The police were criticized by press and public for their incompetence. At Chapman’s inquest one witness complained that when he had told a street constable that there had been a second murder similar to that at Buck’s Row, the policeman had told him that he couldn’t come and that he (the witness) must find someone else. An inspector’s explanation to the coroner that constables on fixed points were not supposed to leave them but to send someone else did not revive his listeners’ waning confidence.
Critics were equally scathing about the casualness of the investigation. Even the coroner voiced his criticisms. He wasn’t provided with plans and had nothing to show where the body was found, not even a map of the street. Clearly, however, there were severe handicaps facing the police investigation. Fingerprinting as a science had yet to be proved and accepted in the English courts; seventeen more years were to pass before the first conviction was obtained from them. The difference between animal and human blood could not be told until 1901. Blood grouping was unknown until 1905. Pocket radios, telephones and wireless cars were for the future. Detection, in fact, relied very heavily on local knowledge, informers and an arrest at the time of the offence. According to Press Association reports, the police felt that they would get nowhere with their inquiries. No attempt was made to disguise the fact that such inquiries as had been made had been so fruitless as to produce in official minds a feeling almost of despair.
Tradesmen had so little confidence in the efforts being made that some of them formed a Vigilance Committee and published the following notice:
Finding that, in spite of murders being committed in our midst our police force is inadequate to discover the author or authors of the late atrocities, we the undersigned have formed ourselves into a committee and intend offering a substantial reward to any one, citizens or otherwise, who shall give such information as will be the means of bringing the murderer or murderers to justice.
Samuel Montagu, the local MP, offered £500 reward for the capture of the murderer, and the police had been bombarded as a result with literally hundreds of letters from all parts of the country offering advice.
Early on the morning of Monday, 10 September the elusive John Pizer (Leather Apron) was traced to 22 Mulberry Street. Police suspicions of him had been intensified after Timothy Donovan, Annie Chapman’s lodging-house keeper, said in an interview with a Press Association reporter that not only had he ejected Pizer from the lodging house a few months earlier for attacking or threatening a woman, but that both he and another witness, when they had last seen him, had noticed that he was wearing a deerstalker hat similar to the one worn by Annie Chapman’s killer.
Pizer was arrested by Sergeant Thicke, nickname ‘Johnny Upright’, who told him that he was wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Annie Chapman. While searching the house they found five sharp long-bladed knives, which Pizer claimed he used in his trade as a boot finisher. They also found several old hats, an unfortunate reminder that Pizer also made hats and that Polly Nichols had boasted of her new one shortly before she was murdered.
Protesting his innocence, Pizer was taken to Leman Street police station. The friends with whom he had been hiding accompanied him, and they insisted that he had not been out of the house since the previous Thursday and that he knew nothing of the affair.
The same afternoon there were crowds waiting outside Commercial Street police station when Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline arrived from Gravesend with William Piggott, a suspect who closely resembled Leather Apron. Somebody had noticed his bloodstained clothing as he was drinking in a pub in Gravesend and had sent for the police. Piggott’s behaviour when he was being questioned had been so erratic that he was arrested at once. On his hands were several recent wounds. In custody he made a rambling statement that he had been in Whitechapel, walking down Brick Lane, on the Saturday morning at about half past four, when he had seen a woman fall down in a fit. Yet when he tried to pick her up she had bitten his hand. Exasperated by her behaviour he had struck her across the face and then, seeing two policemen coming towards them, run away. None of this explained the bloodstained shirts in the bundle of clothing that he was carrying, nor the blood that had recently been wiped off his boots. In London, however, none of the police witnesses could identify him. Nevertheless, rather than let him go it was thought best to keep him in custody until something more could be found out about him. But after two hours in the cells his behaviour and speech became so strange and so incoherent that a doctor was called in and on his advice Piggott was declared insane and sent immediately to an asylum in Bow.
An important point, which had to be cleared up when the inquest resumed, was the exact time of Annie Chapman’s murder. According to the evidence, she must have been murdered after 5.30 a.m. which, if correct, meant that the killer must have walked through the streets in daylight with blood on his hands and clothes. There was some corroborative evidence for this. According to a police statement, a dustman had seen a man with bloodstained clothing walking down the street at about this time.
Doubts had been raised over the time of the killing. Dr Bagster Phillips had thought she might have been dead for about two hours when he saw the body at 6.30 a.m. He subsequently admitted that the heavy loss of blood and the coldness of the morning might have caused him to miscalculate the time. Another witness, who lived next door, said he was crossing the yard of 27 Hanbury Street at about 5.20 a.m. when he heard a woman’s sharply uttered ‘No’ from the other side of the fence. A few minutes later he heard something fall against the fence. He could easily have misjudged the time as he said that he didn’t get up until 5.15 and left for work at 5.30. His timing appears to be a little too rigid – a bit more flexibility might explain the discrepancy.
The first witness was John Richardson. His widowed mother rented the ground floor of 29 Hanbury Street as well as the workshop and yard at the back. It had been her habit to leave her door open, since she trusted her neighbour. But some time earlier the cellar in the yard had been broken into and a saw and a hammer stolen, and since then the cellar had been regularly padlocked at night. John Richardson used to check that the cellar flaps were secure whenever he was in the market. On the day of the murder he had gone to the house at between 4.40 and 4.45 a.m., only an hour before the body was discovered. The front door was closed and so was the yard door. He had not gone down the steps into the yard. The body hadn’t been there then. Indeed, because one of his boots was hurting him he had sat down on the top step with his feet on the floor of the yard. He cut a piece of leather off his boot with a table knife that he had picked up by mistake in the morning at his house and put in his pocket. The coroner pounced on this point and questioned him closely about the knife, which the witness said was about five inches long. He was sent home to fetch it, and the coroner handed it over to the police (it was still lying on the table where he had left it).
Another point that had raised certain doubts in the coroner’s mind about John Richardson’s innocence had centred on the leather apron found by Dr Phillips lying half in a pan of water in the yard. Richardson’s widowed mother explained that her son normally wore it when he was working in the cellar. On the Thursday she had washed it, leaving it by the fence where the police had found it on the Saturday morning. The police had wrongly assumed that it belonged to Leather Apron, John Pizer the bootmaker. Detective Sergeant Thicke said he had known Pizer for several years, and when anyone locally spoke of ‘Leather Apron’ they meant him.
Pizer was no longer in custody. The police had confirmed his alibi that he had been hiding with his brother and stepmother for four days and hadn’t stirred out of doors until he was arrested by Sergeant Thicke on Monday morning. His brother had advised him not to leave the house as he was the prime suspect. In other words, he had an unshakeable alibi: from Thursday 6 to Monday 10 September he had not moved out of the house.
It was equally important that he should have an alibi for the night of 30–31 August, when Polly Nichols
had been murdered. When questioned he told the coroner that he had spent the night at Crossman’s common lodging house in the Holloway Road. It was called the Round-house. At 11 p.m. he had his supper and then walked as far as the Seven Sisters Road. He turned back and went down Holloway Road, from where he saw the glow of a large fire in the London docks. Outside the lodging house, when he got back, he spoke to the lodging-house keeper and one or two constables who were talking together. When he asked them where the fire was they could only tell him that it was a long way off. One of them had then added that he thought that it was ‘down by the Albert Docks’. It was then about 1.30 a.m. as near as he could remember. He had then walked on as far as Highbury railway station before turning back to the lodging house. As it was after 11 p.m. when all the unoccupied beds were re-let, he paid the night-duty attendant 4d. for another bed. Before turning in he sat on a form in the kitchen and smoked a clay pipe. Next morning, he was woken up by the day attendant who told him that he must get up as he wanted to make the bed. He did so and went downstairs to the kitchen.
The coroner said that he thought it only fair to point out that this statement could be corroborated. Pizer left the court completely cleared of the allegations that had been made about him and free to begin the first of several court actions against those newspapers that had so grossly libelled him.
On 26 September Mr Wynne E. Baxter the coroner summed up the evidence. He reserved his bombshell for the end. Two things were missing from Chapman’s body, he said: the rings, which had not been found, and the uterus, which had been taken from the abdomen. The body, he went on, had not been dissected but the injuries had been made by somebody with considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There were no meaningless cuts. The amount that was missing would go into a breakfast cup, and had the post-mortem examination been less thorough it might easily have gone unnoticed. An unskilled person could not have performed such a deed nor, he added, pouring cold water on another popular theory, a mere slaughterer of animals. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that a desire to possess the missing abdominal organ had been the object of the attack. If the object had been robbery, then the injuries to the viscera were meaningless, as death had resulted from the loss of blood from the cut throat. Moreover, when they found an easily accomplished theft of some paltry brass rings and an internal organ which it had taken a skilled person at least a quarter of an hour to remove, they were driven to the conclusion that the object of the attack was the abstraction of the viscera, and the stealing of the rings a thinly concealed attempt to disguise the fact.
It was not necessary to assume that the murderer was a lunatic, because there was in fact a market for such organs. After the earlier medical evidence had been published in the newspapers, the sub-curator of the pathological museum attached to one of the great medical schools had informed him of an incident that could have a bearing on the case. Some months previously an American had asked him to procure a number of specimens of the missing organ, and for these he was willing to pay £20 each; astonishingly, he planned to issue an actual specimen with each copy of a publication on which he was then engaged. Even though he was told his request was impossible, the American had persisted in his demands, explaining that he wanted them preserved in glycerine to keep them flaccid. He had afterwards made the same request to a similar institution.
Mr Baxter told the jury that he had passed this information on to Scotland Yard, and asked if it was not feasible that somebody, having heard of the American’s request, had been incited to commit murder for gain.
This, as The Times pointed out in a leader the next day, not only threw a different light on Annie Chapman’s murder but attributed to it an appalling motive. Sixty years had passed since Burke and Hare committed the series of murders that had given a new word to the English language. A few years later another resurrectionist had been convicted of the same offence. The price then for a body had been between £7 and £10, which, even allowing for the depreciation of money, was less than the sum the American was alleged to have offered. This fact, when coupled with the general conclusion that the murderer had a special method of arresting consciousness in his victim and was possessed of surgical skill, at once vastly narrowed the field of search. Obviously he was a class above the people he had killed, and considerably superior in education to the people whom the police first suspected. ‘There is a perfect abundance of clues provided they are followed up … The police will be expected to follow up with the keenest vigilance the valuable clue elicited through the Coroner’s inquest, and, since the lines of their investigation are plainly chalked out by information which they themselves failed to collect, it will be a signal disgrace if they do not succeed.’
3. Double Event
After a lull of some three weeks, two more equally brutal murders were committed, in the early hours of Sunday, 30 September and within a quarter of an hour’s walking distance of each other.
The first body was found just after 1 a.m. in a narrow court off Berner Street, then a quiet street running down from Commercial Road to the London, Tilbury & Southend railway. At the entrance to the court were two large gates, one of them fitted with a wicket gate that was used when the gates proper were closed. On the left of the court were some terrace cottages, occupied by sweat-shop tailors and cigarette makers. Most of the residents had been in bed by midnight but some of them were kept awake by noise from the International Working Men’s Educational Club on the other side of the court, where earlier in the evening there had been a heated debate followed by impromptu singing and dancing. Although it was after midnight, lights were still showing in the first-floor club windows and onto the terrace windows and roofs of the facing cottages. Otherwise the court was in darkness, and the street lights were out as well. Anyone coming into the court, therefore, had to grope his way for eighteen to twenty feet through a shroud of darkness that lay between the blind walls just inside the gates.
The steward of the club was Louis Diemschutz. He was also a traveller in cheap costume jewellery, which meant that he left the day-to-day running of the club to his wife. It was 1 a.m. when he eventually turned his pony and costermonger’s barrow into the court. As he did so the pony shied to the left and wouldn’t pull straight. Diemschutz thought at first that some mud or rubbish must be in the way but, when the pony shied again, he peered about and saw something bundled on the ground. He poked it with his whip before getting down and striking a match. It was a windy night and the match was instantly snuffed out, but in the spurt of light Diemschutz saw that the object was a woman, probably drunk. He hurried into the club and got a candle. Some of the club members came back with him and helped him to raise the woman’s head and shoulders from the ground. It was then that they knew she was not merely drunk. Blood had coagulated on the cobbles from a gash in her throat, and a lot more – about two quarts, they thought – had flowed down the cobbles towards the club door. Her musty black clothes were wet from the rain. As they lifted her they saw that her hands were folded underneath her, one of them gripping a bag of cachous. Red and white flowers were pinned to her fur-trimmed jacket.
Several men immediately went off in search of a policeman. When they found one his whistle blasts soon brought others running to the courtyard and cottages, which were quickly sealed off. Dr Bagster Phillips examined the body and pronounced life extinct. Putting his hand inside the top of the woman’s bodice and jacket, which were undone, he was heard to tell one of the policemen that she was still warm. He then examined for bloodstains the hands and clothes of everyone who had been in the club or who was living in the court, much to their indignation. They were equally enraged when their homes were thoroughly searched. Eventually the police abandoned their search about 5 a.m. By then, news was beginning to spread that there had been a second body found a mile away in Mitre Square in the City.
The Times thought that ‘the assassin, if not suffering from insanity, appears to be fr
ee from any fear of interruption while on his dreadful work.’ He had taken enormous risks. Mitre Square had three entrances – one from Mitre Street and passages from Duke Street and St James’s Place. On two sides of the square there were warehouses belonging to Kearley and Tonge, with a watchman on night duty. On the third side, opposite where the body was found, there were two old houses, one of which was unoccupied and the other lived in by a policeman. On the fourth side were three empty houses. Every fifteen minutes during the night the square was patrolled by a police constable: at 1.30 the square had been empty when he strolled through; at 1.45 he had found a body.
In a sense this fourth killing was unique. The victim was, as it turned out, the only one to be murdered in the City of London and the investigation, unlike those of the other murders, was in the hands of the City police. They, responsible for the one square mile only, were answerable to the Corporation of the City of London, whereas Sir Charles Warren and the Metropolitan Police were answerable to the Home Office. The Commissioner was Sir James Fraser but, as he was nearing retirement and had been absent for two months, the investigation itself was in the hands of the Acting Commissioner, Major Henry Smith, described by a contemporary as a good raconteur and a good fellow. Since August he had been desperately keen to lay hands on the killer and, to guarantee success, had put nearly a third of the force into plain clothes, with instructions as he candidly admitted in his memoirs ‘to do everything which, under ordinary circumstances, a constable should not do. It was subversive of discipline; but I had them well supervised by the senior officers. The weather was lovely, and I have little doubt that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, sitting on doorsteps, smoking their pipes, hanging about public-houses, and gossiping with all and sundry.’
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 6