A SECOND MAN CAME OUT
of the doorway of the public house a few doors off, and shouting out some sort of warning to the man who was with the woman, rushed forward as if to attack the intruder. The Hungarian states positively that he saw a knife in the second man’s hand, but he waited to see no more. He fled incontinently [sic] to his new lodgings.29
Notwithstanding the state of his underwear, the Hungarian was able to offer a description: ‘About 30, rather stoutly built and wearing a brown moustache. The man who came at him with a knife he also describes. He says he was taller than the other but not so stout, and that his moustache was red.’
‘The police,’ continues the Star, ‘have arrested one man answering to the description the Hungarian furnished. This prisoner has not been charged, but is held for enquiries to be made.’ By the following day these had been made, and together with some other innocent nonentity with a moustache, ‘both were discharged during the day’.
Before these fruitless detentions were even made, the Evening Post had accurately summed up the Hungarian’s evidence: ‘The idea of a quarrel having preceded the murder is generally discredited.’30 Too right it was, because in terms of Jack the Ripper, such a scenario is risible. We don’t know which of these persons the Ripper is meant to have been, but Jack did not hunt drunk, and the last thing you would have seen in his hand was a knife. People tend to run away from knives, as did this unnamed foreigner, and tipping off his victims wasn’t Jack’s style.
What the Hungarian had seen (and almost certainly not in Berner Street) was no more than a typical Whitechapel fracas. ‘I saw lots of squabbles and rows,’ deposed PC Lamb, ‘such as one sees on Saturday nights.’ The inebriate waddling in front of this supposed witness could not have looked less like the world’s number-one murderer, and no newspaper believed he was.
By now the unnamed foreigner had been comprehensively dismissed by the police and the press. He was over. He was wrapping cod and chips. That should have been the end of him, and it would have been had it not been for Swanson’s desperate efforts to dispose of Matthew Packer.
Far from disappearing, the Hungarian was about to get a Christian name. This anonymous bit-part player was to be elevated into a star. From the management that gave you ‘the Nautical Man’, would you now please put your hands together and give salutations to ‘Israel Schwartz’, the witness who never was.
With ‘Israel Schwartz’, Shifty Nib scaled new heights, abandoning any notion of reality to his muse. A yard of compromised ink was squandered on the Hungarian’s story, characters fleshed out, and there is even a bit of colourful dialogue. Our police dramatist re-conjures the scene to a place that couldn’t have been Dutfield’s Yard, and it is here that the previously drunken, but now sober, suspect stops and speaks to the woman.
‘The man tried to pull the woman into the street,’ pens Swanson, ‘but he turned her round and threw her down on the footway: & the woman screamed 3 times, but not very loudly.’31
It had to be a ‘little scream’ to explain why it wasn’t heard by Mrs Mortimer, or anyone in the club. Swanson now becomes positively inspired. ‘On crossing to the opposite side of the street he saw a second man lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road, “Lipski”, & then Schwartz walked away, but finding he was followed by the second man, he ran as far as the railway arch but the man did not follow so far.’32
At this juncture there’s a marginal note: ‘(The use of “Lipski” increases my belief that the murderer was a Jew)’.
Schwartz cannot say whether the two men were together or known to each other. Upon being taken to the mortuary Schwartz identified the body of Stride as that of the woman he had seen & he thus describes the first man who threw the woman down: – age about 30 ht 5ft 5in comp, fair hair, dark small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered, dress, dark jacket & trousers, black cap with peak; had nothing in his hands.33
Swanson’s task was to confuse. If anything of this rotten little copper’s invention had value, which it doesn’t, ‘Israel Schwartz’ would indeed be a formidable witness. ‘Schwartz’ was claimed to have been on the scene later than Matthew Packer and PC Smith (whose creature in a deerstalker is also wiped out), and he had seen Stride assaulted fifteen minutes before she was murdered. Although ‘the knife’ has evaporated in Shifty’s account, she was thrown brutally to the ground, and she screamed. ‘Schwartz’ apparently enhanced his veracity with a positive identification of Stride at the morgue. If the whole of it wasn’t a preposterous fantasy, such a witness might justifiably put Packer in the shade, perhaps explaining why he was kept out of court in favour of ‘Schwartz’.
The only problem with this hypothesis is that ‘Israel Schwartz’ was no more called to give evidence than was Packer.
Swanson cobbled up this bullshit on 19 October, four days before Baxter reconvened his brothel on the 23rd. Given the dynamic of his evidence, ‘Schwartz’ would naturally be first witness up. Should have been, but wasn’t. Having served his diversionary purpose he disappeared, morphing back into a distraction that had long been rejected by the police and the press alike. As early as 7 October, the Sunday People had reported that Swanson’s flight of fancy was in fact ‘a man and his wife quarrelling’, and ‘no notice had been taken of it’. The Hungarian may well have seen a row, but not where he thought he had. There was no ‘railway arch’ anywhere near Berner Street – ‘Schwartz’ would have had to run the length of it, turned into Ellen Street, then Phillip Street, and finally Pinchin Street, before finding one. Nobody else in Berner Street that night saw any sign of a woman in jeopardy or anyone running away from the scene. Nobody saw the drunken man, or the knife man, or the second man lighting his pipe. And nobody heard anybody shout ‘Lipski.’
The Met knew all about ‘Israel Schwartz’ on 1 October. Why then put out false statements, attributed to the still-secret description of Lawende, while ignoring the ‘statement’ of this unique witness? Why does it take until 19 October for Swanson to become interested in the man with the red moustache?
Ripperology rushes in with the mirrors. Among popular excuses for ‘Schwartz’s’ failure to show at Baxter’s court are ‘translation problems’. But if ‘Schwartz’s’ story couldn’t be translated, from where did Swanson get his statement? ‘I questioned Schwartz very closely’ is recorded from Inspector Abberline. And it wouldn’t have been difficult – the Victorian courts were a common haunt for translators. Not three weeks earlier, the East London Observer reported: ‘On the application of Chief Inspector Abberline of Scotland Yard, Mr Saunders [a ferociously anti-Semitic magistrate] again remanded the accused. He also allowed Abberline to interview the accused, with the Interpreter, Mr Savage.’ Where was Mr Savage now? As Bro Baxter had said himself – before his topical induction into the Mystic Tie – ‘I’ve never heard of evidence being withheld from a Coroner’s Court.’ Now he was hearing of it wholesale. Failing Mr Savage (and three other interpreters listed in Swanson’s private notebook) there was always Mr Karamelli, who the previous year had been the interpreter in another famous East End case; which brings us back to ‘Lipski’.
I don’t want to veer too far from ‘Schwartz’, but the politics of the Lipski case are not without relevance. I refer to ‘Schwartz’ in quotes because there’s no hard evidence that that was even his name. I think a bit of subliminal creep may have been at work in Shifty’s creative process. Mix Israel Lipski with endemic anti-Semitism, and you’re not far off a Christian name for ‘Israel Schwartz’. Be that as it may, the two Israels were of similar circumstances and age, poor as mice and ignorant of English. Lipski rented rooms from a Mrs Miriam Angel in Batty Street, where he tried to set up a business in the attic making walking sticks. Part of the process required nitric acid. Lipski went out and bought some, hiring a pair of local ne’er-do-wells to assist him. On 28 June 1887, the day these two men came to her house, Mrs Angel was done to death by being forced to
swallow nitric acid. Lipski, suffering the effects of a similar draft, was discovered unconscious under her bed. A cashbox was involved, and one of the ne’er-do-wells had scuttled off prompt to Birmingham.
The policeman who was later to hound and give a name to ‘Leather Apron’ was put in charge of the case. Detective Sergeant Thick arrested Lipski, and he was put up for trial in front of Mr Justice Fitzjames Stephen. It was an inauspicious choice for the Jew. Fitzjames Stephen (who would later try Florence Maybrick) was losing his marbles, and ignoring evidence favourable to Lipski, he fixated on the word ‘bed’, convincing himself that this was a crime motivated by lust. The accused, he reasoned, had seen Mrs Angel through a window and, using his acid as a threatening inducement, had barged in demanding sex. After ravishing her, he supposedly drank the acid himself in a fit of guilt.
Lipski was sentenced to death. But because of glaring deficiencies in the indictment, public opinion shifted in the Jew’s favour, and the case raised unwonted debate. W.T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette was predictably among the first in Fleet Street to champion the convicted man’s innocence. Careers were suddenly on the line. Home Secretary Matthews and Justice Fitzjames Stephen were passing anxious hours on the eve of the execution – to hang or not to hang, that was the question – when, to the relief of all concerned, Lipski unexpectedly ‘confessed’. Next day the bell at Newgate Prison tolled, and the almost certainly innocent Lipski met his God.
The corks came out in Whitehall, and Matthews kept his job. In his excellent account of the case, The Trials of Israel Lipski (1984), Martin Friedland writes: ‘It seems likely that Lipski’s confession saved Matthews’ political career.’ Never mind the Jew with the broken neck, there was general congratulation amongst the Establishment that Matthews had delivered a knockout blow to Stead and his Pall Mall Gazette, which had relentlessly mocked the System in its defence of the accused. Now it was Stead’s turn for the pillory, and the authorities revelled in it. Matthews’ star rose, and he was to remain Home Secretary for the next five years, managing to navigate a little upset or two with the Whitechapel Fiend, and finally berthing in the House of Lords as a useless Lord Llandaff.
‘A later Under Secretary of State, Sir Edward Troup,’ writes Friedland, ‘certainly thought Lipski’s confession saved Matthews. A storm of protest was raised, which would almost certainly have driven him from office had not Lipski on the eve of his execution confessed to the murder. Moreover, it is possible that if Matthews, the only Catholic in the Cabinet, had resigned, the government would have fallen and Home Rule for Ireland would have been introduced. Incredible as it may seem, then, the confession of a poor immigrant Jew, who could not even speak English, may have been a factor in the future of the United Kingdom, having repercussions even today in the troubles of Northern Ireland.’34
This is the dispassionate opinion of a professor of law.
If Friedland thinks an innocuous Jew like Lipski could have had this impact, becoming a factor in the future of Britain itself, imagine, if you will, the impact a Freemasonic monster might have had on the ruling elite. The exposure of my candidate would have had catastrophic consequences all the way up to the Crown. Lipski wasn’t in the same league.
19 October 1888 was a trying day at the Yard. To coincide with Swanson’s overview of that day, the Met formally put an end to Packer in the Police Gazette: ‘The woodcut sketches, purporting to resemble the persons last seen with the murdered woman, which have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, were not authorised by the police.’ Descriptions of ‘approved Rippers’ followed. They were the twenty-eight-year-old five-foot-five-inch concoction, and the Nautical Man with the red handkerchief tied in a knot.
A composite figure was stalking the East End. He was an inky-fingered, seafaring, short-arsed Israelite without a deerstalker (and you couldn’t miss him, because he’d be hobbling due to his uncomfortable boots). The introduction of ‘Schwartz’ as a wedge to rid it of Packer was to cause the Met more problems than might have been imagined, and any day now Anderson and Warren would be caught telling some serious lies.
On 23 October Baxter at last reconvened his worthless inquest. The Bro’s summing-up must represent a milestone in judicial duplicity. About a third of it was apportioned to sorting out the problem of Mrs Mary Malcolm, whose perplexing input was written off as a ‘comedy of errors’. ‘The first difficulty that presented itself,’ opined Baxter, ‘was the identification of the deceased. It has since been clearly proved that she [Mary Malcolm] was mistaken, notwithstanding the visions which were simultaneously vouchsafed at the hour of her [Stride’s] death to her husband.’
Baxter yabbered on in a miasma of half-truth, no truth, and junk. Despite considerable press interest, Matthew Packer was never mentioned. There were no grapes, no grape-stalks, not even a fruit-stained handkerchief. So anxious was the stooge to avoid mentioning the fruit-seller, he actually moved Stride from the crime scene, relocating her a hundred yards away from the International Club to the other end of Berner Street.
‘At 12.30 p.m.,’ he warbled (confusing p.m. with a.m.), ‘the constable on the beat [Smith] saw the deceased in Berner Street standing on the pavement a few yards from Commercial Street’ (confusing Commercial Street with Commercial Road).
Such flagrant disregard for established fact was no problem for Bro Baxter. He had a jury to deceive. The bewitched coroner went on to compare the wardrobe of PC Smith’s man with those of Brown’s man and Marshall’s man – and of course this went nowhere. A variety of hats were on offer, including a cheeky little nautical number with a peak ‘like a sailor’s’.
Irrespective of the ink lavished on him by Swanson, the man supposedly seen by ‘Israel Schwartz’ didn’t get a look-in, any more than ‘Schwartz’ himself. The Hungarian and his ‘statement’ were gone like dust on the October wind. Is this not most curious? ‘Schwartz’ is either an important witness, or he is not. If he isn’t important, why was his suspect featured in the Police Gazette only four days before? And why was he still there, on the front cover of the issue on the very day of this court? You can’t have it both ways, and truth tolerates neither. The only place ‘Israel Schwartz’ survived was in Swanson’s deceit. Like ‘the Ink-Stained Journalist’ and the soon-to-be-premiered ‘Insane Medical Student’, ‘Schwartz’ was a distraction, and far from functioning as a witness, he was soon to become a nuisance.
On and on waffled Baxter, finally noting the similarity between ‘this case and the mysteries which had recently occurred in the neighbourhood’. Poised to wrap it up, he now thanked the cops: he was ‘bound to acknowledge’, he said, ‘the great attention which Inspector Reid and the police had given to the case’.
Establishment gratitude wasn’t limited to Baxter. Within weeks, Inspector Reid, Sergeant White and PC Dolden (who was supposedly present for Packer’s first ‘statement’) were all ‘recommended for reward’ by Robert Anderson.35 It couldn’t have got more rotten, and with her death formulaically attributed to a ‘person or persons unknown’, the inquest into the murder of Elizabeth Stride was over.
Jack had won another hand, and with cause the press reflected public outrage: ‘The “Bitter Cry” of London is only now beginning to be heard. The Police have become a laughing-stock. People taunt them in the street as they pass.’36 By now Warren’s destruction of the evidence on the wall at Goulston Street was a scandal in flood. His renegade loyalties were leaching dangerously into government. ‘The Home Secretary goes on in his own blundering stupid way,’ scoffed the Telegraph. ‘What do the police do with all the clues?’ demanded the Yorkshireman. ‘The Whitechapel murders have furnished them with clues enough to hang a whole community.’37 On top of it all was Matthew Packer. Nobody but a zoo animal could have been unaware of the fruit-seller.
On the very day Baxter wound up his court, Anderson wrote to the Home Office. Now the verdict was in and the heat was off, he decided to risk sending in Swanson’s ‘overview’.
Whoever had the disagreeable task
of reading this gibberish isn’t known, but it was probably the Permanent Under Secretary of State, Sir Godfrey Lushington. Well aware of Packer, he must have been completely baffled by the introduction of this hitherto-never-mentioned gentleman called ‘Schwartz’. If it were true that he’d identified Stride at the morgue, and had seen her ten minutes before the deed that put her there, he was God’s own witness.
But it wasn’t true, and within days Warren and Anderson would be obliged to wriggle on Swanson’s hook.
Packer wasn’t the only vital witness kept out of Bro Baxter’s court. At about 12.45 a.m. on 30 September Mrs Fanny Mortimer had been out on her doorstep for about half an hour.38 She didn’t see a man with a knife or a red moustache, or a woman lightly screaming as she was thrown to the ground, but she did notice a man walking briskly past a few minutes before 1 a.m. He had a black bag, and considering this suspicious, she later reported him to the police. His name was Leon Goldstein, and Swanson attempted to navigate his existence with dialogue worthy of Tweedledum. ‘At about 1 a.m. 30th,’ he writes, ‘Leon Goldstein of 27 Christian Street Commercial Road, called at Leman Street & stated that he was the man who passed down Berner Street, with a black bag at that hour.’ In other words, Goldstein called at Leman Street police station and reported himself walking down Berner Street at the very moment he was doing it. For no apparent reason. He just popped into Leman Street to report himself before Mrs Mortimer had reported him.
That’s what Swanson writes. What it actually means is that Goldstein was walking down Berner Street at about 1 a.m. on 30 September, and a day later, on 1 October, he called at Leman Street police station to identify himself as the individual Mrs Mortimer had seen walking briskly with the black bag.39
So why doesn’t Shifty say so? The answer is because Leon Goldstein in Berner Street at 1 a.m. on 30 September screws ‘Israel Schwartz’. A Home Office note in the margin asks an edifying question: ‘Who saw this man go down Berner Street?’ It’s a question in want of any known answer, because it blows ‘Schwartz’ right out of the water. Neither Mortimer nor Goldstein saw anything of any fracas, any Hungarian running away from it, or heard anyone shout ‘Lipski.’ Swanson was trapped in a classic liar’s dilemma. On the one hand he must talk ‘Schwartz’ up as a surrogate for Packer, while at the same time back-pedalling in case anyone asked why ‘Schwartz’ didn’t appear in court. The struggle to present such a contradiction reduces Swanson’s prose to a peculiar species of pidgin English: ‘At the same time account must be taken of the fact that the throat only of the victim was cut in this instance which measured by time, considering meeting (if with a man other than Schwartz saw) the time for agreement & the murderous action would I think be a question of so many minutes, five at least, ten at most, so that I respectfully submit it is not clearly proved that the man Schwartz saw is the murderer.’40
They All Love Jack Page 36