The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (78 page)

The first was Elizabeth Stride, a widow and well-known prostitute, whose last place of residence was a common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street. At about twelve-thirty on the fatal morning PC William Smith, on patrol in Berner Street, off Commercial Road, saw her talking with a man. Her companion looked about twenty-eight years old, stood five foot seven or eight inches tall, and sported a small dark moustache. He was respectably dressed in a black diagonal cutaway coat and dark deerstalker and he was carrying a parcel wrapped up in newspaper. Fifteen minutes later another passer-by, Israel Schwartz, actually saw a man throwing Elizabeth down on the pavement outside Dutfield’s yard in Berner Street. Schwartz, too frightened to intervene, cowardly scurried away. But he later furnished the police with a good description of the assailant: “Age about thirty, height five foot five inches, complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak.” Elizabeth’s body was found in the passage communicating between Berner Street and Dutfield’s Yard at about one. Her throat had been cut from left to right, as in the cases of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, but there were no other mutilations.

Just forty-five minutes after the discovery in Berner Street an even more gruesome one was made in Mitre Square, within the eastern boundary of the City of London. City PC Edward Watkins patrolled the square at one-thirty and found it deserted. Entering it again at one forty-four, however, he discovered the dead body of a woman in the darkest and southernmost corner. The throat had been ferociously severed from left to right, the head and face cruelly slashed, there were severe abdominal injuries and the left kidney and part of the womb had been cut out and taken away. “She was ripped up like a pig in the market,” said PC Watkins later, “I have been in the force a long while but I never before saw such a sight.”

The Mitre Square victim was a forty-six-year-old charwoman and prostitute named Kate Eddowes. What is thought to have been the last known sighting of her alive occurred at one thirty-five. Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveller, was leaving the Imperial Club in Duke Street when he noticed a couple standing at the entrance of a passage which led from Duke Street into Mitre Square. The man looked “rather rough and shabby”. He was five foot seven or eight inches in height, of medium build and appeared to be about thirty years old. The clothes included a pepper-and- salt coloured jacket, a reddish neckerchief and a grey cloth cap with a peak. Lawende thought he looked like a sailor. Ten minutes after this sighting Kate’s body was found in the square.

A piece of Kate’s apron, still wet with blood, was found discarded a few streets away in the entry to Nos. 108–119 Wentworth Model Dwellings, Goulston Street. Just above it, written in white chalk on the right-hand side of the doorway, were the words:

If this message was written by the murderer—and it probably was—it was the only tangible clue he ever left behind. Its correct interpretation, however, is problematical. On the face of it it suggested that the killer was a vengeful Jew and for this reason Sir Charles Warren, afraid that it might provoke retaliatory attacks upon the Jewish community, ordered it to be erased before daybreak. Nevertheless, the prevailing police view at the time was that the message was a deliberate red herring, intended to throw them off the scent of the real culprit.

The great disparity in the injuries inflicted upon Elizabeth Stride and Kate Eddowes has led some writers to contend that they were slain by different men. This is not impossible. But Elizabeth may have escaped mutilation only because her killer was disturbed by Louis Diemschutz, the man who found the body, and it is now generally believed that the Ripper walked into the City to find a second victim when his desire to mutilate the first had been thwarted. If so his return to Whitechapel, where he discarded the piece of Kate’s apron, undoubtedly suggests that he lived in the East End.

After the double murder the police unwittingly increased apprehension in the East End by giving publicity to a letter received by the Central News Agency. This letter, purportedly sent by the murderer, was written in red ink and promised further killings. “I am down on whores,” it ran, “and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” The letter was dated 25 September, five days before the double killing, and was signed “Jack the Ripper”. The police posted facsimiles of the letter—and a postcard written in the same hand—outside police stations in the hope that someone might recognize the handwriting but the scribe was never traced. There is nothing in the content of the documents, however, to suggest that they were really written by the murderer. The police themselves came to regard them as hoaxes and many years later a suspicion existed at the Yard that Tom Bulling and Charles Moore, two journalists at the Central News, had been responsible. Whatever the identity of the hoaxer, the only significance of the letter now is that it gave the murderer the gruesome nickname by which he seems destined to be remembered: Jack the Ripper.

The horrific murder of Mary Kelly in her room at No. 13 Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, on Friday, 9 November 1888, was the last generally attributed to the Ripper.

Mary was a young Irish prostitute. At the time of her death she was more than six weeks in arrears with her rent and when last seen, at about two on the fatal morning, was soliciting in Commercial Street. A casual labourer named George Hutchinson saw her meet a well-dressed client there and take him to Miller’s Court. The man had a large moustache curled up at the ends. He was of Jewish appearance, dark, about thirty-four or thirty-five years old and five foot six inches in height. His attire was impressive. Hutchinson remembered a dark felt hat, a long coat with the collar and cuffs trimmed in astrakhan, a large gold watch chain displayed from the waistcoat and a horseshoe pin affixed in the tie. He was carrying a small parcel in his left hand.

At about four two residents in Miller’s Court thought they heard a scream of “Murder!” Some seven hours later the landlord’s assistant, calling at No. 13 for rent, discovered Mary’s body. It lay on the bed, naked except for the remains of a linen undergarment. She had been appallingly mutilated. The throat had been severed, the face hacked beyond recognition, the breasts cut off and the abdomen laid open. The viscera had been extracted and deposited in various places around the body. The flesh from the abdomen and thighs had been stripped away and placed on a bedside table. The heart had been cut out through the abdominal cavity. It was never recovered.

There were similar murders in the East End after 1888 but these are now generally regarded as copy crimes. After Miller’s Court, seemingly, the Ripper vanished, as “if through a trapdoor in the earth”, as one contemporary quaintly termed it.

Some serial killers have claimed far more victims than the Ripper but few have terrorized a community so completely as he did the East End of 1888. Partly this was because his crimes were grotesque, partly because they were so concentrated in time and place. “No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, ex-Head of CID, many years later. “Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: ‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel.’ Such was the burden of their ghastly song; and, when the double murder of 30 September took place . . . no servant-maid deemed her life safe if she ventured out to post a letter after ten o’clock at night.”

So who was Jack the Ripper?

Well, the historical record does suggest a few clues. The witnesses tended to describe a white male, relatively young, in his twenties or thirties, of medium height or less and respectably dressed. Dr Gordon Brown, who carried out the post-mortem examination of Kate Eddowes, was convinced that the murderer had demonstrated surgical skill as well as anatomical knowledge in his extraction of the left kidney. Certainly most of the doctors who saw the Ripper’s handiwork felt that
some
degree of anatomical knowledge had been involved. And the close geographical grouping of the crimes, together with the killer’s return to Whitechapel from Mitre Square, suggest a local man.

Can we go further? Can we put a name to the Ripper? The answer to that one, despite the blandishments of the Ripperologists, is an emphatic no.

The police investigated hundreds of suspects. It is sometimes said that there was a principal suspect but this implies a consensus of view that simply did not exist within the detective force. Some suspects were more interesting than others but different officers held different theories. Many police records from the period have been lost but enough survives for us to identify some of the main suspects. Indeed, as a result of intensive research over the last thirty years we probably know more about these men than the police did at the time.

One of the most interesting police suspects was Aaron Kosminski, a poor Jewish barber committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. Interesting because his appears to have been the only case in which the police procured evidence to link a suspect with any of the crimes. Sir Robert Anderson certainly came to believe that Kosminski was the Ripper and refers to him in his memoirs, published in 1910. By Anderson’s account Kosminski was identified by a witness, the “only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer”, but the police were unable to charge him because the witness, also Jewish, refused to give evidence against a fellow-Jew.

Unfortunately, the more we learn about Kosminski the less likely a suspect he seems. Most of the documentation is lost but the clues we have suggest that the witness was Joseph Lawende, the man believed to have fleetingly seen the Ripper on the night of the double murder, and that he did not identify Kosminski until 1890–91, about two years after the event. A great deal of research has been conducted into identification evidence of this kind since Anderson’s time and it has taught us that at periods of a year or more after the original sighting it is worthless. There are other doubts about whether Kosminski can have been the Ripper. We have no clear evidence that he possessed anatomical knowledge. And although he spent more than twenty-five years in asylums (he died in Leavesden Asylum, near Watford, in 1919) the doctors who monitored his progress there explicitly and repeatedly described him as a harmless patient.

Melville Macnaghten, who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1889 and became Head of CID in 1903, held to a different theory. In his view the Ripper was Montague John Druitt, a man who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames shortly after the Miller’s Court tragedy. However, Macnaghten’s data on Druitt is now known to have been seriously flawed. He thought, for example, that he was a doctor. In reality Druitt was a schoolteacher and barrister. No one has ever proved a connection between Druitt and the crimes, or even the East End. On the other hand there is evidence to suggest that he spent his summer vacation on the south coast in 1888 and hence may not have been in London when Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols died. Thus, on 1 September, the day after Polly was murdered, Druitt was in Canford, Dorset, playing for the local cricket team against Wimborne.

George Chapman (real name Severin Klosowski), executed in 1903 for the murder of Maud Marsh, fits what we know about the Ripper better than either Kosminski or Druitt. Ex-Chief Inspector Abberline undoubtedly believed that Chapman and the Ripper were the same man and after the trial he congratulated Inspector Godley, who had apprehended Chapman, with the words: “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”

Before coming to London in 1887 Chapman was trained as a surgeon in his native Poland. In 1888 he lived in Cable Street, within walking distance of the murder sites. His appearance matches descriptions of the Ripper well. And he was violent and cruel. Chapman was fascinated with weaponry and adorned his walls with swords and firearms and he terrorized a succession of female consorts, threatening one with a knife, another with a revolver and physically abusing several. Maud Marsh was the third “wife” he poisoned to death between 1897 and 1902.

If Chapman was the Ripper he must have abandoned the knife in favour of poison and some writers have not found a change of
modus operandi
as dramatic as this credible. The fatal flaw in the case against Chapman, however, is the simple fact that not a scrap of tangible evidence was ever adduced to connect him with a single one of the Ripper crimes.

Perhaps the most important document to come to light in recent years is the Littlechild letter. Discovered in 1993, it is a letter written by Ex-Chief Inspector John Littlechild, one-time Head of the Special Branch, to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, and it introduced us to a police suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an American quack doctor named Francis Tumblety.

Tumblety was in London at the time of the murders. On 16 November 1888 he was charged at Marlborough Street Police Court with homosexual offences and bailed to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail and fled, first to France, and then back to America.

Littlechild considered Tumblety a “very likely” Ripper suspect and an interesting circumstantial case can indeed be alleged against him. He had pretensions to medical knowledge, he was a known misogynist and he collected anatomical specimens. His collection included, according to one who saw it, jars containing wombs from “every class of women”, and it will be remembered that in two of the Ripper murders the womb had been extracted and taken away.