The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (8 page)

Dear sir

I do wish to give myself up I am in misery with nightmare I am the man who committed all these murders in the last six months my name is so [drawing of coffin] and so I am horse slauterer and work at Name [blacked out] address [blacked out]

I have found the woman I wanted that is chapman and I done what I called slautered her but if any one comes I will surrender but I am not going to walk to the station by myself so I am yours truly [drawing of coffin]

Keep the Boro road clear or I might take a trip up there

Photo

[drawing of knife]

of knife

this is the knife that I done these murders with it is a small handle with a large long blade sharpe both sides

It was seemingly given little consideration and was certainly not made public, but, unbeknownst to the author, it was
to be the first of its kind in a case that would be deluged with such missives on a scale never seen before. Soon after, a second letter was received by the Central News Agency on New Bridge Street, London on 27 September. Written in red ink, it read:

25 Sept 1888

Dear Boss,

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade name

PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha
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The letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police on 29 September with a covering note in the handwriting of Central News journalist Thomas Bulling, which claimed that the agency had treated the thing as ‘a joke’.
¹⁶
What the police initially felt about it is unclear, but in accordance with the author’s wishes, they did indeed keep the letter back until the murderer struck again. And they did not have long to wait.

As Elizabeth Stride served customers in the Poplar coffee shop she ran with her husband, she must have felt that, for once in her life, things were going fine. The establishment offered some security for a woman living far away from her native country and newly married to an Englishman. But it had not always been that way.

She was born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter on 27 November 1843 at a small farm called Stora Tumlehed, in Torslanda parish, north of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her parents, Gustaf Ericsson and Beatta Carlsdotter, had four children, two girls and two boys, of which Elizabeth was the second eldest. Very little of her childhood is known, save for records of her religious instruction between 1848 and 1854, which commented that her biblical knowledge was good. In 1859, she applied to work in Gothenburg and was accepted, her behaviour being deemed ‘good’ and her biblical knowledge ‘extensive’.
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At the age of seventeen, she secured a job as a maid for Lars Frederick Olofsson and his family, staying there until 1864, after which her life began to crumble. In August of that year her mother died, and by the following month Elizabeth had become pregnant. There were complications – she had been diagnosed with a venereal disease (condyloma, or genital warts) and on 21 April 1865 gave birth to a stillborn daughter. Soon after, she was treated for chancre, a highly contagious
ulcer which forms in the early stages of syphilis, but by November, she was given a clean bill of health, appearing in police records as a professional prostitute. Her eventual discharge from the records was helped by her obtaining further employment as a maid, but by 1866 Elizabeth had inherited a respectable sum of money from her mother’s estate, enabling her to go to Britain, and in February 1866 she arrived in London.

She was registered at the Swedish church in Princess Square, St George-in-the-East, in July 1866 and, according to some who knew her later in life, she went into the service of a ‘foreign gentleman’ or a family living near Hyde Park.
²
A life in the West End of London during this period is borne out by her address in 1869, given as 67 Gower Street at the time of her marriage to a carpenter, John Stride, on 7 March at the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields. By the following year they had opened the coffee shop in Upper North Street in Poplar, moving the business a few years later to 178 Poplar High Street, where they remained until 1875. From then on, records show that Elizabeth’s life began to take the same problematical course that she might have thought had been left behind in Sweden.

At the Thames Magistrates Court on 21 March 1877 she is recorded as being sent by the police to the Poplar workhouse for reasons unknown. The Swedish church in London records that Elizabeth sought financial assistance in January 1879 owing ‘to her husband’s illness’.
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By 1881, Elizabeth and John were living in Usher Road, Old Ford, Bow,
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and it is believed that they were at this address when the couple separated. From 28 December until 4 January 1882 Elizabeth was admitted to the Whitechapel workhouse infirmary on Baker’s Row, suffering from bronchitis, where her address was given as Brick Lane. After her discharge, she entered the workhouse on
South Grove for three days – it was after this that she found lodgings at 32 Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields, the doss house which became her favoured residence for much of the remainder of her life. In the meantime, the illness that had seemingly afflicted John Stride resulted in his death from heart disease in 1884 – he was sixty-three years old. We cannot be sure how John’s death affected Elizabeth, but many accounts from those who knew her said that she claimed to have been involved in the
Princess Alice
disaster in 1878, when the paddle-steamer
Princess Alice
was struck by the collier boat
Bywell Castle
at Galleon’s Reach, a terrible incident which resulted in over 600 deaths and which remained the Thames’s worst boating disaster for many decades. Elizabeth claimed that she lost her husband and children in the tragedy, which was blatantly untrue and which has led many to believe that Elizabeth had wilfully created a fantasy to account for her predicament.

A few weeks after John’s funeral, Elizabeth appeared before Thames Magistrates Court on a charge of being drunk and disorderly and soliciting, for which she received seven days’ hard labour.
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In 1885, she began a stormy relationship with Michael Kidney, a waterside labourer seven years her junior, and together they took up lodgings in Devonshire Road, off Commercial Road. The couple separated frequently, and occasionally Elizabeth would absent herself for days at a time – in the three years they were together, Kidney reckoned they had been apart for a total of five months, and that it was abuse of alcohol that caused the separations.
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There were also suggestions of violence on Kidney’s part, for on 6 April 1887 Elizabeth accused him of assault, only for the case to be thrown out when she failed to turn up at the Magistrates Court. In all fairness, there is little to suggest that Kidney was physically
abusive. However their chaotic lives do appear to have been fuelled by alcohol: Kidney himself was sentenced to three days’ hard labour for being drunk and disorderly and using obscene language in July 1888. Elizabeth was also no stranger to the Magistrates Courts during 1887–8, appearing no fewer than seven times for numerous drink and disorder misdemeanours. Financially, things must also have been hard, for she also petitioned twice for monetary assistance from the Swedish church.
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The last time Kidney saw Elizabeth was on Tuesday 25 September 1888 in Commercial Street. She was sober, and the couple parted on good terms, Kidney assuming they would reunite a little later. However, it was not to be.
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Elizabeth returned to 32 Flower and Dean Street, and during the next few days Dr Thomas Barnardo visited the lodging house. The women there complained bitterly of their plight and the threat from the murderer, one exclaiming, ‘We’re all up to no good, and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anyone had helped the likes of us long ago we would never have come to this.’
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Dr Barnardo later confirmed that one of the women assembled was Elizabeth Stride. She was present at the lodging house on Saturday 29 September and that afternoon earned herself sixpence for cleaning two rooms, paid by Elizabeth Tanner, the deputy, who knew Elizabeth as ‘Long Liz’. Subsequently, both spent some time in the Queen’s Head public house at the corner of Commercial Street and Fashion Street before returning to no. 32, where they parted company.
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Fellow lodger Charles Preston saw Elizabeth between 6.00 and 7.00 that evening in the kitchen of the lodging house, where he claimed she was ‘dressed ready to go out’, and she asked him for the loan of a clothes brush. She was
wearing a black jacket trimmed with fur and a coloured silk handkerchief round her neck. He was not told where she was going that evening or what time she would be returning. Catherine Lane was also present, and Elizabeth asked her to look after a piece of velvet while she was away; both Preston and Lane concurred that Elizabeth was sober when she left.
¹¹

Shortly before 11.00 p.m., John Gardner and J. Best
¹²
entered the Bricklayer’s Arms at the corner of Fordham Street and Settles Street. As they did so a man and a woman left the pub, having already been served, and, owing to the heavy rain, the couple stood in the shelter of the doorway. The man was of English appearance and respectably dressed in a black morning suit with a morning coat. He appeared to have no eyelashes but was sporting a thick black moustache. He wore a rather tall black billycock hat and had on a collar. The woman, on the other hand, was poorly dressed, with a flower in her jacket, and the fact that the couple hugged and kissed came as some surprise to Best, judging by their outward differences. The two men offered them a drink and suggested that the man treat his woman companion and when they refused said, ‘That’s Leather Apron getting round you,’ at which point, perhaps tired of the two labourers’ jibing, the couple departed ‘like a shot’.
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They later identified the woman as Elizabeth Stride.

Berner Street was a long but narrow thoroughfare leading from Commercial Road southwards to Ellen Street in the parish of St George-in-the-East. In 1888 Berner Street contained a variety of buildings, most notably a row of houses on the east side, broken by Sander Street and Dutfield’s Yard, which formed a passage between nos. 40 and 42. No. 40 was the International Working Men’s Educational Club, patronized mostly by Jewish workers, a place for socialist political
meetings and with a printing works at the rear, the offices of
Der Arbeter Fraint
(
Worker’s Friend
), a radical Yiddish newspaper. Opposite was a board school, and at no. 46, on the corner with Fairclough Street, was the Nelson beer house. At 11.45 p.m. William Marshall, a resident of no. 64 Berner Street, was standing at the door of his house and observed a couple standing a few doors away on the opposite side of the road. They were kissing, so Marshall could not see the man’s face clearly, but he was able to note other particulars – he was middle-aged and stout, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, respectably dressed in a small black cut-away coat and dark trousers. He was wearing a small peaked cap, ‘something like a sailor would wear’. All in all, he had the appearance of a clerk. The woman was wearing a black jacket and skirt and a black crape bonnet, but Marshall did not notice if there was a flower pinned to her jacket. Just before the couple walked on, the man was heard to say, ‘You will say anything but your prayers.’
¹⁴

Matthew Packer, a greengrocer who served from the front window of his home at 44 Berner Street, told police that he had seen nothing unusual that night and had locked up his shop early as trade was slack owing to the heavy rain that had developed by that time. Unfortunately, Packer was approached again twice about that night and on both occasions changed his story, to the effect that he had seen Elizabeth Stride with a man who bought grapes from his shop. His description appeared to fit others that had already been published, leading Donald Swanson, in his official report of 19 October, to declare:

Packer, who is an elderly man, has unfortunately made different statements so that apart from the fact of the hour at which he saw the woman (and she was seen afterwards by
the P. C. and Schwartz as stated) any statement he made would be rendered almost valueless as evidence.
¹⁵

Dr George Bagster Phillips, who was called upon to perform the post-mortem, noted that there was no trace of grapes – pips, skin or otherwise – in Elizabeth’s stomach, a fact which served to give Matthew Packer even less credibility as a witness. The presence of a grape stalk in Dutfield’s Yard had been widely reported after the event, with some press reports even stating that Elizabeth was found holding some grapes in her hand when she was discovered.
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However, the story was soon refuted as, according to those actually there, there was no such thing.

The officer mentioned in Swanson’s report was PC William Smith, who, at 12.30 a.m. on 30 September, saw a man and a woman (whom he later felt certain was Elizabeth Stride) standing on the pavement a few yards up Berner Street, on the opposite side to Dutfield’s Yard. He described the man as being about twenty-eight years of age, 5 feet 7 inches tall, wearing a dark overcoat and trousers. He also wore a hard felt deerstalker hat and was described as ‘respectable’ looking. The man was also holding a newspaper parcel, about eighteen inches in length and six or eight inches wide. He also noticed that the woman had a flower in her jacket. PC Smith heard no conversation, and as the couple appeared sober and were not acting in a suspicious manner, he continued his beat along Berner Street towards Commercial Road.
¹⁷
Fifteen minutes later, James Brown, a dock labourer on his way to a chandler’s shop, saw a woman with a man in Fairclough Street. The woman had her back to the wall of the board school, facing the man, who had his arm up against it. Brown heard the woman say, ‘No, not tonight, some other night,’ which is what
attracted his attention. There was no trace of an accent in the woman’s voice. Brown said the man was about 5 feet 7 inches tall and stoutly built, wearing a long overcoat which went down almost to his heels. He was wearing a hat, but Brown was unable to describe it. It was quite dark, so he could not tell if the woman was wearing a flower on her jacket, but both appeared sober.
¹⁸

Curiously, the reliability of Brown’s sighting – in terms of timing at least – could be called into question by a remarkable incident that also took place at 12.45 a.m. Israel Schwartz, on his way home to Ellen Street, was passing along the western side of Berner Street, having come from Commercial Road. By the entrance to Dutfield’s Yard he had a most curious and alarming experience. Donald Swanson’s official report takes up Schwartz’s story:

he saw a man stop and speak to a woman, who was standing in the gateway. He tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round and threw her down on the footway and the woman screamed three times, but not very loudly. On crossing to the opposite side of the street, he saw a second man lighting his pipe. The man who threw the woman down called out, apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road, ‘Lipski’, and then Schwartz walked away, but finding that he was followed by the second man, he ran as far as the railway arch, but the man did not follow so far. Schwartz cannot say whether the two men were together or known to each other.

He thus describes the first man, who threw the woman down:– age, about 30; ht, 5 ft 5 in; comp., fair; hair, dark; small brown moustache, full face, broad shouldered; dress, dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak, and nothing in his hands.

Second man: age, 35; ht., 5 ft 11 in; comp., fresh; hair, light brown; dress, dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat, wide brim; had a clay pipe in his hand.
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