Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  The cutting of Commercial Street in the 1840s and the redevelopments inaugurated by the Artisans’ Dwelling Act of 1875 cleared much slum housing. At the same time blocks of tenement flats, like the first Peabody Buildings in Commercial Street in 1864, were being erected to provide decent homes for the working poor. The effects of such developments were not entirely beneficial. Slum clearances tended to drive the poor into surrounding streets which were themselves overcrowded, and model dwellings offered accommodation at rates only the most prosperous artisans could afford to pay.

  Jewish immigration is generally held to have improved the character of some streets. A colony of Iberian Jews, rich and respected Jews of the Sephardim, settled in London during the Protectorate and in the reign of Charles II. The Ashkenazim settlement in the capital dates from the close of the 17th century and their first synagogue, in Duke’s Place, Aldgate, was established in 1722. Thereafter every continental upheaval in which the Jews were sufferers brought influxes of refugees into England. The Russian pogroms of 1881–1882 and Bismarck’s expulsion of alien Poles from Prussia in 1886 encouraged a new wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. Low rents, the proximity of the central business district and the presence of an existing Jewish community drew the newcomers in large numbers to Whitechapel, where the streets they overran became, by and large, quiet, law-abiding and clean. ‘They have already taken one end of Great Pearl Street,’ wrote Charles Booth, ‘and it is probably the Jews alone who will turn out the prostitutes from the end that is still bad.’19

  Notwithstanding these changes crime and prostitution lingered amidst the poverty and squalor, especially in parts of Spitalfields. On Booth’s ‘Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889’ Dorset Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, George Street and Great Pearl Street were all marked in black, denoting that they were occupied by the lowest class, that they were ‘vicious, semi-criminal’. In these overcrowded, labyrinthine slums, where policemen were traditionally greeted with suspicion if not outright hostility, the Whitechapel killer had chosen a perfect hunting ground.

  The methods by which the police were obliged to seek their quarry within this human warren were relatively crude. Although detectives had been appointed at Scotland Yard as early as 1842 the popular opposition to the use of plain clothes men as spies and agent provocateurs among their fellow citizens and the organization of the Metropolitan Police as a preventive force retarded the growth of the detective branch. The CID had been established in 1878 but there were still few aids to detection beyond photography and plaster of Paris for taking impressions of footprints. The second, in the Whitechapel context, was irrelevant and photography would be employed but sparingly during the investigation of the murders. It was not even the usual practice, for example, to photograph the bodies of victims before they were moved and in only one of the murders (that of Mary Jane Kelly) does it seem to have been done. It was possible in 1888 to identify blood as mammalian but not to prove that it was human or classify it by blood group. Galton would not publish his work on fingerprints until 1892, the year after the last of the Whitechapel murders, and there would be no scientific laboratory at Scotland Yard until 1934.

  Where inquiry into the history and circumstances of the victim revealed possible motives for murder these, in turn, suggested suspects. Otherwise the success of the Victorian detective largely rested upon a thorough knowledge of the local villains, upon the evidence of informers, and upon much legwork tracing and interviewing witnesses.

  The Whitechapel murderer, however, may not have been a professional villain and probably worked alone. With only one possible exception there were no eye-witnesses to his attacks because they were committed at dead of night and in secluded locations. Indeed his victims, prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark or unfrequented byways and yards for sex, greatly facilitated his crimes. Most baffling of all to the Victorian detectives, there was no obvious motive.

  In the age of Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and Ted Bundy we are familiar with the phenomenon of the sexual serial murderer but to our ancestors in the 1880s it was relatively unknown. Precedents of the Whitechapel or Jack the Ripper murders are alleged from the United States and Continental Europe but they are ill-researched and seem to have acquired only local notoriety. Certainly there had been nothing like the Whitechapel crimes in recent English experience. There our most ancient citizens would have had to think back nearly eighty years, to the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811, in order to recall murders at all comparable. Even then, horrific as the slaughter of the Marr and Williamson households had undoubtedly been, the motive for the atrocities had evidently been the obvious one of plunder. More, the Ratcliff Highway murderers had obligingly left their weapons behind them and it was the tracing of one of these, a bloodstained maul, to the Pear Tree public house in Wapping that eventually fixed suspicion upon John Williams, a seaman who lodged there.20 The Whitechapel killer, on the other hand, evinced no obvious motive and left no clue. In such a case orthodox police methods were almost futile.

  During the investigation of the murders the police displayed a marked reluctance to share their knowledge with the press or with coroners’ inquiries. The late Stephen Knight thought that this secrecy was unique to the Whitechapel killings and read into it evidence that the police were party to a government sponsored ‘cover-up’ of the Jack the Ripper affair. Knight – and for that matter most other writers on the case – was altogether ignorant, however, of the Yard’s policy on press publicity in the 1880s.

  The fact is that where the publication of information might secure the arrest of a known culprit the police were only too willing to make disclosures to the press. ‘The press is a power in the detection of crime which we must not omit to take into account,’ wrote Howard Vincent, the first Director of the CID, ‘. . . and when publicity is desirable their help is invaluable. Indeed, if the identity of a culprit is clear, and the importance of a case is sufficient, the question of his capture is reduced to a mere question of time and money.’21 Perhaps the first instance of this was the case of Percy LeFroy, the murderer of Isaac Gold in a train on the London–Brighton line in 1881. LeFroy was arrested after police had issued a portrait of him to the press.

  But during the hunt for a killer whose identity had not yet been established it was not the general policy of the CID to make known its discoveries. Vincent himself had laid down that rule:

  Police must not on any account give any information whatever to gentlemen connected with the press, relative to matters within police knowledge, or relative to duties to be performed or orders received, or communicate in any manner, either directly or indirectly, with editors, or reporters of newspapers, on any matter connected with the public service, without express and special authority . . . The slightest deviation from this rule may completely frustrate the ends of justice, and defeat the endeavour of superior officers to advance the welfare of the public service. Individual merit will be invariably recognized in due course, but officers who without authority give publicity to discoveries, tending to produce sensation and alarm, show themselves wholly unworthy of their posts.22

  From the first the police adhered to this principle in their investigation of the Whitechapel murders. The East London Advertiser, hungry for details about the Tabram case, complained on 18 August that the police were ‘very reticent upon the matter generally’ and ‘not disposed to assist in the publication of details.’ Three weeks later, fishing for copy on the Nichols murder, the Advertiser encountered the same attitude: ‘the authorities are extremely reticent and guarded in all the information they tender, and most of the particulars and information has to be obtained from other sources.’23

  On Saturday, 1 September, Mr Wynne E. Baxter, Coroner for the South Eastern District of Middlesex, opened the Nichols inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute. Baxter, fresh from his Scandinavian tour, attended resplendent in black and white checked trousers, dark
coat, dazzling white waistcoat and crimson scarf. In ferreting out the facts of the case he was indefatigable. And his zeal was, of course, troublesome to the detectives who wished to suppress the details of their inquiries. Three witnesses, Edward Walker, PC Neil and Dr Llewellyn, were heard on the first day. At the end of the proceedings Inspector Abberline asked for a lengthy adjournment ‘as certain things were coming to the knowledge of the police and they wished for time to make inquiries.’ The coroner and his jury, however, wanted to hear more so Baxter did not accede to the request. Instead he adjourned the inquest until the following Monday, the next working day. It was only after the second day’s proceedings, during which another eight witnesses made depositions, that the coroner consented to adjourn the inquest for a fortnight in order to provide the police with ‘an opportunity of obtaining further evidence.’24

  Today pedlars of the ‘cover-up’ theory represent police secrecy in the Ripper case as an integral part of a sinister conspiracy of silence designed to conceal the involvement of persons close to the throne. Back in the 1880s it was naturally resented by journalists and they roundly condemned the force for being ‘either sulkily silent or barrenly communicative on topics concerning which the public, through their journalistic delegates, justifiably demand ample information.’25 There were, nevertheless, some perfectly sound reasons for the CID’s policy.

  In a practical context, for example, it was crucial for the detectives to pursue their inquiries before memories faded or clues were obliterated and their frustration at having to spend precious days dallying in attendance at the coroner’s court is understandable. The publication of evidence, moreover, was not invariably in the public interest. In the case of sensational atrocities like those in Whitechapel there was a real danger that publicity would foster panic and that the publication of detailed medical evidence would inspire imitators. The Ripper murders were, as we shall see, to generate copy killings and the baleful influence of Whitechapel began to appear soon after the Buck’s Row tragedy. The first such incident concerned Henry Hummerston, a Hoxton labourer, and his mistress Eliza Smith. Hummerston came home drunk, quarrelsome and sporting a black eye. He asked Eliza who had given him his black eye and she replied that she did not know. The befuddled labourer then insisted that she had done it and commenced to abuse and beat her. Eliza fled into the back yard but Hummerston caught her there, knocked her down and kicked her. He then drew a table knife across her throat and swore that he would make a second ‘Buck’s Row murder’ out of it. This attack, fortunately, was not fatal. Eliza was rescued by her neighbours and suffered only a slight cut which passed halfway round her throat on the right side. Hummerston himself was sentenced on 5 September at Worship Street to six months’ hard labour for assault. But at the very least it demonstrated the sinister effect that gruesome murders can exert upon weak or disturbed minds.26 Finally, as Howard Vincent had pointed out, there was always the possibility that a police investigation might be hindered by the publicity accorded to the activities of detectives. A notable instance of this, at the beginning of the Whitechapel investigation, occurred in the case of ‘Leather Apron’.

  During the hunt for Polly Nichols’ killer police inquiries amongst prostitutes revealed that the Whitechapel whores walked in fear of a man they knew as ‘Leather Apron’. His real name was Jack Pizer and in various parts of the metropolis he had for some time been levying tribute from prostitutes and beating those who resisted his demands. Obviously the detectives were anxious to trace him, if only to eliminate him from their inquiries, and a careful search of common lodging houses began. But then, whether from street gossip or from the unguarded remarks of some policeman, the press learned of ‘Leather Apron’.

  The Star was the prime offender. On 5 and 6 September it devoted long and lurid articles to the subject. The first was headlined:

  ‘LEATHER APRON.’

  THE ONLY NAME LINKED WITH THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS.

  A NOISELESS MIDNIGHT TERROR.

  The Strange Character who Prowls About Whitechapel After Midnight – Universal Fear Among the Women – Slippered Feet and a Sharp Leather-knife.

  It is difficult in a short space to do justice to the Star’s articles on Leather Apron. They seem to have been pieced together from the title tattle of whores, lodging house proprietors and tradesmen and almost no reliable substantiation exists for any part of them.

  Leather Apron, according to the Star, was a Jewish slipper maker who had abandoned his trade in favour of bullying prostitutes at night. The women did not know his real name. But they were able to furnish the newspaper with a description: ‘From all accounts he is five feet four or five inches in height and wears a dark, close-fitting cap. He is thickset, and has an unusually thick neck. His hair is black, and closely clipped, his age being about 38 or 40. He has a small, black moustache. The distinguishing feature of his costume is a leather apron, which he always wears, and from which he gets his nickname. His expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent.’ A George Yard grocer, who had supposedly known Leather Apron for six years, added that he was ‘unquestionably mad’ and that ‘anybody who met him face to face would know it . . . his eyes are never still, but are always shifting uneasily, and he never looks anybody in the eye.’

  The reputation the Star bestowed upon Leather Apron was as villainous as his face. For several years he had subjected the prostitutes of Whitechapel to a reign of terror. His method was to go to public houses after midnight, peep in through the window to select his victim and then wait outside in the dark for them to come out. The hapless whores rarely knew of his presence until he was upon them for, although they could not tell what he wore on his feet, he had the uncanny ability to tread quite noiselessly about the streets. Victims were kicked, bruised, injured and terrified but not, as far as the newspaper could determine, cut. It was told, however, that Leather Apron always carried a sharp knife, the kind used to trim leather, and that he frequently menaced women with it. Thus when ‘Widow Annie’ encountered him, two weeks since as she was crossing the square near the London Hospital, he drew his knife upon her and threatened, with his ugly grin and malignant eyes, to ‘rip her up.’

  The Star was as ignorant as the police as to the whereabouts of Leather Apron. He was everywhere and he was nowhere. According to the newspaper he had even been temporarily in police custody on Sunday, 2 September, but there is no corroboration of it in police records. At the fourpenny lodging house off Brick Lane, where he frequently slept, the people denied he was there and appeared disposed to shield him. Rumour was rife. One of the Star’s informants claimed to have seen him lately in Leather Lane, Holborn. Another swore that she descried him crossing London Bridge into Southwark, ‘as stealthily as usual, with head bent, his skimpy coat turned up about his ears, and looking as if he were in a desperate hurry.’ Two women in Philpot Street told the Star’s reporter that Leather Apron would most likely be found in Commercial Street, opposite the Princess Alice Tavern, it will be necessary.’ they added, ‘to look into all the shadows, as if he is there he will surely be out of sight.’27

  Having read these hair-raising articles few of the Star’s patrons can have doubted that Leather Apron and the Whitechapel killer were one. Yet the only direct evidence offered by the paper was a piece of false gossip to the effect that Leather Apron had been seen walking in Baker’s Row with Polly Nichols on the morning of her murder. Contemporary police reports, indeed, contain no corroboration of the Star’s allegations other than the bare acknowledgement that Pizer bullied prostitutes for money, and they took pains to point out that there was no evidence implicating him in the killings. ‘At present,’ wrote Helson on 7 September, ‘there is no evidence whatever against him.’ Twelve days later Abberline concurred: ‘there was no evidence to connect him with the murder.’28

  The effect of the pre
ss campaign against Leather Apron was twofold. It alerted Pizer to the fact that he was being sought by the police and it stirred up popular feeling against him. The prospect of falling victim to mob vengeance scared him more than the police and he went into hiding amongst his relatives. In this way the best efforts of the detectives were frustrated.

  The arm’s length policy applied by the CID to the press rested, therefore, upon bitter experience and sound reasoning. But it had its disadvantages and some of the detectives of the time, notably Walter Dew and Sir Melville Macnaghten, later publicly disavowed it.29 In particular the CID, by embracing such a policy, largely denied itself the undoubted benefits that publicity can bestow upon police investigations. Just how valuable the publication of clues can be, even in cases in which the identity of the culprit is unknown, has been dramatically demonstrated in our own day by the spectacular success since 1984 of the BBC’s Crimewatch UK. The first 28 programmes, covering 288 cases, resulted in 81 arrests and 9 people were charged with murder.30 The attitude of the police to the press, moreover, exacerbated the already strained relationship between the two. On the part of the police it implied mistrust which the responsible press found galling. And journalists, unable to satisfy their inquiries at the police stations, were reduced to all manner of dubious practices in order to fill their columns – trying to loosen the tongues of police constables with drink and bribes, shadowing detectives to discover and interview their witnesses, scavenging gossip and hearsay about the streets and, of course, romancing shamelessly.

  Since the Clerkenwell explosion of 1867 the number of constables on the beat had been increased. By 1888, moreover, most police stations had been connected by the telegraph, and that autumn saw the appearance in the metropolis of ten experimental ‘police alarms’. These were telephone boxes, affixed to houses or stout posts, to which constables were provided with keys. But such improvements had brought no sense of increased security to the citizens of East London. There, even before the murders, the inadequacy of police protection had been a frequent complaint, one that the lurking menace of a homicidal maniac immediately revived in the autumn of 1888. Henry Tibbatts, a local man with business premises within a stone’s throw of Whitechapel church, was writing in the Daily News as early as 3 September about ‘shamefully inadequate’ policing. ‘I myself have witnessed street fights amounting almost to murder,’ he contended, ‘in the neighbourhood of Osborn Street, Fashion Street, &c., and never at any of these critical periods are the police to be found.’31 Not yet, however, had disquiet turned into panic. Those primarily responsible for the policing of the metropolis were content to leave the matter to their subordinates. Matthews was enjoying his respite from parliamentary duties. Warren was on vacation in the south of France. And on 7 September Dr Anderson left the capital on his way to Switzerland.