There was no rush to get inside Mary Kelly’s room. As Dr. Phillips said in the inquest, he looked through “the lower broken pane and satisfied myself that the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not in need of any immediate attention from me.” The police removed a window from Mary Kelly’s room and Dr. Phillips began to take photographs through the opening. At 1:30 P.M., police used a pickaxe to pry open the door, and it banged against a table left of the bedstead. Police investigators and Dr. Phillips entered the room and what they saw was unlike any travesty the men had ever encountered in their entire careers.
“It looked more like the work of a devil than a man,” McCarthy would later recount at the inquest. “I had heard about the Whitechapel murders but I swear to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this.”
Mary Kelly’s body was two-thirds of the way across the bed, almost against the door. Crime-scene photographs reveal remains so mutilated that she may as well have been run over by a train. The Ripper hacked off her ears and nose and slashed and defleshed her face down to the skull. She had no features left, only her dark hair, still neatly styled, probably because she never struggled with the Ripper. There wasn’t room to attack her from behind the bed, so he attacked her from the front. Unlike the Camden Town murder, Mary was face-up when a strong, sharp blade severed her right carotid artery. Blood soaked through the bed and pooled on the floor.
Abberline, who was in charge of the case, searched the room. He found burned clothing in the fireplace and surmised that the killer continued to feed the fire while he worked so he would have enough light to see, “as there was only one piece of candle in the room,” Abberline testified. The heat was so intense that it melted the spout of a kettle. One might wonder how a fire could burn so brightly and not have been noticed in the courtyard, even through drawn curtains. Someone might have worried that the room was on fire, unless the fire was a low, hot, steady one. As usual, people were minding their own affairs. Maybe the Ripper worked by the tiny light of the single candle in the room. Sickert didn’t mind the dark. The “pitch dark,” he said in a letter, “is lovely.”
Except for a coat, all of Maria’s dirty laundry had been burned. Mary Kelly’s clothing was found neatly folded by the side of the bed, as if she had willingly undressed down to her chemise. Her killer ripped and cut and hacked into her body, laying it wide open, mutilating her genitalia to a pulp. He amputated her breasts and arranged them next to her liver on the side of the bed. He heaped her entrails on top of the bedside table. Every organ except her brain was removed, and her right leg was flayed open to the knee, exposing a completely defleshed, gleaming white femur.
Plainly visible on the left arm are curved cutting injuries, and a dark line encircling her right leg just below the knee suggests the Ripper may have been in the process of dismemberment when, for some reason, he stopped. Perhaps the fire had burned down or the candle was about to go out. Maybe it was getting late and time for him to make his escape. Dr. Thomas Bond arrived at the scene at 2:00 P.M., and in his report he said that rigor mortis had set in and increased during the course of his examination. He admitted he could not give an exact time of death, but the body was cold at 2:00 P.M. Based on that, and on rigor mortis and the presence of partially digested food in her ripped-open stomach and scattered over her intestines, he estimated she had been dead twelve hours by the time he reached the scene.
If Dr. Bond was correct in saying that rigor mortis was still in the process of forming when he began to examine the body at the scene by 2:00 P.M., then it is possible that Mary had not been dead as long as twelve hours. Her body would have been cold long before that. It was drained of blood, she was slender, her body cavity was exposed, and she was covered by nothing but a chemise in a room in which the fire had gone out. Also, if witnesses are to be believed, Mary Kelly was still alive at 1:30. Times given to police and at the inquest were based on area church clocks that rang the half hour and the hour, on changes of light, and when the East End was silent or beginning to stir.