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THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS, 1888

Fiction far outweighs fact in the volume of words used to describe the crimes, motives and character of Jack the Ripper. The facts are few, almost as few as the five murders he is believed to have committed. The fictions stem from the fact – despite mountains of theory and speculation – that no one knows for certain who he was. No single writer, in the last seventy years, has been able to establish the identity of the ‘Whitechapel Murderer’, as he was originally called. Significantly, the first full-length work on the subject, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, was not published until more than a generation, forty-one years, after the murders. It was written by an Australian journalist, Leonard Matters. Since then, and despite confident claims by various writers that they have found The Answer, or The Final Solution, they have not. They fail to convince, to provide conclusive proof, their causes and case histories being spoiled by misconception, misreporting, error, and the perpetuation of earlier journalistic imaginings, assumptions and fancy unsupported by fact. The identity of the Whitechapel murderer is and will remain an enigma. He is not even definitely named in the so-called secret files of Scotland Yard.

Five murders are known to have been committed by the Ripper, but two others were once thought to have been his work as well. The first was of Emma Smith, an ageing prostitute, who lived at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She was attacked in Osborn Street in the early hours of 3 April 1888. Her face and ear were cut, and some instrument, not a knife, had been thrust violently up her vagina. She said she had been assaulted by four men, but could or would not identify them. She died the next day in the London Hospital of peritonitis. Four months later, at 3 am on 7 August, the body of Martha Tabram, aged thirty-five, was found on a staircase landing in George Yard Buildings in Commercial Street. Her throat and stomach had been stabbed or pierced thirty-nine times with something sharp like a bayonet. Earlier that night, she and another prostitute had been seen in the company of two soldiers, who were arrested and paraded with others in front of the second prostitute. But she failed or refused to identify either her own or the other woman’s partner.

It should be remembered that in 1888 the East End of London, a few square miles, was inhabited by about 900,000 people, virtual outcasts living in conditions of extreme depravity, poverty and filth. Fifty-five per cent of East End children died before they were five. Each squalid room in each rotting lodging house was occupied by between five and seven persons – men, women and children. In Whitechapel, about 8,500 people crammed into 233 lodging houses every night, paying as much as 4d for a bed. The parish of Whitechapel was infested with about 80,000 artisans, labourers and derelicts, of whom the better-off – the poor, as opposed to the very poor – earned about £1 a week. The more menial tasks yielded a shilling a day, women being paid less than men. People lived from day to day, earning or stealing what they could to eat and stay alive. Drunkenness and prostitution were rampant. The Metropolitan Police estimated that in October 1888 about 1,200 of the lowest sort of prostitute plied their trade in the dingy Whitechapel streets. Consequently, women were assaulted and injured every night. Some were killed.

Twenty-four days after the death of Martha Tabram there occurred the first of the accepted Ripper killings. At about 3.30 am on Friday, 31 August, Mary Ann Nichols, a forty-two-year-old prostitute, was murdered. She was found in Buck’s Row, lying on her back, her skirt pushed up above her knees; her eyes were open. Her throat had been slashed twice, from left to right, the second eight-inch-long cut almost severing the head. Blood from the cut had been absorbed by her stained and shabby clothes: a brown ulster, a brown linsey frock, two petticoats, stays and black wool stockings. She also wore a black straw bonnet. Her face was bruised. She was 5 ft 2 in tall and had lost five of her front teeth. It was not until her body was removed to the mortuary by the old Montague Street workhouse that other injuries were revealed. Her stomach had been hacked open and slashed several times. Mary Ann Nichols, also known as Polly, had lodged at 18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields, as well as at 56 Flower and Dean Street. She was last seen alive at 2.30 am on the corner of Osborn Street, staggering drunkenly down Whitechapel Road towards Buck’s Row (now Durward Street).

Because she, Tabram and Smith were all murdered within 300 yards of each other and were prostitutes, a connection was made between them that now seems insubstantial. A man known to have ill-treated prostitutes and to have been seen with Nichols became a prime suspect. Known as Leather Apron, he was a Jewish bootmaker, John Pizer – also called Jack.

The next murder was eight days later. The body of Annie Chapman, aged forty-five, also known as Dark Annie, Annie Siffey or Sievey (she had lived with a man who made sieves), was found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street at 6 am on Saturday, 8 September. She lay on her back beside steps leading from a passage into the yard. Her knees were wide apart and her dirty black skirt pushed up over them. Her face was swollen and her chin and jaw were bruised; her tongue protruded from her mouth. Two deep and savage cuts had practically separated her head from her body. Her stomach had been torn open and pulled apart; sections of skin from the stomach lay on her shoulder – on the right was another piece of skin and a mess of small intestines. It was later established that she had been disembowelled – her uterus, part of the vagina and the bladder had been carved out and taken away.

Slight bloodstains were discovered on the palings of a fence beside the body and specks of blood spattered the rear wall of the house above the prostrate corpse. Her rings were missing – they had been torn from her fingers. At her feet lay some pennies and two new farthings; a comb also lay by the body. Presumably this and the coins had been in the pocket under her skirt that had been ripped open. Other adjacent items, which probably had nothing to do with the murder, included part of an envelope stamped 28 August 1888 and bearing the crest of the Sussex Regiment on the back, as well as a piece of paper containing two pills – and a leather apron soaked with water and about two feet from a communal tap.

Annie Chapman was a small (5 ft), stout woman with dark hair, blue eyes, a thick nose and two teeth missing from her lower jaw. She had lodged at 35 Dorset Street, from where she had been evicted at 2 am because she lacked the few pennies for a bed. Drunk and ill, she had wandered off towards Brushfield Street. She was last seen alive at 5.30 am (a clock was striking the half-hour) by a park-keeper’s wife who was on her way to market. She saw Chapman standing outside 29 Hanbury Street, haggling with a foreign-looking man, aged about forty, who was shabbily but respectably dressed and wearing a deerstalker, probably brown. Number 29 was a lodging house, occupied by seventeen people, none of whom heard anything untoward. But the street was not quiet: carts and workers were already moving up and down on their way to work.

Several suspects were taken to Commercial Street police station for questioning on Sunday, 9 September, and in the early hours of Monday the 10th, John Pizer, Leather Apron, was found at 22 Mulberry Street and arrested. Witnesses said that two months earlier he had been ejected from 35 Dorset Street and that he wore a deerstalker hat. The police found five long-bladed knives in his lodgings, of a sort thought to have been used by the murderer. Pizer said that he used them in his boot-making trade. He protested his innocence, and his story that he had been in hiding in the Mulberry Street house for four days, since Thursday, was backed up by his stepmother and brother who lived there. He also had an alibi for the night Mary Ann Nichols was murdered – he was in a lodging house in Holloway Road.

At the inquest on Annie Chapman, the leather apron found in the back yard not far from her body was identified as the property of John Richardson, whose widowed mother lived in 29 Hanbury Street. She had washed the apron on Thursday, leaving it by the fence, where it was found on Saturday by the police. Richardson had actually visited the house about 4.45 am on his way to work, to check that his mother’s padlocked cellar, which had recently been robbed, was intact. In the dawn light, he saw that it was and that the yard was empty.

Another yard was the scene of the murder of Elizabeth Stride, a forty-four-year-old Swedish prostitute, also known as Long Liz. She was killed about 1 am on Sunday, 30 September, a wet and windy night. Her body was discovered by a hawker, Louis Diemschutz, who worked as a steward in a Jewish Socialist Club that backed onto the yard in Berner Street. As he drove into the yard in a pony and trap, the pony shied to the left, doing so twice and drawing the hawker’s attention to a heap of clothes on the ground. He poked at it with his whip and lit a match, which was snuffed out by the wind. But he had seen enough. He fetched help from the club, where the rowdy members were singing and dancing.

Long Liz lay on her muddy left side, her legs drawn up, right arm over her stomach, her left arm extended behind her back, the hand clutching a packet of cashew nuts. Her right hand was bloody, and her mouth was slightly open. The bow of a check silk scarf around her throat had pulled tight and had turned to the left of her neck. The scarf’s lower edge was frayed, as if by a very sharp knife, which had also slit her throat from left to right, severing the windpipe. Bruises on her shoulders and chest indicated that she had been seized and forced down onto the ground when her throat had been cut. Her body was still warm. Evidently the murderer had been frightened off by the returning pony and trap. There were no other injuries or mutilations. It was noted at the mortuary that the dead woman had no teeth in her left lower jaw.

Like Nichols and Chapman, Stride was married but separated from her husband. Like them, she was something of an alcoholic. She had lived in Fashion Street with a labourer called Michael Kidney, who had then moved to 35 Dorset Street. But on the Tuesday before her death she had walked out, lodging instead at 32 Flower and Dean Street. On the Saturday night she had been seen by a labourer, William Marshall, at about 11.45 pm in Berner Street, talking to a mild-voiced, middle-aged, stout and decently dressed man, wearing a cutaway coat. He had looked like a clerk to Marshall: he wore no gloves, carried no stick or anything else in his hands, and on his head was ‘a round cap with a small peak to it’ like a sailor’s hat. He kissed Long Liz and he said: ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ Then they walked down the street.

She was seen again in Berner Street at about 12.30 am by a policeman, PC Smith. He described Stride’s companion as they stood and talked together as ‘of respectable appearance … He had a newspaper parcel in his hand.’ The man was about 5 ft 7 in tall, wore an overcoat and dark trousers and had a dark, hard felt deerstalker on his head. Smith gave the man’s age as ‘about twenty-eight’. The Police Gazette later expanded this description to ‘complexion dark, small dark moustache; dress, black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, collar and tie’.

A third witness, a box-maker, James Brown, crossed Berner Street at about 12.45 am and noticed a couple standing by a wall. He heard the woman say: ‘Not tonight. Some other night’ A glance revealed to him that the man was wearing a long dark coat. The Gazette elaborated Brown’s description as follows: ‘Age about thirty, height 5 ft 5 ins; complexion fair, hair dark, small brown moustache, full face, broad shoulders; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak.’

Are Smith and Brown describing the same man? And was he the man who killed Elizabeth Stride at about 1 am and on being disturbed by the pony and trap fled westwards towards Aldgate?

Just after 1.30 am and half a mile to the west in Duke Street, three Jews, one of whom was a Mr Lawende, saw a man talking to a woman in Church Passage, which led into Mitre Square. She was wearing a black jacket and bonnet and was about three or four inches shorter than the man. He was later described in the Police Gazette as: ‘Aged thirty, height 5 ft 7 ins, or 8 ins; complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build; dress: pepper and salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of some material, reddish neckerchief tied in knots; appearance of a sailor.’ The woman was Catherine Eddowes, aged forty-three. Less than ten minutes later she was dead.

She had been married to a man called Conway, but for seven years she had lived at 6 Fashion Street with another man, John Kelly, and accordingly called herself Kate Kelly. That Saturday night she had been arrested in Aldgate about 8.30 pm: she was drunk and disorderly. Taken to Bishopsgate police station, she had been left to sober up in a cell and was discharged at 1 am – at the same time as Elizabeth Stride’s throat was cut in the yard off Berner Street. Eddowes walked off southwards, down Houndsditch towards Aldgate High Street and Mitre Square, as Stride’s murderer hurried westwards towards her.

At 1.45 am, her body was discovered by the bull’s-eye lamp of PC Watkins as he walked on his beat through the square. It lay on its back in a corner. ‘I have been in the force a long while,’ said Watkins, ‘but I never saw such a sight.’ The body had been ripped open, said Watkins, like a pig in the market. The left leg was extended and the right leg bent. The throat had been deeply slit and the face had been slashed and cut. There were also abrasions on both cheeks. Both sets of eyelids had been nicked and part of the nose and the right ear had been sliced off. The trunk had been torn apart from the sternum to the groin by a series of disjointed thrusts, the pointed knife that was employed being angled from right to left. The woman had been disembowelled – entrails had been thrown across her right shoulder. The uterus and the left kidney had been cut away and removed.

Police sketches and photographs of Catherine Eddowes’s body greatly minimise the view that the murderer had some anatomical knowledge, or took ‘at least five minutes’ over his work. He clearly worked in a frenzy – cutting the throats of his victims, ripping their bodies and pulling out organs with neither care nor skill, and all in a couple of minutes at the most. He would have worked with speed, frantic with bloodlust and also fearful of being caught. He may have had a very rough knowledge of anatomy, sufficient for him to knowingly silence each victim by severing her windpipe, and he might have known what a womb looked like (he removed two) and have been able to distinguish such a comparatively small and obscure item among the mass of organs in the gut. But this does not mean that he had had any actual medical experience or had been a butcher, slaughterman, farmer or hunter of any sort.

The idea propounded at the time by some doctors, that the throats of the victims had been cut (the cause of death) as they lay on the ground, is in reality not very likely – unless the women were already unconscious, or dead. For despite their dirty clothes and drunken state, they are unlikely to have stretched out on the much dirtier, muddy ground to have sex. This service would most likely have been provided standing up against a wall, with their backs to it – or facing it. And it is unlikely that the women were suffocated or strangled before their throats were cut. If they had been strangled, they would surely have fought for their lives. But in no case was there any sign of a struggle, nor were any bruises found on the women’s necks where pressure in strangulation would have been applied. Despite the cut throats, some such marks, if they had been there, must have remained. There were, however, bruises and abrasions on the faces of the women, about the chin and jaw. Stride’s shoulders were also bruised.

It seems likely that the murderer seized the women from behind, with his left arm or hand gripping face or chin and forcing it upwards, thereby stifling any cry and exposing the throat to the long-bladed knife in his right hand. He would then cut from left to right. In every case, the drunken women were taken by surprise. Despite the fact that people were awake and within a few yards of the murders, there was evidently never any resistance or any sound.

Catherine Eddowes wore a black cloth jacket with an imitation fur collar; her black straw bonnet was trimmed with beads and velvet; her dark green dress was patterned with michaelmas daisies and lilies. In her pockets were a handkerchief, a comb, two clay pipes, a cigarette case, a matchbox containing some cotton, a ball of worsted, a mitten, a small tin box containing tea and sugar, five pieces of soap and a blunt table-knife. Around her neck was a ribbon and ‘a piece of old white coarse apron’, presumably in place of a scarf. The three previous victims had also worn scarves. Part of this bloodstained apron had been cut off, and was found at the bottom of some common stairs leading to 108-119 Wentworth Dwellings, Goulston Street (north-east of Mitre Square and on the way to Spitalfields) at 2.55 am.

PC Long, who noticed the bloody rag during his night patrol, stated that at 2.20 am it had not been there. Nor, he said, had a five-lined message written in chalk on a black-bricked wall in the passage: ‘The Juwes are / The men that / Will not / be Blamed for nothing.’ When the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, arrived in Goulston Street about 5 am, he ordered the words to be rubbed out, even before a daylight photograph could be taken of this possible clue. The words, however, were copied. Warren’s action was explained by his concern to avoid the exacerbation of prevailing anti-semitic prejudice. For apart from the fact that some main suspects had been Jews, the last four women had been murdered in Jewish areas and near buildings occupied by Jews.

The ‘double event’ of the murders of Eddowes and Stride provided the press with even more sensational and lurid headlines and reports, and added further fuel to the clamour for the resignation of Sir Charles Warren and the Home Secretary. It was felt that not enough was being done to identify and apprehend the murderer, and the police were strongly criticised. Vigilance committees were formed, petitions signed and demonstrations made. Thousands of letters about the murders and the murderer’s identity were sent to the police and to the press, exhibiting every sort of social, sexual and racial prejudices.

Meanwhile, in the East End, where large morbid crowds had gathered in the streets to view the scenes of the murders and indulge in rabid speculation, a ‘terrible quiet’ descended.

Then a letter and a postcard, received by the Central News Agency, were published with the permission of the police on 3 October. From now on the murderer had a name – Jack the Ripper.

The letter, addressed to The Boss, Central News Office, London City, was dated 25 September 1888 and posted in the East End on 27 September, the Thursday before the double murder in the early hours of Sunday, 30 September. It 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 (Annie Chapman) no time to squeal … I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the 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 ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade name

wasnt good enough to post this before I got all

the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet.

They say I’m a doctor now ha ha.

The letter was followed a few days later by a postcard. It was postmarked 1 October – the Monday after the double murder and not, as many writers have said, on the same day – even ‘a few hours after’ the murders of Stride and Eddowes. The postcard was probably written at least 24 hours after the murders, and after details of them had been sensationally splashed in the Monday morning papers. It was addressed to: Central News Office, London City, EC:

I 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 couldnt finish straight off. had no time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again. Jack the Ripper

The postcard might have been written on Sunday the 30th, anything from twelve to twenty hours after the murders, which were within the few hours after midnight. It might have been written by someone in the locality who had heard of the ‘double event’, or indeed by a journalist, or by anyone connected with the police or medical investigations. In no way does the postcard betoken any foreknowledge of the murders.

Misconception and myth also cloud the next alleged communication from the murderer. Seventeen days after the murders of Stride and Eddowes, on Tuesday, 16 October, at either 5 pm or 8 pm (there were two postal deliveries in the evening in those days), a builder, Mr George Lusk, who was chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee and lived in Alderney Street, Mile End, received a small brown paper parcel, 3 1⁄2 inches square. Within was a cardboard box that contained half a kidney. The postmark was indecipherable, although post-office workers thought the parcel could have been posted in the Eastern or East Central areas. A brief letter came with the stinking kidney, with an address at the top – ‘From hell’.

Sor I send you half the kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer.

signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk

The writer of this note is probably not the same man who penned the ‘Jack the Ripper’ epistles. Apart from the fact that the handwriting is different, the spelling of the Ripper letter and card are superior and written in quite a neat copper-plate. A curious feature of the note to Mr Lusk is the oddly illiterate spelling – it seems deliberate. Words like ‘half’, ‘piece’, ‘fried’ and ‘bloody’ are properly spelt, yet ‘kidne’, ‘prasarved’, ‘nise’, ‘knif’, ‘wate’ and ‘whit’ are not, being given a sort of phonetic spelling which in three cases is merely attained by the omission of the last letters – ‘kidne’, ‘knif’ and ‘whit’. Yet in the last two words, the silent letters ‘k’ and ‘h’ are included. There is also an obvious Irishness to the spelling of ‘Sor’ and ‘Mishter’.

Mr Lusk had already been bothered by a prowler and other letters, and was at first inclined to dismiss the kidney as a disagreeable hoax. But friends advised him to submit the half kidney to the inspection of the police and doctors, and on 18 October Dr Openshaw, at the Pathological Museum, after examining the offensive organ, concluded that the kidney had come from a woman who drank, had Bright’s Disease, and that it was part of a left kidney. He thought it had been removed within the last three weeks. It had also been preserved in spirits after its removal.

It has since been assumed that the kidney was the one missing from the body of drunken Catherine Eddowes. There is no proof of this. Eddowes was buried in the City of London Cemetery at Ilford on 8 October, so there was no chance of direct verification or of comparing the alleged length of renal artery attached to the postal kidney and that still in the murdered woman. It is also virtually impossible – it would have been completely so in 1888 – to tell whether a kidney comes from a woman or a man. Moreover, Bright’s Disease, which infected the kidney, is not necessarily caused by alcoholism, and the postal kidney had been put in spirits within a few hours of its removal – something the murderer of Eddowes would surely not have thought of or had time to do.

Assumptions and error have gilded the half-kidney since it was sent to Mr Lusk. The sender was most probably a morbid hoaxer, possibly a medical student or hospital worker, who must have been much gratified by the success of his little device. On 29 October, another illiterate letter was sent, this time to Dr Openshaw:

Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny i was goin to hopperate agin clos to your ospitle just as i was goin to dror my nife along of er bloomin throte them cusses of coppers spoilt the game but i guess i wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit innerds Jack the ripper.

An interesting feature of the letters quoted above, one or two of which are thought by some to have possibly been written by the actual Whitechapel murderer, is that the addresses were correct (and correctly spelt) and that none of them was addressed to the police – who, in fact, received thousands of letters. This is odd, for murderers with a literary leaning invariably feel bound to communicate with the police, and with no one else – with the exception of Dr Cream, who wrote to everyone.

Sir Robert Anderson, who became head of the CID at the Yard in September 1888, said later: ‘The “Jack the Ripper” letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard is the creation of an enterprising journalist.’ And Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became Assistant Chief Constable at the Yard in 1889 and head of the CID in 1903, wrote: ‘In this ghastly production I have always thought I could discern the stained finger of the journalist – indeed, a year later I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author! But whoever did pen the gruesome stuff, it is certain to my mind that it was not the mad miscreant who had committed the murders.’

The fifth and final murder generally attributed to the Ripper happened forty days after the ‘double event’. It was different in that the victim, a prostitute, was young and attractive, was killed indoors and more horribly and extensively mutilated than any female murder victim before, or perhaps since.

Mary Jane Kelly – also known as Dark Mary, Mary Ann and Marie – aged twenty-four, was murdered in the early hours of Friday, 9 November, in a back room of 26 Dorset Street. Two women in nearby but separate rooms said they heard a woman cry ‘Murder’ about 3.45 am. Mary Kell’s lodging, rented for four shillings a week, was Room 13 in the house and had its own entrance, a side-door opening into a passage called Miller’s Court. Until 30 October she had shared the room with her common-law husband, Joseph Barnett. After a stormy row he left her, since when another prostitute had stayed with her occasionally.

Kelly’s body was discovered about 10.45 am by her landlord’s assistant, Thomas Bowyer, who had been sent to ask her for the thirty-five shillings she owed in rent. Getting no answer to his knocking – the door was locked – he peered through a broken window, removing rags that filled the gap and pulling aside a curtain to do so. The police were sent for, but as the Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, had chosen to resign the day before, the police force were in some confusion. Kelly’s room was not entered (at first by the window) until 1.30 pm.

The bloodstained room was sparsely furnished. Mary Kelly, wearing the remains of a chemise or slip, was lying on her back on a bed, where she had been placed after the murderer cut her throat. By the light of a fire, fuelled by clothes and other items he found in the room (although Kelly’s clothes, folded on a chair, were not so used), he set to work mutilating the body, which was stabbed, slashed, skinned, gutted and ripped apart. Her nose and breasts were cut off and dumped on a table; entrails were extracted; some were removed; other parts lay on the bed. Mary Kelly was nearly three months pregnant.

The last person believed to have seen her alive was George Hutchinson, an unemployed labourer. He had known Kelly for three years. He met her in Thrawl Street as he walked towards Flower and Dean Street about 2 am. She said: ‘Hutchinson, will you lend me sixpence?’ ‘I can’t,’ he replied. ‘I’ve spent all my money going down to Romford.’ She shrugged. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I must go and find some money.’ She walked off, and a man coming in the opposite direction accosted her – they both laughed. Hutchinson watched. He heard Kelly say: ‘All right.’ ‘You’ll be all right for what I’ve told you,’ said the man. They walked towards Hutchinson and passed him – he was standing under a lamp outside a pub, the Queen’s Head. The man lowered his head and his hat as he passed. But Hutchinson was later able to describe him as being about thirty-four, 5 ft 6 in tall, dark-haired, with a small moustache curled up at the ends. He was dressed in a long dark coat, with a dark jacket and trousers; his waistcoat was as pale as his face, and across it was a gold chain. He wore a white shirt, button boots with gaiters and his black tie had a horseshoe-shaped pin in it. He seemed quite respectable, and Jewish.

Hutchinson’s description is very exact: it seems too good to be true. He goes on to say that he followed Kelly and her pick-up into Dorset Street, where they stood talking by Miller’s Court for a couple of minutes. He heard Kelly say: ‘All right, my dear. Come along – you’ll be comfortable.’ The man kissed her, and they went into Miller’s Court. Hutchinson waited, but they failed to reappear.

Nothing is known about Hutchinson that might lend credence or otherwise to his statement. The man he saw need not have been Kelly’s murderer – she was not killed until at least an hour and a half later. Unlike the dark gentleman who chatted quite carelessly outside Miller’s Court, the murderer would have been very careful, one imagines, about not being seen with Mary Kelly and certainly not so near her room.

The rest is silence, apart from the clamour of speculation at the time, as well as generations later, about the identity of the Whitechapel murderer.

Another heavy-drinking prostitute, Alice McKenzie, was murdered in Whitechapel, in Castle Alley, on 17 July 1889. She was found in the street with her throat cut (or rather, stabbed twice); her dress had been pushed above her knees, and there were cuts and scratches on her stomach. However, the death of ‘Clay-pipe Alice’ is not thought to have been the work of the Ripper, who is generally believed to have died or to have been imprisoned for other crimes soon after the murder of Mary Kelly.

Who was he? What happened to him? No one can say for certain. Sir Charles Warren is reported by his grandson to have believed the murderer ‘to be a sex maniac who committed suicide after the Miller’s Court murder – possibly the young doctor whose body was found in the Thames on December 31st 1888.’ Sir Robert Anderson, who became head of the CID in September 1888, wrote in his memoirs: ‘I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer … In saying that he was a Polish Jew, I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact.’ A note scribbled in a copy of his memoirs given years later to the Crime Museum indicates that he believed the Ripper to be in fact a Polish barber, Aaron Kosminski.

Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City Police at the time of the murders, thought the murderer must be the man described by Joseph Lawende. Chief Detective Inspector Abberline, who was the senior Yard detective investigating the murders, thought George Chapman (his real name was Severin Klosowski) was the killer. Chapman, a hairdresser’s assistant in Whitechapel in 1888, when he was twenty-three, was ultimately hanged in 1903 for poisoning his three wives – another kind of murder altogether. Other police officers involved at the time, such as Leeson and Dew, disagreed, writing in their autobiographies: ‘Nobody will ever know’ – ‘I am as mystified now as I was then.’

In February 1894, one man, Sir Melville Macnaghten, wrote what must be the most sensible account of the murders. It was a hand-written seven-page memorandum deposited in the Ripper file to discredit and disprove a newspaper story that a deranged fetishist, Thomas Cutbush, was the Ripper. Cutbush was arrested in 1891 for maliciously wounding two women by stabbing them in the rear. He was found guilty but insane, and incarcerated in an asylum. Macnaghten states: ‘The Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims – & 5 victims only.’ They were: Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly. Macnaghten continued:

It will be noticed that the fury of the mutilations increased in each case, and, seemingly, the appetite only became sharpened by indulgence. It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November 88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards. A much more rational theory is that the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them confined in some asylum. No one ever saw the Whitechapel Murderer, many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one. I may mention the cases of 3 men, any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders:

(1) A Mr MJ Druitt, said to be a doctor and of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, and whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st Dec – or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private info I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew and resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies. He was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many crimes connected with this man which made him a strong ‘suspect’.

(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was frequently 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.

Next to nothing is known about Kosminski and Ostrog. Much more has since been revealed about Montague Druitt.

Born on 15 August 1857 at Wimborne in Dorset, he was educated at Winchester College, where he was a prefect, played cricket for the First Eleven, was the best at playing Five’s, and won a scholarship to New College, Oxford. There he studied Classics and obtained a Third Class Honours degree in 1880. He may then have studied medicine for a year (he had a cousin who was a doctor) before switching to law, enrolling at the Inner Temple in May 1882. While he studied law, he taught at a crammer’s school in Blackheath, where forty-two boys were boarders. He was called to the Bar in April 1885. His father died in September, after which Druitt rented chambers at 9 King’s Bench Walk in the Temple. His career as a barrister was undistinguished and unrewarding; he continued to teach at the Blackheath school until he was sacked around 1 December 1888. The reason for the dismissal is not known: he may have shown homosexual tendencies or behaved unreasonably or oddly – the latter being not unlikely, as his mother had been certified as insane in July that year and put in a mental home in Chiswick. He apparently feared for his own sanity. Last seen alive on Monday, 3 December 1888, he penned a note – ‘Since Friday I felt I was going to be like Mother and the best thing was for me to die’ – weighted the pockets of his overcoat with stones and jumped or waded into the Thames. His body was found floating in the river near Chiswick on Monday, 31 December, four weeks after his disappearance. He was thirty-one.

Was he the Ripper? We know that he was a keen cricketer. A member of the MCC, for several years he played for Blackheath and also for teams in Dorset. The day after Mary Ann Nichols was murdered (about 3.30 am on Friday, 31 August), MJ Druitt played cricket for Canford against Wimborne in Dorset (on Saturday, 1 September). Some five hours after the murder of Annie Chapman (about 5.45 am on Saturday, 8 September) Druitt was playing cricket for Blackheath in south London. Where was he, one wonders, on the night of 29-30 September and at dawn on Friday, 9 November? To the question ‘Could he have committed such atrocious crimes and then played cricket?’ the answer must be ‘Yes.’

Of all the suspects, Druitt and Kosminski seem the ones most likely, from what we know now, to have been the Whitechapel murderer. But as in every other case there is no definite, conclusive proof. Other theories, about doctors, butchers, Jews, freemasons, lodgers, other murderers and a member of the monarchy (the Duke of Clarence), may reasonably, if regretfully, be dismissed. Of all the books written about the Whitechapel murders, the most useful are those by Donald Rumbelow, a police sergeant in the City, and Richard Whittington-Egan (see the Bibliography).

One area of interest remains – the actual scenes of the murders and the addresses of the victims: Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly. Why Whitechapel – rather than other areas of prostitution? And why, when about 1,200 prostitutes are said to have worked in Whitechapel, did the five murdered women, although murdered some distance apart, all live within a few hundred yards of each other? It is conceivable that they not only visited the same pubs and touted for custom in the same streets, but actually knew each other, at least by sight. Annie Chapman lived in 35 Dorset Street – so did Jack Pizer and Michael Kidney, with whom Elizabeth Stride used to live. Mary Kelly lived in and was killed at the back of 26 Dorset Street. Nichols, Stride and Eddowes all lodged at one time or another in Flower and Dean Street – as the last two also did in Fashion Street. Is it coincidence that these five possible acquaintances were killed?

It’s also possible that all five women were neighbours of the Ripper and were known to him, at least by sight, and that he also lived in or near Flower and Dean Street or Fashion Street or Thrawl Street, which were all parallel to each other and led off the main north-south artery in Whitechapel, Commercial Street. It seems highly probable that the Ripper was a local man, well acquainted with all the streets, alleys, yards, pubs and lodging houses in the area, as well as the beats paraded nightly by the police. With bloody clothes he can’t have ventured far from the scenes of the murders, and a local man would have known the darkest, most poorly lit and less-populated routes back to where he lived. The cut-off piece of Eddowes’s bloodstained apron was found in Goulston Street, north-east of Mitre Square where Eddowes died. North-east of Goulston Street itself were the parallel streets of Flower and Dean, Fashion and Thrawl. It’s likely that the Ripper, hurrying away from Mitre Square, was on his way home when he dropped or discarded the piece of apron.

He took great risks, killing where he did and displaying the bodies as he did. But that must have been part of his murderous urge, the thrill of the kill. And he killed in order to cut, not strangle his victims, swiftly and savagely using his knife. And if his victims knew him, at least by sight, they would not have felt unduly alarmed, especially if his manner and appearance were unexceptional, and not evidently those of a maniac or murderous psychopath, as fiction pictures him, but pleasant and persuasive, as actual murderers often are.

From the many statements made by witnesses who might have seen him before or after the murders, some generalisations might be made – he was about thirty, about 5 ft 6 in and wore a hat or cap and had a moustache. And he probably lived in or near Flower and Dean Street, selecting his victims from among the many prostitutes he lived among.