The Legend of Jack the Ripper

Ch13: It never ends.

Just about 48 hours after Mary Kelly's funeral. One of our sources informed us about a story he heard from his friend ,whom he met at a bar. The story broke that Jack the Ripper claimed another victim. On the morning of November 21st, 1888 At about 7.30 am, Annie Farmer, a prostitute had picked up a 'shabby genteel' man on Commercial Street and had taken him back to Satchell's Lodging House in George Street. The man paid 8d for a partitioned double bed on the first floor and with no questions asked by the lodging house deputy, the next hour or two went quietly by. Then, at about 9.30 am, the man was seen dashing out of the house cursing, "What a -- cow!" Witnesses loitering in the street said he had blood around his mouth, a scratch on his face and blood on his hands. He dashed off down Thrawl Street, past several bystanders, including two police officers who did not respond immediately, but when Annie Farmer came out of the lodging house claiming that the man had tried to cut her throat, gave chase to the man but lost him as he went into Brick Lane. From there, things began to escalate alarmingly.

Annie did indeed have a wound to the throat, but no weapon was found. Dr George Bagster Phillips was summoned and he stitched the wound before Annie was taken, on a stretcher, to Commercial Street Police Station. Such a spectacle attracted curious onlookers and before long there were visible signs of excitement in Spitalfields. That evening, the newspapers suggested another Ripper crime, claiming that another woman had been mutilated, but it was soon apparent that this had not been the case and retractions were quickly made. The police were sceptical about Annie Farmer's claims from the off and their doubts were made more concrete when she was found to be hiding coins in her mouth. From this, a possible scenario presented itself. Farmer had attempted to swindle the man out of money and when he remonstrated with her, made a bid to get herself out of the situation by injuring herself and crying attempted murder. As an interesting side note to this little tale, one of the street witnesses, Frank Ruffell, felt that Jack may have been attempting another murder here and that it was, in his words, "his first botched job." Descriptions of the man were also believed to tally with the blotchy-faced character seen with Mary Kelly by Mary Ann Cox on the night of that particular murder. The police were hopeful that the man would give himself up to them to give his own story and clear his name, however, the wait was fruitless and the mystery man was never identified. Annie Farmer never said who he was either, despite claiming that she had known him as a customer for a year and that he often mistreated her. Annie Farmer never recanted her story either, and with her subsequent release from police custody, she drifted off into obscurity, her name preserved in a few sensational news reports as a possible victim of Jack the Ripper, all for a brief moment in time.

A fellow Lodger Esther Hall,in her testimony to the press regarding her involvement in the case, said,

I sleep in the basement of the house and was awoken this morning by a man who told me a murder had been committed. I ran upstairs and saw a woman lying down covered with blood. The deputy put a piece of rag around her throat, and I said, "Are you able to dress yourself?" She said she was not, so I dressed her. I then inquired, "Do you know the man?" She replied, "Yes; I was with him about twelve months ago, and he ill used me then."

She added that the man a black moustache, wore dark clothes and a hard-felt hat and that she thought he was a saddler. Farmer also told her that the man made her drunk before he brought her to the lodging house.

But without further information and the possibility of a fake call, resulted in the case being dropped.

At 7.55 pm, on Wednesday 19th December 1888, Charles Ptolomey was making his way along England row, off Poplar High Street, when he saw a woman in the company of two sailors by the entrance to Clarke's Yard, on the opposite side of the High Street.

One sailor was around 5 foot eleven inches tall and, in Ptolomey's opinion, "looked like a Yankee ''; and the other was about 5 foot seven inches tall.

Ptolomey later recalled that the shorter one was talking to the woman, whom he later identified as Rose Mylett when he was taken to view her body at the mortuary, whilst the taller of the two was walking up and down. "So strange did it seem", he later told the Daily Chronicle, "that I stopped and took account of them."