Читать книгу They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - Bruce Robinson - Страница 13

Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me for making him egregiously an ass.

Iago

Complementing ‘Juwes’, there was another funny little Masonic jest for Charlie Warren about a mile away from Goulston Street. When Catherine Eddowes was released from her lock-up at Bishopsgate police station, she asked the duty officer what time it was. Just before one o’clock, he replied – ‘Too late for you to get another drink.’ Somewhat the worse for wear, she vanished out of the police station with the stated intention of going home.

Eddowes lived at number 6 Fashion Street, an inappropriately named Whitechapel slum directly east of Bishopsgate.1

By any assessment, the place of her death was not on her way home. Around some corner the most dangerous man in London was looking for just such a sweetheart, and in his company Eddowes walked away from Fashion Street and directly south. At any turn in this gloomy labyrinth he could have chosen to kill her. Instead he escorted her to a location of gaslight and multiple windows in which, if anything, he was actually more exposed.

In my view, her assassin took her to Mitre Square ‘by design’, as a requisite of his ‘Funny Little Game’. Cutting compasses into her face up some anonymous back alley would not have conjured the symbolism he was after. What Jack wanted to leave as ‘his fearful sign manual’2 was the ubiquitous and most recognisable Masonic icon of them all, ‘compasses on the square’.

Eddowes was initiated into the ‘Funny Little Game’ with the full Jubelo – her throat cut across, entrails hauled out, and all metal removed. ‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder,’ deposed Dr Gordon Brown at the inquest. ‘A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm.’

CITY SOLICITOR: By ‘placed’, do you mean put there by design?

BROWN: Yes.

Yet we’re enjoined to believe that the symbols carved into Eddowes’ face are a meaningless afterthought. That you can ‘design’ with flopping intestines, but not with the point of a knife. That you can carry a piece of this woman’s apron as a beacon for a message, and then write something above it of no discernible meaning or consequence, and that ‘Juwes’ and a Mason’s Mark are indecipherable abstractions.

Two slayings that night meant two concurrent but quite separate coroners’ courts. The City was an independent entity, responsible to the Corporation of London, and immune to interference from the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police. The Met couldn’t manipulate and control this court as it was to manipulate and make preposterous the inquest into the death of Elizabeth Stride.

City Coroner S.F. Langham, a sixty-five-year-old blueblood behind rectitudinous pince-nez, had spent his entire professional life listening to stories of the dead. First appointed Deputy Coroner for Westminster in 1849, he moved to the City, where he was promoted to Boss Coroner in 1884. His official address was ‘Coroner’s Office, City Mortuary, Golden Lane’,3 and it was here on 4 October 1888 that the inquest into the murder of Catherine Eddowes began. Proceedings were watched by Inspector McWilliam and Assistant Commissioner Smith himself.

The attendance of such eminent spectators is perhaps indicative of the importance the City attached to the case, further underlined by the presence of its thirty-eight-year-old star solicitor. Henry Homewood Crawford was one of the smartest brains on the block. A polyglot, a musician and a talented amateur actor, in the words of a contemporary biography, ‘He may fittingly be described as Attorney General of the City. He is legal advisor to the Right Hon the Lord Mayor, legal advisor to the Aldermen in their capacity as Justices to the City, and also to the Commissioner of Police. He is the City Public Prosecutor, and, apart from the recorder and Common Sergeant, is necessarily the active legal luminary in the Corporation.’4 In short, ‘the active legal luminary’ was no dope. Co-author of A Statement of the Origin, Constitution, Powers and Privileges of the Corporation of London, he knew his City business, and was one day to become its Lord Mayor. Although he began by seeking Langham’s consent to ask the occasional question, Crawford ended up asking almost all of them.

The proceedings at Golden Lane opened with the usual civilities, and a dispiriting traipse through those who had seen little – and most of them less than that. The coppers (and the nightwatchman) who had discovered Eddowes’ still-warm body came in and read from their notebooks. The jury heard from Inspector Collard and City Architect Frederick Foster, who had made drawings of the crime scene and drawn up a plan. Without depriving the narrative of substance, all can be dispensed with until we get to the deposition of Dr Gordon Brown. Brown’s contribution is replete with medical jargon, and is too long to reproduce in full here. I therefore use the version reported in The Times, supplementing the text from the original where necessary. ‘Frederick Gordon Brown, 17 Finsbury Circus, Surgeon of City of London Police, being sworn saith’:

I was called shortly after 2 o’clock. I reached [the Square] about 18 minutes past 2 my attention was called to the body of the Deceased … The body was on its back – the head turned to the left shoulder – the arms by the side of the body as if they had fallen there, both palms upwards – the fingers slightly bent, a thimble was lying off the finger on the right side. The clothes were drawn up above the abdomen, the thighs were naked, left leg extended in line with the body. There was great disfigurement of the face. The throat was cut across to the extent of 6 or 7 inches. The abdomen was all exposed. The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design.

Crawford’s question vis à vis ‘design’ has been quoted on a previous page. Dr Brown’s statement continued: ‘… The lobe and auricle of the right ear [my emphasis] were cut obliquely through; there was a quantity of clotted blood on the pavement, on the left side of the neck and upper part of the arm … The body was quite warm (no rigor mortis) and had only been there for a few minutes.’ ‘Before they removed the body’, he ‘suggested that Dr Phillips should be sent for, and that gentleman, who had seen some recent cases, came to the mortuary … Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed … There was no blood on the front of the clothes. There were no traces of recent connection [i.e. no sponk]. When the body arrived at Golden Lane the clothes were taken off carefully from the body, a piece of the deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing.’5

This will prove of significance. Dr Brown had noticed at the crime scene that ‘the lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through’ (i.e. the whole ear), but only a part of the ear, the lobe, was discovered on arrival at the mortuary. Where the auricle went, whether it was retrieved or had been taken away by the murderer, is not disclosed.

Brown then goes on to describe a truly astonishing catalogue of injuries. The assassin had ripped through Eddowes as if he was on his way to somewhere else: ‘The womb was cut through horizontally leaving a stump 3/4 of an inch, the rest of the womb had been taken away with some of the ligaments … the peritoneal lining [the internal surface of the abdomen] was cut through on the left side and the left kidney taken out and removed.’ (My emphasis.)

Crawford asks if the stolen organs could be used for any professional purpose. Brown’s answer was in the negative: ‘I cannot assign any reason for these parts being taken away.’ Crawford then asks: ‘About how long do you think it would take to inflict all these wounds, and perpetrate such a deed?’ The physician reckoned about five minutes, and confirmed his opinion that it was the work of one man only. He was then asked ‘as a professional man’ to account for the fact of no noise being heard by those in the immediate neighbourhood.

BROWN: The throat would be so instantaneously severed that I do not suppose there would be any time for the least sound being emitted.

CRAWFORD: Would you expect to find much blood on the person who inflicted the wounds?

No. He would not. But he could confirm that bloodspots on Eddowes’ apron (which was produced) were recent.

Crawford asked: ‘Have you formed any opinion as to the purpose for which the face was mutilated?’ This is an interesting question. Crawford suggests that the face may have been mutilated for a purpose. The doctor had no opinion, thinking it was ‘simply to disfigure the corpse’. He added that a sharp knife was used, ‘not much force required’.

If anyone on the jury had any questions about those inverted ‘V’ marks on Eddowes’ face, they were out of luck, because Coroner Langham here adjourned, reconvening the court one week hence.

The next few days gave Crawford time to reflect, perhaps even to dwell on the ‘purpose’ of the curious mutilations, and what they might mean in concert with the ritualistic mutilations of Annie Chapman. Crawford must have been as cynical as everyone else about the fabulous adventures of ‘the American Womb-Collector’, particularly when a doctor had just told him that the burgled organs would be useless for medical purposes.

So why would the coroner at Annie Chapman’s inquest, Baxter, countenance such hogwash? Was it in any way connected with Warren’s destruction of the writing on the wall? Was there some undisclosed reason for wanting it rubbed out? These were questions to ponder, albeit with answers which Crawford had already determined.

On Thursday, 11 October, The Times reported on the resumption of the inquest, claiming that a ‘good deal of fresh evidence’ was on the cards. ‘Since the adjournment,’ it continued, ‘Shelton, the Coroner’s Officer, has, with the assistance of City Police authorities, discovered several new witnesses.’ These included a couple of (briefly suspected) male associates of Eddowes, and even her long-lost daughter. No one paid much attention to this crew, and neither do I. But there were some new witnesses of interest.

At about 1.30 a.m. on the night of Eddowes’ murder, three gents left their club in Duke Street, and stepped out into the rain. The Imperial Club was an artisans’ night out, exclusively Jewish, catering to the upper echelons of the working class. Two of the men walked slightly in advance of the third. They were Joseph Levy, a butcher, resident just south of Aldgate, and Henry Harris, a furniture dealer of Castle Street, Whitechapel.

Mr Harris wasn’t called to give evidence at the inquest, because he said he saw nothing, and that his companions saw nothing either, ‘just the back of the man’. But one of them clearly did see something. He was a forty-one-year-old commercial traveller in the cigarette trade, by the name of Joseph Lawende.

Lawende had already attracted press attention. On 9 October, two days before the resumption of the inquest, the Evening News had published a summary of what the public might expect in respect of this trio’s exit from the Imperial Club: ‘They noticed a couple – a man and woman – standing by the iron post of the small passage that leads to Mitre Square. They have no doubt themselves that this was the murdered woman and her murderer. And on the first blush of it the fact is borne out by the police having taken exclusive care of Mr Joseph Lawende, to a certain extent having sequestrated him and having imposed a pledge on him of secrecy. They are paying all his expenses, and 1 if not 2 detectives are taking him about.’

It’s assumed by The Jack the Ripper A to Z that the City Police were protecting Lawende from the press. This may be so, but it’s obvious that they were also protecting him from the Met. They didn’t want anyone making – shall we say – unhelpful suggestions about what he may or may not have seen. This is corroborated by a Home Office minute later in the month. With quite startling hypocrisy, it states: ‘The City Police are wholly at fault as regards detection of the murderer. They evidently want to tell us nothing.’6

If I were the City Police – most particularly over the farce at Goulston Street – I wouldn’t want to tell the Home Office anything either. It’s clear, in respect of wash-it-off-Warren, that the City Police were attempting to protect the integrity of their witness.

Two days later, Levy and Lawende were in court. But this time there was an adjustment in approach from the ‘active legal luminary’. Crawford knew perfectly well why Warren had washed off that wall. He also knew about the article in the Evening News, and was about to prove it correct.

It had been pouring with rain on the night of the murders, and Joseph Levy told the court ‘he thought the spot was very badly lighted’, and that his ‘suspicions were not aroused by the two persons’: ‘He noticed a man and a woman standing together at the corner of Church Passage, but he passed on without taking any further notice of them. He did not look at them. From what he saw, the man might have been three inches taller than the woman. He could not give a description of either of them … he did not take much notice.’

What are we to make of so vacuous a deposition? It was what novelists call a filthy night in a poorly lit alleyway. Levy had a brim-down glimpse of a man and a woman. ‘From what he saw, the man might have been three inches taller’. Eddowes was a diminutive five feet, meaning her paramour ‘might’ have been five feet three inches. However, if he was a taller man, he ‘might’ have been leaning down to whisper sweet nothings in her ear. We cannot know, and certainly not from Levy, because ‘He did not look at them.’

Peripheral estimates such as his are worthless. An on-site witness, Abraham Heshburg, who actually saw Elizabeth Stride as she lay dead at Dutfield’s Yard, estimated her age as twenty-five to twenty-eight – she was forty-four, and Heshburg was about twenty years out.7 Predicated on the enormous variations of physical description, we can assume that the Ripper was between five and six feet tall, and between thirty and fifty years old – like virtually half the male population of London. It is only when a description is specific that it begins to have some worth, and this perhaps explains why Levy was not under police escort.

We now come to the man who was.

JOSEPH LAWENDE 45 Norfolk Road, being sworn saith:– On the night of the 29th I was at the Imperial Club. Mr Joseph Levy and Mr Harry Harris were with me. It was raining. We left there to go out at half past one and we left the house about five minutes later. I walked a little further from the others. Standing in the corner of Church Passage in Duke Street, which leads into Mitre Square, I saw a woman. She was standing with her face towards a man. I only saw her back. She had her hand on his chest. The man was taller than she was. She had a black jacket and a black bonnet. I have seen the articles which it is stated belonged to her at the police station. My belief is they were the same clothes which I had seen upon the Deceased. She appeared to me short. The man had a cloth cap on with a cloth peak. I have given a description of the man to the police.

But he isn’t giving it here, where only the man’s hat is described. ‘The man was taller than she was … She appeared to me short.’ Did she appear short because the man was much taller than her? It’s a question I would like to have asked, but Coroner Langham asked the question instead: ‘Can you tell us what sort of man it was with whom she was speaking?’

Lawende had clearly been warned off, and again described the man’s hat: ‘He had on a cloth cap with a peak.’ The jury had already heard that, and just in case anyone was looking for a little more description than a hat, Crawford interceded:

Unless the Jury wish it I have a special reason [my emphasis] why no further description on this man should be given now.

The City Police had been protecting Lawende, and now they shut him up. The jury ‘assented to Mr Crawford’s wish’, although I don’t imagine they realised it would be sustained for the next 130 years. Here was a witness who had information about the killer – height, age, whatever – under the ‘exclusive care’ of the City Police, who had imposed ‘a pledge of secrecy’.

Crawford had just defended the pledge, adding veracity to the Evening News report. Here was a man who, at a minimum, had had a glimpse of Jack the Ripper, yet his description was suppressed, and remains a secret to this day.

Cue the fairy dust.

On page 247 of his book, Mr Philip Sugden makes a convoluted and unsuccessful effort to explain away the description Crawford wanted kept secret. He would like us to believe that it is no secret at all, but was brought into the open by the Metropolitan Police on 19 October 1888. He refers us to a description in the Met’s own weekly newspaper, the Police Gazette. The Gazette was founded by Howard Vincent in 1884, and was brought into disrepute by Warren and his boys with the kind of casuistry proffered by Mr Sugden.

‘Lawende saw the man too,’ he writes energetically, ‘but the official transcript of his inquest deposition records only that he was taller than the woman and wore a cloth cap with a cloth peak. Press versions of the testimony, however, add the detail that “the man looked rather rough and shabby”, and reveal that the full description was suppressed at the request of Henry Crawford, the City Solicitor, who was attending the hearing on behalf of the [City] Police. Fortunately,’ he enthuses, ‘this deficiency in the record can be addressed from other sources. Lawende’s description of the man was fully published in the Police Gazette of October 19th 1888.’8

To which I add the word ‘Bollocks.’

Here is Mr Sugden’s historic breakthrough, as published in the Police Gazette on 19 October 1888: ‘… a MAN, aged 30, height 5ft 7 or 8 in., complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build, dress, pepper and salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of same material, reddish neckerchief tied in a knot; appearance of a sailor’. This description of 19 October, grasped by Mr Sugden, was in fact published in The Times on 2 October, more than a week before Lawende gave his evidence, and more than two weeks before its appearance in the Police Gazette. It therefore can have absolutely nothing whatever to do with the description Crawford suppressed at the inquest.

This is what The Times printed on 2 October: ‘… the man was observed in a court in Duke Street, leading to Mitre Square, about 1.40 a.m. on Sunday. He is described as of shabby appearance. About 30 years of age and 5ft 9in in height, of fair complexion, having a small fair moustache, and wearing a red neckerchief and a cap with a peak.’

Apart from knocking a useful inch or two off the height and adding a bit of nautical gibberish, the Police Gazette/Times descriptions are as near as makes no difference, red neckerchief and all. Thus Mr Sugden’s supposed revelation is no such thing, and certainly has nothing to do with the description Crawford suppressed.

I am aware of The Times’s description 130 years after it appeared. Are we to imagine that a man as sharp as Henry Crawford was ignorant of something published in The Times only nine days before? Crawford was a man of rare intellect, and it is simply ridiculous to imagine that he would try to suppress something that had recently been printed in 40,000 copies of the world’s most prestigious newspaper. Crawford would have to be as foolish as Sugden to suggest it. And the Evening News, despite The Times piece a week before, was very well aware on 9 October that the City Police were keeping something secret.

Unless Mr Sugden thinks a ‘pepper and salt’-coloured jacket glimpsed in darkness and rain is some kind of dramatic breakthrough, the Police Gazette has elucidated absolutely nothing. Sugden describes this grey jacket as ‘a fortunate addition to the deficiency of the record’. I call it worthless twaddle. This belated confection in the Police Gazette doesn’t explain Crawford’s imposition of secrecy, and has no value. It is simply a cooked-up, out-of-date newspaper reprint, another dispatch from the Land of Make Believe. If this description had any validity to the Metropolitan Police on 2 October, why not print it in the Police Gazette on that day? Or the 5th? Or the 9th? Or the 12th? Or the 16th? Why wait for the issue of 19 October?

The real reason the Met regurgitated this unsourced ‘description’ was to coincide with an internal report Bro Inspector Donald Swanson had prepared on the same date. Destined for the Home Office, this concoction of 19 October makes reference to the man with the red neckerchief, and since they’d never bothered with him before, it would look most untoward it they didn’t fabricate some interest now. Hence, seventeen days after his appearance in The Times ‘the Seafaring Man’ makes his debut in the Police Gazette, only to be dismissed on the very same day by Swanson himself. ‘I understand from the City Police,’ he wrote, ‘that Mr Lewin [sic] one of the men who identified the clothes only of the murdered woman Eddowes, which is a serious drawback to the value of the description of the man’ (which, incidentally, Lawende never publicly made).9

So despite a front page of the Met’s house journal, even Swanson thinks he’s got nothing on Jack, and only a description of Eddowes’ clothes. Crawford would have had to have been some kind of full-blown half-wit to want to conceal that.

Bye bye, sailor.

The problem with Mr Sugden is that he is all wallpaper and no wall. I sincerely have no desire to isolate him for criticism, but at every point of contention he’s there with his paste-pot and paper. It’s so frequent (not only from him, but from Ripperology in general) that it reads like a kind of corporate hypnotism.

But this description of the man with the ‘reddish’ neckerchief raises some questions. To have been published on 2 October, it must have been known to The Times on the 1st. Where did it get the information? Harris said he saw nothing. Levy said he saw nothing either. He therefore didn’t see a thirty-year-old, five-foot-nine-inch man with a fair moustache and a red neckerchief tied in a knot. Two of these three witnesses are thus dismissed as sources, and what Lawende saw was withheld ever after.

I think this nautical geezer with the red neckerchief is in the tradition of Metropolitan Police inventions (riots in Goulston Street, etc.), slipped by an unknown source to The Times. By this time the Met were under catastrophic pressure, and Warren was less than forty days from the exit. Swanson’s ‘report’ from Scotland Yard was three parts panic, and the rest distortion to fit the fiction Warren was committed to tell. We will never know from whence the seafarer and his neckerchief came, any more than we can know what description Crawford suppressed.

But I don’t like half-arsed ‘mysteries’, and though I might never be able to find out what Crawford withheld, I thought there was a better-than-odds-on chance of discovering why he withheld it. I got a red light about Crawford, and I think it was precisely the same red light he had about ‘Juwes’ and Jack.

If there really was a ‘special reason’ for stifling Lawende’s description, why was it not later revealed? Was it, in the short term, an effort to keep it secret from the Met? After the shenanigans at Goulston Street, it’s possible. Commissioner Smith never forgave Warren, calling his erasure of the writing on the wall ‘an unpardonable error’. Maybe he was determined to keep the slippery bastard out. But I was persuaded that there was a more complex dynamic to be discovered.

Immediately following Levy/Lawende, PC Long was the next witness to be called – a patsy put up to try to divert attention from the duplicity of the men who didn’t care to show themselves.

Long was the only representative of the Metropolitan Police to appear before the court. Neither Arnold nor Warren was called – the latter, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, because the court didn’t want to hold him to contempt. But contempt over what? It wasn’t yet widely known that London’s Commissioner of Police had colluded to conceal the identity of London’s most wanted killer. On 11 October the Evening News ran a report commenting on the court proceedings.

The words ‘The Jews are not the men who will be blamed for nothing,’ were almost certainly written by the murderer, who left at the spot the bloody portion of the woman’s apron as a sort of warranty of authenticity. On Police Constable Long’s report consultation was held and the decision taken to rub out the words [emphasis in the original]. Detective Halse of the City Police protested. A brother officer had gone to make arrangements to have the words photographed, but the zeal of the Metropolitans could not rest. They fear a riot against the Jews and out the words must come. And the only clue [my emphasis] to the murderer was destroyed calmly and deliberately, on the authority of those in high places.

Attempts to navigate the Juwes/apron débâcle were still high on the agenda of Warren’s hidden anti-detective work. On 3 October he had written to his City counterpart, Commissioner Colonel Sir James Frazer, attempting to solicit his blessing for a grab at the surreal. The ‘riot’ angle clearly lacked traction, so to accompany ‘the Nautical Man’ and ‘the Womb-Collector’ he conjured up the limpest suspect yet, ‘the Goulston Street Hoaxer’.