Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

by kindels

  The scene of the second murder in Mitre Square could be reached on foot within twelve minutes or so from Berner Street if one walked at a quick pace. The desolate, run-down square was surrounded by abandoned slums, warehouses and derelict tenements, and was accessible only by one of three long, ill-lit passageways. And it was in the darkest corner of this dimly lit square that the butchered body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered by a lone constable patrolling his beat.

  At 1.44 a.m. P.C. Edward Watkins, regarded by his superiors as a reliable and trustworthy officer, turned into the narrow passageway that led to Mitre Square. He was proceeding at the slow, regulation pace of 2½ miles an hour, and passed between the premises of Williams and Co. on his left and Taylor’s shop on his right.

  There were three gas-lamps lighting the square, but the one in Church Passage at the far end was too far away to provide any effective light. Another lamp, near the corner on the opposite side of the square, was defective, and emitted just a feeble orange glow. The only other lamp was at the entrance to the passageway, but the side wall of Taylor’s shop was blocking its light, so the south corner of the square was in almost, though not total, darkness. When P.C. Watkins entered the square and directed the dull yellow beam of his lamp into this corner, a popular spot for prostitutes to conduct their business, he made his gruesome discovery.

  It was the body of a woman lying on her back in a widening pool of blood, her skirts pushed up above her waist, her face a patchwork of lacerated flesh, skin and blood. Her throat had been severed, her abdomen ripped open, and her bowels were in full view. The intestines were drawn out of the body in a manner reminiscent of Annie Chapman’s injuries, and these lay on her chest and over the right shoulder, while a second, detached piece, about two feet long, lay between the body and left arm.

  P.C. Watkins described his find to The Star newspaper later that day: “She’d been ripped up like a pig in the market,” while he told The Daily News, “…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…. A more dreadful sight I never saw.”

  Inspector Edward Collard was on duty in Bishopsgate Police Station when news of the second murder broke. He immediately sent for Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, the City of London Police Surgeon, who lived in Finsbury Circus, instructing him to go directly to Mitre Square.

  When Dr Brown arrived at 2.18 a.m., he found Dr George William Sequeira, a surgeon who lived in Aldgate, already there, though Dr Sequeira had not examined the body. Dr Brown carried out a thorough examination of Catherine Eddowes’s body, after which he gave his opinion that the victim had died almost instantly when her throat was severed. The cut, which he said had been made from left to right, was so savage and delivered with such force that the victim’s head was almost separated from her shoulders.

  Catherine Eddowes’s face was cut to ribbons but, because of the great amount of blood, it was difficult to discern the extent of her injuries. The eyelids, nose, mouth, cheeks and one ear were all slashed, she had lost the tip of her nose in the attack, and, strangely, a triangular flap of skin, about 1½ inches in height, was cut into each of her cheeks by four oblique incisions, in the shape of what appeared to be the inverted letter V.

  The apron, which was still tied around the victim’s waist, was cut by what appeared to have been the single stroke of a knife. The severed part, about half of the apron, was nowhere to be found. His examination complete, the doctor called for the ambulance and gave instructions for the body to be taken to the City Mortuary.

  Dr Brown gave his view that the deceased had not tried to fight with her attacker, and when her throat was cut, she was already lying down on the wet ground. It had started to rain at 9.05 the previous evening, but ceased soon after midnight. Why Catherine Eddowes had not screamed or cried out, the doctor was quite unable to explain. Either the victim was strangled before her throat was cut, which author Philip Sugden (The Complete History of Jack the Ripper) believed to be the case, or, as seems more likely, the attack was unexpected when it came. Since the victim was a prostitute, one might think she was well used to defending herself against unruly and aggressive clients, and so the reason why she had not fought back was puzzling.

  Detective Constable Daniel Halse, one of the first detectives on the scene, gave orders to search the neighbourhood and to stop and examine every man found on the streets. Proceeding to take an active part in the search, he himself stopped two men in Wentworth Street, but upon answering his questions satisfactorily and displaying no traces of blood, they were quickly released.

  Inspector Collard passed out his orders: all neighbouring streets, alleys and passageways were to be combed inch by inch; houses, lodging houses and tenements were to be entered and searched, and their occupants questioned. Every male, whether in the company of a woman or not, was to be stopped, questioned and searched for traces of blood. Yet, despite all this intense activity, nothing suspicious was found.

  Several police officers were instructed to make enquiries amongst the residents, and search the small cobbled square for clues. Sergeant Jones found three small black buttons, of a type used for women’s boots, in clotted blood near the left side of the victim’s neck. It was always assumed that they belonged to the victim, even though there was no evidence that they did. Furthermore, at the time of her death, the deceased was wearing a pair of men’s laced boots. Jones also found a small metal button in the clotted blood, and a metal thimble – the latter perhaps more closely associated with a woman than a man – near to the right hand. These items were also presumed to have belonged to the victim, although once again, there was nothing substantive to support this view. A small mustard tin found by the left side of the body contained two pawn tickets in the name of Kelly. Further enquiries established that the tin, at least, belonged to the victim, though this discovery led the investigation no further. Inspector Collard searched the pockets of the deceased, but was unable to find either money or any item of value.

  Later on the day of the murder, Dr Brown performed the autopsy at the City Mortuary, while Mr Frederick William Foster, architect and surveyor, made a sketch of the wounds the victim had sustained. Brown confirmed that Eddowes had died after her throat was cut. The injuries to her abdomen, he thought, had been inflicted after death. The abdomen was cut open from the privates to the breasts. The left kidney had been extracted from the body, as had the uterus. Since neither organ could be found despite an intensive and wide-ranging search the police assumed that the murderer had taken them away; the reason why, Inspector Abberline said, was “an unfathomable mystery”. The doctor gave his opinion that the cut had been made by someone in a kneeling position on the right-hand side of the body. The weapon used was thought to be a sharp, pointed knife with a blade at least six inches long. Dr Brown also thought that the killer must have possessed some anatomical knowledge and surgical skill.

  Dr Sequeira’s opinion concurred. He said that the murderer did not appear to possess “great anatomical skill”. He gave his further opinion that while the murderer could have been a qualified surgeon, he might equally have been a “hunter, butcher, slaughter-man or a medical student”. Whichever it might have been, some degree of medical knowledge had certainly been displayed.

  It was a strange case. The murderer had never inflicted facial injuries in any of the previous killings, or carved on them what seemed to be any inverted letters either. But therein lay a clue, though my father and I did not realise it at the time. The victim’s uterus and left kidney were removed which, in Dr Brown’s professional opinion, would be “of no practical use”. This seemed at least to rule out author Tony Williams’s explanation for the removal of the uterus – that it was required for the purpose of Dr John Williams’s research into the cause or causes of infertility. But the reasons w
hy the terrible facial injuries had been inflicted, the inverted Vs carved into each of the victim’s cheeks and her left kidney removed, remained a mystery.

  News of the murders spread as far as America. The headline in The New York Times on 1 October read, ‘Dismay in Whitechapel. Two More Murdered Women Found’, while the editorial stated: “The Whitechapel fiend has again set that district and all London in a state of terror…”. The following day, the Boston Daily Globe commented, “One after another the mutilated bodies of the victims of this mysterious demon have been picked up on the most populous thoroughfares, but no one has seen the murderer, and the police know not where to turn to begin the task of discovery.” And in further comment which encapsulated the enormous, morbid, fascination the murders generated worldwide, “Such is the story of murder and mystery that now not only holds the attention of all England, but the entire civilized world.”

  That the murderer of that night’s two victims were one and the same was confirmed by a forensic comparison of the manner in which the women were killed; they were both lying down when they were attacked, both their throats had been cut from left to right, the left carotid artery of each was deeply severed, while those on the right were barely scratched.

  The two murders left the police perplexed and they could not understand how they could have been committed in such a short period of time. It took the murderer less than an hour to get from the scene of the first of that night’s murders and to reach and leave the scene of the second murder. This included the time it would have taken to get from Berner Street, meet the victim somewhere, accompany her into Mitre Square, persuade her to lie down, murder her, mutilate her face, surgically remove two organs from her body – all this in complete silence – and then escape. No-one working or living in the square saw or heard a thing, even though the only residents were those who lived at number 3 Mitre Square: ironically they were the family of P.C. Pearce, a serving city police officer.

  P.C. Watkins last passed through the square on his beat at 1.30 a.m., when he saw nothing suspicious. P.C. James Harvey, who would be dismissed from the force within a year for reasons that are unknown, looked into the square from Church Passage at 1.41 or 1.42 and he too stated that he saw nothing unusual (but might he have seen a woman perhaps, thought nothing of it and failed to mention his sighting?). No more than two or perhaps three minutes after Harvey had left, P.C. Watkins returned to the square at 1.44 a.m. when he found the body. Once again, it was almost impossible that such a thing could have happened, but once again, it had.

  Still, the night was not yet over.

  At 2.55 a.m., P.C. Alfred Long, who had been searching the streets and alleyways to the east of Middlesex Street, made a strange discovery. A rectangular piece of dirty white material was lying on the ground in a doorway. It was the entrance to a tenement building that was occupied exclusively by Jews: the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street.

  When P.C. Long picked up the material, he found it wet with blood. As he cast his eyes about to see where it might have come from, he spotted something peculiar. Immediately above the spot where he had found the soiled material, a message was written in white chalk letters, each about 1about 1½ inches high inches high, on the black-edged bricks surrounding the doorway:

  The Juwes are

  The men That

  Will not

  be Blamed

  for nothing

  Detective Constable Halse, who had searched the area half an hour earlier, was certain that neither the writing nor the soiled material had been in the doorway at that time. Therefore, the police concluded, both the writing and the bloodied cloth had been left there since 2.25 a.m. approximately.

  The view the police took was that the blood-soaked cloth was the missing part of the apron taken from Catherine Eddowes, and the murderer had used it to carry away his grisly trophies, the uterus and the left kidney. He had then chalked up the writing on the door surround, and deposited the severed part of the apron on the ground beneath, to draw attention to the writing.

  That it was the missing part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron was proved beyond doubt when it was taken to the mortuary. When the two parts of the apron were brought together, the remains of the apron taken from the victim and the soiled piece of apron found in the doorway of the apartments, they fitted perfectly.

  Once again, the police were baffled. Dr Sequeira thought that the Mitre Square victim, whose apron it was, had met her death at around 1.40 a.m. The writing on the wall and the part apron were discovered at 2.55 a.m., more than an hour later. Since Goulston Street is just three streets away, and no more than a five-minute walk, what the murderer had been doing in all that time, if indeed it was the murderer who had chalked up the writing and deposited the apron part where it was found, was a bizarre mystery.

  As for the message, P.C. Long had had the good sense to record in his notebook what he had seen, and he swore that he had copied it down exactly. This was just as well, because the view taken by Sir Charles Warren, the Chief Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, was that it appeared to incriminate Jews in the murders, so, in order to avoid bloody reprisals, he had ordered the writing to be erased.

  Stephen Knight’s imaginative assertion was that the words were a message pointing directly to the three assassins in an attempt to incriminate them – Sickert, Netley and Sir William Gull, who were pursuing their murderous campaign.

  It was the word Juwes, Knight claimed, which galvanised Warren, a leading Freemason, into action, because he recognised the word as Masonic, realised that it implicated Freemasons in the murders, and ordered the writing to be removed in order to cover up a fellow Mason’s crime. At 5.30 a.m. a little more than two and a half hours after the message had been discovered, it was obliterated by a police inspector with a damp sponge.

  Knight’s colourful explanation was that ‘Juwes’ was the collective noun for three apprentice Masons of biblical times, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, who had murdered the Grand Master, Hiram Abiff, for refusing to divulge his secrets to them.

  According to Masonic legend, Hiram Abiff was the son of a widow, and the chief architect of King Solomon’s Temple, built on Mount Zion in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant. Hiram Abiff alone bore the responsibility for the building of the great temple, and was one of only three people who knew the secrets of a Master Mason, the other two being King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre. Knowing the secrets of a Master Mason would enable other, lesser masons, to take on work enabling them to earn the much higher wages of a Master Mason.

  The three apprentice masons, ruffians, had cornered the Grand Master in the temple, intent upon extracting his secrets from him, but he neither could, nor would, reveal his secrets to them without the consent of the other two, King Solomon and the King of Tyre. Each of the ruffians had then struck him a single blow, giving him the opportunity each time to reveal what he knew. He refused, telling them that he was prepared to give up his life, but never his integrity. It had been the third and final blow which had laid him lifeless to the ground.

  It was an interesting explanation, and might have provided a valid reason why Sir Charles Warren, who was indeed a high-ranking Freemason, had acted as he did, except that the word Juwes was the pure invention of Stephen Knight, and is quite unknown in Freemasonry.

  After a fifteen-day search ordered by King Solomon, the assassins were caught and subsequently put to death for their crime. The murder of Hiram Abiff, and discovery of his body, is central to Masonic beliefs and the basis of a Masonic ceremony that is still reenacted to this day.

  Before his capture, Jubelo was heard to say: “O that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder, carried into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and there to become a prey to the wild beasts of the field and vultures of the air, ere I had conspired the death of so good a man as our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff!” It is the left shoulder, therefore, which holds significance for Freemasons, and
not the right.

  In Stephen Knight’s efforts to make Annie Chapman’s murder appear to be a Masonic ritual killing, he explained that her vitals were thrown over her right shoulder by ‘mistake’. Even if this were so, it is hard to believe that the very same error would have been repeated a second time. The report of Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, who attended upon Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, stated that “…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 two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design.”

  If you wish to propose a certain hypothesis, all the pieces must fit together. You cannot just pick and choose those that suit your theory while rejecting others that do not. That such a fundamental error might have been committed once was bad enough, but twice was unforgivable. They were two loose ends that most definitely did not tie up, and were glaring deficiencies in Knight’s case.

  That it was Lizzie Williams who took Eddowes’s uterus and left kidney, wrapped in the severed piece of apron, is certain. That she remained in Whitechapel for more than an hour before writing the incomprehensible message on the door surround and depositing the blood-soiled part of the apron on the ground immediately beneath it, is not.

  The meaning of the chalk message and the discovery of the part apron baffled the best brains of Scotland Yard and have continued to bemuse scientists and scholars ever since. My father and I were puzzled too, as we tried, unsuccessfully, to unravel the mystery and establish if the two discoveries somehow incriminated Lizzie Williams. It was not until we remembered that every good murder mystery has its red herring – the false clue that throws one off track – that we realised that the world’s greatest murder mystery, Jack the Ripper, would likely be no exception. This, we thought, was it.