POLITICS AS MURDER Chapter Three

I believe the best evidence is that Joseph Stalin did not actually kill his own father. But he ordered him murdered, and watched it done. The cobbler Besarion Vanovis was a known violent drunk who for years beat both his wife and son, before abandoning them. And when, in March of 1906, he was found dead on a back street in Tifil, Georgia, there were few tears shed for his demise, and police wrote it down to just another drunken brawl.  But his wound, a huge hole smashed into his skull, was just the sort of injury Stalin now insisted on inflicting upon his other old enemy, Leon Trotsky.  Stalin was very specific about the method.  In fact, contemplating such acts of terror were Stalin's favorite pastime, as the drunken ruler shared with comrades in 1923: “To choose the victim,” he told them, “to prepare the blow with care, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed....there is nothing sweeter in life.”.

After the raid of 24 May, the American Socialist Workers Party tried to raise funds to improve the defenses at 19 Avenida Viena (above), but were only able collect $2,250. Trotsky had previously been approached by Harvard University to donate his papers. And he now had two reasons to close the deal quickly, to protect his own life, and to move his papers to where Stalin could not destroy them. In exchange for his communications and notes between 1917 and 1937, Trotsky was to be paid $6,000 cash.

The money already collected was used to make certain that all windows facing Morelos Street (above) were bricked up, as were the doors in the portico which opened on Viena Street. The windows that remained were now guarded by iron bars. Wooden interior doors, which had proved easily smashed, were replaced with steel.

On 18 June, 1940,  the Mexican Police charged two dozen members of the Mexican Communist Party with taking part in the raid. The leader, artist David Alaro Siqueiros (above), escaped at first, releasing editorials insisting he was innocent and being framed.  But as more and more members of the raid confessed and named him as the leader, the tone of his press releases changed. Now he claimed he was not trying to kill Trotsky, but just to get him expelled from Mexico. Four months later Sisqueiros was finally captured in Jalisco. A judge was bribed to release the painter on bail, unheard of in an attempted murder case. And within 24 hours Siqueiros was in first Ecuador, and then Cuba, and then disappeared into "central America".  Most of the other members of the raid were not so lucky, and ended up serving years in jail.

It was during the confusion and trauma immediately following the 24 May attack that a old friend appeared at the Viena Streeet villa, a young blond woman named Slyvia Ageloff (above).  Her sister, Ruth, had once worked for Trotsky as a typist, and both sisters had met the Old Man and Natalia during his Paris exile.  Trotsky had taken an interest in the young socialists because he was,   in the words of a close family friend,  an “experienced philanderer”.  But Natalia also found the girls a pleasant diversion, and now Slyvia was doubly so.

Sylvia  (above left) explained she had come to Mexico to visit her mysterious Canadian boyfriend, Frank Jackson (above right), who had recently started a new job in Mexico. She was welcomed to tea with the Trotskies,  Although Frank's schedule prevented him from joining them, his absence only added to his mystery.  At first the only time members of the household saw Frank was when his Buick sedan pulled to the curb to pick up Sylvia. Eventually Frank became familiar with the guards, and even agreeing to drive the house-bound Leon and Natalia on an outing to Vera Cruz.  That kindness, and a gift of chocolates for Natalia,  made it easier when Sylvia asked if Trotsky could offer some advice on a political article Frank was writing

The article which Jackson wanted Trotsky to read was titled “The Third Camp and the Popular Front”, referring to Trotsky's argument that workers must reject both capitalism and the gangster state Stalin had created.  But as he read Jackson's words in his study,  Trotsky grew uneasy.  Frank Jackson was sitting too close,  right behind him,  on the edge of his desk, with his coat folded across his lap.  Since the 24 May attack, Trotsky kept a .25 caliber pistol, always within reach on the desk top. But his reach to an alarm switch was blocked by Jackson. Besides, Trotsky found the article obvious and dull.  And after he had made comments and sent Jackson on his way, The Old Man told Natalia he did not want to see the Canadian again.

But Sylvia begged, and Trotsky agreed to read the rewrites Jackson had made.  So about 5:20, on Tuesday afternoon, 20 August, 1940,  Jackson pulled up again in front of the villa. It would be his 10th visit.  Getting out of his Buick he called up to the guard shack above the foray (above),  asking if Sylvia had arrived yet.  The guards answered no, but opened the front door without question.  Again they noted he carried a raincoat. Trotsky was in the garden, feeding his rabbits, so Jackson stepped back to the kitchen, to tell Natalia that he and Sylvia would be leaving Mexico the next day.  But Trotsky's wife had also grown suspicious of the Canadian, and asked him why he was wearing a hat and coat on such a hot day.  Jackson answered, “It might rain.”  Abruptly, Trotsky appeared and invited Jackson back to his study to read the rewrites. Natalia let them go, despite her uneasiness.

Once in the study Jackson waited only a few moments, before drawing a cut-down climbers pick ax hanging off the rear of his belt, hidden beneath his jacket.  Nervously, he wrapped his raincoat around it, and raising it over his head, drove it with all his might into the very top of Leon Trotsky's head. 

The steel point smashed through the top of the Old Man's skull, tore through the living soft layer beneath, and was driven three inches into his brain. 

Jackson said in his confession, “As long as I live I can never forget his cry ...he screamed very long, infinitely long,” Jackson had expected the man to die instantly. He carried a pistol, and a knife, but had used the axe because the NKVD said a sever blow to the head would bring instant death.  But the sound of the old man's cry terrorized the murderer, and everybody else in the villa.

As Jackson pulled the ax back out, to raise it again, Trotsky stood and turned on his assassin. They struggled over the ax, destroying much of the furniture, and throwing Trotsky's blood all around the room. (above)   The younger man managed to slice Trotsky's cheek, before the 60 year old Russian pulled the ax out of his hands. 

As Natalia and a bodyguard rushed into the room they discovered Trotsky standing over his attacker, the ax in his hand, blood pouring over his eyes. Trotsky said to his wife, “Look what they've done to me!” He told the guard he'd been shot. Then Natalia guided him out to the garden.

The guards fell upon Jackson (above),  beating him while he cried, “They made me do it. They're holding my mother. They have put my mother in jail”  When he tried to pull a pistol out of his pocket, they beat him again. Again he cried out, “They have imprisoned my mother”  Then he added, “Sylvia Ageloff had nothing to do with this.”   Then he insisted neither did the NKVD. No one ever believed him.

Trotsky was driven to two miles to Cruz Verde Hospital in Mexico City. A team of neurosurgeons operated to release pressure on his brain. His last words were, “I think Stalin has finished the job he started.” Suffering from shock and blood loss, and severe brain damage, Leon Trotsky never woke up from the surgery, and died half past seven the next evening.  He was buried on the villa's grounds, which have become a museum, dedicated to his memory.

Later, the police, led the bewildered and terrified Sylvia into a hotel room crowded with reporters, where she was surprised to confront Jackson (above). He began yelling, telling her to go away.  But she was under arrest.

Jackson (above, right)  later re-enacted his crime, and even admitted to being Jacques Mornard. And under that name he was convicted of murder, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He served every day of it,  if under luxurious conditions, with female companionship, and servants, all paid for by Stalin's  NKVD.

We know now that Leonid Ettingon told Ramon Mercader just before his final meeting with Trotsky, that if he failed to murder the Old Man, his mother Caridad Mercader (above) , would be sent to a gulag in Siberia.  After Trotsky was dead, Caridad was ordered back to Moscow, where Stalin himself presented her with the Order of Lenin.  The honor was tainted when she realized she would never be free again. 

Twelve years after the murder, Mexican police finally pierced Ramon's disguises, and his true identity was finally revealed. But he kept his silence during his 20 years in jail.  Caridad knew that not only had she turned her own son into a murderer, she would have been arrested and likely executed by Soviet NKVD if he ever talked. She became a drug addict, her heroin supplied by the NKVD.

Joseph Stalin, perhaps the greatest thug of all time,  died in his own bed on 5 March, 1953,  likely poisoned by the head of his NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria.  Beria was arrested and executed on 23 December, 1953 -  just another gangster rubbed out.  That left only the flotsam floating behind to record the damage the gangster had done.

Ramon was released from prison in May of 1960, and traveled immediately to the Soviet Union where he was honored and rewarded for his loyalty and silence. He would never reconcile with his mother (above), who said she was “only good for destroying capitalism, but no good for building Communism.”   She hated living in the Soviet Union,  and left soon after her son returned, dying in Paris in 1975.   Her son, Ramon, died three years later, in Havana, Cuba.  His last words were reported as, “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”  

And Seva, Trotsky's grandson, going by the name Esteban Volkov (above),  still lives in Mexico City,. He made his living as a chemist, but as of 2019, he was the custodian of the Trotsky Museum (the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky)  in the villa in which the old man died.  Esteban still suffers from occasional nightmare of his grandfather's brutal murder. He told a British newspaper, “I still remember looking through the open door and seeing my grandfather lying on the floor with his head bathed in blood and hearing him tell somebody to ‘keep the boy away, he shouldn’t see this'.  I always thought that was a sign of his humanity. Even in a moment like that he was worried about me.”  And to a point, I'm sure that was true. However,  no one should doubt that given the opportunity, Trotsky would have been just as brutal as Stalin. It is the nature of the beast.

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POLITICS AS MURDER Chapter Two

I can sum up Joseph Stalin (above) in a single paragraph. He rose to leadership in the International Communist Party as a bank robber, financing Lenin's political activities. His intended Pièce de résistance sent twenty bomb throwing Communists into a crowded Yerevan Square in the center of the Ukrainian capital of Tilfis, in broad daylight, to hijack a cash shipment. The resulting carnage killed forty people and wounded another fifty. The condemnation over the blood bath was unanimous, even from within the communist ranks. Worse, it netted just 340,000 rubles, but most of it was new 500 ruble notes, which could not be spent. An embarrassed Lenin  had then distanced himself from Stalin, and the Czars secret police arrested and banished Stalin to Siberia, where he was cut off from advancement in Communist Party politics.  If they had only executed the man, millions of people might have been saved.

The young Stalin (above) had been born Georgian, and spoke Russian with an accent, marking him as a “country bumpkin” to the party intellectuals, like Trotsky and Lenin.  He had two webbed toes on his left foot.  He was raised by an alcoholic father who regularly beat his mother. At seven he caught smallpox, which left his face scared.  Shortly thereafter, he was struck by a carriage which broke his left arm.  It was set badly, and healed permanently shorter than the right. Everything set him off as an outsider.  He fell in with street gangs, until his desperate mother secured him a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary.  But his father refused to pay a tuition hike, and abandoned his wife and son.  But Stalin persevered, switched this religion to revolutionary politics and rose to replace Lenin himself in the later 1920's. But he never forgot how Trotsky had belittled him.

In the winter of 1938, Stalin personally ordered that Trotsky “...should be eliminated within a year.” The assignment, given the code name “Pato”, in English, “Duck”,  eventually fell to NKVD agent Leonid Eitingon, (above),  who was living in Spain with his Cuban mistress, Caridad Mercader. Eitingon's  budget for the murder of this one man was $300,000.  First, Leonid needed a trusted agent in Mexico, where Trotsky now lived.  He recruited a Mexican veteran of the Spanish Civil War, painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.  Leonid then moved to New York City with Caridad, They were followed soon afterward by her adult son Ramon. 

 Ramnon Mercader had also fought in Spain on the Republican side,  trained as a spy in Russia and already had two NKVD developed identities.  One was a stolen Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jackson, who had died in Spain.  This easily pierced identity was used to make Ramon/Jackson  more believable when he claimed to actually be Jacques Mornard,  the Communist son of a Belgium diplomat.  Ramon had used both identities before,  in Paris,  to seduce a young American communist, whose sister was a typist for Trotsky.  The seduction had led nowhere operationally,  but illustrated Stalin's determination to infiltrate Trotsky's inner circle via as many paths as possible. 

After the 1917 revolution, Lenin rewarded Stalin with the job of editor of the party newspaper “Pravda” - Truth. The Georgian used that as a base to win election to the parties' powerful Central Committee. Then, after the Red Army, which Trotsky (above) had founded and led, had defeated the last of the Czarist holdouts in 1919, Lenin saw an opportunity in the power vacuum in Poland.  In 1920 he dispatched the Red Army to spread the revolution beyond Russia's borders. Operations aimed at Warsaw were, of course,  commanded by Trotsky, while Stalin commanded troops in southern Poland. The Poles managed to defeat the Soviets, in part because Stalin refused to cooperate with Trotsky's forces. At the next party conference, Trotsky criticized Stalin in a public speech.

Once in America, Leonid  set up "Amtorg Corporation",  a Brooklyn based import-export business, which allowed him to transfer funds to Mexico City for Trotksy's assassination. Shortly after he arrived, Ramon (above)  re- reignited his affair with the young American typist.  It was a short interlude. Three months after Ramon arrived in New York,  in September of 1939,  Leonid traveled to Mexico City,  to check on Siqueiros' preparations for the assassination.  He was followed a month later by Ramon, using his old Frank/Jacques cover.

During 1921 Stalin (above, left) managed to re-ingratiate himself with the boss, always siding with Lenin (above, right)  in petty squabbles with Trotsky and other party leaders. In response, in 1922, Lenin named Stalin General Secretary of the party. Shortly thereafter Lenin suffered the first of several strokes, and began to withdraw from leadership. When Lenin finally died in January of 1923, control of the Communist Party and national leadership quickly fell under Stalin's control. 

Siqueiros reported that he already had an agent inside Trotsky's villa (above) -  the cook Carman Palma. She  had supplied detailed floor plans, daily schedules and personal habits of the residents – “The Old Man”, his wife Natalia and grandson Seva, and a servant girl, There was also Trotsky's three male assistants and his two American bodyguards, as well as the newest bodyguard, Robert Harte.  But Harte was also an NKVD operative, code named “Amur”.   Leonid was impressed, but did not share with Siqueiros any information about Ramon, nor that the operation was receiving  funds and technical support from Adolf Hitler's anticommunist Nazi Germany.

It took three years for Stalin to isolate and then have Trotsky expelled from the Communist Party, and another year to have him exiled from the Soviet Union.  Over the next six years Trotsky was forced to move to first Turkey, then to France, and then Norway, always writing criticisms of Stalin, always the inspiration for the hated "fellow travelers" to the International Communist Party.   At the same time, in a series of “show trials”, Stalin eliminated all domestic opposition to his rule. Best estimates are that during that decade Stalin ordered the murder or imprisonment in Siberian “Gulags” of over 2 million Russians, and starved to death another 4 million through his collective farm programs. By the time the 57 year old Trotsky arrived in Mexico, in February of 1937,   his was the only Communist voice still critical of the paranoid 5 foot, five inch tall Stalin.  But in their article noting his arrival, Time Magazine wrote, “Today Trotsky is in Mexico — the ideal country for an assassination”.

In Mexico Leonid Etington avoided all contact with the Russian embassy. All his communications with Moscow were made through Nazi German diplomatic channels. Nazi agents kept watch on Trotsky's movements outside the villa, while two attractive female agents, Julia Barrados and Anita Lopez,  took an apartment three blocks from 19 Avenida Viena, and befriended the police officers guarding the place, often hosting parties for them. On Thursday afternoon, 23 May, 1940, a few hours before the actual assault, they even stopped by to confirm everything was as usual and no alarm had been given inside the villa.

Once in Mexico, Trotsky began writing what was to be his ultimate anti-Stalinist work, a biography of the Georgian himself.  Prophetically, Trotsky observed “Stalin...seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at his skull.”  And in detailing Stalin's command of the Tilfis massacre, Trotsky wrote that ““Others did the fighting; Stalin supervised them from afar”.  It was this intended biography that finally convinced Stalin to murder Trotsky as soon as possible.

At four the next morning, 24 May, Sequeiros, code named “Horse”, and dressed in an over sized coat, and a over sized fake mustache, got the drop on the two police guards. He led the first team into the foray to capture the three sleeping guards, gag and tie up all five of them. The second team, lead by Russian, Iosif Grubgykevich, code named “Felipe”, knocked on the inner door. Hart opened the door because he recognized “Felipe's” voice.  Hart had been compromised.

Once the guards in the guest house had been pinned down, the operation turned artistic. 

It was Spanish painter Antonio Pujol who burst into the study, and fired into Trotsky's bedroom from the left side.

And Mexican painter Luis Arenal who burst into Seva's room and fired into Trotsky's bedroom from the right. 

But it was Siqueiros, the most famous painter and biggest ego of the trio, who at the end burst through the french doors and emptied his pistol directly into Trotsky's bed. Then Pujol set off a grenade in the study, intended to destroy Trotsky's biography of Stalin. But it was Arenal who drew the only actual blood, a ricochet from the bedroom wall, which struck 14 year old Seva in the toe.

And then there was the problem of Robert Harte. It appears that he, like many of those who helped the conspirators, had been told the object was only to destroy Trotsky's work, not the man himself.  During the escape Harte became “agitated and upset” with his handler “Felipe” because of the murder attempt.  The Russian realized he could no longer trust Harte, and so after they arrived at the farm rented by Siqueiros' sister, Grubgykevich shot the American once at the base of the skull and once into the temple, the standard NKVD execution method.  The next night his body was dumped into a grave dug along the main road.  It seems certain it was the Mexican communists did the heavy work, because Harte was covered in quick lime, under the mistaken belief it would hasten the decay. In fact quick lime preserves flesh. Any trained NKVD agent would know that. Stalin certainly did.  In any case the attempt had been a bust. There was going to have to be another attempt. 

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BLOODY JACK Chapter Twelve

I am amazed the Italian Bishop Mellitus thought he could easily convert the Vikings of England to Christianity. The first step in his master plan, begun the year he arrived in London - 604 C.E. - was to remake a Roman era temple dedicated to the goddess Diana into a church honoring St. Paul. In response the pagans chased Mellitius right out of London. Then they burned down his church. Although they rejected the new religion, not burning down the Bishop himself might be described as Viking religious tolerance. In any case, it was not until 1087, when William the Conqueror's Catholic confessor, Bishop Maurice, built St. Paul's Cathedral, (above), a fortress which would stand for another 600 years - proof in stone that Christianity had conquered London. St. Paul's Cathedral adopted a policy of growth by meiosis – the mother church granting “easements” for the devout to take most communions in off shoot chapels close to their homes, a practice practiced until London was over flowing with chapels pressed right up against the city walls.

In 1250 just the second easement was granted for a chapel outside Aldegate (Old Gate),  in the parish of Stepney. When it is completed in 1286 this church was dedicated to Jesus' mother, Mary, and it was called St. Mary Matfel – being a term for a new mother. Because this small house of worship, and its larger 1329 replacement (above), had walls of common white Kent chalk rubble held together with white plaster, and was clearly visible from the Conqueror’s Tower of London and the city walls, it came to be called The White Chapel. And thus the parish earned its name.

With time William's house of Normandy was defeated by the Plantaganents, who were followed by the houses of Lancaster, York and the Tudors, under whom the Catholic St. Mary's was rededicated as an Anglican St. Mary's.  In 1673 “Whitechapel by Aldgate”, was rebuilt with red brick in a neoclassical Roman style. And in June of 1649, buried in the graveyard of this “Whitechapel” (above), five months after he had chopped off the head of Charles Stuart, King of England and Scotland,  was Richard Brandon, a “rag man on Rosemary Lane” and public executioner.

The Stuarts were followed by the House of Orange and then the German House of Hanover - whose most illustrious Queen - until modern times -  was Victoria, the Empress of India. The white chapel, at the junction of Adler Street, White Church Lane, and Whitechapel High Street, was rebuilt again in 1877 as a Victorian Gothic church, again with red brick (above). 

But three years later, on the night of Thursday, 26 August, 1880 a fire gutted the sanctuary, sparing only the bell tower and the vestry.

The red brick white chapel reopened again in December of 1882, with pews for 1,600 worshipers and an external pulpit to sermonize to the tide of sinners breaking against its walls. It is interesting to note that despite the image of Victorian piety , an 1881 survey of churches showed that on any given Sunday only 1 in 3 residence of England were sitting in pews. 

It was just across the High Street from this church, on the corner of Whitechapel and Osborn (above),  that Emily Holland met the inebriated Polly Nichols early in morning of Friday 31 August 1888. And it was the bell in the 200 foot tower of this church which interrupted their conversation. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Polly Nichols, it tolls for thee.

The parish of Whitechapel in 1888 was bisected by two primary roads. However, this being London, both were drawn using a whimsical compass, and both were badly congested with traffic and horse manure. Whitechapel High Street ran roughly a mile from Aldegate east northeast past the white chapel and the London Hospital, where it was known as Whitechapel Road. Curving parallel north of the High Street, was Wentworth, which after crossing Brick Lane became Old Montague Street, at the eastern end of which was located the mortuary, just around the corner from the Whitechapel Workhouse.

The next primary (sort of) street north of Wentworth and Montague Street was the disjointed Hanbury Street (above), named after local brewer,  Sampson Hanbury.  The west end of the dis-articulatied Hanbury began at the wide though fare of Commercial Street, a block north of the Spitafield Markets -  operating since the middle ages - and Christ's Church. After crossing Brick Lane, Hanbury jogged south at Spital Street, and after Greaterox Street it jogged south again, converging toward Old Montague Street, before terminating, at it's eastern end, just north of Buck's Row. A decade earlier, Hanbury had been four separate named streets, and they had not been straightened or widened, with the name change - merely another example of the geographic anarchy which results by haphazardly imposing order upon preexisting anarchy.

Sandwiched north of Whitechapel and between that and Hanbury was the infamous “Wicked Quarter Mile”, jammed with dark dangerous poverty plagued short side streets like Bushfield, Dorest, White, Princelet, Fournier, Henege, Chicksand and Fashion Streets and Petticoat Lane,  all little more than a block long, all packed with human beings like so many sardines - such as Mrs. "Flower-on-the-Flock", who was infamous for her abilities with a knife.

Along most of its contorted length, Hanbury Street was crowded with cheaply built apartment houses, called 8 by 4's, which had replaced older grander slums. 

Their front doors opened on a hallway running the length of one side of the building. At the rear, a staircase provided access to the higher floors – 4 in all, ground and 1 through 3 - while a doorway (above, right), provided access to the rear yard and an outhouse and 1 or 2 sheds, Two doors along each hall provided access to the apartments, each a single room of 8 feet square.

Typical were the eight rooms at 29 Hanbury Street (above, center), one block east of Commercial Street, which were occupied by 17 people. Since the tenants worked at various hours of the day and night, the front doors of such buildings were never locked, providing open dark hallways, backyards and staircase landings – like the one at George Yard – for “immoral purposes”, aka side businesses. All of the poor but eager denizens of Whitechapel had side businesses. 

Many of the front ground floor apartments were rented to small shops, pubs, or even light industry. The ground floor front room of 29 Hanbury, in the first block north of the Commercial Street,   was a shop run by the well named Mrs. Hardiman, who sold cat meat pies. And I do not mean meat pies for cats. Mrs. Hardiman also slept in the same 8 by 8 foot room, with her 16 year old son. At night they also shared the room with their landlord, Amelia Richardson, and Thomas, her 14 year old mentally challenged grandson.  Above this, in the first floor back room was an old man named Windsor, who slept there with his 27 year old mentally challenged son. The first floor front apartment was vacant and locked. The rear room on the second floor was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and their adopted daughter. The third floor rear room was used by Mrs. Sarah Cox.,   

On the front ground floor of number 17 Hanbury Street,on the north corner with John Street and in the same block, was the “Weaver's Arms” public house, popularly known as “Coonies”. The name on the liquor license was William Turner, but the owner of the building was John MaCarthy. And he was the  “Stage Door Johnny” to the “Queen the English Music Halls”, the lively, vulgar and hilarious 18 year old Marie Lloyd. 

Marie (above) had been preforming since she was 15, and her first hit song, “The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery”, displayed a genius at double entrendre two generations before Mae West - “They call him a cobbler, but he's not a cobbler, allow me to state. For Johnny is a tradesman and he works in the Boro'l, where they sole and heel them, while you wait.” The diminutive Marie, famous for her generosity and good heart, gave all four of John MaCarthy's daughters their start in show business.

There was another pub in the same block, at 23 Hanbury, “The Black Swan”, managed by Thomas David Roberts. In the back yard and basement behind, officially listed as 23a Hanbury Street, was where brothers Joseph and Thomas Bailey made packing cases. And one of their subcontractors was Mrs. Amelia Richardson, who operated her own shop in the basement and rear yard at 29 Hanbury Street.

Three floors above Mrs. Richardson's business, lived John Davis (above), with his wife and three sons, in their own 8 by 8 foot room. They had moved into the third floor front room two weeks earlier. Such a drifting existence was not unusual in Whitechapel. Of the 1.204 families tracked by the Mr; Booth's new Salvation Army during 1888,  44% changed their address that year. The nomadic Whitechapel existence produced constant worry and tension, and like the woman on Buck's row two weeks earlier, on the morning of Saturday, 8 September, 1888, John Davis lay awake in his bed between 3:00am and 5:00am, unable to get back to sleep.

Although he appeared to be “an old and somewhat feeble-looking man”, John Davis held a porter's job at the Leadenhall Market (above) in central London, “famous for its poultry, game, bacon, leather and hides”. And although shortly after 5 that morning he fell back asleep, he was re-awakened at 5:45 by the tolling of the Spitafield church clock.  John surrendered to the need to earn a salary and climbed out of bed. He quietly made himself a watery cup of tea, and dressed.  Just before 6:00 am he went downstairs, intending to use the latrine in the back yard.  Oddly, he found the back door was closed. But having opened that door, and before stepping across the sill and down the two steps, John Davis was brought to a halt.

Lying on her back, with her left side touching the fence shielding the yard from the neighbor's view, with her head at his feet, John Davis saw the body of a woman. John remembered,  “... her clothing up to her knees, and her face covered with blood. What was lying beside her I cannot describe - it was part of her body.” It was, in fact, her intestines, pulled out from her bowel, and draped or tossed over her right shoulder.

Horrified, and in shock, John stumbled back through the house and out onto the street. He wanted to alert the Whitechapel Police Station house on Commercial Street. But a few steps out the front door of 29 Hanbury, he ran into three men, two preparing to work for the Robert's brother's at 23a Hanbury – James Kent and James Green - as well as passerby Henry Holland. Davis shouted to them in a panic, ““Men, come here! Here’s a sight, a woman must have been murdered!”  The three men followed Mr. Davis through 29 Hanbury to the back door. James Kent was under the impression that the victim was  "struggling…[and] had fought for her throat."  But after a quick look at the mutilated corpse,  all three men began running. Holland headed for the Spitafield Market,, expecting to find a Constable there. Henry Holland headed for the Black Swan, determined to drown what he had seen in beer. Davis and Green headed for the Commercial Street Metropolitan Police station (above) two blocks away, where they demanded to see a senior officer because  “Another woman has been murdered!” 

But not just been murdered, this time. This woman had been murdered and then butchered. The killer was growing more comfortable with letting his horror out into the world. He was finding its release satisfying, fulfilling, comforting, even calming. And he was speeding up.

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