Complete History Of Jack The Ripper Part 5

After his examination Pizer thanked the court and retired to the back benches. There, noted the Advertiser, he 'looked somewhat pale and worried after giving his evidence though throughout he was perfectly cool and collected. He displayed not the slightest symptoms of insanity, and chatted freely and affably with Sergeant Thick with whom he sat until the adjournment of the inquiry.' Perhaps he was worried about the large crowd gathered outside the inst.i.tute. Certainly he was recognized at once and greeted with murmurs and muttering when he left the building but Sergeant Thick escorted him home. And with that, apart from some skirmishing in the libel courts and a complaint to Thames Magistrates' Court in October of continued persecution, this most famous of Whitechapel murder suspects disappears from the records of the case.5 Inspector Abberline told his superiors that the suspicions against Pizer had been 'conclusively' demonstrated to be groundless.6 How far does the existing evidence justify this view?

Pizer was an unmarried man in his thirties. His relatives, who shared, of course, a natural disposition to protect him, insisted that he was sober, industrious and kind, and that, being ruptured, he was physically incapable of violence. He was 'not a man to commit murder,' his sister-in-law told the press, 'and she was accustomed to trust her children to his charge.' Since Pizer spent most of his time in common lodging houses, however, it is to be doubted whether his family at Mulberry Street knew very much about his activities. His stepmother conceded, according to one news report, that although he was always welcome when he came to visit them he was never asked where he had been. There is little doubt that Pizer was the man known locally as 'Leather Ap.r.o.n.' Sergeant Thick, who had known Pizer for eighteen years, and indeed Pizer himself, readily acknowledged that fact at the inquest. And although the allegations of his bullying prost.i.tutes have never been substantiated there is certainly evidence to suggest that he was by no means the harmless put-upon he represented himself to be. On 7 July 1887 one John Pozer, almost certainly Pizer, was convicted at Thames Magistrates' Court of stabbing James Willis or Williams, a boot finisher, and was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. This incident occurred on the afternoon of the 6th. Willis was working at 42 Morgan Street when Pozer put his head through the window and complained: 'No wonder I can't get any work when you have got it all.' Then, when Willis went to the door to send him away, Pozer lunged at his face with a shoemaker's knife. Throwing up a hand to shield himself, Willis received a wound in the back of the hand. A year later, on 4 August 1888, Pizer was charged at the same court with indecent a.s.sault. On this occasion, apparently, he was discharged, but for what reason is not recorded.7 However, none of this makes Pizer the Whitechapel murderer. It is important to understand that when the police detained him on 10 September they possessed no direct evidence of any kind linking him with the crimes. The first and only such evidence materialized the next day in the form of Emanuel Violenia and this witness, as we have seen, was very quickly discredited. The knives that were found at Mulberry Street do not const.i.tute tangible evidence against Pizer for they were only such as might have been expected in the possession of a man of his trade. Furthermore, Pizer pleaded alibis for the last two murders. That for the night of 78 September, when Annie Chapman met her death, is hardly convincing. He swore that he never left 22 Mulberry Street between Thursday, 6 September, and the following Monday. This, according to Swanson, was corroborated by 'several persons'. But the only people who could have testified that Pizer stayed at home on the night of the murder were relatives anxious to shield him his stepmother, his married brother and his sister-in-law. Pizer's alibi for the Nichols murder, on the other hand, is very strong. His claim to have been staying in a Holloway Road lodging house when Polly was killed was, again by Swanson's report, confirmed 'and the date fixed' by the proprietor. There is no reason to disbelieve the proprietor's testimony for the date could have been impressed upon his memory by some a.s.sociation with the dock fires which also occurred that night. Indeed, in his inquest deposition, Pizer specifically recalled seeing the glow in the sky caused by the fires and discussing it, at about 1.30 a.m., in Holloway Road with the lodging house keeper and two police constables.

There is one final consideration. After the Nichols murder Pizer was accused by public and press alike. Feeling ran so high against him that he feared for his life. One incident in particular seems to have terrified him. The details are obscure. Gabriel Pizer, John's brother, said that on Sunday, 2 September, some women pointed John out as Leather Ap.r.o.n in Spitalfields and called the attention of a policeman to him. The officer refused to take him in charge but Pizer 'was pursued by a howling crowd that had collected.' Sergeant Thick, interviewed by the Star, referred to the same incident when he said that Leather Ap.r.o.n had not been in a lodging house 'since the Sunday the woman denounced him in Whitechapel, and the police were bamboozled into letting him go.'8 Whatever the truth of the matter, the episode so scared Pizer that he abandoned his regular haunts, the East End lodging houses, and fled, first to a lodging house in Peter Street, Westminster, and then to his relatives in Mulberry Street. Now, if for the sake of argument we a.s.sume that Pizer really did kill Polly Nichols, it is just not credible that he would have ventured out a week later, knowing full well that he was already suspected and that his life was in danger, and have murdered Annie Chapman off a busy Spitalfields thoroughfare in daylight.

Doubtless when the Ripperologists have tired of their black magicians and imaginary Russian doctors, their mad freemasons and erring royals, they will rediscover John Pizer and dress him up as a credible suspect. The fact is, however, that such evidence as has survived the wastage of a century provides no grounds upon which to challenge Abberline's judgement. We can only exonerate Leather Ap.r.o.n of any complicity in the Whitechapel murders.

Pizer was only one of several men detained by the police within three days of the Hanbury Street tragedy. Most of the police records have been lost and newspaper reports are vague and conflicting. But the Star tells us that at noon on Monday 10th no less than seven men were being held at different police stations, and a reading of this and other papers does not suggest that this was an exaggeration. Apart from Pizer, however, the only one of whom much was written was William Henry Piggott, a fifty-three-year-old ship's cook arrested in Gravesend on Sunday night.

One of Piggott's hands was injured but he is said to have initially drawn attention to himself in the Pope's Head Tavern by noisily expressing a hatred of women. After his arrest a paper parcel, which he had left at a local fish shop, was retrieved by the police and found to contain, amongst other items of clothing, a torn and bloodstained shirt. Piggott's explanation, apparently, was that he saw a woman fall down in a fit in Whitechapel at 4.30 on Sat.u.r.day morning. He stooped to pick her up but she bit his hand and, in exasperation, he struck her. Then, seeing two policemen coming, he ran away.

Apprised by telegram of the arrest, Abberline went to Gravesend on Monday morning. Piggott's injured hand, b.l.o.o.d.y shirt and strange behaviour persuaded him that he might have found the man Mrs Fiddymont and others had seen in the Prince Albert public house on the morning of the murder. So he brought him up to London Bridge by train and from thence to Commercial Street by four-wheeled cab. Early in the afternoon the prisoner was placed in a line with other men and confronted, one by one, with the witnesses. Mrs Fiddymont and Joseph Taylor did not think Piggott was the man. Only Mrs Chappell picked him out and even she would not positively swear to him. Nevertheless, the police committed their suspect to the care of the Whitechapel Union Infirmary pending further inquiries.

By the end of the week the police were reported to have satisfied themselves that Piggott had nothing to do with the murders. 'His movements have been fully accounted for,' said The Times on 14 September, 'and he is no longer under surveillance.' The records of the Whitechapel Infirmary show that he was brought there by Sergeant Leach on 10 September, treated for delirium tremens, and discharged on 9 October 1888.9 The spate of detentions generated by the Chapman slaying seems to have come to an end on Monday 10th. After that date we know of no significant arrest for a week. Then, in two separate incidents in one night, the police encountered a very ugly customer indeed.

In the early hours of Tuesday, 18 September, a City constable, John Johnson, was on duty in the Minories. Suddenly he heard loud screams of 'Murder!' They came from a regular trouble spot called Three Kings' Court, an unlighted and walled-in yard about forty feet square, reached from the Minories by a gloomy alley that threaded its way between an empty house and a baker's shop. In the court PC Johnson found a man with a prost.i.tute.

When the constable asked the man what he was doing there he received only the curt reply, 'Nothing.' But the prost.i.tute was obviously very frightened. 'Oh, policeman,' she pleaded, 'do take me out of this!' The woman seemed too overcome to say more so Johnson got the couple out of the court, sent the man about his business and walked with the woman to the end of his beat. Now she was talking freely.

'Dear me,' she exclaimed, 'he frightened me very much when he pulled a big knife out!'

The import of her words must have struck Johnson with the force of a sledgehammer. 'Why didn't you tell me that at the time?' he angrily demanded.

'I was too much frightened.'

The constable quickly retraced his steps but by then the man had disappeared.

He was, in fact, a forty-year-old German hairdresser named Charles Ludwig and he was apprehended later the same night by a Metropolitan Police constable after a scrimmage at a coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street. Ludwig's victim on this occasion was Alexander Finlay or Freinberg, a youth who lived with his mother at 51 Leman Street and worked at an ice cream factory in Petticoat Lane. Finlay gave two contradictory accounts of the coffee stall affair, one to Thames Magistrates' Court and one to the press, both on the day of the occurrence. His court deposition was brief and to the point: Prosecutor [Finlay] said that at three o'clock on Tuesday morning he was standing at a coffee-stall in the Whitechapel Road, when Ludwig came up in a state of intoxication. The person in charge of the coffee-stall refused to serve him. Ludwig seemed much annoyed, and said to witness, 'What are you looking at?' He then pulled out a long-bladed knife, and threatened to stab witness with it. Ludwig followed him round the stall, and made several attempts to stab him, until witness threatened to knock a dish on his head. A constable came up, and he was then given into custody.

Finlay was more garrulous with representatives of the press. By this account Ludwig came to the stall at about five minutes past four and the trouble started when the stall-keeper served him with a cup of coffee and Ludwig only offered a halfpenny in payment. The German was well dressed and wore a frock coat and a tall hat. Dark, slightly built and about five feet six inches tall, he sported a grizzled moustache and beard. 'There is something the matter with one of his legs,' remembered Finlay, 'and he walks stiffly.' Noticing Finlay looking on, Ludwig suddenly rounded on the youth.

'What you looking at?' he demanded in broken English.

'I am doing no harm,' replied Finlay.

'Oh,' said Ludwig, 'you want something.' And so saying, he pulled out a long penknife and lunged at Finlay.

Eluding the drunken German, Finlay s.n.a.t.c.hed a dish from the stall and prepared to hurl it at his head. But Ludwig retreated after his first rush and Finlay was content to call a nearby policeman.10 PC Gallagher 221H arrived at the stall to find Ludwig in a very excited state. On the way to Leman Street Police Station he dropped a long-bladed knife. It was a clasp-knife but the blade was extended. Upon being searched at the station Ludwig was also discovered to possess a razor and a long-bladed pair of scissors.

The circ.u.mstances in which Ludwig had been apprehended must have led police to wonder whether they had caught the Whitechapel murderer. Clearly he was seen as a serious suspect. On the day of his arrest he appeared at Thames Magistrates' Court charged only with being drunk and disorderly and with threatening to stab Finlay but the presiding magistrate, Mr Saunders, spoke of him as a dangerous man and he was remanded for a week. In succeeding days detectives diligently investigated his character and conduct and on 25 September, when he was again brought before the court, they were still not satisfied. At Abberline's request Saunders remanded the prisoner once more and, since Ludwig was professing to understand no English, granted the inspector leave to interview him with an interpreter so that his whereabouts on certain dates might be ascertained.

Notwithstanding the length of the Ludwig investigation no official records relating to it now survive and we must learn what we can of him from contemporary newspaper reports.11 A recent immigrant, possibly from Hamburg, Ludwig was employed as a barber's a.s.sistant on 1 September by Mr C. A. Partridge of the Minories. Partridge engaged him at Richter's, a German club in Houndsditch, and found him a good workman if overfond of drink. After about a week Ludwig was permitted to sleep at the shop but on Sunday, 16 September, he moved out to lodge with a German tailor named Johannes in Church Street, Minories. Johannes, apparently, objected to Ludwig's dirty habits and on Monday morning told him to go.

Thus it was that Ludwig spent the night of 1718 September wandering the streets. Wherever he went he created consternation. At about ten, already the worse for drink, he turned up at Richter's club. The manageress had him thrown out. Later he called at a Finsbury hotel. This was one of Ludwig's usual dives and he looked quite smart in his top hat. But producing a number of razors, he behaved so oddly that some of the inmates became frightened and, when the landlord told him he could not stay, 'was annoyed . . . and threw down the razors in a pa.s.sion, swearing at the same time.' Ludwig left the hotel about one on Tuesday morning. It was not long after that that he took up with Elizabeth Burns, the prost.i.tute PC Johnson rescued from his attentions in Three Kings' Court, and then, about three, he attacked Finlay in Whitechapel High Street. Both Johnson and Finlay noted that he had been drinking.

Ludwig's acquaintances reacted quite differently to talk that, after his arrest, linked him with the Whitechapel murders. Partridge, his employer, thought the idea quite ridiculous and expressed the view that Ludwig was too much of a coward to have committed the crimes. It would be difficult to imagine more cowardly acts than the Whitechapel atrocities but in any case, if the Telegraph is to be believed, Partridge's opinion was based upon little more than the fact that in a recent quarrel the hairdresser had struck his a.s.sistant on the nose and Ludwig had failed to retaliate.

The landlord of the hotel in Finsbury, on the other hand, told a newspaper correspondent that he had been suspicious of Ludwig ever since the Hanbury Street murder. The day after the tragedy (Sunday 9th) Ludwig, in a very dirty state and carrying a case of razors and a large pair of scissors, called at the hotel. He said that he had been out all night and asked to be allowed to wash. The landlord could not confirm a statement by one of his boarders that the German's hands were bloodstained but Ludwig did talk incessantly about the murder and when he offered to shave the landlord the latter very prudently refused. The landlord's portrait of Ludwig, moreover, depicts a very acceptable Whitechapel murderer: 'He is a most extraordinary man, is always in a bad temper, and grinds his teeth with rage at any little thing which puts him out. I believe he has some knowledge of anatomy, as he was for some time an a.s.sistant to some doctors in the German army, and helped to dissect bodies. He always carries some razors and a pair of scissors with him . . . From what he has said to me, I knew he was in the habit of a.s.sociating with low women.'

As far as we are now able to judge there was a strong prima facie case for holding Ludwig. Admittedly the materials in the court depositions and newspapers contain nothing that directly implicates him in the murders. Certainly his alleged visit to the hotel in Finsbury to wash his hands bloodstained or not more than twenty-four hours after the Chapman murder did not prove anything. And there could not have been a sharper contrast between Ludwig's noisy, belligerent and clumsy progress of 1718 September and the swift, silent and sure technique of the Whitechapel killer. Yet Ludwig was in many respects just the type of man the police should have been looking for. He was a foreigner and in age, height and complexion matched the details given by Mrs Long. If the Finsbury landlord is to be credited he even satisfied Dr Phillips' requirement of medical knowledge. Indeed it is possible that this was how he became a barber's a.s.sistant in the first place because on the Continent the barber also often functioned as the poor man's doctor. There were other circ.u.mstances, too, that must have made Ludwig seem a plausible suspect. He lived in the East End. He consorted with prost.i.tutes. He carried a long-bladed knife (the possession of razors and scissors by a barber would not have been deemed significant). He was reluctant to account for his movements on the nights of the murders. He had a most volatile temper. And if Alexander Finlay's court deposition was true, if the barber pursued him round the stall and repeatedly tried to stab him, then Ludwig, at least under the influence of liquor, was potentially homicidal.

Ludwig's case could well serve as a cautionary tale for intending Ripperologists. The capacity of these amateur sleuths to delude themselves and their readers in futile attempts to incriminate men against whom not a jot of respectable evidence exists is apparently infinite. The case against Ludwig, at the height of the Hanbury Street scare, looked far blacker than almost any of those adduced in more recent years against other suspects. But he was not the Whitechapel murderer. For when the killer struck again, twice in the early hours of 30 September, Ludwig was still in police custody.12 'I cannot recall that my grandfather, General Sir Charles Warren, ever stated in writing his personal views on the ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper.' So wrote Watkin W. Williams, Warren's grandson, to author Tom Cullen.13 And, as far as any final, considered judgement by Sir Charles is concerned, he seems to have been right. But, halfway through the murder hunt, the Commissioner did take up his pen in response to an appeal for information by Matthews and until now his letter has lain largely neglected in the Home Office files relating to the case.

About the middle of September the Home Secretary, evidently rattled by adverse press and public comment, sent a memorandum to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, his secretary, directing him to solicit from Warren a progress report on the Whitechapel investigation. Ruggles-Brise was temporarily out of town but the note was sent on to Sir Charles by the Home Office on the morning of 19 September. Warren's reply was made the same day: No progress has as yet been made in obtaining any definite clue to the Whitechapel murderers. A great number of clues have been examined & exhausted without finding anything suspicious.

A large staff of men are employed and every point is being examined which seems to offer any prospect of a discovery.

There are at present three cases of suspicion.

1. The lunatic Isensmith a Swiss arrested at Holloway who is now in an asylum at Bow & arrangements are being made to ascertain whether he is the man who was seen on the morning of the murder in a public house by Mrs Fiddymont.

2. A man called Puckeridge was released from an asylum on 4 August. He was educated as a surgeon & has threatened to rip people up with a long knife. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet.

3. A brothel keeper who will not give her address or name writes to say that a man living in her house was seen with blood on him on morning of murder. She described his appearance & said where he might be seen. When the detectives came near him he bolted, got away & there is no clue to the writer of the letter.

All these three cases are being followed up & no doubt will be exhausted in a few days the first seems a very suspicious case, but the man is at present a violent lunatic.14 Warren's first man was Jacob Isenschmid, an insane pork butcher, of whom more presently. The second man, however, is much more intriguing. For his release from an asylum occurred only three days before the George Yard murder and his alleged threat to 'rip people up' with a knife suggests that he was harbouring some grudge and hence may point to a motive. Yet, until the present writer identified Puckridge and published details about him in a recent number of Ripperana, nothing whatsoever was known about him.15 Sir Charles tells us that his suspect was released from an asylum on 4 August. Registers of patient admissions, kept by the Lunacy Commission, are preserved at the Public Record Office and that of admissions to Metropolitan licensed houses between 1886 and 1900 records that Oswald Puckridge was admitted to Hoxton House Lunatic Asylum on 6 January 1888 and discharged, 'relieved' but not cured, on the following 4 August. Hoxton House, at 50 & 52 Hoxton Street, Sh.o.r.editch, was primarily a private asylum for middle cla.s.s patients. But it did accept paupers from boards of guardians and Puckridge was first entered in the register as a pauper. This, however, is struck out in faded red ink and, written against the correction in the same ink, is the annotation: 'Private 14 Jan. 1888.'16 Research is continuing but it seems likely that no records of the asylum have survived for our period. Nevertheless, now that we have a name we can glean some basic biographical data about Puckridge from genealogical sources.

Oswald Puckridge was born to John and Philadelphia (nee Holmes) Puckridge on 13 June 1838 at Burpham, near Arundel, in Suss.e.x. The family are recorded there in the national census of 1841. John, a farmer, was then forty-five years old, exactly ten years older than his wife, and they had five children: Charlotte (11), Clara (7), Frederick (5), Oswald (3) and Arthur (1). Oswald married in south-east London when he was thirty. His bride was Ellen Puddle, the daughter of Edward Puddle, a licensed victualler, and the ceremony was performed at the parish church of St Paul, Deptford, on 3 October 1868. On the marriage certificate Puckridge is described as a chemist resident in the same parish. Obviously his career subsequently entered into decline but whether the mental illness was a cause or consequence of his waning fortunes is not presently known. On 28 May 1900 he was admitted to the Holborn Workhouse in City Road from a men's lodging house at 34 St John's Lane, Clerkenwell. He died in the workhouse on 1 June. According to the death certificate he was then a general labourer and the cause of death was 'Broncho Pneumonia'.17 Lack of detail on Puckridge and the grounds upon which he was suspected make him a difficult suspect to a.s.sess. The police clearly gave his case some priority and if everything Warren tells us about him was true it is not difficult to see why. On the other hand, the Commissioner's comment that no 'definite clue' had been uncovered implies that the CID were not in possession of any hard evidence linking Puckridge with the crimes and, as Charles Ludwig has taught us, cases hung exclusively around characteristics like medical knowledge and insanity are inevitably inconclusive. There are, besides, other difficulties involved in charging Puckridge with the murders. His description of himself in 1868 as a chemist rather than a physician or surgeon suggests that his training may have been that of an apothecary and raises serious doubts about the nature and extent of his medical knowledge. Puckridge, furthermore, was fifty at the time of the murders. Admittedly, this is consistent with the statement of Mrs Long, who thought that the man she saw talking with Annie Chapman was over forty, but as we will discover in later chapters it is in sharp conflict with the evidence of every other important witness who may have seen the killer. Their estimates of age range from twenty-eight to thirty-five. On this point, too, Mrs Long's testimony can almost certainly be discounted because she did not see her suspect's face. Finally, although most of the police records relating to the Whitechapel murders have been lost, it may still be significant that Puckridge's name does not reappear on the known record. And if he did not remain a suspect the probable reason is that, as Warren predicted, he was eventually traced and able to satisfactorily account for his movements on the nights of the murders. Puckridge is the most interesting suspect we have encountered so far. But unless he be incriminated by fresh evidence he must be exonerated.

Puckridge was by no means the only medical man investigated by the police after Dark Annie's murder. We know that Abberline and his team tried to trace three insane medical students who had attended London Hospital. Two were found, interviewed and eliminated from the inquiry. The third, the only one actually named in police records, was John Sanders of 20 Abercorn Place, Maida Vale. When a detective called at his home neighbours told him that the family had gone abroad but recent research has proved that Sanders was, in fact, then being held in an asylum in England. The son of an Indian Army surgeon, he entered London Hospital Medical College in 1879 and functioned as an out-patient dresser in 18801. Afterwards he became insane. By 1887 he was subject to attacks of violence, made unprovoked a.s.saults on his friends and tyrannized over his household. The rest of his life was spent in various asylums. During the period of the murders he was confined at West Mailing Place, a private asylum in Kent, and he died, aged thirty-nine, in the Heavitree Asylum, Exeter, in 1901.18 The memoirs of Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police in 1888, are the source of yet another medical student story. Twenty years on, Smith recalled how, after the Chapman murder, he sent word to Sir Charles Warren that he had learned of a likely suspect. This man, wrote Smith, had all the requisite qualifications: 'He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings having been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. Sir Charles failed to find him. I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was; but, polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without the shadow of doubt.'19 Although the two London Hospital students Abberline traced and the man Smith traced were all cleared it would be interesting to know who they were. Evidently Oswald Puckridge was not one of them. Admission registers of London Hospital Medical College students are extant and these demonstrate that no student named Puckridge was admitted between about 1850 and 1890. Smith's man lived in Rupert Street, in the parish of St James Piccadilly. But a search of the 1881 and 1891 censuses, and of local rate books from 1887 to 1890, does not reveal anyone by the name of Puckridge owning or occupying premises in the street.20 So who were these mysterious students? Careful research suggests a possible identification of Smith's suspect.

We encounter him on 24 September in the columns of the Star: Is It a Clue?

Some one representing himself as a detective called at a number of boarding establishments in Great Ormond Street on Sat.u.r.day afternoon [22 September], making inquiries for a man by the name of Morford, who was supposed to have had lodgings in that street up to 10 Sept., but who since that time has mysteriously disappeared. At some of the places called at the detective said something about a letter having been received by the authorities which led to the idea that Morford might throw some light on the Whitechapel murders. He was described as a man who had been educated as a surgeon, but who had lost standing in the community through drink. It seems that attention was directed to him through a p.a.w.nbroker, who took several surgical instruments in pledge from him, and who afterwards had reason to suspect that he was not of sound mind. A shopkeeper in Great Ormond Street thought he knew the man who was being searched for, but as the detective had no address but 'Morford, Great Ormond Street', he was not able to make much progress without letting the whole neighbourhood know what he was about.

Contemporary rate books for Great Ormond Street do not identify 'Morford'. However, the Medical Directory for 1888 does list a John Orford as the Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital, in Gray's Inn Road, hard by. And in the same year one Henry Orford, a carman and contractor, was living at 40b Rupert Street. We cannot seriously identify Morford, the down-at-heel surgeon sought by police, with John or Henry Orford, the first an established and entirely respectable medical man, the second a 55-year-old carman. But given the comparative rarity of these names it is by no means improbable that John and Henry were related in some way or that the CID's suspect was kin to them.21 We know about a few other suspects at about this time. There was Edward McKenna, an itinerant pedlar arrested on 14 September. He was thought to be identical with men seen carrying knives in Flower and Dean and Heath Streets but was released after witnesses failed to recognize him. There was John Fitzgerald, a plasterer or bricklayer's labourer who confessed to the Chapman murder on 26 September. Within three days he had also been released, 'exhaustive inquiries having proved his statement to be entirely unfounded'. And there was 'Mary', a male hairdresser and known s.e.x offender. The CID made inquiries about him of their counterparts in Bremen and were informed that he was serving a twelve months prison sentence in Oslebshausen. But without doubt the leading suspect at this stage of the hunt was Jacob Isenschmid, the 'mad butcher'.

'Although at present we are unable to procure any evidence to connect him with the murders,' wrote Abberline of Isenschmid on 18 September, 'he appears to be the most likely person that has come under our notice to have committed the crimes.' Warren obviously agreed. For a day later he accorded him pride of place on his list and singled him out as 'a very suspicious case'. Something of their optimism even seems to have reached the press. 'The detective officers who are engaged in the Whitechapel case', ran one report, 'are said to be more hopeful now than they have been before. It is stated they have some fresh information which encourages them to hope that before the week is over they will be able to solve the mystery.'22 Isenschmid, a Swiss of many years' residence in England, was first brought to the attention of the police by two doctors. Dr Cowan of 10 Landseer Road and Dr Crabb of Holloway Road called at Holloway Police Station on 11 September to point the finger of suspicion. Their grounds were slender enough. Isenschmid was a butcher, he was insane, and George Tyler, his landlord, had told them that he absented himself from his lodgings at nocturnal hours. Detective Inspector Styles, nevertheless, was bound to investigate.

Styles went first to Isenschmid's lodgings at 60 Mitford Road and talked to George Tyler. He told him that Isenschmid had taken lodgings at his house on 5 September and that on the night of the Hanbury Street murder he had come in at nine in the evening and gone out again at one the next morning. This was by no means unusual. In fact Isenschmid had gone out at one o'clock on four of the five working days he had spent at the house. But part of the doctors' allegations had been substantiated and Styles called next at 97 Duncombe Road. There he found Mary Isenschmid, the suspect's wife. She had not seen her husband since he had left home two months ago and did not know how he currently earned a living. She did say, however, that he was in the habit of carrying large butcher knives about with him. The inspector was sufficiently impressed by what he had heard to detail men to watch both addresses and to apprehend Isenschmid if he should turn up.

His diligence paid off. In the early hours of 12 September Isenschmid was arrested and taken to Holloway Police Station. Judged insane, he was sent to the Islington Workhouse and from thence, the same day, to Grove Hall Lunatic Asylum, Fairfield Road, Bow. Sergeant Thick, deputed by Abberline to investigate his case, examined the clothing in which he had been apprehended but could find no traces of bloodstains.

Fortunately a clutch of doc.u.ments relating to Isenschmid has survived in the Metropolitan Police case papers and from these and other sources we can learn a good deal about him. At the time of his marriage to Mary Ann Joyce, the daughter of Richard Joyce, a farmer, in December 1867 he was a journeyman butcher and lived at 41 Bath Street, off the City Road. But afterwards he set up on his own account as a pork butcher at 59 Elthorne Road, Holloway. Sadly the business failed and he began to suffer recurring attacks of insanity.

No one seems to have been very sure what the cause of Isenschmid's problem was. His wife told Sergeant Thick that he became depressed after the failure of his business and the press that he had never been 'right in his head' since a fit in 1882 or 1883. Asylum records at different times attribute his attacks to drink and hereditary factors. While the Star traced their origin to an attack of sunstroke some years before 1888.

Whatever the cause of Isenschmid's malady, its symptoms could be frightening. According to the gossip scavenged in and about Elthorne Road by the Star, his behaviour during periods of insanity was frequently violent. He threatened to put people's 'lights out'. His landlord was cautioned several times against going near him. And, more ominously, he was continuously to be seen sharpening a long knife. The butcher also laboured under strange delusions. One of them was that everything belonged to him. Indeed, he styled himself 'the King of Elthorne Road'.

On 24 September 1887 he was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. From his own observations Dr John Gray of the Islington Infirmary justified Isenschmid's committal on the grounds that he 'says he can build a church give him a shovel and cement . . . can lay 2000 bricks a day and mix his own mortar . . . says he shall be Member of Parliament soon [and] talks with great excitement & violence.' In addition, Mary Isenschmid had told him that her husband 'threatened to kill his wife and children, writes threatening letters to his neighbours saying he will fire their homes and throw vitriol over them, sometimes refuses food for days together [and] threatened to blow up the Queen with dynamite.' In the records of the asylum the illness is said to have been Isenschmid's first attack and to have been a month old upon his committal. On 2 December, only ten weeks after being admitted, he was discharged as cured.

The Isenschmids attempted a fresh start. They found a new home in Duncombe Road and Jacob a new job as a journeyman butcher with Mr Martell in Marylebone High Street. But at Whitsuntide 1888 he left this employment and began to behave as strangely as ever. Sometimes he lapsed into moods of sullen despondency, unwilling to bestir himself to do anything, even to wash. At others he sought solace in religion and sat reading the Bible for hours on end. But the book brought him no comfort. Mrs Isenschmid had seen him fling it across the room in exasperation and heard him lament that he must be 'a very wicked man if all the Bible says is true.' By July 1888 she had had enough. 'He got so bad,' she told the Star, 'that I got an order to have him put in the asylum again. A doctor came to see him and then he got suspicious. I told him the doctor was only the [p.a.w.n] broker's man but he said the broker's man wouldn't ask him how he was. He got afraid that he would be put in the asylum again, and ten weeks ago he ran away.'

Perhaps Isenschmid blamed his wife for driving him out of their home. Certainly Mary feared him. She confided in Sergeant Thick: 'I do not think my husband would injure anyone but me. I think he would kill me if he had the chance.' The Star also heard some disconcerting stories from the new tenant of Isenschmid's old shop in Elthorne Road. Isenschmid appeared there several times during July-September 1888. On one occasion he turned up at the shop with his butcher's ap.r.o.n on and his knife and steel hanging at his side. Holding up a bullock's tail, he announced that he had just slaughtered forty bullocks. On another he sent a load of bullocks' entrails to the shop at three o'clock in the morning.

Isenschmid's case is an instructive one. The fortuitous survival of police records enables us for once to penetrate the investigation and thinking that produced a leading suspect. And what they reveal is just how little evidence it took. For, notwithstanding Isenschmid's ferocious reputation, it is patently clear that the police had virtually no case against him.

Admittedly, as a butcher, he would have possessed crude anatomical knowledge. But such an argument could have been used to incriminate every slaughterman and butcher in the metropolis. He regularly left his lodgings at 1.00 a.m. But this was no more than thousands of working people in Victorian London were obliged to do. Isenschmid himself told the medical superintendent of Grove Hall that he got up early to go to the market where he bought sheeps' heads, kidneys and feet. These he took home, dressed and then sold to West End restaurants and coffee houses. 'That was the cause of him being up so early in the morning,' he said, 'and that was the only way open to him to get his livelihood.' He was mentally ill. And his Colney Hatch record does demonstrate that he was potentially dangerous. But although the police certainly knew that he had been in the asylum there is no evidence that they had any detailed knowledge of his record there. Mary Isenschmid, on the other hand, told Sergeant Thick: 'I do not think my husband would injure anyone but me.' Hardly proof that he was a homicidal maniac! The police even failed to establish a link between Isenschmid and Whitechapel. Mrs Isenschmid told them that Jacob used to frequent Mrs Geringher's public house in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, but when Thick interviewed Mrs Geringher she denied all knowledge of the man.

One circ.u.mstance seems to have weighed particularly heavily with Abberline. He noted in his reports that Isenschmid's description tallied with that of the man seen by Mrs Fiddymont and others at the Prince Albert on the morning of the Chapman murder. Abberline was convinced that they were identical and, from what we know of Isenschmid's appearance, he may have been right. A man in his early forties in 1888, he was about five feet seven inches tall, with ginger hair on head and face. Normally he was a powerfully built man but, as his wife told the press, since he had left home in July he had evidently been accustomed to walking about 'till he's nearly starved . . . and he has got pinched in his appearance and much thinner.' Now all this is certainly consistent with Joseph Taylor's description of the Prince Albert man. Unfortunately, the only people who could have clinched the identification were Taylor, Mrs Fiddymont and Mary Chappell, and Dr Mickle, resident medical officer at Grove Hall, was so concerned about his patient's health that he declined to permit the witnesses to confront him. On 19 September, the date of our last police report on Isenschmid, the doctor was still obdurate and we do not know whether Mrs Fiddymont and her witnesses ever did identify the suspect. But, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that they did. What does it prove? Only that Isenschmid had been in the Prince Albert, about 400 yards from the murder site, at seven on the fatal morning. Bloodstains on a man of his trade could not possibly have been deemed significant.23 And surely it is scarcely credible that one and a half hours after committing a murder the killer would have been sitting, in a bloodstained condition, drinking ale in a pub only yards away from the scene of his crime?

In the event Isenschmid was eventually exonerated. On 21 September the Star reported that his brother had satisfactorily accounted for his movements on the morning of the Chapman murder. This report is unconfirmed and, since Mary Isenschmid has left it on record that Jacob's relatives were all in Switzerland, probably untrue. But, like Ludwig, Isenschmid was cleared by the murderer himself. When he struck again the mad pork butcher was still confined at Grove Hall.24 The Yard's elevation of an innocent man to the position of chief suspect on such flimsy grounds is, at the very least, disturbing. Truly, as Abberline conceded on 18 September, they were never able 'to procure any evidence to connect him [Isenschmid] with the murders'. Yet one gets the distinct impression that if the real murderer had stopped killing after Hanbury Street poor, deranged Isenschmid, unheard and unconvicted, would have gone down in police record and memoir as the slayer of Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. Why did detectives allow themselves to be misled so easily? Well, there were two important factors. One was that police inquiries diligent though they were uncovered so very little about the real killer that they were reduced to grasping at straws. The other was the public pressure upon the force to secure a conviction. Abberline himself, in a report of 19 September, let that particular cat out of the bag. There he suggests that the chief police surgeon or one of the divisional surgeons be requested to contact Dr Mickle in order to expedite arrangements for the witnesses to see Isenschmid because 'time is of the greatest importance in this case, not only with regard to the question of ident.i.ty, but also for the purpose of allaying the strong public feeling that exists.' Such factors operated throughout the entire duration of the Whitechapel investigations. So when we come to consider the cases against the main suspects, at the end of our quest, we will do well to remember what we have learned here.

On 22 September Punch gave its readers 'A Detective's Diary a La Mode': Monday. Papers full of the latest tragedy. One of them suggested that the a.s.sa.s.sin was a man who wore a blue coat. Arrested three blue-coat wearers on suspicion.

Tuesday. The blue coats proved innocent. Released. Evening journal threw out a hint that deed might have been perpetrated by a soldier. Found a small drummer-boy drunk and incapable. Conveyed him to the Station-house.

Wednesday. Drummer-boy released. Letter of anonymous correspondent to daily journal declaring that the outrage could only have been committed by a sailor. Decoyed petty officer of Penny Steamboat on sh.o.r.e, and suddenly arrested him.

Thursday. Petty officer allowed to go. Hint thrown out in the Correspondence columns that the crime might be traceable to a lunatic. Noticed an old gentleman purchasing a copy of Maiwa's Revenge. Seized him.

Friday. Lunatic dispatched to an asylum. Anonymous letter received, denouncing local clergyman as the criminal. Took the reverend gentleman into custody.

Sat.u.r.day. Eminent ecclesiastic set at liberty with an apology. Ascertain in a periodical that it is thought just possible that the Police may have committed the crime themselves. At the call of duty, finished the week by arresting myself!

Baffled as the detectives undoubtedly were their search, of course, was by no means as arbitrary as that. The records of the Chapman inquiry are now very incomplete but in this chapter we have learned the names of nine new suspects not many but perhaps enough to suggest the characteristics the police were looking for.

Insanity and medical knowledge appear to have been the most important. Notwithstanding Coroner Baxter's hypothesis of an economic motive the police were very interested in lunatics. Three suspects (Puckridge, Sanders and Isenschmid) out of nine had seen the inside of an asylum and at least another three (Piggott, Ludwig and Morford) were allegedly of unsound mind. Detectives also seem to have taken Dr Phillips' testimony to heart because not less than five suspects (Ludwig, Puckridge, Sanders, Morford and Isenschmid) had some pretensions to anatomical knowledge. The significance of these two factors in determining the direction of police inquiries is further reflected in the searches made by Abberline and Smith for the as yet unidentified insane medical students. Inevitably, the interest in medically qualified people led to men of middle-cla.s.s origin being suspected and Puckridge, Sanders and Morford might be so described. Only three suspects (Ludwig, Mary and Isenschmid) were of Continental origin. Given the fact that Mrs Long had incriminated a foreigner this may seem a little surprising but the police remained uncertain about the value of her evidence because it could not be reconciled with Dr Phillips' estimate of the time of Annie Chapman's death.

A bright sunny September helped to banish the memory of the summer thunderstorms. And as the month wore on, too, the fear that had stalked the streets after the death of Dark Annie visibly receded. The police, including those in the City, into which the killer had not yet ventured, remained vigilant. But the majority of East Enders, quickly forgetful of terrors past, began to lose themselves once more in the struggle for economic survival. The murder of a woman at Birtley Fell near Gateshead on 22 September encouraged many of them to believe that the Whitechapel murderer had fled the capital.

Visiting Whitechapel Road one night in late September, a Daily News reporter found no sign of apprehension in the great thoroughfare.25 There were the usual flaunting shops, noisy street traders, flaring gin-palaces, raucous entertainments and steaming cookshops. Crowds gathered here and there under the street lamps and stars to listen to the marvels of a new patent pill, to watch a busker 'beating out with a couple of quills what he takes apparently to be music from a sort of home-made dulcimer', to see a performing boy with no legs, to enjoy the spectacle of a street fight, to hear a trader extol the qualities of new trousers at 9s. 6d. a pair. 'A hundred people at least,' the reporter tells us, 'are cl.u.s.tered round the [trouser] salesman who descants hoa.r.s.ely on the unrivalled qualities of his goods, and winds up by flinging a pair out into the crowd for closer inspection.'

Reminders of the tragedies there surely were. The proprietor of the waxworks, exhibiting outside his premises his 'horrible pictorial representations' of the murders, was still turning them to profitable account. And a newsvendor, standing with a bundle of papers under one arm, was exhorting pa.s.sers-by to read the latest on the atrocities between alternate puffs at the half cigar he shared with a neighbouring s...o...b..ack. But of the menace of the unknown killer there was now little trace.

Even away from the rea.s.suring razzle-dazzle of Whitechapel Road, near the scenes of the very crimes themselves, the journalist found people heedless of the danger. On the spot where Polly Nichols had been done to death in Buck's Row he found a man grinding out 'Men of Harlech' on a piano organ. And in Hanbury Street he stopped an elderly pedestrian. 'There seems to be little apprehension of further mischief by this a.s.sa.s.sin at large?' he asked him. 'No, very little,' the old man replied. 'People, most of 'em, think he's gone to Gateshead.'

Just a few nights later, on 30 September, the murderer struck again. And this time he claimed two victims in less than an hour.

9.

Double Event.

ON THE SOUTH SIDE of Commercial Road was Berner Street. A thoroughfare of small two-storey slums in the parish of St George-in-the-East, its inhabitants tailors, shoemakers and cigarette makers were mostly Poles and Germans. On the west side of Berner Street, directly opposite a new London School Board building, was Dutfield's Yard. The name was no longer appropriate since Arthur Dutfield's business had moved to Pinchin Street but the two great wooden gates that guarded the entrance to the yard still proclaimed the connection in letters of white paint: 'W. Hindley, sack manufacturer, and A. Dutfield, van and cart builder.'

Inside the gates Dutfield's Yard was a narrow court flanked on the right by the International Working Men's Educational Club at 40 Berner Street and on the left by No. 42 and, behind that, a row of cottages. At the top of the yard were a store or workshop belonging to Hindley's sack manufactory and a disused stable.

The International Working Men's Educational Club was a Socialist club. Membership was open to working men of any nationality but it was mainly patronized by Russian and Polish Jews. Access to the premises could be gained by the front door in Berner Street or by a side or kitchen door in Dutfield's Yard. The most northerly of the big yard gates had a wicket for use when the main gates were closed. But they were frequently left open, even at night. 'In fact,' said a club member, 'it is very seldom that they are closed. It is customary for members of the club to go in by the side door to prevent knocking at the front.'1 On Sat.u.r.day nights there were free discussions at the club and although the night of Sat.u.r.day, 29 September, was wet and dismal some ninety to one hundred people crowded into the first-floor meeting room to debate 'why Jews should be Socialists.' Morris Eagle, a Russian Jew, took the chair. When the discussion ended, between 11.30 and 12.00, the bulk of the clientele went home but perhaps a few dozen members stayed. Most of these remained chatting or singing in the meeting room upstairs.

Outside, in the yard, it must have been dark. Mrs Diemschutz, the stewardess of the club, later told reporters that at about one the side door 'had been, and still was, half open, and from it the light from the gas jets in the kitchen was streaming out into the yard.' Light also came from the cottage windows, from the first-floor windows of the club and from a printing office at the back of the club where Philip Kranz, the editor of a Yiddish radical weekly Der Arbeter Fraint (The Worker's Friend), was still reading in his room. But no lamp shone in the yard itself. And the illumination from the upper storey of the club fell not so much upon the court below as upon the cottages opposite. Furthermore, whatever benefits the club's side door, the cottages and the printing office conferred farther up the yard, they did little to penetrate the gloom immediately within the gates. Here, for a distance of some eighteen feet from the street, anyone entering the yard had to pa.s.s between the dead walls of Nos. 40 and 42. Here, after sunset, the darkness was almost absolute.

Although dark Dutfield's Yard was by no means unfrequented. We know the names of three members of the club who visited it between midnight and one that night.2 Others probably came and went unrecorded.

About ten minutes past midnight William West popped out of the club by the side door to take some literature to the printing office where he worked farther up the yard. Returning, he glanced towards the gates and noticed that they were open. But he saw nothing suspicious there. Then he re-entered the club, again using the side door, called his brother and set off home. They left by the Berner Street door at about 12.15 a.m.

Joseph Lave, a printer and photographer visiting London from the United States, had temporary lodgings at the club. 'I was in the club yard this morning about twenty minutes to one,' he would tell a reporter later in the day. 'I came out first at half-past twelve to get a breath of fresh air. I pa.s.sed out into the street, but did not see anything unusual. The district appeared to me to be quiet. I remained out until twenty minutes to one, and during that time no one came into the yard. I should have seen anybody moving about there.'

After the Sat.u.r.day night debate Morris Eagle, the chairman, escorted his lady friend home. At about 12.40 he returned. When he tried the street door he found it closed so he walked round the side into Dutfield's Yard. The gates were thrown wide open. As soon as he pa.s.sed through the gateway he could hear, from the open first-floor windows of the club, the strains of a friend singing in Russian. Entering by the side door, he went upstairs and joined in. Just twenty minutes later the huddled body of a woman was discovered lying by the wall of the club between the gates and the side door. Yet Eagle, walking that same ground, had seen nothing. Nor did he remember noticing anyone in the yard. His testimony is good evidence that at 12.40 the crime had not yet been committed. The site of the murder was in the pa.s.sage between Nos. 40 and 42, where it was too dark to enable Eagle to swear positively at the inquest that the body had not been there. But the corpse would be found lying obliquely across the pathway, both face and feet very close to the right-hand wall, and had it been there at 12.40 Eagle, pa.s.sing up the yard, would very likely have brushed against it, if not have actually stumbled over it. 'I naturally walked on the right side [of the path],' he explained, 'that being the side on which the club door was.'3 At 1.00 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September, a man driving a two-wheeled barrow harnessed to a pony approached Dutfield's Yard.4 The driver was a Russian Jew named Louis Diemschutz. He was the steward of the International Working Men's Educational Club and he lived on the premises with his wife, who a.s.sisted him in the management. In addition to being the club steward Diemschutz was a hawker of cheap jewellery and every Sat.u.r.day he took wares to sell in the market at Westow Hill, Crystal Palace. Now, after the day's trading, he had come to deposit his unsold stock at the club before stabling his pony in George Yard, Cable Street.

The steward noticed nothing untoward as he turned into the gateway. He heard no cry, he saw no one about and certainly there was nothing unusual in the fact that both gates were wide open. Yet, as he drove into the yard, his pony shied to the left. Peering down to the right, Diemschutz thought that he could discern a dark object on the ground by the club wall but it was too dark for him to see what it was. He prodded it and tried to lift it with the handle of his whip. Then he jumped down from his barrow and struck a match. It was windy but before his feeble flame was extinguished the steward could make out the shape of a p.r.o.ne figure. And the dim outline of a dress told him that the figure was that of a woman.

Berner Street and its vicinity. marks the place where Elizabeth Stride's body was discovered, at 1 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September 1888 Diemschutz's first concern was for his wife. Perhaps he thought it was she lying there. Or perhaps, as he would tell the press, 'all I did was to run indoors and ask where my missis was because she is of weak const.i.tution, and I did not want to frighten her.' Whatever the reason, leaving his pony at the side door, he dashed into the club and enquired for his wife. He found her, safe in the company of some of the members in the ground-floor dining room, and then stammered: 'There's a woman lying in the yard but I cannot say whether she's drunk or dead.'

Having procured a candle and reinforcements in the form of Isaac Kozebrodski, a young tailor machinist, Diemschutz ventured back into the yard. Even before they reached the body they could see blood. Mrs Diemschutz followed them but only as far as the kitchen door. 'Just by the door,' she later explained to journalists, 'I saw a pool of blood, and when my husband struck a light I noticed a dark heap lying under the wall. I at once recognized it as the body of a woman, while, to add to my horror, I saw a stream of blood trickling down [i.e. up] the yard and terminating in the pool I had first noticed. She was lying on her back with her head against the wall, and the face looked ghastly. I screamed out in fright, and the members of the club hearing my cries rushed downstairs in a body out into the yard.'

Diemschutz and Kozebrodski made no attempt to disturb the body. Instead they immediately set off in search of a policeman. Turning right at the gates and then left into Fairclough Street, they raced with pounding hearts, shouting 'Police!' at the tops of their voices, as far as Grove Street. But no constable did they descry and there they turned back. On the way to Grove Street they had pa.s.sed a horse-keeper by the name of Edward Spooner.

Spooner was standing with a woman outside the Beehive Tavern, at the corner of Christian and Fairclough Streets, when he saw the two Jews running and 'hallooing out "Murder" and "Police"'. They pa.s.sed him but stopped at Grove Street and came back. Intrigued to discover what all the fuss was about, Spooner accosted them. And when they told him that another woman had been murdered he returned with them to Dutfield's Yard. Upon reaching the yard they found a small crowd already cl.u.s.tered around the body. Someone struck a match and Spooner bent down and lifted up the dead woman's chin. It was just warm and he noticed blood still flowing from her throat and running up the yard towards the side door of the club. When the horse-keeper lifted the woman's chin Louis Diemschutz, looking on, saw for the first time the terrible wound in her throat. 'I could see that her throat was fearfully cut,' he told the press some hours later. 'There was a great gash in it over two inches wide.'

At the time of Diemschutz's discovery of the body most of the members remaining on the club premises were still upstairs singing. But when someone came up to tell them that there was a dead woman in the yard Morris Eagle for one tumbled pell-mell down the stairs and out at the side door. 'I went down in a second and struck a match,' he would tell the inquest. Notwithstanding his alacrity, Eagle took very little cognizance of the appearance of the body. As he explained it later to a representative of the press, 'I did not notice the appearance of the woman because the sight of the blood upset me and I could not look at it.' He it was, however, who informed the police. For whereas Diemschutz had turned southwards from the gateway towards Fairclough Street Eagle sped in the opposite direction. And in Commercial Road he encountered PC Henry Lamb 252H and a brother constable.

Lamb's beat in Commercial Road took him past the end of Berner Street. He had last pa.s.sed it only six or seven minutes earlier. And it was between Christian and Batty Streets on his way back that he first saw two men shouting and running towards him from the direction of Berner Street. They were Morris Eagle and a companion. He advanced to meet them. 'Come on,' they cried, 'there has been another murder.' Followed by another constable fresh from a fixed point duty in Commercial Road, Lamb ran to the scene of the crime.

There was a crowd there and when he turned his lantern on the body the bystanders eagerly pressed forward to see. 'I begged them to keep back,' Lamb told the inquest, 'otherwise they might have their clothes soiled with blood and thus get into trouble.'

Kneeling down, he placed his hand against the woman's face. It was slightly warm. Then he felt her wrist but could detect no movement of the pulse. Lamb was uncertain as to whether blood was still flowing from the wound in the throat but he did note that the blood which had run towards the club door was still in a liquid state. That on the ground near to the woman's neck was slightly congealed. There were no signs of a struggle and the woman's clothes did not appear to have been disturbed. Only the soles of her boots were visible from beneath her voluminous skirts. 'She looked,' said Lamb, 'as if she had been laid quietly down.'

PC Lamb lost no time in summoning a.s.sistance. He sent his fellow constable for the nearest doctor and despatched the energetic Morris Eagle to Leman Street Police Station. The best evidence on the appearance of the fifth victim as she lay dead in Dutfield's Yard comes from the medical witnesses.5 It was about ten minutes past one when Lamb's colleague called at 100 Commercial Road, the residence of Dr Frederick William Blackwell. The doctor had to be roused from his bed but while he struggled into his clothes his a.s.sistant, Edward Johnston, accompanied the policeman to Berner Street. Johnston felt the body and 'found all warm except the hands, which were quite cold.' By this time, however, the wound in the woman's throat had stopped bleeding and the stream of blood that had flowed up the yard had clotted. He found very little blood left in the vicinity of the neck.

Dr Blackwell consulted his watch as he arrived on the scene. It was 1.16 a.m. By the light of a policeman's lantern he made a remarkably detailed examination of the body and two days later reported his findings at the inquest: The deceased was lying on her left side obliquely across the pa.s.sage, her face looking towards the right wall. Her legs were drawn up, her feet close against the wall of the right side of the pa.s.sage. Her head was resting beyond the carriage-wheel rut, the neck lying over the rut. Her feet were three yards from the gateway. Her dress was unfastened at the neck. The neck and chest were quite warm, as were also the legs, and the face was slightly warm. The hands were cold. The right hand was open and on the chest, and was smeared with blood. The left hand, lying on the ground, was partially closed, and contained a small packet of cachous wrapped in tissue paper. There were no rings, nor marks of rings, on her hands. The appearance of the face was quite placid. The mouth was slightly open. The deceased had round her neck a check silk scarf, the bow of which was turned to the left and pulled very tight. In the neck there was a long incision which exactly corresponded with the lower border of the scarf. The border was slightly frayed, as if by a sharp knife. The incision in the neck commenced on the left side, 2 inches below the angle of the jaw, and almost in a direct line with it, nearly severing the vessels on that side, cutting the windpipe completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side 1 inches below the angle of the right jaw, but without severing the vessels on that side. I could not ascertain whether the b.l.o.o.d.y hand had been moved. The blood was running down the gutter into the drain in the opposite direction from the feet. There was about 1 lb. of clotted blood close by the body, and a stream all the way from there to the back door of the club.'

It should be noted that the woman's clothing had not been disturbed by her killer. Dr Blackwell indeed discovered that her dress had been unfastened at the neck but this had been done by his a.s.sistant Edward Johnston during his brief inspection of the body.

In the meantime Dr Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, had been summoned to Leman Street and sent on from there to Dutfield's Yard. When he got there Chief Inspector West and Inspector Charles Pinhorn were in possession of the body. The record of his examination, dictated on the spot to Pinhorn, largely corroborates that of Dr Blackwell. It was presented to the inquest by Phillips on 3 October: The body was lying on its left