The weather had been worse this day than yesterday, with no sunshine reported at all, and squalls roared in from the north. Heavy rain and sleet smacked down, and Londoners moved about in a cold mist, going to and from work and later to the theaters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still drawing large audiences at the Lyceum, and a parody of it called Hide and Seekyll had opened at the Royalty Theater. The play She was reviewed in that day’s paper as “a formidable experiment of dramatizing,” offering a murder and cannibals at the Gaiety. At the Alhambra, one of Walter Sickert’s favorite music halls, the doors opened at 10:30 P.M. with a cast of dancing women and Captain Clives and his “marvelous dog.”
Annie Chapman was sleeping off her last glass of spirits while London’s early night life was going on. The week had been a bad one, worse than usual. Annie was forty-seven years old and missing her two front teeth. She was five feet tall, overweight, with blue eyes and short, dark-brown, wavy hair. As the police later put it, “she had seen her better day.” On the street she was known as “Dark Annie.” In some accounts her estranged husband was said to be a veterinary surgeon, but in most of them he was described as a coachman employed by a gentleman who lived in the Royal Borough of Windsor.
Annie and her husband had no contact with each other after they separated, and she made no inquiries into his life until her weekly allowance of ten shillings suddenly stopped in late 1886. One day, a wretched-looking woman, having the appearance of a tramp, appeared at the Merry Wives of Windsor public house and inquired about Chapman. She said she had walked twenty miles from London, staying in a lodging house along the way, and wanted to know if her husband was ill or using that as an excuse not to send money. The woman at the door of the Merry Wives of Windsor informed the tramp that Mr. Chapman had died on Christmas Day. He left Annie nothing but two children who wanted nothing to do with her: a boy who was an inmate of the Cripples’ Home, and a well-educated daughter living in France.
Annie moved in with a sieve maker for a while, and when he left her, she borrowed small sums from her brother, who finally cut her off. She had no further contact with any members of her family, and when her health allowed, she made pennies by selling crochet work and flowers. Acquaintances described her as “clever” and industrious by nature, but the more her addiction to alcohol tightened its grip on her life, the less she cared what she did to earn her keep.
During the four months before her death, Annie had been in and out of the infirmary. She was spending her nights in Spitalfields doss-houses, the most recent one located at 35 Dorset Street, which joined Commercial Street and Crispin Street like a short rung on a ladder. There were an estimated 5,000 lodging-house beds in the hellish dens of Spitalfields, and The Times later observed that at Annie’s inquest the “glimpse of life… was sufficient to make [jurors] feel there was much in the 19th century civilization of which they had small reason to be proud.” In Annie Chapman’s world, the poor were “herded like cattle,” and were “near starvation.” Violence smoldered day and night, fueled by misery, alcohol, and rage.
Four nights before her death, Annie got into an altercation with another lodger named Eliza Cooper, who confronted her in the lodging-house kitchen, demanding the return of a scrap of soap Annie had borrowed. Annie angrily threw a halfpenny on the table and told her to go buy it herself. The two women began to quarrel and carried their disagreement to the nearby Ringer public house, where Annie slapped Eliza across the face and Eliza punched Annie in the left eye and chest.
Annie’s bruises were still noticeable the early Saturday morning of September 8th, when John Donovan, the deputy of the lodging house on Dorset Street, demanded payment of eight pennies for a bed if she planned to stay. She replied, “I have not got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary.” Donovan reminded her that she knew the rules. She replied that she would go out and get the money and please not to let her bed to someone else. Donovan would later tell police that she “was under the influence of drink” when the night watchman escorted her off the property.