Complete History Of Jack The Ripper Part 11

The labourer's press statement contained a more elaborate description of the suspect than had been set down in his statement to the police: The man was about 5 ft. 6 in. in height, and 34 or 35 years of age, with dark complexion and dark moustache, turned up at the ends. He was wearing a long dark coat, trimmed with astrachan, a white collar, with black necktie, in which was affixed a horseshoe pin. He wore a pair of dark 'spats' with light b.u.t.tons over b.u.t.ton boots, and displayed from his waistcoat a ma.s.sive gold chain. His watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone, hanging from it. He had a heavy moustache curled up and dark eyes and bushy eyebrows. He had no side whiskers, and his chin was clean shaven. He looked like a foreigner . . . The man I saw did not look as though he would attack another one [i.e. man]. He carried a small parcel in his hand about 8 in. long, and it had a strap round it. He had it tightly grasped in his left hand. It looked as though it was covered with dark American cloth. He carried in his right hand, which he laid upon the woman's shoulder, a pair of brown kid gloves. One thing I noticed, and that was that he walked very softly. I believe that he lives in the neighbourhood, and I fancied that I saw him in Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning, but I was not certain.13 This information clears the man with the carrotty moustache seen by Mrs c.o.x. And it answers some of the questions raised by Sarah Lewis' testimony. The man in the black wideawake hat, whom Sarah saw about 2.30 looking up Miller's Court 'as if waiting for someone to come out', was probably Hutchinson since by his account he stood outside the court from about 2.15 to 3.00 for precisely that purpose. The man with the black bag and the young man with the woman, both reported by Sarah, are likewise cleared. At 2.30, when she saw them, Mary was already in No. 13 with her new client and Hutchinson was upon his lone vigil outside.

All this, of course, a.s.sumes that Hutchinson's story was true. But was it? No other witness who claimed to have seen a suspect with one of the murder victims swore to such a wealth of detail or spoke with such confidence. The last three words of the labourer's statement to the police must have fired Abberline with hope: 'Can be identified.' It was a claim Hutchinson repeated to the press. 'I could swear to the man anywhere,' he said. That, sadly, is part of the problem. Hutchinson sound just too good to be true.

Only once, by the lamp of the Queen's Head, did Hutchinson get a good look at Mary's companion close up. For most of the time, in dim gaslit streets, he watched from a discreet distance. Yet we are asked to believe that he could describe the man with a precision worthy of Sherlock Holmes, in detail that would have been quite beyond a casual observer even in daylight. Hutchinson's account raises other disturbing questions. If he really did see a man with Mary Kelly on the fatal night why did he wait more than three days after the murder to tell the police? And if he thought he saw the same man again at Petticoat Lane Market on the following Sunday why did he not follow him again or, at the very least, find a constable?

By this time some of my readers may feel that Hutchinson's statements belong in the waste paper basket with Packer's. But the labourer is not to be dismissed as easily as the greengrocer. Two circ.u.mstances in particular speak strongly in his favour. The first is the remarkable consistency between his two statements. They each contain information not to be found in the other but there are only two actual discrepancies of fact between them. In his statement to the police Hutchinson said that Mary's client had a pale complexion and a slight moustache turned up at the ends. To the press he described a man of dark complexion with a 'heavy moustache curled up'. Given the length of the statements, however, these small discrepancies are not significant. Far more impressive are the numerous points of corroboration (at least forty) between the two accounts. This consistency in two statements made on different days to different parties certainly suggests that the labourer's story was not a total invention.

A yet more telling circ.u.mstance supports Hutchinson. Abberline, an experienced and outstanding detective, interrogated him on the 12th and believed him. In forwarding the statement to the Yard that same night the inspector made his view perfectly clear: 'An important statement has been made by a man named George Hutchinson which I forward herewith. I have interrogated him this evening, and I am of opinion his statement is true.'14 If Hutchinson was telling the truth he cannot have been a casual or disinterested observer. His statements, indeed, prove that he was not. For he evinced the keenest interest in Mary and her client, loitering by the Queen's Head to get a close look, shadowing them to Miller's Court and standing the best part of an hour outside on a cold night waiting for them to come out. Hutchinson told Abberline that his curiosity had been aroused by seeing such a well-dressed man in Mary's company but this explanation is too thin. Inevitably, one suspects that he shared some undisclosed relations.h.i.+p with Mary. All we know for certain, however, is what he told the inspector that he had known her about three years and had occasionally given her a few s.h.i.+llings.

A relations.h.i.+p of some kind with Mary Kelly might help to explain why Hutchinson was so slow to come forward after the murder. In his press interview he said that he had first told a policeman on Sunday 11th, the day before he reported to Commercial Street, but there is no corroboration of this in police records. Even if it were so he still delayed more than two days. Possibly he feared being implicated in the crime. After all, by his own admission, he had spoken to Mary and followed her to Miller's Court on the night she was killed, and he had no companion to confirm that his role in the events of that night had been an innocent one. There was, too, a danger that someone who had seen him skulking about there might accuse him and pick him out at a police ident.i.ty parade. If it should transpire then that he knew more about Mary than he cared to admit he would have had some serious explaining to do. Perhaps, like Ted Stanley, the 'pensioner' in Annie Chapman's life, George Hutchinson's first instinct was simply not to get involved.

As we will discover, Hutchinson would prove to be a lasting influence on Abberline. Presumably he had a forthright manner and responded well to questions. Abberline must have reflected too, of course, that Hutchinson had volunteered his statement even though it placed him at Miller's Court about the time of the murder. Whatever the inspector's reasons for believing in him, he at once backed his judgement with action. Attaching two detectives to Hutchinson, he sent them out that very night to perambulate the East End with him in the hope that he might spot the man again. They trudged the streets fruitlessly until three the next morning and later on the 13th were out searching again.

At this point the last important dispute between police and press occurred. Although circulating their description of Hutchinson's suspect to police stations, the CID had hoped to keep it out of the newspapers while they searched for the wanted man. But, as we have seen, on the 13th Hutchinson was found and interviewed by the press and the next day his story was gracing the columns of both morning and evening journals. This publicity may, of course, have been beneficial. It may have elicited helpful information from the public. We cannot tell because the police records have almost all been lost. But the CID view at the time seems to have been that it blighted Abberline's efforts to trace the suspect by alerting him to the hunt and perhaps encouraging him to change his appearance.

While Abberline was searching high and low for a foreigner in an astrakhan trimmed coat the body of the latest victim rested at the mortuary attached to St Leonard's Church, Sh.o.r.editch. The funeral took place on Monday 19 November. There was much public sympathy for Mary. No relatives came forward but Henry Wilton, verger of St Leonard's, was determined that she would not lie in a pauper's grave and bore the entire cost of the funeral.

At noon the church bell began to toll. It was as a signal to the residents of the neighbourhood and they gathered in a solemn crowd, several thousand strong, about the main gate of the church. When the coffin, borne on the shoulders of four men, appeared at the gate scenes of great emotion erupted amongst the crowd. Men stood bare-headed. Women, who predominated in this mult.i.tude, cried 'G.o.d forgive her!', their faces wet with tears. As the coffin was placed in an open car people closed around it, jostling and struggling to touch it. 'The sight,' wrote the Advertiser's reporter, 'was quite remarkable, and the emotion natural and unconstrained.'15 Shortly after 12.30 the funeral procession set off. It was headed, at a very slow pace, by the open car drawn by two horses. The coffin was fully exposed to view. Of polished elm and oak, with metal mounts, it bore a coffin-plate with the terse inscription: 'Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9th Nov. 1888, aged 25 years.' Upon the coffin rested two crowns of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart's-ease. After the car came two mourning coaches, one containing three, the other five mourners. Mary, far from home, had few real friends. At her funeral even the mourners one a representative from McCarthy's, most of the others women who had testified at the inquest were mainly casual acquaintances. But Joe Barnett was there. And so too surely, although the press did not mention her by name, was Maria Harvey.

When the procession moved off the entire crowd appeared to set off simultaneously in attendance, blocking the thoroughfare and stopping the traffic. Only with the greatest difficulty were the police able to clear a pa.s.sage for the cortege through the ma.s.s of carts, vans and tramcars. But at length the little procession made its way along the Hackney Road to St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone.

And there, beneath a cloudy and unsettled sky, the tortured remains of the girl from Limerick were committed to the earth.

17.

The End of the Terror.

ON THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER, a week after the Miller's Court horror, an indignant resident of Pembroke Square in the West End addressed a furious letter to the Daily Telegraph.

'Can nothing be done,' he fumed, 'to prevent a set of hoa.r.s.e ruffians coming nightly about our suburban squares and streets, yelling at the tops of their hideous voices, "Special Edition" "Whitechapel" "Murder" "Another of 'em!" "Mutilation" "Special Edition!" "Beautiful Awful Murder!" and so on, and nearly frightening the lives out of all the sensitive women and children in the neighbourhood? Last evening (Wednesday), for instance, these awful words were bawled out about nine o'clock in a quiet part of Kensington; and a lady who was supping with us was so greatly distressed by these hideous bellowings that she was absolutely too unnerved to return home save in a cab, because she would have to walk about a hundred or two yards down a quiet street at the other end of her journey by omnibus. Now, I venture to ask, Sir, is it not monstrous that the police do not protect us from such a flagrant and ghastly nuisance?'1 The Ripper never ventured west of Mitre Square. His victims were prost.i.tutes all. Yet, as this letter neatly ill.u.s.trates, he instilled fear into the hearts of women all over London.

In the East End the latest murder produced scenes of indescribable panic. At night the streets were abandoned to the patrolling policeman and the amateur detective. During the day noisy, excited crowds milled about the scene of carnage and struck out in helpless rage at any they fancied to blame.

There were a spate of incidents in which men had to be rescued from violent mobs. Some were drunks or eccentrics who courted disaster by shouting 'I am Jack the Ripper!' in public places. But any display of innocent curiosity, especially by a respectably dressed man, might attract ugly crowds. On the day of the murder a young Somerset House clerk, taking a holiday to celebrate the Lord Mayor's Show and the birthday of the Prince of Wales, went to Dorset Street to see the scene of the murder. There he enquired anxiously of the sightseers whether the bloodhounds had arrived. Concern was mistaken for fear. And when the clerk walked away up Commercial Street, he became aware of three men d.o.g.g.i.ng his steps. He quickened his pace. They quickened theirs. Soon it was obvious that some strange kind of pursuit was in progress and pa.s.sers-by happily fell in with the crowd. The clerk, increasingly rattled by the swelling throng marching in his tracks, broke into a run. It was the signal for a wild and clamorous chase. Eventually the terrified fugitive was pursued into Bishopsgate, where he gave himself into the custody of a policeman and was escorted hurriedly to the safety of a police station.

Abroad the Miller's Court murder was making headlines around the world. In Paris it was discussed as keenly as if it had been perpetrated on the Boulevards. 'The smell of blood was still in the air,' wrote a correspondent of an afternoon in the French capital, 'and wherever you turned the talk was almost sure to be about murder . . . Jack the Ripper looms in the imagination as a more fearful scourge of humanity than Cardillac, the secret a.s.sa.s.sin in Hoffmann's tale.' In Austria the tragedy became the sensation of the hour and accounts from the London papers were reproduced almost in extenso by the Viennese press. And in America, too, the papers carried full accounts and editors combed their backfiles in vain for parallel atrocities. 'Nothing in the history of American crime,' declared a New York correspondent, 'can, for special and particular horror, be said to outmatch the East End butcheries.'2 At home it snapped the patience of the Queen. Victoria seems to have followed events in Whitechapel from the first. After the double murder she had telephoned the Home Office to express her shock and ask for information. Now, a day after Miller's Court, she dashed off a telegram to her Prime Minister. 'This new most ghastly murder,' she said, 'shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be.' Three days on she was priming Matthews with suggestions. Had the cattle and pa.s.senger boats been searched? Had any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves? And was there sufficient surveillance at night? 'These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime.'3 The most dramatic development at Scotland Yard was the resignation of Sir Charles Warren. When it was announced in the Commons it was greeted with l.u.s.ty cheers from the Opposition benches. The radical press had a field day. Whitechapel, they crowed, had revenged them for Trafalgar Square.

Today the Commissioner's sudden fall still confuses Ripperologists. Some attribute it directly to police failure in Whitechapel. Others insist that the events were entirely unconnected.

The immediate cause was an article Sir Charles wrote for Murray's Magazine on the administration of the Metropolitan Police.4 Now, in 1879 a Home Office ruling had forbidden officers connected with the department from publis.h.i.+ng anything relating to the department without the sanction of the Home Secretary. So on 8 November Matthews wrote to Warren, drawing his attention to the ruling and requesting his future compliance with it. Sir Charles was furious. In his reply, penned the same day, he declined to accept the Home Secretary's instruction and tendered his resignation. If he had been told that such a rule applied to the police, he declared, he would never have accepted the post of Commissioner in the first place, for it enabled anyone to traduce the force without according him a right of reply. He even went on to question the authority of the Home Secretary under the statutes to issue orders for the police.

The article itself was of little consequence. But Matthews could not tolerate such a flagrant display of independence on the part of the Commissioner and he accepted his resignation with alacrity.

None of this, it is true, sprang directly out of the Ripper affair. But the murderer was casting a long shadow and it would be wrong to exonerate him of all blame in producing the impa.s.se that had developed between the Home Secretary and his Commissioner of Police. The police were under daily attack for their inability to catch the Ripper. And it was partly for this reason that Sir Charles insisted so fiercely on the right to speak out in defence of his men. There is little doubt, furthermore, that Matthews and Warren could have resolved their difficulty over the 1879 ruling had a reasonable working relations.h.i.+p existed between the two men. Sadly, though, by November 1888 their relations.h.i.+p had become one of mutual distrust. It was an atmosphere of suspicion to which their fencing over the Ripper investigation had contributed no small measure.

Some writers have contended that Warren's resignation on 8 November left the police leaderless at a critical time and that this was in some way responsible for their delay in breaking into Mary Kelly's room the following morning. This is not correct. Although the Commissioner tendered his resignation on the 8th he continued to perform his duties for some time after that. His resignation was not officially accepted until 10 November and it was not until 27 November that a successor was appointed. As Matthews told the Commons on the 26th, Warren had 'not yet been relieved from the responsibility of the office, and, therefore, properly continues to discharge its functions.'5 He was succeeded by James Monro, the ex-head of CID with whom he had quarrelled so bitterly early in the year.

In the meantime detectives relentlessly pursued their inquiries into the winter. Very few serious suspects seem to have come to light.

A typical inquiry began in Mile End on the morning of 17 November. At 10.30 that morning Harriet Rowe, a married woman, was sitting alone in her parlour in Buxton Street when a man, a complete stranger, opened the door and walked in. She asked him what he wanted. But all he did was grin at her. Badly frightened, Mrs Rowe ran to the window to attract help and the man then quickly left the house. When Mrs Rowe followed him outside she found him talking to PC Imhoff 211H and asking directions to Fenchurch Street Post Office. The distraught woman told Imhoff what had happened and he took the stranger into custody.

The man proved to be Nikaner Benelius, a Swedish traveller who lodged in Great Eastern Street, Sh.o.r.editch. Brought before Wors.h.i.+p Street Magistrates' Court later in the day, he was charged only with entering a dwelling house for an unlawful purpose and with refusing to give any account of himself. But it is obvious that he was suspected of complicity in the Whitechapel murders. Detective Sergeant Dew told the court that he had been arrested under circ.u.mstances which justified 'the fullest inquiries' and that he had been previously questioned in connection with the Berner Street murder. The court remanded him so that an investigation could be made.

Benelius' behaviour does not seem to have been exactly normal. His landlord, for example, said that he sometimes preached in the streets and acted 'very strangely'. But there is no reason to believe that he was homicidal. He made no aggressive move against Mrs Rowe and when he was searched at the police station no weapon was found on him. Benelius himself insisted that he only went into Mrs Rowe's house to ask the way to Fenchurch Street and, since she admitted leaving her street door open, his explanation is likely to have been correct. We do not know the details of the police inquiry. However, Inspector Reid is said to have told the Star within two days of Benelius' arrest that his innocence of any hand in the murders had been fully established.6 The case of the unfortunate Swede ill.u.s.trates the kind of misunderstanding that could occur when women lived in terror of every shadow. Press reports describe Benelius as a 'man of decidedly foreign appearance, with a moustache' so it is also possible that he was partly suspected because of a resemblance to George Hutchinson's foreigner. If so, he was by no means the only one. In December one Joseph Denny, clad in a long, astrakhan-trimmed coat, was brought in for questioning after being seen accosting women. When subsequent inquiries cleared him, too, he was released from custody.

The story of Mr Galloway, a clerk employed in the City, suggests that some policemen may have been rather too preoccupied with the image of the dark continental.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 November, Galloway was walking home along Whitechapel Road when he encountered a man very like the one Mrs c.o.x had seen with Mary Kelly. 'The man had a very frightened appearance, and glared at me as he pa.s.sed,' Galloway remembered. 'He was short, stout, about 35 to 40 years of age. His moustache, not a particularly heavy one, was of a carrotty colour, and his face blotchy through drink and dissipation. He wore a long, dirty brown overcoat, and altogether presented a most villainous appearance.' Galloway followed the man into Commercial Street, where his quarry unsuccessfully tried to accost a woman and then, near Thrawl Street, appeared disconcerted by the sudden appearance of a policeman. For a moment it looked as though the man would turn back or cross the road in order to avoid the constable, but in the end he recovered himself and went on. Galloway stopped the constable and, pointing out the man, told him that he resembled the one reported by Mrs c.o.x. 'The constable,' said Galloway, 'declined to arrest the man, saying that he was looking for a man of a very different appearance.'7 Despite Galloway, there is sufficient evidence to prove that the police brought in all manner of suspects in the weeks following Mary Kelly's murder. The trouble was that they knew next to nothing about the man they were seeking and were simply overwhelmed by the size of the task confronting them. A Times report, which gives every sign of having originated from within the CID, set out their predicament: Since the murders in Berner Street, St George's, and Mitre Square, Aldgate, on September 30, Detective-Inspectors Reid, Moore and Nairn, and Sergeants Thicke, G.o.dley, M'Carthy and Pearce have been constantly engaged, under the direction of Inspector Abberline (Scotland Yard), in prosecuting inquiries, but, unfortunately, up to the present time without any practical result. As an instance of the magnitude of their labours, each officer has had, on an average, during the last six weeks to make some 30 separate inquiries weekly, and these have had to be made in different portions of the metropolis and suburbs. Since the two above-mentioned murders no fewer than 1,400 letters relating to the tragedies have been received by the police, and although the greater portion of these gratuitous communications were found to be of a trivial and even ridiculous character, still each one was thoroughly investigated. On Sat.u.r.day [10 November] many more letters were received, and these are now being inquired into. The detective officers, who are now subjected to a great amount of hara.s.sing work, complain that the authorities do not allow them sufficient means with which to carry on their investigation.8 Throughout that long winter police and amateur patrols braved the weather to plod the streets of Whitechapel after dark. By spring, with no recurrence of the atrocities, they had been disbanded.

In February 1889 the Toynbee Hall students, out as part of the St Jude's Vigilance Committee effort, finally gave up, 'unable to bear the long hours and exposure involved in patrol work.'9 Special plain clothes police patrols in H and J Divisions went at much the same time. From 7 December 1888 Monro procured an extra allowance of one s.h.i.+lling a day for 1 inspector, 9 sergeants and 126 constables employed in these patrols. The men had been transferred from the uniformed ranks. They did continuous night duty and many, sent from other divisions, were working at some distance from their homes. On 26 January 1889 Monro told the Home Office that he was 'gradually reducing the number of men employed on this duty as quickly as it is safe to do so'. And by 15 March the duty had ceased. A better idea of the duration and size of the plain clothes patrols can be gleaned from figures Monro sent to the Home Office in 1889. From these it appears that they were first established in September 1888, probably after the Chapman murder, and that 27 men were then employed in the duty. In October, after the double event, the number was increased to 89, and in November, following the Kelly murder, again to 143. During December the patrols were maintained at the same strength. But in 1889 they were phased out. In January the number was cut to 102 and in February to 47. After that the patrols were disbanded.10 The termination of plain clothes patrols should not be mistaken for proof that the police knew that the Ripper had died or been locked in some prison or asylum. Finance was a factor. The Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District was worried about the 'great expense' of the extra allowance and anxious to impose limits upon the charge. But the main reason for the ending of the patrols was the absence of fresh outrages. As we shall see, when the death of Alice McKenzie in July 1889 suggested that the Ripper may have resumed his activities the patrols were immediately re-established. It should also be remembered that our evidence relates almost exclusively to plain clothes patrols. Extra uniformed police had also been drafted into Whitechapel from other divisions but we know very little about them. We do know, however, that when the plain clothes patrols were disbanded at least 34 uniformed police, originally detailed for duty in Trafalgar Square, were continued in Whitechapel and that they were still there in the summer of 1889.

For several years the spectre of Jack the Ripper continued to haunt East London. There were regular news stories. And almost invariably unsolved murders were popularly attributed to him. Of the latter, however, only two were truly similar in character to the 1888 atrocities. These were the killings of Alice McKenzie in 1889 and Frances Coles in 1891.

Alice McKenzie was a freckle-faced woman of some forty years. A native of Peterborough, she had lived in the East End for at least fourteen years, sharing the last six or seven of them with a labourer named John McCormack.

In 1889 their home was a common lodging house at 52 Gun Street, Spitalfields. Friends insisted that Alice paid her way by charring. The police regarded her as a prost.i.tute and she is certainly known to have frequently gone out at night. There were other vices. She sometimes drank to excess and was an inveterate pipe smoker.

On the afternoon of 16 July 1889, after working his early morning s.h.i.+ft, McCormack returned to the lodging house in Gun Street. Before going to bed he gave Alice 1s. 8d. to pay for their doss and other necessities. But Alice didn't pay the money. They had quarrelled and McCormack's words had upset her. She went out drinking and he never saw her alive again.11 Her movements for the rest of the day are sketchy. At about 7.10 p.m. she took George Dixon, a blind boy, into a public house near the Royal Cambridge Music Hall. He heard her asking someone to stand her a drink and a man reply: 'Yes'. After a few minutes Alice took the boy back to 52 Gun Street and left him there. Elizabeth Ryder, the lodging house deputy, saw her at about 8.30. At that time Alice, who was 'more or less drunk', left the house without speaking to Mrs Ryder. The last firm sighting of Alice placed her in Brick Lane at about 11.40. The witness was a friend named Margaret Franklin. Margaret was sitting with two friends, Catherine Hughes and Sarah Mahoney, on the step of a barber's shop at the Brick Lane end of Flower and Dean Street, when Alice pa.s.sed them, walking hurriedly down the lane toward Whitechapel. Margaret asked her how she was but Alice would not tarry. 'All right,' she replied, 'I can't stop now.' She was not wearing a bonnet but had a light coloured shawl wrapped about her shoulders.12 At 12.15 that night PC Joseph Allen 423H stopped under a street lamp in Castle Alley, off Whitechapel High Street, to eat a snack. The alley was deserted. As he left it, about five minutes later, another constable entered it on patrol. He was PC Walter Andrews 272H. Andrews remained in Castle Alley for two or three minutes. Like Allen, he saw no one else there. But Andrews' beat brought him back to the alley at about 12.50. And on this occasion, only a few feet away from the lamp under which Allen had taken his snack, he found Alice McKenzie lying dead on the pavement. Blood was flowing from wounds in the left side of her neck and her skirts had been turned up, exposing a mutilated abdomen. When the police later removed the body they found underneath it an old clay pipe of the type referred to in lodging houses as a 'nose warmer' and a bronze farthing.

Alice was killed in the alley between 12.25 and 12.50. Probably before 12.45 because at about that time it started to rain and the ground beneath the body was found to be dry. No one heard a noise or scream. Sarah Smith, manageress of the Whitechapel Baths and Washhouses, backing upon Castle Alley, went to bed between 12.15 and 12.30. The window of her bedroom, though closed, overlooked the fatal spot. Sarah sat awake reading in bed. She was still awake when PC Andrews blew his whistle. Yet she had heard nothing suspicious outside. Alice's killer was never identified.13 Was Alice a victim of Jack the Ripper? There is some reason to think so. Alice, like her now famous predecessors, died when her left carotid artery was severed. As in those cases the cut was made from left to right while she was lying on the ground. And, like them, she suffered abdominal injuries after death. In many of the 1888 murders doctors thought they could detect a degree of anatomical knowledge and/or surgical skill. This was also true of the McKenzie killing. In his medical report Dr Phillips, who performed the postmortem examination, stated that the injuries to the throat had been perpetrated by someone who 'knew the position of the vessels, at any rate where to cut with reference to causing speedy death.'14 If the Ripper did kill Alice McKenzie, however, he departed in some respects from the modus operandi of the canonical murders.

His mature technique had been to sever the throat all round down to the spinal column. There were two jagged wounds in the left side of Alice's neck. But these did not extend to any greater length than four inches and left the air pa.s.sages undivided. Indeed, Dr Bond, who saw Alice's body the day after the autopsy, wrote of them as two 'stabs', the knife then being 'carried forward in the same skin wound'. Bruises high on Alice's chest suggested that the killer had held her down with one hand and inflicted the cuts with the other.

The abdominal wounds, too, were untypical of the Ripper's handiwork. Alice, to be sure, suffered numerous wounds to the abdomen but the majority were no more than scratches. The most serious was a seven-inch cut on the right side. But even this only divided the skin and subcutaneous tissues. It neither opened the abdominal cavity nor injured the muscular structure.

The 1888 evidence indicated that the Ripper was right-handed. Alice's abdominal wounds, on the other hand, suggested that her murderer might have been left-handed. Phillips detected five superficial marks on the left side of her abdomen. They had been produced, he thought, by the pressure of a right thumb and fingers, and he deduced that the killer had applied pressure to the stomach with his right hand, perhaps to facilitate the introduction of the knife under the tight clothing, and then mutilated the abdomen with left-handed cuts. True, Bond disagreed. When Phillips showed him the marks he saw 'no sufficient reason to entertain this opinion.' Instead he speculated that Alice's murderer had lifted her clothes with his left hand and inflicted the abdominal injuries with his right. It should be borne in mind, however, that Bond did not inspect the body until the 18th, the day after the post mortem, and by then some of the wounds had been so disturbed that Phillips felt it necessary to accompany him to point out their original appearance. By then, too, the body had begun to decompose.

Both doctors agreed that the wounds had been inflicted with a sharp-pointed weapon. Phillips contended that it had been a smaller weapon than 'the one used in most of the cases that have come under my observation' in the Whitechapel series. Bond was more cautious. He could not, he said, form any opinion on the width or length of the blade, but he did acknowledge that the cuts could have been done with a short knife.

Clearly Alice could have fallen foul of the Ripper. Opinion at the time was divided. The doctors, of course, could not agree. Phillips did not believe the Ripper was involved because Alice's wounds were not as severe and the cut on her stomach 'not so direct' as in previous cases. Bond, writing to Anderson on 18 July, demurred: 'I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel murders, viz. sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully & resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation, each mutilation indicating s.e.xual thoughts & a desire to mutilate the abdomen & s.e.xual organs. I am of opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.' Anderson himself was on leave when Alice was murdered and it was Monro who turned out at three on the fatal morning to investigate the crime on the spot. Years later Anderson claimed that the killing was an 'ordinary murder . . . not the work of a s.e.xual maniac'. But this was not the view Monro sent to the Home Office after his visit to Castle Alley. 'I am inclined to believe,' he said, '[that the murderer] is identical with the notorious "Jack the Ripper" of last year.' The importance Monro attached to the latest development, moreover, may be gauged by his actions. On the day of the murder he re-established plain clothes patrols in Whitechapel, deploying 3 sergeants and 39 constables in the duty, and increased the uniformed strength in the district with an extra 22 men.15 Two months later the scare deepened when the headless and legless torso of a woman was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, south of Commercial Road. After careful consideration of the medical evidence, Phillips, Monro and Swanson all concluded that this crime was not linked with the Ripper series.16 Nevertheless, plain clothes patrols in Whitechapel were strengthened and Monro immediately called for another 100 men for temporary duty in the district.

There was no repet.i.tion of the outrages and in April 1890 plain-clothes patrols were finally withdrawn. Nearly a year later, in the cold February of 1891, the last real Ripper scare occurred.

Frances Coles was the prettiest of all the Whitechapel murder victims. The daughter of a former bootmaker, she was twenty-six, about five feet tall and had brown hair and eyes.17 Her descent into drink and prost.i.tution is as mysterious as that of Mary Jane Kelly. In 1891 her father, James William Coles, was a 'feeble old man' in the Bermondsey Workhouse, Tanner Street, and her sister, Mary Ann Coles, a single and entirely respectable lady living at 32 Ware Street, Kingsland Road. Frances, too, once held a respectable if humble position at a wholesale chemist's in the Minories, where her work involved 'capsuling' or 'stoppering bottles'. Frances said that she could earn from six to seven s.h.i.+llings a week. But she didn't like the work. It hardened the skin of her knuckles and she complained to her sister that they had become very painful.

Frances seems to have slipped into prost.i.tution when she was only eighteen. In 1891 James Murray, one of her clients, told police that she had been living in doss houses in the Commercial Street area and soliciting in Whitechapel, Sh.o.r.editch and Bow for some eight years. When he first met her she had been staying at Wilmot's lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street.

Frances did her best to keep it all from her family. On Boxing Day 1890 she visited her sister for tea. Frances gave her to understand that she was still working at the chemist's and living with an elderly lady in Richard Street, Commercial Road. Perhaps Mary Ann knew or sensed the truth. She noticed that Frances 'was very poor, and looked very dirty'. Sometimes she smelt of drink. Frances regularly visited their father at the workhouse and used to take him to church on Sundays. As late as Friday, 6 February 1891, when he saw his daughter last, the old man thought she was living in Richard Street. He seems to have known that she had left the chemist but not how she was earning her living. Frances promised to call on him again a week on Sunday. It was an appointment she never kept.

Enter James Thomas Sadler, s.h.i.+p's fireman, fifty-three years old, estranged from his wife and belligerent in his cups.

On 11 February Sadler was discharged from his s.h.i.+p, S.S. Fez, and made his way into Commercial Street. He had been a former client of Frances Coles. So when they saw each other in the Princess Alice public house they teamed up again. They slept together that night at a common lodging house at 8 White's Row, Spitalfields, and spent much of the next day drinking at various pubs in the area. Sadler gave Frances 2s. 6d. and between 7.00 and 8.00 p.m. on the 12th she bought a new black c.r.a.pe hat at a millinery shop, 25 Nottingham Street, Bethnal Green. Peter Hawkes, who served Frances, remembered that she was 'three sheets in the wind' (i.e. drunk).

At some time during the evening Frances quarrelled with Sadler. Apparently Sadler was knocked down and robbed in Thrawl Street. 'I was then penniless,' he told police later, 'and I had a row with Frances for I thought she might have helped me when I was down.' It is to be doubted whether Frances, in her intoxicated condition, was capable of helping herself let alone Sadler. No matter, the two went their separate ways.

Frances returned to the lodging house in White's Row, where she sat on a bench in the kitchen, rested her head in her arms on the table and promptly fell into a drunken stupor. Some time after that Sadler came back. He was drunk. Worse, his face was bleeding, his clothes smothered in dust and he was spoiling for a fight. 'I have been robbed,' he told the lodgers, 'and if I knew who had done it I would do for them.' Neither Sadler nor Frances had their lodging money. Charles Guiver, the watchman, helped Sadler to clean up in the yard and then, with great difficulty, persuaded him to leave. Later, when Frances woke up, she left too. Witnesses were to dispute the times. Guiver thought that Sadler left just before midnight, Frances between 1.30 and 1.45 a.m. But as Samuel Harris, one of the lodgers, remembered it, Sadler left at about 12.30 and Frances only three or four minutes after that.

Frances was seen at about 1.30 in Shuttleworth's eating house in Wentworth Street. She was alone and asked for three halfpenceworth of mutton and some bread and ate the food in the corner. She stayed for about fifteen minutes. Joseph Ha.s.sell, who worked there, asked her to leave three times. But Frances had nowhere to go. 'Mind your own business!' she told him. Finally, at about 1.45, he put her out and she turned in the direction of Brick Lane.

2.15 a.m., Friday, 13 February 1891. PC Ernest Thompson 240H was patrolling his beat westwards along Chamber Street. Leman Street Police Station was only minutes away but PC Thompson must have been nervous. He had been in the force for less than two months and this was his first night on the beat alone. It was a night that would haunt him for the rest of his short life.

As he made his way along the street the constable heard, in the darkness ahead of him, the retreating, unhurried footsteps of a man. The man was too far away to see but he seemed to be walking in the same direction as Thompson, towards Mansell Street. Thompson paid it no attention. But then, turning left into Swallow Gardens, a short pa.s.sage that led under a dismal railway arch into Royal Mint Street, he saw something lying in the middle of the roadway under the arch. When he shone his lamp on it he discovered that it was a woman. Blood was flowing from her throat. And, as Thompson stood horrified, he saw her open and shut one eye. In an instant the constable was blowing frantically on his whistle. The latest victim was Frances Coles. She died there under the arch, before a doctor could arrive.

Frances may have been thrown down violently because there were wounds to the back of her head. Certainly Dr Phillips, who performed the autopsy, and Dr F. J. Oxley, the first medical man on the scene in Swallow Gardens, agreed that her throat had been cut while she was lying on the ground. Phillips concluded that the murderer had held Frances' head back by the chin with his left hand and cut her throat with a knife held in his right. The knife had been pa.s.sed three times across the throat from left to right, right to left and then left to right again. The killer had worked from the right side of the body and it had been tilted in such a way as to suggest that he had tried to avoid becoming bloodstained. Frances' clothes were found in perfect order and there were no abdominal mutilations. Phillips did not think that the attacker had demonstrated any skill and he did not believe that he was the perpetrator of the 1888 murders. Dr Oxley told the inquest that although there was but one incision of the skin there must have been two wounds because the larynx had been opened in two places. He thought that they had been made by someone standing in front of the fallen woman.

The police quickly found a suspect in Tom Sadler. He knew and had quarrelled with the dead woman. Then, at about three on the fatal morning, less than an hour after PC Thompson's discovery in Swallow Gardens, Sadler returned to the lodging house in White's Row and asked to be allowed to sit in the kitchen. Again he was bloodstained and again he claimed to have been set upon and robbed, this time in Ratcliff Highway. Sarah Fleming, the deputy, noticed that he was so drunk that he could scarcely stand or speak intelligibly. She turned him away. 'You are a very hard-hearted woman,' he grumbled. 'I have been robbed of my money, of my tackle and half a chain.' Duncan Campbell, a seaman at the Sailor's Home in Wells Street, told an even more incriminating story. He said that at about 10.15 the same morning a man had sold him a knife for a s.h.i.+lling and a piece of tobacco. He identified Sadler as the man.

At Thames Magistrates' Court on 16 February Sadler was charged with the murder of Frances Coles and remanded pending further investigations. Detectives were c.o.c.k-a-hoop. They seemed to have the murderer of Frances Coles. Might they have Jack the Ripper as well? Careful inquiries were set afoot into Sadler's whereabouts at the times of the other Whitechapel murders.

It was a false dawn. The case against Sadler soon fell apart. Ample witnesses were discovered to testify that Sadler had not been with Frances in the hours immediately preceding her death. In particular, they proved that the fireman's story of a second beating that night had been true. At between 1.15 and 1.50 he got into a fight with some dock labourers outside the gates of St Katharine Dock, a scrimmage that left him bleeding profusely from a wound in the scalp. And the knife? Well, Dr Phillips did not think that the murder weapon had been a very sharp knife. But even so, it is exceedingly doubtful if the knife sold to Duncan Campbell could have done the business. Thomas Robinson, a marine stores dealer to whom Campbell sold the knife, found it so blunt that he had to sharpen it before he could use it at supper. Dr Oxley saw the knife after it had been sharpened. Yes, it could have been used by the murderer in its present condition, he said, but 'if it were much blunter . . . it could not have produced the wound.' There is a further point. The murderer of Frances Coles displayed some presence of mind. Would Sadler, in his besotted condition, have been capable of carrying out the deed? Witnesses who saw him that morning leave us in no doubt of his incapacity. Sergeant Edwards saw Sadler outside the Royal Mint only fifteen minutes before Frances died. He said that he was 'decidedly drunk' and weaving about on the pavement. And Sarah Fleming, an hour later, found him scarcely able to stand. Let Dr Oxley have the last word: 'If a man were incapably drunk and the knife blunt I don't think he could have produced the wound . . . If a man were swaying about I don't think he could control the muscles of his hand and arm sufficiently to cause the wound.'

Wynne Baxter, presiding at the inquest into Frances' death, carefully presented the evidence. His jurors were not impressed by the case against Sadler and on 27 February returned a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown. Four days after that all proceedings against him in Thames Magistrates' Court were dropped. As Sadler left the court his cab was loudly cheered by the crowds standing outside.

It was the right decision. We know that as late as 1894 Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the CID, still suspected Sadler. But the contemporary evidence and there is plenty of it contains little to justify his view.

Attempts to link Sadler with the 1888 murders foundered the moment his voyages were doc.u.mented. On 17 August 1888 he signed on at Gravesend for a voyage to the Mediterranean in the Winestead. This vessel did not return to London until 1 October and Sadler was discharged on this date. In other words, when Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes met their deaths, the fireman was safely at sea.

Friday, 13 February. Unlucky for Tom Sadler, most a.s.suredly for Frances Coles, but also for PC Thompson, alone on night duty for the first time. Those footsteps in the dark troubled him. If he had given pursuit could he have caught the murderer? Could he have captured Jack the Ripper? It was, and is, useless to speculate. For Thompson remained with Frances and, in truth, he could do no other. Police standing orders, tightened up after the 1888 atrocities, required a constable finding a murder victim to summon a.s.sistance and remain on the site. In any case Frances was still alive when Thompson appeared and he could not possibly have abandoned her.

Yet the events of that night remained with the young constable. Frederick P. Wensley, who would rise from the ranks to become Chief Constable of CID, knew Thompson. 'I fancy that the lost opportunity preyed on Thompson's mind,' he wrote, 'for I heard him refer to it in despondent terms more than once, and he seemed to regard the incident as presaging some evil fate for himself.'18 The forebodings proved true. In 1900 Thompson was stabbed to death when he intervened to prevent a disturbance at a coffee stall in Commercial Road.

Perhaps the Ripper hunters sensed that they were actors in a historic drama. For despite frustration and failure an undoubted camaraderie grew amongst them. Still preserved at Brams.h.i.+ll Police Staff College is a walking stick presented to Abberline by the detectives who worked on the case with him. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police History Museum holds a pipe presented to Inspector Nearn. It is inscribed: 'Souvenir to James Nearn, Whitechapel Murders, 1888, from six brother officers.'

There were no Ripper-type slayings after 1891. But the Metropolitan Police file on the murders was never officially closed and for some years afterwards the force kept a weather-eye open for likely suspects. Thus, when William Grant Grainger, yet another s.h.i.+p's fireman, was arrested for stabbing a woman in Spitalfields in February 1895, police tried hard to establish his whereabouts at the dates of the Ripper murders. They were not even able to prove his presence in London in 1888.19 The Ripper, for whatever reason, had gone. But his crimes were the stuff of legend and would not be forgotten. Around them a century of claim and counter-claim, discussion and debate, fictioneering and fraud, had already begun.

18.

Murderer of Strangers.

READERS WHO HAVE stayed the distance now know as much about the Jack the Ripper murders as history can tell. It is time for us to stop and take stock of what we have learned. The answers to many of the questions commonly asked about the case are already within our grasp. On other matters the historical record is silent.

There were nine killings in the series. How many are likely to have been slain by the same hand, that of the man we now call Jack the Ripper? Popular report at the time credited him with all nine. But detectives and surgeons who worked on the case held widely divergent views.

At the extremes Inspector Reid attributed all nine murders to the Ripper and Superintendent Arnold felt that he was responsible for no more than four, apparently those of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Mary Kelly.1 Possibly Arnold was influenced by the views of Dr Phillips. Phillips, who performed or attended the last six post-mortems in the series, is known to have discounted Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles as Ripper victims and to have entertained serious doubts about Kate Eddowes. 'After careful & long deliberation,' he wrote in 1889, 'I cannot satisfy myself, on purely anatomical & professional grounds, that the perpetrator of all the Whitechapel murders is one man. I am on the contrary impelled to a contrary conclusion in this, noting the mode of procedure & the character of the mutilations & judging of motive in connection with the latter.'2 In the opinion of Sir Melville Macnaghten the Ripper slew five victims Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly. Inspector Abberline and Sir Robert Anderson both opted for a tally of six by adding Martha Tabram to Macnaghten's names. Walter Dew believed that these six women were 'definite' Ripper victims. But he made the total seven because he felt that Emma Smith had been the Ripper's first victim.3 Dr Bond personally examined the wounds inflicted upon Mary Kelly and Alice McKenzie and studied medical notes relating to four of the earlier victims (Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes). In his view all these six had been killed by the same man.

Obviously there was no contemporary consensus. We must look at the evidence and make up our own minds.

A careful sifting of the facts suggests that, despite Dr Phillips, we are pretty safe in ascribing at least four victims to Jack the Ripper Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly. To that number Martha Tabram and Liz Stride should probably be added.

The only reason for discounting Martha is the nature of her injuries. For as far as we know her throat was not cut nor was any attempt made to disembowel her. The actual degree of mutilation she sustained is uncertain because of lack of precise information. My friend Jon Ogan, a much respected authority on the Whitechapel murders, sees evidence of similar motivation on the part of her killer as in the subsequent crimes. Martha's clothes were turned up to reveal the lower torso but Dr Killeen did not believe that s.e.xual intercourse had taken place. So Jon contends that the murderer displaced the clothing in order to mutilate the corpse and finds support for his view in the cut, three inches long and one inch deep, in Martha's lower abdomen. This is certainly an interesting hypothesis. But although Martha sustained thirty-nine wounds the three-inch cut seems to have been the only one in the lower torso and cannot be said to bear comparison with those inflicted upon Polly Nichols, the next victim. Martha's injuries, moreover, suggest that she was subjected to a less organized and disciplined attack than those that followed. It is arguable, given the large number of wounds and use of two weapons, that she was slain by more than one a.s.sailant. If that was the case then Privates Leary and Law have got to be prime suspects.

Nevertheless, bearing in mind that this was the first murder, the departures from the Ripper's mature modus operandi are not necessarily significant. It is a mistake to think that a killer's technique will invariably remain the same. Experience and circ.u.mstance alike prompt development and change. The techniques of some serial murderers are known to have varied much more dramatically than is suggested by Martha's case. David Berkowitz, the 'Son of Sam' killer who terrorized New York in the seventies, only reverted to the revolver after an unsuccessful and particularly gruesome attempt to knife a girl to death. Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf vampire of 192930, exchanged knife for hammer in a deliberate attempt to confuse the police. And Peter Sutcliffe strangled his twelfth victim, Marguerite Walls, with a ligature in 1980, mainly, as he claimed at his trial, to escape the stigma of his nickname, the 'Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper'.

In time and place, type of victim, the sudden, silent onslaught, the signs of strangulation, the multiple stab wounds, the absence of weapons or clues left at the murder scene, above all in the frenzied character of the attack, in virtually every other respect, the Tabram murder is kin to its successors.

Macnaghten discounted Martha on grounds which are now known to have been largely erroneous. Abberline, Anderson, Reid and Dew, on the other hand, all included her among the Ripper victims. This, indeed, seems to have been a general police view in 1888. We know that suspects detained after the Chapman murder were also questioned as to their movements on the dates of the Tabram and Nichols atrocities. And when Matthews called for a report on the murders in October 1888 he was sent briefs dealing with the Tabram, Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes killings.

The case for supposing Martha Tabram to have been a victim of Jack the Ripper is thus very strong. Of recent writers only Sean Day and Jon Ogan have cared to espouse it.4 But on balance the present evidence suggests that they are right.

There are also doubts about Liz Stride. Her injuries, like those of Martha Tabram, were dissimilar to those of the four certain victims. The evidence has been discussed earlier and need not detain us here. Most of the difficulties are resolved if we accept that the murderer was disturbed by Diemschutz rattling up with his pony and barrow and, all circ.u.mstances considered, it appears probable that Liz, too, fell victim to the same man.

The remaining possibilities are Emma Smith, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles. We can discount Emma Smith. Contemporary sources prove that she was set upon by three ruffians, and although she was badly beaten and s.e.xually a.s.saulted her a.s.sailants did not, apparently, intend murder. After the attack Emma walked home. She died in hospital the next day.

It is undoubtedly possible that the Ripper slew both Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles. Their injuries were similar, though not identical, to those of the canonical victims. The differences, however, may be more significant than the similarities, because by then the Ripper's technique had become all too well-known. As police court records attest, the 1888 atrocities inspired a spate of imitative attacks. And there will always be a suspicion in the cases of Alice and Frances that they fell victim to copycat killers.

So how many women did Jack the Ripper strike down? There is no simple answer. In a sentence: at least four, probably six, just possibly eight.

It is unlikely, though, that the career of Jack the Ripper was launched in George Yard Buildings or Buck's Row. Earlier attacks by the same man almost certainly occurred. Two such possibilities are doc.u.mented in this book the non-fatal knife attacks on Annie Millwood and Ada Wilson in the spring of 1888.

The attack on Ada Wilson seems to have been the outcome of a robbery which badly misfired and took place at Mile End, well to the east of the Ripper's known range. It is best discounted. That on Annie Millwood is a different proposition entirely. Annie lived in White's Row, very close to George Yard, and since she was a widow may well have been supporting herself by prost.i.tution. Apparently she was the victim of an unprovoked attack by a stranger and sustained 'numerous' stab wounds in the legs and lower body. This incident, like many of the Ripper's known atrocities, took place on a weekend.

If Annie was attacked by the George Yard murderer, and there is every chance that she was, we may, at last, be beginning to doc.u.ment the evolution of Jack the Ripper: a casual, botched attack on Annie Millwood in Spitalfields in February, the ferocious but disorganized slaying of Martha Tabram in George Yard in August and, finally, the emergence of the killer's mature modus operandi, that which would earn him his terrible sobriquet, in Buck's Row three weeks later.

We know much more about the victims today than the police did at the time. They were not the broken-down harridans, mostly in their forties but looking 'nearer sixty', of popular legend. Two, Mary Kelly and Frances Coles, were attractive young women in their mid-twenties. The rest were middle-aged but few looked their years. Indeed, it is interesting that police and press estimates of age, based on appearance, consistently misjudged their ages by making them younger than they are now known to have been. In some cases the difference was considerable. A reporter who saw the body of Polly Nichols said that her features were those of 'a woman of about thirty or thirty-five years.'5 She was forty-three. The official police description of Kate Eddowes described her as about forty. She was well over forty-six.

Children of decent working-cla.s.s parents, virtually all the women had slipped into dest.i.tution through failed marriages and drink.

The inquest testimony respecting them is frequently misleading. Time and time again we are told that they were quiet and inoffensive, sober and industrious, that they kept regular hours and did not walk the streets. We are ent.i.tled to take such protestations with a pinch of salt.

The men who cohabited with these women did not wish to be accused of living from the fruits of prost.i.tution. Lodging house keepers could scarcely admit that their tenants were other than models of propriety without incurring charges of running disorderly houses and having their licenses revoked. And no one, at that time of popular outrage over the murders, could have found it easy to speak ill of the dead. Charity was the mood of the hour and the women of the streets knew it. 'The people speak so kind and sympathisin' about the women he has killed,' one told the Pall Mall Gazette, 'and I'd not object to being ripped up by him to be talked about so nice after I'm dead.'6 In a district of low incomes, unemployment and housing shortages, women bereft of male support fared badly. For the types of work commonly offered charring, was.h.i.+ng and hawking supply far exceeded demand. Inevitably, prost.i.tution became an instrument of survival. All the Ripper's victims were regular or casual prost.i.tutes. In the awesome surroundings of the coroner's court their friends felt constrained to suppress the fact. But in the kitchens of the lodging houses it was another matter. Here, amidst communities which pirouetted regularly on the edge of disaster, the prost.i.tute incurred little opprobrium. As Thomas Bates, the watchman, said of Liz Stride: 'Lor' bless you, when she could get no work she had to do the best she could for her living, but a neater and a cleaner woman never lived!'7 Stephen Knight, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, argued that the Ripper victims knew each other. If this were true it would suggest that the murderer was known to them also, that the killings were not random.

Knight pointed out that although the bodies were discovered in different parts of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Aldgate, the women all lived in one tiny part of Spitalfields.8 His data are by no means always valid. He tells us, for example, that Liz Stride and Michael Kidney lived at 35 Dorset Street, where Annie Chapman is known to have stayed, but this is not correct. When Liz was with Kidney they were living at 35 Devons.h.i.+re Street, off Commercial Road. Still, Knight's observation was basically sound. At the times of their deaths all the victims were living in the small cl.u.s.ter of squalid streets about Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Three were in Flower and Dean Street itself, Liz Stride at No. 32, Kate Eddowes at No. 55, and Polly Nichols either at No. 55 or No. 56. Another two were in nearby Dorset Street. Annie Chapman regularly stayed at No. 35. And Mary Kelly lodged at 13 Miller's Court, which was part of No. 26. The other victims lived in lodging houses in George Street (Tabram), Gun Street (McKenzie) and White's Row (Coles).

Unfortunately, we cannot infer any personal relations.h.i.+ps from these addresses. The fact is that the Flower and Dean Street area was notorious throughout the East End as the lodging house quarter. Its cheap beds attracted the indigent from all parts of East London. In 1888 a report of the London City Mission claimed that there were forty lodging houses in the area accommodating some 4000 souls.9 The history of the victim is usually crucial in a murder case. This is because the killer nearly always turns out to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of the deceased. But our research into the lives of the Whitechapel murder victims has uncovered no link between a major suspect and any of the dead women. Nor has it suggested any convincing new suspect. At present there is nothing to indicate that Jack the Ripper was anything but that most elusive of criminals, the murderer of strangers.

A great deal of printer's ink has been spilled in speculation about the Ripper's modus operandi. The evidence a.s.sembled in this book enables us to reconstruct its mature form with some confidence.

It is probable that the victims accosted or were accosted by the murderer in thoroughfares like Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, and that they then conducted him themselves to the secluded spots where they were slain. This was certainly the case with Mary Kelly, who died in her own room in Miller's Court. And it was probably true of the others. Martha Tabram is known to have serviced another client in George Yard just three hours before she was killed there. Annie Chapman met her death in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street and there is reason to believe that she led her killer there. The house is known to have been a resort of prost.i.tutes, it was within a few hundred yards of Annie's lodging house at 35 Dorset Street and 29 was also the number of Annie's regular bed in the lodging house. Buck's Row, Dutfield's Yard and the dark corner of Mitre Square were also frequently used by prost.i.tutes.

In these wet and muddy streets s.e.xual intercourse would normally have been performed against a wall or fence. Alone with her client in a dark and sheltered spot, the woman stood with her back to the wall and raised her skirts. In such a place and such a position she was completely vulnerable to attack. And before she could utter a cry, the Ripper seized her by the throat. He strangled her, at least into insensibility, and lowered her to the ground with her head towards his left.

A number of circ.u.mstances indicate that the murderer strangled his victims before resorting to the knife. In most cases no screams were heard. We also know that the women were lying on their backs when their throats were cut and that there was relatively little spillage of blood. The wounds bled out on the ground beside or under the neck, much of the blood acc.u.mulating beneath the body and being soaked up by the back of the clothes. Then, in some cases, direct evidence of strangulation was recorded of the bodies. Martha Tabram was found with her hands clenched and her face swollen and distorted. Poll