A plausible scenario was suggested by the foreman of the coroner’s jury: When John Richardson sat on the steps to trim his boot, the back door was open and blocked his view of Annie’s body two feet below where he sat because the door opened to the left, where the body was. Richardson halfway agreed with what the foreman suggested, admitting that since he did not go into the yard, he could not say with certainty that the body wasn’t there while he was trimming his boot. He didn’t think so. But it was still dark when he stopped by his mother’s house, and he was interested in the cellar door and his boot, not the space between the back of the house and the fence.
Elisabeth Long’s statements are more problematic. She claimed she saw a woman talking with a man at 5:30 A.M. and was certain the woman was Annie Chapman. If this is true, then Annie was murdered and mutilated at dawn and had been dead less than half an hour when her body was discovered. Elisabeth did not get a good look at the man and told police she would not recognize him if she saw him again. She went on to say that he wore a brown deerstalker and perhaps a dark coat and was a “little” taller than Annie, which would have made him quite short since Annie was only five feet tall. He appeared to be a “foreigner,” had a “shabby, genteel” appearance, and was more than forty years old.
This is quite a lot of detail for Elisabeth to have observed as she walked past two strangers in the predawn dark. Prostitutes and their clients were not strangers to the area, and more than likely Elisabeth Long knew to keep to her own business, so she didn’t pause to stare. Besides, if she thought the conversation between the man and woman was friendly, then she might not have been inclined to take much notice anyway. The truth is, we don’t know the truth. We have no idea how reliable any of these narrators were. It was a cool, misty morning. London was polluted. The sun wasn’t up yet. How good was Elisabeth’s eyesight? How well did Richardson see? Corrective lenses were luxuries to the poor.
Furthermore, in police investigations it isn’t unusual for people to get excited because they witnessed something and are eager to help. Frequently, the more often a witness is interviewed, the more detail he or she suddenly remembers, just as the more times a guilty suspect is interrogated, the more embellished and conflicted the lies become.
There are only a few statements I can make with certainty about Annie Chapman’s murder: She was not “suffocated” or strangled into unconsciousness, otherwise she would have had noticeable bruises on her neck; she was still wearing the handkerchief when she was murdered, and had her neck been compressed, the handkerchief most likely would have left an imprint or abrasion; her face may have appeared “swollen” because it was fleshy and puffy. If she died with her mouth open, her tongue may have protruded through the gap caused by her missing front teeth.
Coroner Baxter concluded the inquest with his belief that “we are confronted with a murderer of no ordinary character, [whose crimes are] committed not from jealousy, revenge, or robbery, but from motives less adequate than the many which still disgrace our civilization, mar our progress, and blot the pages of our Christianity.” The jury returned the verdict of “Wilful Murder against a person or persons unknown.”
Three days later, on Tuesday afternoon, a little girl noticed strange “marks” in the yard behind 25 Hanbury Street, two yards away from where Annie Chapman was killed. The girl immediately found a policeman. The marks were dried blood that formed a trail five or six feet long leading toward the back door of another decaying house overcrowded lodgers. Police concluded that the Ripper left the blood as he passed through or over the fence separating the yards, and that in an attempt •o remove some of the blood from his coat, he had taken it off and knocked it against the back wall of number 25, which would explain a bloody smear and a “sprinkle.” Police then found a blood-saturated piece of crumpled paper that they believed the Ripper had used to wipe his hands. Jack the Ripper, the police concluded, had fled the crime scene the same way he had entered it.