London Again Shocked by His Villiany - An Aged Woman the Latest Victim of the Fiend - Futile Efforts to Find the Butcher - A Terrible Record of Crime
London, Aug. 8.
Much excitement was occasioned in the Whitechapel district when it was known that the dreaded "Jack the Ripper" had again appeared and had murdered an aged woman named Woolfe. The fiend used his knife with ferocity. He grasped the woman by the head, and drawing her backward he, with one hand across her mouth, silenced the cries she would naturally have tried to make, while with the other hand he drew the keen-bladed knife across her tightly drawn throat, inflicting a terrible wound. Then using the knife as a dagger he plunged it into her body again and again. There is a deep wound on the woman's arm which it is believed was received while she was attempting to ward off the ferocious blows aimed at her body.
When her assailant released her from his grasp she fell upon a doorstep. Despite her terrible injuries she still retained possession of her senses, and though the wound in her throat was bleeding profusely she was able to articulate. Several persons passed while she was lying on the doorstep, and though they endeavored to ascertain what the trouble was, she could not speak English sufficiently well to make them understand that an attempt had been made to murder her.
The woman was taken to a hospital and after a time she recovered sufficiently to tell of the attack upon her. She is German, and unlike the other women murdered and mutilated in Whitechapel, she was not in the company of the man who attacked her, but was passing along the street, when, without warning, the assassin sprung upon her. She saw the glitter of the upraised steel blade, but was unable to escape from the grasp of her assailant. She raised her arm to defend her throat from the sweeping blow aimed at it, and it was through this movement that the wound in her arm was received.
It is understood that the police found a razor covered with blood near the scene of the crime. The wound in the woman's throat could have been caused by a razor, as could also the deep cut in her arm, but from the nature of the other wounds it is believed that they were caused by either a knife or a dagger, as they appear to be stab wounds and not such as would be made with a razor.
One man has been taken into custody on suspicion of being the assassin but the evidence against him is very weak.
The murder in Whitechapel adds another to the most strangely horrible series of crimes known in modern history. The number of the murders done by the hand of the unknown "Jack the Ripper", their peculiar character and the evident insane ferocity which instigated them have excited the attention of the whole world. At a time when steam and electricity have made the earth small and the task of policing it proportionately easy it would seem impossible that such a succession of mysterious murders could be undertaken with impunity. There is nothing like it outside the pages of the criminal romances of French literature.
