Complete History of Jack the Ripper (42 page)

More damaging is Packer’s readiness to modify details in his story in order to accommodate fresh knowledge or movements in popular opinion. It is noticeable, for example, how Packer’s suspect shed years during the course of the grocer’s four narratives. In the statement procured by Grand and Batchelor the man was said to have been middle-aged, perhaps 35, and in the
Evening News
interview about 30–35. Packer told the police, however, that the suspect was a young man, aged between 25 and 30. And Richardson understood, too, that the man’s age was ‘not more than thirty’. Inevitably one suspects that this rejuvenation of Packer’s man had something to do with the release of PC Smith’s description to the press. For the constable’s account, describing a man aged 28, was being circulated in the newspapers from 1 October.
⁸

Even more revealing is this extract from the
Evening News
interview:

The notion that an American might have been involved had been fostered by Baxter’s story of the American seeking specimens of the uterus and by the alleged Americanisms of the first Jack the Ripper letter, to be discussed in a later chapter, and it is remarkable how easily Packer fell in with the reporter’s suggestion. Packer’s description of his suspect’s headgear is also instructive in this context. He told Grand and Batchelor that the man was wearing a wideawake hat and the
Evening News
that it was a black, soft, felt hat. After the
News
interview Packer’s terminology changed. Bruce wrote of a ‘soft felt . . . kind of Yankee hat’, Richardson of a soft felt or American hat.

Finally, there are definite suggestions in the Packer evidence that his story owed less to personal knowledge and observation than it did to contemporary press reports. Thus, in at least two instances, we can catch him out incorporating details from earlier newspaper accounts which were subsequently shown to be incorrect. One is the alleged colour of Elizabeth Stride’s flower. On 2 October Edward Spooner told the inquest that he saw a red and white flower pinned to the dead woman’s coat. This was an error for PC Smith, who saw Elizabeth at 12.35, later deposed to a red rose in her coat, and Inspector Reid, who examined the body specifically in order to compile a description, only inventoried a red rose and maidenhair fern. It is probable, then, that when Packer spoke of the woman carrying a white or white and red flower in her hand, his comment was inspired, not by actual observation, but by press reports of Spooner’s testimony.

Even more important to the credibility of Packer’s story are the grapes.

On Monday, 1 October, the
Daily News
carried statements by Louis Diemschutz, Isaac Kozebrodski and Fanny Mortimer, all alleging that the dead woman had been found clutching a packet of sweetmeats in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other.
⁹
Now,
a packet of cachous was most certainly discovered in Elizabeth’s left hand. But the detail about the grapes appears to have been a baseless fiction. At the inquest the doctors were interrogated on this very point.

Dr Phillips deposed: ‘Neither in the hands nor about the body of the deceased did I find any grapes, or connection with them. I am convinced that the deceased had not swallowed either the skin or seed of a grape within many hours of her death.’ Dr Blackwell was equally emphatic:

‘Did you perceive any grapes near the body in the yard?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hear any person say that they had seen grapes there?’

‘I did not.’
¹⁰

We do not know how the press conducted their interviews with Diemschutz, Kozebrodski and Mrs Mortimer but one of these witnesses – the only one summoned before the coroner – testified differently at the inquest. According to Louis Diemschutz’s press statement, supposedly made on the day of the murder, Stride’s hands ‘were clenched, and when the doctor opened them I saw that she had been holding grapes in one hand and sweetmeats in the other.’ The very next day, however, Baxter asked Diemschutz: ‘Did you notice her hands?’ And Diemschutz replied: ‘I did not notice what position her hands were in.’
¹¹

It is very doubtful if any grapes were seen in Dutfield’s Yard but the printing of such a falsehood could well have given Packer ideas.

We are left with the inescapable feeling that when Packer told Sergeant White that he had seen no one ‘standing about’ on the night of the murder he was speaking the truth and that his story of selling grapes to a strange couple was an afterthought, cobbled together with the aid of newspaper and local gossip. The Yard reached a similar conclusion for Chief Inspector Swanson, reporting on the matter later that month, wrote that Packer had ‘unfortunately made different statements so that . . . any statement he made would be rendered almost valueless as evidence.’
¹²
This may be why he was never summoned to appear before the Stride inquest as a witness.

But why
should
Packer seek to deceive the police? It is possible that the fantasy was designed to enhance this modest grocer’s status amongst his neighbours by providing him with a key role in the drama, by enrolling him in the company of the few who had ‘seen the murderer’. A much more likely explanation, however, will be
found in the sudden escalation in the scale of the reward money prompted by the double murder. On 30 September Packer told White that he had seen nothing suspicious. Two days later, when Grand and Batchelor were conducting their investigations, he had changed his mind. But in the interval fresh rewards, including one of £500 from the Corporation of London, had increased fivefold the total sum on offer for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. The money probably provided the spur, the story about grapes being found in Elizabeth’s dead hand, published on 1 October, the substance for Packer’s tale. On the night of 1–2 October, lured by the rewards, amateur sleuths appeared in force on the streets of the East End. And the next day, sensing a new spirit abroad, the
Star
spoke of others ‘who turn in descriptions on the chance of coming near enough the mark to claim a portion of the reward if the man should be caught, just as one buys a ticket in a lottery.’
¹³
This prescient columnist seems to have hit the nail right on the head. For by then there seems little doubt that Packer, too, had joined the gold rush.

Packer continued to regale the press with stories. On 27 October, while standing with his barrow at the junction of Greenfield Street and Commercial Road, he supposedly saw the murderer again. The man gave Packer ‘a most vicious look’ but, when the grocer sent someone to find a policeman, escaped by jumping on a tram bound for Blackwall. According to yet a third tale, a man who came to his shop on 13 November to buy rabbits told him that he believed his own cousin to be the murderer.
¹⁴
By this time, however, even the press offices had begun to weary of Packer and soon he slipped back into the obscurity from whence he came.

Unlike Matthew Packer, Mrs Fanny Mortimer was not a romancer. But unwittingly she bestowed upon the growing legend of the Whitechapel killer one of its most potent symbols. Mrs Mortimer lived at 36 Berner Street, two doors from the scene of the tragedy, and for most of the critical half hour between 12.30 and 1.00 on the fatal morning was standing at the door of her house. What she saw and heard has been greatly misrepresented by twentieth-century authors.

Walter Dew, writing in 1938, told his readers of a man, aged about 30, dressed in black and carrying a small, shiny black bag, whom Mrs Mortimer saw stealing furtively out of Dutfield’s Yard just before Diemschutz’s pony and cart turned into the gate. It was
more than probable, wrote Dew dramatically, that she was ‘the only person ever to see the Ripper in the vicinity of one of his crimes.’ Twenty years later Donald McCormick quoted what purported to be the actual words of Mrs Mortimer’s contemporary statement. This related how she heard a suspicious noise from the direction of the International Working Men’s Educational Club: ‘It wasn’t like an argument, though there was something like a stifled cry, or an angry voice. Then there was a bump; it must have been the body falling . . . Before I could properly tell what it was I saw a young man carrying a black shiny bag, walking very fast down the street. He looked up at the club, then went round the corner by the Board School.’
¹⁵
Since Dew and McCormick are amongst the Ripperologists’ favourite cribs it is scarcely surprising that Mrs Mortimer continues to figure in the literature as one of those likely to have seen Jack the Ripper. But the truth was very different.

Mrs Mortimer’s original statement, made on the day of the murder, can be found in the
Daily News
of 1 October. It contains no references to stifled cries or the thuds of falling bodies. Indeed, she categorically states that until Diemschutz raised the alarm she had heard nothing. ‘There was certainly no noise made,’ she said, ‘and I did not observe anyone enter the gates.’ She did see a man with a black bag but her statement makes it quite clear that he came, not from Dutfield’s Yard, but from Commercial Road: ‘the only man whom I had seen pass through the street previously [before one] was a young man carrying a black shiny bag, who walked very fast down the street from the Commercial Road. He looked up at the club, and then went round the corner by the Board School . . . If a man had come out of the yard before one o’clock I must [i.e. would] have seen him.’

There is nothing here to suggest that the man with the black bag was anything other than an innocent passer-by. But a day or so after Mrs Mortimer had made her statement he voluntarily presented himself at Leman Street Police Station to clear himself of any possible suspicion. He was Leon Goldstein of 22 Christian Street, a member of the International Working Men’s Club. He had left a coffee house in Spectacle Alley only a short time before Mrs Mortimer had seen him. And his bag had contained empty cigarette boxes.
¹⁶

Goldstein must be dismissed from our investigation. Nevertheless, his brief appearance in the drama had consequences far more reaching than he or anyone else can have imagined. Mrs Mortimer’s statement was widely broadcast in the press and soon everyone seemed to know
that a man with a black bag had been seen near the scene of the Berner Street murder. Perhaps because it reinforced the view given currency by Dr Phillips at the Chapman inquest that the killer might be a doctor, the bag lodged in popular imagination.

So that, even today, in legend Jack the Ripper is as inseparable from his black bag as Davy Crockett from his coonskin cap or Long John Silver from his parrot.

T
HE IDENTIFICATION OF
the Mitre Square victim, lying dead in the city Mortuary, proved a simpler task for the City Police than that of Elizabeth Stride for their Metropolitan counterparts.

At first there seemed little enough to go on. The dead woman looked about forty. She was thin and about five feet in height. She had dark auburn hair and hazel eyes.

Her clothes were old and dirty. The main items were a black straw bonnet trimmed with green and black velvet and black beads; a neckerchief of red gauze silk; a black cloth jacket with imitation fur edging around the collar and fur edging around the sleeves; a dark-green chintz skirt, patterned in Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies, with three flounces; a man’s white vest; a brown linsey dress bodice with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front; a pair of brown ribbed stockings, mended at the feet in white; a pair of men’s laced boots; and a piece of old white apron. She wore no drawers or stays but there were plenty of undergarments: a grey stuff petticoat, a very old dark-green alpaca skirt, a very old ragged blue skirt and a white calico chemise.

The quantity and condition of the woman’s clothing, and the nature of her belongings, stamped her as a vagrant or, at best, a frequenter of common lodging houses. Her belongings consisted of a large white handkerchief, one blue striped bedticking pocket and two unbleached calico pockets, a white cotton pocket-handkerchief, twelve pieces of white rag, a piece of white coarse linen, a piece of
blue and white shirting, two small blue bedticking bags, two short clay pipes, one tin box containing tea and another containing sugar, one piece of flannel and six pieces of soap, a small tooth comb, a white-handled table-knife, a metal tea-spoon, a red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings, an empty tin match-box, a piece of red flannel containing pins and needles, and a ball of hemp.
¹

An examination of the body and its effects yielded possible leads. There was a tattoo (the initials ‘T.C.’) in blue ink on the dead woman’s left forearm. And there was the mustard tin picked up by Sergeant Jones from beside the body. It contained two pawntickets. One was for a man’s flannel shirt, pledged in the name of Emily Burrell, 52 White’s Row, on 31 August for 9d. The other was for a pair of men’s boots, pledged in the name of Jane Kelly, 6 Dorset Street, on 28 September for 2s. 6d. Both items had been pledged at the shop of Joseph Jones, 31 Church Street, Spitalfields.
²
When the police tried to trace these women they discovered that the addresses given were fictitious. In White’s Row, Spitalfields, there was no No. 52. And at 6 Dorset Street no one by the name of Jane Kelly was known to the occupants. But it was the publicity accorded these leads by the press that succeeded in identifying the dead woman. For on the evening of Tuesday, 2 October, a middle-aged labourer walked into Bishopsgate Street Police Station and said that he thought he knew her. His name was John Kelly.
³
The deceased, he said, was Kate Conway alias Kelly, a woman he had been living with for seven years at Cooney’s lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street.