There was "nothing in the shape of a clue," The Times reported on December 27th, and medical and police officials believe the "deed [was] the work of a skillful hand." A point of medical confusion for the police surgeon was that Rose's mouth was shut when she was found and her tongue was not protruding. Apparently it was not understood that in most cases of garrotting, the ligature - in this case a cord - is pulled tightly around the neck and compresses the carotid arteries or jugular veins, cutting off the blood supply to the brain. Unconsciousness occurs in seconds, followed by death. Unless the larynx, or airway, is compressed, as in murder by manual strangulation, the tongue will not necessarily protrude.
Garrotting is a quick and easy way to control a victim because the person loses consciousness rapidly. Strangulation with the hands, in contrast, causes death by asphyxia, and the victim will most likely put up intense resistance for minutes as he or she panics and fights to breathe. Garrotting bears a similarity to cutting a victim's throat. In both cases, the victim can't utter a sound and becomes quickly incapacitated.
One week after Rose Mylett was murdered, a boy disappeared in Bradford, Yorkshire, a theater city on the Irving company's tour that was four and a half to six hours northwest of London, depending on the number of stops the train made. Thursday morning, December 27, at 6:40, Mrs. Gill saw her seven-year-old son John hop on the neighborhood milk wagon for a quick ride. Later, at 8:30, John was playing with other boys, and by some accounts was talking to a man after that. John never came home. The next day, his frantic family posted a notice:
Lost on Thursday morning a boy, John Gill, aged eight. Was last seen sliding near Walmer Village at 8:30 A.M. Had on navy blue top coat (with brass buttons on), midshipman's cap, plaid knickerbocker suit, laced boots, red and white stocking; complexion fair. Home 41, Thorncliffe Road.
The notice listed John as eight because his birthday was a little over a month away. That Friday night at 9:00 P.M., a butcher's assistant named Joseph Buckle was in the vicinity of stables and a coach house very close to the Gills' home. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning, Saturday, he was up early to yoke up his employer's horse for a day of work. As was his usual routine, Joseph cleaned out the stable. While he was pitching manure into a pit in the yard, he "saw a heap of something propped up in the corner between the wall and the coach house door." He fetched a light and saw that the heap was a dead body and that an ear had been cut off. He ran to the bakehouse for help.
John Gill's coat was tied around him with his braces. Several men unwrapped him and found what was left of the boy's body leaning to the right, his severed legs propped on either side of his body and secured with cord. Both ears had been sliced off. A piece of shirting was tied around his neck, and another piece tied around the stumps left of his legs. He had been stabbed multiple times in his chest, his abdomen slashed open, the organs removed and placed on the ground. His heart had been "torn" out of his chest and wedged under his chin.
"I shall do another murder on some young youth such as printing lads who work in the City. I did write you once before but I don't think you had it. I shall do them worse than the women I shall take their hearts," the Ripper had written on November 26th, "and rip them up the same way… I will attack on them when are going home… any Youth I see I will kill but you will never kitch me put that in your pipe and smoke it…"
John Gill's boots had been removed and stuffed inside his abdominal cavity, according to one news report. There were other mutilations "too sickening to be described." One might infer these were to the genitals. One of the wrappings found with the body, The Times reported, "bears the name of W. Mason, Derby Road, Liverpool." What should have been an incredible lead apparently went nowhere. Liverpool was less than four hours away from London by train, and five weeks earlier the Ripper had written a letter claiming to be in Liverpool, and again on December 19th, or a little more than a week before John Gill's murder, the Ripper sent a letter to The Times - allegedly from Liverpool.
"I have come to Liverpool amp;c you will soon hear of me."
Police immediately went after William Barrett, the dairyman who had given John a ride in the milk wagon two days earlier, but there was no evidence against him beyond Barrett's keeping his horse and cart at the stables and coach house where John's body was found. Barrett had given John a ride many times in the past and was highly thought of by his neighbors. Police found no bloodstains on John Gill's body or the coat wrapped around it. There was no blood inside the coach house or the stable. The murder had occurred elsewhere. A constable patrolling the area claimed that at 4:30 Saturday morning he had tried the coach house doors to make sure they were secure and had stood on the "very spot" where John Gill's remains were displayed by the killer not three hours later.
Afterward, in an undated, partial letter, the Ripper wrote to the Metropolitan Police, "I riped up little boy in Bradford." A Ripper letter of January 16, 1889, refers to "my trip to Bradford."
There are no known Ripper letters from December 23rd until January 8th. I don't know where Sickert spent his holidays, but I suspect he would have wanted to be in London on the last Saturday of the year, December 29th, when Hamlet opened at the Lyceum, starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Sickert's wife may have been with her family in West Sussex, but there are no letters I have found from this period that tell me where either Sickert or Ellen was.
But the month of December could not have been a happy one for Ellen. It is unlikely she saw Sickert much at all, and one has to wonder where she thought he was and what he was doing. She would have been deeply worried and saddened by the critical illness of a dear family friend, reform politician and orator John Bright. Daily, The Times gave reports on his condition, reports that could have evoked bittersweet memories of Ellen's late father, who had been one of Bright's closest friends.
The dairyman arrested in the John Gill case was eventually cleared and the murder would remain unsolved. The murder of Rose Mylett was never solved. The notion that Jack the Ripper might have committed either crime didn't seem plausible and was soon forgotten by the people who mattered. The Ripper didn't mutilate Rose. He didn't cut her throat, and it wasn't his MO to savage a little boy, no matter what was threatened in letters that the police would have considered hoaxes, anyway.
Because of the scarcity of medico-legal facts revealed in the newspapers and the inquest, it is difficult to reconstruct John Gill's case. One of the most important unanswered questions is the identity of the man John was last seen talking to, assuming this reported detail is true. If the man was a stranger, it would seem that quite an effort should have been made to discover who he was and what he was doing in Bradford. Clearly, the boy went off with someone, and this person murdered and mutilated him.
The piece of "shirting" around John's neck is a curious signature on the part of the killer. Every Jack the Ripper victim, as far as I know, was wearing a scarf, a handkerchief, or some other piece of fabric around the neck. When the Ripper cut a victim's throat, he did not cut off the neckerchief, and in Rose Mylett's murder, a folded handkerchief was draped over her neck. Clearly, neckerchiefs or scarves symbolized something to the killer.
Sickert friend and artist Marjorie Lilly recalled that he had a favorite red neckerchief. While he was working on his Camden Town murder paintings, and "was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the handkerchief loosely around his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern." It was commonly known that if a criminal wore a red neckerchief to his execution, it signaled that he had divulged no truths to anyone, and carried his darkest secrets to the grave. Sickert's red handkerchief was a talisman and not to be touched by anyone, including the housekeeper, who knew to steer clear of it when she saw it "dangling" from the bedpost inside his studio or tied to a doorknob or peg.