by Covell, Mike
The Daily News, a London based newspaper, featured the following, dated September 11th 1888,
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. The arrest at Gravesend may or may not solve the mystery of the Whitechapel murders, but the incident is decidedly soothing to the public mind. The man arrested is declared by a police surgeon to be insane. In that fact is found relief. It accords with everybody's wish that ordinary human nature should be exempt from suspicion of such crimes, and that it should turn out to be a man “possessed” who has done these dreadful deeds. According to some benevolent ideas now widely entertained, all crime is a form of mental disease; and there is a philosopher among us who prophesies a time when in the natural evolution of society it will become as needless to forbid murder, theft, and the minor offences of our criminal code as it it now to forbid man eating and fetishism. The days of this philosopher's dreams, however, are still far distant. Society in its “process of exuviation” has not yet brought human nature into its ideal conformity with the moral law, “when judges and statute books are not wanted, and when man spontaneously takes the right course in all things.” Some very ugly but obvious motives still explain the existence of even such hideous crimes as murder; and where these motives can be traced, where the incitements of gain, or revenge, or lust alarmed at its own danger, are found to explain the capital offence, no plea of insanity will suffice to remove the taint of crime from madness with such method in it. In the Whitechapel murders, however, no motive has, up to the present, been imagined that would account for the atrocity of the acts. One woman, or even two, might have fallen a victim to some impassioned being who thought he had some injury from their sex and their class to avenge. But our knowledge does not in the present case suffice to explain either the failure of one or two homicides to satisfy the desire of revenge, or the dreadful mutilations with which the outrages were accompanied. Brutality in the shape of bloodthirsty hacking of the murderer's victim is an aggravation for which English society, with all its sins on its head, declines to be responsible. When stories appear in our columns of atrocities on dead bodies we can generally boast that they are committed in a different latitude, and belong to a lower civilization than ours. It is true that the murders of Williams, which formed the subject of one of De Quincey's most thrilling writings, were terribly brutal, and that the murderer deliberately cut the throats of the victims whom he had previously despatched by a mallet or crowbar; but De Quincey's own narrative, which has so brilliantly preserved the record of this man's crimes, presents an intelligible reason for this ferocity. Williams murdered his victims in housefuls. Despatch and certainty were essential to his own safety. A possible revival of consciousness and a groan on the part of one would victim would have warned the others. For the Whitechapel atrocities no such plea is discoverable. Life is supposed to have been taken at the throat, and the nameless horrors committed afterwards with the deliberation and revolting ingenuity of a maniac. On no other theory would the thought of such things be endurable. There is good reason why, without prejudice to the case of the man who is now in custody, the public acceptance of the maniacal theory should be endorsed and encouraged. There is positive danger in the growth of any other opinion at present in Whitechapel. As we have said, the mutilation of bodies, excepting in rare cases to further the murderer's chances of safety, is foreign to the English style in crime. There is a disposition at once therefore to set down such atrocities to the credit of some ill bred and ill nourished foreigner from the lowest dens of vice in Europe. So, in Whitechapel, there was arising a murmur of ugly foreboding for some of the foreign element there. Sheer rumour of the silliest kind was beginning to take an odious precision, and there was arising in the East end a Judenhelze more abhorrent than that which abroad is due to religious fanaticism. To hate the Jew for his religion, to call him “misbeliever, cut throat dog, and spit upon his Jewish gaberdine” even metaphorically is bad enough; but to call him “Leather Apron” and to imply thereby his readiness to murder women, and practise anatomy with his knife upon them, is the refinement of cruelty. There was reason to fear till yesterday that the tendency towards thus insulting the Jews of Whitechapel was growing amid the embarrassing perplexity as to the origin of the murders. The police have discouraged this line of suspicion by acting momentarily upon it, and then proving by their release of the Jew whom they arrested that there was not a doubt of his innocence. For the happy result we may look lightly upon the apparently ludicrous error of this arrest. Piser, the man arrested, was found sitting quietly at home, totally undisturbed by any panic or bloodthirsty demand for that mythical personage “Leather Apron.” He is said to be a poor sickly man whom it was not possible to associate with the assassin now so eagerly wanted, and the reporters seem to have found what the police might easily also have learned, that he had not left his house since Thursday last. Piser, however, will probably not regret his short detention if it has finally put a stop to these anti Jewish suspicions. The inquest on the body of Annie Chapman was opened yesterday, but without throwing any new light on the murder. The evidence was obviously ill got together, and there were no signs, but rather the contrary, of any very active co-operation of the police with the Coroner. Two witnesses brought to the scene of the murder by the man Davies, who found the body, had not been called or identified. The person known as “the pensioner” with whom the deceased had relations, has not been discovered; though the fact that on Saturday morning he called and asked for Chapman should have suggested that he would be a valuable witness as to the murdered woman's habits, or as to those of her associates who, upon his request, were excluded from the lodging house. When Mr. Wynne Baxter's inquiry is resumed tomorrow the more evidence that is forthcoming the better. Why the inquest on the woman Nicholls should have been postponed for a fortnight is not apparent. The police desired it, but if a similar suggestion should come from the police in the present case it would be as well that their reasons for the request should be more specifically stated. The mere desire to work out their investigation on their own lines, without public aid, will not be satisfactory, unless they are assured that they are the track of the murderer, and that further public inquiry would favour his escape and frustrate the ends of justice. The story of Williams, as told by De Quincey, has its moral for the police. De Quincey brings into striking prominence the mistake then made through keeping information back from the public. Williams murdered the Marr family seventy seven years ago in Radcliff highway with a mallet marked “J.P.” This fact was withheld till twelve days had elapsed and the villain had massacred another family. Then the story of the mallet was tardily allowed to come out. It led to his immediate detection. Williams had already been suspected at his lodgings, but there was no clue given to the public to justify an accusation. The moment the mallet and the mark J.P. were mentioned suspicion became certainty. A mallet so marked was found to be missing from the lodging house and in a lumber heap, where search was made for it, was found the murderer's knife “glued by gore to the lining of the pockets” of a discarded waistcoat. The detection of Jackson, who murdered the Manchester warder, was unquestionably owing to the full publication of all the details of his case. Even the present arrest, whether it be justified or not in the end, has been aided by the reports in the newspapers. The police have more to gain that to lose by publicity; and, besides, the publicity helps to relieve the tension on the popular mind. As a result of the investigations of the police into the circumstances attending the murder of Annie Chapman at Whitechapel, several men were arrested yesterday on suspicion. The arrests which were considered to be of most importance were those of a Polish Jew, named Piser, near the scene of the crime, and of a man named Pigott, at Gravesend. Piser was released last evening, but Pigott, being considered to be insane, is to be detained under observation. An inquest on the body of the murdered woman was opened yesterday by Mr. Wynne Baxter at the Working Lads' Institute, Whitechapel road. The witnesses examined were the old man, John Davies, who discovered the body; Mrs. Palmer, who had k
nown the deceased for five years; and the deputy and night watchman of the common lodging house where she was last seen alive. The inquiry was then adjourned till tomorrow. THE WHITECHAPEL MURDER. FURTHER ARRESTS. EXCITING SCENES. From morning till night crowds of people have been lounging about the police office in Commercial street, in Hanbury street - the scene of the last murder - and in Buck's row, the scene of the previous murder. A letter carrier, and, subsequently, a policeman, to whom I expressed a little surprise that crowds of sightseers should have come to Buck's row so long after the event, both remarked that the sightseers were there “because Monday is a holiday.” The agreement between the pair was curious. Monday a holiday, and from all quarters of the East end they have come to celebrate it in these slums of filth and crime. About a hundred people - most of them, it is fair to state, of the loafer class - were clustered round the big gate where Ann Nicholls's body was found. At a short distance from the spot stand the Board School - a tall, red brick building. Through its half open windows came the shrill, pure, thoughtless voices of the children. There, at any rate, I thought, the better generation is growing up. But I was thinking aloud, for my friend the postman struck in sharply, "I hope they are; but meanwhile their mothers take the young `uns to the gin shop. You may see them if you like." I did not want to see them. Buck's row has an evil reputation, apart from its present notoriety for murder; a fight there last Sunday afternoon flooded the place with the rascality of the neighbourhood - unseen of the police. Walking on to the police station in Commercial street, I heard a hue and cry. This was at half past one o'clock. “The murderer! the murderer! Leather Apron's ketched!” shriek the street urchins, and they scurry round the corner of the police station; slatternly women; hulking, ruffianly fellow, in greasy raiment, join in the run. Then there is a noise of laughter, screaming of the small folk, coarse guffawing of the older ones, who ought to know better, but did not. It was a “sell.” Hideous, loathsome, inhuman sport. The small boys in the Campaign district of Ireland play at battering rams upon “forts” improvised out of sticks and street mud. Their fun is humour and wit, in comparison with the bogus hue and cry of the dismal, rancid region where the presence of the unknown murderer is felt mysteriously. I enter the police office, where there is some considerable bustle about people who as I am told are giving evidence as to the man who has been arrested in Gravesend. the officer in charge tells me that nothing is known definitely about him as yet. Intending to call again, I walk up Hanbury street to the scene of Saturday morning's murder, No 29. A great crowd stood in front of it, extending a considerable way up and down the street. Nearly one half of the persons in it were women, most of them bareheaded and unwashed, and a great many with children in their arms. From the windows of upper storeys on both sides of Hanbury street other women leant out, their elbows or outstretched palms resting on the window sills. Not a man could I see in any of those windows, only women, grown up girls and children. They had the air of people who thought their quarter of the world invested with a new importance. What were the crowds gaping and staring at? Nothing. At any rate, at nothing which they could “take in” in a couple of minutes. There stood the dingy house in the backyard of which the crime took place, the ditto of its dingy neighbours. A mangling house, with the yellow paint peeling off its wall like skin disease, flanks it on one side; an ordinary dwelling house on the other. To reach the backyard of No 29, you must traverse the “hall” and passage of the house; there is no back entry, for, as already said, the houses flank each other closely, leaving no intervening space. On traversing the passage, you reach a backdoor, from which three steps lead downwards - that is, to the level of the ugly, little, stony, slimy backyard. This backyard is separated from the next neighbour's by a paling so low that one may vault over it with the utmost ease. In the narrow level space between the steps and the paling was found the murdered body. A policeman guarded the street entrance to this passage, admitting none “except on business.” Few there were who had any legitimate business; nevertheless the crowd stood patiently in the street - stood and stared, hour after hour - a living monument to the innate impulse of wonder and curiosity, showing infinite capacity for good if only civilization should open other paths for their exercise. the sign board on the house says “Mrs. A. Richardson, rough packing case maker.” On the ground floor is a cat's meat shop, the lower half of the window of which is thrown up, affording a view of the counter, and of the two or three people who are moving about inside it, stooping down now and again to take another look at the multitudes outside. Above the ground floor are two storeys - the windows of the lower one being filled with flowers, and adorned with red curtains. As the place is let out in lodgings - there is one room in which five people of a family live together - the street door is usually open, even at night. An open door might tempt the murderer, even suppose he had no previous knowledge of the premises, Nobody, neither constable nor householder, nor patient sightseer (“holiday” maker) knew anything about the murder beyond what had been published in the morning papers. Returning to Commercial street, I again saw the constable in charge. “Have you made anything of your Gravesend prisoner?” I asked. “Nothing whatever,” said he, “except that the man is insane; we shall remove him shortly.” If the London police were as capable in other respects as they are in holding their peace, no criminal in the realm would pass undetected. the constables at the police offices in the Whitechapel were marvels of reticence. Nobody knew anything. The instructions to say nothing had come from Scotland yard. The police engaged in investigating the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman are, according to their latest admission, still without any definite clue. Colonel Maunsell, one of the assistant commissioners, yesterday morning visited Commercial street and Leman street police stations, and conversed with the acting superintendent and Inspector Helson. At about the same hour Detective sergeant Thicke, H division, who has long done duty in the district, receiving information which led him to believe that the man known by the nickname of “Leather Apron” was to be found in a house in Plummer's row, also called Mulberry street, succeeded in apprehending the man, whom he lodged at Leman street police station. The man's name is Piser, a Jew, who certainly bears a remarkable resemblance to the published description of “Leather Apron.” Witnesses were, however, called to identify him, and it soon became certain that he was not the man wanted, and he was liberated. A man was also taken to Hackney Police Station, on the information of some people that his conduct was suspicious, but he, too, was subsequently released. Other persons whose conduct was considered suspicious found themselves arrested and provisionally detained during the day, but no apprehension was considered serious. A man was, however, detained at Gravesend Police Station in Sunday night, whose conduct in a public house in the town had drawn attention, which resulted in a sergeant removing him to the lock up. His manner was wild, his appearance very dirty, and his hands bitten and scratched, as if in a fight with a woman. He admitted that he had come during the day from Whitechapel, and he further said that a woman with whom he got into a row in Brick lane had bitten his hand. He was carrying a bindle which contained two shirts and on these something resembling blood marks were found. It was decided to detain him, and yesterday morning Detective Inspector Abberline left for Gravesend to see the man. He found him to be a man who years ago he had known as a respectable tradesman of Hoxton, but it seems that drink has reduced him, and he is at present suffering, it is said, from delirium tremens. It was considered advisable to bring him to London, and he was removed by the officer to Commercial street Police Station, where he was lodged in a cell, with a constable to watch him. The man has respectable friends, and though his bitten hands and the stains on the linen garments are matters of suspicion, it is not thought likely he will be found to be the murderer. He in no way answers the description of the man wanted, as published by the police. That description applies, as well as can be gathered, to the man who gave the woman Emily Walton two brass medals, or bright farthings, as half so
vereigns when in a yard of one of the houses in Hanbury street at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, and who then began to ill use the woman. The police attach importance to finding the man, but it is not true that two farthings were found in the dress pocket of the murdered woman, which would have been an important corroboration of Walton's story. Up to a late hour last evening, Pigott, the man brought from Gravesend, was detained at Commercial street, but he is known to have respectable friends, who will probably come forward to take care of him. A further communication with regard to this arrest says; Between eight and nine on Sunday night Superintendent Berry, Gravesend, had a communication made to him that there was a suspicious looking individual at the Pope's Head public house, West street. He at once despatched a sergeant to the house, and the man was arrested and taken to the police station. It was noticed that one of his hands was bad, and on examining it the superintendent said it had evidently been bitten. When asked how he accounted for his hand being in this condition, the man said that he was going down Brick lane, Whitechapel, at about four o'clock on Saturday morning last, and a woman fell down in a fit. He stopped to pick her up, when she bit him. He then hit her, and as two policemen came he ran away. Having examined the man's clothing very carefully, Dr. Whitcombe, the police surgeon, was sent for, and the doctor discovered blood spots on two shirts which the man was carrying in a bundle. the doctor also expressed an opinion that blood had been wiped from off his boots. After being cautioned, the man is alleged to have stated that the woman who bit him was at the back of a lodging house at the time. He also said that on Thursday night he slept at a lodging house in Osborne street, Whitechapel, but that on Friday he was walking about Whitechapel all night and that he came from London to Gravesend by road on Sunday. Yesterday morning he stated that his name is Wm. Henry Pigott, and that he is 52 years of age. He further said that some years ago he lived at Gravesend, his father having at one time held a position there connected with a Friendly Society. The man appears in a very nervous state. Pigott was brought up yesterday morning to London Bridge by the 10.18 train, in charge of Detective Abberline, who was met at the station by Detective Stacey, from Scotland yard. The prisoner was not handcuffed, and was smoking a clay pipe and carrying a white cloth bundle. He passed quickly out of the station, no one among the public apparently noticing him, and was driven in a four wheel cab to the police station in Commercial street. He arrived there at 12.48, and is detained pending the arrival of witnesses who have been sent for to identify him. He answers to the description of “Leather Apron” and when taken into custody was without a vest. On being examined by the police at Commercial street station, Pigott was found to be bespattered with what was believed to be blood from head to foot. In his pockets were found a few pence and a piece of lead pencil. He sits in the cell in a state of deep lethargy, taking apparently no notice of anything. His whole demeanour betokens a recent bout of excessive drinking. He adheres to his original story of having been bitten by a woman in a fit, and having thus sustained an injury to his hand. Pigott is a man about five feet four inches in height, and is respectably dressed in grey trousers, black morning coat, and a black bowler hat. His clothes, however, show signs of having been exposed to the weather, and have evidently not been brushed recently. The prisoner has a florid complexion, and wears an iron grey beard, cut in the style generally worn by Americans. Pigott has been examined by Dr. Phillips, the divisional surgeon, and pronounced insane. In due course he will be removed to the infirmary. The police have released Piser. Another account says:- So quietly did the police affect the arrest in the morning of Piser that few people saw it, and those who did had no idea that it had any connection with the recent tragedies in the district. As the news spread, however, the excitement in the district became intense, and was momentarily heightened, the crowd being largely composed of Piser's co religionists. Soon after 3 o'clock a scene of the most extraordinary character took place, the participants being in a mental condition little short of frenzy. A message was brought to Piser's house to the effect that he had been released. Hundreds of Jewish men and women were in Mulberry street. They danced about, clapped their hands, and shouted in great glee, some crying in shrill voices “Praise Jehovah!” Having exhausted these outward demonstrations of joy, they made a rush in the direction of Leman street police station in the hope of meeting and welcoming the released man. Piser appeared unwilling to face the exuberance of his friends, and did not return to the house for some time. It may be mentioned that previous to his discharge Piser was confronted by Mrs. Fiddymont and another woman who were acquainted with “Leather Apron.” They were quite unable to identify Piser as this personage, and with this the whole case against him may be said to have collapsed. From inquiries made by Superintendent Hayes, of the Windsor police, there is every reason to believe that the murdered woman was the widow of a coachman named Chapman, formerly in the service of a gentleman living near the Royal borough, and not of a veterinary surgeon as stated. Her husband held a most excellent position, but she appears to have become very dissipated while with him, and he was at last reluctantly obliged to dissociate himself from her. She lived for a time at Windsor, and eventually quitted there for London. One of her children, a girl, was educated at a respectable ladies' school in Windsor, the cost of her tuition being defrayed by the victim's sister. Chapman was taken ill two years ago, when the remittances sent to his wife seem to have ceased. During his sickness a wretched looking woman, having the appearance of a tramp, called at the Merry Wives of Windsor, in the Spital road, and inquired where he was living. She said that she was his wife, and that she had walked down from London, and had slept at a lodging house in Colnbrook on the way. She also stated that, having been told that her husband, who had discontinued sending her ten shillings a week, was ill, she had come to Windsor to ascertain if the report was true, and not merely an excuse for not sending her the money as usual. The woman quitted the house soon afterwards, and the landlord did not see her again. Chapman died over eighteen months ago, and there is little doubt that since his decease the unfortunate woman has had to depend upon her own resources for a livelihood.
