With that geometrical shape completed, and if Charles Warren still hadn’t capitulated and handed over the menorah, it would be time to move on to the second part of his campaign, to implicate the Jews and suggest that all the killings had been performed by a member of that community.
And Pedachenko had a very good idea about how he could start that particular story circulating in the area.
Sunday, 30 September 1888
Whitechapel, London
At about one o’clock in the morning a hawker of jewellery named Louis Diemschutz arrived at Dutfield’s Yard with his pony and cart to unload his unsold wares before taking the animal to its stable in George Yard, off Cable Street. As he passed through the double wooden gates, which were only rarely closed because the yard was in almost constant use, Diemschutz stated that his pony shied towards the left, away from some object on the ground.
He stopped his cart, climbed down and attempted to find out what the obstruction was. It was too dark in the yard for him to see clearly, and so he struck a match. By its flickering light he saw enough to identify the figure of a woman, lying on the ground.
Diemschutz was a member of the Jewish club – in fact, he was the steward – and as soon as he’d calmed down his pony he went into the club where he met his wife in the dining room on the ground floor.
‘Let me have a candle, will you?’ he asked.
Somebody handed one to him, but before he returned to the yard outside, he explained the reason he needed it to the people in the room.
‘There’s a woman lying in the yard,’ he said, ‘but I cannot say whether she’s drunk or dead.’
Diemschutz returned to the yard, accompanied by a young tailor machinist named Isaac Kozebrodski, and, with the better illumination afforded by the candle, the two men confirmed that what Diemschutz had seen was the dead body of a woman. His wife, who had followed him as far as the door, also saw the body and noticed blood all around it. She was of a nervous disposition, by Diemschutz’s own account, and immediately emitted a sharp scream which alerted all the other members of the club that something had happened.
As soon as they were certain that the woman was dead, Diemschutz and Kozebrodski both ran out into the streets to try to find a policeman. They turned right out of the gates and then left into Fairclough Street, yelling out ‘Police!’ as loudly as they could. They ran as far as the T-junction with Grove Street and then turned back.
A man named Edward Spooner, a horse-keeper, was standing with a female companion outside the Beehive Tavern on the corner of Christian Street and Fairclough Street, and stopped the two men as they ran back past him.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘There’s another woman been murdered,’ Diemschutz replied. ‘In a yard in Berner Street.’
Spooner left his companion and ran down the street with the other two men to Dutfield’s Yard. When they arrived there, they found that a small crowd of people had gathered around the body. Edward Spooner stepped forward and lifted the chin of the dead woman, and for the first time they could all see the gaping wound in her throat.
In the meantime, another club member named Morris Eagle had also heard the shouts of alarm and commotion in the yard, and as soon as he had ascertained the cause he left the premises with a companion in search of a police officer. But where Diemschutz and Kozebrodski had turned south out of the yard, he went north, towards the much busier Commercial Road, and there he found PC 252H Henry Lamb and another constable.
‘Come on. There has been another murder!’ Eagle called out.
‘Where?’ Lamb replied.
‘Berner Street.’
The two police officers returned to the scene with him. After they’d inspected the body, the other constable left immediately to summon a doctor.
Constable Lamb took charge of the scene, but he obviously needed further assistance, and as quickly as possible.
‘Mr Eagle,’ he asked. ‘There is no one else I can ask to do this, so could you please run to the Leman Street police station right away. Tell them what has happened here and ask them to send an inspector as quickly as they can.’
Eagle agreed, and left the yard immediately. The Leman Street station was only a few streets over to the west, and it didn’t take him long to get there.
The alarm was quickly raised. A telegram was sent to the Commercial Street police station at 1.25 that morning, and Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, now back from his annual leave, immediately set out for Berner Street, arriving there at about 1.45, by which time Chief Inspector West, Inspector Pinhorn and a number of other officers from Leman Street were already present.
PC Lamb, who had remained on the scene, stated in his report that the deceased ‘was lying on her left side, and her left arm was slightly under her body. The right arm was across her breast. She looked as if there was no struggle, and she’d been quietly laid down.’
The first doctor to arrive was Frederick William Blackwell, who lived at 100 Commercial Road, not far from the northern end of Berner Street, and he got there at 1.16 by his own watch, but his assistant Edward Johnston had already been accompanied by the police constable to the scene of the crime.
‘The doctor will be here directly,’ Johnston had told Constable Lamb, ‘but if I may I will start to examine the body myself.’
Lamb immediately gave his permission and, while Johnston was carrying out his preliminary examination, the police officers had the gates to the yard closed, which meant that a crowd of almost thirty people was trapped inside, exactly as intended.
They were a mixed bunch, comprising the tenants of adjoining premises, members of the club itself, and several people who just happened to have been passing and had been attracted by the commotion in the area. As well as detaining the group of potential witnesses, Constable Lamb then went into the club to check all the rooms, looking for evidence of bloodstains, the murder weapon or any other clues, a task that would be repeated several times that day.
The police examined the hands and clothes of all the people who had ended up in Dutfield’s Yard, searched their pockets for weapons, took statements from them and recorded their names and addresses. Nothing suspicious was found, and all the people questioned were allowed to return home or continue about their business. Later that morning, the yard was also examined by both the doctors and the police a number of times in a further search for the murder weapon or other clues, but without result.
When Dr Blackwell arrived, he confirmed the physical description of the victim supplied by Constable Lamb, and then carried out his own examination of the body.
‘There’s a very large incision on the victim’s neck,’ he stated, ‘and there’s a length of chequered material, probably a handkerchief or scarf or something of that sort, which has been pulled extremely tightly around her throat.’
‘Can you tell us how long she’s been dead?’ one of the police officers asked.
‘Not for very long,’ Blackwell replied. ‘I estimate that she was killed between about ten minutes and half an hour before I arrived here.’
Dr George Bagster Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, had been summoned to the Leman Street police station at about twenty past one that morning and sent on from there to Dutfield’s Yard.
When he arrived, he also examined the body and made a note of the victim’s injuries. He agreed with the approximate time of death which had already been proposed by Dr Blackwell.
One oddity noted by both doctors was that the dead woman had died clutching a package of aromatic sweets, intended to sweeten the breath and known as cachous, in her left hand. This suggested that her murder had been very rapid indeed.
‘There’s nothing else we can do here,’ Phillips said, when he had completed his examination. ‘As soon as the ambulance arrives, she can be transferred to the mortuary at St George’s.’
The vehicle arrived at the scene within the hour, and the body of the victim, who was still unidentified, was delivered to the mortuary sho
rtly after four in the morning. Sometime after half past five, following a brief visit to the scene by Charles Warren, Police Constable Albert Collins arrived with a mop and a bucket of water to wash away all the bloodstains from the yard, and then the last of the police officers left.
Inspector Reid had followed the ambulance to the mortuary and examined the body of the dead woman there, carefully recording his observations. He estimated that she was about forty-two years old, five feet two inches in height, with dark-brown curly hair and a pale complexion. Her eyes were light grey, and her upper front teeth were missing. She was wearing a long black jacket trimmed with black fur and decorated by a single red rose and a piece of maidenhair fern, an old black skirt, a dark-brown velvet bodice, two petticoats of light serge, white stockings and a white chemise, a black bonnet and a pair of elasticated boots.
As usual, there was nothing on her person to suggest her identity, and her only possessions appeared to be two handkerchiefs, a thimble and a length of wool on a piece of card. Details of this evidence, scanty and inconclusive though it was, was sent by telegraph to all London police stations in an attempt to hasten her identification.
But, inevitably, the murder of the woman who would later be identified as Elizabeth Stride was quickly overshadowed by other, and even more brutal, events elsewhere in the city.
Sunday, 30 September 1888
Whitechapel, London
Catharine Eddowes had been born on 14 April 1842 in Graisley Green in Wolverhampton, the daughter of a tinplate worker named George and his wife Catharine, and was one of eleven children. In 1843 the family moved down to London, but the young Catharine later returned to Wolverhampton, where she obtained a job as a tinplate stamper. This didn’t last too long, and when she lost her job after stealing from her employer, she began living with her uncle in Birmingham, but after a few years she met a former soldier named Thomas Conway in the city and lived there for a while before they moved south to London in 1881, to a house in Lower George Street, Chelsea.
Conway is something of a mystery, with doubts surrounding almost everything about him, including his name. He had apparently served in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, in which he had enlisted under the name of Thomas Quinn, and which paid him an army pension after he’d left the service. He also worked as a hawker to earn additional income, and had tattooed his initials – TC – onto Eddowes’s left forearm.
He never married Catharine, though she had three children by him, two boys and a girl, but then her drinking habits became so disruptive that soon after they arrived in London she was forced to leave the family. According to her sister Elizabeth, Conway was almost as bad with regard to drinking, and frequently beat Catharine when he was drunk, though Catharine’s eldest daughter, Annie, had a very different story to tell. She claimed that her father was actually a teetotaller and had left her mother only because of her persistent drunkenness.
But whatever the actual reason for their separation, Catharine left and within a year she had met a new partner at a common lodging house named Cooney’s at 55 Flower and Dean Street, in Spitalfields. His name was John Kelly, while Eddowes went by the aliases of Mary Ann or Kate Kelly and Kate or Catharine Conway, after her two successive common-law husbands. Her official occupation was as a hawker of matchboxes and other small items on the street, but she was probably making far more money by resorting to casual prostitution. By this time her relationship with Thomas Conway had deteriorated to such an extent that he did his best to make sure that Eddowes didn’t know where either he or their children were living.
She’d had a break from the crowded streets of Whitechapel in August and September 1888, having walked out to a village named Hunton, near Coxheath in Kent, where she, Kelly and a woman named Emily Burrell and her partner were employed picking hops. At this time, ‘hopping’ was extremely popular, and as many as 80,000 itinerant labourers, principally from London, would travel down to Kent for the season, which ran from August to September. When the two couples parted on the way back to London, Burrell gave Eddowes a pawn ticket for a flannel shirt, which she thought would fit Kelly.
On 27 September the two of them reached Whitechapel, but the money they’d earned from their work was soon spent. At Maidstone, Kelly had bought a pair of boots from a shop in the High Street, and Catharine Eddowes purchased a jacket, but when they arrived in London they had no money left at all, and were forced to spend the night in the Shoe Lane Workhouse, in the ‘casual ward’.
The following day, Eddowes did some kind of a job that earned her sixpence, but they needed more than that to pay for a double bed at Cooney’s Lodging House in Flower and Dean Street, so they split it between them, Kelly taking four pence to pay for a single bed at Cooney’s while Eddowes went back to the Shoe Lane Workhouse, where she would have to perform some hard and repetitive manual work, and endure a sermon or two, in exchange for her bed and a plate of indifferent food.
On the morning of 29 September, she was thrown out of the workhouse for some infraction and immediately went round to Kelly’s lodging. Because they had no money or food, they decided to pawn Kelly’s boots, which raised the sum of two shillings and sixpence at a shop named Jones at 31 Church Street. Eddowes and the barefoot Kelly then bought tea and sugar and a little food, and they had a simple breakfast together in the kitchen at Cooney’s.
They remained there at the lodging house until about two in the afternoon when Eddowes told Kelly she intended to walk to King Street in Bermondsey that afternoon to try to obtain money from her daughter, Mrs Annie Phillips. Annie had married a Southwark-based gunmaker and was comparatively well off. Kelly was concerned for her, precisely because of the recent murders, and begged her to be careful, and to come back early. Eddowes replied that she could take care of herself, but promised that she would be back by four in the afternoon. Kelly stayed at Cooney’s for the rest of the day, and at about eight o’clock that evening he bought himself a bed and remained in the building for the rest of the night.
Catharine Eddowes didn’t meet her daughter that afternoon, because the two women had parted on bad terms and Annie hadn’t told her mother that she had moved from King Street the previous year and was then living in Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Road. But without any doubt Eddowes managed to obtain funds from somewhere, probably by prostitution, because at about half past eight that evening she was arrested by PC 931 Louis Robinson outside 29 Aldgate High Street for causing a disturbance, and was clearly drunk. Robinson sought assistance from Constable 959 George Simmons, and together they took her to Bishopsgate police station in Wormwood Street, where she gave her name as ‘Nothing’ on being charged. The station sergeant, a man named James Byfield, locked her in a cell so she could try to sober up.
By one in the morning she had recovered her senses sufficiently to be released from the cell, and was then allowed to leave the station. The releasing officer was PC 968 George Hutt, who had come on duty at 9.45 and who had checked on the prisoner frequently during the evening.
She was questioned again before she was allowed to leave, and this time she gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly, and her address as 6 Fashion Street, Spitalfields. As Eddowes left the station she asked Constable Hutt the time, to which he replied that it was too late for her to obtain any drink. When she walked out of the building, she said ‘Good night, old cock’ to Hutt, then turned left and began walking back towards Aldgate and Hounds ditch, though for her to return to her lodging she should have turned right.
It’s possible that her earlier promise to John Kelly, a promise which she had comprehensively broken, was troubling her, because when Constable Hutt had spoken to her shortly before her release, and had told her that it was one o’clock in the morning, she had said: ‘I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home then.’ That may have been the reason why she decided to remain out on the streets, or perhaps try to find some other place to stay rather than returning to the lodging house where she knew Kelly would be waiting for her, either awake or asleep.
Half an hour later she was seen loitering in Duke Street, near the entrance to Church Passage, with a man she probably hoped would provide her with the funds she needed to pay for a bed that night. Three Jewish businessmen – Harry Harris, Joseph Hyam Levy and Joseph Lawende – were just leaving the Imperial Club, located at 16–17 Duke’s Place, and saw the two figures, but only Lawende, a cigarette dealer, took much notice of them and even he later declared he would not be able to recognize either of them again, though he did supply the police with a vague description of the man. Then the three businessmen separated to return to their own homes.
After only a couple of minutes’ conversation Eddowes realized that her potential client was lacking either the money or the inclination – or possibly both – and turned away in irritation.
She walked down Church Passage and into an open space named Mitre Square. Almost as soon as she stepped out of the covered passageway she saw a figure walking slowly across the square from the direction of Mitre Street. Eddowes snorted in disgust, because it was a woman, and that meant she would probably have to sleep rough, in a doorway or some other sheltered spot, because apart from the man she’d just walked away from, the only other people she’d seen on the streets since she’d been released from custody had been policemen, and approaching one of them would just ensure her a quick trip to another cell somewhere.
As she walked along beside the buildings which lined the side of the square, the other woman turned and headed towards her, reaching her just as Eddowes paused beside a fence with a door which gave access to an adjacent yard, owned by a firm of general merchants named Heydemann and Company.
The Ripper Secret Page 26