Stabbing someone dozens of times is very personal. When cases like that come into the morgue, the police and the medical examiner routinely assume that the victim and assailant knew each other. It is unlikely that Martha knew her killer, but she elicited a very personal reaction from him when she did or said something that didn’t follow his script. She may have resisted him. Martha was known for having fits and being quite difficult when she was drunk, and she had been drinking rum and ale earlier with Pearly Poll. Residents of George Yard Buildings later stated that they heard “nothing” at the early hour of Martha’s death, but their testimony doesn’t count for much when one considers the exhausted, inebriated condition of impoverished people who were accustomed to drunken behavior, scuffles, and violent domestic fights. It was best not to get involved. One could get hurt or in trouble with the police.
At 3:30 A.M., an hour and a half after Police Constable Barrett spotted the loitering soldier outside George Yard Buildings, a resident named Alfred Crow was returning home from work. He was a cab driver, and bank holidays were always busy and kept him out late. He must have been tired. He may even have unwound with a few pints after dropping off his last fare. As he passed the first-floor landing, he noticed “something” on the ground that might have been a body, but he didn’t examine it and went to bed. The creed of the East End, as Victorian economist
and social reformer Beatrice Webb put it, was don’t “meddle” with the neighbors. Crow later explained in his testimony at the inquest that it was not uncommon to see drunks unconscious in the East End. No doubt he saw them all the time.
It seems no one realized that the “something” on the landing was a dead body until 4:50 A.M., when a waterside laborer named John S. Reeves was heading out of the building and noticed a woman lying on her back in a pool of blood. Her clothes were disarrayed, as if she had been in a struggle, Reeves recalled, but he saw no footprints on the staircase, nor did he find a knife or any other type of weapon. He said he did not touch the body but immediately located Police Constable Barrett, who sent for Dr. T. R. Killeen. The time of the doctor’s arrival wasn’t given, but when he looked at the body, the lighting could not have been good.
He deduced at the scene that the victim, whose identity would remain unknown for days, had been dead for approximately three hours. She was “36 years old,” the doctor divined, and “very well nourished,” meaning she was overweight. This detail is significant, because virtually all of the Ripper’s victims, including other murdered women the police discounted as having been slain by him, were either very thin or fat. With rare exceptions, they were in their late thirties or early forties.
Walter Sickert preferred female studio models obese or emaciated, and the lower their social class and the uglier they were, the better. This is evident from his frequent references to women as “skeletal” or “the thinnest of the thin like a little eel” and in the big women with wide hips and grotesquely pendulous breasts that he repeatedly depicts in his art. Other people could have the “chorus girls,” Sickert once wrote, but leave him the “hags.”
He did not have any artistic interest in females who had attractive bodies. He often remarked that any woman who wasn’t too fat or too thin was boring, and in a letter he wrote to his American friends Ethel Sands and Ann Hudson, he voiced delight over his latest models and how “thrilled” he was by the “sumptuous poverty of their class.” He loved their “every day dirty, old, worn clothes.” He added in another letter that were he twenty, he “wouldn’t look at any woman under 40.”
Martha Tabran was short, overweight, homely, and middle-aged. When she was murdered, she was wearing a green skirt, a brown petticoat, a long black jacket, a black bonnet, and sidespring boots – “all old,” according to the police. Martha would have been suited to Sickert’s taste, but victimology is an indicator, not a science. Although victims of serial murder often share some trait that is significant to the killer, this does not imply that a violent psychopath is unbending in what sort of person he targets. Why Jack the Ripper focused on Martha Tabran instead of some other prostitute of similar description can’t be known, unless the explanation is as pedestrian as opportunity.