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→The body in Dutfield's Yard, Berner Street
Dr Frederick Blackwell arrived at approximately 1.16 am. Dr Blackwell noted that the woman’s face was still slightly warm, and he estimated that she had died only twenty or thirty minutes earlier. The woman’s right hand was smeared with blood and lay across her breast, and her left hand, lying partly closed on the ground, "contained a small packet of cachous [breath fresheners] wrapped in tissue paper". She was wearing a checked scarf around her neck, the knot of which was turned to the side and "pulled tightly", which gave Blackwell the impression that the killer had pulled the woman backward with the scarf, perhaps choking her so that she couldn’t scream. As the postmortem examination would later reveal, the woman’s throat had been deeply cut from left to right. Unlike the previous victims, however, she had no abdominal mutilations. The police took down the names of the club members and then conducted inquiries at the crime scene until 5 am.
The victim was Elizabeth Stride, a forty-five-year-old occasional prostitute from Gothenburg, Sweden. Elizabeth Stride had been in an on/off relationship with a waterside labourer, Michael Kidney, who lived on Devonshire Street, Mile End. Their final separation was only five days before Stride’s murder. When Stride was not staying with Kidney, she frequently slept at 32 Flower and Dean Street - a doss house run by a woman named Elizabeth Tanner. According to Tanner, Stride was a charwoman by profession, and in the months prior to her murder, she had been "at work among the Jews" cleaning houses. Tanner claimed that Stride was a sober and quiet woman, but in reality she was an alcoholic who had been fined a number of times for drunk and disorderly behaviour at Thames Magistrate Court. Like many downtrodden women living in the East End, Stride resorted to prostitution when she couldn’t find work.
