The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  The night before he left, Annie Chapman was murdered in Hanbury Street. Soon the newspapers were beginning to comment on his absence.

  Letters from Whitehall (presumably urging that he should return) forced Anderson to spend the last week of his holiday in Paris to be in closer touch with his office. He arrived in Paris on the night of the Berner Street and Mitre Square murders. Next day, an urgent appeal from the Home Secretary forced him back to London. He spent the day of his return and half the following night re-investigating the case. The next day he held a conference with Matthews, who told him that they would hold him responsible for finding the murderer, but Anderson shook his head in the negative.

  ‘I hold myself responsible,’ he said, ‘to take all legitimate means to find him.’

  He thought that the police methods so far had been ‘wholly indefensible and scandalous, for these wretched women were plying their trade under definite police protection’. He actually suggested that all prostitutes found prowling the streets after midnight should either be arrested or warned that the police would not protect them. The first course was thought to be too drastic and, according to Anderson, the second was therefore adopted.

  The Times reported that Warren sent ‘every available man’ into the East End in the hope of catching the killer red-handed.

  In charge locally was Inspector Frederick George Abberline. As so little is known of him it is worth putting down the few details that we do have. According to Scotland Yard records, he was born at Blandford, Dorset on 8 January 1843 and joined the Metropolitan Police on 5 January 1863. The records describe him as being 5 ft. 9½ins. tall, with dark brown hair, hazel eyes and a fresh complexion. More mundanely, he had a varicose vein on the left leg below the knee. His wife’s name was Emma, but when or where they were married is not known. He was appointed to N Division on joining, promoted to sergeant on 19 August 1865 (that’s very rapid indeed), transferred to Y Division on 30 October 1865 and promoted to Inspector on 10 March 1878. He was transferred to A Division and then to CO Division on 19 November 1887. He was appointed First-class Inspector on 9 February 1888 and Chief Inspector on 22 December 1890.

  Abberline had been one of the fourteen ‘appointments to divisions’ in 1878 to the newly formed CID which replaced the old Detective Department. He was a soft-spoken man, rather portly, with the appearance of a bank manager or a solicitor. He had unrivalled knowledge of the East End and for many years had been the detective inspector or Local Inspector for the Whitechapel division which he had left only on promotion to the Yard. He was the best known of the squad of detectives out scouring Whitechapel. From 30 September his main aides were Inspectors Reid, Moore and Nairn, with Sergeants Thicke, McCarthy and Pearce (all of H Division). On average each of them had to follow up about thirty main enquiries per week in inner London and the suburbs.

  After Emma Smith’s murder back in April, people had gossiped at street corners about her death, but nothing more – brutal crime and indeed murder were not uncommon in Whitechapel. There was no hint of the panic and fear that was to come, when they began to walk about in groups, with sheer terror often reflected on their faces. But gradually, as the panic wore off, they would walk about in pairs and finally they could even joke about the murders to the local policeman, as he patrolled Flower and Dean Street, and quip ‘I’m the next for Jack’ or ‘It’s either the bridge or him.’ Men often threatened, particularly in domestic disputes, ‘I’ll Whitechapel you.’

  Scotland Yard’s policy was to keep the newspapers at arm’s length. Inevitably, the press, with so few facts to work on, turned their attention to the police and individuals such as the Commissioner, but none of them – including Abberline – was permitted to give interviews. This policy was wrong. As one policeman later wrote: ‘I have always thought that the higher police authorities in ignoring the power of the Press deliberately flouted a great potential ally, and indeed might have turned that ally into an enemy.’

  The first police theory was that the murders were the work of a gang levying blackmail on these women. This soon gave way to a more likely one that they were the work of one man. Once this was realized, it became much harder for the police to get information. People thought that if this theory were true, then the personal risks to themselves were much greater because he had no accomplice to betray him. Rather than jeopardize their lives, they withheld information which might possibly have led to the killer. Inevitably, there was a continuous flow of information of sorts to the police, some of it from publicity seekers who only wanted to see their name in the newspapers, and much of it was worthless.

  Always there was the question of the killer’s motive. The victims were too poor to be worth robbing; what they had in common was that all were prostitutes.

  The Home Office refused to issue rewards for the killer’s capture. (One inquest jury pointed out with some vehemence that, if the victim had come from the West End, the reverse would have been the case.) Warren was himself in favour of offering a reward, but was overruled by the Home Secretary. There were good reasons for such a decision. Experience had shown that offering rewards was often too strong a temptation for quasi-policemen and vigilantes and led to the formation of blood-money conspiracies in which the reward money led conspirators to frame innocent men, resulting in wrongful deaths and imprisonment. The last trials for such had been in 1816 and 1818. Even so, private individuals did now offer rewards.

  As terror mounted, people’s blood lust became sharper. Among the men concentrated in and around Hanbury Street was Constable Walter Dew, who was later to achieve fame as the man who arrested Crippen. He was standing in Hanbury Street when he saw a local villain, named Squibby, who was wanted on an assault charge (he had been throwing bricks at a policeman when one of them missed him and hit a child). As he moved in closer to arrest him Squibby dashed between the legs of a horse and ran off with Dew in hot pursuit and pulling out his truncheon as he ran. Immediately the crowd jumped to the conclusion that the man he was chasing was Jack the Ripper.

  ‘Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper! Lynch him!’ they shouted.

  The cry was quickly taken up and, as they ran along, Dew could hear hundreds of feet running along behind him. In Flower and Dean Street, Squibby dashed into a lodging house and then into an adjoining building, where he was caught just as he tried to climb through a back window. Dew’s immediate reaction was to prepare for a fight. Normally, it took six or eight policemen to bring Squibby into the station, fighting all the way. This time, however, the man was shaking with fright. Outside the crowd were shouting, ‘Lynch him! Fetch him out!’

  Fortunately, other policemen reached the house in time and barricaded the door against the mob while others went to Leman Street and Commercial Street police stations for reinforcements. This only confirmed the crowd’s suspicions that the police had arrested the killer, and the shouts of ‘Lynch him’, ‘Murder him’ and ‘Get him’ became even more insistent.

  As the police tried to force their way out through the crowd the screams and shouts became more furious still. The crowd surged against the lines of policemen trying to hold them back and made determined efforts to take Squibby from them. But the police managed to bundle the prisoner into a four-wheeler cab and, with an escort, get him to the station. Even so it was nearly turned over. In Spitalfields market they were forced to scramble out of the carriage and then to force their way through a double line of policemen to Commercial Street police station, through the frenzied mob. Even when they reached the station the mob didn’t give up hope of lynching the prisoner. Several times they stormed the building. All efforts to convince them that the man had nothing to do with the murders were to no avail, and it was several hours before they calmed down.

  All this, as Dew said, because some fool, seeing a man chased by the police, had shouted ‘Jack the Ripper!’

  On 1 October, the evening after her murder, the Berner Street victim was identified as Elizabeth Stride. One of the witnesses, who was taken to t
he mortuary to identify her, knew her also as Annie Fitzgerald. She was regularly arrested for drunkenness but whenever she was charged, she always denied that she was drunk and said that she suffered from fits. The inquest was held in the Vestry Hall, Cable Street, before Mr Wynne E. Baxter. One of the witnesses, a lodger at 32 Flower and Dean Street who had known Stride for six years, said that she had always known the woman as Long Liz. This was not a reference to her height. It was a commonplace of the time that men and women surnamed Stride should have a ‘Long’ put before their first name. She was also nicknamed Mother Gum because, when she laughed, a peculiarity of her mouth always displayed the upper gum. Another witness was Sven Olsson, the vestryman of the Swedish Church in Trinity Square, who had known her even longer, for about seventeen years.

  Her maiden name was Elizabeth Gustafsdotter. She was born on 27 November 1843 in the parish of Torslanda, north of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was the daughter of a farmer called Gustaf Ericsson and his wife Beata Carlsdotter. Their farm was called Stora (‘Big’) Tumlehed. Elizabeth had one sister and two brothers. She was confirmed in Torslanda’s church in 1859. On 14 October 1860, when she left school and was evidently old enough to work away from home, she took out a certificate of altered residence from the parish and moved to the parish of Carl Johan in Gothenburg, where she worked as a domestic until 1864 for a workman named Lars Fredrik Olofsson, who had four children. She moved again and on 2 February 1862 took out a new certificate to the Cathedral parish in Gothenburg but the details of her home address or place of work are not known. She still gave her profession as domestic.

  In March 1865 she was registered as a prostitute by the Gothenburg police. The following month she gave birth to a stillborn girl. Possibly her pregnancy had forced her on to the streets as the only way of getting a living. According to the official ledger – she was entry No. 97 – in October the same year she was living in Philgaten in Östra Haga, a suburb of Gothenburg. She was described as being slightly built with blue eyes, brown hair, straight nose and oval face. The register entries of October and November 1865 are for notification of communicable diseases. She had twice been in Kurhuset, the hospital for venereal diseases, the last time three weeks before. The 17 October entry specifies chancre (venereal ulcer) but the entries for 3, 7, 10 and 14 November state that she was ‘Healthy’. After the last entry she was told that she no longer had to report to the police.

  On 7 February 1866 she took out a new certificate of altered residence from the Cathedral parish to the Swedish parish in London. According to the certificate she could read reasonably well but had a poor understanding of the Bible and catechism. She was entered in the London register on 10 July 1866, an unmarried woman. Her first employment is thought to have been with a family in Hyde Park. In 1869 she is supposed to have married John Thomas Stride, a carpenter living at Sheerness. She subsequently claimed that he, with two of their nine children, was among the more than six hundred drowned when the pleasure steamer Princess Alice was rammed and sunk by a collier off Woolwich in 1878. A check of the passenger list reveals that nobody of the name of Stride was on board, however, and the only case recorded of a father and two children drowning was that of an accountant with two sons aged ten and seven.

  For the three years before her death she had been living in Fashion Street with a waterside labourer named Michael Kidney. Occasionally she had earned some money by sewing and charring but, whenever the mood took her, or the restraints of their life together became too much for her, she would drift away from him for a while. During the time they were together they had separated altogether for about five months. The cause was always the same: drink. Kidney never went after her as he always knew that she would return to him in her own good time. On the previous Tuesday she had walked out on him. He didn’t see her again until he identified her body in the mortuary.

  She seems to have gone direct to 32 Flower and Dean Street which is where she was seen the next night by Dr Thomas Barnardo, who was himself to become a Ripper suspect, being then in his forties, a medical man and a surgeon with an intimate knowledge of the streets and East End low-life. He wrote to The Times :

  Only four days before the recent murders I visited No. 32 Flower and Dean Street, the house in which the unhappy woman Stride occasionally lodged. I had been examining many of the common lodging houses in Bethnal Green that night, endeavouring to elicit from the inmates their opinions upon a certain aspect of the subject. In the kitchen of No. 32 there were many persons, some of them being girls and women of the same unhappy class as that to which poor Elizabeth Stride belonged. The company soon recognised me, and the conversation turned upon the previous murders. The female inmates of the kitchen seemed thoroughly frightened at the dangers to which they were presumably exposed. In an explanatory fashion I put before them the scheme which had suggested itself to my mind, by which children at all events could be saved from the contamination of the common lodging houses and the streets, and so to some extent cut off the supply which feeds the vast ocean of misery in this great city.

  The pathetic part of my story is, that my remarks were manifestly followed with deep interest by all the women. Not a single scoffing voice was raised in ridicule or opposition. One poor creature, who had evidently been drinking, exclaimed somewhat bitterly to the following effect: ‘We’re all up to no good, and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next!’ And then she added, ‘If anybody had helped the likes of us long ago we would never have come to this!’

  Impressed by the unusual manner of the people, I could not help noticing their appearance somewhat closely, and I saw how evidently some of them were moved. I have since visited the mortuary in which were lying the remains of the poor woman Stride, and I at once recognised her as one of those who stood around me in the kitchen of the common lodging house on the occasion of my visit last Wednesday week.

  The inquest brought a few new surprises.

  Dr Blackwell had been called at 1.10 on the Sunday morning to go to Berner Street. Stride’s body was still warm when he examined it, apart from the hands, which were cold.

  The right hand was lying on the chest, and was smeared inside and out with blood. It was quite open. The left hand was lying on the ground and was partially closed, and contained a small packet of cachous wrapped in tissue paper. There were no rings or marks of rings on the fingers. The appearance of the face was quite placid, and the mouth was slightly open. There was a check silk scarf round the neck, the bow of which was turned to the left side and pulled tightly. There was a long incision in the neck, which exactly corresponded with the lower border of the scarf. The lower edge of the scarf was slightly frayed, as if by a sharp knife. The incision in the neck commenced on the left side, 2½ inches below the angle of the jaw, and almost in a direct line with it. It nearly severed the vessels on that side.

  He thought that the murderer had probably pulled her backwards by the scarf, but whether she had been standing up when he cut her throat or lying down he could not say. She would not have been able to call out after her windpipe was cut and would probably have bled to death in about one to one and a half minutes. She had haemorrhaged through the partial severance of the left carotid artery.

  Both Dr Blackwell and Dr Phillips had performed the post-mortem at St George’s mortuary on the Monday afternoon in the presence of two other doctors. Phillips said that apart from the injury to the throat there were no other marks on the body except some healing sores.

  The stomach was large, and the mucous membrane only congested. It contained partly-digested food, apparently consisting of cheese, potatoes and farinaceous powder. All the teeth on the left lower jaw were absent. On Tuesday I again went to the mortuary to observe the marks on the shoulder. [There was bruising over both shoulders and under the collar bone on the front of the chest indicating that she had been seized by the shoulders and forced down onto the ground. From the bloodstains it was obvious that her throat wasn’t cut until she was lying down.] I
found in the pocket of the underskirt of the deceased the following articles – key as if belonging to a padlock, a small piece of lead pencil, a pocket comb, a broken piece of comb, a metal spoon, some buttons and a hook. Examining her jacket, I found that, while there was a small amount of mud on the right side, the left was well plastered with mud.

  Both he and Dr Blackwell commented on a knife which had been found that same night in the Whitechapel Road by another witness, Thomas Corman, at 1.20 a.m. A policeman saw him find it outside a laundry shop where it was lying on the bottom step of the doorway. A bloodstained handkerchief was tied around the handle with string. The blade was dagger-shaped and about nine to ten inches long. It was a slicing knife and came from a chandler’s shop. The blade was rounded at the point and both doctors thought it a highly unlikely weapon for the murderer to have used as it could be used only one way – although it would have been capable of making the incisions in the neck.

  The most important evidence to be heard was from three witnesses, one of them a policeman, who had seen Stride within an hour or so of the murder. The first to be cross-examined was William Marshall, a labourer in an indigo warehouse.

  MARSHALL: On Sunday night I saw the body of deceased in the mortuary. I recognised it as that of a woman I saw on Saturday evening about three doors off from where I am living in Berner Street. That was about a quarter to twelve. She was standing talking to a man. I recognise her both by her face and dress. There was no lamp near and I did not see the face of the man she was talking to. He had on a small black coat and dark trousers. He seemed to me to be a middle-aged man.