A message was sent to Inspector Frederick George Abberline of Scotland Yard’s H Division, and he quickly showed up on the scene. Abberline, who was forty-five years old and married for the second time (his first wife died of consumption the same year he married her), is something of a legend in police circles, though details of his personal life are rather sketchy. He had risen quickly through the ranks from constable (patrolman) to sergeant, to undercover operative and detective, and then to inspector. Abberline would come to take charge of all the detectives in the Whitechapel investigation.
As he waited for Abberline and other Scotland Yard officials to arrive, Inspector Chandler had the crime scene thoroughly searched. The woman’s pocket had been slit open and its contents included such ordinary items as two combs, a piece of muslin, and a folded envelope containing two pills. About two feet away, they found a bloodstained leather apron, of the type worn by slaughterhouse workers or possibly cobblers or leather workers. Since the apron was not wet with blood, it was highly questionable whether it was related to the crime. And since in those days there was no scientific means of typing blood, or even determining for certain whether it was from a human being or an animal, a bloodstained garment from one of the many slaughterhouses in the area would have been easily explainable. Still, any potential clue was likely to have a “life of its own,” as this one certainly did.
Dr. Phillips told the inquest he believed the three personal items had been placed with some care—the muslin and the combs at the victim’s feet and the envelope by her head. Two farthing coins were also near the body, though this detail was kept secret by the police to help qualify suspects. If this description is accurate, it’s another indication of a particular psychosis and mental instability. We often find this in disorganized or mixed offenders—that is, a brutal frenzy of attack, together with careful, ritualistic elements that indicate a need to control or master small, discrete components of the crime scene or victim.
One of my earliest major profiling cases involved the murder of a twenty-six-year-old teacher of handicapped children who was mildly handicapped herself with curvature of the spine. She was found strangled, severely beaten, and sexually abused at the top of the stairwell of the apartment building where she lived with her parents on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, New York. She had been spread-eagled and tied with her own belt and nylon stockings around her wrists and ankles, though the medical examiner determined she was already dead when that was done. The cause of death was ligature strangulation with the strap of her pocketbook. The NYPD photos showed a scene of appalling gore and cruelty, and this told me a lot about the offender. What told me even more was that her nipples had been cut off after death and placed on her chest, her comb was set in her pubic hair, and her earrings had been placed symmetrically on the ground on either side of her head. This type of compulsiveness and strange ritualism amidst such a frenzy of disorganized mayhem said to me that my prey had some deep and long-term psychological problems. The method of sexual assault, with the victim’s umbrella inserted into the vagina, told me that this guy had real problems with normal sexual functioning and, even though he’d be in his twenties, was still very much in the pre- or early adolescent stage of sexual fantasy, experimentation, and curiosity about the female body. Taken together with his obvious sociopathic hostility, it didn’t take much imagination to see that we were dealing with a very dangerous individual. I was therefore extremely gratified that we were able to help in hunting down and catching the offender, who, as I’d predicted, lived in the neighborhood, was underemployed, without a car or meaningful job, and had close relatives in the victim’s building.
Based at least in part on Dr. Phillips’s description of the murder scene at Hanbury Street, I believe the police were dealing with a similar type of offender there, but, of course, they would not have had sufficient comprehension to realize it. Though all the evidence was not yet in, I would have begun honing my profile to reflect a fairly unsophisticated offender, like the killer ninety years later in New York, a combination of a violent and sexually immature and inadequate personality.
Dr. Phillips had the unidentified body removed to the Whitechapel Infirmary Mortuary on Eagle Street, and in the afternoon he conducted a full postmortem, which confirmed some of his earlier observations, including facial bruising as we have discussed previously. Laceration wounds of the neck showed that the killer had tried to separate the various bones of the neck after death, the type of perverse anatomical curiosity I would liken to the attempt to remove Nichols’s head.
But there was more. Not only had the intestines been severed from their attachments within the abdomen and placed over the shoulder, the uterus, half of the vagina, and most of the bladder had been entirely removed, apparently cut out with some care. They were not found with the body. The murder of street prostitutes, as we’ve suggested, was not uncommon. But the postmortem mutilation was essentially unknown to the Victorians.
Not so, unfortunately, to us. What we see here is not only a fevered overkill, but a man who may be taking anatomical souvenirs. The removal of the uterus and vagina suggests to me someone who hates women and probably fears them. By removing the victim’s internal sexual organs, he is, in effect, attempting to neuter her, to take away that which he finds sexually threatening. Since, along with this, there is no evidence of traditional rape, the fear of women and their sexual power is a pretty strong bet.
The victim was identified as Annie Chapman by a washerwoman friend named Amelia Palmer. Chapman, born Eliza Anne Smith, was a stout five feet two with brown hair and blue eyes. Of all the victims, she was the most pathetic. In her late forties, her autopsy showed signs of malnutrition and chronic diseases of the lungs and membrane surrounding the brain, which might have killed her before long if the UNSUB hadn’t. She had been married to John Chapman, who’d made his living as a coachman for wealthy families in Mayfair. They had three children, one of whom was a girl who died in infancy and another who was physically handicapped. This was not unusual for the poor. Her marriage, like those of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols, was said to have broken up over her drinking, but since John died four years later of cirrhosis, one might suspect the problem was not one-sided. In any event, she was living by her wits, supplementing whatever small amounts of money she could earn on the streets from selling matches, flowers, and her own crocheting with even smaller amounts from prostitution, working the area right around Spitalfields Market. At the time of her death she was living in Crossingham’s Common Lodging House on Dorset Street, where she’d earned a reputation for a violent temper through brawls with other prostitutes. She was also alleged to be a petty thief, and her late former husband had lost at least one job in Mayfair because of her thievery.
Chapman had been wearing three cheap rings, which were not found on her hand. The killer—or some desperate soul—must have taken them, either for their monetary value or as souvenirs.
The accounts of her last night are tragically similar to that of Polly Nichols. Earlier in the afternoon, she had told her friend Amelia Palmer that she was too sick to work but would have to do something to get money for her bed that night. Another resident at Crossingham’s saw her in the kitchen, already drunk and taking two pills from a box she kept in her pocket. She dropped the box, which broke, and at that point, she put the remaining pills in a torn piece of envelope lying on the floor. She spent the late night and early-morning hours of Friday, September 7, to Saturday, September 8, drinking, then returned to the lodging house about 1:35 A.M., where John Evans, the night watchman, demanded the fourpence doss money.
She replied, “I haven’t got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary.” But, like Nichols, she added, “Don’t let the bed. I’ll be back soon.” She then went upstairs to convey the same message to deputy manager Timothy Donovan, asking him to let her stay on credit. He refused and escorted her off the premises and out to try to make the doss money. As she was leaving, she called out to Evans, “I won’t
be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me.” It’s likely that all of the witnesses who reported they saw Chapman drunk that night probably mistook the fact that she was actually very sick. The autopsy showed little alcohol in her body.
From this point on, the narrative gets a little fuzzy. Someone thought he saw her in the Ten Bells pub across from Spitalfields Market soon after it opened at 5 A.M., but this seems to be a case of mistaken identity. A half hour later, Elizabeth Darrell, also known as Elizabeth Long, saw a woman she thought was Annie Chapman on Hanbury Street, talking to a man slightly taller than herself. Darrell characterized the man as foreign- looking, which at the time in the East End was often a euphemism for someone who appeared to be a Jewish immigrant. According to Darrell, the man asked, “Will you?”
Chapman replied, “Yes.”
Albert Cadoche, a young carpenter who lived at 27 Hanbury Street, thought he heard a fierce struggle and someone yelling “No!” in the next-door backyard at number 29. But police weren’t sure what he’d heard, and like so many other facts about the case, this one remains ambiguous.
Among Inspector Abberline and his colleagues at Scotland Yard, the conclusion was inescapable. The man who had murdered Annie Chapman had also killed Mary Ann Nichols.
Panic spread throughout the East End. Someone was murdering women and the police seemed unable to stop him. Everything was coming together. Did the same fiend who killed Nichols and Chapman also murder Martha Tabram? At first, it had seemed likely that her guardsman escort had done it. But if two other murders had taken place within such a close time and proximity, then that first one could have been done by the same man, too. I would also not discount the possibility that the killer of Polly Nichols was actually attempting to copycat the murder of Martha Tabram.
And some thought maybe that wasn’t even the first. On April 2, 1888, another prostitute, Emma Elizabeth Smith, who lived in Spitalfields, had been robbed and raped and a blunt instrument, possibly a bottle, forced into her vagina. Three days later, she died of peritonitis at London Hospital. At the time, police believed she had been the victim of a local gang, though no arrests were ever made. Now, it looked to the terrified residents as if she was merely the Whitechapel killer’s first tune-up.
“LEATHER APRON” AND OTHER THEORIES
Suddenly, this forsaken area of London was on everyone’s mind. Newspaper reporters flooded in, describing the East Enders as if they were some strange foreign species. The sites of each murder became tourist attractions. The Home Office was advised to offer a reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest, but the home secretary decided against it, believing that the locals were so desperate for money that they’d give false information and make the police department’s job even more difficult. Though he might have been reacting to his own experience with the local newspapers, for whom playing fast and loose with facts for the sake of a more sensational story was a way of life, he was actually following official Home Office policy. His esteemed predecessor, Sir William Harcourt, had prohibited rewards when he found that they led to false accusations and even deliberately inspired crimes.
The East End was rife with rumors. At least one of the doctors who’d examined the bodies thought the killer showed some medical or anatomical knowledge. Did that mean he was a depraved physician? Perhaps a medical student? London Hospital and its medical college were just across Whitechapel Road from where Polly Nichols was murdered. Were they the killer’s training ground and refuge? The poor East Enders were a cynical and mistrustful lot, used to either being ignored or getting the worst of everything. It certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of imagination that a healer could be perverted into a brutal taker of lives.
One of the most prevalent suspicions arose from the leather apron found near Annie Chapman’s body. When police began questioning Whitechapel street hookers, one of the stories that kept coming up concerned a local bully and hustler known as Leather Apron for the article he was always seen with, supposedly because he was a slipper-maker. According to reports, Leather Apron, who was often seen around Commercial Street, would shake down women and demand money from them. He was generally described as a short, thickset man in his late thirties or early forties, with black hair, a black mustache, and an unusually thick neck. The word on the street was that Leather Apron might well be the Whitechapel killer.
One individual who apparently met this description was a Jewish boot-finisher named John Pizer. A sometime resident of Hanbury Street identified him as the man he had seen threatening a woman with a knife in the early morning hours of September 8. Pizer had a reputation for getting into fights, as well as abusing prostitutes. He was arrested at his residence on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Whitechapel, on Monday morning, September 10. Five long-bladed knives were found there. He was taken to the Leman Street police station and placed in two police lineups. In one, a female witness was unable to identify him. In the other, a male witness confirmed he was the one seen on September 8, and that Pizer was known around the neighborhood as Leather Apron. Pizer expressed astonishment and outrage at the charge, claiming he didn’t know what the police were talking about.
In spite of that, he was a likely suspect, at least for a couple of hours. Then the case began to fall apart. The man who identified him could not identify Annie Chapman’s body at the morgue as the woman he had seen being threatened. Then Pizer’s alibis for the nights of the Nichols and Chapman murders were checked out and proved ironclad. After a day and a half, he was released.
The John Pizer story provides us with a cautionary tale. Pizer sure looked good for the crimes, and a lot of the surface details fit. Only after police investigated his circumstances was he exonerated. Why am I mentioning this here? Because most of the suspects who’ve emerged as candidates to be the killer, particularly those who’ve emerged long after the events, fit with just such convenient circumstantial evidence, as we shall see. Now there’s nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. Sometimes, as we’ll further see, it’s all we’ve got and it can be compelling enough for a solid conviction. But the important point to remember here is that anyone we consider as a suspect whom the police at the time could not examine and alibi out in the way they did Pizer is not getting a “fair trial” from us. Of course, no one can, this many years later, but it’s something to keep in mind when you hear some of the more interesting, often outlandish, claims.
The police and the press both made a concerted effort to find the “actual” Leather Apron, without any success, while hysteria about the identity of the “Whitechapel fiend” continued to grow.
And a strong undercurrent was emerging as to who he might be. The Jews, emigrating to England to escape persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, had become a prominent force in the East End. But they spoke a strange language and kept largely to themselves and their own community, maintaining a wary, distrustful distance from gentiles—in other words, “real” Englishmen. When you combine the general resentment of whoever is the most recent immigrant group with the quiet but long-standing strain of anti-Semitism that had been a part of English culture for almost a thousand years, you’ve got a ready-made scapegoat population. Then add two other factors: Whatever scanty evidence there was suggested that the killer worked in either the local livestock slaughtering industry or shoe and leather trade, both of which were dominated by Jewish immigrants. Just as important, no one believed a true Englishman could do such a horrible thing, so it had to be someone from the largest non-English group evident—the Jews.
And such a horrible thing as what? Who kills and eviscerates just for the hell of it, not for robbery, not for revenge, not even to make a political statement? This was something people hadn’t seen before. Was it possible that the character of Mr. Hyde had gone out the stage door of the Lyceum and taken up residence in Whitechapel?
THE LUST MURDERER
In April 1980, my Behavioral Science Unit colleague Roy Hazelwood and I published an article in the FBI Law Enforcement Bullet
in entitled “The Lust Murderer.” We wrote:
The lust murder is unique and is distinguished from the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack or displacement of the breasts, rectum, or genitals. Further, while there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit the lust murder. These individuals will be labeled as the Organized Nonsocial and the Disorganized Asocial personalities.
We’ve moved away from such terms as nonsocial and asocial because they’re difficult to understand and differentiate, but it is fair to say that the organized type tends to be someone who may interact well with society; he just has no regard for or interest in the welfare of anyone other than himself. He understands the implications of his crimes and commits them because they give him a feeling of satisfaction and empowerment not present anywhere else in his life. Though he will have a deep-seated sense of personal inadequacy, this sensation will be warring within him with an equally strong sense of grandiosity and entitlement that has nothing to do with his own highly limited accomplishments. He will plan his crimes and is smart enough to commit them some distance from where he lives or works and to take measures to keep them undetected (e.g., hide the body) for as long as possible.
The disorganized offender, on the other hand, is the traditional loner who feels rejected by society. He is not sophisticated enough to commit an organized, well-planned act or to think to hide the body. The crimes, particularly the early ones, will likely be committed close to his home or workplace, where he feels some measure of comfort and familiarity. While we expect some sort of rape or penetration with the organized offender, we often see none from the disorganized one. And as we suggested earlier, while the organized type may mutilate the body as a sign of his contempt or to hinder identification, mutilation by the disorganized type may represent not only his fear, but a basic sexual curiosity about what goes on below the body’s surface.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 3
