Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (9 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

A MURDERER INTERRUPTED

The Death of Elizabeth Stride

T
he murderer was now developing his ritualistic style: the bodies were being mutilated in specific ways, organs were being taken as souvenirs,
there was a heavily sexualized theme to the mutilations. He chose as victims women who were working in the sex trade, and after killing them he viciously lacerated their whole bodies, but
particularly their genital and reproductive organs. He struck at night, he struck at seemingly random intervals. It is not surprising that fear and hysteria were escalating – but never enough
for some of the unfortunates, the sad women who needed pennies for their bed and to pay for their gin, to stop plying their trade.

Newspapers were full of theories and reports about potential arrests and incidents that were immediately seized upon as being related to the ‘Whitechapel monster’. On 27 September
1888, the Central News Agency, a press agency based near Blackfriars Bridge, received a letter, allegedly from the murderer himself and written in red ink.

Written at right-angles to the main text was a further message, written in pencil:

This was not the first letter claiming to have been written by the murderer, as Commissioner Charles Warren had received one on 24 September from somebody who said he had
carried
out the attacks, and claiming that he would do some more before giving himself up. It was pretty much ignored, unlike this new letter which Central News sent to the
police two days after receiving it, with a covering letter suggesting that it was a hoax. The police, it seems, agreed, but they took some notice of the content, deciding to keep the letter out of
the public gaze until the murderer had, as he promised, done ‘a bit more work’. That moment was not a long time in coming.

The next murders occurred in the early hours of 30 September 1888, less than three weeks after the brutal death of Annie Chapman. Two prostitutes were killed within an hour of each other and in
two different locations; it would later be hailed in Ripper folklore as the ‘Double Event’. It is clear, examining the details, that the killer was disturbed at his first attempt to
murder, and did not have enough time to ritually mutilate the body and was compelled to strike again: killing alone was not enough. Whatever thrill he got from his handiwork, it did not come at the
moment of death, but was associated with what he did to carve up the body.

The first victim that night was Elizabeth Stride, commonly known as ‘Long Liz’, though how she got her nickname is a mystery as she was not particularly tall. Born Elizabeth
Gustafsdottir in 1843 in Stora Tumlehead, on the western coast of Sweden, she had been registered by the police in her home country as a professional prostitute by the age of twenty-two. She was
plagued by venereal infections and gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1865, not long after her mother died. With money she inherited from her mother, she managed to emigrate to London in 1866
and settled in the Whitechapel district. Her troubled life appeared to be on the mend once she
married John Stride in 1869 but thanks to her heavy drinking, and her frequent
arrests for being drunk and disorderly, the couple separated in 1881. John died three years later of heart disease at the sick asylum in Bromley.

Without the support of her husband, Elizabeth returned to prostitution to support herself. From then on she found it extremely difficult to escape the hard life of an unfortunate, but she was a
fantasist who embellished her sad story, probably trying to escape, if only in her boasts, the depths to which she had sunk. She claimed to have worked for a rich family, she said that her husband
and two of her nine children had drowned in a famous incident where a ship sank in the River Thames (in fact he died six years later, and they had no children). She lied about her age, saying she
was ten years younger than she was, and she was embarrassed about having lost her front teeth, claiming they were knocked out and her palate damaged in the riverboat sinking. The post-mortem showed
no damage to her mouth apart from the missing teeth. But I can understand her need to try to build a better past for herself: maybe she even believed some of it herself by the time she had told the
lies so often.

Like the other unfortunates, she tried to support herself without patrolling the streets at night looking for clients: she worked as a cleaner and she did some sewing. But, as with so many of
the others, there simply wasn’t enough work to keep her going, especially with her drink habit. She lived, like almost all of the victims, in the temporary and affordable accommodation of the
common lodging houses. She was living in Brick Lane around December 1881, but spent the Christmas and New Year in the Whitechapel Infirmary, suffering with
bronchitis. After
moving from Brick Lane, Elizabeth lived at a dosshouse at 32 Flower and Dean Street, staying there until 1885, when she met Michael Kidney, a waterside labourer. They moved in together at 38
Devonshire Street, Commercial Road, but their relationship was volatile: they quarrelled often and frequently separated until, on 25 September 1888, Elizabeth left Kidney for the last time and
returned to her old lodgings in Flower and Dean Street. In the years 1887 and 1888, she had clocked up eight convictions for drunkenness at Thames Magistrates Court.

On Saturday 29 September 1888, Elizabeth did her regular job of cleaning rooms in the lodging house during the day, earning a small wage. At 6.30 p.m. she was in the Queen’s Head pub on
the corner of Commercial Street and Fashion Street and shortly afterwards she made her way back to Flower and Dean Street with a friend to get herself ready for the evening ahead. Her subsequent
movements were reasonably well documented.

Fellow resident Catherine Lane, a charwoman, stated that she saw Elizabeth between the hours of 7 and 8 p.m. that evening in the lodging house kitchen, wearing a long jacket and black hat and
appearing relatively sober. Charles Preston, a barber, stated that he too saw Elizabeth in the kitchen that evening, lending her his clothes brush as she was preparing to go out and wanted to
smarten herself up. He described her black jacket as having a fur trim and said there was a coloured, striped silk handkerchief round her neck.

Several hours later, John Gardner and John Best saw Elizabeth leave the Bricklayers Arms in Settles Street shortly before 11 p.m. with a man they described as about 5 foot 5
inches tall, with a black moustache, weak, sandy eyelashes and wearing a morning suit and a billycock (bowler) hat. Gardner and Best, noticing that the couple were sheltering briefly
from a sudden downpour, joked to her, ‘That’s Leather Apron getting round you,’ before Elizabeth and the man went off.

Mathew Packer, a fruiterer of 44 Berner Street, said that he sold half a pound of black grapes at about 11 p.m. to a young man about twenty-five to thirty years of age, who was accompanied by a
woman dressed in a black frock and a jacket with fur round the bottom and a black crêpe bonnet. She was also wearing a flower in her jacket, resembling a geranium, which was white outside and
red inside. The man was about 5 foot 7 inches tall wearing a long black coat which was buttoned up and a soft felt hat described as a kind of ‘Yankee’ hat. He had broad shoulders and
spoke rather quickly in a rough voice. Packer later identified the woman as Elizabeth Stride in St George-in-the-East mortuary, but Packer’s evidence was later questioned, and there was no
evidence from the contents of her stomach of the dead woman having eaten grapes. All crimes attract ‘groupies’, people who want to be at the centre of attention, and this is probably
all that Packer was. Chief Inspector Swanson wrote in a report that Packer ‘made different statements . . . any statement he made would be rendered almost valueless as evidence.’

At 11.45 p.m., William Marshall, a labourer who lived at 64 Berner Street, witnessed a man kissing Elizabeth Stride (he positively identified her in the mortuary) as they were standing near his
lodgings. He heard the man say, ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ He described the man as middle
aged, wearing a round cap with a small peak, about 5
foot 6 inches tall, rather stout in build and decently dressed. As the sighting was an hour before the likely time of the murder, the man he saw is probably an earlier client of
Elizabeth’s.

At 12.35 a.m. PC William Smith was pounding his beat along Berner Street when he saw a man and a woman standing in the street opposite a narrow passageway known as Dutfield’s Yard. The man
was about 5 foot 7 inches tall, about twenty-eight years old, with a small dark moustache and a dark complexion. He was wearing a black diagonal cutaway coat, a hard felt hat, a white collar and
tie, and was carrying a parcel wrapped up in newspaper about 18 inches long and 6 to 8 inches wide. The woman was wearing a red flower pinned to her jacket, which PC Smith later recognized at the
mortuary when he went to view Elizabeth Stride’s body.

Another witness, Mrs Fanny Mortimer who lived just a few houses from the murder scene, gave different stories to journalists, but it boiled down to her seeing nothing more than a young couple at
the corner of the road, about twenty yards from her.

On the corner of Berner Street and Dutfield’s Yard was the International Working Men’s Educational Club, a two-storey building which housed a club for Jewish socialists and
anarchists, mostly of Russian and Polish origin, and on this evening it had hosted a meeting and lecture about the iniquitous ‘sweaters’, the sweatshops where the poor were forced to
work for very low pay. At the end of the meeting members stayed behind, drinking and singing songs in Russian.

Morris Eagle, a member of the club, walked down Dutfield’s Yard at 12.40 a.m., having been away from the premises for just
under an hour to take his girlfriend home,
and he saw nothing unusual before he went back inside.

Only five minutes later, the most important witness of the night, and in my opinion, the whole case, Israel Schwartz, witnessed what I believe is the only definite sighting of the Ripper. Very
little is known about Schwartz other than that he was a Hungarian who spoke hardly any English and who had ‘the appearance of being in the theatrical line’. He was certainly married by
this time as it was stated that he and his wife had moved from their lodgings in Berner Street to a new address in Helen Street, near Backchurch Lane, on the day of the incident.

Schwartz was on his way to his new home and was walking towards the gateway of Dutfield’s Yard at about 12.45 a.m. The report of what he saw was written down in a statement taken by Chief
Inspector Donald Swanson, and I’m reproducing it here in full because it is so vital:

He then went on to describe the second man as 5 foot 11 inches, thirty-five years old, with a fresh complexion, light brown hair and a brown moustache. He wore a dark overcoat
and an old black hard felt hat with a wide brim.

According to Inspector Abberline, ‘Lipski’ had become an abusive term for the Jews in that part of London since the arrest of Israel Lipski the previous year. Lipski, who was of
Polish–Jewish descent, had been accused of murdering Miriam Angel in nearby Batty Street, having forced her to drink nitric acid. Lipski was found under her bed with acid burns in his mouth
and was arrested, brought to trial, found guilty and hanged, despite his protestations of innocence.

At first the police hoped that ‘Lipski’ was the name of the second man, so that he could be traced and questioned, but this was fruitless and they accepted that it was an insult,
possibly aimed at Schwartz because of his Jewish appearance.