Lizzie Jackson was a 24 year-old
homeless prostitute about eight months pregnant, and living in London’s Soho Square at the time of her murder in early June 1889.
On Tuesday 4th June 1889 in the morning, one package containing portions of a woman’s body was found by two boys, as witnessed by waterside labourer John Regan at George’s Stairs, Horselydown (just below London Bridge).
These remains were taken to Wapping police station by Alfred Freshwater of the Thames Police. Several experienced Scotland Yard detectives and Dr. Thomas Bond, the chief surgeon to the Metropolitan police, proceeded to Wapping (a district in East London in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets) to commence investigations.
Almost simultaneous to the discovery by the two boys, was the finding of another parcel by fifteen-year-old Isaac Brett. When taking a walk near the Albert Bridge, Battersea (South West London, within the London Borough of Wandsworth, about 5 miles from the spot of the first discovery). Upon the advice of a passing stranger, he took it straight to the Battersea Police Station, where sergeant William Briggs of V division opened it. The assistant divisional surgeon for Battersea, Dr. Felix Charles Kempster, was called in.
The local police immediately alerted Scotland Yard and Inspector John Bennett Tonbridge or Tunbridge of the criminal investigation department alerted Dr. Bond, who concluded that the two body parts corresponded and there were no doubts that they belonged to the same body.
Further examinations of the thigh, by Dr. Kempster and Mr. Athelstan Braxton Hicks found it to be the left one, and most likely that of a young woman within the 20 to 30 age range.
On Wednesday 5th June 1889, the coroner of East Middlesex Wynne Edwin Baxter, who had presided over the inquests of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, opened an inquest at the Vestry hall, Wapping, into the remains found at Horselydown.
On Thursday 6th June, in the afternoon, Joseph Davis, a gardener at Battersea Park, was at work near some greenery rhododendron shrubbery when he noticed a parcel laying on the ground in an area that was closed to the public. The shrubbery was situated about 200 yards from the shore of the Thames and was a place not frequented usually by the public or employed staff at the park. On nearing the bundle, that was rides with white Venetian blind cord, he noticed an unpleasant smell emanating from it. Upon open it, Davis threw the thing in shock, horrified to recognise parcelled therein bits and pieces from a human body. He found police constable Walter Augier of V division, and conveyed the parcel to Battersea police station.
That same Thursday afternoon, around 4pm, Charles Marlow, a man working on a barge at Covington’s Wharf adjacent to the London, Brighton and South Coast railway at Battersea and coincidentally, almost immediately opposite the spot where an arm belonging to the ’Whitehall torso’ was found in the previous year, noticed a parcel floating up the river.
The doctors and police were now gradually building up a physical description of the woman, based on measurements of the various body parts already found and this description was widely circulated.
By Friday 7th June several other missing portions of the body began to be discovered. On Friday 8th June the left arm and hand turned up in the river Thames off Bankside. On the Saturday afternoon the buttocks and the bony pelvis, with all the organs missing, were picked up near Battersea steam boat pier. The right thigh was also found the same day in the garden of the poet Sir Percy Byshee Shelley’s Chelsea house, which was being rented out to another occupier at the time. On the 10th June the right arm and hand were found floating in the Thames off Newton’s Wharf near Blackfriars Bridge.