Baxter cut to the chase. They needed to deal with the matter of the grapes as quickly as they had done with Diemschutz. The most notable absence, of course, was Packer himself. Here was a fruit-seller who lived two doors from Dutfield’s Yard. If true, his evidence was of incalculable importance. Why was his story not immediately put to the test of a jury? If he was lying, he could be ignominiously dismissed. If he was lying maliciously, he could be put into prison. But he wasn’t called.
Instead, Phillips told the court that subsequent to his last examination of Stride’s body, he had returned to the mortuary and made a more careful examination of the roof of the victim’s mouth. ‘I could not find any injury or absence of anything from the mouth.’ What was he talking about? Her teeth or her tongue? Having set the scene, he went on to deal with Packer in the same vein. ‘I have also carefully examined the handkerchiefs,’ he said, ‘and have not found any blood on them. I believe the stains on the larger one were fruit stains. I am convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’
A sigh of relief must have gone up in certain quarters. Grapes had officially been denied. But Phillips was flirting at the very hem of perjury. Notice how the cunning bastard phrases it: ‘I am convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’
So the fuck what? No pith or peel wouldn’t mean that she hadn’t eaten an orange. No shells wouldn’t mean that she hadn’t eaten eggs. What about the flesh of a grape? Phillips found no evidence of seeds or skins because Stride had spat them out. Rather than dismissing the grapes, he’s inadvertently corroborating Inspector Walter Dew. ‘Detectives searching every inch of the ground,’ wrote Dew, ‘came upon a number of grape skins and stones.’26 Choosing a more appropriate word than ‘seeds’, he called them ‘stones’, because that’s what they were like: like baubles of grit, which together with the skins Stride spat out before wiping her lips on the handkerchief. Was Baxter not even slightly curious about the origin of these ‘fruit stains’, and what sort of fruit had caused them?
Drip by poisonous drip, we shall establish that grapes were indeed clutched fast in Stride’s right hand – unless, of course, Inspector Dew, like PC Lamb, Diemschutz, Kosebrodski, Mortimer and now Packer, was indulging in some inexplicable deceit. Were they all lying? Or was someone else? It was the reality of these grapes sold by Packer that was to send the authorities scurrying like rodents with an aversion to the light. Within hours it would cause Bro Baxter to shut down his lousy little court. Pending the slammed door, a bit of diversionary nonsense over Stride’s right hand was put up for the punters: ‘Have you formed any opinion how the right hand of the deceased was covered with blood?’ ‘No,’ said Phillips – but wait for the fairy – ‘that is a mystery.’ That word, beloved of Warren’s boys and Ripperology alike, was inevitable. It was transparently no ‘mystery’ at all, and Bro Dr Bagster Phillips transparently knew it.
Mr Johnson was the assistant at the postmortem conducted by Phillips and Blackwell. Why was he not recalled to clear the ‘mystery’ up? He, Lamb and Diemschutz had made it clear that Stride’s right arm was across her breast. He undid her dress to ‘see if the chest was warm’. He couldn’t have unbuttoned it if there was a dead arm lying across it. ‘I did not move the head at all, and left it exactly as I had found it,’ he said. But he had obviously moved the arm. According to Blackwell, blood was ‘trodden about’ – in Diemschutz’s estimate, ‘quite two quarts on the ground’. Four pints is a lot of blood, and I suggest that when Stride’s right hand went down onto the ground, blood would have saturated the back of it. When Johnson had finished, he picked up the arm with its now bloodstained hand, and put it back where he had found it. But Johnson wasn’t recalled, and the ‘mystery’ was sustained.
It is apparent that different questions were tailored to different days, as were different questions to different witnesses. Baxter wanted one lot to deny they’d seen the hand, and the other to see only what the Metropolitan Police required them to have seen. Error was therefore frequent. It was an ungainly question from Baxter that put Phillips back on the spot: ‘Does the presence of cachous in her hand show that it was done suddenly, or would it simply be a muscular grasp?’
Come again?
A ‘muscular grasp’ is precisely how Sir Keith Simpson characterised cadaveric spasm, and is consistent with a variety of statements in the newspapers, including that of Diemschutz. But no such description had been given in this court (Blackwell had said the hand was open), so where did Baxter get it? Was it part of the particulars Reid had made available in the middle of the night, emerging here as a bit of a faux pas? Whatever its provenance, Phillips responded with obfuscation: ‘I cannot say.’ Anyone on the jury with an IQ into double figures must by now have been confused. Were the hands open, or in a ‘muscular grasp’? If Phillips didn’t know, who did? Anybody hoping for clarification was to be disappointed shortly after, when Dr Blackwell was recalled. ‘I have little to say,’ declared the doc, ‘except to confirm Doctor Phillips’ statement,’ adding, ‘I removed the cachous from the left hand which was nearly open.’
That can’t be true, because he was already holding them. Phillips had stated, under oath: ‘I took them [the cachous] from her hand and handed them to Doctor Blackwell.’ They can’t both have taken the cachous from Stride’s left hand and handed them to each other. If Phillips took them, how could he be in ignorance of the hand’s appearance? Was it open, or clenched? But never mind the details; Baxter certainly didn’t.
‘The packet had been lodged between the thumb and fourth finger,’ lied Blackwell, ‘and had almost become hidden. That accounted for it not having been seen by several of those around.’ It accounted for no such thing. Plenty of people had seen the cachous – Diemschutz, Kosebrodski, Mortimer, and who knows how many of the other thirty who were never called as witnesses. Dr Phillips had said that a number of them were spilled ‘in the gutter’. Clearly, the visibility of the cachous was not the problem. The problem was trying to pretend that nobody had seen the grapes.
Blackwell wasn’t as seasoned a performer as Phillips, who had piggybacked out of a previous inquest on Baxter’s fantasy Frankenstein with his bag of wombs. No such exit presented itself here, and attempting to square the circle of an open hand and a muscular grasp, Blackwell proposed a compromise that included both. Abandoning his previous deposition, he said, ‘I believe the hand relaxed after the injuries were inflicted, as death would arise from fainting owing to the rapid loss of blood.’
At last we get a concession to the clenched hands. For a hand to ‘relax’ after death, Blackwell is accepting that it was in some way stressed before it. Clenching hands is precisely the point, and we’re back with cadaveric spasm – which, incidentally, is a permanent phenomenon, immune to fainting, and triggered only by sudden death itself.
Were Baxter an honest agent he would have stood these conflicting physicians down pending a comprehensive re-evaluation. Certain witnesses would have to be recalled, and depositions taken from those hitherto excluded. But Baxter wasn’t an honest agent. He was a deluded little footnote who considered it his occult duty to keep these witnesses out.
Baxter had become a figure of fun after Chapman. After Stride he should have been laughed into obscurity. By stealth and selection the wretched pantomime wore on. In came Clerk to the Swedish Church Sven Olsson, to confirm Stride’s nationality and age. She was born near Gothenburg, and she was forty-five (sic). Sven was followed by a worthless effort called William Marshall. He’d seen Stride in Berner Street talking to a man wearing a hat, ‘something like a sailor would wear’. He was a standard short-arse, about five foot six, wearing a ‘small black coat and dark trousers’. This was heady stuff.
BAXTER: Are you quite sure this is the woman?
MARSHALL: Yes, I am. I did not take much notice of them. I was standing by my door, and what attracted my attention first was her stand
ing there some time, and he was kissing her. I heard the man say to the deceased, ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’
The shortcomings in Marshall’s evidence render it all but irrelevant. He says there was no lamp nearby, and he couldn’t see the face of the man – so how could he be so sure of the face of the woman? On 1 October, reporting the mob accruing in Berner Street, the Globe wrote: ‘The rough crowd who met there last night could barely see one another’s faces.’
Marshall’s certainty must be assessed in the context of the testimony given by Stride’s own sister, Mrs Mary Malcolm, who had spoken at a previous session. She was Baxter’s kind of witness – miles away and fast asleep at the time of the murder – but Mary had had a ‘premonition’.
BAXTER: Did you not have some special presentiment about your sister?
MARY MALCOLM: About 1.20 a.m. on Sunday morning I was lying on my bed when I felt a kind of pressure on my breast, and then I felt 3 kisses on my cheek. I also heard the kisses, and they were quite distinct.
Could this be the breakthrough they were all waiting for? Like Marshall, she’d been to the mortuary to identify the murdered woman. ‘When I first saw the body I did not at first recognise it, as I only saw it by gas-light’ – which was a better look than Marshall got. On the following day she returned, stating, ‘but the next day I recognised it’.
No she did not. Not that Baxter gave a toss, but she wasn’t even Stride’s sister. It was left to the Central News Agency to sort it out. ‘It will be remembered,’ it reported, ‘that Mrs Mary Malcolm swore positively that the deceased was her sister, Elizabeth Watts, who she had last seen on Thursday preceding the murder. The Central News caused enquiries to be made, and as the result has succeeded in finding Elizabeth Watts alive and well in the person of Mrs Stokes, the hard-working, respectable wife of a bricklayer living in Tottenham.’
The fact that this woman got into the court while the fruit-seller Matthew Packer was kept out of it tells us all we need to know about Baxter’s ‘inquest’. Mary Malcolm was a nut, ‘a gin-soaked virago’ according to one press report, whose ‘transparent objective was to turn the catastrophe to account somehow’.27
James Brown was next up. He also claimed to have seen Stride talking to a man, about an hour later than Marshall. Baxter was now scraping the barrel – this pair weren’t even in Berner Street. ‘I saw a man and woman standing by the wall in Fairclough Street. As I passed them I heard the woman say, “No, not tonight, some other night.”’
Such a fastidious selection of her clientèle must have been rare for an impoverished prostitute struggling to find coin for her doss. Whores don’t flirt, they fuck for money. It makes one wonder what she was doing on the streets at all. But then, this wasn’t the right street, and it probably wasn’t the right woman either. Be that as it may, Brown’s testimony allowed the police to once again hammer home the notion of the Ripper being vertically impaired. This one was five feet seven inches tall.
The next time Brown made an association between this unidentified couple and the murder was also aural. By now he was sitting in his room in Fairclough Street eating his supper. ‘When I heard screams of “Police” and “Murder” I opened the window but could not see anyone and the screams ceased.’ Brown’s evidence was heard with barely a murmur. It was utterly worthless.
We come now to the penultimate witness, hauled up in an attempt to short-circuit Packer. Police Constable William Smith made deposition on 5 October, the day after the fruit-seller’s newspaper revelations. Smith’s contribution is so patently fabricated that I’m going to reproduce virtually every word of it as it appeared in The Times.
Police Constable William Smith, 425 H, said that on Saturday night his beat went past Berner Street. It was an ill-lit geography of alleyways and streets, finally grinding back to the starting point in Commercial Street and took him between 25 minutes and half an hour. ‘I was last in Berner St at about half past 12 or 12.35. At 1 o’clock I went to Berner Street on my ordinary round. I saw a crowd of people outside the gates of No. 40. I did not hear any cries of ‘police’.
When I got there I saw Constables 12 H [Collins] and 252 H [Lamb]. I then saw the deceased, and, looking at her, found she was dead. I then went to the station for an ambulance. Dr Blackwell’s assistant came just as I was going away.
BAXTER: When you were in Berner Street the previous time did you see any one?
PC SMITH: Yes, a man and a woman.
BAXTER: Was the latter anything like the deceased?
PC SMITH: Yes, I saw her face. I have seen the deceased in the mortuary, and feel certain it is the same person.
BAXTER: Did you see the man who was talking to her?
PC SMITH: Yes; I noticed he had a newspaper parcel in his hand. It was about 18 in. in length and 6 in. or 8 in. in width. He was about 5ft 7in. as far as I could say. He had on a hard felt deerstalker hat of dark colour and dark clothes. I did not see much of the face of the man except that he had no whiskers.
BAXTER: Can you form any idea as to his age?
PC SMITH: About 28 years. He was of respectable appearance. I noticed the woman had a flower in her jacket.
A brief exchange ensued over the direction Smith had taken out of Berner Street. And then Baxter asked about the weather: ‘When did it last rain before 1 o’clock?’ Smith replied: ‘To the best of my recollection it rained very little after 11 o’clock.’
Baxter’s question about the rain isn’t as random as it might seem. It is in fact important in respect of discrediting Matthew Packer’s statement to the Evening News. ‘It will be remembered,’ the News had written on 4 October, quite independently of Packer, ‘that the night was very wet, and Packer naturally noticed the peculiarity of the couple standing so long in the rain. He observed to his wife, “What fools those people are to be standing in the rain like that.”’
The time in question was around half past twelve, just about the time PC Smith said he turned into Berner Street. Was it raining or not? If you want to discredit Packer, it wasn’t. If you want to believe Packer, it was. It’s a tough call to be sure of the weather on a lousy Sunday 130 years ago. But at one o’clock half a mile away it was pissing down. According to Lawende, it was the rain that delayed him and his pals at the Imperial Club. His evidence is supported by the Daily Telegraph, which reported of Stride: ‘Her dress, which was saturated with rain [my emphasis], was of a common black material.’28
Even if Packer had invented the rain, he could hardly have extended his fiction into the columns of the Telegraph. Either Packer, Lawende and the Telegraph are right, or Constable Smith is. In reality, he was saying what he’d been told to say. But he was about to drop a clanger. The foreman of the jury asked, ‘Was the man or the woman acting in a suspicious manner?’
‘No,’ replied Smith.
‘Do you see many prostitutes hanging about in Berner St?’
Again he answered in the negative: ‘No, very few.’
INSPECTOR REID: Did you see these people more than once?
PC SMITH: No. When I saw the deceased lying on the ground I recognised her at once and made a report of what I had seen.
I beg your pardon? He saw Stride talking to a man, and thirty minutes later he saw her again with her throat cut. And he ‘made a report’?
This was inadvertent dynamite, and Baxter instantly moved in to defuse it. Dismissing Smith without another word, he recalled another previously interrogated irrelevance by the name of Michael Kidney. Kidney had lived with Stride for about three years, and had complained in his earlier deposition of going to Leman Street ‘for a detective to act on my information, but I could not get one’.
But never mind that. Baxter had whipped out a hymn book. ‘Have you ever seen this hymn book before?’ Yeah, sure he had, he recognised it as belonging to Stride – and so the fuck what? Recognition of a hymn book had no relevance whatsoever.
If Baxter had held up Wycliffe’s first-ever English Bible it would have had no relevance
either. What was vitally relevant is that PC Smith had claimed to have recognised Stride on the deck in Dutfield’s Yard, and Baxter was trying to hide it.
‘I recognised her at once,’ he said. The woman he’d seen less than thirty minutes before with the ‘respectable’ man was now very dead. The man, therefore, could be nothing other than a prime suspect, if not her actual killer. And yet Smith raised no alarm. He says he ‘made a report’. To whom did he make it, and when? Did he drop it into the nearest postbox?
Why was not Arnold immediately informed? Instead of wasting time harassing Jews, why wasn’t every copper in Whitechapel out looking for the man in the deerstalker hat? Was anyone at Dutfield’s Yard standing under such a hat? PC Smith could have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. For here was a copper popping into a crime scene who might just have seen Jack the Ripper. And yet he’s struck speechless, says nothing to nobody, not to 12 H Collins, not even to 252 H Lamb. Instead, before any doctor has arrived, this turnip in a helmet singularly diagnoses death, and waddles off into the darkness to ‘make a report’.
I don’t believe a word of it. This wasn’t a random drunk in an alley; for all the world, as everyone at the scene must have been aware, it was another Ripper hit. Nobody needed a report, and nobody needed an ambulance. What PC Lamb urgently needed, right here, right now, was help. It’s why he blew his bloody whistle. He had a yard full of people – twenty or thirty, he said – at this point (based on police activity) all potential suspects, and a crowd was already beginning to assemble in the street. Lamb was all alone. ‘When further assistance came,’ he said, ‘a constable was put in charge of the front door.’
Why was not PC Smith commandeered? This was his beat, his murdered body, his responsibility, and everyone was running around in circles looking for police. Again, I don’t believe a word of it. The yarn Smith had been put up to tell is as risible as it is crude. Not a single witness mentions seeing Smith at Dutfield’s Yard. The only time he is mentioned is when he couldn’t be found. ‘When I was fetched,’ said Lamb, ‘I was going in the direction of Berner Street. Constable Smith is on the Berner Street beat.’ But it wasn’t Smith who ran with Lamb. It was a copper on fixed-point duty at the end of Grove Street. Nobody saw Smith anywhere. Somehow he remained as elusive as his invention in the hat.
They All Love Jack Page 31