In the late nineteenth century, the notion persisted that the expression on a dead person’s face indicated pain or fear, as did clenched fists or rigidly bent limbs. It was not understood that the body undergoes a variety of changes after death, resulting in clenched teeth and fists due to rigor mortis. The pugilistic position and broken bones of a burned body can be confused with trauma when they are actually due to the shrinking of tissues and fracturing of bones caused by extreme heat, or “cooking.”
The arm, Dr. Neville went on to say, had been “cleanly severed” from the body with a “sharp weapon.” For a while, the police were inclined to believe the amputated limb was some medical student’s doing. It was a prank, police told journalists, a very bad joke. The finding of the torso in the foundations of the new Scotland Yard building was not considered a joke, but maybe it should have been. While the murder wasn’t funny, if this was the Ripper’s work again, what a huge joke, indeed.
News about this latest development was kept relatively brief. There had been enough bad publicity in August and September, and people were beginning to complain that details printed in the newspapers made matters worse. It was “hurting the work of the police,” one person wrote to The Times. Publicity adds to the “state of panic,” which only helps the killer, someone else wrote.
The police were ignorant and an embarrassment, Londoners began to complain. Scotland Yard could not bring offenders to justice, and in confidential memorandums, police officials worried that “if the perpetrator is not speedily brought to justice, it will not only be humiliating but also an intolerable danger.” The amount of mail sent to Scotland Yard was overwhelming, and Charles Warren published a letter in newspapers “thanking” citizens for their interest and apologizing that he simply did not have time to answer them. One might expect that a great many letters were also written to newspapers, and to sort out crank mail, The Times had a policy that while a person did not have to publish his name and address, the information must be included in the original letter to show good faith.
The policy could not have been an easy one to enforce. The telephone had been patented only twelve years earlier and was not yet a household appliance. I doubt that a member of the newspaper staff got into a hansom or galloped off on a horse to check out the validity of a name and address when the individual wasn’t listed in the local directory, and not everybody was. My scan of hundreds of newspapers printed in 1888 and 1889 revealed that anonymous letters were published but not frequently. Most writers allowed their name, address, and even occupation to be published. But as the Ripper crimes began to pick up momentum, there seemed to be an increase in published letters with no attribution beyond initials or cryptic titles, or in some instances, names that strike me, at any rate, as Dickensian or mocking.
Days after Annie Chapman’s murder, a letter to The Times suggested that the police should check on the whereabouts of all cases of “homicidal mania which may have been discharged as ‘cured.’ ” The letter was signed, “A Country Doctor.” A letter published September 13th and signed “J.F.S.” stated that the day before, a man had been “robbed at 11:00 A.M. on Hanbury Street” in the East End, and at 5:00 P.M. a seventy-year-old man had been attacked on Chicksand Street, and at 10:00 A.M. that very morning a man ran into a bakery shop and made off with the till. All of this, the anonymous writer said, happened “within 100 yards of each other and midway between the scenes of the last two horrible murders.”
What is peculiar about this anonymous letter is that there was no record of any such crimes in the police sections of the newspapers, and one has to wonder how the writer of the letter could possibly have known the details, unless he or she was snooping about the East End or was a police officer. Most letters to the editor were with attribution and offered sincere suggestions. Members of the clergy wanted more police supervision, better lighting, and all slaughterhouses to be moved out of Whitechapel because the violence to animals and the gore in the streets had a bad effect on the “ignorant imagination.” Wealthy Londoners should buy up the East End slums and demolish them. The children of wretched parents should be taken away and raised by the government. On October 15th, a peculiar anonymous letter was published in The Times. It reads like a bad short story that is the work of a mocking, manipulative intelligence, and could be viewed as a taunting allusion to Joan Boatmoor’s murder in coal-mining country: