EXCITEMENT IN WHITECHAPEL
The excitement in Whitechapel is high.
The discovery of this body so soon after the others has paralysed the district with fear. All business in the vicinity of the scene has been stopped and the streets swarmed with people this morning. Many stood about in groups, discussing the murders, and there is a firm opinion that all the murders were committed by the same person. The police have thus far failed to bring anyone to justice and are still hunting for the man they call ‘Leather Apron’.
He is clearly a madman with uncontrollable homicidal urges. It is widely accepted that lunatics are often more devious and cunning than any sane man. While this murderer is at large, no one in Whitechapel is safe.
‘No Englishman could have done this’ was the phrase quoted widely in all the papers. Groups of feral youths were reported to be harassing local Jewish men, trying to bait them into fights, and Jewish families were getting heckled outside their shops and homes. Groups were being followed home from synagogues.
The police found bloodstains and a piece of water-saturated leather apron in the yard. Annie’s meagre possessions had been scattered about nearby: a pocket of her underskirt had been cut away; a piece of muslin, a comb and paper case lay near her body; and a brass wedding ring and its keeper had been torn from her fingers but left on the ground. An envelope containing two pills had been carefully placed by her head, as if left intentionally by Leather Apron as his calling card. If only the inept police could find this man, the papers screeched, the murders would stop.
I seemed to be the only person in London who felt differently. When I read the descriptions of how Dark Annie was found, I saw Thomas’s face as it hung down above me in a bloody rage while I lay on the coach floor; I saw its twin apparition from my nightmares. Where did he go after he left me and drove off in that cab? Where could he have gone? It was too much of a coincidence now: scratches after Martha, coming home covered in blood after Polly and now this. He would have had ample opportunity to murder Annie. Was he thinking of me when he cut her throat? I took to my drops, if only to steady my nerves.
Witnesses emerged. A woman said she’d been harassed in the Queen’s Head in Spitalfields by a man fitting the description of Leather Apron. ‘You’re about the same style of woman as the ones that have been murdered,’ he’d leered at her. Given that the murdered women were all prostitutes, that warranted a slap round the face, but instead she’d merely asked what he meant. To which he’d replied, ‘You’re beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don’t always find ’em.’ A weird conversation, but the papers loved it, and the woman enjoyed her moment of fame.
Dark Annie stuck with me, and I spent a lot of hours – whole days – thinking about her, imagining her last evening, filling more pages of my scrapbook with my notes. There were things about her that sliced at me, things that were a little too familiar for me to undertake my macabre observation without guilt. For a start there was her name. ‘Chapman’ was also my mother’s name, and Dark Annie’s story could easily have been my mother’s, if only she’d had the chance to get to forty-two. Like Dark Annie, my mother was a gentle type, quietly spoken, and chose her words carefully. Those were the qualities I remembered.
It seemed all the more tragic the way the papers wrote about Dark Annie as if she was an ailing, listless vagrant. Yet it was clear she wasn’t always that way. Little details came through, such as the fact she sometimes sold flowers or crochet, and she was known for her love of rum. She lived with a sieve maker, which gave her the nickname: Dark Annie Sievey. She was stout with a thick nose and missing teeth. By all accounts, none of the woman had been considered attractive, even by the standards of the labouring poor.
More details were released, ever so gradually so as to keep us in a perpetual state of quivering horror. Her uterus, the upper portion of her vagina, and the posterior two thirds of her bladder had been removed. As this was done so quickly, the murderer would need to have had knowledge of pathological or anatomical examinations. According to the coroner, the killer had half strangled her to the ground, rendering her voiceless, and then cut her throat. It was blood loss that caused her death.
At the inquest, the piece of leather apron was dismissed as irrelevant – a bitter disappointment, as it had made such good theatre. It was found to have belonged to the son of a tenant.
If there had been hysteria over the murders before, then after this one it went wild. The murders were headline news as far as New York, Montreal, and all over Europe. When they weren’t printing fantastical witness accounts, speculative theories or letters from moralists, the press dedicated column inches to savaging the police. Even the coroner joined in, complaining he had not been given a map to show where or how the last body was found. The general consensus was that the police were stupid, plodding clowns.
At the morgue, Annie’s body had been stripped and washed down by inmates of the workhouse and her clothes dumped in the corner, ruining any evidence. The police surgeon protested that he could not work in such terrible conditions, it being an outrage that Whitechapel didn’t even have its own morgue. The police were overwhelmed and had few resources. They had to rely on word of mouth, and there were a lot of flapping mouths in the East End. A group of local
