Evening Star (Washington, D.C.)
Saturday, 10 November 1888
THE LONDON POLICE.
The Demand for a Change Intensified by the Latest Murder.
Special Cable Dispatch to THE EVENING STAR.
LONDON, Nov. 10.--General Davis postponed his question about the London police in the house of commons, at the urgent request of the home secretary. He will put them on Monday. In the event of the answer not being satisfactory, he will take steps to raise a discussion. Gen. Warren's friends declare that he talks of resigning in consequence of a snubbing he received from the home secretary. The public feeling that a change is required in the police system is intensified by the seventh horrible murder, in Whitechapel, which completely eclipses every other topic.
GEN. WARREN'S OFFER.
A Pardon to Any Accomplice of the Whitechapel Fiend who will "Blow."
LONDON, Nov. 10.--Gen. Warren, chief of the metropolitan police, has issued a proclamation offering a free pardon to any accomplice the Whitechapel murderer may have had, provided he will give information which will lead to the murderer's apprehension.
The woman's Antecedents.
It is learned that the woman whose mutilated body was found in the Dorset-street house yesterday was a native of Limerick, Ireland. She migrated to Wales, where she married a collier, who was subsequently killed by an explosion. After that she drifted to London.
INDESCRIBABLY HORRIBLE.
Fearful Work of "Jack the Ripper" on His Latest Victim.
The butchery of another woman in London has renewed the excitement in that city. It is said the murdered woman told a companion Thursday evening that she was without money, and would commit suicide if she did not obtain a supply. It has been learned that a man, respectably dressed, accosted the victim and offered her money. They went to her lodgings on the second floor of the Dorset street house. No noise was heard during the night, and nothing was known of the murder until the landlady went to the room early Friday morning to ask for the rent. The first thing she saw on entering the room was the woman's breasts and viscera lying on a table.
Dorset street is short and narrow, and is situated close to Miter (sic) Square and Hanbury street.
In the house of commons yesterday Mr. Conybeare asked if it was true that another woman had been murdered in London, Gen. Warren, chief of the Metropolitan police, ought not to be superseded by an officer accustomed to investigate crime.
The question was greeted by cries of "Oh!" "Oh!" The speaker called "Order, order," and said that notice must be given of the question in the regular way.
Mr. Conybeare replied: "I have given private notice."
The speaker--"The notice must be made in writing."
Mr. Cunningham Graham then asked whether Gen. Warren had already resigned, to which Mr. Smith, the government leader, replied, "No."
The Scene of the Crime.
The London correspondent of the Philadelphia Press gives the following particulars of the brutal crime of "Jack the Ripper," its victim, and the locality in which it was committed. The same was in a court off Dorset street. Out of the latter opens an arched passage, low and narrow. A big man walking through it would bend his head and turn sideways to keep his shoulders from rubbing against the dirty bricks. At the end of the passage there is a high court not ten feet broad and thirty lond; thickly whitewashed all around for sanitary reasons to the height of ten feet. That is Miller (sic) Court. Misery is written all over the place, the worst kind of London misery, such as those who have lived their lives in American can have no idea of.
The first door at the end and on the right of the passage opens into a tiny damp room on a level with the pavement. The landlord of this and neighboring rooms is a John McCarthy, who keeps a little shop in Dorset street, on the side of the passage. About a year ago he rented it to a woman who looked about thirty. she was popular among the females of the neighborhood, shared her beer generously, as I have been tearfully informed, and went under the title of Mary Jane McCarthy. Her landlord knew that she had another name, Kelly, that of her husband, but her friends had not heard of it.
Mary Jane took up her residence in the little room in Miller Court when Kelly left her. Since then her life has been that of all the women about her. Last night she went out as usual and was seen at various times up to 11.30 drinking at various low beer shops in Commercial street. At last just before midnight she went home iwth some man, who appears to have dissuaded her from making a good night visit, as was her custom, at a drinking place nearest her room. No description can be obtained of this man.
Right opposite the passage leading to Mary Jane's room there is a big lodging-house where the charge is four pence for a bed. Some men congregated about the door at midnight are sure they saw a man and woman, the latter being Mary Jane, stop to laugh at a poster on one side of the passage, which offers £100 reward for the Whitechapel murderer. The man must have enjoyed the joke, for he himself was the Whitechapel murderer beyond all doubt. The men who saw him can only say that he did not look remarkable.
At 10 o'clock this morning, just as the Lord Mayor was climbing into his golden carriage, three horrified policemen who had first looked in through Mary Jane's window and then drakn big glasses of brandy to steady themselves, were breaking in her door with a pick axe. The Whitechapel murderer has done his work with more thoroughness than ever before. The miserable woman's body was literally scattered all over her room. Almost every conceivable mutilation had been practiced on the body.
Frightful Butchery.
The butchery was so frightful that more than an hour was spent by the doctors in endeavoring to reconstruct the woman's body from the pieces, so as to place it in a coffin and have it photographed.
To-night at midnight Dorset street and all the neighborhood was swarming with a typical degraded Whitechapel throng. Those with any money were getting drunk very fast. Many sober women and all the drunken ones were crying from terror, while the men lounged about singing or fighting and chaffing the women according to their ideas of humor. The police were and are doing nothing of importance. The poor woman's fragments, put together as skillfully as possible, are lying in the Houndsditch Mortuary in a scratched and dirty shell of a coffin often used before. While the body was being carried from the scene of the murder thousands crowded as near as the police would allow, and gazed with lifted caps and pitying faces at the latest victim.
The Murdered Woman's Pal.
The most interesting individual in Miller court was a woman who had intimately known the dead woman. Mary Jane's pal, she called herself. Her room is directly opposite the murdered woman's, and its agitated proprieter stood in the doorway urging a young girl with straggling wisps of red hair who had started for beer not to be gone a minute. She assured me that she would be gald (sic) to talk to me while Kate was away, just to forget the horrors. This woman spoke well of the dead. She had not always been on peaceable terms with the murdered woman, but they were good friends, though quarrelsome. Mary Jane was pretty before she was cut up, Mary said, and she was only twenty-four, not thirty, as she looked, but she would fight and did not care what sort of place she lived in.
The Whitechapel murderer has added the ninth to his list of victims. The stupid London police have been chasing him for more than a year with no hope of success. As in the other cases his present victim is a prostitute, whom he has horribly mutilated. Nothing could not increase the embarrassment and dismay of the police authorities except the announcement from "the ripper," in the line of his previous candid declarations, that he intends to change his class of victims, and make way with the police force itself, beginning with General Warren and working down. This horrible chapter in the history of crime teaches how difficult it is to detect a murder when no personal hatred or other motive than the mere love of killing prompts the crime and furnishes a clue. DeQuincey could have made good use of this true story in his discussion of murder considered as a fine art. It is far more interesting and significant than any which he related. The special danger from this incident to other communities than that in which it occurs is the probability that the successful career of "the ripper" will suggest to other unbalanced intelects in which a strong love of killing lies dormant, or repressed by fear, the safety of gratifying the murderous impulse. Crime is imitative. A single case of a peculiar class may lead to an epidemic.
