Ch13: It never ends.

Just about 48 hours after Mary Kelly's funeral. One of our sources informed us about a story he heard from his friend ,whom he met at a bar. The story broke that Jack the Ripper claimed another victim. On the morning of November 21st, 1888 At about 7.30 am, Annie Farmer, a prostitute had picked up a 'shabby genteel' man on Commercial Street and had taken him back to Satchell's Lodging House in George Street. The man paid 8d for a partitioned double bed on the first floor and with no questions asked by the lodging house deputy, the next hour or two went quietly by. Then, at about 9.30 am, the man was seen dashing out of the house cursing, "What a -- cow!" Witnesses loitering in the street said he had blood around his mouth, a scratch on his face and blood on his hands. He dashed off down Thrawl Street, past several bystanders, including two police officers who did not respond immediately, but when Annie Farmer came out of the lodging house claiming that the man had tried to cut her throat, gave chase to the man but lost him as he went into Brick Lane. From there, things began to escalate alarmingly.

Annie did indeed have a wound to the throat, but no weapon was found. Dr George Bagster Phillips was summoned and he stitched the wound before Annie was taken, on a stretcher, to Commercial Street Police Station. Such a spectacle attracted curious onlookers and before long there were visible signs of excitement in Spitalfields. That evening, the newspapers suggested another Ripper crime, claiming that another woman had been mutilated, but it was soon apparent that this had not been the case and retractions were quickly made. The police were sceptical about Annie Farmer's claims from the off and their doubts were made more concrete when she was found to be hiding coins in her mouth. From this, a possible scenario presented itself. Farmer had attempted to swindle the man out of money and when he remonstrated with her, made a bid to get herself out of the situation by injuring herself and crying attempted murder. As an interesting side note to this little tale, one of the street witnesses, Frank Ruffell, felt that Jack may have been attempting another murder here and that it was, in his words, "his first botched job." Descriptions of the man were also believed to tally with the blotchy-faced character seen with Mary Kelly by Mary Ann Cox on the night of that particular murder. The police were hopeful that the man would give himself up to them to give his own story and clear his name, however, the wait was fruitless and the mystery man was never identified. Annie Farmer never said who he was either, despite claiming that she had known him as a customer for a year and that he often mistreated her. Annie Farmer never recanted her story either, and with her subsequent release from police custody, she drifted off into obscurity, her name preserved in a few sensational news reports as a possible victim of Jack the Ripper, all for a brief moment in time.

A fellow Lodger Esther Hall,in her testimony to the press regarding her involvement in the case, said,

I sleep in the basement of the house and was awoken this morning by a man who told me a murder had been committed. I ran upstairs and saw a woman lying down covered with blood. The deputy put a piece of rag around her throat, and I said, "Are you able to dress yourself?" She said she was not, so I dressed her. I then inquired, "Do you know the man?" She replied, "Yes; I was with him about twelve months ago, and he ill used me then."

She added that the man a black moustache, wore dark clothes and a hard-felt hat and that she thought he was a saddler. Farmer also told her that the man made her drunk before he brought her to the lodging house.

But without further information and the possibility of a fake call, resulted in the case being dropped.

At 7.55 pm, on Wednesday 19th December 1888, Charles Ptolomey was making his way along England row, off Poplar High Street, when he saw a woman in the company of two sailors by the entrance to Clarke's Yard, on the opposite side of the High Street.

One sailor was around 5 foot eleven inches tall and, in Ptolomey's opinion, "looked like a Yankee ''; and the other was about 5 foot seven inches tall.

Ptolomey later recalled that the shorter one was talking to the woman, whom he later identified as Rose Mylett when he was taken to view her body at the mortuary, whilst the taller of the two was walking up and down. "So strange did it seem", he later told the Daily Chronicle, "that I stopped and took account of them."

He then heard the woman say to the shorter sailor "No, no, no!" and heard the shorter sailor speak to her in a low tone.

"It struck me that they were there for no good purpose" he later recalled, "and that was the reason I took so much notice of their movements. I shall always remember their faces, and I could pick them out of a thousand."

He also stressed that, when he had seen her, Rose Mylett seemed perfectly sober.

At 2.30 am, on the morning of the 20th December, she was seen by Alice Graves in the company of two men outside The George pub on Commercial Road, by which time she appeared quite drunk.

At 4.30 am Police Sergeant Robert Golding and Police Constable Thomas Costello found her dead in Clarke's Yard. Her body was still warm, suggesting that death had occurred only a short time before.

According to a later report by Metropolitan Police Commissioner, James Monro:-

"...The face was perfectly placid. The clothes were not disarranged and round the neck was a handkerchief loosely folded, but not tied. In the pocket of the dress was a small phial, empty. In one of the ears was an earring; the other was missing.

There were no signs of any struggle, and no marks of violence visible.

The police believed from the appearance of the body that the case was one of suicide or sudden death from natural causes..."

Assistant Divisional Police Surgeon, Dr George James Harris, was sent for and, having carried out a cursory examination of the body, in the course of which he found no marks or signs of foul play, he pronounced life extinct and ordered that the body be removed to the mortuary.

Here, the mortuary keeper, and Coroner's assistant, Curtain T. Chivers, discovered a mark around her neck, which was approximately an eighth of an inch deep, with some scratches above it.

On that very day, a body was found on the Thames River. It as the body of a man who was later identified as Montague John Druitt.

A postmortem was subsequently ordered and was duly carried out, on 21st December 1888 by Divisional Police Surgeon Dr Matthew Brownfield.

His findings, as stated in his subsequent report, and presented at the opening of the inquest into Rose Mylett's death that was held that same day, were as follows.

"Blood was oozing from the nostrils, and there was a slight abrasion on the right side of the face.

On the neck was a mark which had been caused by a cord drawn tightly round the neck, from the spine to the left ear. Such a mark would have been by a four-thread cord.

There were also impressions of the thumbs and middle and index fingers of some person visible on each side of the neck. Death was due to strangulation. The deceased could not have done it herself. Marks on her neck were probably caused by her trying to pull the cord off.

The murderer must have stood at the left rear of the woman, and, having the ends of the cord round his hands, thrown it round her throat, crossed his hands, and thus strangled her..."

At the inquest, it transpired that the police were unaware of Brownfield's conclusion that Rose Mylett had been murdered and, therefore, since they were still of the opinion that her death had been accidental, they had not launched an investigation.

As Commissioner Monro put it in his report, "This evidence was certainly a matter of surprise to the police, but accepting the medical evidence as correct, the case was one of murder..."

Monro confessed that he had been wrong-footed by the victim's "perfectly placid features" and by the "absence of all signs of violence when the body was discovered..."

He, therefore, sought a second opinion and asked Surgeon, Mr. Mackellar, Mr. Mackellar to make a further examination.

Mackellar concurred with Brownfield's findings that death was the result of strangulation, leaving, a somewhat nonplussed, Commissioner Monro to opine that "there is, therefore, therefore no doubt that the case was one of murder - and murder of a strange and unusual type."

Inevitably, the question was soon being raised as to whether or not this new atrocity spelt the return of Jack the Ripper.

The police, and the majority of the newspapers, seem to have been anxious to dispel any rumours that the murder of Rose Mylett had been the work of Jack the Ripper.

Indeed, there seems to have been a marked determination by the press to avoid the sensationalism that had caused so much panic and unrest in the wake of the previous killings.

The Coroner, Wynne Baxter, was reported as stating at the inquest that, "..The usual signs of strangulation, such as protrusion of the tongue and clenching of the hands, were absent, there being nothing all suggestive of death by violence."

He did, however, point out that such signs were often not present in cases where the violence had been very sudden.

The jury, faced with a large amount of medical testimony and evidence that pointed to strangulation returned a verdict of "Murder by person, or persons unknown."

Reporting on the verdict the Advertiser, reflecting the view held by several other newspapers that the area had had enough of the Whitechapel horrors, commented, " It is unfortunate that there is a fundamental difference of opinion between the coroner and the jury...For months past there has been a succession of abhorrent enormities forced upon public attention, and it would have been a great relief to have been assured that the death of Rose Millett sic was due to accidental strangulation...As the matter stands additional responsibility is thrown upon the metropolitan police, who from the first have contended that the death was attributable to natural causes. The truth may never be known with certainty until the adage that "murder will out" - if murder it be - is once more justified."

It is evident from this, and other reports on what was being dubbed the "Poplar Mystery" that many newspapers were desperately trying to report responsibly on the murder in order to prevent further outbreaks of panic in the district.

However, one newspaper, in particular, in particular seemed determined to lay the blame for this latest, apparent, atrocity firmly at the ripper's door.

On 24th December 1888 The Star, the newspaper whose earlier reporting had done so much to stir up the Leather Apron scare, broke ranks with the majority of other papers and, in an article that bore the tantalising headline, "IS HE A THUG? A STARTLING LIGHT ON THE WHITE-CHAPEL CRIMES. THE ROPE BEFORE THE KNIFE.", it complained that, "...The town has supped so full of horrors that mere murder unaccompanied by revolting mutilation passes apparently for common-place, and the discovery on Thursday morning...of a woman's dead body with the white mark of a strangler's cord around her throat has failed to create any excitement even in the neighbourhood..."

Adopting the same chilling tone as it had with its "Leather Apron" campaign, a tone designed to terrify the residents, the article went on to opine that, "...The swift and silent method of the Thug is a new and terrifying feature in London crime, and this murder is invested with a startling significance by the discovery that it has a possible bearing upon the series of Whitechapel Crimes. The suggestion is this:- "Was the Poplar Murder another of the series of Whitechapel and the work of the same man? If so, has the murderer changed his methods, or is it not possible that the deed of Clarke's-yard is a new revelation of his old methods - that in the other cases, partial strangulation was first of all resorted to, and that when the victims were by this means rendered helpless, THE KNIFE WAS USED in such a manner as to obliterate the traces of the act?"

The article went on to suggest that the previous victims may well have been rendered unconscious by the same method as had been used on Rose Mylett - i.e. strangulation - but that the marks were not apparent because the killer had then gone on to cut their throats and thus destroy the evidence of the strangulation.

Quoting no less an authority than Dr George Bagster Phillips the Police Surgeon who had inspected the body of Annie Chapman, as it lay in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, - even though Phillips had refused to talk to their reporter so they were, to quote the article, reliant on "another source" concerning Phillips's opinion - "...the Poplar Murder and the Whitechapel Murderer are the same man and the method of preliminary strangulation was certainly employed in Hanbury-street, and was possibly employed in the other cases..".She was not a victim of Jack the Ripper, however, the killer was soon to make a comeback.

Months passed but nothing came of some closure. Both the case of body parts and bodies. Although it was presumed at some point that there was no connection between them, but some investigators saw a significant amount of similarities between them.

By this time I was too involved in the cat-and-mouse chase that has been going on. And something in me inspired me to continue it, basically, I was secretly in a passionate relationship with that murderer. Like I wanted to find him, look into his eyes and tell him, You did this! I wanted to find him and put him down and put an end to his terror.

And there i was plannings my own investigation and making a profile of the murderer.