Complete History Of Jack The Ripper Part 6

At about 1.44 a.m., just three-quarters of an hour after the Dutfield's Yard discovery, PC Edward Watkins 881 of the City Police approached Mitre Square from Mitre Street. All was quiet. George Clapp and his wife had been in bed since about 11.00 and PC Pearce since 12.30. They were now sleeping soundly. George Morris, Kearley & Tonge's watchman, was cleaning the offices on the ground floor of their counting house block. PC Watkins' beat normally took him about twelve or fourteen minutes to patrol. When he had last explored Mitre Square, at about 1.30, it had been deserted. And so, as he stepped into the square, it seemed now. There was no sound but that of his own footsteps. Yet, turning right into the southern corner of the square, the constable beheld in the beam of the lantern fixed in his belt one of the most gruesome sights he had witnessed in seventeen years of police work.

Four days later, before the coroner, Watkins described what he had found in the tersest language: 'I next came in at 1.44. I turned to the right. I saw the body of a woman lying there on her back with her feet facing the square [and] her clothes up above her waist. I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach was ripped up. She was laying in a pool of blood.' To the representatives of the press the constable was a little more expansive. 'She was ripped up like a pig in the market,' he told the Star, '. . . I have been in the force a long while, but I never saw such a sight.' The Daily News carried his most detailed account: Mitre Square. marks the spot where the body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered, at 1.44 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September 1888 I came round [to Mitre Square] again at 1.45, and entering the square from Mitre Street, on the right-hand side, I turned sharp round to the right, and flas.h.i.+ng my light, I saw the body in front of me. The clothes were pushed right up to her breast, and the stomach was laid bare, with a dreadful gash from the pit of the stomach to the breast. On examining the body I found the entrails cut out and laid round the throat, which had an awful gash in it, extending from ear to ear. In fact, the head was nearly severed from the body. Blood was everywhere to be seen. It was difficult to discern the injuries to the face for the quant.i.ty of blood which covered it . . . The murderer had inserted the knife just under the left eye, and, drawing it under the nose, cut the nose completely from the face, at the same time inflicting a dreadful gash down the right cheek to the angle of the jawbone. The nose was laid over on the cheek. A more dreadful sight I never saw; it quite knocked me over.

PC Watkins at once ran across the square to Kearley & Tonge's. Finding the door ajar, he pushed it open and hailed the watchman. Inside George Morris was sweeping the steps down towards the door. As he remembered it, the door behind him was knocked or pushed and he turned round, opened it wide and discovered the constable. 'For G.o.d's sake, mate,' gasped Watkins, 'come to my a.s.sistance.' Morris was a Metropolitan Police pensioner himself. Getting his lamp, he followed Watkins outside. 'What's the matter?' he demanded. 'Oh dear,' replied Watkins, 'there's another woman cut up to pieces!'

Watkins showed Morris the body and then, mounting guard over it, sent him off to bring more help. The watchman dashed out into Mitre Street and then into Aldgate. There, blowing his whistle furiously, he attracted the attention of Police Constables James Harvey and James Thomas Holland.

The news reached Inspector Edward Collard at Bishopsgate Street Police Station at 1.55. Telegraphing it to HQ and sending a constable for Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police Surgeon, at 17 Finsbury Circus, Collard set out for the scene of the crime. When he arrived, at two or three minutes past two, he found a doctor as well as several policemen already there. Dr George William Sequeira of 34 Jewry Street, Aldgate, had been called out by PC Holland at 1.55. He would tell the inquest later that the woman had not been dead for more than fifteen minutes before he saw her. But neither Sequeira nor anyone else touched the body until the arrival of Dr Gordon Brown.8 The dead woman lay on the pavement in the southern corner of Mitre Square, her head perhaps eighteen inches from the wall and railings that enclosed the rear and yard of Heydemann's premises, her feet towards the carriageway out of Mitre Street. A 'coal plate', immediately to the left of the victim's head, guarded the entrance to a coal chute, and an arched grating, to the left of her legs, admitted light to the cellar of the empty house next to Mr Taylor's shop. The back wall of the house was parallel with, and several feet to the left of, the body. A later generation would d.a.m.n the spot as 'Jack the Ripper's Corner'. Back in 1888, on the eve of the murder, it had no such sinister repute but it was the darkest corner in the square and a favourite place for prost.i.tutes and their clients. The lamp-post was sixty-five feet away. And, since the corner of Mr Taylor's shop interposed between the murder site and a 'lantern lamp' on the corner of the Walter Williams & Co. warehouse in Mitre Street, the spot was plunged into shadow after lighting-up time.

Dr Frederick Gordon Brown reached Mitre Square at about 2.18 and we are indebted to him for almost all of our scene-of-crime information. He found the dead woman stretched out upon her back. Her throat had been cut and her abdomen ripped open. Her intestines had been lifted out and placed over her right shoulder and one detached portion of intestine, perhaps two feet long, had been placed between her body and her left arm. Her face had been savagely mutilated. The doctor took careful notes and four days later made this report to the inquest: The body was on its back; the head turned to left shoulder; the arms by the side[s] of the body as if they had fallen there, both palms upwards, the fingers slightly bent; a thimble was lying off the finger on the right side; the clothes drawn up above the abdomen; the thighs were naked; left leg extended in a line with the body; the abdomen was exposed; right leg bent at the thigh and knee; the bonnet was at the back of the head; great disfigurement of face; the throat cut across; below the cut was a neckerchief; the upper part of the dress was pulled open a little way; the abdomen was all exposed; the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder; they were smeared over with some feculent matter; a piece of about 2 feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design; the lobe and auricle of the right ear was cut obliquely through; there was a quant.i.ty of clotted blood on the pavement on the left side of the neck, round the shoulder and upper part of arm, and fluid blood coloured serum which had flowed under the neck to the right shoulder, the pavement sloping in that direction; body was quite warm; no death stiffening had taken place; she must have been dead most likely within the half hour; we looked for superficial bruises and saw none; no blood on the skin of the abdomen or secretion of any kind on the thighs; no spurting of blood on the bricks or pavement around; no marks of blood below the middle of the body; several b.u.t.tons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed; there was no blood on the front of the clothes; there were no traces of recent connection.9 The appearance of the body in Mitre Square was also depicted by Brown in a pencil sketch he made upon the spot. This sketch, long lost, was one of several discovered in 1966 by Sam Hardy in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the London Hospital and published by Professor Francis Camps in the London Hospital Gazette.10 There may be a slight discrepancy between the evidence of Dr Brown and that of Inspector Collard. Brown stated that several b.u.t.tons were found in the clotted blood, which was near the left side of the neck and about the left shoulder and upper arm, and that a thimble was discovered near the right hand. In his inquest testimony, however, Collard swore that Sergeant Jones picked up three small black b.u.t.tons ('generally used for women's boots'), a small metal b.u.t.ton, a common metal thimble and a small mustard tin containing two p.a.w.n tickets, all by the left side of the body. The inspector recorded two other important details. The dead woman was not in possession of any money and there was no evidence that she had put up a struggle.

After he had examined it, Dr Brown gave instructions for the body to be taken to the City Mortuary in Golden Lane. By then Mitre Square had become the centre of a frantic police investigation. In 1888, as now, the City of London had its own police force, responsible to the corporation. Its Commissioner, Sir James Fraser, was on leave at the end of September and, in any case, ripe for retirement. So the search for the Mitre Square killer was directed by Major (later Lieutenant Colonel Sir) Henry Smith, the Acting Commissioner, and Inspector James McWilliam, head of the City Detective Department.

On the night of the murder Smith was roused from his bed at Cloak Lane Police Station. He recalled that awakening vividly in his memoirs, published in 1910: The night of Sat.u.r.day, September 29, found me tossing about in my bed at Cloak Lane Station, close to the river and adjoining Southwark Bridge. There was a railway goods depot in front, and a furrier's premises behind my rooms; the lane was causewayed, heavy vans were going constantly in and out, and the sickening smell from the furrier's skins was always present. You could not open the windows, and to sleep was an impossibility. Suddenly the bell at my head rang violently. 'What is it?' I asked, putting my ear to the tube. 'Another murder, sir, this time in the City.' Jumping up, I was dressed and in the street in a couple of minutes. A hansom to me a detestable vehicle was at the door, and into it I jumped, as time was of the utmost consequence. This invention of the devil claims to be safe. It is neither safe nor pleasant . . . Licensed to carry two, it did not take me long to discover that a 15-stone Superintendent inside with me, and three detectives hanging on behind, added neither to its comfort nor to its safety. Although we rolled like a 'seventy-four' in a gale, we got to our destination Mitre Square without an upset, where I found a small group of my men standing round the mutilated remains of a woman.11 When Inspector McWilliam heard the news he went first to the City Detective Office at 26 Old Jewry. Arriving at 3.45, he wired the news to Scotland Yard and then set out for Mitre Square via Bishopsgate Street Police Station. Major Smith, Inspector Collard, Detective Superintendent Alfred Foster and others of his colleagues were already at the scene when he reached the square.

Although the previous murders had all taken place within Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the City Police had by no means remained complacent. The Tabram and Nichols murders in August had caused Smith to instruct his detective department to employ extra men in plain clothes to patrol the eastern fringes of the City, maintain a close watch on prost.i.tutes and account for every man and woman seen out together after dark. In his memoirs the major claimed to have employed nearly one third of his total force upon such duties and fondly pictured them sitting on doorsteps, smoking pipes, loafing about pubs and gossiping with all and sundry in the September suns.h.i.+ne. 'It was subversive of discipline,' he conceded, 'but I had them well supervised by senior officers.'12 At the very moment that the hapless woman in Mitre Square was being murdered and mutilated, indeed, three City detectives Outram, Halse and Marriott were searching the pa.s.sages of houses only a few streets away. At about 1.58, when they received tidings of the murder, these detectives were on the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street.13 Tragically the elaborate precautions taken by the City Police proved insufficient to save the woman found dead in Mitre Square. Major Smith was undoubtedly galled at the failure of his strategy. But he was also beginning to understand something of the ruthless efficiency of the man he was up against. In no crime was this demonstrated more clearly than in this killing in the City.

The murderer had pa.s.sed through Mitre Square like some invisible phantom. PC Watkins, whose beat took in the square, found it deserted at about 1.30. On returning, just fourteen or fifteen minutes later, he discovered the body but even then saw no one and heard nothing suspicious as he entered the square. Watkins entered and left Mitre Square by Mitre Street. At about 1.41 or 1.42 another patrolling constable, PC James Harvey 964, reached (but did not, apparently, enter) Mitre Square from the opposite direction through Duke Street and Church Pa.s.sage. This was several minutes before Watkins found the body but yet, as Harvey a.s.sured the inquest, 'I saw no one [and] I heard no cry or noise.' A third City policeman, PC Pearce, actually lived in Mitre Square. From the window of their house at No. 3 he and his wife might have witnessed the murder but they both slept throughout the entire incident. George Morris, the watchman at Kearley & Tonge's offices, had been a Metropolitan Police constable. When alerted to the atrocity by Watkins he was working only about two yards inside Kearley & Tonge's front door and the door itself had been ajar for perhaps two minutes. According to a statement he made in the Star, Morris 'had gone to the front door to look put into the square two moments before Watkins called to him.' Notwithstanding all which he, too, knew nothing of what had occurred. Finally there was George Clapp, the caretaker who slept at the back of Heydemann's, overlooking the murder site. 'During the night I heard no sound or any noise of any kind,' Clapp told the coroner. Indeed, he had not learned of the murder until between five and six the next morning and by then the Mitre Square victim was lying in Golden Lane Mortuary.14 In less than fifteen minutes, then, the murderer inveigled his victim into Mitre Square, killed her, mutilated her and made good his escape, taking as it would soon transpire the woman's left kidney and womb with him, all virtually under the noses of four serving or ex-policemen!

George Morris, at least, made no excuse. 'The strangest part of the whole thing,' he explained to the press later in the day, 'is that I heard no sound. As a rule I can hear the footstep of the policeman as he pa.s.ses by every quarter of an hour, so the woman could not have uttered any cry without my detecting it. It was only last night I made the remark to some policemen that I wished the butcher would come round Mitre Square, and I would soon give him a doing, and here, to be sure, he has come, and I was perfectly ignorant of it.'15 Having failed to prevent the murder the City Police moved swiftly to apprehend the murderer before he could go to ground or leave the district. It was at best a long chance for there was every possibility that the killer escaped across the City boundary within the ten minutes it took for the news of the Mitre Square tragedy to reach Bishopsgate Street Police Station. No one could be absolutely certain, however, that the Mitre Square and Whitechapel murderers were one and the same man. And even if he was it was by no means out of the question that he operated out of a base in the City.

The earliest detectives on the scene were Detective Sergeant Robert Outram and Detective Constables Daniel Halse and Edward Marriott. They had been searching the pa.s.sages of houses in the neighbourhood and were on the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street when, at about two minutes to two, they first received intimation that their presence was needed in Mitre Square. When they got there and realized that a murder had been committed they set out at once in different directions to look for suspects. In the light of subsequent events the proceedings of one of the three Daniel Halse are important. He described them at the inquest: 'I gave instructions to have the neighbourhood searched and every man examined. I went by Middles.e.x Street into Wentworth Street, where I stopped 2 men who gave satisfactory accounts of themselves. I came through Goulston Street at 20 past 2 and then went back to Mitre Square.' Inspector McWilliam, upon his arrival at the square, also ordered immediate searches of neighbouring streets and lodging houses. Several men were stopped and searched but without any tangible result.16 By three in the morning two major murder investigations were thus going on simultaneously, one based upon Berner Street and in the hands of the Metropolitan Police, the other centred upon Mitre Square and the responsibility of the City force. But the night had still one more surprise in store for the embattled officers. For at 2.55 a Metropolitan Police constable made a discovery that switched the centre of attention once more, this time back from Mitre Square to Whitechapel.

PC Alfred Long 254A had been temporarily drafted from A Division (Westminster) to serve in Whitechapel. There, on duty in Goulston Street at about 2.55, he found a piece of a woman's ap.r.o.n, wet with blood, lying in the entry leading to the staircase of Nos. 108119 Wentworth Model Dwellings. The constable immediately started to cast about for other signs of blood. There were none. But on the right-hand side of the open doorway to the entry, just above the ap.r.o.n, he saw something else. Written in white chalk on the fascia of black bricks edging the doorway were the words: The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.

Long made no inquiries of the tenants in the building but he did search the staircases. He found no traces of blood or recent footmarks. Then, leaving the constable from the adjoining beat to guard the writing and observe anyone leaving or entering the premises, he took the piece of bloodstained ap.r.o.n and handed it in to the duty inspector at Commercial Street Police Station. When he arrived at Commercial Street it was about 3.05 or 3.10 a.m.17 Soon there were City as well as Metropolitan officers gathering at Wentworth Model Dwellings. The precise sequence of events is imperfectly doc.u.mented but a report of Long's discoveries seems to have reached the City Police in Mitre Square and Detective Constables Halse and Hunt evidently went to the Metropolitan station at Leman Street to make inquiries. From there they were directed to Goulston Street. Having ascertained the situation at Wentworth Model Dwellings, Halse stayed to guard the chalked message while Hunt returned to Mitre Square to report and receive further instructions. When Hunt got back to the square he found that Inspector McWilliam had arrived. McWilliam listened to Hunt's report. Then he gave instructions for the chalk message to be photographed and ordered Hunt, in the meantime, to return to Wentworth Model Dwellings and a.s.sist Halse in making a search of the tenements there.18 The search was duly executed. As Halse later apprised the coroner, 'when Hunt returned an enquiry was made at every tenement of the building but we could gain no tidings of anyone going in likely to be the murderer.' But no photographs of the chalk message would be taken. For, in what was to prove his most controversial intervention in the Whitechapel investigations, Sir Charles Warren ordered the writing to be wiped away before a photographer arrived.

To Sir Charles alone is generally attributed the decision to obliterate the writing. He made the final decision and unhesitatingly accepted full responsibility for it but contemporary doc.u.ments make it quite plain that it originated in a proposal of Superintendent Thomas Arnold of H Division. The news from Berner Street brought Warren to Commercial and Leman Street police stations in the early hours of 30 September. When he arrived at Leman Street, shortly before five, Arnold briefed him on the two murders and the discoveries in Goulston Street. The superintendent proposed that the writing be obliterated. Indeed he had already sent an inspector to Wentworth Model Dwellings with a sponge and instructions to await his arrival. But Warren considered it 'desirable that I should decide this matter myself, as it was one involving so great a responsibility whether any action was taken or not', and decided to call at Goulston Street on his way to Berner Street.

Why should Superintendent Arnold, in whose division four out of the six murders had been committed, advocate the destruction of an important clue? And why should Warren, whom the public would hold directly responsible for any failure to catch the murderer, entertain such a proposal for a moment? For more than a century Warren has been mocked and vilified over this matter and it is high time that he and Arnold were allowed to speak for themselves. Their cases are set out in reports for the Home Office dated 6 November 1888.19 First, Superintendent Arnold: . . . knowing that, in consequence of a suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named John Pizer alias 'Leather Ap.r.o.n' having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously, a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited princ.i.p.ally by that sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed . . . Had only a portion of the writing been removed the context would have remained.'

Arnold's dilemma on the night of the double murder is thus laid bare. He appreciated the possibility that the writing might yield a clue. But he also remembered the anti-semitic outburst that had disgraced Whitechapel after Dark Annie's murder. And he dreaded what the consequences might be in the morning if the chalk message, with its overt incrimination of the Jews, became public property at a time when the East End was reeling with the shock of two new murders.

As Sir Charles was being driven to Goulston Street he would have been pondering Arnold's proposal. He was not obliged to accept it, of course, but the superintendent knew far more about conditions in Whitechapel than he did and Warren would have accorded his opinion very great weight. Sir Charles' report takes up the story: I . . . went down to Goulston Street . . . before going to the scene of the murder: it was just getting light, the public would be in the streets in a few minutes, in a neighbourhood very much crowded on Sunday mornings by Jewish vendors and Christian purchasers from all parts of London.

There were several police around the spot when I arrived, both Metropolitan and City.

The writing was on the jamb of the open archway or doorway visible to anybody in the street and could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.

A discussion took place whether the writing could be left covered up or otherwise or whether any portion of it could be left for an hour until it could be photographed; but after taking into consideration the excited state of the population in London generally at the time, the strong feeling which had been excited against the Jews, and the fact that in a short time there would be a large concourse of the people in the streets, and having before me the report that if it was left there the house was likely to be wrecked (in which from my own observation I entirely concurred) I considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once, having taken a copy . . .

I do not hesitate myself to say that if that writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost; and I was much gratified with the prompt.i.tude with which Superintendent Arnold was prepared to act in the matter if I had not been there.

When Warren decided to obliterate the writing only Daniel Halse, the City detective, protested. He wanted it to remain, at least until Major Smith had seen it, and suggested a compromise in which only the top line ('The Juwes are') would be rubbed out. But it was getting light, the area was already beginning to come to life with costermongers preparing for the Petticoat Lane market, and in Metropolitan Police territory Warren's word was final. According to Constable Long, who was present, the chalk message was wiped off at about 5.30.20 There was still the piece of bloodstained ap.r.o.n that Long had found in the entry beneath the writing. It had been surrendered to Dr Phillips. Inspector McWilliam was at Golden Lane Mortuary when it was compared to the ap.r.o.n worn by the Mitre Square victim. About one half of the dead woman's ap.r.o.n had been severed by a clean cut. And the piece retrieved by Long fitted exactly. Dr Brown's testimony on the ap.r.o.n, part of his inquest deposition of 4 October, leaves no room for doubt that after murdering the woman in Mitre Square the killer escaped across the City boundary into Whitechapel: 'My attention was called to the ap.r.o.n [found on the body]. It was the corner of the ap.r.o.n with a string attached. The blood spots were of recent origin. I have seen a portion of an ap.r.o.n produced by Dr Phillips and stated to have been found in Goulston Street . . . I fitted the piece of ap.r.o.n which had a new piece of material on it which had been evidently sewn on to the piece I have, the seams of the borders of the two actually corresponding. Some blood and apparently faecal matter was found on the portion found in Goulston Street.'21 The escape had been almost as remarkable as the murder. Major Smith's well-known description, however, is quite erroneous. 'There is no man living,' he wrote in 1910, 'who knows as much of those murders as I do; and before going farther I must admit that, though within five minutes of the perpetrator one night, and with a very fair description of him besides, he completely beat me and every police officer in London; and I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago.' There is, unfortunately, no known occasion on which the major was within five minutes of the killer. He did visit Mitre Square. But the earliest senior police officer on the scene of the crime was Inspector Collard and even he was eighteen or nineteen minutes behind PC Watkins' discovery of the body. It seems likely that Smith would also have visited the Goulston Street site although there is no actual record of it. If he did the visit undoubtedly occurred after 5.30, when the chalk message was removed. The only possible justification for Smith's curious claim to have been 'within five minutes' of the murderer lies, therefore, in just two sentences of his reminiscences: 'In Dorset Street, with extraordinary audacity, he [the murderer] washed them [his hands] at a sink up a close, not more than six yards from the street. I arrived there in time to see the bloodstained water.' This episode, however, cannot be corroborated from any other source. Furthermore, even if Smith's recollection of it was accurate there was no way of knowing that the bloodstained water in Dorset Street had any connection with the murders. Smith's claim to have been armed with a 'very fair description' of the killer is equally misleading. As we will discover, the City Police did find a witness Joseph Lawende, a commercial traveller who may have seen the Mitre Square murderer, but his evidence was turned up by Inspector Collard's subsequent house-to-house inquiries in the area and was not available on the night of the double killing.22 The murderer's escape was remarkable nonetheless. It would have been less so had he fled into Whitechapel immediately after the Mitre Square atrocity, before the City Police had been alerted, but this does not seem to have been the case. PC Long, whose beat embraced Goulston Street, patrolled it at about 2.20. Although he pa.s.sed the spot where he would afterwards find the ap.r.o.n he was positive that it had not been there then. And Daniel Halse, who pa.s.sed by the same spot at about the same time in pursuit of the criminal, also failed to notice anything. They might have missed it, of course, but if their testimony is to be depended upon the ap.r.o.n was deposited at Wentworth Model Dwellings some time between 2.20 and 2.55, as much as thirty-six to seventy-one minutes after Watkins discovered the body in Mitre Square. The murderer could have reached Goulston Street in five minutes from the square so where he was, and what he was doing, during the intervening time is a mystery. Whatever the cause of his delay, the killer evidently slipped unseen out of the City at a time when its officers had already become active in his pursuit and, again unseen, into a Whitechapel already alerted by the Berner Street murder. Not only that, but he paused long enough in Goulston Street to leave a calling card!

In his memoirs Major Smith concluded his account of the double murder thus: 'I wandered round my station-houses, hoping I might find someone brought in, and finally got to bed at 6 a.m., after a very hara.s.sing night, completely defeated.' Inspector McWilliam, in a report for the Home Office, tells how he visited the City Mortuary and then returned to the Detective Office and wired the Mitre Square victim's description to all divisions and to the Metropolitan Police. 'Additional officers had then arrived,' he wrote, 'and they were sent out in various directions to make enquiry.' To no purpose. And Sir Charles? From Goulston Street he drove to the site of the murder in Dutfield's Yard, and from there, with Superintendent Arnold, to the City Police headquarters in Old Jewry. There, at about seven, he explained his reasons for ordering the obliteration of the writing at Wentworth Model Dwellings. If he antic.i.p.ated support for his decision, however, he was disappointed. McWilliam thought that he had made a mistake and told him so. And Warren's action rankled with Major Smith so much that, twenty-two years later, the major could still write of it as a 'fatal mistake', an 'unpardonable blunder.'23 When the sun rose on Sunday, 30 September, the new day thus found the police baffled and bickering. Nothing was as apparent as their defeat.

10.

Long Liz.

THE BERNER STREET VICTIM, like Martha Tabram and Annie Chapman before her, had been killed within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police's H Division. At 1.25 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September, a telegram bearing the news of the tragedy reached Detective Inspector Edmund Reid at Commercial Street Police Station. Twenty minutes later he was at the scene of the crime. Chief Inspector West, Inspector Pinhorn and several sergeants and constables were already there. Doctors Blackwell and Phillips were with the body.

The police did what they could. Dutfield's Yard and the adjoining buildings were thoroughly searched several times. And a crowd of twenty-eight bystanders that had been shut in the yard by PC Lamb were detained. Some of them were tenants of the cottages in the yard, some members of the International Working Men's Club, others merely pa.s.sers-by drawn to the scene by the promise of excitement. They were interrogated, their names and addresses taken and their pockets searched. Then, before they were allowed to go, the doctors inspected their hands and clothes for traces of blood. These activities yielded no clue whatsoever to the mystery. Later in the day, acting under instructions from Inspector Abberline, detectives were extending the scope of their investigations to the extent of house-to-house inquiries in Berner Street.

Reid, in the meantime, had set about the task of identifying the victim. At St George's Mortuary, where the body had been taken at about 4.30 a.m., he examined the dead woman and made careful notes upon her appearance. Her age, he guessed, might be about forty-two. She was five feet two inches in height. Her hair was dark-brown and curly, her complexion pale. Reid lifted an eyelid. Her eyes were light grey. Parting her lips, he discovered that her upper front teeth were missing. The woman's clothes consisted of a long black jacket trimmed with black fur, an old black skirt, a dark-brown velvet bodice, two light serge petticoats, a white chemise, a pair of white stockings, a pair of side-spring boots and a black c.r.a.pe bonnet. The jacket was decorated by a single red rose, backed by a maidenhair fern.

The inspector found nothing among the victim's belongings that offered any clue to her ident.i.ty. Her jacket pocket contained but two pocket handkerchiefs, a thimble and a piece of wool on a card. The description, however, was communicated by wire to all police stations.1 Identifying the dead woman and unravelling something of her history proved no straightforward task. Almost immediately police inquiries were bedevilled by the intrusion of Mrs Mary Malcolm. Mrs Malcolm was the wife of a tailor and lived at 50 Eagle Street, Red Lion Square, Holborn. On Monday, 1 October, she identified the body as that of her sister, Mrs Elizabeth Watts.

Mrs Malcolm had a very strange story to tell. She said that her sister, who lived in East End lodging houses, had been in the habit of coming to her for a.s.sistance for the past five years. They met every Sat.u.r.day afternoon at four, at the corner of Chancery Lane, and Mrs Malcolm always gave her sister two s.h.i.+llings for her lodgings. But on Sat.u.r.day, 29 September, the day before the murder, Mrs Watts did not come. Mary, who waited in vain from half past three to five, was troubled. Her sister had not missed a meeting for nearly three years. At twenty minutes past one the next morning Mrs Malcolm was lying in bed. It was then that she had a presentiment that some disaster had befallen her sister: 'About 1.20 on Sunday morning I was lying on my bed when I felt a kind of pressure on my breast, and then I felt three kisses on my cheek. I also heard the kisses, and they were quite distinct.' When, later in the day, she heard that another murder had been committed about that time, it seemed to Mrs Malcolm that her worst fears had been confirmed. She walked into Whitechapel, made inquiries at a police station and was directed to St George's Mortuary.

On Tuesday, 2 October, Mrs Malcolm a.s.sured the inquest that the deceased was undoubtedly Elizabeth Watts. She also gave her sister a very dubious character indeed. Her husband had sent her back to her mother because he had caught her misbehaving with a porter. She had once left a naked baby, the product of an illicit affair with a policeman, on Mrs Malcolm's doorstep. And she had been several times taken into custody for being drunk and disorderly. The coroner asked Mrs Malcolm what her sister did for a livelihood. She replied curtly: 'I had my doubts.' Notwithstanding all this, Mary was apparently genuinely distressed by the loss of her sister. One newspaper commented that she seemed 'deeply affected' as she gave her evidence. Upon several occasions during the examination she burst into tears.

The police can hardly have been impressed by Mary Malcolm's fanciful tale of a presentiment. The credibility of her evidence, furthermore, was seriously undermined by her vacillation at the mortuary. When she first saw the body on the Sunday she could not identify it. Before the coroner, she gave various explanations of her failure. At one point she ascribed it to the fact that she saw the body in gaslight, between nine and ten at night. At another she said that she had been unsure because the body did not exhibit a crippled foot. Mrs Watts, she stated, had 'a hollowness in her right foot, caused by its being run over.' Whatever, on Monday she came back to the mortuary, twice, and this time she made a positive identification. Not, be it noted, because she recognized her sister in the dead woman's face but from a small black mark on one of her legs. It was, she explained, an adder bite. As children they had been rolling down a hill when an adder had bitten Mary on the left hand and her sister on the leg.

Neither the police nor the coroner were happy with Mary Malcolm's identification. And their misgivings were eventually vindicated when the real Elizabeth Watts, now Mrs Elizabeth Stokes, turned up, with an appropriately crippled foot, alive if not well. Married to a brickmaker and living at 5 Charles Street, Tottenham, Mrs Stokes said that she had not seen her sister Mary for years. On 23 October she inveighed bitterly against Mrs Malcolm at the inquest. 'Her evidence was infamy and lies,' she cried heatedly, 'and I am sorry that I have a sister who can tell such dreadful falsehoods.' By then, of course, Mary Malcolm had wasted a great deal of police time.2 Despite such distractions the detectives did succeed in establis.h.i.+ng the true ident.i.ty of the victim. She was a Swedish woman named Elizabeth Stride and her last address had been a common lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. But no one, not even Michael Kidney, with whom she had lived for three years, seemed to know much of her past beyond what she herself had told them. And therein the police encountered another difficulty for Elizabeth Stride had been gifted with an imagination every bit as lively as that of Mrs Malcolm.

Her princ.i.p.al fantasy was inspired by the loss of the Princess Alice in 1878. This tragedy, described by The Times as 'one of the most fearful disasters of modern times', has now been almost entirely forgotten. On 3 September 1878 a pleasure steamer, Princess Alice, collided in the Thames with a steam collier, Bywell Castle, and sank with the loss of between 600 and 700 lives. Elizabeth Stride gave out that her husband and two of her children had been drowned in the Princess Alice. She had saved herself by climbing a rope. But during that frantic scramble for life a man clambering up the rope ahead of her had slipped and accidentally kicked her in the face, knocking out her front teeth and stoving in the whole or part of the roof of her mouth. Elizabeth seems to have told this story to anyone who would listen to Sven Olsson, clerk of the Swedish Church in Prince's Square, to Michael Kidney, the waterside labourer who lived with her, to Elizabeth Tanner and Thomas Bates, the deputy and watchman respectively of the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street, to Charles Preston, a fellow lodger there, and doubtless to many another lost to record. Yet there was not a word of truth in it.

The story was dismissed by a Greenwich correspondent of the Daily News: Mr C. J. Carttar, late coroner for West Kent, held an inquiry, extending over six weeks, on the bodies of 527 persons drowned by the disaster, at the Town Hall, Woolwich, the majority of whom were identified, and caused an alphabetical list of those identified, above 500, to be made by his clerk. An inspection of the list, which is in the possession of Mr E. A. Carttar, the present coroner, and son of the late coroner, does not disclose the name of Stride. Whole families were drowned, but the only instance of a father and two children being drowned where the children were under the age of 12 years was in the case of an accountant named Bell, aged 38, his two sons being aged respectively 10 and 7 years. It is true that Mr Lewis, the Ess.e.x coroner, held inquests on a few of the bodies cast ash.o.r.e in Ess.e.x, but it is extremely improbable that the three bodies of Mr Stride and his two children were cast ash.o.r.e on that side of the river, or that they were all driven out to sea and lost.3 Wynne Baxter, the coroner at the Stride inquest, also pointed out that although a subscription had been raised to a.s.sist the bereaved relatives of the Princess Alice dead no person by the name of Stride ever applied for relief from the fund. Elizabeth's upper front teeth were missing. But as for her a.s.sertion that the roof of her mouth had been injured during the disaster, that was easily disproved. On 5 October Dr Phillips, who had examined the mouth of the dead woman specifically to verify this point, reported to the inquest that he could not find 'any injury to or absence of any part of either the hard or the soft palate.'4 The truth, when Inspector Reid unearthed it, turned out to be a dull subst.i.tute for Elizabeth's colourful tale. John Thomas Stride, her husband, survived the Princess Alice disaster by six years. He died of heart disease in 1884. It is probable, although we cannot know, that Elizabeth concocted her story to conceal a failed marriage and to elicit sympathy from the Swedish Church or such others as she dared approach for a.s.sistance.

Disregarding the red herrings and piecing together what the police discovered in 1888 and what subsequent researchers have been able to learn since, we can now reconstruct the broad outline of Elizabeth Stride's life accurately.5 Her maiden name was Elisabeth Gustafsdotter. The daughter of Gustaf Ericsson, a farmer, and his wife Beata Carlsdotter, she was born on 27 November 1843 in the parish of Torslanda, north of Gothenburg. Their farm was called Stora (meaning Big) Tumlehed. On 14 October 1860, when Elizabeth was nearly seventeen, she took out a certificate of altered residence from the parish of Torslanda and moved to that of Carl Johan in Gothenburg. She found work there as a domestic in the service of Lars Fredrik Olofsson, a workman, but soon moved on, taking out a new certificate to the Cathedral parish in Gothenburg on 2 February 1862. Elizabeth still gave her occupation as that of a domestic but this time her place of work is not known.

In March 1865 the police of Gothenburg registered her as a prost.i.tute. Subsequent register entries tell us that she was a girl of slight build with brown hair, blue eyes, a straight nose and an oval face, that in October 1865 she was living in Philgaten in ostra Haga, a suburb of Gothenburg, and that she was twice treated in the special hospital, Kurhuset, for venereal diseases. On 21 April 1865 Elizabeth gave birth to a still-born girl. Nearly a year later, on 7 February 1866, she took out a new certificate of altered residence from the Cathedral parish to the Swedish parish in London. The certificate states that she could read tolerably well but possessed only a poor understanding of the Bible and catechism.6 Why did Elizabeth come to England? According to Michael Kidney's inquest deposition, she told him at one time that she first came to see the country and at another that she had come in the service of a family. This is not good evidence but it is the best we have and there is possibly some truth in both of Elizabeth's explanations. Certainly they are not incompatible. Kidney understood, moreover, that at one time she was in domestic service with a gentleman living near Hyde Park.

On 10 July 1866 she was registered as an unmarried woman at the Swedish Church in Prince's Square, St George-in-the East. Three years later she married. The bridegroom was a carpenter named John Thomas Stride and the service was performed by William Powell in the parish church of St Giles-in-the Fields on 7 March 1869. Elizabeth is described on the marriage certificate as Elizabeth Gustifson, spinster, the daughter of Augustus Gustifson, labourer. At the time of the marriage Stride was living at 21 Munster Street, Regent's Park, and Elizabeth at 67 Gower Street.

Almost nothing is known about their marriage. Elizabeth later told Michael Kidney that she had borne nine children but this statement has never been corroborated. However, we do know that when Walter Stride, John's nephew, last saw the couple, soon after the marriage, they were ensconced in East India Dock Road, Poplar. And Kelly's trade directory for 1870 lists John Thomas Stride as the keeper of a coffee room in Upper North Street, Poplar. In 1871 his business moved to 178 Poplar High Street and there it remained until taken over by John Dale in 1875.

By the late 1870s Elizabeth's marriage was in difficulties. On 21 March 1877 she was admitted to the Poplar Workhouse. Then, soon after the Princess Alice went down, she told Sven Olsson, clerk of the Swedish Church, that her husband had been drowned in the tragedy. She was, Olsson recalled ten years later, then in 'very poor' circ.u.mstances and receiving occasional a.s.sistance from the Church. In 1878, of course, John Stride was very much alive. The fact that Elizabeth was accepting charity and giving out that he was dead, however, suggests strongly that the couple had separated. There was a reunion. The 1881 census records the Strides at 69 Usher Road, Old Ford Road, Bow. But it was temporary. From 28 December 1881 to 4 January 1882 Elizabeth was treated in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for bronchitis and she was discharged from there into the workhouse. She does not seem to have lived with Stride again. From 1882 she lodged on and off at a common lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. John Stride died in the Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum at Bromley on 24 October 1884.

Elizabeth spent her last three years with a waterside labourer named Michael Kidney. Their address is of some import. For press versions of Kidney's inquest testimony give it as 38 Dorset Street and this has led some writers, most notably Stephen Knight, to suppose a connection between Elizabeth Stride and two other victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly, who lived in Dorset Street. But Kidney was misreported. In a statement to the Central News he explained that he lived with Elizabeth 'at 35 Devons.h.i.+re Street down to five months ago, when they moved to No. 36 in the same street.' That Devons.h.i.+re Street, close to the river where Kidney worked, was the correct address is substantiated by other evidence. In May 1886, when applying for relief from the Swedish Church, Elizabeth gave her address as Devons.h.i.+re Street, Commercial Road, and Catherine Lane, who lodged with Elizabeth at 32 Flower and Dean Street in 1888, also heard her say that she had once lived in Devons.h.i.+re Street.7 On Elizabeth herself Kidney's inquest testimony cannot be said to be very revealing, but he did say that she was in the habit of occasionally going away on her own: 'During the three years I have known her she has been away from me about five months altogether . . . It was drink that made her go . . . She always came back again. I think she liked me better than any other man.'

From 1882 Elizabeth was an occasional lodger at 32 Flower and Dean Street. She seems to have been generally well-liked there and was known affectionately as 'Long Liz'. Elizabeth Tanner, the deputy, remembered her as a quiet, sober woman. And a Central News reporter, after interviewing her lodging house cronies, gave her a similar character: 'According to her a.s.sociates, she was of calm temperament, rarely quarrelling with anyone; in fact, she was so good-natured that she would 'do a good turn for anyone'. Her occupation was that of a charwoman.'8 Notwithstanding such golden opinions Elizabeth was well known at Thames Magistrates' Court. In the last few years of her life she appeared there frequently for being drunk and disorderly.

Unless her funds were being squandered on drink Long Liz may only have been an occasional prost.i.tute. This was certainly the view of Thomas Bates, the watchman at No. 32. 'Lor' bless you,' he told one reporter, '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!' Kidney gave her money and she sometimes earned a little by sewing or charring. Elizabeth Tanner saw her frequently during the last three months. 'She told me,' Mrs Tanner deposed at the inquest, 'that she was at work among the Jews.' If all else failed Elizabeth could and did throw herself upon the charity of the Swedish Church. We know from its records that she applied for and received financial a.s.sistance from them on 20 and 23 May 1886 and on 15 and 20 September 1888.

The movements of Elizabeth Stride during the week before her death are obscure. Catherine Lane said that she turned up at 32 Flower and Dean Street on Thursday, 27 September, saying that she had had words with the man she had been living with. The man, Michael Kidney, told a different story. He said that he had last seen Elizabeth in Commercial Street on the Tuesday. At that time they were on friendly terms and when he got home after work he fully expected her to be there. But although she had been home she had gone out again and returned but once in his absence the next day to collect a few belongings. This story of a sudden and unexplained departure does not ring true. It is very likely that there was a quarrel. There had been others. In April 1887 Elizabeth had charged Kidney with a.s.sault but had then failed to appear at Thames Magistrates' Court to prosecute.9 Kidney was obviously anxious to deny a new argument with his paramour lest he be suspected of her murder but there is little reason to doubt his statement that he did not see her after Tuesday. Mrs Tanner and Catherine Lane testified that Elizabeth arrived at their lodging house on Thursday. They seem, however, to have been mistaken. Thomas Bates, the watchman, said she arrived on the Tuesday and, besides, we have evidence from a most unexpected witness that Elizabeth was at No. 32 at least as early as Wednesday, 26 September.

Dr Thomas Barnardo, in a letter to the Times, said that on that day he had visited No. 32 in order to elicit from the residents their opinions upon a scheme he had devised 'by which children at all events could be saved from the contamination of the common lodging houses and the streets.' Talking to them in the kitchen, he found the women and girls 'thoroughly frightened' by the recent murders. One poor creature, who had apparently been drinking, cried bitterly: 'We're all up to no good, and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next!' They were prophetic words indeed, for Barnardo later viewed the remains of Elizabeth Stride at the mortuary. 'I at once recognized her,' he wrote, 'as one of those who stood around me in the kitchen of the common lodging house on the occasion of my visit last Wednesday week.'10 According to Mrs Tanner, the deputy, Elizabeth spent the nights of Thursday and Friday at her house. On Sat.u.r.day morning she cleaned two rooms and Mrs Tanner paid her sixpence. The last time the deputy saw her alive was at about 6.30 on Sat.u.r.day evening. They drank together at the Queen's Head in Commercial Street and then walked back to the lodging house. Elizabeth went into the kitchen. Mrs Tanner, who went to another part of the house, did not see her again until she was called upon to identify her body.

At least two lodgers saw Elizabeth in the kitchen between six and seven. Charles Preston, a barber, noticed that she was dressed to go out. She asked him to lend her his clothes brush but he had mislaid it. At that time there was no flower in her jacket. The charwoman Catherine Lane saw Elizabeth leave the kitchen. She remembered that Elizabeth had given her a large piece of green velvet to keep for her until she came back. 'I know deceased had sixpence when she left,' said Mrs Lane. 'She showed it to me, stating that the deputy had given it to her.'

Elizabeth did not say where she was going. Nor did she intimate when she might be back. It is possible that she intended to return to the lodging house for the night. Admittedly she had not paid Mrs Tanner for a bed on Sat.u.r.day night but, as Charles Preston pointed out, the lodgers sometimes did not pay their money until just before going to bed.

Inquiries into the background of a murder victim are usually productive of some clue pointing to the ident.i.ty of the killer. This is because in the majority of cases murderer and victim are known to each other. By the fifth Whitechapel investigation, however, it must have become apparent that this type of information was not going to elucidate this particular series of crimes. Chief Inspector Swanson, writing his summary report on the Stride murder, did not deem what the police had learned about the victim's past even worthy of recapitulation. 'It may be shortly stated,' he noted gloomily, 'that the inquiry into her history did not disclose the slightest pretext for a motive on behalf of friends or a.s.sociates or anybody who had known her.'11 The post-mortem examination commenced on 1 October at St George's Mortuary.12 In several respects public criticism during and after the Chapman inquiry seems to have forced the police to sharpen up their procedures. Medical men, for example, had lamented the lack of a second medical opinion at the inquiry. It is perhaps significant then that two surgeons Phillips and Blackwell conducted the autopsy upon the body of Elizabeth Stride. Blackwell consented to perform the dissection while Phillips took notes. For part of the time Dr Reigate and Blackwell's a.s.sistant, Edward Johnston, were also present. In this case, too, the body was stripped by the doctors themselves.

They found a long gash in Stride's throat. Dr Phillips described it for the benefit of the inquest on 3 October: Cut on neck; taking it from left to right there is a clean cut incision 6 inches in length, incision commencing two and a half inches in a straight line below the angle of the jaw. Three-quarters of an inch over undivided muscle then becoming deeper, about an inch dividing sheath and the vessels, ascending a little, and then grazing the muscle outside the cartilages on the left side of the neck, the cut being very clean, but indicating a slight direction downwards through resistance of the denser tissue and cartilages. The carotid artery on the left side, and the other vessels contained in the sheath were all cut through save the posterior portion of the carotid to about a line or [of?] 112th of an inch in extent, which prevented the separation of the upper and lower portion of the artery. The cut through the tissues on the right side of the cartilages are more superficially cut, and the cut tails off to about two inches below the right angle of the jaw. It is evident that the haemorrhage, which probably will be found to be the cause of death, was caused through the partial severance of the left carotid artery.

There were no other cuts, no signs of gagging, no marks about the head and neck to indicate strangulation. An abrasion that Phillips at first thought he could detect on the right side of the neck, below the angle of the jaw, proved to be nothing of the kind. When it was washed the mark disappeared and the skin was found to be uninjured. There were, however, bluish discolourations over both shoulders. They were under the collar-bones and in front of the chest. These were neither bruises nor abrasions but pressure marks, apparently caused by the pressure of two hands upon the shoulders. One point will be of some interest to us later on. The lower lobe of the left ear was torn, as if by the forcible removal or wearing through of an ear-ring, but this was an old wound, now thoroughly healed.

The doctor agreed that the cause of death had been haemorrhage resulting from the partial severance of the left carotid artery and the division of the windpipe.

We have a few comments from Dr Blackwell on the murderer's technique. On the day of the crime he told the press that 'it does not follow that the murderer would be bespattered with blood, for as he is sufficiently cunning in other things he could contrive to avoid coming in contact with the blood by reaching well forward.' Two days later he told the inquest that he thought the killer had probably caught hold of Stride's silk scarf, which was found tight and knotted, and had pulled her backwards before cutting her throat. The throat had not been cut while she was standing up: 'the throat might have been cut as she was falling, or when she was on the ground. The blood would have spurted about if the act had been committed while she was standing up.'

On 5 October Dr Phillips gave the inquiry his reconstruction of what had occurred. It was his contention that the murderer had seized his victim by the shoulders and placed her on the ground. From a position on her right side he had then cut her throat from left to right. This injury might have been inflicted in just two seconds. The murderer would not necessarily have been bloodstained because 'the commencement of the wound and the injury to the vessels would be away from him, and the stream of blood for stream it was would be directed away from him, and towards the gutter in the yard.'

A single incision in the neck provided little basis, of course, for p.r.o.nouncements upon the degree of anatomical knowledge displayed by the killer. But both doctors seem to have believed at least that he knew what he was doing. Interviewed by the press, Blackwell spoke of a man 'who is accustomed to use a heavy knife.' And the injury to the left carotid artery prompted Phillips to remark at the inquest that 'in this case, as in some others, there seems to have been some knowledge where to cut the throat to cause a fatal result.'

The doctors also gave evidence relating to a knife that had been found on a doorstep in Whitechapel Road on Monday morning. It was the type of instrument commonly used in chandler shops and known as a slicing knife. The blade was long perhaps nine or ten inches and rounded at the tip. Blackwell and Phillips agreed that although the knife could conceivably have inflicted the injury to Elizabeth Stride it was most unlikely to have been the murder weapon. 'It appears to me,' Blackwell told the coroner, 'that a murderer, in using a round-pointed instrument, would seriously handicap himself, as he would be only able to use it in one particular way.' Phillips conceded that there was nothing to indicate that the killer had employed a sharp-pointed weapon. But, taking into account the relative positions of the murderer, the victim and the incision, he considered it improbable that such a long-bladed knife as that found in Whitechapel Road had been used. In his opinion a short knife, like a shoemaker's well ground down, could have made the cut.

By contrast with the previous murders the killing of Elizabeth Stride produced a b.u.mper crop of witnesses who claimed to have seen the victim in company with a man shortly before her death. Two of them, PC William Smith 452H and Israel Schwartz, came forward with what appeared to be vital information.

PC Smith's beat, a long, circular one that took him 25-30 minutes to patrol, embraced Berner Street. He was there at 12.30 or 12.35 on the morning of the murder and pa.s.sed a man and a woman standing talking on the pavement, a few yards away from where the body was later discovered but on the opposite side of the street. The woman was wearing a red rose in her coat. PC Smith saw her face and subsequently identified the body as that of the same woman. The man was about five feet seven or eight inches tall and had a 'respectable' appearance. Smith did not take much notice of his face. However, he later described him as about twenty-eight years old, of dark complexion, with a small dark moustache. He wore a hard felt deerstalker hat of dark colour, a white collar and tie, and a black diagonal cutaway coat, and he carried in one hand a parcel wrapped up in newspaper. It was about eighteen inches long and six to eight inches broad. Both the man and the woman appeared to be sober but the constable did not overhear any of their conversation.13 PC Smith was a good witness. As a policeman on duty he was probably more observant than most and although a relatively young man (twenty-six) had notched up more than five years' experience in the force. The testimony of the second witness, Israel Schwartz, is possibly of even greater significance. Alone of the witnesses called forth by this terrible series of crimes, Schwartz may actually have seen a murder taking place. More than that, with its possible implication of two men, his evidence cautions us against embracing too readily the conventional wisdom that the killings were the work of a lone psychopath.

Schwartz volunteered his information at Leman Street Police Station on the evening of Sunday, 30 September. No copy of the original statement has survived. Its substance, however, has been preserved for us in Chief Inspector Swanson's synthesis of the Stride evidence, written on 19 October: 12.45 a.m. 30th. Israel Schwartz of 22 Helen [i.e. Ellen] Street, Backchurch Lane, stated that at that hour on turning into Berner St from Commercial Road & had got as far as the gateway where the murder was committed he saw a man stop & speak to a woman, who was standing in the gateway. The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round & threw her down on the footway & the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man standing lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road 'Lipski' & then Schwartz walked away, but finding that he was followed by the second man he ran as far as the railway arch but the man did not follow so far.

Schwartz cannot say whether the two men were together or known to each other. Upon being taken to the Mortuary Schwartz identified the body as that of the woman he had seen & he thus describes the first man who threw the woman down: age about 30, height 5 ft. 5 in., complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket & trousers, black cap with peak, had nothing in his hands.

Second man, age 35, height 5 ft. 11 in., complexion fresh, hair light brown, moustache brown; dress, dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat wide brim, had a clay pipe in his hand.14 The police obviously took Schwartz seriously. They circulated his description of the first man on the front page of The Police Gazette on 19 October. And Swanson, as he tells us in his summary report on the Stride murder, even preferred Schwartz's testimony to that of PC Smith, if only because his sighting was closer to the time of the murder: 'If Schwartz is to be believed, and the police report of his statement casts no doubt upon it, it follows if they [Smith and Schwartz] are describing different men that the man Schwartz saw & described is the more probable of the two to be the murderer, for a quarter of an hour afterwards the body is found murdered.' Why, then, did the police not produce Schwartz as a witness at the inquest? Unfortunately we have no information that can answer that question. A possible explanation is that, as in the case of the writing in Goulston Street, they deliberately suppressed his evidence because it seemed to implicate the Jews, but there are others. Perhaps they considered his testimony so important that they wished to keep the details secret. Perhaps Schwartz, for reasons best known to himself, did not want to appear. Did he, like Pearly Poll, absent himself from his lodgings? Or, quite simply, did he fall ill? We can speculate, but we do not know.

If the police hoped to enshroud Schwartz in secrecy their intentions were almost immediately thwarted by one of the Star's newshounds. On 1 October, just one day after the murder, this paper put out its own version of the story: Information which may be important was given to the Leman Street police late yesterday afternoon by an Hungarian concerning this murder. This foreigner was well dressed, and had the appearance of being in the theatrical line. He could not speak a word of English, but came to the police station accompanied by a friend, who acted as an interpreter. He gave his name and address, but the police have not disclosed them.

A Star man, however, got wind of his call, and ran him to earth in Backchurch Lane. The reporter's Hungarian was quite as imperfect as the foreigner's English, but an interpreter was at hand, and the man's story was retold just as he had given it to the police. It is, in fact, to the effect that he saw the whole thing.

It seems that he had gone out for the day, and his wife had expected to move, during his absence, from their lodgings in Berner Street to others in Backchurch Lane. When he came homewards about a quarter before one he first walked down Berner Street to see if his wife had moved. As he turned the corner from Commercial Road he noticed some distance in front of him a man walking as if partially intoxicated. He walked on behind him, and presently he noticed a woman standing in the entrance to the alley way where the body was afterwards found. The half-tipsy man halted and spoke to her. The Hungarian saw him put his hand on her shoulder and push her back into the pa.s.sage, but, feeling rather timid of getting mixed up in quarrels, he crossed to the other side of the street. B