Complete History of Jack the Ripper (39 page)

Brown’s description of the woman’s companion is very vague indeed. He gave no details whatsoever about the man’s face and if the suspect was wearing any headgear at all Brown did not see, or could not remember, anything of it. The few particulars the labourer did swear to accord ill with the statements of other witnesses. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the man’s appearance was a long, dark overcoat ‘which came very nearly down to his heels.’ This detail cannot possibly be reconciled with Marshall’s talk of a small, black, cutaway coat, with Smith’s description of a black diagonal cutaway coat, or with Schwartz’s reference to a dark ‘jacket’. The height of Brown’s man – five feet seven inches – is consistent with the descriptions proffered by the other witnesses but the build is not. Brown’s man was of average build. Schwartz, on the other hand, described Elizabeth’s assailant as a broad-shouldered man. And William Marshall, who saw Elizabeth with a man at about 11.45, thought that he appeared ‘rather stout’.
¹⁸

At this date the truth can no longer be recovered. There remains, however, a distinct possibility that the labourer Brown did not see Elizabeth Stride. PC Smith told the inquest that very few prostitutes were accustomed to solicit in Berner Street. But there
was
a second couple in the vicinity at the time of the murder. Mrs Fanny Mortimer of 36 Berner Street saw them and mentioned them in a statement to the press on the day of the tragedy: ‘A young man and his sweetheart were standing at the corner of the street, about 20 yards away, before and after the time the woman must have been murdered, but they told
me they did not hear a sound.’ What was evidently the same pair were alluded to again in a news report. ‘A young girl had been standing in a bisecting thoroughfare not fifty yards from the spot where the body was found,’ it ran. ‘She had, she said, been standing there for about twenty minutes, talking with her sweetheart, but neither of them heard any unusual noises.’
¹⁹
The board school, at the corner of which Brown saw his couple, was at the junction of Berner and Fairclough Streets.

Before leaving the Berner Street murder we will need to consider some of the questions arising out of the evidence.

The time of the murder can be established with reasonable certainty. At about 12.40 Morris Eagle, passing over the spot where the body would later be found, noticed nothing. At one Louis Diemschutz discovered the body. All the indications are that it had not been there long. Edward Spooner, one of the early arrivals on the scene, distinctly saw blood still flowing from the wound in the dead woman’s throat. By 1.16, when Dr Blackwell saw the body, the bleeding had stopped. Elizabeth’s neck, chest and legs, however, were still quite warm and her face slightly so. Blackwell thought that she must have been murdered after 12.46 and possibly after 12.56. Elizabeth died, then, not long before Diemschutz’s barrow clattered into the yard. Indeed, the steward’s approach might well have disturbed the murderer at his grisly task.

The evidence we possess suggests that Dr Phillips’ reconstruction of the murder was correct. He opined that the victim had been placed upon the ground and that her killer, working from a position on her right side, had then cut her throat from left to right. There is no doubt that Elizabeth’s throat was cut while she was lying down for the wound to the left carotid artery and other vessels had bled out upon the ground a few inches to the left of her neck. From this pool, blood had flowed along the gutter towards the side door of the club. No other traces of blood were discovered except for a few stains on Elizabeth’s right hand and wrist. Equally, the close proximity of the body to the club wall seems to preclude any possibility of the murderer working from a position on the victim’s left. Elizabeth was found huddled up, her face, knees and feet close to the wall. Diemschutz told the inquest that the body was only about a foot from the wall, PC Lamb that her face was not more than five or six inches distant from it.

This reconstruction does, however, pose problems. We cannot
believe that Elizabeth would have voluntarily lain down in Dutfield’s Yard. Earlier that evening there had been heavy rain and the passage between Nos. 40 and 42 had evidently been transformed into a muddy channel. Elizabeth’s body was discovered lying on its left side and the left side of her head, hair and coat were well plastered with mud.
²⁰
Dr Phillips, taking his cue from the pressure marks over Elizabeth’s shoulders, reasoned that she had been seized by the shoulders and ‘placed’ on the ground. Since she was lying on her left side, head up the yard, one must presume that at the moment of the fatal attack she was facing the wall of the club and that the murderer then pressed her down to his left. But if Elizabeth was forced or thrown down, why were there no signs of a struggle? ‘She looked as if she had been laid quietly down,’ said PC Lamb. Why did she die still clutching her packet of cachous in her left hand? In the event of a struggle is it not likely that Elizabeth would have dropped these items, either to defend herself or as she flung her arms out to break her fall? Most puzzling of all, if Elizabeth was attacked and forced down, why did no one hear her cries? At the time Morris Eagle was singing upstairs in the International Working Men’s Club. Despite the music, he felt that he would have heard a scream from the yard if there had been one. The windows were open but Eagle heard nothing. Downstairs, Mrs Diemschutz was busy about the kitchen and dining room. The day after the murder she told the press that although the side door of the club, close to the kitchen, had been half open, she had not heard anything suspicious whatsoever: ‘I am positive I did not hear any screams or sound of any kind. Even the singing on the floor above would not have prevented me from hearing had there been any. In the yard itself all was as silent as the grave.’ Mrs Mortimer of 36 Berner Street, standing at the door of her house ‘nearly the whole time’ between 12.30 and 1.00, heard no noise. And Diemschutz himself, trundling into the yard at one, noticed nothing suspicious at all until his pony shied.
²¹

We just do not know enough to resolve these riddles. A possibility that Elizabeth was drunk or had been drugged is apparently dismissed by Dr Phillips’ testimony that there was no trace of malt liquor in her stomach and ‘no perceptible trace of any anaesthetic or narcotic.’
²²
In the Tabram, Nichols and Chapman cases clear signs of strangulation indicated a likely explanation for the absence of cries but these do not seem to have been present in Elizabeth’s case. As Mr Baxter pointed out in his summing-up, ‘there were no marks of gagging, no bruises
on the face.’
²³
Elizabeth’s scarf, the bow of which Dr Blackwell found turned to the left and pulled very tight, may present us with a solution. Blackwell thought that the murderer had pulled his victim backwards by catching hold of her scarf. Even this promising circumstance, however, has but a doubtful bearing on the problem. The killer, for example, could have jerked the scarf tight when his victim was already on the ground, simply in order to expose her throat to the knife. None of this speculation precludes the possibility that Elizabeth did call out and that her cries were lost in the strains of the singing from the club.

The Berner Street evidence raises an even more intriguing question. Was Elizabeth’s killer responsible for any of the other Whitechapel murders? Since 1965 it has been fashionable for Ripperologists to name Elizabeth Stride as the third victim of Jack the Ripper, Nichols and Chapman being seen as the first and second. In fact, there is a very strong case for regarding Martha Tabram as the first Ripper victim and at least a plausible one for discounting Elizabeth Stride altogether.

On the face of it the arguments for excluding Elizabeth from the reckoning are formidable. There were, as we have noted, no obvious signs of strangulation. There were no abdominal mutilations. Although Elizabeth’s throat had been cut there was, as Dr Phillips told the inquest, a ‘very great dissimilarity’ between that wound and those which had nearly decapitated Dark Annie. Annie’s throat had been severed all round down to the vertebral column. Furthermore, the vertebral bones had been marked by two sharp cuts and there had been an evident attempt to separate the bones. The cut in Elizabeth Stride’s throat was neither as deep nor as extensive. It left the vessels on the right side of the neck untouched and the left carotid artery only partially severed. ‘The wound was inflicted,’ said Dr Phillips at one point, ‘by drawing the knife across the throat.’
²⁴
The doctor’s testimony on the weapon used in the Stride murder also cautions us against any glib association of this crime with the slaying of Annie Chapman. In his judgement Annie’s injuries had been inflicted with a knife having a blade at least six to eight inches long. He did not believe, however, that a long-bladed weapon had been used on Elizabeth Stride. In this case a short knife, like those employed by shoemakers, could have been the murder weapon.

Because of these factors there must always be an element of doubt about the Stride case. On the evidence as it now stands, however, it
seems probable that she was indeed struck down by the slayer of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. The case for discounting Elizabeth as a Ripper victim is not as weighty as it first appears. The differences between her injuries and those inflicted upon Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman do not oblige us to take the view that she was slain by another hand. The less extensive wounding of the throat and total absence of abdominal mutilations in her case may only mean that her killer was disturbed and scared off before he could complete his task. Again, the fact that Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride may have been mutilated with different knives proves nothing. Even if we knew for certain that a single killer was responsible for all the murders we would not be entitled to assume that he invariably used the same weapon. In this context it is nevertheless worthy of note that Dr Llewellyn, who carried out the post-mortem examination of Polly Nichols, thought that her injuries had been inflicted, not with an exceptionally long-bladed knife, but with a pointed one that had a stout back, perhaps a cork-cutter’s or shoemaker’s knife. This appears to have been just such a weapon as was later used upon Elizabeth Stride. In many respects the Stride murder was very like its predecessors. Tabram, Nichols, Chapman and Stride were all prostitutes, silently slaughtered in dark or unfrequented byways of the East End. More than that, in the last three cases the victims had all had their throats cut from left to right while they were lying upon the ground.

Dutfield’s Yard was a cul-de-sac. A visitor had only two means of egress: he might, like William West, pass through the premises of the International Working Men’s Club, or go through the main gateway. Whether the murderer could have availed himself of the first option is doubtful for at 12.40 on the fatal night Morris Eagle had tried the club’s street door and had found it locked, at least to someone on the outside. More probably the killer escaped through the main gates.

Mrs Mortimer, who was standing at the door of No. 36 for much of the time between 12.30 and 1.00, saw no one leave Dutfield’s Yard before one, and Louis Diemschutz, approaching the yard at one, noticed no one running away. The murderer, then, could still have been there when the steward turned into the gateway. If so he retreated farther into the yard and awaited his chance, slipping out when Diemschutz dashed into the club to raise the alarm or vanishing into the crowd of onlookers that gathered in minutes around the body. It was not until after 1.10, while Edward Johnston,
Dr Blackwell’s assistant, was examining the dead women, that PC Lamb closed the main gates.

Which route did the killer take from Berner Street? The answer to this question, curiously enough, may just be found in an uncorroborated newspaper report. For the day after the murder the
Star
printed this item: ‘From two different sources we have the story that a man, when passing through Church Lane at about half past one, saw a man sitting on a doorstep and wiping his hands. As everyone is on the look-out for the murderer the man looked at the stranger with a certain amount of suspicion, whereupon he tried to conceal his face. He is described as a man who wore a short jacket and a sailor’s hat.’
²⁵

Compare this description with those derived from Marshall and Schwartz. Marshall’s man wore a small black cutaway (as opposed to a frock) coat and a round, peaked cap, ‘something like what a sailor would wear.’ And the man Schwartz saw attacking the woman was dressed in a dark jacket and trousers and a black cap with a peak. Compare it, too, with a description of the supposed Mitre Square murderer, procured by the City Police from a commercial traveller named Joseph Lawende. Lawende’s suspect wore a loose pepper-and-salt jacket and a grey cloth cap with a peak and he had the ‘appearance of a sailor.’ The fascinating thing about the Church Lane report is that it appeared before any of these other descriptions had been published. Only a version of PC Smith’s description, with references to a black diagonal coat and hard felt hat, was then in circulation.
²⁶
Furthermore, Church Lane might logically have been traversed by anyone walking from Berner Street to Mitre Square.

Driven out of Dutfield’s Yard, the killer’s first priority would have been to put distance between himself and the scene of his crime. If he turned northwards along Berner Street he would probably not have felt safe until he reached Commercial Road. But then a new danger would have presented itself. He could not remain in Commercial Road, let alone hazard Whitechapel High Street, with bloodstained hands, for both thoroughfares were well-lighted and populous on Saturday nights, even after one. Church Lane, a relatively secluded byway running from Commercial Road to the High Street, could thus have proved a tempting haven to clean up. This done, he would have passed from thence into Whitechapel High Street, the main artery into Aldgate. If the Church Lane report did describe a genuine sighting of the murderer,
however, the estimated time (about 1.30) was at least ten minutes too late.