In the meantime detectives relentlessly pursued their inquiries into the winter. Very few serious suspects seem to have come to light.
A typical inquiry began in Mile End on the morning of 17 November. At 10.30 that morning Harriet Rowe, a married woman, was sitting alone in her parlour in Buxton Street when a man, a complete stranger, opened the door and walked in. She asked him what he wanted. But all he did was grin at her. Badly frightened, Mrs Rowe ran to the window to attract help and the man then quickly left the house. When Mrs Rowe followed him outside she found him talking to PC Imhoff 211H and asking directions to Fenchurch Street Post Office. The distraught woman told Imhoff what had happened and he took the stranger into custody.
The man proved to be Nikaner Benelius, a Swedish traveller who lodged in Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch. Brought before Worship Street Magistrates’ Court later in the day, he was charged only with entering a dwelling house for an unlawful purpose and with refusing to give any account of himself. But it is obvious that he was suspected of complicity in the Whitechapel murders. Detective Sergeant Dew told the court that he had been arrested under circumstances which justified ‘the fullest inquiries’ and that he had been previously questioned in connection with the Berner Street murder. The court remanded him so that an investigation could be made.
Benelius’ behaviour does not seem to have been exactly normal. His landlord, for example, said that he sometimes preached in the streets and acted ‘very strangely’. But there is no reason to believe that he was homicidal. He made no aggressive move against Mrs Rowe and when he was searched at the police station no weapon was found on him. Benelius himself insisted that he only went into Mrs Rowe’s house to ask the way to Fenchurch Street and, since she admitted leaving her street door open, his explanation is likely to have been correct. We do not know the details of the police inquiry. However, Inspector Reid is said to have told the Star within two days of Benelius’ arrest that his innocence of any hand in the murders had been fully established.6
The case of the unfortunate Swede illustrates the kind of misunderstanding that could occur when women lived in terror of every shadow. Press reports describe Benelius as a ‘man of decidedly foreign appearance, with a moustache’ so it is also possible that he was partly suspected because of a resemblance to George Hutchinson’s foreigner. If so, he was by no means the only one. In December one Joseph Denny, clad in a long, astrakhan-trimmed coat, was brought in for questioning after being seen accosting women. When subsequent inquiries cleared him, too, he was released from custody.
The story of Mr Galloway, a clerk employed in the City, suggests that some policemen may have been rather too preoccupied with the image of the dark continental.
In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 November, Galloway was walking home along Whitechapel Road when he encountered a man very like the one Mrs Cox had seen with Mary Kelly. ‘The man had a very frightened appearance, and glared at me as he passed,’ Galloway remembered. ‘He was short, stout, about 35 to 40 years of age. His moustache, not a particularly heavy one, was of a carrotty colour, and his face blotchy through drink and dissipation. He wore a long, dirty brown overcoat, and altogether presented a most villainous appearance.’ Galloway followed the man into Commercial Street, where his quarry unsuccessfully tried to accost a woman and then, near Thrawl Street, appeared disconcerted by the sudden appearance of a policeman. For a moment it looked as though the man would turn back or cross the road in order to avoid the constable, but in the end he recovered himself and went on. Galloway stopped the constable and, pointing out the man, told him that he resembled the one reported by Mrs Cox. ‘The constable,’ said Galloway, ‘declined to arrest the man, saying that he was looking for a man of a very different appearance.’7
Despite Galloway, there is sufficient evidence to prove that the police brought in all manner of suspects in the weeks following Mary Kelly’s murder. The trouble was that they knew next to nothing about the man they were seeking and were simply overwhelmed by the size of the task confronting them. A Times report, which gives every sign of having originated from within the CID, set out their predicament:
Since the murders in Berner Street, St George’s, and Mitre Square, Aldgate, on September 30, Detective-Inspectors Reid, Moore and Nairn, and Sergeants Thicke, Godley, M’Carthy and Pearce have been constantly engaged, under the direction of Inspector Abberline (Scotland Yard), in prosecuting inquiries, but, unfortunately, up to the present time without any practical result. As an instance of the magnitude of their labours, each officer has had, on an average, during the last six weeks to make some 30 separate inquiries weekly, and these have had to be made in different portions of the metropolis and suburbs. Since the two above-mentioned murders no fewer than 1,400 letters relating to the tragedies have been received by the police, and although the greater portion of these gratuitous communications were found to be of a trivial and even ridiculous character, still each one was thoroughly investigated. On Saturday [10 November] many more letters were received, and these are now being inquired into. The detective officers, who are now subjected to a great amount of harassing work, complain that the authorities do not allow them sufficient means with which to carry on their investigation.8
Throughout that long winter police and amateur patrols braved the weather to plod the streets of Whitechapel after dark. By spring, with no recurrence of the atrocities, they had been disbanded.
In February 1889 the Toynbee Hall students, out as part of the St Jude’s Vigilance Committee effort, finally gave up, ‘unable to bear the long hours and exposure involved in patrol work.’9
Special plain clothes police patrols in H and J Divisions went at much the same time. From 7 December 1888 Monro procured an extra allowance of one shilling a day for 1 inspector, 9 sergeants and 126 constables employed in these patrols. The men had been transferred from the uniformed ranks. They did continuous night duty and many, sent from other divisions, were working at some distance from their homes. On 26 January 1889 Monro told the Home Office that he was ‘gradually reducing the number of men employed on this duty as quickly as it is safe to do so’. And by 15 March the duty had ceased. A better idea of the duration and size of the plain clothes patrols can be gleaned from figures Monro sent to the Home Office in 1889. From these it appears that they were first established in September 1888, probably after the Chapman murder, and that 27 men were then employed in the duty. In October, after the double event, the number was increased to 89, and in November, following the Kelly murder, again to 143. During December the patrols were maintained at the same strength. But in 1889 they were phased out. In January the number was cut to 102 and in February to 47. After that the patrols were disbanded.10
The termination of plain clothes patrols should not be mistaken for proof that the police knew that the Ripper had died or been locked in some prison or asylum. Finance was a factor. The Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District was worried about the ‘great expense’ of the extra allowance and anxious to impose limits upon the charge. But the main reason for the ending of the patrols was the absence of fresh outrages. As we shall see, when the death of Alice McKenzie in July 1889 suggested that the Ripper may have resumed his activities the patrols were immediately re-established. It should also be remembered that our evidence relates almost exclusively to plain clothes patrols. Extra uniformed police had also been drafted into Whitechapel from other divisions but we know very little about them. We do know, however, that when the plain clothes patrols were disbanded at least 34 uniformed police, originally detailed for duty in Trafalgar Square, were continued in Whitechapel and that they were still there in the summer of 1889.
For several years the spectre of Jack the Ripper continued to haunt East London. There were regular news stories. And almost invariably unsolved murders were popularly attributed to him. Of the latter, however, only two were truly similar in character to the 1888 atrocities. These were the killings of Alice McKenzie in 1889 and Frances Coles in 1891.
Alice McKenzie was a freckle-faced woman of some forty years. A native of Peterborough, she had lived in the East End for at least fourteen years, sharing the last six or seven of them with a labourer named John McCormack.
In 1889 their home was a common lodging house at 52 Gun Street, Spitalfields. Friends insisted that Alice paid her way by charring. The police regarded her as a prostitute and she is certainly known to have frequently gone out at night. There were other vices. She sometimes drank to excess and was an inveterate pipe smoker.
On the afternoon of 16 July 1889, after working his early morning shift, McCormack returned to the lodging house in Gun Street. Before going to bed he gave Alice 1s. 8d. to pay for their doss and other necessities. But Alice didn’t pay the money. They had quarrelled and McCormack’s words had upset her. She went out drinking and he never saw her alive again.11
Her movements for the rest of the day are sketchy. At about 7.10 p.m. she took George Dixon, a blind boy, into a public house near the Royal Cambridge Music Hall. He heard her asking someone to stand her a drink and a man reply: ‘Yes’. After a few minutes Alice took the boy back to 52 Gun Street and left him there. Elizabeth Ryder, the lodging house deputy, saw her at about 8.30. At that time Alice, who was ‘more or less drunk’, left the house without speaking to Mrs Ryder. The last firm sighting of Alice placed her in Brick Lane at about 11.40. The witness was a friend named Margaret Franklin. Margaret was sitting with two friends, Catherine Hughes and Sarah Mahoney, on the step of a barber’s shop at the Brick Lane end of Flower and Dean Street, when Alice passed them, walking hurriedly down the lane toward Whitechapel. Margaret asked her how she was but Alice would not tarry. ‘All right,’ she replied, ‘I can’t stop now.’ She was not wearing a bonnet but had a light coloured shawl wrapped about her shoulders.12
At 12.15 that night PC Joseph Allen 423H stopped under a street lamp in Castle Alley, off Whitechapel High Street, to eat a snack. The alley was deserted. As he left it, about five minutes later, another constable entered it on patrol. He was PC Walter Andrews 272H. Andrews remained in Castle Alley for two or three minutes. Like Allen, he saw no one else there. But Andrews’ beat brought him back to the alley at about 12.50. And on this occasion, only a few feet away from the lamp under which Allen had taken his snack, he found Alice McKenzie lying dead on the pavement. Blood was flowing from wounds in the left side of her neck and her skirts had been turned up, exposing a mutilated abdomen. When the police later removed the body they found underneath it an old clay pipe of the type referred to in lodging houses as a ‘nose warmer’ and a bronze farthing.
Alice was killed in the alley between 12.25 and 12.50. Probably before 12.45 because at about that time it started to rain and the ground beneath the body was found to be dry. No one heard a noise or scream. Sarah Smith, manageress of the Whitechapel Baths and Washhouses, backing upon Castle Alley, went to bed between 12.15 and 12.30. The window of her bedroom, though closed, overlooked the fatal spot. Sarah sat awake reading in bed. She was still awake when PC Andrews blew his whistle. Yet she had heard nothing suspicious outside. Alice’s killer was never identified.13
Was Alice a victim of Jack the Ripper? There is some reason to think so. Alice, like her now famous predecessors, died when her left carotid artery was severed. As in those cases the cut was made from left to right while she was lying on the ground. And, like them, she suffered abdominal injuries after death. In many of the 1888 murders doctors thought they could detect a degree of anatomical knowledge and/or surgical skill. This was also true of the McKenzie killing. In his medical report Dr Phillips, who performed the postmortem examination, stated that the injuries to the throat had been perpetrated by someone who ‘knew the position of the vessels, at any rate where to cut with reference to causing speedy death.’14
If the Ripper did kill Alice McKenzie, however, he departed in some respects from the modus operandi of the canonical murders.
His mature technique had been to sever the throat all round down to the spinal column. There were two jagged wounds in the left side of Alice’s neck. But these did not extend to any greater length than four inches and left the air passages undivided. Indeed, Dr Bond, who saw Alice’s body the day after the autopsy, wrote of them as two ‘stabs’, the knife then being ‘carried forward in the same skin wound’. Bruises high on Alice’s chest suggested that the killer had held her down with one hand and inflicted the cuts with the other.
The abdominal wounds, too, were untypical of the Ripper’s handiwork. Alice, to be sure, suffered numerous wounds to the abdomen but the majority were no more than scratches. The most serious was a seven-inch cut on the right side. But even this only divided the skin and subcutaneous tissues. It neither opened the abdominal cavity nor injured the muscular structure.
The 1888 evidence indicated that the Ripper was right-handed. Alice’s abdominal wounds, on the other hand, suggested that her murderer might have been left-handed. Phillips detected five superficial marks on the left side of her abdomen. They had been produced, he thought, by the pressure of a right thumb and fingers, and he deduced that the killer had applied pressure to the stomach with his right hand, perhaps to facilitate the introduction of the knife under the tight clothing, and then mutilated the abdomen with left-handed cuts. True, Bond disagreed. When Phillips showed him the marks he saw ‘no sufficient reason to entertain this opinion.’ Instead he speculated that Alice’s murderer had lifted her clothes with his left hand and inflicted the abdominal injuries with his right. It should be borne in mind, however, that Bond did not inspect the body until the 18th, the day after the post mortem, and by then some of the wounds had been so disturbed that Phillips felt it necessary to accompany him to point out their original appearance. By then, too, the body had begun to decompose.
Both doctors agreed that the wounds had been inflicted with a sharp-pointed weapon. Phillips contended that it had been a smaller weapon than ‘the one used in most of the cases that have come under my observation’ in the Whitechapel series. Bond was more cautious. He could not, he said, form any opinion on the width or length of the blade, but he did acknowledge that the cuts could have been done with a short knife.
Clearly Alice could have fallen foul of the Ripper. Opinion at the time was divided. The doctors, of course, could not agree. Phillips did not believe the Ripper was involved because Alice’s wounds were not as severe and the cut on her stomach ‘not so direct’ as in previous cases. Bond, writing to Anderson on 18 July, demurred: ‘I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel murders, viz. sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully & resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation, each mutilation indicating sexual thoughts & a desire to mutilate the abdomen & sexual organs. I am of opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.’ Anderson himself was on leave when Alice was murdered and it was Monro who turned out at three on the fatal morning to investigate the crime on the spot. Years later Anderson claimed that the killing was an ‘ordinary murder . . . not the work of a sexual maniac’. But this was not the view Monro sent to the Home Office after his visit to Castle Alley. ‘I am inclined to believe,’ he said, ‘[that the murderer] is identical with the notorious “Jack the Ripper” of last year.’ The importance Monro attached to the latest development, moreover, may be gauged by his actions. On the day of the murder he re-established plain clothes patrols in Whitechapel, deploying 3 sergeants and 39 constables in the duty, and increased the uniformed strength in the district with an extra 22 men.15
Two months later the scare deepened when the headless and legless torso of a woman was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, south of Commercial Road. After careful consideration of the medical evidence, Phillips, Monro and Swanson all concluded that this crime was not linked with the Ripper series.16 Nevertheless, plain clothes patrols in Whitechapel were strengthened and Monro immediately called for another 100 men for temporary duty in the dis
trict.
There was no repetition of the outrages and in April 1890 plain-clothes patrols were finally withdrawn. Nearly a year later, in the cold February of 1891, the last real Ripper scare occurred.
Frances Coles was the prettiest of all the Whitechapel murder victims. The daughter of a former bootmaker, she was twenty-six, about five feet tall and had brown hair and eyes.17
Her descent into drink and prostitution is as mysterious as that of Mary Jane Kelly. In 1891 her father, James William Coles, was a ‘feeble old man’ in the Bermondsey Workhouse, Tanner Street, and her sister, Mary Ann Coles, a single and entirely respectable lady living at 32 Ware Street, Kingsland Road. Frances, too, once held a respectable if humble position at a wholesale chemist’s in the Minories, where her work involved ‘capsuling’ or ‘stoppering bottles’. Frances said that she could earn from six to seven shillings a week. But she didn’t like the work. It hardened the skin of her knuckles and she complained to her sister that they had become very painful.
Frances seems to have slipped into prostitution when she was only eighteen. In 1891 James Murray, one of her clients, told police that she had been living in doss houses in the Commercial Street area and soliciting in Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Bow for some eight years. When he first met her she had been staying at Wilmot’s lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street.
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 46