Complete History of Jack the Ripper (16 page)

Notwithstanding these changes crime and prostitution lingered amidst the poverty and squalor, especially in parts of Spitalfields. On Booth’s ‘Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889’ Dorset Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, George Street and Great Pearl Street were all marked in black, denoting that they were occupied by the lowest class, that they were ‘vicious, semi-criminal’. In these overcrowded, labyrinthine slums, where policemen were traditionally greeted with suspicion if not outright hostility, the Whitechapel killer had chosen a perfect hunting ground.

The methods by which the police were obliged to seek their quarry within this human warren were relatively crude. Although detectives had been appointed at Scotland Yard as early as 1842 the popular opposition to the use of plain clothes men as spies and agent provocateurs among their fellow citizens and the organization of the Metropolitan Police as a preventive force retarded the growth of the detective branch. The CID had been established in 1878 but there were still few aids to detection beyond photography and plaster of Paris for taking impressions of footprints. The second, in the Whitechapel context, was irrelevant and photography would be employed but sparingly during the investigation of the murders. It was not even the usual practice, for example, to photograph the bodies of victims before they were moved and in only one of the murders (that of Mary Jane Kelly) does it seem to have been done. It was possible in 1888 to identify blood as mammalian but not to prove that it was human or classify it by blood group. Galton would not publish his work on fingerprints until 1892, the year after the last of the Whitechapel murders, and there would be no scientific laboratory at Scotland Yard until 1934.

Where inquiry into the history and circumstances of the victim revealed possible motives for murder these, in turn, suggested suspects. Otherwise the success of the Victorian detective largely rested upon a thorough knowledge of the local villains, upon the evidence of informers, and upon much legwork tracing and interviewing witnesses.

The Whitechapel murderer, however, may not have been a professional villain and probably worked alone. With only one possible exception there were no eye-witnesses to his attacks because they were committed at dead of night and in secluded locations. Indeed his victims, prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark or unfrequented byways and yards for sex, greatly facilitated
his crimes. Most baffling of all to the Victorian detectives, there was no obvious motive.

In the age of Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and Ted Bundy we are familiar with the phenomenon of the sexual serial murderer but to our ancestors in the 1880s it was relatively unknown. Precedents of the Whitechapel or Jack the Ripper murders are alleged from the United States and Continental Europe but they are ill-researched and seem to have acquired only local notoriety. Certainly there had been nothing like the Whitechapel crimes in recent English experience. There our most ancient citizens would have had to think back nearly eighty years, to the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811, in order to recall murders at all comparable. Even then, horrific as the slaughter of the Marr and Williamson households had undoubtedly been, the motive for the atrocities had evidently been the obvious one of plunder. More, the Ratcliff Highway murderers had obligingly left their weapons behind them and it was the tracing of one of these, a bloodstained maul, to the Pear Tree public house in Wapping that eventually fixed suspicion upon John Williams, a seaman who lodged there.
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The Whitechapel killer, on the other hand, evinced no obvious motive and left no clue. In such a case orthodox police methods were almost futile.

During the investigation of the murders the police displayed a marked reluctance to share their knowledge with the press or with coroners’ inquiries. The late Stephen Knight thought that this secrecy was unique to the Whitechapel killings and read into it evidence that the police were party to a government sponsored ‘cover-up’ of the Jack the Ripper affair. Knight – and for that matter most other writers on the case – was altogether ignorant, however, of the Yard’s policy on press publicity in the 1880s.

The fact is that where the publication of information might secure the arrest of a
known
culprit the police were only too willing to make disclosures to the press. ‘The press is a power in the detection of crime which we must not omit to take into account,’ wrote Howard Vincent, the first Director of the CID, ‘. . . and when publicity is desirable their help is invaluable. Indeed, if the identity of a culprit is clear, and the importance of a case is sufficient, the question of his capture is reduced to a mere question of time and money.’
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Perhaps the first instance of this was the case of Percy LeFroy, the murderer of Isaac Gold in a train on the London–Brighton line in 1881. LeFroy was arrested after police had issued a portrait of him to the press.

But during the hunt for a killer whose identity had not yet been established it was not the general policy of the CID to make known its discoveries. Vincent himself had laid down that rule:

From the first the police adhered to this principle in their investigation of the Whitechapel murders. The
East London Advertiser
, hungry for details about the Tabram case, complained on 18 August that the police were ‘very reticent upon the matter generally’ and ‘not disposed to assist in the publication of details.’ Three weeks later, fishing for copy on the Nichols murder, the
Advertiser
encountered the same attitude: ‘the authorities are extremely reticent and guarded in all the information they tender, and most of the particulars and information has to be obtained from other sources.’
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On Saturday, 1 September, Mr Wynne E. Baxter, Coroner for the South Eastern District of Middlesex, opened the Nichols inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute. Baxter, fresh from his Scandinavian tour, attended resplendent in black and white checked trousers, dark coat, dazzling white waistcoat and crimson scarf. In ferreting out the facts of the case he was indefatigable. And his zeal was, of course, troublesome to the detectives who wished to suppress the details of their inquiries. Three witnesses, Edward Walker, PC Neil and Dr Llewellyn, were heard on the first day. At the end of the proceedings Inspector Abberline asked for a lengthy adjournment ‘as certain things were coming to the knowledge of the police and they wished for time to make inquiries.’ The coroner and his jury, however, wanted to hear more so Baxter did not accede to the request.
Instead he adjourned the inquest until the following Monday, the next working day. It was only after the second day’s proceedings, during which another eight witnesses made depositions, that the coroner consented to adjourn the inquest for a fortnight in order to provide the police with ‘an opportunity of obtaining further evidence.’
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Today pedlars of the ‘cover-up’ theory represent police secrecy in the Ripper case as an integral part of a sinister conspiracy of silence designed to conceal the involvement of persons close to the throne. Back in the 1880s it was naturally resented by journalists and they roundly condemned the force for being ‘either sulkily silent or barrenly communicative on topics concerning which the public, through their journalistic delegates, justifiably demand ample information.’
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There were, nevertheless, some perfectly sound reasons for the CID’s policy.

In a practical context, for example, it was crucial for the detectives to pursue their inquiries before memories faded or clues were obliterated and their frustration at having to spend precious days dallying in attendance at the coroner’s court is understandable. The publication of evidence, moreover, was not invariably in the public interest. In the case of sensational atrocities like those in Whitechapel there was a real danger that publicity would foster panic and that the publication of detailed medical evidence would inspire imitators. The Ripper murders were, as we shall see, to generate copy killings and the baleful influence of Whitechapel began to appear soon after the Buck’s Row tragedy. The first such incident concerned Henry Hummerston, a Hoxton labourer, and his mistress Eliza Smith. Hummerston came home drunk, quarrelsome and sporting a black eye. He asked Eliza who had given him his black eye and she replied that she did not know. The befuddled labourer then insisted that she had done it and commenced to abuse and beat her. Eliza fled into the back yard but Hummerston caught her there, knocked her down and kicked her. He then drew a table knife across her throat and swore that he would make a second ‘Buck’s Row murder’ out of it. This attack, fortunately, was not fatal. Eliza was rescued by her neighbours and suffered only a slight cut which passed halfway round her throat on the right side. Hummerston himself was sentenced on 5 September at Worship Street to six months’ hard labour for assault. But at the very least it demonstrated the sinister effect that gruesome murders can exert upon weak or disturbed minds.
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Finally, as Howard Vincent had pointed out, there was always the possibility that a
police investigation might be hindered by the publicity accorded to the activities of detectives. A notable instance of this, at the beginning of the Whitechapel investigation, occurred in the case of ‘Leather Apron’.

During the hunt for Polly Nichols’ killer police inquiries amongst prostitutes revealed that the Whitechapel whores walked in fear of a man they knew as ‘Leather Apron’. His real name was Jack Pizer and in various parts of the metropolis he had for some time been levying tribute from prostitutes and beating those who resisted his demands. Obviously the detectives were anxious to trace him, if only to eliminate him from their inquiries, and a careful search of common lodging houses began. But then, whether from street gossip or from the unguarded remarks of some policeman, the press learned of ‘Leather Apron’.

The
Star
was the prime offender. On 5 and 6 September it devoted long and lurid articles to the subject. The first was headlined:

It is difficult in a short space to do justice to the
Star’s
articles on Leather Apron. They seem to have been pieced together from the title tattle of whores, lodging house proprietors and tradesmen and almost no reliable substantiation exists for any part of them.

Leather Apron, according to the
Star
, was a Jewish slipper maker who had abandoned his trade in favour of bullying prostitutes at night. The women did not know his real name. But they were able to furnish the newspaper with a description: ‘From all accounts he is five feet four or five inches in height and wears a dark, close-fitting cap. He is thickset, and has an unusually thick neck. His hair is black, and closely clipped, his age being about 38 or 40. He has a small, black moustache. The distinguishing feature of his costume
is a leather apron, which he always wears, and from which he gets his nickname. His expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent.’ A George Yard grocer, who had supposedly known Leather Apron for six years, added that he was ‘unquestionably mad’ and that ‘anybody who met him face to face would know it . . . his eyes are never still, but are always shifting uneasily, and he never looks anybody in the eye.’

The reputation the
Star
bestowed upon Leather Apron was as villainous as his face. For several years he had subjected the prostitutes of Whitechapel to a reign of terror. His method was to go to public houses after midnight, peep in through the window to select his victim and then wait outside in the dark for them to come out. The hapless whores rarely knew of his presence until he was upon them for, although they could not tell what he wore on his feet, he had the uncanny ability to tread quite noiselessly about the streets. Victims were kicked, bruised, injured and terrified but not, as far as the newspaper could determine, cut. It was told, however, that Leather Apron always carried a sharp knife, the kind used to trim leather, and that he frequently menaced women with it. Thus when ‘Widow Annie’ encountered him, two weeks since as she was crossing the square near the London Hospital, he drew his knife upon her and threatened, with his ugly grin and malignant eyes, to ‘rip her up.’

The
Star
was as ignorant as the police as to the whereabouts of Leather Apron. He was everywhere and he was nowhere. According to the newspaper he had even been temporarily in police custody on Sunday, 2 September, but there is no corroboration of it in police records. At the fourpenny lodging house off Brick Lane, where he frequently slept, the people denied he was there and appeared disposed to shield him. Rumour was rife. One of the
Star
’s informants claimed to have seen him lately in Leather Lane, Holborn. Another swore that she descried him crossing London Bridge into Southwark, ‘as stealthily as usual, with head bent, his skimpy coat turned up about his ears, and looking as if he were in a desperate hurry.’ Two women in Philpot Street told the
Star
’s reporter that Leather Apron would most likely be found in Commercial Street, opposite the Princess Alice Tavern, it will be necessary.’ they added, ‘to look into all the shadows, as if he is there he will surely be out of sight.’
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