Free The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker Page B

is strongly opposed to the presence of fallen women in the streets of London would like to cooperate with someone with a view to their suppression.
    The police would then gather in hiding at the prearranged meeting place and grab whoever showed up.

“ BLACK MARY”
    On the morning of Friday, November 9, Thomas Bowyer, an Indian army retiree known to friends and neighbors as Indian Harry, was dispatched by his boss, local merchant John McCarthy, to collect rent at a house he owned at 13 Miller’s Court. It was almost right next to Spitalfields Market and a short walk from both Goulston Street to the south and Hanbury Street, site of the Chapman murder, to the northeast. With the kinds of tenants who lived in such buildings as McCarthy’s, collecting the rent was a regular ordeal for both landlord and renter.
    The entrance to Miller’s Court was a narrow, dingy passageway next to McCarthy’s candle shop. Bowyer knocked on the door of Mary Jane Kelly, also said to have been known as Ginger, Fair Emma, and Black Mary to her various friends and clients. She was a streetwise, twenty-four-year-old Irish girl and by most accounts was quite pretty, though no photographs of her are known.
    It was about 10:45 in the morning when Bowyer called on her, a good time to find her in. He knocked several times without response and began to suspect she didn’t have the rent money and was avoiding him. He tried without success to spring the lock, but there was a long-broken windowpane that had never been fixed. Inside it, an old coat had been hung in place of a proper curtain for some measure of privacy. He pushed aside the coat and peered in. The room was only ten by twelve feet, and the sight that met Thomas Bowyer’s eyes was one of such unmitigated horror that he was virtually paralyzed. A body was lying on the bed, but it was so mutilated, so torn apart, with so much of the flesh ripped off and the insides strewn across the bed and onto the floor, that the dimensions of the body, the outlines of its form, could no longer be discerned.
    When the hideous sight had finally registered in his brain, Bowyer raced down to McCarthy’s shop. McCarthy went back up with Bowyer, glanced in the broken window himself, then immediately dispatched Bowyer to the Commercial Street police station.
    He returned with Inspector Walter Beck and Detective Constable Walter Dew. Dew was a tough straight-shooter known as Blue Serge because of the suit he wore habitually. He would go on to fame as the detective who caught the notorious poisoner Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. But the image he saw at 13 Miller’s Court was so emotionally harrowing that it haunted him the rest of his life. Since this was the first indoor scene, where good evidence could be collected, a conscientious effort not to disturb it was made, and not until 1:30 P.M., when Superintendent Thomas Arnold arrived, was the door finally broken in.
    The bed and surrounding area were saturated with blood. The body, as described by Dr. George Bagster Phillips, showed what had to be the final escalation of the killer’s homicidal mutilating frenzy. The face was cut apart and the head just about severed. The breasts had been cut off, abdomen ripped open, and the internal organs thrown about the room. Much of the remaining body, including the pubic area, right thigh, and right buttock had had the flesh removed down to the bone. The heart was missing from the scene. Not only had the killer attempted to desex this victim, he’d gone all the way to dehumanize, to depersonalize her. Some of the doctors who either visited the scene or studied the body in autopsy estimated that the mutilation had taken as long as two hours, though the cause of death, the severing of the carotid artery, had taken place far sooner.
    It is difficult for normal people to conceive of an act this depraved as a sexual fantasy, but our research shows that it is. Part of the fantasy is destroying the victim to the extent that the