Chapter 2: The Murder Casebook

In defiance of the overcast skies, many middle-class Londoners made the most of August Bank Holiday Monday, 1888, by taking day trips to the south coast or excursions into the countryside. Those who chose to remain in the capital were spoilt for choice as to how to pass the day. Almost all the customary attractions were within a short omnibus ride of the West End and were still a novelty. For half a crown a family of four could spend an agreeable afternoon gaping at the animals in the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, marvelling at the lifelike figures at Madame Tussaud’s or taking in a tour at the Tower of London and still have change for refreshments and the ride home. A couple of shillings would cover entrance to the exotic orchid houses at Crystal Palace or the manicured gardens at Kew, while edification and culture could be had for free at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in fashionable Kensington or at the National Portrait Gallery, which relocated from South Kensington to Bethnal Green in 1885. The advantage of museums was that they offered both diversion and shelter should the skies open unexpectedly.

In contrast, many of those living south of the river enjoyed the day in a more modest manner. Martha Tabram (aka Martha Turner) and her friend Pearly Poll spent the day cadging drinks in various public houses around Whitechapel. Martha, who for some reason had told her new friend that her name was ‘Emma’, was a plump, 39-year-old married mother of two teenage sons, with a swarthy complexion. She had been separated from her husband Henry, a foreman furniture packer, for nine years and had been living with William Turner, a carpenter, in George Street, Whitechapel, supplementing their income by hawking trinkets for a halfpenny an item. But her fondness for ale, and anything stronger when she could afford it, had led her to rely on prostitution. Turner had given up on her and Martha was in need of a few coppers for a room. Poll’s offer to team up for the night must have seemed like a practical solution.

By 10pm they had befriended two soldiers at the Angel and Crown, who said they were stationed at the Tower of London, and were confident of procuring enough change to pay for their lodgings. Shortly before midnight the pair separated. Polly led her client into nearby Angel Alley and Martha staggered arm in arm with her customer round the corner to George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street. Half an hour later Polly and her punter bid each other goodnight and she wandered off giving no further thought to her friend.

A body discovered

It was not until 4.45am the next morning that John Reaves, a tenant at 37 George Yard Buildings, came upon the lifeless body of a woman sprawled on the first-floor landing as he made his way to work. It was Martha Tabram. She was lying on her back with her legs apart and her long black jacket, dark green skirt and brown petticoat pushed up to the waist, suggesting that she had been killed while engaged in intercourse. Her fists were clenched in her death agony and thick sticky blood pooled around her on the flagstones from her black bonnet to her side-spring boots. Reaves stepped over the body and legged it down the stairs and out into the street in search of a policeman.

Under the headline ‘The Murder in Whitechapel’, the following extract from The Times, dated 10 August 1888, details what Dr Killeen, a local physician, discovered when he was called to the scene that morning. The fact that the murder went unreported for three days suggests that both the press and the police were slow to realize the significance of the Martha Tabram murder.

‘Dr T R Killeen, of 68, Brick-lane, said that he was called to the deceased, and found her dead. She had 39 stabs on the body. She had been dead some three hours. Her age was about 36, and the body was very well nourished. Witness had since made a post mortem examination of the body. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was penetrated in two places. The heart, which was rather fatty, was penetrated in one place, and that would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was penetrated in two places, and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrated in six places. The witness did not think all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument. The wounds generally might have been inflicted with a knife, but such an instrument could not have inflicted one of the wounds, which went through the chestbone. His opinion was that one of the wounds was inflicted by some kind of dagger, and that all of them had been caused during life. The Coroner [remarked that]…it was one of the most dreadful murders any one could imagine. The man must have been a perfect savage to inflict such a number of wounds on a defenceless woman in such a way.’

It was established that Martha had been murdered between 1.50 and 3.30am. At the coroner’s inquest, resident Elizabeth Mahonney had testified that she had returned at 1.50 to her rooms at 47 George Yard and seen no one on the landing. An hour and 40 minutes later cab driver Alfred Crow ascended the wide stone staircase to his rooms at number 35 and noticed a woman lying on the landing, but thought little of it as vagrants were in the habit of sleeping off their drink at George Yard. None of the residents had heard a sound during the night, although Mrs Hewitt, the building superintendent’s wife, had heard a cry of ‘murder’ earlier that evening, but hadn’t informed her husband as it appeared to originate from outside and such disturbances were an almost nightly occurrence in the area.

The reason no one heard the poor woman’s cry for help was addressed by the Illustrated Police News, a sensationalist tabloid which, despite the title, had no association with the authorities. It speculated that her cries had been stifled. She had been ‘throttled while being held down and the face and head being so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible’. The Daily News added that Dr Killeen had concluded that there may have been two assailants, one evidently left-handed and the other right-handed and that the wounds had been inflicted by two weapons, one a penknife and the other either a dagger or bayonet.

A soldier under suspicion

Suspicion immediately fell on the soldier who appeared to have been the last person to have seen Martha alive. PC Barrett, the officer who had been called to the scene by Reaves, had seen a soldier loitering in George Yard at 2am, at the time the murder might have occurred. It is very likely that this was the same soldier Martha had been keeping company with two hours earlier when she parted with Pearly Poll. When PC Barrett approached him and asked what he was doing at this hour the soldier replied that he was waiting for a friend who had gone with a woman.

PC Barrett described the soldier as a private in the Grenadier Guards who had a good conduct badge pinned to his tunic but no medals. He was in his early to mid-twenties, of average height (about 175cm/5ft 9in) with a fair complexion, dark hair and a small brown moustache turned up at the ends. But when an identification parade was arranged at the Tower on the morning of 8 August, the constable picked out two men who verified each other’s story and were allowed to return to the ranks. That may have been Scotland Yard’s first fatal mistake. The soldiers were almost certainly the killers and, had they been questioned more thoroughly, Martha Tabram might not be acknowledged today as the Ripper’s first victim.

The body in Bucks Row

Fate was particularly cruel to Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols. She should have been safe in bed on the morning of 31 August 1888 but was instead found sprawled in the street gutted like one of the pigs in nearby Spitalfields market. She had earned her bed and board three times that day but had drunk it all away. Had she saved just a few coppers, she would not have been soliciting for her final customer of the evening when she fell foul of Jack the Ripper.

Polly Nichols was a short, stout, middle-aged, married woman with five children who had been separated from her family because of her fondness for alcohol and was forced to rely on the charitable ministrations of Lambeth Workhouse. But shortly before her death she had tried to get back on the straight and narrow by taking a position as a domestic servant to a respectable couple in Wandsworth. Her new-found employment enabled her to leave the workhouse and find lodgings at Thrawl Street with an elderly room-mate who described her as clean, quiet and inoffensive, so long as she was sober. Her new employers evidently found her agreeable too and something of her state of mind at the time can be gleaned from her final letter to her estranged husband, which paints a very different picture of a penniless streetwalker to the blowsy, foul-mouthed bawd of popular fiction.

‘I just write to say that you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place and going on all right up to now. My people went out yesterday, and have not returned, so I am left in charge. All has been newly done up. They are teetotallers and religious, so I ought to get on. They are very nice people, and I have not too much to do. I hope you are alright and the boy has work. So good-bye for the present. –

From yours truly POLLY

Answer soon, please, and let me know how you are.’

A fatal error

However, the demon drink bedevilled Polly and during a moment of weakness she gave in to temptation, stealing a bundle of clothes from her employers for which she was summarily dismissed. On the night of her death she was turned away from her old lodgings in Thrawl Street because she didn’t have the 4d for the room. Undaunted, she told them to hold her bed for her and that she would be back shortly with the money.

‘I’ll soon get my doss money,’ she laughed as she staggered down the street. ‘See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now!’

Polly was proud of her new black straw bonnet with the black trim. Beneath it her brown hair was turning prematurely grey, framing her sallow skin and brown eyes. She wore a rustic brown, double-breasted overcoat, a new frock of the same colour, a white chest flannel, black stockings and side-spring boots with steel-tipped heels to save wear and tear.

At the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street she chanced to meet her former room-mate, Ellen Holland, who vainly tried to persuade Polly to come back with her. ‘I’ve had my lodging money three times today and I’ve spent it,’ Polly boasted. ‘It won’t be long before I’ll be back.’ It was 2.30am when they parted. Ellen was the last person to see Polly alive.

Just over an hour later two workmen walking down the narrow north end of Bucks Row towards the Board School where the street widens came upon what they assumed to be a tarpaulin discarded on the pavement by the entrance to Brown’s Stable Yard. In the early-morning gloom, with only a feeble street lamp across the way, they couldn’t make out what it was until they stood over it. It was the body of a woman lying on her back with her skirts up around her waist. They adjusted them to afford her some dignity before summoning a policeman, PC Mizen. ‘She looks to me to be either dead or drunk,’ said one, urging the constable to investigate. ‘But for my part I think she is dead.’ Meanwhile, another policeman, PC Neil, stumbled upon the body and was shortly joined by the two workmen and PC Mizen.

She was indeed dead, although no one realized the extent of her mutilations until she had been removed to the mortuary for closer examination. In the early-morning light all the police knew was that her throat had been cut so violently that her head had been almost severed from her body. Her eyes were wide open, gazing up at the blood-red sky. When the horse-drawn ambulance came to take her away her new black bonnet was tossed into the cart beside her.

Polly Nichols, who was murdered on 31 August 1888, was found sprawled in the street, gutted like a pig

The Whitechapel murders

The following extract from The Times, 3 September 1888, is of special interest as it is the first indication that the police were considering that the murders might be the work of a serial killer. It also highlights the question of how the Ripper managed to elude a strong police presence in the area.

‘Up to a late hour last evening the police had obtained no clue to the perpetrator of the latest of the three murders which have so recently taken place in Whitechapel, and there is, it must be acknowledged, after their exhaustive investigation of the facts, no ground for blaming the officers in charge should they fail in unravelling the mystery surrounding the crime. The murder, in the early hours of Friday morning last, of the woman now known as Mary Ann Nichols, has so many points of similarity with the murder of two other women in the same neighbourhood – one Martha Tabram, as recently as August 7, and the other less than 12 months previously – that the police admit their belief that the three crimes are the work of one individual. All three women were of the class called “unfortunates,” each so very poor, that robbery could have formed no motive for the crime, and each was murdered in such a similar fashion, that doubt as to the crime being the work of one and the same villain almost vanishes, particularly when it is remembered that all three murders were committed within a distance of 300 yards from each other.

These facts have led the police to almost abandon the idea of a gang being abroad to wreak vengeance on women of this class for not supplying them with money. Detective Inspector Abberline, of the Criminal Investigation Department, and Detective Inspector Helson, J Division, are both of opinion that only one person, and that a man, had a hand in the latest murder. It is understood that the investigation into the George-yard mystery is proceeding hand-in-hand with that of Bucks Row. It is considered unlikely that the woman could have entered a house, been murdered, and removed to Bucks Row within a period of one hour and a quarter. The woman who last saw her alive, and whose name is Nelly Holland, was a fellow-lodger with the deceased in Thrawl Street, and is positive as to the time being 2:30. Police constable Neil, 79 J, who found the body, reports the time as 3:45. Bucks Row is a secluded place, from having tenements on one side only. The constable has been severely questioned as to his “working” of his “beat” on that night, and states that he was last on the spot where he found the body not more than half an hour previously – that is to say, at 3:15.

The beat is a very short one, and quickly walked over would not occupy more than 12 minutes. He neither heard a cry nor saw any one. Moreover, there are three watchmen on duty at night close to the spot, and neither one heard a cry to cause alarm. It is not true, says Constable Neil, who is a man of nearly 20 years’ service, that he was called to the body by two men. He came upon it as he walked, and flashing his lantern to examine it, he was answered by the lights from two other constables at either end of the street. These officers had seen no man leaving the spot to attract attention, and the mystery is most complete . . .

The deceased was lying lengthways, and her left hand touched the gate. With the aid of his lamp he examined the body and saw blood oozing from a wound in the throat. Deceased was lying upon her back with her clothes disarranged. Witness felt her arm, which was quite warm from the joints upwards, while her eyes were wide open. Her bonnet was off her head and was lying by her right side, close by the left hand. Witness then heard a constable passing Brady Street, and he called to him. Witness said to him, “Run at once for Dr. Llewellyn.” Seeing another constable in Baker’s Row, witness despatched him for the ambulance . . .

[PC Neil] had not heard any disturbance that night. The farthest he had been that night was up Baker’s Row to the Whitechapel Road, and was never far away from the spot. The Whitechapel Road was a busy thoroughfare in the early morning, and he saw a number of women in that road, apparently on their way home. At that time any one could have got away. Witness examined the ground while the doctor was being sent for. In answer to a juryman, the witness said he did not see any trap in the road. He examined the road, but could not see any marks of wheels . . .

Mr. Henry Llewellyn, surgeon, of 152, Whitechapel Road, stated that at 4 o’clock on Friday morning he was called by the last witness to Bucks Row . . . On reaching Bucks Row he found deceased lying flat on her back on the pathway, her legs being extended. Deceased was quite dead, and she had severe injuries to her throat. Her hands and wrists were cold, but the lower extremities were quite warm . . . He should say the deceased had not been dead more than half an hour . . . There was very little blood round the neck, and there were no marks of any struggle, or of blood as though the body had been dragged . . . That morning he made a post mortem examination of the body.

It was that of a female of about 40 or 45 years. Five of the teeth were missing, and there was a slight laceration of the tongue. There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb. There was a circular bruise on the left side of the face, which also might have been inflicted by the pressure of the fingers. On the left side of the neck, about 1in. below the jaw, there was an incision about 4in. in length, and ran from a point immediately below the ear. On the same side, but an inch below, and commencing about 1in. in front of it, was a circular incision, which terminated in a point about 3in. below the right jaw. That incision completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed. The incision was about 8in. in length. The cuts must have been caused by a long-bladed knife, moderately sharp, and used with great violence.

No blood was found on the breast, either of the body or clothes. There were no injuries about the body until just below the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. The wound was a very deep one, and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. There were also three or four similar cuts, running downwards, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downwards. The injuries were from left to right, and might have been done by a left-handed person. All the injuries had been caused by the same instrument.’

Bloodhounds

Shortly before Christmas 1887, Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline had been honoured with a presentation dinner at the Unicorn Tavern in Shoreditch to commemorate his 25 years’ service in the Metropolitan Police, the past 14 of which he had spent in the East End. It was a grand affair with effusive speeches, good food and plenty of locally brewed beer, at the end of which the modest and meticulous West Country career policeman was presented with a gold watch by a grateful citizens’ committee and his many colleagues at H Division in recognition of his contribution to keeping a cap on crime in the roughest district in London. Abberline, who was by then 45 years old, was looking forward to taking up his new post at Scotland Yard to which he had been seconded at the request of the top brass at the newly formed Criminal Investigation Division, or CID as it became known. He could not have imagined that within a year he would be called back to Whitechapel to lead the hunt for a multiple murderer who would ultimately elude both himself and the most experienced detectives in the country.

Abberline knew all the shady characters in every back street of the East End and he didn’t attain such knowledge sitting behind his desk. But when he returned to his old hunting ground in the autumn of 1888 he was portly and balding, with a soft-spoken manner no self-respecting villain would have found intimidating. Colleague Walter Dew (another member of the Ripper team) thought he looked more like a bank manager or solicitor, but Abberline was a copper of the old school, a human bloodhound who wouldn’t give up on a trail once he’d got the scent. If anyone could catch the Whitechapel murderer he could.

A dangerous labyrinth

Abberline was initially optimistic about catching the man responsible for the deaths of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols. But it soon became clear that the quarry knew the labyrinth of alleyways in even more detail than he did. The scale of the problem can be gleaned from a contemporary account written by American journalist R. Harding Davis, who was taken on a tour of the murder sites by another member of Abberline’s team, Inspector Henry Moore.

Moore cut a formidable figure in the East End. He was muscular and evidently able to handle himself, but even so he carried a maple-coloured cane of solid iron in anticipation of trouble, ‘for those who don’t know me’. He told Davis:

‘I might put two regiments of police in this half-mile of district and half of them would be as completely out of sight and hearing of the others as though they were in separate cells of a prison. To give you an idea of it, my men formed a circle around the spot where one of the murders took place, guarding, they thought, every entrance and approach, and within a few minutes they found fifty people inside the lines. They had come in through two passageways which my men could not find. And then, you know, these people never lock their doors, and the murderer has only to lift the latch of the nearest house and walk through it and out the back way . . .

‘What makes it so easy for him is that the women lead him of their own free will to the spot where they know interruption is least likely. It is not as if he had to wait for his chance; they make the chance for him. And then they are so miserable and so hopeless, so utterly lost to all that makes a person want to live, that for the sake of four pence, enough to get drunk on, they will go in any man’s company, and run the risk that it is not him. I tell many of them to go home, but they say that they have no home, and when I try to frighten them and speak of the danger they run, they’ll laugh and say, “Oh, I know what you mean. I ain’t afraid of him. It’s the Ripper or the bridge for me [meaning suicide]. What’s the odds?” and it’s true; that’s the worst of it.’

It was customary for Scotland Yard to send experienced men to assist the local police when their resources were stretched during a serious investigation. So it was not considered a sign of impatience or lack of confidence in local Inspector Edmund Reid and his men when Chief Inspector Moore and his two colleagues, inspectors Abberline and Andrews, arrived at the Commercial Street police station in Whitechapel with a number of assistants in tow, one of them being Detective Walter Dew, who was later to find fame as the man who arrested Dr Crippen. Their arrival was intended to signal that the investigation was to be stepped up a gear and it also served to repair the damage done to morale by the recent resignation of Assistant Commissioner James Monro, who had quarrelled with his superior, Sir Charles Warren. Monro’s replacement was to be Dr Robert Anderson, but ill health prevented Anderson from taking up his post before the beginning of October so Moore, Abberline and Andrews were effectively in charge of the manhunt under the supervision of Chief Inspector Donald Swanson back at Scotland Yard.

Of the three Yard men sent down to Commercial Street, the most overlooked is Inspector Walter Andrews, who had been described by Dew as a ‘jovial, gentlemanly man’. He was 41 years of age when he was assigned to the Ripper case and, though he is not featured at all in the official records, it is believed that it is because he was on the trail of one particular individual, a previously unnamed suspect whose file mysteriously went missing from the archives.

As Walter Dew was later to note in his memoirs, ‘There are still those who look upon the Whitechapel murders as one of the most ignominious police failures of all time. Failure it certainly was, but I have never regarded it other than an honourable failure.’

And he defended the reputations of the three CID detectives sent to assist the local officers. ‘I am satisfied that no better or more efficient men could have been chosen. These three men did everything humanly possible to free Whitechapel of its Terror. They failed because they were up against a problem the like of which the world had never known, and I fervently hope, will never know again.’

Horrible murder in Hanbury Street

‘Dark Annie’ Chapman was a short, heavy-set woman who had lived most of her life on the streets of the East End. Never an attractive woman, by the time she had turned 45 she looked as if life had knocked her about a bit and she had the bruises to prove it. The first of her three children had died, the second had been institutionalized and the third confined in a home for cripples. Her husband had reputedly drunk himself to death and Annie looked set to follow him. By September 1888 she was destitute and down to borrowing a couple of shillings from her brother to pay for a cheap room and a meal with the promise to pay him back when she went hop-picking in Kent. But as always, it was just talk. She never left the city.

In the early hours of Saturday 8 September 1888 she was turned away from her lodgings at 35 Dorset Street because she didn’t have the necessary 4d for a bed and tottered down nearby Hanbury Street in search of a customer. Some time between 5.30 and 6am she became yet another victim of Jack the Ripper.

Body in a back yard

Her body was discovered in the back yard of number 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, by an elderly resident who immediately ran for help. Inspector Joseph Chandler was summoned from Commercial Street police station and was the first officer to examine the body, together with police surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips. Both had seen their share of violent murders but neither was prepared for the gratuitous mutilations in evidence that morning.

The final resting place of Annie Chapman

While neighbours leaned out of their rear windows overlooking the yard, Dr Phillips made an initial examination to determine the time and cause of death. Annie was lying on her back along the fence with her head a few centimetres from the bottom step leading from the back door into the yard. Her blood-smeared hands had stiffened in her death agony as if clutching at her throat, which was wrapped in a handkerchief that the killer might have used to stem the flow of blood, and her legs were drawn up as if she had been having sex when she was killed. The throat had been severed by a ragged cut and the small intestine had been removed and thrown over the right shoulder. Two more portions of the belly wall had been peeled back over the left shoulder and the belly wall with the navel, the womb, the uterus and a portion of the bladder had been removed. Dr Phillips was of the opinion that the killer had a rudimentary grasp of anatomy and that he had used a narrow-bladed knife of 15–20cm (6–8in) in length such as a slaughterman might use – or a surgeon specializing in amputation.

A gruesome search

A search of the yard yielded what appeared to be a number of significant clues, the most promising of which was a wet leather apron hanging a few feet from a dripping tap which it was thought might have been used by the murderer to protect his clothes from being spattered with blood. But inquiries determined that it belonged to the son of one of the residents who had washed it and left it to dry a couple of days earlier. Similarly, a portion of an envelope bearing the seal of the Sussex Regiment and the letters ‘M’ and ‘Sp’ looked promising. The envelope contained pills and was postmarked ‘London, August 23’. But it too proved a false lead. Witnesses had seen Annie pick up a discarded envelope from the floor of her lodging house which answered the description of the portion found near the body and the pills had been hers.

Perhaps the most curious detail was that her paltry personal possessions – a toothbrush and comb – had been placed on a piece of muslin and neatly arranged at her feet as if part of a bizarre ritual. Or perhaps they had been placed there merely to taunt the police? And then there was the matter of the missing rings. The abrasions on her fingers suggested that they had been wrenched off violently, yet both were clearly imitation gold and worth no more than a few shillings. A thorough search of the local pawn shops failed to locate them. The only possible explanation is that they had been taken by the killer as souvenirs of the kill.

The inhabitants of number 29 and their neighbours wasted no time in exploiting the commercial potential of their location. Even after the body had been taken away they were still charging a penny to view the murder site from their back windows.

In a subsequent editorial The Times speculated:

‘Intelligent observers who have visited the locality express the utmost astonishment that the murderer could have reached a hiding place after committing such a crime. He must have left the yard in Hanbury Street reeking with blood, and yet, if the theory that the murder took place between 5 and 6 be accepted, he must have walked in almost broad daylight along streets comparatively well frequented, even at that early hour, without his startling appearance attracting the slightest attention. Consideration of this point has led many to the conclusion that the murderer came not from the wretched class from which the inmates of common lodging-houses are drawn. More probably, it is argued, he is a man lodging in a comparatively decent house in the district, to which he would be able to retire quickly, and in which, once it was reached, he would be able at his leisure to remove from his person all traces of his hideous crime . . . The murderer must have known the neighbourhood, which is provided with no fewer than four police stations, and is well watched nightly, on account of the character of many of the inhabitants.’

Inquest into the death of Annie Chapman

The full extent of the Ripper’s rudimentary surgical skills can best be gleaned from evidence given at the inquest into the death of Annie Chapman by Dr George Bagster Phillips, the divisional surgeon of police.

‘Dr Phillips: I found the body of the deceased lying in the yard on her back. The face was swollen and turned on the right side, and the tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips; it was much swollen. The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached. There was a large quantity of blood, with a part of the stomach above the left shoulder.

The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck. On the back wall of the house, between the steps and the palings, on the left side, about 18in from the ground, there were about six patches of blood, varying in size from a sixpenny piece to a small point, and on the wooden fence there were smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased laid, and immediately above the part where the blood had mainly flowed from the neck, which was well clotted.

The incisions of the skin indicated that they had been made from the left side of the neck on a line with the angle of the jaw, carried entirely round and again in front of the neck, and ending at a point about midway between the jaw and the sternum or breast bone on the right hand. There were two distinct clean cuts on the body of the vertebrae on the left side of the spine. They were parallel to each other, and separated by about half an inch. The muscular structures between the side processes of bone of the vertebrae had an appearance as if an attempt had been made to separate the bones of the neck. There are various other mutilations of the body, but I am of opinion that they occurred subsequently to the death of the woman and to the large escape of blood from the neck.

Coroner: Was there any anatomical knowledge displayed?

Dr Phillips: I think there was. There were indications of it. My own impression is that that anatomical knowledge was only less displayed or indicated in consequence of haste. The person evidently was hindered from making a more complete dissection in consequence of the haste.

Coroner: Was the whole of the body there?

Dr Phillips: No; the absent portions being from the abdomen.

Coroner: Are those portions such as would require anatomical knowledge to extract?

Dr Phillips: I think the mode in which they were extracted did show some anatomical knowledge.

Coroner: In your opinion did she enter the yard alive?

Dr Phillips: I am positive of it. I made a thorough search of the passage, and I saw no trace of blood, which must have been visible had she been taken into the yard. I am of opinion that the person who cut the deceased’s throat took hold of her by the chin, and then commenced the incision from left to right.

Coroner: Could that be done so instantaneously that a person could not cry out?

Dr Phillips: By pressure on the throat no doubt it would be possible.

Coroner: Can you give any idea how long it would take to perform the incisions found on the body?

Dr Phillips: I think I can guide you by saying that I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, and effect them, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour. If I had done it in a deliberate way, such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour. The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.’

Leather Apron

On 4 September the national newspapers revealed that the police were hunting a vile individual known locally as Leather Apron. He had been brought to the attention of the authorities because of his reputation for violent assaults upon prostitutes in the area whom he would threaten with a knife, and if they did not pay him he would beat them until they promised to do so.

His real name was John Pizer but he acquired his nickname from the leather apron he had worn while working as a slipper-maker and which he continued to wear even after he found that extortion was more lucrative.

As soon as Pizer learned that he was being sought in connection with the Whitechapel killings he made himself scarce and it took the police a week to track him down to a relative’s house at 22 Mulberry Street.

On 11 September The Times reported his arrest, the first in what proved to be a series of false leads that plagued the investigation from the first.

‘Yesterday morning Detective Sergeant Thicke, of the H Division, who has been indefatigable in his inquiries respecting the murder of Annie Chapman at 29, Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, on Saturday morning, succeeded in capturing a man whom he believed to be “Leather Apron.” It will be recollected that this person obtained an evil notoriety during the inquiries respecting this and the recent murders committed in Whitechapel, owing to the startling reports that had been freely circulated by many of the women living in the district as to outrages alleged to have been committed by him . . .

Shortly after 8 o’clock yesterday morning Sergeant Thicke, accompanied by two or three other officers, proceeded to 22, Mulberry Street and knocked at the door. It was opened by a Polish Jew named Pizer, supposed to be “Leather Apron.” Thicke at once took hold of the man, saying, “You are just the man I want.” He then charged Pizer with being concerned in the murder of the woman Chapman, and to this he made no reply. The accused man, who is a boot finisher by trade, was then handed over to other officers and the house was searched. Thicke took possession of five sharp long-bladed knives – which, however, are used by men in Pizer’s trade – and also several old hats. With reference to the latter, several women who stated they were acquainted with the prisoner, alleged he has been in the habit of wearing different hats. Pizer, who is about 33, was then quietly removed to the Leman Street Police station, his friends protesting that he knew nothing of the affair, that he had not been out of the house since Thursday night, and is of a very delicate constitution. The friends of the man were subjected to a close questioning by the police. It was still uncertain, late last night, whether this man remained in custody or had been liberated. He strongly denies that he is known by the name of “Leather Apron.”’

Pizer had an alibi for the night Polly Nichols was murdered. He claimed to have been in a lodging house in Holloway Road and his statement was subsequently confirmed by the owner.

When Annie Chapman was killed he was in hiding at his brother’s house. Nevertheless, he was kept in a cell overnight and included in an identification parade the following day. The only witness was a tramp who swore that Pizer was the man he had seen threatening a woman on the night of the Nichols murder, but on closer questioning the witness proved unreliable and Pizer was released.

Pizer was ordered to appear before the inquest into the death of Annie Chapman to account for his movements on the night in question and this gave the press their first look at one of Whitechapel’s most unsavoury characters. The East London Observer described him in Dickensian terms:

‘He was a man of about five feet four inches, with a dark-hued face, which was not altogether pleasant to look upon by reason of the grizzly black strips of hair, nearly an inch in length, which almost covered the face. The thin lips, too, had a cruel, sardonic kind of look, which was increased, if anything, by the drooping dark moustache and side whiskers. His hair was short, smooth, and dark, intermingled with grey, and his head was slightly bald on the top. The head was large, and was fixed to the body by a thick heavy-looking neck. Pizer wore a dark overcoat, brown trousers, and a brown and very much battered hat, and appeared somewhat splay-footed.

When Baxter [the Coroner] asked Pizer why he went into hiding after the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, Pizer said that his brother had advised him to do so.

“I was the subject of a false suspicion,” he said emphatically.

“It was not the best advice that could be given to you,” Baxter returned.

Pizer shot back immediately,

“I will tell you why. I should have been torn to pieces!”

Annie Chapman became a victim of the Ripper after being turned away from her lodgings

‘No mere slaughterer of animals’

On 26 September the coroner summed up the evidence, including the eyewitness testimony of a Mrs Long, who may have been the first person to give a description of Jack The Ripper.

‘At half-past five, Mrs. Long . . . remembers having seen a man and woman standing a few yards from the place where the deceased is afterwards found. And, although she did not know Annie Chapman, she is positive that that woman was the deceased. The two were talking loudly, but not sufficiently so to arouse her suspicions that there was anything wrong. Such words as she overheard were not calculated to do so. The laconic inquiry of the man, “Will you?” and the simple assent of the woman, viewed in the light of subsequent events, can be easily translated and explained. Mrs. Long passed on her way, and neither saw nor heard anything more of her, and this is the last time she is known to have been alive.

[Neighbour Albert] Cadosch says it was about 5.20 when he was in the backyard of the adjoining house, and heard a voice say “No,” and three or four minutes afterwards a fall against the fence.

The street door and the yard door were never locked, and the passage and yard appear to have been constantly used by people who had no legitimate business there. There is little doubt that the deceased knew the place, for it was only 300 or 400 yards from where she lodged. The wretch must have then seized the deceased, perhaps with Judas-like approaches. He seized her by the chin. He pressed her throat, and while thus preventing the slightest cry, he at the same time produced insensibility and suffocation. There is no evidence of any struggle. The clothes are not torn. Even in these preliminaries, the wretch seems to have known how to carry out efficiently his nefarious work.

The deceased was then lowered to the ground, and laid on her back; and although in doing so she may have fallen slightly against the fence, this movement was probably effected with care. Her throat was then cut in two places with savage determination, and the injuries to the abdomen commenced. All was done with cool impudence and reckless daring; but, perhaps, nothing is more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets, and the arrangement of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet. The murder seems, like the Buck’s-row case, to have been carried out without any cry. Sixteen people were in the house. The partitions of the different rooms are of wood. None of the occupants of the houses by which the yard is surrounded heard anything suspicious.

The brute who committed the offence did not even take the trouble to cover up his ghastly work, but left the body exposed to the view of the first comer. This accords but little with the trouble taken with the rings, and suggests either that he had at length been disturbed, or that as the daylight broke a sudden fear suggested the danger of detection that he was running. There are two things missing. Her rings had been wrenched from her fingers and have not been found, and the uterus has been removed. The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by some one who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts. It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognised it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.

The conclusion that the desire was to possess the missing part seems overwhelming. We are driven to the deduction that the mutilation was the object, and the theft of the rings was only a thin-veiled blind, an attempt to prevent the real intention being discovered. It has been suggested that the criminal is a lunatic with morbid feelings. This may or may not be the case; but the object of the murderer appears palpably shown by the facts, and it is not necessary to assume lunacy, for it is clear that there is a market for the object of the murder.

Within a few hours of the issue of the morning papers containing a report of the medical evidence given at the last sitting of the Court, I received a communication from an officer of one of our great medical schools, that they had information which might or might not have a distinct bearing on our inquiry. I attended at the first opportunity, and was told by the sub-curator of the Pathological Museum that some months ago an American had called on him, and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the organ that was missing in the deceased. He stated his willingness to give £20 for each, and explained that his object was to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication on which he was then engaged. Although he was told that his wish was impossible to be complied with, he still urged his request. He desired them preserved, not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine, in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition, and he wished them sent to America direct. It is known that this request was repeated to another institution of a similar character.

It is, therefore, a great misfortune that nearly three weeks have elapsed without the chief actor in this awful tragedy having been discovered. Surely, it is not too much even yet to hope that the ingenuity of our detective force will succeed in unearthing this monster. It is not as if there were no clue to the character of the criminal or the cause of his crime. His object is clearly divulged. His anatomical skill carries him out of the category of a common criminal, for his knowledge could only have been obtained by assisting at post-mortems, or by frequenting the post-mortem room. If Mrs. Long’s memory does not fail, and the assumption be correct that the man who was talking to the deceased at half-past five was the culprit, he is even more clearly defined. In addition to his former description, we should know that he was a foreigner of dark complexion, over forty years of age, a little taller than the deceased, of shabby-genteel appearance, with a brown deer-stalker hat on his head, and a dark coat on his back.’

A verdict of wilful murder against a person or persons unknown was then entered.

It is thought that Mrs Long had formed the impression that Chapman’s companion was a foreigner from his accent, as she didn’t see his face. For many years this has been understood to mean that he was a European, most likely a Jew, but evidence recently uncovered points to the possibility that he might have been an American, which would tie in with the coroner’s story of the doctor who expressed an interest in purchasing anatomical specimens.

A surplus of suspects

Contrary to contemporary public opinion and the claims made by an impatient press, the police made exhaustive inquiries in the area following the murder of Annie Chapman, visiting over 200 common lodging houses and following every single lead offered by anxious residents, all of which led to a dead end. Then, as now, there were people in the habit of making false confessions, either because they were mentally disturbed or because they were seeking attention. And, of course, there were many false and malicious claims made against innocent people which the police were obliged to investigate.

During September Sir Charles Warren came under increasing pressure from the Home Office, which wanted assurances that the police would be making an imminent arrest. In an effort to placate them, he submitted a confidential report in which he detailed the individuals currently under suspicion.

‘No progress has yet been made in obtaining any definite clue to the Whitechapel murderers. A great number of clues have been examined and exhausted without finding anything suspicious. A large staff of men are employed and every point is being examined which seems to offer any prospect of a discovery.

There are at present three cases of suspicion.

1. The lunatic Isensmith [sic], a Swiss arrested at Holloway who is now in an asylum at Bow and arrangements are being made to ascertain whether he is the man who was seen on the morning of the murder in a public house by Mrs Fiddymont.

2. A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a surgeon and has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.

3. A Brothel Keeper who will not give her address or name writes to say that a man living in her house was seen with blood on him on the morning of murder. She described his appearance and said where he might be seen. When the detectives came near he bolted, got away and there is no clue to the writer of the letter.

All these three cases are being followed up and no doubt will be exhausted in a few days – the first seems a very suspicious case, but the man is at present a violent lunatic.’

Of the three suspects, Isenschmid seemed the most likely perpetrator at the time. He had been arrested on 12 September after two doctors and the landlady of a public house had reported his eccentric and threatening behaviour to the police. Dr Cowan and Dr Crabb informed the authorities that in their professional opinion Isenschmid was a violent lunatic and that he disappeared from his lodgings at odd hours of the night. He was also known to have a habit of sharpening knives in the vicinity of anyone he didn’t like the look of, as if to intimidate them. Four days earlier, on the morning of the Chapman murder, Mrs Fiddymout, the landlady of the Prince Albert public house, had been disturbed by the appearance of a furtive man who had a wild look in his eyes and dried blood on his hands. It was Isenschmid, but his brother supplied an alibi for his movements on the day of the Chapman murder and he was released after the Ripper struck again while he was still under arrest.

Oswald Puckridge still looks like a viable suspect, although he was 50 years old at the time of the Ripper murders, which does not conform with the eye-witness descriptions. He was released from Hoxton House Lunatic Asylum three days before Martha Tabram was murdered and he ended his days in Holborn Workhouse on 28 May 1900, so he was at large during the crucial period. However, there is no evidence of any kind to connect him with the killings.

The third man referred to in Warren’s report was probably Francis Tumblety, an American doctor, who, in the light of recently uncovered evidence, now seems a very likely candidate for the Whitechapel murders.

An unfortunate double event – 30 September 1888

‘Long Liz’ was comparatively fortunate in that she was spared the ghastly mutilations which the Whitechapel fiend had inflicted on the other women and was instead despatched with a single slice of a razor-sharp blade. However, for this reason there is still some doubt that she was an ‘official’ Ripper victim, but may have been slain by another hand. In all other respects her story was much like the other women.

A farmer’s daughter and Swedish by birth, Elizabeth Stride had left her home country in 1866 and emigrated to England after the death of her parents and the trauma of having given birth to a stillborn baby. Her marriage to carpenter John Stride did not last long and she was soon walking the streets of Whitechapel. On the night of her death, in the early hours of 30 September 1888, she had been working as a cleaner in Flower And Dean Street but needed to supplement her pitiable income by prostitution.

By all accounts she was slim and pretty, a more attractive prospect than the dowdy bawds with whom she shared a pitch, and she had made an effort to make herself presentable for the punters. To her long, black, fur-trimmed jacket she had pinned a red rose, which proved an important detail when it came to establishing her movements and the veracity of the various conflicting witness statements. In addition she was wearing a black crêpe bonnet, a dark threadbare skirt, a brown bodice, white stockings and the customary side-spring boots.

It was the rose which helped PC William Smith to be confident that it was Stride he had seen with a man in Berner Street 30 minutes after midnight. Her companion was 170cm (5ft 7in) tall, of respectable appearance, and carried a small parcel wrapped in newspaper which the constable estimated was 15–20cm (6–8in) broad and about 45cm (18in) long – the right size to contain a small medical bag, perhaps? He was about 28 years of age, with a dark complexion and a small dark moustache, and was wearing a dark coat, dark trousers, white collar and tie and a hard felt deerstalker hat of the kind made famous by Sherlock Holmes.

A second witness

Fifteen minutes later Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who spoke little English, witnessed a struggle at the very spot where Stride’s body was later found, by the gate to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street. The man was attempting to drag the woman into the street, then threw her to the ground whereupon she screamed. Frightened of becoming involved in a violent argument, Schwartz crossed over the road, passing a second man who was lighting his pipe. A moment later the first man called out ‘Lipski!’ (a derogatory generic name for a Jew, deriving from the name of a notorious murderer who was still in the public mind at that time), whereupon the pipe-smoker gave chase and Schwartz fled, fearing for his life.

After evading his pursuer Schwartz reported the incident to the police and gave the following descriptions of the two men, neither of whom conforms to the descriptions of previous suspects. The man who assaulted the woman was approximately 165cm (5ft 5in) tall, round-faced and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a short brown moustache. He was wearing a dark jacket and trousers and a dark peaked cap. Schwartz thought he might have been about 30 years of age. The man with the pipe was in his mid-thirties, 180cm (5ft 11in) tall, with light brown hair, and was wearing a dark overcoat and a black wide-brimmed hat.

Was it the Ripper?

A possible explanation for the incident might be that the first man took exception to a stranger – particularly a Jew – being a witness to his argument with the woman and may have ordered his friend to give chase. This second sighting is the more intriguing as it places Stride at the murder scene just 15 minutes before her death and raises the distinct possibility that she was murdered by the men Schwartz saw and not the Ripper. This would explain why there were no post-mortem mutilations. And then there is the testimony of Dr Phillips, the police surgeon, who told the Stride inquest on 1 October that there was a ‘great dissimilarity’ between the Chapman and Stride murders, specifically the choice of weapon, which was a round-bladed knife in the latter case. This raises the possibility that Stride may have been murdered by her brutal former partner Michael Kidney, from whom she had separated only a few days earlier, and that Kidney was the man Schwartz had seen pushing her to the ground.

However, many Ripper historians disagree, arguing that Stride had still 15 minutes to meet her murderer after the two thugs had moved on and that the reason for the lack of mutilations was that the Ripper was interrupted by the arrival of a hawker, Louis Diemschutz, who pulled into Dutfield’s Yard in his pony and trap at 1am. When the horse shied Diemschutz looked to see what had disturbed it and saw what appeared to be a bundle of clothes on the ground. But it was too dark to see clearly. The only light in the yard came from the windows of a socialist club to the right and from the second-storey windows of the tenement opposite. The fitful light from the street lamp outside was not strong enough to illuminate the yard even though Diemschutz had left the gate wide open. So he prodded the bundle with his whip and then lit a match which blew out in the wind – but the brief glimpse he caught was enough for him to see that it was a woman’s body. Her throat had been slit, the windpipe severed, the blood clotting a cheap check scarf around her neck. She was lying on her left side with her legs drawn up, knees together. In her left hand she clutched a packet of cheap breath fresheners, the contents of which had rolled into the gutter. Her right hand lay across her stomach, speckled with blood.

The body of Elizabeth Stride was still warm when Dr Frederick Blackwell examined it at the site just after 1.15am, which suggested that she had been killed between 12.45am and 1am when Diemschutz entered the yard. If he had disturbed the Ripper in the act then the killer’s bloodlust must have been unsatisfied and it would explain why he took such pitiless revenge on his second victim of the night, Catherine Eddowes.

Elizabeth Stride who was ‘despatched with a single slice of a razor-sharp blade’

Inquest into the death of Elizabeth Stride

On the first day of the inquest into the death of Elizabeth Stride on 2 October 1888, Dr George Bagster Phillips testified:

‘On Oct. 1, at three p.m., at St. George’s Mortuary, Dr. Blackwell and I made a post-mortem examination, Dr. Blackwell kindly consenting to make the dissection, and I took the following note:

“Rigor mortis still firmly marked. Mud on face and left side of the head. Matted on the hair and left side. We removed the clothes. We found the body fairly nourished. Over both shoulders, especially the right, from the front aspect under collar bones and in front of chest there is a bluish discolouration which I have watched and seen on two occasions since. On neck, from left to right, there is a clean cut incision six inches in length; incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw. Three-quarters of an inch over undivided muscle, then becoming deeper, about an inch dividing sheath and the vessels, ascending a little, and then grazing the muscle outside the cartilages on the left side of the neck. The carotid artery on the left side and the other vessels contained in the sheath were all cut through, save the posterior portion of the carotid, to a line about 1-12th of an inch in extent, which prevented the separation of the upper and lower portion of the artery. The cut through the tissues on the right side of the cartilages is more superficial, and tails off to about two inches below the right angle of the jaw. It is evident that the haemorrhage which produced death was caused through the partial severance of the left carotid artery . . .

I have come to a conclusion as to the position of both the murderer and the victim, and I opine that the latter was seized by the shoulders and placed on the ground, and that the murderer was on her right side when he inflicted the cut. I am of opinion that the cut was made from the left to the right side of the deceased, and taking into account the position of the incision it is unlikely that […] a long knife inflicted the wound in the neck.

Coroner: From the position you assume the perpetrator to have been in, would he have been likely to get bloodstained?

Dr Phillips: Not necessarily, for the commencement of the wound and the injury to the vessels would be away from him, and the stream of blood – for stream it was – would be directed away from him, and towards the gutter in the yard.

Coroner: But why did she not cry out while she was being put on the ground?

Dr Phillips: She was in a yard, and in a locality where she might cry out very loudly and no notice be taken of her. It was possible for the woman to draw up her legs after the wound, but she could not have turned over. The wound was inflicted by drawing the knife across the throat. A short knife, such as a shoemaker’s well-ground knife, would do the same thing. My reason for believing that deceased was injured when on the ground was partly on account of the absence of blood anywhere on the left side of the body and between it and the wall.’

At the close of the inquest Dr Blackwell was called to give evidence and, asked by the foreman of the jury if he had noticed any marks or bruises about the shoulders, replied, ‘They were what we call pressure marks. At first they were very obscure, but subsequently they became very evident. They were not what are ordinarily called bruises; neither is there any abrasion. Each shoulder was about equally marked.’

In summing up on the final day the coroner attempted to clarify the apparently conflicting testimony of three key witnesses who claimed to have seen a woman answering the description of the deceased in the company of a man near the location where the body was discovered between 15 minutes and an hour later.

‘William Marshall, who lived at 64, Berner-street, was standing at his doorway from half-past 11 till midnight. About a quarter to 12 o’clock he saw the deceased talking to a man between Fairclough-street and Boyd-street. There was every demonstration of affection by the man during the ten minutes they stood together, and when last seen, strolling down the road towards Ellen Street, his arms were round her neck.

At 12 30 p.m. the constable on the beat (William Smith) saw the deceased in Berner Street standing on the pavement a few yards from Commercial-street, and he observed she was wearing a flower in her dress.

A quarter of an hour afterwards James Brown, of Fairclough-street, passed the deceased close to the Board school. A man was at her side leaning against the wall, and the deceased was heard to say, “Not to-night, but some other night.” Now, if this evidence was to be relied on, it would appear that the deceased was in the company of a man for upwards of an hour immediately before her death, and that within a quarter of an hour of her being found a corpse she was refusing her companion something in the immediate neighbourhood of where she met her death. But was this the deceased? And even if it were, was it one and the same man who was seen in her company on three different occasions?

With regard to the identity of the woman, Marshall had the opportunity of watching her for ten minutes while standing talking in the street at a short distance from him, and she afterwards passed close to him. The constable feels certain that the woman he observed was the deceased, and when he afterwards was called to the scene of the crime he at once recognized her and made a statement; while Brown was almost certain that the deceased was the woman to whom his attention was attracted. It might be thought that the frequency of the occurrence of men and women being seen together under similar circumstances might have led to mistaken identity; but the police stated, and several of the witnesses corroborated the statement, that although many couples are to be seen at night in the Commercial-road, it was exceptional to meet them in Berner Street.

With regard to the man seen, there were many points of similarity, but some of dissimilarity, in the descriptions of the three witnesses; but these discrepancies did not conclusively prove that there was more than one man in the company of the deceased, for every day’s experience showed how facts were differently observed and differently described by honest and intelligent witnesses. Brown, who saw least in consequence of the darkness of the spot at which the two were standing, agreed with Smith that his clothes were dark and that his height was about 5ft. 7in., but he appeared to him to be wearing an overcoat nearly down to his heels; while the description of Marshall accorded with that of Smith in every respect but two. They agreed that he was respectably dressed in a black cut away coat and dark trousers, and that he was of middle age and without whiskers.

On the other hand, they differed with regard to what he was wearing on his head. Smith stated he wore a hard felt deer stalker of dark colour; Marshall that he was wearing a round cap with a small peak, like a sailor’s. They also differed as to whether he had anything in his hand. Marshall stated that he observed nothing. Smith was very precise, and stated that he was carrying a parcel, done up in a newspaper, about 18in. in length and 6in. to 8in. in width. These differences suggested either that the woman was, during the evening, in the company of more than one man – a not very improbable supposition – or that the witness had been mistaken in detail. If they were correct in assuming that the man seen in the company of the deceased by the three was one and the same person it followed that he must have spent much time and trouble to induce her to place herself in his diabolical clutches.

In the absence of motive, the age and class of woman selected as victim, and the place and time of the crime, there was a similarity between this case and those mysteries which had recently occurred in that neighbourhood. There had been no skilful mutilation as in the cases of Nichols and Chapman, and no unskilful injuries as in the case in Mitre Square, possibly the work of an imitator; but there had been the same skill exhibited in the way in which the victim had been entrapped, and the injuries inflicted, so as to cause instant death and prevent blood from soiling the operator, and the same daring defiance of immediate detection, which, unfortunately for the peace of the inhabitants and trade of the neighbourhood, had hitherto been only too successful.’

After a short deliberation the jury returned a verdict of ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ and the inquest into the death of Long Liz was concluded.

Murder in Mitre Square

Forty-six-year-old Catherine Eddowes had not entirely slept off her drink when her cell door was opened at 12.55am and she was ushered on her way by the jailer at Bishopsgate police station. She had been singing softly to herself for almost an hour and was deemed sufficiently sober to be released. ‘I am capable of taking care of myself now,’ she assured PC Hutt, the duty officer, as she made her way unsteadily towards the exit at the end of a passage. Then she enquired, ‘What time is it?’ PC Hutt replied it was just before one and too late for her to get any more drink, to which Eddowes responded, ‘I shall get a fine hiding when I get home, then.’

‘Serves you right,’ said the PC as he watched her cross the station yard, adding that he would be obliged if she could close the back door on her way out. ‘All right,’ she replied. ‘Good night, old cock.’

It was beginning to rain as she turned down Houndsditch toward Aldgate High Street, but her black straw bonnet would keep her hair from getting bedraggled. She wore a black cloth jacket trimmed with imitation fur, a brown bodice and a green alpaca skirt with a white apron, which gave her an appearance more in keeping with a charwoman than a streetwalker.

Eight minutes later she entered Mitre Square, a gloomy, ill-lit quadrangle bounded on all sides by grim, imposing warehouses. About 20 minutes later PC Watkins crossed the square, shining his bull’s-eye lamp into the dark recesses of the quadrangle and, seeing nothing unusual, he continued on his beat, which took 12–14 minutes to complete. Had he not stopped for a cup of tea offered by a night watchman he might have caught the Ripper in the act.

Another body found

At 1.35am three men, Joseph Lawende, Joseph Levy and Harry Harris, passed a couple taking shelter at the corner of Church Passage which led into the square. Lawende did not see the woman’s face as she had her back to him and could only describe her as being short. She was wearing a black bonnet and a jacket of the same colour. It is likely that it was Catherine Eddowes and that her companion was her murderer. She had her hand on his chest, indicative of intimacy, and they were conversing quietly. Lawende caught only a glimpse of the man who he later described as ‘rough and shabby’, aged about 30, approximately 165cm (5ft 7in) tall and of medium build with a fair complexion and a fair moustache. He was wearing a grey peaked cloth cap and a pepper and salt-coloured jacket with a reddish handkerchief tied around his neck. But it was such a fleeting glimpse that Lawende later admitted to the police that he would not be confident of recognizing the man if he ever came face to face with him. His friends could add nothing to the description, although Levy observed that the couple were rum-looking characters who made him uncomfortable and that he was glad not to be walking alone in that area at night. Ten minutes later PC Watkins had completed his circuit and returned to Mitre Square. In the south-western corner he came upon the body of Catherine Eddowes ‘ripped open, like a pig in the market’.

Her horrifying mutilations sickened even the seasoned City of London Police surgeon, Dr Brown, who was summoned to the scene at 2am.

‘The body was on its back,’ he noted. ‘The clothes [were] drawn up above the abdomen, the thighs were naked . . . the abdomen was exposed . . . great disfigurement of [the] face, the throat cut across . . .

‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared over with some feculent matter, a piece [of] about two feet were quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut obliquely through . . . There were no traces of recent connection.’

When the body arrived at the mortuary a piece of her ear fell from the clothing in which it had been caught. During the post-mortem Dr Brown elaborated on the bizarre facial mutilations he had previously referred to.

‘There was a cut above a quarter of an inch through the lower left eyelid dividing the structures completely through. The upper eyelid on that side, there was a scratch through the skin on the left upper eyelid near to the angle of the nose. The right eyelid was cut through to half an inch. There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose extending from the left border of the nasal bone down near to the angle of the jaw on the right side across the cheek, this cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached from the [rest of] the nose by an oblique cut from the bottom of the nasal bone to where the wings of the nose join on to the face . . . There was on each side of [the] cheek a cut which peeled up the skin forming a triangular flap about an inch and a half.’

Catherine Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square, a gloomy quadrangle bounded by warehouses

The inquest

At the inquest on Thursday, 4 October, Dr Brown was asked to give details regarding the missing organs, and reported, ‘The uterus was cut away with the exception of a small portion, and the left kidney was also cut out. Both these organs were absent, and have not been found.’ The coroner then asked if he had any opinion as to what position the woman was in when the wounds were inflicted:

‘Dr Brown: In my opinion the woman must have been lying down. The way in which the kidney was cut out showed that it was done by somebody who knew what he was about.’

Coroner: Does the nature of the wounds lead you to any conclusion as to the instrument that was used?

Dr Brown: It must have been a sharp-pointed knife, and I should say at least 6 in. long.

Coroner: Would you consider that the person who inflicted the wounds possessed anatomical skill?

Dr Brown: He must have had a good deal of knowledge as to the position of the abdominal organs, and the way to remove them.

Coroner: Would the removal of the kidney, for example, require special knowledge?

Dr Brown: It would require a good deal of knowledge as to its position, because it is apt to be overlooked, being covered by a membrane.

Coroner: Would such a knowledge be likely to be possessed by some one accustomed to cutting up animals?

Dr Brown: Yes.

Coroner: Have you been able to form any opinion as to whether the perpetrator of this act was disturbed?

Dr Brown: I think he had sufficient time, but it was in all probability done in a hurry.

Coroner: How long would it take to make the wounds?

Dr Brown: It might be done in five minutes. It might take him longer; but that is the least time it could be done in.

Coroner: Have you any doubt in your own mind whether there was a struggle?

Dr Brown: I feel sure there was no struggle. I see no reason to doubt that it was the work of one man.

Coroner: Would you expect to find much blood on the person inflicting these wounds?

Dr Brown: No, I should not. I should say that the abdominal wounds were inflicted by a person kneeling at the right side of the body.’

Dr Brown was then asked if it was possible for the deceased to have been murdered elsewhere, and her body brought to where it was found:

‘Dr Brown: I do not think there is any foundation for such a theory. The blood on the left side was clotted, and must have fallen at the time the throat was cut. I do not think that the deceased moved the least bit after that.

Coroner: The body could not have been carried to where it was found?

Dr Brown: Oh, no.’

However, Dr Brown’s opinion was later contested by Dr G W Sequeira, who had been the first medical man on the scene that night, arriving at 1.55am, no more than 15 minutes after the murder had taken place. ‘I think that the murderer had no design on any particular organ of the body,’ he declared emphatically. ‘He was not possessed of any great anatomical skill.’

A sketch of Catherine Eddowes showing pre- and post-mortem injuries: a piece of her ear fell off in the mortuary

The Goulston Street graffiti

‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ No one knows for certain if the writing found chalked on a wall in Goulston Street on the night of the double murder was a cryptic clue, or if it was merely a coincidence that a portion of Catherine Eddowes’ blood-spattered apron was found nearby. The bloodied piece of apron had been spotted at 2.55am by PC Alfred Long who, knowing of the murder in nearby Mitre Square, immediately realized its significance. While searching the immediate vicinity for other possible evidence he noticed the writing and made a note of it. The apron was lying in the passage of what was known as a model dwelling house near to the staircase leading up to Nos. 106 to 119. Long was certain it had not been there when he had passed that way on his previous round at 2.20am.

Detective Daniel Halse of the City Police elaborated on the find at the Catherine Eddowes inquest:

‘On Saturday, Sept. 29 [sic]. . . I proceeded to Goulston Street, where I saw some chalk-writing on the black fascia of the wall. Instructions were given to have the writing photographed, but before it could be done the Metropolitan police stated that they thought the writing might cause a riot or outbreak against the Jews, and it was decided to have it rubbed out, as the people were already bringing out their stalls into the street.

Coroner: Did the writing have the appearance of having been recently done?

Detective Halse: Yes. It was written with white chalk on a black fascia.

Foreman of the Jury: Why was the writing really rubbed out?

Detective Halse: The Metropolitan police said it might create a riot, and it was their ground.

Coroner: I am obliged to ask this question. Did you protest against the writing being rubbed out?

Detective Halse: I did. I asked that it might, at all events, be allowed to remain until Major Smith [acting Commissioner] had seen it.

Coroner: Why do you say that it seemed to have been recently written?

Detective Halse: It looked fresh, and if it had been done long before it would have been rubbed out by the people passing. I did not notice whether there was any powdered chalk on the ground, though I did look about to see if a knife could be found. There were three lines of writing in a good schoolboy’s round hand. The size of the capital letters would be about 3/4 in, and the other letters were in proportion. The writing was on the black bricks, which formed a kind of dado, the bricks above being white.’

No clues in the chalk

Much has been made of the writing and the possible significance of the misspelling of the word Jews, which may or may not have been intentional. In Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution, author Stephen Knight spun a convoluted conspiracy theory concerning three mythical founders of the Freemasons known as the Juwes, which was subsequently revealed to have been inspired by an after-dinner story conceived in a moment of mischievous fun by the painter Walter Sickert and to have no basis in fact.

It seems fanciful in the extreme to presume that a serial killer would stalk the streets armed with a piece of chalk in the hope of finding a suitable surface on which to scrawl a provocative message – or that he would have paused to write anything that was not either a direct challenge to the police or in praise of his own audacity.

If he was inclined to bravado it is much more likely that he would have written something where the murder had been committed. And if he had written anything to taunt the police he would have dropped the bloodied chalk at the spot so that they would know that it was from the killer. Only an innocent would take the chalk away with them to use on another occasion.

Warren’s report to the Home Secretary, 6 November

Sir Charles Warren came under intense public criticism for having authorized the eradication of the Goulston Street graffiti and was forced to justify his action in a report to the Home Secretary.

Confidential

The Under Secretary of State

The Home Office

Sir,

In reply to your letter of the 5th instant, I enclose a report of the circumstances of the Mitre Square Murder so far as they have come under the notice of the Metropolitan Police, and I now give an account regarding the erasing of the writing on the wall in Goulston Street which I have already partially explained to Mr. Matthews verbally.

On the 30th September on hearing of the Berner Street murder, after visiting Commercial Street Station I arrived at Leman Street Station shortly before 5 A.M. and ascertained from the Superintendent Arnold all that was known there relative to the two murders.

The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall in Goulston Street evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews, and which Mr. Arnold with a view to prevent serious disorder proposed to obliterate, and had sent down an Inspector with a sponge for that purpose, telling him to await his arrival.

I considered it desirable that I should decide the matter myself, as it was one involving so great a responsibility whether any action was taken or not.

I accordingly went down to Goulston Street at once before going to the scene of the murder: it was just getting light, the public would be in the streets in a few minutes, in a neighbourhood very much crowded on Sunday mornings by Jewish vendors and Christian purchasers from all parts of London.

There were several Police around the spot when I arrived, both Metropolitan and City.

The writing was on the jamb of the open archway or doorway visible in the street and could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.

A discussion took place whether the writing could be left covered up or otherwise or whether any portion of it could be left for an hour until it could be photographed; but after taking into consideration the excited state of the population in London generally at the time, the strong feeling which had been excited against the Jews, and the fact that in a short time there would be a large concourse of the people in the streets, and having before me the Report that if it was left there the house was likely to be wrecked (in which from my own observation I entirely concurred) I considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once, having taken a copy of which I enclose a duplicate.

After having been to the scene of the murder, I went on to the City Police Office and informed the Chief Superintendent of the reason why the writing had been obliterated.

I may mention that so great was the feeling with regard to the Jews that on the 13th ulto. the Acting Chief Rabbi wrote to me on the subject of the spelling of the word “Jewes” on account of a newspaper asserting that this was Jewish spelling in the Yiddish dialect. He added “in the present state of excitement it is dangerous to the safety of the poor Jews in the East [End] to allow such an assertion to remain un-contradicted. My community keenly appreciates your humane and vigilant action during this critical time.”

It may be realised therefore if the safety of the Jews in Whitechapel could be considered to be jeopardised 13 days after the murder by the question of the spelling of the word Jews, what might have happened to the Jews in that quarter had that writing been left intact.

I do not hesitate myself to say that if that writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost; and I was much gratified with the promptitude with which Superintendent Arnold was prepared to act in the matter if I had not been there.

I have no doubt myself whatever that one of the principal objects of the Reward offered by Mr. Montagu was to show to the world that the Jews were desirous of having the Hanbury Street Murder cleared up, and thus to divert from them the very strong feeling which was then growing up.

Your most obedient Servant,

(signed) C. Warren

Two copies of the graffiti were enclosed and read as follows:

The Jewes are

The men that

Will not be

Blamed

for nothing

On the Ripper’s trail

In his autobiography From Constable to Commissioner (1910), Acting Commissioner of the London Police Sir Henry Smith boasted that ‘There is no man living who knows as much of those [Whitechapel] murders as I do.’ Among his colleagues Sir Henry enjoyed a reputation as a raconteur who was not above embellishing the truth if it made for a more thrilling yarn. Nevertheless his account of the night of the double murder evokes the atmosphere and urgency of what it was like to have been on the trail of the Ripper.

‘In August, 1888, when I was desperately keen to lay my hands on the murderer, I made such arrangements as I thought would insure success. I put nearly a third of the force into plain clothes, with instructions to do everything which, under ordinary circumstances, a constable should not do. It was subversive of discipline; but I had them well supervised by senior officers. The weather was lovely, and I have little doubt they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, sitting on door-steps, smoking their pipes, hanging about public-houses, and gossiping with all and sundry.

In addition to this, I visited every butcher’s shop in the city, and every nook and corner which might, by any possibility, be the murderer’s place of concealment. Did he live close to the scene of action? Or did he, after committing a murder, make his way with lightning speed to some retreat in the suburbs? Did he carry something with him to wipe the blood from his hands, or did he find means of washing them? were questions I asked myself nearly every hour of the day. It seemed impossible he could be living in the very midst of us; and, seeing the Metropolitan Police had orders to stop every man walking or driving late at night or in the early morning, till he gave a satisfactory account of himself, more impossible still that he could gain Leytonstone, Highgate, Finchley, Fulham, or any suburban district without being arrested. The murderer very soon showed his contempt for my elaborate arrangements. The excitement had toned down a little, and I was beginning to think he had either gone abroad or retired from business, when “Two more women murdered in the East!” raised the excitement again to concert pitch.

Jumping up, I was dressed and in the street in a couple of minutes. A hansom – to me a detestable vehicle – was at the door, and into it I jumped, as time was of the utmost consequence. This invention of the devil claims to be safe. It is neither safe nor pleasant . . . it did not take me long to discover that a 15-stone Superintendent inside with me, and three detectives hanging on behind, added neither to its comfort nor to its safety . . . we got to our destination – Mitre Square – without an upset, where I found a small group of my men standing round the mutilated remains of a woman.

It was in Berners Street, a narrow thoroughfare off the Commercial Road leading to the London, Tilbury, and Southend Railway, that Elizabeth Stride, the first of the two victims that night, met her fate. The street is entered by a large wooden gate, folding back in the middle, and almost always left open, and it is conjectured that the murderer took the woman in, closing the gate behind him. At 12.40 a.m., as far as could be made out from the evidence of the inmates, the street was vacant.

Within five minutes of that time a man who had been out late opened the gate. He was driving a pony-trap. The pony shied at something behind the gate, and looking down he saw the body of a woman, and instantly gave the alarm. The woman was seriously injured about the head, and must have been thrown down with great violence, and her throat was cut from ear to ear. Not a sound was heard by anyone. No doubt she was rendered insensible by the fall. The assassin must have slipped past the off-side of the pony, and – as there were civilians and some men of the H Division close at hand – escaped by a very hair’s-breadth, an experience sufficient, one would have thought, to shake his nerve for that night. But no, either because he was dissatisfied with his work, or furious at having been interrupted before he could finish it, he determined to show that he was still without a rival as a slaughterer, and, walking straight up to Houndsditch, he met Catherine Eddowes, and finished his second victim within the hour. The approaches to Mitre Square are three – by Mitre Street, Duke Street, and St. James’s Place. In the south-western corner, to which there is no approach, lay the woman. I was convinced then, and am convinced now, that had my orders been carried out in the spirit – they may have been to the letter – the reign of terror would have ceased that night . . .

The “beat” of Catherine Eddowes was a small one. She was known to a good many of the constables, but, known or not known, she was in the streets late at night, and must have been seen making for Mitre Square. With what object? In pursuance, it is needless to say, of her miserable calling. Had she been followed, and men called to guard the approaches, the murderer would to a certainty have been taken red-handed. The Square, every inch of it, was carefully examined, but not one mark or drop of blood did we discover to indicate by what approach he had made his exit.

By this time a stretcher had arrived, and when we got the body to the mortuary, the first discovery we made was that about one-half of the apron was missing. It had been severed by a clean cut . . . The assassin had evidently wiped his hands with the piece of apron. In Dorset Street, with extraordinary audacity, he washed them at a sink up a close, not more than six yards from the street. I arrived there in time to see the blood-stained water. I wandered round my stationhouses, hoping I might find someone brought in, and finally got to bed at 6 a.m., after a very harassing night, completely defeated.

The revolting details of this murder would shock my readers; but there are certain facts – gruesome enough in all conscience – which have never appeared in print, and which, from a medical and scientific point of view, should certainly be put on record.

When the body was examined by the police surgeon, Mr. Gordon Brown, one kidney was found to be missing, and some days after the murder what purported to be that kidney was posted to the office of the Central News, together with a short note of rather a jocular character unfit for publication. Both kidney and note the manager at once forwarded to me. Unfortunately, as always happens, some clerk or assistant in the office was got at, and the whole affair was public property next morning . . .

I made over the kidney to the police surgeon, instructing him to consult with the most eminent men in the profession, and send me a report without delay. I give the substance of it. The renal artery is about three inches long. Two inches remained in the corpse, one inch was attached to the kidney.

The kidney left in the corpse was in an advanced stage of Bright’s Disease; the kidney sent me was in an exactly similar state. But what was of far more importance, Mr. Sutton . . . one of the greatest authorities living on the kidney and its diseases, said he would pledge his reputation that the kidney submitted to them had been put in spirits within a few hours of its removal from the body – thus effectually disposing of all hoaxes in connection with it. The body of anyone done to death by violence is not taken direct to the dissecting-room, but must await an inquest, never held before the following day at the soonest.

The Ripper certainly had all the luck.’

Interval before the final act

Following the double murder of 30 September, the streets of Whitechapel were uncommonly quiet after dark. Residents complained that after the pubs closed the number of plain-clothes police on the streets and roughs who had been armed with clubs by the Mile End Vigilance Committee outnumbered the inhabitants.

Contrary to public opinion, the police were tireless in their efforts to apprehend the fiend. Almost 100 butchers and slaughtermen were interviewed, as well as dozens of Thames River boatmen. In addition 80,000 handbills appealing for civic-minded individuals to report their suspicions were distributed in the locality.

The newspapers were bombarded with advice from the public on how to catch the killer, which ranged from dressing boxers in women’s clothes to act as bait to employing clairvoyants as psychic bloodhounds. Other readers wrote in with their suspicions regarding their neighbours, lodgers and anyone they might have had a grudge against. One particular report, published in the Star on 1 October, sounded promising, but nothing more was heard of the man at the centre of this allegation.

‘A reporter heard a strange story this morning that may be connected with the murders. A gentleman living not far from the British Museum says: – In the room above mine there is an American lodging. He professes to be a doctor, but does not look like one. In fact, if one judged by his looks, he might be – well, a perfect ruffian. No one knows anything about him. He never does any work, and always seems rather hard up, although he pays his rent regularly. He must wear something over his boots that enables him to walk silently, for no one ever hears him come in. At intervals he disappears for a time.’

Meanwhile, press speculation continued unabated. The Times recorded that:

‘A somewhat important fact has been pointed out, which puts a fresh complexion on the theory of the murders. It appears that cattle boats bringing in live freight to London are in the habit of coming into the Thames on Thursdays or Fridays, and leave for the continent on Sundays or Mondays. It has already been a matter of comment that the recent revolting crimes have been committed at the week’s end, and an opinion has been formed among some of the detectives that the murderer is a drover or butcher employed on one of these boats – of which there are many – and that he periodically appears and disappears with one of the steamers. This theory is held to be of much importance by those engaged in this investigation, who believe that the murderer does not reside either in the locality or even in the country at all. It is thought that he may be either a person employed upon one of these boats or one who is allowed to travel by them, and inquiries have been directed to follow up the theory. It is pointed out that at the inquests on the previous victims the coroners have expressed the opinion that the knowledge of anatomy possessed by a butcher would have been sufficient to enable him to find and cut out the parts of the body which in several cases were abstracted.’

During October the Ripper was conspicuously absent from the capital and life in the East End began to return to normality, although there was much morbid interest in the discovery of a limbless and headless torso found in a cellar of the new Metropolitan Police Headquarters under construction on the Thames Embankment. The location must have been chosen to taunt the police, but even though the scene of the crime was right under their noses, they were never able to solve it. The Whitehall Mystery, as it became known, was not, however, related to the Whitechapel murders, despite rumours to the contrary.

Some attributed the respite in the Ripper killings to the increased police presence, others to the hope that the Ripper had been identified and secretly committed to an asylum or had sought a new killing ground. But the reprieve proved only temporary. On Thursday 8 November 1888 the Ripper returned to Whitechapel to claim what many believe was his final victim.

Fair as a lily

It is a sad fact that the only occasion on which the Ripper’s victims were photographed was in the mortuary. Women of their class and means would not even have had the price of a wedding photograph. It is particularly poignant in the case of Mary Jane Kelly who, according to her friends, was ‘tall and pretty, and as fair as a lily, a very pleasant girl who seemed to be on good terms with everybody’ and ‘one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet when she was sober’. Unlike the earlier middle-aged victims she was just 25, with a fresh complexion and a fine head of red hair which cascaded down her back. Mary Kelly was the only victim who had her photograph taken at the murder site and it is one which is still disturbing to look upon a century later.

It was said that she had once beguiled a gentleman who had taken her to live with him in France but that it hadn’t worked out and she had returned to London, where she began a volatile relationship with Billingsgate fish market porter Joe Barnett. She and Joe would frequently drink their rent money and be forced to find new lodgings. By autumn 1888 they had found a cramped, squalid, ground-floor room for 4s 6d a week at Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields, which was to be the scene of the most notorious murder in criminal history.

In the late afternoon of 30 October 1888 Mary and Joe had an argument, possibly over her insistence on having another prostitute staying with them, Lizzie Albrook, who may have been her lesbian lover. Or they may simply have fallen out over money as Joe had recently lost his job and Mary resented having to go back on the streets to support him. Whatever the reason, he left and did not return until Thursday 8 November, the evening of her murder, to offer her money and try to patch things up. She was having none of it and ordered him to leave, which he apparently did shortly before 8pm without further incident. Maria Harvey, a friend of Mary’s, was a witness to this last meeting and described the pair as parting on the best of terms.

A gruesome killing

Some criminologists have tried to make a case for Joe being her killer, but while it is true that obsessive love can so readily turn to hate, the mutilations inflicted on Mary Kelly are inconsistent with the psychological profile of men who kill their former lovers. Some can’t bring themselves to kill the person who rejected them and so turn on a substitute. Others will assuage their anguish with a clean kill – a single fatal blow – and then cover the body or lay it out in peaceful repose in an attempt to atone for, or to deny, their crime. Many will exorcise their rage over rejection by repeated blows or cuts and dispose of the body by fire, dismemberment, submerging it or burial. Nowhere in the history of crime, as far as we know, has a jilted lover or betrayed partner performed a frenzied autopsy on their former beloved and then left their handiwork for all to see, as was done to Mary Kelly. No matter how enraged Barnett might have been (and there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that he took the break-up badly) he could not have sustained that level of hatred towards his former lover over so many hours and then left her defiled corpse for strangers to stare at.

The body had been mutilated to such an extent that Joe could identify Mary only by the shape of an ear and the colour of her eyes, a detail which has led some Ripperologists to wonder if it was really Mary whose body had been found at the scene. Their scepticism is fuelled by the statement of another witness, Mrs Maxwell, who claimed to have met Mary in the street at 8.30am and an hour later on that Friday morning, but it is almost certain that she was mistaken and that it had been the day before.

Murder in Miller’s Court

Friday 9 November was an important date in the capital. It was the day of the Lord Mayor’s show, when the Mayor would take the oath of office, and then lead a grand procession through the city. It was a public holiday and Mary was intent on seeing the parade. But first she had to earn her rent for that week or she would be turned out once again. She was 29 shillings in arrears and needed to find a punter or two before the landlord sent his rent collector with threats of eviction.

At approximately 2am that Friday morning Mary propositioned labourer George Hutchinson, but when he refused to go with her or to lend her any money she walked away. Hutchinson claims that she talked to another man, who in all likelihood was her murderer, although it is possible that Hutchinson invented the story to divert suspicion from himself. The newspapers were certainly very sceptical regarding the uncanny accuracy of his memory and his capacity to discern small details in a ill-lit street at such an hour.

A correspondent for the Graphic wrote on 17 November 1888:

‘Even if the murders of last Christmas week and of August 7th be excluded as not certainly belonging to the same series, there still remain five butcheries, all apparently perpetrated by one and the same individual. Concerning this individual, all that can be positively affirmed is that he possesses the skill, either of a butcher or of a medical man, in the art of cutting up animals, human or otherwise. It is true that on this last occasion a man has given a very precise description of the supposed murderer. The very exactitude of his description, however, engenders a feeling of scepticism. The witness in question admits that at the time he saw him he did not suspect the person he watched of being the Whitechapel assassin; yet, at two o’clock in the morning, in badly-lighted thoroughfares, he observed more than most of us would observe in broad daylight, with ample time at our disposal. A man who in such a hasty survey notes such points as “a pair of dark ‘spats,’ with light buttons, over button boots,” and “a red stone hanging from his watch-chain,” must possess the eyes of a born detective. Granting, however, that this description is accurate, and not due to the after-effects of a lively imagination, it is evidence that the clue thus given is an important one, inasmuch as it shows that the murderer belongs to a superior class.’

Hutchinson later gave a statement to the police in which he said that he watched Mary and her companion for some time, which accounted for the degree of detail he was able to recall.

‘He then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it. I stood against the lamp of the Queen’s Head Public House and watched him. They both then came past me and the man hung down his head with his hat over his eyes. I stooped down and looked him in the face. He looked at me stern. They both went into Dorset Street. I followed them. They both stood at the corner of the court for about 3 minutes. He said something to her. She said, ‘alright my dear come along you will be comfortable’. He then placed his arm on her shoulder and gave her a kiss. She said she had lost her handkerchief. He then pulled his handkerchief, a red one, out and gave it to her. They both then went up the court together. I then went to the court to see if I could see them but could not. I stood there for about three quarters of an hour to see if they came out. They did not so I went away.’

Hutchinson described the man as ‘aged about 34 or 35, height 5 ft. 6, complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes, slight moustache curled up each end and hair dark, very surly-looking; dress, long dark coat, collar and cuffs trimmed astrakhan and a dark jacket under, light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark felt hat turned down in the middle, button boots and gaiters with white buttons, black tie with horse shoe pin, respectable appearance, walked very sharp, Jewish appearance.’

He added yet more details at a later date: ‘His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone, hanging from it . . . He had no side whiskers, and his chin was clean shaven . . . I believe that he lives in the neighbourhood, and I fancied that I saw him in Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning, but I was not certain.’

The question remains, however, why Hutchinson felt the need to linger. What was his interest in Mary Kelly? The police clearly accepted his statement at face value as they immediately circulated the description he had given them to all the stations in the city.

Witness reports

Perhaps a more reliable sighting was that made by laundress Sarah Lewis, who saw a man lurking around Miller’s Court at 2.30am, half an hour after Hutchinson claimed to have seen Mary with the man who must have been her murderer. It was the same man who had accosted Lewis and a friend a few days earlier. He was short, aged about 40, pale-faced with a black moustache and wore a short black coat and carried a long black bag.

Lewis was disturbed to see him again as he had an unsettling manner and on the previous occasion had insisted that she and her female friend should accompany him. Eventually she and her friend had run off, so frightened were they of what he might do, although nothing explicit had been said and no threats had been made. Their intuition may have saved their lives, whereas Mary Kelly was too drunk to have heeded hers.

Earlier that evening, around 11.45pm, another prostitute living in Miller’s Court, Mary Ann Cox, had observed Mary Kelly in the company of a man and noted that Kelly was so drunk that her speech was slurred. Mrs Cox later gave a description of the man to the police in which she described him as being ‘about 36 years old, about 5 ft 6 in high, complexion fresh and I believe he had blotches on his face, small side whiskers, and a thick carroty moustache, dressed in shabby dark clothes, dark overcoat and black felt hat’.

Mrs Cox recalled that Mary had a knitted red crossover covering her shoulders and a dark threadbare linsey frock. As they passed each other in the narrow courtyard Mary told her, ‘I am going to have a song.’ After Mrs Cox entered her room she heard Mary softly singing ‘A Violet I Plucked From Mother’s Grave’, which she was still singing some time after 1am when Mrs Cox went back out in the drizzling rain. She returned at 3am, by which time there was no sound from Mary’s room and the light that had shone through the torn curtains was out. For the next few hours Mrs Cox lay on her bed unable to sleep and listening to the rain. She heard nothing until 5.45am when she heard someone leaving, but from which room she could not say. She thought it may have been a policeman making his round, as it was too late for the residents who worked in the market. In retrospect, she may have heard the last exit of Jack the Ripper.

The discovery of Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly’s body was discovered at 10.45am by the rent collector Thomas Bowyer who, having had no answer, had put his hand through a broken window and pushed back the coat which served as a makeshift curtain to peer inside. What he saw that morning haunted him for the rest of his life. When he had recovered himself sufficiently he ran to his employer, landlord John McCarthy, who owned a grocer shop on the corner at 37 Dorset Street.

The Times managed to secure an eye-witness account of the murder scene from McCarthy, who returned to Miller’s Court with Inspector Walter Beck and Detective Walter Dew.

They broke the door down and were confronted with what Dew later described as a sight he would never forget until his dying day.

McCarthy told reporters, ‘The sight I saw was more ghastly even than I had prepared myself for. On the bed lay the body . . . while the table was covered with what seemed to me to be lumps of flesh. The sight we saw I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man. The poor woman’s body was lying on the bed, undressed. She had been completely disembowelled, and her entrails had been taken out and placed on the table. It was those that I had seen when I looked through the window and took to be lumps of flesh. The woman’s nose had been cut off, and her face gashed beyond recognition. Both her breasts too had been cut clean away and placed by the side of her liver and other entrails on the table. I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this. The body was, of course, covered with blood, and so was the bed. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may never see such a sight again.’

The Times described the murder scene:

‘A more horrible or sickening sight could not be imagined. The clothes of the woman were lying by the side of the bed, as though they had been taken off and laid down in the ordinary manner.

It was a very poorly furnished apartment, about 12 ft. square, there being only an old bedstead, two old tables and a chair in it. The bedclothes had been turned down, and this was probably done by the murderer after he had cut his victim’s throat. There was no appearance of a struggle having taken place, and, although a careful search of the room was made, no knife or instrument of any kind was found . . . at 10 minutes to 4 o’clock a one-horse carrier’s cart, with the ordinary tarpaulin cover was driven into Dorset Street, and halted opposite Millers-court. From the cart was taken a long shell or coffin, dirty and scratched with constant use. This was taken into the death chamber, and there the remains were temporarily coffined. The news that the body was about to be removed caused a great rush of people from the courts running out of Dorset Street, and there was a determined effort to break the police cordon at the Commercial Street end.

The crowd, which pressed round the van, was of the humblest class, but the demeanour of the poor people was all that could be described. Ragged caps were doffed and slatternly-looking women shed tears as the shell, covered with a ragged-looking cloth, was placed in the van. The remains were taken to the Shoreditch Mortuary, where they will remain until they have been viewed by the coroner’s jury.’

The very last sighting of Jack the Ripper?

A curious postscript to the murder at Miller’s Court was the sighting of a man near the crime scene that Friday morning who answered the description given by Sarah Lewis. According to The Times:

‘A Mrs Paumier, a young woman who sells roasted chestnuts at the corner of Widegate Street, a narrow thoroughfare about two minutes’ walk from the scene of the murder, told a reporter yesterday afternoon a story which appears to afford a clue to the murderer. She said that about 12 o’clock that morning a man dressed like a gentleman came up to her and said, “I suppose you have heard about the murder in Dorset Street.” She replied that she had, whereupon the man grinned and said, “I know more about it than you.” He then stared into her face and went down Sandy’s Row, another narrow thoroughfare which cuts across Widegate Street. Whence he had got some way off, however, he vanished. Mrs Paumier said the man had a black moustache, was about 5ft 6in high, and wore a black silk hat, a black coat, and speckled trousers. He also carried a black shiny bag about a foot in depth and a foot and a half in length. Mrs Paumier stated further that the same man accosted three young women, whom she knew, on Thursday night, and they chaffed him and asked him what he had in the bag, and he replied, “Something that the ladies don’t like.”

One of the three young women she named, Sarah Roney, a girl about 20 years of age, states that she was with two other girls on Thursday night in Brushfield Street which is near Dorset Street, when a man wearing a tall hat and a black coat, and carrying a black bag, came up to her and said, “Will you come with me?”

She told him that she would not, and asked him what he had in the bag, and he said, “Something the ladies don’t like.”

He then walked away.’

A further report received late last night says:

‘Not the slightest doubt appears to be entertained in official headquarters that this fresh crime is by the same hand which committed the others. There is also, it is to be noted, a striking similarity of the month in which the crime has been committed, for while two of the most atrocious of the other murders in the same district were committed on the 7th of the month of September and August, this was committed on the 8th – approximately the same period in the month. This would seem to indicate that the murderer was absent from the scene of these horrors for fixed periods, and that his return was always about the same time. The late storms might account for the crime on this occasion being a day later, the suggestion, of course, being that the murderer journeys across the sea on some of the short passages.’

Profile of a murderer

In his official report to Sir Charles Warren, dated the same day as The Times story, 10 November, Dr Bond, lecturer in forensic medicine at Westminster Hospital, reviewed the particulars of each killing and provided a rudimentary profile of the perpetrator.

‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength & of great coolness & daring – there is no evidence that he had an accomplice. He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal & erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition, sexually, that may be called Satyriasis [a condition of being exceedingly oversexed]. It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that religious mania may have been the original disease but I do not think either hypothesis is likely. The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet “inoffensive-looking man” probably middle aged & neatly & respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible.

Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described, he would probably be solitary & eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear of trouble or notoriety whereas if there were prospect of a reward it might overcome their scruples.’

The seventh victim?

Former Chief Constable Frederick Porter Wensley began his career as a beat constable in the Metropolitan Police in January 1888 and was seconded to H Division, where he was directly involved in the investigation of the Whitechapel murders. The following extract is taken from his memoirs, Forty Years of Scotland Yard, published in 1931.

‘During my first year of service the Jack the Ripper murders occurred in Whitechapel. Again and again bodies of women, murdered and mutilated, were found in the East End; but every effort to bring the assassin to justice failed. For a while there was an atmosphere of terror in the district.

This business brought about my first glimpse of the neighbourhood in which so much of my life was to be spent. In view of the work that I was to do there later there was a touch of coincidence in the fact that my earliest recollections should be concerned with a great murder mystery.

Not that I had much to do with it. In common with hundreds of others I was drafted there, and we patrolled the streets – usually in pairs – without any tangible result . . . Officially, only five (with a possible sixth) murders were attributed to Jack the Ripper. There was, however, at least one other, strikingly similar in method, in which the murderer had a very narrow escape. This occurred something more than two years after the supposed last Ripper murder.

The story is chiefly concerned with a very young officer named Ernest Thompson who had been only six weeks in the service when, on February 13, 1891 – an ominous date – he went out for the first time alone on night duty. A part of his beat was through Chambers Street, from which at that time a turning, most inappropriately named Swallow Gardens, ran under a dark, dismal railway arch towards the Royal Mint. Thompson was patrolling Chambers Street when a man came running out of Swallow Gardens towards him. As soon as he perceived the officer he turned tail, made off at speed in the opposite direction, and was in a few seconds lost to view.

Thompson moved into Swallow Gardens and on turning the corner came across the body of a murdered woman – Frances Coles – mutilated in much the same fashion as the victims of the Ripper. The spot had possibly been chosen because it commanded a view in three directions.

It is probable that had Thompson been a little more experienced he would have taken up the chase of the fugitive immediately. In all likelihood he would have made a capture which might possibly have solved a great mystery. But it is understandable that this young man was so taken aback by his grim discovery that he did not take the obvious steps. It was certainly through no lack of personal courage, as later events showed.

Whether the murderer was Jack the Ripper or not, he escaped. I fancy that the lost opportunity preyed on Thompson’s mind, for I heard him refer to it in despondent terms more than once, and he seemed to regard the incident as presaging some evil fate for himself. By an uncanny coincidence his forebodings came true. The first time he went on night duty he discovered a murder; the last time he went on duty, some years later, he was murdered himself.’

Wensley’s account of the Francis Coles killing is inaccurate in one important respect – he describes the 26-year-old prostitute as having been mutilated ‘in much the same fashion as the victims of the Ripper’, whereas only her throat was slashed. Dr Phillips, the police surgeon who had carried out post-mortems on previous Ripper victims, was adamant that the fatal injuries were not the handiwork of the Ripper. Moreover, the suspect in the Coles killing did not evade the police for long but was later identified as James Sadler, a ship’s fireman who was known for his violent temper and who had been seen arguing with Coles on the night of her death. But he was never charged with the killing for lack of evidence.

A year later the official police file on the Whitechapel murders was closed. The ‘Autumn of Terror’ was at an end.

More possible victims

The following women were extremely unlikely to have been Ripper victims, but it is just possible that one or more may have provided a rehearsal for his escalating cycle of violence.

Fairy Fay was the appellation given by the Daily Telegraph to an unnamed murder victim reputedly found on 26 December 1887 who was allegedly killed by having ‘a stake thrust through her abdomen’. However, no such person appears in any police files or in the records of the local authority. It seems likely that Fairy Fay may have been a ‘Jane Doe’ type tag used by a journalist to denote Emma Smith, who had been fatally injured in a similar way. The Telegraph was clearly referring to the Emma Smith attack, but was mistaken about the date.

Annie Millwood, aged approximately 38, was subjected to a vicious attack and hospitalized on 25 February 1888 for the ‘numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body’ which hastened her death a month later.

Ada Wilson was stabbed twice in the neck on 28 March 1888 and survived.

Emma Elizabeth Smith was attacked by three men, probably extortionists, on 3 April 1888, and a blunt object was inserted into her vagina. She died in hospital two days later. Her death is included because it is commonly cited by many Ripper scholars as the first Ripper murder, although the victim’s own statement shows that to be a false assumption.

Annie Farmer claimed to have been the victim of a knife attack on 21 November 1888, but the injury was superficial which led police to believe that it may have been self-inflicted to bring attention to herself. Consequently no further investigation was deemed necessary.

Rose Mylett (also known as Catherine Millett and Alice Downey) was strangled on 20 December 1888, possibly accidentally after becoming entangled in a cord while drunk.

Elizabeth Jackson was dismembered and the parts tossed into the Thames in the summer of 1889. Although she was a prostitute it is more likely that she was the victim of the ‘torso’ murderer who had deposited an earlier victim in the cellar of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters the previous year.

Alice McKenzie (alias Alice Bryant) had her throat slashed on 17 July 1889 and was left to bleed to death.

The cause of death reawakened fears that the Ripper may have returned but her other injuries suggested a domestic quarrel that had got out of hand.

The Pinchin Street Murder The name given to the third ‘torso murder’ victim discovered on 10 September 1889 who was later identified as prostitute Lydia Hart. It is feasible that the torso murderer and Jack the Ripper were one and the same, but there is no conclusive evidence to connect both sets of killings.

Questions in the Commons

On 9 November Sir Charles Warren resigned as head of the Metropolitan Police in response to increasing personal criticism of his handling of the case and specifically for ordering the erasure of the Goulston Street graffiti which may have offered a vital clue to the Ripper’s identity.

As a consequence of Warren’s departure the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, was pressed to account for the failure of the police in apprehending the murderer. During questions in the House of Commons Matthews countered by stating:

‘The failure, so far, to detect the persons guilty of the Whitechapel murders is due, not to any new organization, or to any defect in the existing system, but to the extraordinary cunning and secrecy which characterize these atrocious crimes. I have already, for some time, had under consideration the whole system of the Criminal Investigation Department, with a view to introducing any improvement, that experience may suggest. With regard to the final question of the hon. member for Camborne, I have to say that Sir Charles Warren did, on the 8th inst., tender his resignation to Her Majesty’s Government, and that it has been accepted.’ (Loud Opposition cheers.)

On a subsequent occasion the Home Secretary was asked whether he contemplated offering any additional reward for the capture of the Whitechapel murderer. His response revealed the degree to which the government feared the threat of civil unrest should the police fail to apprehend the murderer in their midst.

‘I hope the House will allow me, at greater length than is usual in answering a question, to state why I have refrained from offering a reward in the Whitechapel cases. Before 1884 it was the frequent practice of the Home Office to offer rewards, sometimes of large amount, in serious cases. In 1883, in particular, several rewards, ranging from £200 to £2,000, were offered in such cases as the murder of Police-constable Boans and the dynamite explosions in Charles-Street and at various railway stations. These rewards, like the reward of £10,000 in the Phoenix Park murders proved ineffectual, and produced no evidence of any value . . . Since I have been at the Home Office I have followed the rule thus deliberately laid down and steadily adhered to by my predecessors. I do not mean that the rule may not be subject to exceptions, as, for instance, where it is known who the criminal is, and information is wanted only as to his hiding place, or on account of other circumstances of the crime itself. In the Whitechapel murders, not only are these conditions wanting at present, but the danger of a false charge is intensified by the excited state of public feeling. I know how desirable it is to allay that public feeling, and I should have been glad if the circumstances had justified me in giving visible proof that the authorities are not heedless or indifferent. I beg to assure the honourable member and the House that neither the Home Office nor Scotland Yard will leave a stone unturned in order to bring to justice the perpetrator of these abominable crimes, which have outraged the feelings of the entire community.

(Hear, hear.)’

An opposition MP then asked whether the Home Secretary had ‘taken into consideration the propriety of extending the offer of pardon to an accomplice to the murders, having regard to the fact that in the case of the first murder committed last Christmas, according to the dying woman [Emma Smith], several persons were concerned in the murder.’

Mr Mathews said it would not be proper that he would consider the suggestion. On 18 July the Secretary of State was again pressed on the question of whether he would offer a substantial reward, ‘accompanied by a free pardon, to anyone not in the police force and not the actual perpetrator of the recent crime in Whitechapel who would give such information as would lead to the conviction of the murderer; and whether he would sufficiently increase the number of detectives so as to prevent, if possible, further atrocities in East London.’ His answer was intended to put an end to the matter.

‘I have consulted the Commissioner of Police, and he informs me that he has no reason to believe that the offer of a reward now would be productive of any good result, and he does not recommend any departure from the policy resolved on last year, and fully explained by me to the House. Since the occurrence of the outrages in the East-end a large number of men in plain clothes have been employed there, and I yesterday sanctioned an arrangement for still further increasing the number of detectives available for duty in Whitechapel.’

An autumn evening in Whitechapel

On 3 November 1888, Littell’s Living Age, an American magazine, printed the following graphic description of life in the East End during the ‘Autumn of Terror’:

‘Whitechapel and Spitalfields are always interesting neighbourhoods, and recent events have made them decidedly more interesting. They have afforded startling illustrations of the dreadful possibilities of life down in the unfathomable depths of these vast human warrens. At all times one who strolls through this quarter of town, especially by night, must feel that below his ken are the awful deeps of an ocean teeming with life, but enshrouded in impenetrable mystery. As he catches here and there a glimpse of a face under the flickering, uncertain light of a lamp – the face perhaps of some woman, bloated by drink and distorted by passion – he may get a momentary shuddering sense of what humanity may sink to when life is lived apart from the sweet, health-giving influences of fields and flowers, of art and music and books and travel, of the stimulus of interesting enterprise, the gentle amenities of happy hours and intercourse with the educated and the cultured. A momentary sense of what human nature may become may here and there flash in upon one as he gazes out upon the dark waters, but it is only when the human monster actually rises for a moment to the surface and disappears again, leaving a victim dead and disembowelled, that one quite realizes that that momentary scene is a dread reality. Just for a few days the mass of the people of Spitalfields and Whitechapel themselves seemed to be realizing the awful possibilities of the nature that belonged to them. Thousands of them were really shocked and sobered, by the last tragedy especially. One could see in the people’s faces, and could detect in their tones and answers, an indefinable something which told plainly that they had been horrified by a revelation.

The street is oppressively dark, though at present the gloom is relieved somewhat by feebly lighted shopfronts. Men are lounging at the doors of the shops, smoking evil-smelling pipes. Women with bare heads and with arms under their aprons are sauntering about in twos and threes, or are seated gossiping on steps leading into passages dark as Erebus. Now round the corner into another still gloomier passage, for there are no shops here to speak of. This is the notorious Wentworth Street. The police used to make a point of going through this only in couples, and possibly may do so still when they go there at all. Just now there are none met with. It is getting on into the night, but gutters, and doorways, and passages, and staircases appear to be teeming with children. See there in that doorway of a house without a glimmer of light about it. It looks to be a baby in long clothes laid on the floor of the passage, and seemingly exhausted with crying. Listen for a moment at this next house. There is a scuffle going on upon the staircase – all in the densest darkness – and before you have passed a dozen yards there is a rush down-stairs and an outsurging into the street with fighting and screaming, and an outpouring of such horrible blackguardism that it makes you shudder as you look at those curly-headed preternaturally sharp-witted children who leave their play to gather around the mêlée. God help the little mortals! How can they become anything but savages, “pests of society,” the “dangerous classes,” and so on? How black and unutterably gloomy all the houses look! How infinitely all the moral and physical wretchedness of such localities as these is intensified by the darkness of the streets and the houses. It is wise and astute of Mr. Barnett to give emphatic expression to the cry that has so often been raised for “more light” for lower London. If in this one matter of light alone, the streets and houses of the West End were reduced to the condition of the East, what would life become there? Oh, for a great installation of the electric light, with which, as the sun goes down, to deluge the streets and lanes, the dark alleys and passages, the staircases and rooms of this nether world. Homes would become cleaner, and more cheerful and attractive; life would become healthier, whole masses of crime would die out like toadstools under sunlight, and what remained would be more easily dealt with. The Cimmerian darkness of lower London indoors and out constitutes no small part of its wretchedness, and the brilliant lighting of the public-house gives it much of its attraction. Even the repute of many of these shady localities is due in great measure to their impenetrable gloom after nightfall.

It is a relief to get out of this vile little slum and to work one’s way back into the life and light of the great highway, with its flaunting shops, its piles of glowing fruit, its glittering jewellery, its steaming cook-shops, its flaring gin-palaces and noisy shows, and clubs and assembly rooms, and churches and mission halls, its cheap jacks and shooting galleries, its streaming naphtha lights and roar and rattle, and hurrying throngs and noisy groups, and little assemblies gathered together under the stars and the street-lamps to listen to some expounder of the mysteries of the universe or of the peculiar merits of a new patent pill. Here are the newspaper contents-bill spread out at large with some of the newsvendor’s own additions and amplifications, telling of new murders or further details of the old ones. The young man with a bundle of papers under his arm is evidently on the friendliest of terms with the neighboring shoeblack. One or the other of them has picked up half a cigar, and the two are getting alternate pulls at it with evident enjoyment. Up in a retired corner there is a little mob gathered round an almost inanimate-looking figure beating out with a couple of quills what he takes apparently to be music from a sort of home-made dulcimer. A few yards farther on, a boy without any legs is the object of attention; and next comes a group thronging curiously round a four-wheel cab. Nothing can be seen, but as the vehicle drives off towards the hospital and the mob disperses it is generally understood that “she has been knocked about.” The only question about which there seems to be any uncertainty is as to whether she is nearly dead or only very drunk.

A few yards further on there is a waxwork show with some horrible pictorial representations of the recent murders, and all the dreadful details are being blared out into the night, and women with children in their arms are pushing their way to the front with their pennies to see the ghastly objects within. Next door is a show, in which ghosts and devils and skeletons appear to be the chief attractions; and near at hand is a flaring picture of a modern Hercules performing within.

Out again into the great thoroughfare, back a little way past the roaring salesman and the hideous waxwork, and round the corner. This opening here, where the public-house, the bar of which looks to be full of mothers with children in their arms, blazes at the corner, leads down to Bucks Row. Nobody about here seems at all conscious of the recent tragedy, the only suggestion of which is a bill in the public-house window, offering, on behalf of an enterprising newspaper, a reward of a hundred pounds for the conviction of the criminal. A little way down out of the public-house glare, and Bucks Row looks to be a singularly desolate, out-of-the-way region. But there is a piano-organ grinding out the “Men of Harlech” over the spot where the murdered woman was found; women and girls are freely coming and going through the darkness, and the rattle of sewing-machines, and the rushing of railway trains, and the noisy horseplay of a gang of boys, all seem to be combining with the organ-grinder to drown recollection and to banish all unpleasant reflection. “There seems to be little apprehension of further mischief by this assassin at large,” was an observation addressed to a respectable-looking elderly man within a few yards of the house in Hanbury Street, where the latest victim was found. “No; very little. People, most of ’em, think he’s gone to Gateshead,” was the reply.’