Complete History of Jack the Ripper (40 page)

Hitherto this report has been neglected by students of the Ripper crimes. There are, indeed, good reasons for passing it by now. After all, the two independent sources alluded to in the
Star
cannot be identified and no substantiation for the story exists. Nevertheless, it is difficult to escape the feeling that this was a rare occasion upon which the press turned up a clue the police would have done well to follow up.

Finally, what can we learn from the evidence of the eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Elizabeth with a man? The man seen by William Marshall at 11.45 was very like those observed by PC Smith at 12.35 and Israel Schwartz at 12.45. All three descriptions might well refer to one and the same man. If they do, and if he was the killer, he exposed himself to great risk in hanging about the area with his intended victim for over an hour. More, Dutfield’s Yard was a hazardous spot in which to commit murder. Although gloomy it was frequented at night by the inhabitants of the cottages as well as by members of the club, and it was a cul-de-sac which could and very nearly did become a trap in the event of discovery.

The most important witness, if he was telling the truth, was Schwartz. As the closest in time to the discovery of the body he was the most likely to have seen the murderer. Above and beyond that, however, his evidence challenged the popular assumptions then being made about this series of crimes. For, on the face of it, he incriminated not one man, but two, not Jews but Gentiles.

Before considering the implications of Schwartz’s evidence we had best remind ourselves that there is a real possibility that his sighting had nothing to do with the murders. Admittedly he claimed to have seen an assault near the entry of Dutfield’s Yard at 12.45, about the time Elizabeth must have been attacked, but most witnesses to the events of that night were vague in the matter of times. Diemschutz seems to have given the inquest something better than a guess when he said that he returned home at one, noticing the time ‘at the baker’s shop at the corner of Berner Street.’
²⁷
And Dr Blackwell was presumably accurate when he swore that he was called out at 1.10 because he at least had a watch. But few of the other principal witnesses seem to have had any means of verifying the time. Even PC Lamb and Edward Johnston, Blackwell’s assistant, admitted at the inquest that they did not carry watches. Edward Spooner, the
horse-keeper whom Diemschutz brought back to the yard instead of a policeman, thought that he reached the scene of the crime at about 12.35, half an hour earlier than could have been the case, but then, as Spooner explained before the coroner, ‘the only means I had of fixing the time was by the closing of the public houses.’ Matthew Packer, a greengrocer of whom much more later, also used closing time at the pubs to estimate the time at which he had put up the shutters of his shop at 44 Berner Street. Similar imprecision is to be found in the depositions of witnesses at the inquest into the death of Catharine Eddowes, the woman murdered in Mitre Square on the same night. ‘I can only speak with certainty as to time,’ said PC Harvey, ‘with regard to the post-office clock.’
²⁸

Schwartz’s time, then, was not necessarily correct. Furthermore, altercations such as that he described seem to have been commonplace in the area. Baxter asked PC Lamb, whose beat in Commercial Road took him past the end of Berner Street, whether he had seen anything suspicious that night. The constable’s reply is revealing: ‘I did not at any time. There were squabbles and rows in the streets, but nothing more.’
²⁹
Berner Street itself was the subject of conflicting testimony. PC Smith said that very few prostitutes were to be seen there. William West, Morris Eagle and Louis Diemschutz, stalwarts of the International Working Men’s Club and hence doubtless anxious to dissociate it from all scandalous imputation, denied that the club yard was regularly used by prostitutes. Nevertheless, West did concede at the inquest that he had once seen a couple chatting by the yard gates and that he had sometimes noticed low men and women standing about and talking to each other in Fairclough Street close by. Some Berner Street residents, moreover, certainly did regard the club and its yard as a troublespot. ‘I do not think the yard bears a very good character at night,’ said Barnett Kentorrich of No. 38, ‘but I do not interfere with any of the people about here. I know that the gate is not kept fastened.’ The reaction of several residents to the alarm occasioned by the finding of the body is instructive. Charles Letchford of No. 30 told the press that he had taken no notice because ‘disturbances are very frequent at the club and I thought it was only another row’ and Mrs Mortimer of No. 36 similarly attributed the commotion to ‘another row at the Socialists’ Club close by.’
³⁰

If Schwartz was out just fifteen minutes in his reckoning, if the incident he saw took place, not at 12.45 but, say, at 12.30, then the significance of his statement is greatly reduced. We do not know that
he was mistaken but it will always be on the cards that he was witness to nothing more than a street brawl.

Despite these reservations we have in Schwartz a witness – and a witness the police believed – who claimed to have seen a woman attacked at the time and place of a known murder. Not only that, but we have a witness who identified the dead woman as the victim of the attack he saw. His is crucial evidence and we cannot ignore it.

We may be wrong in thinking of Jack the Ripper as just one man. For Schwartz compels us to take very seriously the possibility that he was really two. The Hungarian certainly saw two men at the scene of the crime that night. Were they, in fact, confederates? Schwartz’s impression at the time was that they were. In his statement to the police he said that the first man, the one attacking the woman, ‘called out apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road “Lipski”.’ Schwartz then walked away but, ‘finding that he was followed by the second man’, started to run. He ran as far as the railway arch ‘but the man did not follow so far.’ Quite clearly Schwartz was under the impression that the murderer had alerted his accomplice to Schwartz’s presence and that the accomplice, the second man, was seeing him off.

But a badly frightened man is not a good observer. Later, safe in the police station and under Abberline’s patient cross-examination, Schwartz could not be absolutely certain that the two men had been acting together.

‘Schwartz cannot say,’ runs Swanson’s digest of the original report, ‘whether the two men were together or known to each other.’ Schwartz’s first impression may have been mistaken. Perhaps, like Schwartz, the second man was simply an innocent passer-by. And perhaps, like Schwartz, he took fright at what he was seeing and fled in the same direction. We do not know. However, to judge by the interview Schwartz later gave to the
Star
, the Hungarian remained true to his first instinct. The newspaper evidently dressed the story up to make it a more exciting read but the connection between the two men was reaffirmed. In this version the second man, perceiving Schwartz, called out a warning to the murderer and then rushed forward, knife in hand, ‘as if to attack the intruder [i.e. Schwartz]’. Schwartz, once again, precipitately fled.

Schwartz’s story is also quite strong evidence that the murderer was not a Jew. Since the Home Office made precisely the
opposite deduction from it, though, this statement calls for explanation.

Schwartz thought at the time that when Stride’s attacker shouted ‘Lipski’ he was addressing his accomplice across the road. Lipski was a familiar Jewish name throughout the East End because of the trial and execution of Israel Lipski, a Polish Jew, for the murder of Miriam Angel in 1887. The Home Office favoured the view, therefore, that the murderer probably had an accomplice named Lipski and that both were Jews.

On 24 October, in response to a call for ‘a report of all the measures which have been taken for the detection of the perpetrator of the Whitechapel Murders and of the results’, Warren forwarded to the Home Office copies of Chief Inspector Swanson’s summary reports on the murders. In the margin of the Stride report, against the passage relating to Schwartz, Godfrey Lushington, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, wrote: ‘The use of “Lipski” increases my belief that the murderer was a Jew.’ And on 27 October Matthews himself minuted the papers: ‘The statement of Schwartz that a man, who was in the company of Elizabeth Stride 15 minutes before she was found dead, & who threw her down, addressed a companion (?) as “Lipski” seems to furnish a clue which ought to be followed up. The number of “Lipskis” in Whitechapel must be limited. If one of them were identified by Schwartz it might lead to something of importance.’
³¹

Abberline’s own interpretation of Schwartz’s observations, however, was very different. We owe its committal to paper to the Home Secretary’s continued interest in the affair. Matthews’ queries on Swanson’s reports were transmitted to Warren on 29 October. ‘It does not appear,’ one of them ran, ‘whether the man [murderer] used the word “Lipski” as a mere ejaculation, meaning in mockery “I am going to ‘Lipski’ the woman”, or whether he was calling to a man across the road by his proper name. In the latter case . . . the murderer must have an acquaintance in Whitechapel named Lipski. Mr Matthews . . . will be glad if he can be furnished with a report as to any investigations made to trace the man “Lipski”.’
³²

Abberline was consulted by his superiors for material with which to furnish a reply to this missive and his report, dated 1 November 1888, has survived. It reads in part:

This report, marrying personal knowledge of the witness with an intimate understanding of conditions in Whitechapel, is such a document as only Abberline could have written, and as one of very few that enable us to see inside the head of this fine detective is quite fascinating. The inspector knew that the name Lipski had become an insult, spat in the faces of Jews in the East End, and he noted Schwartz’s ‘strong Jewish appearance’. His deduction, therefore, was that when Stride’s attacker shouted ‘Lipski!’ he was not addressing an accomplice by name, as Lushington and Matthews both assumed, but directing an anti-semitic taunt at Schwartz himself. The import of Abberline’s interpretation is clear – the murderer was probably an East Ender and almost certainly
not
a Jew.
³⁴

There is, though, a third possible interpretation of Schwartz’s evidence. It is an attractive one because it preserves Schwartz’s original feeling that ‘Lipski’ was shouted to an accomplice while, at the same time, suggesting a solution to other unexplained riddles of the ‘double event’. Referring to accomplices by false names in front of witnesses was just as obvious a ploy to Victorian villains as it is to their counterparts today. So if the murderer
did
call an accomplice ‘Lipski’ it was perhaps because he intended Schwartz to
think
that this was the man’s real name and that both he and the murderer
were Jews. We may be dealing, then, with a deliberate subterfuge designed to incriminate the Jews, crude certainly, but good enough to hoodwink the Home Office and perhaps only one of several such ploys practised by the murderer that night. A plan to fix the blame on the Jews would explain, for example, why the murderer killed Elizabeth in Dutfield’s Yard, by the door of the International Working Men’s Educational Club, a club largely patronized by Jewish immigrants, and why, in order to accomplish that object, he might have been prepared to loiter about the street with his chosen victim for more than an hour, observing the movements of PC Smith and awaiting his chance. No other murder in the series took place to the south of the Aldgate-Whitechapel Road thoroughfare.

Such a design could explain, too, that cryptic message left in chalk in a doorway in Goulston Street, just above a piece of the Mitre Square victim’s bloodstained apron: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’

N
O ACCOUNT OF
the Stride killing would be complete without reference to Matthew Packer and Mrs Mortimer. Both witnesses were, and indeed still are, commonly believed to have seen the murderer. And both, in their different ways, contributed immeasurably to the mythology surrounding Jack the Ripper.

Matthew Packer was a greengrocer and fruiterer, trading from a barrow and from his small shop at 44 Berner Street, two doors south of the International Working Men’s Educational Club. Police records describe him only as an elderly man. The reporter who interviewed him for the
Evening News
said that he was quiet and intelligent, that he and his wife were ‘both a little past the prime of life and . . . known as respectable hard-working people.’