WHO HAUNTS WHITECHAPEL IN THE CITY OF LONDON
A Series of Strange Crimes that Revives Poe's Story of the "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Stevenson's "Mr. Hyde"
New York, September 4.
A London special to the Times says the Whitechapel murder mystery transcends anything known in the annals of the horrible. It is Poe's Murders of the Rue Morgue and the Mystery of Marie Roget rolled into one story. It is nothing less than a midnight murderer, whose step is noiseless, whose strike is deadly, and whose cunning is so great that he leaves no trace of his work and no clew to his identity. When the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, who was
last Friday, was investigated, it became evident that the murder was the work of the same hand that committed the two preceding ones. Detectives are now looking for one man, whom they believe to be guilty of all three crimes. This man is called "Leather Apron," and nobody knows him by any other name. He is a character half way between Dickens's Quilp and Poe's Baboon. He is short, stunted and thick set. He has small, wicked black eyes and is half crazy. He is always hanging about the
that fill the intricate network of courts, passages and alleyways in Whitechapel. He does not walk, but always moves on a sharp or queer run, and never makes any noise with his feet. In addition to the three women he is believed to haven murdered, he has scared a hundred more of them nearly to death. Every streetwalker in
has her own story to tell of him. he lives by robbing them late at night. He is suspected of having done the three murders from the fact that he has frequently drawn a knife on women, accompanied by some threats which have been carried out. The story of Mrs. Colwall, who heard the creams of the woman as she was being murdered, is to the effect that she was clearly running away from somebody who was murdering her, and yet she could hear no other footsteps.
