There was of course no absolute proof that the chalked message had been written on the wall by the murderer, but the obvious presumption was that it had been, and none of the officers involved seriously doubted that this was the case.
Once the message had been obliterated, Charles Warren drove on to Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street, the site of the first murder of the night, and then continued to the headquarters of the City Police in Old Jewry. There, both Inspector McWilliam and Major Smith told him that his action in deleting the message had been a bad mistake. Smith would later describe this in writing as both a ‘fatal mistake’ and an ‘unpardonable blunder’.
But Charles Warren was perfectly content with his action. A possible link between him and Jack the Ripper had been permanently eliminated.
* * *
As he had expected, and feared, when Charles Warren returned to his home later that morning, there was another handwritten and hand-delivered letter waiting for him on the hall table.
As soon as he stepped inside the house, Ryan apologized to him.
‘I’m sorry sir,’ he said, ‘but I simply never saw this letter arrive. There was no knock at the door, and it was only when I was walking through the hall that I saw it had been delivered.’
Warren didn’t reply, just picked up the sealed envelope and carried it upstairs to his study.
Before he even opened it, he first collected the previous missives he had received from ‘Michael’, wrote down on a clean sheet of paper exactly what each of them said, and the dates on which they had arrived, then took the originals and their envelopes over to the fireplace set in one wall. He screwed up the letters, placed them in the grate, then lit a match and touched the flame to the paper. When they had been entirely reduced to ash, he used the poker to crumple them into dust.
Only then did he slice open the latest letter from his nemesis, take out the note and read it.
It was composed in the same cryptic style which he had become used to, but was significantly longer than any of the previous messages. The text read:
Not an exact square, but almost. The symbol of the Masons, the two triangles completed. A reminder on the cheeks of the last one. Now we start with the star of the Jews. Two more triangles and six points. Look out for the kidney. The next one will be worse, because I will take my time. You can stop this whenever you want. Just follow my instructions. You have a month.
As he had done before, Warren copied out the text onto the sheet of paper and then consigned the original to the flames.
Then for several minutes he simply sat at his desk with his head in his hands, trying to decide what he should do.
Monday, 1 October 1888
Whitechapel, London
‘Do we know who they were? Or even what they were? Either of them?’
The mood in the small conference room at the Bethnal Green station, a room which Abberline had commandeered once he had officially been appointed to run the investigation into the multiple murders, was subdued. Everything had been quiet in Whitechapel for over three weeks, and Abberline and the other officers had privately begun to hope that the reign of terror was over, and that – for whatever reason – the unknown killer had ceased his hideous rampage. But the events which had taken place over the weekend clearly demonstrated that this was not the case.
‘We don’t have their names yet,’ Detective Inspector Chandler replied. ‘We’re working on it.’
Chandler was still acting as their link to the officers of H Division, and was working very closely with Abberline and the other two Metropolitan Police detectives.
‘And as you’d expect,’ he continued, ‘neither woman was carrying any sort of identification. As for what they were, I suppose it makes sense to assume that they were both unfortunates, just because they were walking alone through the East End in the early hours of the morning.
‘God, what a mess,’ Abberline muttered. ‘And to kill twice in the same night. That shows he’s getting bolder.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Andrews objected. ‘The location of the first murder in – where was it again, oh yes, Dutfield’s Yard – seems to have been fairly busy, lots of people coming and going. So I think he may have intended to only carry out one murder, but before he could finish the job and do whatever butchery he had in mind, he heard somebody approaching and legged it.’
‘Maybe.’ Abberline sounded far from convinced. ‘But even if you’re right and he was disturbed, I still think it shows a very bold approach to then go off and carry out a second killing. The other alternative is that, precisely because Dutfield’s Yard was such a busy place that night, he deliberately just killed the woman because he knew that would immediately become the focus of all the police activity, and then set out to find his second victim in the belief that all of our efforts would be concentrated on that one part of London.’
‘You could make the case either way, I suppose,’ Chandler said, ‘but in fact the place he picked for the second killing had quite a large police presence in it. I’ve already talked to the beat officers who were on duty that night, and as far as I can work out the murderer would have only had maybe ten or fifteen minutes at best to find, kill and mutilate the second woman. If this idea of a first killing to attract the attention of the police to one location so that he wouldn’t be disturbed during the second murder is right, then I would have expected him to pick somewhere a lot quieter, with far fewer police patrols.’
Abberline nodded. That aspect of the double murder had been bothering him as well. Then another thought struck him.
‘I think the way he’s carried out the murders in the past shows that he’s perfectly capable of finding a victim, killing her and then mutilating the body in a very short space of time, even when we’ve known that there are patrolling constables nearby. We’ve seen that already. I’m just beginning to think he might be a lot cleverer than we’ve supposed up to now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m wondering if he picked the location of the second murder quite deliberately, simply because it lies within the boundaries of the City of London, and he knew that that would mean a different police force would be handling the investigation. Maybe he thought that would lead to confusion over jurisdiction and allocation of resources, and that’s why he took a chance and picked on that woman.’
‘Well you’re right about one thing, Fred, we do know that he’s quite happy to take his chances. Of course, the other side of the coin is that perhaps that woman was the only one he had found walking the streets, and the location didn’t matter to him. He might not have even known he’d crossed the boundary into the City.’
‘We could argue this back and forth for the rest of the day,’ Abberline said, ‘and it wouldn’t get us anywhere. Whatever his motive was in carrying out these two killings, and in picking those particular locations, that probably isn’t going to be much help in tracking him down. We have to concentrate on the facts that we have available to us, and this time the killer seems to have left us with a lot more to go on than previously.’
‘You mean the message and the bloody apron?’ Chandler said.
‘Exactly.’
‘I suppose there’s no doubt that the piece of apron was cut from the clothing of the second victim?’ Andrews asked.
Chandler shook his head.
‘None at all. I’ve already had that confirmed by Inspector McWilliam, who was at the mortuary at the time. James McWilliam,’ he added in clarification, ‘is the head of the Detective Department of the City of London Police.’
‘So it’s beyond any doubt that the man who discarded that piece of bloody cloth in the entry way to the building in Goulston Street was also the man who killed the second victim. And, unless we’ve got it completely wrong, the first woman as well,’ Abberline said. ‘And, at least by implication, he was also the person who wrote the message on the wall. The message that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, was so keen to erase.’
&n
bsp; The senior inspector’s tone of voice showed his irritation almost as clearly as the words he used.
‘You’re closer to Warren than any of the rest of us,’ Moore said. ‘Have you got any idea why he did that? I know the message was a bit cryptic, but having a copy of something written in the killer’s own hand could have been a lot of help to us.’
‘I have no idea,’ Abberline replied. ‘I know he said at the time that he was concerned that some of the local residents – and by that he obviously meant members of the local Jewish community – would see what had been written and that might have led to riots or at least civil unrest. He’s got a point about that, I have to concede, but I still don’t understand why the message was wiped off the wall so quickly, before it could even be photographed. I can’t see any reason why the officers on the spot couldn’t have put up some kind of a screen in front of the message, and there were enough of them to make sure that none of the locals could come into the entry way. It seems to me to have been an extremely foolish decision, verging on crass stupidity.’
‘McWilliam felt exactly the same way,’ Chandler said, ‘and he told me so yesterday. And his boss, Major Smith, told him that in his opinion Warren’s decision was idiotic.’
‘But at least we know what the message said,’ Andrews pointed out. ‘That’s something, surely.’
‘I agree, but I don’t think it gets us very far. It’s just a kind of rant against the Jews, but even that’s not entirely clear,’ Abberline said. ‘According to the report by Constable Long, the word “Jews” was spelt incorrectly, and there was an extra word at the end of the first line which whoever wrote it had rubbed out, but it was still just visible. So the complete message would have read “The Juwes are not The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing”, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.’
Abberline wrote out the message in capital letters on a sheet of paper, then stood up, walked across to the wall on which he’d had pinned the Whitechapel map with the locations of the murders – now six in all, including that of Emma Smith – marked on it in ink, and pinned the sheet to the wall beside the map. Then he walked back to the table and sat down.
‘It’s a triple negative,’ he pointed out, ‘so the original message seems to be saying that it’s not the fault of the Jews. But by rubbing out the first “not”, he’s turned it into a double negative, and that changes the meaning completely. You can shorten the message “The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing” to just “The Juwes are The men That Will be Blamed”. I assume that when he wrote the word “not” on the first line, he hadn’t quite worked out what the rest of the message would say, and when he stepped back to look at it, he realized he needed to change it.’
‘It’s still a very complicated expression, though, isn’t it?’ Chandler asked. ‘If he wanted to blame the Jews, why didn’t he just write “The Jews did it” or something obvious like that?’
‘I think,’ Abberline said, after a pause while he collected his thoughts, ‘he’s trying to show us that he’s an educated man, not some common thug, which is why he used such a complicated sentence construction. And according to Long, the writing was done in an elegant and cursive script, the kind of script you’d expect a gentleman, a well-educated gentleman, to use. And that makes me wonder why every word in the message is spelt correctly, apart from the most important word of all: “Juwes”. I’ve already done a bit of checking, and as far as I’ve been able to find out that’s not a known spelling of the word “Jews” in any language. Any ideas?’
‘It could just be an alternative spelling, I suppose,’ Chandler suggested. ‘I happen to know that quite a lot of the locals – those who can read and write, obviously – spell the “Jewry” in “Jewry Street” as “Juwery”, probably because that’s how it sounds when you say it.’ He spelt the name out to the other detectives. ‘It’s not that big a leap from “Juwery” to “Juwes”, is it?’
‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Abberline agreed, ‘and it does make a kind of sense. I can’t believe that a man who can correctly spell “blamed” and “nothing” wouldn’t know how to spell “Jews”, so maybe what he’s trying to do is to show us that he’s a local, that despite being educated, that’s the way somebody from round here would spell the word. Though if that is what he’s intending, I still don’t quite understand why. Anyway, I don’t think the message is going to help us very much, and as Warren wiped off the wall before anybody else saw it, at least we aren’t facing some kind of Jewish insurrection over it.
‘The other thing I find interesting about this,’ Abberline went on, almost as an aside, ‘is that on the first and only time that Commissioner Charles Warren bothers to turn up at the scene of one of these murders, the only thing he does is obliterate the one clue that we’ve so far found that could help lead to the murderer’s identity.’
The other three men stared at him.
‘What are you saying, Fred?’ Andrews asked.
Abberline gave an enigmatic smile.
‘I’m not saying anything. I just think it’s interesting, that’s all. The other thing which is still a mystery to me is why the murderer is sending us messages at all. Why should he be trying to implicate the Jews in what he’s doing? Because that seems to be his intention, I can only assume that he himself isn’t Jewish.’
‘Unless it’s a kind of double bluff,’ Chandler suggested, ‘and he thinks, by leaving a message blaming the Jews for the murders, that we’ll think he’s a Gentile, but he’s actually a Jew himself.’
‘Like I said before,’ Abberline responded, ‘all this is just speculation, and it isn’t going to get us anywhere. We have to get back to basics, to ordinary police work. None of our decoy constables have been approached yet, obviously, but it’s probably worth keeping them on the streets for a while longer, just in case. About all we can do now is the usual house-to-house enquiries and interviews of anybody known to be in the area – in either area, I mean – when the murders were committed. But this time I want more than just house-to-house. I want hand bills printed and delivered to every property in the area. I want everybody in Whitechapel and the East End of London to know that we’re making every possible effort we can to catch this man.
‘And I don’t know about you three,’ he finished, ‘but I’m not holding my breath waiting for any good news at the moment.’
Thursday, 4 October 1888
Whitechapel, London
The first of the two post-mortem examinations to be held was that of the mutilated body discovered in Mitre Square, and that was conducted during the afternoon of Sunday, 30 September, by Dr Frederick Gordon Brown.
In the meantime, the police were trying to discover exactly who the victim was. To begin with, it looked as if the identification of the dead woman wouldn’t be easy. She appeared to be about forty years of age, was about five feet tall and quite slim, with dark brownish hair and hazel eyes.
Her clothes yielded no obvious means of identifying her, being uniformly dirty and old, and in fact were a strange mixture, featuring a man’s white vest and a pair of men’s laced boots, a black coat edged in imitation fur, and a dark-green chintz skirt, as well as numerous undergarments which included a dark-green alpaca skirt and a ragged blue skirt, a grey petticoat and a white calico chemise. In common with many other members of her profession, she carried no identification and wore no drawers.
The state of her clothing was so poor that it was felt she could almost have been a vagrant, or at best an occasional resident in one of the numerous doss houses in the Whitechapel area. Her meagre possessions included a white handkerchief and a few other pieces of material, a couple of clay pipes, two tin boxes containing sugar and tea respectively, a table knife and a teaspoon, a cigarette case, an empty matchbox and a handful of other objects of little or no worth.
‘I don’t know if this might be important,’ Dr Brown said as he looked at the dead woman’s left arm.
One of the attending police officers,
Sergeant Jones, immediately stepped forward and looked down to where the doctor was indicating.
‘That might help, yes,’ the officer said, staring fixedly at the limp forearm.
Somewhat faded, but still just visible was a tattoo which formed the initials ‘TC’ in blue ink.
‘Could be her initials, I suppose,’ Jones said, ‘or maybe they’re the initials of her husband. Either way, it’s something to be going on with, along with those two pawn tickets we found at the scene.’
A small mustard tin had been discovered beside the body, and Jones had picked it up and examined its contents. Inside he’d discovered two pawn tickets, one for a pair of men’s boots, which had been pledged in the name of Jane Kelly of 6 Dorset Street on 28 September, and the other for a man’s flannel shirt, pledged by Emily Burrell of 52 White’s Row on 31 August. And in both cases the pawnbroker was Joseph Jones of 31 Church Street, Spitalfields.
At the time, these had both looked like good solid clues, but as soon as the investigation began there were problems. The first discovery the police made was that there was no number ‘52’ in White’s Row, and nobody named Jane Kelly was known at 6 Dorset Street. It looked as if they were going to be no help at all.
But ultimately it was these two pawn tickets that led to the murdered woman being identified. Because of the huge swathe of publicity surrounding this murder, and the description of her possessions being prominently listed in most of the newspapers, late in the afternoon on 2 October a labourer named John Kelly walked into the Bishopsgate Street police station.
‘It’s this woman what’s been murdered,’ he began. ‘It could be my Kate.’
Kelly explained that his common-law wife, Kate Conway or Kate Kelly, with whom he had lived at Cooney’s Lodging House at 55 Flower and Dean Street for the previous seven years, had disappeared the day before the murder took place.
The Ripper Secret Page 28