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Atchison Daily Globe
Kansas, USA
5 September 1888

"LEATHER APRON"

Mysterious Murders in London Credited to a Strange, Half Crazy Character

London, Sept. 5.
Police investigation of the White Chapel women murders has resulted in the discovery that the man guilty of all three crimes is called "Leather Apron" and nobody knows him by any other name. He is a character half way between Dickens' Quilp and Poe's baboon. He is short, stunted and thick set. He has small, wicked black eyes and is half crazy. He was always hanging about the deep shadows that filled the network of the courts, passages and alley ways in White Chapel. He did not walk, but always moved on a sharp or queer run and never made any noise with his feet. In addition to the three women he murdered he scared a hundred more of them nearly to death, and every street walker in White Chapel has her own story to tell of him. He lived by robbing them late at night and kicked, cuffed or knocked down two score of them in the last two years. His usual lodging place wa a four-penny house in a poverty stricken thieves' alley off Brick Lane. He has left there, now, however, and nobody knows where he is. He is suspected of having done the three murders from the fact that he has frequently drawn a knife on women, accompanied by the same threats which have been carried out on the dead women. The story of Mrs. Colwall, who heard the screams of the woman as she was being murdered, is that she was clearly running away from somebody who was murdering her, and yet she could hear no other footsteps. The blood stains on the sidewalk indicated the same thing - that the murderer, who ever he was, was noiseless in his pursuit, and this quality points direct to Leather Apron. He is a slipper maker by trade and gets his nickname from the fact he always wears a leather apron, and is never seen without it. One peculiar feature of the case is that none of the police or detectives appear to know him, he having always kept out of their sight, and they are now gleaning information concerning him from women he has assailed.


Related pages:
  Leather Apron
       Press Reports: Austin Statesman - 05 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Daily Telegraph - 11 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Daily Telegraph - 12 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Galveston Daily News - 5 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Irish Times - 10 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Irish Times: 11 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Lloyds Weekly News - 9 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Manchester Guardian - 6 September 1888 
       Press Reports: News of the World - 21 October 1900 
       Press Reports: Penny Illustrated Paper - 15 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Star - 10 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Star - 5 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Star - 6 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Times [London] - 11 September 1888 
       Press Reports: Weekly Herald - 14 September 1888 
       Suspects: David Cohen 
       Witnesses: Elizabeth Allen