NE W Discover the chilling story behind history’s greatest unsolved mystery
150 pages of
seventh edition
Digital Edition
documents & evidence
THE VICTIMS
THE THEORIES
The Scenes
THE SUSPECTS
Jack the Ripper
CONTENTS 008 London’s deadly streets 022 A gruesome attack 028 The first victim 040 A killer’s pattern emerges 056 Sinister events in Spitalfields 068 Frustration & sensation 076 The killing continues 090 The double murder 108 Violence comes to a head 122 Fear of the Ripper remains 134 Th e search for Jack the Ripper 144 The Macnaghten Memorandum: prime suspects 146 Macnaughten’s first suspect 148 The Whitechapel monster 150 A petty thief 152 A perfect gentleman 154 Discovering Jack’s diary 156 Linking DNA to letters
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Introduction
O
ne Wednesday in April 1905 a group of gentlemen gathered to take a tour of the East End, specifically the sites where 17 years earlier several women had been murdered by an unknown killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper. The most famous member of the group was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Their guide was Dr Frederick Gordon Browne, who had actually examined the corpse of one of the victims within an hour of the murder. They visited the famous Petticoat Lane, toured a doss house, a Jewish fowl-slaughtering house and, of course, the places where Jack the Ripper set to work. It was a ghoulish adventure, not only because they were visiting the places where gory murders had been committed, but because they were gazing upon the East Enders as if they were in a zoo. One of the most memorable and often repeated stories about the East End is that told by the American author Jack London in the first chapter of his book People of the Abyss (1903). It was the summer of 1902, just three years before Doyle and his friends walked the East End pavements you can still tread today, and Jack London decided to find out what life was really like in the East End. He famously claims to have visited the offices of Thomas Cook in Ludgate Circus, where, to his amazement, he discovered that the company which boasted that it could organize a trip to “Darkest Africa or innermost Tibet” could not send him into the East End of London. The East End was a distant land, an alien planet, a world apart. Over 120 years later, it is visited by more than one million people every year. Now gentrified and arty, an extension of London’s commercial heartland, in the pages of this book you can travel back in time and see the scenes of the crimes. For those wishing to carry out their own “crime scene investigation” (and there appear to be many) such information is crucial, for only with a good understanding of the local geography can we plot the routes victims took in the last hours of their lives, assess the position of witnesses and the police beats and get a detailed understanding of the crime.
We have attempted to bring together as much of this information as possible in order to build a picture of what happened on those dreadful nights, helped by wonderfully evocative – and accurate – artist’s reconstructions. These illustrations give the viewer a chance to see Jack the Ripper’s London in a way they would never be able to, essentially bringing the streets of Jack the Ripper’s London back to life. Maps show what happened on the nights in question and the positions of many places of importance can be seen in context, building up a complete picture of the events surrounding each murder. We have also chosen to include all of those considered to be “Whitechapel Murders”, from Emma Smith in April 1888 to Frances Coles in February 1891. Whether the miscreant popularly called “Jack the Ripper” is responsible for all of these crimes is the subject of continuous debate, for in the massive scope of Ripper research, the exact nature of the authorship of these murders has been pulled apart many times. By presenting this overall picture, it is felt that the reader may best be served by deciding for themselves. Paul Begg and John Bennett, 2012
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Jack the Ripper
A gruesome attack N othing much for certain is known
about Emma Elizabeth Smith; she was apparently 45 years old, 1.57 m (5 ft 2 in) tall, and had light brown hair. She was almost certainly an alcoholic and could be nasty and belligerent when drunk, often sporting bruises or a black eye gained in drink-fuelled brawls. Those who knew her believed that she had been married to a soldier and that she had had two children, but how and why her life had taken a wrong turn was a mystery. Walter Dew, who would become famous as the policeman who pursued the fleeing murderer Dr Crippen across the Atlantic in 1910, was a young policeman in Whitechapel at the time of her murder and he wrote about her in his memoirs, providing information unrecorded elsewhere, perhaps suggesting that he was directly involved in the investigation. He wrote: Her past was a closed book even to her most intimate friends. All that she had ever told anyone about herself was that she was a widow who more than ten years before had left her husband and broken away from all her early associations... There was something about Emma Smith which suggested that there had been a time when the comforts of life had not been denied her. There was a touch of culture in her speech unusual in her class. The dirty streets along which Emma Smith laboured had once been open fields and it is known that in the 1600s a Captain Conisby owned a large area of land there, including a field in which he had 17 long tenters (a framework on which material is stretched taut for drying), a place for spinning, a nursery and two gardens planted with a variety of fruit bushes. Eventually the land was acquired by two brothers, Thomas and Lewis Fossan, whose
Briefing Emma Elizabeth Smith struggled to reach her lodgings in George Street, which ran between the notorious Flower and Dean Street and Wentworth Street in the heart of one of the worst slum districts in London. She lived at No.18, one of several common lodging houses in a row of dilapidated three-story buildings. It was the early hours of Tuesday, 3 April 1888, and bitterly cold. Emma was in considerable pain, for only a few hours earlier, a mere 275 m (300 yards) from her lodgings, she had been attacked and so brutally assaulted that she would die from the injuries she sustained.
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A gruesome attack
ABOVE: Walter Dew in his youth. As a young police officer at the time of the Whitechapel murders, he was party to the events of that autumn and had much to say on the subject in his memoirs, published in 1938.
“The dirty streets along which Emma Smith laboured had once been open fields� 23
Jack the Ripper
Sinister events in spitalfields H anbury street, where Annie Chapman
was murdered, been known previously as Lolesworth Lane. That’s what it was called in about 1648 when a document of that time described it as “newly named or known”, but it soon became known as Brown’s Lane after a prominent resident named William Brown who owned three houses, a yard, two sheds, a cowhouse, a garden and an orchard there. He also rented a large open field which he probably used for pasture and which was known as Lolesworth Field. It, too, had an alternative name, Spital Field, because it had once adjoined a hospital. It would give its name to the whole area and was where Spitalfields Market would be built. By 1677 the whole north side of Brown’s was built up, as is shown on the map created by John Ogilby and William Morgan which dates from that time. Development of the south side followed and it was around 1740 that a carpenter named Daniel Marsillat leased some land from the owner Granville Wheler and built an uninspiring three-storey house with a roof garret used for silk weaving. Sometime in the mid-1800s the street would be renamed Hanbury Street and the house given the number 29. In 1888, above the single front door there was a notice which, in straggling white letters, read “Mrs A. Richardson, packing-case maker”. The door opened into a hallway; on the left there was a staircase leading up and on the right a passage about 7.5 m (25 ft) long and 1 m (3 ft) wide ran the length of the house to a rear door. The floorboards were bare and creaked as you walked along them. The rear door had no lock on it and opened into a yard. Two stone steps led down into the yard, which was around four metres
LEFT: John and Annie Chapman, photographed circa 1869, the year of their wedding. This remains the only published image of any of the Whitechapel murder victims when alive.
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Sinister events in Spitalfields
LEFT: Hanbury Street looking west towards Commercial Street. The turning on the right is John Street, home of John Richardson.
Briefing The next murder by the “Whitechapel fiend� was a turning point in the case. Although the circumstances of the victim were similar to those that had gone before, the scene and timing of the crime demonstrated an increased daring and the injuries inflicted on the poor woman were of unprecedented violence. The East End reeled from these events and with the idea that a maniac was on the loose now well and truly accepted by both the public and the authorities alike, panic and fear replaced the existing apprehension. The press, both domestic and international, responded accordingly, reporting and commenting in a way that fed that fear.
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Jack the Ripper
Frustration & Sensation
S
ome newspapers, such as The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News followed the long-standing tradition of the broadsheet, offering readers lengthy and supposedly reliable news articles crammed into large pages of tightly columned text. Some, such as the Illustrated London News and the Penny Illustrated Paper, had taken advantage of the new printing revolution and offered their readership handsome engravings depicting more grandiose and often sensational events for their delectation. Other newspapers, however, chose to dispense with the sober reporting championed by the broadsheet mainstays and used their circulation and influence to further sociological and often political causes. By the autumn of 1888, two papers in particular had become the firebrands of what would soon be called “the new journalism”. Founded in 1865, the Pall Mall Gazette began as a paper for the higher echelons of society, written by members of their own class. By the time of William Thomas Stead’s editorship (1883–1889), the paper had metamorphosed into a radical, free-thinking journal. Stead was not afraid to get his hands dirty to expose a wrong or champion a cause and in 1885 he self-penned a series of hardhitting articles. Among them was “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, which exposed the scandalous trade of “buying” children for the purposes of prostitution. In order to demonstrate the truth of his revelations, he arranged the “purchase” of Eliza Armstrong, the 13-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep. Stead’s willingness to put himself in jeopardy to prove his point landed him in deep water and he was given a three-month prison sentence. The irony was that he was convicted on technical grounds – he had failed to first secure permission for the “purchase” from the girl’s father. The result of Stead’s
campaign resulted in the age of consent for girls being raised from 12 to 16 that same year. Despite Stead’s punishment, it was an outcome of which he was particularly proud and he was known to wear his prison uniform on the anniversary of his incarceration. Perhaps his most noted claim to fame, however, is that he sailed across the Atlantic aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic in April 1912, becoming one of the many who perished on that fateful voyage. The Star, an evening newspaper founded in 1788 by John Murray, was the newspaper which garnered considerable notoriety and popularity above all others on the back of the Whitechapel Murders. In 1888, its newly appointed editor was Thomas Power “T P” O’Connor, considered today as a leading light of the “new journalism” and who described his journal’s style of reporting as one which was intended to “hit the reader right between the eyes”. The murders of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram had, relatively speaking, scant newspaper coverage outside of the local East London press, though the area was served by no less than six different newspapers at that time and many were moved to comment on the growing feeling of outrage and unease created by these unique crimes. The murder of Mary Ann Nichols took the reporting to another level, with the Illustrated Police News devoting a full-page front-cover illustration to the discovery of her body in Buck’s Row by PC Neil. The national press was now also quick to devote increasing column inches to the events surrounding this most ferocious homicide – the Nichols inquest was reported in detail across the spectrum of newspapers. While the traditional broadsheets attempted to keep to the reporting and express opinion only in the voices of those who wrote to the papers themselves, the Pall Mall Gazette and,
Briefing For the avid reader in late-Victorian Britain, there appeared to be no end of newspapers, journals and gazettes through which literate citizens could furnish themselves with the daily or weekly events of the time. The reduction and eventual abolition of newspaper tax in 1855, bolstered by steady improvement in printing methods, meant that a vast number of publications graced the news-stands. They catered to every requirement, and, helped by an increase in literacy levels following the introduction of compulsory education, were assured of a growing readership.
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Jack the Ripper
Church Street
55 Flower and Dean Street
Bishopsgate Police Station
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WHITECHAPEL
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Eddowes and Kelly part in Houndsditch H ou nd sd it ch
name of “Jane Kelly”, giving her address as 6 Dorset Street. Kelly bought some food and a little tea and sugar and after they had breakfasted Catherine said she would try to borrow some money from her daughter in Bermondsey. Catherine parted from Kelly at 2:00 p.m. in Houndsditch and promised to be back in a couple of hours. According to Kelly, he warned her about the Whitechapel Murderer, but she’d said “Don’t you fear for me. I’ll take care of myself, and I shan’t fall into his hands.” Wherever Catherine went that Saturday afternoon, it almost certainly wasn’t to see her daughter in Bermondsey. Catherine was wearing a chintz skirt buttoned at the waist, over which she wore an apron and
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a brown linsey bodice (linsey was a coarse twill or plain woven fabric woven with a linen warp and a woollen weft) with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front. She also wore a black jacket edged with imitation fur around the collar and cuffs, the pockets trimmed with black silk braid and imitation fur. She had a piece of red silk gauze around her neck as a scarf and on her head she wore a black straw bonnet, trimmed with green and black velvet and black beads, and tied with strings under the chin. On her feet, incongruously, she was wearing a pair of men’s lace-up boots. Apart from the fact that she got hold of enough money to buy (or found someone willing to treat her to) enough alcohol to get
CITY BOUNDARY
ABOVE: Map of the area relating to the Eddowes murder, showing key sites. Murder Site Key Location
The double murder
ABOVE: Mitre Square during the mid-1960s, as seen from the entrance from Church Passage (today’s St James’s Passage).
falling-down drunk, we do not know how Catherine spent the afternoon and early evening, but by 8:30 p.m. she was incapable and locked in the cells of Bishopsgate Police Station to sober up, to be released at 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. She was seen turning towards Houndsditch, a main road connecting Bishopgate and Aldgate. Running almost parallel with Houndsditch was Duke Street, from which a narrow passage led into a gloomy square overshadowed by warehouses. It was called Mitre Square. In about 1108 Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I, founded a priory of Austin canons in Aldgate and in due course two of her children were buried there. It became a great centre of learning, but in February 1532 it was dissolved and sold or given to favoured merchants and courtiers. Nothing of the priory survives today except some pointed arches inside an office building, but a street called Mitre Street follows the line of the nave of the priory church and the former cloister was where Mitre Square is today, with an entrance to the square being in Mitre Street. By the mid-1670s, the area had become known as Duke’s Place and was also the site of St James’s Church. It soon became commercial and by the time the church was demolished in the 1870s, tall warehouses had begun to take over the sides of the square, which earned its present name some time before 1830. Mitre Square measured about 23 x 24 m (77 x 80 ft) and had three entrances, including
Cooney’s Lodging House on each A five-storey building with a single room er Flow of side north the on was ey’s floor, Coon junction, Lane Brick the to close t, Stree Dean and ng and it was one of the largest common lodgi ng lodgi ered regist a e becam It houses in the area. d owne was it when 1871, ber house in Octo ey by a man named Jimmy Smith. John Coon took and beth, married Smith ’s daughter, Eliza rship over the house in May 1884, retaining owne to him d force ment velop re-de when until 1891 ey relinquish it and it was demolished. Coon in the acquired a large number of other houses ury Hanb in pub Loaf Sugar area, as well as the the n, cousi his by ented frequ was h Street (whic ), renowned music-hall performer Marie Lloyd . man hy and he became a very wealt ters In his book, East End Underworld: Chap ur Arth ), (1981 ing Hard ur Arth of in the Life
who Harding, a villain and a violent criminal el echap was a child at the time of the Whit n his murders, recalled that Jimmy Smith begu poor the to coal d price overg sellin business by poor ling swind of “out rich g gettin – le peop e “the people out of small sums” – but he becam who man “the and ” Lane governor about Brick maker book a was He e”. polic the up straightened y while mone him paid ies book local the all and ables he in turn paid off the local police – const ctors inspe and ants serge got a shilling a day and such s bonu a tmas Chris at and , received more is not as a crate of whisky. Harding’s account laint comp a had altogether trustworthy since he he what se expo to ed want against the police and so we but , ption corru venal pread saw as wides rtant rarely hear the criminal voice that it is impo to note his opinion.
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Jack the Ripper
The Search for Jack the Ripper
T
oday, we can call on all the technology, science, psychology and experience acquired over the intervening 12 decades, and we should not judge the methods of those Victorian law-enforcers by our own standards. The men on the beat, armed with little more than handcuffs, a sturdy truncheon and a notebook, could only use nature’s senses and a sound, calm reasoning to do their job. There was no airborne surveillance, CCTV cameras on every street corner, DNA testing, computer databases or two-way radio. Even fingerprinting, a technique which may well have offered interesting leads in the case, was several years away from being accepted as a crime-fighting tool. Those superiors at the top of the police hierarchy, far from being career policemen with years of experience behind them, were often men brought in from other walks of life on the strength of their man-management backgrounds, usually from the military, legal profession or high-level posts in the British colonies. It was all so different and, by today’s standards, unsophisticated to the point of being alarmingly naive. Criticism of the police investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders has always been a major theme in the overall story. Despite many authors’ attempts to vindicate the investigation on the basis of what was available at the time, often producing wellresearched and authoritative studies of the men and their methods, the hackneyed opinion that police incompetence resulted in a killer getting away still raises its head with tiresome regularity. As can be seen from earlier chapters, this was not an opinion developed with hindsight. Even as the Whitechapel Murders were in full swing, the press in particular flexed their muscles in their condemnation of the authorities. With solutions seemingly out of reach for much of the time, many outside the ranks of the police felt it was their job to advise, instruct and offer
Briefing In all likelihood, we may never know for certain the true identity of Jack the Ripper, not, at least, to everybody’s satisfaction. As we know, in the years 1888-1891 the police investigation struggled against a wall of misinformation, blind alleys, red herrings and, perhaps more significantly, the apparent luck of an assassin who has since become the world’s most infamous murderer. The uniqueness of these crimes took the investigating authorities and the civilians they served by surprise, for there was little or no precedent. The limitations of the investigative techniques available to the London police at that time made the task of finding the Ripper a lot harder than it would had those murders taken place in the twenty-first century.
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The search for Jack the Ripper
9000
BELOW: Atmospheric press illustrations detailed the enquiries made by police during the Ripper scare, as well as the activities of the numerous “vigilance committees� which were set up at the time.
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