They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Smith was shut up by Baxter because his accidental evidence presented an instant dilemma. First, to say that he had told any senior officer he had seen a ‘respectable’ man with Stride would reveal the search of the Workingmen’s Club to be the sham it was. Second, both PC Smith and the fruit-seller claimed to have seen Stride with a man at precisely the same time. How can one of these men have credibility, while the other does not? To invest his suspect with credibility would have meant comparable credibility for Matthew Packer. Packer and his grapes would enter the picture, and this was something the System was lying its arse off to prevent.

  Inspector Reid came on next to tell everybody what they already knew. He was to be the last witness anybody would be hearing from for rather a long time. Naturally enough, he made no mention of the ‘respectable man’, whose appearance in Berner Street had become as ghost-like as Smith’s. Reid talked the talk without interruption: ‘A thorough search was made of the yard, but no trace could be found of any person likely to have committed the deed.’ This isn’t so surprising, because at that time he was in Mitre Square cutting out one of Catherine Eddowes’ kidneys. ‘A description was taken of the body and circulated round the surrounding stations by wire.’ All very admirable, but they weren’t looking for a dead body, they were looking for the man who had made it so. At what point did Reid become aware of the ‘respectable man’ in the deerstalker hat? He doesn’t say. Smith was evidently still keeping it to himself. ‘About 4.30 the body was removed to the mortuary.’ At last, after a wait of three and a half hours, Smith got the chance to proffer his ambulance.

  By definition, Reid, Arnold and West must have been in ignorance of Smith’s ‘suspect’ at the time of their search, otherwise they would have known it was doomed to futility. How could any of the people locked up at Dutfield’s Yard have murdered Eddowes? If they were in there, they were innocent.

  This seemed beyond the intellectual capacity of the police, and most especially Smith. Apart from a bit of descriptive ephemera referencing business at the morgue, Reid had just about wrapped it up for the cops: ‘Since then the police had made a house to house enquiry into the immediate neighbourhood, with the result that we have been able to produce the witnesses that have appeared before you.’

  To wit: five people who’d seen nothing; two doctors who were selectively blind; one inebriate who’d had a ‘vision’; one copper with a mouthful of twaddle; and one genuine witness who had discovered the body, Louis Diemschutz, who had been shut up.

  ‘At this stage,’ reported The Times, ‘the enquiry was adjourned to Tuesday week.’

  Such a hiatus was to prove nothing like long enough.

  9

  Rotten to the Core

  Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  The Metropolitan Police were anxious to persuade the public that the Ripper was a tall dwarf. On 19 October 1888 the front page of their weekly, the Police Gazette, featured a description of various Rippers sought. At the shorter end he was five feet five, and at the upper five feet eight. They of course knew that these descriptions were bullshit, because they knew Bro Crawford had successfully withheld a key description at Catherine Eddowes’ inquest. Whatever Joseph Lawende had seen was still a secret.

  The disclaimer in the first line, referring to woodcut sketches, is a reference to some illustrations published in the Telegraph, based on the description Matthew Packer gave the paper of the man who’d bought the grapes. They will be investigated later in this chapter.

  But the rest first.

  Description one is PC Smith’s version of the man he saw in Berner Street, and of whom he ‘made a report’ after nipping into the crime scene. Here he is minus his deerstalker, although he’s acquired a small moustache and a collar and tie.

  Description two is a stir-fry of Marshall and Brown as given in Wynne Baxter’s court, and is as worthless now as it was then. Brown saw a man and a woman in Fairclough Street, and while chewing his dinner in that same street he opened his window and heard shouts.

  Description three is a worthless amalgamation of Levy and Harris, the latter not called to give evidence, both of whom claimed to have seen two people, and is all that can be salvaged without revealing Lawende’s description, which was withheld from the jury.

  The readers of this rubbish are invited to look out for a man between five feet five and five feet eight inches tall, aged twenty-eight to thirty, with a small dark/fair moustache, of respectable or seafaring appearance, carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper, with a red neckerchief tied in a knot and not wearing a deerstalker hat. Anyone seeing such a man should immediately contact Scotland Yard. Anyone who’d seen anything different was unwelcome. Apart from Lawende, one man who had was the fruit-seller Matthew Packer, and his emergence well put the wind up Warren and his boys.

  If the house-to-house search was the reality Inspector Reid claimed, the police could not fail to have been aware of the little grocery shop two doors down from Dutfield’s Yard. The Evening News was certainly aware of it, and on Thursday, 4 October it ran Packer’s story.

  We are enabled to present our readers this morning with the most startling information that has yet been made public in relation to the Whitechapel murderer, and the first real clue that has been obtained to his identity. There are no suppositions or probabilities in the story we have to tell; we put forward nothing but simple facts, each substantiated by the evidence of a credible witness. What they go to establish is that the perpetrator of the Berner Street crime was seen and spoken to whilst in the company of his victim, within forty minutes of the commission of the crime, and only passed from the sight of the witness TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE MURDER and within ten yards of the scene of the awful deed.

  The Evening News prefaced Packer’s story with a description of how it came by it. It was sourced, it says, from two private detectives, ‘Messrs Grand and J.H. Batchelor, of 238, Strand’: ‘When they began their quest, almost the first place at which they sought evidence was at 44 Berner Street, the residence of Matthew Packer. His shop is an insignificant place, with a half-window in front, of the sort common in the locality, and most of his dealings are carried on through the lower part of the window case, in which his fruit is exposed for sale.’

  Before looking at what Packer is said to have told Grand and Batchelor, it’s as well to look at what the newspaper itself made of its source. On the day before publication, Wednesday, 3 October, the Evening News sent its own ‘Special Commissioner’ to Whitechapel to hear the story from Packer and his wife.

  WHERE THE MURDERER BOUGHT THE GRAPES

  INTERVIEW WITH THE MAN WHO TALKED WITH HIM

  Last evening was far advanced when I walked into the greengrocer’s little shop where the murdered woman was ‘treated’ to some grapes, late on Saturday night, by the inhuman monster who shortly afterwards shed her blood. The shop is kept by a quiet and intelligent fruiterer and his wife. They are both a little past their prime and are known as respectable and hardworking people. Their unpretending premises are situated just two doors down from the scene of the murder, and the presumption of any kind of ordinary intelligence would be that it was the very first place at which the detectives and the police would have made their enquiries. They did nothing of the sort, as the man’s simple straightforward narrative will show.

  The ‘Special Commissioner’ took a seat and asked Packer to tell him everything he knew about the events of Saturday night last. ‘Well, that’s soon told,’ was his answer.

  ‘I had been out with my barrow most of the day, but hadn’t done much business; and as the night came on wet, I went home and took the place of the missus in the shop here.’

  THE MURDERER AT THE WINDOW

  ‘Some time between half past eleven and twelve a man and woman came up Berner Street from the direction of Ellen Street, and stopped outside my window looking at the fruit. The man was about 30 to 35 years of age, medium height, and with a rather dark comp
lexion.’

  It’s hardly worth pointing out that everyone who bought from ‘the lower part of the window case’ at Packer’s shop would be stooping, and reduced to ‘medium height’. But let me not get in the way of his account.

  ‘He wore a black coat and a black soft hat. I am certain he wasn’t what I should call a working man or anything like us folks that live around here.’

  And what about the woman? ‘She was dressed in dark clothes, looked like a middle-aged woman, and carried a white flower in her hand. I saw that as plain as anything could be, and I am sure I would know the woman again.’

  Batchelor and Grand now come back into the picture, clearly conducting a test on behalf of their unknown ‘clients’ that could have stopped Packer in his tracks: ‘I was taken today to see the dead body of a woman in the Golden Lane Mortuary (she was Mrs Eddowes in the City Morgue), but I can swear that it wasn’t the woman that stood at my shop window, on Saturday night.’

  Thus, the subterfuge of trying to confuse Packer had failed.

  THE SOUND OF THE ASSASSIN’S VOICE

  ‘Well, they hadn’t stood there for more than a minute when the man stepped a bit forward, and said, “I say, old man, how do you sell your grapes?”

  ‘I answered, “Sixpence a pound the black ’uns, sir; and fourpence a pound the white ’uns.” Then he turned to the woman and said, “Which will you have, my dear, black or white? You shall have whichever you like best.”

  ‘The woman said, “Oh, then I’ll have the black ’uns, cos they look the nicest.”

  ‘“Give us half a pound of the black ones then,” said the man. I put the grapes in a paper bag and handed them to him.

  ‘He spoke like an educated man,’ said Packer, ‘but he had a loud, sharp sort of voice, and a quick commanding way with him.’

  THE MURDERER LAYING HIS PLANS

  ‘They stood near the gateway leading to the club for a minute or two,’ said Packer, ‘then they crossed the road and stood right opposite.’ For how long? ‘More than half an hour, I should say; so long that I said to my missus, “Why them people must be a couple a’ fools, to stand out there in the rain, when they might just as well have had shelter!”’

  They were still standing there when Packer and his wife went to bed, he couldn’t say exactly when, ‘but it must have been past midnight’, he said, ‘for the public houses were shut up’.

  ‘Well, Mr Packer,’ said the ‘Special Commissioner’, ‘I suppose the police came at once to ask you and your wife what you know about the affair, as soon as the body was discovered?’

  ‘The Police,’ replied Packer. ‘NO. THEY HAVEN’T ASKED ME A WORD ABOUT IT YET!!!’

  I doubt the exclamation marks or the capitals were Packer’s – rather this was a journalist pushing his scoop.

  Both the Metropolitan Police and subsequently Ripperology have dismissed Packer’s account, regarding the grapes as fantasy – ‘the Fable of the Grapes’, etc. – the same hallucination suffered by those who weren’t called to give evidence at Elizabeth Stride’s inquest.

  But some took Packer at his word. The first copper who did was Inspector Henry Moore, the forty-year-old son of a cop in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. Moore was sitting in his office on the morning of 4 October when a copy of the Evening News landed on his desk. Considering Reid’s claim to have knocked on every door in Berner Street, it must have come as quite a surprise. Who was this potentially vital witness called Packer? Having never heard of the fruit-seller or his grapes, Moore concluded that the police must somehow have missed him. It must surely have been startling to Moore to read of the reporter’s raw incomprehension at Packer’s response to his questions.

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t quite understand my question, Mr Packer,’ wrote the Evening News’s ‘Special Commissioner’. ‘Do you seriously mean to say that no Detective or policeman came to enquire whether you had sold grapes to anyone that night? Now please be very careful in your answer, for this may prove a serious business for the London Police.’

  A serious business indeed. Moore, being an honest copper, must have been stunned as he read Packer’s answer. ‘I’ve only got one answer,’ he said, ‘because it is the truth.’

  ‘EXCEPT A GENTLEMAN WHO IS A PRIVATE DETECTIVE, NO POLICEMAN OR DETECTIVE HAS EVER ASKED ME A SINGLE QUESTION, NOR COME NEAR MY SHOP TO FIND OUT IF I KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT THE GRAPES THE MURDERED WOMAN HAD BEEN EATING BEFORE HER THROAT WAS CUT!!!’

  Moore was understandably shocked. ‘I beg to report,’ he wrote post-haste to his superiors, ‘that as soon as the above [the Evening News article] came to my notice I at once directed Police Sergeant White H, to see Mr Packer, and take him to the mortuary with a view to the identification of the woman Elizabeth Stride, who it is stated was with the man who purchased grapes at his shop on the night of the 29th inst.’1

  So far, so good. It looked as if Packer’s interview in the press was going to pay off. Meantime, in comes Sergeant White to receive instructions. Clearly neither he nor Moore was yet in the anti-detection loop. Their induction into the Swanson school of policing would take place in the next few hours.

  Later that afternoon, having liaised with Swanson, Sergeant White would claim to have already interviewed Matthew Packer four days previously, on 30 September, recording the encounter in a ‘special book’ supplied for the enquiry. On that occasion Packer had supposedly given him the brush-off, categorically stating that he had neither heard nor seen anything.

  Now, this is curious. If it were true that White had already taken a statement from the fruit-seller, why didn’t he say anything about it when the Evening News was spread out on Inspector Moore’s desk? White would have had to have been a vegetable not to acquaint his superior with the statement he had already taken. If such a statement existed, there would have been uproar on either side of the desk – White furious that he’d been cuckolded by a newspaper, and Moore furious that Packer had maliciously tried to make a fool of the police.

  But White said nothing. He said nothing because he hadn’t interviewed Packer. I give as much credibility to White’s ‘special book’ as Moore did – none – because he wasn’t shown it. Neither he nor White made reference to it, because it didn’t yet exist. In the tradition of PC Smith at Berner Street, a retrospective ‘report’ was cooked up later that day. When it finally emerged at about four o’clock that same afternoon, its phoney account was unequivocal:

  I in company of P.C. Dolden, Criminal Investigation Dept., made enquiries at every house in Berner Street, Commercial Road on 30th, with a view to obtain information respecting the murder. Any information that I could obtain I noted in a book supplied to me for the purpose. About 9 a.m. I called at 44 Berner Street, and saw Matthew Packer, Fruiterer in a small way of business. I asked him what time he closed his shop on the previous night. He replied, half past twelve.

  He closed at 12.30, he said, because ‘in consequence of the rain it was no good for me to keep open’.

  I asked him if he saw anything of a man or woman going into Dutfield’s Yard, or anyone standing about the street about the time he was closing his shop? He replied, ‘No, I saw no one standing about neither did I see anyone go up the yard. I never heard anything suspicious or heard the slightest noise, and knew nothing about the murder until I heard of it in the morning.’2

  If any of this was remotely true, why wasn’t Inspector Moore immediately informed of it? There could have been scant point in dispatching White to Packer’s shop, and there inviting him to identify a dead body that he’d already insisted he’d never seen alive. Instead of sending White to escort Packer to the morgue, why was he not instructed to threaten the old bastard with prosecution? Either White or Matthew Packer was lying.3

  As the Evening News had succinctly put it to Packer: ‘please be very careful in your answer, for this may prove a serious business for the London Police’. Serious it was. If the lies were coming from Packer, he could have gone to prison. There were stringen
t laws against malicious defamation of Her Majesty’s Police:

  All acts which are calculated to interfere with the course of justice, are misdemeanours at the common law, punishable with imprisonment … this may be by preventing or persuading a witness from giving evidence … or by wilfully producing false evidence, or by publishing information that may prejudicially affect the minds of the juror [my emphasis] … any combination which has for its object the perversion of true justice, is a criminal conspiracy and indictable as such.4

  Packer’s revelations were published when Baxter’s court was in full swing. He had broken every law in the book. Either Packer was guilty of ‘criminal conspiracy’, or this statute applied to the entire hierarchy of Scotland Yard. According to Justice Fitzjames Stephen, ‘preventing or persuading a witness from giving evidence is a criminal conspiracy’. By all that is empiric, either Scotland Yard or this East End grocer was perverting the course of justice.

  Remaining mute about his ‘special book’, Sergeant White dutifully trotted off that morning to Berner Street, and saying no more to Packer than he had said to Moore, dutifully trotted back. ‘The Police Sergeant returned at noon,’ wrote Moore, ‘and acquainted me as in report attached (No 52983); in consequence of which Telegram No. 1 was forwarded to Chief Inspector Swanson and the Police Sergeant sent to Central Office to fully explain the facts.’ We don’t know what White told Swanson at Central Office, or what Swanson had to say about Packer’s ‘original statement’ as recorded in his ‘special book’, but I hazard that it was nothing at all. Because the ‘special book’ was one of Swanson’s many retrospective inventions, and until the intercession of the Evening News, the police had avoided Matthew Packer like the plague.