Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (32 page)

Henry Smith openly admitted that he didn’t have a clue as to who the murderer was. Donald Sutherland Swanson seemed to play a middle-of-the-road card, by not actually saying if he thought Kosminski was guilty or not, only that he was the suspect Sir Robert Anderson was writing about. Melville Leslie Macnaghten professes not to know one way or the other, as does John George Littlechild.

Sir Robert Anderson was the only officer involved in the Ripper case to state that the Ripper’s identity was known beyond any doubt. Every other officer talks of ‘a very likely suspect’ or ‘someone they had good reason to suspect’. None of them claim, like Anderson did, that the killer’s identity was definitely known.

Donald Sutherland Swanson was almost certainly correct in his assumption that Anderson was writing about Kosminski. Macnaghten mentioned Kosminski along with two other suspects, Ostrog and Druitt. Robert Sagar wrote about somebody with a name that sounded very much like Kosminski.

Inspector Abberline, of course, named one suspect and one only, and that was Severin Klosowski (Chapman), whom he firmly believed to be the killer; but could Abberline, in naming Severin Klosowski, have been referring to the same person as Anderson and Sagar had also named? In other words, a suspect with the same sounding name, beginning with ‘K’ and ending in ‘ski’.

It is very difficult to ascertain a general consensus of opinion among the police officers and their superiors of the day, as so many of their opinions were diverse in a number of areas. There does seem to be, however, one aspect of the case in which they all agreed upon, and that was a general belief that a Polish Jew was in all probability the killer. The general consensus was therefore that, according to the vast number of witness statements, their suspicions were based upon reasonable grounds.

There can be no denying that they were entitled to their suspicions, but as we all now know, these suspicions never accounted for a conviction in this case.

18

Victims

W 
e know of the five women who were brutally murdered in what became known as the Jack the Ripper murders, but there were six other victims as well, who were also brutally murdered in the same manner, who even to this day some say were victims of the Ripper as well. This is a list of all eleven women, in chronological order, who were murdered during the period known as the Whitechapel murders.

E
MMA
S
MITH

Prostitute Emma Elizabeth Smith was assaulted and robbed at the junction of Osborn Street and Brick Lane, Whitechapel, in the early hours of the morning on Tuesday 3 April 1888. She had been severely injured and possibly left for dead by her attackers, but she somehow managed to survive the attack and walk back to her lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. She told the deputy keeper, Mary Russell, that she had been attacked by three youngish men. Mrs Russell took Smith to the London Hospital, where medical examination revealed that a blunt object had been inserted into her vagina, rupturing her peritoneum. She developed peritonitis and her wounds were unfortunately too severe for her to survive, and she died four days later, having never regained consciousness.

The local inspector of the Metropolitan Police, Edmund Reid of H Division (Whitechapel), investigated the attack, but the culprits were never caught. Detective Constable Walter Dew, stationed with H Division, later wrote that he thought Smith was the first victim of Jack the Ripper, but his colleagues didn’t agree with him, saying that it was the work of a criminal gang. Emma Elizabeth Smith failed to describe her attackers; this was either because of her poor condition at the time or because she was scared of recriminations. There were known gangs around at the time, who lived off the earnings of the prostitutes, and this particular group could well have been one such gang, who had decided to punish Smith for maybe not paying them or disobeying them in some way. It is widely accepted that Smith’s murder was unlikely to be connected with the Ripper killings.

M
ARTHA
T
ABRAM

On Tuesday 7 August 1888, a second prostitute, Martha Tabram, was murdered at about 2.30 a.m. Her body was found in a stairwell at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times with a short-bladed weapon. On the basis of statements from a fellow prostitute, and PC Thomas Barrett who was patrolling nearby, Inspector Reid put soldiers at the Tower of London and Wellington Barracks on an identification parade, but without positive results. The police did not connect the murder with Smith’s, but they did connect her death with the later murders. Most experts today do not connect this murder with the other killings, as Tabram was stabbed whereas the later victims were slashed; but a connection cannot be ruled out.

The following five women have already been extensively covered in this book, and are recognised as victims of Jack the Ripper:

Mary Ann Nichols
31 August 1888

Annie Chapman
8 September 1888

Elizabeth Stride
and
Catherine Eddowes
30 September 1888

Mary Kelly
9 November 1888

The final four women on our list have never been accepted widely as Ripper victims. They are, nevertheless, still classed as victims of the Whitechapel murders.

R
OSE
M
YLETT

The body of 29-year-old prostitute Rose Mylett (also known as Catherine Millett and Lizzie Davis) was discovered by a police officer on Thursday 20 December 1888, in Clarke’s Yard, just off Poplar High Street, East London; she had been strangled.

Rose Mylett had lodged at 18 George Street, which was the same lodging house that Emma Smith, our first victim, had lodged in. A total of four doctors examined the body of Rose Mylett, and all agreed that she had been murdered. Sir Robert Anderson, on the other hand, thought she had accidentally hanged herself on the collar of her dress while in a drunken stupor. Anderson had no specific medical knowledge, as he was trained in law, so why his reasoning on this should have even been considered is beyond comprehension. Anderson requested another doctor, Dr Bond, to give his verdict on the case, which he did, agreeing with Anderson. Wynne Baxter, the coroner in the case, told the inquest jury: ‘There is no evidence to show that death was the result of violence.’ The jury nevertheless returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’ and the case was added to the Whitechapel file.

A
LICE
M
CKENZIE

At around 12.40 a.m. on Wednesday 17 July 1889, Alice McKenzie was found murdered in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Her left carotid artery was severed from left to right and there were wounds on her abdomen. It is not known for certain, but McKenzie was thought to be a prostitute, as all the Ripper victims had been.

Her injuries were very similar to those of the Ripper victims, apart from the fact that they were not as deep as in the earlier murders, and a shorter blade had been used. Police Commissioner James Monro was adamant that McKenzie was a victim of Jack the Ripper, as too was one of the pathologists who examined the body. Sir Robert Anderson disagreed with this, as did Inspector Abberline and another of the pathologists.

Throughout the years there has been much conjecture on this murder; some state that it was definitely a Ripper murder, and others say that the unknown murderer tried to make it look like a Ripper killing to deflect suspicion from himself. At the inquest, Coroner Wynne Edwin Baxter acknowledged both possibilities, and concluded: ‘There is great similarity between this and the other class of cases, which have happened in this neighbourhood, and if the same person has not committed this crime, it is clearly an imitation of the other cases.’

P
INCHIN
S
TREET
T
ORSO

At 5.15 a.m. on Tuesday 10 September 1889, the grisly remains of a woman’s torso were discovered by PC William Pennett, under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. PC Pennett was first alerted to a horrible stench that was emanating from what he thought was a package of some type, covered over with an old chemise. What he saw when he removed the covering made him reel back in horror, for the headless and legless body was already in an advanced state of decomposition.

An immediate search of the area was organised, but no other body parts were found, and neither the victim nor the culprit were ever identified. The pathologists noted that the general lack of blood of the tissues and vessels indicated that haemorrhage was the cause of death. Newspapers vied with each other to be the first to publish the victim’s identity. The first name to be exposed was Lydia Hart, who had disappeared some days earlier. This was refuted, however, when she was found recovering in hospital after what she described as ‘a bit of a spree’. Another claim that the victim was a missing girl called Emily Barker was also refuted, as the torso was from an older and considerably taller woman. The age of the victim was estimated to be between 30 and 40 years old.

Donald Sutherland Swanson did not consider this to be a Ripper case. He suggested it could possibly be linked to similar dismembered body cases in Rainham and Chelsea, as well as the ‘Whitehall Mystery’. The case that became known as the Whitehall Mystery took place on 2 October 1888, during construction of Scotland Yard’s new headquarters on the Victoria Embankment near Whitehall, Westminster. A worker found a parcel in part of the old cellar which contained a female torso. It had been placed there at some point between 29 September, when one of the workmen had last been inside the unlocked vault, and 2 October, when it was discovered. The body had been wrapped in cloth, possibly a black petticoat, and tied with string.

There was indeed much similarity in the two cases, and James Monro agreed with Swanson’s assessment. These three murders and the Pinchin Street case were suggested by both men to be the work of a serial killer, nicknamed the ‘Torso Killer’, who was thought to be either Jack the Ripper himself or a separate killer of similar persuasions. Most Ripper experts today discount any connection between the Torso and Ripper killings on the basis of their different modus operandi.

F
RANCES
C
OLES

Friday the 13th has always been associated with bad luck in one way or another. In prostitute Frances Coles’ case it was very bad luck indeed, for it was on this date in February 1891 that her body was found at Swallow Gardens, a passageway under a railway arch between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street, Whitechapel.

Her body was found by PC Ernest Thompson only moments after the attack at 2.15 a.m. She had minor wounds on the back of her head, suggesting that she had been thrown violently to the ground before her throat was cut at least twice, from left to right and then back again. There were no mutilations to her body, but this could have been due to the fact that the killer was disturbed by PC Thompson before he could complete his work.

Superintendent Arnold and Inspector Reid arrived soon afterwards from Leman Street police station, which was very close to the murder scene. Chief Inspectors Donald Swanson and Henry Moore, who had been involved in the previous murder investigations, arrived by 5 a.m. Investigation into this case started immediately, and within hours the police had the name of a suspect who had been seen with Coles earlier that night. The man was James Sadler, who was tracked down and arrested by the police and charged with her murder.

Swanson and Moore proceeded with a high-profile investigation into Sadler’s past history and his whereabouts at the time of the previous Whitechapel murders. After two weeks of non-stop intensive police work, on 3 March Sadler was released due to lack of evidence.

This was the last case in the series of murders which became known as the Whitechapel murders.