Following the murder of Mary Nichols, which took place on the morning of Friday, August the 31st, 1888, taking a critical look at several newspapers began taking critical looks at the police efforts to identify the victim and catch the perpetrator of the atrocity.

It must be said that some of those “looks” were not at all flattering.

The London Evening News, on Monday the 3rd of September, 1888, published the following article, that compared the English system of dealing with murder victims to those in France, and was, to say the least, somewhat critical of the London police.

A SIDE LIGHT FOR AN INQUEST

A PLEA FOR A CENTRAL MORTUARY

I went to the inquest on the body of the woman murdered in Whitechapel as a matter of curiosity rather than of duty. I wanted to see whether the first act is the attempted unravelling of the mystery was so constructed as to have that desired effect, and I may at once express my disappointment.

The body of Mary Nichols was found at about four o’clock, a.m., and the evidence of Dr. Llewellyn showed that when he arrived on the spot, twenty minutes later, perhaps, the extremities were still warm.

Hence we may take it that at about two or a little later Mary Nichols was still alive, a supposition confirmed by the statement of those who saw her, or fancied that they had done so, at that time near Whitechapel Church.

HAUNTS OF UNFORTUNATES

It is no injustice, therefore, to the memory of the murdered woman to class her among the lowest category of unfortunates.

This lowest category has in every quarter of the metropolis its haunts, as well as the highest; haunts, admittance to which can be gained at almost any hour in the early morning, haunts which are distinctly known to the police, and if they are not, should be.

I am not now speaking of the common lodging-houses to which the like of Mary Nichols repair when their perambulations temporarily cease, either through a “stroke of luck” or from the knowledge that they can be no longer profitable; I am speaking of the most dreadful “dens of assignation and accommodation.”

That there are such dens about, Brady and Thomas streets, about Buck’s-row, there can be no doubt.

ON THE CONTINENT

On the Continent the landladies of any and every such a den would have been summoned to appear before the examining magistrate (juge d’ instruction) who had taken the case in hand at the outset – there being no such a functionary as the coroner.

They would have been interrogated on the chance that they might have harboured Mary Nichols and her paramour.

TURNING A BLIND EYE

Edmond Texler, the eminent French journalist, who died about a twelvemonth ago, said that “respectability” was the most tyrannical word in the English language.

English respectability thinks itself obliged to close its eyes to the fact of such places existing, for they exist in contravention of the law instead of with its concurrence, as on the Continent.

Consequently the hags that preside in them being severely and “respectably” left alone, no possible light could be forthcoming from that quarter.

Assuredly it was not expected that they should voluntarily reveal the means of their nefarious livelihood and so risk not only losing the latter, but the infliction of a fine and perhaps imprisonment besides for keeping a disorderly house.

SPARE THE PUBLIC

“The public should be spared those revelations of social and moral leprosy,” say the purists.

“The public’s morbid curiosity should not be overfed.”

AT THE “MORTUARY”

It is no doubt on this principle that they have tacitly ignored if not discountenanced the claims – in the interests of criminal detection more efficient than we at present possess – of the hugest metropolis of the Western world to a central morgue, such as at least Paris, Vienna, and Berlin can boast.

It is on this principle, no doubt, that they would approve the senseless and maybe unwarrantable action of the police inspector of the Bethnal Green division in shutting the door of the Whitechapel mortuary against any and every would-be visitor, “now that the body has been identified,” to use the words – probably the inspector’s own – as reported by a workhouse inmate and an amateur “chucker-out” left in charge.

THE DAUGHTER OF A WORKING MAN

Identified as what?

As the daughter of a working-man, whose husband had deserted her, who lived with another artisan for some time, then returned to her father, eventually quitted his roof to go into service, where she betrayed her trust, and finally took to the streets, to meet with her doom at the hands of some unspeakable ruffian – mentally responsible or not for his act.

Were the police under the impression that the public mistook the murdered woman for a patrician or plebian Lucrece, a noble or proletarian Dinah, who had strayed or been inveigled to the back slums of Whitechapel by a patrician or plebeian Tarquin, been ravished, and dispatched afterwards?

NO NEARER A SOLUTION

The identification has brought us no nearer to the solution of the mystery, but the exhibition of the body to all comers for another day or two might have done this.

I say might, not would.

BENEFITS OF PUBLIC VIEWING

Among the thousands that would have been attracted thither – for Londoners are not a bit less curious than Parisians or Berliners, and thousands visit their respective morgues when the victim of a mysterious crime is exposed – there might have possibly been one who had seen Mary Nichols in the society of a man in the last hours of her life.

He (the supposed informant) need not necessarily have belonged to Whitechapel.

He might have been a tramp, a waggoner, who, wending his way through Whitechapel to the west or south of the capital, had stopped at a coffee-stall and noticed the couple.

MIGHT NOT READ THE PAPERS

If under the present circumstances such a person exists, and if he had applied as I did at the mortuary, after the jurymen had viewed the body, he would have met with the same courteous and dunderheaded reply that I got on the authority of the sapient inspector of the Bethnal Green division.

A waggoner or a tramp it should be remembered, is not a regular subscriber to the morning and evening papers; a description of Mary Nichols’s appearance, dress, and fate may have reached him yesterday through a Sunday paper.

IN PARIS OR BERLIN

In Paris or Berlin he would go straight to the morgue and look in at the window behind which both the body and the clothes in which it was found would be shown.

Here an application to the police would be necessary, provided Mary Nichols was not already buried.

If the applicant were lucky enough to meet a detective alone, he might be listened to, for the would-be Vidocq would smell professional glory.

If there happened to be two or three, he would be snubbed and brow-beaten through professional jealousy.

I am not inventing, but stating facts which it would not be very difficult to prove.

THE PARIS MORGUE

In Paris, to which city I shall confine myself, seeing that its morgue is virtually administered like those of Vienna and Berlin, the police have little or no control in these matters.

WHAT HAPPENS IN PARIS

The body once admitted to the morgue “on the formal and printed request” of a Commissary of Police, the greffier (secretary) of that establishment becomes its responsible custodian until relieved of the charge by an order for burial from the Procurator of the Republic attached to the Court of First Instance.

Immediately after its reception the body is undressed and washed, the clothes are disinfected.

In some special cases the body is dressed again; in others it is merely wrapped in a winding sheet, left partially nude, and the clothes suspended in front of one of the dozen black marble slabs on which the corpses are laid out.

The three plate glass windows under the portico afford a full view of the whole of the interior; to arrest decomposition the slabs and their contents are constantly besprinkled with ice-cold water.

If the body is identified and the cause of death surmised or ascertained to be suicide or accident it is removed at once, but kept in the basement in the tiroirs a froid (a kind of huge chest of drawers lined with zinc, not unlike a refrigerator) until the family can be communicated with.

UNIQUE IN THE ANNALS OF CRIME

The ceremony of “confrontation” takes place in an appartement, the description of which merits a whole chapter, for it is perhaps unique in the world’s annals of crime.

Every chair has its associations.

If after three days no information as to identity be forthcoming, the greffier applies for an order of internment to the above-named Procurator, who, through the intermediary of the Prefect of Police, grants said order, provided there is no cause for doubt.

Otherwise, the body is kept above earth and decomposition retarded by means of chemical injections.

French criminal jurisprudence being not at all averse to forcing the criminal into a confession of his guilt, “confrontation” is resorted to whenever it becomes possible, such bodies have been kept as long as a fortnight and three weeks.

THE ENGLISH SYSTEM

English justice takes all possible precautions against the criminal betraying himself.

But between the criminal betraying himself and the police stupidity suppressing a possible clue from the outside there is a great difference.

Experience has taught us by now, and ought to have taught them, that their pretended discoveries were due to accident and to the public.

Where they have had no such windfalls, as in the last two Whitechapel murders, the Camden Town murder, the Canonbury affair, they have miserably and disastrously failed.

If the inspector of the Bethnal Green division be a sample of the average intelligence of his brethren one cannot wonder at these failures.

THE STAKES ARE HIGH

But Mr. Matthews is an intelligent man, and Parliament would not refuse him the grant for a Central Morgue if applied for.

Such an institution would at any rate import the element of chance into the detection of criminals.

The police evidently do not believe in this element, any more than some of the gamblers at Monte Carlo, who generally come away ruined.

But the latter are generally staking their own money; the London police are staking the lives of at lease five millions of inhabitants on the belief in their own infallibility.