The Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police, Henry Smith, who may have been as tenacious as Captain Ahab was in his hunt for the great white whale, probably didn’t anticipate that the fiend would surface in his own neighborhood and get away with murder for a hundred years. As usual, Smith was sleeping poorly in his quarters at Cloak Lane Station, built into Southwark Bridge on the north bank of the Thames. A railway depot was in front and vans clanked and rattled at all hours. The furrier’s business behind his rooms gave off the stench of curing animal hides, and he had not a single window he could open.
Smith was startled when his telephone rang, and he groped for it in the dark. One of his men told him there had been another murder, this one in the City. Smith dressed and hurried out the door to a waiting hansom, “an invention of the devil,” as he called it, because in the summer he was miserably hot, and in the winter he froze. A hansom was designed to carry two passengers, but this early morning the one Smith climbed into carried the superintendent and three detectives in addition to himself. “We rolled like a seventy-four [a warship] in a gale,” Smith recalled. But “we got to our destination – Mitre Square,” where a small group of his officers stood around the mutilated body of Catherine Eddows, whose name they did not yet know.
Mitre Square was a small, open area surrounded by large warehouses, empty houses, and a few shops that were closed after hours. During the day, fruit vendors, businessmen, and loiterers filled the Square. It was entered by three long passageways, which at night were thick with shadows barely pushed back by gaslights on the walls. The Square itself had only one lamp, and it was some twenty-five yards from the dark spot where Catherine was murdered. A City Police constable and his family lived on the other side of the Square, and heard nothing. James Morris, a watchman stationed inside the Kearley & Tonge Wholesale Grocers warehouse, also in the Square, was awake and working and heard nothing.
It seems that once again, no one heard a sound when the Ripper butchered his victim. If times sworn to can be trusted, Catherine Eddows could have been dead no more than fourteen minutes as P. C. Edward Watkins’s beat brought him back into Leadenhall Street and then into the Square. He could walk his beat in twelve to fourteen minutes, he testified at the inquest, and when he passed through the Square last at 1:30 A.M., there wasn’t the slightest hint of anything out of the ordinary. When he shone his bull’s-eye lantern into a very dark corner at 1:44 A.M., he discovered a woman lying on her back, her face to the left, her arms by her sides with the palms turned up. Her left leg was straight, the other bent, and her clothes were bunched up above her chest, exposing her abdomen, which had been cut open from just below the sternum to her genitals. Her intestines had been pulled out and tossed on the ground above her right shoulder. Watkins ran to the Kearley & Tonge warehouse, knocked on the door, and pushed it open, interrupting the watchman, who happened to be just on the other side, sweeping the steps.
“For God’s sake mate, come to my assistance,” Watkins said. Watchman Morris stopped sweeping and fetched his lamp as an upset Morris described “another woman cut up to pieces.” The two men hurried out to the southwest corner of Mitre Square, where Catherine’s body lay in a pool of blood. Morris blew his whistle and ran up to Mitre Street, then to Aldgate, where he “saw no suspicious person about,” he recalled at the inquest. He ran and blew his whistle until he found two constables and told them, “Go down to Mitre Square. There has been another terrible murder!”
Dr. Gordon Brown, the police surgeon for the City Police, arrived at the scene not long after two o’clock. He squatted by the body and found next to it three metal buttons, a “common” thimble, and a mustard tin containing two pawn tickets. Based on body warmth, the complete absence of rigor mortis, and other observations, Dr. Brown said that the victim had been dead no longer than half an hour, and he saw no bruises or signs of struggle or evidence of “recent connection,” or sexual intercourse.