Martha Tabram

Martha Tabram is considered by some to be the possible first victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer "Jack the Ripper" who afterwards killed and mutilated as many as five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London during the late summer and fall of 1888. Sometimes known as "Emma" and also as "Martha Turner," after the man she had most recently lived with, she was 39 and destitute at the time of her death.

Tabram's body was first noticed at 3:30 in the early morning of Tuesday, August 7, 1888, lying on a landing above the first flight of stairs in George Yard Buildings, Gunthorpe Street, Whitechapel. The landing was so dimly lit that this resident of the apartment building mistook her for a sleeping vagrant, and it was not until 4:50am that a second resident saw she was dead. Her killer had stabbed her 39 times in the body and neck, including nine stab wounds in the throat, five penetrating the left lung, two the right lung, one the heart, five the liver, two the spleen, and six the stomach, also wounding her lower abdomen. A third resident had not noticed anyone lying there while using the stairs three times around 1:50am, indicating Tabram was killed between 1:50am and 3:30am. Residents had seen and heard nothing between those times.

Contemporary newspaper reports at the beginning of September linked Tabram's murder to that of Mary Ann Nichols on August 31, and later to a murder on September 8, two on September 30, and one on November 9. These last five murders are now generally attributed to the unidentified "Jack the Ripper." All were knife murders of impoverished prostitutes in the Whitechapel district, generally perpetrated in darkness in the small hours of the morning, in a secluded site to which the public could gain access, and occurred on or close to a weekend. The day before Tabram's murder was the night of a Bank Holiday.

Tabram was born Martha White on May 10, 1849, in Southwark, London, the daughter of Charles Samuel White, a warehouseman, and his wife Elisabeth. The family had five children altogether. In May 1865 when Martha was sixteen, her parents separated; six months later her father died suddenly. Later she went to live with Henry Samuel Tabram, a foreman packer at a furniture warehouse, and married him on December 25, 1869.

In 1871 the couple moved to a house close to her childhood home, where they had a son in February of that year and another son in December of the following year. The marriage was troubled due to Martha Tabram's drinking, which was heavy enough to cause alcoholic fits, and her husband left her in 1875. For about three years he paid her an allowance of twelve shillings a week, then reduced this to two shillings and sixpence when he heard she was living with another man.

Martha Tabram lived on and off with Henry Turner, a carpenter, from about 1876 until shortly before her death. This relationship was also troubled by Tabram's drinking and occasionally staying out all night. By 1888 Turner was out of regular employment and the couple earned income by selling trinkets and other small articles on the streets, while lodging for some months in a house off Commercial Road in Whitechapel. Around the beginning of July they left abruptly, owing rent, and separated for the last time about the middle of that month. Tabram moved to a common lodging house in Spitalfields.

The Monday night before her murder, Tabram was drinking with another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, known as "Pearly Poll," together with two soldiers in a public house close to George Yard Buildings. The two couples left and separated at 11:45pm, each woman with her own client. This was the last time Tabram was seen alive. Connelly, not cooperating wholly with police, later identified two soldiers in barracks as their clients, but both had alibis. No suspect was ever arrested for Tabram's murder.

Later students of the Ripper murders have largely excluded Tabram from the list of five "canonical" Ripper victims, chiefly because her throat was not cut followed by evisceration in the manner of later victims. This conclusion was supported by Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department, who attributed this killing to an unidentified soldier in private notes he made in 1894, which came to light in 1959. Dr. Timothy Killeen, who performed the autopsy on Tabram, strengthened this belief with his opinion that one of Tabram's wounds was inflicted with a weapon stouter than the others, a dagger or possibly a bayonet.

Critics of this explanation point to the time of Tabram's murder, at least two hours after leaving with her soldier client, which would have allowed her to solicit another client. Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders, and his notes reflect only the opinions of some police officers at the time, including errors of fact about possible suspects. Serial killers are known to have changed their murder weapons, but especially to develop their modus operandi over time, as the Ripper did with increasingly severe mutilations. While the five canonical Ripper murders were located roughly to north, south, east and west of Whitechapel, Tabram's murder occurred close to their geographic center, suggesting the possibility of a first murder perpetrated on impulse more than planning by a killer who lived close by.

The truth, like the identity of the Ripper, may never be definitively resolved.