It was in these circumstances that Mr Harris, the secretary, on 16 September solicited the help of the Home Secretary. He requested Matthews to augment their reward fund or state his reasons for declining to do so but Leigh-Pemberton, replying for the Home Office the next day, merely repeated that the practice of offering rewards had been discontinued because they tended to produce more harm than good. Disappointed, the committee wrote again on 24 September, inviting the Home Secretary to attend a meeting of their committee to explain his refusal of a reward. They had to wait several days for a reply that informed them only that Matthews was ‘unable’ to attend.12
On 27 September the committee switched to a new tack. Unable to elicit a satisfactory response out of Matthews, Mr Lusk addressed a petition to the Queen. He reminded Her Majesty that of the four murders that had been recently committed in the East End the last two at least had been the work of the same hand and that the ‘ordinary means of detection had failed.’ He felt that the killer would probably strike again and that the offer of a reward ‘was absolutely necessary for securing Your Majesty’s subjects from death at the hands of the above one undetected assassin.’ Lusk took pains to point out that the Home Secretary’s refusal to sanction a reward had already incurred hostile criticism from his vigilance committee, criticism that had been ‘re-echoed throughout Your Majesty’s Dominions not only by Your Majesty’s subjects at large but, with one or two exceptions, the entire press of Great Britain’, and he therefore begged the Queen to direct that a government reward ‘sufficient in amount to meet the peculiar exigencies of the case’ be offered immediately. These efforts were to no avail. Lusk’s answer, dated 6 October, came from the Home Office. The Home Secretary, explained Leigh-Pemberton, had laid the petition before the Queen and had also given directions that no effort or expense be spared to catch the murderer. But he had not felt able to advise the Queen that justice would be promoted by a departure from his previous decision.13
Notwithstanding the efforts of these worthies to apprehend the culprit it became evident on 19 September, when Mrs Long gave her evidence to the inquest, that the killer might indeed have been a foreigner. Here, despite all the disclaimers, was the first positive evidence that the murderer was a Jew and the prospect of anti-Jewish riots moved that much closer. By this time, fortunately, the excitement generated by the Chapman murder had subsided. But Sir Charles Warren recognized the danger and was deeply troubled by it.
A regular stream of stories and rumours, mostly unfounded, kept excitement at fever pitch the first few days after the murder. On the day of the crime there were tales of another body having been found at the back of the London Hospital and a woman told of a message chalked on the door of 29 Hanbury Street: ‘This is the fourth. I will murder sixteen more and then give myself up.’ To one story the police attached some significance. It was recounted by Mrs Fiddymont, wife of the proprietor of the Prince Albert at the corner of Brushfield and Steward Streets, and by two of her customers.
At seven on the morning of the murder Mrs Fiddymont was serving behind the bar and talking to a customer, Mrs Mary Chappell of 28 Steward Street. Suddenly a rough-looking man came into the middle compartment and asked for half a pint of ale. As she drew the ale Mrs Fiddymont studied the man in the mirror at the back of the bar and there was evidently something so frightening about him that she asked Mrs Chappell to stay. If the description given by the two women to the press was accurate there was no wonder.
His shirt was torn badly on the right shoulder. There was a narrow streak of blood under his right ear, parallel with the edge of his shirt. There were three or four small spots of blood on the back of his right hand and dried blood between his fingers. Above all, there was his look – ‘so startling and terrifying.’ The stranger wore a stiff brown hat drawn down over his eyes and when he saw Mrs Chappell watching him from the first compartment he turned his back to her and got the partition between them. Then he swallowed his ale at a gulp and left.
Joseph Taylor, a builder of 22 Steward Street, followed him as far as Half Moon Street, Bishopsgate, and described him later for the Star. He was a man of medium height, middle-aged or slightly older, with short sandy hair and a ginger moustache curling a little at the ends. He had faint hollows under his cheekbones. Taylor thought his dress ‘shabby-genteel’ – pepper-and-salt trousers of a villainous fit and a dark coat. His manner was nervous and frightened and he seemed disorientated, crossing Brushfield Street three times between the Prince Albert and Bishopsgate. The man walked rapidly with a peculiar springy stride. It was all Taylor could do to overtake him but when he did manage to come alongside the man glanced across at him. ‘I assure you,’ said Taylor, ‘that his look was enough to frighten any woman. His eyes were wild-looking and staring. He held his coat together at the chin with both hands, the collar being buttoned up, and everything about his appearance was exceedingly strange.’14
The Prince Albert was only about four hundred yards from 29 Hanbury Street. Obviously, then, the police were interested in this tale of a man, bewildered and bloodstained, seen there on the morning of the murder. We know that detectives interviewed Mrs Fiddymont and her witnesses on the day of the occurrence. And later, as will be seen, Abberline tried to link the man with at least two suspects – William Henry Piggott and Jacob Isenschmid.
When darkness fell the indignation of the East End mobs gave way to terror. For several days after the murder the closing of the shops and the removal of the flaring lamps of the stalls precipitated a general stampede for home. After 12.30 the streets were all but deserted, abandoned to the possession of patrolling policemen. Some prostitutes fled from Whitechapel. Most people stayed indoors after dark and tradesmen did a roaring trade in locks. Within a week, it is said, most of the street doors of lodging houses in and about Hanbury Street had been newly fitted with locks and bona fide lodgers supplied with keys. There were those who could not even feel safe in their own homes. On Saturday 8th, when Mrs Mary Burridge, a dealer in floor cloth at 132 Blackfriars Road, was standing at her door reading the Star, she was so upset by the report of the murder that she retired to her kitchen and fell down in a fit. After briefly regaining consciousness two days later she died on Wednesday 12th.
No one could know for certain that only East End prostitutes were at risk and apprehension spread to all classes throughout the metropolis. A less tragic expression of it occurred at the White Hart Public House in Southampton Street, Camberwell, on the afternoon of 10 September. A 39-year-old labourer named John Brennan came into the pub. He was a man of ‘a very rough and strange appearance’ and his coat was torn up the back. Soon he began to talk about the murder in a loud voice. No, the police had not yet caught Leather Apron, he said. More, Leather Apron was a ‘pal’ of his and he had the very knife with which the deed had been done. In the East End he would probably have been mobbed. In Camberwell his boasts produced the opposite effect. Within no time at all the other customers were in the street, the landlady had locked herself in the bar-parlour and Brennan was in sole possession of the bar. But the arrival of a constable terminated the labourer’s shenanigans and the next day he found himself before Camberwell Police Court. There Brennan, ‘who treated the whole matter as a good joke’, was ordered to enter into bail to keep the peace.15
The effects of the murder scare were still evident in the East End on Monday night. A Central News Agency reporter, who visited Whitechapel that evening, depicted a general air of desolation.16 Even in important throughfares like Commercial Street and Brick Lane the only prominent pedestrians were constables, patrolling silently past the little knots of homeless vagabonds that huddled in doorways. ‘Other constables, whose “plain clothes” could not prevent their stalwart, well-drilled figures from betraying their calling,’ wrote the journalist, ‘paraded in couples, now and again emerging from some dimly lighted lane, and passing their uniformed comrades with an air of conscious ignorance.’ Smaller thoroughfares like Flower and Dean Street appeared dark and unut
terably forlorn, their gloom punctuated only at infrequent intervals by flickering gas jets, and almost everywhere there were caverns of Stygian blackness in narrow entries and areas of unlit waste ground.
But there was a sign that the worst of the panic was over. The Whitechapel Road had recovered its nerve. There groups of men and women chatted, joked and laughed boisterously upon the flagstones until long after one. And there prostitutes, driven by necessity to ply their trade at whatever risk, had reappeared. Young, noisy women, decked out in their finery, strutted or lounged at the brightly-lit crossroads. After one these began to disappear, leaving only the most desperate of their kind – the old, half-fed, impoverished drabs, to crawl about from lamp to lamp until the first signs of dawn.
Thereafter East End life began to return to its regular rhythms. Those who had feared to stir abroad after dark or who had not dared to stray from the lighted main throughfares began to move freely again. Those who had fled Whitechapel started to return. Even so, more than a week after the murder, a constable could tell Thames Police Court that the Bow Road was still being troubled by disorderly women whom the murders had driven out of Whitechapel. And, not merely in the East End but all over the metropolis, the calm was fragile. The discovery of a woman, drunk and suffering from a wound in the throat, in a by-way of Shepherd’s Bush Road one night brought crowds flocking to the scene in the morning. When Ann Kelly, the ‘victim’, was treated at the West London Hospital it transpired that her wound was superficial and apparently self-inflicted. An assault upon another woman, Adelaide Rutter or Rogers, a few days later in Down Street, Piccadilly, triggered off another scare in the West End. ‘The wildest rumors were flying about the West End this morning of a murder analogous to the Whitechapel tragedies being attempted,’ said the Star. And as late as 19 September hostile mobs might still menace any suspicious-looking character. That night a policeman had to rescue a drunken cabinet-maker named Thomas Mills from a crowd in Wellington Row, Shoreditch. He found them pulling him about and shouting: ‘We’ll lynch him, he’s Leather Apron!’17
There were people, of course, who sought to derive advantage from the tragedies. On the weekend of the murder the occupants of neighbouring houses in Hanbury Street did a brisk trade in charging sightseers a penny each to view the backyard of No. 29 from their own rear windows. The proprietor of a small waxworks in Whitechapel Road was just as quick off the mark. By daubing a few streaks of red paint on three old wax figures and by placarding three lurid pictures outside his premises he induced hundreds of passers-by to part with their pennies in order to view the ‘George Yard, Buck’s Row and ‘Anbury Street wictims.’ On the afternoon of Monday, 10 September, another opportunist – William McEvoy, a ship’s fireman – was using the scare to cadge drinks at public houses in the area of Cable Street, St George’s. His technique was to intimidate landlords by telling them that he had been locked up all day on suspicion of having committed the murder and then to demand liquor. Refusals were met with obscene language. Arrested, he struck a police constable at the station and the next day was sentenced at Thames Police Court to seven days’ hard labour.18
In the meantime public journals and their correspondents maintained a spirited discussion about the motive for the murders and the nature of their perpetrator.
Dark Annie’s pocket had been rifled and her rings wrenched from her finger. But robbery could not stand as a credible motive for crimes distinguished by ‘a rage of cruelty, a fantastic brutality.’ If Annie had been attacked by a common thief the abdominal mutilations would have been quite pointless since death had already resulted from the loss of blood at the throat.
So the press floundered about in search of a more adequate explanation. Was the killer a religious maniac bent upon the extirpation of sin by the slaying of whores? Or were his crimes actuated by revenge for some real or fancied injury suffered at their hands? Was he, perhaps, a member of some heathen sect that practised barbaric rites? Did he crave notoriety and seek to horrify the nation by acts of unexampled ferocity? Or was he simply a drunkard? The Reverend Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, a kindly if eccentric clergyman with a passion for writing letters to The Times, thought that he could detect the hand of a jealous woman in the affair.19 But it was still the lunatic theory that led the field. Its most prestigious advocate was Dr L. Forbes Winslow, specialist in mental disorders, author of the Handbook for Attendants on the Insane, founder of the British Hospital for Mental Disorders and consultant in many of the principal criminal cases of the period. His contention was that homicidal mania was incurable but might be difficult to detect in that it sometimes lay dormant. Hence, when interviewed at Scotland Yard, he advised the detective department to call for returns from the various asylums so that the whereabouts of all such patients discharged by them as ‘cured’ might be ascertained.20
No serious challenge to the lunatic theory emerged until the end of the month. Then, on the last day of the Chapman inquest, Coroner Baxter introduced the possibility of an economic motive for the crimes.
The Nichols inquest was resumed on 17 September and adjourned to the 22nd, when it was concluded. The jury returned the only verdict possible – ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’. The Chapman inquest occupied five days in all – 10, 12, 13, 19 and 26 September. Again the coroner was Mr Wynne Baxter and the venue the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel Road. Again, despite much valuable testimony, a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ was recorded.
The proceedings in the Chapman case were enlivened by the intermittent sparring of Mr Baxter and Dr Phillips.
Phillips appeared before the court on the third day. He testified that death had occured from syncope, or heart failure, caused by the loss of blood from the throat. And that being the case he asked the coroner if he might be excused from giving details of the abdominal injuries. These, he pointed out, had been inflicted after death and were not necessary in order to understand the cause of death. Baxter demurred. ‘The object of the inquiry,’ he reminded the doctor, ‘is not only to ascertain the cause of death, but the means by which it occurred. Any mutilation which took place afterwards may suggest the character of the man who did it.’ However, in deference to Phillips’ obvious reluctance to proceed, he postponed that part of his evidence until an adjourned sitting.
On 19 September Dr Phillips was recalled to conclude his testimony. Again he lodged a strong protest at having to reveal the details of the abdominal mutilations, alleging that to give publicity to this information would ‘thwart the ends of justice’. But Baxter was not to be thwarted. Never before, he observed, had he heard of a request to keep back evidence at an inquest. And he swept aside Phillips’ main argument: ‘I delayed the evidence in question as long as possible because I understood you to say that there were reasons which you knew, but which I don’t know, why that course was desirable in the interests of justice. It is now however nearly a fortnight since the death, and therefore justice has had some little time to avenge itself.’ The court was cleared of women and newsboys and the unhappy doctor then proceeded to give evidence that the press considered unfit for publication.21
This dispute between Baxter and Phillips has been many times described but with little understanding of the issues involved.
Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal. He was simply conforming to the code of practice that Howard Vincent had bequeathed to the CID, a code that required the utmost discretion on the part of police officials in all cases in which the identity of the culprit had not yet been established. It was a controversial policy then and has been generally abandoned by police authorities since. Yet, as we have seen, it rested upon important considerations.
Baxter had a weighty case too. In the first place he was obliged by law to take the whole of Dr Phillips’ evidence for the Statute de Coronatore required coroners to inquire into the nature, character and size of every wound on a dead body and to enter the information on
their rolls. The purpose of this requirement was to preserve the evidence of the crime. In the event of a suspect not being brought to trial until long after the date of the offence the only authoritative record of the injuries and marks found upon the body of the victim might be that in the inquest depositions. Similarly, as Baxter intimated at the Chapman inquest, it was important that the testimonies of all witnesses be fully entered in the records of the court so that their evidence might in future be turned up even if they themselves could no longer be traced. There was, finally, the question of publicity. Baxter believed – and most police officers today would probably endorse the view – that the publication of police knowledge furthered the process of detection by eliciting fresh information from the press and general public. And it was in justification of this belief that, on the last day of the Chapman inquiry, he presented the court with what appeared to be dramatic new evidence bearing upon the case.
Taking his lead from Dr Phillips, who had suggested at the previous sitting that the killer had slain Annie in order to secure a specimen of the uterus, Baxter told the court that the murderer need not necessarily have been a lunatic. For the doctor’s testimony had elicited new evidence – evidence that pointed to the existence of a market for the organ in question:
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 19