The Cases That Haunt Us (5 page)

If I were examining these cases today, by the Chapman murder I would already be suspecting a lust killer, which will be important when we finally get to our list of possible suspects. Though the crimes largely represent a disorganized
UNSUB
, mixed aspects suggest a personality somewhere along the continuum.

Did lust murderers exist before the Whitechapel murders? Probably, though for one reason or another they were overlooked as a pattern or misinterpreted as robberies or revenge killings, particularly if the mutilation involved was too extreme. And keep in mind that prior to Victorian London and the Industrial Revolution, cities were smaller and communities more homogeneous. We’ve speculated that stories and legends about witches, werewolves, and vampires (blood-drinking, or anthropophagy, is a notuncommon trait of the disorganized offender) may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend such perversities.

THE
DOUBLE
EVENT

The police sent hundreds of extra officers into the East End each evening—one of them reportedly disguised as a woman—trying to catch the killer in the act. This was one of the few effective means of catching a killer of random strangers. If the victim knew the killer, police could follow a trail of relationships and reliable witnesses. If the killer was a robber who followed a pattern in his criminal enterprise, any of a number of casual witnesses or snitches might give him up. But with no precedent for this type of crime, the best strategy seemed to be to use manpower to prevent him from having the opportunity to kill or, if that failed, to have the mechanism in place to stop him as he fled.

About 1:00 in the morning of Sunday, September 30, after a long afternoon and evening of selling, a street jewelry merchant named Louis Diemschutz was returning to the International Workingmen’s Educational Club on Berner Street, a fraternal organization founded by immigrant Jewish socialists and intellectuals. He heard Yiddish or Russian singing coming from the open windows of the club. He was driving a small pony cart. As he turned off Berner Street into the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard, the animal suddenly stopped and wouldn’t move forward. Diemschutz noticed a bundle against the gate and prodded it with his long-handled whip. He struck a match and saw that it was actually a woman, who appeared to be drunk. This would have been a common sight in this neighborhood at this time of night. Concerned that the drunk might be his wife, he got down from the cart and went into the club, where she worked. It wasn’t she, and he soon returned with several club members. They examined the woman more closely and realized her throat had been slashed. Quickly, two of them ran off to find a policeman, on the way meeting another acquaintance, Edward Spooner. He was talking with a woman, probably a prostitute, outside the Beehive pub on Fairclough Street, which intersected Berner at the first corner. The three of them found Constable Henry Lamb on the corner of Fairclough and Grove Street and brought him back with them to the scene.

Lamb sent for Dr. William Blackwell, who arrived at 1:16 A.M. by his own watch. He pronounced her and stated she had been dead for less than twenty minutes, which meant only a few minutes or less before Diemschutz happened upon the body. The time he took to go into the club in search of his wife may have afforded the lurking killer the opportunity to escape. Dr. Blackwell believed she’d been killed standing up, her head forced backward by the silk kerchief around her neck, and her throat cut. A lot of blood was at the scene, and unlike in the previous murders, defense wounds on the victim’s hands indicated a struggle.

A hysterical woman, Mary Malcolm, married to a local tailor, was convinced the victim was her sister Elizabeth Watts Stokes and identified the body by an adder bite on the leg. She claimed she’d had a ghostly premonition that Elizabeth would be murdered that night.

At 1:30 the same morning, thirty minutes after Louis Diemschutz had discovered the body, Constable Edward Watkins of the City of London Police Force was passing through Mitre Square on a beat he completed every twelve to fourteen minutes. He found the square empty and peaceful.

You may have noticed that I identified Constable Watkins as belonging to the City Police rather than the Metropolitan Police. In London, they faced (and still face) one of the same problems that dogs American law enforcement agencies today: overlapping jurisdictions. The City of London refers to a one-square-mile area that comprises the traditional business and historic districts, built on the site of the original Roman settlement. The City boundary runs north from the Thames, just to the west of the Tower of London, and includes St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Bank of England, the Royal Courts of Justice, and the Guildhall. It has its own police force, which is separate and distinct from Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police. In the United States, this is a common phenomenon. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica each have their own police forces separate from both the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County Sheriff ’s Department, even though geographically they are completely within L.A. territory. Various parts of Washington, D.C., are patrolled by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Park Police, the U.S. Capitol Police, the Secret Service’s Executive Protective Division, etc. So who does what, and when, can become problematic. It really gets to be a challenge when an offender is not administratively considerate enough to confine his illicit activities to one jurisdiction.

This is the problem they began facing in London on the night of what became known as the Double Event.

Between 1:40 and 1:42 A.M. Constable James Harvey walked down his beat on Church Passage, one of the three routes into Mitre Square, which fell within the jurisdiction of the City Police. He didn’t see anyone and didn’t hear anything suspicious. Three minutes later, Constable Watkins began his next tour through the square, approaching from the opposite side. And this time he discovered a body in the southwest corner. A woman was lying on her back in a pool of blood. When Watkins shined his light on the scene, he saw that her throat had been slashed, her dress pulled up above her waist, her abdomen slit open, and her intestines pulled out. Watkins ran to a nearby warehouse to get help, then rushed back to stay with the body. One of the responding officers brought back Dr. George William Sequeira, who said that the woman had been dead only a few minutes. Within another ten minutes, they’d sent for Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, the City Police surgeon.

Dr. Brown arrived shortly after 2 A.M. and conducted a meticulous examination. A thimble was lying near one of the victim’s fingers on the right side. The intestines had been positioned over the right shoulder. The uterus and kidneys had been removed from the body and were not at the scene. The face and right ear had been severely mutilated in what appeared to be a deliberate, ritualistic manner, unlike the seemingly random slashing and cutting of the rest of the body. Dr. Brown determined the death would have been practically immediate, from hemorrhage from the left common carotid artery. All of the mutilations were inflicted postmortem.

THE
GOULSTON
STREET
GRAFFITO

City police fanned throughout the area, hoping to catch a killer whose trail was still hot. At 2:20 A.M. Metropolitan Police Constable Alfred Long, on his first night on the beat, passed down Goulston Street, which came off Whitechapel High Street on the north side and was just over the line (Middlesex Street) from City jurisdiction. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Thirty-five minutes later something was there. A bloody piece of cloth, still wet, was lying on the landing of an entryway to 108–119 Goulston Street, a tenement known as the Wentworth Model Dwellings. It turned out to be part of an apron worn by the Mitre Square victim and was probably the only documented piece of physical evidence in the entire case.

On the wall above where the apron fragment was lying, Long saw a message written with white chalk. By his recollection it read: “The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.”

Other officers reported the wording and capitalization as “The Juwes are not The men That Will be Blamed for nothing.”

The discrepancy arose because no evidentiary record of what became known as “the Goulston Street graffito” remains. Superintendent Thomas Arnold, head of H Division, arrived at the scene. Alarmed by the implication of the scrawled message and fearing, whether it was related to the killer or not, that it would incite violent anti-Semetic passions already kicked up by the Leather Apron rumors, he sent for an officer with a wet sponge to have it erased. Others, particularly in the competing City Police, argued that it would soon be daylight, at which point the evidence could be photographed before its destruction, but Arnold did not want to take the chance. Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren arrived on the scene sometime later and confirmed Arnold’s order. He thought the graffito was written by someone who wanted to cast general blame on Jewish socialists. The message was wiped out just before sunup, about 5:30 A.M.

Three weeks later, amidst a firestorm of criticism, both personal and as to how the Met was handling the case, Warren would resign his post.

Even if the Goulston Street graffito had been preserved and was known to have come from the killer, it would have been of limited forensic value. Chalk on a wall will not give you the handwriting exemplar of ink or pencil on paper, so attempting to match up the scrawl with any known handwriting would be fairly meaningless. Behaviorally, it might be of some use, but largely, I would think, to say that the writer was unstable, anti-Semitic, or both.

The location where the apron was found, however, is a much more important indicator, because behaviorally, we may reasonably conclude that Goulston Street was along the killer’s route between two critical locations: Mitre Square, where the murder took place, and the unknown spot where the killer lived or sought refuge that night. We have to be a little careful about this because, as Scotland Yard pointed out when they retraced the suspected path, a stray dog could have picked up the cloth wherever the killer dropped it and carried it as much as a hundred yards. But I think we can still be confident about the general direction. We should also mention that Mitre Square is only about a twelve-minute walk from Berner Street, where the night’s first victim was discovered.

Yet, having said all that, we cannot discount the enormous significance of Arnold’s and Warren’s decision to erase the message. By doing so, they spawned one of the great conspiracy theories of the case—that of Masonic involvement—and we might as well go into it here.

Most people within the police ranks believed that “Juwes” was merely an illiterate spelling of
Jews
, the people already resented by much of the East End and suspected of involvement with the murders. But there was another interpretation. Juwes, according to some, referred in the secret traditions of Freemasonry to three traitors who had worked on King Solomon’s temple and had murdered its architect and master mason, Hiram Abiff. Their names were Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum. According to the tradition, the three Juwes had all manner of insidious tortures inflicted on them as punishment and warning, including the removal of their tongues and ritual disembowelment, with the intestines thrown over one shoulder. This, of course, recalls the mutilation of some of the Whitechapel victims, particularly with regard to the intestines. However, with all the mayhem, the tongues were not cut out, which would seem to have been just as symbolic and therefore just as important. As far as the intestines are concerned, there was so much mutilation that you could practically connect any historical mutilating torture with it and not be too far off.

A significant number of those involved with the case, including Warren and for a brief period Dr. Robert Anderson, were Masons. The conspiracy thinking had it that the murders were part of a vast Masonic plot, and that by erasing the graffito, Warren was attempting to protect his fellow Masons, even if it meant destroying evidence and hampering an investigation. Of course, if we accept that it was a warning, why would he then erase it before anyone could be warned? Either way, the logic is just too messy to make much sense from an investigative analysis perspective. It must be said, however, that the Masonic conspiracy theory continued to grow and become more elaborate until finally it even attached itself to already established royal-family theories.

All in all, I tend to agree with the police that the graffito was an incidental finding, not related to the murder. Coincidence that it just happened to be on the wall above the apron? Maybe, maybe not. Graffiti were common in that area, particularly with similar sentiments. The first thing we have to ask is, what the hell does “The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing” or “The Juwes are not The men That Will be Blamed for nothing” mean? For the most logical interpretation, I turn to Martin Fido, the prominent British scholar, author, and crime historian, and among the most knowledgeable and resourceful of Ripper investigators. Fido interprets the syntax of the Goulston Street graffito as being characteristic of the cockney tendency to use double negatives. Fido notes that Goulston Street is right around the corner from Middlesex Street, or Petticoat Lane, the largest Jewish marketplace in London. Connecting the two was Wentworth Street, site of a cheap shoe market. Given anti-Semitism, and that it was well-known that one could obtain inexpensive shoes, clothing, and other goods from Jewish merchants, Fido explains that in cockney dialect the graffito can be “translated” into “The Jews are the men who won’t take responsibility for anything” and was probably scrawled by a bigoted and irate (not to mention poorspelling) East Ender who felt he had been cheated by a Jewish merchant who would not stand behind his product. It would, therefore, be mere happenstance that the angry message was seen right above the bloody apron fragment.