Complete History of Jack the Ripper (29 page)

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 Apron 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 Apron 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.’
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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 assume 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 Apron 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 Saturday 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, bloody 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 prostitute.

When the constable asked the man what he was doing there he received only the curt reply, ‘Nothing.’ But the prostitute 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:

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 snatched 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.
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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 circumstances 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.
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A recent immigrant, possibly from Hamburg, Ludwig was employed as a barber’s assistant 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 17–18 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 passion, 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 prostitute 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 assistant 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 assistant 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 associating 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 17–18 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 assistant in the first place because on the Continent the barber also often functioned as the poor man’s doctor. There were other circumstances, too, that must have made Ludwig seem a plausible suspect. He lived in the East End. He consorted with prostitutes. 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.
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