Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  When the constable asked the man what he was doing there he received only the curt reply, ‘Nothing.’ But the prostitute was obviously very frightened. ‘Oh, policeman,’ she pleaded, ‘do take me out of this!’ The woman seemed too overcome to say more so Johnson got the couple out of the court, sent the man about his business and walked with the woman to the end of his beat. Now she was talking freely.

  ‘Dear me,’ she exclaimed, ‘he frightened me very much when he pulled a big knife out!’

  The import of her words must have struck Johnson with the force of a sledgehammer. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that at the time?’ he angrily demanded.

  ‘I was too much frightened.’

  The constable quickly retraced his steps but by then the man had disappeared.

  He was, in fact, a forty-year-old German hairdresser named Charles Ludwig and he was apprehended later the same night by a Metropolitan Police constable after a scrimmage at a coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street. Ludwig’s victim on this occasion was Alexander Finlay or Freinberg, a youth who lived with his mother at 51 Leman Street and worked at an ice cream factory in Petticoat Lane. Finlay gave two contradictory accounts of the coffee stall affair, one to Thames Magistrates’ Court and one to the press, both on the day of the occurrence. His court deposition was brief and to the point:

  Prosecutor [Finlay] said that at three o’clock on Tuesday morning he was standing at a coffee-stall in the Whitechapel Road, when Ludwig came up in a state of intoxication. The person in charge of the coffee-stall refused to serve him. Ludwig seemed much annoyed, and said to witness, ‘What are you looking at?’ He then pulled out a long-bladed knife, and threatened to stab witness with it. Ludwig followed him round the stall, and made several attempts to stab him, until witness threatened to knock a dish on his head. A constable came up, and he was then given into custody.

  Finlay was more garrulous with representatives of the press. By this account Ludwig came to the stall at about five minutes past four and the trouble started when the stall-keeper served him with a cup of coffee and Ludwig only offered a halfpenny in payment. The German was well dressed and wore a frock coat and a tall hat. Dark, slightly built and about five feet six inches tall, he sported a grizzled moustache and beard. ‘There is something the matter with one of his legs,’ remembered Finlay, ‘and he walks stiffly.’ Noticing Finlay looking on, Ludwig suddenly rounded on the youth.

  ‘What you looking at?’ he demanded in broken English.

  ‘I am doing no harm,’ replied Finlay.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ludwig, ‘you want something.’ And so saying, he pulled out a long penknife and lunged at Finlay.

  Eluding the drunken German, Finlay snatched a dish from the stall and prepared to hurl it at his head. But Ludwig retreated after his first rush and Finlay was content to call a nearby policeman.10

  PC Gallagher 221H arrived at the stall to find Ludwig in a very excited state. On the way to Leman Street Police Station he dropped a long-bladed knife. It was a clasp-knife but the blade was extended. Upon being searched at the station Ludwig was also discovered to possess a razor and a long-bladed pair of scissors.

  The circumstances in which Ludwig had been apprehended must have led police to wonder whether they had caught the Whitechapel murderer. Clearly he was seen as a serious suspect. On the day of his arrest he appeared at Thames Magistrates’ Court charged only with being drunk and disorderly and with threatening to stab Finlay but the presiding magistrate, Mr Saunders, spoke of him as a dangerous man and he was remanded for a week. In succeeding days detectives diligently investigated his character and conduct and on 25 September, when he was again brought before the court, they were still not satisfied. At Abberline’s request Saunders remanded the prisoner once more and, since Ludwig was professing to understand no English, granted the inspector leave to interview him with an interpreter so that his whereabouts on certain dates might be ascertained.

  Notwithstanding the length of the Ludwig investigation no official records relating to it now survive and we must learn what we can of him from contemporary newspaper reports.11 A recent immigrant, possibly from Hamburg, Ludwig was employed as a barber’s assistant on 1 September by Mr C. A. Partridge of the Minories. Partridge engaged him at Richter’s, a German club in Houndsditch, and found him a good workman if overfond of drink. After about a week Ludwig was permitted to sleep at the shop but on Sunday, 16 September, he moved out to lodge with a German tailor named Johannes in Church Street, Minories. Johannes, apparently, objected to Ludwig’s dirty habits and on Monday morning told him to go.

  Thus it was that Ludwig spent the night of 17–18 September wandering the streets. Wherever he went he created consternation. At about ten, already the worse for drink, he turned up at Richter’s club. The manageress had him thrown out. Later he called at a Finsbury hotel. This was one of Ludwig’s usual dives and he looked quite smart in his top hat. But producing a number of razors, he behaved so oddly that some of the inmates became frightened and, when the landlord told him he could not stay, ‘was annoyed . . . and threw down the razors in a passion, swearing at the same time.’ Ludwig left the hotel about one on Tuesday morning. It was not long after that that he took up with Elizabeth Burns, the prostitute PC Johnson rescued from his attentions in Three Kings’ Court, and then, about three, he attacked Finlay in Whitechapel High Street. Both Johnson and Finlay noted that he had been drinking.

  Ludwig’s acquaintances reacted quite differently to talk that, after his arrest, linked him with the Whitechapel murders. Partridge, his employer, thought the idea quite ridiculous and expressed the view that Ludwig was too much of a coward to have committed the crimes. It would be difficult to imagine more cowardly acts than the Whitechapel atrocities but in any case, if the Telegraph is to be believed, Partridge’s opinion was based upon little more than the fact that in a recent quarrel the hairdresser had struck his assistant on the nose and Ludwig had failed to retaliate.

  The landlord of the hotel in Finsbury, on the other hand, told a newspaper correspondent that he had been suspicious of Ludwig ever since the Hanbury Street murder. The day after the tragedy (Sunday 9th) Ludwig, in a very dirty state and carrying a case of razors and a large pair of scissors, called at the hotel. He said that he had been out all night and asked to be allowed to wash. The landlord could not confirm a statement by one of his boarders that the German’s hands were bloodstained but Ludwig did talk incessantly about the murder and when he offered to shave the landlord the latter very prudently refused. The landlord’s portrait of Ludwig, moreover, depicts a very acceptable Whitechapel murderer: ‘He is a most extraordinary man, is always in a bad temper, and grinds his teeth with rage at any little thing which puts him out. I believe he has some knowledge of anatomy, as he was for some time an assistant to some doctors in the German army, and helped to dissect bodies. He always carries some razors and a pair of scissors with him . . . From what he has said to me, I knew he was in the habit of associating with low women.’

  As far as we are now able to judge there was a strong prima facie case for holding Ludwig. Admittedly the materials in the court depositions and newspapers contain nothing that directly implicates him in the murders. Certainly his alleged visit to the hotel in Finsbury to wash his hands – bloodstained or not – more than twenty-four hours after the Chapman murder did not prove anything. And there could not have been a sharper contrast between Ludwig’s noisy, belligerent and clumsy progress of 17–18 September and the swift, silent and sure technique of the Whitechapel killer. Yet Ludwig was in many respects just the type of man the police should have been looking for. He was a foreigner and in age, height and complexion matched the details given by Mrs Long. If the Finsbury landlord is to be credited he even satisfied Dr Phillips’ requirement of medical knowledge. Indeed it is possible that this was how he became a barber’s assistant in the first place because on the Continent the barber also often functioned as the poor man’s doctor. There were other circumstances, too, that must
have made Ludwig seem a plausible suspect. He lived in the East End. He consorted with prostitutes. He carried a long-bladed knife (the possession of razors and scissors by a barber would not have been deemed significant). He was reluctant to account for his movements on the nights of the murders. He had a most volatile temper. And if Alexander Finlay’s court deposition was true, if the barber pursued him round the stall and repeatedly tried to stab him, then Ludwig, at least under the influence of liquor, was potentially homicidal.

  Ludwig’s case could well serve as a cautionary tale for intending Ripperologists. The capacity of these amateur sleuths to delude themselves and their readers in futile attempts to incriminate men against whom not a jot of respectable evidence exists is apparently infinite. The case against Ludwig, at the height of the Hanbury Street scare, looked far blacker than almost any of those adduced in more recent years against other suspects. But he was not the Whitechapel murderer. For when the killer struck again, twice in the early hours of 30 September, Ludwig was still in police custody.12

  ‘I cannot recall that my grandfather, General Sir Charles Warren, ever stated in writing his personal views on the identity of Jack the Ripper.’ So wrote Watkin W. Williams, Warren’s grandson, to author Tom Cullen.13 And, as far as any final, considered judgement by Sir Charles is concerned, he seems to have been right. But, halfway through the murder hunt, the Commissioner did take up his pen – in response to an appeal for information by Matthews – and until now his letter has lain largely neglected in the Home Office files relating to the case.

  About the middle of September the Home Secretary, evidently rattled by adverse press and public comment, sent a memorandum to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, his secretary, directing him to solicit from Warren a progress report on the Whitechapel investigation. Ruggles-Brise was temporarily out of town but the note was sent on to Sir Charles by the Home Office on the morning of 19 September. Warren’s reply was made the same day:

  No progress has as yet been made in obtaining any definite clue to the Whitechapel murderers. A great number of clues have been examined & exhausted without finding anything suspicious.

  A large staff of men are employed and every point is being examined which seems to offer any prospect of a discovery.

  There are at present three cases of suspicion.

  1. The lunatic Isensmith a Swiss arrested at Holloway who is now in an asylum at Bow & arrangements are being made to ascertain whether he is the man who was seen on the morning of the murder in a public house by Mrs Fiddymont.

  2. A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a surgeon & has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.

  3. A brothel keeper who will not give her address or name writes to say that a man living in her house was seen with blood on him on morning of murder. She described his appearance & said where he might be seen. When the detectives came near him he bolted, got away & there is no clue to the writer of the letter.

  All these three cases are being followed up & no doubt will be exhausted in a few days – the first seems a very suspicious case, but the man is at present a violent lunatic.14

  Warren’s first man was Jacob Isenschmid, an insane pork butcher, of whom more presently. The second man, however, is much more intriguing. For his release from an asylum occurred only three days before the George Yard murder and his alleged threat to ‘rip people up’ with a knife suggests that he was harbouring some grudge and hence may point to a motive. Yet, until the present writer identified Puckridge and published details about him in a recent number of Ripperana, nothing whatsoever was known about him.15

  Sir Charles tells us that his suspect was released from an asylum on 4 August. Registers of patient admissions, kept by the Lunacy Commission, are preserved at the Public Record Office and that of admissions to Metropolitan licensed houses between 1886 and 1900 records that Oswald Puckridge was admitted to Hoxton House Lunatic Asylum on 6 January 1888 and discharged, ‘relieved’ but not cured, on the following 4 August. Hoxton House, at 50 & 52 Hoxton Street, Shoreditch, was primarily a private asylum for middle class patients. But it did accept paupers from boards of guardians and Puckridge was first entered in the register as a pauper. This, however, is struck out in faded red ink and, written against the correction in the same ink, is the annotation: ‘Private 14 Jan. 1888.’16 Research is continuing but it seems likely that no records of the asylum have survived for our period. Nevertheless, now that we have a name we can glean some basic biographical data about Puckridge from genealogical sources.

  Oswald Puckridge was born to John and Philadelphia (née Holmes) Puckridge on 13 June 1838 at Burpham, near Arundel, in Sussex. The family are recorded there in the national census of 1841. John, a farmer, was then forty-five years old, exactly ten years older than his wife, and they had five children: Charlotte (11), Clara (7), Frederick (5), Oswald (3) and Arthur (1). Oswald married in south-east London when he was thirty. His bride was Ellen Puddle, the daughter of Edward Puddle, a licensed victualler, and the ceremony was performed at the parish church of St Paul, Deptford, on 3 October 1868. On the marriage certificate Puckridge is described as a chemist resident in the same parish. Obviously his career subsequently entered into decline but whether the mental illness was a cause or consequence of his waning fortunes is not presently known. On 28 May 1900 he was admitted to the Holborn Workhouse in City Road from a men’s lodging house at 34 St John’s Lane, Clerkenwell. He died in the workhouse on 1 June. According to the death certificate he was then a general labourer and the cause of death was ‘Broncho Pneumonia’.17

  Lack of detail on Puckridge and the grounds upon which he was suspected make him a difficult suspect to assess. The police clearly gave his case some priority and if everything Warren tells us about him was true it is not difficult to see why. On the other hand, the Commissioner’s comment that no ‘definite clue’ had been uncovered implies that the CID were not in possession of any hard evidence linking Puckridge with the crimes and, as Charles Ludwig has taught us, cases hung exclusively around characteristics like medical knowledge and insanity are inevitably inconclusive. There are, besides, other difficulties involved in charging Puckridge with the murders. His description of himself in 1868 as a chemist rather than a physician or surgeon suggests that his training may have been that of an apothecary and raises serious doubts about the nature and extent of his medical knowledge. Puckridge, furthermore, was fifty at the time of the murders. Admittedly, this is consistent with the statement of Mrs Long, who thought that the man she saw talking with Annie Chapman was over forty, but – as we will discover in later chapters – it is in sharp conflict with the evidence of every other important witness who may have seen the killer. Their estimates of age range from twenty-eight to thirty-five. On this point, too, Mrs Long’s testimony can almost certainly be discounted because she did not see her suspect’s face. Finally, although most of the police records relating to the Whitechapel murders have been lost, it may still be significant that Puckridge’s name does not reappear on the known record. And if he did not remain a suspect the probable reason is that, as Warren predicted, he was eventually traced and able to satisfactorily account for his movements on the nights of the murders. Puckridge is the most interesting suspect we have encountered so far. But unless he be incriminated by fresh evidence he must be exonerated.

  Puckridge was by no means the only medical man investigated by the police after Dark Annie’s murder. We know that Abberline and his team tried to trace three insane medical students who had attended London Hospital. Two were found, interviewed and eliminated from the inquiry. The third, the only one actually named in police records, was John Sanders of 20 Abercorn Place, Maida Vale. When a detective called at his home neighbours told him that the family had gone abroad but recent research has proved that Sanders was, in fact, then being held in an asylum in England. The son of an Indian Army surgeon, he entered London Hospital Medical College in 18
79 and functioned as an out-patient dresser in 1880–1. Afterwards he became insane. By 1887 he was subject to attacks of violence, made unprovoked assaults on his friends and tyrannized over his household. The rest of his life was spent in various asylums. During the period of the murders he was confined at West Mailing Place, a private asylum in Kent, and he died, aged thirty-nine, in the Heavitree Asylum, Exeter, in 1901.18

  The memoirs of Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police in 1888, are the source of yet another medical student story. Twenty years on, Smith recalled how, after the Chapman murder, he sent word to Sir Charles Warren that he had learned of a likely suspect. This man, wrote Smith, had all the requisite qualifications: ‘He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings having been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. Sir Charles failed to find him. I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was; but, polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without the shadow of doubt.’19

  Although the two London Hospital students Abberline traced and the man Smith traced were all cleared it would be interesting to know who they were. Evidently Oswald Puckridge was not one of them. Admission registers of London Hospital Medical College students are extant and these demonstrate that no student named Puckridge was admitted between about 1850 and 1890. Smith’s man lived in Rupert Street, in the parish of St James Piccadilly. But a search of the 1881 and 1891 censuses, and of local rate books from 1887 to 1890, does not reveal anyone by the name of Puckridge owning or occupying premises in the street.20 So who were these mysterious students? Careful research suggests a possible identification of Smith’s suspect.