There were several attacks on prostitutes in Whitechapel in the spring and summer of 1888. One of which was Emma Smith, a forty-five year old prostitute, who was attacked and robbed on 2 April. Her face and head were badly injured by a group of men but no one was arrested for her attack. On 6 August, Martha Tabram, another prostitute was found dead in George yard, only a hundred yards from where Emma Smith was attacked. According to her post mortem report she had been stabbed thirty-nine times on her ‘body, neck and private parts with a knife or dagger.’ The time of death was estimated at 2:30am. It appeared that there was a killer on the loose preying on prostitutes in Whitechapel. However, it was obvious that the two crimes were not connected. Emma Smith had been the victim of a much more vicious crime.
The atmosphere in Whitechapel in the summer of 1888 was very tense and people were afraid to leave their homes. On Friday 31 August 1888, a woman named Polly Nicholls was found dead in Buck’s Row by a man named Charles Cross. Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear and her clothes were soaked in blood. A doctor, Rees Llewellyn, was sent to the scene of the crime, and upon arrival pronounced the woman dead. She had been killed by the wound to her throat. Policemen carried out house to house enquiries, but no one had heard anything suspicious. At the mortuary, they discovered that her body had several deep wounds caused by a long bladed knife. The next day her father and husband identified her as Mary Ann Nicholls (it was common for prostitutes to change their name). Mary Ann Nicholls was
forty-two when she was killed. She was married to William Nicholls and had five children, but her heavy drinking had led to the breakdown of the marriage. For the last few years she had lived off her earnings as a prostitute. She was sad, lonely and destitute, but liked by most people who knew her. The East London Observer, like most people in Whitechapel, found a connection between the murders of Martha Tabram and Polly Nicholls, and they published it in the newspaper. According to the article, ‘The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive of shaped and plunder can be traced. The excess of effort has been apparent in each murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being.’ Despite this, the Home Secretary refused to provide a reward for catching the killer, and stated that it was the Metropolitan Police Force that should catch him instead.
Just over a week after the death of Polly Nicholls, another body was found by John Davies in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, and was later identified as Annie Chapman She had been beaten and mutilated according to Dr. George Phillips, a police surgeon who was called to the scene of the crime. Her face and tongue were badly swollen. Her abdomen had been cut open, and some of her organs had been placed around her. Like Polly Nicholls, her throat had been cut and reached right round her neck. She was lying in a pool of blood. Dr. George Phillips estimated the time at 4.30am. The knife used for the murder, he had guessed, was a narrow, thin blade and about six to eight inches long in length, one similar to the ones used for amputations by doctors. According to the coroner, Wynne Baxter, the injuries made on the victim were done by somebody with anatomical skill or knowledge. They therefore knew where to find the organs he wanted and how to use a knife. Only a skilled person could know where to find the organs and recognise them when they were found. Elizabeth long, a witness, described the man as a ‘shabby genteel,’ who ‘looked like a foreigner.’ He had dark skin and was wearing a deerstalker hat, perhaps a dark coat.. She believed he was tall and aged over forty. The evidence given by her is not entirely reliable as he had his back to her. Near the body of Annie Chapman were several objects. The first was an envelope with “Sussex Regiment” on and containing two pills. From her pockets a piece of cloth, and to combs were found next to her body. Also a leather apron, a nailbox and a piece of steel were found in the backyard of number 29. The evidence, however, did not help catch the killer. According to someone from Annie Chapman’s lodgings she had put her pills in the envelope when her pillbox broke. He leather apron, nailbox and steel belonged to John Richardson, whose mother lived in the house where the objects were found. Richardson was one of the witnesses who gave evidence about the murder.
After the murders of the three women, the streets of Whitechapel were deserted at night, Newspapers featured articles on the murders and local people bombarded the police with information about anybody who acted strangely. Attention was drawn to the Jewish community who inhabited the East End. This was because in Elizabeth Long’s statement she said that the man who was talking to Annie Chapman looked like a foreigner and partly from simple Anti-Semitism. A group was set up by the middle of September naming themselves the ‘Mile End Vigilance Committee.’ It consisted of businessmen, mostly Jewish, and the MP for Whitechapel, Simon Montague, also a Jew, offered a reward for the killer. Then on 11 September, John Pitzer, ‘Leather Apron’ was arrested for the murder of Polly Nicholls.
On the 27 September, a letter was sent to the Central News Agency, and became known as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. He begins the letter with, ‘I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet.’ He then tells the readers that ‘the next job I shall do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send them to the police officers.’ Towards the end of the letter he writes, ‘My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. At first it was thought to be a hoax, as they received so many from people claiming to be the killer, but after the next murders, the police had it reproduced on posters and newspapers. It was signed ‘Jack the Ripper.’ It was only until after the third murder that the police believed the letter to be genuine.
Elizabeth Stride, another prostitute, was found dead by Louis Diemschutz, and immediately ran to get a policeman. Dr. Frederick Blackwell, who was called to the scene, writes in his inquest that her right hand was smeared with blood, and her left hand contained a packet of breath fresheners. There was no money on the body. Like the other victims, her throat had been slashed and her windpipe cut in two.
There were several witnesses that saw Elizabeth Stride talking to a man, who perhaps was the killer. At 11:45pm, William Marshall saw her talking to a middle aged man, who was about five feet six inches in height. He was wearing a round cap with a peak and appeared to be educated. Later at 12:30am, Police Constable William Smith saw her talking to a man. He described him as thirty years old, about five feet seven inches tall, with dark hair and a moustache. He was wearing a deerstalker hat, a black coat and a white collar and tie. He had a large parcel in his hands. The chairman of a club stated that he had walked through the yard at about 12:40am and had seen nothing. She was later seen by Israel Schwartz at 12:45pm, talking to a man. According to Schwartz, the man trued to pull her to him then threw her onto the pavement. He then called to a second man, who was on the other side of the road. Schwartz thought that the man was called Lipski. He then ran away because he thought he was going to be followed. Schwartz identified that the woman was Elizabeth Stride, and described both the men. The first man was about thirty years old, and five feet five inches tall. He had dark hair and a dark moustache, and was wearing a dark jacket, trousers and a black cap. The second man, he described, was thirty-five years old and five feet eleven inches tall. He had light brown hair and a moustache. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a black wide-brimmed hat. Finally, James Brown saw Elizabeth Stride talking to a man, although he guessed the time at 12:45am. The man was five feet seven inches tall and was wearing a long dark overcoat. Brown heard Elizabeth say, “Not tonight, some other night.” Every one of Jack the Ripper’s victims were found dead with their throats cut. However, Elizabeth Stride’s body had not been mutilated like in all the other murders. This suggests that the Ripper had been disturbed and fled to avoid being caught.
Not long after Stride’s body was found, Police Constable Edward Watkins’s discovered another body in Mitre Square barely a mile away. Watkins had passed through the square at 1:30am, but when he returned at 1:44am, he found a body lying in the corner. The police then searched the area for clues and found part of the woman’s apron in Goulston Street in Whitechapel at 2:55am. On the wall above the apron, written in chalk were the words:
The Juwes are
The men That
Will not
Be Blamed
For nothing
The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force, Sir Charles Warren, ordered the writings on the wall to be cleaned off, before they could be photographed and used as evidence. He believed that if the writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and people would probably have been killed. But if the words were a genuine clue, then they were almost certainly written by the murderer and would, therefore, have been written in his handwriting.
A postcard was sent to the Central News Agency on 1 October, a day after the murders. The handwriting is believed to be the same as that in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and became known as the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard. However, the postcard could in fact have been fake as the postcard was posted the day the murders were committed. So the writer of the postcard could have read about the murders in the newspaper before posting it.
According to the evidence given in the inquest by Dr. Brown, she was mutilated as much as the other Ripper victims. Her body had been cut open from the breastbone to the lower abdomen. The intestines, the left kidney and most of the womb had been cut out. There were cuts on both eyelids and the tip of the nose was detached. The right earlobe had also been cut off, as the Ripper had said in his first letter, and fell from her clothing when she was taken to the mortuary.
After the murder of Catherine Eddowes, a letter was sent to George Lusk, the president of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, on 16 October. With the letter in a cardboard box was half a human kidney preserved in wine, which after a medical examination it was suggested that the kidney was very similar to the one removed from Catherine Eddowes. The letter begins with ‘From hell,’ and it can be implied from this that he believes he is carrying out the devil’s work. He tells Mr Lusk in the letter that he ‘fried and ate it was very nise.’ He continues by teasing the Committee members by saying that he ‘may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you wate a whil longer.’ The spelling mistakes were probably deliberate. He ends the letter by taunting the reader further, ‘Signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.’ We cannot be sure it was the Ripper. However, the fact remains that every victim was a prostitute, killed in Whitechapel, with their throats cut, and slice open in perhaps a surgical manner.
After the murders of Stride and Eddowes, when darkness falls the streets of Whitechapel were virtually deserted. The only people who walked the streets at this time were many uniformed and plain clothed policemen. The Mile End Vigilance Committee employed men to patrol the streets after midnight. Businesses were damaged, as no one set foot in Whitechapel unless they had to. Mary Kelly, aged twenty-five, turned to prostitution in November 1888, as her boyfriend Joe Barnet who she was living with, was unemployed. She was described by Police Constable Walter as ‘fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a white apron.’ By another person she knew, she was described as ‘tall and pretty and a pleasant girl, who seemed to be on good terms with everyone.’ After being found by Thomas Bowyer, the police were called to the crime scene. Mary Kelly was found naked on her bed. Her abdomen, breasts and thighs had been cut off and the internal organs removed. Her face had been mutilated beyond recognition. The tissues of the neck had been slashed through to the bone. The majority off her organs were found near her body, apart from her heart, which was never found.
Although every victim had their throats slashed, no other victim had been mutilated quite like Mary Kelly. After the previous murder, it was popularly suggested that the Ripper had some sort of medical or anatomical training. However, Dr Bond concluded in his report that ‘the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific or anatomical knowledge.’ He even dismissed the evidence that the Ripper may have been a butcher or horse slaughterer. Dr Bond was the only medical expert who believed this.
George Hutchinson, a friend of Mary, said that he had met her at about 2:00am on 9 November. She left him and then stopped to talk to another man. He was described as about thirty-four or thirty-five years old, and five feet six inches tall. He had dark eyes, a slight moustache curled u at the end, and dark hair. He was wearing a long dark coat, collar and cuffs, and a dark jacket underneath, light waistcoat, dark trousers, dark hat, button boots and gaiters, with white buttons, black tie with horseshoe pin. He looked respectable with a Jewish appearance. He later added that his watch chain had a big seal, with a red stone hanging from it. His chin was clean-shaven with no side-whiskers. He believed that he lived in the neighbourhood and he saw him around one day. Mary Ann Cox, another prostitute, saw Mary Kelly going into Miller’s Court with a man at 11:45om. He was about thirty-six years old, about five feet six inches tall and had blotches on his face. He had thick ginger hair and was dressed in shabby dark clothes with a dark overcoat and hat. Sarah Lewis was walking with another woman at 8:00pm on Wednesday 7 September, when they were approached by a fairly short man of about forty years old with a black moustache. He was wearing a black coat and carrying a black bag about a foot long. According to Lewis, he wanted one of the women to follow him, but the women ran away. She saw him again at 2:30am on the Friday morning near Miller’s Court. She rushed into a friend’s house. Just before 2:00am she heard a woman cry ‘murder.’ Dr Bond and Dr Phillips disagreed about the time of death. Bond believed it was between 1:00am and 2:00am, but Phillips believed it to be between 5:00am and 6:00am. This confusion did not help the police to make use of the evidence of the witnesses.
3.Why were the Police unable to catch Jack the Ripper?
When Polly Nicholls was murdered, nobody had any idea of what they were dealing with, and did not know that a serial killer was to blame, or even what one was. As all clues suggested that the murder was a local affair, the Home Secretary refused to grant a reward. In Whitechapel at that time both locals and policemen assumed that Polly Nicholls had in fact been killed by a local who had something to do with prostitution.
From the way that Polly Nicholls had been cut up, the police believed that the murderer had some medical knowledge or training. This led to the arrest of three local horse slaughterers, but they were released as they provided the police with alibis to their whereabouts at the time of the murder.
Inspector Frederick Abberline was in charge of investigating the case. He had served for the Metropolitan Police Force for twenty-five years; most of which had been spent in Whitechapel. A character called ‘Leather Apron’ was the first suspect for Polly Nicholls murder, who, according to stories had the reputation of demanding money from prostitutes under the threats of violence. According to The Star newspaper, ‘Leather Apron’ was a Jewish slipper maker, and about five foot four or five tall with a thick neck. Under his dark close-fitting cap, his hair was black, and he had a dark moustache. He was approximately thirty-eight or forty years of age. He always wore a leather apron, hence the name. According to witnesses of the ‘Leather Apron’, ‘His expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe him.’
Inspector Joseph Chandler of H Division investigated Annie Chapman’s murder and with Inspector Abberline they agreed that the murders had been committed by the same person. ‘Leather Apron’ was arrested three days after the murder of Annie Chapman. However, ‘Leather Apron’, John Pitzer, was released from prison, although he had at least one conviction of stabbing. This was because he had alibis for both murders. During the death of Polly Nicholls, he was at a lodging house, the owner backed up his story, and at the time of Annie Chapman’s murder he was hiding in a relative’s house. According to Elizabeth Long, the man that Annie Chapman was talking to on the night of her murder ‘looked like a foreigner.’ This led to concentration on foreigners, and was not helped by The Star’s statement that ‘Leather Apron’ was Jewish. This caused the people of Whitechapel to turn on the Jewish community. However, after the Mile End Vigilance Committee had been set up, the attention had been drawn away from the Jewish community.
Inspector Chandler was not impressed by Elizabeth Long’s statement, and decided that her estimated time of death, 5.30am, was incorrect. Chandler’s reason for ignoring Elizabeth Long was that her evidence conflicted with that of Dr. Phillips, who was an experienced and highly regarded police surgeon. When Dr. Phillips suggested at the inquest that her time of death was inaccurate, the police again ignored it. The fact that the killer may have had medical knowledge was not taken notice of by the police. Instead they believed that he might be a visitor to Whitechapel rather than a resident. Although there was no evidence that the killer was a foreigner, they took Elizabeth Long’s statement seriously.
In an attempt to catch the murderer, many things were done. The number of patrols of Whitechapel was greatly increased by the police force. Although police constables patrolled Whitechapel in a criss-cross pattern at regular intervals, the next two murders must have been carried out in very short periods of time, possibly as little as five minutes. Once the other two women had been murdered, the number of patrols in Whitechapel had been increased again. Due to the fact that the Metropolitan Police Force employed no females, policemen dressed as prostitutes in hope of trapping the killer. This attempt ended unsuccessfully. The police visited most of the lodging houses in Whitechapel and interviewed more than 2,000 lodgers. Seven-six butchers and slaughterers were questioned, though they had been dismissed as possible suspects by the coroner at the inquest into the death of Annie Chapman. Sailors on the Thames River boats were also questioned and bloodhounds were used to follow the scent of the killer, but neither method ended with any clues or suspects. The police force delivered public notices to 80,000 houses to plead for witnesses to come forward with any evidence they may have about the women murdered in Whitechapel. There were three startling points about the handbills. Firstly, the police could not and would not have released a description of the killer. Secondly, they still believed the killer lived in Whitechapel, and thirdly, they were still appealing for information regarding suspicious characters. The last point shows that the police were still using the standard methods of detective work, even after the great mass of evidence had been collected about the Ripper and his victims.
After the third and fourth murders, the police decided that the Ripper was a resident of Whitechapel. The evidence for this was that the murders took place on the weekends, which suggests that he works during the week, and travels to Whitechapel to commit the murders. In a community like Whitechapel where people lived very closely together, it would be highly likely that someone would have seen the Ripper by then.
After the murder of Mary Kelly, the police continued to increase the number of police patrols, and suspicious individuals were the subjects of mob violence. The description of the Ripper given by William Hutchinson was taken very seriously by Inspector Abberline. This description had been passed around to every police station in London. However, the description was almost too good, particularly the later information. More than one write had suggested that he might have been trying to avoid any suspicion himself. However, the police did not investigate him at all.
All of the evidence suggests that he Ripper chose his victims as he came upon him, and he killed the women so quickly that they were not able to fight against their attacker. He was also described as ‘a ruthless, cold-blooded killer and clearly some sort of sexual psychopath. After the fifth victim, Mary Kelly, there were two other female victims who could have possibly have fallen prey to Jack the Ripper. The first was Alice McKenzie, a prostitute found dead in July 1889, and the second victim was Frances Cole, another prostitute, found dead in February 1891 almost two years later. Both victims had their throats cut, but the police did not believe that the Ripper murdered them. This was because Alice McKenzie’s throat had been cut differently than the Ripper’s other victims, and Frances Cole had apparently been killed after a quarrel.
In February 1894, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had become Assistant Chief Constable in the CID five years earlier, wrote a memorandum on the case. In it he named the three most likely suspects. The first was Mr M. J. Druitt, a doctor and of a good family. He disappeared just after Mary Kelly was found dead, and his body was found in the Thames on 31 December 1888, after being in the water upwards of a month. He was sexually insane, and Macnaghten doubted that his family believed that he was the Ripper. The second was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew and resident in Whitechapel. He became insane and hated women greatly, specially prostitutes. He had strong homicidal tendencies and was taken to a lunatic asylum in about March 1889. He was connected to many circumstances, which made him a strong suspect. The third was Michael Strogoff. He was a Russian doctor and a criminal, who was detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained. Macnaghten drew the conclusions because he believed that the Ripper’s final victim was Mary Kelly, because he was in some way prevented from continuing his work further. He believed the reason for this was he became completely deranged. His evidence for this was the way in which Mary Kelly had been murdered, which he thought would have taken about two hours. This made Druitt Macnaghten’s prime suspect. After Macnaghten, many other people have tried to discover the identity of the Ripper. A popular suspect was Prince Edward Victor, a grandson of Queen Victoria. However, he had alibis for four of the five murders. At the time of May Kelly’s murder he was having dinner with the Queen. Another suspect was Sir William Gull, a royal surgeon. Some people believed he might have murdered the women in his carriage to avoid being caught, although there is nm evidence to prove this theory. The most popular suspect was Francis Tomelty, an American. After the murder of Mary Kelly, he moved back to the USA, where similar murders were committed. However, despite more than a century of investigation, the identity of Jack the Ripper is still unknown.
