He Has Resumed His Horrible Butchery
THE WORST HE HAS DONE YET
London, Nov. 10.
The Whitechapel butcher, after a cessation of two months, has resumed his horrible atrocities. His ninth victim has paid the
penalty of his insatiable thirst, and still the atrocious fiend is at large.
In a small room in Dorset street, Spitalfields, the center of the silk weaving districts, the body of his latest victim was found yesterday. Unlike the previous atrocities, this awful crime was committed within a building. The woman is known as Lizzie Fisher among her associates. Like all the others, she was a disreputable character. She was married to a porter named Lawrence, but lived with him only occasionally. When she tired of the companionship of her husband she would abandon him and occupy the room in which her mutilated body was found.
The murdered woman had a latch key to the house in which her room was located. She could enter the house when she pleased and be seen by no one. None of the occupants have any idea as to when she returned home, and no one saw any man with her or entering her room. The possibility of his identification is therefore very remote. He might have left the house at any time between 1 and 10 in the morning, and escaped without observation.
The mutilation of the victim was more frightful than in the case of any who preceded her.
The butcher must first have choked his victim or stunned her by a blow on the head. When she was unconscious he brought into requisition the keen knife used by him in his previous atrocities. First he severed the head from the body with all the skill and dexterity of a practiced surgeon. Holding the ghastly evidence of his appalling crime before him, he exercised his bloodthirsty mania at will. The skin of the face was cut in fantastic figures. The forehead was slashed and large patches of skin cut clean off that portion. The cheeks were then slashed and cut in the same horrid fashion. Then he slit the nose, but, not satisfied with this fearful disfigurement, he cut that organ from the face. The ears were also severed. having completed the horrible mutilation of the severed head of his victim, he devoted his fiendish attention to the other portions of the body. With a single slash of the knife he laid open the abdomen of the victim. Then, with the skill and delicacy of a surgeon, he disemboweled the unfortunate woman and laid the intestines across the chest. The flesh of the thighs was cut and hacked in fearful shape.
To complete the horrible sight he took the fearfully mutilated head of his victim and placed it under one of the arms of the woman. The other arm he drew across the body and placed her hand in the pit of her stomach.
The murder is undeniably a continuation of the series which was for a while interrupted for want of opportunity or inclination. In this case the murderer worked leisurely, as is made evident by the fact that the killing was done in a room fronting on the street, on the ground floor, and within a few yards of a temporary police station, whence officers issued hourly to patrol the district. Although the metropolitan police system is not yet discredited, the bloodhound theory is entirely thrown out, since the murder was not discovered until 10 o'clock in the morning, while the streets were teeming with people and traffic was going on uninterruptedly. Fen. Sir Charles Warren was early on the scene and told a reporter that all the precaution in the world could not prevent the work of such murderers. The sole chance remaining to the police, he said, was to catch them red handed, and their change of tactics increased the difficulty. In the open air, where the killing has been done hitherto, the chance of their apprehension was slight, but in the case of an indoor murder, such as the last, the hope of arresting the perpetrator was almost barren of fruition.
The latest murder will undoubtedly cause a large number of arrests on suspicion, but that the monster will be brought to book is a matter of extreme doubt, since he has left no clew not worked over by the officers investigating the previous cases. The most annoying feature of the case is that the arrest of innocent persons on suspicion will have to be repeated. The opinion of Archibald Forbes and Mr. Winslow that the assassin is a homicidal maniac is confirmed by the latest murder, and the prediction has become general that another murder will soon follow.
The brutality of the mutilation to which the last body was subjected surpassed all the others. In the room to which the corpse was taken chunks of flesh and portions of the viscera were strew (sic) upon the floor and the dissecting table, and the stomach of one of the surgeons gave way at the spectacle.
In the house of commons Mr. Conybeare, member for Camborne, asked whether, in view of the latest Whitechapel murder, Sir Charles Warren ought not to be superseded as chief commissioner of police by a man accustomed to investigate crimes. The speaker gave the member notice that the question must be submitted in writing.
