Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (11 page)

The pressure on Abberline was starting to mount. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, at Scotland Yard, was demanding results, which was easier said than done. Abberline was working day and night, sometimes even sleeping in his office overnight, which didn’t bode too well with his wife, Emma. To add to his woes, he also had the press breathing down his neck, asking for interviews, and printing headlines that more or less labelled the police as incompetent fools.

The press were blaming everyone and anyone, with the Home Secretary, Henry Mathews, and Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Warren, being described as ‘Helpless, Heedless, and Useless’. As if to reiterate these comments against them, Sir Charles Warren came up with the ridiculous idea of using bloodhounds to track the killer down. How on earth they were going to be able to accomplish this, no one seemed to know. While on a trial run in Tooting Common, the two dogs, Barnaby and Burgho, ran away. Telegrams were sent to all London police stations to be on the look out for the pair of canine detectives. When the press picked up on this of course, the public were convulsed with laughter, and the police were ridiculed even more.

One needs to bear in mind that Inspector Abberline was at this time not just investigating a singular murder case he was still in charge (theoretically) of the Whitechapel murders as a whole, which now included, Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols and now Annie Chapman, and still without one credible witness or suspect.

To make matters worse, if that were possible, a group of local businessmen had formed themselves into a group known as the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, led by a local builder named George Lusk, who was elected chairman during the committee’s first meeting on 10 September 1888. The purpose of the committee was to employ local volunteers to patrol the streets, mainly at night, in their search for the murderer. They said that the murders were affecting their businesses, and that the police were doing nothing whatsoever to help.

As chairman of the committee, George Lusk became something of a celebrity, with his name appearing in the national newspapers and on posters in Whitechapel, appealing for information concerning the identity of the murderer. Lusk also complained about the police’s lack of foresight in not offering a reward for such information. In answer to this, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson immediately had an official police poster made up, stating: ‘Ghastly Murder in the east end. – Dreadful mutilation of a woman. – Capture Leather Apron.’ This absolutely infuriated Abberline, as John Pizer, the man the public knew as Leather Apron, had by this time already been cleared of any involvement in the murder, and to mention the name ‘Leather Apron’ again would, he felt, throw the public off the track completely. This was still, of course, before the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ was thrust into the public arena.

6

Searching for the Real
Annie Chapman

F 
rederick George Abberline had not embarked on his career in the police force because he thought it was going to be an easy job, neither did he do it for the money, for a policeman’s wages in those days were very poor by today’s standards, and the only perk he was allowed was living accommodation at his local police station. Abberline had entered the police service because he was a decent and honest man. In today’s parlance, he would probably be described as a man of the people.

Although born in the country, he never felt more at home than when he was in the East End of London; he became almost an honorary East Ender, and as such, had an empathy with his surroundings, and the people who lived and worked there. Unlike many other policemen of his day, Abberline was interested in the well-being of his fellow East Enders, and did not treat them simply as statistics; be they a local priest, a market labourer or a lowly prostitute, in his eyes they were all human beings, who deserved the same level of help, respect, and protection from the police as a Westminster politician would expect.

During his years in the police force, Abberline had seen many murders, but it was only when he was put in charge of what became known as the Ripper case that he saw anything so horrific; for these poor women had not just been murdered, they had been mutilated, and from the little evidence on hand, he could see no motive for the murders, other than that the women were all prostitutes.

Abberline decided to find out as much as possible about these women, from their early life onwards, and not just as lifeless corpses lying in some dirty alley in the East End. He felt that if he could learn more about them, it might just be possible to gain an insight into their lives, their friends, their fears and what motivated them. This, he hoped, might possibly lead to the murderer.

Starting with the most current, which was Annie Chapman, Abberline learned that she was born Eliza Ann Smith, on 22 February 1842, the daughter of George Smith, a soldier in the 2nd Regiment Life Guards, and his partner, Ruth Chapman. Annie was born out of wedlock; her parents didn’t marry until nearly six months after she was born in Paddington. Although a soldier at the time of their marriage, Annie’s father later became a domestic servant.

Annie Chapman was 27 years old when she married her cousin, John Chapman, a coachman, on 1 May 1869. They were married at All Saints church in the Knightsbridge district of London. They lived quite happily for a number of years at various addresses around West London, during which time they had three children, Emily Ruth Chapman, born 25 June 1870; Annie Georgina Chapman, born 5 June 1873; and John Alfred Chapman, born 21 November 1880.

The family moved in 1881 to Windsor, Berkshire, where John Chapman took a job as coachman to a farm bailiff. But instead of the idyllic lifestyle they had expected, this seemed to signal the start of their downfall. Their youngest child, John, had been born severely disabled, but instead of the country air and lifestyle helping him, it seemed to have the opposite effect, and he developed breathing problems. As if this wasn’t enough to break Annie’s heart, within months, their firstborn, Emily Ruth, developed meningitis, and died of it shortly after at the age of 12. There can be no denying that this tragedy, coupled with the ongoing effect of seeing their youngest child constantly gasping for breath, sent both Annie and her husband on the road to heavy drinking, and eventual separation in 1884.

John Chapman left the matrimonial home, leaving Annie to look after the two remaining children on 10
s
per week, which he supported her with. Ten shillings doesn’t seem much by today’s standards, but it was enough at that time, especially in the country, to provide her with a reasonable standard of living. The one big problem was, however, that Annie was still drinking heavily, and within a short time, had her youngest child, John, taken into the care of a local charitable school. At around this time, Annie’s daughter, Annie Georgina, who by now was an adolescent, had also decided to leave the family home, and ran off to join a travelling circus in the French Third Republic.

Annie Chapman eventually moved to Whitechapel, where sometime around 1886, she moved in with a man named John Sivvey at a common lodging house at 30 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. It is unsure whether Sivvey was his real name or just a nickname, as he did work at making wire sieves. Whatever the outcome, Annie Chapman became known to many people at that time as Annie ‘Sievey’ or ‘Siffey’.

This relationship didn’t last long, however, as on Christmas Eve 1886, having not received her weekly 10
s
from her ex-husband, Chapman made a few enquiries, and found, much to her misfortune, that he had died that same week of alcohol-related causes. Not only had she lost her only source of income at that time, but within days, John Sivvey also walked out, in all probability due to the cessation of her weekly 10
s
income. One of her friends at the lodging house later testified that Chapman became very depressed after this and went rapidly downhill, drinking more than ever, when she could get the money that is. This in turn led to her friends calling her ‘Dark Annie’.

Chapman earned a little money from crochet work, making antimacassars, but this just about managed to pay for her lodgings; if she needed money to buy drink, which she often did, then the only way she knew of obtaining this was to sell herself as a prostitute. By 1888 she was living at Crossingham’s lodging house at number 35 Dorset Street, where she paid 8
d
a night for a double bed. She had two regular clients, one known as Harry the Hawker and the other, a man named Ted Stanley, a supposed retired soldier who was known to her fellow lodgers as ‘the Pensioner’. As it later transpired, Stanley was neither a retired soldier nor a pensioner, but was in fact a bricklayer’s labourer who lived at 1 Osborn Place, Whitechapel.

The majority of people who knew her at Crossingham’s described her as very civil and industrious when sober, but added that she was often seen staggering and incoherent, especially after one of her drinking bouts. In the week before her death she complained of feeling ill after suffering several bruises to her face, including a black eye. This followed a fight with Eliza Cooper, a fellow resident in Crossingham’s. The two women were allegedly rivals for the affections of Harry the Hawker, but Eliza Cooper denied this, and claimed the fight was over a borrowed bar of soap that Annie had not returned.

The more Abberline found out about Chapman, the more he empathised with her, especially when he discovered that at the time of her death, she was suffering from tuberculosis, for it was this very same illness which had tragically robbed him of his first wife, Martha. Abberline was not the sort of policeman to take his work home, so to speak, but he felt a compulsion to do so with this particular case, and even asked his wife Emma for her thoughts on why and how these women allowed themselves to live such degraded lives.

In a way, he was perhaps using his wife’s thoughts and perceptions of these women, whom she saw on a day-to-day basis in the area in which they lived, in the same way as a modern-day psychological profiler, who records a person’s behaviour and analyses their psychological characteristics in order to predict or assess their ability in a certain sphere or to identify a particular group of people. There is no record that Abberline ever used this direct line of thought in his investigative methods, but he certainly showed a very keen interest in the women, as human beings and not just victims. The closer he could get to them, the closer he might get to finding out the identity of their killer.

The night prior to Annie Chapman’s death, more suggestive of October or November weather than September, it had been raining, with a cold wind blowing. This led to the streets of East London being almost empty, and consequently led to a distinct lack of trade for Chapman and the other women who worked there. After walking the deserted streets for nearly two hours, Chapman was cold and fed up, and decided to have a drink in her local pub to get dry, and with a bit of luck, she might even pick up a customer. The one drink, which she originally went into the pub to have, turned into three or four, and before she knew it, she was drunk and out of money.

Now penniless, and faced with the ever-worsening weather outside, she asked the landlord of the pub for one more drink, which she would pay him for the following day. The landlord, however, experienced these women all the time and point-blank refused her until she could pay for it. The time was about 1.45 a.m. when she finally left the pub and made her way back to her lodgings. Her misfortunes, however were not at an end yet, as when she finally did arrive at the lodging house, the lodging house deputy, Tim Donovan, refused her admission. ‘Sorry Annie,’ he told her. ‘You know the rules, no money, no bed.’

The strict house rules didn’t deter Chapman too much; she had been through this same scenario many time before, but always thought it was worth chancing her arm one more time. ‘You never know,’ she once told a friend. ‘He might take a shine to me one day, and I’d be in there for free.’ Poor Annie Chapman certainly wasn’t a good judge of character, for the house deputy never took a ‘shine’ to any of the women who lodged there. The reason for this is unsure: some said that he was impotent, others, that he was homosexual.