Confessions of a Ripperologist
John Malcolm. Revised e-text version, 2007.
Full text below.
PART TWO: FRAMING THE MURDERS
Late nineteenth Century East London.
“From Paddington to Bayswater I was sent to a district which, even before the
advent of Jack the Ripper, a year later, had a reputation for vice and villainy
unequalled anywhere in the British Isles.”
The history of East London is rich and colorful and is worth exploring in
itself; and definitely relevant to the events that would unfold in 1888.
According to the Brief History of Tower Hamlets from the Tower Hamlets
Libraries,
“After the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, land was
made available for building and around this time the split between East and
West became marked, with the West attracting the gentry and professional
classes and the East the trades, industry and commerce.”
And from London’s East End: Point of Arrival by Chaim Bermant, which
explores the history of (especially) Jewish immigration at and around the time
of the Whitechapel murders:
“East London was a developers paradise. Property was cheap, and
the population was neither articulate nor influential, nor the sort which could
be easily organised in protest.”
Subsequently the East End became the gateway for the floods of eastern European
immigrants who were fleeing persecution in their homelands and seeking a new
life on the “free” and hopeful shores of England. And there were plenty of entrepreneurial enterprises
that sprang to life to take advantage of the situation.
But the depths of the area’s past was, by the late 1880’s, obscured by the
noise, the smoke and the smells of rotting souls, burning dreams and the
screaming and scraping for survival. Sanitary conditions were often appalling,
raw sewage being a familiar hazard; disease was rampant and the infant mortality
rate was exceptionally high. Running water and electric lights were luxuries…
“…by 1888 Tower Hamlets was already an over-congested ghetto of displaced
labour with housing at a premium. Sub-letting within sub-letting was rife…well
beyond the statutory limits.”
“In 1887 a Board of Trade report declared that some twenty thousand workers in East London
could be classed as sweated labour. About seventy-five percent of them were
‘recent arrivals, and most of the rest were Jews of foreign extraction’.”
As mentioned previously, the books by William Fishman, Jerry White and Winston
G. Ramsey stand at the top of the class if one wants perhaps the most vivid and
sobering descriptions of the conditions of life in East London around the turn
of the century (at least of the ones that I have so far perused). It is
virtually impossible to imagine or reconcile the relative comfort and security
of today’s Western society with the absolute despair and degradation suffered
by many of the inhabitants of a place so unique, yet so misunderstood.
“Poverty”, “vice”, “depravity”, “unemployment”, “squalor”, “prostitution”,
“homelessness”…these are some of the words commonly associated with the
negative pictures of the East End, although there was much more, both depressing
and uplifting about the people and their struggles.
“…in the year of Jack the Ripper…poverty, crime, disease and social unrest were
at their height. On the bright side was the communal life of clubs, pubs, the
street and family gatherings, which softened the brutality of the daily grind.”
And from the foreword (of the same book) by Richard Cobb:
“East End 1888 was not the sort of place where one might live long…And yet is a
landscape peopled by a varied humanity: wry, resourceful, violent, drunken,
thieving, tenacious, ingenious… -as well as despairing, defenceless, rejected
and hopeless.”
Another observation:
“…a generation ago the mass of lower classes were entirely illiterate, and
their surroundings were so squalid and wretched that a lapse towards crime was
easy.”
“Life for the police officer in Whitechapel in those days was one long
nightmare.”
This would set the scene for the dramatic and unforgettable events that took
place in 1888. Whitechapel and Spitalfields were the primary settings, for this
was where the shadows were the darkest. This area lies closest to the eastern
border of the City proper just to the north of the Tower of London and the
Docklands and was once occupied by fields and farmlands until the Industrial
Revolution and its subsequent aftershocks inspired its transformation into an
overcrowded and impoverished center of mixed cultures and languages. And the
irony of its proximity to the wealth and brilliance of the center of the Empire
is a sobering reflection of the indifference of the powers that were. One of
the few positive things that came about as a result of the Whitechapel murders
was that it eventually became a reality that was impossible for anyone to
ignore. Describing some of the “improvements” that were made in consequence of
the attention that the murders directed toward the conditions of the area,
Jerry White writes, in Rothschild Buildings, about a particularly evil
section of the East End:
“By the end of 1894, virtually all of the old Flower and Dean St had been
destroyed…Three-quarters of Thrawl St had changed, as had nearly all of Lolesworth St.
Wentworth St was now entirely respectable…Jack the Ripper had done more to
destroy the Flower and Dean St rookery than fifty years of road building, slum
clearance and unabated pressure from police, Poor Law Guardians vestries and
sanitary officers…destroying the houses where the ‘fallen’ and the ‘vicious’
lived.”
Although the area had undergone recent alterations that condensed some of the
worst sections and relieved a bit of the over-crowding problem, many of the
previous philanthropic efforts fell short of the support they would later
realize after the murders had drawn the public’s attention to the dire need for
help.
The Murders.
“Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need
to create a memory for himself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche (as translated by Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale) in 1887’s On the Genealogy of Morals…
And as anonymous as the perpetrator
or perpetrators of the ten (or eleven) murders that were included in the
official files remain, the memories created by the Jack the Ripper murders have
most definitely become etched permanently in the psyches of true-crime
enthusiasts and historians, whoever it was that may have been responsible.
Whether or not the murders achieved a conscious goal (as in a “memory”) will
never be known. In this I feel fairly confident.
“Often imagined as a seasoned urban traveler, the Ripper could move
effortlessly and invisibly through the space of London, transgressing all
boundaries, committing ‘his’ murderous acts in public, under the cover of
darkness, exposing the private parts of ‘public women’ to open view.”
The conditions of the times that perpetuated such a fertile breeding ground for
crime as the East End did not, at first, reveal the extreme potential that
was to be realized so dramatically in the early morning hours of 3 April, 1888.
Although the events that took place made little impression at the time, the
effects of this time-released capsule became very traceable by the end of the
following autumn. Arguably unrelated directly to the murders that would follow,
the significance of this occurrence has been, for the most part and perhaps,
irresponsibly, either casually tossed aside or dismissed entirely, in spite of
the insights that may be gleaned from a closer inspection of the circumstances.
This observation has inspired possibly my biggest disagreement with the popular
consensus and regardless of how many times or from however many angles I try to
look at this, I am still simply baffled as to how this could be. But this is
where the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 began, and as this is technically
indisputable, it is also where I choose to begin this account.
“THE word ‘submerged’ likes me not. I have endeavored to find or to invent
another and a better word. So far without success. The word must define the
class. It is the unhappy company of those who have fallen in the world. There are
many levels from which one may fall; perhaps there are many depths into which
one may fall;…the one essential is that he must have stepped out of his own
class and fallen down below. He is a shipwrecked mariner on the voyage of life,
he is a pilgrim who has wandered into the dark and malarious valleys beside the
way. We have read in the annals of the luckless voyages how those who escaped
with their lives wandered along the seashore, living by the shell-fish they
could pick up, moving on when there were no more mussels, huddled together at
night in the shelter of a rock for warmth. We know and are familiar with their
tales of misery. As these shipwrecked mariners on the cold and inhospitable
coast, so are the unfortunates whom we call submerged; in a like misery of cold
and starvation do they drag on a wretched existence.” –Sir Walter Besant in his
East London (1899).
Emma Elizabeth Smith, 45, of 18 George
Street, Spitalfields was typical of the
seven of the “unfortunate” class of women who would lose their lives violently
in a concentrated area of the East End in 1888. The Victorian euphemism for “prostitute”
would come to a deeper meaning, one not lost with time.
The sheer number of women who were, more or less forced into prostitution is
hard to fathom in this day and age, but the choices made by these women are
much easier to understand now in the context of the brutal economic conditions
that blanketed the area in a cloud of desperation. The actual estimates are
more than astounding- they are simply mind-boggling. But a good deal of these
women were considered “casual” prostitutes who used this “oldest profession”
only as a last resort;
absent in those days, under those circumstances, was the stigma that sticks to
this occupation like glue today. It would probably not be entirely accurate to
describe the majority of these women as respectable though, but there were far
fewer options and far more grave decisions to make.
Whitechapel and Spitalfields were not easy places for outsiders to stomach (my
descriptions of the murders, for outsides will be, unfortunately,
proportionately disagreeable) and were as dangerous and unpredictable as a
civilized society could offer. Those who were forced to the streets were
subjected to the familiar hazards of the job: pimps or “protectors”,
extortionists, muggers, police and disease; many comforted themselves with
medicines such as rum or gin; so they also had habits that contributed to the
vicious circle that was their day to day and often comparatively short
existence. The odds were against it, but regrettably there is an exclusive
order of the most unfortunate of the unfortunates; there were possibly hundreds
who literally, unknowingly and ironically begged for a chance to be included,
but all traces of them have vanished, for their unfortunate ends lacked the
drama and explosiveness that paved the way for the select few to have their
names remembered. I’m not sure that this sort of sacrifice would have been
enviable.
On Monday, 2 April, Emma Smith found herself, possibly soliciting, in the
vicinity of the Whitechapel Road; by an account of her accounts, she was
walking in the direction of her lodging house around 1:30am (the 3rd)
and she happened upon “three youths- the youngest no more than 18”, “a gang”,
“two or three men”, or anyhow more than one person, no matter whose account of
the accounts of her accounts you choose, near the church of St. Mary Matfellon.
And from these accountants we learn that Smith had crossed to the opposite side
of the street, apparently wary of a confrontation, but was followed into Osborn Street,
robbed and beaten. For some reason it appears that she lingered for some hours
before she staggered back “home”, for at somewhere around four or five that
morning she returned. The estimated distance from the spot where she was
assaulted was 300 yards, but this was a very liberal guess, for it was probably
less than 200 yards. The deputy lodging house keeper, when made aware of the
obvious violence that had been inflicted upon her, escorted her to the London Hospital,
which was about a half a mile away (I’m not touching this one). She was
admitted, shortly thereafter lapsed into a coma and died at 9:00am on the 4th
of internal injuries. It was ascertained that a “blunt instrument” used “with
great force” was “thrust up the woman’s passage”. It was not uncommon, back
then, we tend to agree, for anyone, at any time, to cross paths with
violence in the streets; so common, we are led to believe, that seldom special
notice was taken by the press or the police. A vivid and poignant recollection
of the Cockney perspective of how rough it could be in the streets, Arthur
Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago (1896), captures a forgotten spirit
that hits home in a desperate way and demonstrates a fleeting glimpse of how it
may have been. As a native East-Ender, Morrison writes, literally, from inside
what Jack London later called “the Abyss”:
“Cosh-carrying was near to being the major industry of the Jago. The cosh was a
foot length of iron rod, with a knob at one end, and a hook (or a ring) at the
other. The craftsman carrying it in his coat sleeve, waited about the dark
staircase corners till his wife (married or not) brought in a well drunken
stranger: when, with a sudden blow behind the head, the stranger was happily
coshed, and whatever was found on him as he lay insensible was the profit of
the transaction. In the hands of capable practitioners this industry yielded a
comfortable subsistence for no great exertion. Most, of course, depended on the
woman: whose duty it was to keep the other artist going in subjects.”
But the murder of Emma Smith has somehow come to our attention, as it
did, eventually, to the public at the time, however this may be explained. An
attack as obscene as this would be no less agreeable today than it would have
been in 1888. To suggest otherwise would be obscenely naďve. A coherent
argument against this has thus far been elusive, although attempts have been
made…
No one was arrested for the murder of Emma Smith, and her death faded quietly
into the background, easily obscured by the din of everyday life in the East End.
Although the prevalence of crime is well documented, murder was not a
common occurrence in the district and the brutality of this particular crime
was outstanding.
Various criminal groups or “gangs” did reek havoc on the neighborhoods and the
prostitutes were perhaps the most defenseless of their targets. They were
frequently subjected to ill-treatment, which certainly included violence and
“blackmail”. Murder was probably not the intended result in the case of Emma
Smith, but it was something beyond controlled aggression and the descriptions
of the attack bore the hallmarks of gang activity, indeed.
“One of the greatest problems of the police in the bad old days were organized
gangs. Lawless characters banded together, and under some fancy name went about
robbing and blackmailing honest tradesmen, assaulting innocent pedestrians,
garroting and fleecing drunken sailors, and preying upon the defenceless
foreign element, chiefly poor Polish Jews.”
All went quiet on the murder front until the early morning hours of 7 August,
when a thirty-nine year old prostitute named Martha Tabram had her life taken
just a few steps away from where the attack on Emma Smith occurred. Her body
was discovered at about 4:50am (although at 3:30am a resident did notice what
he thought was a sleeping form) on the first floor landing, just inside the
entrance to George Yard Building (or Buildings), which was at the top of George
Yard, near the corner of Wentworth Street and only a stone’s throw from her
lodgings at 19 George Street, the same short George Street where Emma Smith
slept. She had succumbed to thirty-nine stab wounds to her “body, neck and
private part” in what was no doubt a wild and out-of-control demonstration of
anger. Earlier that evening she had been in the company of another prostitute,
“Pearly Poll”, who described their encounter with two soldiers- each woman
eventually leading their respective “dates” to discreet adjacent alleys- and
although this was the last Pearly Poll had seen of Tabram (a.k.a. Turner),
there was difficulty in identifying the soldiers and the trail went cold. It
has not been rare for researchers, etc., to assume that it was by the hand of
one of these soldiers that Martha Tabram had died. Inquest testimony suggesting
that two different weapons may have been used, one being described as possibly
a “dagger or sword bayonet”, has helped to fuel this speculation. This issue
will be addressed later. This event knocked a little harder at the door of the
public consciousness and took the degree of violence to the next level; it
would not be long before this was eclipsed.
Before the horror of this murder had a chance to die down, another “fallen
woman” was to meet her end at the hands of some unknown killer, this time in
Buck’s Row, a narrow street that ran parallel to the Whitechapel Road,
almost directly opposite the London Hospital, where Emma Smith breathed her last breath.
Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, 43, most recently of 56 Flower and Dean Street, which
ran from Brick Lane through to Commercial Street and was bisected by George
Street, was last seen alive by a fellow lodger at 2:30am on the 31st
of August, at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel High
Street/Whitechapel Road, visibly drunk, which was a common condition of those
of her class. A little over an hour later, about 3:40am, two men separately on
their ways to work stumbled upon what they believed to be a passed-out or
sleeping woman. To their horror, the lifeless body, although still warm, was
beyond help, her throat deeply and savagely slashed. After the arrival of the
police and a local doctor who pronounced the woman dead, the body was taken to
the local “mortuary”, which was actually more like a shed. It wasn’t until the
clothes were removed by the attendants that the extent of the damage was
revealed. Not only had her throat been severed down to the vertebrae (there
were two distinct cuts), there were bruises on her face and multiple deep,
jagged wounds to her lower abdomen.
The murders had progressed from obscene to frenzied to almost clinical. Now
there was no avoiding the panic that was to come. The police were still
considering that these murders were committed by one of the local gangs and by
now everyone was making connections. The press caught on, took the ball and ran
with it.
An article in The Daily Telegraph of 1 September noted:
“The more probable theory is that the murder had been committed by one or more
of a gang of men who are in the habit of frequenting the streets at late hours
of the night and levying blackmail on women. No money was found on deceased…
“A woman of the neighbourhood, saw her later, she told police- even as late as
2:30 on Friday morning- in Whitechapel-road, opposite the church, and at the
corner of Osborne-street;”
This would seem to tally with the statements of a dying Emma Smith and the
circumstances of her attack, but the next murder was to steer the inquiries in
a different direction.
The sensation had only a week to stew before it burst into flames. A little
before 6:00am on Saturday morning, 8 September, the body of Annie
Chapman, 47, was discovered in the back yard of a house in Hanbury Street,
not far from where the unfortunate woman was denied a bed several hours
earlier. She had been staying at a lodging house in Dorset Street,
but had not the measly sum required for the night’s shelter. The horrible state
that Polly Nichols had been found in was outdone by an even more shocking
treatment…not only had Annie Chapman’s throat been severed down to the bone,
(she had very nearly been decapitated- and it seemed that there may have been
an attempt)…her abdomen had been “entirely laid open”, some of her intestines were
thrown over her shoulder and even worse- parts of her uterus and its
appendages, bladder and vagina were cut out and missing from the scene. There
were also bruises to her face and signs of strangulation. If the previous
murders were of a character unknown to those times, this most recent one left
everyone completely aghast.
“Since the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’ did not emerge for almost a month, most
papers referred to the culprit as a ‘fiend’, ‘ghoul’, ‘monster’, or ‘assassin’,
who seemed to epitomize the depravity and violence they associated with the
East End. The victims were called ‘poor unfortunates,’ and their ‘polluted’
bodies served as allegories of all the disease, dirt, and vice of Whitechapel.”
A genuine panic ensued and the finger pointing and suspicions flew like knives
through the air. The departure from gang-related theories shifted the
accusations toward some unknown singular fiend
and in consequence blame fell upon the immigrant Jewish community, as it was
deemed logical by the natives, for the strange ways of these Jews were as
foreign to the English people as these crimes were to the history of English
criminology. Or so goes one of the simplest explanations. This phenomenon was
infinitely more complex and will be explored more in depth later. But whoever
was committing these atrocities, it must have been a madman…or maybe
not. If the times were not difficult enough for everyone, this would make
everything worse. Nothing would ever be the same…and the terror was far from
over.
While the police grappled with the murders, the entire situation was descending
towards total chaos by the minute. Criticisms of the methods employed by the
authorities rained down as the climate became more desperate. The already
tortured landscape was used as a political battlefield by opposing political
factions. In Jack the Ripper and the London Press, L. Perry Curtis, Jr.,
writes:
“While the Liberal and the Radical press belabored the police and the
government for their failings, Tory papers stressed the dangerous conditions in
Whitechapel and the likelihood of collective violence against the Jews unless
the police stepped-up their patrols. Both the Star and Pall Mall
Gazette accused Home Secretary Henry Matthews and Chief Commissioner Warren
of bungling the investigation and caring little about the murder victims.”
The first sign that a solution might be close at hand came with the
much-publicized arrest of a local Jewish boot-finisher supposedly nick-named
“Leather Apron”, who was believed to be one of those who was in the habit of
blackmailing and threatening local prostitutes. But John Pizer, the man
arrested and accused of owning the nick-name, supplied a solid alibi and much
to the bewilderment of the locals, was publicly exonerated. If not “Leather
Apron” (which became a popular name that was used when discussing the
murderer), then who? (It has been debated as to whether Pizer was the “Leather
Apron” of rumour.) Although Pizer was cleared, unfortunately the Jews, by
public opinion were not. Anti-Semitism, if not already a constant undercurrent
amidst the deteriorating economic climate, was to nearly become a full-blown
pogrom.
The events of the early morning hours of Sunday, 30 September would,
unbelievably, transcend all previous notions, accusations, suspicions and
actions, for not just one, but two women would lose their lives at the hand of
an unknown assailant during this night.
At approximately 12:45am, a man by the name of Israel Schwartz turned into
Berner Street from Commercial Road (not to be confused with Commercial Street)
and witnessed a man (who was walking “as if partially intoxicated”, according
to a translated interview with the Star) stop and talk to a woman who
was standing at the top of a passage leading into Dutfield’s Yard, an alley
next to the International Workingmen’s Educational Club, and then throw her
down in the street. Trying to avoid what appeared to be a domestic squabble,
Schwartz crossed to the opposite side of the street, when the man apparently
noticed him and shouted “Lipski” in his direction. (“Lipski” was an
anti-Semitic taunt that had become popular owing to the case of a Polish Jew
named Israel Lipski, who had been convicted and hanged a year earlier for
murdering- by poisoning- a woman, coincidentally only one street over from
Berner Street. That case had stirred ethnic controversy and became sensational
in its own right. But more on that later, also.) From The Trials of Israel
Lipski by Martin L. Friedland:
“When an ordinary person kills a person everything is quiet. It will not occur
to anyone to call another person by the name of the murderer. But when Lipski
is sentenced to death, the ordinary people taunted other Jews ‘Lipski’! Two
weeks ago Saturday it happened in Brick
Lane. Last Saturday in Church Lane
there was a great fight between Jews and locals, and all because of Lipski.”
Schwartz also described a second man who was lighting his pipe at the door to a
beer shop at the corner only a few yards away. He could not say for certain to whom
the shout of “Lipski” was directed at or whether the two men were connected,
but as Schwartz hurried away, he noticed the second man following behind him.
He could not say if the man was chasing him or if he too was frightened by the
man who threw the woman to the pavement. Fifteen minutes after the episode
witnessed by Schwartz, Louis Diemshutz, the steward of the International
Workingmen’s Club, on returning from selling his wares of cheap jewelry, came
upon the recently despatched body of Elizabeth Stride, 45, most recently of 32
Flower and Dean Street, just inside Dutfield’s Yard. There had been an
animated Saturday night meeting at the Club, and there were still many people,
some could even be heard singing upstairs. Although she had not been subjected
to the bodily mutilations of the previous victims, her throat had been cut in a
similar manner, but this time only once, and it has been assumed (and
subsequently, by modern enthusiasts, debated) that the arrival of Diemshutz and
his pony and cart had cut short the endeavors of the murderer. The police were
quickly summoned, the neighborhood searched and the occupants of the club
questioned and examined for any possible clues, but without a positive result.
In the meantime, part two of what was to become known as the “Double Event” was
unfolding not far away.
“Aldgate, City entrance into Whitechapel, is plagued by open slaughter-houses
in the main and side streets, with blood and animal innards splattered on the
sidewalks.”
Catherine Eddowes, 46, whose regular bed had been at 55 Flower and Dean Street,
was arrested for public drunkenness and taken to Bishopsgate police station at
around 8:30pm (Saturday the 29th) and held until she was deemed
sober enough to be released, which happened to be almost exactly the time that
the body of Elizabeth Stride was being discovered in Berner Street. But instead
of heading toward Flower and Dean Street, she made in the direction of Mitre Square,
Aldgate. Here, at approximately 1:35am, she was seen by three Jewish men, who were leaving a
club several yards away, talking with a man at the top of Church Passage, a
narrow and dark entrance leading into Mitre
Square. Ten minutes later, a patrolling
policeman, upon entering the Square, came across Catherine Eddowes who had been
“ripped up like a pig in the market.” Her throat had been cut and she had been
disemboweled, this time her uterus and left kidney were nowhere to be found.
And to add a macabre exclamation point, on each of her cheeks was carved
inverted “V” shapes and her eyelids were carefully nicked, to go along with
deep gashes to her face which, among other things, severed the tip of her nose
and part of her right ear.
“It really gets to be a challenge when an offender is not administratively
considerate enough to confine his illicit activities to one jurisdiction.”
This murder was the first of the series to involve the City of London Police
force, which was separate from the Metropolitan Police, insofar as it was
responsible only for the approximately one square mile that was the Corporation
of the City of London. Mitre Square was just within these boundaries.
(Rumblings of rivalry between the forces probably had little effect on the
professional relationships of the two, but there were jabs flung about from
time to time, especially in later reminiscences by police officers. It appears
as though they exchanged information and worked together as they should have in
such an important case, but we will probably never know for sure.) As women
were killed within both jurisdictions that night, both forces overlapped in
their immediate and subsequent investigations.
During the searches that fanned out in the vicinities, one of the only physical
clues that we are aware of was found in a doorway in Wentworth Model Dwellings
in Goulston Street, a short distance from Mitre Square. A portion of
Catherine Eddowes’ apron, which had been cut away and was stained with blood
and, apparently “faecal matter”, was discovered, above which was a message,
written in chalk, recorded by a Metropolitan Police constable as “The Juwes are
the men That will not be Blamed for nothing.” (Slight variations were proposed,
as the message, later to become known as the “Goulston Street Graffito”, was
erased before a photograph could have been taken.)
It is an extremely difficult problem to resolve regarding the relevance of the
graffito in relation to the apron or the murderer and one that will be
discussed further in the next chapter.
“And when we look at journalism in Victorian England, we find it to be a
freewheeling, sensationalistic business in which truth and restraint were often
sacrificed in service of a big story.”
Another significant development was the arrival of a letter, posted on 27
September and followed by a postcard, posted on 1 October,
purportedly by the same author, that were addressed to the Central News Agency,
which was responsible for the dissemination of news stories. This is (as far as
we know) where the sobriquet “Jack the Ripper” first appeared. These missives
claimed responsibility for the murders, but very few of those who have
seriously studied the case (and not insignificantly those at the top of the
investigations at the time) believe that they were genuine. Discussions of the
provenance of these relative to the crimes, as well as their content, are not
necessary here. Their importance, I believe, lies only with providing us with
the now famous moniker that now epitomizes the ultimate human potential, even
though they may have obscured the awful truth. A flood of similar and often
imitative correspondences followed, every one investigated, but all serving
only to bog down the authorities in their desperate attempts to stop the
murders. A letter addressed to George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance
Committee (one of apparently several groups formed in consequence of the
murders), was received on 16 October with a piece of human kidney supposedly
from the body of Catherine Eddowes. This seems to have been a sick joke, but,
for obvious reasons, it is the only letter that has really ever been considered
as possibly genuine. (It was written “From hell” and curiously, made no mention
of “Jack the Ripper”.)
Public sensation was peaking and the police were scrambling to figure out not
only who was committing the murders, but also how to control the panic;
house-to-house searches were made, as were scores of arrests on suspicion, and
mountains of statements, reports and correspondences that were collected proved
seemingly all to no avail.
However it may be explained, the month of October passed with no further
murders taking place. A relative calm settled in, but still there was an
uneasiness and detectable tension just below the surface. All had hoped that
somehow the murders had ceased, but “Jack the Ripper” would make one final
dramatic appearance in 1888, and this time there was little worry of discovery
or interruption until the deed was finished.
“And now I approach a phase of the Ripper story which I would give a great deal
even now to have expunged from my memory.
“As my thoughts go back to Miller’s Court, and what happened there, the old
nausea, indignation and horror overwhelm me still.
“The thing of which I am about to write happened nearly fifty years ago. Yet my
mental picture remains as shockingly clear as though it were but yesterday.
“It is all before me now. Jack the Ripper at his most devilish. No savage could
have been more barbaric. No wild animal could have done anything so
horrifying.”
“What I saw when I pushed back an old coat and peeped through a broken pane of
glass into the sordid little room that Kelly called her home, was too harrowing
to be described. It remains with me- and always will remain- as the most
gruesome memory of the whole of my police career.”
“When my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light I saw a sight which I
shall never forget to my dying day.
“The whole horror of that room will only be known to those of us whose duty it
was to enter it. The full details are unprintable…There was little left of her…
“All this was horrifying enough, but the mental picture of that sight which
remains most vividly with me is the poor woman’s eyes. They were wide open, and
seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror.”
Several people reported seeing 25 year-old Mary Jane Kelly on the day of the 8th
and in the early morning hours of Friday, the 9th of November in and
around Commercial Street. The barely human form that was discovered at 10:45am
that same morning by Thomas Bowyer (an agent of Mary Kelly’s landlord, John
McCarthy), who was sent to try and collect some rent, in her room at 13
Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, bore little resemblance to the laughing and
singing “unfortunate” of the night before…no words I know could possibly
exaggerate the furious destruction of a human being who could not possibly have
deserved an end such as it was for Mary Kelly, alias Marie Jeanette…The
following descriptions are in the words of Dr. Thomas Bond, police surgeon,
taken from a report of the initial post-mortem:
“Notes of examination of body of woman found murdered & mutilated in Dorset
St….The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed…The legs were wide
apart…The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed &
the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms
mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of
the features. The tissue of the neck was severed all round down to the bone…The
viscera were found in various parts viz; the uterus and kidneys with one breast
under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet,
the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side of the body.
“The flaps removed from the abdomen & thighs were on a table.
“The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, & on the
floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about 2 feet square. The wall by the
right side of the bed & in a line with the neck was marked by blood which
had struck in a number of separate splashes…
“The face was gashed in all directions the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears
being partly removed…
“The pericardium was open below & the Heart absent.”
Those who witnessed the aftermath of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly would never
be the same. We cannot possibly expect ourselves to understand the absolute
horror that was experienced by the other “unfortunates” who would fall
victim to this unconscionable act of violence.
The Whitechapel murderer then went to ground or involuntarily ceased his
operations, and may very well have ended his murderous exploits with an
exclamation point, intentionally or not.
Alice McKenzie, the Pinchin Street Torso and Frances Coles.
Nothing more was heard from the Whitechapel murderer until the body of Alice
McKenzie, around 40 and of the same class of women, was found in Castle Alley,
which was very near the junction of Whitechapel High Street and Commercial
Street, shortly after 12:50am on 17 July of the following year; she had been
“stabbed” in the throat and had suffered a long cut and some superficial
scratches and cuts to her exposed abdomen. Everything, at least at first
glance, would suggest that the murderer had returned to hunting after an
inexplicable seven month break. But unless, for some reason, the killer of the
previous women had regressed to a certain degree in his rage and in his
methods, the possibility that someone else was responsible can be reasonably
pondered. The arguments for and against have me inclined to think this latest
murder is coincidentally unrelated or possibly imitative, but I’m not yet quite
convinced. For me to be technically selective here does contradict my impending
arguments that will be used to connect other victims to a common criminal, so
take that as you will; I’ll do my best to explain.
The Pinchin Street Torso. A woman’s torso, minus head and legs, was deposited
under a railway arch not far from Berner
Street, in September of 1889, a
horrific crime in itself, but generally excluded from the tally of victims of
Jack the Ripper. The particulars (the body had apparently been transported and
dumped and bears a strong resemblance to the “Whitehall Mystery”, where a
headless, limbless body was found at the site where New Scotland Yard was being
built) as with the previous and the following East End prostitute murders,
persuasively distance this from the crimes of the infamous Whitechapel
Murderer, but the similarities leave room for doubt.
The murder of Frances Coles in Swallow Gardens. A 26 year-old prostitute who had lodged in Thrawl Street
was found by a policeman with her throat cut and dying in an alley south-west
of Berner Street on 13 February,
1891. This was the last murder to be
included in the official “Whitechapel Murders” file and she was the only other
victim whose circumstances of death seemed loosely related to the previous
crimes.
James Thomas Sadler, acquaintance and most probably client of deceased, was
suspected, arrested and later acquitted in this murder, but the circumstances
warrant careful consideration when morally judging guilt or innocence here...The
police apparently still believed that Sadler was responsible and that this
murder was unrelated to the crimes of “Jack the Ripper.”
Recalling A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison could just as well have
been describing an incident that may have ultimately led to the death of
Frances Coles when he told of the “coshing” practice illustrated earlier. After
Sadler was arrested, he claimed that he had been beaten and robbed- possibly
even set up by his “friend”- Frances Coles.
The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.
The Marquis de Sade asked in his La Philosophie dans le Boudoir in 1795
“Was there ever a race more sympathetic to murder than the Jews?”
An extremely sensitive social and political aspect of these crimes and perhaps
one of the most important and at the same time one of the most neglected topics
of discussion involves the Jewish community, which would include both the
English Jews and the recently immigrated, and its relationship with the East End. There
has been a considerable amount of material written about the Jewish East End;
it is a world worthy of exploration and its details and passions are positively
intricately interwoven with the history, mystery and myth of Jack the Ripper.
Times were tense and also complicated; there was an active and rumbling
fault-line, if not two; the authorities acknowledged its tangible presence and
took precautions to keep the peace. There were deep conflicts within the Jewish
community also: between the Anglicized English Jews and the poor foreign
immigrants; between the strictly Orthodox and the young socialists and
Anarchists; between the “sweaters” and the “sweated”, etc. Some examples are
portrayed by Lloyd P. Gartner in The Jewish Immigrant in England
1870-1914:
“The center of Jewish socialism was its club, which was both a lounge and a
beehive of socialist education and propaganda. To the distress of the earnest
leaders, conviviality at socialist clubs attracted some who cared nothing for
socialism, and irritated socialists maintained that food, drink, and attendant
distractions were better left to the ‘pub’ and coffee house.”
And a deeper look a few sentences later elaborates:
“One facet of the Jewish socialists’ activities caused hard feelings in the
Jewish community. Having cast off the Jewish religion on their road to
socialist faith, they were convinced that the chains of religion must be struck
off in order to create a truly socialist outlook. As Eastern European Judaism
was considered especially incompatible with modern enlightenment, the Jewish
socialist eagerly undertook to emancipate the Jews from religion by teaching
such things as science and sociology, which the immigrants could learn nowhere
else because their language was Yiddish. One experienced socialist observed
that English socialism did not have to be so anti-religious because religion in
England did not throttle the Englishman as Judaism did the Jew. It seemed
useless to have religious Jews in socialist clubs because such attempts
invariably exploded with the lighting of the first cigarette on the Sabbath.”
Several publications dedicated to the various social and political concerns
informed, educated and agitated. According to Gartner, the first Yiddish
socialist newspaper was published on July 25, 1884,
by Morris Winchevsky and W. E. Rabbinowitz.
“The name of the new journal was The Polish Yidel (The Little Polish
Jew), which was changed to Die Tsukunft (The Future),…Winchevsky’s
intention in picking the first title was to emphasize the claims of the
proletarian Polish Jew in England against the snobbery of the wealthy Jewish natives…
“It proposed to be a teacher of those who knew only Yiddish, a guide for
‘greeners’ and a source of news, while it renounced interest in religious
matters or in personalities.
“The Polish Yidel kept an appearance of bland neutrality even when it
distinguished between four types of Jews. The ‘indifferent’ care only about
themselves: ‘assimilationists’ consider Jewish separateness to be the root of
Jewish troubles; ‘nationalists’ blame the Jews’ homelessness for their
sufferings; ‘socialists’ consider the Jewish problem to be part of the general
social problem, not one apart.”
“As a Jew, Winchevsky showed strong concern over the then rising tide of
anti-Semitism. While he admitted that the Jews had freedom and opportunity in England, he
also pointed to the dislike of the Jews in the East End and to the difficulty
encountered by a Jew who would rent a house there. The conclusion was
irrational: ‘Jews, look about while there is yet time! A pogrom in Brick Lane at
the crossroads of Commercial Road can be more terrible, bloodier than a pogrom in
Balta…’…Winchevsky interpreted racial anti-Semitism in England
economically: increasing population, shrinking markets, rising costs of
Government. ‘Charlatans’ exploit these conditions by blaming everything on
Jewish capitalists; they ignored or minimized the number of poor Jews, better
to pick on the world’s eternal ‘stepchild’.”
“Turning
to the Jews themselves, The Polish Yidel pointed to faults which
increased their vulnerability to anti-Semitic attacks- a supposed special
English dislike of foreigners, the annoyance of a trading nation with Jewish immigrant
traders, and the misdeeds of individual Jews on the stock exchange, in obscene
publishing, commercial scandal and gambling, and as employers of sweated
labour.”
(Forgive me for spending what may appear to be an inordinate amount of time on
the Jewish questions, but these details have figured prominently in the
perspective I have developed; and I believe them all to be relevant.) More from
The Jewish Immigrant in England 1870-1914,
relating to the subsequent movements spawned or encouraged by the
aforementioned publications (and others):
“The Jewish socialist revolutionaries started off in united opposition to the
existing social order, to religion in general and to Judaism particularly, and
to the organized Jewish community…From the first, there was a cleavage between
socialist and anarchist ideologies, which within a few years became two
competing factions. Soon after, the remaining socialists also differentiated
among themselves between Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries;”
The International Workingmen’s Educational Club in Berner Street
was for a time (and including 1888) a primary center for debate amongst the
sides of these issues. The Arbeter Fraint (“Worker’s Friend”), an
important “open, but non-partisan, Socialist paper”,
founded by Winchevsky, was printed from a house in Dutfield’s Yard.
The inside and the outside wrestled each other with abandon, although
strengthening themselves individually, most probably not to the advantage of
the whole.
And the natives were becoming more than restless.
The Jews, in a passage from Judgment of the King of Navarre, by 14th
century poet Guillaume de Machaut, were blamed for, amongst other things, the
plagues in Europe. But it didn’t stop there.
“…That one does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The
proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. We would no
more choose the ‘first Christians’ to associate with than Polish Jews- not that
one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell good.”
These are but a few examples of the kind of stereotypical, historical baggage
that these most recent (as well as those already uncomfortably embedded)
immigrants towed with them to their settlements in the East End.
An
alien race without question to the generations of Cockney East-Enders,
religion, culture and language were walls in a maze of differences. So it
should not come entirely as a surprise to recognize the emergence of a fertile
ground from which a deserving scapegoat could spring. Although relations were
generally amicable up to the point of the murders, any animosity was given
ample opportunity to be fruitful and multiply. As fleeing Jews spilled into London from
murderous persecutions in their unforgiving former homelands, the already
over-crowded and impoverished East End boroughs stewed with a semi-patriotic contempt that
not unbelievably bred a general feeling of suspicion and mistrust. This was but
another complication of the many that challenged the police who so often have
come under harsh scrutiny for their “inability to catch” the Whitechapel
Murderer. But this was not an insignificant piece of peripheral consideration.
These particular difficulties would play a prominent role in the ensuing drama.
“To an East End which was water-starved sometimes, unsatisfactorily inspected
by public authorities, and overcrowded in decrepit or poorly built houses, the
Jews brought not only an extra measure of overcrowding, but a seeming ignorance
of sanitary requirements. Accumulated and uncollected refuse lay in rotting
piles inside and outside houses, while the interiors were often dank and
malodorous from foul water closets, leaking ceilings, untrapped sinks, and
cracked, moist walls.”
“One of the sorest points in the relations between immigrant Jews and native
English in immigrant districts revolved about the rent question. Specifically,
it concerned the higher rents which Jews seemed willing to pay for houses,
speeding up the displacement of English tenants…
“The Jews’ alien status and the higher rents which accompanied them incited
severe hostility when they settled in a new street as the Jewish quarter
gradually spread out. Sensing that they would soon be submerged, some of the
English and Irish inhabitants moved out at once. Others remained behind to give
vent to cold or hot hostility, whether by calculated snubbing or, at times, by
stones thrown and windows broken.”
Gartner elaborates, using London County Council and Royal Commission exchanges
to detail the social differences that led to animosities. Very interesting
reading. But let me take a breath.
From The Trials of Israel Lipski by Martin L. Friedland, quoting from
the Evening News of 24 August,
1887:
“The low class of Polish Jews which Lipski belonged to, are the pariahs of
modern European life…In the districts blighted by their presence the standard
of living and morality alike is lowered…For the man one may feel sorrow, but
one cannot look with equanimity on this social cancer which is spreading in our
midst, and is so baneful to all human progress.”
Radical opinions, obviously from biased sources, but an indication of the
hostility and paranoia within the different social circles swirling about the East End.
“The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.”…An anti-Semitic
taunt? A note to deflect suspicion to or away from the Jews? Or a defiant
declaration of pride?
“And the conclusion that we came to was that he and his people were certain
low-class Polish Jews; for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in
the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile
justice.” –Sir Robert Anderson in his 1910 autobiography The Lighter Side of
My Official Life.
Contemporary Investigations.
According to John Douglas in The Cases that Haunt Us, “From my
experience, every major case seems to have loose ends. If you’re a detective or
a profiler, you get used to this ambiguity. You don’t like it, but you learn to
live with it.”
“Never in the history of the East End of London had such elaborate precautions
been taken to prevent the very thing which had not only been done, but
repeated.”
From Leonard Matters’ The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, the first
full-length English-language
account of the murders:
“It was not true, of course, to assert that Scotland Yard was either inept or
indifferent to what had become a public peril. The police force engaged in
patrolling the East End was considerably strengthened, and the best men of
the Criminal Investigation Department were put onto the quest for the
murderer.”
But this opinion is one not widely accepted by today’s crowd, and is quite
often and not surprisingly ridiculed from top to bottom. Criticisms were
leveled at the authorities at the time of the murders and not always without
merit, but often somewhat irrationally.
“Until a very recent period every outbreak of epidemic disease led to panic and
prayer-meetings: epidemic crime still leads to panic, but abuse of the police
takes the place of the prayer-meetings. The abuse is less intelligent even than
the panic. When an outbreak of fever occurs, we do not abuse the doctors.”
More attempts have been made to discredit the authorities than have been made
to praise them and this is understandable, since no one was ever brought to
justice and this mystery remains, at least publicly, unsolved; in life it is
much less socially objectionable to take out our frustrations on inanimate
objects, and dead and buried people are, for all intents and purposes, such.
And it would be hardly arguable amidst today’s heated and sometimes irrational
disagreements over this topic that we are not in fact, frustrated by not
successfully being able to pin the tail on the donkey.
There are no good reasons for suspecting that the authorities acted in anything
but a completely professional and competent manner. Much has been made about
bickering and personality clashes amongst senior police and Home Office
officials, but there is little or no evidence to suggest negligible behavior or
operations.
“A criticism leveled at the police at this time was that following the Mitre Square
murder, there was little or no co-operation between the City and the
Metropolitan police forces. This is sheer nonsense. The two forces worked
amicably together in this as in thousands of other cases.
“There was never the remotest reason for, one body of police to be jealous of
the other.”
“I wish some of those other critics of the police at the time of the Ripper
could have been compelled to spend a few nights in the districts in which it
was our unenviable job to try to keep law and order. They, too, would have
changed their opinions.”
“The public, I fear, knows little of the many-sided activities of the police in
bringing criminals to justice. It is impossible for them to know. So much that
is done behind the scenes can never be revealed to the public.”
“There was no lack of information, but as so often happens, when the various
statements had been sorted and sifted they were so contradictory as to be
well-nigh valueless.”
Volumes of silence about the Whitechapel murders followed in the wake of Dew’s I
Caught Crippen, and the bitter cries of the victims echoed into oblivion.
Now I have properly set you all up to be overtly blasted with my unrestrained
and infinitely opinionated wisdom.
(See Philip Sugden’s The Complete History…for discussions about two
violent assaults that did not end in murder: on Annie Millwood of White’s Row,
Spitalfields [25 Feb. ‘88] and Ada Wilson of Maiden St., Mile End [27-28 March
‘88], both involving a knife and unknown assailant.)
