Complete History of Jack the Ripper (41 page)

The first detective to encounter Packer was Sergeant Stephen White of H Division, one of two officers detailed by Abberline on Sunday, 30 September, the day of the murder, to make house-to-house inquiries in Berner Street. We know that he was supplied with a special notebook in which to record his findings. This, alas, has disappeared. So our only record of White’s first interview with Packer is contained in a report written by the sergeant on 4 October:

If the police imagined that they had done with Packer they were very much mistaken. For by 2 October, just two days later, the greengrocer was telling a quite different story to Messrs Grand and Batchelor of 283 Strand, two private detectives in the employ of the Mile End Vigilance Committee. He now insisted that at about 11.45 on the night of the murder he had sold half a pound of black grapes to a man and a woman standing outside his shop in Berner Street and that this couple had afterwards loitered about the street for more than half an hour. ‘The man,’ said Packer, ‘was middle-aged, perhaps 35 years; about five feet seven inches in height; was stout, square-built; wore a wideawake hat and dark clothes; had the appearance of a clerk; had a rough voice and a quick, sharp way of talking.’
²

Further inquiries by Grand and Batchelor apparently tended to substantiate this story. Two sisters, Mrs Rosenfield and Miss Eva Harstein of 14 Berner Street, told them that early on the Sunday morning they had noticed a grape-stalk, stained with blood, in Dutfield’s Yard, close to where the body had been found. Reasoning that the police could have washed the stalk down the drain when they cleaned up the yard, Grand and Batchelor then visited Dutfield’s Yard to search the sink. There, amidst a heap of heterogeneous filth, they are said to have discovered a grape-stalk.

The
Evening News
got wind of this development. And on the evening of 3 October one of its reporters called at 44 Berner Street to hear the full story from the lips of the man ‘who spoke to the murderer’. Packer’s tale, as set forth in this interview, is worth recounting at length.

For most of Saturday, 29 September, Packer was out with his barrow. But he didn’t do much business and, ‘as the night came on wet’, decided to go home and take his wife’s place serving in the shop. At some time between 11.30 and midnight a man and a
woman walked up Berner Street from the direction of Ellen Street and stopped outside his window to look at the fruit.

The man looked about 30–35 years of age, was of medium height and had rather a dark complexion. He wore a black coat and a black, soft, felt hat. ‘He looked to me,’ explained Packer, ‘like a clerk or something of that sort. I am certain he wasn’t what I should call a working man or anything like us folks that live around here.’ His companion was middle-aged. She wore dark clothes and was carrying a white flower in her hand.

After the couple had stood there for about a minute the man stepped forward and said: ‘I say, old man, how do you sell your grapes?’

‘Sixpence a pound the black ’uns, sir,’ replied Packer, ‘and four pence a pound the white ’uns.’

The man turned to the woman. ‘Which will you have, my dear, black or white? You shall have whichever you like best.’ The woman chose the black. ‘Give us half a pound of the black ones, then,’ ordered the man. Packer thought that he sounded educated. He had ‘a loud, sharp sort of voice, and a quick commanding way with him.’

There was no need for the couple to come into the shop. It had a half window in front and most of Packer’s dealings were carried on through the lower part of the window case in which his fruit was exposed for sale. He put the grapes into a paper bag and handed them out to the man.

For a minute or two the man and woman stood near the entrance of Dutfield’s Yard. Then they crossed the road and, for more than half an hour, stood across the way from the shop. ‘Why,’ Packer exclaimed to his wife, ‘them people must be a couple o’ fools to stand out there in the rain eating the grapes they bought here, when they might just as well have had shelter!’ They were still there when the Packers went to bed. Packer couldn’t remember exactly when that was but thought that it ‘must have been past midnight a little bit, for the public houses were shut up.’
³

The
Evening News
concluded its article with a sally at the police. ‘Well, Mr Packer,’ the reporter is made to observe, ‘I suppose the police came at once to ask you and your wife what you knew about the affair, as soon as ever the body was discovered?’

‘The police?’ echoed Packer. ‘No. THEY HAVEN’T ASKED ME A WORD ABOUT IT YET!!!’ He then went on to explain that although a plain-clothes officer had come to the shop a day after the murder in order to look over the backyard no policeman had yet questioned him about what he might know of the tragedy.

When the
Evening News
story was published on 4 October the police were understandably bewildered. Inspector Moore immediately sent Sergeant White to talk to Packer again and to take him to the mortuary to see if he could recognize Elizabeth Stride. White’s efforts, however, were consistently thwarted by the private detectives. First he went to Packer’s shop but Mrs Packer told him that two detectives had already collected her husband and taken him to the mortuary. On his way there the sergeant met Packer, with one of his escorts, coming back.

‘Where have you been?’ asked White.

‘This detective asked me to go to see if I could identify the woman,’ said Packer.

‘Have you done so?’

‘Yes’ replied Packer. ‘I believe she bought some grapes at my shop about 12 o’clock on Saturday.’

Soon they were joined by the second detective. White then asked them what they were doing with Packer. They said that they were detectives and when the sergeant asked to see their authority added that they were private detectives. One of them produced a card from his pocket book but would not allow White to touch it. Eventually they ‘induced’ Packer to go away with them.

Later in the day White again visited Packer in his shop. But while he was talking with him the same two men drove up in a hansom cab. This time they said that they were taking Packer to Scotland Yard to see Sir Charles Warren and persuaded him to go off in the cab with them.
⁴
The antics of Grand and Batchelor, however frustrating for the police, were apparently well intended. Certainly they delivered Packer to Scotland Yard. The grocer’s statement, written in the hand of A. C. Bruce, the Assistant Commissioner, is dated 4 October:

On 6 October the
Daily Telegraph
published a new Packer account. It contained a few more details about his suspect’s appearance. He was described as a square-built man, about five feet seven inches tall and perhaps thirty years of age. His hair was black, his complexion dark, his face full and alert-looking. He had no moustache. Wearing a long black coat and a soft felt hat, the man struck Packer as being more like a clerk than a workman. He spoke in a quick, sharp manner. What distinguished the
Telegraph
’s article, however, was its attempt to go beyond words.

The journalist responsible for the article was J. Hall Richardson. ‘In accordance with the general description furnished to the police by Packer and others,’ he explained, ‘a number of sketches were prepared, portraying men of different nationalities, ages and ranks of life.’ The sketches had been submitted to Packer and – according to Richardson – he had unhesitatingly picked out a picture of a man without a moustache and wearing a soft felt or American hat as most resembling the man he had seen. His choice was one of two woodcut sketches published in the article under the caption: ‘SKETCH PORTRAITS OF THE SUPPOSED MURDERER.’
⁶
The difficulty for the police in all this was that, for reasons we will presently notice, they were unhappy about the accuracy and relevance
of Packer’s evidence. Fearing, therefore, that Richardson’s initiative would mislead rather than inform the public, they issued a notice in the
Police Gazette
disavowing the sketches as ‘not authorized by Police.’ And, at the same time, they published as a corrective the descriptions furnished by PC Smith, Israel Schwartz and Joseph Lawende, though suppressing the names of these witnesses.
⁷

What value is to be placed on Packer’s evidence? Perhaps he was telling the truth. Perhaps, when White questioned him on the morning of the murder, Packer had not yet made a connection in his mind between the couple who bought the grapes and the crime. Perhaps he did not do so until the next day, when the press carried statements alleging that grapes had been found in one of the dead woman’s hands. Perhaps. Certainly, to judge by the number of latter-day Ripperologists who trawl up the grocer’s story to sustain their own theories, his evidence is still very widely believed.

Assuming for the moment that Packer
was
an honest witness, how does his information fit in with that of the other witnesses? Well, his man was very like the one seen by James Brown at 12.45. Both Packer and Brown described a man of about five feet seven, wearing a long dark coat, standing with a woman by the board school. The only recorded difference between them – Packer’s suspect is said to have been square-built and Brown’s of average build – is less significant than the sum of the like factors. It is thus tempting to link these two and to speculate whether the differences between the reported times of the witnesses could have been produced by the obvious imprecision of both. However, in several respects (in the absence of a moustache and in the wearing of a long frock coat rather than a short/cutaway coat and of a wideawake, soft felt or Yankee hat rather than a peaked hat or cap) Packer’s man is impossible to identify with those described by PC Smith and Israel Schwartz. An obvious explanation of this difficulty is that Stride got rid of the man with the long coat seen by Packer and Brown and accosted or was accosted by her murderer, the man in the peaked cap, almost immediately afterwards. Indeed, the words James Brown overheard testify to some kind of rejection of the man in the long coat by the woman. ‘Not tonight,’ she said, ‘some other night.’ The stumbling block to this tidy little reconstruction of events is William Marshall. For Marshall deposed to having seen Stride with a man strikingly similar to those described by Smith and Schwartz as early as 11.45. This raises once again the possibility that Packer and Brown may have seen a different couple altogether. We
have already noted the presence in the vicinity of at least one other couple before and after the time of the murder.

Overwhelmingly, though, the available evidence suggests that Packer was not an honest witness.

There is a discrepancy between his narratives on times. According to the statement recorded by Bruce, he sold the grapes at about 11 o’clock and closed his shutters, leaving the couple standing by the school, at about 11.30. But the other accounts all place the whole episode an hour later. The time that the man and woman came to the shop is given by Grand and Batchelor as about 11.45, by the
Evening News
as between 11.30 and 12.00, by Sergeant White as about 12.00 and by Richardson as about 11.30. The couple were standing across the road for perhaps half an hour after that and were still there when Packer closed up and went to bed. Packer told White that he closed at 12.30 because of the rain. Grand and Batchelor understood that he had last seen the couple, as he was preparing to close, at 12.10 or 12.15, and that he had estimated the time ‘by the fact that the public houses had been closed.’ And the
Evening News
got the same story: ‘I couldn’t say exactly, but it must have been past midnight a little bit, for the public houses were shut up.’ In all fairness it should be said that witnesses are characteristically vague on times and that, Bruce apart, those given by Packer are broadly consistent.