The Cases That Haunt Us (4 page)

Chapman had been wearing three cheap rings, which were not found on her hand. The killer—or some desperate soul—must have taken them, either for their monetary value or as souvenirs.

The accounts of her last night are tragically similar to that of Polly Nichols. Earlier in the afternoon, she had told her friend Amelia Palmer that she was too sick to work but would have to do something to get money for her bed that night. Another resident at Crossingham’s saw her in the kitchen, already drunk and taking two pills from a box she kept in her pocket. She dropped the box, which broke, and at that point, she put the remaining pills in a torn piece of envelope lying on the floor. She spent the late night and early-morning hours of Friday, September 7, to Saturday, September 8, drinking, then returned to the lodging house about 1:35 A.M., where John Evans, the night watchman, demanded the fourpence doss money.

She replied, “I haven’t got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary.” But, like Nichols, she added, “Don’t let the bed. I’ll be back soon.” She then went upstairs to convey the same message to deputy manager Timothy Donovan, asking him to let her stay on credit. He refused and escorted her off the premises and out to try to make the doss money. As she was leaving, she called out to Evans, “I won’t be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me.” It’s likely that all of the witnesses who reported they saw Chapman drunk that night probably mistook the fact that she was actually very sick. The autopsy showed little alcohol in her body.

From this point on, the narrative gets a little fuzzy. Someone thought he saw her in the Ten Bells pub across from Spitalfields Market soon after it opened at 5 A.M., but this seems to be a case of mistaken identity. A half hour later, Elizabeth Darrell, also known as Elizabeth Long, saw a woman she thought was Annie Chapman on Hanbury Street, talking to a man slightly taller than herself. Darrell characterized the man as foreign- looking, which at the time in the East End was often a euphemism for someone who appeared to be a Jewish immigrant. According to Darrell, the man asked, “Will you?”

Chapman replied, “Yes.”

Albert Cadoche, a young carpenter who lived at 27 Hanbury Street, thought he heard a fierce struggle and someone yelling “No!” in the next-door backyard at number 29. But police weren’t sure what he’d heard, and like so many other facts about the case, this one remains ambiguous.

Among Inspector Abberline and his colleagues at Scotland Yard, the conclusion was inescapable. The man who had murdered Annie Chapman had also killed Mary Ann Nichols.

Panic spread throughout the East End. Someone was murdering women and the police seemed unable to stop him. Everything was coming together. Did the same fiend who killed Nichols and Chapman also murder Martha Tabram? At first, it had seemed likely that her guardsman escort had done it. But if two other murders had taken place within such a close time and proximity, then that first one could have been done by the same man, too. I would also not discount the possibility that the killer of Polly Nichols was actually attempting to copycat the murder of Martha Tabram.

And some thought maybe that wasn’t even the first. On April 2, 1888, another prostitute, Emma Elizabeth Smith, who lived in Spitalfields, had been robbed and raped and a blunt instrument, possibly a bottle, forced into her vagina. Three days later, she died of peritonitis at London Hospital. At the time, police believed she had been the victim of a local gang, though no arrests were ever made. Now, it looked to the terrified residents as if she was merely the Whitechapel killer’s first tune-up.

“
LEATHER
APRON”
AND
OTHER
THEORIES

Suddenly, this forsaken area of London was on everyone’s mind. Newspaper reporters flooded in, describing the East Enders as if they were some strange foreign species. The sites of each murder became tourist attractions. The Home Office was advised to offer a reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest, but the home secretary decided against it, believing that the locals were so desperate for money that they’d give false information and make the police department’s job even more difficult. Though he might have been reacting to his own experience with the local newspapers, for whom playing fast and loose with facts for the sake of a more sensational story was a way of life, he was actually following official Home Office policy. His esteemed predecessor, Sir William Harcourt, had prohibited rewards when he found that they led to false accusations and even deliberately inspired crimes.

The East End was rife with rumors. At least one of the doctors who’d examined the bodies thought the killer showed some medical or anatomical knowledge. Did that mean he was a depraved physician? Perhaps a medical student? London Hospital and its medical college were just across Whitechapel Road from where Polly Nichols was murdered. Were they the killer’s training ground and refuge? The poor East Enders were a cynical and mistrustful lot, used to either being ignored or getting the worst of everything. It certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of imagination that a healer could be perverted into a brutal taker of lives.

One of the most prevalent suspicions arose from the leather apron found near Annie Chapman’s body. When police began questioning Whitechapel street hookers, one of the stories that kept coming up concerned a local bully and hustler known as Leather Apron for the article he was always seen with, supposedly because he was a slipper-maker. According to reports, Leather Apron, who was often seen around Commercial Street, would shake down women and demand money from them. He was generally described as a short, thickset man in his late thirties or early forties, with black hair, a black mustache, and an unusually thick neck. The word on the street was that Leather Apron might well be the Whitechapel killer.

One individual who apparently met this description was a Jewish boot-finisher named John Pizer. A sometime resident of Hanbury Street identified him as the man he had seen threatening a woman with a knife in the early morning hours of September 8. Pizer had a reputation for getting into fights, as well as abusing prostitutes. He was arrested at his residence on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Whitechapel, on Monday morning, September 10. Five long-bladed knives were found there. He was taken to the Leman Street police station and placed in two police lineups. In one, a female witness was unable to identify him. In the other, a male witness confirmed he was the one seen on September 8, and that Pizer was known around the neighborhood as Leather Apron. Pizer expressed astonishment and outrage at the charge, claiming he didn’t know what the police were talking about.

In spite of that, he was a likely suspect, at least for a couple of hours. Then the case began to fall apart. The man who identified him could not identify Annie Chapman’s body at the morgue as the woman he had seen being threatened. Then Pizer’s alibis for the nights of the Nichols and Chapman murders were checked out and proved ironclad. After a day and a half, he was released.

The John Pizer story provides us with a cautionary tale. Pizer sure looked good for the crimes, and a lot of the surface details fit. Only after police investigated his circumstances was he exonerated. Why am I mentioning this here? Because most of the suspects who’ve emerged as candidates to be the killer, particularly those who’ve emerged long after the events, fit with just such convenient circumstantial evidence, as we shall see. Now there’s nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. Sometimes, as we’ll further see, it’s all we’ve got and it can be compelling enough for a solid conviction. But the important point to remember here is that anyone we consider as a suspect whom the police at the time could not examine and alibi out in the way they did Pizer is not getting a “fair trial” from us. Of course, no one can, this many years later, but it’s something to keep in mind when you hear some of the more interesting, often outlandish, claims.

The police and the press both made a concerted effort to find the “actual” Leather Apron, without any success, while hysteria about the identity of the “Whitechapel fiend” continued to grow.

And a strong undercurrent was emerging as to who he might be. The Jews, emigrating to England to escape persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, had become a prominent force in the East End. But they spoke a strange language and kept largely to themselves and their own community, maintaining a wary, distrustful distance from gentiles—in other words, “real” Englishmen. When you combine the general resentment of whoever is the most recent immigrant group with the quiet but long-standing strain of anti-Semitism that had been a part of English culture for almost a thousand years, you’ve got a ready-made scapegoat population. Then add two other factors: Whatever scanty evidence there was suggested that the killer worked in either the local livestock slaughtering industry or shoe and leather trade, both of which were dominated by Jewish immigrants. Just as important, no one believed a true Englishman could do such a horrible thing, so it had to be someone from the largest non-English group evident—the Jews.

And such a horrible thing as what? Who kills and eviscerates just for the hell of it, not for robbery, not for revenge, not even to make a political statement? This was something people hadn’t seen before. Was it possible that the character of Mr. Hyde had gone out the stage door of the Lyceum and taken up residence in Whitechapel?

THE
LUST
MURDERER

In April 1980, my Behavioral Science Unit colleague Roy Hazelwood and I published an article in the
FBI
Law Enforcement Bulletin
entitled “The Lust Murderer.” We wrote:

The lust murder is unique and is distinguished from the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack or displacement of the breasts, rectum, or genitals. Further, while there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit the lust murder. These individuals will be labeled as the Organized Nonsocial and the Disorganized Asocial personalities.

We’ve moved away from such terms as
nonsocial
and
asocial
because they’re difficult to understand and differentiate, but it is fair to say that the organized type tends to be someone who may interact well with society; he just has no regard for or interest in the welfare of anyone other than himself. He understands the implications of his crimes and commits them because they give him a feeling of satisfaction and empowerment not present anywhere else in his life. Though he will have a deep-seated sense of personal inadequacy, this sensation will be warring within him with an equally strong sense of grandiosity and entitlement that has nothing to do with his own highly limited accomplishments. He will plan his crimes and is smart enough to commit them some distance from where he lives or works and to take measures to keep them undetected (e.g., hide the body) for as long as possible.

The disorganized offender, on the other hand, is the traditional loner who feels rejected by society. He is not sophisticated enough to commit an organized, well-planned act or to think to hide the body. The crimes, particularly the early ones, will likely be committed close to his home or workplace, where he feels some measure of comfort and familiarity. While we expect some sort of rape or penetration with the organized offender, we often see none from the disorganized one. And as we suggested earlier, while the organized type may mutilate the body as a sign of his contempt or to hinder identification, mutilation by the disorganized type may represent not only his fear, but a basic sexual curiosity about what goes on below the body’s surface.

What connects the two types of lust murderers is an obsessive fantasy of the act, beginning long before it is committed. In just about every case of lust murder we’ve seen or studied, the fantasy comes before the act. Particularly in the case of the disorganized offender, the victim may simply present herself or become available at a time and place at which the subject is ready to act, ready to forcibly draw a human being into his fantasy world. Seldom will the murder weapon be a firearm, because it affords too little interpersonal, psychosexual gratification. More likely, the killer will use his hands, a blade, and/or a club or blunt object of some sort. If an anatomical souvenir is taken, it is often symbolic of wanting to totally possess the victim, even in death.

The term
lust
inevitably brings up the idea of sex, and indeed, sex is a key component of the crime. But as we’ve already suggested, the motivation for the act, the psychological need it addresses, can be summed up in three words: manipulation, domination, and control. These are the elements that give the perpetrator a heightened satisfaction that he does not achieve from anything else in his life.

So where does the sexual component come in? Clearly, for the lust murderer, sex is joined in his mind and fantasies with power and control. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to use the definition of rape proposed by my friend Linda Fairstein, head of the New York County District Attorney’s Office Sex Crimes Unit and one of the great heroes in the constant war against these predators. In the ongoing debate over whether to classify rape as a crime of sex or violence, Linda calls it a crime of violence in which sex is the weapon. Though in the Whitechapel crimes we’re not dealing with rape per se, the distinction is still instructive.

In our 1980 article, Roy Hazelwood and I proposed that the formation of a lust murderer personality happens early in life, and subsequent research has given us no reason to alter that opinion. There will be a pattern of behavior leading up to the violence, usually starting with voyeuristic activities or the theft of women’s clothing, which serve as a substitute for his inability to deal with women in a mature and confident manner. The organized type will be aggressive during his adolescent years, as if he is trying to get back at society for perceived wrongs or slights. He has trouble dealing with authority and is anxious to exert control over others wherever he can.