By today’s standards of policing, it was shoddy to remove a possible piece of evidence. But in those days, there was no importance attached to the belongings of a victim because without the benefit of the modern forensic tests we can carry out today, they added nothing to the investigation. In terms of solving these crimes, well over a century later, it was the best possible thing to happen. If the shawl had gone with the rest of Catherine’s possessions, it would have been destroyed with so much other evidence. I will always be hugely grateful to PC Simpson for taking it, and to his descendants for keeping it safe. My investigation has taken a great deal of hard work and patience, but it has also been blessed by some luck: this single fact, the careful preservation of a shawl that was at the scene of one of the killings, must rank as the greatest luck of all.
We can only assume the press included this description of the chintz dress or skirt with the border of Michaelmas daisies in their reports because a journalist was either present at the scene and glimpsed the material (and despite the best efforts of the police, crime scenes were not kept secure as they are today), or that they talked to policemen who were there and who again mistook the distinctively patterned shawl for a skirt or dress.
The ‘old white apron’ was also described as being extremely dirty and a section of it was missing. This missing piece was found at 2.55 a.m., by PC Alfred Long, lying in the open doorway leading to the staircase of 108–19 Wentworth Model Dwellings, less than a quarter of a mile away in Goulston Street, back over in Whitechapel. The piece of apron was bloodstained. As PC Long checked for any other signs of blood in the immediate area, he saw writing in chalk on the wall directly above where the apron piece had lain. It read: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’.
After searching the staircase and finding nothing else of any significance, he found another officer to guard the writing and headed, with the bloodied piece of apron, for Commercial Street Police Station, arriving there at approximately 3.10 a.m. Shortly after this discovery, officers from both the Metropolitan and City police went to the site at Goulston Street. City detectives Daniel Halse and Baxter Hunt were first. Halse, along with DS Robert Outram and DC Edward Marriott, had been standing near Mitre Square when the alarm had been raised and were at that time part of a sweep of the area following the reports of Elizabeth Stride’s murder.
Halse took charge of guarding the graffiti and Hunt returned to Mitre Square. As other constables arrived in Goulston Street, it was generally felt by members of the City police that the writing should be photographed. However, their Metropolitan counterparts were already beginning to feel uneasy about leaving the message on view. It was a Sunday morning and the thriving Petticoat Lane Market, of which Goulston Street was an offshoot, would soon be busy with both Jewish and Gentile traders and visitors. Metropolitan Superintendent Thomas Arnold was concerned that the message was inflammatory enough to spark a disturbance, particularly after the mass-panic associated with ‘Leather Apron’, and he thought it might be necessary to erase it. City officers pushed for the erasure of the word ‘Juwes’ only, but as Goulston Street was not within their jurisdiction, it was not their decision to make.
When, at 5.30 a.m., Chief Commissioner Charles Warren arrived at the scene he agreed with Arnold’s concerns and had the writing erased in its entirety.
It was a controversial decision at the time, and it still is for students of the case today. It is possible that the message could have resulted in a disturbance that could escalate into damage to property and even the death of innocent Jews, and in that case the right decision was taken. We will never know. I believe it could have been well guarded until at least the photograph was taken. There has, inevitably, been a great deal of debate over the significance of what has become known as the ‘Goulston Street Graffito’, with some believing the Ripper himself wrote it and others feeling that, in an area populated by so many Jewish immigrants, derogatory graffiti would have been commonplace. I think he did write it, because it was not in a prominent site where an agitator would have chosen to splash their incendiary message, and the apron piece abandoned with it would seem to be a pointer to its significance. But what did it mean? The double negative means it could be a defence of the Jews, or an attack on them. It could be an attempt to throw the police off the scent.
Ultimately it was only one more sensational event on a night full of shocks, and even without the message on the wall, the piece of apron being left there tells us which way the Ripper was heading when he left Catherine’s mutilated body, a direction which could take the man I believe to be the Ripper home in about ten minutes.
But for the police investigators at the time, and hundreds of researchers ever since, the question remains: how did the Ripper manage to murder and mutilate Catherine Eddowes in such a short time frame, and so soon after killing Elizabeth Stride? As testimony from various witnesses came forward, the sheer daring of the Whitechapel murderer came into sharp focus.
As PC Watkins checked Mitre Square at 1.30 a.m. that morning, finding nothing out of the ordinary, three men, Joseph Lawende (pronounced Lavender, and sometimes spelt that way), Harry Harris and Joseph Hyam Levy, were preparing to leave the Imperial Club on Duke Street, close by Mitre Square. Having waited for a shower of rain to pass, they left a few minutes after 1.30 a.m. and began to walk along Duke Street towards Aldgate. As they passed the narrow entrance to Church Passage on the opposite side of the road (which led directly into Mitre Square), they noticed a man and a woman standing there. Levy, referring to the couple, said to Harris, ‘Look there, I don’t like going home by myself when I see those characters about.’ Later he said that he assumed ‘persons standing at that time of night in a dark passage were not up to much good.’
Neither Harris nor Levy gave the couple much consideration, but Lawende, a Polish cigarette salesman who had come to Britain in 1871, appears to have taken more notice. He described the man to the police as ‘of shabby appearance, about 30 years of age and 5ft. 9in. in height, of fair complexion, having a small fair moustache, and wearing a red neckerchief and a cap with a peak.’ He also said that the man had the appearance of a ‘sailor’. The woman was standing with her back to the three men and was wearing a black jacket and black bonnet. Lawende’s detailed description was not given to the press, nor was it repeated in detail at the inquest, where he gave brief evidence. But the police statement with the description was later published in the Police Gazette. It was probable the police deliberately withheld it at first, in the same way that they possibly kept Schwartz’s evidence away from the public and the media by not including him at the inquest.
The police showed Catherine Eddowes’ clothing to Lawende and he believed it was the same he had seen worn by the woman. He said she appeared to be a little shorter than the man and she had her hand on his chest. The couple did not appear to be quarrelling or drunk. Lawende’s probable sighting of Catherine Eddowes with a man shortly before her death became the second potential sighting of the murderer (after Israel Schwartz) that night. Sadly, Lawende also went on to say at the inquest that he did not feel he could recognize the man again if he were confronted with him.
There are discrepancies between the descriptions of the man seen that night by Schwartz, Lawende and PC Smith, but there are also many points in common, and from what we now know about the (unintentional) inaccuracy of eye-witness accounts, it seems probable that all three saw the same man.
The sighting by Lawende and his two friends took place at approximately 1.35 a.m. Five minutes later, PC James Harvey, the only other officer whose beat took him close to Mitre Square that night, passed along Church Passage from Duke Street. He did not see anybody at that time and, as his beat did not take in Mitre Square, he stopped briefly at the entrance to the square. Having noticed nothing out of the ordinary, he turned round and went back the way he had come. It is very likely that as he did so, the murder of Catherine Eddowes was taking place in the dark corner of Mitre Square opposite. Fou
r minutes later, PC Watkins found the body.
But it was not just PCs Watkins and Harvey who came into close proximity to the murderer. George Morris, the watchman at the Kearley and Tonge warehouse, on the opposite side of the square to where the body was found, claimed that he had left the front door of the building open while he cleaned the stairs inside. Off-duty City policeman Richard Pearce, who lived in one of two houses in Mitre Square, was sleeping in the bedroom with his family, none of whom heard any disturbance during the night. Similarly, George Clapp, sharing his home at 5 Mitre Street with his wife and a nurse who looked after Mrs Clapp, heard nothing unusual, even though the bedroom windows were just above the spot where the murder took place. And finally, James Blenkinsop, a nightwatchman looking after some roadworks in St James’s Place (connected to Mitre Square by a small passage) had nothing to report other than a well-dressed man apparently passing by at 1.30 a.m. and asking him if he had seen a man and a woman pass through.
It was as if the Ripper was a ghost. He managed to entice his victim into the square, perform a brutal murder, position the body and viscera in a specific manner, steal parts of her body and slip away invisibly into the night within a timescale of eight or nine minutes.
By coincidence, the sites of both the double murders are now schools. I have followed the two possible routes he took between the two scenes. I did the journeys at slow pace, loitering in doorways, as he must have done, to avoid passers-by, and both routes took about six minutes, well within the time available to him. At a normal, strolling place it was three minutes, and moving rapidly took only two minutes.
I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like for Catherine Eddowes, meeting the Ripper. Was he in a state of great excitement, having failed to carry out his rituals at the first murder? Was he covered in blood? How did he escape all the police out in the area? Not just because of the first murder but because on that night extra men had been drafted in due to fears of unrest caused by Fenian demonstrations in support of a free Ireland? Although she had been released from the police station because she had sobered up, Catherine was still probably the worse for drink, and perhaps she didn’t notice anything odd about the man who took her into Mitre Square. It seems, from all the murders, that he was adept at killing his victims quickly, before he started his mutilations – there are very few reports of sounds from the victims.
Catherine’s case is the most interesting to me, as it is the shawl taken from the scene of her murder which has finally unlocked the case. I hope, for her sake, that death came immediately and that she did not surfer after the first slash to her neck that killed her.
The night of the ‘double event’ caused, as you can imagine, a massive storm of press and public interest, with crowds of visitors attracted to the murder spots the next day, despite the police preventing them getting near.
The day after the double murder a postcard, again signed from ‘Jack the Ripper’, arrived at Central News:
I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. Had not got time to get ears off for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
It was obviously written by the same author as the earlier ‘Dear Boss’ letter, which had never been published, as it referred to its content. It was the arrival of this postcard which prompted the publication of the earlier letter, and for the first time the public heard the name ‘Jack the Ripper’. It is tempting to assume that because the postcard arrived the day after the double event, it must have been posted before and thus was written by the murderer who is telling the press about his latest atrocity before it hits the news. But the postal service then was much more frequent than today and included services on Sundays; the author of the postcard could easily have heard of the murders through word-of-mouth by Sunday afternoon, written his missive and had it delivered the following day.
Posters were produced and facsimiles of the letter and postcard were printed in the press, with the intention of prompting anybody who recognized the handwriting to come forward with information. The name ‘Jack the Ripper’ was seized upon almost immediately as a suitable replacement for ‘Leather Apron’. There was one problem however: it inspired a great many copycat letters which began arriving at various institutions in their hundreds over the next few weeks. The Metropolitan police certainly got their share and, after the murder of Catherine Eddowes on their territory, the City police were targeted too. Many letters used the arrogant, mocking tone of the original letter and postcard and one even made a direct threat to somebody, presumably one of the witnesses relating to the double event who had spoken to the authorities:
You though your-self very clever I reckon when you informed the police. But you made a mistake if you though I dident [sic] see you. Now I known you know me and I see your little game, and I mean to finish you and send your ears to your wife if you show this to the police or help them if you do I will finish you. It no use your trying to get out of my way. Because I have you when you dont expect it and I keep my word as you soon see and rip you up.
Yours truly Jack the Ripper.
One letter, sent to Central News and apparently in the same hand as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, explained a rather disturbing motive for the murders and also promised to increase the carnage:
Dear Friend
In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall [probably a reference to one of the Thames Torso murders in 1888]. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the women of Moab and Midian shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit for ever. Do as I do and the light of glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped. will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke well well Jacky’s a very practical joker ha ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Even at the time, and more so over the years, the letters were assumed by the police to be hoaxes. Today most historians and researchers are agreed that the first were, in all probability, written by an eager journalist, spicing up an already dramatic story. He may have sent everyone on a wild goose chase, but nevertheless he came up with the name, Jack the Ripper, that has followed the case down the years.
The police investigation was intense. Eighty thousand leaflets requesting information were distributed:
POLICE NOTICE TO THE OCCUPIER
On the morning of Friday, 31st August, Saturday 8th, and Sunday, 30th September, 1888, Women were murdered in or near Whitechapel, supposed by someone residing in the immediate neighbourhood. Should you know of any person to whom suspicion is attached, you are earnestly requested to communicate at once with the nearest Police Station.
Because of the suggestion that the Ripper knew the internal organs of the body well enough to carry out his ritualistic mutilations, butchers and slaughterers were singled out and interrogated, and so were sailors working on the Thames boats. For two or three weeks bloodhounds were deployed, until the experiment of using them was called off. Two thousand lodgers from the local dosshouses were interviewed.
In the days immediately after the murders many of the unfortunates stayed away from the streets, and the East End was virtually deserted after dark. Shops and businesses suffered, as customers stayed away from the area. Almost the only activity on the streets after dark was the police patrols, which were stepped up, and there were even reports of policemen dressing as prostitutes, in a bid to lure the Ripper back to his patch, although their hobnail boots apparently gave them away.
The stree
ts were still busy during the day, however, and when poor Catherine Eddowes’ body was taken to its final resting place, eight days after her death, it was a huge occasion. The Times described ‘a multitude of persons’ assembled to see the simple cortege leave the police mortuary. Although Catherine was eventually placed in an unmarked grave at Ilford Cemetery, her procession through the streets was as if she had been a famous dignitary, with a carriage load of press reporters following the mourners. Progress through Whitechapel was very slow, as thousands of people were on the streets to see it, including whole families, with children being held up by their parents. Catherine’s four sisters, two nieces and John Kelly, the man she lived with, were at the graveside. By contrast, Elizabeth Stride was given a pauper’s funeral two days earlier, with very few people there.
Frustrated by the police’s lack of success, and feeling that the murders were beginning to affect their livelihoods, groups of local businessmen got together to create ‘vigilance committees’. Not only did they start a campaign to get the Metropolitan police to offer rewards for the capture of the Ripper, but they also paid men, armed with whistles and stout sticks, to be a visible presence on the streets after dark, essentially attempting to become extra eyes and ears for the beleaguered police.
Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Page 9