The discovery of Jane Clouson at Kidbrooke Lane, 26 April 1871. From Chapter 1 of Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane:
He stumbled upon her at 4:15 on Wednesday morning, April 26, 1871, half an hour before the sun rose, just as definition and color began to bleed into the amorphous black and gray. Donald Gunn, a police constable of R, or the Greenwich Division of the London Metropolitan police, was at the extremity of his beat, which had taken him from Shooter’s Hill southwest through the smaller town of Eltham, and then northeast to this deserted road flanked by market gardens and bisected by the little rivulet—Kid Brook— that gave this road its name—Kidbrooke Lane. Kidbrooke Lane provided a direct route between the Kent countryside and the metropolis, but few carriages or wagons traveled that way, as it was muddy, rutted—nearly impassable. The lane’s adjoining footpath, however, was drier, and during the day the route was well frequented by pedestrians, particularly in the evenings: then, the area around Kidbrooke Lane became a well-known haven for lovers, the surrounding fields offering the perfect space apart for lovemaking, just minutes from the bustle of southeast London, but a world away from the relentless attentions of the city, and particularly from prying parental eyes. But the lovers had fled hours before, and PC Gunn usually trod this final part of his night beat in profound solitude; Kidbrooke Lane must have seemed to him far removed from the most populous city in the world—must have seemed in its quiet more like the place where he had grown up: distant Caithness, the northeastern tip of Scotland.
Gunn had made his first circuit of Kidbrooke Lane two and a half hours before, approaching Kidbrooke by the footpath, separated from the road by high hedges, and returning by way of the road itself. If Jane had been lying there then, he must have walked right past her. The moon had set long before this, and although Gunn carried a bull’s-eye lantern with him—it was standard issue for all metropolitan police officers—he did not use it that night, instead making his way down the road guided by dim starlight and by rote memory.
Now, as he made his second circuit up the footpath to the brook, and a hundred yards down the muddy lane, he made out a sodden black-and-brown jumble of clothing that slowly resolved itself into a human body: a woman, or a girl, rising from the mud and trampled grass on her hands and knees. She faced away from him, but he could see her head bobbing up and down as she moaned softly, “piteously.” He immediately concluded that she was drunk, literally dumped here in her inebriation by an ungallant lover to sleep it off alone.
Gunn walked to her, towered over her, and asked sternly what she was doing there.
“Oh, my poor head; oh, my poor head,” she moaned.
He clutched her shoulder and gave her a shake. What was the matter, he asked her: how had she come by her injuries? He noticed then a smear of blood on her cheek.
The woman lifted her left hand from the ground, stretched it toward him, and in a feeble voice, asked him to take hold of it.
She slowly turned her face toward him.
Gunn recoiled as he looked at her and saw a face no longer human—a battered and bloody mass. Several gashes were cloven into her skull. Her left cheek was slashed open and smashed in. Her right eye was destroyed, and above it a chunk of the temporal bone had been bashed out, leaving a hole from which her brain clearly protruded.
He stared at her in horror for several seconds before finally reaching out his hand for hers. It was too late. The woman lost her balance and pitched face-first onto the ground.
“Let me die,” she murmured, and then fell still.
Gunn, for a moment helpless, let her lie there while he surveyed the area. Four feet from the woman, behind him and toward the middle of the road, he could see a small pool of blood, cold and clotted into the mud. Around this center was grouped a mass of footprints; this was where she must have been attacked, must have fallen; from here she had crawled to the side of the road. Two feet from the woman was a pair of women’s gloves, daintily placed one within the other, and two feet from them was a black bonnet, decorated with three embroidered red roses.
Gunn looked up and down the road in the wild hope that the attacker might still be near. But he and the woman were alone.
He lifted her, unconscious, from the mud and set her down gently on her back on the dry grass by the side of the road. And then he turned and ran—southeast down the lane, to the farm of the ancient manor of Well Hall: the hostler and stable boys there, he knew, would already be awake and working. But upon running into the farmyard, Gunn found better help than that: his sergeant, Frederick Haynes, happened to be there, pausing in his early-morning round of surprise inspections of his constables on their beats. Gunn hurriedly conferred with Haynes about the woman. The two men then dashed off in opposite directions: Haynes up Kidbrooke Lane to attend to the woman and Gunn to the police station at Eltham to assemble a stretcher party from the officers who would just then be returning from their night beats.
Sergeant Haynes found the woman lying insensible where Gunn had left her. In his hurry Gunn had set her down with her skirts hiked up above her knees, and so Haynes, seeing her, jumped to the conclusion that she must have been assaulted sexually. Sergeant Haynes looked around him and saw the marks of a violent struggle, the trampled-down grass, and the chaotic, indistinct footsteps. He saw the hat, picked up the gloves. The attack, he realized, had been recent, but not all that recent: the pool of blood in the muddy road had clotted, as had the blood on the woman’s face and matted in her hair: the blood had ceased to flow from many of her wounds. She had obviously lain here for several hours—four or five, at least.
He stood sentinel over the unconscious woman as the sun rose, until Constable Gunn returned with several others. Haynes took charge, supervising the lifting of the woman onto the stretcher, and then ordering Gunn to remain at the scene, both in the hope of waylaying anyone who might have witnessed the attack and to protect the crime scene from contamination by curious passersby—if not from fellow police. The others set out, double-time, for Eltham, Haynes taking the lead, with his ear by the woman’s head. She revived enough, he later claimed, to speak once more, moaning, “Oh, save me!” before passing out again.
They bore her into Eltham and one of the larger houses on the High Street, where they pounded on the door to rouse Dr. David King. As police surgeon and medical officer of health for the district, he would seem the best man for miles around to treat the woman’s wounds. But with a glance King realized that her life was far beyond his—and likely anyone’s—power to save. He directed Haynes to send her on to Guy’s Hospital, nine miles to the northwest in Southwark. They could at least make her comfortable there.
