One week after Rose Mylett was murdered, a boy disappeared in Bradford, Yorkshire, a theater city on the Irving company’s tour that was four and a half to six hours northwest of London, depending on the number of stops the train made. Thursday morning, December 27, at 6:40, Mrs. Gill saw her seven-year-old son John hop on the neighborhood milk wagon for a quick ride. Later, at 8:30, John was playing with other boys, and by some accounts was talking to a man after that. John never came home. The next day, his frantic family posted a notice:
Lost on Thursday morning a boy, John Gill, aged eight. Was last seen sliding near Walmer Village at 8:30 A.M. Had on navy blue top coat (with brass buttons on), midshipman’s cap, plaid knickerbocker suit, laced boots, red and white stocking; complexion fair. Home 41, Thorncliffe Road.
The notice listed John as eight because his birthday was a little over a month away. That Friday night at 9:00 P.M., a butcher’s assistant named Joseph Buckle was in the vicinity of stables and a coach house very close to the Gills’ home. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning, Saturday, he was up early to yoke up his employer’s horse for a day of work. As was his usual routine, Joseph cleaned out the stable. While he was pitching manure into a pit in the yard, he “saw a heap of something propped up in the corner between the wall and the coach house door.” He fetched a light and saw that the heap was a dead body and that an ear had been cut off. He ran to the bakehouse for help.
John Gill’s coat was tied around him with his braces. Several men unwrapped him and found what was left of the boy’s body leaning to the right, his severed legs propped on either side of his body and secured with cord. Both ears had been sliced off. A piece of shirting was tied around his neck, and another piece tied around the stumps left of his legs. He had been stabbed multiple times in his chest, his abdomen slashed open, the organs removed and placed on the ground. His heart had been “torn” out of his chest and wedged under his chin.
“I shall do another murder on some young youth such as printing lads who work in the City. I did write you once before but I don’t think you had it. I shall do them worse than the women I shall take their hearts,” the Ripper had written on November 26th, “and rip them up the same way…. I will attack on them when are going home… any Youth I see I will kill but you will never kitch me put that in your pipe and smoke it….”
John Gill’s boots had been removed and stuffed inside his abdominal cavity, according to one news report. There were other mutilations “too sickening to be described.” One might infer these were to the genitals. One of the wrappings found with the body, The Times reported, “bears the name of W. Mason, Derby Road, Liverpool.” What should have been an incredible lead apparently went nowhere. Liverpool was less than four hours away from London by train, and five weeks earlier the Ripper had written a letter claiming to be in Liverpool, and again on December 19th, or a little more than a week before John Gill’s murder, the Ripper sent a letter to The Times – allegedly from Liverpool.
“I have come to Liverpool &c you will soon hear of me.”
Police immediately went after William Barrett, the dairyman who had given John a ride in the milk wagon two days earlier, but there was no evidence against him beyond Barrett’s keeping his horse and cart at the stables and coach house where John’s body was found. Barrett had given John a ride many times in the past and was highly thought of by his neighbors. Police found no bloodstains on John Gill’s body or the coat wrapped around it. There was no blood inside the coach house or the stable. The murder had occurred elsewhere. A constable patrolling the area claimed that at 4:30 Saturday morning he had tried the coach house doors to make sure they were secure and had stood on the “very spot” where John Gill’s remains were displayed by the killer not three hours later.