The Invention of Murder (61 page)

And in the same month that the
Pall Mall Gazette
worried about John Bull’s love of blood, suddenly John Bull had the most famous murder case ever to revel in. On the morning of 7 August 1888, Martha Tabram was found dead in George Yard Buildings, just off Whitechapel High Street. The crimes of the unknown person dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ have probably had more written about them than any since Cain killed Abel. The great horror – and the great fascination – of this series of murders is that they are entirely unknowable. The date they began, or ended, is open to question; the number, and sometimes even the names, of the victims is disputed. Sometimes Martha Tabram and a number of other women are listed as victims; other times they are not. There was no arrest, no trial, no verdict to draw a line under the case, only a shadowy figure and a list of suspects that is almost comic in its inclusiveness. In October 1888 alone, the
Pall Mall Gazette
suggested that the murderer was an army doctor with sunstroke who had been too heavily influenced by
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde;
a mad occultist; anarchists of various nationalities and beliefs; a clergyman; a rogue policeman; and a ‘scientific humanitarian’ who was killing prostitutes in order to improve the world.
*
So wide has the net been spread that any murderer will slip easily through the holes. Of the more than fifty murders discussed in this book, only three saw no arrest shortly after the discovery of the murder – the case of the drunken John Peacock Wood, of Thomas Ashton the mill owner’s son, and of Constance Kent. In each of those cases there was a closed group from which to pick – the police who arrested Wood, the Spinners’ Union men, and the Kent family. Here there was no group, no single suspect to reassure the population that the ultimate crime would always be followed by retribution.

The death of Martha Tabram aroused little interest, a common fate for these women, frequently alcoholic, all of them at the outer edges of poverty. An attack of particular ferocity might attract passing attention: four months earlier, Emma Smith had been gang-raped, including with a blunt instrument ‘with great force’, and then robbed. The level of violence, and the supposition that her death was the work of one of the High Rip gangs, who extorted protection money from prostitutes, made her story worth a sentence or two to the newspapers. The
Daily News
merely reported Martha Tabram’s death as a ‘supposed murder in Whitechapel’ – which since the woman had been stabbed more than three dozen times, seems to stretch the meaning of the word ‘supposed’ past breaking point. The
Echo
was the first, although unintentional, link between the East End murders and
Jekyll and Hyde:
its articles on the finding of the body and the inquest were separated in print by a piece noting that George Grossmith’s farce
The Real Case of Hyde and Seekyll
was to open shortly. The view was that Martha Tabram had been killed by a client. She had been seen with a friend and two soldiers earlier in the evening, and her body was first spotted at 3.30 a.m. by a cab driver heading home. He did not stop to look at her – as the clerk would later not stop to look at Mrs Hogg – because ‘people constantly slept on the stairs’, either drunk or simply homeless.

It was on 31 August, when Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols was found dead in Buck’s Row, that the press began to feel that this was a story worth following. As the press magnate Alfred Harmsworth noted, ‘crime exclusives are
noticed
by the public more than any other sort of news. They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success.’ The series of deaths which came to be grouped together as murders by a single, unknown person, were, without doubt, a circulation-booster, and for the local East End papers they were a godsend. Newspapers had always sold on crime –
The Times,
with 20 per cent of its coverage given to the subject, had a circulation of 100,000, the
Telegraph,
with 30 per cent, sold 250,000 copies, and
Lloyd’s
750,000. The
Star
was a local ½d. paper that had only started publishing in January of that year; after the murder of Annie Chapman in September, its circulation went up to over a quarter of a million copies a day, dropping back to 190,000 by the middle of the month, when no further killings took place; in early October, after Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered on the same night, the paper’s circulation rose once more, to 217,000 copies, and after the final murder it reached 300,000. The
Star,
the
Evening News
and the
Echo
were said to have run their presses around the clock during the autumn and winter of 1888, rushing out new editions with updates – or to say there were none, as when the
Evening News
on 1 September had an announcement: ‘The Exchange Telegraph Company, on inquiry this morning at Scotland Yard, were informed that no arrests had been made in connection with the brutal murder at Whitechapel up to eleven o’clock to-day.’

The national newspapers, as well as the local ones, began to take notice.
The Times
still assumed that Mrs Nichols would soon be revealed as simply another ‘unfortunate’ murdered by a High Rip gang, but most newspapers recognized that this idea was becoming untenable, and began instead to focus on the mutilations, the element that tied these murders into a single series. The
Star
headlined its piece ‘A Revolting Murder. Another Woman Found Horribly Mutilated in Whitechapel. Ghastly Crimes by a Maniac’, and used the word ‘disembowelled’ in the subhead. On 1 September it had returned to the deaths of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, and noted the ‘significant similarity’ of the ‘hideous mutilations’.

High Rip gangs, maniacs, these and other possibilities were discussed in the press, and already, only the day after Mrs Nichols’ death, the action, or inaction, of the police had begun to attract derision. ‘The theories of the police about most things connected with the detection of crime are not deserving of much attention at any time,’ began the
Evening News.
‘They, therefore, showed much cuteness in not insisting too long upon the possible fact of there being a fiend in human shape, such as Mr. Stevenson describes, roaming about the metropolis.’ It then went on to repeat various atrocities, historical and in fiction (some of which were nonetheless identified as ‘absolute fact’), before it signed off with a final dig at the police for failing to catch either the ‘maniac’ or the High Rip gang members. The following day
Lloyd’s
joined in, reporting that one of the first people to come across Mrs Nichols’ body had found a policeman who was ‘calling people up’ (that is, waking them for their factory shifts, a community service that also earned the police extra money on the side). Instead of immediately going to the body, or summoning aid, ‘He continued calling the people up, which I thought was a great shame.’ The witness added pointedly that the body was cold enough to make it evident that ‘no policeman on the beat had been down there for a long time’.
The Times
was appalled to discover that when Mrs Nichols’ body had been brought to the makeshift mortuary (there was no permanent one in Whitechapel, another local complaint) it had been stripped without police supervision, or instructions on how to handle the clothes which might have provided clues.

By the end of the first week of September, the press had wrung the stories dry. Then the mutilated body of Annie Chapman was found early on the morning of 8 September. The
Star
returned to the gothic style of half a century before: ‘London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large … The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London. is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.’ Two days later, the
Star
was less concerned with making its readers’ flesh creep, and more with its own position. In an article headed ‘The Police and the Press’, it issued a denunciation, a challenge and an assertion of the importance of newspapers within the crime-detection world:

The newspapers, particularly the newspapers with radical views, or a working-class audience, saw that they could use the murders as a stick with which to beat the police. There was, unfortunately, rather a lot of material to hand. Police numbers had been rising steadily: from just over 3,000 men at the foundation of the Met, to about 8,000 in 1852, and nearly 12,000 in 1886. All divisions now had a detective department of up to ten men, with the central division at Scotland Yard increased to forty-two men. Minor crimes were dealt with by local divisions; anything bigger was shunted to Scotland Yard. The Criminal Investigation Department, or CID, as it now was, had nearly three hundred men on its staff, but it was no longer the admired institution its creators had hoped. In 1878 three senior Scotland Yard detectives had been found guilty of corruption in what was known as the Turf Fraud case, and the entire department was put on probation, apart from Dolly Williamson, who was made Chief Superintendent, and his deputy. In 1880 another case revealed that a suspected abortionist had been entrapped by detectives acting as
agents provocateurs.
The judge condemned ‘employing
spies
to go and lie’, and the Home Office made the situation worse by issuing such a weak defence – ‘As a rule, the police ought not to’ – that it was clear that this was standard practice.

Col. Edmund Henderson, named Commissioner on the death of Mayne in December 1868, resigned after a rally for the unemployed at Trafalgar Square had led to the Black Monday riots of February 1886. He was replaced by Charles Warren, a soldier. He ran into the same problem in November 1887, when another rally turned into Bloody Sunday: nearly 5,000 police and soldiers blocked access to Trafalgar Square, and it was only at the last minute that a bayonet charge of the crowd was prevented. Even so, hundreds of unarmed protesters were badly injured. That was a public problem. At Scotland Yard, a more urgent internal problem was that Warren could not get on with James Monro, head of the CID. Monro complained that Warren was only interested in street disorder. The percentage of men assigned to detection in London, Monro noted bitterly, was 2.42; in Liverpool and Glasgow it was 3.5 per cent; in Birmingham, 4.5. Two weeks after Martha Tabram was murdered, Monro resigned, and was replaced by Robert Anderson, who had acted as the Home Office’s ‘adviser in matters relating to political crime’ – he was the government’s spymaster.

In the best of circumstances, the man whose job it was to break the Fenians would not have been much loved in the East End, with its large Irish Catholic population. Anderson made sure of general detestation by his complete lack of interest in the residents of Whitechapel. He started work as head of the CID on the day Mrs Nichols was murdered. At the end of his first week, Mrs Chapman was killed. The following day, he left on a month’s holiday. He could just as easily receive reports from the office in Switzerland, he told his superiors; indeed (one can almost hear his aggrieved tones), he had even moved part of his vacation to Paris, for swifter communication with London. In his absence the CID was under the supervision of Dolly Williamson, who suffered from a heart condition and could no longer participate operationally, but who was kept on the force because of his vast experience. The next in the chain of command was Superintendent Shore, who was in effect running the entire CID. Thus the Whitechapel murders were handled locally, by the divisional detectives, with input from just one Scotland Yard inspector.

The newspapers ensured that their readers knew these shocking facts. Other shocking facts were slower to emerge. Until now, the press had been relatively reticent in describing sex crimes. While both the courts and the papers were far more habituated than modern audiences to body parts being displayed in court, or to detailed reports on scientific or medical testimony, sex was off-limits. The ‘criminal violence’ that Fanny Adams may have undergone was a reference to possible rape, not to the undoubted criminal violence of being murdered and dismembered; similarly, after Mrs Angel had been killed by a corrosive poison, the doctor said he had pulled back the bedclothes to check if ‘any violence had been offered to her’. ‘Outrage’ was another common euphemism: in 1874 a woman had died after a gang-rape, and the
Telegraph
reported that she had been ‘outraged to death’. After the inquest on Mrs Tabram, the
East London Observer
referred to mutilations in ‘the lower portion of the body’, and added that there were no indications of ‘recent intimacy’.
*
Then, with the death of Mrs Nichols,
Reynolds’s Newspaper
gave its front page over to a report: the mutilations, it wrote, were ‘too horrible to describe or even hint at’ – and then it described them, at length and in detail. By the time Mrs Chapman was murdered a week later, it would appear from the return to discretion that the police had leant on both the coroner and the newspapers. When the inquest on Mrs Chapman opened,
Lloyd’s,
apparently alone, used the word ‘womb’.
The Times,
the
Evening Standard,
the
Telegraph
and the
Morning Post
simply said that ‘portions’ were missing from Mrs Chapman’s ‘abdomen’, while others refrained even from mentioning the area from which the organ was missing. (Other body parts were not subject to the same restraint: the
Star
blazoned, ‘The Heart and Liver were Over Her Head’.) After the inquest was resumed at the end of the month, the coroner used the word ‘uterus’, and several papers –
The Times
and some of the weeklies that specialized in crime, such as
Lloyd’s
followed suit. The next week the
Lancet
used the word ‘vagina’, while denouncing the press for feeding ‘a depraved appetite for the horrible and the bestial’.