Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  Without a doubt, however, the most shocking aspect of Phillips’s testimony was that the killer had removed the “uterus and its appendages with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two thirds of the bladder” and had taken the organs with him. Today, it is known that such behavior—taking body parts as “souvenirs” of a murder—is not uncommon among serial killers. Yet in Victorian times, there was little awareness of serial murder at all, either by the public or by the police. “What kind of monster could do such things?” people wondered. Naturally, people looked for a theory to explain what seemed unexplainable. The Telegraph, for example, warned that the East End was prowled by “beings who look like men, but are rather demons, vampires.”23 Some people suggested that the murderer was a religious maniac or a member of a cult, and that the murders were part of some sort of bizarre ritual.

  Right from the start, one of the most common theories was that the murderer was a madman who had escaped or been recently released from a lunatic asylum. “This angle of investigation was pursued relentlessly,” wrote Metropolitan Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew in his memoirs. “Inquiries were made at asylums all over the country, including the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor, with the object of discovering whether a homicidal lunatic had been released as cured about the time the Ripper crimes commenced.”24 Inspector McWilliam of the City of London CID likewise noted in a Report to the Home Office (October 29) that officers had been sent “to all the lunatic asylums in London to make enquiry respecting persons recently admitted or discharged: many persons being of the opinion that these crimes are of too revolting a character to have been committed by a sane person.”25 It is likely that such inquiries covered both asylums and workhouses, and that officials at these institutions were instructed to contact the police if any promising suspects turned up.

  Yet in the eyes of many East End residents, there was an even more likely suspect: the Jew. As we have seen, anti-Semitism in Whitechapel had already reached a dangerous level even before the murders, and thus the East End Jewish immigrant fell under suspicion from very early on. The immigrant Jew presented a perfect scapegoat for the locals’ need to lay blame for the murders on some outside, mysterious, and incomprehensible alien entity. The Leather Apron scare only increased the locals’ suspicions, and the result, inevitably, was a further dramatic increase in anti-Semitism in the East End. After Annie Chapman’s murder, crowds of native British locals began to assume a much more openly threatening manner toward Jews in the East End and said they would lynch the murderer if they found him. In fact, a riot very nearly broke out on the day after the murder, as reported in an article titled “A Riot against the Jews” in the East London Observer:

  On Saturday in several quarters of East London the crowds who had assembled in the streets began to assume a very threatening attitude towards the Hebrew population of the district. It was repeatedly asserted that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime as that of Hanbury-street, and that it must have been done by a Jew—and forthwith the crowds proceeded to threaten and abuse such of the unfortunate Hebrews as they found in the streets. Happily, the presence of the large number of police in the streets prevented a riot actually taking place.26

  As Lloyd’s Weekly reported, “Bodies of young roughs raised cries against the Jews, and many of the disreputable and jabbering women sided with them. This state of things caused several stand-up fights, thus putting a further and serious strain on the police, many of whom began to express their fears of rioting.”27 Noisy crowds roamed the streets, shouting “Down with the Jews!” and the police had a difficult time keeping things under control. Three days later, the Evening News printed a letter from a City police constable named George Henry Hutt under the heading “Slaughtering the Jews”:

  I found it difficult to traverse the streets in the vicinity of the Whitechapel, without observing in almost every thoroughfare, knots of persons (consisting of men, women and children), and overhearing their slanderous and insulting remarks towards the Jews, who occasionally passed by. With justice to my countrymen, I mention that the foul epithets was made use of by people of the most ignorant and dangerous class, promoted by the information they had casually obtained that a man known as “Leather Apron” had a Jewish appearance, and was wanted for the recent Whitechapel murders.28

  Whether Leather Apron was the Ripper or not, his mere existence was like an open wound that aggravated the tension between the East End’s Jews and gentiles. The police must have been at least somewhat relieved, therefore, when on September 10, the day before Hutt’s letter was printed, Leather Apron was finally arrested at his stepmother’s house by Detective Thicke.

  After the arrest, the police thoroughly investigated Pizer’s alibis and found that they checked out. Ultimately, the police discovered absolutely no evidence connecting Pizer with the murders, and they had no option but to release him. The police then allowed Pizer to give testimony at the inquest, apparently in the hopes of defusing any threats of mob vengeance against both him and the Jews in general. When asked why he went into hiding, Pizer declared, “I will tell you the reason why. I should have been torn to pieces.”29 After Pizer testified as to his whereabouts on the night of the Chapman murder, the coroner added, “I think it only fair to say that this statement can be corroborated.” Pizer then sat down next to Sergeant Thicke, looking “somewhat pale and worried.” When Pizer later exited the building, he was “recognized at once,” according to the East London Advertiser, and “the murmurs and mutterings from the crowd which greeted his appearance boded no good.” Sergeant Thicke walked him home.30

  Pizer was thus exonerated, and the name “Leather Apron” quickly faded from the public’s attention. As George Sims put it, “Most people are beginning to see that Leather Apron has probably as much to do with the Whitechapel murders as the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.”31

  By September 14, the tensions had eased somewhat, and the Jewish Chronicle reported that within the last week, “the foreign Jews in the East End of London have been in some peril—though happily averted.”32 The article drew parallels to the pogroms of Eastern Europe, noting, “It is so easy to inflame the popular mind when it is startled by hideous crime, that sensation-mongers incur a fearful responsibility when they add to the excitement by giving currency to every idle rumour.” But if the police thought that Pizer’s exoneration would put an end to the anti-Semitic tensions in the East End, they were mistaken, and the newspapers continued to report on various “clues” that seemed to point to a Jewish killer. As noted in the Jewish Standard, “So inflamed was the popular mind, so convinced was it that ‘Leather Apron’ was the murderer, that had he been captured by the crowd Lynch Law would have almost certainly been put into operation. As Piser plaintively said, he would have been torn in pieces. And not only so, but the whole Jewish quarter would have been in danger of attack.”33 The Jewish community, sensing the impending danger of the situation, rallied together in solidarity with their English neighbors, to show that they were as eager as anyone to discover the culprit. The Jewish MP for Whitechapel, Samuel Montagu, offered a reward for the capture of the criminal, and the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which had been formed to “strengthen the hands of the police” and patrol the streets, seconded the offer. The Vigilance Committee, headed by a man named George Lusk, was largely made up of Jewish tradesmen.34

  On September 10, just two days after Chapman’s murder, the Daily Telegraph reported that the police were looking for a man “with a foreign accent” who had “entered the passage of a house at which the murder was committed with a prostitute at 2 a.m., the 8th.” The source of this story is a bit of a mystery. According to several newspaper reports, a woman named Emily Walton accompanied a man into one of the backyards on Hanbury Street at 2:30 a.m. on the eighth—just three hours before Chapman was murdered. Once in the yard, the man began to treat Walton roughly, until her screams scared the man off. It is not clear if there was any
truth to this story, however, and it may well be a false lead, as Walton did not appear at the inquest. Whatever the source of the police telegram, more damage had been done, since the description of the man “with a foreign accent” cast further suspicion on the Jews.

  Then, on September 19, Elizabeth Long gave her evidence at day four of the inquest, and it was revealed that the man she saw with Annie Chapman on the morning of the murder “looked like a foreigner.”35 It was now on record that the murderer might have been a Jew.

  During this period, the police kept busy chasing down leads and arresting suspects, but ultimately, they all seemed to go nowhere. And because the new head of CID, Robert Anderson, was still on vacation, overall command of the investigation was still effectively in the hands of his subordinate, Chief Constable Adolphus Williamson. As the panic increased, and the press continued to comment on the absence of Scotland Yard’s leader, Commissioner Warren decided to give responsibility for the entire investigation to Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson. A letter from Warren to the acting assistant commissioner of CID (in Anderson’s absence) instructed,

  [Swanson] must be acquainted with every detail. I look upon him for the time being as the eyes and ears of the Commr. in this particular case. He must have a room to himself, & every paper, every document, every report every telegram must pass through his hands. He must be consulted on every subject. I would not send any directions anywhere on the subject of the murder without consulting him. I give him the whole responsibility.36

  Thus it was that on September 15, Donald Swanson was put in charge of what would become the most famous murder investigation in history. Four days later, Commissioner Warren was forced to admit to the Home Office, “No progress has as yet been made in obtaining any clue to the Whitechapel murderers. A great number of clues have been examined & exhausted without finding any thing suspicious.”37 And then on September 27, the Central News Agency received a letter written in red ink, in a neat cursive hand, from a person claiming responsibility for the crimes.

  Dear Boss,

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.

  Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper

  Dont mind me giving the trade name

  PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha38

  From the standpoint of those who wished to sell newspapers (and eventually books and movie tickets), the name Jack the Ripper was a godsend. It was like throwing a match into a vat of gasoline, igniting an interest in the case that has scarcely died down in the hundred and twenty years since the murders took place.

  10

  Elizabeth Stride

  On September 30, around 12:45 a.m., a Hungarian immigrant named Israel Schwartz was walking home along Berner Street when he witnessed a disturbing scene unfold on the sidewalk before him. A “broad-shouldered” man ahead of him suddenly attacked a woman who was standing near the entrance to a dark courtyard called Dutfield’s Yard. Schwartz was frightened and didn’t want to get involved, so he crossed to the other side of the street, where he then noticed a second man standing at the corner lighting a pipe. The broad-shouldered man by this time had noticed Schwartz and shouted out something that sounded like “Lipski!” Schwartz hurried onward. He then began to think the “pipe-man” was following him, so he ran until he was safely away.1

  A short time later, around 1 a.m., a man named Louis Diemschutz was driving his costermonger’s barrow along this same stretch of Berner Street and turned into Dutfield’s Yard—the same spot where Schwartz had witnessed an attack only fifteen minutes earlier. Dutfield’s Yard was a narrow courtyard between two buildings. On the south side of the yard was a brick house, and farther back were several “terraced cottages, occupied by sweat shop tailors and cigar makers.”2 On the north side was 40 Berner Street, the two-story building that housed the International Workingmen’s Educational Club, where Diemschutz was steward and manager. As mentioned earlier, the IWEC was a club of Jewish socialists and anarchists, mostly of Russian and Polish origin, and was the nexus of the assault on the capitalist exploitation by “sweaters” in the tailoring industry. A meeting of socialists had in fact ended shortly before Diemschutz arrived, and a number of people were lingering in the upstairs meeting room, talking and singing in Russian.

  Diemschutz could not see much of anything as he steered his cart into the dark courtyard, but suddenly his pony recoiled and pulled to the left, apparently frightened by a shape lying next to the wall of the club. Diemschutz prodded the shape with his whip, then got down off his cart to investigate. He lit a match and briefly saw the figure of a woman before the wind blew out the match. Diemschutz rushed into the club and told his wife and several other club members that there was a woman lying in the alley but “that he was unable to say whether she was drunk or dead.”3 He grabbed a candle and rushed back to the yard with a man named Isaac Kozebrodsky. In the dim candlelight, the men saw that the woman was indeed dead and lying in a pool of blood.4 Diemschutz’s wife followed the men as far as the club door, and when she saw the woman’s “ghastly” face and the blood trickling through the yard, she screamed. Diemschutz and Kozebrodsky ran off for help, shouting, “Police!”

  Several people in the upstairs room went down to the yard to find out what was happening. One club member named Morris Eagle ran off with a companion in the direction opposite from that taken by Diemschutz and Kozebrodsky. On Commercial Road, the men found two police constables, P.C. Henry Lamb and P.C. Edward Collins, and returned with them to Dutfield’s Yard. When P.C. Lamb arrived, he shone his lantern on the body. The woman was lying on her side with her knees drawn up in a sort of fetal position, and her throat had been cut. According to Lamb, “She looked as if she had been laid quietly down.”5 Lamb sent P.C. Collins to call for a doctor and then told Eagle to report the murder at the Leman Street police station. By this time, some twenty or thirty people had gathered in the yard, many of them from the club. Lamb tried to keep the crowd away from the body, because he didn’t want anyone to get blood on his or her clothing. Then he closed the gate and stationed a constable outside to see that no one entered or left the yard.6

  When Dr. Frederick Blackwell arrived around 1:16 a.m., he noted that the woman’s face was still slightly warm, and he estimated that she had died only twenty or thirty minutes earlier. The woman’s right hand was smeared with blood and lay across her breast, and her left hand, lying partly closed on the ground, “contained a small packet of cachous [breath fresheners] wrapped in tissue paper.”7 She was wearing a checked scarf around her neck, the knot of which was turned to the side and “pulled tightly,” which gave Blackwell the impression that the killer had pulled the woman backward with the scarf, perhaps choking her so that she couldn’t scream.8 As the postmortem examination would later reveal, the woman’s throat had been deeply cut from left to right. Unlike the previous victims, however, she had no abdominal mutilations. The police took down the names of the club members and then conducted inquiries at the crime scene until 5 a.m., by which time news of the murder had spread, and an excited crowd had gathered in front of the club.

  The victim this time was Elizabet
h Stride, a forty-five-year-old occasional prostitute from Gothenburg, Sweden, known locally as “Long Liz.” For three years prior to her murder, Liz Stride had been in a relationship with a waterside laborer named Michael Kidney, who lived on Devonshire Street, Mile End. Kidney was said to have beaten Stride on occasion, apparently because he objected to her lifestyle, and as a result, the pair separated frequently. The last separation was only five days before Stride’s murder, when the couple broke up after a “row.” When Stride was not staying with Kidney, she frequently slept at 32 Flower and Dean Street in a doss house run by a woman named Elizabeth Tanner. According to Tanner, Stride was a charwoman by profession, and in the months prior to her murder, she had been “at work among the Jews” cleaning houses. Tanner claimed that Stride was a sober and quiet woman, but in reality she was an alcoholic who had been fined a number of times for drunk and disorderly behavior at Thames Magistrate Court.9 Like many downtrodden women living in the East End, Stride resorted to prostitution when she couldn’t find work.

  There were several witnesses to events in the vicinity of the Stride murder. One witness, fifty-seven-year-old Matthew Packer, claimed that at 11 p.m. he sold some grapes to a man and a woman from the window of his house at 44 Berner Street, just south of Dutfield’s Yard. The man had the look of a young clerk, Packer said, with broad shoulders, and a quiet but rough voice. He was age twenty-five to thirty and was about five feet seven inches tall, with a long, black, buttoned up coat, and a soft felt hat. “They passed by as though they were going up Commercial Road,” Packer said in his October 4 police statement. “But—instead of going up they crossed to the other side of the road to the Board School, & were there for about 1/2 an hour till I should say 11.30, talking to one another. I then shut up my shutters.”10