Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Soon they were joined by the second detective. White then asked them what they were doing with Packer. They said that they were detectives and when the sergeant asked to see their authority added that they were private detectives. One of them produced a card from his pocket book but would not allow White to touch it. Eventually they ‘induced’ Packer to go away with them.

  Later in the day White again visited Packer in his shop. But while he was talking with him the same two men drove up in a hansom cab. This time they said that they were taking Packer to Scotland Yard to see Sir Charles Warren and persuaded him to go off in the cab with them.4 The antics of Grand and Batchelor, however frustrating for the police, were apparently well intended. Certainly they delivered Packer to Scotland Yard. The grocer’s statement, written in the hand of A. C. Bruce, the Assistant Commissioner, is dated 4 October:

  On Sat. night [29 September] about 11 p.m., a young man from 25–30, about 5 [feet] 7 [inches], with long black coat buttoned up, soft felt hat, kind of Yankee hat, rather broad shoulders, rather quick in speaking, rough voice. I sold him ½ pound black grapes, 3d. A woman came up with him from Back Church end (the lower end of street). She was dressed in black frock & jacket, fur round bottom of jacket, a black crape bonnet, she was playing with a flower like a geranium white outside & red inside. I identify the woman at the St. George’s Mortuary as the one I saw that night.

  They passed by as though they were going up [to] Commercial Road, but instead of going up they crossed to the other side of the road to the Board School, & were there for about ½ an hour till I should say 11.30, talking to one another. I then shut up my shutters. Before they passed over opposite to my shop, they went near to the club for a few minutes apparently listening to the music. I saw no more of them after I shut up my shutters.

  I put the man down as a young clerk. He had a frock coat on – no gloves. He was about 1½ inches or 2 or 3 inches – a little bit higher than she was.5

  On 6 October the Daily Telegraph published a new Packer account. It contained a few more details about his suspect’s appearance. He was described as a square-built man, about five feet seven inches tall and perhaps thirty years of age. His hair was black, his complexion dark, his face full and alert-looking. He had no moustache. Wearing a long black coat and a soft felt hat, the man struck Packer as being more like a clerk than a workman. He spoke in a quick, sharp manner. What distinguished the Telegraph’s article, however, was its attempt to go beyond words.

  The journalist responsible for the article was J. Hall Richardson. ‘In accordance with the general description furnished to the police by Packer and others,’ he explained, ‘a number of sketches were prepared, portraying men of different nationalities, ages and ranks of life.’ The sketches had been submitted to Packer and – according to Richardson – he had unhesitatingly picked out a picture of a man without a moustache and wearing a soft felt or American hat as most resembling the man he had seen. His choice was one of two woodcut sketches published in the article under the caption: ‘SKETCH PORTRAITS OF THE SUPPOSED MURDERER.’6 The difficulty for the police in all this was that, for reasons we will presently notice, they were unhappy about the accuracy and relevance of Packer’s evidence. Fearing, therefore, that Richardson’s initiative would mislead rather than inform the public, they issued a notice in the Police Gazette disavowing the sketches as ‘not authorized by Police.’ And, at the same time, they published as a corrective the descriptions furnished by PC Smith, Israel Schwartz and Joseph Lawende, though suppressing the names of these witnesses.7

  What value is to be placed on Packer’s evidence? Perhaps he was telling the truth. Perhaps, when White questioned him on the morning of the murder, Packer had not yet made a connection in his mind between the couple who bought the grapes and the crime. Perhaps he did not do so until the next day, when the press carried statements alleging that grapes had been found in one of the dead woman’s hands. Perhaps. Certainly, to judge by the number of latter-day Ripperologists who trawl up the grocer’s story to sustain their own theories, his evidence is still very widely believed.

  Assuming for the moment that Packer was an honest witness, how does his information fit in with that of the other witnesses? Well, his man was very like the one seen by James Brown at 12.45. Both Packer and Brown described a man of about five feet seven, wearing a long dark coat, standing with a woman by the board school. The only recorded difference between them – Packer’s suspect is said to have been square-built and Brown’s of average build – is less significant than the sum of the like factors. It is thus tempting to link these two and to speculate whether the differences between the reported times of the witnesses could have been produced by the obvious imprecision of both. However, in several respects (in the absence of a moustache and in the wearing of a long frock coat rather than a short/cutaway coat and of a wideawake, soft felt or Yankee hat rather than a peaked hat or cap) Packer’s man is impossible to identify with those described by PC Smith and Israel Schwartz. An obvious explanation of this difficulty is that Stride got rid of the man with the long coat seen by Packer and Brown and accosted or was accosted by her murderer, the man in the peaked cap, almost immediately afterwards. Indeed, the words James Brown overheard testify to some kind of rejection of the man in the long coat by the woman. ‘Not tonight,’ she said, ‘some other night.’ The stumbling block to this tidy little reconstruction of events is William Marshall. For Marshall deposed to having seen Stride with a man strikingly similar to those described by Smith and Schwartz as early as 11.45. This raises once again the possibility that Packer and Brown may have seen a different couple altogether. We have already noted the presence in the vicinity of at least one other couple before and after the time of the murder.

  Overwhelmingly, though, the available evidence suggests that Packer was not an honest witness.

  There is a discrepancy between his narratives on times. According to the statement recorded by Bruce, he sold the grapes at about 11 o’clock and closed his shutters, leaving the couple standing by the school, at about 11.30. But the other accounts all place the whole episode an hour later. The time that the man and woman came to the shop is given by Grand and Batchelor as about 11.45, by the Evening News as between 11.30 and 12.00, by Sergeant White as about 12.00 and by Richardson as about 11.30. The couple were standing across the road for perhaps half an hour after that and were still there when Packer closed up and went to bed. Packer told White that he closed at 12.30 because of the rain. Grand and Batchelor understood that he had last seen the couple, as he was preparing to close, at 12.10 or 12.15, and that he had estimated the time ‘by the fact that the public houses had been closed.’ And the Evening News got the same story: ‘I couldn’t say exactly, but it must have been past midnight a little bit, for the public houses were shut up.’ In all fairness it should be said that witnesses are characteristically vague on times and that, Bruce apart, those given by Packer are broadly consistent.

  More damaging is Packer’s readiness to modify details in his story in order to accommodate fresh knowledge or movements in popular opinion. It is noticeable, for example, how Packer’s suspect shed years during the course of the grocer’s four narratives. In the statement procured by Grand and Batchelor the man was said to have been middle-aged, perhaps 35, and in the Evening News interview about 30–35. Packer told the police, however, that the suspect was a young man, aged between 25 and 30. And Richardson understood, too, that the man’s age was ‘not more than thirty’. Inevitably one suspects that this rejuvenation of Packer’s man had something to do with the release of PC Smith’s description to the press. For the constable’s account, describing a man aged 28, was being circulated in the newspapers from 1 October.8

  Even more revealing is this extract from the Evening News interview:

  ‘Did you observe anything peculiar about his voice or manner, as he spoke to you?’

  ‘He spoke like an educated man, but he had a loud, sharp sort of voice, and a quick commanding w
ay with him.’

  ‘But did he speak like an Englishman or more in this style?’ I asked, imitating as well as I could the Yankee twang.

  ‘Yes, now that you mention it, there was a sound of that sort about it,’ was the instantaneous reply.

  The notion that an American might have been involved had been fostered by Baxter’s story of the American seeking specimens of the uterus and by the alleged Americanisms of the first Jack the Ripper letter, to be discussed in a later chapter, and it is remarkable how easily Packer fell in with the reporter’s suggestion. Packer’s description of his suspect’s headgear is also instructive in this context. He told Grand and Batchelor that the man was wearing a wideawake hat and the Evening News that it was a black, soft, felt hat. After the News interview Packer’s terminology changed. Bruce wrote of a ‘soft felt . . . kind of Yankee hat’, Richardson of a soft felt or American hat.

  Finally, there are definite suggestions in the Packer evidence that his story owed less to personal knowledge and observation than it did to contemporary press reports. Thus, in at least two instances, we can catch him out incorporating details from earlier newspaper accounts which were subsequently shown to be incorrect. One is the alleged colour of Elizabeth Stride’s flower. On 2 October Edward Spooner told the inquest that he saw a red and white flower pinned to the dead woman’s coat. This was an error for PC Smith, who saw Elizabeth at 12.35, later deposed to a red rose in her coat, and Inspector Reid, who examined the body specifically in order to compile a description, only inventoried a red rose and maidenhair fern. It is probable, then, that when Packer spoke of the woman carrying a white or white and red flower in her hand, his comment was inspired, not by actual observation, but by press reports of Spooner’s testimony.

  Even more important to the credibility of Packer’s story are the grapes.

  On Monday, 1 October, the Daily News carried statements by Louis Diemschutz, Isaac Kozebrodski and Fanny Mortimer, all alleging that the dead woman had been found clutching a packet of sweetmeats in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other.9 Now, a packet of cachous was most certainly discovered in Elizabeth’s left hand. But the detail about the grapes appears to have been a baseless fiction. At the inquest the doctors were interrogated on this very point.

  Dr Phillips deposed: ‘Neither in the hands nor about the body of the deceased did I find any grapes, or connection with them. I am convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either the skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’ Dr Blackwell was equally emphatic:

  ‘Did you perceive any grapes near the body in the yard?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear any person say that they had seen grapes there?’

  ‘I did not.’10

  We do not know how the press conducted their interviews with Diemschutz, Kozebrodski and Mrs Mortimer but one of these witnesses – the only one summoned before the coroner – testified differently at the inquest. According to Louis Diemschutz’s press statement, supposedly made on the day of the murder, Stride’s hands ‘were clenched, and when the doctor opened them I saw that she had been holding grapes in one hand and sweetmeats in the other.’ The very next day, however, Baxter asked Diemschutz: ‘Did you notice her hands?’ And Diemschutz replied: ‘I did not notice what position her hands were in.’11

  It is very doubtful if any grapes were seen in Dutfield’s Yard but the printing of such a falsehood could well have given Packer ideas.

  We are left with the inescapable feeling that when Packer told Sergeant White that he had seen no one ‘standing about’ on the night of the murder he was speaking the truth and that his story of selling grapes to a strange couple was an afterthought, cobbled together with the aid of newspaper and local gossip. The Yard reached a similar conclusion for Chief Inspector Swanson, reporting on the matter later that month, wrote that Packer had ‘unfortunately made different statements so that . . . any statement he made would be rendered almost valueless as evidence.’12 This may be why he was never summoned to appear before the Stride inquest as a witness.

  But why should Packer seek to deceive the police? It is possible that the fantasy was designed to enhance this modest grocer’s status amongst his neighbours by providing him with a key role in the drama, by enrolling him in the company of the few who had ‘seen the murderer’. A much more likely explanation, however, will be found in the sudden escalation in the scale of the reward money prompted by the double murder. On 30 September Packer told White that he had seen nothing suspicious. Two days later, when Grand and Batchelor were conducting their investigations, he had changed his mind. But in the interval fresh rewards, including one of £500 from the Corporation of London, had increased fivefold the total sum on offer for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. The money probably provided the spur, the story about grapes being found in Elizabeth’s dead hand, published on 1 October, the substance for Packer’s tale. On the night of 1–2 October, lured by the rewards, amateur sleuths appeared in force on the streets of the East End. And the next day, sensing a new spirit abroad, the Star spoke of others ‘who turn in descriptions on the chance of coming near enough the mark to claim a portion of the reward if the man should be caught, just as one buys a ticket in a lottery.’13 This prescient columnist seems to have hit the nail right on the head. For by then there seems little doubt that Packer, too, had joined the gold rush.

  Packer continued to regale the press with stories. On 27 October, while standing with his barrow at the junction of Greenfield Street and Commercial Road, he supposedly saw the murderer again. The man gave Packer ‘a most vicious look’ but, when the grocer sent someone to find a policeman, escaped by jumping on a tram bound for Blackwall. According to yet a third tale, a man who came to his shop on 13 November to buy rabbits told him that he believed his own cousin to be the murderer.14 By this time, however, even the press offices had begun to weary of Packer and soon he slipped back into the obscurity from whence he came.

  Unlike Matthew Packer, Mrs Fanny Mortimer was not a romancer. But unwittingly she bestowed upon the growing legend of the Whitechapel killer one of its most potent symbols. Mrs Mortimer lived at 36 Berner Street, two doors from the scene of the tragedy, and for most of the critical half hour between 12.30 and 1.00 on the fatal morning was standing at the door of her house. What she saw and heard has been greatly misrepresented by twentieth-century authors.

  Walter Dew, writing in 1938, told his readers of a man, aged about 30, dressed in black and carrying a small, shiny black bag, whom Mrs Mortimer saw stealing furtively out of Dutfield’s Yard just before Diemschutz’s pony and cart turned into the gate. It was more than probable, wrote Dew dramatically, that she was ‘the only person ever to see the Ripper in the vicinity of one of his crimes.’ Twenty years later Donald McCormick quoted what purported to be the actual words of Mrs Mortimer’s contemporary statement. This related how she heard a suspicious noise from the direction of the International Working Men’s Educational Club: ‘It wasn’t like an argument, though there was something like a stifled cry, or an angry voice. Then there was a bump; it must have been the body falling . . . Before I could properly tell what it was I saw a young man carrying a black shiny bag, walking very fast down the street. He looked up at the club, then went round the corner by the Board School.’15 Since Dew and McCormick are amongst the Ripperologists’ favourite cribs it is scarcely surprising that Mrs Mortimer continues to figure in the literature as one of those likely to have seen Jack the Ripper. But the truth was very different.

  Mrs Mortimer’s original statement, made on the day of the murder, can be found in the Daily News of 1 October. It contains no references to stifled cries or the thuds of falling bodies. Indeed, she categorically states that until Diemschutz raised the alarm she had heard nothing. ‘There was certainly no noise made,’ she said, ‘and I did not observe anyone enter the gates.’ She did see a man with a black bag but her statement makes it quite clear that he came, not from Dutfield’s Y
ard, but from Commercial Road: ‘the only man whom I had seen pass through the street previously [before one] was a young man carrying a black shiny bag, who walked very fast down the street from the Commercial Road. He looked up at the club, and then went round the corner by the Board School . . . If a man had come out of the yard before one o’clock I must [i.e. would] have seen him.’

  There is nothing here to suggest that the man with the black bag was anything other than an innocent passer-by. But a day or so after Mrs Mortimer had made her statement he voluntarily presented himself at Leman Street Police Station to clear himself of any possible suspicion. He was Leon Goldstein of 22 Christian Street, a member of the International Working Men’s Club. He had left a coffee house in Spectacle Alley only a short time before Mrs Mortimer had seen him. And his bag had contained empty cigarette boxes.16

  Goldstein must be dismissed from our investigation. Nevertheless, his brief appearance in the drama had consequences far more reaching than he or anyone else can have imagined. Mrs Mortimer’s statement was widely broadcast in the press and soon everyone seemed to know that a man with a black bag had been seen near the scene of the Berner Street murder. Perhaps because it reinforced the view given currency by Dr Phillips at the Chapman inquest that the killer might be a doctor, the bag lodged in popular imagination.

  So that, even today, in legend Jack the Ripper is as inseparable from his black bag as Davy Crockett from his coonskin cap or Long John Silver from his parrot.

  12

  ‘Don’t Fear for Me!’

  THE IDENTIFICATION OF the Mitre Square victim, lying dead in the city Mortuary, proved a simpler task for the City Police than that of Elizabeth Stride for their Metropolitan counterparts.