Jack The Ripper

by Mark Whitehead

  Five minutes later, Morris Eagle returned with PC Henry Lamb and a fellow officer. Lamb was quick to get people to stand back from the body, lest they get blood on their clothes. Examining the woman, he noticed the blood that flowed towards the side door of the club had not yet con­gealed. He sent the other officer to fetch a doctor and Eagle to Leman Street police station for assistance.

  Dr Frederick Blackwell arrived at the scene at about 1.16am and examined the body. By now the blood on the pavement had begun to dry. His findings on this brief exami­nation included the following: Her legs were drawn up with her feet against the right side of the passage. Her neck, chest, legs and face were all slightly warm but her hands were cold. Her right hand was open, lying on her chest and smeared on both sides with blood. Her left hand, partially closed, con­tained a small packet of cachous (small aromatic sweetmeats sucked to sweeten the breath). Her face was quite placid. Around her neck was a check silk scarf, the bow of which was turned to the left and pulled tightly, suggesting that the mur­derer had pulled her back by it. There was a long incision in the neck, made from left to right. It had severed the vessels on the left side but not on the right, and had cut the windpipe completely in two. Blackwell noted that there were no spots of blood nearby nor on the clothing. He placed the time of death between twenty minutes and half an hour before he had arrived. She would have bled to death quite slowly but have been unable to cry out due to the severing of the windpipe. The injuries, he noted, were ‘beyond self-infliction’.

  After about half an hour Blackwell was joined by Dr Bagster Phillips who confirmed most of his findings. Phillips, however, stated that the woman had been alive ‘within an hour’ of his arrival.Their estimates, therefore, put the time of the murder as early as 12.36am or as late as 12.56am.

  Meanwhile, PC Lamb had secured the gates and made pre­liminary searches of the club, the yard and the surrounding cottages.Those attending the club were held until their state­ments had been taken and their persons searched. Dr Phillips examined them for bloodstains. The body was removed to St George’s Mortuary in Cable Street. By 5.30am, the last signs of the murder were washed away by PC Albert Collins. But by then events had moved on. The Ripper, it seemed, had not tired of his ‘funny little games’ for the night.

  Approximately three-quarters of a mile and twelve min­utes walk away from Berner Street lay Mitre Square. It was situated just behind Mitre Street and was mainly enclosed by warehouses. A small, cobbled area of about twenty-four square yards, it was heavily trafficked by day but at night it was poorly lit and deserted.The lighting, such as it was in the square, meant that the south-west corner, by a row of deserted houses, was the darkest part.The solitude it offered made it a favoured haunt for prostitutes and their customers.

  At about 1.44am, PC Edward Watkins of the City Police (Mitre Square lay just within the eastern boundary of City jurisdiction) completed his fifteen-minute circuit and arrived back in Mitre Square. When he had last walked through it, it had been deserted.This time, there were signs that it had been occupied during his absence. In that darkest corner was the body of a woman, her throat cut and her stomach ripped open, lying on her back in a pool of blood.

  Within twenty minutes, Mitre Square was buzzing with police activity. Also summoned were Dr George Sequeira, who declared the woman dead, and police surgeon F Gordon Brown. Close to the body was found a mustard tin contain­ing two pawn tickets that would later aid identification. The body was taken to the City Mortuary at Golden Lane where Dr Brown, observed by Drs Sequeira, Sedgwick Saunders and Bagster Phillips, would perform the post-mortem.

  Goulston Street Graffito

  PC Alfred Long was one of the police drafted in from A Division (Westminster) during the night of the ‘double event.’ His second patrol of Goulston Street, at 2.55am, was a momentous one, for it revealed the first clue ever left by the Ripper in his flight back to Whitechapel and another clue that, whether left by the Ripper or not, proved to be one of the most controversial pieces of evidence discovered during the ‘Autumn of Terror’. Outside the entrance to the stair­case of Nos. 108–119, Wentworth Model Dwellings he found a piece of a woman’s apron, still wet with blood. The piece would later be found to match a gap in Catharine Eddowes’ apron exactly.There were no other traces of blood on the pavement nor on the stairwell, but on the right-hand side of the doorway to the dwellings’ entrance there was a message, written in white chalk on the black bricks.

  The message read, as best we can gather from notes taken at the time:

  The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing

  Long took down the message. Arriving later, DC Daniel Halse took down a version with a slightly different inten­tion: ‘The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing.’ Other versions claim that the word was spelled ‘Jewes’ or ‘Juews.’

  Unfortunately, for the following reasons, these tran­scripts are all that we can rely on now.

  Long took the apron to Commercial Street police station at around 3.05am. Following his alert both the City and the Metropolitan Police, including Halse, converged on Goulston Street. Notice was sent to Mitre Square where Inspector McWilliam ordered the message to be pho­tographed and the surrounding tenements searched. The searches revealed no one who was likely to be the Ripper.

  Sir Charles Warren was alerted to the situation and met with Superintendent Thomas Arnold at Leman Street. Here Arnold proposed that the writing be removed and had already dispatched an inspector with a sponge to await Warren’s arrival before proceeding. Arnold’s reasons are understand­able but his methods remain questionable.The graffito was in a predominantly Jewish area, one which would soon be heav­ily populated by market traffic for Petticoat Lane. DC Halse protested at the erasure and suggested that the top line only should be erased. Another suggestion, that it be covered with a cloth was also vetoed. Under Warren’s supervision (it has been rumoured, but never proven, that Warren erased the message himself) the message was removed. Twenty-two years later, the decision would still rankle. In his memoirs, Major Smith, acting City Police Commissioner, would refer to the erasure as an ‘unpardonable blunder’.

  Much discussion has surrounded the graffito. The main points are:

  • That the killer threw the apron down by the message, which was already in place – which is fortuitous, but not impossible. Inspector Swanson notes that the writing looked blurred which suggests age (or possibly left-handedness, which the Ripper had not displayed), although others would state that it looked recent.

  • The murderer must have written it, because an overtly anti-Semitic message written in such an area would soon have been obliterated by the inhabitants.

  • Several newspapers, including the Pall Mall Gazette, erroneously stated that ‘Juwes’ is Yiddish for Jews, thereby sug­gesting that the killer was Jewish. Warren discussed this with the acting Chief Rabbi, who said that the Yiddish for Jews is ‘Yidden’. Warren would earn the Rabbi’s thanks for his actions in quelling further anti-Semitic protests.

  • The murderer used deliberate subterfuge to incriminate the Jews and throw the police off the track. As we shall see, certain witness testimony suggests this theory is cor­rect, if the Ripper was the murderer of...

  Elizabeth Stride

  Presided over by Wynne Baxter, the inquest into Elizabeth Stride’s death was held at the Vestry Hall, Cable Street. It was as detailed and lengthy (reconvened 2, 5 and 23 October) as Catharine Eddowes’ inquest would be expedi­tious. It was, at first, a confused affair, due to the fabrications that Stride had spun about her life and to Mrs Mary Malcolm who identified the body on 1 October as her sister, Mrs Elizabeth Watts. Malcolm claimed that every Saturday she met her sister on the corner of Chancery Lane to give her two shillings for her lodgings. That week she had had a premonition that something had happened to her sister and that Saturday she had waited in vain. On enquiring about the murder, the police had directed her to St George’s Mortuary. It took her three sightings
to finally confirm that the deceased was Mrs Watts. Much time was wasted with Mrs Malcolm, whose increasingly bizarre claims about her sister’s behaviour were finally repudiated with the emer­gence of Mrs Watts, very much alive and not a little put out by Mrs Malcolm’s stories. Stride was eventually identified beyond all doubt by PC Walter Stride, a nephew of her estranged husband, who had recognised her from a photo­graph.

  Stride was born Elizabeth Gustafsdotter in 1843, in Torslanda near Gothenburg, Sweden. From 1860 she had worked as a domestic servant in Carl Johan parish, Gothenburg, before moving to Cathedral parish in 1862, again working as a domestic servant. In 1865, she had been registered as a prostitute and gave birth to a stillborn daugh­ter. During this time she was twice admitted to hospital with venereal disease.

  In 1866, she moved to London where, according to acquaintances, she had worked as a domestic for a gentle­man living near Hyde Park. In 1869, she married John Stride at St Giles-in-the-Fields. Her marriage certificate gave her maiden name as Gustifson. During their marriage, they allegedly ran a coffee shop in Poplar and in March 1877 she was briefly admitted to Poplar Workhouse. It seems that their marriage had broken down by 1882. Elizabeth Tanner, deputy keeper of a common lodging house at 32, Flower and Dean Street testified that Stride had lived there on and off since that year. It was there that she gained the nickname ‘Long Liz’ (not because of her height, 5 feet 5 inches, but because it is a common East End epithet for people named Stride).

  Stride always told friends that she had lost her husband and two children in 1878, when they had drowned, along with 600 other passengers on the Princess Alice. The leisure steamer had collided with the collier Bywell Castle on the Thames, near Woolwich. Her story was untrue. John Stride did not die until 1884 (in Bromley, of heart disease) and they had no children.

  By 1885 she was living with Michael Kidney, a waterside labourer, either at 38, Dorset Street or 36, Devonshire Street, Commercial Road (again, accounts differ).The latter’s proximity to the docks seems the more credible. They sup­ported themselves on Kidney’s earnings and Stride’s domes­tic work. Kidney testified that, during their three years together, she’d been away from him for about five months in total. He blamed her liking for drink. Between 1887 and 1888 she had been convicted eight times for drunkenness. But this is probably not the whole truth. There is no doubt that they quarrelled, and Kidney does not seem to have been as mild-mannered as he presented himself at the inquest. In April 1887, Stride had him charged with assault but then she failed to appear in court to prosecute him. It seems likely that, after quarrels, she would leave to avoid further assaults.

  Kidney claimed that he had last seen her in Commercial Street on 25 September and was surprised that she was not home when he returned from work that evening. She prob­ably returned to 32, Flower and Dean Street, and was cer-tainly there on 26 September. This verification comes from a surprising source – Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had been talking to the residents of 32 on Wednesday evening, elicit­ing responses for his proposals to save the children of pros­titutes from the streets. He had occasion to view the remains of ‘Long Liz’ and recognised her immediately as one of the women that he had seen in the kitchen of the lodging house that evening. The same day, Stride had returned home to remove some personal belongings, another sign that they had quarrelled recently and she planned to stay out of Kidney’s way for some time. Stride was only an occasional prostitute, relying more on money from Kidney and char­ring work. Elizabeth Tanner recalled being told that she ‘was at work among the Jews’, and on 29 September Stride cleaned two of the lodging rooms, for which Tanner paid her sixpence. Tanner last saw her when they met for a drink at

  6.30 that evening at the Queen’s Head, Commercial Street and walked back to the lodging house together.

  It is known that Stride left again after 7.00pm but there are no other sightings of her until around 11.00pm when Mr J Best and John Gardner saw her leave the Bricklayer’s Arms in Settle Street in the company of a young Englishman of ‘clerkly’ appearance. He had a black moustache and wore a morning suit and a billycock hat. They headed in the direc­tion of Commercial Road and Berner Street. Forty-five min­utes later, William Marshall saw her with an Englishman on Berner Street heading toward Dutfield’s Yard. The man he described was similar to Best and Gardner’s descriptions. Supposedly he overheard the man say: ‘You would say any­thing but your prayers.’

  PC William Smith saw the couple at the same place at 12.35am. He noticed that the woman had a red rose on her coat and would later identify the body as that same woman. He described the man as 28, 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a dark complexion and a small dark moustache. He was wearing a black diagonal coat, a hard felt deerstalker hat and a white collar and tie. In one hand he was carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. Both appeared to be sober. Smith heard none of their conversation.

  More important is the testimony of Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew who lived in Ellen Street (which crossed Berner Street). Inspector Swanson’s report to the Home Office on 19 October is the only record of this testimony, given at Leman Street police station on 30 September. Schwartz had got as far as the gateway to Dutfield’s Yard when he saw a man stop and speak to a woman stood in the gateway.The man tried to pull her into the street but turned her round and threw her down. She screamed three times but not very loudly. Schwartz crossed to the opposite side of the street. As he did so he saw a second man lighting his pipe.The man with the woman called out (apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road), ‘Lipski’. Schwartz walked away but, finding that the second man was following him, ran as far as the railway arch. By then the other man had stopped.

  Schwartz did not know whether the two men knew each other but felt that, because of this exchange, they did. He described the first man as about 30, 5 feet 5 inches tall, of fair complexion with dark hair and a small brown mous­tache. He was full faced and broad shouldered with a dark jacket and trousers, wearing a black, peaked cap.The second man was taller, about 5 feet 11 inches, and about 35 years old. His hair and moustache were light brown. He wore a dark overcoat and an old black hard felt hat with a wide brim. Given that Stride was dead fifteen minutes later, Schwartz’s report was widely accepted by the police as being a glimpse of the killer.The phrase used by the man was much discussed by the police. Swanson felt that ‘Lipski’ implied that the killer was Jewish. This was read the same way by the Home Office, who assumed that he was address­ing the second man as ‘Lipski’, implying that, not only was the killer a Jew, but also that he had a Jewish accomplice.

  Inspector Abberline, with his knowledge of the area, reversed this theory entirely. He pointed out that the previ­ous year Israel Lipski had been hanged for the murder of a Jewish woman. Since then, his surname had been used as an insulting epithet to Jews in the East End. Other possibilities suggested are that the man used it as a verb (i.e. ‘I am going to “Lipski” this woman’ – although, as Lipski actually used poison, this seems a little tenuous) or, as Philip Sugden sug­gests, it was used to disguise the identity of the second man and, as with the Goulston Street graffito, to imply that Jews were behind the Whitechapel murders.

  Despite the seeming importance of Schwartz’s evidence there is no record of him ever testifying at Stride’s inquest. Although all of Baxter’s inquest papers into the Ripper’s vic­tims are missing, no press reports carry Schwartz’s testi­mony. One of Dr Robert Anderson’s memos during the police debate over the meaning of ‘Lipski’ mentions that he did testify. If this wasn’t an error on Anderson’s part then it suggests that the newspapers withheld reporting his evi­dence on the grounds that it might, once more, inflame anti-Semitic feeling. Wynne Baxter was notably thorough in hearing all evidence and the police would certainly have been acting unlawfully to have kept Schwartz from attend­ing. Given the haste to erase the Goulston Street graffito, this wouldn’t be entirely out of the question.

  The statement of Mrs Fanny Mortimer, through inaccu­rate reporting, brin
gs us the most enduring Ripper myth. In her statement, she mentions ‘the only man whom I had seen pass through the street previously was a young man carrying a black shiny bag, who walked very fast down the street from Commercial Road’. The man, Leon Goldstein, volun­tarily reported to Leman Street police station to clear him­self. His bag contained empty cigarette boxes. However, connected with Bagster Phillips’ speculation that the killer might be a doctor, the black bag fixed itself in the public consciousness and has remained there ever since.

  Elizabeth Stride’s post-mortem was conducted at St George’s Mortuary by both Dr Blackwell and Dr Phillips. Phillips noted that the throat wound bore signs of having been inflicted by a short, probably blunt, blade, like a shoe-maker’s knife. No other injuries were found. There was some bluish discoloration to both shoulders, pressure marks, which suggested that Stride had been forced to the ground. Her left ear lobe had been torn at some previous juncture, but had long since healed over. Phillips found no trace of narcotics or anaesthetic in her stomach.

  The post-mortem did raise one or two interesting differ­ences between this and the previous murders which even now leave Elizabeth Stride’s inclusion as a Ripper murder debatable but irresolvable. There were no abdominal muti­lations (although the arrival of Diemschütz and his carriage probably interfered with the Ripper’s plans). There was no evidence that Stride had been strangled prior to having her throat cut. Plus, if Schwartz did see Stride’s killer, his aggressive and vocal behaviour seems to bear no relation to the silent, solitary murderer of Nichols and Chapman. However, like Nichols and Chapman, it appeared that the killer cut Stride’s throat while she was down on her back. Lack of evidence of a struggle suggests that she was uncon­scious before the fatal knife strokes. This brings us back to the possibility that it was the Ripper who killed her and only the arrival of Louis Diemschütz dissuaded him from contin­uing his work on Elizabeth Stride.