Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Lawende, walking a little apart from his companions, was nearer to the couple. He saw more. The woman was short and wearing a black jacket and bonnet. She stood facing the man, one hand resting upon his chest. Lawende only saw her back. There was no quarrel in progress. Rather the couple appeared to be talking very quietly and Lawende could not hear what was being said.

  Lawende saw the man too but the official transcript of his inquest deposition records only that he was taller than the woman and wore a cloth cap with a cloth peak. Press versions of the testimony, however, add the detail that ‘the man looked rather rough and shabby’22 and reveal that the full description was suppressed at the request of Henry Crawford, the City Solicitor, who was attending the hearing on behalf of the police. Fortunately this deficiency in the record can be redressed from other sources. Lawende’s description of the man was fully published in the Police Gazette of 19 October 1888:

  At 1.35 a.m., 30th September, with Catherine Eddows, in Church Passage, leading to Mitre Square, where she was found murdered at 1.45 a.m., same date – A MAN, age 30, height 5 ft. 7 or 8 in., complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build; dress, pepper-and-salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of same material, reddish neckerchief tied in knot; appearance of a sailor.

  On the same date Chief Inspector Swanson attributed precisely the same details to Lawende in his report on the Stride murder.23

  Much later some remarkable claims would be made in relation to Lawende’s sighting so it is important here to note that he did not see his suspect well enough to feel confident that he would be able to recognize him again. Our sources make this absolutely clear. On 11 October, only eleven days after the event, Lawende told the inquest: ‘I doubt whether I should know him again.’ At the end of the same month Inspector McWilliam reported to the Home Office that ‘Mr Lewend (sic), who was nearest to the man & woman & saw most of them, says he does not think he should know the man again.’ On 6 November, also writing for the Home Office, Swanson similarly asserted that ‘the other two [Levy and Harris] took but little notice and state that they could not identify the man or woman, and even Mr Lawende states that he could not identify the man.’ Although Major Smith’s memoirs may recall Lawende’s description inaccurately they also corroborate the commercial traveller’s diffidence: ‘The description of the man given me by the German [Lawende] was as follows: Young, about the middle height, with a small fair moustache, dressed in something like navy serge, and with a deerstalker’s cap – that is, a cap with a peak both fore and aft. I think the German spoke the truth, because I could not “lead” him in any way. “You will easily recognize him, then,” I said. “Oh no!” he replied; “I only had a short look at him.”’24

  Lawende and his friends walked down Duke Street into Aldgate, leaving the couple still talking at the corner of Church Passage.

  A weakness of Lawende’s testimony is that he did not see the woman’s face. It is possible that she was not Kate Eddowes although when Lawende was permitted to examine Kate’s clothing at the police station he expressed the opinion that they were identical to those worn by the woman he saw. Church Passage, moreover, led directly into Mitre Square where Kate was found dead just nine minutes after Lawende’s sighting.

  Many minor mysteries surround the Eddowes murder. To begin with there are several unanswered questions concerning Kate’s conduct on the day of her death. When John Kelly last saw her, on Saturday afternoon in Houndsditch, he was quite sure that she was destitute and sober, and she gave him to understand that she was going to her daughter’s in King Street, Bermondsey, to see what she could scrounge. Whether she went there or not we do not know but if she did she did not find her daughter because Annie left King Street two years previously without leaving a forwarding address. Where Kate went, who she saw and what she did our sources do not tell. Somewhere, however, she acquired enough money to drink herself into a stupor. More important, we know nothing of Kate’s movements between 1.00 a.m., when she was discharged from Bishopsgate Street, and 1.35 a.m., when she was seen, apparently soliciting, in the entry of Church Passage in Duke Street. She had spent her former earnings on drink and may have been making her way to the casual ward at Mile End. If so she was not averse to exploiting any opportunity that presented itself along the way to earn a few coppers. Perhaps she aspired to raise sufficient to pay for a bed at Cooney’s or to make her peace with Kelly. ‘I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home,’ she had told PC Hutt.

  A yet more intriguing question concerns Kate. The City Police seem to have seriously considered the possibility that her presence in Mitre Square had not been entirely fortuitous, that she had, in fact, kept a pre-arranged appointment there with the man who slew her.25 The rationale for this view was that since no policeman observed Kate and her killer walking together towards Mitre Square – and the City Police were under instructions to keep men and women out together under close surveillance – they may have made their separate ways there as to a pre-arranged rendezvous. Support for such a contention might be read into Kate’s anxiety for an early discharge from the police station and into her insistent inquiry of PC Hutt about the time. More, the appointment theory could tie in neatly with this tantalizing item from the East London Observer of 13 October:

  A reporter gleaned some curious information from the Casual Ward Superintendent of Mile End, regarding Kate Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim. She was formerly well-known in the casual wards there, but had disappeared for a considerable time until the Friday preceding her murder. Asking the woman where she had been in the interval, the superintendent was met with the reply that she had been in the country ‘hopping’. ‘But,’ added the woman, ‘I have come back to earn the reward offered for the apprehension of the Whitechapel murderer. I think I know him.’ ‘Mind he doesn’t murder you too,’ replied the superintendent jocularly. ‘Oh, no fear of that,’ was the remark made by Kate Eddowes as she left. Within four and twenty hours afterwards she was a mutilated corpse.

  This snippet is one of those scraps of evidence that surface occasionally to challenge our conventional view of the Whitechapel killings. But however intriguing, as it stands it is nothing more than a piece of unsupported hearsay. It may even be less than that because the parting exchange alleged between Kate and the casual ward superintendent is so like that between Kate and John Kelly that it is tempting to see the Observer’s tale simply as a piece of dishonest reporting drawing upon confused memories of Kelly’s various press statements. That no police officer observed Kate and her killer wending their way together towards Mitre Square proves nothing. The fact is that they were apparently seen – by Lawende in Duke Street – and it is entirely possible that they had just met there. No, at present there is little reason to suppose that the penniless waif who was ‘always singing’ met Jack the Ripper by anything but a desperately unlucky chance.

  Thanks to the survival of the Brown and Foster sketches and of the official inquest record the Mitre Square murder is more satisfactorily documented than any other crime in the series. Nevertheless, analysis of this material leaves us with a problem already familiar from three previous cases.

  Brown decided that loss of blood, resulting from the cutting of the left carotid artery, had been the cause of death. When Kate’s throat had been cut, however, she was already lying on the ground. Why? Surely she would not voluntarily have lain down in the wet (the back of her jacket was found covered in dirt as well as blood) but there were no signs of a struggle, nothing to indicate that she had been forced down, and no one had heard a cry.

  Questioned by the coroner, the medicos could offer nothing like a convincing explanation for that absence of a cry. ‘The throat had been so instantly severed that no noise could have been emitted,’ said Brown. ‘I account for the absence of noise as the death must have been so instantaneous after the severance of the windpipe and the blood vessels,’ chimed Sequeira. All of which neglects to explain why Kate didn’t cry out as she was being put down, before he
r throat was cut. Could she have been poisoned or drugged? If so the traces escaped Dr Saunders’ analysis of her stomach contents. ‘I carefully examined the stomach and its contents,’ he reported, ‘more particularly for poisons of the narcotic class, with negative results, there not being the faintest trace of these or any other poison.’

  The absence of any scream or cry suggests, once again, the possibility that the victim had been strangled before her throat had been cut. Such a hypothesis finds support in the comparatively small spillage of blood. When the murderer severed Kate’s throat blood did not spurt out over the front of her clothes. The left carotid artery bled out onto the pavement on the left side of the neck and Brown found a pool of clotted blood there at 2.18 a.m. Because of the slope of the pavement some of it had trickled under the neck to form a fluid patch about the right shoulder. Blood had also accumulated under Kate’s back and the backs of her jacket, vest and bodice were all badly stained. This pattern of staining, for reasons already noticed, is consistent with the view that her throat was cut after death.26

  The theory that Kate’s mutilations were Masonic in character has been refuted elsewhere. Nevertheless, in her case, as in that of Annie Chapman, there does seem to have been some eerie ritualistic element. Dr Brown found a piece of the intestine, about two feet long, placed between the body and the left arm, ‘apparently by design’. And there were matching cuts on each of Kate’s cheeks, peeling up the skin to form triangular flaps of skin, and corresponding nicks to her eyelids.

  Brown seems to have been more impressed than his colleagues by the murderer’s medical expertise but the doctors concurred in the view that his handiwork had evidenced some degree of skill. Recent medical experts have disagreed with each other. After studying Foster’s sketch of Kate’s abdominal injuries and police photographs, the pathologist Francis Camps concluded that the murderer may have had some elementary anatomical knowledge but little if any surgical skill. ‘Far from being the work of a skilled surgeon,’ he said, ‘any surgeon who operated in this manner would have been struck off the Medical Register.’ Quite so. But Nick Warren, a practising surgeon, contends from personal experience that because the kidney is so difficult to expose from the front of the body the killer must have possessed some anatomical experience.27 It should be borne in mind, too, that the mutilations were performed in exceptionally difficult circumstances. In Mitre Square the murderer worked at great speed, in constant danger of discovery, and in the darkest corner of the square, deep in the shadow cast by Mr Taylor’s shop.

  He was undoubtedly a fast worker, just how fast will become immediately apparent to anyone who cares to consider the matter of times. The killer was seen with his victim in the entry of Church Passage soon after 1.30 by the three men leaving the Imperial Club. The precise time was fixed by Lawende, one of the three, at about 1.35. and by Levy, a companion, at 1.33 or 1.34. We can be reasonably confident in these times because the witnesses checked the club clock before they left the building and Lawende, in addition, owned a watch. Murderer and victim must have passed through Church Passage and into Mitre Square very soon after Lawende’s party had gone. At 1.44 or 1.45, just ten minutes after the Church Passage sighting, PC Watkins found Kate’s body.

  The testimony of PC James Harvey is problematical. If his deposition is to be credited, Harvey walked through Church Passage and looked into the square at about 1.41 or 1.42 but detected nothing untoward. ‘I saw no one, I heard no cry or noise,’ he said. Perhaps the murderer was still there, crouching unseen in the shadow of Taylor’s shop. Or perhaps – it might have been possible, though only just – he had already slain Kate and left by Mitre Street or St James’ Place. Neither of these possibilities seem very likely and inevitably one wonders about Harvey. His timing may well have been awry. It was, as he conceded himself, not much better than guesswork: ‘I passed the post office clock between 1 and 2 minutes to the half hour . . . I can only speak with certainty as to time with regard to the post office clock.’28 When the murder occurred Harvey had served twelve years in the City Police. Within another year he would be dismissed from the force for reasons as yet unknown.

  Whatever view we take of Harvey’s claim, the killer worked with ruthless speed and efficiency. Dr Sequeira thought that the murder would have taken about three minutes but Brown told the inquest that the injuries he had seen could not have been inflicted in less than five. Even so, after cutting the throat and mutilating the abdomen, the killer had obviously had enough time in hand to indulge in further gratuitous cutting and slashing to the face.

  One further clue, albeit small, is afforded by the medical evidence. Professor James Cameron, a specialist in forensic medicine, recently deduced from the medical sketches and photographs that Kate’s murderer had been right-handed, ‘as the incision drags to the right, as would happen, and is deeper as more viscera is exposed.’29 Precisely the same inference can be made from Dr Brown’s comments that the abdomen was laid open upwards by a man kneeling at the prostrate victim’s right side. For it would have been difficult if not impossible for anyone to have worked left-handed from such a position.

  On the face of it there is no more baffling aspect of the whole Mitre Square mystery than the murderer’s escape from the City. If Constables Halse and Long were correct and the piece of apron which the killer deposited in Goulston Street was not there at about 2.20 this is especially the case. For, since the apron was not found until 2.55, we are left with the possibility that the murderer loitered for an hour or more on the fringes of the City before making good his escape. The capacity of the culprit to elude patrolling policemen perplexed Walter Dew, then a young Metropolitan detective attached to H Division. Half a century later he noted the precautions that had been taken by both forces before the double murder and marvelled that ‘the Ripper, or any other human being, could have penetrated that area and got away again . . . It seemed as though the fiend set out deliberately to prove that he could defeat every effort to capture him.’30

  Remarkable the escape certainly was – but not inexplicable. Although the murderer’s clothes may have been bloodstained the area through which he passed abounded in slaughterhouses. There was, for example, a Jewish abattoir in Aldgate High Street, hard by Mitre Square. Consequently the sight of slaughtermen on the streets at night in bloodstained aprons or overalls was presumably a familiar one. But more importantly, we are almost certainly wrong in imagining the murderer fleeing the scene of his crime reeking with blood. An examination of Kate’s clothing demonstrated that some of the cuts had been made through the clothes, which would have afforded the murderer some protection against bloodstaining. Furthermore, if the mutilations were inflicted after Kate had already been strangled the spillage of blood would have been relatively slight. The abdominal injuries were certainly inflicted after death and, as Brown noted, occasioned little appreciable bleeding. A greater effusion of blood flowed from the left carotid artery. But by kneeling on the right side of the body, and turning the victim’s head to the left as he severed her throat, the murderer could have directed the flow towards the ground and away from him. Mud found on Kate’s left cheek does suggest that her head had been held in this way. Whatever, neither Brown nor Sequeira thought that the murderer need necessarily have been bespattered with blood.

  The police should not be judged too harshly for allowing the killer to slip through their clutches. The City force, it is true, had been put on standing alert by Major Smith but they had been enjoined to watch prostitutes and couples rather than single men. Then, too, we are not treating of an age of panda cars and radio communication. We do not know how quickly the news from Mitre Square reached the various patrolling constables and plain clothes men in and about the City. The experience of Halse, Outram and Marriott proves that some at least had heard something of the tragedy within fifteen minutes of PC Watkins’ discovery but even after they knew, a man with a plausible tale would have given them no cause for detaining him unless he was bloodstained or behaving in an
obviously suspicious manner. In addition, the police on duty that night had virtually no idea what their quarry looked like. The only description that they might have read or been told about – that from Elizabeth Long – had emanated from a witness who had not even seen the suspect’s face. When Inspector McWilliam arrived on the scene of the crime he ordered immediate searches of streets and lodging houses in the vicinity. It must then, however, have been about four or later and by that time the bird had long since flown.

  Much of the discussion surrounding the Eddowes murder has inevitably centred upon the cryptic message chalked in the entry of Wentworth Dwellings in Goulston Street: ‘The Juwes (Juews?) are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ Why did Sir Charles order it wiped away before it could be photographed? What did it mean? And to what extent was its obliteration by the Metropolitan Police, in Smith’s phrase, an ‘unpardonable blunder’? We have already dealt with the first of these questions and the answer to the last partly hinges upon our response to the second.

  The trouble with the chalk message is that, like many clues relating to these murders, we can document its existence but do not know enough to interpret its meaning. There are at least three permissible interpretations of this particular clue. All three are feasible, not one capable of proof.

  The first is that the writing was not the work of the murderer at all. It was attributed to him only because of its proximity to the discarded piece of Eddowes apron. But suppose the killer happened to throw the apron, quite fortuitously, down by an existing piece of graffiti? In such a case we would be utterly wrong in according to the writing any significance whatsoever. Walter Dew was inclined to endorse this approach to the problem. Why, he asked, should the murderer ‘fool around chalking things on walls when his life was imperilled by every minute he loitered?’ He might, of course, have been right. Chief Inspector Swanson referred to the writing as ‘blurred’, which suggests that it might have been old. Constable Halse, on the other hand, saw it and thought it looked recent. And Chief Inspector Henry Moore and Sir Robert Anderson are both on record as having explicitly stated their belief that the message was written by the murderer.31 The position of the writing, just above the bloodstained piece of Kate’s apron, and the unlikelihood of any overtly anti-semitic message surviving long in chalk in an entry principally used by Jews, oblige us to take it seriously. Both of the remaining interpretations assume that the killer was its author.