The ‘double event’ according to one reporter, seemed to bring the entire population of the East End – all Jack London’s half a million souls – onto the streets. The police had sealed off Mitre Square and Dutfield’s Yard, but the streets leading to them were solid with sightseers all Sunday and in lesser numbers for several days to come. Likewise, the inquests on the two women were mobbed and disappointed ghouls turned away at the doors jostled as close as they could to the buildings to catch snippets of news.
Where possible, women no longer ‘carried the banner’ but queued to enter the Spikes all over the East End. Those still out on the streets, in stairways and doorways and Itchy Park, armed themselves with knives or hatpins if they could. The terror gripped Whitechapel and Spitalfields as surely as the thick fogs that came with the middle of October. Historian Philip Sugden lists tragic people who hanged themselves – Mrs Sodeaux of Hanbury Street in a state of alarm over the murders; a man named Hennell who believed the police had him in the frame for them. Elsewhere, ghouls made money, as such people always had out of ’orrible murder – not least the journalists of various newspapers. Penny gaffs put on tableaux with ‘Jack the Ripper’ lit by naphtha flares. As early as September, Margaret Harkness, writing as John Law in the Pall Mall Gazette, complained
…there is at present almost opposite the London Hospital a ghastly display of the unfortunate women murdered. An old man exhibits these things and while he points them out you will be tightly wedged in between a number of boys and girls, while the smell of death rises into your nostrils.1
A pavement artist in Whitechapel Road drew crowds with his brilliant red-chalk drawings. The committee of the International Working Men’s Club, good socialists all, charged admission to its premises so that the curious could gaze out of the windows at the murder scene in Dutfield’s Yard.
A fearful and tearful East End buried Elizabeth Stride on 6 October and Catherine Eddowes two days later. But it was what happened at the end of the week that brought the nightmares screaming back. On Tuesday the 16th, George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a three-and-a-half-inch square cardboard box in the post. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and the almost indecipherable postmark probably read ‘London E’. With it was a letter, badly written and poorly spelt with the address which has become part of Ripper folklore – ‘From Hell’.
Mr Lusk
Sor [it said in stage Irish]
I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer
Signed
Catch me when you can
Mishter Lusk
This was very much in the vein of dozens of letters now flooding in to the police, the Press and prominent people whether or not they were directly involved in the Whitechapel case. What made this letter different was what else the box contained. It was a kidney.
Pages and pages have been written on this macabre package and it is as frustrating as the Goulston Street graffito. The letter and the kidney both have their ‘armed camps’ in attack and defence. Dr Thomas Openshaw, Curator of Pathology at the London Hospital to whom members of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee took the kidney, believed it to be human and taken from the left side of a body. He noted that it was preserved in wine, not the spirits usual in a cadaver required for medical students’ experiments. Major Smith of the City Police to whom the kidney was sent after Abberline had examined it at Leman Street, was in no doubt that it was indeed ripped by the killer from Kate Eddowes and sent to the high-profile George Lusk as a taunt. The other side of the argument, from Dr Frederick Brown who also examined it, rests on the fact that he was uncertain whether it was a right or left kidney. Brown also believed that the wine-based spirit which hardened the organ could only have achieved that level of hardening in a week (not the three since the Eddowes murder).
What ought to have been a decider was the evidence of Bright’s disease, from which Kate Eddowes was believed to be suffering, because of Brown’s description of the ‘pale’ kidney that remained in the body. Openshaw was at first quoted as saying the kidney was from a female of about forty-five years old and ‘ginny’ i.e. showing alcohol abuse. He subsequently retracted this and today, the medical jury is still out.
Did Robert Mann write the letter and send the kidney? The postmark is probably right, even some of the spellings/pronunciations in the letter – ‘prasarved’ – are nineteenth-century Cockney. The spelling, while odd – ‘knif’, ‘nise’, ‘kidne’ – could be from someone with a basic National School education a long time before or from someone who had been taught his letters in the workhouse. My natural instinct was to dismiss this letter as just another hoax, but having discussed it with Professor Laurence Alison of Liverpool University, I am now inclined to believe it is genuine. Graphologist Patricia Marne thinks so too, finding in its chaotic form and erratic rhythm the hallmarks of a psychopath. The long downstrokes to the ‘g’ and ‘y’ show signs of aggression, the ‘periodic pressure reveals anger with emotional instability, leading to violent mood variation’… ‘The muddled and jumbled lines with the letters running into each other demonstrate inability to control intense emotion.’2 As to the level of decomposition in the Lusk kidney, this could be explained by Mann being able to preserve it in a wide variety of fluids in the Whitechapel mortuary. He actually says so in the text.
What about other pointers in the letter? ‘From Hell’ speaks for itself as to Robert Mann’s inner torment. He is at last furious that other people are cashing in on his killings and he does not deign to use the most chilling sobriquet of any serial killer in history, instead going for the ‘catch me when you can’ variant. This is not a cry for help, but a rare glimpse of an otherwise anonymous man’s arrogance. Did he actually eat the rest of the kidney? Did he really intend to send his murder weapon? I very much doubt it. He was merely making a point.
One week later, Openshaw received a letter and Ms Marne and others believe it was written by the same hand. I do not. It is addressed ‘Old Boss’ like scores of others and signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. It spells ‘nife’ differently and uses obvious stage Cockney – ‘them cusses of coppers’ and ‘along of er bloomin throte’. Above all, it appends the rhyme:
Oh have you seen the devle
with his mikerscope and scalpel
a lookin at a kidney
with a slide cocked up.
Robert Mann may have regarded any doctor in his mortuary as the equivalent of the devil. He may even have watched them using microscopes and knew what a slide was, but the doggerel is too fanciful for a man used to the shadows. With the exception of his brief appearances in the inquests of Nichols and Chapman and this one burst of petulance over the Lusk letter, he is like the wallpaper that no one notices; that is why he was never caught.
The police and the inhabitants of the East End were experiencing a lull throughout October, although of course they could not relax. Patrols, especially at weekends, the killer’s preferred time, were at their peak. Hysteria followed hysteria as an armless, headless and legless female body was found in the building site of New Scotland Yard on the third day of the Stride inquest. House to house enquires continued, rumours flew. In connection with the Eddowes murder, the police focused their attention on the three friends going home from the Imperial Club, because one of them had seen Jack the Ripper.
Because of the timings involved in the murders of Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, the most likely eyewitness descriptions of the Whitechapel murderer came from Elizabeth Long, James Brown, Israel Schwartz and Joseph Lawende, although as we have seen, Schwartz was frightened off and is less reliable than the others. Lawende’s description was of a man of medium build and shabby appearance, with a pepper-and-salt loose jacket, a grey cloth cap and reddish neckerchief. He was aged about thirty and had a fair complexion and a moustache. We must question Lawende’s accuracy, however, since The Times reported him as saying that the suspect was 5 foot 9 inches, not the 5 foot 7 inches that is referred to in the Home Office files. If we take Mrs Long’s and Lawende’s descriptions together, they clearly cannot have been the same man. It was very dark at the entrance to Mitre Square and Lawende admitted he would not know the man again. On the other hand, Mrs Long and James Brown could be describing the same person. If, of course, we accept Laurence Alison’s caveat that ‘so fallible are our memories it is almost a wonder that eye-witness accounts are given the credence they are within the criminal justice system’,3 then all such evidence should be discounted.
What has given Lawende prominence in the folklore of the Ripper is that various people have assumed that the ‘witness’ referred to by Sir Robert Anderson in his memoirs is Lawende. We have already noted the unreliability of the memoirs written years after the event. Anderson claims that his witness was ‘the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer’. If Chief Inspector Swanson was right (in the ‘marginalia’ he wrote in Anderson’s book) the witness was male and Jewish. Ripper historians therefore have concluded that Anderson meant either Israel Schwartz or Joseph Lawende, with Lawende’s friend Joseph Levy as a possible third. However, since nearly all the City Police files on the case were destroyed in World War Two and a sizeable percentage of the Met records are missing too, there is every possibility that there were other Jewish witnesses whose names we do not know.
Whatever the accuracy of Lawende’s account, it led to no arrests and throughout October Robert Mann went about his daily routines. For him the ‘double event’ must have been an extraordinary roller-coaster of emotions. Deprived of his objective with Liz Stride, he unleashed his fury on the body of Kate Eddowes, and this, for a while, must have satisfied him. How long he kept her kidney and her womb we do not know, but in the chaotic mismanagement of the mortuary ‘shed’ in Eagle Place, it would be easy to hide it ‘in plain sight’. He did not kill again in October because the madness had not returned and because the acid fog worsened the cough that had been irritating his throat and chest for some days. It was not until the clearer November that his mood changed and he seemed preoccupied, far away; at least, as far away as No 13, Miller’s Court, Dorset Street.
This was the shabby, one-roomed (12 feet square) ‘home’ of Mary Kelly, fifth and last of the ‘canonical’ victims of Jack the Ripper – sixth and penultimate victim of Robert Mann. The murder of Mary Kelly is the most confusing of all the Whitechapel murders because Mary was twenty years younger than the other victims and was the only one killed indoors. Those who believe that the killings ended with her murder have taken their leaf from the memoranda of Melville Macnaghten:
A much more rational theory is that the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court and that he immediately committed suicide [opening the door to M J Druitt] or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations [enter Cutbush and several more] that he was by them confined in some asylum.4