Two young Irish brothers called Habron, farm labourers, were accused of the crime at Manchester Assizes and one of them, William Habron, aged nineteen, was sentenced to death on 28 November 1876 – the day before the murder of Arthur Dyson. William’s brother, John was found not guilty, and the jury added a recommendation for mercy to William Habron ‘on the grounds of his youth’. For three weeks he was confined in a condemned cell. But on 19 December the Home Secretary granted a reprieve and William’s sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life. He was sent to Portland Prison, where he remained for over two years.
Peace had watched the Habron trial from the public gallery and kept silent. He said later: ‘What man would have done otherwise in my position?’ But now that he was to be executed himself, he told the Reverend Littlewood that he thought it right ‘in the sight of God and man to clear the young man’. He ended his confession by saying: ‘What I have said is nothing but the truth and this is my dying words. I have done my duty and leave the rest to you.’
Charles Peace was hanged by William Marwood at Armley Jail in Leeds at 8 am on 25 February 1879.
His last days were spent in interminable letter-writing and prayer and the Christian exhortation of others. But his reprobate real self prevailed. Of his last breakfast he said: ‘This is bloody rotten bacon!’ And when a warder began banging on the door as Peace lingered overlong in the lavatory on the morning of his execution, he shouted: ‘You’re in a hell of a hurry! Are you going to be hanged or am I?’ On the scaffold he refused to wear the white hood – ‘Don’t! I want to look’ – and insisted on making a speech of forgiveness, repentance and trust in the Lord. Four journalists who were present wrote down his last words, spoken as his resolution left him: ‘I should like a drink. Have you a drink to give me?’ As he spoke, Marwood, the executioner, released the trap door. Peace fell; the vertebrae at the base of his head fractured and dislocated, and his spinal cord was severed.
He wrote his own epitaph for the memorial card which he himself had printed in jail: ‘In memory of Charles Peace who was executed in Armley Prison, Tuesday, February 25th 1879. For that I done but never intended.’
On 19 March, William Habron was moved from Portland to Millbank Prison in London and then set free with a full pardon. He was told that his father had died six months earlier ‘of a broken heart’. He was given £1,000 in compensation ‘to ease his pain and anguish’.
In due course, DI Henry Phillips donated some items that had been used by Peace in his burglaries to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. A hundred years later, Phillips’s very informative, hand-written memoir was in turn donated to the museum by lorry driver Peter Coyle, on behalf of Phillips’s great-niece, Mrs Bell.
JACK THE RIPPER
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS, 1888
Fiction far outweighs fact in the volume of words used to describe the crimes, motives and character of Jack the Ripper. The facts are few, almost as few as the five murders he is believed to have committed. The fictions stem from the fact – despite mountains of theory and speculation – that no one knows for certain who he was. No single writer, in the last seventy years, has been able to establish the identity of the ‘Whitechapel Murderer’, as he was originally called. Significantly, the first full-length work on the subject, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, was not published until more than a generation, forty-one years, after the murders. It was written by an Australian journalist, Leonard Matters. Since then, and despite confident claims by various writers that they have found The Answer, or The Final Solution, they have not. They fail to convince, to provide conclusive proof, their causes and case histories being spoiled by misconception, misreporting, error, and the perpetuation of earlier journalistic imaginings, assumptions and fancy unsupported by fact. The identity of the Whitechapel murderer is and will remain an enigma. He is not even definitely named in the so-called secret files of Scotland Yard.
Five murders are known to have been committed by the Ripper, but two others were once thought to have been his work as well. The first was of Emma Smith, an ageing prostitute, who lived at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She was attacked in Osborn Street in the early hours of 3 April 1888. Her face and ear were cut, and some instrument, not a knife, had been thrust violently up her vagina. She said she had been assaulted by four men, but could or would not identify them. She died the next day in the London Hospital of peritonitis. Four months later, at 3 am on 7 August, the body of Martha Tabram, aged thirty-five, was found on a staircase landing in George Yard Buildings in Commercial Street. Her throat and stomach had been stabbed or pierced thirty-nine times with something sharp like a bayonet. Earlier that night, she and another prostitute had been seen in the company of two soldiers, who were arrested and paraded with others in front of the second prostitute. But she failed or refused to identify either her own or the other woman’s partner.
It should be remembered that in 1888 the East End of London, a few square miles, was inhabited by about 900,000 people, virtual outcasts living in conditions of extreme depravity, poverty and filth. Fifty-five per cent of East End children died before they were five. Each squalid room in each rotting lodging house was occupied by between five and seven persons – men, women and children. In Whitechapel, about 8,500 people crammed into 233 lodging houses every night, paying as much as 4d for a bed. The parish of Whitechapel was infested with about 80,000 artisans, labourers and derelicts, of whom the better-off – the poor, as opposed to the very poor – earned about £1 a week. The more menial tasks yielded a shilling a day, women being paid less than men. People lived from day to day, earning or stealing what they could to eat and stay alive. Drunkenness and prostitution were rampant. The Metropolitan Police estimated that in October 1888 about 1,200 of the lowest sort of prostitute plied their trade in the dingy Whitechapel streets. Consequently, women were assaulted and injured every night. Some were killed.
Twenty-four days after the death of Martha Tabram there occurred the first of the accepted Ripper killings. At about 3.30 am on Friday, 31 August, Mary Ann Nichols, a forty-two-year-old prostitute, was murdered. She was found in Buck’s Row, lying on her back, her skirt pushed up above her knees; her eyes were open. Her throat had been slashed twice, from left to right, the second eight-inch-long cut almost severing the head. Blood from the cut had been absorbed by her stained and shabby clothes: a brown ulster, a brown linsey frock, two petticoats, stays and black wool stockings. She also wore a black straw bonnet. Her face was bruised. She was 5 ft 2 in tall and had lost five of her front teeth. It was not until her body was removed to the mortuary by the old Montague Street workhouse that other injuries were revealed. Her stomach had been hacked open and slashed several times. Mary Ann Nichols, also known as Polly, had lodged at 18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields, as well as at 56 Flower and Dean Street. She was last seen alive at 2.30 am on the corner of Osborn Street, staggering drunkenly down Whitechapel Road towards Buck’s Row (now Durward Street).
Because she, Tabram and Smith were all murdered within 300 yards of each other and were prostitutes, a connection was made between them that now seems insubstantial. A man known to have ill-treated prostitutes and to have been seen with Nichols became a prime suspect. Known as Leather Apron, he was a Jewish bootmaker, John Pizer – also called Jack.
The next murder was eight days later. The body of Annie Chapman, aged forty-five, also known as Dark Annie, Annie Siffey or Sievey (she had lived with a man who made sieves), was found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street at 6 am on Saturday, 8 September. She lay on her back beside steps leading from a passage into the yard. Her knees were wide apart and her dirty black skirt pushed up over them. Her face was swollen and her chin and jaw were bruised; her tongue protruded from her mouth. Two deep and savage cuts had practically separated her head from her body. Her stomach had been torn open and pulled apart; sections of skin from the stomach lay on her shoulder – on the right was another piece of skin and a mess of small intestines. It was later established that s
he had been disembowelled – her uterus, part of the vagina and the bladder had been carved out and taken away.
Slight bloodstains were discovered on the palings of a fence beside the body and specks of blood spattered the rear wall of the house above the prostrate corpse. Her rings were missing – they had been torn from her fingers. At her feet lay some pennies and two new farthings; a comb also lay by the body. Presumably this and the coins had been in the pocket under her skirt that had been ripped open. Other adjacent items, which probably had nothing to do with the murder, included part of an envelope stamped 28 August 1888 and bearing the crest of the Sussex Regiment on the back, as well as a piece of paper containing two pills – and a leather apron soaked with water and about two feet from a communal tap.
Annie Chapman was a small (5 ft), stout woman with dark hair, blue eyes, a thick nose and two teeth missing from her lower jaw. She had lodged at 35 Dorset Street, from where she had been evicted at 2 am because she lacked the few pennies for a bed. Drunk and ill, she had wandered off towards Brushfield Street. She was last seen alive at 5.30 am (a clock was striking the half-hour) by a park-keeper’s wife who was on her way to market. She saw Chapman standing outside 29 Hanbury Street, haggling with a foreign-looking man, aged about forty, who was shabbily but respectably dressed and wearing a deerstalker, probably brown. Number 29 was a lodging house, occupied by seventeen people, none of whom heard anything untoward. But the street was not quiet: carts and workers were already moving up and down on their way to work.
Several suspects were taken to Commercial Street police station for questioning on Sunday, 9 September, and in the early hours of Monday the 10th, John Pizer, Leather Apron, was found at 22 Mulberry Street and arrested. Witnesses said that two months earlier he had been ejected from 35 Dorset Street and that he wore a deerstalker hat. The police found five long-bladed knives in his lodgings, of a sort thought to have been used by the murderer. Pizer said that he used them in his boot-making trade. He protested his innocence, and his story that he had been in hiding in the Mulberry Street house for four days, since Thursday, was backed up by his stepmother and brother who lived there. He also had an alibi for the night Mary Ann Nichols was murdered – he was in a lodging house in Holloway Road.
At the inquest on Annie Chapman, the leather apron found in the back yard not far from her body was identified as the property of John Richardson, whose widowed mother lived in 29 Hanbury Street. She had washed the apron on Thursday, leaving it by the fence, where it was found on Saturday by the police. Richardson had actually visited the house about 4.45 am on his way to work, to check that his mother’s padlocked cellar, which had recently been robbed, was intact. In the dawn light, he saw that it was and that the yard was empty.
Another yard was the scene of the murder of Elizabeth Stride, a forty-four-year-old Swedish prostitute, also known as Long Liz. She was killed about 1 am on Sunday, 30 September, a wet and windy night. Her body was discovered by a hawker, Louis Diemschutz, who worked as a steward in a Jewish Socialist Club that backed onto the yard in Berner Street. As he drove into the yard in a pony and trap, the pony shied to the left, doing so twice and drawing the hawker’s attention to a heap of clothes on the ground. He poked at it with his whip and lit a match, which was snuffed out by the wind. But he had seen enough. He fetched help from the club, where the rowdy members were singing and dancing.
Long Liz lay on her muddy left side, her legs drawn up, right arm over her stomach, her left arm extended behind her back, the hand clutching a packet of cashew nuts. Her right hand was bloody, and her mouth was slightly open. The bow of a check silk scarf around her throat had pulled tight and had turned to the left of her neck. The scarf’s lower edge was frayed, as if by a very sharp knife, which had also slit her throat from left to right, severing the windpipe. Bruises on her shoulders and chest indicated that she had been seized and forced down onto the ground when her throat had been cut. Her body was still warm. Evidently the murderer had been frightened off by the returning pony and trap. There were no other injuries or mutilations. It was noted at the mortuary that the dead woman had no teeth in her left lower jaw.
Like Nichols and Chapman, Stride was married but separated from her husband. Like them, she was something of an alcoholic. She had lived in Fashion Street with a labourer called Michael Kidney, who had then moved to 35 Dorset Street. But on the Tuesday before her death she had walked out, lodging instead at 32 Flower and Dean Street. On the Saturday night she had been seen by a labourer, William Marshall, at about 11.45 pm in Berner Street, talking to a mild-voiced, middle-aged, stout and decently dressed man, wearing a cutaway coat. He had looked like a clerk to Marshall: he wore no gloves, carried no stick or anything else in his hands, and on his head was ‘a round cap with a small peak to it’ like a sailor’s hat. He kissed Long Liz and he said: ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ Then they walked down the street.
She was seen again in Berner Street at about 12.30 am by a policeman, PC Smith. He described Stride’s companion as they stood and talked together as ‘of respectable appearance … He had a newspaper parcel in his hand.’ The man was about 5 ft 7 in tall, wore an overcoat and dark trousers and had a dark, hard felt deerstalker on his head. Smith gave the man’s age as ‘about twenty-eight’. The Police Gazette later expanded this description to ‘complexion dark, small dark moustache; dress, black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, collar and tie’.
A third witness, a box-maker, James Brown, crossed Berner Street at about 12.45 am and noticed a couple standing by a wall. He heard the woman say: ‘Not tonight. Some other night’ A glance revealed to him that the man was wearing a long dark coat. The Gazette elaborated Brown’s description as follows: ‘Age about thirty, height 5 ft 5 ins; complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shoulders; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak.’
Are Smith and Brown describing the same man? And was he the man who killed Elizabeth Stride at about 1 am and on being disturbed by the pony and trap fled westwards towards Aldgate?
Just after 1.30 am and half a mile to the west in Duke Street, three Jews, one of whom was a Mr Lawende, saw a man talking to a woman in Church Passage, which led into Mitre Square. She was wearing a black jacket and bonnet and was about three or four inches shorter than the man. He was later described in the Police Gazette as: ‘Aged thirty, height 5 ft 7 ins, or 8 ins; complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build; dress: pepper and salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of some material, reddish neckerchief tied in knots; appearance of a sailor.’ The woman was Catherine Eddowes, aged forty-three. Less than ten minutes later she was dead.
She had been married to a man called Conway, but for seven years she had lived at 6 Fashion Street with another man, John Kelly, and accordingly called herself Kate Kelly. That Saturday night she had been arrested in Aldgate about 8.30 pm: she was drunk and disorderly. Taken to Bishopsgate police station, she had been left to sober up in a cell and was discharged at 1 am – at the same time as Elizabeth Stride’s throat was cut in the yard off Berner Street. Eddowes walked off southwards, down Houndsditch towards Aldgate High Street and Mitre Square, as Stride’s murderer hurried westwards towards her.
At 1.45 am, her body was discovered by the bull’s-eye lamp of PC Watkins as he walked on his beat through the square. It lay on its back in a corner. ‘I have been in the force a long while,’ said Watkins, ‘but I never saw such a sight.’ The body had been ripped open, said Watkins, like a pig in the market. The left leg was extended and the right leg bent. The throat had been deeply slit and the face had been slashed and cut. There were also abrasions on both cheeks. Both sets of eyelids had been nicked and part of the nose and the right ear had been sliced off. The trunk had been torn apart from the sternum to the groin by a series of disjointed thrusts, the pointed knife that was employed being angled from right to left. The woman had been disembowelled – entrails had been thrown across her right shoulder. The uterus and the left kidn
ey had been cut away and removed.
Police sketches and photographs of Catherine Eddowes’s body greatly minimise the view that the murderer had some anatomical knowledge, or took ‘at least five minutes’ over his work. He clearly worked in a frenzy – cutting the throats of his victims, ripping their bodies and pulling out organs with neither care nor skill, and all in a couple of minutes at the most. He would have worked with speed, frantic with bloodlust and also fearful of being caught. He may have had a very rough knowledge of anatomy, sufficient for him to knowingly silence each victim by severing her windpipe, and he might have known what a womb looked like (he removed two) and have been able to distinguish such a comparatively small and obscure item among the mass of organs in the gut. But this does not mean that he had had any actual medical experience or had been a butcher, slaughterman, farmer or hunter of any sort.
The idea propounded at the time by some doctors, that the throats of the victims had been cut (the cause of death) as they lay on the ground, is in reality not very likely – unless the women were already unconscious, or dead. For despite their dirty clothes and drunken state, they are unlikely to have stretched out on the much dirtier, muddy ground to have sex. This service would most likely have been provided standing up against a wall, with their backs to it – or facing it. And it is unlikely that the women were suffocated or strangled before their throats were cut. If they had been strangled, they would surely have fought for their lives. But in no case was there any sign of a struggle, nor were any bruises found on the women’s necks where pressure in strangulation would have been applied. Despite the cut throats, some such marks, if they had been there, must have remained. There were, however, bruises and abrasions on the faces of the women, about the chin and jaw. Stride’s shoulders were also bruised.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 4