The Invention of Murder (63 page)

Such certainty might be welcome after the horrors of 1888. At the end of August, after a direct instruction from the Home Office, Robert Anderson finally cut short his vacation and returned to London. As he was travelling, at 1 a.m. on 30 September Elizabeth Stride was found murdered on Berner Street; at 1.45, Catherine Eddowes’ body was discovered around the corner on Mitre Square. Elizabeth Stride was a Swede, who worked when she could as a seamstress or a servant, and when she couldn’t, as a prostitute. She was known to take a drink, but unlike the other victims was generally in employment, and was fairly respectable. She was found near the International Working Men’s Club, a Jewish radical organization, and although she had throat wounds, there was no other mutilation. The murderer may have been interrupted, and thus gone on to kill Catherine Eddowes. Mrs Eddowes was an alcoholic, but she too worked fairly regularly, as a charwoman, and in season she went hop-picking. She was ferociously mutilated, and it was this double crime that truly opened the newspaper floodgates.

That night the editor of
Lloyd’s
was woken by a messenger with the news, and was back in his office just after two o’clock on Sunday morning.
Lloyd’s,
being a Sunday paper, was already being printed, but the editor himself went to the police stations to pick up what information there was, then moved on to Mitre Square and the mortuary, before ‘spinning out’ an article for an early special edition, which over the next twenty-four hours was updated by as many editions as the presses could print. The following Sunday,
Lloyd’s
produced approximately 25,000 words on the subject.

All reticence was thrown aside. The
Star
reported that Mrs Eddowes had been ‘ripped up like a pig in the market’, her ‘puberic [sic] bone. left completely bare’. Licence for this sort of report was implicitly given at the inquest on Mrs Eddowes, where the coroner three times asked if the murderer had shown anatomical skill, with the questions phrased to imply he expected the answer ‘Yes,’ although the most the police surgeon was willing to say was that a butcher or a slaughterer could have known where the various organs lay. The coroner, clearly hankering after the mysterious American doctor, asked, ‘Could the organs removed be used for any professional purpose?’ The surgeon was adamant: ‘They would be of no use for a professional purpose.’ The coroner persisted: ‘Can you as a professional man assign any reason for the removal of certain organs …?’ ‘I cannot,’ replied the surgeon. At the resumed inquest a week later, the question was asked twice more, and twice more the doctors replied in the negative, one adding firmly: ‘the murderer had no particular design on any particular organ’.

This was no longer enough. Over the period of the murders, the
Telegraph,
living up to its reputation as a crime-sheet, printed nearly 400,000 words on the subject, over seventy-two columns. The
Morning Post
and
The Times
had over eighty columns each; the
Star,
a local, 115. Meanwhile the Sunday papers, despite having to compress a week’s news in each issue, gave the story proportionately far more space. Four of the major Sundays
(Lloyd’s, Reynolds’s, People
and the
Weekly Times)
expended nearly 210,000 words on the subject over four issues, while four dailies that focused on crime
(Daily Chronicle, Telegraph, Evening News
and
Globe)
had just under half a million, but over twenty-four issues. To fill this amount of space, almost anything went, and the newspapers all reported in anatomical detail what had been done to Mrs Eddowes.

There followed a range of articles suggesting that the organs had been removed for magic rituals, or religious ceremonies. The
Star
and the
Pall Mall Gazette
both printed reports claiming that candles made from human fat put people into an enchanted sleep, so they could be robbed with impunity; the
Pall Mall Gazette,
its antiSemitism even closer to the surface after Lipski, reported that these magic candles were used to commit murder in Russia. As early as 15 September, the
East London Observer
reported popular sentiment: ‘such a horrible crime. must have been done by a Jew’. Mrs Stride was not only found outside the Jewish working men’s club, but Berner Street was just one street away from Batty Street, where Mrs Angel had been murdered the year before. This was not merely newspaper pandering to popular sentiment. Otherwise intelligent people were swept away by the hysteria. On the night of Mrs Stride’s death, a man claimed that someone near the spot where she was murdered had shouted ‘Lipski!’ at him. Godfrey Lushington, the Home Office Under-Secretary, said, ‘[this] increases my belief that the murderer was a Jew’.

This conviction, held by many, was encouraged by a scribbled inscription found on the wall near Mrs Eddowes’ body, which may have read: ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’. Sir Charles Warren quickly had the words erased, seeing them as a trigger for anti-Semitic action. In retrospect they were most likely another journalistic confection, influenced by Sherlock Holmes’s first outing the previous year. In
A Study in Scarlet,
Holmes finds the mysterious word ‘Rache’ written in blood on the wall of the room in which the dead man lies, and recognizes it as the German for ‘revenge’. The
Pall Mall Gazette
stoked up prejudice: ‘The language of the Jews in the East End is a hybrid dialect, known as Yiddish, and their mode of spelling the word Jews would be “Juwes”. This the police consider a strong indication that the crime was committed by one of the numerous foreigners by whom the East End is infested.’
The Times
added: ‘the Talmud says that a Jew who is intimate with a Christian must slay and mutilate her’, in order to be ritually cleansed. The Chief Rabbi responded by pointing out that the Yiddish for ‘Jews’ was ‘Yidden’, not ‘Juwes’, and that he could ‘assert, without any hesitation, that in no Jewish book is such a barbarity’ as
The Times
suggested ‘even hinted at’. But innuendo persisted: when the deranged Richard Prince was arrested in 1897 for the murder of William Terriss, the Dundee son of a farm labourer was accused of looking ‘like a foreigner’, and ‘loitering’ in the ‘shade’ of a synagogue in Maiden Lane.

No one, of any age, was immune from this blanket coverage. The novelist Compton Mackenzie, five years old in 1888, later remembered that bedtime became ‘almost unendurable’ even far away on the other side of London, with ‘the hoarse voices of men selling editions of the
Star
or
Echo
… shouting along the street … “Murder! Murder! Another horrible murder in Whitechapel! Another woman cut up to pieces in Whitechapel.”’ These newsboys’ shouts were a common feature of memoirs and fiction. Even in France they were part of the story. In one French play the newsboy shouts, ‘Demandez le crime de Whitechapel!. L’horrible assassinat de deux femmes commis par Jack l’Éventreur … Horribles détails … Un penney! [sic]’
*
(for more on this play, see pp.460–62).

After the double murder and their inquests, the newspapers searched again for more amusement to be had from the subject, and they found it in an unlikely place. Several of them had suggested that bloodhounds should be brought in to track the murderer, evidently not having any idea of how difficult, if not impossible, this would be in a busy city. Finally Sir Charles Warren caved in, and the police borrowed a couple of hounds from a breeder near Scarborough, and, reported the
Evening News,
ran trials in Hyde Park, with Sir Charles, in a bizarre – and misguided – PR exercise, volunteering to act as the quarry. On 9 October, the
Pall Mall Gazette
combined the Trafalgar Square riots with the East End murders in ‘A Ballad of Bloodhounds’:

In reality, the bloodhound idea had been virtually forced upon a pragmatic Warren by the clamour of the newspapers, and he refused to purchase the two animals, which were kept quietly moping in kennels.
*

Meanwhile, Robert Anderson of the CID was outraged to hear that prostitutes were being protected by constables on the beat, and suggested that any woman found in the streets of Whitechapel after midnight should automatically be arrested. It had to be explained to him that it was not actually legal to arrest people for walking in the streets. He countered with the proposal that it should be made clear that the police no longer had orders to protect ‘working’ women, which was agreed to.

Unsurprisingly, the police were treated even more harshly by the papers than before.
Punch
demanded: ‘Of what use was VINCENT HOWARD in the Detective Department?. A prize will be given for a moderately satisfactory solution.’ (‘Vincent Howard’ was in fact Howard Vincent, who in 1878 had been appointed Director of Criminal Investigation at Scotland Yard aged only twenty-nine, to clean up the department after the Turf Fraud case.)
Reynolds’s
bitterly suggested that the procession for the Lord Mayor’s Show should form as follows:

Even a penny-dreadful,
The Whitechapel Murders, or, The Mysteries of the East End,
which appeared at approximately this time,
*
was flat-out hostile towards the police. In the opening three episodes, following the style of boy’s-own detective stories set up by Ernest Keen and others, the detectives are the heroes. Richard Ryder, or ‘Detective Dick’ as he is known ‘and hailed by his superiors’, is put on ‘special duty to unravel the mystery’. Dick goes to the local rogues’ pub, where the landlord tries to bar him: ‘Nothing is private for Dick Ryder,’ announces our hero, and the landlord immediately stands back: ‘He knew the name too well not to respect it.’ Then, in episode four, a character suddenly announces: ‘We have carefully investigated the causes of the miserable and calamitous breakdown of the police system,’ which can ‘chiefly’ be blamed on ‘The inefficiency and timidity of the detective service, owing to the manner in which Sir Charles Warren has placed it, and forbidden it to move except under instructions.’ (What happens after this volte-face is unknown: only the first five instalments appear to have survived.)

With no murders between 8 October and 9 November, the newspapers had to cast around for material. Many returned to the Jekyll and Hyde theme. One of the highlights of the stage adaptation at the Lyceum was the transformation of its star, Richard Mansfield, from Jekyll to Hyde, in front of the audience, relying solely on changes in posture, facial expression and gait (and probably lighting). It is likely that this feat of stagecraft exacerbated the prevailing fear, making it seem entirely possible that an urbane professional man could, with no warning, suddenly become a ravening beast. By early September, the
Pall Mall Gazette
had already referred to the unidentified killer as ‘Mr.Hyde at large’, and on 29 September the final performance of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
was announced. The
Telegraph
spoke for many: ‘there is no taste in London just now for horrors on the stage. There is quite sufficient to make us shudder out of doors.’ However Mansfield’s next play was panned. In need of a vehicle, he hastily scheduled a revival of
Jekyll and Hyde
‘owing to great demand’. His poor taste was deplored by many; others saw his insistence in continuing as more sinister. ‘I should be the Last to think because A man take A dretfull Part he is therefore Bad,’ wrote one anonymous correspondent to the police, ‘but when I went to See Mr Mansfield Take the Part of Dr Jekel and Mr Hyde I felt at once that he was
the Man Wanted … I do not think there is A man Living
So well able to disgise Himself in A moment …
Who So well able to Baffel the Police,
or Public he Could be A
dark man.
Fair Man. Short man. or Tall in A five Seconds if he carried a fine Faulse Wiskers &c in A Bag.’

While Mansfield does not seem to have been troubled by the police, or by a nervy populace, others were not so lucky. A drunken German accosted two women he thought were prostitutes, and a mob gathered around him, shouting ‘Jack the Ripper’. (He was found guilty of ‘frightening the women … at a time when they would easily be frightened’, and sentenced to a month’s hard labour.) Another man was reported for suspicious behaviour because ‘he carried a black bag and his actions were very strange’. The following month, still another man was suspected because he ‘stared into the face of a woman in Whitechapel-road’.