The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  That was the last thing Abberline wanted to hear.

  ‘Where?’ he demanded shortly.

  ‘Hanbury Street. In Spitalfields.’

  ‘Who’s got it?’

  ‘Joseph Chandler was the first on the scene.’

  ‘Right,’ Abberline said. ‘As soon as he gets back here, tell him I want to see him, with a full report on what he found there. You and Andrews can sit in on it as well. This has got to stop, right now. And let me have a note as soon as you can of exactly where the body was found.’

  There wasn’t a great deal of available space at the Bethnal Green police station, and all three of the Metropolitan Force inspectors – Abberline, Andrews and Moore – were sharing a tiny office in the back of the building that was really only designed for a single occupant, or at the most two people. It was separated from the adjacent office by a thin wooden partition, upon which Abberline had pinned the largest-scale map of the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London that he could find. On it, he had marked the locations of the two prostitute murders which had so far taken place – Martha Tabram and Mary Ann Nichols – in red ink with the dates below them. Just to complete the picture, he had also marked the place – oddly enough very close to the site of the killing of Martha Tabram – where Emma Smith had been fatally attacked by the gang of thugs. But this notation was in blue, because Abberline could see no connection between this killing and the later two murders. The later three murders, he amended silently to himself, as he pushed the door open and stood for a moment glancing at the map.

  There was a brisk double tap on the open door behind him, and a uniformed constable handed him a slip of paper.

  ‘Thanks,’ Abberline said, and looked at what was written on it.

  The note was short and to the point. It read ‘Unidentified woman. Body found at 29 Hanbury Street.’

  Abberline nodded to himself, picked up a pen from the desk, located the site of the murder on the map, marked it with a red cross and added the only piece of information he had to hand at that moment, which was the date of the killing. The name, he hoped, would follow in due course.

  * * *

  Inspector Chandler appeared about half an hour later, looking harassed, which was entirely unsurprising.

  ‘It’s a bad one this, Fred,’ he said by way of greeting, his voice angry but subdued, almost as if he was in shock, which was probably not far from the reality of the situation. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. Whoever did it totally gutted her.’

  Abberline nodded, and spotted his two colleagues, Andrews and Moore, approaching the office down the corridor outside.

  ‘We need to find a bigger room, Joseph,’ he said. ‘We won’t all fit in here.’

  Chandler led the way to a small conference room down the corridor, pushed open the door and stepped inside. A table was positioned in the middle of the room, and there were six chairs ranged around it.

  ‘This should do us,’ Abberline remarked, as the four officers pulled out chairs and sat down. ‘Right, Joseph, tell us what you found at Hanbury Street this morning.’

  Inspector Chandler nodded, took a notebook from his pocket and in grim, subdued tones explained what had happened in the early hours, and what he’d seen when he arrived at the site of the latest killing.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before,’ he concluded, echoing his previous statement to Abberline. ‘This time, he hadn’t just killed her and cut her open: he’d gutted her like a pig and pulled out most of her intestines, as well as cutting off flaps of her skin.’

  There was a horrified silence around the table as the three seasoned detectives absorbed this piece of information.

  ‘I know this will sound ridiculous,’ Chandler added, after a few seconds, ‘but it almost looked to me as if the killer had been preparing her body. You know, the way a butcher prepares an animal for the table, cutting out the intestines and all the other stuff that you don’t eat to leave the bone and muscle, just the empty carcass.’

  For a moment, Abberline and the other two officers just stared at him.

  ‘You don’t mean you think the murderer was planning to eat some part of the woman, do you?’

  Chandler shook his head.

  ‘I really don’t know, Fred. I can’t believe that any killer, no matter how depraved he might be, would do that. I’m just telling you what I saw, and what it looked like to me.’

  Again there was a brief silence in the conference room, before Abberline spoke again.

  ‘I think you might be right, Joseph, at least in one respect.’

  ‘You’re not saying that you think this man is a cannibal, are you?’ Moore asked, his voice betraying the disgust he was feeling.

  ‘No,’ Abberline replied, ‘but there is another way of looking at what he did. I know Joseph has described exactly what he found this morning, and I also know exactly how the four of us feel about this, the same way that any normal person would feel when confronted by this kind of brutality. And perhaps that’s the real point here.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Andrews said.

  ‘Bear with me. Look, we’ve all had exactly the same reaction to this killing. We’re all absolutely disgusted by it. I’m beginning to wonder if this man’s motive isn’t just the taking of human life, or even the mutilations which he performs on the dead body – and everything I’ve seen about this case so far suggests that the women are dead before he starts work on them, which I suppose has to be some kind of a blessing – but something else. I think he’s deliberately setting out to shock people, and that’s his plan. That’s why he’s doing it.’

  Chandler nodded slowly.

  ‘I see what you’re driving at. You mean it’s not the victims who are important – I’m sorry, that’s not quite what I mean. Obviously these women are important, just as the life of any woman, or any man for that matter, is important. But what you mean is that for this killer, they’re almost incidental. What’s important for him is the way the corpse looks once he’s finished with it.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Abberline said, ‘and if I’m right, that gives us a real problem. It means there’s absolutely no point in investigating the victims, and trying to identify anybody in their lives who might have a motive for killing them, because we won’t find anyone. We won’t find anybody simply because there’s nobody there. This is an unknown man killing somebody that he’s never met before. It’s a stranger killing another stranger. And that means there’s really no point in us even finding out who the women were – although obviously we will do that – because it’s utterly irrelevant.

  ‘This man, I think, is picking his victims completely at random. So far, they’ve all been prostitutes, but that’s only because he strikes in the early hours of the morning and the most likely women to be on the streets at that time of day are unfortunates. But any woman, of any class, walking alone in Whitechapel or Spitalfields late at night, could become the next victim. The woman he chooses is just something he can use to express himself, if you like, the way a painter can turn a blank canvas into a masterpiece. This man is using his victims to make a statement. It’s as if he’s trying to send a message to somebody.’

  That was such a radical way of looking at the seemingly motiveless and completely unconnected murders – unconnected apart from their being carried out by the same perpetrator – that for several seconds none of the other officers responded.

  Finally, Andrews broke the silence.

  ‘A message, Fred? But a message to whom?’

  Abberline smiled bleakly.

  ‘That’s the problem, of course. I have absolutely no idea.’

  Chandler closed his notebook and looked across the table at Abberline.

  ‘If you’re right,’ he said, ‘then you’re really also saying that there’s nothing we can do about these murders. The killer could strike again, at any time, anywhere in the East End of London. Even if we put a constable on every street corner – and don
’t tell me we can’t, because I already know we haven’t got enough men to do even a tenth of that – there would still be no guarantee we’d catch him. He can just wait until the street’s quiet and nobody’s looking, grab a single woman and drag her into a dark corner somewhere, and do his business with her. The first we’d know about it would be when some man on his way to work sees the body.’

  Moore and Andrews both nodded their heads: the logic of the situation seemed inescapable.

  ‘That’s not a bad summary of the situation, Joseph,’ Abberline said, ‘but I’m not giving up on this. There must be something we can do to catch this maniac.’

  Chandler reached into another pocket and pulled out a newspaper.

  ‘I have no idea what we can do about it,’ he said, ‘but whatever plan you want to put into effect, Fred, you’d better do it soon. I picked up this newspaper on the way in to the station here. The press are all over this latest murder already.’

  ‘The Star, Joseph?’ Andrews asked, with a small smile, as he recognized which newspaper Chandler was holding. ‘I thought you were more of a Telegraph man.’

  ‘I am, but the people of Whitechapel aren’t reading the Telegraph. They’re reading the Star and newspapers like it, and that’s what matters.’

  Chandler placed the newspaper on the table in front of him.

  ‘Let me read you the first section of the editorial,’ he said, ‘and then you can tell me what you think: “London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt now that our original theory was correct and that the Whitechapel murderer, who now has four victims to his knife, is one man, and that man a murderous maniac.” Not exactly reassuring for the unfortunates of Whitechapel, is it? I don’t like the way the reporter has described it, but I have to say that I can’t really argue with what he’s said.’

  ‘It’s three murders, not four,’ Abberline pointed out. ‘I’m quite sure that that this killer had nothing to do with the death of Emma Smith.’

  ‘True enough,’ Chandler agreed. ‘I think the Star is about the only paper left that thinks her killing was the work of the same man, but three or four, or thirty or forty for that matter, I still don’t see how we’re going to catch him. And when the other newspapers come out, they may use different expressions and describe the killer in different terms, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Star pretty much sums up the feelings of the people of Whitechapel, and especially of the women. They really think there’s a kind of man-beast out there, picking them off, one by one.

  ‘And the other thing,’ he went on, ‘is that the crowds have already started to gather all around Hanbury Street. When I left, there were already hundreds of people milling around the area, trying to find the exact spot where the murder had been committed, and I passed hundreds more on my way back here. I’ve ordered extra uniformed constables to the area to try to keep some kind of order, because I think we could easily see fights breaking out, maybe even a riot.’

  Again there was silence for a few moments as Chandler finished speaking. Then Abberline took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and looked at what he’d written on it.

  ‘I had worked out a kind of plan,’ he said, ‘but I think what you’ve told us this morning, Joseph, has rather scuppered that. I kept on thinking that there must be some connection between the victims, that they all knew each other or something of the sort, and that the killings were revenge or retribution or something else that linked them. But now I think it’s very clear that that’s not the case, and that what we’re looking at is essentially a random, almost a motiveless, crime. This man doesn’t care who he kills, or even when or where he kills them. All he’s interested in is putting the corpses on display, if you like.’

  Abberline glanced around the table at his fellow officers.

  ‘You all know how limited our resources are. If any of you have got any good ideas about where we go from here, I’d very much like to hear them.’

  Monday, 10 September 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  On the Saturday, news of the murder spread quickly through the crowded tenements of Whitechapel, and crowds began to gather in the area shortly after dawn.

  Frightened, anxious, agitated or simply angry people assembled outside the site of the murder in Hanbury Street, while other groups congregated near the mortuary where the body had been taken. Police stations in the area also attracted crowds, and the Ten Bells pub located on Commercial Street, where it was popularly believed that Chapman had taken her final drink, was packed. But it was Hanbury Street, the scene of the atrocity, where most people assembled.

  The crowds grew so large, quickly numbering in the thousands, that many of the local businesses were forced to close, and police officers had to make frequent forays into the street to try to disperse them to allow normal road traffic to pass. According to Reynold’s Newspaper, the streets ‘swarmed with people who stood about in groups and excitedly discussed the details of the murder. Great anxiety is felt for the future. While the murderer is at large, they cannot feel safe.’

  And it wasn’t just the people of Whitechapel who had assembled in Hanbury Street. According to other reports in the press, people had travelled there from all over London. According to the Standard, ‘thousands of respectably dressed people visited the scene,’ and these allegedly included ‘two prominent members of the peerage.’

  Perhaps predictably, the natural sense of enterprise of the Londoners soon began to assert itself. A number of costermongers quickly arrived and set up their stalls in the streets and began doing a roaring trade selling fruit to people in the crowd, and some of the residents of 29 Hanbury Street seized the opportunity to make some easy money, and began charging eager spectators one penny a time to look at the actual murder site. According to contemporary accounts, several hundred people paid this fee before the police managed to stop it. At a small waxworks nearby, the owner splashed red paint over one of his displays and immediately began attracting crowds of eager spectators, all of whom paid the admittance fee to view his ‘reconstruction’ of the killing.

  Then the rumours began to circulate. One of these stated that the murderer had daubed a message on the wall of the house stating that: ‘I have now done three, and intend to do nine more and give myself up.’ A different version of the same rumour suggested that the message read: ‘This is the fourth. I will murder sixteen more and then give myself up.’

  Yet another report claimed that a woman had been murdered behind the London Hospital, though nothing was found there, and when a young woman began moaning that the so far unidentified victim had been her mother, she attracted immediate sympathy from the crowds of spectators, none of whom thought to ask how she could possibly know the dead woman’s name. But it was soon established that she was deluded, and she ended up in a violent struggle with a police officer. An ambulance heading towards the hospital was pursued by crowds, and hundreds of people ran to the Commercial Street police station when another rumour started to the effect that the murderer had been caught and taken there. In fact, the prisoner in question was simply a common thief.

  The killer was seen everywhere. Any man who didn’t appear to be entirely normal in his dress, or his conduct, or his actions, was immediately assumed to be the murderer. Innocent passers-by were attacked by mobs. A slaughterman with a few spots of blood on his hands was followed by a group of men from a pub, where he’d stopped to take an innocent drink. And there were the inevitable braggarts who, for whatever reason, either claimed to be the killer or to know who he was. Men with knives and suspicious looks abounded, and even the most respectable of men were suspected of being the faceless murderer.

  The London newspapers were quick to exploit the situation. The evening papers sold out in record time, and large crowds gathered outside the newsa
gents waiting for fresh supplies to be delivered. People who had obtained copies quickly found themselves surrounded by groups of men and women eager to hear the latest news.

  Even respectable papers like the Telegraph were not immune from the hyperbole which dominated the news. On the following Monday, the paper featured an article which discussed a baleful prowler haunting the dark streets and alleys of Whitechapel and the East End, and talked of ‘beings who look like men, but are rather demons, vampires.’

  And then things took an unexpected turn in Hanbury Street.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jewish population of the East End of London had increased enormously, and it was estimated that in the Tower Hamlets district alone there were probably almost fifty thousand Jews, and around two thirds of this number lived in Whitechapel. Hanbury Street in particular, along with several other neighbouring roads, had a very high concentration of Jewish residents.

  Although some of the Jewish residents were fairly prosperous, a very large proportion of them lived in poverty, and their situation was made worse by the attitude of the English residents of the area. They regarded the Jewish community with deep suspicion because they were, by definition, foreigners and therefore strange.

  The Jews were also seen as a source of competition in the employment market, and were thought to be taking jobs that rightfully belonged to the English workers in the area. There were other bones of contention as well, including the charge that Jewish manufacturers concentrated on producing shoddy and cheaply made goods which were then sold in the various shops and markets for much less money than good-quality products from English manufacturers.

  More pertinent to the recent events in Whitechapel, it was also known that the Jews had bizarre and – to English eyes – unnatural habits, such as the ritual slaughter of animals as part of their food preparation, a method of killing which involved slitting the animal’s throat. As far as many of the local residents were concerned, it was only a short step from the slaughter of animals to the slaughter of ‘unfortunates’, and the news of the murder of Annie Chapman provoked an immediate violent wave of anti-Semitic feeling.