When the police were looking for Jack the Ripper, a great deal of importance was placed on witness descriptions of men last seen with the victims. Investigative reports reveal that much attention was paid to hair color, complexion, and height, with the police not taking into account that all of these characteristics can be disguised. Height not only varies in an individual depending on posture, hats, and footwear, but can be altered by "trickery." Actors can wear tall hats and special lifts in their shoes. They can stoop and slightly bend the knees under voluminous coats or capes; they can wear caps low over their eyes, making themselves appear to be inches taller or shorter than they are.
Early publications on medical jurisprudence and forensic medicine reveal that much more was known than was actually applied in crime cases. But in 1888, cases continued to be made or lost based on witness descriptions instead of physical evidence. Whether the police knew anything at all about forensic science, there was no practical way to get evidence tested. The Home Office - the department of government that oversees Scotland Yard - did not have forensic laboratories then.
A physician such as Dr. Llewellyn might never have touched a microscope; he might not have known that hair, bone, and blood could be identified as human. Robert Hooke had written about the microscopic properties of hairs, fibers, and even vegetable debris and bee stings more than two hundred years earlier, but to death investigators and the average doctor, microscopy was as rarified as rocket science or astronomy must have seemed.
Dr. Llewellyn attended the London Hospital Medical College and had been a licensed physician for thirteen years. His surgery or medical office was no more than three hundred yards from where Mary Ann Nichols was murdered. He was in private practice. Although the police knew him well enough to request him by name when Mary Ann Nichols's body was discovered, there is no reason to suppose that Llewellyn was a divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard; that is, he was not a physician who offered his services part-time to a particular division, which in this instance was the H Division covering Whitechapel.
The job of a divisional surgeon was to attend to the troops. Free medical care was a benefit of working for the Metropolitan Police, and a police surgeon was to be available when needed to examine prisoners, or to go to the local jail to determine if a citizen was drunk, ill, or suffering from an excess of "animal spirits," which I presume refers to excitement or hysteria. In the late 1880s, the divisional surgeon also responded to death scenes for a fee of one pound one shilling per case; he was paid two pounds two shillings if he performed the autopsy. But by no means was he expected to be well acquainted with the microscope, the nuances of injuries and poisonings, and what the body can reveal after death.
Most likely, Dr. Llewellyn was a local doctor the police felt comfortable calling upon, and it is possible that he had located in Whitechapel for humanitarian reasons. He was a Fellow of the British Gynecological Society, and would have been accustomed to being called upon at all hours of the night. When the police rapped on his door on the cool, overcast early morning of August 31st, he probably got to the scene as quickly as possible. He wasn't trained to do much more than determine that the victim was really dead and offer the police an educated guess as to when death had occurred.
Unless the body was turning green around the abdomen, which would indicate the beginning stages of decomposition, it was traditional in the early days of death investigation to wait at least twenty-four hours before performing the postmortem, on the remote chance that the person might still be alive and "come to" as he or she was being cut open. For centuries, the fear prevailed that one might be mistaken for dead and buried alive. Bizarre stories of people suddenly trying to sit up inside their coffins were in circulation, prompting some who were sufficiently concerned about such a fright to have their grave rigged with a bell attached to a string that ran through the earth to the coffin. Some stories may have been veiled references to cases of necrophilia. In one instance, a woman in her coffin wasn't really dead when a man had sex with her. She was paralyzed, it turned out, but conscious enough to consent to the weakness of the flesh.
Police reports of Mary Ann Nichols's murder leave little doubt that Dr. Llewellyn did not seem particularly interested in a victim's clothing, especially the filthy rags of a prostitute. Clothing was not a source of evidence but identification. Perhaps someone recognized a victim by what he or she was wearing. People did not carry around forms of identification in the late 1800s, unless it was a passport or visa. But that would have been rare. Neither one was required for British citizens to travel to the Continent. A body was unidentified when it was collected off the street and came to the mortuary unless he or she was known by the locals or the police.
I have often wondered how many poor souls went to their graves unidentified or misnamed. It would not have been a difficult task to murder someone and conceal the victim's identity, or to fake one's own death. During the investigations of the Ripper murders, no attempt was made to distinguish human blood from that of birds or fish or mammals. Unless the blood was on the body or near it, or on a weapon at the scene, the police could not say that the blood was related to the crime or came from a horse or a sheep or a cow. In the 1880s, the streets of Whitechapel near slaughterhouses were putrid with blood and entrails, and men walked about with blood on their clothing and hands.
Dr. Llewellyn misinterpreted just about every detail in Mary Ann Nichols's murder. But he probably did the best he could with his limited training and what was available at the time. It might be interesting to imagine how the murder of Mary Ann Nichols would be investigated today. I'll place the scene in Virginia - not because it is where I once worked and have continued to be mentored, but because it has one of the best statewide medical examiner systems in America.
In Virginia, each of the four district offices has forensic pathologists who are medical doctors trained in pathology and the subspecialty of forensic pathology, training that involves ten years of postgraduate education, not counting three additional years if the forensic pathologist also wants a law degree. Forensic pathologists perform the autopsies, but it is the medical examiner - a physician of any specialty working part-time to assist the pathologist and the police - who is called to the scene of a sudden, unexpected, or violent death.
If Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn were employed in Virginia, he would have a private practice and serve part-time as a medical examiner for one of the four districts, depending on where he lived. If Mary Ann Nichols were murdered at the time of this writing, the local police would call Dr. Llewellyn to the scene, which would be cordoned off and protected from the public and bad weather. A tent would be set up, if need be, and there would be a perimeter of strong lights and spitting flares. Officers would be on the street to keep away the curious and divert traffic.
Dr. Llewellyn would use a clean chemical thermometer and insert it into the rectum - providing there was no injury to it - and take the temperature of the body; then he would take the temperature of the air. A quick calculation could give him a very rough idea of when Mary Ann was killed because a body under relatively normal circumstances, assuming an ambient temperature of about seventy-two degrees, would cool one and a half degrees Fahrenheit per hour for the first twelve hours. Dr. Llewellyn would check the stages of livor mortis and rigor mortis and carefully perform an external examination of the body and what is around and under it. He would take photographs, and collect any obvious evidence on the body that might be dislodged or contaminated during transportation. He would ask the police many questions and make notes. He would then send the body to his district medical examiner's office or morgue, where a forensic pathologist would perform the autopsy. All other scene evidence collected and photography would be handled by police detectives or a police forensic squad.