Complete History of Jack the Ripper (31 page)

His diligence paid off. In the early hours of 12 September Isenschmid was arrested and taken to Holloway Police Station. Judged insane, he was sent to the Islington Workhouse and from thence, the same day, to Grove Hall Lunatic Asylum, Fairfield Road, Bow. Sergeant Thick, deputed by Abberline to investigate his case, examined the clothing in which he had been apprehended but could find no traces of bloodstains.

Fortunately a clutch of documents relating to Isenschmid has survived in the Metropolitan Police case papers and from these and other sources we can learn a good deal about him. At the time of his marriage to Mary Ann Joyce, the daughter of Richard Joyce, a farmer, in December 1867 he was a journeyman butcher and lived at 41 Bath Street, off the City Road. But afterwards he set up on his own account as a pork butcher at 59 Elthorne Road, Holloway. Sadly the business failed and he began to suffer recurring attacks of insanity.

No one seems to have been very sure what the cause of Isenschmid’s problem was. His wife told Sergeant Thick that he became depressed after the failure of his business and the press that he had never been ‘right in his head’ since a fit in 1882 or 1883. Asylum records at different times attribute his attacks to drink and hereditary factors. While the
Star
traced their origin to an attack of sunstroke some years before 1888.

Whatever the cause of Isenschmid’s malady, its symptoms could be frightening. According to the gossip scavenged in and about Elthorne Road by the
Star
, his behaviour during periods of insanity was
frequently violent. He threatened to put people’s ‘lights out’. His landlord was cautioned several times against going near him. And, more ominously, he was continuously to be seen sharpening a long knife. The butcher also laboured under strange delusions. One of them was that everything belonged to him. Indeed, he styled himself ‘the King of Elthorne Road’.

On 24 September 1887 he was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. From his own observations Dr John Gray of the Islington Infirmary justified Isenschmid’s committal on the grounds that he ‘says he can build a church give him a shovel and cement . . . can lay 2000 bricks a day and mix his own mortar . . . says he shall be Member of Parliament soon [and] talks with great excitement & violence.’ In addition, Mary Isenschmid had told him that her husband ‘threatened to kill his wife and children, writes threatening letters to his neighbours saying he will fire their homes and throw vitriol over them, sometimes refuses food for days together [and] threatened to blow up the Queen with dynamite.’ In the records of the asylum the illness is said to have been Isenschmid’s first attack and to have been a month old upon his committal. On 2 December, only ten weeks after being admitted, he was discharged as cured.

The Isenschmids attempted a fresh start. They found a new home in Duncombe Road and Jacob a new job as a journeyman butcher with Mr Martell in Marylebone High Street. But at Whitsuntide 1888 he left this employment and began to behave as strangely as ever. Sometimes he lapsed into moods of sullen despondency, unwilling to bestir himself to do anything, even to wash. At others he sought solace in religion and sat reading the Bible for hours on end. But the book brought him no comfort. Mrs Isenschmid had seen him fling it across the room in exasperation and heard him lament that he must be ‘a very wicked man if all the Bible says is true.’ By July 1888 she had had enough. ‘He got so bad,’ she told the
Star
, ‘that I got an order to have him put in the asylum again. A doctor came to see him and then he got suspicious. I told him the doctor was only the [pawn] broker’s man but he said the broker’s man wouldn’t ask him how he was. He got afraid that he would be put in the asylum again, and ten weeks ago he ran away.’

Perhaps Isenschmid blamed his wife for driving him out of their home. Certainly Mary feared him. She confided in Sergeant Thick: ‘I do not think my husband would injure anyone but me. I think he would kill me if he had the chance.’ The
Star
also heard some
disconcerting stories from the new tenant of Isenschmid’s old shop in Elthorne Road. Isenschmid appeared there several times during July-September 1888. On one occasion he turned up at the shop with his butcher’s apron on and his knife and steel hanging at his side. Holding up a bullock’s tail, he announced that he had just slaughtered forty bullocks. On another he sent a load of bullocks’ entrails to the shop at three o’clock in the morning.

Isenschmid’s case is an instructive one. The fortuitous survival of police records enables us – for once – to penetrate the investigation and thinking that produced a leading suspect. And what they reveal is just how little
evidence
it took. For, notwithstanding Isenschmid’s ferocious reputation, it is patently clear that the police had virtually no case against him.

Admittedly, as a butcher, he would have possessed crude anatomical knowledge. But such an argument could have been used to incriminate every slaughterman and butcher in the metropolis. He regularly left his lodgings at 1.00 a.m. But this was no more than thousands of working people in Victorian London were obliged to do. Isenschmid himself told the medical superintendent of Grove Hall that he got up early to go to the market where he bought sheeps’ heads, kidneys and feet. These he took home, dressed and then sold to West End restaurants and coffee houses. ‘That was the cause of him being up so early in the morning,’ he said, ‘and that was the only way open to him to get his livelihood.’ He was mentally ill. And his Colney Hatch record does demonstrate that he was potentially dangerous. But although the police certainly knew that he had been in the asylum there is no evidence that they had any detailed knowledge of his record there. Mary Isenschmid, on the other hand, told Sergeant Thick: ‘I do not think my husband would injure anyone but me.’ Hardly proof that he was a homicidal maniac! The police even failed to establish a link between Isenschmid and Whitechapel. Mrs Isenschmid told them that Jacob used to frequent Mrs Geringher’s public house in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, but when Thick interviewed Mrs Geringher she denied all knowledge of the man.

One circumstance seems to have weighed particularly heavily with Abberline. He noted in his reports that Isenschmid’s description tallied with that of the man seen by Mrs Fiddymont and others at the Prince Albert on the morning of the Chapman murder. Abberline was convinced that they were identical and, from what we know of
Isenschmid’s appearance, he may have been right. A man in his early forties in 1888, he was about five feet seven inches tall, with ginger hair on head and face. Normally he was a powerfully built man but, as his wife told the press, since he had left home in July he had evidently been accustomed to walking about ‘till he’s nearly starved . . . and he has got pinched in his appearance and much thinner.’ Now all this is certainly consistent with Joseph Taylor’s description of the Prince Albert man. Unfortunately, the only people who could have clinched the identification were Taylor, Mrs Fiddymont and Mary Chappell, and Dr Mickle, resident medical officer at Grove Hall, was so concerned about his patient’s health that he declined to permit the witnesses to confront him. On 19 September, the date of our last police report on Isenschmid, the doctor was still obdurate and we do not know whether Mrs Fiddymont and her witnesses ever did identify the suspect. But, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that they did. What does it prove? Only that Isenschmid had been in the Prince Albert, about 400 yards from the murder site, at seven on the fatal morning. Bloodstains on a man of his trade could not possibly have been deemed significant.
²³
And surely it is scarcely credible that one and a half hours after committing a murder the killer would have been sitting, in a bloodstained condition, drinking ale in a pub only yards away from the scene of his crime?

In the event Isenschmid was eventually exonerated. On 21 September the
Star
reported that his brother had satisfactorily accounted for his movements on the morning of the Chapman murder. This report is unconfirmed and, since Mary Isenschmid has left it on record that Jacob’s relatives were all in Switzerland, probably untrue. But, like Ludwig, Isenschmid was cleared by the murderer himself. When he struck again the mad pork butcher was still confined at Grove Hall.
²⁴

The Yard’s elevation of an innocent man to the position of chief suspect on such flimsy grounds is, at the very least, disturbing. Truly, as Abberline conceded on 18 September, they were never able ‘to procure any evidence to connect him [Isenschmid] with the murders’. Yet one gets the distinct impression that if the real murderer had stopped killing after Hanbury Street poor, deranged Isenschmid, unheard and unconvicted, would have gone down in police record and memoir as the slayer of Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. Why did detectives allow themselves to be misled so easily? Well, there were two important factors. One
was that police inquiries – diligent though they were – uncovered so very little about the real killer that they were reduced to grasping at straws. The other was the public pressure upon the force to secure a conviction. Abberline himself, in a report of 19 September, let that particular cat out of the bag. There he suggests that the chief police surgeon or one of the divisional surgeons be requested to contact Dr Mickle in order to expedite arrangements for the witnesses to see Isenschmid because ‘time is of the greatest importance in this case, not only with regard to the question of identity, but also for the purpose of allaying the strong public feeling that exists.’ Such factors operated throughout the entire duration of the Whitechapel investigations. So when we come to consider the cases against the main suspects, at the end of our quest, we will do well to remember what we have learned here.

On 22 September
Punch
gave its readers ‘A Detective’s Diary À La Mode’:

Baffled as the detectives undoubtedly were their search, of course,
was by no means as arbitrary as that. The records of the Chapman inquiry are now very incomplete but in this chapter we have learned the names of nine new suspects – not many but perhaps enough to suggest the characteristics the police were looking for.

Insanity and medical knowledge appear to have been the most important. Notwithstanding Coroner Baxter’s hypothesis of an economic motive the police were very interested in lunatics. Three suspects (Puckridge, Sanders and Isenschmid) out of nine had seen the inside of an asylum and at least another three (Piggott, Ludwig and Morford) were allegedly of unsound mind. Detectives also seem to have taken Dr Phillips’ testimony to heart because not less than five suspects (Ludwig, Puckridge, Sanders, Morford and Isenschmid) had some pretensions to anatomical knowledge. The significance of these two factors in determining the direction of police inquiries is further reflected in the searches made by Abberline and Smith for the as yet unidentified insane medical students. Inevitably, the interest in medically qualified people led to men of middle-class origin being suspected and Puckridge, Sanders and Morford might be so described. Only three suspects (Ludwig, Mary and Isenschmid) were of Continental origin. Given the fact that Mrs Long had incriminated a foreigner this may seem a little surprising but the police remained uncertain about the value of her evidence because it could not be reconciled with Dr Phillips’ estimate of the time of Annie Chapman’s death.

A bright sunny September helped to banish the memory of the summer thunderstorms. And as the month wore on, too, the fear that had stalked the streets after the death of Dark Annie visibly receded. The police, including those in the City, into which the killer had not yet ventured, remained vigilant. But the majority of East Enders, quickly forgetful of terrors past, began to lose themselves once more in the struggle for economic survival. The murder of a woman at Birtley Fell near Gateshead on 22 September encouraged many of them to believe that the Whitechapel murderer had fled the capital.

Visiting Whitechapel Road one night in late September, a
Daily News
reporter found no sign of apprehension in the great thoroughfare.
²⁵
There were the usual flaunting shops, noisy street traders, flaring gin-palaces, raucous entertainments and steaming cookshops. Crowds gathered here and there under the street lamps and stars to listen to the marvels of a new patent pill, to watch a busker ‘beating
out with a couple of quills what he takes apparently to be music from a sort of home-made dulcimer’, to see a performing boy with no legs, to enjoy the spectacle of a street fight, to hear a trader extol the qualities of new trousers at 9s. 6d. a pair. ‘A hundred people at least,’ the reporter tells us, ‘are clustered round the [trouser] salesman who descants hoarsely on the unrivalled qualities of his goods, and winds up by flinging a pair out into the crowd for closer inspection.’