a box but did not fly away come the morning. I began to wonder how these women must have felt. What was going through their minds when they realised what was about to happen to them? Did they fight? What does a woman feel in the moment she is murdered?
I found the newspaper reporting frustrating. I consumed newspaper after newspaper, in the hope of filling in gaps in the detail, but to no avail, most simply rehashed the same old facts, which were thin on the ground to begin with and some were more like directions as to what opinions we should form of the women. As a way of making sense of it all, and for something to do – I decided I would walk in these women’s shoes, and surmise some of this missing detail myself. I was going to try and thread their stories together, like stitching up my own Frankenstein’s monster, but instead I would create the victims, these forgotten and discarded women, and I would bring them back to life in their last moments. I understand this to be weird, macabre and a little indulgent in what some might call the perverse. God knows what Thomas and Mrs Wiggs would think of it, they would call me twisted, immoral or sick, but my own physician had advised that I might find some therapy in writing my thoughts down. I was curious to see where it would lead me. I only wanted to bring these women back and spend a little time with them, have them speak and for me to listen and understand. The moment you realise you are to be murdered and your life is to end in such a miserable way must be the loneliest of all. Someone should have the courage to accompany them in this and I found myself compelled to do so.
I scoured the million theories and opinions that filled the papers, I analysed the articles that were fleshed out from the most meagre of ideas and the ones that had been fabricated around eyewitness accounts that were nothing at all. I curated my scrapbook of snippets, and from all that text and supposition I fashioned my own account of the last moments of Little Lost Polly. And I felt better for it. Then I hid these scrawls in the dresser in the back dining room.
It became very difficult to read the information and maintain a rational thought which wasn’t excited by a most paranoid fear. Commentators variously held that it had been a case of mistaken identity, the revenge of a jealous lover, the work of a maniac, an escaped lunatic… The perpetrator had to be foreign for no Englishman could have done such a thing. It was a lunatic Jew down on whores. The murderer was left-handed. It was a gang of body-snatchers… Some newspapers said Polly lost a tooth during the attack, others said she lost five and that the murderer had kicked them loose. It turned out she was missing the top five but had lost them years ago.
The only commonality between the reports was an accepted belief that the murderer had to be the same man who’d killed Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. Detective Inspector Abberline, of the Criminal Investigation Department, and Detective Inspector Helson, of J Division, had also stated this. If the murderer had hoped to make an impact, he must have been extremely proud.
But what of Thomas? He had come home the night of Polly’s murder covered in blood. I had been reading about the murder of Martha Tabram over breakfast on the morning Thomas had appeared with scratches down his neck. Hadn’t he been missing the night before?
It seemed far-fetched, of course, a mere coincidence. Then I read that the doctor at the inquest believed the murderer must have anatomical knowledge; all the vital parts of Polly Nichols’ forty-two-year-old body had been targeted with such precision, he said, he suspected that
