Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (15 page)

That the murderer of that night’s two victims were one and the same was confirmed by a forensic comparison of the manner in which the women were killed; they were both lying down when they were attacked, both their throats had been cut from left to right, the left carotid artery of each was deeply severed, while those on the right were barely scratched.

The two murders left the police perplexed and they could not understand how they could have been committed in such a short period of time. It took the murderer less than an hour to get from the scene of the first of that night’s murders and to reach and leave the scene of the second murder. This included the time it would have taken to get from Berner Street, meet the victim somewhere, accompany her into Mitre Square, persuade her to lie down, murder her, mutilate her face, surgically remove two organs from her body – all this in complete silence – and then escape. No-one working or living in the square saw or heard a thing, even though the only residents were those who lived at number 3 Mitre Square: ironically they were the family of P.C. Pearce, a serving city police officer.

P.C. Watkins last passed through the square on his beat at 1.30 a.m., when he saw nothing suspicious. P.C. James Harvey, who would be dismissed from the force within a year for reasons that are unknown, looked into the square from Church Passage at 1.41 or 1.42 and he too stated that he saw nothing unusual (but might he have seen a woman perhaps, thought nothing of it and failed to mention his sighting?). No more than two or perhaps three minutes after Harvey had left, P.C. Watkins returned to the square at 1.44 a.m. when he found the body. Once again, it was almost impossible that such a thing could have happened, but once again, it had.

Still, the night was not yet over.

At 2.55 a.m., P.C. Alfred Long, who had been searching the streets and alleyways to the east of Middlesex Street, made a strange discovery. A rectangular piece of dirty white material was lying on the ground in a doorway. It was the entrance to a tenement building that was occupied exclusively by Jews: the Wentworth model apartments in Goulston Street.

When P.C. Long picked up the material, he found it wet with blood. As he cast his eyes about to see where it might have come from, he spotted something peculiar. Immediately above the spot where he had found the soiled material, a message was written in white chalk letters, each about 1about 1½ inches high inches high, on the black-edged bricks surrounding the doorway:

Detective Constable Halse, who had searched the area half an hour earlier, was certain that neither the writing nor the soiled material had been in the doorway at that time. Therefore, the police concluded, both the writing and the bloodied cloth had been left there since 2.25 a.m. approximately.

The view the police took was that the blood-soaked cloth was the missing part of the apron taken from Catherine Eddowes, and the murderer had used it to carry away his grisly trophies, the uterus and the left kidney. He had then chalked up the writing on the door surround, and deposited the severed part of the apron on the ground beneath, to draw attention to the writing.

That it was the missing part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron was proved beyond doubt when it was taken to the mortuary. When the two parts of the apron were brought together, the remains of the apron taken from the victim and the soiled piece of apron found in the doorway of the apartments, they fitted perfectly.

Once again, the police were baffled. Dr Sequeira thought that the Mitre Square victim, whose apron it was, had met her death at around 1.40 a.m. The writing on the wall and the part apron were discovered at 2.55 a.m., more than an hour later. Since Goulston Street is just three streets away, and no more than a five-minute walk, what the murderer had been doing in all that time, if indeed it was the murderer who had chalked up the writing and deposited the apron part where it was found, was a bizarre mystery.

As for the message, P.C. Long had had the good sense to record in his notebook what he had seen, and he swore that he had copied it down exactly. This was just as well, because the view taken by Sir Charles Warren, the Chief Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, was that it appeared to incriminate Jews in the murders, so, in order to avoid bloody reprisals, he had ordered the writing to be erased.

Stephen Knight’s imaginative assertion was that the words were a message pointing directly to the three assassins in an attempt to incriminate
them
– Sickert, Netley and Sir William Gull, who were pursuing their murderous campaign.

It was the word
Juwes
, Knight claimed, which galvanised Warren, a leading Freemason, into action, because he recognised the word as Masonic, realised that it implicated Freemasons in the murders, and ordered the writing to be removed in order to cover up a fellow Mason’s crime. At 5.30 a.m. a little more than two and a half hours after the message had been discovered, it was
obliterated
by a police inspector with a damp sponge.

Knight’s colourful explanation was that ‘Juwes’ was the collective noun for three apprentice Masons of biblical times, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, who had murdered the Grand Master, Hiram Abiff, for refusing to divulge his secrets to them.

According to Masonic legend, Hiram Abiff was the son of a widow, and the chief architect of King Solomon’s Temple, built on Mount Zion in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant. Hiram Abiff alone bore the responsibility for the building of the great temple, and was one of only three people who knew the secrets of a Master Mason, the other two being King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre. Knowing the secrets of a Master Mason would enable other, lesser masons, to take on work enabling them to earn the much higher wages of a Master Mason.

The three apprentice masons, ruffians, had cornered the Grand Master in the temple, intent upon extracting his secrets from him, but he neither could, nor would, reveal his secrets to them without the consent of the other two, King Solomon and the King of Tyre. Each of the ruffians had then struck him a single blow, giving him the opportunity each time to reveal what he knew. He refused, telling them that he was prepared to give up his life, but never his integrity. It had been the third and final blow which had laid him lifeless to the ground.

It was an interesting explanation, and might have provided a valid reason why Sir Charles Warren, who was indeed a
high-ranking
Freemason, had acted as he did, except that the word Juwes was the pure invention of Stephen Knight, and is quite unknown in Freemasonry.

After a fifteen-day search ordered by King Solomon, the
assassins
were caught and subsequently put to death for their crime. The murder of Hiram Abiff, and discovery of his body, is central to Masonic beliefs and the basis of a Masonic ceremony that is still
reenacted
to this day.

Before his capture, Jubelo was heard to say: “O that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder, carried into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and there to become a prey to the wild beasts of the field and vultures of the air, ere I had conspired the death of so good a man as our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff!” It is the
left
shoulder, therefore, which holds significance for Freemasons, and not the right.

In Stephen Knight’s efforts to make Annie Chapman’s murder appear to be a Masonic ritual killing, he explained that her vitals were thrown over her right shoulder by ‘mistake’. Even if this were so, it is hard to believe that the very same error would have been repeated a second time. The report of Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, who attended upon Catherine Eddowes, the Mitre Square victim, stated that “…the intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared over with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design.”

If you wish to propose a certain hypothesis, all the pieces must fit together. You cannot just pick and choose those that suit your theory while rejecting others that do not. That such a fundamental error might have been committed once was bad enough, but twice was unforgivable. They were two loose ends that most definitely did not tie up, and were glaring deficiencies in Knight’s case.

That it was Lizzie Williams who took Eddowes’s uterus and left kidney, wrapped in the severed piece of apron, is certain. That she remained in Whitechapel for more than an hour before writing the incomprehensible message on the door surround and depositing the blood-soiled part of the apron on the ground immediately beneath it, is not.

The meaning of the chalk message and the discovery of the part apron baffled the best brains of Scotland Yard and have continued to bemuse scientists and scholars ever since. My father and I were puzzled too, as we tried, unsuccessfully, to unravel the mystery and establish if the two discoveries somehow incriminated Lizzie Williams. It was not until we remembered that every good murder mystery has its red herring – the false clue that throws one off track – that we realised that the world’s greatest murder mystery, Jack the Ripper, would likely be no exception. This, we thought, was it.

The statement ‘The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing’ is pretty meaningless, except that, on the face of it at least, and taken together with the soiled apron part, it appears to implicate Jews in the murders. Since it was the missing part of the apron and not the chalk writing which drew the attention of P.C. Long, it is quite possible that the writing had already been chalked up for some time
before
the apron part was deposited where it was later found, and not at the same time, as is commonly believed.

We thought that the true explanation is both straightforward and has little to do with the murders – or with Lizzie Williams. We considered that it was unlikely that someone who had been so meticulously careful as to escape, both unseen and unheard, from the scene of every murder, would delay their getaway by more than an hour to chalk up a message that no one, to this day, has been able to make sense of. A more likely explanation was that someone had dealt with a Jew who lived in the apartments, and felt aggrieved that he had somehow been tricked or cheated out of his money. It may have been someone who used chalk in the everyday course of his business – perhaps a butcher or fishmonger, to mark up the day’s prices – and as he walked past the apartments, he seized his opportunity to scribble an insult as best he could. A Jew who lived in the apartments had seen the writing as he left his home during the early hours, and made a mental note to rub it off if he could find a piece of suitable material. Some time later as he (or she?) returned home, he found the folded piece of apron that the murderer had discarded. As he opened the apron part to rub off the writing, he discovered that it was covered with blood on the inside and dropped it in shock and disgust. It fell to the ground in the doorway, where it lay until it was found by P.C. Long. Whoever had brought the part apron back to the apartments might not wish to become involved in a murder investigation. It could all have been as simple as that.

Elizabeth Stride, the Berner Street victim, died from excessive blood loss when her throat was cut. While the witness Israel Schwartz observed a man attacking her and was able to provide the police with a good description of this man, he could not say if he was in possession of a knife. If Stride’s attacker, the man wearing the peaked cap, had
not
cut the woman’s throat, but had left the scene immediately after Schwartz had seen him and run off, which would make sense, it would have allowed Lizzie Williams a window of opportunity of almost fifteen minutes before Louis Diemschutz arrived with his pony and cart. It would have taken no longer than a few seconds for the murderer to cut Stride’s throat, Dr Blackwell thought; so it was entirely possible for Lizzie Williams to commit the murder, and make her getaway, well before Diemschutz arrived.

Steven Knight’s version of events was that Stride was too drunk to enter the carriage, where Gull intended to kill her, and he was accompanied by, of all people, Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – a fellow Freemason. John Netley and Anderson followed Stride to Berner Street on foot, while Gull remained in the carriage, concealed somewhere south of Commercial Road. As they reached the gates to Dutfield’s Yard, Netley attacked Stride while Anderson kept watch; so, according to Knight, Anderson was the man Schwartz had seen leaning on the lamppost, calmly lighting a clay pipe.

It did not seem feasible to us that Sir Robert Anderson, a
well-known
and instantly recognisable public figure, would be likely to involve himself in such a conspiracy, however well disguised. And to light a pipe with all the nonchalance of someone watching falling autumn leaves was equally implausible. Knight’s explanation just did not wash.

Who the man with the pipe was is open to conjecture. He was never traced by the police; neither did he come forward to offer an explanation for his presence opposite the gates to Dutfield’s Yard. He could have been an accomplice of Stride’s attacker; equally, he might have been an innocent bystander, and using the knife to clean the bowl of his pipe. He may have left the club, by the Dutfield’s Yard entrance, for a breath of fresh air, as did Joseph Lave, an American photographer and printer who was lodging temporarily at the club. At 12.30, Lave went out through the yard and into the street where he saw no one. He said: “The district appeared to me to be quiet … no one came into the yard. I should have seen anybody moving about there.” Lave went back into the club ten minutes later. Or the mystery man may have been waiting for someone, perhaps even a prostitute, which would explain his reluctance to involve himself in the investigation that swiftly followed the discovery of Elizabeth Stride’s body. Since Schwartz did not even know he was being followed until he turned round, it seems feasible that the man with the pipe was running away for the same reason as Schwartz: a desire not to become involved in the fracas. In this event, although it is far from certain, there would have been two witnesses who could give a description of Stride’s attacker to the police, making it unlikely that he would be prepared to run the even greater risk involved of murdering Stride – leaving her free to be killed by someone else: Lizzie Williams.