Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  Why Lizzie Williams had not washed the blood from her hands using the clean water in the pan was another unanswered question, and would she have gone out onto the streets in daylight after the murder with her hands covered in blood? It did not seem likely to us, but what other explanation could there be?

  The manhunt in the days that followed the discovery of Annie Chapman’s body was the biggest ever seen in London. The East End, and particularly Whitechapel, was saturated with dozens of detectives and constables drafted in from every part of the metropolis and beyond. All two-hundred common lodging houses in the immediate vicinity were searched, and their occupants asked if they remembered a man entering early in the morning with bloodstains on his face, hands or clothing. Lunatic asylums all over London were visited, their inmates examined; none drew suspicion. At least seven men suspected of involvement in the murder were arrested; one, a pensioner named Edward Stanley, was known to have been in the company of the victim. Their descriptions supposedly matched that of the murderer – even though there had been no eyewitnesses to the attack – but all seven were ultimately released. Still the excitement and publicity which their arrests generated in the newspapers convinced a sceptical public that even if the police hadn’t actually caught the murderer, they were leaving no stone unturned in their efforts to do so.

  Scotland Yard and the London Metropolitan Police were baffled. Another brutal killing had occurred, this time in broad daylight in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable for the murderer. There was only one way out of the small yard in Hanbury Street, and that was back along the long corridor that ran the depth of the house. Even though the alarm had been raised within minutes after the crime, the murderer had inexplicably escaped, slipped through the patrolling police undetected, and vanished yet again.

  We simply could not understand what had compelled Lizzie Williams, an upper-middle-class, middle-aged woman to commit an apparently motiveless crime and act in such a reckless manner: to murder Annie Chapman in a backyard where she could so easily have been discovered, rip open her abdomen and take out her uterus, then leave the scene with her ghastly package and go back onto the streets supposedly covered in blood. It was very strange, and it made us all the more determined to find out how she had done it and, just as importantly, why.

  CHAPTER 8

  Even if we could understand Lizzie Williams’s motive for murdering Mary Kelly – jealousy – if still not yet the reason for the extent of the terrible injuries she had inflicted, we were lost for an explanation as to why she might have killed and butchered Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. But her murderous campaign was far from over, and while the motives behind the murders, and reasons for the injuries she had inflicted, were, thus far, impossible for us to fathom, we felt we were coming closer to finding the answers for which we were searching.

  On Sunday, 30 September, two murders were committed during the early hours of the morning, one soon after the other. Two days later Scotland Yard received a postcard dated 1 October, purportedly sent by the murderer and in writing similar to that displayed in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. It referred to the killings as the ‘double event’, by which name the murders of that night came to be known.

  I was not codding

  dear old Boss when

  I gave you the tip,

  you’ll hear about

  Saucy Jackys work

  tomorrow double

  event this time

  number one squealed

  a bit couldn’t

  finish straight

  off. had not the time

  to get ears for

  police. thanks for

  keeping last letter

  back till I got

  to work again.

  Jack the Ripper

  The body of the first victim, Elizabeth Stride, was discovered at 1.00 a.m. inside the open gates to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, which was south of the Whitechapel Road. The body of the second victim, Catherine Eddowes, was found at 1.44 a.m. three-quarters of a mile away in Mitre Square, off Fenchurch Street, by a lone constable patrolling his beat.

  There has been much speculation over the years as to how two murders could have been committed by the same hand, so far apart, in such a narrow time frame.

  Stephen Knight suggested that the only possible way was by his imaginative conspiracy theory. It enabled Sickert, Netley and Gull to travel quickly by horse-drawn coach from the scene of the first murder to the scene of the second, collecting and dispatching their unfortunate victim along the way.

  But, in our opinion, the murders were accomplished by Lizzie Williams acting on her own. How they were achieved we would discover later, but the hour before the death of Catherine Eddowes would provide the key to at least part of the mystery – and it had nothing to do with Knight’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  It was at 8.30 p.m. on Saturday, 29 September, the night before the murders, that a middle-aged woman was found drunk in Aldgate High Street. She was wearing a black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, a red silk handkerchief tied about her neck, a black jacket trimmed with imitation fur, a brown linsey bodice with a black velvet collar, and a white apron over a dark-green chintz skirt, imprinted with a daisy and lily flower pattern.

  She was causing a nuisance by marching up and down the pavement imitating a fire engine. By the time P.C. Louis Robinson forced his way through the large crowd that had gathered to watch the woman’s impromptu performance, she had collapsed to the ground where she lay in a dishevelled heap and was quite unable to move. With the help of another constable, P.C. George Simmonds, P.C. Robinson managed to lift her to her feet, arrested her and together the officers took her into custody at Bishopsgate Police Station. When Sergeant James Byfield asked the woman her name, she was too drunk to answer him, and she was put into a cell until the effects of the drink wore off.

  Several times during the course of the evening she was visited in her cell by P.C. George Hutt, who had come on duty at 9.45 p.m., and by 11.45 she had sobered considerably and could be heard singing to herself. At 12.30 a.m. she asked P.C. Hutt when she would be allowed to leave, and he replied, “Shortly”.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Hutt judged the woman fit enough to be released. He unlocked her cell and escorted her back to the main office. Sergeant Byfield asked her again for her name, this time so that he could enter her details on the release record. She gave her surname as ‘Kelly’. It was the surname of John Kelly, the man she had been living with for the past seven years. Her first names, she said, were ‘Mary Ann’. She gave her address as 6 Fashion Street in Spitalfields, which Byfield also noted on his form. At 1.00 a.m., and perhaps at the very moment when she was being discharged from custody, the body of the first of that night’s victims was discovered.

  Within the hour, the night had claimed its second victim – the woman in the black straw bonnet trimmed with black and green velvet, the woman whom Sergeant Byfield had earlier released from custody.

  The first victim, Elizabeth Stride, was forty-five years old. Her body was discovered by Louis Diemschutz, a steward, and a salesman of cheap jewellery at a market near Crystal Palace in south London. At 1.00 a.m. he returned with his pony and cart to his home in The International Working Men’s Educational Club in Berner Street, where a meeting of Polish and Russian Jews had taken place some hours before. The back entrance to the club could be reached from Dutfield’s Yard. The pony shied away to the left as he turned into the yard, and when he stopped to investigate the reason why, he was shocked to find, by the light of his match, the body of a woman lying on the ground just inside the open gates.

  Leaving his pony and cart standing in the gateway, Diemschutz fled through the yard and into the club to seek help. There, he blurted out his discovery, and within moments he was followed back out to the yard by several club members who had lingered on to talk after their meeting ended. One of them, Isaac Kozebrodski, a Polish tailor, brought along a lit candle. By its dim and flickering
light, they could make out a two-inch wide gash which ran around the woman’s throat. A widening pool of blood, which matched in colour the single red rose the deceased had been wearing in her buttonhole, flowed from the open wound in a steady stream which reached to the back door of the club, almost ten feet away.

  P.C. Henry Lamb, the constable Diemschutz and Kozebrodski summoned, thought there might be a chance that the victim was still alive. He found that her face was warm, but there was no pulse and the spilled blood was starting to congeal. P.C. Lamb’s report stated that there were no signs of a struggle and the victim’s clothing had not been interfered with. He said, “She looked as if she had been quietly laid down.”

  Chief Inspector West from Leman Street Police Station, located to the south of Whitechapel Road, arrived at the crime scene and ordered a search of Dutfield’s Yard for blood, clues and the murder weapon – but nothing came to light. Twenty-eight people who had gathered to watch the police investigation were detained by P.C. Lamb when he closed the gates to Dutfield’s Yard, effectively locking them in; they were questioned, searched and inspected for evidence of bloodstains, bruising and scratches, but, again, nothing suspicious was found and they were all released.

  Dr Frederick William Blackwell, physician and police surgeon, arrived at the crime scene at 1.16 a.m. and examined the corpse by the weak light provided by a constable’s lamp. The highlights of his report noted that the woman was

  …lying on her left side obliquely across the passage, her face looking towards the right wall. Her legs were drawn up, her feet close against the wall of the right side of the passage. Her head was resting in a carriage-wheel rut, the neck lying over the rut. Her feet were three yards from the gateway. The left hand, lying on the ground, was partially closed, and contained a small packet of cachous [boiled sweets used to freshen the breath] wrapped in tissue paper. The deceased had round her neck a check silk scarf, the bow of which was turned to the left and pulled very tight. In the neck there was a long incision which exactly corresponded with the lower border of the scarf. The border was slightly frayed, as if by a sharp knife. The incision in the neck commenced on the left side, 2½ inches below the angle of the jaw, and almost in a direct line with it, nearly severing the vessels on that side, cutting the windpipe completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side 1½ inches below the angle of the right jaw, but without severing the vessels on that side. The blood was running down the gutter into the drain in the opposite direction from her feet. There was about 1lb. of clotted blood close by the body, and a stream all the way from there to the back door of the club.

  It was Dr Blackwell’s opinion that the throat of the deceased had not been cut while she was on her feet, but when she was falling, or even when she was lying on the ground. He thought the fatal injury could have been inflicted in as little as two seconds.

  As Dr Blackwell’s examination was taking place, Dr George Bagster Phillips arrived and later conducted his own examination of Elizabeth Stride’s body. It agreed in all major respects with the report Dr Blackwell presented to the inquest, which opened on 3 October: that death had been caused by haemorrhage resulting from the partial severance of the left carotid artery and the windpipe.

  Dr Phillips pronounced the woman dead and ordered that her corpse be taken to St George’s Mortuary in Cable Street. The ambulance was summoned, and as soon as the body was removed, P.C. Albert Collins dutifully washed away the blood from the pavement, ensuring that no traces were left.

  The police investigation, under Inspector Abberline, which commenced later that day, frustratingly drew a blank. A house-to-house search in Berner Street produced no evidence, clues or witnesses; yet again, Scotland Yard’s efforts to apprehend their most elusive murderer, were proving to be fruitless.

  It was at this point that a witness was traced. He was Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian immigrant, who had seen the deceased shortly before her death. At 12.45 a.m. he was walking down Berner Street. As he approached the gates to Dutfield’s Yard, he saw a man a little way ahead of him stop to speak to a woman wearing a red rose in her jacket. A moment later, the man took hold of her and tried to pull her into the street, but then he turned her around and threw her to the ground. Another man, leaning against a lamppost on the opposite side of the street, was watching the scuffle while lighting his pipe. Schwartz thought he might have been acting as a look-out for the attacker, but equally, he might not have been involved at all. At that point Schwartz panicked, turned and fled the way he had come. After covering a short distance, he looked back, and saw that the man with the pipe was following him, so he continued running away. He did not know if the man was trying to catch him, or if he was also running away from the woman’s attacker, and eventually Schwartz lost sight of him.

  Israel Schwartz was the last person known to have seen Elizabeth Stride alive when she was attacked, though he made no mention of her assailant wielding a knife; he did, however, state that he saw a knife in the hand of the man with the pipe. He described the woman’s attacker as aged about thirty, 5ft 5in in height, with a fair complexion, dark hair and a short moustache, wide shoulders, dark jacket, trousers and a black peaked cap. Under Inspector Abberline’s intensive questioning, Schwartz could not say if the man attacking the deceased and the man running after him were acting in concert or not.

  According to Dr Blackwell, Elizabeth Stride had died at some time after 12.46 a.m., perhaps even after 12.56. The victim’s throat had been cut. There had been no robbery as far as anyone could tell; the deceased’s clothing had not been interfered with, and there was no evidence of a struggle or sexual assault. So the motive for her murder, as for those of Mary Ann Nichols and Dark Annie Chapman before her, was inexplicable.

  But there was something strange: the beat of P.C. William Smith, which took about 30 minutes for him to complete, brought him along Berner Street. At a time between 12.30 and 12.35, he passed a man and a woman wearing a single red rose on maidenhair fern in her buttonhole, both of whom he observed carefully, in accordance with his orders (in case the woman might be protecting the man). He later identified the female as the deceased. The man and woman were talking together on the other side of the street, opposite the gates to Dutfield’s Yard.

  At about 12.45, some 10 or perhaps 15 minutes later, James Brown, a dock labourer, saw a man and a woman talking together at the corner of Berner Street and Fairclough Street. When questioned by the coroner, Wynne Baxter, at Stride’s inquest on 5 October, Brown said he was “almost certain” that the woman he had seen was the same woman he had identified in the mortuary, Elizabeth Stride, but when pressed, he said he had not seen a red rose in her jacket. Since he could not possibly have missed seeing the flower if the woman he saw was wearing one, whomever he had seen it was not Elizabeth Stride. Since Stride was middle-aged, it seems reasonable to assume that the woman Brown saw was of a similar age. The woman, who was just yards away from where the murder was committed just a few minutes later, has never been identified. Was she perhaps the murderer?

  Since the time of Brown’s sighting, at 12.45 according to his statement, was the very same time that Israel Schwartz said it was when he was walking down Berner Street, one of them must have been mistaken. On a balance of probabilities, it was more likely that it was James Brown who had made the error. He left his home not long after 12.10 a.m., and had not checked the time since.

  Within three weeks of the murder, about eighty suspects who had been detained by the police were cleared of any involvement in the crime, while a further three hundred more were investigated, but without result. No one whom the detectives questioned could throw any light on the crime, or suggest a credible suspect. The murderer had vanished.

  The Star on 1 October stated: “He must be inoffensive, probably respectable in manner and appearance, or else after the murderous warnings of last week, woman after woman could not have been decoyed by him. Two theories are suggested to us – that he may wear women’s clothes, or may be a policeman.” />
  The attacks seemed to be getting more brutal with the discovery of each new body. Mary Ann Nichols, who was throttled and had had her throat cut, sustained severe abdominal injuries; Annie Chapman was partially throttled, her throat cut, her abdomen torn open and her uterus ripped out. But in the case of Elizabeth Stride only her throat had been cut; so why was that all?

  One popular opinion is that Diemschutz had disturbed the murderer before further injury could be inflicted. It was clear that the murder had only just happened, as evidenced by the blood that was still flowing from the open wound to the victim’s neck. Another, equally likely possibility, is that the murderer intended only to kill Elizabeth Stride, but not to mutilate her body.

  The police line of thought was that the murderer may have stayed hidden in the yard until the coast was clear, and escaped when the driver ran into the club to seek help – which was a reasonable assumption to make. Alternatively, by the time Diemschutz arrived at the yard with his pony and cart, the killer had only just left; but Diemschutz had neither seen nor heard anyone leaving the scene of the crime. Yet that was not unusual. As the police would have been the first to admit, no one had been seen or heard fleeing from the scenes of the Nichols and Chapman murders either. In all three cases, after committing the crimes, the murderer had simply disappeared, as though into thin air, avoiding police patrols and passing through tight cordons, leaving no trace or clue behind.