S3 – 9: Making a Killing

living dissecting human bodies. Even as the doctors and police in Miller's Court grappled with their shock over the murder, there were two other men who arrived on the scene who both believed that the hunt for clues to Marry Kelly's death was theirs to supervise. But I'm not talking about the challenge of coordinating between detectives from Scotland Yard and officers of the City Police who were investigating the murder in Miter Square. No, this was a boundary dispute

over another crucial part of the process. It was a wrestling match between London coroners, one of them we know well, of course. When Baxter Mary Kelly's room was in Win Baxter's White Chapel jurisdiction, so that afternoon they admitted Baxter to the crime scene, believing that he would be responsible for determining Mary Kelly's cause of death and conducting the interviews that would help the police work and feed the

story to the London press. But Baxter was in for a surprise because he wasn't the only coroner on the scene that afternoon. The other man was someone he knew all too well, Roderick McDonald. He had come alongside Dr Phillips, and he put his own claim on conducting the inquest. If there was incentive for departments like the Metropolitan Police and the City Police to resolve disputes and share information, the same certainly can't be said for the coroners of

East London. Because they were paid by the corpse. In a place where living was as hard as the East End, the position of coroner came with the promise of a steady income. That's what made when Baxter and Roderick McDonald put themselves up for the position two years earlier in eight six, and because coroners were elected, that meant that Baxter and McDonald were political opponents to choose their corner. The people of the district met at a church hall

in bethnal Green. Names were called out and hands were raised to show approval. The thing was though, when Baxter had brought a group of friends to that election, large loud, burly friends, friends with anger problems and a habit of following Baxter around. It made one candidate give them the sarcastic nickname Baxter's Lambs. The Times, though, didn't play coy. They called Baxter's supporters a mob of roughs, and they were rough. Indeed, his men beat, choked and fought the

supporters of other candidates. In fact, they caused so much trouble in the church hall that election night that the whole thing was called off. No one could be sure of the number of votes for each candidate when raised, hands were lost between flying fists, so a poll of the district was scheduled for three days later. The London Standard reported that all day long, carts and cabs hired by the candidates rolled to the church filled with voters.

When it was over, though, Baxter's Lambs proved to be the convincing shepherds. When Baxter tallied the most votes, with McDonald hot on his heels in second place and the other candidates were left in the dust. Baxter had his corner seat. It was the night that made sure that he would be in office when the murders started in Whitechapel. Two years later, though, the district was split and a position was created for a new corner Roderick McDonald. Both

men started collecting fees for the White Chapel dead. So on a November day in eighteen eighty eight, Rodrick McDonald and Win Baxter were in a contest for who would turn Mary Kelly's death into their next paycheck. The victim's room was in Win Baxter's jurisdiction, but somehow Roderick McDonald went out by having Mary Kelly's body transported over the border into Shortage. In fact, it was a reversal of

Annie Chapman's case. Her murder on Hanbury Street had been in McDonald's jurisdiction, but she had been carried by police into Baxter's Amaine. Once Mary Kelly's body was on McDonald's turf, he was responsible for her inquest. Win Baxter was left out in the cold. Now Baxter's inquests of murder victims

had inflamed public fears. The long weeks of witness interrogations the doctors brought back over and over to recite the horrible litany of wounds, cuts and mutilations, the police constables giving the press their firsthand accounts, complete with bodies emerging in dramatic lamp lights. But with McDonald at the helm, Mary Kelly's inquest took a different approach cooperating with the police. He kept it to a single day. It was quick

and to the point. In a clear criticism of his opponent, Win Baxter, McDonald announced that to go through the same evidence time after time only causes expense and trouble. He reminded his jury as well as the listening press, that inquests had but one goal to determine the cause of death, and his jury had o trouble doing their job. They quickly delivered their verdict on Mary Kelly's death willful murder by some person unknown. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey.

The Home Secretary was under fire. Aberleine Swanson and the other officers at Scotland Yard were hoping that by opening and closing the inquest quickly, panic over the most gruesome and horrifying murders so far would not burst out across Whitechapel. To some extent, it worked. There were a few stories for the Star to chase, there were fewer monster visions

for London readers to fear. But if journalists found less to rile up the public in the halls of Government, the ferocious debate only continued to rage, and the target of most attacks was the Home Secretary. Now, it was true he had done enough to rid himself of Charles Warren, he had accepted the Police Commissioner's resignation and was just waiting for the man to see himself out so that James Monroe could take his place. But whether that was enough to play Kate the Queen and the public was

another question altogether. And there was another place where the Home Secretary, Matthews was scrutinized and scathingly dressed down on almost a daily basis, the halls of Parliament. In the weeks after Mary Kelly's murder, The Times of London offered an inside look at the kinds of fury that regularly was unleashed in the chambers of Government. On November twelve, the day that Mary Kelly's inquest was both opened and

closed by Roderick McDonald. The pointed questions for the Home Secretary came in a flurry, and they all had to do with the central issue who was running the show over at Scotland Yard. If Charles Warren's resignation was a relief to Matthews, this was the other side of that coin. The men confronting him in the House of Commons seemed to know that something strange had happened behind the scenes, with one man in particular, the spy and Detective James Monroe.

Matthews found himself running from a difficult question. Why was the Home Secretary still working with Monroe? If the Scotsman had stopped working with the police, it would have passed no one's notice that a spymaster from the Special Branch had come to serve on the staff of the Home Secretary. And that didn't leave any members of Parliament feeling particularly comfortable, let alone members like Edward Pickersgill, the representative of Bethnal

Green in the East End. He had been campaigning against police abuses since his election in eight five, and he would be remembered in later years for calling secret policing dirty work. In the House of Commons, shouting and cheering followed the demands that Matthews make it clear what Monroe was doing on his stay off, and of course the issue of who would replace Charles Warren was on everyone's mind.

Over the next couple of days, the House of Commons rang with arguments about the role of police in London, who they should be, how they should be funded, and who should lead them. Edward Pickersgill wasted no time reminding his fellow members that London was now under the thumb

of soldiers who had been hardened in India. The time has come, he said, for a change in this regime under which the mounted men of the police, with an ex lancer at their head, rode people down in the streets and the infantry, instructed by an ex officer of the Guards, batond them. What Pickersgill wanted was a force to effectively detect crimes. So for members of Parliament like him, it was good riddance to Charles Warren, but that hardly

sewed up the issues in the East End. Pickersgill continued to Pepper, the Home Secretary, with questions throughout November trying to peel back the layers of secrecy around the communications between the Home Office and the police. He was worried about the killer roaming White chap yes, but he was even more worried about the rots in the government of the city that allowed it to happen. Every choice that the Home Secretary had made was picked over and pounded flat.

Demands that he changed course and offer a reward for the killer. Demands that he offer a pardon for accomplices to entice them out from the shadows. It seems that many members of Parliament believe that somewhere along the secret government correspondence were the answers they were looking for. Answers about what the police knew and when, Answers about why the investigations had failed. Answers about whether the government had really done everything it could to bring the killer to justice.

The arguments swirled back and forth through the causes and consequences of the murders. What could the Home Office do about the East Ends lodging houses, with their cramped conditions housing crowds of unknown persons. What could the Home Office do to stop the police from publishing the names of suspects who turned out to have no connection to the murders. But we're staying with a connection to Jack the Ripper. When all the questions were asked, though Parliament would be

left unsatisfied. They could demand the capture of the killer. Sure, they could demand a change. But even after Charles Warren stepped away from his post and James Monroe stepped out from his shadowy corner of the Home Office to take command, Home Secretary Matthews had nothing more to give them. Like the police of the world's largest city, the government of the world's most commanding empire was at a loss because the answers to their questions just weren't there. The whole

city was on tenter hooks. Now, that's not tender hooks, no. The phrase comes from the clothmaking trade, when new made sheets of wool were hung like tents on hooked wooden frames to keep the cloth from shrinking while it dried. The process gave its name to East End landmarks like the Tenter Streets and Tenter passage in Spittle Fields, Wherefore, a very long time the English wall trade had a home.

At the end of November of eight though, crime after unsolved crime had everyone in this city feeling like something was about to snap. And the truth is that what we call the Jack the Ripper murders were not the only heinous killings in London. Of eight they were clearly the most discussed, the most publicized, and the most significant in the eyes of history. But other than the brutal mutilation of Mary Kelly, they were not even the most heinous or most gruesome. Here's Dr Drew Gray to say

more about that. There were other murders, and not not least the Thames torso mystery, which which could possibly be

linked to the rip of Killings um so. In that case, there was the discovery of a female torso in the Thames at Raynham in May seven, with more body parts surfacing that same year, and then in September, right while the White couple cases is kind of reaching its end, another torso was being found amongst the building work for police head quarters at White Hall, and in June third dismembered female body was tracked from the Thames at Horsby

Down before in September of that year the police discovered a rotting torso underneath arches in Pension Street, which isn't far from where there's strive to be murdered just a year earlier. The details of these crimes are truly stomach turning. Take for instance, the case that opened in the midst of Scotland Yard itself in October, which came to be

called the Whitehall mystery. That's when a carpenter who was working on the construction of the new police headquarters spotted a wrapped package tucked away at the building site near the spot where he left his tools. When he first saw the bundle, he left it alone. It was unusual, but he hardly was the only one working on the construction site. After the second day seeing it lie undisturbed, though, the builder pointed it out to a supervisor and the

two men opened it together. What they found in I'd shocked them both. It was the mutilated torso of a woman. This sent everyone on the site into a flurry of investigation. Who could have dropped it there? And when all the workers on the site were questioned and speculations flew wildly, the examination of the body was undertaken by Dr Thomas Bond himself. He had examined a severed arm that had been found a few weeks earlier along the Thames at Pimlico,

and he immediately made the connection. The body was too decomposed to tell the doctors much, though the pall Mall Gazette reported that the deceased was a very fine woman and the body was exceedingly well nourished. They guess the woman had been dead for about six weeks, but the rudimentary forensic science available to Dr Bond and his assistant meant that by the time the body was found, the

trail was already cold. Things got worse for the police though, when a journalist with a terrier did with the Metropolitan Forces never could. He used his dog to scare up evidence in a search at the building site. The terrier covered another arm and leg near the place where the carpenter found the rap torso it was a huge embarrassment for Scotland Yard and for a little while the Star

drove that point home. But the mystery was quickly overshadowed by the double event murders of Liz Stride and Katherine ETOs. The police and Dr Bond didn't think it was likely that the two cases were connected, and the case was already cold by the time the body was found. There were a few stories that discussed the horrible find and even drew connections to the Whitechapel murders, but with so much less pressed, the horrible dismemberment failed to make the

same kind of impression on the city of London. Here's more from historian Paul Beg. They were overshadowed by the Whitechapel murders and therefore they just didn't get the publicity that they One imagine is that they might have done

had the Whitechappel murders not being committed at the same time. Equally, of course, it depends on what really grabs the attention of the press, and these were body parts, in effect, that were being found at different times in fairly separated places, and unlike the Ripper killings, which were suggested one person operating in a very small area. It may well be that that also killings just didn't grab public attention. And we have known about these murders for quite a long time.

It's only in the last few years that people have been writing books about them and really bringing them into the sphere of of anybody interested in the Ripper murders as well, because they show what was going on at the time in the same way that the press could turn the Whiteappel murders into an international panic while dismissing what came to be known as the Torso murders, the name Jack the Ripper could receive the same treatment. It drives home a simple but profound point that should be

all but obvious by now. It was the storytelling about the murders and the invention of the name Jack the Ripper that pushed the Whitechapel killings into the public eye, and along the way invented one of the most enduring stories in the history of modern crime. In fact, when Mary Kelly's inquest was quickly closed in November, the reporters of The Star, The Times and the Paul Malgazette were hard pressed to keep the fear alive. As the growing

chill of December descended over London. There were other stories to tell that absorbed attention, and until there were new victims to sketch out and new inquests to publicize, there just wasn't anything new to say. The tension of the murders went slack as the weeks marched by the strengthened police numbers in the East End. Carried on for as long as the new Commissioner James Monroe could justify the budget to the Home Secretary, but government budgets rarely make

press sensations, even when they reached the headlines. Soon enough, the name invented by the Central Press Agency had gone the way of every figure from popular fiction. He had his day in the sun and faded with the ink he was printed on. The papers closed their chapter on Jack the Ripper. They moved on, but the case, well, that was still open, because the thing that gave energy to those early press reports was still true. The killer had not been caught, but the police didn't move on

as easily as the press. The flow of sensationalist stories may have stopped, but the search was ongoing. The questions that needed to be answered still hung in the air, and the veriest senior policeman in the Metropolitan Office all had their sense of who the killer might be. The problem was, though they all disagreed. In the final months of eight eight, immediately following Mary Kelly's death, a number

of suspects were arrested. One detective sergeants who had been involved in patrolling Whitechapel brought a man into police court on the day that Mary Kelly was buried. He was the time, said, a man of decidedly foreign appearance, and his mustache was no doubt the thing that put him front and center in the suspicions of the police. The sergeant presented the magistrate with his deep suspicions he had arrested this man before and held him under lock and

key in connection with the murder of Liz Stride. It was only after he was released that Mary Kelly was found dead. To the sergeant's mind, this could be the murderer that they had all been searching so hard for. A Swede named nicanner Ben alias. This time he had been arrested for a terrifying home invasion. A woman had been at home alone and had left open the street facing door. When she was sitting in her parlor, the man suddenly burst in. Terrified, she gasped out, what do

you want? In reply, he only grinned. She jumped out of her chair and ran to the window, but when she turned back to the room he had disappeared. It was enough to get him arrested by a constable in the street, but the evidence against him thinned out to the parallel between his break in and Mary Kelly's murder

in her room. The police he held him for a few days and peppered him with questions, but all they learned was that his landlord sometimes found him preaching in the streets, and he was twenty five shillings behind on his rent. He had been under watch from the Birmingham police and they had sent word to London to do the same, but rather than keep an eye on him from a distance, the London authorities had immediately colored him

for questioning. The Birmingham police had speculated that this man was the true Whitechapel killer, escaping London after each murderer by taking the early train out of the city. After questioning him, though he was released and soon vanished from the pages of history, he wasn't the only doctor to

come under scrutiny and then make a quick escape. In fact, there was an Irish American doctor in London, a man named humble t. He was frequently watched by Scotland Yard and at least one Chief inspector and the man in charge of the Special Branch in eight firmly believed Dr Tumblety was the murderer. He was so certain, actually, that he had him arrested, and there's no surprise that he

would be watched by the Special Branch. He was justin Irish American doctor, but one with Finney and sympathies, and the bombs of the Finneyan campaign still resounded throughout Scotland yard. And as they watched him, their suspicions grew. After all, he was bitter in the extreme, they said, toward women. If either of the charges were true and tumble Ty was connected to either the bombings or the brutal murders, Special Branch must have been incendiary with rage. Because the

American doctor was allowed to post bail. Two men came forward, paid the enormous fee and then disappeared, and Tumblety went out with the tide. He hopped from London to France and then back to the United States. In fact, the Special Branch went so far as to send an officer over the Atlantic to hunt him down. When word got out that an American doctor had been arrested on suspicion of the murders, that the world was reading about with horror, the American press had a field day. In New York,

they published sightings of tumble Ty. When his ship arrived and they also published accounts of the English detective attempting to catch him. Taken together, those stories allowed the man to vanish without a trace as far west to San Francisco. The chronicle profiled the doctors passed in the city with

commentary from the local chief of police. In fact, some of Tumblet's money was still held in a San Francisco bank, but the man never appeared to claim it, and East End murders didn't end with the man's departure from London.

The year ended with a terrifying event just before Christmas, a killing that left many people wondering whether the same murderer was still at large and still praying on vulnerable women in the East End because it was in the early morning hours of December that Rose Milette's body was found by two police officers who were patrolling the street where she was killed the shadow darkness of Clark's Yard. There were no cuts on her body and her money

was still in her pockets. After he had fetched a surgeon to examine the body, the police sergeant searched the yard and found no signs of a struggle. The surgeon, who arrived on the scene declared her dead, though the body was still warm when she was delivered to the mortuary. The police believed that she had died of natural causes.

When when Baxter marched into the inquest the next day, a different conclusion was about to hit the papers and to shock Scotland Yard, who thought their work on the murder was done because during the post mortem examination, two other doctors found that there was a wound on the woman's neck. It was a deep mark that ran from the right side of the spine around the front of her throat, ending beneath her left ear. The woman, it seems, had been strangled. It was a shock to the police department.

With no signs of struggle and no witnesses around the yard reporting any unusual noise, a dread came over the police. The press reported that the stealth and efficiency of the killing must be the work of a skillful hand, and everyone knew exactly who that meant. It was all too obvious to the Times, who conjured up the specter of in their words, the recent crimes as the only possible precedent for murder. After all, the killer had vanished without

a trace. James Monroe sent for a medical examination from a trusted adviser, Dr Thomas Bond, and he immediately dispatched a capable officer to devote his energy to the case, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. But Swanson wasn't the only one investigating the murder, with Win Baxter helming the inquest. The Star soon followed after, and as always, they had a

story in mind to fit the case. Their lead sentence proclaimed that a police surgeon had determined that the woman's murder was the work of the White Chapel fiend, and they came to that conclusion by hunting down Dr Phillips, the man whose theory that the White Chapel killer was a surgeon made so many East End doctors the target

of deep suspicion. The Star reporter claimed that Dr Phillips, who had examined the body of Annie Chapman at Hanbury Street, believed that she had been strangled before her throat was cut. This had strengthened his belief that the killer was an anatomist, because he believed that the murderer knew just where to wrap a wire around a victim's neck to choke off any screams. And so The Star reported Dr Phillips believed that this new victim, Rose Myolette, had been killed by

the same man. But once again Dr Phillips profile of the killer was about to crash against the opinion of Dr Thomas Bond when he swept into examine Rose's body on Christmas Eve. Doctor Bond said that there was no mark on her neck from accord, and certainly not the kind of thing you would expect if she had been strangled violently. If anything, he reported, she had been a drunk and when she fell to the ground, the neck of her jacket had pressed against her throats and killed her.

A terrible accident, he said, but nothing more. When Baxter was furious when he reopened the inquest, he ripped into the betrayal doctor. After doctor had seen the body, he said, at the urging of the detectives, but without his knowledge or permission, medical opinions were flying thick and fast, But only Doctor Bond had thrown his expertise against the idea

that Rose Miolette had been murdered. It was police against corner surge at each other's throats, and the star flogging on the idea that the ripper was still hunting in the East End. The jury at the inquest came back with a verdict that Win Baxter expected Rose Milette had been murdered by some person or persons unknown, and like the murder of the other women in Whitechapel, the killer would never be caught. But despite the Star's best efforts, other papers let the story lie Rosa's death was a

tragedy in its own right. In fact, other women would continue to die under deeply suspicious circumstances in the East End, but the writers who could weave the threads together into a terrifying image had laid down their chaotic looms. The Ripper scare was over. Mary Kelly's eyes were still open. You remember the way that they imprinted on the inspector who first pushed back the dirty coat to behold the room for him. They screamed of the police failure to

catch the killer before he had reached her. For others, though, the eyes of Mary Kelly were the last desperate avenue of investigation. Remember that suggestion in the papers after Annie Chapman had died that police should take photographs of the victim's eyes to see if they would reveal the imprinted image of the killer. According to one memoir published years later by one of the inspectors after Mary Kelly's death. The police actually tried it, he says. They didn't expect

it to work necessarily. They did it as an experiment, but they did it all the same, and they didn't take half measures. They called in expert photographers and used the latest type of cameras. They snapped away at Mary Kelly's Retina's, hoping that her trauma had imprinted itself there. Of course, all the effort was useless and it should be no surprise that it didn't work. The result, he wrote, was negative. Along with the idea of using bloodhounds to

hunt the killer through Whitechapel's busy streets. It was another attempt at cutting edge technique that proved to be used us in the heart of the city. There was another set of eyes brought to the case, though, Melville McNaughton. He was the man who had been refused police service by Charles Warren at the beginning of eighteen eighty eight when James Monroe to control of the Metropolitan Police. Though McNaughton finally got his chance, here's Adam Wood to say more.

Things changed, of course, when Warren resigned at the end of Monroe became commissioner. Mcnorton was appointed Assistant Chief Constable support in Williamson in June and replaced him in December nine when Williamson died. So they had the three friends

together there, Anderson, Monroe and mc norton. But although he wasn't around at the time of the reper investigation of McNaughton was quite actively involved in inquiries into subsequent murders in White Chapel, such as Alis McKenzie and Francis Coles. And in his autobiography, which is completely exaggerated, he's rolling everything to be honest, but he puts himself in the

center of things quite heavily there. I think it seems to be that he was frustrated it on the outside, wanting to be part of investigation, but certainly took any

big invol Whitney things alter his appointment. But if McNaughton resented the fact that he wasn't on the case during the Whitechapel murders, he didn't let his new opportunity go to waste, because, as you may have guessed, Mary Kelly wasn't the last woman to be killed in Whitechapel, which brings us to July of eight eighty nine, when an East End lodger named John woke up to find that his bed was empty and cold. His partner, Alice, hadn't

come to the lodging house the night before. He stumbled blearily down the stairs to talk with the lodging housekeeper, who told him that he hadn't seen Alice, nor had she paid the fee for their bed. She was found almost two hours later by a constable walking his beats in Whitechapel. As he proceeded Downcastle Alley. Alice's body was lying on the footpath between two vendor's carts, faintly lit

by a nearby street light. The constable saw that she was slumped to her side and that her clothes were stup over her body, where it lay in a pool of blood. Dr Phillips was summoned for the medical examination, and the Whitechappel detectives who made it to the scene just after one o'clock were no strangers decides like this. Less than a year had passed since Mary Kelly's death. Most of the same men were still on the job, and the wounds they saw on Alice's body chilled them.

Two cuts acrossed her neck and long, jagged slices went deep into her abdomen. Crowds packed in around Castle Alley, crowds packed in around the mortuary, and Melville McNaughton must have felt a thrill because the truth was as plain as day. Jack the Ripper had killed again. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. When ever, a new body turned up, the question had to be asked, was this the work

of Jack the Ripper. In a year that followed Autumn of Terror, everyone responsible for governing life and death in Whitechapel was caught in a fog of uncertainty. At Alice Mackenzie's inquest, Win Baxter intoned for The Times of London that there is great similarity between this and the other class of cases which have happened in this neighborhood, and if this crime has not been committed by the same person,

it is clearly an imitation of the other cases. There is nothing to show why, he said, the woman is murdered or by whom lon Obscured was created by me, Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed

the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit i heeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.