At this point, then, the mutilations peculiar to Chapman had not yet been revealed to the public, nor apparently to one of Whitechapel’s most senior detectives. Astonishing as it seems, we have a police surgeon withholding evidence crucial to Abberline’s investigation. Hence the Inspector’s liaison with Helson. No progress there, either. Joseph Helson was no more forthcoming than, and just as baffled by it all as, Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. ‘They have nothing to suggest,’ was the sum total of it, according to the Daily News, ‘and in the case of Nichols, to judge by an observation of Inspector Helson on Saturday, they have no hope of any further evidence.’4
In which case we may as well look at a photograph to pass the time. Inspector Joseph Helson is the Freemason with the beard on the right.
So that’s that, then. Bro Helson doesn’t know any more than Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. Meanwhile, Phillips was poised to show equal reticence in a coroner’s court.
The coroner in question was a forty-four-year-old solicitor, fond of elegant clothes and his own opinions. By any definition, and certainly his own, Wynne Baxter was a man of importance. He had written one of the standard works on the coroner’s trade, Judicature Acts and Rules, and, never shy of his stature in the Victorian scheme of things, his telegraph address was ‘Inquest London’. Conservative to the marrow but of sincere social conscience, Baxter had risen inexorably through Establishment ranks, becoming Junior High Constable in 1880 and first Mayor of his home town, Lewes, the following year. In 1887 he’d been elected as Coroner for East Middlesex (Whitechapel included), and in that capacity almost all of Jack’s outings became the business of his court. He presided over inquests into Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles.
Baxter was Establishment to his manicured fingertips, but he was no Establishment stooge. Minions of the state were no less immune to his searching invective than stupid witnesses (the cops got a crisp bollocking over allowing Nichols to be removed to the morgue without noticing she’d been disembowelled).
An adjournment in respect of Nichols meant that Baxter’s summing-up was delivered in concurrence with the inquest following it. He was thus able to compare the postmortem atrocities she had suffered with those of Chapman. ‘The similarity of the injuries in the two cases was considerable,’ he observed. ‘There were bruises about the face in both cases, the head nearly severed from the body in both cases.’ It was at this point that his perceptions diverged from those of the police surgeon assigned to Nichols: ‘Doctor Llewellyn seemed to incline to the opinion that the abdominal injuries were inflicted first, and caused instantaneous death; but, if so, it seemed difficult to understand such desperate injuries to the throat. Surely it might well be that, as in the case of Chapman, the dreadful wounds to the throat were first inflicted and the abdominal afterwards?’ ‘That was a matter of importance,’ he remarked, ‘when they [the jury] came to consider the possible motive there could be for all this ferocity.’
A matter of importance indeed; and but for the intervention of the System via Bro Dr Phillips two days later, a matter that would doubtless have been explained. Phillips was a Pecksniff of classic self-delusion whose misguided loyalties would debase Baxter and turn his court into a national laughing stock.
The inquiry into the death of Annie Chapman began on 12 September 1888 at the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel. It was a virtual rerun of Nichols. A string of witnesses and protracted testimony over who, what and where led to the inevitable verdict ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’.
The hearings lasted over five sessions. In my view there was only one witness of real significance, and he was the one who didn’t want to talk. Bro Dr Phillips arrived on day three. His evidence was punctilious and comprehensive, until he came to the tender question of the mutilations. There was then a change of tone. These horrors, he insisted, had been performed after death, and therefore had no relevance to the cause of it.
Predicated on such vacuous nonsense, it was of no importance that, for example, John George Haigh dissolved his victims in acid after shooting them through the head.5 It was a .45 bullet that killed them, and the carboy brimming with H2SO4 was merely a bit of local ephemera. There was nothing left of Haigh’s last victim but a couple of gallstones and a pair of dentures. Teeth with no face, but what a story they chattered. You don’t need to be William Shakespeare to hear whispers from the throats of the dead. But according to The Times, Phillips ‘thought that he had better not go into further details of the mutilations, which could only be painful to the feelings of the jury and the public’.
The jury weren’t here for a lullaby, and this was tosh. Baxter formulated this view with more diplomacy. ‘The object of the enquiry,’ he reminded Phillips, ‘is not only to ascertain the cause of death, but the means by which it occurred. Any mutilations which took place afterwards may suggest the character of the man who did it.’
‘The character of the man who did it’ was precisely what Phillips was trying to avoid. While feigning concern for the sensitivity of others, his posture was actually obscene, of utility to no one but the bloody outrage rampaging around Whitechapel. Phillips was covering up, cynically playing the same shabby card Warren was about to pull from his sleeve in Goulston Street.
Stand by for the obligatory dose of fairy dust, courtesy once again of Mr Philip Sugden. ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal,’ he soothes. ‘He was simply conforming to the code of practice that Howard Vincent had bequeathed to the CID, a code that required the utmost discretion on the part of police officers in all cases in which the identity of the culprit has not been established.’6
Irrespective of the fact that Bro Dr Phillips was not a police officer, this is one of the most singularly ridiculous sentences in Mr Sugden’s book. I shall be returning to ‘Vincent’s Code’, and the contempt in which Warren held it, in the following chapter. Meanwhile, to evoke Vincent here is to reduce his ‘Code of Practice’ to the musings of Donald Duck.
Are we supposed to believe that Phillips was withholding information for the public good, that ‘caution’ was somehow the bedfellow of impending forensic breakthrough? Was he poised – together with the indefatigable efforts of Scotland Yard – for a triumphant exposition that would make sense of Vincent and shortly reveal all? I’m afraid not. In fact, nothing could be more distant from reality. At Elizabeth Stride’s inquest some few weeks hence, Bro Phillips would dissemble like a common delinquent, and at the shameful ‘inquest’ into the death of Mary Jane Kelly he attempted not to show up at all.7
Vincent’s Code? The only man laughing was a psychopath. Plus, I’d like to know to which code Mr Sugden refers. I have a copy of Vincent (1881), and in the context of homicide he properly makes no reference to a coroner’s court. He had no jurisdiction in such a place – its procedures were conducted under the Rules of the Coroner. I suggest some other excuse for Phillips’s obfuscation must need to be hammered to fit. Nor should we forget the superannuated nonsense riding pillion: ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal.’ Well, thanks for that, but I think we’ve already got the gist, which I believe appears as points 6 to 11 of Instructions to a Freemason under interrogatory distress.
But at least there’s something over which Mr Sugden and I can agree: Phillips was not party