Complete History of Jack the Ripper (17 page)

Having read these hair-raising articles few of the
Star
’s patrons can
have doubted that Leather Apron and the Whitechapel killer were one. Yet the only direct evidence offered by the paper was a piece of false gossip to the effect that Leather Apron had been seen walking in Baker’s Row with Polly Nichols on the morning of her murder. Contemporary police reports, indeed, contain no corroboration of the
Star
’s allegations other than the bare acknowledgement that Pizer bullied prostitutes for money, and they took pains to point out that there was no evidence implicating him in the killings. ‘At present,’ wrote Helson on 7 September, ‘there is no evidence whatever against him.’ Twelve days later Abberline concurred: ‘there was no evidence to connect him with the murder.’
²⁸

The effect of the press campaign against Leather Apron was twofold. It alerted Pizer to the fact that he was being sought by the police and it stirred up popular feeling against him. The prospect of falling victim to mob vengeance scared him more than the police and he went into hiding amongst his relatives. In this way the best efforts of the detectives were frustrated.

The arm’s length policy applied by the CID to the press rested, therefore, upon bitter experience and sound reasoning. But it had its disadvantages and some of the detectives of the time, notably Walter Dew and Sir Melville Macnaghten, later publicly disavowed it.
²⁹
In particular the CID, by embracing such a policy, largely denied itself the undoubted benefits that publicity can bestow upon police investigations. Just how valuable the publication of clues can be, even in cases in which the identity of the culprit is unknown, has been dramatically demonstrated in our own day by the spectacular success since 1984 of the BBC’s
Crimewatch UK.
The first 28 programmes, covering 288 cases, resulted in 81 arrests and 9 people were charged with murder.
³⁰
The attitude of the police to the press, moreover, exacerbated the already strained relationship between the two. On the part of the police it implied mistrust which the responsible press found galling. And journalists, unable to satisfy their inquiries at the police stations, were reduced to all manner of dubious practices in order to fill their columns – trying to loosen the tongues of police constables with drink and bribes, shadowing detectives to discover and interview their witnesses, scavenging gossip and hearsay about the streets and, of course, romancing shamelessly.

Since the Clerkenwell explosion of 1867 the number of constables on the beat had been increased. By 1888, moreover, most police stations had been connected by the telegraph, and that autumn saw
the appearance in the metropolis of ten experimental ‘police alarms’. These were telephone boxes, affixed to houses or stout posts, to which constables were provided with keys. But such improvements had brought no sense of increased security to the citizens of East London. There, even before the murders, the inadequacy of police protection had been a frequent complaint, one that the lurking menace of a homicidal maniac immediately revived in the autumn of 1888. Henry Tibbatts, a local man with business premises within a stone’s throw of Whitechapel church, was writing in the
Daily News
as early as 3 September about ‘shamefully inadequate’ policing. ‘I myself have witnessed street fights amounting almost to murder,’ he contended, ‘in the neighbourhood of Osborn Street, Fashion Street, &c., and never at any of these critical periods are the police to be found.’
³¹
Not yet, however, had disquiet turned into panic. Those primarily responsible for the policing of the metropolis were content to leave the matter to their subordinates. Matthews was enjoying his respite from parliamentary duties. Warren was on vacation in the south of France. And on 7 September Dr Anderson left the capital on his way to Switzerland.

It was the lull before the storm. On the morning of Saturday, 8 September, the
East London Advertiser
ventured a prediction that was pregnant with foreboding. ‘The murderer must creep out from somewhere,’ it ran, ‘he must patrol the streets in search of his victims. Doubtless he is out night by night. Three successful murders will have the effect of whetting his appetite still further, and unless a watch of the strictest be kept, the murder of Thursday will certainly be followed by a fourth.’
³²

So it proved. For in the early hours of that same morning, after those words had been written but before they appeared on the streets, the body of another woman was discovered in the back yard of a house in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. She had been mutilated more horrendously than any of the others. Close by, saturated with water, lay what appeared to be a clue. It was a piece of a leather apron.

T
O HER FRIENDS
the fourth victim was known simply as ‘Dark Annie’.

She is identified in police records as Annie Chapman, alias Annie Siffey. A sad, broken-down little prostitute, she lived a precarious and semi-nomadic existence on the streets and in the common lodging houses of Spitalfields. She was forty-seven years old.
¹

At one time Annie’s future must have seemed secure enough. On 1 May 1869 she married a coachman named John Chapman. The place of residence of both is recorded on the marriage certificate as 29 Montpelier Place, Brompton, where Annie’s mother lived until her death in 1893, but the newly weds soon set up home at 1 Brook Mews North, Bayswater, and then at 17 South Bruton Mews, Berkeley Square. By 1881 they had moved to Clewer, in Berkshire, where John had taken a position as coachman to Josiah Weeks, a farm bailiff, at St Leonard’s Hill Farm Cottage. There were children. Emily Ruth was born in 1870, Annie Georgina in 1873 and John in 1880.

But tragedy dogged Annie throughout the eighties and her life disintegrated under a catalogue of disasters. Her little boy was a cripple and Emily Ruth died of meningitis when she was only twelve. In 1888 John junior was said to be in the care of a charitable school and Annie Georgina travelling with a performing troupe or circus in France. Then, after the death of her firstborn, Annie’s marriage, like those of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols, ended in tatters. Police
records indicate that her intemperate habits were to blame but John himself was a heavy drinker and the misfortunes of the children must have imposed strains upon the union. Whatever the cause, the couple lived apart for three or four years during which time Annie received an allowance of 10s. a week from her husband. In 1886 she was lodging at 30 Dorset Street, Spitalfields, with a man who made wire sieves, and for this reason was sometimes known as ‘Mrs Sievey’. But the death of John Chapman and the loss of her allowance that same year robbed her of her remaining financial security.

Chapman died on 25 December 1886, at 1 Richmond Villas, Grove Road, Windsor. The cause of death was registered as cirrhosis of the liver, ascites and dropsy. He was only forty-two. One of Annie’s friends during her last years was Amelia Palmer, a charwoman and the wife of a dock labourer named Henry Palmer. In testifying before the inquest into Annie’s own death she spoke of the great effect that John Chapman’s death seemed to have had upon Annie, emotionally as well as financially. The termination of her allowance, which came by postal order made payable at Commercial Road Post Office, was the first indication Annie received that something was wrong. She then learned, upon inquiry of one of John’s relatives living in London, that her husband was dead. Annie cried as she told Amelia about it. And two years later Amelia remembered how she had often seemed downcast when speaking of her children and how ‘since the death of her husband she has seemed to give way altogether.’

Very possibly the sieve maker’s interest in Annie disappeared with her allowance. At any rate he left her and moved to Notting Hill soon after the death of John Chapman. Annie struggled on alone. At times she seems to have benefited from the charity of relatives. Her brother, Fountain Hamilton Smith, last saw her in Commercial Street a week or two before her death. She did not tell him where she was living but said that she was not doing anything and needed money for a lodging. Smith gave her 2s. On the last evening of her life she may also have borrowed money from other relatives at Vauxhall. Yet there must have been limits to such sponging. Amelia Palmer knew that Annie had a mother and sister living at Brompton but did not think that they were on friendly terms. ‘I have never known her to stay with her relatives even for a night,’ she informed the inquest.

Annie did crochet work, made antimacassars and sold flowers. On Fridays she would take what she had made to Stratford to sell. When sober she was industrious but she was overfond of liquor: ‘I have
seen her often the worse for drink,’ said Amelia. She turned, too, to prostitution although, to judge by her photograph and police records, her appearance was unprepossessing. She was plump but only five feet tall. Her complexion was fair. Her hair was wavy and dark brown, her eyes blue. She had a large, thick nose, and two teeth were missing from her lower jaw.

About four months before her death Annie took up residence at Crossingham’s lodging house, 35 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. Timothy Donovan, the deputy, remembered her as an inoffensive woman who never caused them any trouble and was on good terms with the other lodgers. Her main weakness was drink. Possibly her Stratford money was squandered on liquor. At least Donovan said that Annie was generally drunk on Saturdays.

Annie paid 8d. for a double bed. Her only regular visitor, however, was a man Donovan knew only as ‘the pensioner’. In Annie’s life ‘the pensioner’ is something of a mystery. If we are to believe the deputy he regularly came to the lodging house with Annie on Saturdays and stayed until the following Monday. More, he instructed Donovan to turn Annie away on any night that she tried to bring another man home with her. The pensioner, said Donovan, sometimes dressed like a dock labourer and at others had a gentlemanly appearance.

His real name was Ted Stanley. He lived at 1 Osborn Place, Osborn Street, Whitechapel, and he was not, in fact, a pensioner at all. In the inquest proceedings he is described as a bricklayer’s labourer. We also know from police records that, on the night Polly Nichols was killed, Stanley was on duty at Fort Elson, Gosport, with the 2nd Brigade, Southern Division, Hants., Militia.

On 14 September 1888 Stanley made a statement at Commercial Street Police Station. Five days later he appeared as a witness at the inquest. Yet, he was scarcely forthcoming about his relationship with Annie. On the one hand, despite the repeated assertions of Timothy Donovan, he insisted that he had only visited Annie once or twice at the lodging house and absolutely denied telling Donovan to turn her away if she came with other men. On the other he admitted to having associated with her in other places and to having known her for about two years. Whatever the exact nature of their relationship Ted Stanley shunned any involvement once he knew that Annie was dead. On the day of the murder he turned up at the lodging house to verify a rumour he had heard from a shoeblack that she had been killed. Assured that
the news was true, he turned and walked straight out without another word.

Annie must have heard and talked about the Whitechapel murders but, crushed by ill health and poverty, and frittering most of the little she had on drink, she found herself regularly back on the streets. To judge by the testimony of the doctor who performed the post-mortem examination she was tuberculous and, although plump, had suffered great privation. A week or more before her death she was involved in a fight. It was the only fracas Donovan could remember her in and the date and details are vague.

Annie’s antagonist was Eliza Cooper, a hawker and fellow lodger at 35 Dorset Street. On 19 September she gave her version of the debacle to the inquest. The trouble started, explained Liza, on Saturday, 1 September. Annie brought Ted Stanley to the lodging house. When she began asking around for a piece of soap she was referred to Liza who loaned her one. Annie handed it to Stanley and he went out to get washed. Later that day Liza met Annie again and asked for the return of the soap. ‘I will see you by and by’ was the airy reply. On the following Tuesday the two women saw each other in the lodging house kitchen. Liza once more asked for her soap but Annie testily threw a halfpenny down on the table and said, ‘Go and get a halfpennyworth of soap.’ There was a quarrel which flared up again later in the day at the Britannia, on the corner of Dorset and Commercial Streets. On this occasion Annie slapped Liza’s face and snapped: ‘Think yourself lucky I did not do more.’ Liza replied by striking Annie in the left eye and on the chest.

It is probable that, several weeks after the incident, Liza’s memories of this sordid little squabble were already becoming confused. We may suspect, too, that she contrived to make herself the aggrieved party. Certainly, even if Annie was drunk, it is difficult to see in the vindictive, combative Annie of Liza’s tale anything of the meek, inoffensive little woman of the other witnesses. John Evans, the nightwatchman at 35 Dorset Street, spoke at the inquest of the fight only two days after Annie’s death. He confirmed the cause of it (a piece of soap) but said that it took place in the lodging house kitchen. In two particulars at least Eliza was mistaken. The fight cannot have taken place as late as 4 September. Ted Stanley noticed that Annie had a black eye on Sunday, 2 September, and the next day Annie showed her bruises to Amelia Palmer. Timothy Donovan, moreover, told the inquest that Annie was not at the lodging house
during the week preceding her death. The best evidence that we have places the fight in the middle of the previous week. Donovan said that it occurred about Tuesday, 28 August, and that two days later Annie was sporting a black eye from the encounter. ‘Tim, this is lovely, ain’t it?’ she chirped. John Evans deposed that the incident took place on 30 August. It is also clear that Annie sustained bruises to the chest and right, rather than left, temple, a point that will prove of some significance when we come to consider the post-mortem evidence.