EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (6 page)

Jack The Ripper

The last day of August 1888 was dawning chilly and damp as Charles Cross walked through Buck Row in the Whitechapel district of London’s East End at around four in the morning. Suddenly he saw a dark shape lying on the ground in front of the entrance to a stable yard. He was surprised to see, as he approached, that it was a woman lying on her back. Whitechapel was a rough area in which around 1,200 prostitutes were known to work and where most of the inhabitants were poor, unemployed or criminals. Consequently, it was not unusual to stumble upon someone who had collapsed through a surfeit of alcohol or who had been assaulted.

Another man approached on the street and Cross asked him to help. The two men knelt over the woman, failing to notice that she had almost been decapitated. They saw that her skirt had been lifted up over her waist. They pulled it down for decency’s sake and went off in search of a police officer. Arriving on the scene, Constable John Neil shone his lantern on the woman and immediately saw that her throat had been slashed from ear to ear and her eyes were wide open and staring. A doctor and an ambulance were called, but it was far too late for them to do anything to help her.

Doctor Rees Llewellyn was first on the scene and he established that she had been dead for no more than thirty minutes and that she had been killed by the wounds to her throat. Her throat had been slashed twice but when they got her to the morgue for further examination, they discovered that she had also been wounded in the abdomen, the killer having mutilated that part of her body. It showed a long, deep knife wound and several other downward cuts. It appeared that she had been already on the ground when these wounds were inflicted.

Within a short while, the woman was identified as Mary Ann Nichols, aged forty-two, who had been living off her earnings as a prostitute under the name of ‘Polly’. She had been the mother of five children, married to a printer, but due to her excessive drinking the marriage had broken up, forcing her to take to

the streets.

A police veteran, Frederick George Abberline, was put in charge of the investigation but had very little to work on. There were neither witnesses nor clues. No one had heard or seen anything unusual and no vehicle seemed to have transported the perpetrator from the scene.

It was not the first murder in the area in recent times. Just over three weeks earlier, Martha Tabram, a thirty-nine-year-old prostitute, had been found murdered in George Yard. She had died in a frenzied knife attack, receiving thirty-nine stab wounds to her body, neck and private parts. However, her throat had not been slashed, as had happened to Mary Ann Nichols and there was no mutilation of the abdomen. A penknife had been used to deliver the wounds, as opposed to the long-bladed knife that had been used to kill Nichols.

Even some months before that, in April, not far from where Martha Tabram was found, another prostitute was seriously injured in a vicious attack in which a blunt instrument had been rammed into her vagina. It seemed clear to police, however, that these incidents were unrelated to the death of Mary Ann Nichols,

even though the locals linked them in their minds. Nonetheless, it was hard to escape from the dreadful conclusion that there was a maniac on the loose.

It was not long before he struck again.

Annie Chapman, known on the street as ‘Dark Annie’, had had an awful life. She had married a coachman, John Chapman, in 1869 and the couple had three children, one of whom died from meningitis and another of whom was crippled. The marriage came under stress and the couple started to drink heavily. They broke up but when her husband died, Annie lost everything, even the tiny bit of financial security she enjoyed from an allowance with which he provided her. She was forced to earn her living from prostitution when there was no income from her other work – crocheting and selling flowers.

In the early hours of Saturday 8 September, she was thrown out of her lodgings and ordered to earn some money to pay her rent. She was found a few hours later in the backyard of a building on Hanbury Street, across the road from Spitalfields market, by a cab driver. Like Ann Marie Nichols, her skirt was pulled up over her waist. This time, the scene that met investigators was far more gruesome than the last time. The killer had cut out her small intestine and other internal organs and these were lying on the ground beside her right shoulder. Once again, her throat had been cut, this time it seemed, after she had been rendered unconscious by strangulation. Near her feet, arranged in some kind of order, lay a couple of combs and a small piece of cloth that she had been carrying when attacked. Near her head was an envelope of pills. Doctors realised with horror that the uterus, part of the bladder and the upper part of the vagina were no longer inside the body and could not be found at the scene. The killer had taken them with him.

The incisions and the precise nature of the removal of Annie’s organs persuaded investigators that the murderer must have possessed anatomical or pathological experience. They began to think that their killer might be a medical man, using the type of narrow, six to eight inch-long knife used by surgeons carrying out amputations.

One thing was certain. The man who had killed Ann Marie Nichols had also murdered Annie Chapman.

Once again, clues were non-existent and witnesses inconclusive. One woman saw a man and woman talking around the time of the murder, but although she was able to recognise Annie, the man had his back to her.

A feeling of suspicion began to grow in the area towards members of the large Jewish community that lived in the Whitechapel area. Local Jewish merchants banded together to create the Mile End Vigilance Committee in an effort to create a neighbourhood watch scheme and Samuel Montagu, the Jewish MP for the constituency in which Whitechapel lay, offered a reward.

The police began to round up suspects – drunks and eccentric characters as well as men who were just downright insane. Each time, however, it came back to the medical prowess that the killer had displayed. The men they were bringing in for questioning did not have it or had cast-iron alibis for the nights in question, sometimes provided by asylums or by police stations in which they had spent the night.

A few weeks passed before the next murder. Forty-five-year-old Elizabeth Stride, known to her fellow streetwalkers as ‘Long Liz’, was found at one o’clock on the morning of Sunday 30 September in Dutfield Yard, just off Berner Street in Whitechapel. She was not a full-time prostitute, earning a living when she could by doing sewing or cleaning. She was known to like a drink, however, and was no stranger to the magistrates’ court. She had left her boarding house early the previous evening.

When she was found, unlike in the other cases, her skirt was not pulled up over her waist. There were no signs of strangulation, but her throat was cut, the knife having sliced all the way through her windpipe. They estimated her time of death to have been between 12.36 and 12.56 am but she had been seen a few minutes before then by a policeman, talking to a man aged around thirty who had dark hair and a moustache. The policeman noted that he wore a deerstalker hat, a black cutaway coat, a white shirt collar and a dark tie. In his hand he carried a bundle. Another witness described a man talking to a woman at 12.45 am. He claimed they were arguing and that he threw her to the ground where she screamed three times. This witness also described seeing a second man standing across the road lighting a pipe, to whom the first man called out ‘Lipsky!’ The witness said that the second man followed him as he walked away from the argument and that he took to his heels to get away from him. Confusingly, other witnesses came forward to describe other men that ‘Long Liz’ talked to that night.

The killer had had a busy night, however, because as they examined the body in Dutfield Yard, just a quarter of a mile away, in Mitre Square, the body of another woman was discovered by a patrolling constable.

When he had walked through the square at 1.30 am, Police Constable Edward Watkings had seen nothing unusual, but when he came through the area again fifteen minutes later, he saw something lying in a corner of the square. It was a woman and, to his horror, he saw that her throat had been cut and her innards protruded from a gaping wound that had been made in her stomach. Blood pooled beneath her.

This victim differed in that she had severe mutilations to the face. As with the other victims, it looked as if there had been no struggle. She had probably been surprised and killed very quickly. She had been sliced open from her breast-bone to her pubic hair and her intestines had been cut out. Her left kidney had been removed and taken away by the killer, as had the womb. Her eyelids had been sliced through, the end of her nose cut off and her right earlobe had been sliced off.

Again, no one in the vicinity had seen or heard anything untoward, apart from one witness, Joseph Lawende, who had seen her earlier, talking to a young man at 1.35 am. He had been wearing a deerstalker hat and had a small, fair moustache. There was one significant piece of evidence, however. A constable found a bloody piece of apron lying on the ground at the entrance to a building in Goulston Street. Written in chalk on the bricks above it was the strange message: ‘The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed For Nothing.’

The piece of apron was from the one worn by the victim and it seemed as if they had at last found something worth investigating. Astonishingly, however, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, ordered that this vital piece of evidence be washed off the wall. He was concerned that the message would provoke an attack on Jews living in the area.

The officers involved in the case were amazed that the killer could have committed two murders in such a short space of time and escape unseen into the night. They conducted house-to-house interviews and everyone on the streets was questioned, but to no avail.

The Mitre Square victim was forty-six-year-old Catherine Eddowes, known as Kate. She was an occasional prostitute, especially when she had been drinking. This night she had set out to visit her daughter to borrow some money, but failed to arrive. She had found money by some other means and ended up being arrested for being drunk and put in a cell at Bishopsgate police station. They had let her out at 12.30 am and that was the last anyone saw of her alive.

As for the chalked message, no one could recognise the spelling ‘Juwes’. There did not appear to be any dialect or language in which ‘Jews’ was spelt ‘Juwes’. The police thought that it was probably a deliberate attempt to put the blame on the Jews and distract Scotland Yard from its search for the real killer.

The case was now hot news and had caught the public’s attention. Hundreds of letters arrived at Scotland Yard, at newspapers and at the homes of the investigating detectives. One in particular gave the murderer the name that has gone down in the annals of criminal history for all time. It was sent on 25 September to a news agency, Central news and read:

‘
Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha.ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the Police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly Jack the Ripper. Don't mind me giving the trade name
’

At first, the man who received the letter failed to take it seriously but after a couple of days sent it to the police. The night after they received it, Kate Eddowes and Liz Stride were murdered. On October 1, another letter in the same handwriting arrived at Central News:

‘
I wasn’t codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll 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
.’

The letters were circulated and a copy was placed outside every police station in case the handwriting was recognised, but no one came forward.