Jack The Ripper Page 3

  Driven to make their own investigations due to police reticence in supplying information, the press sought another man. Local prostitutes had told the police about a man who had, for some time, been demanding money with menaces from them.They called him ‘Leather Apron’. Journalists got hold of this information and newspapers, particularly The Star, began to carry descriptions of him and his crimes. He was supposedly a Jewish slipper maker with black hair and moustache, aged about 40, wearing a close-fitting cap and, of course, a leather apron. He usually carried a large knife and frequently threatened his victims with the phrase, ‘I’ll rip you up!’ The reports added to this some pure stage vil­lainy: ‘His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but exces­sively repellent.’ At some point the ‘monster’s’ real name became known. He was John Pizer, a Polish Jewish boot fin­isher. Further gloating press coverage not only helped to convince fearful locals that ‘Leather Apron’ and the Whitechapel murderer were one and the same, but also stirred up considerable anti-Semitic feeling in the area. Police enquiries concerning his whereabouts uncovered some sightings.Timothy Donovan of Crossingham’s Lodging House confirmed that he had seen him there sometime before the murders commenced and had thrown him out for threatening a woman. He was also said to frequent the Princess Alice pub in Commercial Street but now seemed to have vanished. The Police tried to calm the situation, and Inspector Helson’s weekly report to Scotland Yard (7 September) said that they were merely trying to find Pizer in order to establish his whereabouts on the night of Nichols’ murder for ‘at present there is no evidence what­soever against him’.

  The inquest into Nichols’ death opened on 1 September. It was held at the Whitechapel Working Lads’ Institute and headed by Wynne Baxter. With adjournments it ran over four days (reconvened 3 September, 17 September and 23 September). During his summation, Baxter criticised the police for not noticing the mutilation of the body sooner and complained about the lack of proper mortuary facilities in Whitechapel. Despite the police’s best efforts over the pre­vious three weeks, the jury’s verdict was ‘Wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’.The foreman of the jury commented that if a reward had been offered the killer would probably have been caught. He blamed class bias for, if the victim had been rich, a reward would certainly have been offered.

  Nichols was buried on 6 September at the City of London cemetery in Ilford. The mourners included her father, her husband and her eldest son. Police and the undertaker con­spired to keep sightseers away so the cortege could leave Whitechapel unhindered.

  ‘Cool Impudence and Reckless Daring’

  ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’

  T S Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

  Annie Chapman

  One needs look no further than Annie Chapman for a prime example of the misery of those women’s lives who crossed Jack the Ripper’s path. She was known to many of her acquaintances as ‘Dark Annie’ – allegedly because of the dark moods that frequently gripped her. Her life certainly gave her good reason. She was born in 1841 to George Smith, a private in the Lifeguards, and Ruth Chapman. Her brother, Fountain Smith, was born in 1861. She supposedly had a sister, of whom little is known, other than Annie men­tioning that she lived in Vauxhall. In 1869, Annie married John Chapman, a relative of her mother, at All Saints Church in Knightsbridge. They lived together in west London until 1881 when they moved to Windsor. Chapman is often referred to as a veterinary surgeon (this seems to have come from the inquest testimony of Annie’s acquaintance, Amelia Palmer), but he was in fact a domestic head coachman. Reportedly he lost his job due to Annie’s dishonesty, but there is no definite evidence of this.They had three children, a son (crippled) and two daughters (one died in 1882 and the other, Anna Georgina, ran away with a travelling circus).

  Annie left the family before the daughter’s death and returned to London. Here she received an allowance of ten shillings a week from John, but the payment was often spo­radic. It ceased altogether with his death in 1886.

  The press were quick to blame the marital breakdown on Annie’s alcoholism and immorality. However, inquest testi­mony from acquaintances suggests that she was only occa­sionally drunk and that she was only an occasional prostitute. More often she survived through hawking her own crochet work, matches and flowers. Also, John Chapman died of dropsy and cirrhosis of the liver, further suggesting that Annie was not entirely to blame.

  During 1886, Annie lived at 30, Dorset Street with a sievemaker named, or possibly nicknamed, Jack Sievey.Why they separated is uncertain. From May 1888 Annie lived mainly at Crossingham’s Lodging House, 35, Dorset Street where, by all accounts, she got on well with the other lodgers. The only exception was in the last week of August when Annie got into a fight with fellow lodger, Eliza Cooper. Their stories differed wildly, but it was definitely over a man and some money and Annie sustained bruises to her right temple and chest.

  About 5 feet tall, stout, with dark wavy brown hair, blue eyes and a thick nose, Annie survived rather than lived. Dr Bagster Phillips who examined her after her death found that she was undernourished and had chronic diseases of the lungs and brain membranes that would soon have killed her if fate hadn’t intervened. Amelia Palmer, a friend of Annie’s, recalled seeing her on 3 September in Dorset Street where Annie had talked of her ill-health and showed Amelia her bruises. She also discussed the possibility of going hop pick-ing ‘if my sister will send me the boots’. The next day, Amelia saw her again, this time near Spitalfields Church. Annie told her that she felt no better and that she might go to the infirmary for a day or two. Amelia asked her if she had had anything to eat. When Annie told her she hadn’t even had a cup of tea, Amelia gave her tuppence, telling her not to spend it on rum. The last time she saw Annie was on 7 September. They met in Dorset Street at about 5.00pm. Asking her if she was going to Stratford, Annie told Amelia that she wasn’t as she felt ‘too ill to do anything’. Coming back that way some ten minutes later, Amelia found Annie still in the same place.‘It’s no use giving way,’Annie told her, ‘I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.’

  At 7pm Annie was back at Crossingham’s where she asked Donovan if she could sit in the kitchen. She told him that she had been in the infirmary although there is no record of her being admitted to either Whitechapel or Spitalfields Workhouse Infirmary. At about 12.12am, she was still in the kitchen, where William Stevens, a fellow lodger, found her ‘slightly the worse for drink’. He saw her take a box of pills from her pocket. The box broke and Annie transferred the pills to a piece of torn envelope taken from the floor. At this point, Annie left and probably went for a drink (Frederick Stevens, another lodger, recalled having a pint of beer with her at 12.30am). By 1.35am she had returned to Crossingham’s. Donovan claims that he found her drunk and eating a baked potato. A bed was vacant and Donovan asked her for her ‘doss’. When told that she didn’t have it, Donovan responded that she seemed to find money for drink easily enough. Annie wasn’t put out and told him not to let the bed as she would be back for it.

  John Evans, the lodging house’s nightwatchman, saw her leave. As she left, she said: ‘I won’t be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me.’ He watched her walk into Little Paternoster Row in the direction of Brushfield Street. Evans, too, would state that he thought she was the worse for drink but the likelihood is that he, Stevens and Donovan all took her ill-heath for drunkenness. Her post-mortem would reveal that she hadn’t had alcohol for hours. At 5.30am, Elizabeth Darrell (or Durrell) saw a woman whom she identified as Chapman talking with a man outside 29, Hanbury Street. The man had his back to her but she described him as being over forty. Although she did not see his face, Darrell describes him as looking ‘like a foreigner’, wearing a deerstalker hat, possibly a dark coat and being of ‘shabby genteel appearance’.The man asked Chapman,‘Will you?’ Chapman replied, ‘Yes.’

  29, Hanbury Stree
t

  29, Hanbury Street was home to seventeen people at the time of Annie Chapman’s death. Mrs Amelia Richardson, a widow, was listed as the occupant but she rented out over half of the house and lived in the front room of the first floor with her grandson, Thomas. The cellar and backyard were used for her packing-case manufacturing business in which she was assisted by a man named Francis Tyler and her son, John, who lived in Spitalfields and worked as a porter at the market. The house had a front and back door. Both of these were rarely locked and often left open at night. They were joined by a passageway that ran the length of the house. As a result, people were often found dossing there.Although Mrs Richardson wasn’t aware of this, John made it his business to check on the house, usually on days that he was going to market.

  On the morning of 8 September, John Richardson checked the house between 4.40 and 4.45am. He went through the passageway and stood on the steps leading into the backyard. Here he paused to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been chafing his foot. Although he didn’t look around thoroughly, he saw nothing in the yard that was out of the ordinary.

  At some point between 5.15 and 5.30am (three contem­porary sources state three different times) Albert Cadosch (or Cadoche or Cadosh) of 27, Hanbury Street (next door) went into his yard. From behind the fence separating the two houses he heard a conversation between some people in 29’s backyard. The only word he caught was a woman saying, ‘No’. He did not investigate. Nor was his curiosity piqued when, three minutes later (either 5.18, 5.28 or 5.33) he returned to the yard and heard something fall heav­ily against the other side of the fence dividing the two prop­erties.

  At about 6.00am (on this, most sources seem fairly clear), John Davis, one of 29’s many tenants, entered the backyard. It was there that he found the body of Annie Chapman. She was lying on her back, her dress pulled up over her knees and her intestines were placed over her right shoulder. After summoning two men from a nearby packing-case manufacturers, Davis went to fetch the police. Soon the rest of the house was awake, just in time for the police to arrive and secure the building.

  At 6.30am, H Division surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips arrived. According to his on-the-spot examination, Chapman had been dead for two to three hours. Phillips subsequently shortened this period because it was, ‘a fairly cool morning and... the body would be more apt to cool rapidly from its having lost a great quantity of blood’. He also noted that the face and tongue were ‘very much swollen’, suggesting that Chapman had been strangled before being mutilated. Blood smeared on the fence corre­sponded with where the victim lay, confirming that she had been murdered there.

  Phillips’ post-mortem notes that Chapman’s throat had been severed by a jagged incision.A flap of the stomach wall, the small intestines and attachments had been removed and placed over the right shoulder but remained attached to her body. Two other pieces of stomach wall and sections of her pubic area were placed over the left shoulder. Other parts were missing altogether: a further part of the stomach wall including the navel; the womb; the upper part of the vagina; and most of the bladder. Abrasions on the ring finger sug­gested that a ring, or rings, had been forcibly removed. Phillips expressed the opinion that, from the removal of vis­cera, the murderer possessed anatomical knowledge. He believed the knife used was narrow, thin and sharp, with a blade six to eight inches long,‘not an ordinary knife but such as a small amputating knife, or a well-ground slaughterman’s knife’. Phillips said he didn’t think he could have produced all of Chapman’s injuries in under fifteen minutes.

  There was friction between Phillips and Wynne Baxter at the inquest. Phillips at first refused to describe the mutila­tions in great detail because he felt that they would only be ‘painful to the feelings of the jury and the public’. On 14 September, Baxter allowed this, but Phillips was recalled five days later when Baxter, after clearing the inquest of all women and boys, insisted that he provided the full details. Phillips did so.

  After Chapman’s body had been moved, a piece of coarse muslin and a small pocket haircomb case, probably along with two polished farthings were found, seemingly piled up deliberately. A popular con trick was to shine up farthings so that they would pass as shillings in a dim light, but whether Chapman had been going to try this or had had it tried on her remains unknown. Near where her head had been was a portion of an envelope and a piece of paper containing two pills. The back of the envelope bore the Sussex Regiment’s seal. On the other side was the letter ‘M’ in a ‘man’s’ hand­writing and the letters ‘Sp’ (possibly the start of ‘Spitalfields’). Postmarked ‘London 23 Aug., 1888’, some sources quote it as ‘London, 28 Aug., 1888’. The envelope came under considerable police scrutiny, and enquiries were made at the Sussex Regiment at Farnborough. However, there was no success in tracing a soldier known to be writ­ing to anyone in Spitalfields. Inspector Chandler would later note, after hearing the statement of William Stevens, that the envelope was most likely the one that Annie Chapman took from the kitchen floor at Crossingham’s and therefore not worth pursuing as a possible clue.

  Rumours of items deliberately ‘arranged’ at the other vic­tims’ feet have become part of the mythology of Jack the Ripper. But it only happened with Chapman and the items were the contents of her pocket, which had been cut open. The farthings were noted in the newspaper reports of the murder but not mentioned later in the police reports or newspaper reports of the coroner’s inquest. Later claims that Chapman’s rings were also in the pile are false. In fact, the police spent considerable time checking ‘all pawnbro­kers, jewellers, dealers’ to find the rings that were missing from Chapman’s fingers. There were no others found. A search of the backyard revealed some items which were found to belong to Mrs Richardson. More ominously, the police found a sodden leather apron near a tap at the end of the yard.This clue also led nowhere as Mrs Richardson con­firmed that it was her son’s and had been there since the pre­vious Thursday, when she had washed it.

  Like Nichols, Chapman’s body was taken to the grimy shed that was Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary Mortuary for post-mortem. On 9 September, her body was formally identified by both Timothy Donovan and her brother Fountain Smith. On 14 September, she was buried at Manor Park cemetery in a small ceremony attended by family members.

  Two days after Chapman’s death, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel, Samuel Montagu, personally offered £100 reward for information leading to the murderer’s arrest. An advocate of many charities for the poor and particularly immigrant Jews in the East End, he also supported the local Vigilance Committees, forwarding some of their petitions and requests to the Home Office. That same day the Mile End Vigilance Committee was founded by a group of con­cerned ratepayers. Meeting at The Crown pub in Mile End Road, they elected George Lusk their president, announcing to the press that members would be present in the Crown every morning to hear any information or suggestions that the public had to offer. Lusk later came to fear his new­found publicity.

  The inquest into Annie Chapman’s death opened on 12 September at the Whitechapel Working Lads’ Institute. Presided over by Wynne Baxter, it lasted for five days (reconvened 13, 14, 19 and 26 September), a length which drew criticism. A letter to The Times on 19 September, sug­gested it was time the inquest closed and the usual verdict be given. The amount of information being supplied, the writer remarked, would surely be better used by the police than the press.

  When the inquest closed, Baxter’s summation included his own theory for the murderer’s motive. He told the jury that he’d heard from the ‘sub-curator of the Pathological Museum’ at one of ‘our great medical schools’ information that might have a bearing on the inquiry. Months previously an American approached the sub-curator and asked him to procure uteri for which he would pay £20 each. The American’s reasons for this request were even more bizarre. He claimed to be producing a publication and wished to supply a preserved uterus with each copy. Baxter stated that another medical institution had received a simil
ar request, and suggested that the murderer might be engaged in sup­plying these organs. This raised the spectres of Burke and Hare, and Baxter suggested that the police should focus their enquiries among those with the necessary anatomical expertise.

  Meanwhile, the police investigations were exceptionally thorough. Swanson’s report details that they pursued several lines of inquiry. Occupants of 29, Hanbury Street were interviewed and their rooms searched. Statements were taken from adjoining houses. All common lodging houses in the area were checked to see whether anyone acting suspi­ciously had entered that morning. Chapman’s history was investigated, anyone who knew her interviewed and their movements at the times of Tabram’s, Nichols’ and Chapman’s death checked. Details were circulated and attempts made to trace anyone who’d been reported as a possible suspect. Enquiries were made at public houses in the area and local prostitutes were interviewed. ‘The com­bined result of these enquiries,’ Swanson notes in his report to the Home Office on 19 October, ‘did not supply the police with the slightest clue to the murderer.’ However there were, as we shall see, no shortage of suspects.

  Interlude

  ‘No Englishman could have perpetrated such a horri­ble crime...’ Mob member, quoted in East London Observer, 9 September 1888

  Immediately following Annie Chapman’s murder, the streets of Whitechapel seemed to reflect the fear and anger felt by its inhabitants. At night, the area was virtually deserted and many prostitutes were believed to have fled to safer districts. Those who were out after dark were most often plain-clothed policemen, some of whom were disguised as women in an effort to flush out the killer. Enraged mobs also roamed the streets, often taking justice into their own hands. Walter Dew, a Detective Constable at the time, related how a violent criminal named ‘Squibby’ came close to being lynched. He’d thrown a brick at a policeman and, when the police gave chase, they found themselves joined by an angry crowd who believed that the police were chasing the murderer.