The night before her murder, Tabram was drinking with another prostitute, Mary Ann Connelly, known as "Pearly Poll", and two soldiers in a public house, the Angel and Crown, close to George Yard Buildings. The four of them paired off, left the public house and separated at about 11:45 p.m., each woman with her own client. Martha and her client went to George Yard, a narrow north-south alley connecting Wentworth Street and Whitechapel High Street, entered from Whitechapel High Street by a covered archway next to The White Hart Inn. George Yard Buildings were on the eastern side of the alley, near the northern end to the back of Toynbee Hall. The Buildings were a former weaving factory that had been converted into tenements. Today, the location is called Gunthorpe Street and residential flats stand on the site of George Yard Buildings. Pearly Poll and her client went to the parallel Angel Alley.
In the early hours of the night, a resident of the Buildings, one Mrs. Hewitt, was awoken by cries of "Murder!", but domestic violence and shouts of that nature were common in the area and she ignored the noise. At 2:00 a.m., two other residents, husband and wife Joseph and Elizabeth Mahoney, returned to the Buildings and saw no one on the stairs. At the same time, the patrolling beat officer, PC Thomas Barrett, questioned a grenadier loitering nearby, who replied that he was waiting for a friend. At 3:30 a.m., resident Albert George Crow returned home after a night's work as a cab driver and noticed Tabram's body lying on a landing above the first flight of stairs. The landing was so dimly lit that he mistook her for a sleeping vagrant and it was not until just before 5:00 a.m. that a resident coming down the stairs on his way to work, dock labourer John Saunders Reeves, realized she was dead.