by Robert House
Whereas the Advertiser wrote only, “Dr. Keeling then described where the wounds had been made, and in answer to questions stated positively that there were no signs of there having been recent connexion [sexual intercourse].” It is perhaps also relevant to point out that the coroner “thanked Dr. Keeling for the very careful way in which he had given his testimony.”30
Evidence also seemed to indicate the possibility that Tabram was strangled. The Illustrated Police News, for example, reported that Tabram was “throttled while held down, and the face and head so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible.”31 Thus, it seems likely that the attacker first strangled Tabram and then intended to kill her with a stab to the heart, followed by multiple stabs in the torso and the throat.
The jury returned a verdict of “murder by a person or persons unknown,” and Inspector Reid informed the court, “Careful inquiries are still being made with a view to obtain information regarding the case.” In his closing comments at the inquest, the coroner remarked, “For a poor defenceless woman to be outraged and stabbed in the manner which this woman had been was almost beyond belief.”32
In the aftermath of this latest horror, the citizens of the district began to worry that there was a madman on the loose. On August 10, the Echo reported on the similarity between the murders of Martha Tabram and Emma Smith, who, the paper said, had been killed by some miscreant “thrusting a walking-stick or other blunt weapon into her body with great violence.” “For ferocity, the two cases are somewhat analogous,” the report concluded, “and some of the Scotland-yard experts in tracing criminals and fathoming crime incline to the opinion that one man is responsible for the two crimes.”33 Tabram’s murder was indeed remarkable for its viciousness, even for the violent East End. “No crime more brutal has ever been committed in the East-end,” said an unnamed officer of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on the day of the inquest.34 The East London Advertiser reported on August 11, “The virulent savagery of the murderer is beyond comprehension.” And Mr. Collier, the deputy coroner at the inquest, noted, “It is one of the most terrible cases that anyone can possibly imagine. The man must have been a perfect savage to have attacked the woman in that way.”35
Unfortunately, Inspector Reid’s inquiries went nowhere. Then another violent murder, three weeks later, seemed to confirm everybody’s worst fears.
7
Polly Nichols
Mary Ann (“Polly”) Nichols was forty-three years old and somewhat short, with brown hair that was turning gray and a number of front teeth missing. When Polly, the daughter of a blacksmith, was only eighteen, she married a printer named William Nichols. The couple had five children, but according to William, his wife was “much given to drink,” and by 1880, the marriage was in shambles.1 The couple separated, and Polly left the children with her husband. For a few years, she lived with a blacksmith named Thomas Drew, but then she separated from him as well. After that, Polly’s life appears to have taken a downward turn, and by 1888 she was living in the East End and scraping out a meager living as a prostitute.2 In fact, as Neal Shelden noted in his book The Victims of Jack the Ripper, “It is difficult to know how long she had lived the life of a streetwalker,” and it is possible that Nichols had been working on and off as a prostitute since about 1880.3
By August 1888, Polly Nichols was sharing a bed in a common lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street with another prostitute, named Emily Holland (aka Jane Oram). Around August 24, Nichols moved to the White House, a “doss” amid the rookery of Flower and Dean Street.4 Flower and Dean Street was described as “perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis,” and it was said that the police were afraid to venture too far into this den of crime at night.5 One who did “was threatened by a man standing on a kerbstone, who held a large stone in his hand and said ‘If you come a step further, I’ll knock your brains out with the stone!’ ”6
On the rain-swept night of August 30–31, Nichols had some drinks at the Frying Pan Public House on Brick Lane, then returned to her previous lodgings at Thrawl Street, where she sat in the kitchen, somewhat drunk and completely broke. Around 1:30 a.m., the deputy of the lodging house kicked Nichols out because she did not have money to pay for a bed. Polly told the deputy to save a bed for her. “Never mind! I’ll soon get my doss money,” she said. “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.”7
About an hour later, Emily Holland ran into Nichols at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and Osborn Street, “nearly opposite the parish church.” According to Holland, Polly was “much the worse for drink and staggering against the wall.”8 Holland tried to convince Nichols to go back to the lodging house and share her bed, but Polly declined, stating, “I’ve had my doss money three times today and spent it.” She added, “It won’t be long before I’m back.”9 After Holland left, Polly wobbled off down Whitechapel Road, heading east.
The spot where Nichols spoke to Holland—“nearly opposite the parish church” (that is, St. Mary Matfelon)—was very close to the same location where Emma Smith had passed the two or three young men who then followed and attacked her. It was also only a two-minute walk from the site of the Tabram murder. Walking east down Whitechapel Road, Nichols would soon pass the Whitechapel Bell Foundry at the corner of Fieldgate Street, where the American Liberty Bell had been cast in 1752. The foundry, just 250 yards from where Nichols was last seen, was less than a one-minute walk from Greenfield Street, where Aaron Kozminski was probably living at the time. Nichols was unaware that she was walking into the hunting grounds of a predator.
Forty-five minutes later, at 3:15 a.m., P.C. John Neil of J Division (97J) was patrolling his beat along a “narrow, cobbled, mean street” named Buck’s Row, just half a mile east of where Nichols was last seen. Buck’s Row was a dark and gloomy street, dimly lit by only one gas lamp at its far end. On its south side were “dirty little houses of two stories,” and opposite were “the high walls of warehouses which at night would shadow the dirty street in a far deeper gloom than its own character would in broad day light suggest.”10 At the west end of the street was the black, looming shape of a board school. P.C. Neil noticed nothing out of the ordinary at the time and continued on his beat.
Half an hour later, at approximately 3:40 or 3:45 a.m., a carman (a person who drove a horse-drawn vehicle for delivering goods) named Charles Cross was walking west down Buck’s Row on his way to work when he noticed a dark shape that looked like a tarpaulin, lying in front of a locked gateway that led to a small stable yard. As Cross got closer, he saw that the shape was in fact a woman. He hesitated, unsure of what to do, and then out of the silence heard footsteps approaching behind him. It turned out to be another carman, named Robert Paul, also on his way to work. “Come and look over here,” Cross said. “There is a woman lying on the pavement.” The two men approached the body, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Cross felt the woman’s hands, which were cold and limp, and said, “I believe she is dead.” Paul then put his hand on the woman’s chest. “I think she is breathing, but very little if she is.”11 The woman’s dress was pulled up almost to her stomach, and Cross thought it looked like she had been “outraged and gone off in a swoon.” Paul pulled down the woman’s clothes.
Cross and Paul were both “behind time” (that is, late for work) and didn’t want to stop very long, so they continued down the street, hoping to find a policeman along their way. About eight hundred feet away at the corner of Baker’s Row and Hanbury Street, they encountered P.C. George Mizen and informed him of what they had seen. “She looks to me to be either dead or drunk,” Cross said. “But for my part I think she is dead.”12 Mizen left to investigate. It was a little before 4 a.m.
A few minutes earlier, P.C. Neil’s beat had taken him back into Buck’s Row, where he then also came across the woman lying on the side of the street. He stooped down to lift the woman up, assuming she was drunk, but then in the light of his lantern, noticed that he
r throat was cut “almost from ear to ear.” As Neil stated later, “I examined the body by the aid of my lamp, and noticed blood oozing from a wound in the throat. She was lying on her back, with her clothes disarranged.”13 The woman’s legs were extended and a little bit apart.
Various policemen soon arrived on the scene. P.C. John Thain had been walking along Brady Street when Neil signaled to him with his bull’s-eye lantern. Neil sent Thain to fetch the local surgeon, Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn. When P.C. Mizen arrived, Neil sent him for an ambulance. Meanwhile, Neil went across the street to Essex Wharf to inquire whether anyone had seen anything, but no one had. About this same time (4 a.m.), a night watchman named Patrick Mulshaw was guarding a worksite in Winthrop Street, just one street south of Buck’s Row, when a man passed by and said, “Watchman, old man, I believe somebody is murdered down the street.”14 When Mulshaw went into Buck’s Row, he saw three or four policemen and a number of other men standing around the body.
When Dr. Llewellyn arrived at approximately 4 a.m., he noted that the body was still warm and estimated that the woman had been dead for no more than half an hour, placing the time of death at sometime around 3:30 a.m. Because a small crowd was starting to gather, Llewellyn ordered that the body be taken to the Whitechapel infirmary mortuary, where a further examination could be conducted. The police constables carted Polly’s body off to the Whitechapel mortuary, and it was not until her corpse had been undressed and placed in a black coffin at the mortuary that attendants noticed that her abdomen had been mutilated.
Dr. Llewellyn’s postmortem examination revealed that Nichols had been savagely butchered. In his inquest testimony, Llewellyn stated that Nichols had “severe injuries to her throat”—specifically, two parallel incisions cut from left to right. One of these, an eight-inch-long gash, “completely sever[ed] all the tissues down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed.”15 Llewellyn also made the manifestly obvious point that he was “quite certain that the injuries to her neck were not self-inflicted.” His testimony continued:
There were no injuries about the body till just about the lower part of the abdomen. Two or three inches from the left side was a wound running in a jagged manner. It was a very deep wound, and the tissues were cut through. There were several incisions running across the abdomen. On the right side there were also three or four similar cuts running downwards. All these had been caused by a knife, which had been used violently and been used downwards.16
Here we see the first real evidence of the Ripper’s signature abdominal mutilations, as there was one long, deep cut in the lower abdomen, from which the woman’s intestines were protruding. In some respects, Nichols’s wounds seem to have been similar to those of the previous victim, Martha Tabram. The nature of the cuts, with a knife, “which had been used violently and been used downwards,” seems to suggest a stabbing motion. Also, there were “two small stabs on [the] private parts,” which, as before, were not mentioned in newspaper accounts.17 In addition, the long gash in the lower abdomen sounds at least somewhat similar to the three-inch-long cut in the lower portion of Tabram’s body.
The murders were fast becoming a sensation, and newspapers all over the world picked up the story, drawing attention not only to the murders themselves but also to the deplorable conditions and the depravity of the East End. A letter printed in the Echo noted, “Thousands who read the Echo have not the faintest idea of the terrible state of things which exist in these parts.”18 The author claimed that the number of “fallen” women in the district was increasing greatly. “The drink houses are the great attraction for these wretched women. Is it not high time that something be done to check this sad state of things?” In the aftermath of the Nichols murder, some attention was focused on a “High Rip” gang as the likely perpetrator of this and the previous murders. Yet the police, although briefly considering this possibility, soon began to think otherwise. As the Times reported, the murder had “so many points of similarity with the murder of two other women in the district—one Martha Turner, as recently as August 7, and the other less than 12 months previously—that the police admit their belief that the three crimes are the work of one individual.” The report added, “The investigation into the George-yard mystery is proceeding hand-in-hand with that of Buck’s-row.”19
Polly Nichols’s funeral was held on September 6, and large crowds came out to see her funeral cortege as it passed through Whitechapel. According to the Echo, “The hearse and two mourning coaches were followed by a concourse of people for a considerable distance along the Whitechapel-road.”20 The crowd was augmented by a large number of Jews who were observing the holiday of Rosh Hashanah and were thus not at work that day. In all likelihood, Aaron Kozminski watched as the funeral procession went somberly along Whitechapel Road past St. Mary’s church.
8
The Police
To my great joy I was posted to “H” division, which meant—Whitechapel. The dread of most young constables, it was my father’s wish. “If ever you do join the Force,” he once said, “I hope they send you to Whitechapel. It will make a policeman of you.” And it did!
—Ex-detective sergeant Benjamin Leeson
By September 4 or 5, newspapers began to report that the police were on the lookout for a thug with the ominous-sounding name “Leather Apron.” According to a CID report, Leather Apron became a suspect in the murders “on account of his alleged levying blackmail on prostitutes and assaulting them if they did not comply with his request.”1 The newspapers’ descriptions were frightening. An American reporter who ventured into the East End to ask the locals’ opinion on the murders was told that the murders had likely been committed by “a ‘wild looking man, wearing a leather apron,’ who had been seen about in Whitechapel lately, and was believed to be an escaped lunatic.”2 A report in the Star claimed that Leather Apron was “a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Hebrew type,” and “a more ghoulish and devilish brute than can be found in all the pages of shocking fiction.”3 News of the creature quickly spread across the Atlantic, where the Atchison (Kansas) Daily Globe described Leather Apron as “half way between Dickens’ Quilp and Poe’s baboon.”4 By September 6, the police were still attempting to arrest Leather Apron, who was now described as a “crazy Jew,” but they were unable to locate him.
Leather Apron’s real name was Jack Pizer, as noted in a report submitted to Scotland Yard by Inspector Joseph Helson of J Division: “A man named Jack Pizer, alias Leather Apron, has for some considerable period been in the habit of ill using prostitutes in this, and other parts of the Metropolis.”5 Pizer was a Jewish thirty-eight-year-old boot finisher of Polish extraction, who stayed at various lodging houses in the district. When he discovered that he was the prime suspect in the case, and fearing a lynch mob, Pizer went into hiding at his stepmother’s house on Mulberry Street.
It is easy to see why Pizer was afraid. The press reports clearly played into the East End locals’ fear and resentment of Jews, and the implied racism in the articles is self-evident—indeed, they made Pizer sound more like a monster from a cheap horror novel than a human being. It was after the appearance of the newspaper reports putting forth Leather Apron as a suspect that a truly violent anti-Semitism began to fester in the East End.
By this time, the unsolved murders were becoming a real headache for the police. The investigation was the responsibility of London’s Metropolitan Police Force (aka the MET), the jurisdiction of which included the vast majority of London and the East End. The only area in London outside of the MET’s territory was the City of London, the so-called square mile that included the old portion of London that had been inside the city’s fortresslike walls. This area was under the control of a completely separate City of London Police Force, which was (up to this point) not involved in the murder inquiries. The MET consisted of 23 police divisions, 30 superintendents, approximately 800 inspectors, 1,350 sergeants, and roughly 12,000 police constables (P.C.�
��s).6 The
P.C.’s were generally divided into beat constables, who patrolled circular beats, and fixed-point constables, who stood in one location so as to be readily located in case of trouble. The duties of the MET roughly broke down to two main functions: the prevention of crime, which was the responsibility of uniformed police constables, and the investigation of crimes already committed, which was the responsibility of detective inspectors under the direction of the Criminal Investigation Department or CID. At the time of the Whitechapel murders in 1888, the head of the MET was Commissioner Sir Charles Warren, an ex-army officer who had previously been the administrator of various British colonial interests. Directly under Warren was James Monro, an ex-inspector general of police in India, who was both assistant commissioner in charge of the CID, and director of the Special Irish Branch, a small but highly secretive unit of spies within the MET that collected intelligence on terrorist threats from Irish Fenian groups. Up to that point, the Whitechapel murder inquiries had been in the hands of H Division inspector Edmund Reid, a capable and well-respected detective with sixteen years’ experience. After the Nichols murder, however, the investigation was ramped up, and the ground inquiries were delegated to Inspector Frederick Abberline of Central Office CID and Inspector Joseph Helson of J Bethnal Green Division. Abberline was assigned to the case because of his previous experience as an inspector in Whitechapel and his knowledge of crime in the East End, which was said to be unsurpassed. The force of police constables in H Division was also augmented by men drafted in from other divisions, as well as by a team of plainclothes detectives especially assigned during the murders.
In the late 1880s, there was a great deal of friction between the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office—the former wishing to operate without interference, the latter concerned that the police were not always forthcoming with information—and both were regularly excoriated by the press for their perceived shortcomings. Home Secretary Henry Matthews regularly clashed with Police Commissioner Charles Warren, who in turn micromanaged the affairs of his underlings to such an extent that CID chief James Monro noted in his unpublished memoirs that the Home Office et al., “nearly drove me frantic . . . attempting to direct a police inquiry instead of letting the responsible police officers do the duty.”7 Warren was also frustrated that Monro, his subordinate at the MET, was able to circumvent the chain of command due to his double role as head of the Special Branch. The two men did not get along, and had divergent views on police procedure. As a result of such frustrations, Monro resigned his four-year tenure as head of CID at the end of August 1888, just prior to the murder of Polly Nichols. His replacement in the job was a forty-seven-year-old Irish ex-barrister and spymaster named Robert Anderson.