LONDON OFFICIALS SEARCHING FOR A MYSTERIOUS MALAY.
A Sailor Tells of a Threat Against Whitechapel Women - Houses Seized to Aid the Search for the Whitechapel Fiend…
SPECIAL CABLE DISPATCH TO THE TRIBUNE.
[Copyright, 1888, by James Gordon Bennett.]
LONDON, Oct. 5. - The perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders is still at large and no clew has been discovered likely to lead to his capture. No further arrest of any one has been made. The excitement in the neighborhood of the murderer's terrible exploits shows no diminution in intensity. It has been ministered to all day by a series of rumors of a particularly sanguinary character, but they have not the slightest truth in them. A cable dispatch about the Dodge story in New York of Alaska, the Malay, excited considerable interest in police circles, and immediately upon the receipt of a copy of the cablegram detectives were sent to make inquiries at the Glen Line Steamship Company's, the Home for Asiatics, and at other places in the East End where it was likely information respecting the Malay could be obtained. Mr. Freeman, manager and Superintendent of the Asiatic Home, said he had been at the home for thirty years and had never known a Malay of the name Alaska. Malays, he said, are Mohammedans and do not use European names, but the word "lascar" is the Mohammedan name for seaman, and Dodge might have been misled. Recently, a crew of Japanese sailors had lodged at the home, and Mr. Freeman admitted that one of these men was a desperate character, for on one occasion he stabbed three of his comrades who were staying in the home. He was arrested, but when his trial came on the injured men had taken ship and gone away. The Queen's Music-Hall, where Dodge says he met Alaska, is most luxuriously fitted up, in a style equal to many of the West End music-halls. Mr. Wood, the manager, says that he had heard nothing of the alleged robbery of the Malay, and referred his inquirer to two attendants, Alexander Nowland and Henry Pierce, who look after the boxes in which sailors just returned from a voyage usually disport themselves. Both men declared that no such robbery could have taken place on the premises without their hearing of it, and as far as they were aware no such thing had happened. Axel Welin, Secretary of the Scandinavian Sailor's Temperance House, West India docks, is extremely popular with foreign sailors. He ransacked his books, but could find no trace either of Dodge or the Malay. Messrs. Magregor's Son & Co., owners of the Glen Line of steamers trading to Singapore, China, etc., stated that the Glenartney sailed in April from London for China and returned Aug. 14. After taking in a cargo at Antwerp she again sailed for China Sept. 8 and was last reported Sept. 23 at Suez. They have no one named Alaska on board. The chief cook of the Glenartney is a thoroughly respectable Chinaman, who has been in the service of the firm for many years, and they have had no Malays on the ship. It is the general opinion that the story of the seaman at New York is a yarn.
LONDON, Oct. 5. - Sir Charles Warren, Chief of the Metropolitan Police Force, has decided to employ bloodhounds in his efforts to discover the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murder.
The police place confidence in the story of George M. Dodge, a seaman, who says that in August last he met a Malay cook named Alaska, with whom he had previously been acquainted on shipboard, in a music hall in London, and that Alaska told him he had been robbed of all he had by a woman of the town, and threatened that unless he found the woman and recovered his property he would kill and mutilate every Whitechapel woman he met. The police are searching everywhere for the Malay.
Acting on information which has been furnished them the police who are investigating the Whitechapel murders have seized and occupied several houses in that section.
