Complete History of Jack the Ripper (30 page)

‘I cannot recall that my grandfather, General Sir Charles Warren, ever stated in writing his personal views on the identity of Jack the Ripper.’ So wrote Watkin W. Williams, Warren’s grandson, to author Tom Cullen.
¹³
And, as far as any final, considered judgement by Sir Charles is concerned, he seems to have been right. But, halfway through the murder hunt, the Commissioner did take up his pen – in response to an appeal for information by Matthews – and until now his letter has lain largely neglected in the Home Office files relating to the case.

About the middle of September the Home Secretary, evidently rattled by adverse press and public comment, sent a memorandum to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, his secretary, directing him to solicit from Warren a progress report on the Whitechapel investigation. Ruggles-Brise was temporarily out of town but the note was sent on to Sir Charles by the Home Office on the morning of 19 September. Warren’s reply was made the same day:

Warren’s first man was Jacob Isenschmid, an insane pork butcher, of whom more presently. The second man, however, is much more intriguing. For his release from an asylum occurred only three days before the George Yard murder and his alleged threat to ‘rip people up’ with a knife suggests that he was harbouring some grudge and hence may point to a motive. Yet, until the present writer identified Puckridge and published details about him in a recent number of
Ripperana
, nothing whatsoever was known about him.
¹⁵

Sir Charles tells us that his suspect was released from an asylum on 4 August. Registers of patient admissions, kept by the Lunacy Commission, are preserved at the Public Record Office and that of admissions to Metropolitan licensed houses between 1886 and 1900 records that Oswald Puckridge was admitted to Hoxton House Lunatic Asylum on 6 January 1888 and discharged, ‘relieved’ but not cured, on the following 4 August. Hoxton House, at 50 & 52 Hoxton Street, Shoreditch, was primarily a private asylum for middle class patients. But it did accept paupers from boards of guardians and Puckridge was first entered in the register as a pauper. This, however, is struck out in faded red ink and, written against the correction in
the same ink, is the annotation: ‘Private 14 Jan. 1888.’
¹⁶
Research is continuing but it seems likely that no records of the asylum have survived for our period. Nevertheless, now that we have a name we can glean some basic biographical data about Puckridge from genealogical sources.

Oswald Puckridge was born to John and Philadelphia (née Holmes) Puckridge on 13 June 1838 at Burpham, near Arundel, in Sussex. The family are recorded there in the national census of 1841. John, a farmer, was then forty-five years old, exactly ten years older than his wife, and they had five children: Charlotte (11), Clara (7), Frederick (5), Oswald (3) and Arthur (1). Oswald married in south-east London when he was thirty. His bride was Ellen Puddle, the daughter of Edward Puddle, a licensed victualler, and the ceremony was performed at the parish church of St Paul, Deptford, on 3 October 1868. On the marriage certificate Puckridge is described as a chemist resident in the same parish. Obviously his career subsequently entered into decline but whether the mental illness was a cause or consequence of his waning fortunes is not presently known. On 28 May 1900 he was admitted to the Holborn Workhouse in City Road from a men’s lodging house at 34 St John’s Lane, Clerkenwell. He died in the workhouse on 1 June. According to the death certificate he was then a general labourer and the cause of death was ‘Broncho Pneumonia’.
¹⁷

Lack of detail on Puckridge and the grounds upon which he was suspected make him a difficult suspect to assess. The police clearly gave his case some priority and if everything Warren tells us about him was true it is not difficult to see why. On the other hand, the Commissioner’s comment that no ‘definite clue’ had been uncovered implies that the CID were not in possession of any hard evidence linking Puckridge with the crimes and, as Charles Ludwig has taught us, cases hung exclusively around characteristics like medical knowledge and insanity are inevitably inconclusive. There are, besides, other difficulties involved in charging Puckridge with the murders. His description of himself in 1868 as a chemist rather than a physician or surgeon suggests that his training may have been that of an apothecary and raises serious doubts about the nature and extent of his medical knowledge. Puckridge, furthermore, was fifty at the time of the murders. Admittedly, this is consistent with the statement of Mrs Long, who thought that the man she saw talking with Annie Chapman was over forty, but – as we will discover in later chapters
– it is in sharp conflict with the evidence of every other important witness who may have seen the killer. Their estimates of age range from twenty-eight to thirty-five. On this point, too, Mrs Long’s testimony can almost certainly be discounted because she did not see her suspect’s face. Finally, although most of the police records relating to the Whitechapel murders have been lost, it may still be significant that Puckridge’s name does not reappear on the known record. And if he did not remain a suspect the probable reason is that, as Warren predicted, he was eventually traced and able to satisfactorily account for his movements on the nights of the murders. Puckridge is the most interesting suspect we have encountered so far. But unless he be incriminated by fresh evidence he must be exonerated.

Puckridge was by no means the only medical man investigated by the police after Dark Annie’s murder. We know that Abberline and his team tried to trace three insane medical students who had attended London Hospital. Two were found, interviewed and eliminated from the inquiry. The third, the only one actually named in police records, was John Sanders of 20 Abercorn Place, Maida Vale. When a detective called at his home neighbours told him that the family had gone abroad but recent research has proved that Sanders was, in fact, then being held in an asylum in England. The son of an Indian Army surgeon, he entered London Hospital Medical College in 1879 and functioned as an out-patient dresser in 1880–1. Afterwards he became insane. By 1887 he was subject to attacks of violence, made unprovoked assaults on his friends and tyrannized over his household. The rest of his life was spent in various asylums. During the period of the murders he was confined at West Mailing Place, a private asylum in Kent, and he died, aged thirty-nine, in the Heavitree Asylum, Exeter, in 1901.
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The memoirs of Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police in 1888, are the source of yet another medical student story. Twenty years on, Smith recalled how, after the Chapman murder, he sent word to Sir Charles Warren that he had learned of a likely suspect. This man, wrote Smith, had all the requisite qualifications: ‘He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings having been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. Sir Charles failed to find him. I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent
up two men, and there he was; but, polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without the shadow of doubt.’
¹⁹

Although the two London Hospital students Abberline traced and the man Smith traced were all cleared it would be interesting to know who they were. Evidently Oswald Puckridge was
not
one of them. Admission registers of London Hospital Medical College students are extant and these demonstrate that no student named Puckridge was admitted between about 1850 and 1890. Smith’s man lived in Rupert Street, in the parish of St James Piccadilly. But a search of the 1881 and 1891 censuses, and of local rate books from 1887 to 1890, does not reveal anyone by the name of Puckridge owning or occupying premises in the street.
²⁰
So who were these mysterious students? Careful research suggests a possible identification of Smith’s suspect.

We encounter him on 24 September in the columns of the
Star
:

Contemporary rate books for Great Ormond Street do not identify ‘Morford’. However, the
Medical Directory
for 1888 does list a John Orford as the Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital, in Gray’s Inn Road, hard by. And in the same year
one Henry Orford, a carman and contractor, was living at 40b Rupert Street. We cannot seriously identify Morford, the down-at-heel surgeon sought by police, with John or Henry Orford, the first an established and entirely respectable medical man, the second a 55-year-old carman. But given the comparative rarity of these names it is by no means improbable that John and Henry were related in some way or that the CID’s suspect was kin to them.
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We know about a few other suspects at about this time. There was Edward McKenna, an itinerant pedlar arrested on 14 September. He was thought to be identical with men seen carrying knives in Flower and Dean and Heath Streets but was released after witnesses failed to recognize him. There was John Fitzgerald, a plasterer or bricklayer’s labourer who confessed to the Chapman murder on 26 September. Within three days he had also been released, ‘exhaustive inquiries having proved his statement to be entirely unfounded’. And there was ‘Mary’, a male hairdresser and known sex offender. The CID made inquiries about him of their counterparts in Bremen and were informed that he was serving a twelve months prison sentence in Oslebshausen. But without doubt the leading suspect at this stage of the hunt was Jacob Isenschmid, the ‘mad butcher’.

‘Although at present we are unable to procure any evidence to connect him with the murders,’ wrote Abberline of Isenschmid on 18 September, ‘he appears to be the most likely person that has come under our notice to have committed the crimes.’ Warren obviously agreed. For a day later he accorded him pride of place on his list and singled him out as ‘a very suspicious case’. Something of their optimism even seems to have reached the press. ‘The detective officers who are engaged in the Whitechapel case’, ran one report, ‘are said to be more hopeful now than they have been before. It is stated they have some fresh information which encourages them to hope that before the week is over they will be able to solve the mystery.’
²²

Isenschmid, a Swiss of many years’ residence in England, was first brought to the attention of the police by two doctors. Dr Cowan of 10 Landseer Road and Dr Crabb of Holloway Road called at Holloway Police Station on 11 September to point the finger of suspicion. Their grounds were slender enough. Isenschmid was a butcher, he was insane, and George Tyler, his landlord, had told them that he absented himself from his lodgings at nocturnal hours. Detective Inspector Styles, nevertheless, was bound to investigate.

Styles went first to Isenschmid’s lodgings at 60 Mitford Road and
talked to George Tyler. He told him that Isenschmid had taken lodgings at his house on 5 September and that on the night of the Hanbury Street murder he had come in at nine in the evening and gone out again at one the next morning. This was by no means unusual. In fact Isenschmid had gone out at one o’clock on four of the five working days he had spent at the house. But part of the doctors’ allegations had been substantiated and Styles called next at 97 Duncombe Road. There he found Mary Isenschmid, the suspect’s wife. She had not seen her husband since he had left home two months ago and did not know how he currently earned a living. She did say, however, that he was in the habit of carrying large butcher knives about with him. The inspector was sufficiently impressed by what he had heard to detail men to watch both addresses and to apprehend Isenschmid if he should turn up.