The brutal murders of two women in the same confined area in just over a week saw the Press go into overdrive. The stuff of fiction in the form of Penny Dreadfuls had somehow become reality and no one felt safe. A moment’s thought would have convinced the affluent West End that the murderer’s targets were so far removed from them that they might as well have been a different species, but killings like these do not sit well with rationalism and there was panic on the streets.
The day after Robert Mann killed Annie Chapman, William Piggott walked from Whitechapel to Gravesend in Kent and had a drink at the Pope’s Head. His loud conversation was decidedly misogynist and the landlady called the police. Since he admitted to having had a fight in a Whitechapel dosshouse and had a hand wound and blood on his shirt and shoes, he was put into an identity parade by Inspector Abberline. Three witnesses, Mrs Fiddymont, Mary Chappell and Joseph Taylor had all seen a shifty, bloodstained man drinking in the Prince Albert in Brushfield Street the previous morning. Since none of them could be sure of their identification, Piggott had to be released. His whereabouts after that are uncertain, but it is possible he could have been sent to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, where an alleged Ripper could have broken bread with the real one.
On Monday 10 September, the best known of several pressure groups was formed, not trusting the police to get the job done. This was the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee whose sixteen original members met at the Crown pub in the Mile End Road, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the man they were determined to hunt down. The builder George Lusk was president, B Harris was secretary and Joseph Aarons treasurer. Their brief was to be available in the Crown every morning to receive information from the public and they wrote letters to the police and the Press. On 27 September Lusk went so far as to send a petition to the queen urging her to intervene personally on the matter of rewards. Her Majesty’s reply, via the Home Office, was that it would not be in anyone’s interest. When rewards had been offered in the past, this had led to the perversion of justice in order to get rich quick. The whole issue of rewards festered throughout the Autumn of Terror and beyond.
That was the day they arrested John Pizer, known as ‘Leather Apron’. A Pole, but British-born, the man lived on and off at his parents’ home at 22 Mulberry Street. He was known to have a history of violence and had done time for assault. The name ‘Leather Apron’ first hit the headlines on 4 September, before the Chapman murder and Pizer’s exact whereabouts on the night of Polly Nichols’ death are uncertain. The newspaper stories described him as a threat to prostitutes and Scotland Yard had him in their sights. Detective Sergeant Thick arrested him at home – ‘You’re just the man I want’ – and took him into custody at Leman Street police station along with his leather-working knives and hats. Once again, Mrs Fiddymont watched him in a line-up and once again failed to recognize anybody. The half-Spaniard, half-Bulgarian vagrant Emmanuel Violenia claimed that he had seen Pizer threatening a woman in Hanbury Street on the morning of 8 September. When invited to see the body of Annie Chapman in the mortuary, however, Violenia refused. Police concluded that he was either a busybody or someone hoping for a reward and Pizer was released.
Perhaps in view of the fact that the public were clamouring for his head and he had only one known friend in the world, Mickeldy Joe with whom he drank at the Princess Alice, Pizer was given a chance to clear his name at the same Chapman inquest which Mann attended, but on the Wednesday. In answer to Baxter’s questions, he admitted to being a shoemaker with the nickname Leather Apron (although he had previously denied this to the police). The normally irascible Baxter appears extremely polite to Pizer, giving him a chance to say his piece. He either felt genuinely sorry for the man, caught up as he was in a frenzy of false accusation, or he knew how dangerous he was and was anxious to avoid trouble in his courtroom.
Pizer does not quite disappear off the radar. He received compensation from the Star for putting him in the frame and summonsed Emily Patswold on 11 October for calling him ‘Leather Apron’ and hitting him. The man seems to have been out of work in the months of the Ripper, perhaps because of ongoing hernia problems and he died of gastroenteritis at the London Hospital in the summer of 1897.
Having lost one suspect, the police picked up another, Jacob Isenschmidt.1 The Press quickly dubbed him the Mad Pork Butcher. His business had failed and he had spent several months in Colney Hatch asylum the previous year. He was given to nocturnal wanderings and his profession clearly linked him in the public’s mind with the mutilations involved in the murders. He was reported by two doctors in Holloway and subsequently arrested on Wednesday 12 September by officers there. ‘The Holloway lunatic’ was a Swiss national, at once ticking a lot of boxes as a knife-carrying foreigner, but he was clearly deranged (and harmless). He was sent to Islington Workhouse, then Grove Hall asylum and finally returned to Colney Hatch where he was still a resident when the later murders occurred.
Before those later murders, the police arrested Edward McKenna, a man resembling someone seen behaving oddly in Flower and Dean Street on the day after the Chapman murder. A Miss Lyon believed she had been accosted by ‘Leather Apron’ and did not care for the glint in his eye. Questioned by Abberline, McKenna’s story that he had been asleep in a doss in Brick Lane at the time was corroborated and he was released.
Altogether more dangerous was Charles Ludwig, the hairdresser from Hamburg who had arrived in London only months earlier. This time, a scissors-carrying foreigner, he was an irresistible suspect for locals, but he was certainly genuinely antisocial. As we have seen, he knew the Minories well, having worked for Mr C A Partridge in the street and lodged nearby. Early in the morning of Tuesday 18 September he took one-armed prostitute Elizabeth Burns to Three King’s Court near the Minories. There were railway arches here and it was clearly a regular haunt of prostitutes. He pulled a knife, but her shrieks of ‘Murder!’ brought City Constable John Johnson running to the scene. The policeman moved Ludwig on and he escorted Liz Burns to the end of his beat; only at that point did she tell him about the knife and by that time, the bird had flown.
It can only have been moments later, however, that he turned up at an all-night coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street and pulled his knife on bystander Alexander Freinberg. Ludwig was arrested by Constable 221H John Gallagher, charged with being drunk and disorderly and using threatening behaviour. He was remanded for over a fortnight because of his access to razors and his clearly unstable temperament. His dilemma was resolved by Robert Mann when he killed his next victim.
I have introduced these random suspects to show the problem the police faced. Whitechapel and Spitalfields were full of odd characters whose behaviour was, to say the least, unusual. What threw them suddenly into the spotlight was the work of the real Whitechapel murderer, quietly going about his business at the Whitechapel Infirmary. No report could be ignored. Any strange behaviour had to be followed up. The upshot of course, is that it made the police appear ridiculous, as if they jumped at every shadow and were so clueless that their operations were directed by media scaremongering. It was brilliantly lampooned by Punch four days later –
A Detective’s Diary à la mode
| Monday | Papers full of the latest tragedy. One of them suggested that the assassin was a man who wore a blue coat. Arrested three blue coat wearers on suspicion. | |
| Tuesday | The blue coats proved innocent. Released. Evening journal threw out a hint that the deed might have been perpetrated by a soldier. Found a small drummer-boy drunk and incapable. Conveyed him to the station-house. | |
| Wednesday | Drummer-boy released. Letters of anonymous correspondent to daily journal declaring that the outrage could only have been committed by a sailor. Decoyed petty officer of Penny Steamboat on shore and suddenly arrested him. | |
| Thursday | Petty officer allowed to go. Hints thrown out in correspondence column that the crime might be traceable to a lunatic. Noticed an old gentleman purchasing a copy of Maiwa’s Revenge. Seized him. | |
| Friday | Lunatic dispatched to an asylum. Anonymous letter received, denouncing local clergyman as the criminal. Took the reverend gentleman into custody. | |
| Saturday | Eminent ecclesiastic set at liberty with an apology. Ascertain in a periodical that it is thought just possible the Police may have committed the crime themselves. At the call of duty, finished the week by arresting myself! |
And as if this situation was not bad enough, on 26 September John Fitzgerald added another kind of ‘lunatic’ to the mix by giving himself up to the police and confessing to the murder of Annie Chapman. He was a bricklayer’s labourer and incoherently drunk. None of his confession made sense and he was proved to be elsewhere at the time. He was released on the 29th.
And by the 29th, Robert Mann was probably already in the aura phase and the need to kill rose in him at the very time that the ‘Dear Boss’ letter arrived at the Central News Agency and the murders were on everyone’s lips. This was reflected in the increasing numbers of police patrols and vigilante groups in the area and definitely had an effect on Mann’s behaviour in the killing zone.
This time, the killing zone was further south than usual. Absolutely in keeping with the geographical profile we noted earlier, he was venturing further afield, confident in his abilities, sure of his ground; and he was travelling due south away from the Nichols and Chapman murder sites. It is possible though that it was the very presence of the police, effectively (and ironically) carrying out Robert Peel’s original remit of them as a preventative force that sent Mann in that direction. Because although the line drawn by the Commercial Road was within his profile, it did not fit the boundaries of the Old Montague Street mortuary. Any corpse found here would be sent to St George’s-in-the-East. Mann was also out earlier in the night than usual and we do not know why. Perhaps the urge was irresistible, perhaps he saw a window of opportunity vis-a-vis the mortuary key or the surgeon’s knife. Whatever the reason, I believe he was in Berner Street by half past midnight on 30 September. Somebody else who was there was Mann’s fourth victim, Elizabeth Stride. But she was not alone.