Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Inquiries into the background of a murder victim are usually productive of some clue pointing to the identity of the killer. This is because in the majority of cases murderer and victim are known to each other. By the fifth Whitechapel investigation, however, it must have become apparent that this type of information was not going to elucidate this particular series of crimes. Chief Inspector Swanson, writing his summary report on the Stride murder, did not deem what the police had learned about the victim’s past even worthy of recapitulation. ‘It may be shortly stated,’ he noted gloomily, ‘that the inquiry into her history did not disclose the slightest pretext for a motive on behalf of friends or associates or anybody who had known her.’11

  The post-mortem examination commenced on 1 October at St George’s Mortuary.12 In several respects public criticism during and after the Chapman inquiry seems to have forced the police to sharpen up their procedures. Medical men, for example, had lamented the lack of a second medical opinion at the inquiry. It is perhaps significant then that two surgeons – Phillips and Blackwell – conducted the autopsy upon the body of Elizabeth Stride. Blackwell consented to perform the dissection while Phillips took notes. For part of the time Dr Reigate and Blackwell’s assistant, Edward Johnston, were also present. In this case, too, the body was stripped by the doctors themselves.

  They found a long gash in Stride’s throat. Dr Phillips described it for the benefit of the inquest on 3 October:

  Cut on neck; taking it from left to right there is a clean cut incision 6 inches in length, incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw. Three-quarters of an inch over undivided muscle then becoming deeper, about an inch dividing sheath and the vessels, ascending a little, and then grazing the muscle outside the cartilages on the left side of the neck, the cut being very clean, but indicating a slight direction downwards through resistance of the denser tissue and cartilages. The carotid artery on the left side, and the other vessels contained in the sheath were all cut through save the posterior portion of the carotid to about a line or [of?] 1–12th of an inch in extent, which prevented the separation of the upper and lower portion of the artery. The cut through the tissues on the right side of the cartilages are more superficially cut, and the cut tails off to about two inches below the right angle of the jaw. It is evident that the haemorrhage, which probably will be found to be the cause of death, was caused through the partial severance of the left carotid artery.

  There were no other cuts, no signs of gagging, no marks about the head and neck to indicate strangulation. An abrasion that Phillips at first thought he could detect on the right side of the neck, below the angle of the jaw, proved to be nothing of the kind. When it was washed the mark disappeared and the skin was found to be uninjured. There were, however, bluish discolourations over both shoulders. They were under the collar-bones and in front of the chest. These were neither bruises nor abrasions but pressure marks, apparently caused by the pressure of two hands upon the shoulders. One point will be of some interest to us later on. The lower lobe of the left ear was torn, as if by the forcible removal or wearing through of an ear-ring, but this was an old wound, now thoroughly healed.

  The doctor agreed that the cause of death had been haemorrhage resulting from the partial severance of the left carotid artery and the division of the windpipe.

  We have a few comments from Dr Blackwell on the murderer’s technique. On the day of the crime he told the press that ‘it does not follow that the murderer would be bespattered with blood, for as he is sufficiently cunning in other things he could contrive to avoid coming in contact with the blood by reaching well forward.’ Two days later he told the inquest that he thought the killer had probably caught hold of Stride’s silk scarf, which was found tight and knotted, and had pulled her backwards before cutting her throat. The throat had not been cut while she was standing up: ‘the throat might have been cut as she was falling, or when she was on the ground. The blood would have spurted about if the act had been committed while she was standing up.’

  On 5 October Dr Phillips gave the inquiry his reconstruction of what had occurred. It was his contention that the murderer had seized his victim by the shoulders and placed her on the ground. From a position on her right side he had then cut her throat from left to right. This injury might have been inflicted in just two seconds. The murderer would not necessarily have been bloodstained because ‘the commencement of the wound and the injury to the vessels would be away from him, and the stream of blood – for stream it was – would be directed away from him, and towards the gutter in the yard.’

  A single incision in the neck provided little basis, of course, for pronouncements upon the degree of anatomical knowledge displayed by the killer. But both doctors seem to have believed at least that he knew what he was doing. Interviewed by the press, Blackwell spoke of a man ‘who is accustomed to use a heavy knife.’ And the injury to the left carotid artery prompted Phillips to remark at the inquest that ‘in this case, as in some others, there seems to have been some knowledge where to cut the throat to cause a fatal result.’

  The doctors also gave evidence relating to a knife that had been found on a doorstep in Whitechapel Road on Monday morning. It was the type of instrument commonly used in chandler shops and known as a slicing knife. The blade was long – perhaps nine or ten inches – and rounded at the tip. Blackwell and Phillips agreed that although the knife could conceivably have inflicted the injury to Elizabeth Stride it was most unlikely to have been the murder weapon. ‘It appears to me,’ Blackwell told the coroner, ‘that a murderer, in using a round-pointed instrument, would seriously handicap himself, as he would be only able to use it in one particular way.’ Phillips conceded that there was nothing to indicate that the killer had employed a sharp-pointed weapon. But, taking into account the relative positions of the murderer, the victim and the incision, he considered it improbable that such a long-bladed knife as that found in Whitechapel Road had been used. In his opinion a short knife, like a shoemaker’s well ground down, could have made the cut.

  By contrast with the previous murders the killing of Elizabeth Stride produced a bumper crop of witnesses who claimed to have seen the victim in company with a man shortly before her death. Two of them, PC William Smith 452H and Israel Schwartz, came forward with what appeared to be vital information.

  PC Smith’s beat, a long, circular one that took him 25-30 minutes to patrol, embraced Berner Street. He was there at 12.30 or 12.35 on the morning of the murder and passed a man and a woman standing talking on the pavement, a few yards away from where the body was later discovered but on the opposite side of the street. The woman was wearing a red rose in her coat. PC Smith saw her face and subsequently identified the body as that of the same woman. The man was about five feet seven or eight inches tall and had a ‘respectable’ appearance. Smith did not take much notice of his face. However, he later described him as about twenty-eight years old, of dark complexion, with a small dark moustache. He wore a hard felt deerstalker hat of dark colour, a white collar and tie, and a black diagonal cutaway coat, and he carried in one hand a parcel wrapped up in newspaper. It was about eighteen inches long and six to eight inches broad. Both the man and the woman appeared to be sober but the constable did not overhear any of their conversation.13

  PC Smith was a good witness. As a policeman on duty he was probably more observant than most and although a relatively young man (twenty-six) had notched up more than five years’ experience in the force. The testimony of the second witness, Israel Schwartz, is possibly of even greater significance. Alone of the witnesses called forth by this terrible series of crimes, Schwartz may actually have seen a murder taking place. More than that, with its possible implication of two men, his evidence cautions us against embracing too readily the conventional wisdom that the killings were the work of a lone psychopath.

  Schwartz volunteered his information at Leman Street Police Station on the evening of Sunday, 30 September. N
o copy of the original statement has survived. Its substance, however, has been preserved for us in Chief Inspector Swanson’s synthesis of the Stride evidence, written on 19 October:

  12.45 a.m. 30th. Israel Schwartz of 22 Helen [i.e. Ellen] Street, Backchurch Lane, stated that at that hour on turning into Berner St from Commercial Road & had got as far as the gateway where the murder was committed he saw a man stop & speak to a woman, who was standing in the gateway. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round & threw her down on the footway & the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man standing lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road ‘Lipski’ & then Schwartz walked away, but finding that he was followed by the second man he ran as far as the railway arch but the man did not follow so far.

  Schwartz cannot say whether the two men were together or known to each other. Upon being taken to the Mortuary Schwartz identified the body as that of the woman he had seen & he thus describes the first man who threw the woman down: – age about 30, height 5 ft. 5 in., complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket & trousers, black cap with peak, had nothing in his hands.

  Second man, age 35, height 5 ft. 11 in., complexion fresh, hair light brown, moustache brown; dress, dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat wide brim, had a clay pipe in his hand.14

  The police obviously took Schwartz seriously. They circulated his description of the first man on the front page of The Police Gazette on 19 October. And Swanson, as he tells us in his summary report on the Stride murder, even preferred Schwartz’s testimony to that of PC Smith, if only because his sighting was closer to the time of the murder: ‘If Schwartz is to be believed, and the police report of his statement casts no doubt upon it, it follows if they [Smith and Schwartz] are describing different men that the man Schwartz saw & described is the more probable of the two to be the murderer, for a quarter of an hour afterwards the body is found murdered.’ Why, then, did the police not produce Schwartz as a witness at the inquest? Unfortunately we have no information that can answer that question. A possible explanation is that, as in the case of the writing in Goulston Street, they deliberately suppressed his evidence because it seemed to implicate the Jews, but there are others. Perhaps they considered his testimony so important that they wished to keep the details secret. Perhaps Schwartz, for reasons best known to himself, did not want to appear. Did he, like Pearly Poll, absent himself from his lodgings? Or, quite simply, did he fall ill? We can speculate, but we do not know.

  If the police hoped to enshroud Schwartz in secrecy their intentions were almost immediately thwarted by one of the Star’s newshounds. On 1 October, just one day after the murder, this paper put out its own version of the story:

  Information which may be important was given to the Leman Street police late yesterday afternoon by an Hungarian concerning this murder. This foreigner was well dressed, and had the appearance of being in the theatrical line. He could not speak a word of English, but came to the police station accompanied by a friend, who acted as an interpreter. He gave his name and address, but the police have not disclosed them.

  A Star man, however, got wind of his call, and ran him to earth in Backchurch Lane. The reporter’s Hungarian was quite as imperfect as the foreigner’s English, but an interpreter was at hand, and the man’s story was retold just as he had given it to the police. It is, in fact, to the effect that he saw the whole thing.

  It seems that he had gone out for the day, and his wife had expected to move, during his absence, from their lodgings in Berner Street to others in Backchurch Lane. When he came homewards about a quarter before one he first walked down Berner Street to see if his wife had moved. As he turned the corner from Commercial Road he noticed some distance in front of him a man walking as if partially intoxicated. He walked on behind him, and presently he noticed a woman standing in the entrance to the alley way where the body was afterwards found. The half-tipsy man halted and spoke to her. The Hungarian saw him put his hand on her shoulder and push her back into the passage, but, feeling rather timid of getting mixed up in quarrels, he crossed to the other side of the street. Before he had gone many yards, however, he heard the sound of a quarrel, and turned back to learn what was the matter, but just as he stepped from the kerb a second man came out of the doorway of the public house a few doors off, and shouting out some sort of warning to the man who was with the woman, rushed forward as if to attack the intruder. The Hungarian states positively that he saw a knife in this second man’s hand, but he waited to see no more. He fled incontinently, to his new lodgings.

  He described the man with the woman as about 30 years of age, rather stoutly built, and wearing a brown moustache. He was dressed respectably in dark clothes and felt hat. The man who came at him with a knife he also describes, but not in detail. He says he was taller than the other, but not so stout, and that his moustaches were red. Both men seem to belong to the same grade of society.

  The police have arrested one man answering the description the Hungarian furnishes. This prisoner has not been charged, but is held for inquiries to be made. The truth of the man’s statement is not wholly accepted.’15

  House-to-house inquiries in the neighbourhood of Berner Street produced two other witnesses – William Marshall and James Brown. The sightings of these witnesses, unlike those by Smith and Schwartz, were neither mentioned by Swanson in his summary report nor published in the Police Gazette. Clearly the Yard did not accord them the same importance. But both men made depositions at the inquest and we have no reason to doubt their honesty.

  William Marshall lived at 64 Berner Street and worked as a labourer in an indigo warehouse. At about 11.45 on Saturday night, loafing in his doorway, he saw a man and a woman standing talking quietly on the pavement, ‘opposite No. 58 [Berner Street], between Fairclough Street and Boyd Street.’ This was three doors to the north of Marshall’s house. Marshall saw the man kissing the woman and overheard a snatch of their conversation. The man said: ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ The woman laughed. They stood there for about ten minutes and then began to walk unhurriedly in Marshall’s direction, passing him and continuing southwards towards Ellen Street. Neither of them appeared to be the worse for drink.

  Marshall did not think that the woman was wearing a flower in her coat. The next day, however, he was taken to the mortuary and identified the deceased as the woman he had seen. At the inquest on 5 October Mr Baxter, the coroner, pressed him hard for a description of the man:

  BAXTER: ‘Did you notice how he was dressed?’

  MARSHALL: ‘In a black cutaway coat and dark trousers.’

  BAXTER: ‘Was he young or old?’

  MARSHALL: ‘Middle-aged he seemed to be.’

  BAXTER: ‘Was he wearing a hat?’

  MARSHALL: ‘No, a cap.’

  BAXTER: ‘What sort of a cap?’

  MARSHALL: ‘A round cap, with a small peak. It was something like what a sailor would wear.’

  BAXTER: ‘What height was he?’

  MARSHALL: ‘About 5 ft. 6 in.’

  BAXTER: ‘Was he thin or stout?’

  MARSHALL: ‘Rather stout.’

  BAXTER: ‘Did he look well dressed?’

  MARSHALL: ‘Decently dressed.’

  BAXTER: ‘What class of man did he appear to be?’

  MARSHALL: ‘I should say he was in business, and did nothing like hard [meaning manual] work.’

  BAXTER: ‘Not like a dock labourer?’

  MARSHALL: ‘No.’

  BAXTER: ‘Nor a sailor?’

  MARSHALL: ‘No.’

  BAXTER: ‘Nor a butcher?’

  MARSHALL: ‘No.’

  BAXTER: ‘A clerk?’

  MARSHALL: ‘He had more the appearance of a clerk.’

  BAXTER: ‘Is that the best suggestion you can make?’


  MARSHALL: ‘It is.’

  BAXTER: ‘You did not see his face. Had he any whiskers?’

  MARSHALL: ‘I cannot say. I do not think he had.’

  BAXTER: ‘Was he wearing gloves?’

  MARSHALL: ‘No.’

  BAXTER: ‘Was he carrying a stick or umbrella in his hands?’

  MARSHALL: ‘He had nothing in his hands that I am aware of.’

  BAXTER: ‘Different people talk in a different tone and in a different way. Did his voice give you the idea of a clerk?’

  MARSHALL: ‘Yes, he was mild speaking.’

  BAXTER: ‘Did he speak like an educated man?’

  MARSHALL: ‘I thought so.’16

  Marshall’s evidence is intriguing because the man he described was similar in appearance to those seen by PC Smith and Israel Schwartz. All three witnesses could easily have observed the same man. The value of the labourer’s testimony, unfortunately, was reduced by his failure to get a good look at the man’s face. Where the couple were first standing, by No. 58, it was too dark for Marshall to see the man’s face distinctly. The nearest gas lamp, he explained, was ‘at the corner, about twenty feet off.’ Later, when the two set out in the direction of Ellen Street, they were walking towards Marshall and into the ambit of a lamp at the corner of Boyd Street. But they walked in the middle of the road and, as they passed Marshall, the man was looking towards the woman: ‘he [the man] was looking towards the woman, and had his arm round her neck.’ Unquestionably the main objection to Marshall’s evidence as far as the police were concerned, however, was the time of his sighting. It took place at about 11.45, one hour and fifteen minutes before the murder was discovered, and although Marshall’s man might indeed have been the killer a prostitute like Elizabeth Stride could have accosted, or have been accosted by, several men in the ensuing hour.