by Robert House
Watkins’s beat took him back into Mitre Square at roughly 1:44 a.m. After entering from Mitre Street, he then turned right to continue counterclockwise around the square’s perimeter. When Watkins turned his bulls-eye lantern toward the dark southern corner of the square, he saw a sight that would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was the body of a woman, horribly mutilated. “I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding,” Watkins later said. The woman’s stomach had been “ripped up, [and] she was lying in a pool of blood.”7
Watkins ran across the square to the Kearley and Tonge warehouse, where he found the night watchman George Morris inside cleaning offices. “For God’s sake, mate,” Watkins cried, “come to my assistance!”
“Stop till I get my lamp,” Morris replied. “What is the matter?”
“Oh, dear,” Watkins said. “Here is another woman cut to pieces.”8 The two men went out into the square and briefly looked at the body, then Watkins told Morris to run and get help. The night watchman took off, blowing his whistle as he went up Mitre Street. In nearby Aldgate High Street, Morris found P.C. Harvey and told him about the murder, which undoubtedly came as a shock to Harvey, because he had looked into Mitre Square from the end of Church Passage only three or four minutes earlier. Harvey signaled to a second police constable across the street, and the three men returned to Mitre Square. Harvey then dispatched the other constable to fetch Dr. George William Sequeira in nearby Jewry Street.
News of the murder spread quickly, and by about 2 a.m., two doctors and numerous detectives and police constables, some of whom had heard Morris’s whistle, were converging on Mitre Square.9 Dr. Sequeira was one of the first to arrive on the scene, at just five minutes before 2 a.m. City Detective Daniel Halse had been standing with two other detectives near St. Botolph’s Church on the corner of Houndsditch when they heard about the murder a little before 2 a.m. The three detectives ran to Mitre Square and arrived only a few minutes after Dr. Sequeira. Halse gave “instructions to have the neighborhood searched and every man examined”; then he and several other detectives and constables spread out to search the surrounding area for clues and suspicious characters.10
Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown arrived with his assistant at 2:18 a.m. and did an on-site examination of the body. Eddowes was lying in the all-too-familiar position of the Ripper’s other victims: she was on her back, with her legs apart, and her right leg bent at the knee. Her clothes were drawn up, exposing the abdomen and the genitals, and the upper part of her dress was torn open. She was even more viciously mutilated than Annie Chapman had been—as P.C. Watkins later put it, “She was ripped up like a pig in the market.”11 Her throat had been deeply cut, and there was a long incision from the abdomen to the rectum, which cut through the vagina. In addition, her intestines, “smeared with some feculent matter,” had been removed and placed over her right shoulder. There were also cuts through her eyelids, cheeks, lips, nose and one earlobe. In addition, both the left kidney and the uterus had been removed and apparently taken by the killer.12
At 2:55 a.m., P.C. Alfred Long discovered an important clue in Goulston Street, a largely Jewish thoroughfare just a few minutes east of Mitre Square. The street was the site of an outdoor market where Jewish merchants sold food and clothing from stalls, and, as such, it “formed part of the commercial centre of the Jewish East End.”13 As P.C. Long was walking along the northern end of the street, he noticed a rag smeared with blood and fecal matter lying inside the entrance to 108–119 Wentworth Dwellings, a “model dwelling” building largely inhabited by Jews, many of whom were secondhand clothing dealers at the open-air market. The rag turned out to be a piece of Eddowes’s apron, which the killer had apparently severed “by a clean cut,” then used to wipe the blood from his hands and knife. Above the apron, scrawled in chalk “in a good schoolboy hand” on the inside of the entryway was an enigmatic message: “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”14
Long made a quick search of the staircases and then, after informing adjoining beat constables of his discovery, went to the Commercial Street Police Station and gave the bloody rag to the inspector on duty.15 As word of the discovery spread, members of both the City and the Metropolitan Police forces went to Goulston Street. The fact that the cryptic message was directly above the discarded bloody apron seemed to suggest it had been written by the murderer himself, and the police considered the writing an important clue. Inspector James McWilliam, head of the City Police Detective Department, was at the crime scene in Mitre Square when he first learned of the graffito, and he immediately relayed instructions that the writing should be photographed. Detective Halse, by then in Goulston Street, received the order and sent for a photographer.
Shortly before 5 a.m., Commissioner Warren arrived at Leman Street Police Station to consult with H Division police superintendent Thomas Arnold. Arnold had already seen the graffito in person and was concerned that if the writing was left much longer the public would catch wind of it, and a riot against the Jews might ensue. He proposed to Warren that the writing should be erased, but insisted that Warren had to make the decision, so Warren decided to go to Goulston Street to assess the situation himself.
According to Detective Halse, by the time the police commissioner arrived on Goulston Street, the people were already “bringing out their stalls, which they did very early on the Sunday morning.”16 As Warren later wrote in a report to the Home Office,
There were several Police around the spot when I arrived. . . . A discussion took place whether the writing could be left covered up or otherwise or whether any portion of it could be left for an hour until it could be photographed, but after taking into consideration the excited state of the population in London generally at the time the strong feeling which had been excited against the Jews, and the fact that in a short time there would be a large concourse of the people in the streets and having before me the Report that if it was left there the house was likely to be wrecked (in which from my own observation I entirely concurred) I considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once, having taken a copy.17
The message was copied down, but there was no time to photograph it, and the writing was wiped out at 5:30 a.m.18 Warren came under harsh criticism for his decision. City Inspector James McWilliam, for example, reportedly told Warren that the erasure of the message was “a fatal mistake.” In his report to the Home Office, Warren defended his decision and added, “I do not hesitate myself to say that if the writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.”19 The extent to which the police went to suppress an anti-Jewish “onslaught”—essentially destroying one of the few actual clues in the entire case—is telling. The threat of pogroms had again reared its ugly head.
The Goulston Street graffito is one of the most frequently debated aspects of the Whitechapel murders case. Some people have naturally suggested that the graffito had nothing to do with the murders at all, and that it was merely a coincidence that the Ripper had dropped the apron near it. In Chief Inspector Swanson’s summary report of the Eddowes murder, the chalked writing was described as “blurred,” which led some researchers to speculate that it was not very recent.20 On the other hand, Detective Halse said at the inquest that “he assumed that the writing was recent, because from the number of persons living in the tenement he believed it would have been rubbed out had it been there for any time.”21 In any case, the police took the writing very seriously, and both Sir Robert Anderson and Henry Moore believed that the message had been written by the killer.22 Today we know nothing more about the matter than the police did at the time, and the debate continues.
The intended meaning of the graffito was a subject of much debate. Commissioner Warren believed that the graffito was “evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews” but admitted that the wording of the message was difficult to interpret. “The idiom does no
t appear to be English, French, or German,” he wrote, “but it might possibly be that of an Irishman speaking a foreign language. It seems to be the idiom of Spain or Italy.”23 In short, Warren thought the author of the graffito was someone whose native language was not English.
Among the police, the two main interpretations of the message were that either it was written by a Jew boasting about committing the murders, or that it was written by a gentile as a deliberate ruse, to cast blame for the murders on the Jews. For example, as Samuel Montagu wrote in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle, “If the ‘handwriting on the wall’ was done by the monster himself, can there be any doubt of his intention to throw the pursuers on the wrong track, while showing hostility to the Jews in the vicinity?” Given that the wording of the message is so vague, it is important to note that in either of these interpretations, the author of the message was ostensibly a Jew, bragging about committing the murders.
“The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” We might consider the implications of such a message from the perspective of someone like Aaron Kozminski. The Russian Jewish immigrants in the East End were a group that had been unfairly blamed for years. In Russia, they had been blamed for numerous social problems and were accused of being leeches who exploited the Russian peasants. They were blamed for both the assassination of the czar and for the anti-Jewish pogroms that followed in its wake. After arriving in London, this same group was once again blamed for various social ills in the East End, including unfair competition (most notably, in the tailoring trade) and taking jobs from the native-born English residents. After the murder of Annie Chapman, the Jews were again, predictably, blamed for the Ripper murders. In all of these instances, arguably, the Jews were wrongly blamed. In 1888, an East End immigrant Jew might very well have said, “We are being blamed for nothing!”
The message was located in a spot where it may have been calculated to do the most damage. As noted, Goulston Street was a site of particular relevance to Jews. Just one street to the west was Petticoat Lane, the largest Jewish market in London, described as “a seething, boiling, bubbling mass of poor humanity.”24 Goulston Street was the site of the chazar mark, the Jewish employment market where master tailors went to find “greeners” for their workshops. The street was also the site of a major antisweating meeting in early 1888. If the murderer was an immigrant Jew, then the message may have been intended as a defiant statement that the Jews had been wrongly made into scapegoats (blamed for nothing). Was the murderer essentially saying, “Now I will give you something to blame the Jews for . . . we will not be blamed for nothing”? Interpreted thus, the graffito is a chilling statement, both irreverent and wicked.
In the end, despite the confusion about the meaning of the graffito, one thing at least is certain—Jack the Ripper left the bloody apron in Goulston Street after murdering Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square. This gives us one of the few real clues in the entire case, because it indicates the direction the killer walked after committing the murder—in other words, his probable “getaway” route and, in all likelihood, the direction of his home. I will discuss this later in a chapter on modern geographic profiling. For now, suffice to say, the apron was deposited along the most direct route toward Aaron Kozminski’s home on Greenfield Street.
12
Lonesome October
As morning dawned on September 30, talk of the murders spread like wildfire throughout the East End, and the streets once again became packed with people. Large crowds gathered in Berner Street and Mitre Square, and police guarded both crime scenes and let no one in to see them. The murder sites had by then become a tourist attraction even to the more fashionable residents of London. Denizens of West London took “a lively interest in the doings of the Whitechapel murderer,” the Observer reported, and “a very large number of cabs and private carriages containing sightseers have visited the scenes of the tragedies.”1
On the following day, the Central News Agency received a second correspondence signed “Jack the Ripper”—this time it was a postcard, again written in red ink, and in the same handwriting as the letter. It read,
I wasnt codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. you’ll hear about Saucy Jackys work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had not the time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper2
The fact that the writer of the postcard seemed to have an intimate knowledge of several details of the murders made the police take both this correspondence and the previously received “Dear Boss” letter very seriously. Both were clearly written by the same person, and the statement “number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off” sounded like an accurate description of the Stride murder. For several reasons, however, the police at once doubted the authenticity of both letters, and as Commissioner Charles Warren wrote to the Home Office, “At present I think the whole thing is a hoax but of course we are bound to try & ascertain the writer in any case.”3 Likewise among modern researchers, the general consensus is that both letters were hoaxes. For one thing, it has been pointed out that a hoaxer could have learned the details of both murders from the newspapers. In fact, according to both Robert Anderson and Inspector John Littlechild of the Special Branch, the police discovered the hoaxer’s identity. As Anderson later wrote, the letters were “the creation of an enterprising London journalist.”4 Littlechild suggested that the author of the “Dear Boss” letter was either Tom Bulling or Charles Moore, both of the Central News Agency, and he noted, “It was a smart piece of journalistic work.”5 In the weeks and months to come, the police would receive numerous letters from people claiming to be the murderer. Almost all of them were considered to be hoaxes. Meanwhile, the new murders provided ample fodder for the press, and accounts of both inquests were reported extensively in several papers. As before, the papers sold like hotcakes.
The month of October seems to have been a crucial time for the investigation, and there was a growing sense that the police were on the verge of a breakthrough. In the days immediately after the double event, the Metropolitan police conducted thorough house-to-house inquiries in the immediate vicinity of Berner Street and distributed handbills to residents asking for information. As noted by authors Stewart Evans and Donald Rumbelow, these house-to-house inquiries “undoubtedly, took in the adjoining streets.”6 Thus, it is likely that they included the homes of Isaac Abrahams at 74 Greenfield Street and Matilda and Morris Lubnowski at 16 Greenfield Street, just one block north of the site of the Stride murder on Berner Street. The police may have interviewed members of the Kozminski family in October, as a matter of procedure, and if so, they probably first came across Aaron Kozminski at this time. In any case, Kozminski’s family certainly would have seen one of the thousands of police handbills asking for information regarding “any person to whom suspicion is attached.”
Sometime around October, Robert Anderson finally returned to London to take charge of his duties as head of the CID.7 “On my return,” Anderson later wrote, “I found the Jack the Ripper scare in full swing.”8 It is likely that Inspector Donald Swanson briefed Anderson on the status of the investigation, then Anderson undertook “reinvestigating the whole case,” as he put it. When Anderson met Commissioner Warren and Home Secretary Henry Matthews for a conference on the investigation, Matthews told him, “We hold you responsible to find the murderer.” Anderson declined the responsibility but replied that he would hold himself “responsible to take all legitimate means to find him.”9
By this time, there was considerable pressure on the Home Office to solve the case, and it had been repeatedly suggested that the government should offer a reward for information leading to the murderer’s capture. Yet the Home Secretary refused to do so. Matthews would come under attack for this position, but he never changed his mind. The City Police, on the other hand, did offer a reward, and on October 5 the Police Gazette reported that “A
reward of £500 will be paid by the Commissioner of the City of London Police, to any person (other than a person belonging to a Police Force in the United Kingdom) who shall give such information as shall lead to the discovery and conviction of the murderer or murderers.”10 Additional rewards were offered by a variety of institutions, groups, and private individuals, until a total of close to £1,500 was available to anyone who could provide information that would lead to a conviction of the Ripper. As a result, the police found themselves inundated with “clues” and tips submitted by concerned citizens, who claimed to have knowledge pointing to the perpetrator of the crimes.
On October 8, the day of Kate Eddowes’s funeral, a large crowd assembled outside the mortuary on Golden Lane in the City of London. The streets were filled with so many people that the road was effectively blocked, while other spectators looked on from windows and the rooftops of adjoining buildings. At 1:30 p.m., the funeral procession emerged. Eddowes’s polished elm coffin was carried in an open glass car, followed by a mourning coach in which rode Eddowes’s boyfriend, John Kelly, and four of the victim’s sisters. Thousands of people followed the cortege as police conducted the carriages with some difficulty to the City of London boundary, then along Whitechapel Road past St. Mary’s church, where another large crowd was assembled, and continuing through Mile End, Bow, and Stratford. All along the eight-mile route, people stood to watch and express their sympathy for the Ripper’s latest victim, and it was said that some five hundred mourners attended the interment at Ilford Cemetery.
Because the Eddowes murder had occurred within the boundary of the City of London, the crime fell to the jurisdiction of the City Police Force. Both the MET and the City Police were now working the Ripper case together, for better or worse. James McWilliam, the head of the Detective Department for the City of London Police, wrote, “The department is co-operating with the Metropolitan Police in the matter, and Chief Inspector Swanson and I meet daily and confer on the subject.”11 Swanson likewise noted that the Metropolitan Police “have daily acquainted the City Police with the subjects and natures of their enquiries.”12 Several liaison officers, including a City detective named Robert Sagar, were deputed for daily meetings between the City Police and the Metropolitan Police at Leman Street Station.
