The Ability to Kill (18 page)

If, for the suburban Londoner, the words ‘West End’ create a vision of wealth, gaiety, luxury and grace, the words ‘East End’ conjure up the very opposite—poverty, misery, squalor and violence. Nowadays, neither vision is very close to reality, for the West End is meretricious, and the East End has vitality and pride. But seventy years ago things were different. Then, the slums of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were horrible, and most of those who lived in them could make existence tolerable only by getting drunk.

This was the hunting ground that Jack the Ripper chose.

There have been many mass-murderers with bigger scores. Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist, killed ten and seriously injured over thirty-four; Doctor Palmer of Rugeley poisoned fourteen; William Burke, the Edinburgh Irishman, sold the bodies of sixteen victims; Fritz Haarman, the ‘Ogre of Hanover,’ was convicted of twenty-seven murders; Petiot, as we have seen, claimed sixty-three. Yet, Jack the Ripper, whose known killings total a modest six, is probably the most famous of them all.

Possibly, because he was never caught, nor even positively identified.

It all began in the early hours of the morning of August 7, 1888, on the stairway of a tenement house called George Yard Buildings in the parish of Spitalfields.

At 2 a.m. a couple named Mahoney returned to their room in the Buildings. Mrs Mahoney then went out to buy some fish and chips for supper. Both were comparatively sober. Neither of them saw anyone on the stairway.

An hour and a half later, another occupant of the Buildings, a cab-driver named Albert Crow, returned home from work. On his way up the dark stairs he noticed a figure lying on the first landing. He found nothing unusual in this. There
was
nothing unusual about it. He went up to bed.

At 5 a.m. another man, John Reeves, left the Buildings to look for work. There was some dawn light on the stairway now. He could see that the figure was lying in a pool of blood. He was a respectable man, so he decided to tell the police about it.

The body (for she was already dead) was that of Martha Turner (35) a married woman living, as a common prostitute, apart from her husband. She had lodged in Star Place, off the Commercial Road. The police doctor found thirty-nine deep stab wounds in the body, nine in the throat, the rest in the breasts and abdomen. At least two different knives had been used.

The discovery of this, the first of the Ripper murders, is described in some detail, not because it was specially interesting in itself, but because it is necessary for an understanding of the case of Jack the Ripper to appreciate the circumstances in which the crimes were committed. There were no street lights in the neighbourhood, no stairway lights. The sight of someone lying motionless on a public stairway (or indeed anywhere else) would excite no concern. It would be assumed that the person was drunk or asleep, or both. Not even the fact of the murder aroused much interest. There had been a lot of murderous assaults that summer in Spitalfields; there always were in the warm weather. In April, another prostitute, Emma
Smith, had died from one of them. The only novelty about the murder of Martha Turner was the extent of the mutilations, and even that was attributed to an attack by several men. That had been how Emma Smith had died.

It was the second Ripper murder that sounded the alarm.

At 3.45 a.m. in the morning of August 31, a man walking down Bucks Row,
^§
Whitechapel, saw what he thought was a tarpaulin lying in the gutter. He was a cart driver, and the idea of acquiring a spare tarpaulin interested him. He crossed the road and took a closer look. He then saw that this was no tarpaulin, but a woman, dead drunk or just dead. At that moment another man came along and the two examined her. They found that her throat was cut and called the police.

The body was soon identified as that of Mary Nicholls (42) a prostitute who slept in common lodging houses. She had last been seen alive, and very drunk, at 2.30 a.m. It was the police surgeon who found that, in addition to the throat wounds which had caused death, the body had been almost completely disembowelled. At the inquest, he stated that, in his opinion, the crime had been committed by someone with a knowledge of surgery; and, moreover, by the same person who had killed Martha Turner. He could speak with some certainty, for by the time the inquest on Nicholls was held, the third murder had already been committed.

The victim this time was Annie Chapman (47), a widow. She, too, was a prostitute and she, too, lived in doss houses. At 2 a.m. in the morning of September 8 she arrived half drunk at a sixty-bed house in Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. The keeper of it refused to let her in as she did not have fourpence to pay for a bed. After arguing for a bit, she went away to earn the fourpence.

‘Don’t let my doss,’ she called to the keeper as she went. ‘I’ll soon be back with the money. See what a fine bonnet I’ve got. I shan’t be long.’

Her dead body was found four hours later in a yard behind 29 Hanbury Street, near Spitalfields Market. Her throat was cut and she had been disembowelled. It was not until a full post-mortem examination had been made, however, that it was discovered that the murderer had, with some skill, removed one of the internal reproductive organs.

The news, published with a wealth of medical detail that no paper would dare to print nowadays, shook Victorian England to the core. The whole thing was inexpressibly shocking. The very fact that the victims were all of the ‘unfortunate’ class touched the guilt-laden Victorian mind in a most sensitive area. The notion that the man responsible for these atrocities might be a surgeon; an educated, professional, respectable person, instead of a boozy brute of a labourer, was just as disturbing.

The East End was in a turmoil. This may seem surprising. After all, they were used to violence. Why should they get so excited about the deaths of these three wretched drabs?

Part of the trouble was that they could not yet realise that the murderer was confining his attentions to women of one particular kind. Everyone felt threatened. But even when the pattern of the murders became clear, a deeper horror still remained. The violence to which they were accustomed was that of relatively simple people. The fit of anger, the involuntary clenching of a fist or the seizing of a throat, the bash over the head, the clawing, snatching, kicking kind of violence—that they understood. Their forefathers had yelled and capered with the mobs at Tyburn while the executioner disembowelled the King’s enemies. In their youth, the middle-aged among them had flocked to Newgate for a hanging. They understood
the lust for cruelty and they understood the rage to kill. What they did not understand was madness—madness with intelligence. In fear already bordering on panic, they looked about for someone to accuse.

Their first choice fell upon a Polish Jew called John Pizer. He was known locally as ‘Leather Apron,’ a name to which the newspapers had no difficulty in imparting a sinister ring. It was said that he had been going about with blood on his hands brandishing long knives and threatening people, and that everyone went in terror of him. In fact, he was a harmless shoe-maker (and, not unnaturally, wore a shoe-maker’s leather apron) with the sort of wild appearance and eccentricity of manner which sometimes goes with feeble-mindedness. As much for his own protection and a desire to placate the public as from a serious suspicion of his guilt, the police arrested and investigated him. At the adjourned inquest on Annie Chapman he was formally cleared. Other suspects were speedily found—a slaughterman, an inoffensive half-wit, a German named Ludwig—and as speedily had their innocence established. Exhibitionists made the usual false confessions. Public indignation began to focus on the police. The Commissioner at the time was Sir Charles Warren, a singularly pigheaded martinet who had regimented Scotland Yard into a state of wooden inadequacy that was becoming a public scandal. Even Queen Victoria felt strongly about it. She described herself as ‘much upset’ by the murders and thought that the police should ‘employ more detectives.’

It was at this tense moment that the murderer (the title ‘Jack the Ripper’ had not yet been coined) brought off his most sensational
coup.
On September 30, in the space of less than an hour, he murdered two women.

The first, Elizabeth Stride (45), was killed in a small yard at the back of a house in Berner Street, Whitechapel. Just before
1 a.m. the driver of a small cart who stabled his pony in the yard, drove in at the end of his day’s work. Suddenly, the pony shied and the driver jumped down to control it. He soon found that what had startled the animal was the body of a woman with her throat cut. Blood was still pumping from the wound. There was no mutilation this time. The murderer had only just that very moment killed. Almost certainly he was still in the yard. When the driver ran for help the murderer walked away.

He did not walk far.

Mitre Square is about fifteen minutes from Berner Street. At 1.45 a.m. a policeman flashing his lantern into the dark corners of the Square saw the body of Catherine Eddowes (45). Earlier in the evening she had been picked up helplessly drunk by the police and left in a cell to sleep it off. By 1 a.m. the police cells had been getting crowded (it was Saturday night) and, as she was by then sober enough to walk, the police had told her to go. A few minutes later she met the Ripper. Evidently, the interruption of his work in Berner Street had irritated him, for her body was so badly mutilated that it was some time before she could be identified. And the Ripper had added a flourish or two to his work this time. He had nicked her lower eye-lids with his knife; he had also neatly removed her left kidney.

The following day the Central News Agency revealed that on September 27 they had received a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ saying that ‘in the next job I will clip the lady’s ears off and send them to the police.’ They also announced that they had that morning (a few hours after the double murder) received a bloodstained postcard with the following message written on it in red ink:

I was not codding, dear old Boss, when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow. Double event this time. Number one squealed a bit; couldn’t finish straight off. Had no time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

Coming on top of the double murder, the effect of these communications on the public was shattering. The expert opinion now is that both letter and postcard were the work of a practical joker; but at the time they were taken very seriously indeed. For, not merely did they give the murderer a name; they also suggested that the police were helpless. In fact, Scotland Yard had by now taken extraordinary precautions to prevent further murders. Big reinforcements of uniformed and plain clothes men had been poured into the East End rabbit warren. Patrols of vigilantes had been organised. Hundreds of suspects had been investigated. On the night of the double murder there had been two special constables within three hundred yards of the crime in Berner Street; and the policeman who found the body of Catherine Eddowes at 1.45 a.m. had been inspecting the lonely Mitre Square at intervals of fifteen minutes all through the night. As late as 1.30 a.m. he had found the Square empty. But there were three entrances to it and a maze of unlighted alleys and passageways all round. In fact the area was almost impossible to patrol effectively. Anyone who experienced the war-time London black-out will be inclined to sympathise with the Commissioner.

At the time he had no sympathy at all. The public was alarmed and it wanted action. The only action that the Commissioner had taken so far had been to conduct a trial of police bloodhounds on Tooting Common. The results were unfortunate. All the bloodhounds lost themselves and had to be tracked down by policemen. Amid the storm of angry derision which greeted the news of this fiasco, there were loud demands for Sir Charles’ resignation.

In the end he did resign. Jack the Ripper must be the only murderer who ever succeeded in driving a chief of police out of office.

He waited five weeks before striking again.

The sixth victim was Marie Jeannette Kelly and she differed from her predecessors in three significant respects. She was young (24) and she was, despite her heavy drinking, still attractive. Unlike the other women, too, she had a room of her own on the ground floor of a place called Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street
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by Spitalfields Market. It was in this room that the murder was done, and for once Jack the Ripper had no fear of interruption. At 10.45 a.m. on November 9 someone happened to look through the window of the room and raised the alarm. By midday the London evening newspapers were bringing out special editions. By the afternoon all London had the details of the crime. Marie Kelly had died, as had the others, with her throat cut; but with time and privacy at his disposal, Jack the Ripper had acted out a terrible fantasy. The body of Marie Kelly had been almost completely dissected and the parts arranged methodically, with a kind of ritual precision about the torso.

That was Jack the Ripper’s last murder.

There have been many theories put forward as to his identity and fate. Here are three of the commonest: