‘I cannot,’ replied Hutchinson, ‘as I am spent out going down to Romford.’
‘I must go and look for some money,’ said Mary.
She walked off towards Thrawl Street and there she met the man Hutchinson had already seen standing at the corner. He went up to her, put his hand on her shoulder and said something. Hutchinson did not hear the words but the couple both burst into laughter. The man then again placed his hand on Mary’s shoulder and they began to walk slowly in Hutchinson’s direction. Hutchinson himself walked on until he reached the corner of Fashion Street, where he loitered by the public house. The man with Kelly wore a soft felt hat ‘drawn down somewhat over his eyes’. As the couple passed him Hutchinson ducked down to see his face and the man ‘turned and looked at me very sternly’.
They crossed the street and turned into Dorset Street. Hutchinson followed them as far as the corner and from there watched them stand for about three minutes at the entrance of Miller’s Court. ‘I have lost my handkerchief,’ Mary was saying loudly. The man pulled a red one out of his pocket and gave it to her. They both then went into Miller’s Court.
Hutchinson’s efforts to learn more were persistent but fruitless. When he ventured up the court himself he saw no light in the house and heard no noise. And although he stood about the entrance of Miller’s Court for about forty-five minutes the couple did not reappear. ‘When I left the corner of Miller’s Court,’ he told the press, ‘the clock struck three o’clock.’
The labourer’s press statement contained a more elaborate description of the suspect than had been set down in his statement to the police:
The man was about 5 ft. 6 in. in height, and 34 or 35 years of age, with dark complexion and dark moustache, turned up at the ends. He was wearing a long dark coat, trimmed with astrachan, a white collar, with black necktie, in which was affixed a horseshoe pin. He wore a pair of dark ‘spats’ with light buttons over button boots, and displayed from his waistcoat a massive gold chain. His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone, hanging from it. He had a heavy moustache curled up and dark eyes and bushy eyebrows. He had no side whiskers, and his chin was clean shaven. He looked like a foreigner . . . The man I saw did not look as though he would attack another one [i.e. man]. He carried a small parcel in his hand about 8 in. long, and it had a strap round it. He had it tightly grasped in his left hand. It looked as though it was covered with dark American cloth. He carried in his right hand, which he laid upon the woman’s shoulder, a pair of brown kid gloves. One thing I noticed, and that was that he walked very softly. I believe that he lives in the neighbourhood, and I fancied that I saw him in Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning, but I was not certain.13
This information clears the man with the carrotty moustache seen by Mrs Cox. And it answers some of the questions raised by Sarah Lewis’ testimony. The man in the black wideawake hat, whom Sarah saw about 2.30 looking up Miller’s Court ‘as if waiting for someone to come out’, was probably Hutchinson since by his account he stood outside the court from about 2.15 to 3.00 for precisely that purpose. The man with the black bag and the young man with the woman, both reported by Sarah, are likewise cleared. At 2.30, when she saw them, Mary was already in No. 13 with her new client and Hutchinson was upon his lone vigil outside.
All this, of course, assumes that Hutchinson’s story was true. But was it? No other witness who claimed to have seen a suspect with one of the murder victims swore to such a wealth of detail or spoke with such confidence. The last three words of the labourer’s statement to the police must have fired Abberline with hope: ‘Can be identified.’ It was a claim Hutchinson repeated to the press. ‘I could swear to the man anywhere,’ he said. That, sadly, is part of the problem. Hutchinson sound just too good to be true.
Only once, by the lamp of the Queen’s Head, did Hutchinson get a good look at Mary’s companion close up. For most of the time, in dim gaslit streets, he watched from a discreet distance. Yet we are asked to believe that he could describe the man with a precision worthy of Sherlock Holmes, in detail that would have been quite beyond a casual observer even in daylight. Hutchinson’s account raises other disturbing questions. If he really did see a man with Mary Kelly on the fatal night why did he wait more than three days after the murder to tell the police? And if he thought he saw the same man again at Petticoat Lane Market on the following Sunday why did he not follow him again or, at the very least, find a constable?
By this time some of my readers may feel that Hutchinson’s statements belong in the waste paper basket with Packer’s. But the labourer is not to be dismissed as easily as the greengrocer. Two circumstances in particular speak strongly in his favour. The first is the remarkable consistency between his two statements. They each contain information not to be found in the other but there are only two actual discrepancies of fact between them. In his statement to the police Hutchinson said that Mary’s client had a pale complexion and a slight moustache turned up at the ends. To the press he described a man of dark complexion with a ‘heavy moustache curled up’. Given the length of the statements, however, these small discrepancies are not significant. Far more impressive are the numerous points of corroboration (at least forty) between the two accounts. This consistency in two statements made on different days to different parties certainly suggests that the labourer’s story was not a total invention.
A yet more telling circumstance supports Hutchinson. Abberline, an experienced and outstanding detective, interrogated him on the 12th – and believed him. In forwarding the statement to the Yard that same night the inspector made his view perfectly clear: ‘An important statement has been made by a man named George Hutchinson which I forward herewith. I have interrogated him this evening, and I am of opinion his statement is true.’14
If Hutchinson was telling the truth he cannot have been a casual or disinterested observer. His statements, indeed, prove that he was not. For he evinced the keenest interest in Mary and her client, loitering by the Queen’s Head to get a close look, shadowing them to Miller’s Court and standing the best part of an hour outside on a cold night waiting for them to come out. Hutchinson told Abberline that his curiosity had been aroused by seeing such a well-dressed man in Mary’s company but this explanation is too thin. Inevitably, one suspects that he shared some undisclosed relationship with Mary. All we know for certain, however, is what he told the inspector – that he had known her about three years and had occasionally given her a few shillings.
A relationship of some kind with Mary Kelly might help to explain why Hutchinson was so slow to come forward after the murder. In his press interview he said that he had first told a policeman on Sunday 11th, the day before he reported to Commercial Street, but there is no corroboration of this in police records. Even if it were so he still delayed more than two days. Possibly he feared being implicated in the crime. After all, by his own admission, he had spoken to Mary and followed her to Miller’s Court on the night she was killed, and he had no companion to confirm that his role in the events of that night had been an innocent one. There was, too, a danger that someone who had seen him skulking about there might accuse him and pick him out at a police identity parade. If it should transpire then that he knew more about Mary than he cared to admit he would have had some serious explaining to do. Perhaps, like Ted Stanley, the ‘pensioner’ in Annie Chapman’s life, George Hutchinson’s first instinct was simply not to get involved.
As we will discover, Hutchinson would prove to be a lasting influence on Abberline. Presumably he had a forthright manner and responded well to questions. Abberline must have reflected too, of course, that Hutchinson had volunteered his statement even though it placed him at Miller’s Court about the time of the murder. Whatever the inspector’s reasons for believing in him, he at once backed his judgement with action. Attaching two detectives to Hutchinson, he sent them out that very night to perambulate the East End with him in the hope that he might spot the man again. They trudged the streets fruitlessly until three
the next morning and later on the 13th were out searching again.
At this point the last important dispute between police and press occurred. Although circulating their description of Hutchinson’s suspect to police stations, the CID had hoped to keep it out of the newspapers while they searched for the wanted man. But, as we have seen, on the 13th Hutchinson was found and interviewed by the press and the next day his story was gracing the columns of both morning and evening journals. This publicity may, of course, have been beneficial. It may have elicited helpful information from the public. We cannot tell because the police records have almost all been lost. But the CID view at the time seems to have been that it blighted Abberline’s efforts to trace the suspect by alerting him to the hunt and perhaps encouraging him to change his appearance.
While Abberline was searching high and low for a foreigner in an astrakhan trimmed coat the body of the latest victim rested at the mortuary attached to St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch. The funeral took place on Monday 19 November. There was much public sympathy for Mary. No relatives came forward but Henry Wilton, verger of St Leonard’s, was determined that she would not lie in a pauper’s grave and bore the entire cost of the funeral.
At noon the church bell began to toll. It was as a signal to the residents of the neighbourhood and they gathered in a solemn crowd, several thousand strong, about the main gate of the church. When the coffin, borne on the shoulders of four men, appeared at the gate scenes of great emotion erupted amongst the crowd. Men stood bare-headed. Women, who predominated in this multitude, cried ‘God forgive her!’, their faces wet with tears. As the coffin was placed in an open car people closed around it, jostling and struggling to touch it. ‘The sight,’ wrote the Advertiser’s reporter, ‘was quite remarkable, and the emotion natural and unconstrained.’15
Shortly after 12.30 the funeral procession set off. It was headed, at a very slow pace, by the open car drawn by two horses. The coffin was fully exposed to view. Of polished elm and oak, with metal mounts, it bore a coffin-plate with the terse inscription: ‘Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9th Nov. 1888, aged 25 years.’ Upon the coffin rested two crowns of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart’s-ease. After the car came two mourning coaches, one containing three, the other five mourners. Mary, far from home, had few real friends. At her funeral even the mourners – one a representative from McCarthy’s, most of the others women who had testified at the inquest – were mainly casual acquaintances. But Joe Barnett was there. And so too surely, although the press did not mention her by name, was Maria Harvey.
When the procession moved off the entire crowd appeared to set off simultaneously in attendance, blocking the thoroughfare and stopping the traffic. Only with the greatest difficulty were the police able to clear a passage for the cortège through the mass of carts, vans and tramcars. But at length the little procession made its way along the Hackney Road to St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone.
And there, beneath a cloudy and unsettled sky, the tortured remains of the girl from Limerick were committed to the earth.
17
The End of the Terror
ON THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER, a week after the Miller’s Court horror, an indignant resident of Pembroke Square in the West End addressed a furious letter to the Daily Telegraph.
‘Can nothing be done,’ he fumed, ‘to prevent a set of hoarse ruffians coming nightly about our suburban squares and streets, yelling at the tops of their hideous voices, “Special Edition” – “Whitechapel” – “Murder” – “Another of ’em!” – “Mutilation” – “Special Edition!” – “Beautiful – Awful – Murder!” and so on, and nearly frightening the lives out of all the sensitive women and children in the neighbourhood? Last evening (Wednesday), for instance, these awful words were bawled out about nine o’clock in a quiet part of Kensington; and a lady who was supping with us was so greatly distressed by these hideous bellowings that she was absolutely too unnerved to return home save in a cab, because she would have to walk about a hundred or two yards down a quiet street at the other end of her journey by omnibus. Now, I venture to ask, Sir, is it not monstrous that the police do not protect us from such a flagrant and ghastly nuisance?’1
The Ripper never ventured west of Mitre Square. His victims were prostitutes all. Yet, as this letter neatly illustrates, he instilled fear into the hearts of women all over London.
In the East End the latest murder produced scenes of indescribable panic. At night the streets were abandoned to the patrolling policeman and the amateur detective. During the day noisy, excited crowds milled about the scene of carnage and struck out in helpless rage at any they fancied to blame.
There were a spate of incidents in which men had to be rescued from violent mobs. Some were drunks or eccentrics who courted disaster by shouting ‘I am Jack the Ripper!’ in public places. But any display of innocent curiosity, especially by a respectably dressed man, might attract ugly crowds. On the day of the murder a young Somerset House clerk, taking a holiday to celebrate the Lord Mayor’s Show and the birthday of the Prince of Wales, went to Dorset Street to see the scene of the murder. There he enquired anxiously of the sightseers whether the bloodhounds had arrived. Concern was mistaken for fear. And when the clerk walked away up Commercial Street, he became aware of three men dogging his steps. He quickened his pace. They quickened theirs. Soon it was obvious that some strange kind of pursuit was in progress and passers-by happily fell in with the crowd. The clerk, increasingly rattled by the swelling throng marching in his tracks, broke into a run. It was the signal for a wild and clamorous chase. Eventually the terrified fugitive was pursued into Bishopsgate, where he gave himself into the custody of a policeman and was escorted hurriedly to the safety of a police station.
Abroad the Miller’s Court murder was making headlines around the world. In Paris it was discussed as keenly as if it had been perpetrated on the Boulevards. ‘The smell of blood was still in the air,’ wrote a correspondent of an afternoon in the French capital, ‘and wherever you turned the talk was almost sure to be about murder . . . Jack the Ripper looms in the imagination as a more fearful scourge of humanity than Cardillac, the secret assassin in Hoffmann’s tale.’ In Austria the tragedy became the sensation of the hour and accounts from the London papers were reproduced almost in extenso by the Viennese press. And in America, too, the papers carried full accounts and editors combed their backfiles in vain for parallel atrocities. ‘Nothing in the history of American crime,’ declared a New York correspondent, ‘can, for special and particular horror, be said to outmatch the East End butcheries.’2
At home it snapped the patience of the Queen. Victoria seems to have followed events in Whitechapel from the first. After the double murder she had telephoned the Home Office to express her shock and ask for information. Now, a day after Miller’s Court, she dashed off a telegram to her Prime Minister. ‘This new most ghastly murder,’ she said, ‘shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be.’ Three days on she was priming Matthews with suggestions. Had the cattle and passenger boats been searched? Had any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves? And was there sufficient surveillance at night? ‘These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime.’3
The most dramatic development at Scotland Yard was the resignation of Sir Charles Warren. When it was announced in the Commons it was greeted with lusty cheers from the Opposition benches. The radical press had a field day. Whitechapel, they crowed, had revenged them for Trafalgar Square.
Today the Commissioner’s sudden fall still confuses Ripperologists. Some attribute it directly to police failure in Whitechapel. Others insist that the events were entirely unconnected.
The immediate cause was an article Sir Charles wrote for Murray’s Magazine on the administration of the Metropolitan Police.4 Now, in 1879 a Hom
e Office ruling had forbidden officers connected with the department from publishing anything relating to the department without the sanction of the Home Secretary. So on 8 November Matthews wrote to Warren, drawing his attention to the ruling and requesting his future compliance with it. Sir Charles was furious. In his reply, penned the same day, he declined to accept the Home Secretary’s instruction and tendered his resignation. If he had been told that such a rule applied to the police, he declared, he would never have accepted the post of Commissioner in the first place, for it enabled anyone to traduce the force without according him a right of reply. He even went on to question the authority of the Home Secretary under the statutes to issue orders for the police.
The article itself was of little consequence. But Matthews could not tolerate such a flagrant display of independence on the part of the Commissioner and he accepted his resignation with alacrity.
None of this, it is true, sprang directly out of the Ripper affair. But the murderer was casting a long shadow and it would be wrong to exonerate him of all blame in producing the impasse that had developed between the Home Secretary and his Commissioner of Police. The police were under daily attack for their inability to catch the Ripper. And it was partly for this reason that Sir Charles insisted so fiercely on the right to speak out in defence of his men. There is little doubt, furthermore, that Matthews and Warren could have resolved their difficulty over the 1879 ruling had a reasonable working relationship existed between the two men. Sadly, though, by November 1888 their relationship had become one of mutual distrust. It was an atmosphere of suspicion to which their fencing over the Ripper investigation had contributed no small measure.
Some writers have contended that Warren’s resignation on 8 November left the police leaderless at a critical time and that this was in some way responsible for their delay in breaking into Mary Kelly’s room the following morning. This is not correct. Although the Commissioner tendered his resignation on the 8th he continued to perform his duties for some time after that. His resignation was not officially accepted until 10 November and it was not until 27 November that a successor was appointed. As Matthews told the Commons on the 26th, Warren had ‘not yet been relieved from the responsibility of the office, and, therefore, properly continues to discharge its functions.’5 He was succeeded by James Monro, the ex-head of CID with whom he had quarrelled so bitterly early in the year.
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 45
