Although Warren was still relatively unconcerned about the deaths of the women themselves – after all, they were only unfortunates and frankly of little concern to anyone, in his opinion – he had been unexpectedly moved by the sight of the body of Elizabeth Stride lying in the mortuary. For the first time since the killings had begun, Warren had seen at first hand the result of the work of his nemesis, and it had been something of a shock. Intellectually, of course, he knew exactly what had been happening to these women, but it had produced very different emotions in him when he had seen the corpse of that woman.
But he although was still absolutely determined not to hand over the menorah, he knew that, somehow, the killings were going to have to stop, and he was really beginning to feel the pressure. Almost every day there were news reports and editorials in the papers which were harshly critical of the police force – the force which he commanded – and which emphasized in great detail exactly how little progress had been made in catching Jack the Ripper. And to make matters worse, Warren, and every other police officer in London, knew that these criticisms were entirely justified. With the single exception of Warren himself, nobody involved in law enforcement in Britain’s capital city had the slightest idea of the identity the killer or of his real motive.
And it wasn’t just the reference to Catharine Eddowes’s missing kidney which was concerning Warren. He knew from the police reports and the few witness statements that each of the murders to date had been performed in a matter of minutes, with both the killer and the victim in exposed positions, with the attendant risk of discovery at any moment. If the murderer could somehow lure a woman into a quiet and secluded location, where he could carry out his work unobserved and at his leisure, Warren knew that the man would be able to produce mutilations which would surpass anything which he had done before, and which would have a devastating effect on Warren’s own professional position, and of course on the residents of Whitechapel.
There had to be some way of catching the man before he started work again. And not just catching him. The one thing Warren could not permit to happen was for ‘Michael’ to appear in court and tell his own side of the story, to explain to a judge and jury what Warren had done in Jerusalem almost twenty years earlier. Although he knew that no proof of what he’d done could be offered, Warren was also aware that mud had a habit of sticking, and even if he managed to avoid being investigated or prosecuted himself, the rumours would spread, and in all probability his army career would at best stall, and at worst might be over.
He realized that he had only two viable courses of action. First, he could simply accede to the man’s demands and hand over the Jewish relic. Or, second, he would have to devise some means by which he could get ‘Michael’ by himself and kill him. It was a desperate solution to a desperate problem, but Warren found he could justify that action, at least to himself, simply because of what ‘Michael’ had done in London. Not for the first time, he regretted not having pulled the trigger of his Webley revolver during their first and only meeting.
What he had to do was work out some way of engineering another meeting between himself and the other man, in a secluded location with an absence of witnesses, where he could carry out the deed and somehow dispose of the body.
And at that moment, Warren had absolutely no idea how he could achieve that.
A double knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.
‘Come.’
The door opened and Inspector Abberline stepped into the office, a large folded sheet of paper held in his left hand.
‘What is it?’ Warren asked. ‘You don’t have an appointment.’
‘I know, sir,’ Abberline began, ‘but I thought you would want to see this as soon as possible. I don’t know how significant it is, but I’ve discovered something rather interesting about the locations of the murders.’
The inspector unfolded the sheet of paper he was carrying and placed it on the desk in front of the commissioner.
Warren saw immediately that the map Abberline had prepared was almost identical to the one which was folded up and tucked away in one of the pockets of his locked briefcase. He had hoped that nobody else would realize the significance of the locations of the killings, but clearly something about this had dawned on the inspector.
‘I’ve marked the location of all of the murders to date on this map of Whitechapel, sir,’ Abberline went on, pointing at a series of crosses, each marked by a name and a date, ‘and I then drew lines to connect them. As you can see, the first three killings, those of Tabram, Nichols and Chapman, form a clear triangle with a fairly acute angle at the apex. Then, if you use the location of the Chapman killing as a starting point, the murders of Stride and Eddowes also form a triangle, but one with a much larger angle at the apex. In fact, it’s almost ninety degrees at the site of the Eddowes killing.’
Warren stared at the map for a few moments before he replied.
‘I’m quite sure, Abberline, that if you plotted almost any series of murders you would end up with some interesting geometrical shapes. What, exactly, is your point?’
Abberline glanced up at the commissioner, then down again at the map.
‘You might think that this is a bit far-fetched, sir, but when I drew these connecting lines, the thing that struck me immediately was that the shapes were familiar. It took me a while, but then I realized what it was. I’m a Freemason, sir, as I believe you are, and if you don’t draw the connecting lines on the map between the locations of the Chapman and Tabram murders, and between Chapman and Stride, you end up with two “V” shapes. To me, they look very like the shapes of the compasses and the square, the Masonic symbol. They don’t exactly correspond, but they’re very close.’
Warren didn’t respond, just looked at the inspector.
‘I think, sir, that I was right when I said to you that this man was trying to send somebody a message.’
‘What message? And to whom?’ Warren demanded.
‘I think this man has a grudge against Freemasonry, and he’s deliberately carried out these killings to display the shape of the Masonic symbol on the ground in Whitechapel. I think he’s trying to suggest that the killer is a Mason, and to discredit the whole Masonic movement.’
Charles Warren relaxed slightly. Abberline’s perspicacity had surprised him. He hadn’t expected anyone to relate the locations of the murders to the ancient symbol of his Craft, and he was just thankful that the inspector’s analysis hadn’t led him to the correct conclusion, that the murders were indeed a message, a message to Warren himself. What he now needed to do was throw the inspector off the track as far as he possibly could.
‘That’s interesting, Abberline,’ he said, ‘but you’re reading far too much into what’s been happening in Whitechapel. It’s a pure coincidence that you can see these shapes on the ground. It’s obvious to me that the killer is simply selecting his victims wherever he can find them, and he’s choosing each new location some distance away from his previous murder, to avoid being detected by the increased patrols we have in the area.’
Abberline didn’t look entirely convinced by his superior’s argument.
‘And there’s another thing,’ Warren continued. ‘If by some chance you’re right, then now the murders will presumably stop, because he’s already created the shape of the two triangles, the Masonic symbol, on the ground. Do you really think that this man has now completed his work, and that we’ll have no further killings? Are you so convinced about this that I can order our extra patrols and police officers to leave White chapel?’
Abberline shook his head.
‘I can’t say that, no, sir,’ he replied.
‘Exactly,’ Warren snapped. ‘Jack the Ripper is still out there, Abberline. You know it and I know it, and you would be far better employed in trying to find him instead of coming up with a ridiculous fairy story like this.’
Abberline walked out of the commissioner’s office, and out of Scotland Yard, with a worried frown on his
face, a frown which remained all the way back to the Bethnal Green police station.
He knew that Charles Warren was an exceedingly difficult man to deal with, a man who consistently failed to listen to any advice given to him by any other person, irrespective of their position, background or knowledge, but even knowing that, Abberline still had a strange undercurrent of doubt about the commissioner. A doubt that was beginning to border on suspicion.
It was almost as if the man knew more than he was prepared to say about the killings. He had apparently been unsurprised by the murders, had perhaps even been expecting them, and that simply didn’t make sense. He couldn’t be involved in them, obviously, because he had been out of the country when the second woman, Mary Ann Nichols, had been slaughtered, and bearing in mind that both the Metropolitan Police and the commissioner himself had been the subject of one of the most angry, focused, intense and aggressive media campaigns the capital city had ever seen, he very clearly had no motive for any kind of involvement.
But if that were the case, why was he always so consistently dismissive of any new information which Abberline – or anyone else, for that matter – placed before him? And the detective inspector still remembered, very clearly, Charles Warren’s reaction when Abberline had suggested, almost in passing, that the killings seemed almost to be a message to somebody. The man had gone so white that for a moment Abberline had almost expected him to faint.
Warren clearly knew something about what was going on, something which he was extremely unwilling to impart to his subordinates, to the very people who were trying unsuccessfully to bring Jack the Ripper to justice. But Abberline had not the slightest idea what that knowledge might be, or how the commissioner could possibly be involved.
He shook his head. He would just have to continue the hunt for the mass murderer as best he could, and follow up any leads that he could identify, while at the same time keeping a very close eye on Charles Warren, his ultimate superior, just in case the man let slip anything that could be of value.
Abberline closed his eyes briefly as the cab neared its destination. It was invidious situation for anybody to be in. He was chasing a murderer who seemed able to evade any and all precautions which were taken to prevent his actions, a man who left no clues to either his identity or his motive for carrying out the killings, and who probably would strike again, perhaps several times. He was a member of a police force that was being reviled on a daily basis by the newspapers, and which had not the slightest idea what to do next to catch this man. And, finally, he now suspected that his superior officer might in some way be involved with either the murderer or the killings themselves.
As well as the grotesque nightmare which had engulfed Whitechapel and Spitalfields, Frederick Abberline now seemed to be held captive in a nightmare all of his own.
Wednesday, 10 October 1888
Whitechapel, London
Because of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter received by the Central News Agency on 27 September, the serial killer who had been targeting prostitutes in the East End of London now had a name, and a name that would stick.
The soubriquet the ‘Whitechapel fiend’ had enjoyed a brief popularity before being supplanted by the specific but misleading ‘Leather Apron’ and the more prosaic ‘Whitechapel murderer’, but the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ spread like wildfire once details of the letter were published. The name was, at one and the same time, both commonplace – ‘Jack’ was one of the most popular male names of the time – and appropriate in that it described precisely what the unknown killer did. Soon after the ‘double event’ of the killings of Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes, the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ was on everyone’s lips. Warnings like ‘Watch out for Jack’ and ‘Careful Jack doesn’t get you’ were muttered when friends parted, and not in jest. The killer really was still out there – he had just demonstrated that in an utterly unequivocal manner – and everyone knew it.
The first letter received by the Central News Agency was dated 25 September and had carried a London East Central postmark for 27 September and, in the context of what happened on the night of the 30th, some of the sentences seemed particularly pertinent.
‘Jack the Ripper’, the signatory of the letter, had said specifically that he wanted to start his ‘work’ again, and that the next time he would ‘clip the ladys ears off’. This letter was sent by the agency to the Metropolitan Police on 29 September, and in the early hours of the very next morning the killer had struck again, twice. He had indeed ‘got to work right away’, just as he’d threatened. And when he’d mutilated the body of Catharine Eddowes, he’d severed the lobe of her right ear. He hadn’t removed it from the scene to send it to the police, but this might simply have been because he couldn’t find it. When the body was stripped in the mortuary, Dr Brown noted that ‘a piece of deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing’, so it is conceivable that the murderer cut it off and then dropped it and was unable to locate it in the dark of Mitre Square. And with the steady tramp of a policeman’s boots getting steadily closer, he might not have been able to risk taking the time to sever and remove the other one.
The mere fact that the letter had mentioned cutting off the ears of his victim, and that this had then been done, strongly suggested that the writer of the letter – the man who signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ – was indeed the murderer.
And what happened next seemed to confirm this supposition.
In the first post on Monday, 1 October, the Central News Agency received another communication purporting to have been sent by the killer. This time it was a postcard, apparently stained with blood, and again signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’. It was undated, but bore a ‘London E’ postmark stamped that same day. The postcard had clearly been written by the same person who had authored the letter, a fact established both by an examination of the handwriting on the two communications, which had enough points of similarity to establish that a single hand had been responsible for both, and also by the content of the postcard, which referred specifically to the letter.
The postcard read:
wasnt codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. youll hear about saucy Jackys work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
Very obviously, the person who wrote this postcard had also sent the letter. It was also obvious that the writer was extremely well informed about the circumstances of both the murders which had taken place on the night of 30 September. It was already popularly believed that the killer might have been disturbed in Dutfield’s Yard and would have had to make a rapid escape, and the reference to the ears of the second victim also implied that the writer was the killer.
But in fact this wasn’t quite as clear-cut as it at first appeared. News of the murders had spread rapidly through the tenements and public houses of Whitechapel in the hours following the discovery of the two bodies, and details of the circumstances of the two killings quickly became common knowledge. According to some of the Monday newspapers, several Sunday editions had carried details of the double murder and, according to the Telegraph, a state of ‘almost frantic excitement’ had pervaded the East End of London on the Sunday and ‘thousands of people visited both Mitre Square and Berner Street, and journals containing details of the crimes were bought up by crowds of men and women in Whitechapel, Stepney, and Spitalfields.’
As far as the timescale was concerned, the fact that the postcard was stamped with the date of the first of October – OC 1 – meant that it could have been written either on the Sunday but posted after the last collection, or very early on the Monday morning. So it was possible that the writer had simply composed a brief message based upon the stories which were already circulating throughout the district. Alternatively, it was possible that the writer knew so much about both murders because he had been at the two crime scenes in person, wi
elding his knife to deadly effect.
Either scenario was feasible, and there was no obvious way of deciding which was the more likely. The view of most police officers at the time, and certainly that of Charles Warren, who not only knew the identity of the murderer but also his motive, was that both the letter and the postcard were part of a hoax perpetrated by a newspaper reporter, most probably intended to revive public interest in a story which was seen to be dying away. On 10 October, Warren told Godfrey Lushington, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office: ‘At present I think the whole thing a hoax but we are bound to try and ascertain the writer in any case.’ The most obvious suspicion was that the communications were the work of a London journalist, but the police never named a suspect, and there were no prosecutions in the matter.
This time, there was no delay in sending the missive to the police, who took it extremely seriously and began a concerted campaign to try to identify the writer. They prepared copies of both the letter and the postcard and on 3 October they published them on a poster which requested that anyone who recognized the handwriting should immediately contact them. A copy of the poster was put up outside every police station in London, and others were sent to the newspapers. On the following day, 4 October, several of the papers published facsimiles of the two messages wholly or in part.
The result of this campaign was almost exactly the opposite of what the Metropolitan Police had hoped. Nobody apparently recognized the handwriting, which had been the purpose of publicizing the two communications, but the fact that the hitherto anonymous killer now had a name seemed to spark a positive flood of letters all, of course, signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’. Scotland Yard had already been receiving some twenty letters every day about the series of murders, and the Central News Agency almost double that number. But once the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ entered the public consciousness, in weeks the combined total of letters being received by both organizations topped one thousand a week.
The Ripper Secret Page 31