The Real Mary Kelly (21 page)

He was questioned about the decision to erase the writing and said that he and others of his City Police colleagues that were present protested against it and asked that it should at least be left long enough for their commander – Acting City Commissioner Major Smith, who was already on his way from Mitre Square about five minutes’ walk away – to see it. Even this request was refused and because Goulston Street was Metropolitan territory there was nothing that Halse could do about it other than to make as accurate a copy of the graffito as he could in his notebook. When his colleague Detective Hunt arrived the two men did something that the Metropolitan Police had failed to do. They visited every apartment in the Wentworth Model Dwellings and interviewed the inhabitants.

It was a point not lost on the jury. At the time that Halse and Hunt started their interviews, nearly two hours had elapsed since Long had first discovered the piece of apron and the chalk message on the wall. If they had been
left by the murderer returning to his lodgings in the building, he would have had adequate time to clean himself up and conceal the weapon. At this point PC Long reappeared at the inquest with his notebook and was given an extremely hard drubbing by the coroner, the City solicitor and members of the jury. They repeatedly asked him why he had not searched the buildings and questioned the residents whilst the trail was still hot but Long, who it seems was allowed to be a scapegoat by his Metropolitan Police superiors, was able to do little more than mumble unhappily, ‘I did what I thought was right under the circumstances.’

Crawford in particular praised the diligence of the City Police who were operating off their own territory and therefore under something of a handicap and, by implication, heaped opprobrium on the Mets who, it became increasingly obvious, had blundered at every step of the way. By the time the reports of the inquest were published in the next day’s papers, the pressure on the Metropolitan Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was becoming nearly intolerable.

A curiosity of the Eddowes inquest was the verdict. The coroner, Samuel Langham, addressed the jury just before they withdrew to consider the verdict. Having first presumed that they would return a verdict of ‘wilful murder by person or persons unknown’, he then had a second thought and said that on reflection, perhaps it would be sufficient to return a verdict of wilful murder against some person unknown, inasmuch as the medical evidence conclusively demonstrated that only one person could be implicated
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. The jury duly returned that verdict. It was the only one of the five Ripper verdicts in which the crime was positively ascribed to a single person. It is difficult to see how Langham reached that conclusion since, if the murderer had had an accomplice acting as a lookout for instance, it would have made it persons rather than person.

The day following the ‘Double Event’, the headless, limbless torso of a woman was found in a cellar of the very building in Whitehall that the Metropolitan police were themselves in the process of refurbishing as part of their new headquarters. Shortly afterwards one of the missing arms was found floating in the Thames. The woman had been dead for a matter of weeks and the police moved quickly to distance the killing from the Whitechapel murders, but it did nothing to improve public confidence and it joined the growing catalogue of murders in 1888 that remain unsolved to the present day.

The newspapers were in uproar over the following days. There was a clamour for the resignation of Warren and Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary. Publication of the mocking ‘Dear Boss’ letter received by the Central News agency a few days preceding the ‘Double Event’ and the ‘Saucy Jack’ postcard on the following day did nothing to dampen the furore.

It was at about this time that the use of bloodhounds to track the murderer was suggested. Sir Charles Warren, desperate to try anything that would rescue his rapidly plummeting reputation, accordingly engaged Edwin Brough, a Yorkshire breeder of bloodhounds, to bring a couple to London for trials.
The news, when it hit the papers, provoked gales of ridicule. As many people rushed to point out, the chances of a dog being able to pick out and follow an individual scent in the teeming, crowded streets of East London was ludicrous. To be fair it was never Warren’s intention to use them under those circumstances but to reserve them in the event that another body was found in an isolated spot during the hours of darkness and to give them their head only if the streets were relatively deserted. To that end he gave orders that in future no body should be removed from the site of the crime until after he personally had been summoned and the dogs were present.

‘Burgho’ and ‘Barnaby’ duly arrived by train from Scarborough together with their owner and were quickly put through their paces in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park under various weather conditions and at different times of day. Sir Charles himself insisted on being tracked and declared himself satisfied with the result. It was concluded that they worked well at night, particularly in frosty conditions. Overall their performance was judged satisfactory and Warren personally authorised their use in the event of another Ripper murder. Unfortunately the Home Office neglected to pay Brough or to settle the matter of insuring the valuable pedigree dogs whilst they were in police hands, and so after a few days he sent Burgho to Brighton to take part in a dog show and entrusted Barnaby to a friend whilst he returned home to Scarborough.

By this time there were many theories about the possible identity of the Ripper. The police had questioned hundreds of witnesses and innumerable theories were advanced in letters to the authorities and to newspapers by armchair detectives, medical men, ministers of religion and retired generals. Most assumed that it could only be the work of a madman, a devil incarnate, a criminal lunatic and this equated in many peoples’ minds to a foreigner – amongst whom, although generally unspoken, the large immigrant Jewish population counted.

There were many alleged sightings of men seen with the four victims within minutes of their murders. The trouble was that no two really matched any one description. Ages ranged from the 20s to about 40, height from 5ft 3in to 5ft 9in. Some were described as of foreign appearance, some wore peaked sailors’ hats, some were drunk, some were sober; there was no consensus. Possibly the three independent sightings of PC Smith, William Marshall and James
Brown before the murder of Elizabeth Stride were the most consistent but even they differed in several essentials.

There was however one other good sighting. On the morning of 8th September, when Annie Chapman was murdered in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, a Mrs. Long (some newspaper reports also seem to refer to her as Mrs. Darrell or Durrell although that may be a different person) was passing the house on her way to Spitalfields market. The time of the murder could be fixed with almost total certainty as having taken place between 5.30am and 5.45am when the body was found. Albert Cadosch, the Frenchman lodging next door, had heard something heavy fall against the board fence that separated the two yards a little after 5.30am and that something was almost certainly Annie’s body.

Elizabeth Long was certain about the time because she remembered hearing the clock on Truman’s brewery in Brick Lane strike the half hour as she turned into Hanbury Street
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. She saw a man and a woman standing near the door of number 29 and she afterwards visited the mortuary and positively identified the body as being that of the woman she had seen. She also saw the man but did not get a good view of his face as he was turned away from her. ‘I did not see the man’s face,’ she said, ‘but I noticed that he was dark. He was wearing a brown low-crowned felt hat. I think he had on a dark coat, though I am not certain. By the look of him he seemed to me a man over forty years of age.’ She went on to say that he looked ‘foreign’ but what she meant by that is not clear since, by her own admission, she did not see his face. ‘Shabby-genteel’ was her final summing up.

What she had described was a typical lower middle-class man in a clerical or non-manual occupation; in that part of London there were thousands who could have answered the description. The billycock hat, either black or brown, of the sort that would later generally be called a bowler, was described as a low-crowned hat to distinguish it from a high crowned or ‘top hat’ that was worn by men slightly higher up the social scale. In cold weather it was often worn with either an Inverness cape or an Ulster overcoat. It was Francis’s usual get up
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.

The problem was it could also have been a perfect description of practically every middle-aged detective working on the case, as the many contemporary
photographs and drawings show. Perhaps that was part of the problem; the man that Mrs. Long described was too ordinary, too much like one of them. It was altogether too close to home and maybe that is why they preferred to concentrate on young ‘foreign looking’ men in sailors’ garb. The idea that the Ripper might be a middle-aged man with a wife at home and a pair of carpet slippers warming in front of the fire was just too unbelievable.

Nevertheless, this remains perhaps the best description of the Ripper that exists. Mrs. Long gave her evidence firmly and confidently. She was a sober, respectable woman – not a man whose memory was blurred by alcohol as many of the other witnesses were – and she had been at precisely the right place at the right time. Most importantly it puts the age of the murderer perhaps ten years or more higher than other descriptions. Many other people writing about the events of that night have reported her as saying ‘a man about forty years of age’. There is no doubt at all from the many newspaper reports of her evidence that what she actually said was ‘a man over forty years of age’. It is a very important observation. What the detectives should have been looking for was a lower middle class, 50-year-old man living in Stepney, not a foreign-looking sailor in his 20s.

Indeed, in that respect, the police could have done worse than heed the advice of Queen Victoria herself, who was taking a very keen interest in affairs. She dictated a letter to the Home Secretary following the resignation of Sir Charles Warren on 9th November in which she advised a greater number of detectives in the streets at night, better street lighting and that special attention should be given to single men living alone
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. The police had in fact already carried out an investigation of men living alone in lodgings in the immediate area with no positive result, one problem being that, without warrants to search individual premises, if permission was refused which was frequently the case, they had no option but to leave empty-handed. There is no evidence that the rest of her advice was acted upon and even her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, to whom she dictated the letter, wrote in a footnote: ‘Perhaps these details might be omitted.’

On 5th October, three days after the unidentified woman’s torso was found at Scotland Yard, a further letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police by
Tom Bulling at Central News. This time, curiously, he sent only the envelope and a transcript of the letter and the original, if indeed there was an original, has never surfaced.

Bulling’s transcript read:

Although much less well known than its predecessors it is recognised as the third ‘Dear Boss’ letter even though, significantly, the author used a different salutation in this one and one that, importantly, is unique in the entire canon of Ripper letters. Bulling’s reason for not sending the original to Chief Constable ‘Dolly’ Williamson can now only be guessed at. Some people, including apparently the police themselves, believe that there was no letter and, like the previous missives, the entire business was a put up job by Bulling himself. This theory was reinforced in their minds when, shortly afterwards, Bulling took to drink and was later fired by the managing director of Central News for sending a telegram announcing the death of Bismarck which stated bluntly
‘Bloody Bismarck is dead.’ Possibly he meant the epithet literally but Bulling was sacked nonetheless
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.

It is difficult to see why Bulling would have written the letters. The fact that the first one was held by Central News for two days before being handed to the police robbed it of its immediacy. No attempt was apparently made by the agency to pass any of the three communications to their clients, the world’s press; that was done by the police themselves although undoubtedly Central News gained some publicity in the process.

The wording of the final letter connects it firmly to its predecessors. There is the same use of Americanisms such as ‘quit’, ‘wiped out’ and ‘reckon’; the same slightly laboured attempts at humour and the use of ‘ha ha’ to emphasise that the author had made a joke in case the reader was in any doubt. One thing, however, marks the letter out as different – the desperate attempt to distance the writer from the Whitehall murder. If it had been written by Bulling or another journalist as a joke, or by someone else who falsely wanted to claim responsibility for the Ripper murders, surely claiming yet another victim would have added to the story. Denying any responsibility for it does not make sense. Only if the actual Ripper had written it and he wanted to ensure that only a particular group of murders and no others were ascribed to him does it add up. The pseudo-religious rant about the daughters of Moab and Midian was no doubt included to reinforce the connection between the killings and give them a shared motive. It also gave a common flavour to the crimes and, because of the Old Testament references, another link to the Jews.