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

by Robert House

  Packer was later taken to the mortuary, and he identified Stride as the woman he saw. There are problems with Packer’s testimony, however. When he was originally questioned on the morning after the murder, Packer did not mention the incident at all but instead told the police, “I never saw anything suspicious or heard the slightest noise and know nothing about the murder until I heard of it in the morning.” As Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson wrote in a report, Packer had “made different statements” and therefore “any statement he made would be rendered almost valueless as evidence.”11 Most Ripperologists likewise dismiss Packer as a credible witness.

  Another witness, William Marshall, claimed to have seen a man and a woman “kissing and carrying on” around 11:45 p.m. on Berner Street between the intersections with Fairclough Street and Boyd Street, one block south of the murder location. The man was described as middle-aged, about five feet six inches, stout, and wearing a short black cutaway coat and a “round cap with a small peak,” like a sailor’s hat. It was dark, however, and Marshall did not get a good look at the man’s face, although he thought the man looked like “he was in business, and did nothing like hard work.” Marshall overheard the man say, “You would say anything but your prayers,” to which the woman laughed. After talking for about ten minutes, the couple sauntered off toward Ellen Street, away from Dutfield’s Yard.12 After the murder, Marshall was taken to the mortuary, where he positively identified Stride as the woman he had seen. In any case, Marshall had witnessed this couple an hour before the probable time of the murder, so his evidence may be of little relevance.

  Around 12:30 a.m., only fifteen or twenty minutes before the murder, P.C. William Smith, a twenty-six-year-old beat constable whose patrol included Berner Street, saw a man and a woman standing on the sidewalk opposite Dutfield’s Yard. “I have seen the deceased in the mortuary,” Smith later said at the inquest, “and I feel certain it is the same person.”13 The woman was talking to a man who was about twenty-eight years old, five feet seven inches tall, with a dark complexion and a small dark mustache. The man had a respectable appearance; was wearing dark clothes, an overcoat, and a hard dark felt deerstalker hat; and was carrying a newspaper-wrapped parcel approximately eighteen inches long by seven inches wide.14 About ten minutes later, at 12:40 a.m., twenty-four-year-old Morris Eagle returned to the Workingmen’s Club after walking his girlfriend home. He tried the front door but, finding it locked, walked around and entered the club through the side door in Dutfield’s Yard. Eagle did not see anybody in or near the yard at this time, which is important, because he walked right through the dark portion of the yard where Stride’s body was found only twenty minutes later. This suggests that the murder must have occurred after 12:40 a.m.15

  Around the same time Eagle returned to the club, a dock laborer named James Brown left his house on Fairclough Street and walked to a shop at the corner of Fairclough and Berner streets to get his supper. When Brown left the shop three or four minutes later, he saw a man and a woman standing against the wall of the board school at the corner. Brown estimated that it was then around 12:45 a.m. but admitted that he had not looked at a clock recently. He overheard the woman say, “No, not tonight, some other night.”16 The man was about five feet seven inches and of average build, with a long dark overcoat that reached almost to his heels. Brown later claimed that he was “certain the woman was the deceased.”17 It seems, however, that he was incorrect in this identification, because the couple was later tracked down and questioned. As reported in the Evening News, “When the alarm of murder was raised a young girl had been standing in a bisecting thoroughfare not fifty yards from the spot where the body was found. She had, she said, been standing there for about twenty minutes, talking with her sweetheart, but neither of them heard any unusual noises.”18

  To add to the confusion, we have one final witness—Mrs. Fanny Mortimer. In a report printed in the Daily News, Mortimer claimed that she stood in the doorway of her house at 36 Berner Street, just a few doors north of the Workingmen’s club, “nearly the whole time between half-past twelve and one o’clock this (Sunday) morning, and did not notice anything unusual.”19 She added, “A young man and his sweetheart were standing at the corner of the street, about 20 yards away, before and after the time the woman must have been murdered, but they told me they did not hear a sound.”20 This was probably the same couple seen by Brown at 12:45 a.m..

  Mortimer’s story is difficult to interpret, because she claimed to be outside for upward of a half hour between 12:30 and 1 a.m. but did not see anything, including the assault that Israel Schwartz witnessed at 12:45, practically right next door. Yet a report in the Evening News gave a slightly different version of the story. The report stated that Mortimer went outside shortly before 12:45 a.m., after hearing “the measured heavy stamp of a policeman passing the house on his beat,” and then stood in the doorway for only about ten minutes. “The quiet and deserted character of the street appears even to have struck her at the time,” the report added. Mortimer then went back inside and got ready for bed. A few minutes later, she heard Diemschutz’s cart roll by, and then, shortly afterward, she heard all of the commotion following the discovery of Stride’s body.21

  It is difficult to make sense of all of this seemingly contradictory testimony, and as a result, the murder of Elizabeth Stride is now one of the most hotly debated aspects of the entire case. The crux of the problem is the testimony of Israel Schwartz, who saw a man attacking a woman (later identified as Stride) in front of Dutfield’s Yard, only about fifteen minutes before Stride’s body was discovered just a few yards away. It is a distinct possibility that Schwartz actually witnessed the Ripper in the act of committing a murder. The police seemed to think this was the case, and they clearly considered Schwartz an important witness. But our knowledge of the event is complicated by the fact that Schwartz did not appear at the public inquest into the Stride murder. Instead, Schwartz’s testimony was apparently recorded in private proceedings, probably because the police did not want his description of Stride’s attacker published in the newspapers. Their caution was futile, however, because a reporter from the Star newspaper tracked Schwartz down and got the story anyway.

  The fact that the broad-shouldered man shouted “Lipski!” was a point of interest to the police. The use of the term “Lipski” was in all likelihood a reference to a widely publicized murder that had occurred a year previously in Batty Street, one street over from Berner Street. Israel Lipski was a Jewish immigrant umbrella salesman who had been convicted and hanged in 1887 for murdering a young pregnant woman named Miriam Angel by forcing her to consume nitric acid. As Detective Frederick Abberline pointed out, after the murder trial, “Lipski” was used as a sort of derogatory slang term in the East End in reference to Jews.22 As an article in the Yiddish paper Die Tsukunft (The Future) from the time of the trial noted, “When Lipski is sentenced to death, the ordinary people taunted other Jews ‘Lipski’!”23 One theory, therefore, was that the broad-shouldered man shouted “Lipski!” as a taunt or a threat because of Schwartz’s Jewish appearance. This might seem to suggest that the attacker was not himself Jewish. As it turns out, however, a recently discovered article has shown that Jews used the term Lipski as a derogatory insult as well, so we cannot assume that Stride’s broad-shouldered attacker was not Jewish.

  Many Ripperologists have accepted the theory that the Ripper was interrupted during the murder, thus explaining the notable lack of abdominal mutilations to Stride’s body. Specifically, it has been proposed that Louis Diemschutz interrupted the Ripper at his bloody work when his cart rolled into Dutfield’s Yard. Yet the problem with this theory is that there is a fifteen-minute gap between the assault witnessed by Schwartz at 12:45 and the discovery of the body by Diemschutz at 1 a.m.—ample time for the Ripper to have performed his typical postmortem mutilations. This conundrum has led some researchers to conclude that the broad-shouldered man was not the Ripper. Moreover, they argue, the attack witn
essed by Schwartz was too clumsy and heavy-handed to have been committed by the Ripper.

  There is a better explanation. The theory that the murderer was interrupted is probably correct, but in all likelihood, the interruption was not by Diemschutz, as is commonly argued, but instead by a much more obvious candidate—Schwartz himself. If the broad-shouldered man was the Ripper, then what Schwartz witnessed was almost certainly a murder in progress. The attacker must have been worried that Schwartz would return with the police, and he may also have feared that Stride’s screams would attract attention, either from the people inside the club or from the young sweethearts Fanny Mortimer claimed were standing “at the corner of the street, about 20 yards away.”24 Clearly, it was not an ideal situation for committing a murder and then lingering about to perform postmortem mutilations on the body. Still, the Ripper must have realized that he could not let Stride live to identify him. He probably waited until Schwartz left, dragged Stride into the alley, and killed her quickly, then left the scene immediately afterward. This would place the murder around 12:45 a.m. or shortly thereafter—in agreement with Dr. Blackwell’s estimate of the time of death as between 12:46 and 12:56 a.m.

  The only problem with this scenario is that Mortimer claimed that she went outside shortly before 12:45 a.m., after which time she didn’t see anybody at all. Of course, as with every witness that night, Mortimer’s estimate of the time might not have been accurate. She claimed that she went outside after she heard the “measured heavy stamp of a policeman passing the house on his beat,” and some researchers have suggested that this might have been P.C. Smith, patrolling his beat on Berner Street. But Dave Yost, in his article “Elizabeth Stride: Her Killer and Time of Death,” proposed that “the idea that she heard a constable is not necessarily correct.” Yost argued that the footsteps Mortimer heard might not have been those of P.C. Smith but instead were those of the murderer leaving the scene of the crime.25 This suggests the possibility that Mortimer went outside shortly after the murder occurred and after the murderer left.

  In summary, despite some lingering confusion over the exact sequence of events that night, we must endeavor to draw the simplest and most logical conclusions from the facts as we know them. Was Liz Stride a victim of Jack the Ripper? In my opinion, she almost certainly was. Other than the lack of abdominal mutilations, the Stride murder was generally consistent with the Ripper’s modus operandi. The killer severed Stride’s left carotid artery with a deep left-to-right cut and may have incapacitated her through strangulation.

  In my opinion, it is also very likely that the broad-shouldered man seen by Israel Schwartz was Jack the Ripper. It is important to note that the man seen by Schwartz was very similar in description to the man described by P.C. Smith. Schwartz described the man he saw as “about 30; ht, 5 ft 5 in; comp[lexion] fair; hair, dark; small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak, and nothing in his hands.”26 Whereas P.C. Smith described a man who was about twenty-eight years old, 5′7″ tall, with a cleanshaven and respectable appearance, wearing dark clothes, an overcoat, and a hard dark felt deerstalker hat.27 Schwartz and Smith may well have been describing the same person.

  These descriptions also matched that of a man who was seen wiping his hands shortly after the murder. According to the October 1 Star newspaper, “A man, when passing through Church Lane at about half past one, saw a man sitting on a doorstep and wiping his hands. As everyone is on the lookout for the murderer the man looked at the stranger with a certain amount of suspicion, where upon he tried to conceal his face. He is described as a man who wore a short jacket and a sailor’s hat.” Church Lane was adjacent to St. Mary Matfelon, near the spot where Emma Smith was accosted and where Polly Nichols was last seen alive. The “short jacket” and “sailor’s hat” essentially matches the broad-shouldered man’s dark jacket and black peaked cap.

  But more important, the above descriptions also matched the description of a man witnessed near the scene of a second murder that took place later the same night. For after Stride’s murder, the Ripper was apparently unsatisfied and struck again, less than one hour later.

  11

  Kate Eddowes

  Some five hours before the murder of Liz Stride, a woman named Kate Eddowes was making a drunken spectacle of herself somewhere in the vicinity of St. Botolph’s Church before passing out in a heap on the sidewalk on Aldgate High Street. Eddowes was another fairly typical East End prostitute. She was forty-six years old and had had a number of children with her common-law husband, Thomas Conway, before the two separated in 1881. The all-too-familiar reason given for the separation was Kate’s drinking habits. After the split, Kate moved in with a man named John Kelly at a lodging house on Flower and Dean Street. Eddowes sometimes earned a living by hawking goods on the street, and also, like Liz Stride, she reportedly did “cleaning amongst the Jews.”1

  At 8:30 p.m., City P.C. Louis Robinson came across Eddowes lying on the sidewalk near the Bull Inn, smelling “very strongly of drink,” with a crowd gathered around her. The constable asked if anyone knew the woman’s name or where she lived. No one answered, so he picked up the woman and tried to sit her against the wall, but she fell down sideways. Robinson and another constable then took her to Bishopsgate Police Station. Eddowes was so drunk that she couldn’t stand up without assistance, and when asked her name, she replied, “Nothing.”2 She was put in a cell to sober up. She remained asleep for several hours, but when the jailer George Henry Hutt checked on Eddowes shortly before midnight, she was awake and singing a song to herself. At 12:30 a.m., when Hutt checked on her again, Eddowes asked when she could be released. “When you are capable of taking care of yourself,” Hutt said. “I can do that now,” Kate replied. Hutt finally decided to release her a few minutes before 1 a.m. Eddowes asked what time it was. “Too late for you to get anything to drink,” Hutt told her.

  “Well, what time is it?” she persisted.

  “Just on one,” Hutt answered.

  “I shall get a damn fine hiding when I get home,” Kate said.

  “And serve you right,” Hutt said, opening the door to her cell. “You had no right to get drunk.”

  Eddowes was brought into the office to see the sergeant on duty, where she gave her name, falsely, as Mary Ann Kelly of 6 Fashion Street. Hutt then opened the door to the outside passage. “This way, missus. Please pull it to.” “All right,” Kate said. “Goodnight, old cock.”3 She left the Bishopsgate Police Station and stepped out into the black night.

  Half an hour later, three men had just exited a Jewish club called the Imperial at 16–17 Duke Street and stepped outdoors into a rainy night. Joseph Lawende, a traveling salesman in the cigarette trade, Joseph Hyam Levy, a butcher, and Henry Harris, a furniture dealer, stood outside, facing the Great Synagogue, a large blockish building with high arched windows that stared down at them from across the street. Originally founded in 1690 as the first Ashkenazi synagogue in London, the Great Synagogue was probably the most important Jewish landmark in the entire East End. It was, according to historian Toni L. Kamins, “not only a synagogue, but also the community’s center and its heart, and it was known throughout the world.”4 The synagogue was the domain of Hermann Adler, assistant to the chief rabbi of the British Empire, who (as previously mentioned) was one of the primary targets of ridicule by the antireligious socialists of the Berner Street Club and the Arbeter Fraint newspaper.

  When Lawende, Levy, and Harris left the Imperial around 1:35 a.m., they noticed a man and a woman standing across the street from them, near the entrance of Church Passage, a narrow alley that ran alongside the synagogue. Levy turned to Harris and remarked, “Look there, I don’t like going home by myself when I see those characters about.” He added, “The court ought to be watched.”5 Levy later said he assumed that “persons standing at that time in the morning in a dark passage were not up to much good.” Despite the fact that the couple was only fifteen feet away, Levy and
Harris admitted that they took little notice of them. Lawende, however, apparently got a better look. He later gave a description of the man to the police and claimed that Kate Eddowes was dressed the same as the woman he saw that night.

  At the other end of Church Passage, directly behind the synagogue, was a dark and desolate courtyard called Mitre Square. The court was roughly sixty feet square and dimly illuminated by only two lights—one freestanding gas lamp stood in front of the Kearley and Tonge tea and grocery warehouse on the west side of the square, and a second fixed lamp was attached to a building at the end of Church Passage in the east corner. Mitre Square was even darker than normal on this night because the freestanding lamp was deficient, either because “the quality of the gas supplied to the lamp was poor, gas pressure was low, or the mantle had corroded.”6 The southern corner of the square, a place frequently used by prostitutes, was blanketed in deep shadow.

  Mitre Square was just within the easternmost boundary of the City of London and was thus under the jurisdiction of the City of London Police Force. Two City Police constables patrolled beats that went into the square. One of these, a City P.C. named Edward Watkins, walked a circuitous beat that took him through Mitre Square about every fourteen minutes. A second P.C., named James Harvey, walked an adjacent beat that took him along Duke Street past the Great Synagogue and then to the end of Church Passage facing Mitre Square. When P.C. Watkins entered the square at 1:30 a.m., he did not see anything unusual. Likewise, when P.C. Harvey walked down Church Passage around 1:40 and briefly looked into the square, he noticed nothing out of the ordinary and went back up the passage to continue his beat. (Harvey’s estimate of the time came from the clock that was hanging outside the Postal Telegraph Office, Money Order, and Savings Bank at the corner of Duke Street.)