Obviously, the times given by witnesses conflict, and they never stated at the inquest how they happened to know what time it was when they walked past people or stumbled onto bodies. In that era, most people told time by their routines, the position of the sun in the sky, and church clocks that chimed the hour or half hour. Harriet Hardiman of 29 Han-bury testified at the inquest she was certain it was 6:00 A.M. when she was awakened by a commotion outside her window. She was a cat meat saleswoman whose shop was inside the rooming house; she made her living by going out with a barrow full of stinking fish or slop left over from slaughterhouses to sell to cat owners while long lines of felines followed along her routes.
Harriet was fast asleep on the ground floor when the excited voices woke her with a start. Fearing the building was on fire, she awakened her son and told him to go outside and look. When he returned, he said that a woman had been murdered in the yard. Both mother and son had slept soundly all night, and Harriet Hardiman later testified she often heard people on the stairs and in the passage that led into the yard, but all had been quiet. John Richardson’s mother, Amelia, had been awake half the night and certainly she would have been aware had someone been arguing or screaming. But she claimed she had heard not a sound, either.
Residents were continually in and out of the rooming house at 29 Hanbury, and the front and back doors were always kept unlocked, as was the passage door that opened onto the enclosed yard at the rear of the house. It would have been easy for anyone to unlatch the gate and walk into the yard, which is what Annie Chapman must have done just before she was murdered. At 5:55 A.M., John Davis, a porter who lived in the rooming house, headed out to market and had the distinct misfortune of discovering Annie Chapman’s body in the yard between the house and the fence, very close to where Richardson had been sitting on the stone steps about an hour earlier mending his boot.
She was on her back, her left hand on her left breast, her right arm by her side, her legs bent. Her disarrayed clothing was pulled up to her knees, and her throat was cut so deeply that her head was barely attached to her body. Annie Chapman’s killer had slashed open her abdomen and removed her bowels and a flap of her belly. They were in a puddle of blood on the ground above her left shoulder, an arrangement that may or may not be symbolic.
Quite likely, the placement of the body organs and tissue was utilitarian – to get them out of the Ripper’s way. It would become apparent that he was after the kidneys, uterus, and vagina, but one can’t dismiss the supposition that he also intended to shock people. He succeeded. John Davis fled upstairs to his room and drank a glass of brandy. Then he frantically rushed inside his workshop for a tarpaulin to drape over the body and ran to find the nearest police constable.
Moments later, Inspector Joseph Chandler of the Commercial Street police station arrived. When he saw what he was dealing with, he sent for Dr. George Phillips, a divisional surgeon. A crowd was gathering and voices cried out, “Another woman has been murdered!” With little more than a glance, Dr. Phillips determined that the victim’s throat had been cut before her “stomach” was mutilated, and that she had been dead about two hours. He noted that her face seemed swollen and that her tongue was protruding between her front teeth. She had been strangled to death, Dr. Phillips said – or at least rendered unconscious before the killer cut her throat. Rigor mortis was just beginning to set in, and the doctor noted “six patches” of blood on the back wall, about eighteen inches above Annie’s head.
The droplets ranged from very small to the size of a sixpence and each “patch” was in a tight cluster. In addition, there were “marks” of blood on the fence in back of the house. Neatly arranged at Annie’s feet were a bit of coarse muslin, a comb, and a piece of bloody torn envelope with the Sussex Regiment coat of arms on it and a London postmark with the date August 20,1888. Nearby were two pills. Her cheap metal rings were missing, and an abrasion on her finger indicated that they had been forcibly removed. Later, on an undated, unsigned postcard believed to have been sent by the Ripper to the City Police, the writer skillfully drew a cartoon figure with a cut throat. He wrote “poor annie” and claimed to have her rings “in my possession.”