A week later he was back on the witness stand, and this time Baxter wasn’t in the mood for waffle. Once again he wanted to know about the mutilations, and once again Bro Phillips didn’t want to tell him.
BAXTER: Whatever may be your opinions and objections, it appears to me necessary that all the evidence that you ascertained from the postmortem examination should be on the records of the court for various reasons which I need not enumerate. However painful it may be, it is necessary in the interests of justice.
DR PHILLIPS: I have not had any notice of that. I should be glad if notice had been given me, because I should have been better prepared to give evidence.
This pretence hit the deck when Baxter offered another postponement. Such delay was worthless if it meant returning to the issue, and Phillips declined. What exactly did Phillips think he was there for? He was a police surgeon called to give evidence at a coroner’s court, and ‘notice’ of his requirements was surely implicit in his summons. Shuffling his notes, he tried to get away with a rehash of the evidence he’d already given: ‘I think it is a very great pity to make this evidence public. Of course, I bow to your decision, but there are matters which have come to light now which show the wisdom of the course pursued on the last occasion, and I cannot help reiterating my regret that you have come to a different conclusion.’
How Baxter was supposed to arrive at a conclusion over matters he was unaware of isn’t explained. He was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Phillips then went on to rehearse his descriptions of the bruises on Chapman’s face, as though this were the information everyone sought. Both Baxter and the jury had heard it before, but apparently it was all they were going to get.
DR PHILLIPS: When I come to speak of wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public.
BAXTER: We are here in the interests of justice and must have all the evidence before us.
Exasperated with this obstruction, Baxter ordered that ‘several ladies and [newspaper messenger] boys in the room should leave’. Phillips had now run out of excuses, but still flapped about like something the tide had left. Shifting from jurors’ sensibilities, he had a go at the ‘ends of justice’: ‘In giving these details to the public, I believe you are thwarting the ends of justice.’
Baxter had had enough, and so had the jury.
BAXTER: We are bound to take all the evidence in the case, and whether it be made public or not is a matter for the responsibility of the press.
FOREMAN: We are of opinion that the evidence the doctor on the last occasion wished to keep back should be heard.
Several jurymen endorsed this with cries of ‘Hear, hear.’
‘I have carefully considered the matter,’ ruled Baxter, ‘and have never before heard of any evidence requested being held back.’ Considering that during his long career Baxter was to preside over thousands of such hearings, this was quite a statement. Doing to death by unpleasant means was the stock in trade of a coroner’s court, and he had never before heard of any evidence being held back. So what was the game, doc?
‘I have not kept it back,’ whined Phillips. ‘I have only suggested it should not be given out’ (which to the average ear sounds remarkably like keeping it back). Presumably he was defending the police’s claim that there was ‘not the slightest clue to the murderer’. Well, if he never left a clue, why withhold it?
In reality the mutilations didn’t represent anything as mundane as a ‘clue’, but were the essence of what these murders were, duplicated with escalating symbolic ferocity time after time. They were irrefutable evidence of ritualistic murder, and the only question outstanding was: What was the ritual?
Baxter had skated into dangerous territory, insisting on his court’s rights even as the ice cracked under his feet.
BAXTER: We have delayed taking this evidence as long as possible, because you said the interests of justice may be served by keeping it back; but it is now a fortnight since this occurred, and I do not see why it should be kept back from the jury any longer.
DR PHILLIPS: I am of opinion that what I am about to describe took place after death, so that it could not affect the cause of death you are enquiring into.
BAXTER: That is only your opinion, and might be repudiated by other medical opinion.
DR PHILLIPS: Very well, I will tell you the results of my postmortem examination.
The newspapers declined to print his description, which was ‘totally unfit for publication’ according to The Times. Seekers of sensation would have to make do with the medical journal the Lancet, which limited itself to précis: ‘It appears that the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body and placed by the shoulder of the corpse.’8
Chapman’s shocking list of injuries must have chilled the court, and especially the coroner who had demanded it. As the doctor enunciated each telling word, Baxter must have realised what all the reticence was about. Bro Phillips was describing a ritualised enactment of Freemasonic penalty, something any Freemason would have recognised immediately. Bro Wynne Baxter was a Freemason, and recognise it he surely did.
I have no doubt that (with the exception of the case of the Ripper) both Phillips and Baxter were men of integrity. But, like Shelley’s pestilence, Jack poisoned the very soul of all that was honourable, and with Baxter we can actually see the process of enmeshment in action. Cue the ‘Mystic Tie’. By tradition it is juries that are nobbled. In this case the process was reversed. At the next and last session of Chapman’s inquest, this seasoned coroner, of previously unimpeachable repute, concocted one of the most ridiculous lies ever told in a coroner’s court.
Baxter had put his foot in it, and it was now incumbent upon him to conjure up something that might serve to explain away Jack’s Masonic surgery in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. As the finale to his deliberations, the compromised Bro Coroner implanted a preposterous fiction in the jury’s mind. The Ripper had made off with Chapman’s uterus, and this, according to Baxter, was the crux of the matter. Repugnant as this act was, monstrous as it was, there was no reason to suspect that anything other than market forces was at play, ‘For it is clear,’ he shitmouthed, ‘there is a market for the object of the murder.’
The object of the murder had become the financial value of a body part. Mrs Chapman was the victim of a commercial enterprise.
Would you now please welcome ‘the American Womb-Collector’.
‘Within hours of the issue of the morning papers,’ opined the newly accredited zombie, ‘I received a communication from an officer of one of our great medical schools, that they had information that might or might not have a distinct bearing on our enquiry. I attended at the first opportunity, and was told by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum that some months ago an American had called on him, and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the organ that was missing from the deceased. He stated his willingness to give 20 pounds for each, and explained that his object was to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication in which he was engaged.’ (His publishers must have been well pleased that the projected dissertation wasn’t upon the pathology of testicles.) ‘Although he was told that his wish was impossible to be complied with, he still urged his request. He desired them preserved,’ continued the unlikely entertainer, ‘not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition, and he wished them sent to America direct. It is known that this request was repeated to another institute of similar character.’
It was proved almost immediately