Complete History of Jack the Ripper (61 page)

At this point the last important dispute between police and press occurred. Although circulating their description of Hutchinson’s suspect to police stations, the CID had hoped to keep it out of the newspapers while they searched for the wanted man. But, as we have seen, on the 13th Hutchinson was found and interviewed by the press and the next day his story was gracing the columns of both morning and evening journals. This publicity may, of course, have been beneficial. It may have elicited helpful information from the public. We cannot tell because the police records have almost all been lost. But the CID view at the time seems to have been that it blighted Abberline’s efforts to trace the suspect by alerting him to the hunt and perhaps encouraging him to change his appearance.

While Abberline was searching high and low for a foreigner in an astrakhan trimmed coat the body of the latest victim rested at the mortuary attached to St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch. The funeral took place on Monday 19 November. There was much public sympathy for Mary. No relatives came forward but Henry Wilton, verger of St Leonard’s, was determined that she would not lie in a pauper’s grave and bore the entire cost of the funeral.

At noon the church bell began to toll. It was as a signal to the residents of the neighbourhood and they gathered in a solemn crowd, several thousand strong, about the main gate of the church. When the coffin, borne on the shoulders of four men, appeared at the gate scenes of great emotion erupted amongst the crowd. Men stood bare-headed. Women, who predominated in this multitude, cried ‘God forgive her!’, their faces wet with tears. As the coffin was placed in an open car people closed around it, jostling and struggling to touch it. ‘The sight,’ wrote the
Advertiser
’s reporter, ‘was quite remarkable, and the emotion natural and unconstrained.’
¹⁵

Shortly after 12.30 the funeral procession set off. It was headed, at a very slow pace, by the open car drawn by two horses. The coffin was fully exposed to view. Of polished elm and oak, with metal mounts, it bore a coffin-plate with the terse inscription: ‘Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9th Nov. 1888, aged 25 years.’ Upon the coffin rested two crowns of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart’s-ease. After the car came two mourning coaches, one containing three, the other five mourners. Mary, far from home, had few real friends. At her funeral even the mourners – one a representative from McCarthy’s, most of the others women who had testified at the inquest – were mainly casual acquaintances. But Joe Barnett was there. And so too surely, although the press did not mention her by name, was Maria Harvey.

When the procession moved off the entire crowd appeared to set off simultaneously in attendance, blocking the thoroughfare and stopping the traffic. Only with the greatest difficulty were the police able to clear a passage for the
cortège
through the mass of carts, vans and tramcars. But at length the little procession made its way along the Hackney Road to St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone.

And there, beneath a cloudy and unsettled sky, the tortured remains of the girl from Limerick were committed to the earth.

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, 15 N
OVEMBER
, a week after the Miller’s Court horror, an indignant resident of Pembroke Square in the West End addressed a furious letter to the
Daily Telegraph.

‘Can nothing be done,’ he fumed, ‘to prevent a set of hoarse ruffians coming nightly about our suburban squares and streets, yelling at the tops of their hideous voices, “Special Edition” – “Whitechapel” – “Murder” – “Another of ’em!” – “Mutilation” – “Special Edition!” – “Beautiful – Awful – Murder!” and so on, and nearly frightening the lives out of all the sensitive women and children in the neighbourhood? Last evening (Wednesday), for instance, these awful words were bawled out about nine o’clock in a quiet part of Kensington; and a lady who was supping with us was so greatly distressed by these hideous bellowings that she was absolutely too unnerved to return home save in a cab, because she would have to walk about a hundred or two yards down a quiet street at the other end of her journey by omnibus. Now, I venture to ask, Sir, is it not monstrous that the police do not protect us from such a flagrant and ghastly nuisance?’
¹

The Ripper never ventured west of Mitre Square. His victims were prostitutes all. Yet, as this letter neatly illustrates, he instilled fear into the hearts of women all over London.

In the East End the latest murder produced scenes of indescribable panic. At night the streets were abandoned to the patrolling policeman and the amateur detective. During the day noisy, excited crowds
milled about the scene of carnage and struck out in helpless rage at any they fancied to blame.

There were a spate of incidents in which men had to be rescued from violent mobs. Some were drunks or eccentrics who courted disaster by shouting ‘I am Jack the Ripper!’ in public places. But any display of innocent curiosity, especially by a respectably dressed man, might attract ugly crowds. On the day of the murder a young Somerset House clerk, taking a holiday to celebrate the Lord Mayor’s Show and the birthday of the Prince of Wales, went to Dorset Street to see the scene of the murder. There he enquired anxiously of the sightseers whether the bloodhounds had arrived. Concern was mistaken for fear. And when the clerk walked away up Commercial Street, he became aware of three men dogging his steps. He quickened his pace. They quickened theirs. Soon it was obvious that some strange kind of pursuit was in progress and passers-by happily fell in with the crowd. The clerk, increasingly rattled by the swelling throng marching in his tracks, broke into a run. It was the signal for a wild and clamorous chase. Eventually the terrified fugitive was pursued into Bishopsgate, where he gave himself into the custody of a policeman and was escorted hurriedly to the safety of a police station.

Abroad the Miller’s Court murder was making headlines around the world. In Paris it was discussed as keenly as if it had been perpetrated on the Boulevards. ‘The smell of blood was still in the air,’ wrote a correspondent of an afternoon in the French capital, ‘and wherever you turned the talk was almost sure to be about murder . . . Jack the Ripper looms in the imagination as a more fearful scourge of humanity than Cardillac, the secret assassin in Hoffmann’s tale.’ In Austria the tragedy became the sensation of the hour and accounts from the London papers were reproduced almost
in extenso
by the Viennese press. And in America, too, the papers carried full accounts and editors combed their backfiles in vain for parallel atrocities. ‘Nothing in the history of American crime,’ declared a New York correspondent, ‘can, for special and particular horror, be said to outmatch the East End butcheries.’
²

At home it snapped the patience of the Queen. Victoria seems to have followed events in Whitechapel from the first. After the double murder she had telephoned the Home Office to express her shock and ask for information. Now, a day after Miller’s Court, she dashed off a telegram to her Prime Minister. ‘This new most ghastly murder,’ she
said, ‘shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be.’ Three days on she was priming Matthews with suggestions. Had the cattle and passenger boats been searched? Had any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves? And was there sufficient surveillance at night? ‘These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime.’
³

The most dramatic development at Scotland Yard was the resignation of Sir Charles Warren. When it was announced in the Commons it was greeted with lusty cheers from the Opposition benches. The radical press had a field day. Whitechapel, they crowed, had revenged them for Trafalgar Square.

Today the Commissioner’s sudden fall still confuses Ripperologists. Some attribute it directly to police failure in Whitechapel. Others insist that the events were entirely unconnected.

The immediate cause was an article Sir Charles wrote for
Murray’s Magazine
on the administration of the Metropolitan Police.
⁴
Now, in 1879 a Home Office ruling had forbidden officers connected with the department from publishing anything relating to the department without the sanction of the Home Secretary. So on 8 November Matthews wrote to Warren, drawing his attention to the ruling and requesting his future compliance with it. Sir Charles was furious. In his reply, penned the same day, he declined to accept the Home Secretary’s instruction and tendered his resignation. If he had been told that such a rule applied to the police, he declared, he would never have accepted the post of Commissioner in the first place, for it enabled anyone to traduce the force without according him a right of reply. He even went on to question the authority of the Home Secretary under the statutes to issue orders for the police.

The article itself was of little consequence. But Matthews could not tolerate such a flagrant display of independence on the part of the Commissioner and he accepted his resignation with alacrity.

None of this, it is true, sprang directly out of the Ripper affair. But the murderer was casting a long shadow and it would be wrong to exonerate him of all blame in producing the impasse that had developed between the Home Secretary and his Commissioner of Police. The police were under daily attack for their inability to catch the Ripper. And it was partly for this reason that Sir Charles insisted so fiercely on the right to speak out in defence of his men.
There is little doubt, furthermore, that Matthews and Warren could have resolved their difficulty over the 1879 ruling had a reasonable working relationship existed between the two men. Sadly, though, by November 1888 their relationship had become one of mutual distrust. It was an atmosphere of suspicion to which their fencing over the Ripper investigation had contributed no small measure.

Some writers have contended that Warren’s resignation on 8 November left the police leaderless at a critical time and that this was in some way responsible for their delay in breaking into Mary Kelly’s room the following morning. This is not correct. Although the Commissioner tendered his resignation on the 8th he continued to perform his duties for some time after that. His resignation was not officially accepted until 10 November and it was not until 27 November that a successor was appointed. As Matthews told the Commons on the 26th, Warren had ‘not yet been relieved from the responsibility of the office, and, therefore, properly continues to discharge its functions.’
⁵
He was succeeded by James Monro, the ex-head of CID with whom he had quarrelled so bitterly early in the year.

In the meantime detectives relentlessly pursued their inquiries into the winter. Very few serious suspects seem to have come to light.

A typical inquiry began in Mile End on the morning of 17 November. At 10.30 that morning Harriet Rowe, a married woman, was sitting alone in her parlour in Buxton Street when a man, a complete stranger, opened the door and walked in. She asked him what he wanted. But all he did was grin at her. Badly frightened, Mrs Rowe ran to the window to attract help and the man then quickly left the house. When Mrs Rowe followed him outside she found him talking to PC Imhoff 211H and asking directions to Fenchurch Street Post Office. The distraught woman told Imhoff what had happened and he took the stranger into custody.

The man proved to be Nikaner Benelius, a Swedish traveller who lodged in Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch. Brought before Worship Street Magistrates’ Court later in the day, he was charged only with entering a dwelling house for an unlawful purpose and with refusing to give any account of himself. But it is obvious that he was suspected of complicity in the Whitechapel murders. Detective Sergeant Dew told the court that he had been arrested under circumstances which justified ‘the fullest inquiries’ and that he had been previously questioned in connection with the Berner
Street murder. The court remanded him so that an investigation could be made.

Benelius’ behaviour does not seem to have been exactly normal. His landlord, for example, said that he sometimes preached in the streets and acted ‘very strangely’. But there is no reason to believe that he was homicidal. He made no aggressive move against Mrs Rowe and when he was searched at the police station no weapon was found on him. Benelius himself insisted that he only went into Mrs Rowe’s house to ask the way to Fenchurch Street and, since she admitted leaving her street door open, his explanation is likely to have been correct. We do not know the details of the police inquiry. However, Inspector Reid is said to have told the
Star
within two days of Benelius’ arrest that his innocence of any hand in the murders had been fully established.
⁶

The case of the unfortunate Swede illustrates the kind of misunderstanding that could occur when women lived in terror of every shadow. Press reports describe Benelius as a ‘man of decidedly foreign appearance, with a moustache’ so it is also possible that he was partly suspected because of a resemblance to George Hutchinson’s foreigner. If so, he was by no means the only one. In December one Joseph Denny, clad in a long, astrakhan-trimmed coat, was brought in for questioning after being seen accosting women. When subsequent inquiries cleared him, too, he was released from custody.

The story of Mr Galloway, a clerk employed in the City, suggests that some policemen may have been rather too preoccupied with the image of the dark continental.