To The Perpetrator of the Whitechapel Murders - All London Reduced
to a Condition of Abject Terror - Arrests That Do Not Reassure -
Rewards and Expert Opinion
London, October 1.
Not even during the days of the great dynamite scares was all London more excited and panic stricken than it is to-day over the mysterious Whitechapel murders. The fact that the victim in every case has been a fallen woman and an outcast does not tend to reassure any one, for the fact remains that in this metropolis of the world, in the latter days of the Nineteenth Century a man of fiendish propensities is roaming the streets night after night, committing the most brutal murders at will, and that not all the London police, led by all the far famed Scotland Yard detectives, have as yet obtained the first clew to his identity. The two additional murders of Saturday night have reduced the great city to a condition of abject terror, and even men may now be found who declare that they are afraid to venture out after nightfall.
So great has been the storm of indignation against the police that to-day, in pure self defense, they arrested several persons, each on suspicion of being the wholesale murderer, but no one believes that the real murderer has been arrested. To-day the Financial News offered a reward of £300 for the capture of the murderer and an hour later the Lord Mayor offered a further reward of £500. Even higher rewards may yet be offered, for until the perpetrator of the crimes is in custody no one in London will breathe easily. In their terror people wildly run to medical experts for their opinion, and get nothing. It is generally believed that the murderer whoever he may be, is skilled in the art of surgery. It does not take a medical expert to accept that as a fact.
Today Dr. Henry Forbes Winslow, Sir Risdon Bennet and other distinguished physicians gravely announced their latest opinion on the matter. It was that they are now more than ever convinced that the murderer is a homicidal lunatic.
As that is precisely what every one else is convinced of it simply goes to show that the medical experts know just as much about the matter as do the baffled and confused police.
