In 1888, there were no calibrations and algorithms. There were no late-twentieth-century gadgets such the Single Photon Absorptiometer or scintillation detectors to estimate height based on the length of the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula – the long bones of the arms and legs. The changes in density or mineral concentrations of bones are age-dependent. For example, a decrease in bone density usually correlates with an older age.
It could not accurately be claimed that the dismembered woman was exactly twenty-six years old, although it could have been said that her remains appeared to be those of a post-prepubescent female who probably was in her late teens or twenties, and that she had dark brown hair in her axillae, or armpits. The estimate that the woman had died five weeks earlier was also a guess. Doctors simply did not have the scientific means to judge time of death by decomposition. They knew nothing about entomology – the interpretation of insect development as a marker for time of death – and maggots teemed over the torso when it was found in the recesses of the new Scotland Yard building’s foundation.
The autopsy revealed pale, bloodless organs that indicated hemorrhage and would have been consistent with the woman’s throat having been cut before she was dismembered. At her inquest, Dr. Thomas Bond testified that the remains were those of a “well nourished” woman with “breasts that were large and prominent” and who at some point had suffered from severe pleurisy in one lung. Her uterus was missing, and her pelvis and legs had been sawn off at the fourth lumbar. The arms had been removed at the shoulder joints by several oblique cuts, and she had been decapitated by several incisions below the larynx. Dr. Bond said that the torso had been skillfully wrapped, and the flesh bore “clearly defined marks” where it had been bound with string. These marks left by string are noteworthy. Experiments conducted in the early- and mid-nineteenth century revealed that ligature marks are not formed on bodies that have been dead for a while, indicating that the string was tied around the dismembered woman either while she was alive, or more likely, not long – perhaps only hours – after her death.
The severing of the pelvis from the torso is quite unusual in dismemberments, but neither the doctors nor the police seemed to have given this detail much thought, or even offered opinions about it. No other body parts of the woman turned up, except what was believed to be her left leg, which had been severed just below the knee. The partial limb had been buried several yards from where the torso had been found. Dr. Bond described the foot and leg as “exquisitely molded.” The foot was well cared for, the toenails neatly trimmed. There were no corns or bunions that might indicate that the victim had been a “poor woman.”
Police and physicians were of the opinion that the dismemberment was an attempt to conceal the victim’s identity. This conclusion is inconsistent with the killer severing the pelvis at the fourth lumbar and at the hip joints – or essentially removing the victim’s sexual organs and genitalia. One might wonder if there is a similarity between such a mutilation and what the Ripper did when he slashed open the abdomen of his victim and took her uterus and part of her vagina.
When the torso was found on the site of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters, it was bound in old cloth and “a lot of old string of different sorts tied all around in each direction,” said Frederick Wildore, the carpenter who noticed a mysterious shape at six o’clock in the morning on October 2nd, when he reached inside a dark recess of the foundation, looking for his basket of tools. He dragged out the bundle and cut open the string and for a moment did not know what he was looking at. “I thought it was old bacon or something like that,” he said at the inquest. The foundation was a labyrinth of recesses and trenches, and to hide the bundle there could not have been done unless the person knew his way, Wildore claimed. It was “always as dark as the darkest night in the day.”