Mary Ann Nichols


Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols was the first canonical victim of the unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, who is believed to have killed and mutilated a minimum of five women in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London from late August to early November 1888.

Life and background

Mary Ann was born to locksmith Edward Walker and his wife Caroline on 26 August 1845, in Dean Street, Soho, in London. On 16 January 1864 she married William Nichols, a printer's machinist, and between 1866 and 1879, the couple had five children: Edward John, Percy George, Alice Esther, Eliza Sarah, and Henry Alfred. Their marriage broke up in 1880 or 1881 because of disputed causes. Her father accused William of leaving her after he had an affair with the nurse who had attended the birth of their final child, though Nichols claimed to have proof that their marriage had continued for at least three years after the date alleged for the affair. He maintained that his wife had deserted him and was practising prostitution. Police reports say they separated because of her drunken habits.
Legally required to support his estranged wife, William Nichols paid her an allowance of five shillings a week until 1882, when he heard that she was working as a prostitute; he was not required to support her if she was earning money through illicit means. Nichols spent most of her remaining years in workhouses and boarding houses, living off charitable handouts and her meagre earnings as a prostitute. She lived with her father for a year or more but left after a quarrel; her father stated he had heard she had subsequently lived with a blacksmith named Drew in Walworth. In early 1888, the year of her death, she was placed in the Lambeth workhouse after being discovered sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, and in May left the workhouse to take a job as a domestic servant in Wandsworth. Unhappy in that position—she was an alcoholic and her employer, Mr Cowdry, and his wife, were teetotallers—she left two months later, stealing clothing worth three pounds ten shillings. At the time of her death, Nichols was living in a Whitechapel common lodging house in Spitalfields, where she shared a room with a woman named Emily "Nelly" Holland. She was 5 feet 2 inches tall, had brown eyes and greying dark brown hair.
, site of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols

Last hours and death

At about 23:00 on 30 August, Nichols was seen walking the Whitechapel Road; at 00:30 on 31 August she was seen to leave a pub in Brick Lane, Spitalfields. An hour later, she was turned out of 18 Thrawl Street as she was lacking the fourpence required for a bed, implying by her last recorded words that she would soon earn the money on the street with the help of a new bonnet she had acquired. She was last seen alive standing at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road at approximately 02:30 by her roommate, Emily Holland. To Holland, Nichols claimed she had earned enough money to pay for her bed three times that evening, but had repeatedly spent the money on alcohol.
A carman named Charles Allen Cross found Nichols's body lying on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row, Whitechapel at 3:40 AM, about 150 yards from the London Hospital and 100 yards from Blackwall Buildings. Her skirt was raised. Another passing cart driver on his way to work, Robert Paul, approached and saw Cross standing in the road. Cross called him over, and both men walked across to the body, where they examined it together. Cross expressed his opinion that she was dead, but Paul was uncertain and thought she might simply be unconscious. They pulled her skirt down to cover her lower body, and went in search of a policeman. Upon encountering PC Jonas Mizen, Cross informed the constable: "She looks to me to be either dead or drunk, but for my part, I believe she's dead." The two men then continued on their way to work, leaving Mizen to inspect Nichols's body.
As Mizen approached the body, PC John Neale came from the opposite direction on his beat and by flashing his lantern, called a third policeman, PC John Thain, to the scene. As news of the murder spread, three horse slaughterers from a neighbouring knacker's yard in Winthrop Street, who had been working overnight, came to look at the body. None of the slaughterers, the police officers patrolling nearby streets, or the residents of houses alongside Buck's Row reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious before the discovery of the body.
PC Thain fetched surgeon Dr Henry Llewellyn, who arrived at 04:00 and decided she had been dead for approximately 30 minutes. Her throat had been slit twice from left to right and her abdomen mutilated with one deep jagged wound, several incisions across the abdomen, and three or four similar cuts on the right side caused by the same knife, estimated to be at least 6–8 inches long, used violently and downwards. Llewellyn expressed surprise at the small amount of blood at the crime scene, "about enough to fill two large wine glasses, or half a pint at the most". His comment led to the supposition that Nichols was not killed where her body was found, but the blood from her wounds had soaked into her clothes and hair, and there was little doubt that she had been killed at the crime scene by a swift slash to the throat. Death would have been instantaneous, and the abdominal injuries, which would have taken less than five minutes to perform, were made by the murderer after she was dead. When a person is killed, further wounds to their body do not always result in a large amount of blood loss. When the body was lifted a "mass of congealed blood", in PC Thain's words, lay beneath the body.
'' depicting the inquest into Nichols's murder

Inquest

As the murder had occurred in the territory of the Bethnal Green Division of the Metropolitan Police, it was initially investigated by the local detectives, inspectors John Spratling and Joseph Helson, who had little success. Elements of the press linked the attack on Nichols to two previous murders, those of Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, and suggested the killing might have been perpetrated by a gang, as in the case of Smith. The Star newspaper instead suggested a single killer was the culprit and other newspapers took up their storyline. Suspicions of a serial killer at large in London led to the secondment of Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews from the Central Office at Scotland Yard.
Although Nichols carried no identification, a Lambeth workhouse laundry mark on her petticoats gave police enough information to eventually identify her. Nelly Holland and William Nichols confirmed an identification provided by a former workhouse resident. While her death certificate states that she was 42 at the time of her murder, birth records indicate she was 43, a fact confirmed at her inquest by her father, who described her as looking "ten years younger" than her age. The coroner at Nichols's inquest, which began on 1 September at the Working Lads' Institute on Whitechapel Road, was Wynne Edwin Baxter. Inquest testimony as reported in The Times stated:
Although Llewellyn had speculated that the attacker could have been left-handed, he later expressed doubt over this initial thought, but the belief that the killer was left-handed endured.
Rumours that a local character called "Leather Apron" could have been responsible for the murder were investigated by the police, even though they noted "there is no evidence against him". Imaginative descriptions of "Leather Apron", using crude Jewish stereotypes, appeared in the press, but rival journalists dismissed these as "a mythical outgrowth of the reporter's fancy". John Pizer, a Polish Jew who made footwear from leather, was known by the name "Leather Apron" and was arrested despite a lack of evidence. He was soon released after the confirmation of his alibis. Pizer successfully obtained monetary compensation from at least one newspaper that had named him as the murderer.
After several adjournments, to allow the police to gather further evidence, the inquest concluded on 24 September. On the available evidence, Coroner Baxter found that Nichols was murdered at just after 3 a.m. where she was found. In his summing up, he dismissed the possibility that her murder was connected with those of Smith and Tabram since the lethal weapons were different in those cases, and neither of the earlier cases involved a slash to the throat. However, by the time the inquest into Nichols's death had concluded, another woman, Annie Chapman, had been murdered, and Baxter noted "The similarity of the injuries in the two cases is considerable." The police investigations into the murders of Chapman and Nichols were merged.
The subsequent murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes the week after the inquest had closed, and that of Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November, were also linked by a similar modus operandi, and the murders were blamed by the press and public on a single serial killer, called "Jack the Ripper".

Funeral

Nichols was buried on 6 September 1888. That afternoon, her body was transported in a polished elm coffin to Mr Henry Smith, Hanbury Street undertaker. The cortege consisted of the hearse and two mourning coaches, which carried William Nichols and Edward John Nichols. Nichols was buried at the City of London Cemetery, in a public grave numbered 210752.
In late 1996, the cemetery authorities decided to formally mark Nichols's grave with a plaque.