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.”[7]

   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.”[8]

  “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’.”[9]

   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.”[10]

   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.”[11]

  “Life for the police officer in Whitechapel in those days was one long nightmare.”[12]

   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.[13] 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.”[14]

   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;[15] 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 3^rd) 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 4^th 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 naïve. 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.”[16]

   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 31^st 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;”[17]

   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.”[18]

   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[19] 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.”[20]

   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.”[21]

   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 29^th) 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.”[22]

   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.[23]) 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.”[24]

   Another significant development was the arrival of a letter, posted on 27 September and followed by a postcard, posted on 1 October[25], 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”.)[26] 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.”[27]

  “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.”[28]

   Several people reported seeing 25 year-old Mary Jane Kelly on the day of the 8^th and in the early morning hours of Friday, the 9^th 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”[29], 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.[30] And the natives were becoming more than restless.

   The Jews, in a passage from Judgment of the King of Navarre, by 14^th 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.”[31]

   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.”[32]

  “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.”[33]

   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.”[34]

   From Leonard Matters’ The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, the first full-length English-language[35] 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.”[36]

   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.”[37]

  “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.”[38]

  “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.”[39]

  “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.”[40]

   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.)

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